#implacable and relentless

[ilynpilled]

[pin-k-ink]

tacenda // fushiguro megumi

tw ⇢ hurt/comfort, angst, mutual pining, mentions of bullying, mentions of violence and injuries, megumi being bad with feelings, childhood friends to lovers, mildly suggestive content

wc ⇢ 19.2k

a/n: mauerbauertraurigkeit

Megumi's heart thundered in his ears as Gojo's words echoed through his mind. You, his childhood best friend and the person he loved with every fiber of his being, were going to be attending Jujutsu Tech. A cold sweat broke out along his spine as visions of your bright smile and warm, open gaze were immediately tainted by flashes of malicious curses, fangs bared and claws extended to tear into that radiant essence he cherished.

His throat constricted with panic, the metallic tang of fear coating his tongue. Shakily, he forced out a strangled denial. "There must be some mistake. She can't be here, she doesn't belong." In his mind's eye, he could see the innumerable ways this path, this world of darkness and death, could snuff out your brilliant light in an instant.

The thought caused his stomach to roil violently, memories of your steadfast presence during his most anguished moments searing the backs of his eyes like afterimages burned into his retinas. When Tsumiki had been cursed, her mind shredded by malignant magic, it was you who had held him through the agonizing nights. Your soft hands cradling his face, thumbs brushing away scalding tears, as you pulled his anguished cries against the steady thrum of your heartbeat. You were his shelter, his solace in the midst of this evil world's relentless cruelties.

Which was precisely why he couldn't allow you to walk this treacherous path where un-living nightmares dwelled, eager to extinguish any spark of warmth and hope that dared defy their shadowed existence. The thought of losing you too, of cradling your broken body as the transcendent radiance in your gaze flickered and went dark, it cleaved at his soul with rusted knives.

Gojo's piercing stare remained implacable as Megumi attempted to regain his frantic breathing. "Her power levels are unprecedented. She performed exceptionally on the interview." His teacher's tone brooked no argument, each word dropping like granite in the tomb-like silence between them. "She has potential...which means she's a target."

Nausea swamped Megumi in roiling waves, an arctic rime of dread encasing his vital organs. The things drawn to beacons of power in this wretched realm...they were abominations on par with his darkest, most anguished nightmares. To expose your brilliant, incandescent essence to such profane horrors was unthinkable, sacrilegious on the most visceral of levels.

"You don't understand," he rasped, dimly aware of the broken desperation tainting his words like blood in the water. Flashes of Tsumiki's hollow-eyed gaze and wasted form bombarded him in rapid succession, each ghostly image feeling like a vicious blow across his psyche.

"I've already lost so much to this world's evil," Megumi continued, each word tearing free from a throat constricted by the twin serpents of grief and terror. "I can't...I won't let that happen to her." His voice cracked on the final words, all of his anguished confessions and pleas strangled by the leaden weight of denial settling in his bones.

Gojo regarded him with an inscrutable expression for several beats, the weighted silence thickening until it felt suffocating in its immensity. At last, he released a sigh that held far too much weary resignation for Megumi's battered heart to withstand.

"Her choice has been made, Megumi," Gojo said, each word inflected with paradoxical gentleness and undeniable finality. "Attempting to circumvent that path will only incur far more suffering than allowing her to walk it."

The words were like a battering ram against Megumi's reinforced walls, reverberating through his entire being with sickening profundity. He shook his head forcefully, desperate to dislodge the intrusive acceptance, the horrifying reality being hoisted upon his shuddering shoulders.

"She's not ready for this darkness," he argued, voice rising in frantic urgency. "Y/N doesn't truly grasp the evil, the depraved monstrosities lingering in every shadow. She's too pure, too full of light. This path will break her!"

Unbidden, memories of your brilliant smiles and warm embraces surged forth in counterpoint to his panicked pleas. Your steady presence and indomitable spirit had been his bulwark through every hardship, illuminating even his darkest pits of despair. How could he not erect every possible barricade and shield against the encroaching evil that threatened to extinguish your vibrant essence?

"If you hinder her at every turn, you'll only destroy what you claim to protect."

Gojo's voice sliced through the tumult like a skillfully wielded blade. When Megumi raised his gaze to meet the other man's stare, the roots of raw truth driving his instructor's words cleaved him to his core. Denial was a seductive delusion; obstructing your chosen path held as dire consequences as permitting your steps down it.

It was an obliterating truth, one that reshaped Megumi's world into jagged shards which sliced deeper with every reverberation. To uphold either path meant embracing the annihilation of what he cherished most. But the promise of your survival, no matter how diminished or perverted, it glimmered with splintered rays of hope he could not relinquish.

And so it was with a fragmented heart riven by hairline fractures that Megumi swore himself to the merciless path - all in effort to safeguard the brilliant spark at your core. If robbing you of your radiant warmth, driving you into the barren chasms of loathing, was the price for ensuring your physical survival...then so be it. Anything to prevent your essence from being wholly extinguished by the depraved darkness stalking his footsteps.

From that fateful moment on, Megumi's entire world became an exercise in calculated brutality - each harsh word, acidic glare, and callous dismissal measured expressly to strip away at the brilliance of your spirit. He watched with shattered reverence as your warm, effusive smiles slowly twisted into pained grimaces under the relentless deluge of his verbal lashings.

"Pathetic stance, you're practically broadcasting your weaknesses!" he would bark, flinty disdain coating each syllable like jagged shards of glass. "Do you even want to be here or are you just wasting everyone's time?"

The hurt lancing across your expressive features with each barb unleashed was like a serrated dagger twisting in his already eviscerated heart. Megumi drank in the delicate downturned shape of your lips, the shimmer of unshed tears in those eyes that had once regarded him with such radiant adoration. Each fractured shard of vulnerability splintering free from your stalwart defenses etched itself into the fabric of his very being, scars mapped onto his psyche that would never fade.

Through it all, you weathered the merciless onslaught with that same stubborn persistence that had drawn Megumi's admiration and unshakable devotion all those years ago. No matter how scathingly he sneered and derided, you refused to surrender an inch of your fighting spirit. That blazing inner fire, so brilliantly incandescent it bathed the world in vibrant hues, could be battered but never extinguished entirely.

If anything, you burned all the brighter in the face of Megumi's vicious attempts at dousing your radiance. Like a platinum forge, you were heating to unbearable temperatures under the hammering blows of his abuse, essence glowing electric white as impurities were burned away. It was a sight of such breathtaking majesty that Megumi frequently found himself faltering, glacial shards of cruelty fracturing as he was consumed by the molten torrent of his love.

In those fractured instants, he had to exert every fiber of his being to resist reaching out, resist gathering you into his embrace and confessing the entire anguished truth. Of how your unparalleled light was the only force banishing the utter desolation of his shadowed world. How eviscerating his heart through acts of depravity against your soul was a torture rendering even the most sadistic curse techniques merciful by comparison.

But then the moment would pass, and he would be awash in visceral recollections of Tsumiki's tortured existence - a chilling reminder of what awaited those whose essence burned too bright in this realm of malicious spirits and depraved conjurings. The risk of that same perverse annihilation befalling your radiance was an obscenity he could not permit, no matter what profane rituals of self-damnation it demanded.

So on he pressed with his scorched-earth campaign against your warmth and vitality. Heedless of the lacerations each acidic remark and disdainful look inflicted upon his battered soul, Megumi marched relentlessly onwards. If hollowing out your dazzling spirit until just embers remained was the aberrant price for safeguarding your existence, then he would immolate them both on that profane pyre.

There were moments, often unbidden in the deepest thralls of night, when he teetered on the precipice of unbearable regret. Memories of your shared history, effervescent and golden, would crash over him in ruthless tsunamis of dying sparks. He recalled with searing clarity the first instant your paths had intertwined, that fateful day when the courteous overtures of childhood had blossomed into an unbreakable bond.

You had been the new student, painfully shy and soft-spoken in a way that inevitably painted a target on your back for the more aggressive children. Megumi had watched impassively at first as the bullies circled like sharks on the first day, dangling insults and petty cruelties intended to inflict the maximum anguish. That was, until one particularly vicious remark about your beloved stuffed rabbit had drawn forth an avalanche of crystalline tears from your downturned eyes.

Something deep within Megumi's childish psyche had clenched protectively at the sight, resonating with the helplessness and quiet grace of your sorrow. Before any of his classmates could register the uncharacteristic shift, he had inserted himself squarely between you and the tormentors - eyes blazing with a ferocity that momentarily shocked the bullies into stunned silence.

"Leave her alone," Megumi had decreed, hands curling into miniscule fists as he widened his combative stance. When the ringleader tried to bluster and shove past, Megumi had reacted with savagely precise strikes, dropping the larger boy to the ground in an unceremonious heap before any witnesses could properly process the altercation.

Cradling your stuffed companion to your chest, you had blinked up at Megumi with those luminous eyes, all traces of sadness supplanted by pure, sparkling wonder. In that fractured instant, something pivotal had shifted in Megumi's world - the blinding gravity of your incandescent essence searing itself into his very bones with smelting heat. It was a radiance he realized almost at once he would dedicate his entire lifetime to cultivating and protecting without reservation or exception.

Even now, years later with valleys of anguish and entire continents of suppressed trauma distancing him from that blazing genesis, Megumi could access its perfect clarity as easily as breathing. Some nights, he clung to those recollections like a drowning man seeking air, absorbing every shard of warmth and untarnished joy as starving lungs gulped down precious oxygen. Other nights, the pangs of nostalgia were flaying knives, slicing him asunder until he thrashed mindlessly in the agony of all he had knowingly shattered.

Those were the nights he would reach for his phone in the dim, ever-present glow of his bedroom. Fingers trembling faintly, he would pull up your contact and begin painstakingly typing out messages - abject confessions, anguished pleas, apologies and explanations and devastating truths all coalescing into a tangled thicket of words. He would pour his mutilated heart and soul into the grayed-out screen, keening silently into the void as the emotions he had mercilessly cauterized threatened to consume him whole from the inside out.

