#MC saying they were going to make it their new mission

[lostworldss]

Nia didn’t grow up with parents or siblings to take care of her. She grew up in the harsh rigidness of the temple, that focuses on training and studying but not growing up.

The closest thing she had to family was Scholar Vash, but even so that was probably not at the same level as having a parent to take care of you as you grow up.

She’s always taking care of other people, but not caring for herself because she never really learned that she should. One of the values of the temple is vowing to give up your life force to help others. She was literally taught Not to care for herself or really value her life because in the Temple’s eyes her whole purpose is to just be used by/for other people.

So she really doesn’t know how to care for herself at all, because she’s never had anyone to take care of her in her life or allow her to be her own person and live her life for herself and the way she wants to (until now).

Also I love that MC says she’ll teach her to care for herself, not because MC would ever leave necessarily, but because that’s important to have, more than just having someone else to take care of you.

[mingis-orangejuice]

How do the OG love interests react to you with Sylus?

*a/n: Hi guys this is my first headcanon so please be nice :) In this none of them are officially dating MC but it's pretty obvious that they all have feelings for her. Also, it takes place at a work event for MC and I know technically in the main story there's no way Sylus would be allowed into a hunter’s association event, but I couldn't think of any other type of event where they would all happen to be at the same time. Either way, this is just for fun so it doesn't really need to make sense.

Genres/Warnings: fem!reader, nothing to really worry about, this is just some good old-fashioned fluff/crack. Some jealousy tho

An award ceremony was coming up at Unicorns to award the best hunters at the company, You were surprised when Captain Jenna told you that you’d been nominated for a few categories like most wanderers eliminated in a single mission and even Hunter of the Year, but since you were a rookie hunter you didn't think you’d win any of them, still, it was nice to be included, especially since you were one of the only rookies to be nominated.

That evening you got a call from Sylus congratulating you on your nominations. 

“How did you even know I’d been nominated” you asked. 

“Mephisto informed me,” he said with a small chuckle

“Oh so you have him monitoring me at work now?” you questioned, slightly annoyed.

“He was simply in Linkon doing some business for me, is it my fault that he happened to pass by your office on the way back to the base?” Sylus sarcastically asked, you could almost hear the smirk in his voice.

“Anyways, I wanted to ask you, have you decided on what you’re going to wear to the award ceremony yet? 

“Yeah, why?” you were suspicious of his sudden interest in your fashion choices.

“Good, come over to the base I want to see it,” he said flatly

“Why?” you were even more suspicious of his motives now. 

“Well, we’ll need to match if I'm going to be on the arm of the Hunter of the Year right?” *click*

Sylus didn’t even wait for you to reply and just hung up, almost like he knew you’d come over anyway so he didn’t need confirmation. He was right. Somehow he had not-so-subtly invited himself to your award show as your plus-one.

As you walk into the banquet hall, arms linked, you see a familiar face in the crowd…

Zayne: 

-Zayne would be a little bothered but would hide it by asking Sylus a million questions. about how he knows you, when he met you and how long have you and him been friends.

-He would make sure to emphasize the word “Friends” to know for sure if you two were dating

-his logic is if you and Sylus are dating, one of you would correct him, but if you are indeed just friends you wouldn’t say anything.

-to his relief, you  didn't correct him

-Sylus would sense the fact that Zayne probably has some type of close relationship with you too so he’d pull you a little closer by your waist as he proceeds to ask Zayne his own series of questions about how he knows you.

-Zayne would be satisfied after the conversation and excuse himself to go find his seat.

-even tho he was relieved that you weren’t dating Sylus he’d still glance over at you every few minutes because he couldn’t put his finger on it but he has a hunch that Sylus might be bad news and he wants to make sure you’re safe.

-Sylus would keep his hand on your waist the whole night because even tho you didn’t notice Zayne’s glances Sylus sure did.

-Overall while Zayne wouldn’t like the fact that you came to the ceremony with another man (especially since you didn’t even think to invite him) he’d respect your choices and leave you be (mostly)

Rafayel:

-He’d be the most openly bothered by it.

-the second he sees you walk in he runs up to you, ready to playfully scold you for not inviting him and that he had to find out about the event from Thomas, so he thought he’d invite himself. He told the person at the door that he was your plus one (he also slipped them a $100 bill)

-as he ran up to you his smile faded as he saw your arm linked with another man that wasn’t him

-oh so this is why you didn’t invite him

- He would greet you with a long hug hoping to make Sylus Jealous 

-he would instantly turn on his best customer service voice when greeting Sylus to try and hide how hurt he is that you invited some random guy instead of him

- but that would quickly fade once Sylus starts answering his long list of questions he just has to ask to make sure this random not important guy that you invited instead of him was worthy of being your plus one.

-Rafayel takes every answer as a challenge to try and one-up Sylus

-if Sylus mentioned that he took you to a fancy Italian restaurant in Linkon City last week, Rafayel would mention how he took you to a real Italian restaurant in Italy last month, (or at least how he wanted to but you were busy with work and couldn’t just drop everything and join him in Italy)

-if Sylus said he bought you the dress that you’re wearing, Rafayel would remind you of the time he bought you a cute mermaid-themed hoodie which is actually your favourite and you use it all the time, therefor it’s more important than a dress that you’ll only wear once

-while Rafayel was getting worked up trying to keep up with Sylus. Sylus kept his calm demeanour the whole conversation, he noticed that the calmer he was the more annoyed Rafayel would get and he found it amusing. 

-Rafayel would constantly text you throughout the night to check on you even though you were sitting only 1 table away.

-Sylus took note of this and would purposefully do things like put his arm around your shoulder or wipe the food off your lips to get Rafayel to frantically text you making sure you’re ok, and ask if you want to switch seats and come sit next to him where you won't have a random guy constantly touching you.

-overall he will be suuuuper jealous and will make it very obvious (even though in his mind he thinks he was being subtle) 

Xavier:

-I think he’d be extremely bothered but he'd be way better at hiding it than Rafayel

-like the others he’d also have a few questions for him about what his relationship with you is but he would very casually drop them into a normal conversation

-he, much like the others stared at you the whole night, but only just to make sure you were ok, definitely not because he was jealous or anything. You’re his co-worker and friend so he feels responsible if anything happens to you.

-he would try and do a background check on him during the event on his hunter's watch but nothing came up, since Sylus obviously didn’t tell Xavier who he really was. 

-this made Xavier even more worried, who is MC really sitting with, how is she so calm and why would he give him fake info, just what is he trying to hide? 

-he was so focused on staring at you and Sylus that he didn't even notice that he downed 3 full plates of finger foods, every time the waiters would pass by he would unconsciously grab the plates out of their hands and bitterly eat while staring, almost like he’s in a trance.

-once you guys get to the apartment building and the adrenalin wears off he’ll notice that his stomach is in so much pain from all the food he unknowingly ate while staring at you and Sylus.

-he nearly collapses in the elevator on the way to your apartments, so you decide to invite yourself over to his and take care of him

- he may be in tons of pain right now but at least he gets you all to himself 

*Please do not reupload anywhere this is my original work

[hyukascampfire]

𝒯𝑂: 𝑆𝑂𝑀𝐸𝑂𝑁𝐸 𝐹𝑅𝑂𝑀 𝐴 𝑊𝐴𝑅𝑀 𝐶𝐿𝐼𝑀𝐴𝑇𝐸 ༉

𝓘N THIS STORY 〃 a life lived as a human among the fae is one hard-earned. the folk are built of indescribable beauty, and of debauchery and mischief. for some, a life lived subservient to the folk is just fine; but to those who dream of something more, they would spend their lives clawing and biting to make it happen.

you, looking for a way to escape a life as a faerie’s human servant, put a new foot forward thinking that any life could be better than that. but, when your first assignment as a king’s spy is alongside a brooding, icy faerie man, you begin to wonder what your place in this foreign world really could be.

wc ➳ 23.2k

pairings faerie!taehyun x human!reader, faerie!yeonjun x human!reader

warnings angst, unprotected sex, voyeurism, orgasm denial, jealousy, angst again, dubious intentions of multiple main characters... poor mc has no idea who to believe

playlists ⑊ yeonjun ˒ taehyun ˒ series

…🪶ashlynn's note this part, i put my heart and soul into! i rewrote so many parts and agonized over following the path that i most wanted the story to go down—i hope it shows! xoxoxoxo, love ya! again, this is a long one, so pls let me know about spelling mistakes :,)

← ⑊ →

You had hoped that learning of Yeonjun’s relationship with the same crowd who have made attempts on your life would be enough to rattle your brittle heart into sense. You really had. As you watch Taehyun, bent over the war strategy table, though, you wish you had more time to sort it out in your head. You hate the thought of settling on half-baked answers and information all for the fact that time is not on your side. When had time ever really been kind to you, though? It had not made exceptions when you were small and innocent in your cradle, had not slowed down to allow you to at least cherish your final moments a normal child with her human parents. You can only fantasize who you would be if you had been given just enough time to know that gentle love. Even now, time makes your choices for you.  

Taehyun looks over those metal figurines as if searching for something in them. There are more of them stood and strewn out on the map. It reminds you how you are now faced with a plethora of newer, more powerful players.  

You miss when this had been a simple spying mission—when your path forward had been unobscured and clear. You envy that version of yourself: able to believe that bad things presented themselves as such. The world had been clean-cut. Evil had jagged teeth and foul breath, and good had soft edges and sweet smiles. You’re not sure where that distinction lies anymore.  

“How’s your shoulder?” you say, making your presence known. You’re sure he had been keen to your presence from the moment you’d entered the estate, though; not only thanks to his better hearing, but also because Taehyun is constantly assessing his surroundings. The smallest insect could hardly sneak up on him. You push off the doorframe and enter the room. 

He nods his head once in greeting, but he doesn’t tear his gaze away from the table’s ensemble. “It’s doing fine.” 

Sighing, you decide not to push it. The sight of that puncture had been ghastly, and it wreaks havoc in your belly every time you replay it, but the tick in his jaw when you mention it tells you enough of how he feels about disclosing whether or not anything might hurt him. How many times in the past few weeks had you forced him to do just that? It’s no wonder that the two of you butt heads so terribly. Allowing you to stitch him up must’ve been the extent of how far he’d let you see him in need of help. 

You gesture toward the table. “Have you decided when we leave?” 

Taehyun answers you with a strained sigh out through his nose: a testament to how he’d been mulling it over. He levies those figures a few more moments of his gaze as if they might speak an answer for him. They don’t. He concedes to their lack of direction and turns to you. “Every moment we spend here, we risk our identities further,” he starts, crossing his arms over his chest.  

You wince. He still believes that you’d at least contained some of your identity by taking out those three faeries. You know better. Even the bard in that tavern had known what had happened; it’s why Yeonjun ended up finding out in the first place. Even if not all of them had been a part of that rebellion, it’s reckless to assume that there were no more than that. 

Continuing, he says, “And judging by what we’ve picked up, we need to get it all back before the solstice.” He doesn’t pace as he thinks. Only the faraway look in his eyes betray the noise in his head. 

You hate the way it sounds like he’s going to demand that you leave immediately, and you hate how it sieges your tongue and makes it dance into a pitiful ploy to stay. To give yourself some credit, it’s better that Taehyun knows every bit of information you have. This moment is desperate for informed decisions. 

“I saw Yeonjun this morning,” you blurt. The words bubbled and bubbled behind your lips until they’d found the tipping point and spilled out. You’d agonized over what to make of it all for hours: that Yeonjun had been as deceitful with you as you’d been with him, that you are a sorry human girl that had wedged her way into the cross-firings of a war much beyond yourself, that you still have the gall to consider your own feelings despite its grandness... None of that worrying had led you to a conclusion that both your heart and mind would agree on.  

Taehyun’s gaze snaps to you, contained and remote aside from the twitching at the corners of his lips. The intensity of it makes you waver, but you have no time for wavering.  

“He’s... been made aware of our purpose here. He knows that we’re spies,” you say. As you watch him try to piece that together, you add, “He’s part of their rebellion.” 

Now he laughs, barbed and full of mock and disbelief. “The prince is rebelling against his father? He thinks he’ll find the throne like that? What’s his plan for when this falls through? For when his father hears of his mutiny? The prince will lose his head.” 

The thought makes you nauseous, despite how Yeonjun’s image has grown to be something murky. You don’t know what Yeonjun’s intentions are in aligning with the rebellion here. You hardly know anything about his relationship with his father and the High Court aside from the fact that he feels suffocated by his life back there. You’d assume that there’s a lot more to his reasoning, but you’ve learned your lesson about assuming that you know who people are. The inability to lie comes with the need for secrets. The thought that perhaps Yeonjun is only making a shady attempt for power crosses your mind, but either your own reasoning or your own stubbornness shoves it down. Nobody in faerie would hand their fealty to a prince who’d taken the throne of a long-standing king by those sorts of means. He’d be a king with no denizens to preside over. 

You interject Taehyun’s parade of scoffs. “He told me that war is coming, that it’s been coming.” 

His face drops, and he straightens up. “Of course it is. It’ll begin the moment we return with what we’ve found.” 

Your lips go a bit numb, and then your fingers follow. You know that this is your duty—it’d been this all along. It should come as no shock to you that he intends to relay this all to The King. But that was before you allowed your heart to make its home here. How simply he demands that you return to those lands with information that would kill Yeonjun... it has acid crawling a path up your throat. 

You make your best effort to ensure that your voice doesn’t falter as you speak. “He offered us protection as long as we stay here,” you say. “We don’t have to leave now.” You try to catch his gaze as you add, “We don’t have to leave at all.”  

You know that Yeonjun plays a part in the rebellion, but you don’t know how deep his devotion goes, and you also don’t know to what ends you can trust his intentions. How far do his loyalties to the rebellion go? And, where do his loyalties to you stand? The thought that he may have never loved you at all... it’s been a plague to your heart and mind from the very moment he’d revealed the truth to you this morning. Your guilt has chipped away at you without mercy—you’ve spent so many awful nights wishing you could unload your deceptions in front of him. How had it ended up so trivial in the grand scheme of things? How are you the one left feeling betrayed? 

You really, really cannot imagine having Yeonjun’s blood on your hands. He is one of them—a creature deception, and yet you still cannot shake those stolen nights from your bones. He had been your first. He’d made this place a home for you, where you had never had a home. It’s pitiful to search so deeply in someone else for your own strengths; even you can see that. Nevertheless, you do it. You suppose that a pair of warm arms and sweet words will do that to someone, no matter if you know that they could rot you like sweets do the tooth. It’s not unlike drunkards who find their day’s comfort in their drinks, even as it rots their body and mind away. Anything for a stretch of belonging and bliss. You're desperate for it. 

Taehyun’s sinewy words rattle your wandering mind back to reality. “He tells you that he is a member of the same group of people that have tried multiple times to kill you, and you believe him when he says he’s going to protect you? Still?” he spits, shaking his head. “What makes you so sure that he’s not just keeping us from running? That he isn’t handing us on a platter to his rebel friends? You’re going to get us fucking killed.” 

Blood roars like frothy-white rapids in your ears, warring with the echoes of his honey-glazed exclamations of love. To some capacity, he had to have meant those words. Faeries can’t lie, and he had said it so plainly. He loves you. 

“We can’t leave yet,” you say, stepping toward him on legs that you fear might collapse beneath you. “You said it yourself; we can’t return without the whole story. If we return now, we could be missing something.” You study the frosty set to his face and suck in a stabilizing breath. “Please, Taehyun. Please trust me on this.”  

You sound desperate and pleading, but you don��t reel it in at all. You are desperate and pleading. You have no intent of returning as some successful spy and continuing a life of deception and violence. It’s not who you are; it’ll never be who you are. Maybe this world tries to ask it of you, but you refuse to concede to it. 

“Part of our job is staying alive,” he says, his body rigid. He doesn’t like where you’re going with this, you can tell that much. 

“Is that what you want? To be a pawn of war? Isn’t that what we are if we bring this information back?” you challenge. “Don’t you think that if the prince of all people has turned against him, then serving at his hand is the wrong choice? I don’t know The King—I’ve never even seen him! Why should I be excited to serve him?” 

“The prince has more reason than anybody to want his father off his throne.” 

“That’s not what I’m saying,” you say, stepping further toward him. Though, it does make you revisit those thoughts. If vying for the crown is really Yeonjun’s intention, you suppose he’d have no problems pleading with you to stay in order to tie off loose ends. You wish you could see it all from somebody else’s untainted eyes. “What I’m saying is, do you want to be a spy? What has The King ever done for you to earn your loyalty?” 

Taehyun looks at you with disbelief, the corners of his mouth tilting down. “I don’t care about the damn king,” he snaps, and then gestures down at the table with all those figures. “The Queen operates on necessary evils. Where she can find a string to pull, she will pull it. My father was her general for a reason. Do you think she would keep him unless she approved of his violence? There is no good side to this war—just sides. If you’re suggesting that we stay here and try to forget that we came as spies, then you can forget it.” 

You glance over at the war table and wonder how you’ve become a moving piece in ancient faerie politics when all you’d set out for was a purpose. You’d been so warped by your bitterness with your upbringing that you’d failed to see how anything could be worse than that. You’d been so excited that you jumped willingly into dark water without knowing how deep it was, and now your feet can’t touch the ground. Is this the purpose you want? 

“Leave, then,” you say, stepping back. “You can leave. Just let me stay here. Please.” 

Something in Taehyun’s expression flips, so subtle that you can’t name it. It unsettles you, your hair standing on edge. There is something in his eyes that you do not like.  

“So, that’s it?” he says, his voice odd too. “That’s all it took for you to hand your future over on a leash to him?” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you stammer. The only ones with a collar around your neck are the spies. They’re the ones who insisted on that geas—the ones who needed to compel you with their faerie magic to ensure your obedience.  

“It means that you got all the way here, uncovered a whole rebellion, and made a life for yourself, not handed to you by a prince, and you’re going to trade it in. It means that you’ve let him convince you that you are weak and need to be coddled.” 

Your fists curl tight and dig your nails into your palms. “I never wanted to be a spy,” you grit out. Yeonjun is not the reason you want to stay here. He may be part of it, but you’ve come to be utterly unwilling to return to that spy den like it’s your home, or something. It’s not. You’d slept there for one night. Beyond just your word and that geas, what reason do you have to return? 

“You didn’t? And yet, it’s what we are, isn’t it?” he says. “Do you think that I dreamed of being a spy? That I do it because I love it? Actions have their consequences.” 

“Then, what do you do it for, Taehyun?” you say. “When do you begin living your life for you? Doing what you do because it’s what you want?” 

Taehyun seems to consider your words for a few long heartbeats before settling into something in his head. You allow yourself to let go of some of the tension in your shoulders as you watch his expression morph into something much less poisonous. 

You hadn’t expected him to react like that. 

“Do you have any weapons on you?” he says. 

Faltering, you sputter out, “What?” You look over the room. The last time you’d been in here, you’d sparred. Does he intend to properly fight you in here now? Had you pushed him too far? Shaking your head and feeling at all the places you usually tuck your blades away, you say, “No... I don’t.” 

“Get some. Where we’re about to go...” he trails off, as if reconsidering, but then he continues, “I’ll get you a hag stone.” 

You furrow your brows, not taking off to do so. “A hag stone?” you echo, thankful that he isn’t trying to duel you, but wary at the need for such a faerie ward. Hag stones are of the more serious class of wards used to protect humans from faerie enchantment or glamour. Most often, humans would string theirs up with a bit of thread through the hole of it and wear it around their necks as a pendant. Unlike turning one’s clothes inside out or taking red berries on your person, hag stones protect against the more devastating faerie magic. You shudder simply wondering what you might need a hag stone to protect yourself from. 

He nods a bit solemnly. “Kelpie do not let a meal or trick pass them by when they wait so long to have them.” 

You look at him with wild eyes, hoping to see him laugh or play his words off as a joke. He does not, but of course he doesn’t. Taehyun doesn’t waste his words on jokes. 

“Why... Why would we be going to a kelpie?” you ask him, laughing around the ball of fright in your chest. 

He lends you a wretched look. “I have old debts to call on.” 

❆

The forest in which Taehyun leads you is untamed. At some point, the sound of nature’s buzzing tapers off, and you know that you’ve entered a deeper forest than you ought to be sticking your nose in. When the forest goes silent, it’s only for one reason.  

You’d grown up here. Maybe you’d been born elsewhere, but that does not negate the fact that you had grown up scared every day of the powerful creatures that inhabit this world. Your fear has ruled you for your whole life, and you let it. You’d be a fool not to. It’s how you survive in this world. Your limbs tremble; they plead with you to listen to everything you’ve ever known—do not mess with what is bigger than you.  

You step around frost-capped puddles and dance between briars, careful not to snag yourself on their claws. It unsettles you further that this part of the forest is so untrodden and overgrown. With no folk coming through, you fear how the kelpie might behave when you make an audience before it. Will it climb straight from its frosty swamp and drag you back down with it? Is the hag stone you clutch at your chest enough to keep you safe? 

“I don’t understand why we’re doing this, Taehyun,” you say, delicately avoiding any tumbles as you speed up to gauge his feelings by his face. You’re not fond of the remote blankness in his eyes, nor the staunch determined set to his jaw. “That thing might kill us, and your shoulder is hurt. You shouldn’t be out here; you should be letting it heal.” 

“I know my limits,” he says. 

Grimacing, you return his curt tone. “Taehyun.” You grab at the material of his sleeve with urgency. When he stops to look at you, you continue. “I want you to actually listen to me. You’re being unreasonable. Yeonjun said he’d use his pull to protect us. Both of us. We have no reason to be out here, you’re just putting us in danger.” 

He lets your words stew in the air for a moment before saying, “I’m the one putting us in danger? Me?” He scoffs. “We are about as safe dealing with a kelpie as we are living off his promises. I’m doing what’s best for us. Trust me.” 

You’re winded by his choice of words. You’ve become wary of dealing out your trust so frivolously. Those two words ring alarm bells. 

“But where is this coming from? You didn’t want to stay.” Your breath furls out in a plume of white smoke in front of your face as you speak.  

He looks as if he doesn’t want to answer that. It only makes you more apprehensive. Your limbs fill with lead, planting you where you stand. “Taehyun, I’m scared,” you say. “Isn’t finding help from a solitary faerie a bit too far? How is trusting Yeonjun any more dangerous than that?” 

Taehyun steps toward you. “He is going to kill us. It’s not if, it’s when. That bastard is going to hurt you. This... This is for us. We are self-sufficient; we don’t need his protection shit.” A bitter tang colors his words. “I know that you’re scared. I won’t let it hurt you; I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise that you’ll be okay. You want to stay, don’t you?” 

You nod. You would even make deals with a kelpie for it.  

“Okay, then, let’s go,” he says, taking off with those words, effectively punctuating the conversation.  

You follow him. 

You grow more anxious the deeper you trudge into the forest without any consolation as the daylight begins creeping away. Following behind Taehyun, the wind whips at the perfect angle so that his form takes most of its terror, allowing you a respite from at least some of the brutal cold. You don’t feel any remorse using him as a shield against the elements—frost runs through his veins. He doesn’t shiver or wince at it. 

Taehyun stops a few feet before a wintry mire framed by crystallized cattails and reeds. Your heart stutters as he looks around to ensure that this is the right spot. The water is dark and deep. You stay a healthy distance away from it. You do not want to find out just how deep it is. 

“Where is it?” you say, keeping your voice low as if the beast might lunge from the water and snatch you up if you don’t. 

Taehyun surveys the forest surrounding you and then the body of water as he always does, and when he looks to you, you already know he’s calculated and planned. He doesn’t face a situation without thought—that notion soothes you, even if it’s to the slightest degree.  

“It won’t come until I call it,” he says, gesturing at those murky and horrible watery depths. Swallowing hard, you consider how close you stand to it. You take a shuffled step back. “When you see it, you need to stay calm. Don’t let it see your fear. It’ll find it amusing and latch onto you. Do you understand?” 

A rush of heavy dread spreads from your core and seizes your lungs at his words. You’ve made it this far. You want to stay. You want to stay, bad. If this thing outsmarts you, you will not go down without swinging this time. You have your daggers, and you know how to wield them. Bravery is most of the battle, isn’t it? 

You muster a nod, trying to give yourself a brave heart, but Taehyun shakes his head. Your eyes must betray how stricken you are. “Do you understand?” he repeats, his voice sharp and grave. 

“I do.” 

He accepts your words, pressing on. “It will try to trip you over your words and spin you into a trap with tricky words. Do not entertain it, even as it tries, okay?” 

You’ve been terrorized by faerie tricks your whole life. You can handle their schemes just fine. “Okay.” 

Taehyun frees a blade from its hiding place and brings it to his palm. He slides it there, slicing it open. Crimson creeps from the slit, running in between his fingers and trickling onto the snow. He’d cut pretty deep. 

“Why are you—Taehyun?” you say, stepping toward him as he curls his wounded hand into a fist over the water, shaking it so as to let the droplets down into the black water. You regret those steps you’d made toward him as something comes crashing through the surface. 

No, rather than emerging from under the surface, the beast is born from the water, manifesting from it as something gangly and wretched. From its pointed ears to its hooves, it pushes up from nothingness until it is standing there, real and terrible before you. Its skin glistens with a thickness like oil and its hair and tail hang in heavy, seaweed-like tendrils, plastered against its body. The scum floating on top of the water clung to its hair and pelt as it rose, twigs and the like poking from its withered body. A bridle cages its head, leather reins dangling down. Of all its awful things, you believe that its eyes are the worst—bone-white and piercing, they send a terror down your spine that solidifies in your bones. You know you will not soon forget the ancient soullessness that lives there. The folk do sometimes resemble the places in which they hail from; you suppose that the kelpie bares striking resemblance to the swirling water that sits at its feet. 

You try not to choke or gasp or react in any way at all, but it isn’t easy. You focus your adrenaline on keeping your breathing as even as you can manage. 

“It has been a long time since I’ve found a human at my doorstep,” the creature says, steam blowing from its nostrils as it snorts. How long might a long time mean to a faerie, especially one you know is so ancient? You hope that your presence does not intrigue the beast at all. 

Taehyun swoops in before you can speak, and you are boundlessly thankful for it. “I’ve come to call on the debt you owe me,” he says. He doesn’t leave any room for any familiarity or playfulness. 

“Is it that time?” the kelpie says, placing one hoof down onto the snow. It had looked so incorporeal and liquid that you half expect it to burst and turn to water as it does, but it climbs out just fine. Very real.  

Taehyun eyes the kelpie as it makes land, dribbling with water and its kelp hair swinging. You swallow hard as it disregards his presence to observe you. You’re used to the folk disregarding you, not this. How many years had you yearned for their attention? Right now, you scare under it.  

“For what do you need my help, boy?” it says, voice gurgled, “And why do you bring this human along? Is it for her? Or, rather, have you brought her as your peace offering?” 

Your legs tremble beneath you.  

“I don’t owe you any peace offering, kelpie,” Taehyun says, his head held righteously high. “You’ll offer me what I ask, or you’ll suffer for it.” 

Shifting under the tense atmosphere, you still don’t speak. In Faerie, debt is law. The folk live by a law that is, like many other things about them, foreign to you. Whatever natural laws by which they govern themselves are vastly lost on you—but of keeping promises and respecting debts, you are very aware. They hate to be indebted—you’re sure it’s why this kelpie is so peevish. You hope that the folk’s need to balance their debts is enough to keep it hospitable.  

The kelpie makes a rumbling and throaty sound that mimics that of a laugh. It rumbles the ground below your feet. “Just as rigid as the last time we met like this,” it says. “I wonder if it's because you’ve inherited your father’s stone heart, or because you fear me?” 

The kelpie remains playful with its intonation, but tension lies thick and dangerous beneath both of their words. You know well enough that the beast is not being light-hearted.  

Taehyun holds his face firm. He refuses to give an inch. “Do not try that with me. You have your word to upkeep for my help.” 

Shimmering under the moon’s light now, the beast treats us with a long moment of hostile silence. You can feel its malintent despite how hollow those eyes remain.  

“What do you ask of me?” it finally says, whipping its drooping tail behind it. 

“There is a rebellion here,” starts Taehyun, shoulders relaxing to the slightest degree as the kelpie defers, “The north is uneasy. I’m optimistic that you’ll lend us your protection and hand, whenever I call on it. Regardless of it being in my interest, I’m sure that you aim to keep your lands peaceful, no?” 

“Rebellion? For what would anything of the courts be in my interest? Of their rebellion or even just their ridiculousness, I do not care. I’ve left your gentry to you, leave me to mine.” 

Taehyun’s nostrils flare. “I’m not asking you to care about the courts, I’m asking you to lend me your help when I ask of it,” he grits out, “Or, rather, I’m not asking. I am informing you that I am expecting you to uphold your debt to me, and you’d better be ready to do so. This is just courtesy.” 

You feel the kelpie’s offense in the hollow quiet that follows Taehyun’s demands. Among many things, the fae are prideful creatures. Your stomach is in terrible knots. Taehyun is just trying to regain the power in the situation. You know that. It doesn’t make you any less scared for your life. With an ancient creature like a kelpie, it is paramount to earn its respect, or else it will push you around. 

Worse than that. It will drag you down into its waters and make your soul into a meal. 

“It’s a pity you think that hag stone will save you from me, human.” The kelpie turns its attention back on you. You bade your knees not to crumple. “It takes much more than that to protect you in places like these. Perhaps you’ll be safe from petty enchantment, though.”  

