#Polish Loose Gemstone

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[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Comet Donati [Chapter 3: Steal My Girl]

A/N: Hello lovely readers! Thank you so so so much for the love this fic has received. I wanted to give you a heads up that I will be co-leading a field trip to Japan from July 4th-14th and will therefore have much less time to write. HOPEFULLY I won’t have to skip a Sunday update, but I wanted to make you aware just in case. I hope you enjoy Chapter 3!!! 💜

Series Summary: Sex, drugs, boy bands. You are a kinda-therapist recruited (via nepotism) to help Comet Donati through a recent crisis. Things are casual with Aegon, very not-casual with Aemond. Loosely inspired by One Direction.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sexual content (18+), drugs, alcohol, smoking, mental health struggles, Aegon-induced chaos, ANGST, Iceland, you cannot escape the Cookie Monster pajama pants.

Selected Chapter Quote: “So what, you don’t like me anymore?”

Word count: 8.3k (wtf I need to chill).

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @doingfondue @catalina-howard @randomdragonfires @myspotofcraziness @arcielee @fan-goddess @talesofoldandnew @marvelescvpe @tinykryptonitewerewolf @mariahossain @chainsawsangel @darkenchantress @not-a-glad-gladiator @gemini-mama @trifoliumviridi @herfantasyworldd @babyblue711 @namelesslosers @thelittleswanao3 @daenysx @moonlightfoxx @libroparaiso @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @mizfortuna @florent1s @heimtathurs @bhanclegane @poohxlove @narwhal-swimmingintheocean​ @heavenly1927 @mariahossain @echos-muses @padfooteyes​ @minttea07​

Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist! 💜  

Athens, Madrid, Porto, Vienna, Stockholm, and now: descending into Reykjavik through clouds like iron. The North Atlantic is an endless sheen of cold overcast blue, a mirror of the sky. The earth is rocky and anemic. There are no jewel tones here, no sapphires or emeralds or aquamarines or fire opals or topazes. It is impossible to look down at Iceland, this dominion of impassionate jaggedness, and not think of how the Vikings had to reap their treasures from every other corner of Europe, silver and gold and glass and slaves piled into ships to be rowed back to the hostile earth they clung to, perhaps just to prove they could.

Across the aisle of the private jet—more like a penthouse than a plane, posh neutral colors and hand-stitched leather—Luke is showing Aemond his latest lyrics, loops of silver on matte black pages. They’re good, from what you’ve heard. They’re really good. And that tells you what kind of person Aemond truly is as he helps Luke polish rocks into gemstones. Anybody can soften the blow of mediocrity. It takes courage to build ladders for people who might one day outclimb you.

Daeron is playing his Nintendo 64, which is hooked up to a 98-inch flat screen tv; Mario is leaping through paintings into worlds of lava, ice, sentient ticking bombs. Criston is answering emails. Cregan is sprawled across a couch with his sunglasses on, presumably sound asleep. Jace is leering at you, dark hair hanging in his face and slurping a Vesper.

You ask him half-mocking: “What tattoo are you going to get for Reykjavik?”

He yanks off his sequined red blazer—nothing underneath, as usual—and twists around to show you the puffin on his left shoulder blade. Comet, at some point in time that preceded you, has already been to Iceland. “Cute, right? Wanna pet it?”

You roll your eyes. “I’m sorry I asked.”

He grins. “No you’re not.”

Aegon kicks the back of Jace’s chair. He’s scribbling some notes of his own, which is unusual. In place of a spiral notebook with onyx pages, Aegon is writing on crinkled Starbucks receipts with a Sharpie. He’s wearing his favorite aviator sunglasses, khaki cargo pants, an excessively bright cyan tank top, and matching Crocs.

Baela stares blankly out the window for a few seconds—like she’s buffering, a lagging connection—and then she looks to you hopefully. “Shopping when we land?”

“Does Iceland have shops…?”

“Probably more than Kansas,” Aemond says, then smiles mischieviously.

“Missouri,” you fling back. He returns his attention to Luke.

“They totally have shops in Iceland,” Baela assures you.

“Then I am amenable. I need more concert outfits.” You mostly wear your boy band t-shirts from home, which has become a joke: One Direction, Backstreet Boys, New Kids On The Block, NSYNC, the Jonas Brothers, Boyz II Men, 98 Degrees, BTS…but never Comet Donati. Anyone but them. Aegon calls you a traitor. Aemond teases, smirks, tries to hide how much he watches you the same way people contemplate art on museum walls, a little confounded, a little entranced.

“Rhaena?” Baela says. “Hello? Hello? Hola? Bonjour? Rhaena?”

Rhaena startles, peering up from her novel: Jurassic Park. Once upon a time, as you’ve learned, she had planned to study paleontology. She wants to be alone in the middle of a field someplace digging up bones. Well, no great tragedy there; one is never too old to be a paleontologist. She can take off five years, or ten years, or twenty, or thirty to see Luke through his touring days and then pick back up her own ambitions like keys left on a hook. But Baela gave up a ballet scholarship to follow Jace across the globe, puddle to puddle, land to land, and in your albeit limited understanding, ballerinas age in something like dog years. Their career is a brilliant, lightning-brief flash and then long, anonymous decades running out their mortal clock as choreographers, backup dancers, personal trainers, instructors for blue-blooded five-year-olds. Baela won’t be able to reclaim that dream for much longer. It might be too late already. She is out of practice; but she misses ballet. When Jace is being snide or oblivious, you’ve seen her gazing out windows—Escalades, hotels, jets—wondering if it was all worth it. You gut yourself for someone and they don’t even have the courtesy to put up a gravestone. It’s only natural to develop a propensity to haunt.

“What?” Rhaena asks.

“Shopping. This afternoon. Interested?”

Rhaena’s eyes go wide. She fidgets: closing and then opening her book, touching a hand to her earrings, delicate strings of small silver hearts. “Um…I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Oh, not this again,” Baela groans.

“Just go without me. Bring me back something, you know what I like.”

“What’s the problem?” You are investigative but not accusatory. The tone is essential.

“She’s scared of store employees,” Baela says.

“Well you don’t have to make it sound like that—!”

“What’s so scary about store employees?” you ask Rhaena, calm, cool, collected, nonjudgmental. Aemond glances over, as he often does when you’re working, like he can’t get enough of watching that switch flip, when you slink covertly into therapist mode like a water moccasin weaves through swamps, subtle ripples in the muddied water and vigilant eyes.

“I just hate it when people are watching me,” Rhaena says, twirling an earring. “They’re always waiting right by the door—especially at the posh places like the ones Baela goes to—and they want to know what I’m shopping for, and they want to make suggestions, and they follow me to the fitting room and ask what I like and what I don’t. And I can’t get rid of them! Even if I’m like ‘Just looking, thanks!’ they’ll circle back every five minutes to check on me. I can’t stand it. I get so frazzled I can’t decide how I really feel about a skirt or dress or whatever because I’m too busy trying to make conversation with someone I don’t want to talk to anyway. I end up with a headache and a shopping bag full of regrets. I’d rather click a button on my MacBook Air and save myself the suffering.”

You nod sagely. “What is it about talking to the employees that stresses you out so much?”

“I don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. I don’t want to cause problems.”

“But it’s not like you’re going to do anything they haven’t experienced before. They see hundreds, maybe even thousands of customers a month. And even if you did something ridiculously, dementedly embarrassing, like…um…hey, Aegon, what’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done while clothes shopping?”

“I fell asleep in a fitting room. I pissed on the floor. I set something on fire. I vandalized One Direction merchandise.”

“No, there was that other time,” Daeron says. Mario is swimming through rings of underwater coins; they chime gleefully as he collects them.

“What other time?” Aegon says.

Daeron grins. “Come on. You know.”

Aegon remembers. “Oh yeah. Once I bit a girl’s feet until I accidentally ripped off part of a toenail and she bled everywhere. But that wasn’t my fault. She was begging for it. It was consensual.”

Criston, not looking away from his emails, says: “And that’s why Aegon is now banned from all Michael Kors locations for life.”

“Right.” You turn back to Rhaena. “So you would never do anything that deranged. But even if somehow you did, what’s the actual worst-case scenario? What, realistically, could happen as a result?”

Rhaena considers this. “The employees will think I’m weird, I guess.”

“So what you’re so concerned about is that the store employees—who are literally paid to be inconvenienced by you—might think you’re weird? Which they’ll remember for, what, maybe an hour before some other customer gives them a more memorable calamity to focus on? You don’t think they’re more annoyed by purse-dog-toting heiresses screeching at them or cokeheads pissing on their floors?”

“Rude,” Aegon says.

Rhaena smiles guiltily. “I mean, when you put it that way, it does sound stupid.”

“Not stupid,” you insist. “Just out of proportion.”

“Okay,” Rhaena says. She takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “Okay. I guess I’ll go shopping.”

“Yes!” Baela cheers, already scrolling through Reykjavik shops on her iPhone.

“Hey, Stargirl,” Aegon says, and then hurls something at you like a frisbee. It’s an Amex Black Card.

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

You raise an eyebrow at him. “What’s my budget?”

“No budget. As long as it’s slutty.”

“I will buy nothing but cardigans and mom jeans.” You crane your neck to peek at his receipts. The black Sharpie squiggles aren’t words; they’re shapes, pictures. “What are you drawing?”

“New merch designs!” Aegon holds up the receipts so you can see.

“Circles…?”

He is somewhat wounded. “Donuts!”

You don’t even know where to begin. “Why donuts, Aegon?”

“Because that’s his code word for doing lines in the bathroom,” Criston says.

“No!” Aegon objects. “Because Donati sounds like donuts! So we could have all these mini donuts, print them on hats or shirts or whatever, and then in the frosting where the sprinkles would be we can put tiny stars, suns, moons, planets, galaxies…and comets, obviously.”

Jace scoffs. “I think you spend a little too much time thinking about donuts.”

Aegon goes quiet. So does everyone else. Gazes flit nervously around the cabin. The only sounds are the roar of the jet and Mario 64, although Daeron has turned his back on the cheerful Italian protagonist and is looking pensively over his shoulder at Jace. Aegon resumes sketching his cosmic Sharpie donuts, his lips pressed tightly together.

“Hey,” you say to Jace, and then once you have his attention, wicked dark eyes: “Shut the fuck up.”

“What?”

