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yeyinde · 1 year ago

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GAZFEST | fistful of ashes

for Gazfest by @glitterypirateduck

CATEGORY: alternate universe, AU | PROMPT: "I really want to kiss you right now."

"Did you know?" "Of course I knew," he reaches for you, mouth turning downward, bitter and sad, at the way you flinch back, shying from his touch. But he's relentless, and you feel the burn of the sun, of searing stars across the back of your hand when he runs his fingers over your skin. He dips down, wrist to vein to knuckles to— "How could I not?" He inhales long and hard, and takes all the air from the room. "When you're wearing my brother's ring?"

Warnings: 18+ MATURE | infidelity/cheating (Reader cheats with Gaz, not on him; is married to Gaz's brother for political reasons), inaccurate historical descriptions, religious imagery, slight secret identity; Soap is a terrible wingman; angst; pining & yearning; allusions to smut but no descriptions

Word Count: 15,2k

Entombed between marble monoliths is a secret alcove, a hidden nook. It's a place of refuge when the howling winter winds seem to shake the foundation of the sprawling estate, screaming through the barren hallways. You spend most of your day curled on the day bed pushed against the far wall where the window sits, framed in thin, iron rods. On the opposite sides of clear glass is a stained mosaic depicting the fall of a dragon and the triumph of a king. Dusted in semi-opaque primary colours, it spills a kaleidoscope of beauty on the herringbone floor.

Its discovery came weeks into your marriage with the eldest Garrick when you wandered down the sprawling halls of your new home, fingers trailing over mahogany walls with evergreen trim, contemplating your new forever.

Then: a stutter. A gap. Your hands sunk into emptiness, into a vacuum just big enough for your frame to squeeze through on a halted breath.

Inside this abyss, you found a circular room with a vaulted, domed ceiling of metal, and books shoved in a haphazard pile at the foot of the daybed.

It smells strongly of toluene—that cloying scent of dust and rotting paper—and something breaks apart inside of your chest at the sight of this place. Cosy and small. An intimate, homey escape in the middle of stifling, oppressive opulence.

The respite it offers becomes an anchor amid a turbulent storm. A crutch to curl your trembling fingers around, finding purchase in stone. An immovable object. You bury your nails into slate and hold on as tight as you can.

No one can find you here.

(You don't even think they bothered to look.)

But—

"Thought I'd find you here, birdy."

—He does.

He always finds you.

He. He.

He introduces him—cheeks rudied and bashful, head dipped in a soft sort of reverence—and tells you that everyone calls him Gaz. You like the way it fits between your teeth. Gaz. It's a small blade you keep tucked in your breast pocket: unassuming and deadly. Gaz. Gaz.

On the window pane, etched in a child's scribble, is that very same name. Gaz. He shows it to you after he finds you hiding away in the alcove and the shock of a man you don't recognise suddenly squeezing through the gap in the wall abates.

You run your finger over the indents as he sits with his back against the marble pillar, eyes fixed on the horizon line as the sun dusts his face in a golden glow, and tells you this place used to belong to him. His escape when he was a child.

Sheepishly rubs his head, then, and admits that he'd missed it more than he thought he would.

"It's just a room, but—" one shoulder lifts in a tentative shrug. "'dunno. Just—kinda missed the peace of it all, I guess."

"Yeah," you whisper, your breath warm when it passes over your lips. Warm. It makes your heart stutter. "I get that. This place is—"

There are many words that buoy in your mind as you take a moment to run your eyes across the small dome, the well-loved books that line the walls, the marble pillars, the mosaic, the sunset in the distance. It feels otherworldly, in a way. A place etched out on paper and brought to life with a delicate hand.

You catch his eyes, broken into fragments in the cuts of stained glass, and even through the frosted reflection of the window, warmth bleeds through. The gentle rays of the sun. Apricity. You press your knuckle against the blurry dip of his cheekbone and the frigid winter moulding itself to the outside burns your skin.

He's different from everyone you've met here.

Their frigid disposition isn't unlike the icy Chinook raging through the draughty insides of the sprawling palace—a polite indifference at best, a cold dismissal at worst—and the contrast between them and him is a startling one. The man whose domicile you stumbled upon exudes heat; blooming warmth. It fills the barren gaps between your lungs and prickles molten fingers across your pericardium, strumming it like the nimble chords of a harp. It reverberates inside of you.

(Your heart is a gong. His hands are a mallet.)

The thought, intrusive and unwarranted, makes you jolt. It brings you back to yourself quite suddenly, and you're all too aware of the fact that you're an intruder in his private chambers, his secret home.

The apology rushes to your tongue, clanging against the back of your teeth, and you breathe it out in a whisper, too afraid of speaking more than a breeze in this sanctuary. They'll find you. Drag you out because it isn't proper to hide in a corner surrounded by books and the heady scent of a man—woodsmoke, charcoal, vetiver; toluene, musk, sun-bleached linen—and make you hide away in your rooms where no one knows you exist, or sit you in the grand hall where everyone pretends that you don't.

"I, um, don't mean to intrude. I can leave…"

His eyes are warm when you whip around to meet them, lips tugging downward in a harsh, fearful frown.

He waves you off with a lazy roll of his wrist. "Nah, you can come as much as you like."

From anyone else, you would have taken it as a banal pleasantry, but there is something about this man that bleeds true. And so, you do.

Every day you find yourself sitting on the chaise, reading through the array of epics and poems, all still carrying the fingerprints of the child who carved his name into wood. He joins you often enough, taking his spot on the opposite side of yourself, sometimes reading or regaling stories of each blemish and imperfection you come across. The copy of Fall of the House of Usher is waterlogged because he once used it to balance a cup of water on the bed as he reached over to grab his matches; it's readable, he insists, but—

"That bit about the sister. It's all ruined," his brow pinches in a soft contemplation. "But it's probably not that important, anyway."

—The match he struck burned a hole in the side of the bed. He smoked tobacco that he knocked from his father's study and ashed it out on the windowsill, which still bears the scorch mark.

It's lived in and loved. A haphazard bivouac pitched by a child who grew within the circular walls. Toys tucked into the corner. Children's books stacked at the bottom of the bookshelf, hidden from sight as his taste changed, grew more eclectic and matured. Singed tobacco leaves shoved inside naughty books he snatched from the maid when she wasn't looking. Alcohol stains the rim of an old mug with the faded painting of an old action hero smiling on the side. Childish delight stroking the walls with wonder and excitement to a moody teenager drowning himself in the plights and woes of others, to an adult sitting on the floor and musing fondly about the disarray and the decay.

You watch it all unfold in a series of memories and soft, little moments that dance across his handsome face—some open, and spoken aloud; others hidden, a secret thing not meant to share (like the panties in the corner you'd found that turned the tips of his ears and the knob of his nose bright red—the maids, he'd stuttered out—and the old bucket hat under the pillow that made his brow pinch in a deep sense of dismay, of loss).

He was in the war, he tells you one evening, eyes solemn, and brushed with pensiveness. One he never wanted to be in, but he met a man—a warrior, he calls him—and knew, then, that he’d go wherever he went. Following his cause until the bitter end.

You know the story—how could you not when the bitter end was found the moment you signed your name away on a piece of paper?

And so, you tell him.

“I ended it. A trade, you know?”

“I know,” he says, scoffing. “Of course I do. I was there. I was close enough that I could have rescued him, I have—”

“I’m sorry,” you speak to Gaz but can’t tear your eyes away from the hat clutched between his fists.

He doesn’t acknowledge your apology, offering a quick shrug instead.

“Are you happy at least?” He asks, and what a strange question it is. Happy. Happy. What is happiness?

You let out a laugh that sounds brittle. Pieces of glass lodged in your throat. “What does it matter?”

It's this admission, and the palpable weight of his loss, of your own, that seems to serve as the catalyst that breaks open the levee between you. Gaz meets you at the door the next morning, ushering you in with a soft, secretive smile that turns his honeycomb eyes a startling amber in the yawning sun.

He tells you about himself—he was always a rather quiet child but got quite restless in his teenage years; his father was never as proud of him until he said he was joining the war; he hid chocolates and treats in this room to eat later, and you spend an afternoon hunting down them all; he likes the ocean but loves the feeling of sand between his toes even more; he reads a lot, he confesses with a peculiar little flush darkening his cheeks: mostly poetry because it sounds like a song when he whispers it aloud, and you find yourself weaning heat from the sun when he relents to your pestering and finally opens his favourite book and reads it to you. His voice is a guitar strum. A piano pluck.

It settles between the gap where your lungs hang, curling over moondust bones. It's a heavy thing to carry at first, but the weight feels like an anchor, steady and sure, against the turbulence when he's not around.

You, in turn, give him pieces of yourself. Cleaving large swaths of your essence, your being, for him to wear over his shoulders like a quilted cloak.

There are things you don't tell him. Things you keep to yourself because you like the anonymity this little haven affords, and how he treats you like a person and not like a pretty little trinket meant to be sealed away in a glass display case.

You know that he's keeping things from you, too, like who he is—a guard, you think; a soldier, maybe—because the history he has with this place speaks of intimate familiarity but he owns up to nothing except a name that you don't really believe is his.