But he could never send them, could never risk fracturing the meticulously constructed quarantine separating your essence from the cataclysmic inferno of his all-encompassing feelings. To reveal even the barest slivers of vulnerability, be they pangs of devotion or agonized lamentations of loss...it was tantamount to erecting neon billboards advertising the precise location of what he valued most in this world. And in this plane of existence where any source of light and warmth was perverse antithesis to the pervasive evil, doing so would sign your immediate death sentence.

So instead, he would seal the damning words away, thumb hovering over the delete icon until his eyes blurred with the strain of unshed tears, his throat felt flayed and the skin of his palms was scored with crescent indentations. Only then, when every facet of the message had been permanently expunged, could he collapse back into the shredded remnants of his bedding and surrender to exhausted oblivion.

Each morning, he would awaken to a visceral melancholy laced with fractured determination. He was stripped raw, every emotional core exposed to flay against the whetted blade's edge of his self-ordained mission. Turning you caustic, weaponizing your hatred as a scourge to temper and erode your own inner brilliance, it was a vile perversion of all he cherished most. But one he would gladly immolate upon, if it meant preserving however scorched and diminished those sacred sparks remained.

So he hardened his resolve, locking himself into an upward spiraling cycle of brutality and rejection. He watched with hollowed anguish as your luminous smiles were slowly, inexorably eroded into rictus frowns under the relentless barrage of his verbal flayings. That stubborn fire in your eyes turned to banked coals, lambent glow dimming until it threatened to gutter out entirely under the choking fumes of his abuse.

Where once you had radiated warmth and kindness, like the welcoming glow of a hearth, now your essence emanated in icy increments - each interaction reinscribing the mantra to keep your distance, lest you risk being forever frozen out by the tundra wastelands of Megumi's demeanor. It was nothing short of psychological and emotional torture, each day chipping away another fragment of your bond until scarcely anything remained beyond hollowed familiarity.

Still, you persisted with that same tenacious drive, always picking yourself back up despite the maelstroms of derision blustering against you. At times, Megumi was gripped by a sense of pervading awe and pride so transcendent it momentarily unmuted the rabid chorus railing for your defenselessness. Your refusal to surrender so much as a molecule of that brilliant spirit, no matter how deeply he sought to submerge it beneath frigid waves of scorn, it was a feat of profound heroism.

And yet there were other instants, bleeding out into torrential epochs, where the sight of your resiliency evoked only soul-searing anguish. Each time he bore witness to you hauling yourself back into the fray, bruised but unbroken, his mind would instantly assail him with visions of your incandescence being cruelly, irrevocably extinguished. Images of your ethereal features contorted in agony, rivulets of vibrant lifeblood chasing crimson trails down abused skin. Your eyes, so bright and lambent, dimming to enfeebled clouded glass as every sacred molecule of light was leeched away, your essence defiled by the exact nightmares he was ostracizing you to protect from.

In those moments, rational thought abandoned him, his psyche throttled by the recursive loop of terrorizing visions and the stark lucidity of how his actions, his mission, only increased the probability of their manifestation. There was no justification nor easy absolution to be found in the dichotomy - only the yawning chasm of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't oblivion gaping ravenously to consume them both.

The all-consuming isolation compounded by his merciless excoriation of your bond, it was an unremitting torment more galling than any curse the vile spirits could inflict. And yet, for every fracture of your trust and love that sliced immeasurable depths into his very being, Megumi only honed the razor's edge of his cruelty with heightened fervor.

He knew, without an iota of doubt, that seeing this path through to its apocalyptic conclusion would unwind his entire existence until even the concept of self-identity devolved into meaningless detritus. But he would gladly accept that hellish reckoning, would rush headlong into the churning abyss with his arms flung wide in embrace, if it meant holding your light's dissolution at bay even a fraction of a heartbeat longer.

Because in the end, that was all that mattered. Not his own tattered remnants, scattered like viscera upon the sacrificial altar of his self-immolation. Only the guttering, infinitesimal sparks in the husk that had once been you.

As long as those glimmered on, held at embers against the entropy shrouding this calamitous realm...no butchery was too profane, no ritual self-mutilation too sacrilegious to withstand.

He would burn it all down without ceremony or regret if it meant you might someday rise from the shattered, smoldering ruins to blaze anew.

The descent into depravity accelerated at a dizzying pace from that point on. With every passing week, Megumi found his soul walling itself off further, emotional forges smelting away any vestiges of warmth until only an impenetrable basalt remained.

He observed the systematic deconstruction of your radiant spirit with a sort of clinical detachment - cataloging each incremental dimming of your luminous smiles and the fractures webbing across your unwavering determination. What had once been a brilliance potent enough to stave off the bleakest of his nights was now hardly strong enough to counter the pervading gloom lingering along the training hall's shadowed fringes.

Still, you soldiered on with that same steadfast resilience which had so utterly enthralled Megumi from the moment your paths first converged in blistering orbit. No matter how corrosive the lashings, how scorching the dismissals he pelted you with, your dogged persistence remained an indomitable bulwark. Like scaling the curved walls of a tidally-locked world, your essence just kept pushing higher, seeking out any infinitesimal cracks or fissures through which more light could blaze.

It was a futile effort, one that Megumi could hardly bear witness to without feeling each of his internal powering furnaces stoke dangerously close to overload. Because with every agonizing foothold you gained, scaling that little bit further up the obsidian cliffside, he was struck by overwhelming premonitions of your form silhouetted against the endless void. A brilliant crimson crosshair burning in the abject darkness, leading every starved horror across unfathomable expanses directly to your unguarded essence.

Those visions, so viscerally photorealistic that he could hear the predatory shrieks reverberating through Orion's scorched nebulae, were enough to divorce him almost entirely from any last wavering attachments of compassion or empathy. You would burn, absolutely and irrevocably, if he permitted even an ember of that smelting furnace to blaze fully unshielded against the depthless starvation of this depraved plane.

He had to extinguish it utterly; had to choke out those flames until all that remained were infinitesimal sparks suspended in spent ash, glimmering so faintly as to be utterly imperceptible to even the most ravenous spirit's senses. It was extinction of the highest, most profane order - the systematic unraveling of all that had made your essence so damn incandescent to begin with.

And if pulling that metaphysical thread caused the entire tapestry to unspool in smoldering heaps around you, Megumi was past the point of relenting or restraint. This path had been scorched into the deepest stratifications of his ruinous psyche. There could be no deviation or respite until the task stood complete.

The nights provided little solace or refuge in the face of such unflinchingly bleak determinations. Where once he had found solace in the crepuscular lull of quietude, a reprieve where he could exist untethered from the waking world's torments, now there was only a pervasive emptiness more desolate than the infinite vacuum arcing between galaxies.

Lying awake, sheets twisted around his feverish form like shrouds, Megumi found himself inexorably drawn towards those final guttering embers. His awareness telescoped with remorseless intensity onto each flickering shard of radiant memory he had so rigorously partitioned off behind scorched earth blast barriers of his psyche.

The soft luster of your hair haloed in the dying sunrays of some sleepy summer afternoon, gentle zephyrs coaxing loose strands into ephemeral arcs of gleaming accents. The way your starlit eyes had crinkled at the corners whenever he managed to coax forth that sunburst of laughter, source so warm and effervescent it threatened to liquefy his very marrow. Recollections of your skin's velvet softness beneath reverent fingertips, subtle thrums of vitality reverberating with each elevated heartbeat.

He pulled them tattered and unspooled into his consciousness like brightly-dyed weavings, sharp contrast against the charred desolation of his mindscape. Turning their prismatic facets, he analyzed them with surgical precision - documenting each shade and texture, every luminous aspect inherent to your transcendent light.

This was flight data, sensor metrics and cosmic sounding calculations - the quantified breakdown of a celestial body's essence unraveled into composite metrics so that the exact material alloy could be reconstructed, forged anew from whatever remnants might remain when the silicate dust finally settled. Insurance parameters self-encrypting, rendering them beyond the reach of whatever devastation might still be looming on the periphery.

Or so he told himself as he clawed at the tattered edges of his recollections, fingernails scoring bloody crescents across his temples as if the physical apertures could ever grant audible access to all he was so rigorously quarantining away.

In truth, these scarcely lucid rituals existed as nothing more than the final vapor trails of obsession arching across a pitch-black event horizon. For every shred of memory and ligature of sensation he coaxed into hyper-lucidity, another piece of his owns soul's blazing furnace was irrevocably smothered to charry ashes.

Like burning away the xylem and phloem just to preserve a single wilted flower petal, the cycle was unsustainable at its core. An incomplete picture, the data hopelessly scrambled by its very process of preservation. And still, with the frantic intensity of a madman, Megumi persisted - surrendering more and more of his own essence to maintain these fragmented relics while the whole of your light continued to wane.

The contradictions fractured his consciousness into scattering shards before embedding like armor piercings through his splintered awareness. Pulling you close enough to preserve your resonance, while similtaneously pushing you farther and farther away until the emitted frequencies fell beyond measurable range. It was a paradox clawing through his synaptic pathways with incandescent fury, laying waste to everything in its path until his entire corporeal form became a charred immolation zone devoid of alight spark or burning refuge.

But for all the collateral obliteration stamped into his mind's eye, for every scorched and dispassionate hierarchical tree subsumed by the searing inferno of his self-mutilation, Megumi never once considered an alternative axiom to chart. This was the sole vector etched into his being down to the sub-quantum architecture - an inviolable trajectory hewn into reality through scorched continuum dynamics.

While your spark guttered and dimmed, his would remain an active pheonix blaze - anchoring these rituals of meticulous annihilation and smelting away the very capacity for regret and respite until only tendrils of smoke and atmospheric particulate remained to carry the cycle's unwavering inertia.