“It’s a great idea. It’s a really adorable idea, actually. Let’s see you come up with something better. Go on, whenever you’re ready. I’m waiting. I’m still waiting. But you’re not much of an ideas guy, are you, Jace? Fortunately, you’ve always had other people around to pull that weight.”

Jace opens his mouth to say something, then snaps it shut as Cregan stands up. He towers over you both, as tall as Aemond but more muscly all over, in the chest and the shoulders and the legs. He lowers his sunglasses to show his eyes: greyish, cold, flinty. He glares at Jace, and then at you, and then at Jace again. Jace holds up both hands, showing his palms. You bow your head in capitulation. Cregan lies back down on the couch and repositions his sunglasses just as the pilot turns on the fasten seatbelts signs. As you click yours into place, you exchange a glance with Aemond across the aisle. He is smiling, foxlike and approving, as if he can’t wait to see what else you have left to show him.

“So!” Baela says. “Guess who found a shop in Reykjavik that sells Gucci!”

The jet glides through mist and fog to make a rather bumpy landing at Keflavik International Airport, fighting against gusts of wind coming in off the North Atlantic Ocean, the same water that swallowed the Titanic, the Faucett Peru Boeing 727, the Free Life hot air balloon, whaling vessels and Viking longships, countless cruisers and destroyers and submarines that blasted holes into each other during the world wars. As the band prepares to disembark, Aemond reaches into the front pocket of his shirt—black, with white circling koi fish—and slides out a pair of sunglasses. He doesn’t like wearing them. They limit his vision even more than it already is. But he never walks into an airport without sunglasses on, you’ve discovered. Just in case paparazzi are there snapping photos.

“You don’t have to do that,” you tell Aemond.

He gestures to his scar and his blind eye, a pale cloudy blue. “I’ve thought about just getting it cut out. But then I’d have to worry about shoving in a fake one.”

“I think it’s kind of beautiful,” you say. “It reminds me of Neptune or something.”

And the look he gives you, the look, like he’s never heard anything like this before, like he didn’t know that words could fit together in that order. You hold out your hand to him. He lays the sunglasses in your palm. You put them on, grinning up at him.

“Now I’m the one who looks like a multi-millionaire popstar.”

“Hey, we match!” Aegon says as he follows you and Aemond out of the jet, massaging your shoulders and clopping noisily in his Crocs.

There are paparazzi at the airport, but only two of them, young men in black hoodies who dart around loosing flashes into the stuffy, aggressively heated air. Jace, Baela, Daeron, and Aegon beam and wave, radiant, magnetic, born celebrities. Rhaena smiles politely but hides behind Luke. Cregan saunters and smolders, knowing exactly what his devotees expect from him. Criston and the security guards are loaded up with suitcases like pack mules. The paparazzi don’t pay much attention to Aemond—a former heartthrob, a cracked relic, a fossil or a ruin—but one of them snaps a few pictures of him. Aemond turns his face so they’ll get his good side, his unmarred side…and then he grabs for your hand. You try not to reveal how ecstatic you are, how wildly, uncoolly, over-the-moon thrilled. Your expression might end up commemorated forever in a tabloid, after all.

Shopping in Reykjavik is mostly wool sweaters, hiking boots, and weather-proof jackets, but Baela leads you and Rhaena to a boutique that carries something more her speed: Gucci, Burberry, Balenciaga, Valentino, Saint Laurent. You and Baela try to distract the employees as much as possible; still, they find time to nettle Rhaena with those bothersome, predictable, unnecessary questions. She gets a little flustered, but she fights the instinct to run and hide, to allow herself to sink into a frenetic puddle of self-inquisition. You can almost see the words scrolling behind her dark gentle eyes like a news ticker: They get paid to help me. They aren’t going to remember any of this in a few hours. I’m not on a stage. I’m not being judged.

In the fitting room, you take two selfies to send to Aemond’s WhatsApp account: one in a flowing neon yellow gown, the other in a short, velvet, sparkly black dress embroidered with silver stars.

You ask: Day or night?

He answers before you’ve changed back into your jeans and pink Harry Styles hoodie. Night, obviously. And then he adds: Which constellation are you? Vulpecula the fox? Cygnus the swan?

“God, he’s such a dork,” you murmur to yourself, smiling. You have to think for a while before you reply. You don’t know many constellations; that makes it difficult to rattle off something witty. Then you are inspired. You type: Definitely not Virgo :)

He responds immediately: :)))))

“What does that mean?” you whisper to yourself in the solitude of the boxlike fitting room. “What the hell does that mean???” He spends nearly all of his time with you, but he rarely touches you. He’s never made a move. He’s never even kissed you. You wouldn’t mind if he did. No, fuck the coyness that women are supposed to cloak themselves in to preserve their worth. You’re waiting for him to kiss you like someone drowning waits for a gasp of air.

Despite Aemond’s vote, you can’t help yourself. You buy both dresses. You don’t look much like an Aegon Targaryen, but the cashier doesn’t seem too troubled by this. Baela and Rhaena are still trying on outfits, so you swing your bag around boredly and wander over to see what Criston is up to. At Aemond’s insistence, he accompanied you on this shopping expedition and left the rest of the security detail back at the Reykjavik EDITION, a luxury hotel overlooking the harbor. Criston is in the jewelry section and holding up a medallion necklace, rotating it to see how the light reflects off the speckling of tiny gemstones, the wise golden face. His own face is distant and melancholy.

“Oh, that’s lovely, Criston!” you say. “All those emeralds. Who’s pictured on it?”

“Saint Jude. Lost causes.”

Interesting. “Are you religious?”

“Not especially. But Alicent is.”

“Who…?”

Criston walks off to the cash register. You watch him go, curious and perplexed.

Back at the hotel, you enter your suite to find a blond Targaryen lounging in your bed…but perhaps not the right one. Aegon still has his Crocs on and is, for some reason, clutching a plushie puffin. He glances over at you, noting your shopping bag.

“Fashion show?” he says. “I hope it’s nothing but miniskirts and bikinis.”

“Don’t you have places to be? Substances to snort?”

“Cregan is currently trying to locate some.”

“That’s really not good for you. Physically or mentally. You might be addicted.”

He barks a laugh, like it’s absurd. “You can’t get addicted to coke, Stargirl.”

“You definitely can.”

He suddenly looks panicked, like he’s never considered this before.

“So.” You hesitate. “Aemond.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the concept.”

“He’s insecure. Very insecure, though he’s learned how to hide it.”

Aegon throws and catches the puffin, bouncing it off the ceiling. “I wouldn’t disagree.”

“It goes deeper than the accident, I think. The scar, his eye, what happened with the band…that awakened it again. That freed something that he’d had locked away. But where did it start?”

Aegon stares up at the ceiling. He tosses the puffin a few more times, abusing it terribly. “Whoever you are when you’re in high school…that’s sort of who you are forever, you know? If you’re popular and beloved and understood, you carry a certain self-confidence into the rest of your life with you like a suitcase. It’s an assumption that people care about what you have to say. It’s a conviction of your own value. It’s a presupposition the world would have to wrestle away from you. But if you’re a loser in high school, that stays with you too. And it’s one hell of a heavy suitcase to lug around.”

You try to imagine seeing Aemond through eyes that aren’t awed, craving, quietly adoring. It’s simply not possible. “He was alone?” you ask softly, dreading the answer.

“I had friends. He had grudges.” Aegon’s mouth twists as he tries to stop it from trembling. “My father…”

“I know, Aegon.” Your voice is gentle. “You told me in Kansas City, that night at the bar. You don’t have to say it again.”

He is relieved. “Yeah. So people respond to that in different ways, right? I lived in the present. I talked to anybody who would listen to me, and I partied and I got high and I got laid, and I was the antithesis of the kind of son my father would have wanted just to spite him. Aemond escaped into the past. He read books, traced bloodlines, collected old obsolete things. Maybe that gave him hope that a better place was waiting for him out there somewhere, a better time. He got to be cool for three years. That’s it, and that’s all he’ll ever have. He was the one with vision. He said he was going to audition for The X Factor, and I only went with him to meet girls. Then he made it through the first round and I did too. And when they were going to cut us, he found Jace and Luke and Cregan and convinced everyone to start performing together. The show wanted to replace Luke, did you know that? They thought he was too boyish, too innocent. Aemond fought for him. And then Comet finished in second place, and all the sudden we were signed to a label, and we were selling millions of records and we were touring, and we were winning Grammys, and we were buying our parents and siblings houses…and two months after our third album came out, Aemond was maimed at the Budokan and it was time for him to get off the ride.”

You stare at Aegon, tremendously sad, not knowing what to say. Sometimes the right words don’t exist.

Aegon smirks. “He really likes you.”

“Maybe.” And then, with guileless vulnerability: “I hope so.”

“That’s dangerous.”

Your brow knits into fearful grooves. “Why?”

“I know how to enjoy something without owning it. I don’t think Aemond does.”

You don’t want to ask, but you have to. “What was Shelby like?”

Aegon considers this for a long time before he answers. “She was simultaneously too good for him and not good enough.”

Too gorgeous. Too cool. Too Pinterest-board perfect, airy like summer. But not deep. A river, a glimmer, but with no understanding of the abyss. You aren’t sure how you know that this is what Aegon means, but you do. You don’t want to think about Shelby anymore. You pivot. “So Aemond is the past and you’re the present. Who’s the future? Daeron?”

Aegon smiles, lazy and warm. “I think you’re the future.”

“Yeah right. Get your Crocs off my bed.”

He complies, groaning, flopping onto the floor gracelessly.

“Where’d you get the puffin?”

“Some Icelandic kid recognized me in the elevator. He wanted to give me a present. In return, I signed an autograph and got him and his dad front row seats to the show tomorrow. So I’d say it was a very favorable exchange for him.”

“You’re a saint,” you say, and then find yourself thinking randomly of Saint Jude again. Lost causes. Lost causes.

Aegon grins at you as he crawls to his feet and makes for the door. “Patron saint of mayhem.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You’re watching old Comet Donati performances on YouTube when the hotel fire alarm goes off. And it’s strange, because the unscarred, clear-eyed boy on the screen is Aemond but also isn’t him; he smiles more easily, he looks at people without suspicion, he is ebullient and confident and carefree like kids blowing bubbles on front porches. When you open your suite door, dressed in your favorite Cookie Monster pajama pants and an oversized New Kids On The Block t-shirt, Aemond is just arriving.

“Oh good,” he says. “You’re still awake.” And then he walks with you to the nearest stairwell.