But you think your secret is even bigger, more damning, and you keep it pressed tight to yourself—a putrid little thing made of rot and obligation, one that leaks noxious miasma into the air whenever it's touched. You don't want the stench to permeate the air of your sanctity, the one you share with Gaz, and so you swallow it. Choke yourself on the festering lump until it slides down your esophagus and moulders in your stomach. Far enough away from this place you never want it to touch.

In between the worry, and the responsibility that makes you curl into yourself, desperately wishing for respite inside the dome with Gaz reading poems to you in secrecy, you find yourself slipping down a precipice with no clear end in sight. A steep slope into an abyss. There is nothing to suspend your fall.

(You wonder, sometimes, if you even try.)

It should make you feel guilty, but Gaz holds your trembling hand in his and offers up books for you to read together, and suddenly the fall isn't as scary as it once was.

Suddenly, it feels right to find solace in his touch and feel love bloom in your chest.

How could it be wrong when he makes you feel as if the world that was once on fire is now just warm?

On a whim, and filled with the courage of multitudes, you whisper the words threaded in the seams of your heart against the worn pages. Softly, slowly, and then all at once.

"I love you, Gaz."

His hand shakes. There are stars in his eyes when he blinks. Orion gleams in umber. Sagittarius heaves in sard. He leans close and you smell lightning in the air, ozone and copper, and feel static on your cheeks. Magnetic, he pulls and pulls, and you go, quietly, willingly, and think of white sand bleached by the summer sun. Dancing for Ra with the ocean glinting like crystalline diamonds. Twin footprints in the sand. Love left behind on the shore.

"Oh, birdy," he breathes, and the words are filled with elation but touched with a deep, unrelenting sense of fear. "Why would you—?"

But he doesn't finish.

Gaz kisses you and it feels like the hot breath in the desert. All warmth and light, gentleness tinged with sadness.

Sadness. Sorrow.

Because you're not meant for him, and you're wearing another's ring.

Gaz doesn't return the next day.

Or the next.

Winter fades into autumn, and you sit on the bed with your empty chest and your hollow marrow.

Whenever he's gone, he still wears your quilt.

And carries your heart in his warm hands.

The marriage is at the end of November when the ground frosts over with winter's cruel breath, and the air bites your cheeks and stings your lungs.

You'd have preferred the warmth of summer, when the sun reached the solace, sitting at its zenith and painting the world in lovely shades of bloom and green. Golden in its splendour.

Idle dreams flicker by as you stand beside the altar, fingers caught in the webbing of your thick gown. Thought filled with a wedding on the sandy shores, with the humid air hugging you from all sides. The scent of the ocean in the back of your throat. The sun kissing your crown, wrapping gentle hands over your shoulders. Embracing you. Holding you. You bow to Ra, to Helios, and suckle on tart dragon fruit and sweet sugar cane. Rest wreathes of sunflowers and bluebonnets at the foot of their temple before dancing in the sand.

You dream of sweaty palms linked together, twin sets of footprints in the sand. The ocean calls out in bliss as you dip yours in the cool waters, and kiss under the fading sun.

It bursts quite suddenly when a cold hand grabs at your wrist, pulling you from the yonder, the hinterland where you dream of a man with a smile as bright as the sun. You blink away the thought when it twists painfully at your chest. An ache of something that will never happen. Forever a dream.

Impatience seems to linger in the air when you sluggishly bring your trembling hand up, taking the ornate pen—the blessed metal cold and painful to the touch—and clumsily sign your name on the second line.

It's a hurried thing. The air of celebration is moot; festivities hardly matter when the only point of intrigue is the signature wet ink at the bottom of a parchment paper, claiming your matrimony to the eldest Garrick, firstborn son, and the subsequent peaceful merging of families, dynasties with much to gain from two little rings.

You barely finish the last letter of your name before they pull the paper away. A jagged trail of ink cuts a line across the bottom, down, down, down. The sight of it fills you with dread—a bad omen, maybe—but they pay it little mind as they swiftly stamp it, sealed and bound in royal wax; unbreakable, now, and permanent, and hurriedly roll it up, tucking it away where it's in the pocket of the officiate.

It leaves you feeling colder than the Chinook roaring down the mountain. All air in your lungs is sharp shards of crystallised ice. Piercing and painful. Breathing through frostbitten lungs.

Your husband, Griggs, is a handsome man, you suppose. Classically beautiful with his dark eyes and strong cheekbones. He's tall and stolid. You'd be remiss not to notice his attractiveness, but there's an air of distance, detachment, that seems to permeate over you like a looming storm cloud. He doesn't take your hand in his. Doesn't stroke the back of it with his thumb. There are no airy words of comfort or secretive smiles he can't hide.

It's transactional.

The ladies around you cup their hands over their mouths, whispering about how lucky you are to have such a man. But maybe it's the loss of agency, the lack of romance, that makes you sour at the thought of it all.

How lucky indeed, you think when he turns you to, lips a grim line, and eyes several degrees colder than the ocean at the bottom of the cliff.

"Right, then," he says, voice carrying the same echo as the barren gallows. "I suppose a kiss is in order? To seal it all?"

His kiss is just as cold as his words. The dream in your head blurs, turning black as it streaks with tendrils of tar.

Indeed, you think, breathing shuddering through the bergschrund of your lungs. Indeed, indeed, indeed—

Days bleed into weeks, months. Winter tangles into the seams of your new life, fraught with uncertainty and a deep-rooted despair.

Your husband is not a cruel man, you know this, but there is an absence that seems to linger between you. An absolute nothingness that permeates the air, thick and stifling. The duties shared in matrimony reek of responsibility and obligation. Checking the boxes of an itinerary to appease everyone else.

When he isn't in his war room, conduit to a bloody battle that seems to stretch into every crevice and corner of your life, he's weaving the merger (merger, because that's what it is; business first and foremost, romance an afterthought) into a new tapestry to proudly display the alliance of your families.

Favours gained to everyone, your father had said. Everyone except you, of course, for nothing of this acquisition, this farcical marriage, is of any benefit. It's a new cage, gilded though it may be with the finest gems embedded in bars made of gold.

Your mantra to get through the empty marriage bed, the isolation in this sprawling mausoleum where the people around you treat you like a tchotchke, a precious artefact meaningful in symbolism only, becomes: it could be worse.

And it could be.

Your brothers and sisters were married off to Lords and Counts and Kings who bestow their ownership in fine prints dusted across their neck, the gentle folds of their wrists. Cruelty is the only thing they've come to know after a lifetime spent languishing in a palace by the sea.

It could come to you, too, and you hold on to that. Cling to it until your knuckles protrude from your skin. It could be worse.

To avoid thinking of everything, anything, you hide yourself in the vast library, and find solace in the words printed on pages; tales and woes far greater than your own. You ignore it all, and it, in turn, ignores you.

Left to waste away in a palace that feels as desolate as the moon, and just as familiar, too.

It could be worse. It could be—

"My brother is returning," Griggs says, hands smoothing down the front of his shirt. There's an air of pride that seems to roll from beneath the small tick in his jaw. "You'll meet him soon. Do look your best, won't you?"

You murmur your assent, but your head is elsewhere. Still stuck in that room with Gaz whispering poems in your ear.

"Good."

He doesn't wait around long. There is no kiss goodbye, and he leaves the room without another glance in your direction.

The room always feels colder with him in it, but the broad expanse of his back hurrying through the door is just as chilling.

You don't think he ever wanted to be a husband, but your sympathy, your pity falls short of missing true authenticity. He could have said no. The peace would have still come. The war would have ended. Allied in matrimony was a spectacle for everyone else—a true, unbreakable union; the merging of two powerful lineages—but the point would have been made with a paper, too.

He condemned you to a life of lovelessness, a tchotchke no one knows how to act around, for the power it gave him. The dictation.

Griggs might have been happier with someone else, but his pride is gluttonous. Ravenous. He needed more, more, to cement himself as an important man, incapable of being usurped.

The pity you could feel is a saponaceous thing. There, maybe, but unable to be held; too slippery to touch. Each time you think you have a proper grip, you remember that he did this to himself, and he did this to you, and it falls back from where it came. Breaking into shards on the pavement.

You hate him. Hate yourself a bit more for not running away after Gaz when you had the chance.

(Too late. Too late.)

They fetch you later, wearing bright smiles on their faces as they talk about the return of the youngest Garrick. A hero, they wink, and you bask in their joviality after months of nothing but frigid indifference.

"A hero?" You question.

The lady nods. "He was in the war. I'm sure he'll tell you all about it. It's been so, so long since he's been home."

You tuck the information away with a soft smile.

"What is his name?"

He stands with his back to you, hands moving as he tells a story to his brother and the men situated around him. You feel the barren space in your chest thud.

You'd know him anywhere. The cape he wears around his shoulders is made from the fibres of you. In his warm palms sits your heart.

"His name is Kyle," they say, but you know him as Gaz.

He carries the same aloofness as his brother, an inherited trait, maybe, but where there's distance in the umber druse of Griggs, canyons and unreachable valleys, Gaz's is full of warmth. Flickering campfire in the distance. A gentle sea breeze. Tigers eye. Sard. He burns.

In spite of it all, you feel yourself unravelling under his heat.