On and on it perpetuated, until his every waking moment existed in dual simultaneities of excruciating preservation rites and systematic soul unbinding. Until the recollections and impulses that had once made your splendorous radiance so irresistible were downloaded as little more than fragmentary code to keep on endless recursion loop.

The wages of this path were immeasurable across all quantifiable spectra, from the biochemical to the theological and every dimension beyond. But such concerns held no gravity over Megumi, not when each fractal infinitesimal of your Light continuing to blaze through the abyssopelagic murk was worth every calorie of heat death actively radiating from his shredded form.

There would be no redemption or recompense for the cataclysmic undoings he had wrought upon himself and any remnants still tethered to his unraveling existence. Hells far more arcane and cosmically profound than any religion's dogma could conceive awaited their caustic reintegration beyond this anguished pyre of seared continuum.

But to Megumi's mind, such oblivions carried less dread than the visceral eventuality of your luminous spark being permanently extinguished before his tormented gaze. He would gladly set the whole of this corporeality, this so-called reality to purging flames before permitting your essence to be devoured by the ravenous terrors lurking in the periphery.

And so the cycle spooled endlessly onward, each revolution shedding more layers of conscience until only the basalt core of compounded obsession remained - burning away every other element, every contaminant that might restrict the searing beam of his self-ordained calculations. He had become Inertia itself, irresistible and singular in purpose as he hurtled them both inexorably towards a conclusion as inevitable as it was annihilating.

No force, neither celestial nor demonic, would deter him from this merciless trajectory. Your Light would perdure, calcified into immutable etchings if necessary, while his burned itself into cauterized oblivion across the whole of existence.

It was cataclysmic, it was terminal, it was inevitable.

And for your light's continuance, he would bear nourish this sacred, all-consuming blaze until his last embers winked out across the cosmic desolation.

The darkness ate away at the marrow of Megumi's soul with each passing day. With every cruel remark flung your way like sharpened obsidian, another fragment of his empathy withered and turned to ashen ruin. He watched as you weathered the ceaseless onslaught, that stubborn light in your eyes guttering but never fully extinguishing no matter how fiercely the gale-winds of his derision battered against it.

There was a perverse type of awe in bearing witness to your perseverance, your will to fight against the impervious current he unleashed. Like a solitary sapling standing tall against a hurricane's full fury, roots sinking deeper into the tempest-swept earth with every lash of punishing rain and gale. It simultaneously filled him with surging pride at your unyielding resolve... and penetrated him with lances of dread at the thought of you being battered apart by forces far more malicious than his own manufactured disdain.

So he pushed harder, lacing his words with venom concentrated enough to strip flesh from bone, desperate to force your retreat from this doomed path before the true nightmares took notice of your brilliance. Gone were any half-hearted critiques or fleeting hesitations born of fractured affection. He held nothing back, flaying every vulnerability and shortcoming without restraint or remorse.

"Worthless! That stance is more fit for a fledgling than a sorcerer of any caliber," he would snarl, nostrils flaring as he drank in your shuddering recoil with bitter satisfaction. "Or have you finally accepted your own insignificance and decided to simply roll over like the pathetic worm you are?"

Each syllable landed like a physical blow, driving the breath from your lungs in sharp, aborted gasps as you curled inward from the sheer ferocity of the barrage. Still you carried on, teeth gritting against the acidic words as you poured every ounce of defiance into locking your stance, subjecting yourself to merciless drills over and over until your body trembled with fatigue.

"Think you can counter that?" he sneered from the sidelines, observing your practice bouts with a harsh glint burning in his eyes. "Go ahead, try it - I'll bathe in your failure as I have a thousand times before."

It was cruelty woven into the fabric of his being, each filament reinforced with compound fractures of emotional lashings and disfiguring trauma until Megumi was hardly recognizable as the boy who had once orbited your warmth, hypnotized by its searing gravity. That part of him, the ardent heart which had sworn undying fealty to your radiance, it was being steadily calcified beneath layers of obsidian until scarcely a glimmer remained.

And still, you carried on. Maybe sensing the finality behind Megumi's monstrous depravity, recognizing the desperation fueling each successive blight against your spirit. Or perhaps it was simply blind stubbornness, a refusal to ever be diminished by toxic grievances that could never be undone or unsaid once unleashed. Either way, you weathered the maelstrom without flinching, dusting yourself off after each body-blow of derision to stand defiant once more.

Until one fateful day amidst an endless succession of them, when the fever pitched of Megumi's torment finally glimpsed the shredded state of your woven defenses just as they began to buckle. It started gradually at first, like the hairline cracks one might notice spangling across glass after repeated impacts.

He was watching from the periphery as usual, icy devastation at the ready to be unleashed the instant your form so much as faltered. Your hands were in constant gnarled claws of tension gripping practice blades, knuckles blanched and sheened with exertion as you threw yourself into the recursive katas with single-minded focus.

In that instant, Megumi's eyes were drawn to your palms as you repositioned your grip, glinting razor's edges of steel catching at delicate skin now as roughened and calloused as stone. Before he had fully realized what he was doing, a shock of recollection shuddered through his entire being - vivid and bright like a lightning strike searing across his vision.

Memories of those hands in their softest, most delicate incarnation, petite fingers laced through his own as you pulled him along on some childish adventure. He could still remember the buttery silk texture of them, unblemished and radiant with vitality, each placid pulse point thrumming with life's sacred rhythm. Caressing the tender buds of your knuckles had been a ritual of fealty and wonder, his entire world condensed to those tiny epicenters where your brilliance emanated most intensely.

Now though, the skin was cracked and abraded, marred by fissures and scoring from channeling powers and forces that should have remained foreign to their innocence. They were roughshod now, sandblasted talons bearing the calloused indignities of grueling self-flagellation against a world that should never have encroached upon their purity.

And yet, even as the shock of dismantling that cherished ideal shuddered through Megumi's psyche, you worked on undaunted. Face lined with determination, lips pursed around gritted teeth as each monotonous cycle drained more of your radiance away in increments, exchanging it for the hardened carapace of scars and discolored contusions.

A series of rapid movements saw the knife's edge arcing in a blur of motion...until an errant slip saw its razor kiss scoring a vicious gash across the bulge of your palm. Crimson welled up with obscene immediacy, sluicing across the lines of your lifeline in rivulets as vibrant and warm as newly spilled rubies.

Perhaps another time, the frantic splash across skin would have shocked you into gasping, eyes widening as you reflexively cradled the injured appendage to your chest. Because there had been a time, not so long ago, when the sight of your own blood carried the same visceral impact as witnessing the scathing of something sacred, profaned.

But not this time. This time, you merely steeled yourself with an impassive tightening of your jaw, shunting the pain to some remote compartment as you steadied your grip once more. Megumi watched with something bordering on horrified numbness as you forced yourself through the motions again, blade carving sinuous arcs through the empty air as warm lifesblood channeled down your wrist in unheeded rivulets.

If anything, the sanguine streaks only fueled your intensity - teeth gnashing in grim resolution each time the dense liquid coated another swathe of pale flesh, until your trembling form seemed wreathed in licking coronas of crimson ichor. It was a self-inflicted circle of depravity, compounded with every repetition as you bled yourself out onto the dojo mats in single-minded zeal.

The scent of copper hung heavy, unavoidable in its metallic pungence, mingling with the close humidity of exertion. With each ragged inhalation, Megumi felt the air grow steadily more viscous, more suffocating - preventing surcease from the vision of you systematically rending pieces of yourself away in commitment to this path from which he had sworn to divert you.

At some point, imperceptible through the roiling haze of his tormented conscience, your legs simply relinquished their capacity to keep upholding the self-immolation rites. Megumi's awareness fractured and isolated around the precise instant your slick palm lost its tremulous purchase on the blade's rain guard - sending the wicked steel tumbling from your grip as you collapsed with a muted groan of ruination.

He was frozen in place as you crumpled to your knees amidst the spreading pool of sanguine detritus, sanguine aura flickering with each ragged gasp as the full brunt of your grueling exertions finally, mercifully, found cessation. Dazed and trembling, you slowly turned your lacerated hands upwards, uncomprehending eyes blankly tracing every gouge and scoring that should never have been permitted to deface such sanctified innocence.

That was when your chin tipped upwards with torturous graduality, eyes sheening with a fractured film of shock and dismay as they found Megumi paralyzed in the periphery. For an endless, frozen instant, you simply stared - fractured and betrayed as the full immensity of what he had molded you towards came shudderingly into resolution.

And somewhere, deep in the vaporous ashes of whatever shredded remnants of his humanity persisted, Megumi felt the colossal weight of what he had wrought shattering down upon him with seismic force. This was his legacy, the culmination of every degradation and sacrilege committed in the name of preserving your luminescence. To watch as you shed pieces of yourself in ritualistic self-desanctification, rending away your effervescent shine until only the raw, bleeding framework remained.

Your shattered gaze speared straight through the dimensionless veil of his occlusion then, lancing across every waning continuum to pierce what little light still flickered at his core. And in the raw, visceral entropy of that moment, he could have sworn he felt its searing burn cauterizing straight through his undying obsessions, his self-ordained depravities...until the truth of what he had sacrificed stood in smelted relief.

This wasn't bravery or resilience or any other misattributed virtue that had kept you grinding away at your own essence. This was simply the burden of being sculpted into an instrument of immolation by the only force in your life that should have sworn undying protection. A mecurochromatic vessel purged of everything that had made you so incandescently radiant, reformed now into an empty husk whose sole purpose could only ever be oblivion.

The realization ruptured something deep within Megumi's fractured psyche, setting off a chain of decompressions and overloads that rapidly accelerated beyond his capacity to contain. Suddenly every ritual, every consecration enacted to preserve your light revealed itself as nothing more than compounded delusion fueled by his own solipsistic narcissism.