Taehyun shoves his words in before you can give the kelpie any sort of reaction. Not even a tremble. “Understood?” 

“You’ve made deals with our kind before. The magic reeks on you. It’s lousy enchantment, I could dissolve that geas for you. All you’d have to do is climb up on my back, and I’d grant you your freedom.”  

You can’t help but perk up. The prospect of ridding yourself of the geas placed over you is a painfully delicious one. 

Bristling, Taehyun steps between you and the kelpie. Whether he does it to fight off the beast should it lunge at you or to prevent you from approaching it, you’re unsure. “Do not,” he says. 

“Wasn’t going to.” You say it, and of course it’s true. The kelpie is poking around to see what will most entice you. Regardless, you can’t deny how awfully you wish that geas were gone. It’s the one thing that you fear will tether you to The King’s bidding. No matter how you armor yourselves from the rebellion here in the north, what’s to stop the spies from tugging on the enchanted leash? One command from Cricket, and your body would betray you and walk the whole way there itself. 

Though you don’t verbalize your interest, the kelpie no doubt sees the interest alight in your eyes. It pounces accordingly. “Unless you’d prefer that I give you a whole other enchantment. Protection against any of our kind’s glamours? Permanant true sight? A touch to my pelt would be all it would take for you to make yourself free.” 

Taehyun clicks just the hilt of his sword free from the sheathe. “Stop with the tricks. You can find your fun elsewhere.” 

Like the swampish water behind it, the kelpie stands there totally still, studying Taehyun. You really wish this altercation could wrap up at any pace faster than it currently is. You’re itching to escape those white eyes. They’re much more intimidating as night settles in. What sort of thing had Taehyun even done to indebt a creature like this to him? Once again, you’re left confronting how little you know of him and his past. By the time you’ve come to terms with the last thing, the next arrives to remind you that the folk lead much longer lives than you do. 

It finally speaks again. “Why have you brought this human with you, Lord?” Its furls out the term like a weapon. This bitter intonation that you’ve seen be used multiple times to speak of Taehyun’s title sticks with you. The title is a taunt. In this case, the you know it comes from the kelpie’s place of utter indifference and lack of obeisances toward whatever sovereignty the Courts may claim. The kelpie only answers to the land.  

“Because I needed you to know that your protection will extend to her. Know her face, learn it so that when I call on you, you’ll play your part correctly.” 

“I fail to see why you dote over her safety. Who is the human to you?” The kelpie takes a step forward, its powerful muscles rippling with the moon’s white light on its ink pelt. You mirror it with a step back. Taehyun stays put. “I owe her no help. That’s not how this works. I concede that I am bound to your help, but I do not repay double. You overestimate my generosity.” 

You watch as Taehyun takes on a posture that you’ve come to recognize as his offensive posture, potent adrenaline twisting up your stomach and sending your heart into a fit so fierce that you feel it in all your pulse points. You’re sure that swords are a laughable matter to the kelpie. Iron, though, you’re sure would still burn. Turning your hands to fists, you make a conscious effort not to find your iron weapons. If the kelpie were to see that, it may escalate things. You do not want to escalate.  

It’s only smart for you to consider your disadvantages: Taehyun is wounded. He had literally been struck by an arrow last night. You’re so far into the woods that running would consist of stumbling over roots and avoiding thorny bushes. Taehyun might know them, but you’re fully unfamiliar with a kelpie’s weaknesses, or if they even have any at all. You’re better off appeasing the beast.  

“Taehyun,” you warn. 

He pays it no mind. “I said,” he snarls, “stop with the tricks. You owe your very ability to draw breath to me, and beyond that. It was my neck on the line to grant you that. What I did for you was worth many debts. If you want to settle it all to even, you’ll do it. Don’t play this like a fool.” He doesn’t address the kelpie’s first question. 

Taehyun creeps toward the kelpie. You’re not sure where he sources all that fearlessness from inside himself. He’s way too close for your comfort. “What are you doing?” you hiss, quiet and meant for just him. There is no way he intends to fight this thing right now. You’d prefer taking the risk of trusting Yeonjun’s word over this any day. 

“Even the general”—the kelpie spits that word with a similar distaste as he had Taehyun’s title—“knew when he was in over his head. Ask a more respectable payment of me.” 

You suck in a breath. “Let’s just go,” you tell Taehyun. “We don’t need to do this; we didn’t need to in the first place.”  

As Taehyun takes one last step toward the kelpie, he reaches a sword’s distance from it.  

Really? Is this happening right now? 

“I’m giving you grace right now, kelpie,” he says, his voice pure warning, “My father is the one who landed you like that. It’s humorous that you’d even speak of him while we’re sorting out the debts that you incurred because of him. I suggest that you give up the sly act.” 

Once again, a charged and meaningful pause rings throughout the forest. The silence speaks volumes of how the kelpie takes his words.  

It’s a flash of movement, the two dark figures like blurs as Taehyun’s hand flies out to grab a hold of the reins that hang from its head and the kelpie rears back with a bone-piercing, harrowing whinny. He braces himself on its side and uses its flank to push off of. The creature bucks fast, but Taehyun is faster.  

The rage that it bellows with guts you. The forest ground trembles with its frantic clambering, hooves battering the snow.  

The kelpie’s frenzy ends as Taehyun takes the reins in both hands. It doesn’t make any more attempts to send him off, nor does it stumble about wildly. It settles. The kelpie bows its head. Your hands cover your mouth. They’re ready to muffle your scream. You wait for Taehyun to become one with the beast’s figure and for it to drag him down to the depths of its water that don’t see the sun’s light. Nothing happens. Instead, he slips off the back of the kelpie without any trouble, landing with a thud back on the ground.  

“Fix your appearance,” Taehyun commands.  

You allow a sound of surprise to slip as the beast melts down, shedding water to the ground and crumpling over. You watch it shrink all the way down until, where once the gangly beast had stood, the form of a faerie man stands. He unfurls from the forest floor to his full height, taller than Taehyun and reedy in his limbs. His hair cascades down from his head in shaggy, damp brown locks with twigs and leaves tangled in. Sharp faerie ears protrude from it. It confirms to you that this is just another form of the kelpie, not someone else entirely. 

“You’re a fool,” the man says, turning on Taehyun with wild eyes.  

You join his confrontation on Taehyun. “What the hell is going on?” you say. You’re still jittery with the urge to run. 

Taehyun entertains only you, saying, “I hoped that he’d just make things easy in the first place.” 

The man, dripping with water from his tattered, sopping rags for clothes, sneers. “I would not serve you if you fucking killed me. Of course you had to take my bridle.” 

You give Taehyun an expectant look. You’re in dire need of being filled in. 

“His bridle,” he says, grabbing the reins that still hang from the man’s face even in his human form and tugging him into a walk into the forest, “I grabbed it. He serves me, now. He can hate it all he wants, but he’ll do what I ask.” 

The thought makes you deeply uncomfortable, but you can’t pin exactly why. It lives somewhere around the place inside you that loathed the way the folk made your kind into their glamoured servants.  

“We’re just going to bring him back with us?” You trail them tentatively back through the woods that you had arrived from. “Like a prisoner, or something?” 

“Exactly like a prisoner,” the man says, excited to get a hit in on Taehyun. Of course, he’s unhappy.  

He stumbles as Taehyun tugs him forward by his bridle. “Shut your mouth,” Taehyun says. It’s more commanding than angry. “What’s your name?” he asks him.  

The man looks as though he wants to deny him that knowledge. Names are a powerful thing to a faerie. They spend their lives hiding them away—to give away their real name would make them totally vulnerable to the whims of whoever knows and uses it. However, you assume that whatever hold Taehyun has over him now works in a similar way, and his lips move despite his revolt.  

“Beomgyu,” he answers, eyes full of bite. 

You climb between a pair of close-resting, gnarled trees. “Does he have to keep that thing on, Taehyun?” you say, struggling with the sight of him being dragged along. It’s unsettling. “Like, does it work without that?” 

Stopping, Taehyun reaches up to pull the bridle off and around from Beomgyu’s head. He lets it fall to the snow. “You can use his name if you need to command him and I’m not around. He’ll have to do what you say.” Pushing Beomgyu into a walk, he says, “You’re going to protect us if in any case we need it. That includes her. You’re going to stay within my estate, unless one of us brings you somewhere. You won’t try your hand at any escape, and you won’t make any attempts to harm us either directly or by omitting something you are aware will do so.” 

You rub your hands together to generate heat as he lists his commands. Why would he even need those precautions, if Beomgyu is supposed to be his compulsory servant now? Would that not mean that he’d be unable to harm him? Either Taehyun is being extra precautious, or the command he has over him is weaker than you had thought at first. Beomgyu scowls the whole way through. Perhaps if Taehyun had not spoken those exact words, he would have lunged at him. 

As the kelpie stalls, Taehyun urges him forward once again with a shove. “Walk,” he snaps. “You did this to yourself. If you’d been a respectable man, I’d have only asked for your help when we needed. Now, you’re following us everywhere.” He allows him to stew on that for a little before saying, “You do your job well and I’ll let you return to your waters. I’ll forget I even made you my servant, and you’ll live knowing you’re no longer in my debt. You’ll not have to worry that someone might tame you again, because I already had, and I won’t even utilize it. We’ll never even make each other’s acquaintance again. You’ll be free to toil in your forest, and I will stay far away. All I need is for you to keep us alive and unharmed.” 

At least he doesn’t intend to keep him forever as an eternal servant. Most faeries that fall into debts work their long lives as living servants. Your years as Nut-hatch's worker taught you how that life whittles your soul down. Hundreds of years of just that is unfathomable. Maybe that is the cost of betraying honor here, though.

“So be it,” Beomgyu says, teeth gritted.  

You continue to trudge through the forest behind them. 

❆

Once you’re within the walls of the estate and Beomgyu is given a place to stay, you turn to Taehyun. “What part of that was safer than trusting Yeonjun?” you say.  

His eyes drop closed and he sighs. “It was worlds safer,” he grits out. “I knew what I was doing. You had that hag stone, and I’d have cut him down if he tried anything.” 

He stretches out his shoulders, shifting them uncomfortably under the fabric of his tunic. You know that his sewn-up wound bothers him. Could it be getting infected? You hope not—an infection this early on would most definitely mean it would be a nasty one. If only he weren’t insistent on pretending that it’s nothing. “I don’t think you could”—you gesture at your own shoulder—“you’re going to infect your shoulder. I don’t know how to treat an infected wound that big.” 

“I wouldn’t have even gone there if I thought I couldn’t handle it. I had a plan. I can protect us just fine.” 

Us. You’ve been wondering what your purpose here might become once you abandon returning to your duties. Would you be staying with Yeonjun? If he betrays you, and Taehyun were to push you out now that you’re no longer partners in duty, where would you go? Crawl to the doorstep of some random faerie to place yourself in their services, just to find yourself a warm place to stay? Taehyun now makes it clear that he still sees the two of you as a pair, but why? You still can’t understand why he’d suddenly switched up the moment you said you’d stay here even if he left. Realistically, he should’ve killed you for being a traitor to the king that he serves. You know that his intentions are more complex than that, but you fail to grasp where they lie. His actions and his words clash.  

“And when Yeonjun doesn’t betray us? What will all of this be for?” 

“This doesn’t stop at the prince,” he says, “there are more players than just him and The Queen. Any one of them could determine that we’re liabilities. Don’t you think that we should prepare for that? We came here as spies infiltrating their court from the very king that they rebel against; of course they’ll have plans for us. It’s still best that you stay your distance from the prince from this point on, regardless, unless you bring the kelpie.” 

Your mouth drops open, brows pinching. You don’t like the thought of being chaperoned at all. If Yeonjun is to betray you, then it’ll be your own fault. You can take the consequences of your actions just fine. “I think I can make that decision for myself,” you say, voice low. “And I can protect myself, too. Are you saying my skills aren’t up to your standards? Well, I didn’t spend that time working on them for nothing, and I don’t plan on stopping. I know I’m not perfect, but I think I can at least use a dagger adequately.” 

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Taehyun says, eyes flat with frustration. “You can protect yourself well. I know that. What I mean is that you shouldn’t rest your life on his integrity. I have no doubts that you’d be able to protect yourself from him alone. He’s delicate. The King doesn’t pamper his children, but I have no doubt that the prince hasn’t wielded a sword anywhere other than in sparring. But you don’t know if you’ll ever truly be alone, and you don’t know whether or not he’s setting you up. I think you can at least agree that it’s best that you can acknowledge that and behave accordingly, no?” 

“I rested my life on your integrity today. Am I supposed to trust you blindly, too? What if you’re just stringing me along until you kill me for my treason to The King? You were his spy, no? How many years did you serve him? Why have you given it up so easily? Why are you staying here? None of it makes sense to me, but I still trusted you. Was I wrong for that? Are you a liar, Taehyun? Does your tongue tell lies?” 

His eyes crystallize, a few degrees colder than you’d seen them all day. “I can lie,” he says. “But would I have done what I did today if I intended to kill you? It’s time that you see that actions tell you so much more than words ever will.” 

Again, he treads around your questions about his intentions. “Why are you staying here?” you repeat, studying him with your suspicion.  

He’s quiet. 

“Answer me,” you demand. 

“Is this not my home?” he says. 

Unsatisfied, you press more. “I thought you hated this place. Why would you want to stay here? Don’t you have an awful reputation here?” 

His eyebrows shoot up, but his face stays hauntingly blank. You’re used to his blank mask, but this feels different. “If you think that I left here because of my reputation, then you’ve fooled yourself.” He begins making for his quarters. “I have obligations to fulfilling my father’s role as Lord of this estate,” he says before turning and ending the conversation on his terms. 

That leaves you just as confused. If he cared about his responsibilities here, he would’ve never left them in the first place to become a spy under The King. It makes no sense. Whether or not it’s true, you’re positive that you aren’t getting the whole story. You sigh and drag your feet bed-bound. You hope to never have another day as unending as today again. 

❆

You dodge Beomgyu for the entirety of the day, not sure what to make of a new presence around the estate, even if it’s an indebted servant beast of a presence. You’d half expected Taehyun to rope him up in the horse stalls outside, making that his permanent residence, but he’d given Beomgyu a place somewhere in the servant’s quarters. You’re glad of it—you may be wary of him, but you don’t wish anything like that for him. Now that he has a more human form, you find yourself able to empathize with him more than you were when he was a hulking, killer water horse. He doesn’t necessarily run around much—without a doubt because he’s not the happiest about being forced into Taehyun’s servitude. You don’t blame him. 

Despite your efforts, he enters the kitchens while you’re alternating between chomping on a slice of bread and a platter of dates. He eyes you. Though in this form his eyes are not as piercing, they’re still heavy.  

You offer him a slice of the bread and push the platter toward him. “Hungry?” 

He shakes his head. “I don’t eat the way you do.” 

Then why’d he come to the kitchens? Either he’s exploring, or he came looking for you. “Not even like this?” you ask, gesturing down to his form. 

“I eat when someone is foolish enough to come to my waters,” he says. “I thought I’d be eating yesterday, but the Lord subverted those plans, didn’t he?” 

You laugh a bit, though it’s absurd to laugh about being eaten with the same creature that had intended to do so.  

“I sometimes go for more years than the entire span of your human life without eating,” he says, tilting his head to one side. Shaggy locks of hair follow his head with it. It’s unkempt and in dire need of a washing to rid it of dirt. 

You gesture at his dirt-smudged cheek. “Do you want to clean up? I’m sure Taehyun has some clothes to spare for you. There are some pretty nice bathing quarters, here, too. The kind that makes you reluctant to get out.” 

A wry smile cracks across his face, a bit feral like the rest of him. “I’m not afraid of some dirt. These are my clothes. I’d go naked before dressing myself in his.” 

“Okay, then,” you snort, shrugging. “No baths.” You rip a bite out of the wrinkled fruit in your hand. “How did you even end up... in debt to Taehyun?” you ask, eager to fill yourself in. If Taehyun insists on not telling you anything, you’ll find it in other places. You’d picked up that it had something to do with his father, but you need to know more. The more you’re able to piece together, the better you’ll be able to make sense of Taehyun’s behaviors. You hope so, at least. He holds is truths very close to himself, and almost everybody else seems to harbor a poignant distaste for him. 

Beomgyu’s face sours up again. “I had a dispute with his father. The General was going to raze my forest and kill each one of us. I’d called on him and asked for his help. I’m not sure what he did, but The General never came. If I knew it’d land me like this, though...” He grimaces. “I’d have just let him make me history.” 

Reigning in the laugh that bubbles in your chest at his resentment, because you’re positive that you finding humor in his misfortunes would ruffle him, you nod and pocket that information. “Then, why didn’t you just agree to help when he tried to collect your debt in the first place?” 

“I was going to,” he snaps. “He’s just a prideful creature. No patience. If he’d waited a few moments, I’d have agreed.” 

Humming, you don’t tell him that he’s definitely the one who wound himself up like this. Taehyun had made it clear multiple times that Beomgyu needed to stop playing around.  

Taehyun’s voice comes from the doorway, cutting into the conversation with its matter-of-factness. “Speaking bad on my name while I’m away, kelpie? Should I amend your list of commands to include watch your mouth?” His tone is bare and humorless. 

Beomgyu bristles beside you, about to rebut him before you spy the weapon at Taehyun’s hip and interrupt before they can come to verbal blows. “Where are you going?” 

Taehyun rips his icy gaze from Beomgyu to you. “To Court,” he answers, plain and as if it were obvious. 

Furrowing your brows, you say, “Court? Why didn’t you tell me we’re going? I don’t want to get ready in a rush.” Your mind turns. You weren’t even sure what you’d be doing now that you’re no longer here as spies. There’s no need to infiltrate Court, now. Would you just be attending as revelers? Not to mention that Yeonjun no doubt has no clue that you’re even staying. You hadn’t seen him since you’d ran to him yesterday morning and had your world thrown for a loop as he revealed his truth. How had so much happened in one day?  

His mouth hardens. “You’re not attending with me,” he says, knuckles turning white over the pommel of his sword. “You’ll stay here with him today.” 

Your heart thrums in your chest; not with fear like it had been doing so much over the span of the last few days, but with anger. “What?” you say, shock straining your voice. “No. I’m getting ready; wait for me, or don’t. I don’t care.” You spin on your heels to do just that, gritting your teeth. He thinks he can tell you what to do? Is that it? You don’t care what he’s done for you, or what power he thinks he has over you because of it. You’d left your life of taking commands behind for a reason. This was supposed to be new beginnings, not just your past life under a new skin. 

He catches your upper arm frantically. Whipping your head to him, you rip yourself away from him and back off. “I said, no,” you grit out, lips twitching into a heavily emotional scowl. It’s not just that he’s telling you to stay back today: you know that what he’s doing is much bigger than that. It sends memories of a life in a seamstress’ cottage flooding back. You struggle to keep your head afloat, to keep yourself from drowning in it, but they’re old and deep wounds. 

“Oh, look at that,” Beomgyu croons. “You are just like him. Except, your father was a general, so at least he had some reason to believe that folk would obey him. You? Not so much.” 

Taehyun’s head snaps to him. He barks a command. “Leave.” 

His eyes flash and he reels against it, but Beomgyu’s body moves against his own will. There’s a spark of ravenous hate smeared across his lips and in the glare he gives Taehyun as he leaves. 

“So, you’re just going to hand out commands and expect them to be followed now, huh? Because you’re suddenly just... taking up this role as Lord? Well, you’re not my Lord. You’re not his, either.” 

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Stop that.” 

Laughing a bitter laugh, you spit, “Stop what? Oh, I’m sorry. I should just obey you like a good human does, huh? ‘Cause that’s what we’re for, right? My bad, I’ll get a head start on working around the estate—what would you like for dinner, my lord? Or, do you need me to press your clothes? Go ahead and place your glamour over me, so at least then I won’t have to serve you consciously.” Your words are angry, but you choke toward the end around the lump of emotion in the back of your throat. 

He takes both your arms into his hands, his brow furrowed hard. “Stop it,” he snarls. “Stop it, damn it. Don’t do that. You’re not a servant here. Don’t you try to cry to me, I expect better than this from you. That’s not it at all.” 

You shove back on his chest, putting some distance between you. “I’m not crying,” you say. “And, so what if I was? There’s nothing wrong with it. Really, I think it’d do you a little good to cry some time.” 

“It’s weak,” he says. “Pitying yourself just ends up making you into a fool. If you just sit around and wallow, you’ll stay where you are. The only thing you can do is act.”  

That sounds about right coming from his lips. “Is that what your father taught you?” you ask. “Well, he was wrong. You can cry and try and take care of things at the same time. Crying is not the weaker emotion.” 

“I’m just asking you to stay back today,” he says. 

“Why?” you say, throwing your hands up in exasperation. “Tell me why? It’s not like we’re spying around or have some sort of mission to keep secret. Why can’t I just go enjoy it like that for once?” 

“Can you just do this for me?” Taehyun says, jaw tight. “I just need you to stay.” 

You’ve become sick of him not telling you things. Being in the dark never feels good, but it especially feels like shaky ground now. If he thinks you’ll be attacked, so what? You’re the one who wanted to stay here. Let you come. You’re better off being attacked as a group of three than he would be by himself, no? 

You decide to lean into his own concerns to appeal. “What if they’re waiting for you? Wouldn’t it be better that Beomgyu and I are there? Isn’t that why you did that whole thing yesterday?” 

He shakes his head. “If they are, then it’ll be easier for me to slip out if it’s just me.” 

Crossing your arms over your chest, you determine by the solemn lines to his face that he’s not going to give. “Fine,” you say. “I’ll stay here today. If it’s so necessary, I’ll stay here. Do you want me to stay inside the estate, too? Could I go see Yeonjun?” 

“I’d prefer that you stay here,” he says, slow and measured and veiling tension. 

You shake your head, pairing it with a tired laugh. “Yeah, right, I forgot. He’s a threat too. Well, you have fun then.” Turning and departing from the kitchens, you leave behind your bread and dates. So much for lunch. 

❆

Reaffirming Taehyun’s ability to lie, it was not just that one day. The next day, Taehyun slipped out for Court, sword on hip and pleading with you to stay in the estate on the terms that he believes they still might have an attack planned for you. It turned into a week that you were cooped up in the estate, and then two. The same walls you’d once looked at in wonder for their beauty became the ones you stared at mindlessly during the most boring of hours. 

You spend most of your time listening to Beomgyu drone on and on about the ways he’d tricked faeries and humans. He’s quite odd, but it’s not like you can blame him for it—most of the folk are odd to you, and he’s an ancient beast among them. You feel like that warrants a spunky personality like his. He’s nice company, anyway. Such a long life lends you an impressive wealth of stories. 

You can’t help but think about Yeonjun. He’s got to have seen Taehyun at Court by now. If there haven’t been any incidents at this point, doesn’t that mean that he doesn’t intend to betray you? The images of him thinking that you’re avoiding him makes you want to slip out to see him. You not sure why you don’t. Maybe the lies that sat between you affect you more than you thought they did. You’re quite the hypocrite, though. You’d kept secrets just as much as he had. 

You miss those stolen nights you two had shared. A knot, queasy and pessimistic, sits in your belly each time you lay in your bed and remember them and tells you that you’ll never see anything like that again. You’d allowed a girlish part of you to blossom beside him—a part of you that could throw caution to the wind and melt into the fun things in life.  

As you rot your days away in that estate that has become more like a dungeon than an estate, you allow yourself to miss him only a little. Once it begins transforming into a certain impending doom about how you’d thought that staying here would be everything you’d ever wanted, you find something else to do. If you aren’t toiling around by yourself or listening to Beomgyu drone, you’re practicing your combat skills. The times that Taehyun stops in to help you, it ends with you insisting that you’re fine to make appearances in Court by now, or at least see Yeonjun with Beomgyu in attendance. He never agrees. Each time, it’s the same awful excuse: Tensions are worse. He doesn’t know if they’re planning something. When you ask why he demands that he can attend, but you and Beomgyu can’t join: He’s a lord. It’s his duty to attend Court. 

The solstice is nearing, too. You’d looked forward to it, honestly. Hopefully Taehyun will let you attend by then. 

You sit crisscrossed on the hardwood flooring, running your fingers through your hair. Beomgyu is stood a couple feet away, and makes big gestures as he explains the one time he’d been called to attend Court as a solitary faerie. Moments like this have kept you grounded over the weeks. 

“And the stupid crone tried to say that I was wrong for catching him,” he exclaims, crossing his arms over his chest and shaking his head as if the ancient memory were still as fresh as day one.  

You laugh. “What did you even do to end up there, anyway?” you ask. You can hardly picture Beomgyu in the setting of Court, even more so meeting with The Queen and her council. Moreover, you’re intrigued to know what he’d said to talk himself out of trouble. You’re amazed that he managed to make a sufficient enough case to save his life. 

“They said that I’d been taking too many of their folk—hah! I must eat too, you know? Oh, the pretention! Do they expect me to starve? If a fool lands themselves on my pelt and then in my waters, it’s only natural that they’re eaten. I’m simply freeing them from one more mud-brained fool. The Courts are full of those, too. It’d take me a millennium to eat them all. What are they so worried for, I wonder? They do the very same to their own people.” 

“Aren’t they ridiculous?” you say. Like you, he’d been an outsider in Court. Though you’re sure that it’s just as, if not more, intricate to those well-versed in it, to the ones like you two... It’s odd to see. You had grown used to it in the time you spent there, but you still know what the first day had felt like. Anyway, you hadn’t spent as many days there as you feel you had. All that had happened had bloated that time in your memories. “To be quite honest with you, your kind are all so odd to me. I grew up among you, but still... my instincts are always kinda at odds with my surroundings, you know?” 

Beomgyu considers that for a moment, as if trying to view the fae from a human’s eyes. “Even when we look so similar?” he asks you, grabbing at a lock of his hair and making a round gesture over himself. 

You nod. “Even in this form, you just... I don’t feel like I’m looking into the face of another human. Maybe that’s because I watched you turn to this from a horse, though.” 

“A kelpie,” he corrects. “What gives it away?” 

“Sorry, a kelpie,” you snicker. You look over his face. It’s so close to right, but somewhere in your mind you can decipher that something is not right. Like all of the fae, though, there’s an unspeakable beauty there, beyond explanation. It demands your human attention. Even the most terrifying are beautiful. “Well, for starters, your ears. They’re pointy. All of you have that, and none of us do. And then... I guess”—you narrow your eyes—“your eyes? They’re just different. And your limbs are pretty lanky, too.” 

He frowns as if he’s unable to see it. “You don’t sound so sure,” he says, joining you on the floor. “I’ve had quite some time to look at myself in my life. I don’t think I ever saw any of that when I was in this form...” 

“I’m sure you did,” you say, lips turning up in a playful mock. A water creature no doubt has an eternity to stare into the water at themselves in its rippled reflection. “Did you do a lot of that?” 

Scowling, he huffs. “No. But I’m sure you would, if you looked like this, huh?” 

You roll your eyes. “You’re ridiculous.” His face morphs from dismay to careful concentration. Frowning, you look around and ask, “What?” 

“I hear somebody,” he answers, pushing off the floor. 

Your spine tingles, but you search for the logical explanation. “Like... Taehyun?” 

“No... the walk is definitely different.” He strains to listen. “He’s usually pretty quiet. This one... they don’t conceal their footsteps.” 

Neither of you can get to a window to scope anything out before there’s three heavy knocks from the door, the metal knocker ringing. You shoot him a wary look and tilt your head toward the door. You mouth the word, answer? 

He considers for a moment and then nods. Well, he’s the one able to hear their approach. You trust they’re at least not imminent danger. You pull the door open. A breeze of frost comes rushing in as you do, blowing your hair and as jarring as a hit to the face might be. You’ve been cooped up in here for so long you’ve forgotten how bitter the cold here is.  

Behind the door your eyes lock with a pair of inky ones, settled into a pinched and snooty face. “Letters from the palace I have for you, my lady,” she says, her voice mousy. She holds out a stack full of letters to you, all held together by some twine. 

An errand runner. You furrow your brows down at her and accept them. The little hob wrings out her long fingers. “From who?” you ask her.  

She bows her head to you hurriedly. “Oh, from the prince, my lady! He sends these for you!” 

You look down at the stack in your hands, and your heart begins to run amok in your chest. He’d sent to you? You thank her. She scurries off in the snow and you close the door, sharing a look with Beomgyu. 

“The prince?” he says, brows shot up. “Meaning, The King’s son? He’s sent letters for you?” 

Nodding, you hold the stack close to you. Your feet ache to find your quarters and to begin tearing into each one; you’re ravenous for any sort of word from him. Does he hate you? Does he miss you? At least he still thinks of you. You’d worried that he might’ve found another lady of the court to dote on in your absence... 

“Yeah,” you say over your shoulder, more interested in tearing the letters open than explaining to him why the prince would be sending you letters. Curiosity sits in his furrowed brow. You hadn’t exactly prattled on about Yeonjun to him. Had you even mentioned him at all? 

He tags along as you head to your room and plop onto your bed. You don’t tell him to leave you; opening these letters alone... You appreciate his presence in some odd way.  