"Hi," he swallows, and you hear the hitch in his breath. The stutter in his lungs. Those honeyed eyes warm just for you. "I hadn't realised your—" he stumbles, swallows again. You feel heat brush against your cheeks. Warm palms on cool skin. "Your wife, ah, was this beautiful."

It's under his younger brother's acknowledgement that your husband seems to preen; prideful, now, that someone has assured him of your worth.

"Yes," your husband murmurs, haughty and sure. "Quite the sight, no?"

"Yeah," Kyle breathes, and his warm breath leaves scorch marks on your cheeks. "Quite."

Griggs folds his pride neatly between his Duchenne smile, and the sight of it makes you want to weep. How could you not notice such blatant similarities between him and the man who snuck around the estate like it belonged to him?

Wilful ignorance, maybe.

You look away from them, glueing your eyes to the glossy wood waxed to perfection until all of the roughly hewn mahogany is gone, erased, now just a shadow of itself, and try not to wallow in the loss of it all.

There was real happiness in that alcove that now fills you with shame. Now poisoned by the rot you choked yourself on to protect him from the gangrenous mass growing inside of you. Shielding him from it all.

You wonder if he was doing the same, and the words come, rain against moss: soft and soundless, before you can swallow them down, too.

"Did you know?"

His hesitancy makes sense now, in hindsight. A lot of things do. The missing pieces to a puzzle you didn't try very hard to solve fit together.

How could you be so stupid? How could you—

There's a part of you that wonders if this was a ruse set up by your husband to test your—and your family's—loyalty to the Garricks. To wave a man in front of you, one who was patient and kind and much too good to be true, and see how hard you fall.

But Kyle looks at you in dismay, and the sight of it twisting across the face of the man you love—loved—is almost too much to bear.

He waits until the soldiers have passed before turning to you with a broken visage of a smile slipping across his face. His eyes are dark. Noculent.

"Did I know?"

He laughs but it's hollow. Empty. The vacancy in your chest aches at the hushed pain fracturing spiderwebs of grief over his expression.

"Of course I knew," he reaches for you, mouth turning downward, bitter and sad, at the way you flinch back, shying from his touch. But he's relentless, and you feel the burn of the sun, of searing stars, across the back of your hand when he runs his fingers over your skin. He dips down, wrist to vein to knuckles to—

Your heart pulses in his hand. Aching. Shattering.

"How could I not?" He inhales long and hard and takes all the air from the room. "When you're wearing my brother's ring?"

(The only sound made is the shattering of your heart still clutched in his warm palm.)

To torture yourself for your transgressions—a form of self-flagellation, maybe—you think about what might have happened if you met him first. If the silly pride of the men you're forced to place your faith into had abated long ago, and the one you were gifted to was Gaz.

You would have married in September when the world was still in a lush, green bloom; summer still clinging to its last vestiges and painting the world in cornstalk yellow and azure blue.

The heat on your cheeks. The sun scorching your back. A perfect equinox of summer into autumn. Your honeymoon spent under the sheets all winter. It would have been perfect.

He would have wed you on the shores instead of the cliff. He would have danced in the sand with your hands tangled in his. A mass of atoms merging into one.

He would have been able to love you the way he wants to, and you would have done the same.

It's a breathtaking hurt to think about such things. To dream of the life you would have lived and taste the sun on the tip of your tongue only to wake up in an empty bed with a ring on your finger that seems to grow tighter and heavier by the day.

Agony fills the gap in your chest, but sometimes it feels like it isn't enough, that it should hurt more because as much as it burns, as much as it aches, you always go back to him again. Drawn to his arms: moth to a flame.

You'll do it all again and again and again.

At dinner, his hand slides under the table.

You meet him in the middle, drawn there by a gravitational pull. Orion calling you. Cosmic dust fills your nose; a nebulous gossamer spooling over you in threads of weaving red.

His hand feels like Gaz's when it folds over yours, and in that, you find home.

When everyone breaks away, wandering back into their fixed places within the sprawling estate on the better side of the war (aided, in large part by your father's considerable contribution in the form of your dowry), he gives you a knowing wink from across the table, an amalgam of cheekiness and subtly, and parts for the evening as well, leaving you to alone in a room much too big for one person.

And so you go. Follow the familiar footsteps to the alcove where Kyle meets you by the door, palms flat on the frame as he leans in, pushing himself between the marble pillars, and kisses you until you see stars.

He always pulls away with a smile that looks like it costs him a shard of his soul. And maybe it does. Maybe it chips at yours, too, but nothing matters anymore when his hand drops to your waist and he pulls you into this secret room where nothing exists except you and him.

"Missed you, Gaz," you whisper, a secret confessional that no one should ever hear.

But he does, and his smile looks like it pains him. "Me, too, birdy."

It pains you, too, but maybe it should. Maybe it should hurt more because you're certain that there's no room in the great beyond for the person who falls in love with their husband's younger brother.

Unlearning Gaz to make room for Kyle brings up a strange assortment of emotions from within you. All slipping through the cracks that break apart against your skin, your person; hollow crevasses where you flayed yourself to give pieces to him.

It's a slow process filled with trepidation, guilt, and uncertainty—

He left you once, after all, and a little part of you fears that he'll do it again.

It gets harder to sneak away to the alcove with so many eyes on you—on Gaz. Kyle. Wonderstruck and filled with adoration, they follow his every move. Asking questions of his gallantry, of the war. Of the men he saved along the way.

He's overwhelmed by it all. You know him enough to see through the gossamer of temerity he weaves around himself in golden threads is as much of a farce as the marriage you find yourself locked into.

Broken people trying desperately to patch up the cracks with duct tape and false hope.

Still. Still.

Underneath it all, the heavy blanket of lies that saturates the air between you, the glances met in the middle of a crowded room, gentle touches hidden behind marble monoliths, it's still Gaz. The man who whispered Byron's prose in your ear, and laughed at the absurd humour nestled in the fine print from Poe. Argued the semantics of Pliny's lies and painted a beautiful picture in the seams of Homer's epics. Who breathed life into words on paper, and stained your hands with borrowed ink.

You love him. You love him.

But you're not allowed to.

Outside of the shared kiss between towering pillars, he barely touches you. Shunned, maybe, by the ring on your hand.

You try to hide it, to stifle it down. To play the part of a loving, adoring wife to the man who is barely ever home.

The alcove is forgotten. A place you pretend you don't know exists.

It sits on his shoulders just as heavily as it does yours, but what can you do?

You offer thin smiles and waning glances, hoping that this ache in your chest will dissipate with time—

nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?

—with distance.

But Kyle's hand brushes yours in corners concealing your sin in thick drapes of tenebrous. Touches gentle and sparse. A tentative reacclimation of your still kindling love. It burns in these small moments, setting fire to the world around you until it's ashes in your palm. Where nothing matters except the heat of his skin on yours.

"Missed you," he whispers in empty hallways. "Miss you so much, birdy, I can't stand it—"

"So don't," you breathe, silken petals on wrought iron. "Don't, Gaz—"

His responding groan is agony. The groyne splits into halves.

The sound of it ripens in your barren chest.

It's a heavy secret to keep, a burden that squeezes uncomfortably between your ribs. There's fear, of course—while the laws are no longer as archaic as they once were, no one would go after Griggs if he discovered this burgeoning affair and decided to kill you. Many would consider it justified. Even without knowing the way your heart beat so brilliantly when Kyle was near, or the feeling of permafrost that covered your flesh whenever Griggs deigned to touch you.

Your own safety is a caveat to your secrecy, but you can feel the tension between Griggs and Kyle—some heavy, awful thing that rots in the air whenever they're together; and it goes beyond simple jealousy. You'll do whatever you can to protect him. To hold his soul in your palm, and keep it safe from the world that wants to hurt it. So, you swallow it all, and hide—

But one of the guards that came with Kyle, a soldier you think, greets you one morning and with his sharp smirk, shatters the illusion of safety you've constructed around yourself like it was a cheap, glass toy.

He dips his head, and you blink at the cut of his hair—a mohawk, and quite unusual for this side of the court where there's always an air of propriety and decorum; a stuffy sense of prestige—but the confusion is bit down the middle when he smirks.

"Don't worry. Yer secrets safe w'me."

"Oh," you murmur. Oh.

"Does anyone else know?" You ask one evening, eying the way the man with the unusual Mohawk seems to smirk whenever you and Kyle are near. "About us?"

Kyle's easy grin turns sheepish. "Ah, well. My friend—Soap—" you make a face, and he grins. "Don't worry. His parents didn't really name him that. His name is Johnny. We fought together, with Price. He knows, but only because he's so bloody observant. He looks stupid, but he isn't. He's probably the smartest man in the room…"

You let the admission sit in your tongue, tasting the weight of being known, and gauging how it fits between your molars. You'd be able to kiss him freely, to love him openly, wholly. No one would even blink if you leaned over, resting your weary head on his shoulder after a long day in the waning summer sun. A kiss to his cheek would be as natural as the cool indifference etched in the harsh lines of Griggs’ face when he regards you each morning he deigns to join everyone at the table. The guards barely blink when he brushes his fingers over the back of your hand—a facsimile of a happy marriage for the men who watch you just as coldly as he does—and you imagine it's Gaz instead. Where there sits a frigid tundra is instead a lush savannah full of warmth. An oasis heated under the sun.