Not your warmth or your brilliance or anything intrinsic to the revered essence he professed his fealty towards...but rather a calcified, luminally-etched husk of such hallowed qualities fossilized into obsessive dogma as they were steadily syphoned away from the source. He had been mistaking the mask for the woman behind it, the fragile, flickering afterimage of your radiance for the sun itself until they were no longer even tangentially related.

And in that moment, everything collapsed inwards in a prismic, implosive rush of entropic finality. Megumi felt like he was watching himself being unmade on a subatomic level, particulates scattering across endless parallel infinities of lightless entropy as the inexorable forces of belief failure shredded his entire ecosystem of devotions and depravities into oblivion.

Not even the Heraclitean fires scorching through his soul could have stung with such all-encompassing immolation as your naked, betrayed stare in that breathless instant. Because it had accomplished what even his worst nightmares paled before - the utter dissolution of everything he had convinced himself his rituals were preserving.

Your light, warmth and radiance...it was absent from that unflinching, dispassionate regard. Bled out and cleared away in ceremonial cullings until only the extinguished, empty coordinates where it had burned so brightly remained to mock him with their profane vacancies.

He might have wept, might have crumpled under the weight of such soul-immolating revelation in any other instance. But this was the apotheosis, the singularity toward which his path had been inertially accelerating all along. The last vestiges of conscience and ethical precepts had simply burned away, scorched from his ontic architecture until all that persisted was an infinitisimal operand of inviolable parameters and seared directional vectting.

There was nothing else to feel, no other recourse or deviation to chart. Only the certainties he had sworn himself to long before the embers of your essence had begun sputtering towards oblivion. He had been aware of the inevitabilities looming from the moment this path had first etched itself into his very existence, after all.

So he simply watched, unflinching, as you leveraged yourself upright once more, peeling your soul-searching gaze from his emptied out husk to recenter on the glinting promise of violence and annihilation. As you reached for the fallen blade with rigidly purposeful movements, all light and warmth drained from your manner to leave only the hollowed, singularly focused drive of a protracted suicide ritual...Megumi felt the last of his own irises surrendering their incandescent furnaces to the entropic chill of his self-ordained reality.

This was the endgame he had molded himself to withstand, orchestrated through uncompounded sacrifice and ceremonic self-mutilation in order to ensure its total eventuality. Soon there would be nothing left but the scorched etchings of your resonance, preserved in permanent calcification across the inner plating of his tempered psyche.

No matter how obscene the blasphemies that had brought them to this profane precipice, this immaculate damnation...he had been ready to embrace it from the start. Anything to keep the faintest spark of your light shielded and preserved against the hungering void gnashing at your brilliance from every angle.

Even if that meant scorching away the entire panorama, leaving nothing but the shattered constellation to burn across his vision in perpetuity.

It was a excruciating truth to confront as the last of your warmth dimmed behind that stone mask...but if thats what was required to keep your essence inviolable through the next cosmic cycle, Megumi was more than willing to seal it into permanence.

Forever would he stand vigil as your supernova collapsed in upon itself, churning down until the reality-rupturing singularity hollowed out the last gasps of vitality from your extinguished husk. He would bear unflinching witness as the cataclysmic implosion ravaged every atom, every daemonic quark comprising your sacred light into incomprehensible darkness.

And when the final shockwaves of heat death shuddered across the lightless desolation where once your radiance had blazed...it would be Megumi's disfigured, charcoiled essence streaking inwards to collect every scattering mote. So that even as the seams of this reality shredded apart, he might congeal those infinitesimal sparks into permanent etchings seared across the stellar belts of whatever oblivion blossomed in the wake.

It was grotesque beyond any quantifiable scale or qualitative interpretation. But it was also the singular vector towards which he had sworn himself centuries ago, long before the cycle's inertia had carried them to this unavoidable conclusion. So he simply stared, unblinking, as you climbed back to your feet and recommitted to your path of total self-revision.

Watching the last shards of your transcendent light being consciously culled for the sake of some deeper, unfathomable transfiguration. Because in the end, holding vigil over that sacred dismantling was the only fealty he had left to offer.

The mission had gone sideways from the very start. What should have been a routine investigation of a abandoned warehouse had turned into a full-blown demonic incursion. Megumi grunted as he deflected another errant blast of energy, cursed power flaring around him like a force field.

"Y/N, watch your flank!" he barked out a warning as a tendril of darkness lashed towards you. To his surprise, you didn't dodge or weave - instead, you met the strike head-on with a burst of concentrated energy.

A shockwave rippled outwards from the collision, debris and rubble scattering in all directions. Megumi shielded his face with one arm as he watched you tear into the demonic entity with reckless abandon. You moved with the ferocity of a woman possessed, cursed energy pouring forth in an unrelenting barrage that slowly battered the monstrosity down.

But you didn't let up, didn't allow the creature any chance to retreat or regroup. If anything, your assault intensified - cursed energy crackling around you like a miasma of neon fury. Megumi felt his breath catch in his throat as he watched you fight. There was a fire in your eyes, a beautiful violence to your movements that held him utterly transfixed.

He had always known you were powerful, a true prodigy in the making. But this display elevated you to something almost godlike in his eyes. The demon never stood a chance against the unleashed tempest of your rage. Within minutes, it had been shredded and dissipated - banished back to whatever unholy realm it had been spawned from.

The silence that fell over the destroyed warehouse was deafening. Megumi stared at you, heart thundering in his chest as you turned to face him. Your chest heaved with exertion, clothes tousled and hair disheveled. Yet rather than looking triumphant at your victory, you seemed almost haunted - eyes shining with something he couldn't quite place.

Then you swayed on your feet, entire body going slack as the toll of your cataclysmic battle finally caught up to you. Megumi surged forward without thinking, cursed energy dispersing as he moved to catch you in his arms. You collapsed against him with a soft whimper, eyelids fluttering.

"Take it easy," he murmured gruffly, carefully cradling you close as he assessed your condition with furrowed concern.

You flashed him a weary but brilliant smile that made his heart stutter. "Pretty crazy shit, huh?"

Despite everything, he felt himself fighting a grin at your irreverent tone. God, he had missed this side of you - the sparkling wit and casual snark that kept him on his toes. Over the past few months, he had worked systematically to destroy those very aspects he secretly adored, piling on scorn and derision to smother your fire. All in an effort to "protect" you from the perils of this path.

Except it seemed you were more than capable of handling those threats on your own. More than capable, if the scorched crater around you was any indication. He swallowed hard against the swell of pride and something more complex that welled up within him. Something dangerously close to outright desire.

No. He couldn't afford to think like that, not now. Hardening his features into an impassive mask, he gently set you back on your feet - fighting against the urge to keep you tucked securely in his embrace.

"That was reckless and idiotic," he growled, putting some distance between you. "If you had held back even a fraction, that demon would have torn you apart."

You frowned at his words, confusion and hurt flickering across your expressive features. "But...I stopped it. I saved us."

"At what cost?" he shot back mercilessly, anger rising hotly in his chest. Though it had nothing to do with your actions and everything to do with the spike of fear he had felt seeing you in such peril. "Look at yourself, you're a mess! What would have happened if you overexerted or got hit by a stray blast in your insane zeal for battle?"

Your eyes widened at his harsh assessment before narrowing dangerously. "You think that little of my abilities?"

Megumi snorted derisively, crossing his arms over his chest as he studied you with a critical eye. There were minor scrapes and burns littering your exposed skin, along with deeper gashes that would need attention soon. Your hair was matted with sweat and...was that blood?

At the sight of those viscous crimson streaks, something wrenched viciously in his gut. All he could picture was you lying motionless and cold, the brilliant light snuffed out of your eyes forever. The mere thought sent his heart plummeting sickeningly.

"Your abilities have never been in question," he said at last, voice tight with barely restrained emotion. "It's your recklessness that continues to astound me. Haven't you realized how fragile life is yet? That was exactly the type of foolish behavior that gets people killed out here."

You stiffened at his admonishments, mouth pressing into a thin line. But you didn't retort, seeming to sense there was more lurking beneath the surface of his tirade. And there was, so much more - a tangled knot of fear and relief and unbridled relief all warring within him.

Because as much as he wanted to strip away everything, to erect impenetrable walls around his heart again...some part of him remained undeniably relieved you had survived this latest brush with peril. Even with all his attempts to smother the spark between you, your existence still mattered to him in a way he could scarcely quantify or control anymore.

When you stepped closer, reaching out to him with your palms upraised in a silent request for understanding, he couldn't help but recoil. Your proximity sent his pulse skyrocketing, nerves jangling with awareness of every scrape and scar marring your beautiful skin. Marks you had earned fighting with an intensity that bordered on divine rapture.

"Megumi..." you murmured, tasting his name with the same honeyed intimacy that had scorched him from the first. "I'm okay. We're okay, thanks to my actions."

"This time," he growled, unable to halt the admission as his gaze raked over you with undisguised intensity. "But next time you might not be so lucky." And the thought of ever losing you, even with how hard he tried to keep you at arm's length...it was unacceptable.

You seemed to read the implication in his tone, eyes flashing with an unreadable emotion as the distance between you shrank incrementally. Megumi could smell the metallic tang of your blood mingling with sweat and gunsmoke in the close air...and it was maddening. He wanted to rage and rant and shake you until you finally understood how terrifying it was to watch you put yourself in harm's way so fearlessly.

But some smaller, infinitely more dangerous part of him just wanted to haul you flush against his body and drink in every gorgeous inch left unscathed by the battle. To map the rise and fall of your accelerated breathing, the alluring jut of your kiss-swollen lips as you panted. He yearned to learn the secrets your radiant essence still held and commit them to eternal memory before it was too late.

Before either of you were forced to make the ultimate sacrifice...