Outside, the hotel guests are clustered together with their travel companions, shuddering under coats and sweaters and blankets clasped around their shoulders like capes. Even at the start of July, Iceland is cold: fifties during the day as Americans like you measure in Fahrenheit, forties at night, nearly always overcast. It’s 11 p.m., but the sun won’t set until midnight, and even then only for a few short hours; the sky is wearing the colors of dusk, lilac, rose pink, pale blue, fire and gold. You’re shivering, rubbing your bare forearms and feeling the goosebumps that have risen there like braille. Aemond tugs off his black and white Calvin Klein hoodie and offers it to you. As you pull it over your head, you breathe in the pieces of him that have snared in the fabric: smoke and cologne, gin and soap and the brine of the seaside air. Now wearing only his jeans and his koi fish shirt, Aemond lights a cigarette and gazes up at the hotel, postmodern angles and semi-transparent glass.

“No one’s going to give me a hoodie?” Aegon says, quaking in his cyan tank top. Criston reluctantly unzips his bomber jacket and hands it over.

“Did you do this?” Criston asks him, meaning the fire alarm.

“What?! No! No way, man! It wasn’t me!”

Criston turns to Cregan for confirmation. Cregan shrugs, ambiguous. “I knew it!” Criston exclaims. He is distraught.

Several fire engines arrive, red lights strobing, and firefighters enter the hotel to investigate. Baela and Jace are standing near each other but not speaking, arms crossed, faces tense. Luke, Rhaena, and Daeron are watching an episode of The Crown on Luke’s iPhone. Cregan lights a cigarette and manages to take two drags before Criston notices and lunges to bat it out of his hand.

“Stop it!” Criston orders. “You’ll ruin your voice!” Nobody tells Aemond not to smoke. His voice doesn’t matter anymore.

Aegon asks you, his hands buried in the pockets of Criston’s jacket: “Would you run into a burning building to save me?”

“Why would you be in a burning building?”

“That’s really not the point.”

“I’d think about it.”

Luke says, the glow of his iPhone dancing across his face: “Wow, Prince Charles is a bitch.”

“You’d think about it?” Aegon says to you. “You’d think about it?!”

“You have no excuse to be in a burning building. You have now experienced an evacuation, you know exactly how to leave a building successfully, if you’re still in it for some reason then that’s your problem.”

“You hear that, Criston?” Aegon says. “This is a good thing. Now everyone knows what to do if there’s a real fire! And we’re in hotels all the time, so this is super helpful!”

“Please shut up,” Criston begs.

“Hey Cregan, share with the class, what did you learn about fire safety from this fortuitous occasion?”

“I already knew what to do.”

Aegon is grinning. “Yeah? What’s that, Cregan?”

“Get in the shower and wait for the fire department to come rescue me.”

Everyone laughs—even Jace and Baela—and Cregan’s lips quirk up in one corner, the only hint that he is joking. A parade of firefighters exit the hotel. One of them is carrying a toaster. Black smoke pours out of the slits in the top.

She says something in Icelandic that you can’t understand, then repeats in English: “Who was trying to cook hotdogs in a toaster?”

The guests chatter incredulously among themselves: Who would do such a thing?

You, Aemond, Luke, Rhaena, Daeron, Cregan, Jace, Baela, and Criston are mindful to look anywhere except at Aegon. You gaze out at the horizon, the kaleidoscopic midnight sun. Aegon peers down at his Crocs, hair tangled and blue eyes wide.

“Very well,” the firefighter with the toaster says, a little smugly. “We will consult with the hotel staff and see which guest was registered to that room.”

“Goddammit!” Criston hisses, and shoves by the band to go meet the firefighters. You can’t hear what’s being said, but his hands move in exaggerated gestures of humiliation, apology, restitution. Fortunately, the Icelandic people seem to be forgiving.

Daeron turns to Aegon. All he says is: “Why?”

“I couldn’t figure out the buttons on the stove!”

Criston comes trudging back to the band. Guests are being admitted into the hotel to return to their drinks, their television shows and mystery novels, their families, their lovers, their beds. “Alright, it’s taken care of. Go to your rooms. All of you, right now, go.”

No one has the heart to argue with him; he looks half-broken already. Everybody disperses. You and Aemond end up alone together as the elevator zooms to the fifth floor. He takes his small, square metal lighter out of his jeans pocket and toys with it, repeatedly flicking the lid open and then shutting it again.

You point to it. “Vintage lighter. Vintage bike. And yet you write with glittery gel pens instead of quills and ink. Poser.”

“I like old things,” he says, smiling. “I think history is important.”

And you hear Aegon’s words like an echo: That’s dangerous. You start pulling off Aemond’s hoodie to give it back to him.

“No,” he says, sounding pleased. “You keep it.” So you do, finding excuses to bring the sleeves close to your face—touching your hair, your lips, your eyelashes—so you can inhale him.

Aemond leaves you at the door of your suite, but you don’t go inside. You wait for another five minutes until Criston steps out of an elevator and into the hallway, alone and agitated. Still, he has concern to spare for you.

“You okay? Locked yourself out?”

“No. I was just hoping to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.” Criston is tired, but his eyes, dark like fertile earth, are attentive.

“When Aemond was hurt…when the label yanked him out of Comet…no one fought for him?”

“Luke did,” Criston says.

And then he continues down the hall, shoulders low, a man troubled by both the past and the future.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Blue Lagoon is like Aemond’s sightless left eye: a milky blue, opaque, something you could drown in. The band spends several hours splashing and wading in water warmer than the blood in your veins. The white silica mud that forms the floor is soft beneath your bare feet, squishing between your toes; people spread it over their skin like a skin shedding its scales in reverse. Criston orders strawberry-banana smoothies from the in-water bar, trying to distract Aegon and Jace from the beer and the wine. Currently, Comet’s most worrisome performers are locked in combat: Daeron is on Aegon’s shoulders, Luke on Jace’s, entangled in a spirited chicken fight. This is much preferable to their first choice, Marco Polo, which led to Jace ‘accidentally’—and repeatedly—bumping into various early-twenties female tourists, whereupon he would inevitably profusely apologize, introduce himself, and pose for selfies, beads of turbid mineral water dripping from his curls. Cregan has drifted to the other side of the lagoon, floating on his back and basking beneath the overcast midday sun.

“I can’t believe they made everyone shower naked before getting in here,” Rhaena says, drinking her smoothie, submerged in rippling blue up to her collarbones. She had nearly refused to go through with it—I’ll wait in the car! I’ll be fine! I’ll just watch The Crown on my phone for three hours!—until you and Baela offered to hold up your towels to shield her from view and insisted that none of the other guests (all female, as the showers are sorted by gender) were paying attention. Nudity is not a big deal in Iceland. It’s quite a far cry from Missouri.

“You gotta honor the local culture, babe.” Baela flashes Rhaena a teasing grin. “Scandinavians are super progressive. No shame about bodies or relationships. Very sex-positive.”

“Well Jace is certainly blending in.”

Now Baela isn’t grinning anymore. She frowns broodingly out over the lagoon. Rhaena, regretting that she said it but knowing it can’t be taken back, noisily slurps at her smoothie even when it’s gone. You and Aemond exchange an uncomfortable glance. Baela has never broached the topic of her relationship with you, but you know it’s coming. You can sometimes see her working up the nerve like a bucket filling with water, drop by drop.

You change the subject. “See, Rhaena? The naked shower thing wasn’t even that bad. It was over in two minutes, and absolutely nobody was judging you. And if you hadn’t done it, you would have missed out on this amazing experience!”

“You weren’t nervous?” she asks you. “Not at all?”

“I little bit, yeah. Of course. I’m an American.” Everyone chuckles. “But logically, I knew no one would really be watching me. I’m not that interesting. And also…I wasn’t truly naked.”

“Huh…?”

You wiggle your eyebrows and, smiling radiantly, spin around and point to the black-ink tattoo between your shoulder blades, underscored by the straps of your swimsuit that cross just below it: a comet with a streaming tail, lyrics that Aemond dreamed up in a kinder world. Rhaena laughs.

“Oh, right, of course.”

“You are obsessed with that thing!” Baela says, but she sounds relatively happy again.

“It’s true. I am. I admit it.” Sometimes you find yourself staring at it in hotel bathroom mirrors still foggy with steam, wiping away condensation to marvel at the irrevocable ways in which Aemond has marked you, ways you are thankful cannot be erased. When you wear anything that reveals your upper back like a spilled secret, you often catch Aemond gazing at it too. Now he reaches over and skims a fingerprint along the circle that his lyrics form around the comet:

I’ll come back for you if it kills me

Comets clip by again after eons and so can I

There’s a jolt down your spine like lightning, but more eager than jarring. All other thoughts vanish from you. You look over at Aemond, and he looks back, his lips slightly parted, his right eye beckoning to you. And you know it will be good with him, if it happens, when it happens. It will be more than good. It will be laced with an intensity, with a dire breed of necessity that you’ve never tasted before. All at once, you and Aemond realize what you’ve done and drift away from each other again, weakening gravity, elliptical orbits.

“No shame, guys,” Baela quips, raising her smoothie glass in a toast. “Sex-positive, remember?”

After the 45-minute drive back to Reykjavik, and after the concert, the band coalesces in Jace’s suite. There aren’t many hangers-on for this stop of the tour; Reykjavik is isolated and peaceful and not particularly desirable for friends of convenience who are more interested in clubbing and drugs than camaraderie. You wouldn’t trade nights like this for anything in the world.

Aemond is reading off his latest notes, white ink on black paper, stars on the backdrop of the universe. A Benson & Hedges cigarette smolders between two fingers on his left hand. Smoke curls up around his face. “Aegon, you were three steps behind the choreography for basically the entire show.”

“Yeah, that was on purpose.”

“It wasn’t,” Aemond counters, but he can’t help but smile.

“Women love a tragic disaster of a man who is screaming to be fixed.”

“Daeron,” Aemond continues. “I really like that hair flip you’ve started doing…”

Aegon is knocking back dark glass bottles of Gædingur Stout and slurring, very drunk and sinking deeper by the minute. In the absence of coke, he has resorted to other crutches. You are squeezed between Aemond and Baela on one of the couches. And Aemond isn’t really touching you, but he also is: the delicious subtle pressure of his thigh against yours, occasional nudges of his elbow, ostensibly unintentional grazes of knuckles and palms. He’s drinking his usual, a Bramble, and so are you, swirls of slow-moving pink like drops of blood in open water. And you think in a hazy bliss like listening to ground-level conversations from the bottom of a swimming pool: Tonight, tonight, tonight, he’s going to come back to my room with me tonight.