A callous touch becomes a kiss.

You would shy away from his affection, but your heart would thrill with the pleasure of his love. The openness in which he regards you—something to be cherished, worshipped. Your cheeks would burn in a flustered embarrassment as Soap barely tried to hide a jesting leer behind his cup, but it would be no match for the way your heart sang under the solace.

Something creeps along the edges of your periphery. A phantom sensation that rots you from the inside out, makes you glow green—

Avarice. It takes you a moment to realise what it means, what this strange feeling in your chest is, but—

You're jealous of that person, that fictional you in the fantasy, who has everything in the palm of your hand but still shies away from his touch.

Stupid. Stupid. It's so silly. So foolish. Your lips tug downward in a sharp, steep frown.

Kyle watches the flickering emotions pass by, and quickly shakes his head, but how would he know the rotten tangle of contradictions within your heart?

"I trust Soap with my life." His words are sharp with his sincerity, and you know instantly the harshness isn't meant to scold, but to reinforce. He's trying to convince you of the same. You feel it in the sure way he reaches out for you, laying his hands on your shoulder, making you see the truth in his words as he speaks them aloud. "And I trust him with yours, too."

His probity thickens the air.

"Okay," you say. Okay. You bring your hand up, pressing it against the steady beat of his heart. It's firm, true. You want it to echo in the hollow of your veins forever. "Then I trust him, too."

And, oh, how he smiles, then—

(Avarice. How could that be when you have the brilliance of his grin stretched out in front of you? When Kyle stands before you, the most beautiful kouros you'd ever seen?

That you who shies away from his touch ought to be jealous because in the palm of your hand sits pure happiness.)

The visits to the alcove become a distant memory. Large vacuums of time where you're both missing will undoubtedly raise suspicion, and with Kyle's return, Griggs seems determined to play the role of a dutiful husband. His personal passel of guards follows you around, an ever-watchful shadow.

"He's not suspicious," Kyle shakes his head when you inquire about this presence. Was it something you've done? But no. "It's something a husband—" the disdain in the word makes you blink, but he leaves no room for you to ask: "—would do. And he's all about appearances. He's doing this because he thinks I'll notice if he doesn't."

With the alcove dashed—mourned over in the evening when you pass it by, fingers slipping sorrowfully into the cold vacuum—he whispers to meet him in the library instead.

You spend many hours just sitting together, gauging the appropriate distance in the frown that lines the guard's face as he takes you in. All proper and cold. Polite indifference. You yearn to have Soap watch over the two of you instead, but Griggs is firm about his men watching you.

(Following you.)

You pretend to be two people who have never known the taste of each other's breath, or the way his heart thundered under your palm. His lips on your lashes, smothering you in tentative kisses as he bid you that final farewell as Gaz.

The dance gets easier.

You lounge on the chaise with a book open on your lap—sonnet sixty-five—and play the dutiful spouse happy to see your husband's younger brother when he wanders in, his own book tucked between his forearm and side. A pantomime of a happy family.

He sits at a respectable distance after a perfunctory greeting, and opens his own book—Lancelot, le Chevalier de la charrette—and pretends he isn't more invested in meeting your furtive stare than he is at the plight of a lovelorn knight.

Each meeting seems to triplicate the growing tension that has been there since he fell asleep one afternoon, still moonlighting as Gaz and sleepily turned toward you with eyes made of melted pennies and crushed umber. Soft, molten, and just for you. Just for you.

"Sorry, birdy," he whispered, voice thick and rough from sleep. "Didn't mean to pass out on you…"

It was then that your heart began to struggle. Frantically pulling and pulling at the ivory prison it was kept inside until it became loose and freed itself from the confines of your ribs—a gnarled, rotting birdcage where it was meant to moulder for an eternity—and lept to him. The permafrost on its flesh melted the closer it got to him, to his touch, his warmth.

Gaz runs hot. A lavascape. Thermal springs.

(How could you have ever expected it to stay with you, shivering from the cold, when he soaked up the blistering heat of the sun?)

It's easy to toe the edge of that unseen precipice in these quiet moments. To shuffle closer when the guard watching over you leaves, satisfied that no harm with befall you (and encouraged by Gaz, warrior of the Garrick house, to take a break, to rest); to lean into the space he occupies until the heady scent of him—charred bundles of pine, evergreen, sycamore; the brininess of his sweat—fills your nose until you're lost in a daze, a cloud, where only you and he exist. A microcosm of your own making.

He lets you rest your head on his shoulder as he reads to you about the perils of his latest book, voice a deep ravine, a fusillade against the palm you lay flat on his chest.

But the peaceful innocence of a gentle love shatters when he begins the passage.

Lancelot and Gunivere.

Everything about it, them, makes you burn.

His hands tremble, voice cracks. Adultery. Sin. It sucks the air from the room until you struggle to breathe.

How could they? You ask, the stutter in your voice tangible. How could they?

Gaz presses his nose against your crow and breathes in deep. His whisper curls around your bones. How could they not?

(How indeed.)

Lancelot and Gunivere give in.

Gaz places his hand on your wrist, eyes burning coals in the fading sunlight, and you find a question in those sweltering depths. A plea.

They did it, so why not us?

You taste sweet jasmine petals and green cardamom when he leans in, his breath ghosting across your lips, your tongue.

"Finally—" the word is mangled in his throat, shorn off by a groan when your lips touch his. Tentative and sweet. The slow unfurling of a late summer's morning when the shade is cool, but the sun burns your skin. A languid unfurl.

When he opens his eyes, a slow, dreamy blink, you're reminded of an old calico you had back home. A lazy beast who was fed a little bit by everyone around it because no one could say no when it would mew up at them with large, glossy eyes. You caught it one morning on your balcony, slumbering next to the picked bones of a fish it must have snatched from the men at the harbour—the ones who always sent him on his way with a little herring or a piece of tuna. It blinked then, slow and full of torpor, much like Gaz right now, before it yawned, paws stretching across cement before it rolled over, soaking up the heat on its round, full belly.

His likeness to that little beast fills you with longing for home, for the crystalline shores of a port town where everyone smiled at you, and didn't pretend you weren't there. Where you felt safe and happy and—

Gaz kisses you again, and it feels like you're there, standing in the square of the market, surrounded by jovial chatter and old ladies haggling the price of a fatty tuna and a pinching lobster. It's a warm embrace surrounded by familiarity. You lean into him and wonder if he'd leave here with you. If he'd run away back to your home.

But you'd never ask because he'd never go. He would never betray his family like that just like yours would never accept you back.

You're content with this. This sin is enough.

Enough, enough, enough.

The word becomes a mantra as winter slips deftly into spring. As the ground blooms in swaths of green, and the air turns balmy as the sun awakens from its hibernation.

Enough, you think when Gaz presses his hands against yours beneath the table, eyes darker than obsidian and streaked with want, green with greed.

Enough. Enough—

His kisses grow deeper as if he's trying to swallow you whole. To devour every part of you until nothing remains in this earthly realm; until the entirety of you is locked tight inside of him, safe and sound, and just for him.

He kisses you like he's desperate. Like he's in pain and you're an antidote to his misery.

(But when he moans so achingly against your lips until the vibrations run through your skin, making them tingle, you feel more like a poison. The catalyst.)

And maybe you are. Maybe every cell in your body is infectious, and he's been syphoning from the noxious sap that pools on your tongue. You, the personification of pestilence dragging him down, rotting him from the inside out. Him, the hapless victim.

It would make sense, that. You've always been awful—so greedy for him, and wilful in the sins you're willing to commit against your marriage.

"Fuck, birdy," he pants into the seam of your lips, nose grazing your cheek.

You're burning. Feverish.

You want, want, want—

"If we don't stop now," he says at length, fingers knotting into the fabric around your waist.

Bunched in his fist, it pulls at the hem until just a sliver of your skin is revealed. His thumb brushes the heat of your flesh, then—whether by accident or design, you don't know, but the feeling of him, naked and bare, makes you shake, makes your stomach quiver under his touch.

There have been moments before this when it was just the sateen slide of skin on skin. The prickle of coarse hairs dusting across his forearms. The heat of his flesh searing your fingerprints. You've mapped the ridges and valleys of his face between your palms. Know, quite intimately, the way his cheekbones feel pressed tight to your lifeline. The little flutter of his lashes before he dips his chin, catching the inner knuckle of your thumb between plump lips.

The stubble around his jaw tickles your hand and your upper lip when he kisses you softly. His nose presses into the skin of your cheek when he bows his head to syphon the air from your lungs. Or the soft push of his lips when he kisses the tip of your nose the weight of his hands on your waist, keeping you close.

He likes to bring your hand up to the light sometimes, fingers laced together, palms locked in a tango, and charts the way the sun scatters over your flesh.

You know him. You know Gaz, Kyle.

But this—

The rough graze of his dry thumb trailing over your belly makes you tremble, and heats you up from the inside out.

It's too much. It's too much. It's—

You mewl his name. A soft plea.

Gaz groans like you've gutted him.

"Oh, fuck, birdy—"

—not enough.

He kisses you until you’re breathless, stealing small snippets of your soul with each fervid lash of his tongue on yours, chasing the poison leaking from within.