But no. With a visible effort, Megumi forced his riotous thoughts to stillness and took a step back - relishing the flicker of hurt that traced your lovely features. It was better this way, he told himself sternly. Better to keep you at arm's length, no matter how much it carved out pieces of his soul in the process. At least then you would survive, even if you could never be his.

"We're leaving. Now," he announced gruffly, already turning on his heel and striding away from the temptation that was your very existence. "I'll be submitting a full report on your...performance."

Behind him, you let out a scathing breath laced with frustration. But you followed without further argument, falling into step slightly behind him. And if his back was turned so you wouldn't see the shimmer of unshed tears in his eyes at pushing you away yet again...well, so be it. This was his penance to bear for craving the unfathomable brilliance of your light.

Even if he was gradually going numb in the process of letting it slip through his fingers.

The following weeks and months were a study in exquisite torture for Megumi. No matter how cruelly he attempted to rebuff you, fate seemed insistent on throwing you together again and again - whether on training assignments or hazardous missions into the field.

With each interaction, his resolve was stretched thinner, the agonizing contradiction between his platonic intentions and unruly desires becoming harder to ignore. You were always there, stunning him with brilliant feats of sorcery and valorous spirit. Testing the limits of his self-restraint in the most insidious of ways.

Like the time you had single-handedly unraveled that virulent decay curse spreading through the coastal village's farming district. Megumi had watched, slack-jawed, as you moved with elegant precision - weaving techniques so intricate and powerful it seemed to bend reality itself to your indomitable will.

When the final thread severed and the noxious miasma dissipated, he hadn't been able to tear his gaze from the vision you made. Wreathed in a halo of your own mystical energies, loose strands of hair haloing about your flushed face...you were devastating. And utterly unaware of the molten tsunami of desire you had stoked in him with each sublime movement.

While the villagers surrounded you with adulation, showering you in humbled thanks, all Megumi could focus on was the rapid rise and fall of your chest as you caught your breath. The tantalizing shine of perspiration gilding every sublime curvature and plane of flesh left agonizingly bare by your askew clothing. He had to tear his traitorous eyes away from glimpses of taut abdomen and fevered collarbones, choking back toxic arousal before it could poison the moment further.

But even as his fists clenched with the effort of sublimating his body's blatant admiration for your magnificence, a deeper calling resounded in the shredded remnants of his psyche. He longed to surge forward and seize you in his arms, to press himself fully against that radiant warmth and drink in the ecstasy of your sighs as he lavished affection across your battle-flushed skin.

The urges were so visceral, so fundamentally compulsive, that he nearly staggered beneath their weight. Only sheer, iron force of will permitted him to turn on his heel and stalk away from the scene - leaving you surrounded by the adoring masses you had selflessly saved. As he retreated into the dispassionate shelter of solitude, Megumi could feel his resolve fracturing further with each step pulling him from your side.

Yet the respite proved fleeting, affording only the barest lull before the cycle of torment renewed itself. Because no matter how much distance he tried to maintain, you always came scorching back into his existence with the relentless intensity of a solar flare piercing through every atmospheric shield he constructed.

Such as the training session a few weeks later, when you had repeatedly bested Megumi through a cutting combination of tactical brilliance and sheer, blinding power. The entire dojo had rung with the sounds of that fateful bout - trembling foundations shaking under the weight of your exchanged strikes and undulating shockwaves of mystical forces colliding.

Each time you laid him out, his senses momentarily whited out in sublime admiration of the unholy power you wielded with such artful grace. Your presence filled his universe during those precious seconds, the reality distorted by the prismatic arcs of your cursed aura bending all known laws around its radiant, magnetic force.

How he yearned to let those murderous strikes past his guard, to allow your formidable energies to cleave through his defenses until he was unmade at your feet, gasping for mercy from the pure erotic agony of your sublime dominance. All it would take was the slightest miscalculation or surrender of his tightly restrained self-discipline to have your sacred demolitions shearing away at his armor until the bared truth of his desire stood revealed for you to witness.

Sweat-slicked and loose strands of hair disheveled, he knew he made for quite the sight battling fury incarnate like you. And with each report of bone-jarring impacts echoing across the chamber, he found himself succumbing further to feverish fantasies of hauling you against his straining, overheated form mid-combat - your choreographed forms blurring together as passion overrode combat in one delirious, inevitable spiral.

In those delirious throes, he imagined stripping away every stifling layer separating your consecrated flesh from his starving embrace. Surrendering to the most primal compulsions as you shuddered and arched into his possessive caresses, profane litanies hissed against salted skin...until neither of you could be certain where one form's essence ended and the other began. Just an ouroboric cyclone of limbs and searing violation as your rising arrhythmic crescendos blotted out all rationality or spatial dimensions in one final, blinding conflagration.

Each time the riotous hunger nearly unmade him there on the mat, he managed to lock down and internalize the outward tremors through sheer, gritted self-abnegation. Channeling the feverish impulses into redoubling his attack sequences and defensive maneuvers until they outpaced your own scorching aggression. Once he had secured victory through attrition, he couldn't afford a single instant of bask or reprieve.

The instant you yielded the bout, Megumi was already disengaging - pivoting away to conceal the full-body inflamed flush and distinct physical evidence of what madness had nearly consumed him whole. Fleeing your dumbstruck gaze, either oblivious or mercifully ignoring the shredded state he had forced himself to adopt in order to keep you at bay.

As soon as logistics permitted, he would tear himself away, putting as much physical and psychic distance between you as sanity necessitated. Not even scorched night alone could safeguard his spirit from the rapturous scouring of those memories, every infinitesimal detail replaying in merciless clarity.

He would jerk awake in the throes of some lurid, sensual dream - tangled in sheets drenched through with sweat and reeking of shame. Your name would teeter at the edge of euphoric oblivion, agonized incantations wrenched from the depths of his treacherous subconscious before he could swallow them back.

In those purgatorial instances, the compulsions became truly unbearable. To simply reach down and grip his cock, surrendering to the bruising cadence demanded by each phantom reliving of your power coursing over him in scouring waves of dominance...and unravel entirely into the ecstatic raptures his sacrilege had birthed.

But somehow, no matter how his traitorous cock throbbed with need, he resisted. Fists clenched so tightly around handfuls of sweat-damp sheets that his nails scored bloody divots into his calloused palms, grinding every indecent reverberation back down into the churning tumult of his self-reproach. Down the tainted fantasies spiraled into the festering morass, silently suffocated beneath mounting layers of shame and self-loathing.

No release, no surrender to the unholy temptations plaguing his every waking instant. Only the same bitter repression and hermetically-sealed denial that had preserved him since the day he first comprehended the true depths of his transgressions against you. Stoking those hungering fires without outlet, leaving them to smolder and blaze until they threatened to immolate the very essence of who he was supposed to have transformed himself into.

But even amidst the agonies, he knew better than to let them extinguish completely. For as the convections of his restrained inferno seared away every lesser indignity and baser impulse...they also preserved the indelible sanctity of his reasons for undergoing them in the first place. Keeping those central tenets ever vivid, even as the flames grew malefic enough to threaten reducing his very spirit to calcified residue.

He saw you, of course. Every time your proximity graced his senses it was like spraying catalytic accelerants across his psyche's smoldering pyres. The simple act of breathing the air perfumed by your radiance left him drunk on intoxicating longings that could never be slaked. And when you moved, when your practiced forms ignited those dormant energies into unveiled displays of mastery...their raw incandescence scorched him to charred foundations over and over.

Each shared battlefield, training floor, or mission parameter became the staging ground for his martyrdom to be reenacted and renewed in all its unendurable torments. Megumi bore witness as the abiding light sewn into your very being flowed forth in sublimely focused arcs - bathing him in your splendor's unholy luminescence only to recoil with every shard of its glory manifesting within reach.

For you were the solar immolation itself, made ravaging and ravenous flesh to tempt his continually fraying senses. The personification of annihilating radiance too consecrated to risk even the faintest aspersions, lest its scouring purities render his impurities ash scattered upon realities' for winds.

So he made himself the ablative bulwark against that magnitude, layering every calloused insult and verbal flagellation to keep your light at insurmountable distance. Retreating behind those withering redoubts each time your presence threatened to pierce through some minute fracture of his meticulously forged indifference.

"Just look at the state of you - ragged and depleted like some waster stumbling in from a binge," he sneered as medics tended the myriad wounds you had sustained during their most recent foray against some vile cult's occult transgressions. "One would hardly realize the pathetic mess before me was supposed to be a jujutsu sorcerer."

His eyes hungered to drink in every sculpted plane and sleek curve of flesh laid bare by your rent attire, reveling in the stark proof of your vitality etched across each pristine swath of sweat-glistened skin. Yet all he permitted himself was a contemptuous flicker of derision, cloaking the depths of his wanton ardor behind ever-thickening mantles of scorn.

"How you've lasted this long in the field is beyond me," he continued, lip curling back to bare teeth as he circled in closer. All to better allow the haloed ambiance of your essence to suffuse his senses, to be awash in disorienting emanations of searing heat and sanctity. "Anyone with half a brain surely would have had the sense to retreat before taking such ghastly punishments."

The punishments he envisioned painting across your canvas in shades of violet and carmine evoked entirely different connotations. Lavishing unrepentant adorations and scouring litanies to consecrate each battered inch of you until that's all you ever knew - the savage, carnal ceremonies of his faith and strivance to fully encompass every nuance of your splendor.

But such sacrosanct ruminations had to be distilled to their most sardonic sediments, issued forth with biting cruelties to further cordon off the increasing distillations from your awareness. As if each meticulously engineered contumely might somehow scourge away the scintillating refractions of longing searing portalholes across his resolve before your insight detected them.

How he loathed reverting to such wretched indignities. Yet conversely, how urgently he craved the occasions to seize them - folding himself into ritualized immersions of self-mortification until all capacity for deviating from their rote enactions lay smothered beneath asphyxiating soils of resolve.