Unstringing the pile, you pull the first one out and run a thumb over the wax seal that identifies it as definitely from the High Prince—a fine silver dusted over white wax and branded with the image of Yeonjun’s insignia, the fox. It’s uneven and dribbled, clearly sealed by Yeonjun himself with the insignia ring he often wears on his finger. You pry it open and then unfurl the parchment inside. 

𝒟𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝓊 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑛𝒹 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝐶𝑜𝓊𝑟𝑡? 𝑃𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑝𝓈 𝑤𝑒 𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝 𝑚𝒾𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟. 𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝒾𝓈 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒. 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝓃𝒹𝑒𝑟 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒. 𝐼𝑓 𝑚𝑦 𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒𝓈 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑎𝓈𝑒 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑚𝑒 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘. 𝑀𝑦 𝑑𝑜𝑜𝑟𝓈 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝓊.  

𝒯ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝓈 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛.

𝑌𝑒𝑜𝑛𝒿𝑢𝑛

Beomgyu’s gaze burns holes through you as you read this first one. You sigh, pressing your lips into a thin line as you reach for the next one. This one twists a hot knife of guilt into your belly and up into your heart. 

𝐻𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝐼 𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝓈𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔?   

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙'𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑒𝓃𝑑 𝐶𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ 𝐼 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑘 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝓇 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝓈𝑖𝑑𝑒 ℎ𝑖𝑠, 𝓎𝑜𝑢'𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝓇 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒. 𝐼'𝑚 𝑢𝓃𝒹𝑒𝓇 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝓈 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑠𝑒𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑒. 𝐴𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ, 𝑝𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑝𝓈 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝓎𝑜𝑢𝓇 𝑎𝑏𝓈𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑚𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑤𝑖𝓈𝑒.

𝐼𝑠 𝑖𝑡 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝓈𝑒 𝐼 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝒾𝑑𝑒𝓃𝑡𝒾𝑡𝓎? 𝐼𝑠 𝒾𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝓊 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝐼 ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝑢? 

𝐴𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝓊𝑡𝑚𝑜𝓈𝑡 𝑐𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟: 𝐼 𝒹𝑜 𝑛𝑜𝑡. 𝐼 𝒹𝑜𝑢𝑏𝑡 𝐼 𝑐𝑜𝓊𝑙𝑑 𝑖𝑓 𝐼 𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑑. 𝑌𝑜𝑢'𝓇𝑒 𝓆𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝒶𝑟𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑒𝓇.   

𝐼 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝐼 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑎 𝑏𝑖𝑡 𝑟𝒾𝒹𝑖𝑐𝓊𝑙𝑜𝑢𝓈, 𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝓎𝑜𝑢 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑤𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑤 𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑓𝑜𝓇 𝓈𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔. 𝐼 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝓇𝓈𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡. 𝐼𝑡'𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝒶𝑡 𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑏𝓇𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝓇𝑡, 𝑟𝒾���ℎ𝑡? 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑤𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑡. 𝑁𝑜𝑡 𝑢𝓈.  

𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑚𝒾𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑠𝑎𝓎 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 𝑠𝑜 𝑒𝒶𝑠𝑖𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝒾𝑐𝑘𝑙𝑒. 𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛'𝑡 𝑒𝑥𝑖𝓈𝑡. 𝐼 𝑠𝑎𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑡 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝓈, 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝐼 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑓𝑒𝑙𝑡 𝑖𝑡.

𝒟𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝓇 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝒾𝑡 𝑓𝑒𝑙𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝓉 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑢𝓇 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝓈 𝑚𝑒𝑡, 𝑡𝑜𝑜? 𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑜𝒹𝑑 𝑖𝑠 𝒾𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙 𝓈𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠𝑜 𝒹𝑒𝑒𝑝 𝒾𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝓎𝑜𝑢, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝓈𝑜 𝑓𝑎𝓇 𝑏𝑒𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝓎𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑜𝓉 𝒶𝑙𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑖𝑡𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝓊𝑟𝓈𝑒?

𝑃𝑙𝑒𝒶𝑠𝑒 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑚𝑒, 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑡𝓉𝑦. 𝐼𝑓 𝐼 𝑐𝑎𝑛'𝑡 𝑠𝑒𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝑢𝓇 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒, 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝓈𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑚𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑎𝓈𝓊𝓇𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝓉 𝑦𝑜𝑢'𝓇𝑒 𝑜𝑘𝒶𝑦. 

𝑌𝑒𝑜𝑛𝒿𝑢𝑛

“What do they say?” Beomgyu asks, timbred voice whipping you from the words that had settled a quaking ache in your chest.  

You’re not entirely sure how to tell him that they’re desperate letters of the High Prince’s love for you, a worthless human girl that had avoided him on purpose. He probably wouldn't believe you, anyway. Leaving behind your old life, you had pleaded with the sky to make your life something worth note. It seems that it had answered. Fate works in odd ways like that, granting your wishes in the last way you might expect.  

“A lot,” you say, brushing him off. Your voice cracks with it, though,  

Hearing the veiled emotion, he frowns, inching forward to take a peek. “Why are you upset?” he pries, and then gasps as a thought formulates in his head. “Have they called you to be tried by the council?” He considers his own suggestion for a long moment and then shakes his head. “You hardly have gone anywhere enough to cause that degree of trouble, though.”  

You let your face drop into your hands. Is the tremor in your chest from laughter, or from crying? You couldn’t say. Maybe it’s both. 

The kelpie makes an unsure sound, clearing his throat. “I... uh, I jest...” 

Collecting yourself, you say, “No. I’m not being called in for trial.”  

Dried up rose petals come fluttering out with the next letter. The flower of love. 

𝐻𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝑙𝑒𝑓𝓉 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝓇𝑡ℎ? 𝐶𝑜𝓊𝑙𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑜𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝓈𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑙𝑎𝓈𝑡 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑎𝑡 𝓎𝑜𝑢𝓇 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝓈𝑜? 𝐼 𝑑𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑠𝑜 𝑝𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑐, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑚𝓎 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑒𝓈𝑜𝑚𝑒. 𝐼 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑤𝑒'𝑑 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒. 𝐻𝑎𝑑𝑛'𝑡 𝓎𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝓈𝑡𝑎𝑦 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑚𝑒?

𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝓈𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝓇𝑒𝑠𝑖𝒹𝑒 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛 ℎ𝒾𝑠 𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒶𝑡𝑒, 𝐼 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝓇𝓈 𝑡𝑜 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝐼'𝑚 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑠𝓊𝑟𝑒 𝒾𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦'𝑙𝑙 𝓇𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ 𝓎𝑜𝑢, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑑𝑜, 𝐼 ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝐷𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼'𝑑 𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑛𝓎𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔?

𝑃𝑙𝑒𝑎𝓈𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝓈𝑒𝑒 𝑚𝑒. 𝐼 𝑏𝑒𝑔. 𝐿𝑒𝑡'𝑠 𝓉𝑎𝑙𝑘. 𝐼 ��𝑢𝓈𝑡 𝑤𝒶𝑛𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 𝑤𝓇𝑜𝑛𝑔. 

𝑌𝑒𝑜𝑛𝒿𝑢𝑛

Why hadn’t you at least gone and told him that you’ve stayed? How had you allowed yourself to feel fear when you think of him? You don’t deserve his love. You don’t even know if you deserve love at all. All it would’ve taken was one night of slipping out. He deserved to know that you’re okay. You don’t remember being this selfish. When had it happened? Maybe selfish is what becomes of you when you’ve wasted a lifetime expected to serve others before yourself and then are granted the freedom to consider yourself first. You don’t want to be selfish, though.  

The one you pull open now is more raw. Hurt. The paper, scrawled in writing that becomes less elegant and more frenzied as you read down it, crumples in your hand. 

𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘 𝐼'𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝓈𝑜𝓇𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝒶𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑙𝓎 𝑓𝑜𝓇𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑒'𝑣𝑒 𝓈ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑, 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑛𝑜𝑡. 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊. 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝓊. 𝑃𝑙𝑒𝑎𝓈𝑒 𝓇𝑒𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑦 𝒶𝑟𝑚𝓈. 𝒯ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑜𝓇 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝓇 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝑤𝑒𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝓈𝑜𝑜𝑛 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑡 𝑖𝑡.   

𝐷𝑜 𝐼 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝓈𝑎𝑦 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑚𝑜𝓇𝑒?   

𝐼 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝓊, 𝑑𝒶𝓇𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐼𝑡'𝑠 𝑚𝒶𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑚𝑒 𝓈𝑖𝑐𝑘  

𝑌𝑒𝑜𝑛𝒿𝑢𝑛

You stuff the letters back in their envelopes and shove them into a box in your wardrobe. If you don’t, you’ll read them over until you’re ill. Once over was enough for you. 

❆

“The Lord would have my pelt if I let you leave,” Beomgyu, crossing his arms firmly over his chest, says. “Let alone by yourself.” Realizing that his words insinuate that Taehyun holds any true power over him, he backtracks. “If it weren’t for the harness, I’d be unconcerned with his anger, but... Of course, you know, I’m obligated by my imposition to his word, so...” 

Tugging your boots on, you say, “So, tell him I commanded you to stay. You’ll be fine.”  

You had waited for Taehyun to leave for Court, anyway. You have hours of the night to sly-foot your way around him. 

You’d moped around for a few more days, your gut heavy with stones each time you remember Yeonjun’s letters. Stuffing them into a box, no matter how deep into the corner of your wardrobe, still could not wipe those words from your mind. You’d turned them over and over until you couldn’t handle imagining him writing those letters with a hopeful heart any longer.  

The solstice is only a few days away now, too. You’d been bound to the estate for weeks. Although you’re unsure what Taehyun’s real intentions are in boarding you in, you can no longer even care if leaving will end up getting you attacked. You’ve become a bird with clipped wings.  

Even if your wings are out of order, you’ll walk your way to your freedom. Hell, you’d crawl there. It just so happens that Yeonjun’s doorway feels like freedom in this moment.  

Like he’d always said, the doors remain unbarred. You don’t even have to use the metal knocker; you just push through the doors of swirling white engravements. Just as if nothing had changed. He’d been waiting for you. 

Instead of Yeonjun in his quarters, you find a brownie diligently working on doing up Yeonjun’s bedding. When she turns to you, her hands continue their efforts. 

“The prince is not here right now, dear,” she says, snout twitching. Round eyes recognize you before you can introduce yourself. “He’s only just made for Court, though. You should catch him quite quickly, if you mean to.” 

It seems he hasn’t given up searching for you in Court, either. You offer her your gratitude and slip out from his room. Picking up the hems of your dress, you race to catch Yeonjun before he’s arrived at Court. Once he does, things get more sticky—if Taehyun spots you... Pushing down the anxiety that bubbles up at the thought, you cross your fingers. Let luck be on your side.  

Your Court dress, though heavy, feels nice on your skin. Although you often look down on court goers for their pompousness, you can’t deny how good it feels to fit in. That’s perhaps the reason you cling to Court the way you do; you’re beyond desperate for belonging. 

On the plush, snow-dusted bits of the forest’s floor, you spot a set of footsteps. They’re quickly being filled with the flurries. You clasp your hands in an overwhelming bout of gratitude—luck had listened, this time. Those tracks are as fresh as can be. You double your pace. 

Around a bend, you’re overjoyed to see his figure walking there. Finally hearing you coming over the roar of snowfall, he spins. His face pinches and then drops as he recognizes you. 

“You... You came?” he says. Disbelief flips his lips into a frown. “You got my letters?” 

“I did,” you answer, catching your breath. “I’m so sorry.” 

A few feet float between you, the space not yet closed but so magnetic. His cheeks are tinged pink with the cold. Yours must be too.  

“I’d thought you left. I thought I’d never see you again.” 

Your chest caves in a little at the hurt in his voice and the way it clashes with the longing in his eyes. He wants to be angry; he wants to yell at you. He can’t do either when he’s just thankful to see your face. You had missed his just as much. 

“I’m sorry,” you repeat. “It shouldn’t have happened.” 

Yeonjun approaches you and takes your face into his hands. His fingers are ice on your skin. He swallows in your face, soft black eyes darting from your eyes to your lips and around the rest of it; just like he’d begged you to let him do in his letters. 

“Why?” Yeonjun asks you, brushing your hair back with his fingers like he’s just testing the feel of it. 

You don’t know how to answer him. You could tell him a lot of things: Taehyun told me to stay away. He had told me that you’d hurt me. I’d started to believe him. I became scared of you. We had lied to each other. None of them feel adequate in this moment, so you shake your head. 

His eyes harden to a degree as you don’t answer. “Why wouldn’t you come talk to me, pretty?” he urges. “If something was wrong, why couldn’t you come to me? We can’t leave things broken. I sent you weeks of letters. Weeks.” 

Weeks? You’d only seen four.  

“Finally, I got smart enough to send them when he’s at Court. And then you show up here. Tell me, how am I to think that you’re okay? When he won’t even let you speak with me?” 

You blink once. Twice. Taehyun had been intercepting letters. A pit of anger flares in your belly. Whatever this protecting thing he’s doing really is, you’re sick of it. Since when had he become your keeper? He’d demanded that Yeonjun was trying to do just that, but here he is, and you have no clue why he’s doing it. 

“I didn’t know you’d sent letters until yesterday,” you tell him. “I should’ve come and seen you.” 

Running his thumb over your cheek, he murmurs, “You’re not going back there. Please, tell me you’ll stay with me. If you’re to stay here in the north forever, let it be with me. We can’t slip around like this forever.” 

Shaking your head in his hands, you pull back. You can’t decipher the dread that washes over you at his suggestion once again. Your heart is wary with the need to do just that—to not return to the estate where you’d become some sort of prisoner. Something washes over you and tells you that it won’t go the way you’d wanted, just as most things in your life hadn’t. 

Seeing the way you retract, Yeonjun becomes more desperate. “Please,” he says, hands finding your shoulders to hold you as if you’ll leave him there.  

“We’ll figure it out,” you say. “Just give me a few days to think about it, okay?” 

His face stays drawn as if he wants to argue it, but he relents. Taking your frozen hands into his own and wrapping them up in attempts to warm them, he says, “Okay. Okay, let’s get away from this blizzard, then. I’ll wait for you, love.” 

Your chest sizzles. The cold isn’t so bad, today. In a way, you’d missed it. You nod.  

Yeonjun brings you to his chambers and urges you to settle into a plush seat. You run your hands over the embroidered whorls of thread on the cushions as you watch him rummage through a chest. “What are you looking for?” you ask him, drinking in his figure. He’d switched his Court shirts for some more comfortable wear, but even in those he looks princely. He’s so pretty. Your heart flutters as he fishes out what he’d been searching for and turns to you with a smile. He settles beside you carrying a leatherbound book and a miniature wood sculpture of a girl. 

“These,” he says, setting them down on the cushion between you.  

You pick up the wood thing, looking over its painted pink cheeks and feeling the carvings that make its face. It’s fitted with a dress; one unlike any you’d ever seen. Your brow furrows. “What’s this thing?” you ask. 

“It’s called a doll,” he says explains. You feel his eyes on you, watching your reaction, not on the thing in your hands. “Human girls carry them around to play with. They change the dresses and stuff. They even make things for them to hold, but... I couldn’t get ahold of any of those.”  

Heart stuttering, you look at the wood-carved thing. “Human girls?” you ask, imagining a life where you too could have worried only about what dress your toy would wear. You revere the resilience your younger self had to have. At least you didn’t know any better; you didn’t know how you could’ve had it. That ignorance saved you. The painted eyes of the doll stare back at you. 

“Kinda cute, huh?” he says, smiling and scooting closer to fiddle with the thing’s hair. “They even do their hair up all pretty.” Looking back up to you, he says, “It’s a shame that no human who has ever grown up here knows of things like these. Simple joys.” 

You nod, a little choked up. “Yeah. I wish I had. It would have been nice to have something like this as a girl.”  

He tucks some hair behind your ear to get a better look at your face from the side. “How did you ever end up being a spy?” 

Tearing your gaze from the doll to meet his, you find a sadness there despite you not even having told him yet. It’s as if he knows it’ll hurt him already. You fiddle with the little doll’s dress as you recount. “I was a servant to a seamstress,” you start. “A royal seamstress, too. She was favored well by the gentry. She brought in hordes of clients and made dresses and Court clothes for them—but, really, her work mostly ended at being there to hear what they’d want and inlaying the dresses with her magic when they’d ask for it. The rest was my work. Taking their measurements, making their dresses... I worked her shop as soon as I became able to.” Memories of cruel and wicked faces that snickered at your expense or those who found it entertainment to scare you come back, as fresh as ever. Those memories never leave you; the ones so early on that they’d calcified into permanent parts of your personality. That terrified little girl will always be somewhere in your mind. She surfaces quite a lot, these days.  

“There was this one time...” you say, trailing off to trudge up a more awful memory. “A Lady had come in to have a dress made. She brought a guard along with her. He was this massive troll with grey skin like a toad.” You’d recall his details without any trouble for the rest of your life, you think. “I’d ran off to grab some fabric for the Lady, and he followed,” you say, voice wavering just how your little heart had wavered as you had turned around from the bolts of fabric to see the goblin stood there. “He yanked me around by my hair until I sobbed, and then he had me get on the floor and beg him to let me live.” You know now that of course he wasn’t going to kill you—he wouldn’t want problems with Nut-hatch—but you hadn’t known it then. You thought you were dead. “When he had enough of his fun, he let me go. When the other two saw how hysterical I was, all I got was being asked why I’d left them waiting so long.”  

Yeonjun asks, voice soft and tender, “The seamstress allowed that?” His eyes are heavy with a mixture of emotions. You see sadness and anger there, but also something a bit more. 

“Nut-hatch?” you say. “Of course.” They’d known what he was doing in there, of course. Even a human could have heard it. As long as you served your purpose, the folk could not care less. 

He looks taken aback at that, recognition turning his brows up. “Nut-hatch? You worked for Nut-hatch?” he asks. 

Nodding, you hum. You had no doubt he’d know her name. Her work was well-renowned in his father’s court and beyond. “I did.” 

His eyes rake over you for a long few beats before he turns your face up. “Their names?” he asks. 

“Huh?” 

“The goblin and the Lady. What are their names?” 

You try to tug at the threads of that old memory. “I don’t remember,” you say. Much of it is fresh, but you hadn’t committed their names to memory. Inconsequential in the grand scheme of it. “It’s okay. It’s passed now.” 

He doesn’t look very convinced, mind wheeling behind his eyes. You don’t want to stay on this memory for too long. Pushing it back into the dusty corner where it stays, you continue explaining. “I accepted that as my life for a long time, but... At some point, I just wanted more. I imagined all the ways I could find a new life as a human here. There are so many other things I’d preferred, but the only one I could manage was that. Even that, I was wrong about. I’m not really made for that, you know?” You lighten your tone in hopes that it’ll make your chest feel lighter as well.  

He listens intently and then leans forward to press a kiss to your forehead. Pulling you into his chest and keeping you notched under his chin, he says, his voice smooth to your ears, “I’m so happy you’re here now, pretty.” 

Letting out the weight in your lungs in a long, meaningful sigh, you melt into his touch. It’s difficult not to when his body is so warm against yours. You revel in it for some time, just letting him smooth over your hair and rub your back. You try your best not to let any old, sad emotions pour out through your eyes; this is a happy moment. You’ve made it. Perhaps things had been harder than you imagined they’d be, but you knew it’d be a long journey when you escaped that sewing cottage anyway. 

Peppering a few last kisses to the top of your head, he releases you to pick up the book he had also grabbed from that chest. On the front it reads: Pride & Prejudice.  

“A book?” you say, looking over the brown leather and gold printing. It’s an unfamiliar name to you, but you never read much anyway.  

He nods and pries it open. The spine crackles with age. “It’s also from the human world.” Thumbing through the pages, he adds, “It’s a story. I read it often, it’s quite a nice one. I want to give it to you so that you can read it too; it’s a beautiful love story.” 

You lean in to take a look at the words, too perfect to be handwritten. “Where do you get all this stuff?” you say. It reminds you of he’d brought you to that market for human goods. He seems to be interested in things that are human. Perhaps that includes you. Either that or he continues to show you these kinds of things for your sake. 

“I lived in their world for some years,” he says, flipping through the pages. “It’s quite different. Though... I found myself not wanting to leave. When the time came, I brought these back with me to remind me of that time.” 

Lived? Not just visited, but Yeonjun had lived in the human realm? Your heart flurries with a lifetime of wondering what your true home was like. How ironic is it that he knew more of humans than you? That you’re the one asking him questions about your kind? “How long?” you ask first. “And why were you living there?” 

“Just for something my father wanted me to do,” he answers, “Somewhere around a decade, I believe.” 

He’d spent ten years there. Multiple things click into place—no wonder he’s so able to understand your human emotions. No wonder it feels as though you’ve been seen to a different degree by him than you’d ever known before. He’d spent years with your kind. “What is it like?” you say, not sure where to begin with your questions. 

He smiles fondly. “You wouldn’t even be able to believe me, pretty. You’ll just have to see it.” 

See it. “You’d take me there?” you say.  

“Of course,” Yeonjun says, frowning. He takes one of your hands into his, pressing a kiss to it. “You deserve to see it.” He presses another kiss to your skin, now at your wrist. The hair on your skin raises at the contact. His eyes find yours as he begins a slow ascent of kisses up your arm. Each is warm and sends your spine blazing. Once he reaches your shoulder, he slows down, leaving a long moment between kisses. He continues this pace—one that both makes you wish he’d slow down and that he’d hurry and quell your want—right up the juncture of your neck and up the column, too. His controlled breaths puff out like fire on your skin where his mouth lingers. You let your head back to help his path up. He places one final kiss at your jawline before his lips land on yours, drunken and in no rush at all.  

You can’t help the visceral urge to run your hands over his soft skin, to check if the warmth there was real or if you’d manifested it in your longing. Yeonjun breaks this lethargic kiss just to laugh, but he’s quick to recapture your lips. He meets your hand and brings it under his silken shirt, guiding you up the soft planes of his abdomen. 

Pushing you back, he whispers into your mouth, “I missed you so much, pretty.” 

You rememorize the gentle muscles of his stomach beneath your palm. “It was only so many days,” you tease, “you’re just horny.” 

He lets go of your hand to begin slipping down your dress from the shoulders. “Yeah?” he hums, gobbling up each inch of skin that he reveals. “I suppose I am. It’s a gift to be able to love you in this way.” Once the fabric is clear of your hips and he’s tugging it down your legs, his face turns sly. He studies your wettened core. “I think you missed me too, though, love.” 

You drag your bottom lip into your teeth. You had. Your chest thumps rhythmically in your chest, syncing like symphony with the throb between your thighs. 

Blood sings in your veins when he places his palm right on the boundary between your lower belly and your cunt. Your stomach soars, too, so excited by his touch so near where your body craves it. He runs it up, feeling the curves of your body, up to your breast. You expect him to stop and pay attention to your chest, but he presses his hand down right over your heart and feels its beating against his palm. His eyes flutter to a shut, and he leaves his hand there for a few moments, relishing in it.  

“What other purer form of love can I show you?” he says, tapping on your hip. “On your hands and knees, baby.” 

You flip, your limbs a bit clumsy in anticipation. Once you’ve found your way there, he dances his fingertips on the small of your spine. 

“Did you think of my touches while we were apart?” 

“Mhm,” you hum. Especially on the nights when the estate seemed the emptiest. Some nights, your fingers were just not enough to save you, and you’d contemplate making a big escape to find him.  

“Well, I shouldn’t make you wait too much longer then, huh?” he coos, running that hand down to ghost touches over your slit. Though minimal, you jolt. You’d been so ravenous for this. He’d worked his shirt off so that when he leans forward to meld his chest to your back, it’s his skin that touches yours, not fabric. His hand stays ghosting touches that leave you softly gasping. 

He teasingly pinches your clit, laughing in your hair at the sharp hiss it draws from you. “So reactive,” Yeonjun muses. His fingers find their way to your hole. He dips the middle two in. “Just like the first time we made love like this. Your lovely face is burned into my mind, pretty. You have such hungry eyes.” As he pushes his fingers in, he uses his free hand to tilt your face against the cushion so that he can better see your eyes. 

You sigh, shuddering and breathy, as he begins to curl his fingers. It only takes him a few curls to rediscover that spot that has sparks flying behind your eyes. 

“There?” he asks, chin on your shoulder. “That feel good, darling?” 

Your muscles tremble at their own accord, rendering your huffs trembled as well. “Yes,” you answer. Each meaningful curl hits its mark, knees unsteady pillars that dig into the cushions. “So—so good. Please don’t stop.”  

He maintains a sickening pace—your muscles twitch around his giving fingers, just enough so that your entire body buzzes and your stomach twists, but not enough to send you shaking yet. You collapse down from your elbows, chest in the cushions. He brushes back the hair that obscures your face with the movement, adamant to see your face.  

He eggs you on by curling deeper; faster. Your answering groan is shaky and tense—you can’t get enough of the knot he curates in your belly, but at the same time, it’s daunting. He sits back, but his fingers don’t falter. His free hand explores, feeling your body up for all the time he couldn’t.  

Stomach taut and brimming on your peak, you suck in a breath. Your orgasm sits so close, running a line of electricity from between your legs up to your spine, raising goosebumps on your skin.  

Your eyes fly open, mouth ready to scold, as Yeonjun pulls his fingers from you. Your chest bubbles up with frustration, your orgasm drifting off to somewhere else. “Why?” you ask, cheeks burning. It slips and slips away from you, hole twitching around nothing as if seeking out just enough stimulus to bring it crashing back. “I was so close.” 

His hand soothes the loss ever so slightly by circling your cunt, but he does not make the mistake of offering you any touch where you most need it. It only prolongs the float down, keeping you suspended. You abhor it.  

“Please,” you whine. 

He doesn’t entertain your whines. He only continues to deliver just enough to torment you until he’s sure that you’re not so wound up that you’ll cum the moment he touches you, and then he slides his fingers back in and begins building up a more tense knot with pointed curls. Your insides delight in the return of attention, falling almost instantly back into a brutal climb. Yeonjun doesn’t bother with languid, teasing strokes now. He aims for your ruining. 

You writhe against the cushions. Your heart is a fluttering bird in your chest, trilling at the prospect of your release. It’s so close—so close that you might be able to just touch it. It tastes like honey on your tongue, painting your words sweet. “Love you,” you tell him. “Love you so much.” 

Yeonjun rewards your sweetness with his free hand on your throbbing clit, sending your hands gripping at the cushions. You wiggle your hips helplessly in search of just the right amount of friction that it’ll finally give you want you’ve been wanting. “Yes,” you mewl. “Yes, so close—” 

“Wait, baby,” he commands from behind you. “It’ll feel so much better. I promise. Hold it back.” 

He reins in his touches once again, not stopping like last time. It’s not enough to put a stop to the orgasm rippling right under your skin, right at the edge of ripping through you. You can’t hold it back; it’s right there. 

“No,” he says, once again ripping his touch from you. It doesn’t stop anything—you go rigid just before it crashes over you, and then you’re shaking without his hands even on you. You cum with a vengeance—body reclaiming twofold what he had denied you.  

“Holy shit.” Yeonjun groans watching you come unraveled without his help. “So riled up that you’re cumming by yourself, pretty,” he says, running a hand around to feel your belly muscles twitching and the way they roll along with the twitches of your hips. He eggs on your orgasm with gentle touches at your clit, sending you jolting, until you’re a panting mess and he can tell that you’ve had enough. 

You attempt to push yourself off your chest, but he gently guides you back down with a palm against your back. “Stay there, pretty. You can handle a little more, right? You did so well, I know you can. Let me make love to you, darling.” 

The cushions are awfully warm against your skin and you’re still dealing with the waves of pleasure that drift up from your cunt, but you nod your head for him. “’Kay,” you say. 

The rustling behind you tells of how he’s slipping out of the rest of his attire. You lay boneless as he does, focusing on the waves running down your thighs. It’s ecstasy in its purest form. It floats through your veins, addling any consciousness and breaking you down into what you are at your core. 

The familiar prod at your entrance jolts you back to life. As he presses in, he presses a hand to your flushed cheek. It’s a welcome temperature difference—you feel set ablaze in some sort of languid flame, one that takes its time to consume you. He laughs softly. “You’re burning up,” he says as he bottoms out, as if the feeling of him filling you up isn’t rendering you jittery in anticipation. “Ready for me, pretty?” he teases, taking your hips into his hands. “I need you to make those pretty sounds for me. I want to know that they’re just as sweet as I remember them.” He punctuates his sentence with deep rolls of his hips, aiming where he knows will have you singing. 

You’re helpless to the chorus of ‘Oh's and ‘Yes’s that he draws from you, the smacking of his hips and your sweet moans much too loud for you. You dread the thought of his servants hearing you and push your face into the cushions, muffling the array of sounds that bubble over. It’s all you can do—you could hardly contain your sounds. 

Your scalp strains as he tugs your head back, tugging your face from the cushion. “None of that, love. I waited too long for that. Don’t hide your pretty voice.”  

You shake your head. “Too loud,” you pant. “They’re gonna hear.” 

“I don’t care who hears you. Let me hear how good I’m making you feel, or I’m going to stop. Do you want me to stop?” His fingers cling to your soft hips, betraying how much this is affecting him. You know that he hardly wants to stop. 

You’re turned to mush, though. In this moment, being heard feels nowhere near as awful as Yeonjun ceasing those dizzying thrusts. You shake your head, scalp aching against the movement. “No,” you say, breathless.  

“That’s what I thought,” Yeonjun taunts, letting your cheek drop back into the fabric. “Let them hear our love. Let them hear how real it is, darling. Louder.”  