(Poison, maybe—)

Gaz pulls away from your mouth with a reluctant dip of his chin. A mournful sound spills from his wet, bruised lips, but he doesn't give in and kiss you again. He rests his forehead on yours, and you feel the heat of him bleeding into you. Sweat drips from his hairline, and tickles your skin. You want to glisten in it. To drench yourself in him, wear it like shiny, new skin. The whole world would know then, that you belonged to him.

(—or sweet nectarean.)

"Can't—," he makes another noise in the back of his throat when his thumb reaches higher, tip skirting the rim of your belly button. Your flesh is damp. Slick with sweat. You feel the fever in your veins, leaking from the cracks in your marrow. "Can't do this, birdy—"

He swallows. You hear the click in his throat like a gunshot cutting through a field.

(You, the hapless fool, standing right in its trajectory.)

It must show on your face. The suddenness of your dismay, your confusion, because Gaz lifts his hand from where it was clenched tight around the back of the chaise and presses his knuckle against your hairline. A soft rap on your skin.

Knocking sense into this head of yours, he joked once when you'd jump with fear over each noise made in the hallways. Mind always spinning, looping; weaving knots of spooled anxiety between each synapse.

He does it now, too, and despite yourself—and the anguish notching inside your chest (does he not want to? Does he not want you? After all this time, is he going to change—?)—your burning lips quirked up in a small smile.

"—m'not gonna change my mind," he's whispering to the fearful, vindictive hisses in the back of your head. His knuckle drags down your temple, trailing up the incline of your cheekbone. Gaz's eyes are cloudy with want when he lifts his chin up, reinforcing his words with a blistering stare. "Just not—not here—not for our first time. You deserve better than a stuffy library."

Nothing he says reeks of deception. There's nothing hidden beneath the surface that will come and tear you apart later. He's suffering in this just as much as you are. The weight of your combined guilt will surely crush you both one day, but it will be together. Together. And—

You splinter down the middle at his words.

You reach up, cupping his fist in the palm of your hand. "Yes," you murmur, soft and full of adoration. "I want that, too. I want that for us."

Kyle smiles and you think of a supernova.

With your shared acknowledgement of this, this, and the inevitability of where it's all heading, Kyle seems to grow bolder. Boastful. More wanting.

His touches linger. His smile seems to grow when you're around.

"I don't want you to get hurt," you confess, hushed and severe as he peppers kisses down the column of your neck. "I don't know what they'll do to you if we get caught, but—"

He grunts. "We won't."

"Kyle—"

"My brother is the most daft man who's ever lived. You think he'll notice anything at all?"

This, too, is new, but only just. You know there is animosity between them—covered in a thick layer of propriety and feigned familial affection—and that it doesn't have much to do with you. Not at first, anyway. This grudge they foster spans far beyond your arrival, but you're not oblivious to the way Kyle seems to grow darker, more possessive each morning after you've retired with his brother in tow.

He kisses you under the shade of a marble pillar when no one is looking as if he's trying to erase the memory of him from your skin.

He pulls away when you hesitate, brow knotted in a touch of contempt that hardens his words into a mallet.

"He hasn't even noticed that you don't love him. Do you really think he'll find out about us?"

"That's—"

It's true. He doesn't question you when you disappear for most of the day, making sparse sightings around the estate just to have a story in place in case someone begins to wonder why you and Kyle are always absent at the same time. Not that it matters much, really. No one has.

No one will, he promised. Not a single fucking person here likes the bastard. Do you think they'll rat us out? Run to my older brother and tell on me?

You acquiesce, but it sits in your stomach like a stone.

"I've been reading something," he tells his brother at dinner, eyes dancing with derision over veal. "About Lancelot and Gunivere."

You tense in your chair, knuckles whitening from the grip you have on your fork. That statement alone feels like a confession.

But your husband doesn't even spare you a glance. "Really? Sounds—stuffy."

"It's really good," Gaz grins at you, wide and sharp—a mouthful of fanged teeth—and you feel the heat spume in your belly. "You should read it sometime."

"I think I'll pass." He reaches for the glass of wine with a muted shake of his head. He'll be busy all night, he murmurs—much too busy for silly books.

Beneath the thick oak table, you kick Gaz in his shin, lips turning down in askance. A silent admonishment that doesn't quite reach your eyes.

He doesn't stop grinning.

"I really want to kiss you right now."

The words are a heated whisper that barely catches on the towering stelae concealing you both from prying eyes.

It's wrong, you know. Heinous in the way that these sorts of affairs usually are. Wrongness emanates from your coupling, sinfully detestable; it calls upon illicit evils and conjures images of damnation and dread from the pit of your stomach, but—

"Yes," you breathe, heart sitting heavy in your throat. "God, yes. Please, Gaz—"

When he presses his lips to yours, it feels like coming home. It feels right. Like the shape of them were made to fit the curve of yours.

How could it be wrong when it feels like this? When you can taste nirvana in his gentle breath, feel the burn of heaven on your skin when he touches you tenderly.

It can't be wrong. It can't be—

Kyle lays you down on the daybed made of silk and dark pine, and touches places that feel like they were made to bear his fingerprints, to carry his mark.

There's a quiet reverence in the way he seeks you out, learning new arning the new flesh bared to his eager gaze, his wanting hands. A soft propitiation. Each stroke of his fingers on your body is painted in adoration, love, until you’re covered in the hues he makes of you. A pastiche in shades of love, passion. It seeps into the crevasses, and the valleys; floods your pores and burrows into your bloodstream.

You colour so prettily under him.

And he, a painter, an artist, pulls back in the fading light from the waning sun and admires his masterpiece.

“You’re so fuckin’ perfect,” he rasps, nearly choking on the words as they claw their way out of his chest. “I could stay like this forever. Wake up to the sight for the rest of my life.”

It sounds more like a promise than it does a wish, and your heart aches for him, for you. For this moment that ought to be hung from the walls for all to see, to know, but instead is tucked inside a corner, hidden behind walls. You want to scream aloud how much you revere him, and love him, but the precariousness of it all dampens your voice. Dousing water on an incipient flame that hasn’t even had the chance to bloom.

“Oh, Kyle—” Grief scorches his name until it’s charred, leaving stains of soot and ash between your teeth.

He bends down, stealing the sorrow from your tongue. “Just for now, birdy, just for a minute—”

He takes your hand in his—tender and bleeding warmth—and lifts it high above your head until your knuckles graze the pine of your headboard before he settles over you, broad shoulders blocking out the dying sunset until all you can see, all you can feel, is him.

“This is just for us. Just for us—” Kyle swallows the anguish so it doesn’t hurt you anymore. “Let’s just pretend for a moment?”

And you do.

“If I could steal you away from him, I would.”

It’s a balmy confession into your crown as he holds you tight. The steady beat of his heart is a testament to the truth in his words, and you long to burrow inside his chest, to fold yourself between the gaps in his ribs, and stay there for as long as he’ll let you.

(And if it’s forever, you will merge into his bones until you’re suffused into his marrow.)

“I’d take you away right now.”

You think of that cat without an owner. The one who sleeps on any balcony that’s kissed by the sun and eats fatty tuna by the sea. It’s homeless but that doesn’t matter: it was never meant to be trapped inside where the sun cannot caress the soft spot between his ears, or tickle his chin.

Sometimes he lounges on the top of the seawall, batting lazily at the waves, and you’ve always thought that was the meaning of freedom. To do whatever he pleased, to go whenever he wanted. To brush his body against the ankles of passersby, enjoying brief comfort in the arms of a stranger before wandering off to pester the tabby who mewled at him from behind thick glass.

Living that life blinks by, coloured in shades of flaxen and azure; warm honey, melted gold. Glittering pennies by the shore. Sand between your toes. Hot pavement burning your feet.

A little house—white stucco and royal blue trim—by the sea; living there in perpetuity with him.

You think about asking, then. Voicing this little sapling aloud, nurturing it into growth. To make it real. To escape with him, and run until you find another alcove hidden between marble; a place just for the two of you.

But you don’t. The words sour in your throat.

It isn’t that he’ll say no that keeps the words at bay, but the fear that he’ll say yes.

You’ll do whatever you can to protect him—even at the expense of yourself. Your happiness.

(You’re content with this. This is enough.)

“Sounds lovely,” you whisper into his skin. “Maybe one day…”

And you tell him about that place. The cat that reminds you of him. The white house near the shore with a rickety pier you used to stand on for hours, just gazing out at the sea.

He pulls you closer. "We'll go there. Just the two of us."

This—your consummation—breaks everything open.

The feverish desire that bloomed turns rapacious—a near-constant ache from within that feels unquenchable even when you're still burning from the phantom whisper of Kyle's touch.

That little taste was just a morsel. It whets the palette of the beast that resides in your soul, but it's ravenous. Starved. It wants and wants—unslaked with just a simple touch.

You're not alone in this devastating agony, this heedless need. Gaz must feel it, too, because those soft, tender kisses turn biting and aggressive; possessiveness seems to bleed into the space where his body isn't touching yours. He rushes out the guard the moment you walk into the library, clumsy in his haste to finally be alone with you. To explore the charted valleys of your body and marvel at the way they seem to fit his peaks perfectly.

("Made for me," he breathes against your collarbones. "Just like I was made for you.")