“Oh great,” you mumble as you check your Facebook messages on your iPhone.

“What’s wrong?” Rhaena asks. She’s nestled against Luke on the opposite couch, twirling locks of his hair around her benign, delicate fingers. Jace is sitting beside Luke, drinking a Vesper and trying not to make eye contact with Baela. Daeron is in the fuzzy white sheepskin lounge chair, Cregan perched on a bar stool, Criston standing watchfully with a vivid green bottle of Perrier in one hand. When he briefly steps out onto the balcony to take a call from the label, you can hear only the most dim, indistinct murmurings through the thick tinted glass, sounds but not words. Aegon is sitting—and occasionally crawling around—on the floor. The Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way is playing.

“I’m subletting my apartment in Kansas City and there is a strict no pet policy. But my neighbors snitched on the new tenant and apparently she’s got a Flemish Giant rabbit living there with her.”

“Not even a normal rabbit,” Baela muses. “A giant rabbit.”

You sigh. “All the rugs are going to be chewed up by the time I get back.” And Aemond glances over anxiously, like he doesn’t want any reminders that you won’t always be around.

“What’s your apartment like?” he says.

“Old. Vintage. Most of it hasn’t been updated since the 1950s. You’d appreciate it, actually. It would match your aesthetic.”

“Maybe I’ll have to see it sometime.”

You smirk at him, flirtatious, baiting, the silver stars on your dress reflecting golden lamplight. “Maybe. If I invite you.”

He leans in to whisper so only you can hear: “You will.”

“I think I’d be a landlord if I wasn’t famous,” Jace says, nursing his Vesper meditatively like an aspiring philosopher. “I’d just sit back and collect the checks as they rolled in. And you get to raise the rent every year.”

“Yeah, that sounds like you,” Aegon says, grinning up at him saccharinely.

“What would you be, Stargirl?” Jace asks; and you realize you hate the sound of him using Aegon’s name for you.

“I mean, a therapist.” And everyone laughs, even Criston.

Jace flushes, brushing his curls back from his face with one hand. “Oh yeah. Clearly.”

You look to Aemond. “You’d be a historian or an archivist or something.”

“Or a writer,” Luke says.

“Maybe,” Aemond agrees, a tad uncomfortable with the attention. “Or an animal activist, maybe. I’d like to do some sort of good in the world.”

Aegon shouts, far more loudly than necessary: “What would you be, Criston?”

“Thousands of miles away from you.” More laughter, riotous; but Criston is smiling a little.

“What about you, Cregan?” Jace asks. “What would you want to be if Comet didn’t exist?”

Cregan downs a shot of Absolut Vodka. “A plastic surgeon.”

“What? Why?”

Cregan shrugs. “You get to see tits all the time.”

There are scandalized squeals and guffaws. Baela says: “I would not let you anywhere near my tits.”

“And not just tits!” Daeron adds brightly. “Don’t they do, what’s it called, vaginal rejuvenation?”

Cregan points at him with his empty shot glass. “Exactly.”

“Oh God, that sounds painful.” Rhaena hides her face behind a flute of champagne.

“Yeah,” you say. “I don’t think I’m interested.”

Aegon snorts, drips of Gaedingur Stout flying from his nose. “Like you’d ever need it. You’ve got a pornstar pussy, fucking gorgeous.”

A hush sweeps through the room like a dust storm. Baffled glances dart around wildly. Immediately, Aegon realizes his mistake. He gazes up at you from the floor with large, glazed, drunken blue eyes that glisten with apology. You gape back, half-furious and half-petrified.

“Wait, what?” Aemond says. Ashes build on his cigarette, forgotten.

“Oh, wow.” Jace gestures from you to Aegon. “You guys…you guys have…?”

“It was once, a long time ago,” you say quickly. “Like, a really long time ago. Over a year ago.”

Aegon is trying to help. “Ages ago. Ancient history.”

“Where? In Kansas City?!” Baela gasps, stunned.

Aegon tells her: “You remember that bar we all went to after the show, right? The one on the roof?”

Baela is blinking at you, not comprehending. “You hooked up with him? In a bar?! Aegon?!”

“Um, yeah.”

Jace brays out a laugh, shaking his head. “Damn, Stargirl. I thought you had better taste than that.”

You feel like you’re fighting for your life. You feel like you can’t breathe. “It really wasn’t serious…” Not the sex part, anyway.

“No, no, it totally wasn’t,” Aegon agrees gamely. “It was like, what? How long were we in that bathroom? Maybe ten minutes total?”

Daeron is giggling. “Bruh, stop roasting yourself!”

As the chatter flies, you hide your face in your hands; beneath your palms, your cheeks are hot. You can feel Aemond pulling away from you, spaces opening up between your thighs and shoulders and arms like the ever-expanding void of the universe. When you steal a glimpse of him through the cracks in your fingers, he is staring down at the floor. He is silent, but you can see the thoughts—the images—riddling him like bullets. You can see him filling up with them like a punctured ship fills with seawater. He smokes until his cigarette is gone, and then immediately lights another.

Luke is the one to mercifully intercede. “Hey, Criston, where are we going next?”

“Uh,” Criston says, trying not to gawk at you or Aegon. “Let me think. Uh. Oh, right. Paris.”

Jace cackles. “The city of love! How appropriate!”

Criston ignores him. “You have some press interviews and then you’re doing two shows at the Accor Arena on July 7th and 8th…”

Aemond gulps down the rest of his Bramble and then walks out onto the balcony, closing the sliding glass door behind him.

“Fuck,” Aegon sighs miserably, then guzzles his Gaedingur Stout.

You bolt off the couch and go after Aemond. The heavy sliding glass door growls as you roll it open and then shut it again. Outside, Reykjavik is cold and windswept. The midnight sun is aflame. It’s still too bright to see the Northern Lights; even if they were there, you would have no way of knowing. Aemond is smoking with his back to you. He’s looking out over the boats bobbing in the harbor, sunbeams glinting on the crests of waves. Flapping gulls swoop and scream.

You say cuttingly, like a surgeon slicing away malignancies: “So what, you don’t like me anymore?”

Aemond flicks ashes over the balcony railing. “I just think I understand you better.”

“What does that mean?”

He whirls to you and says pointedly: “Why are you here?”

A disorienting question. Too easy. “I followed you out onto the balcony.”

“No, here with the band, here in Reykjavik, why are you here?”

You know how the truth sounds, but you can’t rewrite it. “Because Aegon asked me to be.”

“Because he asked you to come fix me, right?” Aemond demands. “To crack open my skull and stir things around until I’m okay with the fact that my life ended seven months ago.”

“No!” you shout into the wind. “I mean, yes, he thought I’d be able to help you, to help Comet, but that’s not what this is about for me anymore—”

“Why would I believe you? You’re a liar, you’re a confirmed liar, why would I believe a single goddamn word of what you have to say?!”

“I didn’t lie to you!”

“Friends!” Aemond roars. He doesn’t touch you, but his rage is horrifying, ageless and deep like lava bubbling beneath tectonic plates. “You said you and Aegon were friends!”

“We are friends—”

“No, you’re not. You met him, you fucked him, and then when he invited you to join the tour you dropped everything to do it, why, because you still want him? And I’m the charity case? Or I was just next in line? Maybe you were planning to work your way through the whole band. Who’s next, Jace? I don’t think he’d object.”

“No—!”

“You and Aegon. And you didn’t even have the guts to tell me.”

“Because I didn’t want to have this conversation, the one where you eviscerate me for something that happened before I even met you!”

“You chose him,” Aemond says, venomous. “At the bar in Kansas City, you chose him.”

“What?! Aemond, I don’t even remember seeing you, I don’t think you were there at all—”

“I was there.” He glares at you, thunderstorms, tornadoes, the earth splitting in two. “Last June. Rooftop bar. String lights. View of the river. I remember it, I was there.”

“Well then you didn’t notice me either and you probably spent the whole night with Pilates princess, Malibu Barbie Shelby, so what’s the fucking point?!”

He glowers at the horizon. Iceland DOES have jewel tones, you think erratically. But they only come out at night, like owls or bats. “It’s different.”

“It’s not different! You’re so convinced people don’t like you that you do insane, irrational things that make people not like you! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy! It’s a fucking circle, you idiot!”

“I’ve had enough psychoanalysis, thanks.”

“No, you could use some more of it, you could use a lot more, you have so many demons it’s like Paranormal Activity in your brain, they’re in there all day tearing things off the walls and kicking over chairs and sabotaging anything you dare to care about and you let them!”

He turns away from you. “Just go the fuck back to Kansas.”

“I’m from Missouri!”

Aemond pitches the end of his cigarette over the balcony. His good eye flicks to the sliding glass door. The curtains rustle as the faces that hovered there just seconds ago disappear back into the suite. Very muffled through the thick glass, you can hear Criston chastising people.

You ask Aemond, embers in your throat: “This is really something you consider unforgiveable?”

He shakes his head, mournful, violently disappointed. “You’re just a groupie. You’re just a slut.”

Slut. It’s not the word, it’s the way he said it, with dismissiveness, with condemnation, the same way men love to use it as a blade to carve off every other piece of you—kindness, coldness, ferocity, loyalty, wit, passion, talent, triumphs, failures, ghosts—until that one little word is all that’s left. You’re dismantled into a clutter of loose bolts and bent nails. You’re a beef cow that was led into the maze of a gnashing, metal-and-blood processing plant and came out the other side a brainless, raw-pink patty just the right size to fit in a Big Mac box, something to be consumed but not remembered. “What did you say to me?”

He’s staring out into the twilight sky, both hands on the balcony railing. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe I…”

“Are you kidding me?! I can’t believe I got your lyrics tattooed on my fucking back, what am I supposed to do about that now, rip my own skin off?!”

“So get it covered up. I’m sure Aegon would be thrilled to help you choose a new design, or Jace, or Cregan, or Daeron, or whoever.”

“You know what I think?” you say, caustic like acid.

“Don’t say it,” he threatens, low and dark.

“I think you haven’t fucked anyone since the accident, and you’re terrified to. But you shouldn’t be, Aemond. Because there’s nothing wrong with you. There has never been anything wrong with you.”