You tentatively let your sounds out into the thick air, but he decides that it’s not enough for him. Taking his hand off your hip to brace himself on the seat’s plush armrest, he doubles down his thrusts, feverish and desperate to guide you both to a beautifully explosive end. Your mouth drops open, unfiltered words and sounds spilling out from your chest as you grab at the cushions for help. With the hand that he doesn’t use to deliver those wild thrusts, he encases your hand in his own, threading his fingers between yours.  

For a few more incandescent moments, Yeonjun’s room only consists of your unabashed cries, his alternating grunts and whines, the rhythmic and hollow smacks of his hips to your skin, and the musk of your passion. Frantic bodies dance against each other, skin against skin in the purest way. Your thighs tremble pathetically, his cock brushing against your sweet spot until you squeeze your eyes shut and ride out the quivering of your cunt around him. You squeeze his hand as you shake. 

“Yes,” his pretty voice whines, “Just like that.”  

Picking up his pace, he chases to join you in your orgasm. He pants behind you, desperately fucking into you until his hips stutter and he stills, falling into your shoulder to deliver needy rolls and shooting warm spurts of his release into you.  

You two stay like this for some unhurried moments. You focus on his heartbeat; feeling it thudding against your back reminds you that he is real, and he is love. You hold his hand in yours a little tighter. 

❆

“I doubt that this will go exactly as you believe it will,” Beomgyu says, watching you do your hair up. Your eyes meet his in the vanity’s mirror.  

Arms burning as your hold them over your head, your words come out clipped with the ache. “It worked yesterday, didn’t it?” you say. You push a filigree comb into your hair to secure it up. “I got back hours before he did.” 

“I’m not saying that Taehyun is right,” he says, “but I think that it would do us both a favor if you practice a bit more precaution.” 

“What, are you afraid of Taehyun?” you ask, raising your brows at him in the reflection.  

Your taunt hits its mark, Beomgyu shifting in your bed and scowling. “Of Taehyun, never,” he parries, “of the fact that he could ask me to do anything and I’d do it, yes.” He shakes out his lightly matted tresses, a habit you’ve noticed over the passing weeks. “I played a little too closely to the fire with him once, and it landed me like this: no longer the owner of my being. I’d sooner chew off my own fingers than become his obedient dog, but I believe you also know that it’s best to soar low with this, no? Are we not together in this?” 

You press your lips into a thin line. In a way, you’d come to an alliance of sorts with Beomgyu. Despite his being a kelpie, the two of you are not so different now. Both confined to these walls, listening to Taehyun when he commands it. You don’t want any of your actions to snap back on Beomgyu, though. With you attending Court today, it’s almost definite that Taehyun will see you. You turn to face him. “Why don’t you join us, then?” you offer. “I’ll tell him myself that I commanded you to come with me. I’m sure he’ll be less upset if I have you there with me.” 

He gives it a thought, his eyes looking as tired and sunken as they always do. “I’m not one for Court,” he says. 

“But I’ll be there,” you plead, unable to help the twitching of smirk on your lips. “If we do it together, it can’t be so bad.” 

He frowns, but you can see that you’ve won. “I grieve for how the forest left me to my own,” Beomgyu grumbles. 

You surge up from your seat, eyes bright. “You’ll go?” you say, giddy to return to the thrill of faerie revelry and also to see the strange kelpie in the center of it. 

Grimacing, he answers, “I will join you.” 

You take his hands into yours and press a cheeky kiss to his forehead. “You’re not so scary as you try to paint yourself,” you tell him, watching as he catches bait. You laugh as he glowers. 

“Don’t push it.” He climbs off your bed. “I’m scarier than you should imagine, girl. I do this for my own reasons.” 

You pull a patronizing frown and nod. “Of course, I know.” 

You don’t have to wait for him to get ready to any capacity; he tells you that he has no intentions of making any impressions, and you’ve seen faeries in far more drastic states of disarray. Many show up for their reveling in just their skin. 

Beomgyu drones on about how he detests the audaciousness of the gentry folk while you make for the hall. The forest around you is as quiet as you remember it being when you’d first met him. It reminds you that, no matter how used you become to him, he is a creature to be feared. The little folk are right to hide away. For you, though, his might is a relief: should Taehyun be right, you’ll be safe. He moves at your beck and call. Though, the thought of forcing the kelpie to carry out your will is an uneasy one that you do not strive to fulfill. 

Once the buzzing of Court comes into earshot, wonderful faerie music along with it, you breathe it in. “First time in... how long since you’ve shown your face here?” 

“Perhaps four-hundred-something years,” he answers, looking over the scene with as much distaste in his face as his voice. “We solitary folk don’t make ourselves known here unless to bow to a crown. I do not bow to any crown.” 

Itching to find your prince, you gesture toward it. He should be fine—Court is supposed to be an insouciant place. “Don’t they host anybody who decides to come? Faerie hospitality, and all that? You’ll be fine.” 

“It’s all hospitality until you step foot from those trees,” he says. “And even hospitality is sometimes betrayed. You know how capricious we can be, I’m sure.”  

You approach the warm lights, but his words remain with you. It beckons you to remember that their minds are fickle and fundamentally different from yours. However you think they may act, they might act in the complete opposite way. You should at least let that guide how you conduct your actions a little bit. 

As you breach the pillars of trees and are finally surrounded once again by their pinched faces and gangly limbs, you search for both Taehyun and Yeonjun. You see neither, and so you make your way to the tables to seek snacks. You scour them for something sweet to chew over as you wait for him to appear. He’d said he’d be coming around this time, right? You surely hadn’t mistaken the time he’d told you? 

Beomgyu speaks from beside you, observing a hag that loiters nearby. “Is he not here?” he asks. 

Shrugging, you say, “He’ll be here soon.”  

You watch the hag inching closer, bent over with age; though, you assume that’s she’s been old for the entirety of her life. Her pointed ears droop from her thin tresses of silver, cuffed with gold.  

Turning from her, you gesture over the cavorting crowds, more frantically chasing their merriments than ever before. The solstice arrives tomorrow; they welcome its presence with their excitement. “This is all for the solstice?” 

He offers you an affirmative nod. “Just some excuse to entertain themselves like this,” he explains, “the solstice will arrive whether they encourage its coming or not. I believe that they just enjoy this debauchery too much.” His hollow eyes rake over the throngs. “Anyway, many of them are just here because it’s the only time that they’ll see Court. Otherwise, only the gentry gather here.” 

“What makes you any different than them?” you ask. “What makes you so averse to offering your allegiance to the High Courts? Would it not be nice to have their protection, and to keep them off your back?” You seek Yeonjun once more in the crowds, but still, he doesn’t appear. “You know, so they don’t call you in for things like eating too much?” 

“I do not surrender my sovereignty to any. Come they to my doorstep and demand that I do, I could not care. I’m content with the way I make my life.”  

His refusal to do just that must be why Taehyun’s father had come to claim his life. You’re sure that it’s also why the coming of the General’s son to steal his autonomy must’ve made him so angry. You don’t blame him.  

Why would The Queen demand fealty from the solitary folk? You’d thought that, like the High King, she’d leave them to their forests. If they’re all as adamant as Beomgyu, it seems like a lost cause. 

“Well,” you say, “I’m glad that—” 

A gnarled hand, fingers knobbed against your skin and skin about as soft as tree bark, tugs your arm. You spin to find who owns it.  

The hag’s eyes remind you of Beomgyu’s, piercing and dull with the weight of a long life. Though, hers are much more unsightly than his mud-brown ones, saggy eyelids drooping over a pair of eyes with ink-black where the whites of her eyes should be. She pulls you toward her by your skirts.  

You tug yourself back, pinching your brows. “Who are you?” 

She points her clawed, grey hand out at you, bangles of gold and chunky beads jingling as she does. “You, girl,” the hag says, urgent. Her voice is harsh and it crackles as she speaks. She reaches inside of her furry robes and produces a wood trinket from it. In her palm that she shoves at you lays a bit of wood carved into the shape of a wolf, painted in black. Its shaggy black fur reminds you of the kind Taehyun would sometimes wear over his shoulder.  

“I don’t need that,” you say, rejecting her hand. Nothing in faerie comes for free—the hag just sees a human girl that she can offer free things to in hopes that you’ll know no better and take. Then, you’d be in her debt, and she’d demand something from you. You do know better, though. 

“Oh,” she says, shaking her head as she draws out the word. “You do, girl. Take it, take it. You need it, I know it. Take it, I won’t hold it to you, girl, just have it.” Razor teeth appear behind her curled lips. “It is dormant with me. But, in your hands... Take it.” She shakes her jousted hand out at you each time she demands that you take it. “It offers you protection. It would do no good in my possession. It beckons me to give it to you, its pleas are so loud—loud, loud, loud! Take it off my hand, won’t you?” 

Her urging unsettles you, but so do her words. You assume that it’s inlaid with some sort of protective enchantment. Why would you need protection? Although, she could also just be fooling you. She could be holding a perfectly plain hunk of carved wood in her palm for all you know. You shoot a look at Beomgyu. If she were any trouble, he’d tell you. 

He looks about as lost as you do, shrugging. 

“Oh, sakes!” the hag grumbles, clutching her robes to her body. She takes Beomgyu’s hands and places the thing there. “There. I have no reasons to be here fooling humans. Useless debts, what could you give me? Nothing I need.” She points a sturdy, twiggy finger at you. “Keep it on you, girl, else it won’t do its work.” 

With those final ill-boding words, the hag hobbles off, her curved back disappearing between the gaps in the crowd. 

“Here,” Beomgyu says, regarding the trinket with his observation. “That hag really wanted this to be yours, so I think it ought to be in your hands.” He tries pushing it off to you. 

Laughing, you don’t reach out to take it, darting his hand with your whole body. You hang your hands in the air. “I’m not taking that thing,” you say. “She handed it to you, so I really think it ought to be in your hands.” 

He deadpans. “I’ve just been collecting myself a heap of debts, haven’t I?” He closes it into his fist for his lack of pockets. “What’s this one to add?” 

“Does it... feel like it has anything bad on it?” you ask, remembering how he’d identified your geas. “Like a curse, or a bad enchantment, or something?” 

Shaking his head, he says, “No. I feel it does have a protective purpose, but the magic there is... odd. Hard for me to decipher. Probably that hag’s.”  

You purse your lips, nodding. Regardless, whatever protection that thing might have offered you, you’ll be fine without it. 

Shaking off the odd interaction, you resume perusing the snack platters in your wait. You skip over glazed pinecones. Those would be terrible on your human stomach and teeth. You can only imagine how they’d jab at your gums. You opt for a helping of braised fiddlehead ferns. Chewing on the furled thing, you entertain yourself with the revelers. Littler folk dart in and out of legs. Long-limbed gentryfolk with flowers in their hair spin with interlocked hands at the center of the clamor. Sharp-eyed faeries with even sharper mouths speak in clusters, no doubt scheming. In all its oddness, you’d missed it.  

 A silk-smooth voice steals your attention. “A kelpie?” Yeonjun says, regarding Beomgyu beside you. “Now, how did you manage to befriend a kelpie? Even better, how did you drag it here?” 

Your chest lights up. “Long story,” you say, brushing his curiosity off. “What took you so long?”  

He’s dressed in his Courtly best—cuffs made of ruffle and an array of rings decorating his fingers. They catch light as he brings his hand up to run a hand along the expanse of your collarbone. He hesitates to answer for a split second. “I ran into Kai on my way,” he explains. “He’s performing here today and for tomorrow's solstice.” 

Accepting his answer, you go to tell Beomgyu that you’re going off, but he’s not even there as you turn. He must’ve wandered off as Yeonjun had arrived. 

“Want to join them?” he asks, tilting his head toward the dancing bodies. Soft black strands drift over his eyes.  

Shaking your head, you offer him some of the sweets you’d been eyeing, knowing that he’s got a knack for sweets. “Not today. I think I want to remember all of tonight, and, well...” Memories of the way you’d danced uncontrollably until it’d fade to black lick at your mind. You want to revel in your return to normalcy fully, not with a buzzing mind. You can’t deny the allure of that tingling in your bones as you hear the faerie music, though. It curls a wild finger at you, beckoning. 

An uncomfortable look passes through his eyes, gone as fast as it had come. “All right, darling,” he hums, accepting the sweets. “Does the Lord know you’re here?” 

Lips tugging into a faint frown, you say, “Not yet, I think.” The quick expression doesn’t go unnoticed by you. Unlike the ice the Taehyun offers you, Yeonjun wears his feelings all over himself. It’s just one way that they are fundamentally different. “Is something wrong?” 

Yeonjun looks taken aback at your asking. “I’m doing just fine,” he says. “Why do you ask?” 

He does not say nothing wrong. You know it is because he cannot lie. You look him over. What had happened? And, why is he averse to telling you the truth? “Just thought you looked a bit upset.” You shrug. “Did you want to dance?” 

His nose crinkles with a laugh. “No, pretty. I’d be in your presence doing nothing and still be content.” He takes your hands into his, the metal on his fingers biting cold against your skin. “How about we go listen to Kai play?” 

He leads you to where the musicians work at concocting their works, claiming a chalice of some drink from a table on the way. Kai, of course, stands away from the rest, back to a tree while his fingers dance on the strings. You look around for Taehyun from here, but still, you don’t see his face. 

Yeonjun holds the chalice’s neck between his middle two fingers, sipping from it. “It’s nice to know that even as this season ends, I won’t be forced to go back there.” 

His pretty lips wrap over the edge of the chalice as he drinks from it. “Won’t your father know something is up when you don’t return?” 

Nodding slowly, he grimaces. “I suppose that time has finally come.” 

You squeeze his hand in yours. “We both sacrificed things to be here, huh?” you say. You don’t know a lot of what Yeonjun’s life back in his home court was like, but you know that it would be hard to revolt against your own family for anybody. Even for the prince of Faerie. 

He captures your eyes, his soft brown ones making crescents with his gentle smile. “We did,” he muses. 

“Remember our first night in Court?” you say. You’d been so uneasy, searching for a place to fit in. Then, from the crowds of overwhelming faces, he’d appeared, all charm and welcoming smiles. How couldn’t you have let your heart fall? 

Another flash of disconcertment, his smile faltering. He hides it behind another sip of his drink. Swallowing, he nods, laughing off-kilter. “I do. I think watching you dance that time was the best thing I’ve ever seen.” 

Odd, but you don’t push the issue. If he says that he’s fine, it must just be something to little effect. “What made you come up to me that night?” you say, remembering how confused you’d been when such a pretty gentry boy had taken interest in you. You’d agonized over why he’d done so for long, and sometimes you still, but you’ve made some peace with it by now.  

His lips are tight. “I... It’s hard to explain.” 

You accept that answer at face-value and let your head fall into his shoulder while you watch Kai dutifully work at his songmaking. Among those making the music for Court, his contributions stand out as the most enthralling. Faerie music is too elusive for you to decipher why, but perhaps it’s just his lazed passion. “I understand,” you say. His shoulder is tight and less cushy than you expect it to be. Looking up to him, you frown to see how he’s looking down at you, eyes stormy. He looks like he’s sick to his stomach. You go to ask if he’s going to be okay, but he speaks before you can. 

“Pretty, I... I have to tell you something.” He pulls you off of him to look into your eyes. He’s always been so steadfast and sure, but now his gaze wavers. “I’m so sorry.” 

Your stomach drops. You don’t like the way he’s looking at you. “What?” you say, a tingle in your spine telling you that something isn’t right; that you’re not going to like what he’s going to say. “Yeonjun, you’re making me nervous. Is something wrong?” 

You know it’s awful and you’re not sure why you do it, but for a split second, you inspect the hall for possible attackers. A terrible bout of potent adrenaline makes you want to run or cry. Beomgyu is here, right? 

He swallows hard, face a ghostly pallor. “I can’t keep doing this,” he says, voice trembling. “I need to tell you the truth, it’s... it’s been eating me alive. I can’t look into your sweet face and know...” 

Acid climbs up your throat. Your heart joins it, thick in your throat and choking you. “What? Know what Yeonjun?” you ask, lips trembling. Your skin prickles, hair raising. You may throw up. He looks stricken in place, not answering you. “What?” you demand. 

“I didn’t come up to you for no reason that day.” 

Your heart, still caught in your throat, bursts. It’s a horrifying, bloody affair. “No,” you say, shaking your head. You feel so removed from your body that you can almost envision how your blood-drained face might match his. 

“I knew that you were the spies the moment I saw you. It was....” He sucks in a breath. Your world spins around you as you wait. “I was supposed to determine who the spies were. I was supposed to have them killed, but pretty, I knew I couldn’t do that the moment I saw you. I thought it was just going to be some... some random faerie that I’d...” 

If your world was spinning before, it’s now flipped upside down and inverted. “No,” you repeat, a guttural plea that you know won’t change anything. It’s the only word that your mouth will make for right now, though. 

You’re hurt. You’re scared. You’re angry. You’re frozen. 

Yeonjun grabs for your hands, but you rip yourself away from him, your glaring eyes so at odds with your wobbling lips. “It doesn’t change anything,” he says. “It doesn’t change how I love you now. You know I love you. You know I love you, right? I’m so sorry. I would never hurt you. I did my best to protect you. Please, I never wanted to hurt you,” he rambles, frantically grabbing for your arms as he falls down to his knees before you. 

A few faeries around you gasp, and a blur of their commotion forms around you. The crowned prince of Faerie just went to his knees. Your eyes dart wildly around their guffawing faces, and between a space you spot a familiar face: cold eyes and a cracked mask of indifference. He looks right at you. 

What on earth is going on? How is this life right now? You snap back to Yeonjun in front of you. 

“Please, don’t look at me like that, pretty,” he pleads. “Please.” His voice cracks, eyes frantic. “Slap me. Tell me you hate me for it. But please, don’t look at me like you’re scared of me.” 

Tears scald your cheeks. 

“I know that it’s selfish of me to ask you that; I know, I know it—but please, I can’t handle it, love. I was never going to let anything happen to you, I knew it the moment I saw you. I felt it right here”—he gestures to his beating heart, the one your hand had felt and cherished so only last night—“I knew that no matter how big my ambitions were, they would never be bigger than that.” 

You can’t listen to any more. His words pour out onto your skin, but they all slip off like rain upon a beast’s winter pelt. None can penetrate the ringing in your ears. 

Yeonjun sees how retracted you’ve become. “Pretty, please,” he says, slower and more dire now. “Say something." 

You don’t know what to do. Your feet are rooted fast to the ground, but you know that you have to leave, or else you’ll start creating excuses for him. You know yourself too well to let that happen. 

Picking up your skirts, you manage only a few words to part him with. “Though your kind can’t lie,” you say, “you have been the biggest liar I have ever known. You said you loved me.” 

“I do,” he says, shaking his head, eyes twinkling. “I do.” 

Maybe love is a different thing to a faerie. 

You take off. He calls for you, but it’s muffled by the restlessness of the folk around you and the still-playing music. You dart between openings and bounce off bodies, lights and angry faces a blur in your frenzy. Most folk don’t spare you even a glance; nothing could pull them from their merriment. But others gawk at you like you put on a performance, greedy eyes drinking in any amount of fanfare. Their eyes itch under your skin. Crossing the expanse of the hall has never felt so arduous.  

You’ve become their spectacle. 

Breaking into the cold night air, you don’t run home or collapse to your knees in a sob. You hold your dress hard in your hands, the one he’d gifted you among so many others, its fabric bunching in your fists, and stand there as if frozen staring into the tree line ahead. You don’t move and you don’t think; both would remind you that this is real and that you are a fool. You just allow the bitter air to swaddle your skin. 

You don’t even know if you doubt that he loves you. You don’t even know if he actually never intended to hurt you. Had there been times where all you’d done was look at him with starry eyes, and he’d look at you deciding whether or not to have you killed? 

Why are you even here? There is nothing left for you. Whatever simple joys you thought you’d found, they’re gone. You’re so far away from home, and you’ve nobody to call home. You’d left behind your beginnings of a purpose, and now the only purpose you serve is to rot away in Taehyun’s estate because you demanded that you stay here. 

All that time you’d spent worrying, and still, you walked yourself into this. You’re a joke. And now, you’re fully serving your purpose as one—to be laughed at.

White breaths unfurl into the night air before you, floating off to join the snowflakes and heavy fog. You just watch those fluffy flakes fall for a while. 

Snow creaks under a few footsteps behind you, someone letting you know that they’re there. “You’ve gotten awfully good at sneaking around,” Taehyun says. 

You let your head fall back, sighing slowly out through your nose. Turning to him, you spit, “I understand. You were right. I got it, okay? I don’t need you to come here and rub it in.” 

Beomgyu approaches from behind Taehyun. 

Taehyun doesn’t say anything for a bit, ice-hard eyes darting all over your face. “Take her back to the estate,” he tells Beomgyu. 

Glad to escape him, you begin your way on your own. You know that he’s only looking at your break down as pathetic. Perhaps it is, but recognizing that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Wind lapping at your wet cheeks have them stinging as you walk. 

Beomgyu awkwardly trails behind you as you follow the path that had become trodden in the time that you and Taehyun have been here, foliage and shrubbery broken down to make somewhat of a path. 

He doesn’t speak; you don’t expect him to. Instead, you break the quiet yourself, unable to stand only the sound of wind twirling between trees. “I should’ve taken that ridiculous charm thing,” you say, laughing through your tears. That hag had absolutely been able to feel what was coming with you with whatever intuition that the magic in her bones lends her. 

“But then,” Beomgyu says, “you wouldn’t know the truth.” 

That’s true. Not knowing the truth doesn’t make it untrue, but at least it spares your fragile heart. “I don’t know if I’d mind that,” you tell him. “I think I’d prefer it.” 

Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes. 

❆

You don’t remember falling asleep. You remember climbing into your bed, dreading that you’ll be in your head all night, but to some mercy, you’d found sleep not long after that. 

You’d pulled yourself from bed, no matter how it had grown a gravitational pull and insisted that it’d hold you warm while you weep. If you hadn’t, you might not have gotten up at all. As a girl, you’d force yourself into the day’s routine when you had your worst days. It’s the only way that you live through it. You’d also made an effort to walk past your wardrobe. It carries so much of him: the lovely things he’d gifted you, his letters, and that book he’d lent you. It’s not that you don’t want any of these things; to wither away in your bed, to go through his things and wonder how someone who’d showered you so had meant to be your killer, to drag your feet... It’s that you can’t. 

You poke your needle through the fabric. On the cut of white fabric stretched inside the embroidery hoop, you’ve embroidered a dozen woven wheel stitch flowers of different colors and types. Your bottom aches against the hardwood flooring and your lower spine strains, but you don’t pay any mind to their complaining. You just continue to embroider the little flowers. Some are poppy, some rose, and some you’d made up just to have more to stitch. 

A knock resounds through the war room from the doorway. You look to see Taehyun there. He’s dressed in his Court attire. 

“You should get dressed,” he says. “It’s almost midnight. If you want to make it in time, you’ve got to get ready now.” 

Since when had he decided that you’re okay to go? It’s as if this elusive threat that’d he’d been so careful has up and disappeared. “You can go. It’ll take me too long to get ready.” 

Truth be told, you’d go sick seeing Yeonjun’s face, and you know without a doubt that you would. 

“It’s the solstice,” Taehyun says, stepping into the room. He looks like he wants to say more, but he doesn’t. 

Despite how much you had wanted to see it, your heart is too apathetic for it to be worth anything now. Returning to the same faces that had seen your demonstration and no doubt now talk of it... You’d rather finish your fifth rose. “I know.” 

He hesitates, studying you while gears turn in his head. “Hadn’t you thought that something would happen on the solstice?” he says. “Come on. It’s worth seeing how this unfolds.” 

“Why? We aren’t spies anymore. I don’t care what happens in their conflict. It’s well beyond my control as a human here.” 

He grimaces, but you don’t recognize the look there to be anger, more a rigidness. He rests his hand on his sword as he always does. “Then we’ll stay here.” 

You furrow your brows. “Huh?” 

“We can celebrate the solstice here,” he elaborates. “We don’t need to do it there. Plenty of folk celebrate on their own.” 

It dawns upon you that this is his stilted attempt at comforting you. It’s the only way he knows how. You push off the ground. You couldn’t ignore this sliver, however little, of tenderness. You’re not sure if you’d ever see it again if you did. You’ll take anything to distract your mind, as well. You can’t escape the image of Yeonjun’s eyes as he’d pleaded with you from the ground. “I’m not sure Beomgyu will join us, though. He doesn’t believe in the need to celebrate the solstices.” 

“He will if I command it,” he says.  

“What, you’re going to command the poor kelpie to sit and watch a bonfire with us?” you say, imagining how he’d brood. 

The north is wickedly cold at all times, but it’s especially so after night falls. You shuffle closer to the bonfire that Taehyun had built. It’s multitudes smaller than the bonfire you’d sat around with Yeonjun, but it’s warm enough for just the two of you. You quickly shove down those tainted memories before they sting. A lump of emotion forms in your throat before you can, though. You clear it. “Is there anything special that you’re supposed to do?” 

Feeding one last log into the flame, he watches it catch. “We started this really early,” he says. “The fire is supposed to keep you warm and represent the sun’s warmth until sunrise...” He trails off, sliding the cuffs of his shirt that he’d slid up to his elbows to tend to the fire down and sucking in an awkward breath. He looks between the fire and you as though he’d not fully thought out his offer when he’d made it. 

You face your palms to the orange flame, letting the roiling waves of heat warm them. “It’s nice like this.” 

The flame sizzles and pops, spewing sparks and eating up the wood, for a few long moments. You’re not in a talky mood, and Taehyun doesn’t seem to know where to begin on conversation with you that isn't functional. No snow falls around you, and any wind is cut by the estate. This—a place to lose yourself to your mind—is both the thing you need and what you most should not have. 

Taehyun stands watching the fire twirling, his arms over his chest.  

“Is your shoulder healing fine?” you ask, once the air starts feeling a bit heavy with the weight of the prolonged quiet. “Are my stitches holding up fine? No infection, or anything?” 

His gaze flicks up to you. “You stitched it up pretty well,” he answers. “I saw the flowers you were making. You’ve got a good hand.” 

Frowning, you say, “You didn’t say it’s not infected...” 

“It’s not infected,” he says. 

That could be a lie or the truth, you know. But... this sort of deception, you’re more comfortable with. Your human mind can pick up on these subtleties, can catch the careful intonation of somebody trying to hide something behind a lie. “Could I see it?” you ask him. 

He hesitates, expression flat as his eyes convey the extent of his consideration. “You can.” He grabs at his tunic, the fabric the only thing his frost blood even needs to wear out in the cold, and pulls it over his head. 

You swallow hard and fight the flush to your cheeks at the sight of his scar-flecked flesh, his muscled abdomen disappearing as he turns around to show you his back. When you’d last seen his bare skin, you’d been so high on your fear and adrenaline that you’d barely flinched.  

Blinking, you focus on the arrow puncture at his shoulder blade. It’s done some healing, but tinged by an angry red and visibly swollen around the stitches. You curse. 

Of course, he’d rather let his shoulder rot away than admit that he needs any more of your help than he’d been forced to allow. That would require admitting that he’s not just an impenetrable wall of ice. “That is definitely infected,” you say. “Were you just going to let that kill you? Infections like that are beyond help once they get in your bloodstream.” 

“I’ve had infected wounds before,” he says, preparing to put his shirt back on. “This one is nothing. It’ll take a bit longer, but... It’ll heal up fine.” 

You grab his arm. “Just let me clean it a bit,” you insist. “It’s not that big of a deal. You’re not scared that it’s gonna hurt, are you?” 

Sighing, Taehyun says, “I thought you wanted to enjoy the solstice.” 

The hopeful girl you’d been had wanted that, but now it’s just a reminder of everything you don’t want to remember. You wave your hand in the air dismissively. “We did. Come on.” 

You find a bucket to fill with water and cloth along with some stash of ancient spirits in the kitchens, their containers lined with a layer of dust so thick that you know they’re left over from Taehyun’s father. He watches you gather it all. 

You beckon him to turn and show you his shoulder again. He does, bracing his arms on a counter and letting his head hang. You spill out some of that strong liquor into the wound. You’re not really sure if it’ll work as a disinfectant, but as a girl you’d seen an older woman pour it over her wound once, and it’s all you know. 

Gently dabbing at his shoulder now with the water-soaked rag, swollen except for where the stitches sinch it, you say, “You should’ve been going gentle on this thing.” 

Taehyun doesn’t make any fuss as you prod at the wound. “I had more important things to concern myself with,” he says plainly. You press the wet rag to the wound and hold it there, and he begins to try and redirect the conversation to anything other than about himself. “What did the prince say to you at Court?” 

Your stomach drops. “It was nothing.” 

“I know that’s not the truth,” he says, picking up his head to try and look over his shoulder at you. “Tell me the truth.” 

You take the long, torn strips of cloth and begin wrapping it around the expanse of his broad shoulders in a sloppy and amateurish wrap. As long as it shields the wound, it’ll work. “That’s rich coming from you,” you say. “There’s plenty that you lie to me about. You even lied about this.” You tap his shoulder. 

Turning now that you’re done, Taehyun eyes you. You don’t know if he’d been able to hear anything over the sounds of Court or if he’d heard it all with his better hearing ears. You can’t tell which it is.  

“I’ll hear it from some Court gossiper anyway. I think you’d prefer to tell me it yourself.” 

The thought of that scene being a topic of Court gossip makes you ill, but you know that it’s true. The folk love the show, especially one that includes a prince of Faerie on his knees in front of a human. Red-hot embarrassment takes a leisurely stroll up your spine. Your biggest fear has taken flesh in the cruelest way possible.  