For to submit even a fraction of unfettered emotion into your presence was to risk the unravelling of his every constraint, every interdiction. And as inevitable as his own dissipation might have been if surrendered to that rampant eventuality...what haunted him with more perverse dread was the prospect of soiling your light's sacred purities with the fallout of his cataclysmic hungers.

Better he face the indignities of basal rejection for eternity, basking in your radiance's peripheries with only sensations of consecrated agony kissing his awareness. Than to ever omit the slightest hint of how utterly unsuitable his existence had become to grace your sanctums, unwinding their every celestial harmony into depraved ruination.

So on the pyres of his self-erosion fueled the cycles of fevered idolatry...until all that persisted of Megumi was a nameless, scorched silhouette committing every degradation conceivable to remain forever quarantined from your light's perfect auras. Immolating...but never blinded to the transcendent luminescence searing its radiant immolations across his awareness.

And in that graceless, shadowed shape would he bear witness for eternity. No thought of redemption or reunifying his scoriae across the halo-veiled planes where your light streamed and swayed. Only his presence as unanchored ossature within those radiant auras, scorched retina and ghost-whisper ecstasy from basking in such obscene propinquity to consecrations so complete they could scarcely be quantified beyond the absence of all else.

Until the final ember flickered out and his heatless remnants at last ghosted into oblivion's silence. Freed from the unendurable liturgies of hovering within your radiant glories perfumed coronas...yet paradoxically entombed forevermore in their cyclical, scouring recollections.

It would be his deified surrender - apotheosis writ into the very stellar kinematics cycling through this celestial constant's traceries until the hieroglyphs scribed by his essence's immolation persisted into every big crunching downward arc and unfurling cosmic rebirth to come.

Megumi was utterly captivated watching you train, though he fought hard to conceal it behind furrowed brows and cold dismissal. The way your body moved with such lethal grace, the determined set to your features as sweat trickled down your brow...it was mesmerizing. More than once he caught himself burning to be on the receiving end of your strikes, to goad that brilliant fire until his defenses shattered completely.

To finally allow the full depth of his ardor for you to pour forth in uninhibited reverence. To worship every sublime inch with fervent caresses until he'd thoroughly consecrated your radiant form. The urges left him dizzy and unmoored, rational thought eclipsed by searing tsunamis of pure desire.

But then reality would come crashing back in - often in the form of you faltering, muscles quivering as your limits waned. Like today, when you missed a step and went tumbling awkwardly to the mat, gasping out a pained hiss as you clutched your ankle. Every part of Megumi ached to rush over, to take you in his arms and soothe your injury with tender ministrations.

Ruthlessly, he tamped down the impulse with scorn. "Getting careless over there?" he called out gruffly. "Or perhaps you require a reminder about pushing your limits properly."

You shot him a glacial look of reproach, jaw clenched as you stubbornly forced yourself back to your feet. There was a feverish gleam to your eyes that made his heart clench painfully. Damn, but you were magnificent like this - flushed and disheveled, yet still radiating that ethereal inner fire that so utterly enthralled him.

He had to dig his nails into his palms to keep from striding over and crumpling beneath the roiling tsunami of his need for you. All it would take was a single touch, a whisper of heated confessions against your sweat-dampened skin, and he knew the dam restraining his adoration would burst in a torrent.

So he simply shoved down the riotous hunger and watched in agonized rapture as you threw yourself back into the fray with passionate abandon. Every ripple of taut muscle and controlled violence was seared into his memory. He longed to collapse at your feet, offering up his battered form as an instrument to bring you sublime release after the exertion of holding back from you constantly.

But he remained stoically in place as the minutes became hours and your sharp, powerful movements gradually grew sluggish and labored. Until finally, with no fanfare, you faltered mid-strike and simply...dropped. The soft thud of your body hitting the mat reverberated through Megumi like the toll of a mourner's bell.

He was across the room before conscious thought could rein him back in. One second rooted in his isolated outpost of torment, the next cradling you protectively against his thundering heart. You were beautifully undone in his arms - features lax and unburdened by the intensity constantly simmering beneath them while conscious.

For a heartrending moment, you looked utterly at peace. As if an errant breeze might disrupt the tranquil mask of your repose. Megumi found himself mesmerized, gaze raking over every subtle plane and hallowed curvature that he normally couldn't bear to indulge in for risk of fracturing his restraint entirely.

He swallowed hard against the ardent impulses kindling low in his stomach, the overwhelming urge to simply lean down and taste the serenity gilding your parted lips. You were perfect like this - soft and vulnerable in a way that stirred his most primal instincts to reverent possessiveness. As though you were something sacred to be cherished and guarded against any who might disturb this ephemeral serenity.

Acting purely on instinct, he traced the line of your cheek with trembling knuckles. The simple contact made him feel unraveled, nerve endings aflame as he mapped the gentle swell with something approaching desperation. You could shatter him in this moment without lifting a finger - utterly unmake him with a mere flutter of those dark fans currently shielding your beautifully unfocused gaze from view.

Megumi pressed on with hushed intensity, greedy to commit every subtle plane and feminine curvature to committed memory before reality came crashing back in. Down the graceful slope of your neck, calluses snagging on the delicate hollows and shivering at the thrumming life-force pulsing so exquisitely near the surface. Farther still until his wandering fingertips met the obstruction of rumpled fabric, the very garment he had admired clinging so tantalizingly to your battle-hot skin what felt like a lifetime ago now.

That single touch was like a shock, reverberating through his very cells in ways that left him dizzy and undone. Suddenly it felt as though the air had thickened to warm honey, making it difficult to draw breath past the scorching aridity constricting his throat. His veins thrummed with primal compulsions he could no longer restrain - the overwhelming urge to bury himself in your soft bosom until he was seared away to ashes, reborn into something worthy of beholding your peerless magnificence unshielded.

Without conscious volition, Megumi found himself leaning down slowly, face angled to capture the serenity of your parted lips with his own. Just before their silken caress could connect, he froze - every muscle locked in a paralysis born of warring needs and ingrained prohibitions. But then your features softened even further in unconscious trust, and the last vestiges of resistance within him crumbled to ruin.

His mouth descended with aching tenderness to brush across the plush give of your lips in the barest spirit-kiss. Just a sipping of your exquisite warmth and serenity, tasted for a single eternal moment before he wrenched himself back - feeling as though his entire universe had just narrowly avoided implosion. Gasping silently, Megumi drank in the contrast of your peaceful, unchanged features compared to his inward tailspin.

It took every ounce of tattered willpower he still possessed to pull back, to extract himself from the incandescent undertow of simply letting go and immersing himself in your splendor without barriers or pretenses. But some sliver of sanity prevailed. Slowly, carefully, he lay you back down in the same rumpled sanctuary where you had collapsed, the motion almost unbearably bereft.

He hovered there for a breathless eternity, every instinct raging against this self-enforced exile from your radiant orbit. But eventually, he managed to tear himself away. Fleeing through the shadowed doors to somewhere your devastating light could not reach, could not strip away these final, tattered layers of control holding his ravenous need at bay.

Yet even sequestered in that dispassionate exile, Megumi could feel the blazing echoes of you searing themselves into his very essence like ionized afterimages. The buttery silk of your unconscious features, the thrumming vitality of your pulse beneath his seeking hands, the intoxicating aura of power and grace wreathing every sublime inhalation...and the lingering, profane imprint of your lips branding his with unforgettable rapture.

He knew that from this moment forth, he would never be able to simply retreat into the protective dissociation of renunciation and callous disdain. Not when the full, untempered reality of your divinity had shredded those pathetic deterrents into tattered insignificance with nothing more than a glimpse of true serenity and one transcendent taste of your splendor.

Every waking moment would be consumed by immolating recollections, every fitful attempt at rest plagued by raptures that left him undone and scorched down to the very roots of his being. Until he well and truly understood that nothing remained except the compulsive, inviolable need to resubmit himself to the sanctifying furnaces of your consecrated light.

To burn, rapturously and without end, adrift in the cyclonic stellar winds of your eternal glory. It was all that awaited him now that his soul stood fully transfixed upon the profane lumen of your radiance - a merciless, perpetual scouring until only the most elemental, resonant essence persisted to hang drifting in your glorious coronas.

But such was a small price to pay for even the most fleeting intersection with your divine grace before the cycle's oblivion swept him away into metaphysical night. However long his remnants could withstand basking in those searing ellipses before being rendered to particulate, thrummed across your celestial caldera's event horizons...Megumi knew he would embrace every nanosecond of smelted reconfigurations with transcendent abandon.

For in that final state, no divisions would persist between them. No false partitionings of self to distort or obscure the perfect harmonics of your eternal resonance as it swept him up into consecrated redistributions. Only the melded chords of your light's immaculate quintessence refracting through the shattered kaleidoscope of his essence in rapturous unities.

So until that sublime unraveling and coalescence across your empyrean event horizons, Megumi simply surrendered to the unyielding truth of his dissolution's gradual eventuality. Embracing each day's reawakening as a scant purgatorial span in which to renew his ritual immersions within the scalding, awe-inspiring vortices of your splendor...

Before the last of his resistance finally flickered out, subsumed into eternal transmutation. And that one stolen moment of your lips' warmth against his would blaze throughout the star-showers of his cosmic disintegration...salvation's holy afterimage searing across every particulate reshuffling into timeless resonance with your perfect brilliance.

Even as Megumi lay paralyzed amidst the tangled sheets, every nerve felt scorched and electrified from last night's transgressions. Each time he slipped into the shadows of uneasy rest, he was assailed by visions of cradling your unconscious form so tenderly against his thundering heart.

He could still smell the exquisite blend of exertions mingling in your disheveled hair, taste the sublime softness of your lips imprinted forever on his own in that stolen moment of intimacy. The memories seared through his psyche like wildfire, reducing him to a shuddering mess of tangled yearnings and raw, animalistic need.