But he doesn’t hear that part. He only hears the first thing, what you never should have said at all. It’s true, but that doesn’t mean you should have said it. “I hate you,” he says softly, and you can’t think of a reply. The space between you fills up with wind, cold, dying sunlight. Aemond looks at the sliding glass door. “I don’t want to go back in there.”

“Well, we’re five stories off the ground, so you’ll probably have to.”

He studies the series of balconies that run along this side of the hotel, each separated by perhaps three feet of open air. Then he starts climbing over the metal railing.

“Aemond, don’t!”

But it’s too late. Fortunately, he has long limbs. He scrambles onto the next balcony, and then the one after that, and then one more, until he reaches the balcony for his own suite. He tries the sliding glass door—locked—and then sits down to wait for someone to open it. You go back inside Jace’s suite, where everyone pretends to have been talking about something other than you.

“Where’s Aemond?” Criston says, alarmed.

“He’s on the balcony of his suite. You should go let him in.”

“What?!” Criston yells, and then sprints out into the hallway.

You flee too. Both Baela and Aegon try to stop you, try to talk to you. They’re asking what Aemond said. They’re asking if you’re okay. You tell them you’re fine and that you want to be left alone. They argue. You insist. You walk back to your own room and start packing.

Your suitcase fills up with crumpled clothes and souvenirs: a Colosseum pencil sharpener from Rome, a tiny alabaster Apollo from Athens, a Spanish fighting bull refrigerator magnet from Madrid, handmade soap from Porto, a bar of chocolate from Vienna, a moose snow globe from Stockholm, a silica mud mask from the Blue Lagoon, a tiny stuffed comet that Rhaena crocheted for you. You reach back to touch your fingertips to the comet tattooed over your spine, tears biting in your eyes. If I had told him from the start, would that have made a difference? If I had met him first, would we have had a chance? You are gathering up your makeup when you hear a knock on the doorframe.

Cregan lurks there. When he speaks, he sounds startled; he sounds afraid. “You can’t leave.”

“I’ve literally never had a conversation with you, so thanks for the input but I’m still going.”

“No,” he says, persistent. “You can’t leave.”

“Aemond doesn’t want me here.” Your voice is fragile, shattering. “I can’t help him anymore.”

“It’s not just about Aemond. It’s about everyone. They’re all fucked up. They all need you.”

You stare at Cregan, not understanding. “I really don’t think I’m equipped for this.”

He fixes his cool greyish eyes on you. He is harsh but somehow not unkind. “You would never be able to comprehend where I came from. I’m not going back to that. The band has given me everything. I’m not going to let anyone take that away from me. You have to stay. You have to fix Comet. You can’t leave.”

He watches you, and you watch him, and you aren’t sure who has the upper hand here, who is the predator and who is the prey. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe everyone is a patchwork of strengths and deficits, fields of gold strewn with landmines.

At last, you relent. And Cregan doesn’t vanish until you’ve begun taking your souvenirs out of your suitcase and placing each of them—carefully, reverently—back on your nightstand where they were before.

[fluffle-writes]

hello! I loved the weirdcore au, such a cool idea, i wanted to ask, how do vil and rook clean their wings? taking a bath seems kinda risky, imagine the pain of getting soap on multiple eyes! Actually their self care routine as a whole makes me curious, does vil still wear makeup here? Or he just takes care of his hair?

Weirdcore AU Masterlist Here!

I AM AWAKE AND READY TO TALK MORE ABOUT MY AU :D

Vil and Rook's wings! They definitely need to work around the eyes, but they have third eyelids for each of their eyes - similar to crocodiles! This allows them to fly with them open to observe the ground beneath them - which can assist in hunting or searching for something. It can also mean that irritants are more difficult to get into their eyes - but there are still problems with using cleaning agents on their wings.

Generally though, they actually don't use soaps on their wings! A thorough enough job of preening with clean water washes away any accumulated dirt, blood, dust, or dead skin cells away well enough - and damaged feathers come loose quite easily to be pulled out during preening sessions. Not to mention, soaps can strip the wings of natural oils that protect their skin and feathers.

(Chances are, if you visit in the evenings, you may come across groups of Pomefiore students preening one-another's wings in little cliques - as it's a common bonding activity for individuals with feathered wings.)

As for the rest of their self care routines, it would really need to differ from person to person... I'll speak more in depth about how their features work as well as how they maintain their appearances under the cut.

Vil's flesh has an almost malleable feel to it - it's almost slime-like to the touch but without any residue left behind, while also having the texture of human skin. Looking at him closely enough reveals that his body is actually semi-transparent. He uses pigment sacs - similar to octopi - to imitate the appearance of galacies on his skin's surface, but he can just as easily manipulate light to alter his appearance as he wishes.

Because of this, his skin may be more fragile and need more gentle cleansers and a thorough moisturising routine - which Vil keeps on top of, of course. Additionally, although I was unable to include it in his sprite edit, Vil has near-invisible glass-like talons instead of fingernails and toenails which he keeps well maintained and filed sharp.

Vil's hair is odd in the sense that it's more like liquid than hair. It's quite viscous, but leaves no residue when touched like his skin, and anything that touches it can pass through with little difficulties aside from the viscosity. Touching it can leave a tingling (almost electric) sensation in the hands, and ingestion can spell death due to the toxicity of the oils and hormones Vil's body produces to ward off danger. It doesn't need cleaning as it maintains itself for the most part, but Vil often adds ground up gold and gemstones to colour it how he wants to.

His wings and tail, as mentioned above, are kept neat and tidy through preening sessions with Rook and, more recently, Epel. He has glands that secrete natural oils under his feathers, which can be spread across them to moisturise them properly and strengthen them.

(Fun fact - When Vil was a newborn, he looked more like an amoeba with six stubby little limbs (which later grew into his wings!) He learned how to maintain a much more structured body shape and control his pigment sacs like his father later on in life)

Rook's self care routines are more focused on his animalistic traits - polishing his horns and brushing through his fur any time it gets a bit too unruly. He also often applies moisturising oils to the palms of his hands, as they are similar to paw pads that foxes have and need more tlc to keep them soft and reduce irritation/itchiness.

Bathing habits of his are similar to Vil, vetoing the use of soap on his wings but still using them on the rest of his body. Due to his fur, though, Rook may have a hard time getting thoroughly dry after without help - although he often opts to shake himself off and flap his wings to create wind to help him dry faster. Because of this, bathing has to be an evening task for him - lest he end up with skin irritation from trapped moisture.

(Vil spent a god awful amount of time combing through Rook's fur and applying potions to his skin to prevent irritation when he first moved to Pomefiore - and since then Rook's always been manhandled a little bit if Vil suspects he's falling slightly behind on that area of self-care. He is NOT sitting with Rook in his lap for hours untangling that mess of a coat again - his shedding in the spring is bad enough!)

Epel needed a LOT of TLC when Vil first spotted him - his body, hair, and wings are all made of a marble-like material. Had he practiced self care often enough, Epel would have handled the cold climate in Harveston perfectly well. However, he would often insist that applying protective wax and oils to maintain smooth skin was unnecessary since he could handle the cold just fine without it.

This meant that, once he arrived at NRC, what would have been smooth and well cared for features was instead rough around the edges with damage done by the cold and the snow from years spent outside in that environment. Epel's self care routine is chock full of revitalising tinctures designed to help his skin regain it's strength and smoothness, as well as a special type of beeswax to protect him from any more damage - which is also applied to his horns.

As for cleaning, soap and water works well except for on his wings - which instead has a special cleanser Vil made with keratin-boosting properties to ensure that they're strengthened properly without interfering with Epel's ability to fly.

(Epel himself is a little miffed with all of the routines Vil made him keep up with after he joined Pomefiore, but will admit that he feels much better a lot of the time now that he's actually properly taking care of himself.)

[justpoliteconversations]

Of A Feather [Legend x Winged!Reader]

Birds of a feather and all that nonsense.

One of the fic requests from this Post. It grows.

Masterlist

TW: None.

Disclaimer: Don't own The Legend of Zelda franchise. Linked Universe is the fan creation of jojo56830.

---

Hidden in the joists above the common room, you gaze upon your lover with keen interest from the darkened ceiling supports. Watching closely as he stripped from his outer armor and protective clothing at the doorway of your shared (with Ravio too, but he had snuck out earlier that morning, leaving you with the morning chores the jerk) home. Taking in, with the greatest appreciation and spine tingling delight, the elegant arch of his lithe back muscles, the hard flex of his thighs and calves as he bent over to take his boots off.

Even more appreciatively though, you watched as his nimble, ringed fingers went through the motions, each polished, glimmering stone drawing you in like a moth to flame. You drew slow, controlled breaths as the leather cord of a necklace (several, in fact) was revealed across his nape, teasing you with the promise of the elaborate nest of precious stones you knew lay at your love's chest.

Hn. Maybe you'd forgive Ravio for abandoning you this morning. You'd accept a little light work as payment for this moment of private (because Ravio always had something to say, the fucker), unabashed ogling. The bastard was rather intelligent and liked you well enough most days, so he'd probably done it on purpose (he had, because he was getting bored of your constant whining while Legend was gone. and because he hated dusting day).

Link snorted, quite unattractively at that, and cast a sly glance over his shoulder to your hiding place. You caught a glimpse of something shining at his collarbones and your heart nearly arrested. "You gonna come down and greet your man or just stare all day?" He snarked, teasingly, a barely contained smile forced into the visual of a smirk.

You saw through it all though. Your Link had always been such a needy bunny when he first got home from one of his advantures. Just one little peck on the cheek or wrist, and he'd putty in your hands.

That wasn't fun though. First, you needed to play the game.

"My man?" You snarked back, leaning over the joist so he could see your glinting eyes in the darkness. Unnerving to most, but you could see the way red crept up the collar of his tunic, under the straps of leather promise. "My man wouldn't come home without bringing back something good. As an apology for leaving his poor beloved all alone in this big, empty (Link snorted, because empty? really?) house."

Link's smirk twitched, resisting the urge to drop into a fond smile at your poor excuse of a hook and reel. He bit anyway, because how could you not when you seemed so proud of your little comeback.

"My apologies, most beloved in all the land." That you rolled your eyes at. "Let this humble knight make amends to his Angel." The words rolled so smoothly off his tongue as he fell back on his little used mannerisms.