The broken levee is shattered at your feet. In the sudden rush of water, you become clumsy. Jaded with apathy when you're not in his arms, and careless with your passion.

The book lay discarded on the table when Gaz slides his hand up your knee.

"Again?"

Your name comes out in a needy huff. "And again. And again. And—"

Sometimes, in Kyle's arms, you seem to forget that you're married. That his brother waits for you to finish combing your hair before he climbs into bed, murmuring soft nothings about the world around you, and how it all fits.

He's quite taken with philosophy, you find, gazing at yourself in the mirror. It's startling to see how much you've changed since you first were told of this whole affair—the war, marriage, and how that single piece of paper, and this heavy ring, would be the cause to end it all. You were a sunken shell of yourself. Hollow, empty.

But your cheeks are fuller now. The corners of your eyes creased with laugh lines. Your lips were redder from the kiss Gaz snatched before you were whisked away.

You look different. Sunkissed. That cosy home on the cove, white stucco and royal blue, buoys in your mind again. With the sure set of your shoulders, and the ghost of a smile still whispering across your lips, you know that this is the closest you've ever come to being the first set of footprints in the sand.

You almost reach for it.

Let me go—

"And Price is alive, I suppose, so that complicates things."

His reflection waves a flippant hand when you dart to him, half visible in the corner of the mirror.

"What—?"

Price. That name sounds familiar—

My captain, he whispers, tapping out a skewed rhythm on his bent knee. The hat dangles from the tip of his finger, but despite the almost careless disregard he shows for the item, you know it'll never touch the floor. Was a good man, but stone cold when he needed to be. Willing to do all the shite we couldn't. Respected him a lot, you know? Looked up to Price…

"He's been imprisoned by Makarov for the last three years. Prisoner of war." He shrugs like it means nothing, but you suppose to him, a man whose signature is on tonnes of death certificates made in limbo during the war, it would be. "A right nightmare."

"Are you—? Have you told G—your brother?"

He scoffs. "No. The last thing I need is for him to run off and try to free him. Bad enough the Mactavishs' have heard whispers and haven't stopped pestering since then."

He moves closer until he's situated behind you, and for a moment you're startled by the sight of him. In the fading twilight, he looks striking. Where Gaz seems to glow in daybreak, illuminated by the coruscating sun and creating an almost breathtaking sfumato of copper, umber, warm gold, amber, and raw honey, his brother, by contrast, is suited for dusk. It casts shadows beneath his lashes, under his cheekbones, in a chiaroscuro.

The contrast between them is unmissable—Gaz is made of starlight, and meant for sunrise and sunsets; and his brother for moonlight, for overcast days in Autumn—and it bludgeons into you, a mallet to your chest.

The impact breaks everything into pieces, everything you thought you held firm. Guilt puddles to the surface, and overflows in a great deluge until you're swallowed down, falling into the abyss.

You can't think about it.

"Gaz will be furious if he finds out you kept this from him."

"Gaz?" He repeats, head tilting to the side. In the reflection, your eyes widen. "You call him Gaz? You're both rather close, aren't you?"

Your heart leaps to your throat, thudding painfully with each panicked thought that races through your mind, a cacophony of does he know? and when did he find out?

Gaz called him daft. Oblivious now that the power of ruling over the court was in his hands. In many ways, it's true—his visits have been infrequent, sparse; and when he was there, his mind seemed miles away. It made the guilt churning in your stomach settle when he'd pass on a message that he wouldn't be retiring for the evening in your shared suit, but would be busy with other things. His absence was a notable gap in the estate, and without him there, you'd slipped so easily into Gaz. Fanning the flames that burned so brightly in the alcove all those months ago.

He wasn't around enough to witness anything, and you've always been so careful. Hiding behind pillars, and sneaking into empty rooms. Evading the prying eyes of your appointed guard and the passel of workers who drifted around the halls as they needed. No one saw anything except the carefully curated picture of stumbling upon each other in the library where you both went to read, and you're sure that any reports he might have gotten would attest to this.

It abates some of the panic, but there's a keenness in his narrowed eyes that makes you bluster. He knows you're not—in love with him, and so, your hesitation around him should be obvious. Normal. Nothing has changed except sometimes you catch yourself frowning at his back, desperately trying to pretend you weren't wishing he was Gaz when he rolled over in your shared bed. And maybe you pay more attention to Gaz at dinner instead of him, but how could he glean anything from that when his mind was elsewhere the entire time? When his circuit of advisors whispered in his ear and drew his attention away? It's normal. All of it. Everything you and Kyle have ever done in public is perfect chase, acceptable.

You swallow thickly and his eyes drop to the smooth column of your throat, buoying in the reflection. There's something there in crushed amber, something knowing and horrid. It curdles your stomach, twisting in knots that keep looping over itself in tight tangles.

"No more so than most."

His narrowed eyes slide across the unblemished skin of your neck, and pause on the soft patch of flesh beneath your jaw. Your heart seizes. The phantom graze of Kyle's fanged canines brims. He's grown rather fond of burying his face into the column of your throat, nipping along your sensitive neck. That place in particular he often peppers a series of soft kisses to before suckling on a patch of skin, drawing it between his lips, his teeth.

But it's unmarked.

Kyle knew his brother would be home tonight. It's untouched for that reason. And yet, he lingers there. Watchful. Keen. Is that suspicion in his eyes or has he always carried dark ravines in those drusy depths?

You swallow again. An excuse—you need—

But he speaks before any form in the roaring tangle of your thoughts, and his tone is—upbraided. You burn. Shame, maybe. But no more guilt. Just—

Fear. Panic.

"Mm, I suppose so."

The next morning, he presses a kiss to your numb lips when he wakes. It's soft. Chaste, almost. There's something sweet about it—but it's cloying. Saccharine. It rots your teeth.

Thoughts begin to loop inside your head, weaving messy tangles as they arc high above before battering into the soft ceiling. There's a sense of chaos to them; unfettered terror. They push and push against the walls but there's no escape from their domed prison. They slip past, but they're sluggish even in their fright as if moving through thick molasses. Syrupy. Soporific.

But as he stands from the bed, and turns to you with a cold smile, one tangles around the tips of your fingers in a muted panic, seeking comfort from your own hand:

He knows.

He must because Griggs waits for you—an uncharacteristic move that only serves to reinforce the fear curdling, sour and acrid, in the pit of your stomach because he never stays, never lingers—and gives you no time to tell Kyle anything. About Price, about his brother and the poorly kept secret.

You wonder when he must have figured it out as you comb through your wet hair, gazing vacantly at the etiolated spectre in the mirror. Was it when Kyle had you against the marble pillar? Mewling his name out in a scorching benediction to the night as he held you tighter than ever before, whispering hymns into the sweat-slicked heat of your neck? Or in the library when he spread your thighs apart, locking your knees on his shoulders, and took you to nirvana with just his mouth.

Or maybe it was all of it. Each gentle touch, and press of his lips painted you in a mosaic of colour for everyone to see, to know. Every stain is a testament to the devotion echoing inside your heart for a man who is not your husband.

Your face, once full and lustrous, falls sallow, clouding with determination.

You'll save the man who makes you burn—no matter the cost.

Despite the watchful eye he keeps on you, locked to his side, a prisoner in your own home, Gaz finds out about Price.

Whispers, maybe, through the halls. The guards. Whatever the reason for the leak, you can see the way it makes his older brother burn with barely concealed fury. How dare they speak when he told them not to?

It's matched by Gaz's own anger when he storms into the dining hall, eyes blazing with vigour. His wrath makes them darken to smouldering coal, and guncotton. You can almost smell the acrid burn of salt peate in the air.

He seems to stutter in his march at the sight of you sitting so close to his brother, an unusual discovery, and you know the growing crease between his brows is in response to that, to the scant space between his arm and yours. You long to reach out, to tell him he knows, run, but the words are swallowed when Griggs drops his hand to your wrist, silencing you.

Kyle takes in the sight with a steep tug of his lips, a flash of teeth, but he says nothing about it. Can't, you know. Can't because it isn't isn't his place.

Instead, he seethes, and turns to Griggs with his nostrils flaring. "Price is alive?"

Griggs tuts. "How did you find out?"

"That doesn't matter. When are we going after him?"

It’s cut down with a swift shake of his brother’s head. “We're not. It’s too reckless. We’ll end up back in war with Makarov, and I’m not going to allow—”

“So we just leave him there—?!”

A nod comes and you’ve never felt anything colder, more callous than that.

“Unbelievable! You’re just going to let him rot?”

“We’ll negotiate, but if it goes nowhere—”

“The MacTavishs won’t settle for this. Soap and Ghost won't, either.”

Griggs leans back in his chair, eyes narrowing. “Well, they have little say in the matter, don’t they?”

"Are you serious?"

He nods, and Kyle bears his teeth in disgust. "Price's predicament is of his own doing, not ours—"

"His own—?!" Rage turns his words caustic. Fury paints them charcoal black. "Some fuckin' leader you are! You've got a kingdom falling into disarray and a spouse that doesn't love you, so what do you know?" He scoffs, skewering his glare at the way Griggs' hand rests over your wrist. "War hero, they called you, but all I see is a fool. A coward. He was twice the man you'll ever be."