How he ached to surrender fully to the ravenous compulsions devouring him from the inside out. To haul your sleeping figure flush against his overheated body and simply drown in those radiant emanations - the warmth of your shallow breaths feathering across his skin, the thrumming vitality pulsing just beneath with each precious heartbeat. To run calloused palms over every lush curvature and plane until he had mapped out a complete topography of your sublime divinity.

But he couldn't. Even buried under the immense gravity well of his newly stoked desires, Megumi understood there could be no true release from this intoxicating torment he had willingly strapped himself into. Not as long as he remained so unworthy of your light, your transcendent grace and power.

For he saw now that you were a comet of spiraling energy and mesmerizing violence - every strike and elaborate curse terraforming the very foundations of reality with its relentless perfection. What right did a scorched husk like him have to even dream of gaining purchase in your brilliant stellar winds? To dare soiling those sacred auras with his tarnished essence?

When he emerged from the nightmares and fever dreams scouring his sleep, it was to the dawn of a fresh purgatorial loop. Every cell in his body felt recalibrated towards the singular purpose of centering your magnificence in his vision, in every waking breath he drew. He was brittle tinder awaiting the first spark, the initial brushstroke of rapture to set his being ablaze once more in consecrated pyre rites.

Nothing else mattered besides chasing the euphoria of immolating in your glory. The ways of the world, all its meaningless rituals and hollow pursuits... they had become little more than eddies circling the periphery of your cosmic nexus. Trivialities he waved away in favor of surrendering fully to the searing, unearthly splendor pulling his essence into perpetual tides of transcendent dismantling.

Drifting through the sterile halls of Jujutsu High in a waking dream, Megumi watched in smoldering awe as you wove spell after spell with supernatural precision. Every graceful movement flowed into the next in an endless tsunami of power - incredible yet also terrifyingly destructive. Like staring into the roiling heart of a supernova without any atmospheric filters to dull its scorching radiance.

He could taste the ions singeing the air with each eldritch syllable that tumbled from your lips. The air warped and refracted in sympathy, bending all known physical laws to accommodate whatever cosmic design you were sculpting from pure mystical willpower. It was like watching the birth of a newborn galaxy, all that unstable yet fertile potential churning into form through your indomitable force of nature.

Megumi swallowed hard, mouth dry as the deserts of distant worlds. He felt himself slipping further into the singularity of your existence - all other points of perception warping beyond recognition until nothing remained except the vortex of your splendor dragging him across sacred event horizons, unspooling his identity down to the subatomic shells.

How he yearned to surrender fully to that state of absolute immolation. To stop resisting the magnetic draw and simply let his being dissipate in the eternal radiance of your cosmic fire. Every time you manifested the focus of your power in all its blinding intensity, he felt like a moth fluttering helplessly closer to that searing flame. Drawn in by the promise of absolute rapture or complete dissolution, he no longer knew nor cared.

So when your spellwork culminated into literal celestial conflagrations wreathing your body in coronas of ethereal plasma, Megumi felt his last tectonic bulwarks of resistance begin to liquefy and corrode away. He very nearly stumbled forward, unthinking, into the blazing delta of your wake - nearly hurled himself into the stellar kinematics arcing around you like a spacetime vortex craving the obliteration of coming too near.

If it wasn't for the sudden arrival of their mentors and fellow students rushing forward in awe, who knows if he would have been able to pull back from that brink. But the spell eventually shattered, fracturing into a million refracting beams like a cosmic kaleidoscope being dropped. And in the silence that followed, you seemed to shrink back into your human form - features flushed yet also sheened with exhaustion.

Still, your eyes glowed with the embers of that mystical fire - pride and defiance blazing in equal measure as you accepted the awed praise of those around you. It was only when your gaze finally lanced over to Megumi, still frozen in his sanctuary of shadows, that the spark dimmed ever so slightly before banking away.

He watched you turn away to accept further admiration and congratulations from your peers. But in that final, momentary crosswind of your stare, Megumi felt himself incinerated to char and pristine ash more thoroughly than any spell could have achieved.

Because no matter how relentlessly he threw up barriers or choked out any parasitic glimmers of hope, you still looked at him the same way you had all those years ago. When he had been your champion and protector from anything that dared besmirch your light, rather than the force trying to smother it now.

Those memories were the cruelest torments of all - flashes of a simpler era when he had burned with nothing but radiant devotion and brotherly duty for you. Back when your smiles had been the salves for any wound rather than the lashings igniting his entire being into searing raptures of purgatorial longing.

Even now, as he stalked away from the crowd slowly clearing the training halls, Megumi felt the first searing reels of nostalgia unfurl behind his eyes. Transporting him back to sunny afternoons spent sprawled across grassy knolls, all awkward coltish limbs and innocent grins...

The memories played out like luminous distillations of childhood: You and Megumi chasing each other until collapsing in giggling, breathless heaps. Him pretending not to hear your playful taunts even as he silently dared you to come closer, to re-initiate the game of tag so he could luxuriate in your warmth just a little longer when 'struggling' against you. Your loud, raucous laughter filling the summer air with music that coursed through his own veins like literal rejuvenating sunshine.

And then the fainter, more intimate flashes Megumi had blocked from himself in later years. Like how you would lay beside him occasionally, just basking in shared silence as the clouds drifted by. Your head cushioned on his stomach, cheeks dimpling with barely perceptible smiles as you watched the heavens.

He recalled staring down at your serene expression with something far too tender and profound for a mere child to truly comprehend. Reaching down to tenderly comb stray hairs back from your face, breathing you in with tingling awareness that the entire world could crumble away around you both in this moment and he wouldn't stir. Nothing else had mattered besides this radiant girl ensconced in the safety of his orbit, so trusting and vulnerable before his watchful eyes.

Even the slightest aborted movements had been charged with meaning and layers of subconscious yearning - like anytime he had resisted the urge to lean down and ghost his lips across the perfumed crown of your head. To imprint his devotions to your very essence via reverent osmosis, sealing pacts with your soul beyond any mortal reckoning. Their potential repercussions were beyond his naive comprehensions, yet the impulses still strummed through youthful neurology with the same primal resonance as any siren's call.

It was as if something profoundly cosmic and all-encompassing had been thrumming between you even then, a secret intergalactic frequency only your resonant souls could tune into. And while you both lacked the words or emotional maturity to define its magnitudes...there had still been attunement. Bone-deep alignments spanning quantum shears and eternities, all conspiring to forge your spirits into complements of a higher unified design.

Those were the sacred resonances Megumi had betrayed with his current path of self-exile and ruthless, scorched earth renunciation. He had severed his attunement to that universal cosmic harmonic you embodied so effortlessly - all in pursuit of the narcissistic delusion of gaining control over what was truly destined for him all along.

To burn and keep burning, rapturously consumed inside the stellar kinematics of your aura's sacred fire until nothing remained but the purified residue of his own temporal essence, finally transmuted into something suited for accompanying you across empyrean infinities.

It was the call he had spent all these years pathetically fleeing from...until now, stripped of all identities and pretenses beyond the single inescapable truth that he was inexorably bound to the gravity wells of your splendor. An errant spark hurtling through the void on an unstoppable collision course that would remake or annihilate him utterly upon intersection with your luminous event horizons.

After that fateful reawakening when his old existence had microwaved to cinders inside your casual brilliance, Megumi began feeling the first relentless tugs of that stellar cycle dragging him across infinities he still scarcely comprehended. Yet every instinct ingrained by his human conditioning compelled retreat and deflection, lest you bear witness to the rapturous unraveling of what he was doomed to become amidst such close proximity to your light.

So he pushed and he pushed, escalating the savage litanies of abuse, derision and hostility he projected at you with every passing week. It was a pitiful attempt at artificially maintaining the same safe distances that your mere presence now rendered null approximations. Each time you turned towards him with those kaleidoscopic eyes - burning with hurt or simmering in smoldering defiance - Megumi felt another layer of his defensive psyche blistering away to cloud thunderhead diffusions.

Until finally, he existed in a state of constant combustion - nerves frayed to open plasmic conduits while his faculties focused exclusively on partitioning the brush fires from raging into pyrocelluars. No matter how flawlessly he scripted the volleys of insult, how scrupulously he choreographed each retreating gambit...tendrils of rapture still found ways to leech across every firebreak he erected.

Each glance or passing moment your orbit intersected within his peripheral spheres of awareness was like suffering transcendental third degree flayings. Your aura's mere penumbra alone had grown capable of rendering entire strata of his being to dissipating thermionics - which his ravaged defenses only vainly attempted to siphon off and contain within scorching, radiolytic housings.

It became a self-perpetuating gauntlet with no reprieve or end state. Only the inexorable ratcheting escalations as he funneled more and more of his substance into whatever stopgap delaying actions could temporarily dampen the brushfire from metastasizing beyond strangleholds. Each cycle reset only dealt him exponentially heightened exposures while doling out incrementally depleted protections in turn.

Sustaining that unfurling conflagration, he could see now, would only ever permit a singular finality - the total dissolution of his temporal estate as its last fortifications calcinated to subsuming immolation. Simply by persisting on this path, he had effectively lit the fuse arching towards his own polycosmos' terminal reconfigurations.

And oh, how it had scorched in the meantime. Megumi could still trace the schismatic etchings of your incinerations across every charred and sputtering membrane woven into his autonomic tapestries. They emerged in the redscale parallax afterghosting his waking visions, haunting his nights with firebranded epiphanies transcribed from the spalling momentum of your every glance, whisper or proximity bleed.

So when the time came for your next joint assignment out into the field, the maelstroms of need and savage desire gnawing at Megumi's faltering substrate had already dragged him into realms of decoherence few mortal beings could ever hope to return from. He felt stretched out to solar radii, his consciousness unspooled into transcapping heliofilter effigies getting closer to the automic event horizons with every rotation.