Turning to face you fully, he beckoned you to him with a single raised hand (the one with the red jeweled ring you adored so much), keeping the other at the small of his back. He was bent slightly at the waist, staring up at you with amused, smoldering eyes framed by attractively tussled pink-blonde bangs. Displaying the thick tangle of beauty hanging in a dazzling curtain from his neck, at his collarbone. A choker hidden just at the base of his throat, lined with richly colored gemstones.

How could you refuse a siren's call.

You fell from the supports with careless ease, and with a brief snap of motion, glided on great, gleaming black wings to the floor below. Loose papers flutter at the gentle swish of wind left in your wake, the soft sway of tapestries, pictures and maps a quiet symphony to your passing.

You saw the way his sharp eyes took you in with covetous admiration, locked on the carefully (purposeful) arranged constellation of colorful stars dotted against your perfectly preened feathers and skin. A welcome home gift and a punishment all at once, delicate chains of gold and silver binding many of his most prized treasures close to your skin, your wondrous wings.

You landed before him with the delicate chime of jewels and chains, rearing to your full height in a blatant show of presentation. Raising your neck to display the gorgeous necklaces (his necklaces, his prizes, hard won and kept in the darkest of dungeons) and flicking your ears to rattle the intricate, dangling earrings (collected over a lifetime, by his scarred battle-worn hands) caressing against your neck.

Upon your forehead you could feel the silky sway of your hair ornaments resting in artful waves, lines of thin bands woven into the strains of your locks. The subtle weight of glittering temptation rested upon your wings with confident poise, a masterpiece of flesh and stone.

You held out your left hand to the man (waiting, anticipating). Revealing a thin, polished band upon a singular finger, painstakingly crafted metal so luminescent it glowed even in the daylight. Perfect, but for the warped edge you so adored to run your thumb across on those long, lonely nights (crafted by the hands of the man you love, and offered on one knee with an open, willing heart).

"Well, my knight." You said, smiling around far too many teeth. Hiding the way your heart thundered at the sight of his haggard, sleep deprived but dearly missed face. "Make your amends."

He leaned forward and placed a kiss, slow and lingering, upon the hand of his greatest treasure (having naught the strength to deny himself his longing any longer with his heart's desire so close). "Of course, my most beloved." His placed his forehead to the ring, falling to one knee with a tender smile across his lips. "Whatever you command of me."

And you smiled back, dropping to your knees as well to swoop him into your arms, wings circled around you both in a flutter of constellations. Kissing him on the nose, the game lost before it'd even begun. "Take a bath. You stink."

"Huh!?"

---

Some miles away.

"So. This buisness partner he's talking to." Twilight began (again), trying and failing to stare down the strangely dressed man Legend had summarily dumped them on (again). "Are they really as ruthless as you say?"

Ravio threw his head back, hands on his hips and back straight as he squeaked obnoxiously (mischievously). "The most ruthless I've ever met! The first to ever put Mr. Hero soundly on his knees!" At the other Hero's widened eyes, the merchant waved a dismissive hand. "Fear not though! Mr. Hero is experienced with their cunning ways! He won't be taken advantage of so easily a second time!"

"Still-" Twilight started, only to be stopped by a large, assuring hand on his shoulder.

"He's got this Rancher." Time said, an impish gleam in his eye that went unnoticed by the twilight hero. "He's Legend, after all."

After a brief, silent stare Twilight eventually conceded with a small, teasing smile. "You're right. He probably doesn't want us to see him getting bested in his own time, is all."

"Yeah." Time hummed agreeably as he cast a knowing smirk at the hooded merchant. "That's what it is." He winked, or blinked (or maybe he did nothing at all). Hard to tell with only one eye.

Behind the hood, Ravio rolled his own eyes, exasperated.

'You owe me so many rupees when I get back, Crow!'

"Hey? Where's Hyrule?"

"Wasn't he with you?"

"No! Wild had him!"

"Had Who?"

'If I ever get back!'

---

Back to the shadows to rest my weary mind.

[the-skin-inthe-bath-is-mine]

This is a personal project that I'll be embroidering and sewing by hand.

Okay so I'm planning the 20cm test before finishing the 10cm tests just because it takes a while to polish off the digital planning. Gives me something to do when I can't access my embroidery stuff. I have three characters in mind just because I'm currently limited to yellow/blonde hair + pale completion with fabric. I'm only gonna pick one to do for now. Doing an established character just in case I grow a pair and decide to sell it if the project turns out okay. Three different characters from three different fandoms+ rambling under the cut. I'll most likely be posting progress for whoever is picked like with most of my projects so if there's any bias for who anyone wants to see lmk. The possible test subjects are Satan (OBM) Raphael (WHB) and Nazuna Nito (Enstars)

Used my fandom blogs @ for the drawings out of habit. Oh and these all have some type of animal ears because I think it's cute. I wanna use snaps magnets or velcro to hold everything in place but I'm not sure yet.

Satan - Obey Me

The only one who looks halfway decent because I've been drawing him since 2021. My goal is to make a large scale Thirteen plushie with a lamb theme similar to the middle Satan. I also really don't like it when people delude Tanny to cat guy but I am a cat guy so he's most likely getting optional kitten ears if picked. The plain bows would just be plain embroidery but if the lamb design is picked I'll be embroidering fabric on top of fabric. I don't know what the methods called. I'm not a professional. I have an idea on how to make Satan's tail but would be weird to explain??? Possibly my favorite but that's just because the Obey Me brain worms run deep. Also the only one I feel confident in making clothes for.

Raphael - What in Hell is Bad

Look. We aren't gonna talk about why I'm playing the horny demon game. I don't understand why I play either. Anyway. I love Raphael's design too bad I wanna choke him in the most violent lest sexual way possible. This design would involve a lot of sewing fabric on fabric which I really don't mind. I have an idea on how to make little bandages that a kinda wanna tryout. The only thing is I'd like to add beads to the embroidery for his piercings. A bit of a price to pay for only doing one eye but I think it's worth it. This one specifically will also be good practice for using metallic embroidery thread. I'm torn between bunny and the fake horns??? Raphael is just annoying angry rabbit chewing on power cords coded. The only problem is I'd probably wanna make the other two dick heads eventually and *vague choking gestures* why are those freaks so damn pretty. Overall a lot of fun different textures to play with. The only thing is I probably won't post much about making him aside from helpful design components because dude is from a R18 game.

Nazuna Nito - Ensemble Stars

I actually already own a few Enstars plushies and plan on making both Jin and Akiomi for the larger scale tests. So. Yea. I don't think I need anymore??? The first is the easiest with the whole bunny thing. Probably gonna sew the fabric for the stomach art on and embroider around it. Second is loosely based on Nazuna's first 5* event card. It was the event that was going on when I started playing Enstars. Trying to figure out the game while playing Love it Love it still haunts my nightmares. The final one is based on his recent scout 5* I need to work on coloring gemstones but I think it'd translate nicely to embroidery. This design is gonna be the easiest out of this bunch. The most complicated thing will probably be color matching embroidery thread.

[lancedoncrimsonwings]

Augusnippets Day 14

Path of Comfort Prompt; "Gifts/Celebration"

Day 14 of @augusnippets August 2024 Whump writing challenge! (Augusnippets Masterlist)

Characters;

- POV: Gawain - The Green Knight

- Lancelot - The Weeping Monk

(Character Masterlist)

(Ao3 Link)

Wordcount; 737

TWs; N/A. Teeth rotting fluff today.

The camp thrummed with excitement ahead of the evening's winter celebration, all bustling voices and movement outside Gawain's tent. He couldn't help but smile as he prepared, having bathed already, finishing up his shave by pulling a razor over the last side across his cheek. He wiped off his face, pulled a comb through his hair and began to dress in the clothes he'd been given earlier.

Dark brown, nearly black trousers of soft tanned sheepskin wrapped his legs snugly as he pulled them on- though they were a little more form fitting than what he was used to, the supple leather still offered him full range of movement. They were laced up their full length at the sides and embroidered with the Fingers of Airimid as they appeared on his Skyfolk kin and these vines had been handstitched across the dark leather in emerald green silken threads, with beads of gold that shimmered in the candlelight.

A loose lace up shirt in a gorgeous shade of dark forest green with lighter beaded vines embroidered across it came next, followed by a wide brown leather belt of interweaving strips to finish the ensemble. He fastened the belt at his waist, over the shirt and loosely tied the emerald green ribbon that laced up the shirt at his chest.

Nervously, he eyed the remainder of what he had been given. Two small pouches, one of which was his own, one of which was a gift- for Lancelot.

Delicately, he opened the first pouch and inside, nestled in a soft scrap of fur was a pendant. It was formed of a green chunk of raw gemstone, wrapped in tiny golden vines that hung from a golden chain. He fastened the necklace with trembling hands, allowing it to drape over the tunic, which was open at his chest.

"Gawain?"

Lancelot's voice sounded from outside the tent.

"Just a moment!" Gawain replied quickly, daring to take a second to open the second pouch.

This pendant was similar to his own, but where his was rough and green, Lancelot's had a greyish well-sized polished stone. It shone with a beautiful iridescence of amber, purple and blue under the light. Expertly crafted slivers of aged silver wrapped the stone, with tiny inlaid stones of multiple colours dotted about the intricate piece, which linked to a silver chain. It lay heavy in his palm. He hoped Lancelot would like it...

"Ok, you can come in now."

Lancelot stepped into the tent, confusion evident on his angular features. Gawain couldn't help but gasp in awe, by the Gods, Lancelot was beautiful...

"Are you ok?" Lancelot asked. His hair was loose, having been carefully brushed, soft brown waves cascading about his shoulders. He dressed in what looked like a black shirt- at first, anyway- green silk strands woven throughout caught the light, glittering emerald. The shirt was open and unlaced, exposing his chest almost all the way down to the navel, billowing sleeves tied at the wrist. His shirt tucked into charcoal grey trousers of cloth, and below his knees, strips of black leather wrapped over the top, fastened at his mid calf. Like Gawain, Lancelot was barefoot- as was customary for the celebration.

"Gawain!" Lancelot snapping his fingers in front of his face jolted him from his accidental staring. Gawain cleared his throat, feeling his cheeks flush with embarrasment at the raised eyebrow Lancelot gave him.

"I, ah... got you something."

Gawain gestured with his finger for Lancelot to turn around. Despite a suspicious frown, Lancelot obliged silently. Gawain belatedly realised the chain was long enough to put on without unfastening it, so he reached up over Lancelot's shoulders to place the pendant around his neck. He stepped back and waited, watching Lancelot look down at it, an unreadable expression on his face as he carefully held the stone, examining it.