Well, if he’s going to end up knowing anyway... You’d prefer it’s from your mouth. You don’t know what sort of conflated half-truths the folk might come up with, since they have no more idea what happened than what they saw. “He was supposed to kill us,” you say, chest too tight to explain it in any depth. “Or, at least, find out who we are, so that we could be killed.” 

Taehyun doesn’t look shocked. He nods. “So, they anticipated our arrival, then. The odds had been stacked against us from the beginning.” 

You nod. Would you have been able to escape? If things had never become entangled between you and Yeonjun, would you and Taehyun lived beyond the first day? Taehyun is strong and you know that he’s no doubt survived plenty in his life, but you’d have been caught completely unaware. “Yeah.” 

“I told you that he’d show you his colors eventually.” 

You want to fight him on that, but you can’t. You have nothing to say. He’d been right. 

What’s left for you now that he has?  

…🪶 ashlynn's note RAHHH! like i said, this part gave me a bit of grief because part 3 was left so open ended—i had so many options and paths i could follow, but ultimately, i chose this one! how do we feel?

﹙🏷️ ﹚ @lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @sanshiningstarhwa , @hyucktapes if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

[octopus-punching-union]

I'm writing this up for the second time since Tumblr ate my post :( so this probably won't be as much detail this time around.

The darker side of Darkwick

There's been a lot of allusions to shady stuff and harsh punishments at Darkwick since the very beginning, and it was so satisfying to see it come together this chapter. Quick recap of what's happened so far—

Haku gives some omimous warnings about harsh punishments when MC is trying to run away. He mentions Articles 77 and 78 (which are more fully explained in the Hotarubi chapter) and that ghouls can be punished for taking any actions outside of their missions.

This is constantly backed up since the very beginning. MC not being allowed to go home even briefly. Permits are required to leave campus and it's not unusual for recreational permits to be denied. Even with a permit, you can't be out at night unless it's for a mission. Stopping to get a snack while on a mission is potentially grounds for punishment. Entire Houses get punished for the misbehavior of a few people, and a House can be blanket banned from leaving campus.

When MC returns after that escape attempt, Kaito is upset as he's just now realized that he could be punished as an accomplice. Up until this point, he's been sympathetic to MC wanting to go home.

Haku also reminds Rui of the dangers of deviating from the mission and it seems that Rui is subject to particular restriction and surveillance. He says that a punishment would be particularly bad if Rui was involved.

Haku makes an odd comment like "since there's a chance we'll go home after graduation." Combined with Ritsu's comment about the Laurel Crown being the best way to get independence from Darkwick... I have a lot of thoughts about this and will write up a separate post later.

Budgets are fucked up, with Haru personally responsible for funding repairs to Jabberwock. (I'm also gonna write a separate post about this later.)

On to the new stuff from Hotarubi chapter—

We learn that Darkwick has a secret prison which was run by Ultio, one of the defunct houses. Lyca is being held there due to prejudice about him being part werewolf. He was imprisoned while being investigated for murder, but despite the discovery that he is innocent, he is still locked up because he could potentially be dangerous.

Articles 77 and 78 are explained. They allow for the imprisonment of ghouls who deviate from their missions and anomalies that are deemed too dangerous to society. Lyca is being held as a dangerous anomaly because he is part werewolf.

Subaru's first mission at Darkwick was to kill Lyca. He apparently decided to investigate instead and attempt to prove Lyca's innocence. He has been petitioning for Lyca's release, to no effect.

(This makes me wonder if Subaru was always in Hotarubi? The facility was being run by Ultio at the time, and why would they bring in someone from another house to kill a prisoner? If the initial mission was investigation using Subaru's unique stigma, it would make sense to bring him in from outside. But Lyca says that he knew Subaru had been sent to kill him from their first meeting. Related, Subaru also says that he and Zenji have been in the same house since first year, but he does not say that they were always in Hotarubi.)

We also get confirmation that there were multiple fatalities during the Clash. Zenji, who was killed by a rogue anomaly and is now back as a ghost, wasn't the only one who went "past the point of no return."

Finally, when MC and Haku go to the Chancellor and Moby to ask for Lyca's release, they are both very against it. The Chancellor starts to say, "What if we have another case of a ghoul—" but is silenced by Moby. Moby also seems like he's kinda threatening Haku in this scene.

[bunnybrews]

the predator, the prey and the hunter- sylus x reader (slight mc x reader)

genre : angst, slight yandere, suggestive

syn : betrayal isn't something sylus takes lightly, specially when it comes from his bunny.

cw : non-mc! reader, abduction, violence, hair pulling, choking, usage of nicknames (dove, bunny, love, doll, etc.), mention of slapping, slight yandere behaviour.

wc : 2,961

you were nothing but a low ranking member of onychinus, so receiving a mission of such importance was extremely rare and yet here you were, babysitting the hunter who had recently been abducted by your master.

you watched in wonder as the hunter moved around, seemingly searching for an exit. there was a certain grace she carried which enamoured you.

she had everything you wanted, she was everything you wanted to be. brave, kind, strong willed and above all, she belonged to the place of your dreams, linkon city.

you had always wanted to go to linkon, to see the sun, to feel its rays hit your body and fill you with a deep sense of joy and warmth just like all those books described.

but alas, some dreams can never be fulfilled. your fate had already been decided when you took birth in a small shady cabin in the N109 zone to a mother who had a terminal illness and a father who was barely there due to his duties as an onychinus member.

you remember being barely fourteen when the news of your father dying during a mission reached you home. your mother had cried and sobbed all day while you just sat there, unable to bring yourself to cry over a man who you barely saw.

your mother followed your father's footsteps just a year later. her illness finally taking what was left of her.

just a day after your mother's death, the leader of onychinus had personally visited your small shack, offering you a place in his mansion and a position in his syndicate.

though you had nothing against him personally, infact, you held a certain amount of respect for him, yet this was not what you wanted. you didn't want to be part of a criminal organisation, no, you wanted to leave.

you wanted to fulfil the dreams you saw as a young child, to experience the stories your mother often read to you, you wanted to escape the dark alleys of N109 zone and flee to linkon.

yet you weren't dumb enough to refuse his offer. you knew that doing so would ensure a rather painful death. hence, you agreed.

and here you were now, staring at the hunter as if she was some goddess who had just descended from the high heavens.

the stars in your eyes were painfully visible to everyone, including the hunter. she could see the curiosity and naivety that lingered in your eyes. as much as it bothered her, she knew tricking and using you would be her only way to escape this hell.

your eyes lit up as you saw the hunter take a seat next to you on the sofa before you quickly looked away, trying to school your expressions back to neutral.

though before you got the chance to do so, a hand was placed on your thigh making you snap your head towards the hunter who was currently smiling down at you.

the fact that the hunter was a few inches taller than you was made evident when you had to crane your head up to look into her eyes.

they were green like the protocores you saw being transported in and out of the mansion and so so shiny! you were basically lost in their vibrancy.

a gentle squeeze to your thigh brought you out of your musing as a chuckle left the hunter's pretty lips.

“what's your name?” it was a simple question but the voice that left her lips had you in a trance, one that was broken by another squeeze to your thigh.

“i- i can't tell you my name. sorry!”

you were quick to remember your training and lessons, making sure to not reveal anything.

“why though? its just a name, its not like i'm going to report you to the hunters or something”

“umm yeah but master told us to not reveal anything about ourselves to anyone. he says that it could lead us into a lot of trouble. i'm really sorry but i can't go against his orders”

the hunter huffed in annoyance as she realised that she won't be finding any answers from the girl anytime soon. she had to change her approach.

“no no, you don't need to apologise. its my fault for asking. it's just that i've been trapped here for so long and you are the first person who hasn't been rude to me, i was just trying to get to know you more i guess, i'm sorry.”

her voice was softer now, hints of sadness and pain wafting through it. you couldn't help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the girl sitting next to you, your heart melting a little at the frown on her face.

“i understand, it must have been hard for you, not having anyone to talk to. while i may not be able to share anything valuable with you, i'll be more than happy to indulge in a conversation!”

a smirk graced the hunter's lips for a second, the innocent dove had just entered the cage set up for her. she almost scoffed at your naivety. you don't belong here in this hell, she would have to make sure to take you with her when she finally finds a way out.

“how about we play 20 questions? we'll be able to get to know each other better this way without revealing any crucial details about ourselves and you can just skip the questions which you feel are too imposing.”

the hunter's plan was perfect. a game of 20 questions was her best shot at gathering whatever information she could under the guise of getting to know each other.

“that sounds so fun! we can do that!”

“alright, i'll start. why did you join onychinus?”

she watched as you tensed up, an air of uncomfort forming around you. sensing your unease, she decided to tread carefully and changed up the question.

“nevermind, you don't have to answer that. hmm, well…how about…what is something that you really want to do or really want to achieve?”

the hunter knew that this was a risky gamble yet the gleam that took over your eyes at the question reassured her. your voice was soft as you shyly answered while playing with your hands.

“i've always wanted to see the sun. i've heard lots of stories about it, my mom used to read them to me before bed! i just wanna see it with my own eyes. anyways, its my turn to ask you a question now!”

she nodded at you, motioning you to ask away.

“how does the sun feel like? does it feel good when you walk in the sunlight? is it just like the stories or does it hurt and irritate you?”

“it's even better than the stories. walking in the sunlight feels like you are being embraced by warmth itself. it's really magical.”

hook, line and sinker! the trap had already been set into place, all she needed to do now was to lure you out and judging by the look of amazement in your eyes, she could tell that she was already halfway there.

“alright, it seems to be my turn now. if you really want to see the sun so badly, then why are you still here in this damned place?”

she observed the way you lowered you head slightly and chewed on your bottom lip. she sighed as her hopes of getting an answer out of you diminished.

“uh well, i can't just leave. master won't allow it.”

“why? does he not give you any freedom to do as you wish? has he trapped you here as well?”

“it's not like that! i am allowed to roam around the zone all i want but i can't leave. it's against the rules. also, even if i was allowed to leave the zone, its not like i could ever step into linkon without being hunted down and charged for my association with onychinus.”

the frown tugging at your lips quickly lifted as a warm hand was placed under your jaw, gently lifting your face up.

“i can help you. i know someone who can make up a fake identity for you, no one will be able to recognize you!”

you sighed against her palm turning your face slightly so that your cheek was resting against her palm instead of your jaw.

“what's a fake identity gonna do when i can't even leave the zone? i told you, i'm not allowed to leave”

“then let's run away. run away with me and we'll go to linkon. let me help you. help me so i can help you.”

she felt the way you tensed up and drew back from her, a gasp leaving your lips. the hesitation was visible in your eyes, but there was something else too.

“y-you shouldn't be saying things like that out loud! master will be so angry if he heard you. he'll lock you up and kill me for even talking about such things if he heard this.

“will you please stop thinking about your master for a second and instead think about yourself for once! what about you? what about your wants? your desires? are you really just going to give all your dreams up like that? is this what you want? to keep living in this slump until you grow old and die one day without even seeing the sunlight? is that what you want, huh?”

her words jabbed at a wound that had always been present in your heart. you don't want this. you don't want to grow old here and die without seeing the sunlight, just like your parents did. you don't want the same fate as them.

the hunter smirked as she watched the flame she had ignited swallow you whole. the sweet sound of your resolve crumbling was audible to her. she could see your hesitation being replaced with determination.

“but how? how are you going to take me to linkon when you yourself are trapped here?”

“this, my love, is where you enter the plan. you will get me out of here, and as repayment, i'll get you a new identity and citizenship in linkon.”

“but how would i be able to help you? if i knew how to escape this place successfully, don't you think i would have used that tactic to flee already?”

“you may not know how to escape the N109 zone but i'm sure you know how to exit this mansion. all you have to do is get me out of here and leave the rest to me. don't worry your pretty little head too much by overthinking, doll. just lead me out of here, and i'll take you with me to the place of your dreams.”

she held out her hand to you, patiently waiting for you to accept her offer. it didn't surprise her a bit when your soft hand found its way into hers, fingers intertwined together.

you quickly stood up, taking the hunter with you as you used your key to open the door, leading the both of you towards the hallway which you knew would open into a secret exit.

the both of you dashed towards the exit hand in hand until a black mist suddenly pushed you both back forcefully, making you crash into the nearest wall.

before you could even open your mouth to let out a whine, a pair of blood red eyes captured your gaze. he found out.

you glanced at the hunter when the sound of someone choking and wheezing started filling the room. you could see the black mist tightly coiled around her neck, squeezing the life out of her.

if this is how he punished the girl who he had abducted because she owned something that was necessary for his plan, you didn't even want to find out how he would punish you, a low ranking employee.

all you could do was shut your eyes tightly and await the punishment that you were sure was going to come your way.

the feeling of a bruising grip on your jaw was all that you felt before you were pushed aside, your body hitting the floor as you finally opened your eyes to see your master stalking towards the hunter.

the choking noises subsided as the grip of his evol loosened. you watched as he touched the hunter's hair before roughly pulling them, making her look into his eyes.

“were you really dumb enough to believe that you could escape me, huh? you really thought you could plot against me in my own home and i won’t find you? i must commend you though, you may not be the smartest tool in the shed, but you are an excellent manipulator or maybe my dumb little bunny is just too stupid, falling for your silly tricks”

just as the last sentence left his lips, he turned towards you. the trembles in your body increased as the distance between you and your master decreased.

you felt his evol coil around yourself as you were brought to your feet, body immobilised and held in place by his evol.

tears started leaking out of your eyes as you awaited your fate. a whimper escaping your trembling lips as a hand reached up towards your face. you expected a slap but instead were greeted by his rough calloused fingers wiping your tears.

“my stupid bunny, always managing to find a way to amuse me. did you really think that i would let you leave? so dumb. what am i going to do with you? should i lock you up in a room just like her, take all your freedom away? or should i punish you, show you what happens to naughty little bunnies when they disobey their masters? tell me bunny, which one do you prefer?

you knew it was a trick question and yet you shook your head wildly. glancing up at your master with tears still streaming down your eyes as soft sobs left your lips, you could see the disappointment in his eyes.

the knowledge that you were the reason for the disappointment made your sobs increase in both volume and velocity. your body trembling badly under the hold of his evol.

seeing your pitiful condition, the hunter couldn't help but blame herself, the sight of you tear stained face making her lose her temper and rebel against the energy holding her in place.

“step away from her you monster! she had no part in this!”

sylus snapped his head towards the hunter, eyes narrowing in annoyance as she fought for you as if you were hers to protect.

it was obvious that the hunter had taken a liking to you and this filled the red eyed man with fury. the thought of the hunter liking you was sending his brain into an overdrive.

he had to prove his ownership over you. needed to prove his ownership over you. if he was going to have to take you in front of the damned hunter to prove that you were his then so be it.

he used his evol to pull you towards himself, a hand snaking down to your waist as he pulled you closer until your back was resting against his chest.

“tch, you see miss hunter, that's where you are wrong. she did have a part in this, a huge part if i say so myself.”

his grip tightened over you as his other hand went to your face, turning it to an angle so that you were staring into his eyes once again.

“she should have known better than to fall for your antics. she should've been smarter and most importantly, she should've remembered who she belongs to”

with that he leaned down and pressed his lips to yours. the kiss was anything but gentle. his teeth pulled at your lower lip, tongue swirled around yours, lips moved against yours at a bruising pace, all while you stood there like a statue.

he pulled away from you after sometime of sucking the life straight out of your mouth. his eyes briefly finding yours before they moved to the hunter who had her jaw clenched and anger flared at the sight.

he watched in amusement as she thrashed around his evol, trying to escape the bruising grip before looking down at you once again.

you were still staring up at him with your glossy lips parted and your eyes widened in horror. at that moment you looked like the textbook definition of adorable if he may say so himself.

he used the hand holding your face to gently push a strand of stray hair behind your ear before leaning down to whisper in your ear, his voice low but loud enough for both you and the hunter to hear.

“i think i finally figured you punishment out bunny. you've been such a naughty girl lately. do you know what happens to naughty girls? they get fucked roughly by their masters. im not that cruel though, so i'll make your punishment a little easier for you. since you've taken such a liking to miss hunter over there, i'll make sure she stays with you, watching you while i fuck the life out of you. you would like that, won't you bunny?

you were suddenly pushed onto your knees and the hand which was previously holding you now rested on your head.

cautiously, you peeked up at the hunter hoping to find a sign of reassurance in her eyes but to your shock, her eyes, just like your master's, were glazed with lust.

oh heavens, tonight was definitely going to be a long and tiring one for you.

[projectdark-if]

Project DARK is an 18+ character-driven SPY IF inspired by a rather eventful weekend binging on Mission Impossible movies. It can be described as Suicide Squad meets Mission Impossible. MC, a retired villain, will be a new operative in a team to bring down their old best friend.

You were a jewel thief and hired mercenary, outsourcing your skills at thievery and espionage for all types of...shady characters. Yeah, you were aiding in the possible destruction of the world in exchange for money, but details, right?

You were the best in the business alongside your partner, Spider. You're not supposed to get close to people in this business, but Spider somehow weaseled into your life and became your best friend.

But then they died, killed by operatives of Mission Shadow, the one organization that has been hunting you down since day one. You decided to retire, changing your name and identity in an attempt to make an honest and private life of what you have left.

Until Project DARK finds you.

Project DARK: an experiment to put the most together the most skilled shadow villains to train and defeat the biggest threat they've faced.

Your best friend, whom you thought was dead.

They need you and your skills. You know Spider best. No longer are you the villain, but a Project DARK operative joining as the newest recruit to the ranks.

Good luck.

Customize your operative from appearance, personality, gender identity.

Tailor your past: were you a merciful villain, or a merciless one? Did you make enemies or try to make friends? Liked for being kind and easy to work with or hated for being the literal worst?

Romance members of your team or your target, with some having special relationships.

Choose what kind of operative you'll be and shape the dynamic of the team.

Try not to fall into old habits and get sucked into the dark world of crime. You left that life for a reason.

THE TARGET | Spider [m or f]: your old best friend and the new target. They've been busy since their 'death' and have grown a network of connections that can dismantle the world as you know it. They're apparently planning something big. Big enough that the organizations of the world created Project DARK to take them down.

Special romance: can have had previous thing with them that was never confronted or simply have been best friends.

THE LEADER | Elias/Elena Steel: one of the best operatives, personally recommended by MI6. The only non-villain on the team, E is also appointed leader and doesn't like you much, considering the fact that a mission of yours ended with their closest partner dead. While you may have not pulled the trigger, E blames you all the same.

Strict and as cold as steel, it makes sense why E is the one with the team on their shoulders.

Special romance: enemies to lovers. E hates your guts.

THE SECOND IN COMMAND | Nick/Nina Sharma: second-in-command and a retired illegal weapons dealer, N is, surprisingly, E's closest friend. N has long given up that life, but before their new work as a operative, you knew them as a distant associate. You two have crossed paths on multiple occasions, most of them happening with them almost killing you or vice versa. N can't help but be nice, but you can tell they're not really a fan of you.

Special romance: may have had a lapse in judgement and have had a one night stand...or multiple.

THE BRAINS | Zane/Zena Omari: One of the most skilled hackers and a familiar face on the FBIs most wanted list, Z is on the team in order to be able to go back home without getting arrested. Oddly enough, they're not what the media says they are. Friendly, warm, comedic. Z seems to be having too much of a good time, even with the circumstances surrounding their presence.

THE WEAPONS EXPERT | Luca/Lucia Cruz: L doesn't know you much, and doesn't care to. Hyper-focused on the mission, L's disinterest in you is a breath of fresh air. You don't know what they did and how they got here, but you do know they were facing a life sentence. Still, things aren't always what they seem.

Maybe it won't stay that way.

[monster-effer]

Christmas Time in the N109 Zone – Sylus x reader

Summary: Can you bring Christmas cheer to the N109 Zone? There’s only one way to find out. Content: Fluff, Sylus and reader are dating, reader is the MC, Christmas cheer (1.3k wc) A/N: I was not planning to write a Christmas fic, but I couldn’t help myself once “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee played on Spotify shuffle. I hope y’all are having a lovely holiday season no matter which holiday you may or may not be celebrating! Please enjoy <3

You were on an important mission. Your objective was to bring Christmas cheer to the N109 Zone, specifically Sylus’ place. Since you lost your grandma and Caleb in one fell swoop, you’ve struggled to feel any sort of Christmas cheer around this time of year.

With this plan in mind, your first step was to bring this up to your boyfriend Sylus. After you explained the reason behind your new project, Sylus’ crimson eyes softened, and he nodded in agreement. He would give you anything you asked for, and often things you didn’t think to ask for.

Over the days leading up the holiday you’ve drip fed bits of Christmas cheer into Sylus’ life and home.

December 20th:

You insist that Luke, Kieran and Mephisto join Sylus and you for Christmas photos at the local mall with Santa. Sylus huffs at the suggestion but after some insisting, relents because he can’t say no to you. You try to hold in laugh when the twins relentlessly tease their boss as you all wait in line for photos.

It is a little awkward trying to figure out where everyone will go for the photo. Eventually, you and Sylus end up sitting on the red rug at Santa’s feet, Luke and Kieran are sitting on one of Sant’s legs each while Mephisto perches himself on Santa’s left shoulder.

The resulting picture is silly and heartwarming. Right before the camera flashed Mephisto let out a festive "sqwack!" which caused you to glance up at him with a smile. Sylus is warmly gazing at you with a small smile on his face. Luke and Kieran are wearing their masks but with the addition of elf hats on each of their heads while they hold up bunny ears behind Santa’s head.

You make sure to have several copies in assorted sizes printed out before you leave the mall.

December 21st:

Sylus to comes with you for last minute tree shopping. Initially you were resigned to the idea that only thin, sad looking trees would be left. But a Christmas miracle occurred because you scored a HUGE, 10 foot tree that would fit perfectly under the high ceiling in Sylus’ living room.

Transporting the tree was the next obstacle, but luckily this was resolved with a generous tip from Sylus. And the tree was delivered later that day. Once the tree was placed in the designated corner of the living room, you could enact the next phase of operation: Bring Christmas Cheer. The decorating.

December 22nd:

The morning after bringing home the Christmas tree, you brought over some ornaments, garland, and an eerily familiar looking crow tree topper that you found while browsing online.

You…may have gone overboard with the three boxes of decorations you brought over but you wanted the entire living room to look festive. After having breakfast together, you, Sylus and the twins divided and conquered the decorating tasks as Christmas music played softly in the background. The twins were handling decorating the mantel above the fireplace and hanging up Christmas lights.

You focused on decorating the tree with Sylus. He decorated the upper parts of the tree that you could not reach because the tree was massive. Once you were satisfied with the decorations on the tree, Mephisto took it upon himself to seize the crow tree topper and plop it perfectly onto the point of the tree to finish it off.

December 23rd:

On this day, everyone went their separate way to buy, and wrap presents. You spent the day strolling through Linkon city’s downtown area and the N109 zone trying to drum up ideas of what to get everyone.

So far, this is your progress:

Luke and Kieran: matching ugly sweaters and red, festive crow masks commissioned from 303’s workshop in the N109 zone.

Luke: Crow shaped ice molds since you always catch him crunching on ice no matter the season.

Kieran: Supplies for dart making.

For Mephisto: a shiny Reindeer bauble because he loves collecting little trinkets.

The only person left on your list is Sylus. What would be a good gift for a man that could buy himself anything? You wander around for hours before dejectedly thinking about getting him something generic like a Christmas themed lotion set.

But your eye catches the glint of a beautiful picture frame inside of a photo shop, and you realize you have found the perfect gift for your boyfriend.

December 24th:

In anticipation for Christmas being tomorrow, you requested everyone’s presence at Sylus’ home.

You put on your favorite Christmas song playlist, while you all arrange your wrapped gifts under the tree. After they are all placed, you start baking some gingerbread cookies in Sylus’ kitchen.

While the cookies are sitting on a cooling wrack, you put on some classic Christmas films. You and Sylus cuddle on one of the couches while Luke and Kieran chase Mephisto around the room trying to place a teeny, tiny Santa hat on his head. (They were not successful)

During your childhood, it was a Christmas tradition to stay up until midnight before opening the presents. You try your best to do so, but you are no match for the Christmas movie marathon and Sylus’ body warmth. You end up dozing off.

The next thing you remember is being gently nudged awake. Opening your eyes reveals Sylus looking down at you amusedly. You glance at the clock on his fireplace mantle, and it reads 11:58 pm.

December 25th (midnight):

You smile softly at Sylus and get up to stretch. Then you spot Luke and Kieran cuddled up together and asleep on another couch. After waking them up and summoning Mephisto, you exchange gifts just as the clock hits midnight.

Luke and Kieran enthusiastically rip open their gifts. They both briefly pause as they unearth the identical masks you had commissioned for them, they unceremoniously stand up and run out of the room together. They return a few minutes later proudly wearing their new crow masks. “Thank you, Ms. Hunter,” they say in unison.

Mephisto caws happily as you roll another sparkly bauble his way. He quickly nips it in his beak and flies off to add it to his ever growing pile of trinkets.

You watch in nervous anticipation as Sylus begins to unwrap the gift you handed him. What you bought him is not the most expensive or luxurious gift, but you hope that your intentions shine through.

Once he’s removed all the wrapping paper, he takes a moment to silently scan the titanium picture frame. The frame holds multiple photos of you and him the past few months you’ve shared together.

Finally, after what felt like the world’s longest pause, he looks directly into your eyes and says, “Thank you for this sweetie, I’ll hang this up in my bedroom so I can see it when I fall asleep every morning.” Sylus’ smile is soft in a way you rarely get to see. His usual barriers and walls are down as his appreciation for the gift and his affection for you is clearly on display.

You heart is filled with gooey warmth as you look around the living room. Your gaze reaches the tree then realizing you are the only one who has not opened their presents. You received an astonishingly ugly sweater from Luke and Kieran and a crow plushie “from” Mephisto. Sylus hands you a small black box that holds a beautiful gold locket. When you open the locket a photo of you and Sylus looking blissfully happy greets you. Your grin is bright as you ask him to fasten it around your neck.

You wouldn’t forego all the chaos you had to go through to create the memories made with this chaotic bunch. This year, Christmas has officially made its way to the N109 Zone.

[alessiamalfoyzabini]

Dark Moon | EXTRA 01 | Monster

Pairing | yandere!gangster!Jimin x Reader

Word Count | 3,9k

Warnings | +18, yandere themes, knife wound, memories of past trauma and abuse, references to an attempted murder and escape attempt (present in the main story), Stockholm syndrome, guilt, Hoseok loves to psychologically torture MC, references to MC's traumatic past (hard yandere Jimin) and her love-filled present (soft yandere Jimin) that MC calls before and after, smut (fingering, wet kisses, nipple sucking), non-sexual choking attempt, fear and anxiety, this is not for minors.

This fanfiction is yandere, if you don't like the genre, don't read and if you are not of age, don't read.

I don't want to hear any complaints in the comments, thank you.

This does not reflect my way of thinking or living at all, it is just a work of fiction, it is like watching a horror movie, many of us love horror movies, but we would never dream of what we see in those movies happening in reality as well.

Simply put, this story was written for entertainment purposes, it should not be seen as a reflection of my values, opinions or morals. I absolutely do not condone such acts.

⤷ Summary | You thought the worst was over, but the dark shadows are denser than you thought.

➢ Author's Note | Hi, guys!

After receiving many comments asking for an extra chapter for Dark Moon, I decided to write one, I hope you enjoy this glimpse of how things turned out later, thanks for loving Dark Moon 🥹❤️

Taglist: @katherine-kookie @btsuga-d @dragons-flare @takemeaway5402 @m00njinnie @seokjins-luigi @pjmsneverland @ajkwww @jimincrystal @ungodlyjoon @hecateslittlewitchling @namjoonsbuspass @darkuni63 @xicanacorpse @jiminismine4ever @btssimplove @antisocial-mochi267 @reallygenerouskoala @velvet-stardust2002 @angelicsmileworld @dabishou @ke1k029 @lennieharper @pantara @superrsstaargirrl13

➢ Main Story

➢ Happy Ending Series

➢ Side Note | The first two stories - Happy Ending and Dark Moon - were written in the third person, which had been my style for a long time. However, I’ve recently started writing all my new stories in the second person, as I find it much more immersive and enjoyable. As a result, the new stories in this series will continue in the second person. Thank you for reading this far ❤️

Jimin's return from a mission is announced by many heavy footsteps, some even shuffling, you hear excited whispers and words left unsaid.

You jerk open your eyes, your blurred vision in the dark making you dizzy, but that is not the reason for your nausea.

Jimin.

You jump up with your heart in your throat, it's not unusual for him to come home late from work, it's the other agitated voices that startle you. Something has definitely happened that has alerted the others as well.

You quickly grab your robe and tie it in a tight knot at the waist, you don't even bother to put on shoes, when you lower the handle the click resonates like a gunshot and a shiver runs down your spine, you will never get used to that kind of life, even though Jimin has become your whole world, and as a result his life is yours too.

You move your feet toward the living room, where surely everyone else is gathered, and you bring back an unruly lock of hair, tongues of fire sway sinuously throughout the hallway, someone has lit the fireplace, a sign of a long night they will spend here.