Kyle looks to you, then, nostrils flaring in his fiery anger, his hurt, but he waits. He waits for you.

This is it. That moment he spoke of—steal you from right under his nose—and there's hope blooming in the fibres of your chest at his proposal. Run with me, his eyes scream, beseeching you. Run with me now. Leave this place. We'll make do on our own.

Your mouth opens, but Griggs digs his fingers into your wrist. A warning. Griggs' grip is tight. Paralysing. You can't move. Can't—

The betrayal flashes across Kyle's face as he realises you're not going, you're not moving, and it rips through your core like the serrated edge of a white-hot knife, tearing your flesh into scraps, into pieces. They hang from your ruined flesh in drapes of agony, but nothing hurts more than the anguish on his face when his fist closes around the mournful brag of your heart in his palm.

Keep it, you think. Keep it safe. It's always been yours. Always, always—

"Careful, brother," his tone is low, a rough scrape that cuts through the stifling heat of Kyle's trembling fury. It chills you. "That might get you in trouble one day, to speak so ill of your future king."

"That's what it's about, isn't it?" He spits. "Playing nice with Makarov so you get to be king? While Price fucking rots?! I'm not going to let you do this—"

"And who did this in the first place, Kyle?" He turns to you with a coy tilt of his chin. "Did he ever tell you?" At your confused expression, he seems to scoff. "Of course not. They're always the righteous ones, aren't they? Who do you think caused this war between Makarov? Who prodded the beast when he wasn't supposed to?"

Price is a bit… bloodthirsty when he sets his mind to something. Hard-headed. He'd have stopped at nothing to get Makarov—

"That's—" Kyle's eyes cut to you. "That's not—"

"Was it not you? Not Price? Did you not go and meddle where you shouldn't have, and cause this all to happen? Tell me I'm lying, Kyle."

"You bastard," he seethes, but he doesn't refute his claims.

Your stomach plummets. This war was the reason you were made to leave your home, the sandy shores and the fat, lazy cat. The reason you had to marry Griggs.

Your eyes burn with unshed tears. No, no. "Tell me that isn't true—"

"Oh? Had he not told you?" Griggs coos. "Did you know that you were supposed to marry him?"

I should have been here. I should have been—

You couldn't have stopped it, Kyle.

…yeah. Yeah, I—

"Yes, you were meant to marry Kyle all along but he was too busy running around the countryside chasing after ghosts to be wed." He leans down, whispering mockingly in your ear until it burns. "A shame, isn't it? That you could have been his all along."

No, no, no—

He says your name, but it's strangled in his throat. "That's not—I didn't know—I had to–to find Price—"

His question is at the forefront of your mind. Mocking, now. Cruel. Are you happy at least? And, oh, how painful it is to have your heart cloven in two.

There's a part you have to play to ensure Kyle's safety. A facade you must wear. The dutiful spouse does not leave their husband's side.

And so, you sit. You stay, and you break into pieces when Gaz's shoulders shake with the weight of his grief, of yours, and he turns his back to you.

It can't go on like this. It can't.

Griggs strokes your pulse with the flat of his thumb. "Good choice."

Outside the dining hall, you can hear Kyle calling out to the men around him, ordering them into action. His voice is a powerful weapon, and he wields it with cutting precision, slicing down any question of his authority, his goal.

You wonder what Griggs thinks about his men being tethered so tightly to Kyle, more loyal to him than their own eventual King.

You wonder, too, if this was why he didn't show up to wed you. How cruel. How—

"What did he mean by that?" He asks, glancing down at the ring on your hand. "A spouse that doesn't love you. What does love have to do with anything?"

And you break.

"It's a bit important, isn't it?" You snarl. "But you knew—you knew—"

For the first time since you've met him, he cracks a small smile, and the sight nearly cloves your heart in two.

It's misery. It's resignation.

"I can't relinquish you from this contract, you know I can't. The moment I do, I yield the power to keep Makarov away from my family. If you get caught, you'll be punished. Kyle will, too. Adultery used to be ground for execution but—" his smile, then, is an ugly, gnarled thing. "How am I meant to kill the brother I'm doing all of this to protect? How could I possibly become King with my younger brother's blood on my hands? But you… I can't be a foolish wittol."

"So, what will you do?"

He moves closer, arms folding over his chest. "Kyle is smart. Pragmatic. But when it comes to that man, well…" he offers a wan smile. "He's quite reckless. He'll go after him, of course. But I can't have that. I'll send him away."

"Where?"

"North, maybe. Send him on a merry chase through the countryside while I negotiate with Makarov."

"Gaz would never go. He's too smart. He'll see through it."

"I've never seen my brother so happy before…" There's a touch of wistfulness in his voice. A hint of regret, maybe. But when it looks at you, all you see is nothing. A frigid wasteland. "And I guess that's because of you, isn't it? So, you'll send him away. You'll tell him to go. And he will because it's you."

"No. No—"

"You will. You know you will, because accidents happen, don't they?" His smile is vicious. The threat, the implication, curls around your throat. "And we wouldn't want that, would we?"

Griggs is far more cunning than you could have ever imagined.

"His hubris was your undoing," he murmurs, smoothing out the collar of your shirt. "Lancelot, le Chevalier de la charrette. He thinks I'm an ignorant fool, and always has because my idea of valour is much less—" his lips twitch. "Bloody than his. Or the Barbarians he sides with. You see, we never really got along much these days. I always thought Price should have been thrown in prison where he belongs for the stunt he pulled. The only reason he wasn't—well, Makarov got there first, didn't he?"

"You hate him this much?"

"He nearly got my brother killed," he says, but you know there's more to it. "And he killed Barkov. Caused a massive uproar in Urzikstan. You know they supported my rise to the throne? It was quite a nightmare to have to pick up the pieces and make excuses as to why it was covered up. Foolish, the lot of them. And that Riley—"

"I don't know him—"

"Of course," he cuts you off with a wave of his hand. "It doesn't matter. You're going to send Kyle away. You're going to tell him you hate him, you never want to see him again. You wish he was dead. All those dramatic things, yes? And then he'll leave. He'll go with his guard under the careful orders of General Shepherd and Graves."

The names are meaningless to you—maybe you heard them in passing a long time ago, but they don't register any sense of familiarity, and you tuck them away with little more than a numbed nod.

"Good. Now do what you're told, and we'll pretend this little—ah, affliction—never happened."

It did, you want to scream. It happened. It was real. It was.

But in spite of your conviction, the unignorable weight of Kyle's involvement in this—in ripping you away from your home and into the cold embrace of a man you don't know, couldn't ever come to love—splits your resolve, and funnels the same anguish he tried to hard to swallow down into your heart.

Griggs has you wait for Kyle near the entrance hall, standing bereft of comfort and numbed in the antechamber as he assembles his soldiers in the symposium down the hall.

You haven't seen him since he stormed out, and it feels as if you've been gutted and hollowed out. A trojan horse meant to mislead and deceive. Caught in a political game of euchre between two brothers you have a tangible relationship with. You know which side you're on, who you'll always pick in the end, but still.

It stands out again just how guileful Griggs is, and how deep those roots go. The unveiling truth of Gaz's involvement in the war is meant to shatter the relationship between you into pieces he can exploit. The betrayal sets everything up for him—pawns to his victory—and you're meant to lash out, to hate Gaz for this slight against you. A tool to inveigle him to the opposite side of where Makarov is while Griggs continues to play games behind the scenes. Master puppeteer. He'll play Makarov, too. Entice him with a treaty.

The dominoes are stacked for him: you get to Gaz, sending him on his way. Griggs plays Makarov and gets rid of Price. He's crowned King, and you—

Somehow your affair will leak. A guard who saw, who was threatened into secrecy. He'll come forward once the throne is assured, and admit to what he witnessed. With Kyle in purgatory chasing ghosts, there is nothing in the way to stop you from being cast to the gallows.

Adultery is more lenient now, he'd said, but you're not stupid. The time you had alone in the library was spent pouring over laws and loopholes. It might be outlawed in your kingdom, too barbaric, but here? It's antediluvian but still legal.

You'll be convicted in court. His hands tied by the archaic legal system, all he can do is mourn your loss as you're sent away. Woe is him, the heartbroken fool.

He'll change it after. He would have to, wouldn't he? In memory of you.

Or an accident, perhaps.

They do happen after all.

You suppose you have a choice here—or, rather, a test. Prove your devotion to Griggs and maybe he'll spare you. The implication of it hung so heavy in the air when he'd fixed the ring on your hand, and said—

With this, the whole kingdom could be ours.

Ours. All that power—

You hear footsteps and chatter before the door creaks, swinging open with a loud bang. It seems to shake the walls, and you brace yourself to face him again.

"Birdy—"

Hearing his voice makes you tremble.

Gaz stands in the foyer, eyes widening at the sight of you. Prettied up in linen and lace. Made beautiful for him in the eyes of a man who thought he knew what Kyle wanted.

But it sits too heavily on your shoulders, and the weight of it all makes Kyle frown.

"What—?"

"I've come to—"

He cuts you off with a shake of his head. "I can't—I have to do this—"

He stands, rigid and sure. Immovable in his decision. Beside him, Soap looks just as determined. Just as grim.