"Do you... like it?" Gawain asked, hesitantly. Uncharactaristic anxiety had balled up within his chest and he didn't quite know what to do with all the nervous energy flooding through him.

Lancelot looked up to him, and Gawain realised the expression was one of quiet reverence.

"It's beautiful." Lancelot replied simply.

Like you, then... Gawain almost said, relief rushing though him but he bit his tongue just in time. Instead, he offered Lancelot his arm with a smile.

"Shall we away?"

Lancelot echoed Gawain's smile with one of his own, accepting the offered arm.

Yes, I did take two years of Fashion in college why do you ask...

Some adorable fluff today! I may yet draw their outfits.

For now, here are a few references for their necklaces! Lancelot's necklace was based on the gorgeous labradorite pieces by Lunarieen UK (left), I've always wanted to buy one. Gawain's I made up, but here's a moodboard (right) for it!

[whatcha-thinkin]

Tell your story in the reblogs!

[erotica4thedamned]

I went to the pool, and took some pool with me. Pool tiles. Obviously, I didn't take them out myself. They were sitting at the bottom.. Waiting for me probably. They look like gemstones, or diamonds...

Speaking of random "objects".. And "Trinkets", etc

This is my fake plastic stone pebble. Again, loose in some fake plastic tree. It was nice because I didn't get to buy a thing while I was at the mall. I don't usually. So this had to be compensation of sorts.. I'll pretend it is. It made up for it all anyway

I'm a bit sentimental about these things

Oh, and yeah my nails are alternating between red, and black. They're cool despite the premature chipping. Cheap nail polish does that

[shanecompany]

Mens Wedding Bands: 6 Essential Tips for Choosing Your Perfect Match

Shopping for a mens wedding band can be just as exciting as picking out an engagement ring — especially when you find a trusted fine jewelry brand that’s dedicated to offering you a personalized experience. While there are many options out there and a lot of factors to consider, finding a band that reflects your style and personality doesn’t have to be difficult. Consider these six essential tips as you reflect on the perfect mens wedding band for you.

Start with a Budget There are rings for men in every price range, so starting with a budget can help narrow down the field. Style, metal, and finish all affect the price of this important investment. There are no rules on how much you have to spend on the ring; it’s whatever you (and potentially your partner) are comfortable with spending on the ring. Select Your Ideal Style There are a few styles to choose from when selecting your wedding band. The classic band is an all-metal band, sometimes with a bit of texture, but oftentimes smooth. You can also choose diamond accents for an extra pop, a single diamond, or a gemstone for some personality and color. Determine Which Shape Is Right for You Next, you need to choose the shape of the ring. This is wholly a personal choice, though some styles may be more comfortable for you to wear than others. ● Rounded inside and out rings are the classic and most common shape. They’re comfortable to wear and have a timeless look. ● Flat wedding bands have a flat exterior and a rounded or flat interior. They’re a contemporary choice, and the style is rising in popularity. ● D-shaped or domed wedding rings have a flat inside and rounded outside, which can help give a closer fit to the finger. ● Beveled rings are between flat and domed rings, with three facets instead of a continuous outer surface. Choose a Metal to Rock Choosing a metal may be the most important part of choosing a ring. Some popular choices include: Precious Metals ● 14k White Gold ● 14k Yellow Gold ● 14k Rose Gold ● Platinum Alternative ● Titanium ● Zirconium ● Cobalt ● Tantalum Some fine jewelry brands may even offer exotic ring material choices such as meteorite, titanium, Damascus steel, or forged carbon fiber. Finish It Off Finally, choose a finish. High polish is common, giving your ring a highly reflective shine. A satin finish gives a similarly smooth surface but isn’t quite as reflective. You can also find other finishes, often textured, such as tree bark or sand. Hammered finishes make the ring look rugged, like it was forged with a hammer. Rock polishes are in the same vein but give more of a rocky appearance, which is less pronounced than a hammered appearance. Customize It to You You can choose a pre-made ring, or you can use all of the information above to create a custom ring that’s right for you. Choose whether you want gemstones or just metal, as well as your preferred style, materials, and more to make it truly unique. Find a trusted fine jewelry brand that can help you figure out what you want and what looks best, helping you get a fully customized ring you’ll love for a lifetime. Some of the best brands may even offer an online custom band builder to help you create a ring unique to you as you select the material, profile, dimension, finish, outside features, sleeves, and engraving. About Shane Co. Family-owned since 1929, Shane Co. makes expertly crafted fine jewelry to help everyone shine their brightest each day. Capture life’s most beautiful moments with jewelry designed in-house and hand-finished by on-site jewelers. You’ll discover truly unique pieces for a one-of-a-kind present, a milestone anniversary gift, a perfect engagement ring, or a beautiful gesture to yourself. Shane Co.’s passion for loose diamonds and colorful gemstones from around the world goes back four generations. The brand responsibly sources and hand-selects stones, cutting each to the highest standards. Their jewelry is not mass-produced and offers many options for customization, ensuring a truly personalized piece meant to last a lifetime. Shane Co. welcomes everyone and is proud to be your friend and jeweler.For jewelry crafted with the greatest care, including mens wedding bands, Shane Co. is your trusted source for fine jewelry. Find the perfect mens wedding band for you or create your own at https://www.shaneco.com/ Original Source: https://bit.ly/4bt4qHK

[adsilverfashion]

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[uniqueopal]

[ascendancy-echoes]

Chapter 10: Magic

8th of Eighthmoon, 1016 AG

A few days had passed since the children had learned the truth of their parents’ adventures. Janus had thought about the situation the whole time and came to the conclusion that since the children were aware of what had happened to him and the others, he and the others should talk to the children about how they had magic like them. He knew that Zarya would continue to comment about everyone’s magic, so it was a matter of time before Oren or Liz asked questions. After talking to Lucca about his concerns, they both agreed to talk to Crono and Marle about the matter.

While Lucca took Zarya to visit with Liz and Oren, Janus went to speak to Crono and Marle in private. They were surprised he wanted to tell them the truth about their magic after they had all agreed to avoid the matter until the kids were much older.

“The truth is mostly out as it is thanks to Zarya… ‘borrowing’ my sketchbook,” Janus replied. “We may as well come clean about a few things.”

Crono and Marle exchanged glances. They knew Janus was right.

“There is one more thing I wanted to tell you guys,” Janus added. “I told Zarya about Schala and about Zeal… not what exactly happened but that I was once a prince and that Zeal has been gone for a long time.”

Seeing his friends’ surprised expressions, he continued, “I thought about it after Oren’s question to me…  We can omit details like what exactly happened in Zeal and the fact I forced my way back with magic but I realize that I should be somewhat honest with him and Liz about my past.”

“After you left, we did give Oren and Liz the short version of our adventure but we didn’t say that you were from Antiquity,” Marle admitted.

“We also mentioned Spekkio,” Crono added.

Janus nodded. “All the more reason for us to tell them something. Given that Zarya can’t keep a secret very well, they have to be suspecting something by now.”

“I still don’t know,” Crono sighed. “Oren won’t say it, but I know the last year has been hard on him. He resents all these rules and if we tell him he has magic but he can’t use it openly, our answers might not satisfy him.”

“He’s a smart kid,” Janus remarked. “I think they’ll understand why it’s been a secret.”

~o~O~o~

Meanwhile, Lucca left Zarya with Liz and Oren so she could join Janus and see what Crono’s and Marle’s answer was. She promised the children she’d be right back.

Zarya smiled and told her mom goodbye before turning her attention to her messenger bag. She overheard Oren and Liz talk about what the adults possibly need to talk about in private this time. Oren guessed they were deciding if they could tell them more about their adventures. Zarya reminded herself to tell Oren and Liz that her dad was a prince after all.

Speaking of her dad, Zarya had found another treasure of his. It was in a box on his desk in his and her mom’s room. She had been looking for more paper to draw on when she found it. Remembering the treasure, Zarya dug around her bag and pulled it out to admire it.

Liz looked at Zarya and the strange leather bracelet sitting in her cousin’s hands. She asked “What do you have there, Zarya?”

Zarya offered the bracelet to Liz. “It’s so pretty.”

Liz took the bracer and looked it over. The blue cabochon gemstone inlaid in iron immediately reminded Liz of her mom’s necklace. She rubbed her thumb across the gem’s polished, smooth surface. It felt warm, kind of tingly. 

A swirl of sky blue light, cold as a winter day, erupted from the stone. Liz let out a gasp and dropped the bracer. The swirl of light, which had briefly formed the shape of a large disc, vanished as the bracer left her hands.

“What the heck?” Liz exclaimed.

Oren picked up the bracelet off the ground. He carefully looked it over. He noticed the resemblance to his mom’s necklace too. Part of him thought it looked more like armor rather than a bracelet. He slipped it over his wrist but it was too loose, obviously meant for someone bigger than him or Liz. Like his sister he rubbed the gemstone, curious if her touch had been what triggered the strange phenomenon. A burst of deep blue light and water swirled from the stone and formed a swirling disc like a small shield.

“What is this thing?” Oren breathed as he touched the shield. Against all logic, the water was solid. He began to feel a bit light-headed as the swirling shield of water remained.

“It’s raining!” Zarya giggled. She looked at the shield. “Cool water.”

Liz pointed at the strange disc and said, “It looks like a shield made of blue lights and water.”

Oren looked at Zarya. “Zarya, where d-”

The door to the library opened and Liz and Oren looked up to see their parents entering. 

“Kids, there’s something your father and I-“ Marle stopped mid-sentence. Her eyes fell upon the shield her son he created.

No one spoke for what felt like forever before Janus finally shouted out, “Damnit Zarya, you know you aren’t allowed in our room alone! We talked about this!”

He stormed over to the children. Oren quickly slipped the bracer off and handed it to Janus. The watery shield dissipated as soon as the bracer was in Janus’s hands.

“Sorry, dad….” Zarya sighed.

“Oren, sit down and take some deep breaths. The feeling will pass in a moment,” Janus instructed, seeing the fatigued look on the young boy’s face. Turning to Lucca, he added, “I told you we needed a lock on our bedroom door.”

“Dad’s happy?!” Zarya cried out.

Janus’s expression softened. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, sweetie. It’s just frustrating that you keep sneaking into our room and taking things without asking. It’s not safe, Zarya.”