“Squeeze this, man,” you hear someone say, you recognize him as Jungkook and frown, "It's going to hurt, but you know the drill by now," he continues and your heart misses a beat.

When you reach the living room and the heat of the fire invests you, two heads turn in your direction, you simply feel the ground missing from under your feet.

You see Jimin, lying on the couch, pale under the mop of once again black, blood-stained hair; you don't know if it's his, but the one on his uncovered side that Jungkook is taking care to stitch up with needle and thread definitely belongs to him.

“What happened?” you simply manage to ask with a choked edge to your voice, rocking on jelly legs before collapsing at your husband's side, who clutches a leather glove between his teeth to suppress the pain.

The man weakly lifts his eyelids in your direction, two shiny black pools look at you affectionately and with weary hand tries to caress your face, you immediately clasp your fingers to his, they are cold you find yourself noticing and this startles you.

You glance at the wound, it is just below the ribs and Jungkook's quick hands move the needle expertly, there is ice wrapped in a cloth abandoned on the couch, perhaps to try to make the area around the wound less sensitive, you also notice a bottle of disinfectant and some gauze.

Jimin winces all the same, clenching the glove between his teeth so as not to show you his pain, not out of shame, but because he doesn't want to worry you further.

Your mind involuntarily goes to that day.

The day you hurt him trying to escape, those are hard memories to swallow, you don't like to remember the before, but how can you not think back when you have the same scenario before your eyes?

“I'm fine,” hisses Jimin fulminating Jungkook when he presses the tip of the needle a little too hard, ”It's superficial.”

“One more inch and we could have run to the hospital, though,” mutters the third man's voice, you try to ignore his disturbing presence.

It was not difficult to bond with all the members of Jimin's family, all except him.

Hoseok never showed any interest in being your friend, and you always mentally thanked him for that. Since that time at the Dark Moon, you have had no direct contact with him and you are more than okay with that, he is a real monster. You can see it in his eyes, the evil that he harbors and is not ashamed to let it out whenever he can.

That day, you would have died by his hand if Jimin had not gotten in the way, despite the wounds he had. You owe everything to Jimin you think, kissing his sweat-soaked forehead softly. The boy closes his eyes at the pleasant warmth of your lips against his smooth skin.

“You're not well, Jimin,” you whisper in his ear, Jimin's eyelashes flicker a little, you can see the shadow of a smile amid the pain.

“You're always so anxious, my love,” he chuckles with difficulty, in response you inhale into his dark hair his masculine fragrance, mixed with gunpowder and blood, “I'll survive, as always.”

How many more times must you wake up with your heart in your throat, with Jimin wounded and lying on the couch sweating and bleeding. The only thing sweet about that image is the bold smile he gives you every single time.

“And you always try to downplay everything,” you say bitterly, kissing him on the lips.

Jungkook looks at you out of the corner of his eye without saying anything, but he is clearly more relaxed now that you are there to look after Jimin, Hoseok on the other hand snorts.

“You women are so complicated,” there is boredom in his tone, it irritates you but you tighten your lips into a thin line to ignore him, ”Even though you were more like us that time than you want to admit, remember?”

The reference to that day freezes you, you widen your eyes and lift them to his.

His hair is no longer as red as blood, now it is as black as his soul, but his sadism is still there. He loves to hurt physically, but he doesn't disdain psychological hurt. Especially if it is to hit you, after all, resentment is his best friend and he never considered you part of his family.

Jimin's eyes go wide, the black has stopped sparkling, the sweetness has been replaced by anger.

“Shut the fuck up, Hoseok,” he hisses with a latent snarl. He is hurt, but that doesn't mean he will allow Hoseok to disrespect you, ”She is not to blame!”

He always says that, but is that really the case?

“Or what?” the other challenges him, leaning against the back of the sofa.

“Please... stop,” you mutter dejectedly to both of them, agreeing - reluctantly - with Hoseok. True, you were no different from them that day. It is a guilt you will carry with you forever.

Perhaps because of your tone, perhaps because of your look, or perhaps both, Jimin vibrates with anger and disdain. He jerks up ignoring your arms trying to pick him back up, managing to grab Hoseok by the collar of his black leather jacket, landing a punch right on his mouth that he dared to say too much to his wife, this set of movements blowing out a few stitches, making Jungkook growl in frustration.

“That's really enough now!” Jungkook has never been a go-between, he has always reasoned with physical force, and it doesn't even take a moment to force Jimin back to his seat, weak as he is, and push Hoseok away with an irritated shove, “You've both pissed me off.”

Hoseok rubs his split lips, blood smears his black gloves - the same kind of gloves Jimin had on the night he caught you - his teeth have torn flesh as a result of Jimin's punch, but he doesn't seem to show resentment.

He knows he has gone too far. Even if he doesn't regret it.

He also seems at times amused at his friend's reaction, love is a feeling he does not understand, he finds it ridiculous, and he also finds Jimin and Jungkook ridiculous for getting “tamed.”

Hoseok disgusts you.

“You didn't have to react that way, we all know what he's like,” you whisper softly on your husband's lips, Jimin is breathing heavily out of anger and grief, Jungkook seems to have abandoned the path of kindness and is stitching him up carelessly, perhaps even with a hint of malice.

“I don't tolerate-” I don't tolerate  anyone disrespecting you, you block that sentence by kissing him again, losing yourself in the soft lips and sugary taste of the boy who brought you to your knees, in every sense of the word.

You block him because you don't feel you deserve all that respect, Hoseok is right.

That evil man is like a virus in your brain, he wanted to hurt you that day and for a just reason, you almost killed a member of his family, you are unforgivable and you willfully ignore the reasons that led you to such an extreme act. You remain a murderer, the man you hold in your arms now, he would not be here now if you had managed to escape without giving him help.

“Christ, I want to go home,” Jungkook whines, envious of your intimate contact, he wants to go home to his wife and spend the rest of the night with her, but he has to stitch Jimin up first and some stitches are blown out, this thought makes him nervous and that hint of malice sneers a little more.

Jimin finds himself screaming in an instant with no more glove to help him, he casts a shocked glance at Jungkook, more blood stains his quick fingers, and yet he looks innocent, as if he has not just voluntarily stuck the needle deeper than was really necessary.

“Be kind, Jungkook,” you smile at the pigtailed boy, who rolls his eyes in response, “Please.”

“At least there's someone who knows politeness in this room,” he mumbles back, Jimin snorts throwing his head back on your soft, cozy chest, you lift your gaze and pin it on Hoseok, he's looking at you with a strange smile. He knows what you're thinking.

You pull the blankets up to Jimin's chin, he is shivering with cold and that worries you. Jungkook instructed you which antibiotic to give him once a day, then closed the door behind you, careful to let Hoseok out first.

Jungkook didn't trust you to be alone with him either.

You swallow a knot that tightens your throat, you feel suffocated. You need to get some air, even though it's probably cold outside that would freeze the soul of even the devil.

“Don't do that,” you hear yourself say, turning to Jimin.

He has pulled himself up from the blankets and looks at you harshly.

“What?” you ask pretending to arrange something in a drawer, your attitude exhausting him.

“Don't think of another man,” the blackness of his eyes is darker, the jealousy is always there, ”I hate that my woman thinks of another.”

This makes you smile incredulously, “I don't think of another man, Jimin, you are my man” you clarify with your hands on your hips, you see him melt a little as a sad smile finally comes to light.

Oh.

He means to say...

“You think about the things this man says,” he points out to you, ”But it's all bullshit, stop this guilt, it's killing me.”

Tears accumulate between your eyelashes, you blink quickly to chase them away.

“But it's true, I did-I almost killed you,” your lips tremble, Jimin instantly notices.

He doesn't like to resume the before, it disturbs him. But he has to if he wants to calm you down somehow.

“And before you tried to kill me, I hurt you willingly,” he emphasizes the last word with a grimace of contempt, to himself, “I pushed you to the limit and at that moment I liked it.”

Jimin never hid his darkness, he promised to love and respect you after, but it was not so before.

It was hell, just thinking about it leaves you paralyzed, the memories of pain are suffocating. Those of the pleasure you did not accept but yearned for are even more so.

Still, you shake your head, whichever way you look at it, you feel guilty.

“You were drunk; you didn't really want to” you try to justify him.

“I was drunk because I was fucking pissed, pissed at you,” the man points out to you, now bleary-eyed.

He would never hurt you now, in the after.

Right?

“You can justify me, but not yourself?” the pain in his voice leaves you stunned and pained, the shadows of your past are dense and heavy, Hoseok wallows among them, you think angrily.

But Jimin doesn't feel the same way, the problem is not Hoseok, he knows that very well.

You two still haven't gotten over the before, that's what reinforces the pain.

“I can't accept what I did, because I was never this” you were never a monster, no need to say that, Jimin already understood, “But I acted like one, you at least do it for a living.”

The man shakes his head, “I did it out of anger, and anger led to making my hate-based reality also a job” for a moment he sees the exhausted little boy collapsing at Seokjin's feet again and accepts his offer.

He will not deny it, it was the best choice ever, even if the circumstances that led him to meet you were terrible.

But he doesn't regret his love; he could let you go, but he won't.

He is too involved with you, you are too involved with him, you are a family now, in the after.

He just wants to take that weight off your shoulders crushing you. Even though it will hurt both of you.

“Come here, babe,” he invites you, moving a hand to draw you to him.

It doesn't have to happen again, you find yourself already sitting on the bed by his side, it was instinctive, the need for him overwhelming.

“I'm sorry,” you whisper in a choked voice, truly sorry for the dark thoughts you are giving him while he is in a pitiful condition.

“Straddle me,” he says bluntly, squinting your eyes.

“But... are you crazy? Jungkook finished with the stitches not even twenty minutes ago, I could hurt you, the wound is fresh!” you protest with your chest heaving up and down rhythmically, you cannot deny that the request tickled you.

But Jimin grabs you by the hips and intimates you to do as he told you, “Ride me, Y/N” his voice sounds sensual and needy, a giddy feeling tightens in your lower belly.

You lick your lips lifting yourself up on Jimin, surround his hips with your thighs, the robe opens over them and let Jimin look at your soft skin with desire. He has stopped shaking, you notice.

Paying attention to his wound, he opens the robe over your chest as well and slowly pulls down the thin straps of your nightgown, the man's eyes darken at the seductive sight of your delicate breasts and already turgid nipples, he would have gladly spent the evening another way if a half-dead bastard hadn't stabbed him out of spite, you'd be under him crying and moaning in pleasure, instead he has to settle for that position.

But he can always make up for it somehow, right now - in your after - he thinks, closing his plump lips around a stiff, rosy tip that asked for nothing more, the sensation of his wet tongue playing with your breasts makes you hold your breath, your clitoris throbbing and your entrance moistening, already ready to receive him in all his tantalizing thickness.

A dusting of pink colors your cheeks, Jimin loves your sensitivity, you could come just like that.

Your husband licks a streak of saliva down the column of your neck, you tremble as he finally reaches your lips before imprisoning them in a fiery and lively kiss, the sensual and soft entwinement of your tongues makes your thighs wiggle against his skin, you clench his legs and Jimin lays one of his hands on your hip and thrusts toward you, you mew meekly feeling the thick tip of his cock pressing against your panty-covered entrance.

Ignoring the glowing twinges in his side, Jimin sensually moves his pelvis against your pussy, playing with the tip of tongue, which grasps and tickles yours. You could really cum exactly that way and it would still be sublime and overwhelming, but Jimin sneaks his other hand inside your panties and puts some pressure with one finger on your swollen, taut clit, circles around it mischievously and then presses again, making it throb repeatedly and to his liking.

You are forced to separate from his wonderful mouth to catch your breath, narrowing your eyes at the bite he leaves on your neck, before gently sucking on the same spot. You don't doubt that there will be a bruise when you wake up, but it's a pain so pleasurable that your juices flows from your slit shamefully, you know it when you lower your eyes and notice the wet spot spreading across his pajama pants, at the height of his cock that continues to rock against you.

He continues to seduce you with his mouth until the first contractions of orgasm leave you breathless.

“Oh God... Jimin... I'm close,” you whisper in a shrill tone, your eyes watery with pleasure.

Jimin stops the movements of his pelvis, and before you can beg him to continue, he clamps his teeth on one of your nipples, flicking it repeatedly with the tip of his tongue, and penetrates you with his middle and ring fingers, leaving his thumb to stimulate your contracted clitoris mercilessly.

The urgency of your pleasure is like an electric shock, your walls sucking his fingers instantly into their silky softness, vibrating softly as they are penetrated and every single sensitive and receptive point stimulated, the orgasm shooting powerful and fast, you haven't even given him time to get to the last thrust, you come with raging shivers all over your body.

Just as you open your mouth to scream out all your pleasure, the hand Jimin was holding on your thigh goes up to your neck, his fingers tightening around it, but there is something strange about it.

It's not just erotic pressure, the fingers clench, so much, too much.

You open your eyes wide, searching for a miserable trickle of air, you try to tell Jimin with your eyes that you can't breathe, that he is hurting you, you even dig your nails into his arm, but nothing. Jimin's gaze is distant, remains intensely focused on you and doesn't seem to want to let go, fear and agitation blind you, you need oxygen as soon as possible, and eventually your brain shuts down and your body's response kicks in.

You strike Jimin in the face several times, heedless of his reddening skin, scratch his chest bloody, almost reopen the wound and fill him with fists. He accepts every single blow you give him in silence, because the feeling of your pulse desperately running under his fingers disgusts him, repulses him, but it must be so or you will never understand. When you try to grab him in your turn by the neck, to do the exact same thing to him, he finally releases you and you both regain air.

But for you the coming of air is painful, terrible, you take in so much that you can't really breathe and you choke, beginning to cough. You rise from him in shock, but you collapse to the ground with your head spinning and your peripheral vision almost completely obscured, your ears ringing and you are unable to think. You feel only shock, but also much, too much anger.

You thought the before was over, that the after was only full of love, you do not understand and when he reaches out to embrace you, your body instinctively rejects his touch.

Your still-dull mind loves him, your all too reactive body rejects him because of the danger, you are confused, you can only rely on instinct, which tells you to run away and get to safety.

Despite everything, Jimin comes back to embrace you and this time he does not accept your rejection, your body trembles in response, and when your mind finally manages to generate a thought, you can only ask…

“Why?” you cry, pressing your forehead to the floor, “Why did you do that?”

You touch your neck, it hurts, just as your lungs hurt. It was just horrible, why did he do such a thing? He said that... he said that...

“Because I love you,” he whispers miserably, "And that was the only way to make you understand," his voice sounds strange, as if trying to hold back sobs.

“I love you,” “The only way,” “To make you understand.”

You let him embrace you without trying to push him away anymore, but the terror is still there. It flows through your skin like a raging river.

“Now tell me, did you hit me because you wanted to or because it was your body reacting to what I was doing to you?” he asks softly in your ear, staring motionless at an undefined spot in the room.

Now you understand, he used sex to distract you and the threat of death to remind you of the danger and fear of that day.

You don't die from violent anal intercourse, but you die little by little inside if it is repeated day after day. Your mind had not held, your body had rebelled against that fate.

It was instinct, survival instinct.

“I didn't mean to do it... hit you I mean,” you sob, his lips brushing one cheek gently, as if to soothe you.

“You are not a monster, my love,” he whispers, remaining silent a few moments before resuming, “I am the monster” there is still self-loathing in his words, with the tip of his nose he brushes the marks of his fingers on your neck.

You know he's sorry, but you also know he won't regret it, not if it helped you understand.

You are not a monster, you just reacted to what was done to you, your mind and body were broken. Your mind more than your body.

You forgave Jimin and you will surely forgive him even now, in the after, because he helped you understand, understanding was the last step to forgiving yourself as well.

The shadows are less dense and Hoseok no longer wallows among them.

It is Jimin's words that matter, not Hoseok's.

Hoseok hates you and would do anything to kill you, whether physically or psychologically, it matters little.

Jimin loves you and would do anything for your welfare, even pass as a villain in an effort to help you understand.

Remember what you thought when Jimin confessed after saving you.

It is a sick love, but one you need to feel safe.

And you don't regrets anything.

“Jimin?” you call out to him, get a murmur in response, “Thank you.”

He kisses the fingers of your hand, some of them stained with his blood, but he regrets nothing.

“You are the most precious thing I have, Y/N,” he confesses, ”Hurting you disgusts me, though in this case it was necessary, forgive me.”

Overflowing with sincerity, you finally relax, “I have already forgiven you,” you reply.

Jimin cannot block the emotion he feels, he kisses you in your soft, fragrant hair, he knows he does not deserve it, but you are his whole world, “Thank you.”

[invisible-lint]

Something Wrong

AzrielxReader

Summary: Azriel is late coming home and you worry

Warnings: MC death, major angst

Word Count: 1.3k

You pace in front of the fireplace, the warmth coming from it doing nothing to warm the chill in your bones. Something was wrong with Azriel, you were certain. He was supposed to be back  hours ago. Typically when either of you went on a mission, you would put walls up, silencing the mating bond, to keep from being distracted, but if either of you were delayed for any reason, you took down those walls just long enough to let the other know. But he hadn’t. When you had gone to Rhys worried, your mate hadn’t responded to the violet eyed male either. 

You were supposed to go with him, but right before the two of you were set to leave, you had gotten news that changed everything. You’re pregnant. You almost hadn’t told him, knowing that he’d make you stay behind, but had decided being left behind was better than what might happen if he noticed your changing scent while the two of you were away. 

So here you were, pacing in front of the fireplace in Rhys’ office, waiting for him to let you go track down your mate.

Rhys says your name, getting your attention. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’ll be back soon and tell us why he was late and why he didn’t answer. And then we can kick his ass for making us worry.”

You shake your head, you may not be able to feel your bond right now, but you can feel it in your soul. “Let me go after him.”

“Absolutely not. Azriel told me why you stayed behind. I am not sending his pregnant mate, my pregnant friend out into a potentially dangerous situation. If I did, he’d kick my ass and have every right to do so.” You stop your pacing and cross your arms, glaring at the High Lord. How is he so calm right now?

“Send me after him.”

“No.”

“Who are you more afraid of, Azriel or me?”

“Azriel, no question. You’re a very close second right now though if it makes you feel any better.” It doesn’t. You’re about to argue more when a bout of nausea sends you racing for the wastebasket next to the desk. Why it’s called morning sickness when it plagues you at all hours of the day, you’re not sure. 

“Sorry about the waste basket.” Rhys just shrugs and waves his hand, cleaning it. Thank the Mother for magic.

“Don’t worry about it. If he’s not back in an hour I’ll have Cassian go look for him, okay?”

You nod, giving up on arguing with him.

Feyre comes in with a glass of water and a cup of ginger tea. You stand slowly, and move to the couch near the window before taking the glass from her, sipping it slowly. She sits next to you, taking your free hand in hers. She squeezes your hand, trading the water for the tea once you’ve finished it. You sip the tea, appreciating the way it soothes your stomach. 

“It helped when I was pregnant with Nyx. I can have some sent to your house if you’d like?”

“I’d like that, thank you.” 

“Of course.” You sit like that with Feyre, sipping your tea for the next hour. Azriel doesn’t show up.

“Rhys somethings wrong. I know something is wrong.” He looks at you, starting to believe that you may be right.

“I’ll tell Cassian to go search.” You feel Feyre wipe tears away from your eyes. When did you start crying? 

“We put up walls when we’re on missions. Would… If he was… I’d know if he was…”

Feyre rubs your back, trying to comfort you, keep you from breaking down completely. “You’d know. That you would know. He’s still alive.” You nod, letting out a breath. 

“Cassian is heading there now. He’ll find him, don’t worry.”

And so you wait. Feyre continues to rub your back, and you lean against her, taking comfort in your friend. After a while, you find yourself rubbing the spot where your and Azriel’s child is growing. You chew your lip. When Cassian gets back with him, you’ll have to have a talk with him about stepping back, at least for a little while. You need him. And you want to make sure that your child gets to meet their father. 

You must have dozed off, waking suddenly when Rhys and Feyre both stand. You look between the two of them, knowing they’re communicating mind to mind. 

“What is it? Did Cassian find him?”

Rhys’ voice is calm and even. Too even. “Yes. I’m going to go get the two of them and Feyre is going to go get Madja.” It’s bad. It has to be bad if Azriel couldn’t even winnow himself home. If Rhys has to go and get them. In your growing state of panic, you don’t even notice them leaving. You stand, pacing by the fire again. What had happened?

 It’s the smell of the blood you notice first, running towards the source of the smell. When you take in the sight of your mate, you start crying again. You make your way to his side, taking his hand in yours. “Oh, Az… What happened?” 

He tries to reach up to wipe the tears away from your face, but doing so must aggravate his injuries, because he winces, letting his arm fall back down by his side. “You should see the other male.” You shift, pressing your forehead to his. You don’t like the raspy sound of his breathing. The way his shadows seem to be lying dormant, pooling with the blood underneath him. 

“Just hold on a little bit longer, Azzie. Feyre went to get Madja.”

“Promise me something?”

“Anything.”

“If I die-”

“No. I take it back. You are not dying. You can’t die. I won’t allow it.”

“I don’t think you have much of a choice in the matter, Love.”

You sit up, looking him in the eyes, ignoring how pale he is, how close to dying he is. Where is Feyre with Madja? 

“I don’t care. I need you. I can’t do this alone.” 

“Yes you can. You’re the strongest person I know. I love you. So much.”

“I love you too Azzie. You’re going to be okay.” He just smiles at you sadly. He’s not sure if it’s hope or sheer stubbornness or if you’re just refusing to see the reality of the situation in front of you. He wishes he wasn’t going to die. Wishes there wasn’t so much to live for. Wishes he would get to hold the child you’re growing. He takes a shallow breath, eyes getting heavy.

“No no no no, c’mon Azriel! You’ve gotta keep your eyes open! Keep your eyes open for me, Azzie baby.” He wishes he could listen to you.

Feyre was right. You would have known if he had been dead earlier. You feel it when he dies. Feel it as the mating bond disappears. It’s different from when you would block eachother out. Then, you could still feel it there, a warm presence in your chest, a golden thread connecting you. Now, your chest feels empty, hollow. The golden thread is gone. You cling to him, screaming.

Madja and Feyre appear then, too late. Not that anything could have been done if they had arrived earlier. You pull him into your arms, holding him to your chest as you scream and sob. Your friends watch on, their own eyes filled with tears. Eventually, your throat becomes too raw to scream, so you just hold him, sobbing, ignoring how his blood soaks your clothes. Then, you run out of tears, so you just hold him, not wanting to let go. 

Feyre tries first to get you to let go of Azriel, but you ignore her. Cassian tries next with no success. When Rhys tries, you don’t let go, but you do look up, your eyes meeting his violet ones. 

“I told you something was wrong.”

A/N: I'm a little bit sorry for this one and I don't even have Hozier to blame this time. Feel free to either send in requests!

[countdown-if]

"Countdown" is a slice-of-life inspired by "Gilmore Girls," and is rated 18+.

Three months ago, life took a sharp turn. Your mother found herself entangled in a situation so bad, she couldn't dig her way out of it, like usual. This time, the hole was way too deep. She needed help, and the only people capable of aiding her were the same ones she had vowed never to allow back into her life, let alone introduce to you and your younger sibling.

Who were they?

Your grandparents—a powerful and well-established duo.

In short, they did manage to help your mother back on her feet, but not without strings attached—never without strings.

Now, you're facing a senior year in a private school, fully funded by none other than grandma and grandpa, dearest. The only task at hand: do what your mother couldn't—graduate.

Form relationships, pursue your passions, burn bridges etc.,—the decision is entirely up to you.

🍁 Customise your MC (gender, style, personality etc...).

🍁 Choose 1 out of 3 part-time jobs (p.s. 'if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen' and pursue another in your new school!)

🍁 Choose your path. Are you aiming for a top Uni like Harvard next? Or maybe you'll step foot into the world of music? Rumour has it 'Crimson Haze' is looking for a new addition. What will it be?

🍁 Romance 1 out of 6 love interests.

🍁 A lot more in store!

Casey Decker (m/f) 🍁 [profile page]

Your friendship goes way back to the nappy days. With both of your mothers on the younger end of the spectrum, it’s no surprise you grew to be close too—'best friends' type of close.

Casey is a ray of sunshine, full of life, and quite possibly the jelly to your peanut butter. They’re sweet like that—they can be, at least. But best friends should be just that: best friends. Besides, as of recently, Casey is taken.

Appearance: Medium-length, straight, golden blond hair covers the nape of their neck. They have slightly tanned skin, a sprinkle of freckles across their nose and cheeks, and grey eyes.

Lake Aydin (m/f) 🍁 [profile page]

Lake has just started working at the grocery store nearby your house. High-school dropout, you assume. They don’t talk much…to you. Kind of a mystery, that one. Their social media confirms just that—there's not much to go by. 

Also, your first meeting wasn't the greatest or smoothest. But one thing's for sure: you'll be around there a lot, so you might as well get talking in the meantime, right?

Appearance: Dark brown eyes, pale skin, and short, straight black hair for m!L. For f!L, it's medium-length black hair. They wear glasses whenever they remember.

Harry/Hallie Johnson (m/f) 🍁 [profile page]

H doesn't actually go to your school, but events are often organised as a collaboration between a handful of private schools, both of yours included. So yeah, you might see them around.

H is good at all of that—the networking, the galas, the fundraising, and public speaking part. They know what they want, and they have a resume to show for it. H is CC—charismatic and confident. They're who parents wish their kids would bring home, so needless to say, they've got your grandparents' stamp of approval.

Appearance: Deep brown skin, short tightly curled black hair for m!H, and a little longer than shoulder-length, tightly curled black hair for f!H. They have light brown eyes.

Santiago/Samara Garcia (m/f) 🍁 [profile page]

S is an academic with tunnel vision for success. They're consistently at the top of the class, leading the ranks, and on a mission to become valedictorian.

What sets S apart from the majority, you might ask? They're one of the only two people who got into the private school solely based on merit. No mommy's or daddy's money, none of that. It's all about brains and drive.

And what about you? Are you a high achiever? If yes, expect a somewhat healthy rivalry. Heads up, though—S doesn't fail. If no, they'll look down on you, and they won't make any effort to hide that. It's a double-edged sword.

Appearance: They have wavy brunette, borderline black, nearly shoulder-length hair, tan skin, and hazel eyes. They also have three beauty marks: one above their left eyebrow, one right below the left corner of their lip, and one on the tip of their nose.

Riven/Raven Rodrigo (m/f) 🍁 [profile page]

R is destined to be a superstar. Three years ago, R and 3 of their friends formed a band called 'Crimson Haze,' and it seems like all their hard work has finally paid off this summer. They've had a couple of gigs overseas, and they've done really well. They're on their way to major stardom, but first, they need to figure out a few things. Something's missing—perhaps a fifth and final member?

R is a passionate musician, a reckless friend, and a nonchalant lover. Music is their life. However, their love life is...unsteady. They don't do distractions, aka relationships; only fun.

Appearance: They have dyed jet-black hair, short messy waves for m!R, and long messy waves for f!R. They also have amber eyes and olive skin.

Nolan/Naya Brown (m/f) 🍁 [profile page]

N is the star athlete and the school's pride and joy. They have a lot of eyes on them, watching and expecting big things to come. On the court, they're a beast, but in class? Not so much. Their grades are below average, and if they want to keep competing for that full-ride scholarship, they need to bring their grades all the way up.

N is a typical cool and popular kid—playful, funny, and well-liked around the school. Whether they remember it or not, you share a history. You used to know N. FYI, they've been in a committed relationship for the past two and a half years.

Appearance: They have light brown skin in the winter and medium-brown skin in the summer. Their hair is dark brown, with short and loosely curled hair for m!N, and long and loosely curled dark hair for f!N.

DEMO TBA | FORUM

[iliveforyouilongforyouvesuvia]

Sending my request once again! (I think, don't rlly remember 😰) Full hc about the M6 with a MC in a coma?

The Arcana HCs: When MC falls into a coma

~ don't know if this is what you were going for but it turned into a sleeping beauty situation XD hope you enjoy! - brainrot ~

-- to set the scene --

It was an overcast day. The air had been unusually still ever since your lover had stepped out after breakfast to start their day, and you'd found your own set of tasks to be oddly uneventful ... and lonely. It's why, when an elderly grandfather hobbles by and offers you a warm bread roll, you don't hesitate to take a bite as soon as you've waved goodbye. You don't take a second.