It knocks against a tender spot inside your chest, and you think about the anger he'll feel after all of this, when he leaves and realises that Price is a placeholder for Griggs’ ascension to the throne. A peace offering to Makarov.

He reaches out to you, but the action is full of hesitation, uncertainty. There's so much unsaid between you, so much rot putrefying at your feet.

So much could have been different, and there's a small part of you that still seeks to blame him for it. All the whispered confessions, the heavy weight of your guilt—none of it might have happened if only he—

Gave up his dreams.

A new shame is born from that awful, ugly thought. The reverence in his voice when he spoke of the man, the guilt that lashed at your sternum when he confessed in your arms about leaving him behind.

I'll never forgive myself for it, birdy. I had to keep looking. I had to.

Hindsight bleeds around the edges, tainting each memory with the gruesome truth nestled in his words. He kept so much from you, and the unignorable knowledge of it pools deep in your marrow, painting every moment with an ugly stain of envy, blackening it with anger.

Were you ever a choice? Or were you—

An accident.

A throwaway in the grand scheme of it all, easily passed off to the next available suitor. Unwanted. Unneeded.

Until it suited him best.

And you want to scream. To rage at him. To split your anger, your betrayal into shards and throw them at his chest. Daggers of fury, of heartbreak meant to maim, to hurt. You want him to feel the same anguish inside your veins, dragging festering blood to your pathetic heart that still sings for him, still yearns.

Under it all, a bigger part of you still understands why—why he did it, how he could. Kyle didn't know you when he made his choice, and you're sure that he's suffering for it just as much as you are.

"I know this is something you have to do," you murmur, but your words are stilted. Mechanical. "And you—you should go."

It seems to throw them both. Soap looks pensive as he stands, rigid and faithful by Kyle's side. His hand lowers to his sword, and you're almost taken by the sight of his intuition; the way it flickers across his features is almost indescribable under the honeyed glow of the lanterns.

He knows something is wrong. Tastes it in the air.

Kyle, blinded by the sight of you, doesn't yet. And you know, then, what you must do.

"Birdy—?"

"It's what you have to do, isn't it?"

There's so much between you. A thundercloud looms overhead, threatening a downpour. You ignore it all—a conversation for another time, maybe (hopefully)—and move forward, gathering them into your arms.

Hugging Kyle openly is unusual for you, but embracing Soap stands out. You feel Kyle tense in your arms.

"Birdy…"

"Don't trust Graves," you whisper into his chest. "Or Shepherd."

"...what?"

"He knows. About us—"

"Birdy—" he tries to pull again, but you cling to him.

"Don't. Don't. I know—I know this is something you have to do. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine. I'll be okay. Just—Makarov isn't where you think he is."

"That slimy, fucking—"

It's Soap who keeps Kyle from lashing out with a firm hand on his shoulder, and a pointed glance. "Yer sure?"

You pull back with a muted nod, too aware of the guards standing just outside of the hall. Out of earshot, but still. Still. Much too close for comfort.

"He told me so himself. Just don't—do what you need to, but don't let on, yeah?"

"Steamin' bloody Jesus… the whole fuckin' court is corrupt."

Soap looks startled, unmoored by the devastating blow you dealt to them. The betrayal, the treachery by their own men, their own commander, seems to dig deep into him. It hurts. You can see lashing across his face, the pain of it too deep for him to remain impassive. He buckles, but he doesn't break. It's tucked back into neutrality with a nod that feels like it meant more for himself than for you.

But Kyle still looks wrathful—the picture of ferocious betrayal, hatred, and you think about Griggs and his own version of love in that instance. They wear their fury in the clench of their jaw, the furrow of their brow. It turns their eyes to lavascapes, melted pennies. Liquid gold. It drips from the drusy peaks of his iris, raking rivers of red through moonstone.

Kyle comes back to himself, but worry paints his face a shade of grey. "Come with us."

"He'll know. I can't."

He waves. "You have to—"

But even as he says it, you both know it can't happen. Despite it all, you're safer with Griggs than you would be on the battlefield. You'd be a liability at best, and he needs to keep up the facade of loyalty to Griggs, to Graves and Shepherd, so that they can save Price.

It's you or him. An ultimatum he's already been faced with before.

Your smile is brittle. "Gaz…"

But he knows. He knows.

The careful visage of a determined warrior crumbles, leaving the shattered remains of a man, unsure and fearful, behind. It breaks you into pieces. One that drops over his shoulders like falling ash.

He catches them in his fist, and holds tight.

His voice is agony when he speaks. Broken timbre, charred wood, but he plays his role, now.

He must.

"I'll come back for you, birdy."

And you do, too.

"I'll wander along the beach—" you breathe, forcing every ounce of longing, regret, heartache, and love into the words. A promise, an oath. You'll wait for him forever.

"And I'll find you by the footprints in the sand."

"You might be right, birdy—"

You hum, and then:

"Why birdy?"

The hazy mirage of Gaz inverted in the foggy window, streaked with rivulets of rain, seems to blink as if started by your question.

"Oh, uh… well," he clears his throat, a touch sheepish as he looks past your shoulder to the grimy window you stand in front of. "I saw you when I snuck home—here. When I, uh, when I snuck here."

"And you thought I was a bird?"

He moves in the reflection, taking careful steps to the edge of the daybed where you sit with your legs crossed, knees pressed against the wall, and your elbows resting on the ledge. Gazing, listlessly almost, at the rain-soaked world just beyond the thin glass.

"Yeah, kinda. You might have been sitting just like this, but when I looked up, I just saw your face. With your arm like this—" he reaches over, grasping your left hand in his warm palm before pulling it up and tucking your knuckles under your chin. "Yeah, just like that, I think."

"And this made you think of a bird?" Your brow raises in the murky window. "Really?"

"From the outside, yeah. You looked—" his hand falters on your wrist, freezing in place. He swallows thickly, and you trace the bob of his prominent Adam's apple with a feverish fascination. He clears his throat before he speaks, eyes downcast. Lost in thought, maybe. "You looked like a trapped bird. A little birdy. Thought you were an owl or somethin' that got locked inside. I felt so bloody horrible—I couldn't remember the last time I'd been here. Thought you might have been starving—"

"But you found me."

His chin lifts. The weight of his stare paralyses you. "Yeah. I did."

"Not a trapped bird, though."

"Birdy," he swallows again, and consternation gnarls across his brow. "You—fuck. I just—if I wasn't so much of a—"

"Gaz." You bring your hand up to his, trapping his palm against your skin before he can pull it away. "I'm fine. I'm better now that I have you."

But it doesn't abate his sorrow. Anguish collapses across his face. "Birdy, I'm so—fuck—"

You don't know why the thought of a trapped bird makes him so achingly sad, but the weight of his grief makes you mourn his loss alongside him.

"It's fine. I'm fine." You kiss his palm. "As long as I have you, I'm fine."

"You can't mean that."

"I do. Always. And sometimes…" You fluster a little, heart racing in your chest. It beats so sharply against the fragile rings of your ribcage, that you wonder if a bird isn't trapped inside there, too. Longing to be free. "Sometimes I wish it was you."

"It will be," he promises, hushed and fervid. An oath for the walls to hear. Meant only for the room that watched him grow, that lead him to you. "I'll take you away from here. Somewhere far away—"

"Somewhere warm."

"The beach, then. The desert. I'll take you to the Sahara and we'll live with the birds and lions. So far away from anyone that could hurt you, birdy. It'll just be me and you."

"Sounds lovely."

"I'll take you across the sea. I'll buy a boat. We could stay there forever at sea. Little, tiny spots in the great ocean. No one will ever find us." He bends down, pressing his lips to you temple. His eyes are embers: they burn with his conviction. "We'll forget what it feels like to be on land. We'll forget how to walk—"

"Maybe a house," you whisper. White stucco that absorbs the sun. Blue trim—as blue as the coruscating ocean. A fat cat, too. "By the sea."

"Yes. Yes," he breathes. His arm wraps around your chest, holding you close. "Just wait for me, birdy. Wait for me—"

"Gaz," you laugh. "Don't be silly. I'll wait for you forever. You can find me by the sea."

He shivers. "I really want to kiss you right now."

"What are you waiting for?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing—"

Credits: “Dante Swoons before the Soaring Souls of Paolo and Francesca, Virgil at his Side,” by Henry Fuseli (c. 1818) / Madonna della Pietà (1498–1499) / Canto V (verses 121–123) of the Inferno from La Divina Commedia (ca. 1310–14) / Fitzwilliam Museum domed entrance ceiling / the Rising Sun by John Donne / The Cathedral by Auguste Rodin / Sonnet 40 by William Shakespeare / Cupid and Psyche by Antonio Canova (1808) / A Glimpse by Walt Whitman / 'La notte' by Hendrik Christian Andersen / Recreation by Audra Lorde / Unknown sculpture / Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes

#this is so pretentious but HELLO!!!! IT'S ME #this is probably so big its unrebloggable sry #gaz x reader #kyle gaz garrick x you #kyle garrick x you #gaz x you #kyle gaz garrick x reader #kyle garrick x reader #this is so long #so angsty #gazfest #i'm also not super sold with the pics idk i thought the statues would be ok but like ughhh i hate seeing white hands in reader insert fics #and i don't think this is any different #i might change it

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