“What is that thing,” asked Liz, pointing at the bracer in Janus’s hands.

The grownups looked amongst themselves.

“Kids… you remember how we said we learned to use magic, right?” Marle asked.

Oren nodded. Before he could ask what his mother was getting at, Liz shouted out, “Wait… Do we have magic too?!”

Janus looked at Oren and Liz. He asked if they recalled any times that Zarya mentioned rain or snow around them despite what the weather actually was.

“Rain or snow,” Zarya echoed. She looked at Oren and smiled, “It’s raining.”

“So what does Zarya talking about the weather have to do with magic?” asked Oren.

“Zarya and I have a special ability,” Janus explained. “We can see the magic around your parents… and around you. It takes a lot of effort for me to perceive everyone’s magic but Zarya seems to see it all the time with no effort.”

“We all have an element that our magic is connected to… Zarya sees everyone’s innate elements. That’s why she says those things,” Lucca explained. “My element is fire, your parents are lightning and ice.

“Zarya can see that you have ice magic like your mother, Liz,” Janus added. “And that you have water magic, Oren, like Glenn did.”

“What about you?” asked Oren as he looked towards Janus. “And what’s Zarya’s?”

“I haven’t been able to discern Zarya’s magic and she hasn’t been able to tell us clearly yet. Mine is a rare kind,” Janus replied after a moment. “Most in my homeland would have called it shadow magic.”

He rubbed the gemstone, activating the shield. Oren and Liz looked on in awe at the disc of iridescent black mist. Janus explained that he had made the shield to protect himself during their adventure.

“You said your homeland…. Is there a country where people can use magic? Why haven’t we heard about it before?” asked Oren.

Janus sighed. Even after all these years, the memories of Zeal and its fall were still very vivid to him. In many ways, it felt like just yesterday that he had met Lucca in Kajar’s library and his life changed forever.

“I am from a kingdom called Zeal that existed in Antiquity.” Janus finally said after a long pause. “Many millennia ago it was the center of magic in this world and I was its prince.”

Janus explained to Liz and Oren that the world was once divided into those who could use magic and those who could not. The Earthbound and the Enlightened. It was the way of things for countless generations. Then one day, disaster struck Zeal as Lavos, the source of magic, destroyed the kingdom and sent it falling into the ocean. He and a small number of Enlightened survived the disaster.

“Had I not met your parents or your aunt, I wouldn’t have survived my kingdom’s fall,” Janus said, keeping his gaze low.

“Wait, isn’t Lavos the thing you guys fought?” Liz asked.

“My people had no idea what Lavos was other than a source of immense energy that allowed us to have magic,” Janus replied. “After Zeal fell, I joined your parents’ fight against Lavos and saved the future.”

Oren recalled his parents' account of the events, how they hadn’t mentioned Janus’s origins. He thought it was weird they hadn’t told them the truth when such a detail seemed important. It also contradicted the part of the tale when his parents had told Liz and him that everyone had to return to their own times to make sure history would go on as normal.

“Wait… Why didn’t you go back?” Oren asked. “Mom and dad said Glenn and the others left. Why didn’t you?”

Janus looked genuinely surprised at Oren’s question. He hadn’t thought of what to say if confronted with the fact he was living in an era he wasn’t from. Before he could reply, Lucca stepped in.

“You both know how Zarya is different… Your uncle and I are the same way,” Lucca explained. “Your uncle stayed with us because his people didn’t understand that difference. He was shunned in his time for who he is.”

“But… he’s their prince,” Liz stated. “Couldn’t he just tell them to be nice?”

“I wasn’t first in line and even my own mother and sister expected me to fit in,” Janus sighed. “Everyone tolerated my… quirks but your parents and aunt were the first to treat me with genuine kindness and acceptance.”

“Besides…. After Zeal’s fall, my older sister denied the suggestion that we continue as we had in Zeal,” Janus added. “She insisted on a council of Earthbound and former Enlightened to decide things in the village that formed from the survivors of the disaster. My voice would not have been heard.”

“Daddy magic?”  Zarya chimed. “Dad shows Zarya magic? Svet??”

Zarya’s request to see magic reminded Janus of the whole point of this talk. He smiled at her and said, “I’ll show you in just a moment.”

“Dad, svet??” Zarya asked, her voice edging on sounding frantic. “Make lights?”

“In a moment,” Janus assured.

“Svet?!” Zarya almost shouted. She pulled at Janus’s sleeve and let out a loud, lamenting whine. “Svet, pleeaaase?!”

Janus smiled softly at Zarya and assured her that he would summon some lights in a second. Oren and Liz watched as Janus traced a symbol in the air, a glowing trail of light following his finger before he repeated the strange word that Zarya had kept saying.

A small sphere of light appeared in Janus’s hand. He explained to Liz and Oren that it was a simple light spell that he had learned in his youth.

“While my innate magic is shadow, I have the unique ability to cast spells from any element,” Janus explained. 

“Can we learn some magic?” Liz asked excitedly. “I mean, we have it so-”

“We’ll have to think about it,” Crono interjected. “We didn’t tell you two about your magic because it’s a big secret that we have it. Your Granny, the Ashtears, and the senior staff that worked for your grandfather know about us, but we are the only humans in the entire world that have magic… It might cause some problems if the public knew.”

Oren sighed. More secrets, but maybe he could get some answers. He looked at his parents and asked, “How long have you known? Since we were babies?”

“No,” Marle answered. “We’ve known about it for about four years… Zarya revealed she could see our magic and noticed you two walking by one day. Like your father said, we’ve kept our magic a secret for years. We didn’t want you to worry about it either.”

“While people as a whole don’t hate Mystics anymore and they keep to themselves, there is still a wariness about them and their ability to use magic,” Crono added. “I hope you understand.”

Liz and Oren nodded. As annoyed as Oren was at the fact he had to keep a part of himself secret, he knew that his parents were right to worry. He and Liz had just started learning about the war that their ancestors had fought in. While their uncle spared them the details, Oren had snuck a peek at many of the history books. He knew what horrible things the Mystics had done to Choras and its surrounding towns and villages. And he knew what the humans had done in return.

“Why don’t you two go play with Zarya?” Lucca suggested, changing the subject. “Zarya, let your dad and I see what’s in your bag before you run off and play with your cousins.”

Zarya clutched her bag and protested until Janus stepped forward and insisted. She laughed nervously as she handed over her bag, all the while asking for it back. A quick search by Janus revealed she had absconded with her mother’s Poyozo plush and several cookies from the kitchen, but otherwise it was all her own toys and books.

“You can keep Mr. Baa, but you should have asked first,” Lucca sighed, taking the bag of cookies from Janus who handed them to her. “You’re okay now.”

Zarya took her bag back from Janus and chirped out a thanks before turning and running off to follow Oren and Liz who had waited by the door. Liz cheerfully suggested they go to the garden. Oren let out a sigh and agreed reluctantly.

Crono walked over to the door and watched his children lead Zarya down the hall. Satisfied they were out of hearing range, he shut the door and turned back to Lucca and Janus.

“We can’t teach them to use their magic.”

“Why not?” Janus asked. “I know plenty of non-combative spells. It wouldn’t be too hard to show them-”

“They don’t need it,” Crono replied sternly. “What point is there?”

“It’s not that we aren’t against the idea,” Marle said, giving Crono a look. “But Crono is right, what good would it do? There’s no reason for them to learn magic when the rest of the world doesn’t have it and we have no need for it ourselves..”

“What if the Mystics try something again?” replied Janus. “We still don’t know why those three were poking around even after all this time. They might come back.”

Crono and Marle exchanged glances and sighed. Janus was right. A thorough search of the castle had turned up nothing stolen or planted by the Mystics, but Crono and Marle knew that there had to have been a reason for their infiltration. Still, the years of silence left them wondering if the Mystics had given up.

“I’m not suggesting we prepare the children to fight,” Janus continued. “You both know I would never do something to endanger any of them.  I can teach them protection spells and healing… It will be fine, I promise.”

Crono frowned slightly, but he felt Marle reach over and squeeze his hand reassuringly. He sighed and said, “I hope you’re right, Janus...”

[gotis-gems-and-jewellery]

Wedding rings for women diamond ring 14k gold oval moissanite rings for women gold ring with balck diamond for gift for her wedding ring

 Handmade item

 Materials: Silver, Gold, White gold, Rose gold

 Gemstone: Moissanite

 Gem colour: Black & White

 Band colour: White

 Style: Mid-century

 Can be personalised

 Made to Order

Description

Oval Moissanite Straight Shank Engagement Ring, Nature Inspired Mois sanite Bridal Ring Set, Anniversary Ring, Bridal Ring, Twig Ring, Bridal Set

The stone was originally cut and polished by our skilled craftsmen, the stones in jewelry are 100% handcrafted. Moissanite is a great alternative to mind diamonds.

● A matching piece is also listed below in the "Matching Piece" section.

💎𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐎𝐟 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐝

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Moissanite Details

→ Center Stone Shape: Oval Moissanite

→ Center Stone Size: 1 CT

→ Center Measurement: 7x5 mm

→ Stone Color: Black

→ Stone Clarity: VVS

→ Mohs Scale : Moissanite 9.25

→ Refractive Index : 2.65 (Moissanite)

Side Stone Details

→ Side Stone Shape: Round Cut

→ Side Stone Size: 0.019 CTW

→ Number of Diamond : 16

→ Color: White

→ Clarity: VVS

Metal details

→ Metal Type: Silver/ Gold

→ Metal Purity: 10KT/14 KT/18KT

→ Metal Tone: White/Yellow/Rose

→ Metal Stamp: Upon request

Band Width: 2.10mm(Approx)

Band thickness: 1.30mm(Approx)

𝐎𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫:

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● After your order, we'll send you a CAD file (digital image).

● Once you confirm, we will send your order to the manufacturing department.

● After your ring is complete, we will send you a picture before shipping

● then we will ship your ring.

💎 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞:

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● Moissanite in nature is very durable and lasts the same as diamond

● We offer a 90-day warranty on all our Loose diamonds or Jewelry.

● We also provide paid service after the completion of the warranty.

● You can send us an email or can send a message on Etsy 24x7 for any service required thereafter.

💎 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞 :

1. Custom Orders will be not Cancelled and Returned.

2. If you want to give return your pretty ring to us in the future. (Return jewelry is acceptable with only our policy). So we will make a return and will refund your amount except for PayPal transaction fees.

💎 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐮𝐬

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