Julian

He's had a long day at the clinic, and as short as his commute is, he still feels like he's been a hundred miles away from you as he heads over after sunset. He's missed you all day

He's sure he forgets how to breathe when he walks in to see you collapsed on the floor. He knows what corpses look like, he can tell you aren't dead, but that's little comfort when you don't wake up

Carrying you to bed and working feverishly to narrow down all the possibilities. You're not injured, you're not sick, your vitals seem to fine, but ... you don't wake up. Even smelling salts don't do it

Spends the next three days refusing to leave your side except to fetch more help or resources. The whole community helps him

Mazelinka brings soup, Portia and Nadia stop by with some rare medicines, Asra pops in at all odd hours with new spells to try, and even Barth sends a hot meal or two over from the Rowdy Raven

Julian doesn't leave until he gets a call in the middle of the night. A nearby neighbor has gone into labor, and needs attention until the midwife can arrive from across town

He kisses your hand goodbye on his way out and is too busy hustling out the door to hear you stir. His shout when he gets home several hours later to see you reading wakes half the city

Asra

They'd spent the morning out running errands and the afternoon catching up with their parents. It's been busy and interesting and they're excited to show you what they got you in the market

Except all of that goes tumbling out of his grasp when he walks in to find you collapsed behind the counter, unresponsive

Somehow they manage to get you upstairs and in bed through the daze, and then they get ready to work through the night

He does notice the partially-eaten bread roll and can tell there's some sort of powerful magic in it, but unraveling what it is proves harder than he expects. The next 24 hours blur by in a haze

At some point, Faust goes off to find Chimes and Flamel and Aisha and Salim appear at the back door to help out. When they see Asra's state, they urge them to get some rest while they take over

He makes up a layer of blankets on the floor next to you to sleep, not wanting to disturb your condition, but it feels wrong to close his eyes without the usual goodnight kiss (at 5 PM)

They lean over to press a gentle peck between your eyebrows, and the sight of you beginning to twitch awake makes them freeze in place. It might be too good to be true

And that's how you wake up, to an exhausted Asra collapsing onto your chest

Nadia

Horrified. She's already blaming herself for being too busy to check in on you earlier, you seemed fine this morning, but here you are in one of the entrance's side rooms collapsed since goodness knows

A quick check with the guards confirms they saw you speaking with a stooped old man at the gates just that afternoon - and the roll they saw him give to you is next to you on the floor

To say that she distracts herself from her pain by leaving you to the healthcare professionals and trying to make up for her negligence by hunting down your poisoner would be an understatement

She's a woman on a mission. She'll leave Chandra in your chambers to bring her any updates and start her investigation immediately

Can't really bring herself to be with you for too long when she believes it's her fault. It's two weeks before she sits down next to you to see how you're doing, after doctors suggested she talk

It's hard. She takes your hand in hers and stares at your motionless face, and all she's able to do is tell you everything she's done so far to find the old man as though it'll earn her your presence again

Only after that, as the sun starts to set and she runs out of things to say, does she lean down whisper her love into your ear and press a kiss to your cheek. The surprised "eep!" when you wake up is priceless

Muriel

Panics as soon as gets in, because his mind is already jumping to the worst possible conclusions about what he's seeing

Are you dead? Are you hurt? Were you attacked? Did a rogue wild animal make its way in and maul you? Did Lucio come back? Did the Devil come back? He should've kept you safe -

It's Inanna's insistent whining and nudging that gets him to carry you to the bed from where he's gathered you up. It's hard to check for your pulse when his hand won't stop shaking

Whatever's going on, it doesn't take long for him to realize that you're okay. You're okay, you're just ... asleep. And not waking up

He'll try taking a nap on the floor next to you until you do

It's as the next day drags on that he starts to worry that you might not be getting enough food or water. He still doesn't know if this warrants calling Julian (he'd rather not) but you need hydration

Thankfully he's kissed you plenty of times before, so it's not too nerve-wracking a task for him to take a sip of fresh spring water before pressing his mouth to yours and trying to help you drink

You didn't expect to wake up like this

Normally Muriel would be a little more grossed out about having water coughed all over his face, but he's too happy to care

Portia

If she walks into a room and sees you collapsed, she's screaming

She's screaming loud enough to be heard from the Palace, and then she's rushing towards and nearly sobbing in relief when your skin is warm and your chest is still moving steadily up and down

She doesn't know why you collapsed or what's wrong with you (if it's something she can't see, then she doesn't want to mess it up) so she avoids moving you until she has someone around to help

Ilya. She needs Ilya, and Mazelinka, and Nadia, and Asra too, and maybe all the names ending in "a"s if it'll help her figure out how to help you any sooner. She'll get you through this. It'll be okay

Between Nadia spotting the bread roll, Julian confirming that there isn't an obvious medical reason, and Asra and Mazelinka's combined magical food knowledge, it's obvious what happened

The delightful thing about a woman like Portia is that she doesn't like stopping to be sad when she knows there's still hope to work towards. Nobody knows the spell? Trial and error!

"True love's kiss" is the third thing on the list after failing to enter your dreams and dripping soup into your mouth. Waking up to Portia smugly telling her older brother that all those "fairy tales" were onto something after all is an unforgettable experience

Lucio

All he knows is that one moment, he was triumphantly announcing his return and very pleased with himself about completing a shopping trip that involved only wise spending choices

And the next moment, every wise spending choice was clattering to the floor because you weren't moving

He's been on enough battlefields to know the difference between wounded and dead, but you don't seem to be either

The worst part is, you're not waking up. No matter what he does, you don't wake up. He's seen this before - he remembers watching as a vengeful ghost as his ex-wife lay motionless for three years

Is that how long this is going to take? Three years? He's not worried about his loyalty, he'll find a place that'll take care of you while he picks up whatever jobs he needs to keep you afloat, but

What if he makes another "oopsie" and you're not there to help?

It all overwhelms him to the point that he lays his head down on your stomach to have a little moment to himself, and he turns his face against your shirt to catch any ... eye water

Apparently mouthing "I love you" against your belly button counts, because the next thing he knows you're lifting your head and asking what's wrong. He's not touching a bread roll again

[lovexdeepspace]

Hi ! I hope you’re having a great day! I’ve read that you are open to new ideas regarding LDS and so I thought maybe you’re able to do one where the LDS boys comfort MC when something triggering happen to them? I’m looking forward to reading your posts 💞

“i’ll always be here.”

summary; rafayel, xavier, and zayne are your island in the storm.

warnings; triggering topics (stalking / near-death experiences / [canon] death), sadness

note; thank you anon for requesting & i hope you’re having a day as lovely as you are!! 💕🫶 (will be formatting when i can, just away from my laptop for some time and i wanted to post !!)

rafayel

had your occupation as a hunter not made you to be more aware of your surroundings, you would have never caught onto the man who had been tailing you.

you stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt when he turned the corner of the dark alley many knew to be populated with the homeless and subsequently avoided. as soon as the man thought he had you cornered he picked up speed and that’s when you turned on him, pistol in hand.

“h-hey, let’s put that away,” he stammered, raising his hands up as he skidded to a stop. you didn’t budge, trying your damndest to keep your hands steady.

“turn around,” you hissed, “and walk away.”

the man didn’t waste a second, taking a few steps back before turning on his heel and making a run for it. once he turned the corner you let out a sigh of relief, shaky hands placing the pistol back into the holster at your hip. you headed back onto the main path with a clouded mind, your heartbeat ringing in your ears. without a second thought you followed the sidewalk towards the large white building that overlooked the beach, your steps hurried.

you pushed the gate open and practically ran up the paved path towards the large front doors of rafayel’s studio, grateful to find that he had accidentally left them unlocked once again. as soon as you stepped inside you pulled the doors shut once more, the lingering feeling of being followed making your skin crawl. after locking the doors you kicked off your shoes and shuffled into the main room, finding rafayel sitting on the floor with a canvas propped up in front of him.

he turned at the sound of your approaching footsteps, looking up at you with a raised brow. you clenched and unclenched your fists as you tried to think of something — anything — to say but all that came out was a choked sob. panicked, rafayel pushed himself to his feet and grabbed your shoulders then your face, looking for any injuries.

“what happened?” he asked, checking your arms and torso. “take a breath, i can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

you swallowed harshly, tears rolling down your cheeks. “a man,” you choked out, “was following me. had to threaten him for him to leave.”

rafayel’s face contorted with some combination of disgust and anger but softened as you sniffled. he held his arms out and you collapsed into his embrace, a feeling of security crashing over you as he held you tight.

“i’ve got you,” he murmured, resting his chin atop your head. “you’re safe here.”

xavier

it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

this mission was supposed to be easier yet, here you were, fighting a god damn elysian cervus. your fill-in partner was unconscious somewhere, leaving you to fight this beast on your lonesome. your shirt was soaked with blood from a gash on your torso and you were pretty sure some ribs were broken but you pressed on until delivering the final blow.

the wanderer fell, motionless on the ground. slowly you move and collect the protocore, stashing it away before searching for your partner. you found her slumped against a tree a little ways away, using your watch to call for help as you slowly settled down next to her. as you talked to the operator you pressed two fingers to the side of her neck, relieved to find a pulse.

help came not too long after you had called, carting you and your partner to the hospital for the both of you to be treated. you ended up with three broken ribs, a fractured ankle, and lots of stitches across your abdomen.

“you got very lucky,” a nurse had informed you the following day as she checked your vitals. “whatever had caused that nasty gash just barely missed some of your organs.”

“lucky me,” you muttered, laying back in the hospital bed. “when will i be able to go home?”

the nurse checked some papers on her clipboard. “the doctor wrote here that he’d like to keep you another couple days. just get some rest, sweetheart.”

she left and you sighed, turning your head to look out the window. the silence was peaceful and you admired the city, thinking of how serene it looked from this angle. a small knock at your door had you flinch and you covered your heart with a sigh of relief when you saw xavier standing there.

“how’re you feeling?” he asked, settling in a chair at your side. the bouquet of flowers he had brought were set gently on your bedside table, his eyes never leaving you. the guilt in his stare was unmistakable and you knew it was eating him up inside that he had been unavailable to accompany you on the mission.

“like shit,” you responded with a low chuckle, “but i’ll be okay. doc says i should be able to head home in a couple days but i’ll be off active duty for some time.”

xavier nodded, reaching out and grabbing one of your hands in both of his as he said your name quietly. “you need to rest. you’ve been pushing yourself so hard and haven’t been giving yourself a break like i’ve suggested.”

you tried to interrupt but xavier squeezed your hand and you noticed the slight tremble in his grip and the tears that were forming in his eyes as he continued.

“i could’ve lost you! so, please, think about yourself for once or — allow me to be selfish — think about me. think about how much losing you would impact my life!”

you stared at him as he swallowed harshly, taking one hand away to wipe at his eyes while he mumbled an apology. you reached out and cupped the side of his face, running your thumb over his cheekbone tenderly.

“i’m sorry,” you murmured. “i’ll rest. i never meant to worry you so much, xav.”

he sighed, leaning into your touch. “i came here to comfort you and look at how the tables turned.”

you smiled. “you did more than enough, xavier. as much as i need rest, you need to be comforted and that’s alright.”

zayne

the last couple hours were no better than a blur to you.

one second you’re standing outside your grandmother’s front door, the next you’re on your stomach, surrounded by flames and the house in front of you was no more than rubble. your body ached and you weakly call out for caleb and your grandmother, trying desperately to pull yourself toward the house. your fingers meet something cool and you glance down to find the chain of caleb’s necklace caught on your pinky.

your heart sinks and you pull the necklace close to your body, sobbing caleb’s name as you curl up on the walkway. your eyes shut and you aren’t sure how much time passed because when you open them again you’re in akso hospital, laid on a bed in a dimly lit room.

you look to your hands and feel panic rise in your chest when you don’t see caleb’s necklace. your heart hammered in your chest as your hands scanned the blanket covering your lower half, hoping it was somewhere on the bed.

“i put it on your bedside table.”

zayne, sitting on a couch near the window of your room, stood and moved to stand by your bedside. he picked up caleb’s necklace from your bedside table and he gingerly placed it in your awaiting hands, grief evident in his expression.

“i’m sorry for your loss,” he murmured, his hand lingering near yours as he spoke. he slowly sat on the edge of your bed and finally grabbed your hand, giving it a comforting squeeze. “i’ve taken the next week off to stay with you, if you’d like. you should be able to leave tomorrow morning and whether you want to stay at your place or mine is up to you entirely.”

your eyes stayed glued to your hands, one clutching caleb’s necklace while the other held zayne’s tightly. you wanted to respond or even show a sliver of gratitude but your mind was weighed down by the heavy loss of caleb and your grandmother. the heat and force of the explosion was still so fresh on your skin and all you could do was grieve. sobs shook your whole body and zayne tentatively moved closer, carefully pulling you into his embrace.

“i’m so sorry,” he whispered, chin resting atop your head as one hand cradled the back of your head and the other gently rubbed up and down your back. tears of his own rolled down his cheeks as he continued to whisper comfort to you while you clung to him and cried.

[thefaithfulnightwriter]

𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐊 ~ Chapter Two

Summary - 𝙄𝙣 𝙬𝙝𝙞𝙘𝙝 Azriel's mate is banished to another world by Amarantha. To a world she never knew existed. To a different world called Zenithara. She finds herself being stuck in Zenithara for many years. And as more time passes it leads her to giving up hope to ever get back to her family, her mate. It changes her living in such a world. She never once felt safe in Zenithara. But one day when she is given a mask. She finds herself feeling safe and concealed from the world. It gave her a sense of strength and power. Which leads her to persevere in the new world she was in.

But what will happen when she finds herself being sent back to her old world Prythian, to her home in Velaris? What will happen when she is finally reunited with her family… her mate?

Pairing - Azriel x Female!Oc

Universe - A Court of Thorns and Roses

Warnings -  Characters may be a bit OOC, Mature Themes, Gore, Death, Semi Smut, Violence, Language, Weapons, Mention of Past Abuse, Mention of War, Things Will Be Changed, Fluff, Angst, Some Sensitive Subjects, Mating Bonds, Scars, Experimentation, More Will Be Added If Needed.

Disclaimer - I do not own the series ACOTAR. I do own certain characters, and I own my mc. I do own somethings that are made up. I also got some inspiration from some movies and tv shows. So if you see anything familiar.  But i own my writing and whatnot you get where im going and what i am saying lol.

Author's Note - i really hope you like this fic. i gotta say this fic is very challenging for me because of the world building around it and what not. but i do love it. i hope you guys do too. that is all i can think to say lol.

─── Zenithara ───

─── G.H.O.S.T Ship ───

Anna was now sitting on a carrier ship that was going back to Sky City. Her team, Alpha team who were mainly led by Evan, surrounded her. Very soft music was playing in the background. To try and keep everyone calm. But also not loud so everyone could stay alert. 

But the main thing she heard was soft talking between teammates and clicking of weapons. All were making sure their weapons were charged and loaded. Making sure they were all in the right holsters and secured. 

Even after the team successfully retained the load of many innocent people that were kidnapped from Sector One, and were on their way to the Arena. The Arena now resorting to kidnapping people for the Killer games. Being that they were losing people from the Abyss. Well more so the Arena. Being that the justice system was moving and placing criminals elsewhere. Not wanting the Arena or Killer games to continue. Which led G.H.O.S.T. to have to step in and save the people they can. 

Right now though Anna’s team was still on guard. Because the mission wasn't over just yet. They still needed to get these people safely back to Sky City. So they could get checked more thoroughly for injuries, and so they could give the justice system their statements on what happened to them. 

The people they had saved were currently in med bay. People from Beta team trying to keep them calm, and helping them with any injuries they could. Along with the team mates who had been injured during the mission.

At the moment Anna was observing her surroundings with her now glowing gold eyes. Now being able to see clearly without her glasses, as she used one of her abilities. Her ability of enhanced eyesight. Which when she used such eyesight her eyes always glowed a golden color. 

Right now she was watching everything around her on the ship. From behind her mainly golden, black, porcelain colored mask. That covered her whole face. The only thing that could be seen were her eyes. Other than that you couldn't see her face, nothing. Only her eyes. 

In Anna's eyes it was a beautiful mask. It was gifted to her by Katrina many years ago when she was still in the Arena. A mask that was very precious to Anna. A mask that she took care of and kept in immaculate shape.  

The top had golden and black intricate patterns that flared up slightly at the crown of her head. With amber and golden jewels that dangled on the side. Then at the middle of her head of the mask was an amber jewel. 

The golden and black detailed patterns that went from the top of her head then curved under her eyes and over her nose. Around her eyes were black, the only thing that was seen were her eyes. The lower half of her face was covered by porcelain with a pair of golden lips painted on it. 

Then around her neck was covered by black cover that had a few golden chains. It held up the mask and some mechanics that were connected to her mask. Her being the only one who knew how to use it. Knowing all the ins and outs of the mask. Having it for many years now.   

The mask was one of Anna's prize possessions. Having her mask on was also one of the things she used to cope with everything. Her mask gave her a sense of safety and power. It concealed her from the world. Giving her the strength to persevere in Zenithara. 

But most of all it kept her hidden. It hid who she was, hid her scars, her emotions, it hid Anna. 

Which was something she loved. She loved to stay hidden. Anna seemed to love it so much that she wore her mask whenever she was around people. The only time she had it off was around Evan and his father. But sometimes it was still hard for her to take it off. The two though knew how to coax it off her and make her feel safe. They were the only two who could. 

Though when Anna was alone. Mainly in one of her homes in the three Sectors or her own room, that was the only time she had the mask off. Not feeling safe but somewhat comfortable. It was when she swapped her mask for her glasses. Letting her eyes settle to their normal dark brown. But that rarely happened.   

She was accustomed to having her golden gleaming eyes on display. She was accustomed to seeing everything in a more intense and enhanced way. 

Though she had her glasses it couldn't compare to having her enhanced sight. And without either she was just blind. Only being able to see a meter in front of her. Which she didn’t like. It made her feel vulnerable, and she couldn’t stand that feeling. That was why she used her enhanced sight so much, most of the time. 

But also with that she always has an ear out for anything as well. Having trained her hearing just as much as her eyesight. So, if anything happened she would be prepared in any way. It wasn't really hard with her being a high fae. 

Though at one point her pointed ears caused her trouble while in the Arena. Doctors became more curious than ever over her, and wanted to experiment on her when they found her in the Arena. More than any other subject they had. They wanted to find out everything about her, and enhance everything. One of the things it led to was having a piece of her ears cut off. Leaving on the outer shell of her pointed ear to have a crescent type shape cut out.  

Even after that inncident she stayed strong, it was hard but she kept going. It didn't deter her. But it did lead to her wanting to train her hearing to be sharper. Just as sharp as her heightened eyesight, when her eyes were glowing. So she could rely on her hearing if anything. Having done such a thing though caused her to have an advantage. With her eyesight and hearing. But also caused her to see and hear the world in a different way. 

Just like now. Looking around once again she took everything in. The walls of the ship, the bags, the weapons, and the people talking and whispering. Who were her teammates. There were many who she noticed and recognized but few she didn't. 

It caused her to sigh and lean further back into her seat. As she stayed to herself. She didn't want to interact nor be near anyone. Anna just wanted to get this mission over with and help where she could. Then go home. Maybe have a drink then escape into her art work. 

When she wasn't on missions she was working on her art. It was another thing she used to cope. Through her art she brought Prythian her old world to Zenithara. She had walls upon walls covered with paintings of her old world, her old life. They were in all three of her houses. 

Her favorite house was in Sector Two, Middle ground. She had dedicated the house to everything Night Court, or Velaris. Middle Ground gave her the most inspiration. Reminding her the most of her home Velaris somewhat.

In her house that was in Middle Ground there were murals all over. They were mainly paintings of places in Velaris. Like the mountains that surrounded Velaris, the stars, the House of Wind, the Rainbow, Rita's, and more. But there were also paintings of her family. One wall was dedicated to them. Cassian, Rhysand, Amren, and Morrigan. 

Then there was a wall dedicated to one more person, a male. A male that she missed so much. That had a piece of her heart. A piece of her soul. A piece of her that she would never get back. He was someone she desperately wanted to not forget. He was someone so important to her. He was her mate... Azriel. 

Over time, over the past fifty something years Anna has forgotten some of her old life, her old world. That was one of the reasons she drew and painted so much, it was so she wouldn't forget. Anna wouldn't say she had the most excellent memory. But she could remember some things. But the one thing or person she remembered the most about was Azriel. 

Though there were things she had forgotten like his voice, his scent, the way his touch felt. It caused Anna to cry for days when she realized she had forgotten such things. But the things she could remember out weighted the things she couldn't. She believed it was because she drew him so many times over the years. It was so she could remember and keep the memories alive. To keep his memory alive and with her. 

She could mostly remember what he looked like. Things like his tan skin that seemed to glow under the sun. His beautiful large strong black wings upon his back that he would use to fly.  His clever shadows that wisped around him. His ebony hair that fell over his eyes. And his eyes. 

His beautiful hazel eyes that could show nothing one moment, then another moment be filled with such raw emotions. He could take her breath away with one look. Anna missed those looks. She missed his intense hazel eyes on her. Anna missed Azriel so much. At times she found herself missing him the most.

A sad sigh escaped her lips. As her head and shoulders fell and her eyes closed. As she remembered Azriel. It took everything in Anna to not let her tears fall. To not let her emotions go everywhere and let her powers out. Being they were connected to her emotions. 

It took a lot out of Anna this time to steel herself. And Anna noticed it. She noticed that it was becoming harder for her to keep doing such a thing. Because lately Anna... she was tired. 

Anna was tired of hiding. She was tired of fighting. She was tired of losing people. She was tired of feeling lost. She was tired of this world. She was tired of it all. But Anna knew she had to keep going. Because she knew that many people would want her to keep going. Azriel, her old family in Prythian, Katrina, Eva, her nephews. Anna knew she had to stay strong. 

Anna though didn't know how long she could go on. Because when it came down to it she was exhausted, lost, and alone. Yes, there were parts of Zenithara that were beautiful. And Anna may have or not seen them all. But if she was being honest with herself Anna just didn't care for Zenithara. Not as much as she cares for Prythian. Because even with more than half a century passing with her in this world Zenithara, she still felt so lost, and alone. 

Even with Evan and his father. Anna loved her nephews very much and they helped her. But there was only so much they could do. They had their own lives, and unfortunately they would never understand her. Not what she has been through. Not what she is or who she was. No one would understand. But she still loved them for helping her.

Anna was soon shaken from such thoughts when she heard Evan. Catching her attention. She was soon looking at him with her golden eyes. She found him kneeling in front of where she was sitting. His crystal eyes were on her and filled with worry. As he gently placed his fingerless gloved cover hands over hers. He was quick to hold them when she didn't pull away from him.

"Hey. Are you okay?" Evan whispered softly to her. So only she could hear what he was saying. Knowing she could hear him. He didn't want to draw any attention to them. Knowing Anna didn't like the attention on her. He also didn't want her to feel uncomfortable. So he took to speaking low to her, and tried to keep her attention on him. 

All Anna could do was take a deep breath and nod slightly. As she looked away from him. She didn't want to tell him her thoughts or problems. She didn't want to push her problems onto him. Nor did she want to burden him with her issues.    

"I find that hard to believe. You know you can talk to me right Auntie Goldie?" Evan sighed sadly. Hearing him caused Anna to nod her head again. Which led him to send her a small smile. He wanted her to talk to him but didn't want to push her. So, he did what he and his father do all the time. Let her know they were there for her no matter what. 

"Remember I'm always here for you Aunt Anna. No matter what you've got me. And you got dad too. I know it's hard and I don't know what you're going through. Just know you are not alone," he tried to soothe her. She was soon nodding her head as a sigh was heard from her. She then gently leant forward placing her head against his. She really appreciated Evan. He was so optimistic, kind, and caring. It made her smile. But her smile widened behind her mask even more hearing what he said next.

"After this mission, why don't I call up dad and all three of us can head to Middle Ground. We can meet at your place cause I know it's your favorite. Then you can tell us some stories or we can watch some movies or something. Have family time together. Just the three of us," Evan planned. He was soon chuckling with a wide smile. As he watched Anna nod quickly. She had  leaned back and clapped her hands together gently to show him her excitement. 

He knew that she was smiling by the look in her glowing eyes. That he's learned to read since he was young. He was happy to see she was excited for the plan, also happy he was able to lift her mood a bit. Nodding his head he agreed. Standing up he still had a hold of her gloved covered hand. He was then pulling her to help her get up from the seat. 

"Alright it's a plan. I'll call -," Evan started. But he was abruptly cut off. Because soon he and Anna were falling back into the seats. Being jostled by the carrier ship shaking. It was as if something had hit the ship. 

Which led everyone to be on guard and alert. Making themselves prepared for anything. Knowing it could be an attack. Evan was quick to grab the radio on his shoulder. Demanding the pilot to tell him what was going on. Asking if the ship was hit or if there was an attack.   

"No attack. It seems we have been hit by something, sir. But umm... there is something we think you should see. We're not sure what it is," The co-pilot stammered unsure and seemed to be a little scared. A sigh escaped Evan before he answered.

"Okay I'm on my way."

"Everyone calm down for now but be on alert. You coming Goldie?" Evan ordered the team. Which he received a nod from many. He was then turning to ask Anna. She was quick to nod and followed him to the cockpit. 

After a few minutes of walking they were in the control area. The pilot and co-pilot seemed to be whispering to each other. While one was pointing outside the window in front of them. It seemed they had stopped the carrier, keeping it hovering in place. Looking at each other Anna and Evan shrugged. 

"What are you pointing at? And why have we stopped? We're still on a mission. We have to get these people back to Sector One," Evan questioned the two with a sigh. As he rubbed his face and crossed his arms. 

He was starting to get frustrated because he wanted to get this mission done with. But he soon stopped when Anna placed a hand on his arm. Turning to her he was met with her golden eyes that were wide behind her mask. She was quick to point as she looked forward. 

Evan was quick to turn to see what she was looking at. All he saw was a bright light in the distance. It looked like a ball of light or an orb. He was then stepping forward with Anna. Both trying to get a closer look. More so Evan. The orb was just hovering there in the middle of the sky in front of the ship. It was as if it were waiting for something.     

"We don't know what it is or what to do. The reading signature from it is off the scale and unknown. And it seems every time we try to move it follows. The jostling you felt was us trying to move away from it. But it hit the ship. Then it started moving around us as if to observe us, to us it's like it's looking for something. We honestly don't know what to do," the pilot explained to Evan, not taking his eyes off the light. 

"Do you think it's something from the Arena?" Evan asked the two. As he leaned forward on the pilot seats. Trying to observe the orb of light. Anna was in a state of wonder as she looked at the orb. So much so she tilted her head in confusion.    

"Like I said sir we don't know what it is. The signature and energy coming off of it is off the scale and unknown. We tried to quickly go through the database, but still can't find a match. We wanted to know what you think we should do. Because it seems we can't move without it following or attacking. And I don't think you want that thing following us to our hidden headquarters. Nor attacking us," the pilot answered. Looking to Evan and Anna for the first time now. 

"Shit," Evan whispered angrily. As he threw his head back and closed his eyes thinking on what to do. Nothing like this has ever happened before. So he was clueless on what to do. He was beginning to get a headache with how much he was thinking. Between this and the mission he was getting tired. He just wanted to get the mission over and have his family day with his father and Aunt. 

But his thoughts were shaken. When he felt a small gloved hand grip his arm and pull him. Opening his eyes Evan looked to see it was Anna and was quick to follow her. After telling the pilots to keep him posted which they agreed to do. Anna was then pulling him just outside the room so they could talk. 

"Let me take a look at it Evan," Anna reasoned with him with her soft voice. She could see that Evan was starting to get slightly overwhelmed. So she wanted to help him. Take some of the weight of his shoulders. Anna knew she was the only one who could get close enough to take a look at the orb of light. She also knew they needed to get past it and fast. So they could finish this mission and get the people who were kidnapped back home. She was pretty much the only one who could try to get this thing out of the way. 

But hearing her Evan was quick to shake his head and disagree with her plan. He didn't want to put her in such danger. Not when they didn't know what it was, and never dealt with something like this before. He didn't want to send her in blind. He didn't want to lose his Aunt. The only real maternal figure in his life now. Evan was about to speak. But was stopped by Anna raising her hand gesturing to him to stay quiet. Which led Evan to sigh and stay quiet as he looked into her golden eyes.

"I only say this because I am the only one who can get close enough to it. And I can do it quickly. We are still on a mission Evan. We need to get these people back quickly. You know the longer we wait and sit here like sitting ducks isn't good. We are losing time. And the chance of someone from the Arena finding us is getting higher. So let me go and take a look at this thing. Let me see what I can do," Anna explained to him softly. It shocked Evan to hear her say so much in one sitting. But he shook the shock away.

Knowing now wasn't the time to think too much about such a thing. Taking in what Anna said Evan grunted in frustration. Because he knew she was right. He was then quick to look at the watch on his wrist. It caused Evan to curse under his breath because of the time. Time seemed to not be on their side right now. 

Turning his gaze on Anna he looked into her shining eyes. Trying to see if he could read her. Trying to see if he could see any emotions. Anna's mask hid her very well. It hid all of her… but her eyes. Even then it was hard to read her still because she could hide her emotions so well. It was more so hard to read her when around people. Though when it was just them or her with his father she showed them her emotions. Showed them her emotions mainly through her eyes. 

Other than that there was nothing else that she really did. As the years went on she talked less, and reached out less and less to them. Which worried him and his father a lot as of lately. But right now he looked into her gleaming eyes. He could see she was tired which worried him. Because it was a look that he sees more and more of over the time he’s spent with her. But he also could see a look of determination in her eyes right now. 

It caused Evan to clench his jaw. Because he knew she was the only one who could do this. Looking at his watch again he growled slightly in frustration. He was then running his hands through his wavy hair and over his face. Before nodding at her. Agreeing with her plan. Looking at her with concern. 

"Okay. You go out there and do what you can as quickly as you can. As you said we are still on a mission. You need to be as quick as possible. I'll make sure we keep an eye on you the whole time. If you want to you can talk to me while out there whenever. And if you need to get out of there, you get out of there. I mean it. We'll find another way if anything," Evan cautioned. Hearing his speech caused Anna to smile behind her mask. But she nodded nonetheless. To let him know she agreed and to ease his worries.  

"Have some faith in your Aunt Goldie. I am around a hundred years old. I got some wisdom in me. And let's not forget I've been doing this longer than you," Anna joked as she pointed at him. Evan chuckled at her before opening his arms. Inviting her into a hug. Smiling behind her mask Anna giggled and walked forward into his arms. Throwing her soft arms around his waist. 

He was quick to wrap his arms around her shoulders. Not wanting to let her go. Sighing Evan was scared for his Aunt. The one he was closest to. The one who has been there for him all his life. He was filled with fear for her because he didn't want to lose her. 

But he knew that she was strong and smart. So he pulled away, letting her go. Having some faith in her. Looking down at her, he smiled with a nod. Kissing her masked cover head quickly before she could push him away. It caused Anna to giggle while Evan chuckled. Both of them were soon shaking their heads at each other. 

Before Evan patted her arm and gestured for her to follow him quickly. Anna nodded and rushed to follow behind him. Both knew they needed to be quick. After a moment she realized he was leading her to a weapons vault room. More specifically hers and his that they shared. 

Soon Anna was grabbing a few gadgets. Her hologram watch, an extra radio, a locator. Then grabbing the two golden guns that Evan held out for her. After making sure they were loaded and giving her extra clips. She rolled her eyes at him and shook her head. Seeing her Evan was quick to voice his worries.

"Hey there's nothing wrong with extra protection. Especially when your goin' in blind. I know you have your powers, magic, or whatever. But just take them to give me peace of mind. Please," Evan pleaded with her. Sighing Anna nodded and placed them in the holsters on her thighs. She never really liked guns or anything of that sort. She preferred her non mechanical weapons. But more so preferred her weapons that were made specifically for her.

Which were her short sword that was strapped to her back. Then her two daggers that were tucked into her long black boots. Then her lasso at her side. Then her knives that were hidden all over her. They were all specially made for only her and her powers. 

So she could use the weapons as a conduit for her magic at times. The weapons could absorb small amounts of her magic’s essences. It made her weapons glow with heat depending on how much magic she stored in said weapon. They could burn through pretty much anything depending on how much magic was stored in them. It was another form of weapon she could use. 

After Anna was done collecting her weapons with Evan's help. She was soon guided to the rear of the ship by Evan. Where the Alpha team was. They were looking at Evan and Anna with confusion. 

"We've seem to have run into a problem. Gold here is gonna go out and take a look at it. We're going to be on stand by so if anything happens. Remember we are still on a mission. So, be ready for anything. Anything can still happen. While she is out we'll be keeping an eye on her from the monitors," Evan explained to them. 

Going over what is happening with them. As he took out a small touch pad and pressed a few buttons on the screen. He swiped the screen and a large hologram monitor soon appeared on the wall. Showing the team what was outside in front of the ship blocking their way still. Many were shocked at the orb. Causing them to ask questions. Which led Evan to answer what he could.  

"Alright that's it with the questions for now we're wasting time. We need to get this over with okay. Goldie, remember what I said. Take a look, do what you can, but if you need to get out of there. Get out," Evan declared. Leading the team to quiet down. He then turned to Anna. 

Who nodded at his request. As she walked past everyone to get to the back opening. Waiting for the hatch to open. Closing her eyes she took a deep breath. Composing herself to fly, and preparing herself for anything. Evan sighed as he walked to the side of the opening reaching for the latch. Looking at her for a moment making sure she was ready.

"You ready?" Evan asked her. Opening her eyes Anna took another deep breath, nodded, and gave him a thumbs up. Seeing her make the gesture he sent her a nod.  

"Alright be careful Aunt Anna. Remember we got our family night coming up,"  Evan reminded her with a smile. Anna giggled and nodded. Before pointing at the latch. Evan was hesitant but reluctantly pulled it. Opening the back of the ship, making wind blow and whip around them. 

Looking at Evan one last time she sent him a small salute. Then before he could say anything else she ran forward and jumped out of the back of the ship. The last thing she heard was the team laugh. As Evan cursed at her for scaring him.

A laugh escaped her as she fell from the ship. But soon she found herself closing her eyes. Anna allowed herself to fall and feel the wind rush past her. Feeling the wind against her skin. She could feel the rush and sensation of falling. And enjoyed the feeling. Letting herself feel free. She wishes she could stay like this for a while longer. But Anna knew she had a task.

So sighing she opened her shining eyes. Feeling the power she had within. Soon a luminescent gold light appeared at her chest. As the light appeared so did the warmth. Feeling it Anna smiled and allowed the feeling to grow and wash over her.

Allowing her powers to engulf her whole. And soon a gold shimmering light surrounded Anna. She then stopped falling and was hovering in the vast sky. With a gold light shimmering around her, that was her magic. Wrapped around her like a blanket. Keeping her safe and in the air. 

Looking around she saw the lights of the city above and below. Noting they would be going off soon because of the time. Then she found the carrier ship above her. She needed to get to the front of the ship, and check out this orb of light. Then try to move it. Nodding to herself she then willed her powers to carry her forward. 

She smiled behind her mask as she flew through the sky. Loving the feeling of soaring through the air. With her task in mind she was quick to reach her destination. Which was the front of the ship. Looking over her shoulder at the front windows of the ship. She could see the pilots, a few of her teammates, and Evan. She shook her head and waved. Before turning and making her way towards the orb of light. She was growing closer and closer to the light. 

Before she stopped abruptly. Her smile falling from her lips as a frown washed over her. The feeling it was giving off. It was a familiar magic. It was a magic she hasn't felt in such a long time from anywhere but herself. Even then her own magic seemed tainted. But this sort of power or magic was pure. And it was from her old life, from her old world Prythian.

"You okay Goldie?"     

Anna heard Evan through her speaker ask. Quickly reaching for the comms on her mask. She was about to answer him and explain what was happening. When suddenly the air shifted around her. She then watched as the orb of light moved closer to her. She was quick to glide and move back but it kept coming closer to her. Anna had no clue what to do. 

She kept slowly moving back more. Trying to keep a distance from the orb of light. That is until she heard it. A loud noise similar to the snapping of a whip and thunder. A noise that haunted her dreams. It was the same noise she heard when she was pushed into that portal by Amarantha. It caused her to stiffen in a state of fear. But the difference now was this time she was hearing it more than once.

She was quick to cover her ears. Feeling overwhelmed by the noises. All she could hear was the whipping noise mixed with loud thunder and Evan on the comms. She was quick to ignore them and pull herself together. And was soon trying to fly away as fast as she could. Anna only got so far when she felt the wind pick up around her. She could feel the magic that was controlling the wind. She felt the force of it against her powers. It caused a scream to escape her as she tried to keep a hold on her powers. As the wind pushed her closer and closer to the orb. 

Tears began to fall from Anna's eyes as she tried to fight against the force. Anna didn't know how to feel. She knew that this may be her way home. And a part of her was hoping for it. But then another part of her was scared and filled with fear. What if this was just another portal to another world she didn't know? What if someone or even Amarantha was just playing with her and was sending her to another world? 

It has been too long for this portal to just come out of nowhere and send her back to Prythian. It seemed too easy. Which meant it was most likely to send her to another world. That was the only thing that was coming to her mind. 

It was what caused her to fight against the current. But it was no use, it was too much. Anna cried because there was nothing she could do to keep from going into the portal. And Anna knew that she needed to stop fighting so she could preserve her magic. So she wasn't defenseless in the next world. 

Looking at the ship one last time. Anna could see her team rushing around through the windows. Seeming to try and find a way to get to her. They were all somewhat a blur to her. But the one she could see clearly was Evan yelling. More tears fell thinking of him. Evan and his father were going to be the only ones she was going to miss from this world. The only ones who she hasn't lost. In that moment she focused on Evan's voice that was coming through the comms. She could hear him yelling frantically through the comms. But the last thing she heard was his cry for her.

"Aunt Annamarie." 

[festivalsofmargot]

Pretty Thoughts {Sebastian Sallow x GN!Reader}

Introduction: Sebastian is down bad for you, my dear reader. But a lot of overthinking on your part makes you blind to it. So, his only option is to keep chasing after you. Takes place after MC meets Anne and before Seb’s final mission. Your Hogwarts house is up to you.

Word Count: ~2700

Warnings: Kissing, Teen Angst

Author’s Note: This is an (un)official Part 2 to Pining in Potions Class. I like writing one shots that could go together if you’d like, but you definitely don’t need to read any other stories to know what’s going on. I love the idea of a clingy Sebastian. Teens finding their first love can feel amazing but they also don’t know how to act. All they know is they want to be with that person at all times.

Songs (if interested):

Kill the Director - The Wombats

Whatever You Like - Single Version - Anya Marina Cover

Wallpaper - Matt Watson

How Long - TALK

You had found Sebastian around you a lot more lately, not that you minded. You enjoyed it, actually. But at the same time, it kept you on edge. Though you hadn’t known the Slytherin for long, this behavior seemed very out of the ordinary for him. When you were first getting to know him, he would be brief and to the point with you, then he was off. He was always prioritizing practicing new spells in the undercroft or going over every book he could get his hands on from the restricted section. 

At first, you thought maybe he had a falling out with Ominis, but then you saw them walking into the dining hall seemingly fine with each other. And then, you made yourself paranoid it had something to do with Anne’s health. But to your relief, he updated you on something funny she wrote in her latest letter to him.

Your early conversations mainly consisted of discussing the things he had found in Salazar Slytherin’s spell book, but that was only a small portion of the time these days. More often than not, the two of you weren’t saying anything at all. He was just there with you. Whether it be studying, laying in the grass and basking in the sun, or sitting with you at breakfast going over some last minute homework. 

He was getting dangerously close to you lately too. He might not have thought anything of it. But you on the other hand? Your mind went reeling. Every time you were together, he would do something simple that made your stomach dance with butterflies. He’d brush your fingers with his, lay his head on your lap while you laid in the grass, and touch his shoulder against yours whenever you sat together in the dining hall.

It was your final class of the day, and you were barely paying attention, your mind thinking back on those light touches you and Sebastian shared. Looking up from your notes to sneak a glance at him, you found he was already staring back at you. The both of you quickly averted your eyes.

With Professor Hecat’s dismissal, all the students made their way out of the classroom. Sebastian caught up to your side.

“Have to cancel our library session. I need to meet with Ominis. Can I still try to see you later?” He looked at you with hopeful eyes, as if he needed you to confirm he could, in fact, see you later.

“O-Of course, Sebastian. I’ll probably be in the library for the rest of the night if you need me.”

He gave you a small smile and nod of his head. He took a few steps backwards to leave, keeping his eyes on you a moment longer, then he turned and went on his way.

- 

Rubbing at your eyes, you were relieved to be nearly done with all of your homework. It was the weekend now, you didn’t need to worry about finishing it all that night, but Sebastian hadn’t come to see you yet. So you stayed a bit longer than anticipated. It was getting late and everyone was gone except for you and Madam Scribner at her desk at the library entrance. 

You’d feel bad if Sebastian showed up and you weren’t there to at least tell him you were done and heading to bed. But if you were too tired, you were too tired. Sebastian wouldn’t be crushed if he turned up and you were gone... right?

You shook the thought from your head and rubbed at your blushing cheeks with the back of your hand. Sebastian doesn’t feel that way about you, he needs to focus on helping his sister. If he wants anything more, he’ll tell you. But then you began thinking about all his small touches again, pulling yourself back into the fantasy.

Shaking the thoughts from your head, you knew you needed a distraction. You decided to get up from your table and explore the shelves for another book. Nothing education related, there had to be something in this humungous library that was just meant for enjoyment. Some fictional story to take your mind off of everything.

Aha! You believed you found just the book. You couldn’t quite tell from the cover, but the title was “My Beloved”. That sounded like a romance novel, right? Plucking the book from the shelf and running your hands across its bindings, you made your way back to your table. Not wanting to sit thanks to the lingering nerves, you opened up the book to a random page and read it over to see if your prediction on the content was correct.

You found it was a romance that took place in a small village. Before you knew it, you were engrossed in the story, picturing yourself and Sebastian as the main characters who were in love. You slowly placed both of your hands on the table, leaning on them as you kept reading, forgetting you could sit back down. It’d really come to this, you were so head over heels for him you were picturing the two of you in a romance novel. A dreamy sigh escaped your lips.

“What are you reading?” Sebastian asked, coming up to your side. Your attention snapped to him. He chuckled at your startled expression and very red complexion. “Uh oh, catch you reading something interesting, did I?” 

"Um...”, You started, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Your mind was still recovering from the romantic scenarios you were just picturing the two of you in. 

Shaking your head and avoiding his gaze, Sebastian took this to mean you were upset with him. His heart sank. “I’m sorry it took me so long. Ominis and I decided to try a new spell and it took us forever to figure out. I was so focused on getting it right, I lost track of time. You’re not leaving soon, are you?”

You gave a small wave of your hand, dismissing his apology. “It’s alright, Sebastian. I got caught up here and... well, lost track of time myself.” You slid the book away from him, slowly closing it, hoping you didn’t look suspicious.

But, of course, Sebastian thought you looked suspicious. He raised a questioning brow at you and glanced at the book.

“What?” You asked innocently, turning away from him and looking down at the romance novel, firing off ideas in your head of how you’d put it away without him figuring out what it was.

“That book you got there. Why are you acting so secretive? Did I catch you reading something interesting after all?” Sebastian got closer, leaning one hand on the table next to the book and peering at it over your shoulder. His chest pressing up against your back. There he went again, giving you the slightest touch and driving you mad. The scent of his cologne filled your nostrils, intoxicating you. In that moment, you were tempted to yank him close and bury your face in his neck.

He turned his head to look at you for an answer, but you couldn’t get yourself to look back. He was so close, his lips were so close. You could make out his freckles out of the corner of your eye, feel his breath against your skin. Did he know what kind of effect he had on you? Was he teasing you? Your lips were moving to speak but no words would come out.

He gave you a playful nudge with his shoulder, prodding you to answer him. “Come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?”

And it wasn’t that bad, at most he would tease you for reading a romance novel. What was holding you back at this point was how nervous Sebastian was making you. As if you weren’t tense enough, he took it a step further and placed both of his hands on either side of you on the table, trapping you in. He rested his chin on your shoulder, taking another peek at the book.

“I never realized how much taller I am than you.” He chuckled, chest humming against your back. Keeping you in place, his callused hands grabbed yours to remove them from covering the title of the book. He held your hands in his while he read it over, then he gave a quiet, amused hum.

You turned in his arms and he lifted his head off your shoulder to meet your gaze. He smiled at you, but it faded when he saw your face. 

“What’s wrong?”

Finally facing him, even with how close he was, your desire took over your reason. And, just for a moment, you allowed yourself to be selfish. “You make me nervous, Sebastian.” You told him in a low tone.

He didn’t think you looked nervous at all. Something was written on your features but he certainly wouldn’t call it ‘nervous’. Your eyes were dark and you licked at your lips. It was brief but it caught his eye, seeing a quick glimpse of your tongue made his head race with all sorts of thoughts.

You too glanced at his lips, not caring if it was obvious what was on your mind.

Seeing your eyes shamelessly stare at his mouth, he froze. He was afraid if he made one wrong move, you’d run. He had wanted to kiss you for a while now, and right then it looked like you wanted to kiss him too. 

Then you did, and his heart went rapid. He had been convinced you could feel it when your hands moved up along his chest until one snaked around his shoulders and the other rested on his neck. His hands left their place on the table to grab your waist, pulling you closer, holding you in place. His warmth enveloped you.

You pulled away to kiss at Sebastian’s neck and his knees went weak. You kissed around the area you pictured he sprayed his cologne. You took an inhale and breathed out, “I always loved this scent on you.” You kissed at the area one more time, sending a pleasant tickling sensation up the back of his neck. His fingers dug deeper into your waist.

You go back to kissing his lips, which were softer than you had imagined. The way he earnestly moved his mouth against yours ignited sparks in your chest. You had wanted him so badly, and you finally had him there in your arms, on the tip of your tongue, for the taking. One of your hands moved to his hair and you reveled in the feeling of his locks between your fingers. 

But the abrupt sound of heels walking along a marble floor slowed your kiss to a halt. Madam Scribner. The two of you were so swept up in the moment you completely forgot other people existed (faculty that Sebastian does not have a good reputation with included).

The two of you left each other’s embrace just as Scribner came into view. Sebastian, hair slightly askew, gave a cough and acted like he was looking over some important papers which were actually your homework pages for a class he didn’t have. All the while, you had managed to open up the romance novel, nodding your head as if you were learning some new herbology methods.

Madam Scribner eyed the two of you while she put away a few books. “Getting late, best finish up before curfew.” And then she was gone, returning to her desk.

You and Sebastian looked at each other, cheeks flushed, and grinning from ear to ear. You bit at your lip and he rubbed the back of his neck. Clearing your throat, you started gathering up your homework and books.

Sebastian watched with an ache to pull you back in and keep kissing you senseless.

“I-I’m sorry I did that. That was selfish of me.” You stammered, his brows furrowed in confusion.

“What do you mean?” He asked, returning to your side, thinking through anything he could have done to make you feel this way. You had helped him through so much, if anything he thought he was the selfish one. You came in as a new fifth year with seemingly endless catching up to do and you had to learn how to wield ancient magic on top of that. Yet, he was unabashed in asking for your help countless times, anything to steal you away for himself.

“Well I-I know how busy you are with your research for Anne and I’d hate to be the one who slowed you down just because I-.” You went quiet, unable to finish the sentence, fingers fumbling to organize the papers in your hands.

“Just because you... what?” He urged on.

“Merlin, Sebastian. Do I need to spell it out for you?” You exhaled, leaving to go put away the books you borrowed, him following close in pursuit.

“Please do.”

“As I said,” You sighed. “You make me... nervous.”

“In a good way or bad way?”

Putting the last of the books away, you turned to face him again. “Good, I suppose.” You confessed, barely above a whisper, unable to meet his gaze.

He tried to bite back the giddy smile forming on his lips. “I make you nervous in a good way.” He repeated back, almost sounding proud.

You nodded your head, looking down at your twiddling thumbs, listening out if he would say how he felt about you.

Sebastian glanced over to Madam Scribner, who made it not so subtle she was keeping an eye on the two of you. “We should start heading to our rooms now, I suppose. Curfew and all.”

Your heart dropped, he didn’t say a thing about reciprocating your feelings. Not even a simple “I feel the same.” He must have only been swept up in the moment, enjoying the attention. Perhaps teenage hormones could make kissing enticing no matter who you were with? Embarrassment filled your every limb and you wanted to run and hide. You gathered your things to go.

“Um, yes. You’re right. We should be going.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“No, that’s alright. At this point, I’m asleep on my feet and you must be exhausted too. I’ll just floo and go straight to bed.”

Your rejection took him aback. “Oh. Well, alright then. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

“Maybe. I’ve got some assignments outside of the castle, might not have time.”

“Well, let me come along to help.” He offered eagerly.

“Don’t worry yourself, just send me an owl if something comes up for Anne. Sleep well, Sebastian.” 

Before he could say anything more, you sped off to the library floo, and then you were gone. He was baffled at your sudden shift, everything was going so well. The two of you kissed and you had confirmed you felt the same as he did. He couldn’t believe he could make someone like you nervous. Hearing you say how you felt about him made him so happy he could burst. But then you were rushing to leave, rejecting his offer to help again. He didn’t think he said anything wrong, he barely said anything at all. Yet off you went, like you couldn’t get away fast enough.

He groaned in frustration as he made his way to his room. He had managed to kiss you and he still felt as distant as ever from you. He had never had the courage to outright tell you how he felt, so he would constantly toe the line with his touches. The brushing fingers, laying his head on your lap, sitting as close as he could to you in the dining hall, and now a kiss, all of which you seemed to welcome.

Sebastian laid in bed, staring up at the ceiling, going back and forth in his head what your actions tonight meant. You had waited in the library for him all that time, you initiated the kiss, said you liked - no - loved his cologne, told him he made you nervous in a good way, and then you wanted nothing more to do with him. He replayed the whole night and he couldn’t pin down where he went wrong. 

He’d have to find you first thing in the morning, before you could leave.

[instant-delusions]

OH MY GOSH are you a rafayel lover too 😭 i swear, i love him so much! and im happy that l&ds comnunity is growing here that a new ff of raffy is posted everyday when i refresh the tags! im glad u seem enthusiastic to accept requests 😔 my raffy brainrot is so bad i need my fix!

can i request? we know rafayel has some sort of "abandonment issues" and we know where it stems from and how it manifests (where he says mc can do what they want as long as they come back to him or let him know what they're doing 😭) and imagine that mc GENUINELY forgets bc she's tired from all the work as a hunter, and when she meets raffy again, he's quiet and she's trying to prod a word out of him but he won't budge cuz he's hurt 😭 and u can go on from there! aargh i love hurt/comfort so much.

happy valentines!! (in advance) 😔🎊🎂

YES rafa is my babygirl. my muse. my glubglubglub. my everything. HE'S SUPER RELATABLE TOO ??? HELP my abandonment issues are literally the same, I'm almost offended 😭😭💔 tysm for the request & happy early valentinesss 💓💓💓

ʟᴏ$ᴇʀ=ʟ♡ᴠᴇʀ !

rafayel x reader

cw: burn-out like symptoms, wounds/blood, arguing, cursing, hurt & comfort

𓆝 ⋆｡𖦹°‧𓇼

6:00 a.m., you skimmed over rafayel's last message and told yourself to reply later - of course, as fate does, a super strong wanderer appeared which occupied you for an excruciating, multiple hour long fight. it was night when you returned home, stripping off your uniform and throwing your gun on the kitchen counter. You barely made it to bed, soaking your sheets in a bit of blood before completely passing out.

it was noon when you woke up again and evening when you were done with your report and bandaging your wound. finally, you were able to check your phone, and it doomed on you. rafayel's message stayed unreplied. you scrolled down his other three texts.

𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼

11am rafa: are u ok?

12am rafa: (y/n), can I come over?

1pm: are u serious? not this again.

𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼

you furrowed your eyebrows in regret, but exhaled painfully right after. your wound opened again.

you were forced on another, quicker mission that night, but it still left you exhausted, your former wound nagging at you still. once again you came home late, passed out, and woke up around noon. opening your phone, there were no new messages.

quickly, you pressed the call button and were shocked to find the artist wasn't picking up.

𓆝 ⋆｡𖦹°‧𓇼

5:00 pm y/n: hey, sry rafayel. work has been a lot lately.

5:01 pm y/n: I'm rlly sorry

𓆝 ⋆｡𖦹°‧𓇼

wincing, you sat down, your heart beating anxiously for some reason. 'what if this is it? I broke his promise. there's no reason for him to stay. it's fair, but I need him around. because...'

because you like him. it's selfish, you want him around although you barely fill his needs. suddenly, a very familiar dark cloud forms in your stomach and you feel depressed. deeming another relationship ruined by your work, you open social media to drown out the silence.

several hours passed until a knock at your door ripped you out your daze. quickly, you got up and open it. "rafayel." you say, his name coming out almost like a sigh of relief before you could register it. he was dressed in his white shirt, and white pants adorned with an intricate silver belt - he looked put together as always. you, on the other hand, were in an oversized tee, messy hair and deep eyebags with chapped lips. "hi." he simply greeted, making his way into your apartment.

you followed him, breathing anxiously at his unreadable aura. "listen, rafayel - I'm sorry, I wanted to reply and text you but.."

"you forgot." he replied, crossing his arms. there was a look of hurt and disappointment in his face. "it's not that simple." you argued, breathing in to continue, but he emotionally cut you off. "it is, though. (y/n), if you'd like me enough, a simple task like keeping me updated would be easy."

"rafayel. I like you, I like you a lot but..." you breathed in deeply, the harshness of his words getting to you enough to make your eyes teary. defeated, you sat down on your couch, burying your face in your hands. "these past days have been a lot, I could barely take care of myself and most of the time I was either fighting, passed out or tending to my wounds..." you trailed off weakly - due to your eyes being covered, you couldn't see rafayel's eyebrows raising in shock at your reaction, his arms slowly sinking.

"I swear if I'd have a normal life, I'd text you regularly, but it's not." slowly, you raise your head to meet his eyes - yours were puffy and red, tears streamed down your face. rafayel stayed silent, waiting for you to continue.

"it'd be selfish of me to wish for you to stick by me while i don't fulfill your needs, i know i'm not a good...friend. I try to do my best, rafa. you mean a lot to me, but i understand if you want to leave. you deserve someone better."

at this point, tears were streaming down your face freely, and soft sobs escaped your throat. rafayel lowered his gaze, afraid he'd sink to his knees and beg for forgiveness instead. after a while, he sat next to you, slowly intertwining his fingers with yours and brushing his thumb across your hand as he watched your body move with your sobs. "(Y/N), there is not a single part of you that is selfish."

gently, he holds your cheek and makes you look at him. his hand remains there as he continues talking.

"rather, it is me who is selfish. i crave your attention and validation, and feel hurt if i don't receive it. i'm sorry for being petty, i should've come over sooner. and..."

rafayel moves his hand to wipe away your tears and softly kisses your forehead, he smiles as he hears you breathe out softly.

"i could never bring it over my heart to part from you."

you gaze into his rich, magenta eyes and feel your heartstrings pull towards him. it's as if there were a bridge between your chests. closing your eyes, you feel your love for him blooming in the valleys of your bloodstream and bubbling out of your skin, and it weirdly feels as old as millenia, as if you'd known this love all your life, and all the lives you lived before.

"i'm glad." you smiled wobbly, "i feel the same." with a sigh, you leaned your head on his shoulder and let your body relax.

"i dunno how to feel about you calling us 'friends', though."

[hogwartslegacyreactions2]

Can i request the react to mc wearing the knight armor outfit they have? It just has so much comedic value it would be a CRIME not to wear it. Especially during poppys dragon quest that would be hilarious. Better if MC is a gryffindor as well since the chivalry thing. The outift has so much potential unexplored.

A/N: lmao I love this

HLC REACT TO MC WEARING A FULL SUIT OF ARMOR

!!CLANKCLANKCLANKCLANK!! MC rushed to meet their friend, sliding to a stop in front of them. The visor has fallen in front of their face and they flip it back up after two failed attempts. They hold a pose then do a spin to show off the dull old armor they found. MC just knows they'll be impressed.

SEBASTIAN SALLOW: He watches them the whole time they're running up to him. They nearly trip over their own feet and go face first into the dirt. He blinks slowly and shakes his head, maybe he was seeing things. There's no way they were going to pull off a stealth mission in that. "Mental..." Is all he can manage to say out loud.

OMINIS GAUNT: "What is that God awful racket??" He stands perplexed in front of the suit of armor that seemingly just came to life and started walking around. His face was fully contorted in confusion as MC struggled to open the visor. "What are you-...just, what!?"

ANNE SALLOW: Okay, when she admitted that she was actually into the whole "knight in shining armor" trope, she wasn't implying to them to take it seriously. Now they just look silly. Silly enough to make her smile, but silly nonetheless. "You're not actually going out in that, are you?"

IMELDA REYES: She doesn't want to give MC the satisfaction of making her laugh at their goofiness, but watching them try to mount a broom in armor is the funniest thing she's seen in a while. They're so off balance that they look like a new born deer trying to walk over a fence, while also covered in metal. They keep falling into a heap on the ground and she is struggling to keep it together.

NATSAI ONAI: "Oh wow, you can wear the metal suits in the halls? I thought they were just for show. Can I wear one?" Whatever shenanigans MC is up to, she wants in. If MC gives her one, she'll proudly go stomping around the grounds with them.

GARRETH WEASLEY: He quirks his eyebrows and chuckles. "Come on, the explosion wasn't that bad last time. But since you're here, and well protected, care to test my latest brew? I call it Baba Yaga's Bombastic Buttersnipes! It'll be a hit at the Halloween festival this year, I just know it! ...As long as I can figure out how to keep the splash range to less than ten feet." He says the last sentence under his breath.

LEANDER PREWETT: He covers his mouth as he examines MC's choice of wardrobe. He takes his hand away and opens his mouth to say something but words fail him. He covers a sneaking laugh with a cough and covers his mouth again. "Well uh....good on you for really, uh...committing to the whole Gryffindor...pride, yeah...pfff!" He turns away, turning red from holding his laughter.

AMIT THAKKAR: His confusion turns to laughter as MC fights the visor to stay up. "You're really committed to the 'hero' role, aren't you? Got a suit of, somewhat, shining armor and everything. You look like you just stepped out of a story book." He giggles to himself as MC gives him a thumbs up and proudly marches on.

EVERETT CLOPTON: He laughs so hard, he snorts. He covers his face in embarrassment but can't stop laughing. His sides hurt. He's tearing up. MC needs to walk away so he can catch his breath.

POPPY SWEETING: She looks them up and down for maybe a second before doubling over in laughter. "Well I don't think the dragon will have any trouble spotting you!" She wipes a tear from her eye. "I hope you're more agile than you look or you're going to be roasted alive in that."

ELEAZAR FIG: He thought he was used to MC's unusual fashion sense by now. Turns out they can still surprise him. He doesn't say anything of it, just gives them a concerned side eye. Where did they even find a full suit of unenchanted armor that fit? Maybe he should start asking more questions...but life is easier to manage if he doesn't.