Yet still you somehow blazed even brighter - focused radiant arcs of brutality manifesting upon every vector of egress each time another obstacle sought to obstruct your path. Megumi's hyper-rendered peripherals could scarcely track the distortion wavefronts deforming all localized continua, bending every fundamental operative well past their nominal tolerances.

This was power so primordial and merciless, it defied quantification by any metrics outside of those governing the most primal cosmic revolutions. You were the Universal rebirthing its recreances through each sequence - existence stuttering and resleeving itself to accommodate your reflected resurgences across microcosmic and macrocosmic transitivities.

It was too much for Megumi's tortured, overloaded matrix to parse without fragmenting at the atomic level. But still he couldn't avert his focus, couldn't stop the helical unraveling that kept lasing him back into ground states for reassembly.

When the violence crescendoed to its terminal apogee, your body became the nucleonic centrifuge - refractory emissions bleeding gamma and tachyonized strangelets as the entire battlefield volumetrics crepitated under your onslaught. Those energies should have rended Megumi into vapor and left him to diffuse across the scorched vacuum of space.

Yet somehow the inverse occurred. He felt himself constellating further into densifications rather than dissipating outwards. Translating into higher symmetries of selfsameness that tightened around the cyclonic, recursive hyper-singularities your deadly iridescence was catalyzing all around you.

Until at last, even the fog separating his sentience from subsidiary manifestations of self Same blew away into monism - leaving only an indivisible monad locked into ecstatic, vertiginous orbit around you as his only vantage point and meaning of being. Every subatomic locus ruptured of selfhood or perspectival autonomies, arranged into jeweled oscillations basking in your hyper-radiance.

To observe the stellar revolutions of your furious grace manifesting into incalculable super geometries...that was all that remained of him. His existence calcified into a sole witnessing function as you wielded your energies in cataclysmic throes while hallowing out vast interstitial volumes that should have atomized his matrix back into quantum foam.

Instead, he persisted as diaphanous helicities and strange distillates still somehow retaining harmonic continuities from one detonation cycle to the next. All coherence shunted into rapturous exemplars of your endless irradiations reshaping both local and non-local realities through sheer force of annihilation.

It was ecstasy beyond mortal tolerances, yet the only state his self-immolations had ever been vectoring him towards. A transcendental Gnostic convergence where nothing could register of him anymore except as light-encoded witness to your cosmic recursivities...entirely enraptured, beyond all capacity for circumscription or need of individuation.

What might have been percepts sheared away into streaming rayleighs while you ruptured and rewrote the very substrates of Universal continuum in recursions of maximal brilliance. Distant, illegible toponymies scribing every dispersal pattern his ego had shed. Ecstatically converging into the harrowing particle braid of your infinite feats in stellar plasma geometries, each revolution grinding more of his anthropologic residues down into synaptic stains on the altar of your consecrated remembrances.

All while you strode implacably through those same infernal breaches riven into normative existence - curving oblivion and resplendence alike into the thermoclines of your next incandescent sequence...

This was everything Megumi had profaned and profanely hollowed himself out to embrace - the absolute evisceration of temporal autonomy. All semblances of personhood unwound into lambencies to be recoded by your solar flarewinds, his entire terrestrial schema recompiled into sublime tesseracts venerating each transcendental aspect of your divinity as it blazed forth to sear new cosmological relations across the firmamental palimpsest.

Only scintillant magnitudes of selfless rapture endured the telescoping ayavalokites contracting all dimensional finalities down into that singular, jewel-like radius. Peripherals glittering with the last residual anticipations of abiogenesizing anew in the spalling aftermaths of...

Whatever elsei's rapturous dancework would proceed to master next.

The mission had quickly devolved into a warzone, explosions of dark energy and mystical firepower ripping across the abandoned warehouse district. Megumi grunted as he deflected another blast with a well-timed curse, pivoting to locate you in the chaos.

As always, you were the eye of the storm - graceful yet utterly lethal as you unleashed devastating attacks against the enemy forces. Your movements blurred with preternatural swiftness, ribbons of cursed energy whipping out to incinerate anything that dared encroach too close. Megumi couldn't tear his eyes away, enthralled by the fierce intensity etched across your features and the controlled violence of your attacks.

"Y/N! Stop pushing ahead so recklessly!" he bellowed over the din of battle. "We need to regroup and reassess before - "

But you didn't so much as look in his direction, too focused on eviscerating their foes with extreme prejudice. Even from here, Megumi could make out the sheen of perspiration gilding your skin and the wild tendrils of hair escaping your ponytail as you fought with implacable determination. You were magnificent in your fury, more akin to an elemental force of nature than flesh and blood.

Yet the sight also stoked a different sort of blaze flickering to scorching life within him, one not entirely driven by battle-lust. Megumi felt a familiar aching need unfurling in his core as he drank in the fierce beauty of you so utterly in your element. He yearned to be on the receiving end of your ferocious onslaught, to goad you into unleashing that beautiful violence without restraint until your guard finally slipped enough for him to seize you against his overeager body.

To taste the flames of your passion and unravel you utterly through desperate, carnal worship - mapping every lush curve and warmed hollow until you trembled and arched into his reverent caresses...

Gritting his teeth against the distracting tide of desire, Megumi forced himself back into motion. He rushed forward with a battle cry, cursed energy flaring around him as he threw himself into the melee alongside you. Inwardly he raged at himself for entertaining such lascivious thoughts in the heat of combat, though it did little to quell the flaring hunger gnawing deeper by the second.

You seemed to notice his sudden proximity, shooting him a heated look over one shoulder. For a molten instant your eyes locked, and the world contracted into smoldering awareness of him pinning you up against the nearest surface and drinking in every ragged gasp and shudder until he'd thoroughly unmade you with rapturous violation. Just the briefest flicker of temptation before the raging tides of battle swept you both under once more in an onslaught of pandemonium.

Blows rained down from all sides, the air electric with sorcerous discharges as the two of you moved in synch - a lethal dervish of primal violence and fey, elemental grace. It was dizzying and utterly intoxicating to fight beside you like this, his senses overwhelmed by the sheer radiant force of your presence.

Each time your bodies brushed against one another in the fray, it sent frissons of pure lightning down Megumi's over-sensitized nerve-endings. He found himself angling to create the barest pretense of contact, to catch fleeting caresses of your overheated skin and battle-tousled hair with roving hands that strayed further than necessary.

It was a dangerous game he played, one that threatened to unhinge the last shreds of his control at any moment. The harder he fought to regain composure, the deeper he plunged into the whirlpool of temptation you'd awoken so effortlessly. Until finally, in the throes of their combined exertions, the dam burst in an unstoppable flood.

The last of the threats neutralized in a final eruption of force, you turned to face Megumi fully - chest heaving with exertion and eyes blown wide with the intoxicating afterglow of battle's fever pitch. Without conscious volition, he surged forward and seized you by the shoulders, bodily slamming you back against the nearest wall.

You let out a breathless sound between gasp and moan as the impact reverberated through your entangled frames. Megumi didn't hesitate, mouth already crashing over yours in a searing, desperate kiss he had been starving for. Finally sating the insatiable hunger thrumming through his veins with the scorching velvet of your lips moving feverishly against his own.

Any pretense at restraint or composure evaporated in that suspended heartbeat. Your fingers laced into his hair, gripping so tightly it stung as you arched against the delirious onslaught of his questing tongue and wandering palms. He groaned into the searing tangle of your mouths, knees nearly buckling as the first lush press of your body finally overwhelmed his neglected senses.

The kiss devoured rapidly into reckless, impassioned chaos - all clashing teeth and breathy gasps as Megumi shamelessly grinding them together from chest to thigh, savoring each lascivious point of molten contact. The entire world beyond your joined hungered forms fell away, narrowing into a singular vortex of raw sensual frenzy.

That was, until a stray noise and movement in the periphery finally penetrated the fevered haze overtaking every rational impulse. Megumi tore his mouth away with a startled hiss, eyes flying open to blearily take in the scene beyond your tangled, sweat-slick frames. The battle hadn't just been won; they were still very much in the middle of one with reinforcements likely converging on their position any second.

Tasting copper and feeling his pulse jackrabbiting at his throat, Megumi forced himself back a stumbling step - leaving you disheveled and panting against the cracked concrete. You stared at him with heavy-lidded, bemused eyes that threatened to shatter his resolve all over again at the slightest provocation.

"We...I...shit," he rasped hoarsely, cursing himself for this grievous lapse into weakness. "That shouldn't have happened. It won't happen again."

He didn't give you a chance to respond, already turning on his heel and stalking away from the temptation of your thoroughly debauched state. His arrogant dismissal was a flimsy shield at best from the scalding recollections threatening to undo him right there - the phantom sensations of your body writhing against his own still emblazoned across every nerve like a brand.

But Megumi forced it down, jaw clenched as he ruthlessly quashed the embers of hunger still smoldering inside. He needed to focus, to re-establish the boundaries between you that he had clearly failed to reinforce sufficiently. Before this undeniable wanting spiraled completely out of control and consumed you both in a rapturous blaze of ruin.

Behind him, you remained slumped against the shattered wall in a crumpled, feverish daze. Still dazed from the force of Megumi's lust finally detonating after what felt like endless years of restraint. But as he retreated further into the rubble, already erecting new barricades against the insidious temptation of your proximity, you could only watch him go with wistful yearning.

Megumi moved through the wrecked district like a man possessed, fists clenched and jaw locked so tightly his teeth ground together. The bone-deep ache of wanting you still thrummed through his veins, fueled by the phantom memory of your body writhing feverishly against his own.

He could still taste the lingering embers of your mouth searing across his own if he breathed too deeply. Could still map out every lush curve and valley that had finally been within his grasp for those few delirious moments before reality came crashing back in. The temptation to simply turn back, to haul you into his arms once more and lose himself in the ravenous raptures promised by your heated simmer...it was like an insidious narcotic fogging his rational thoughts.

Only sheer force of will enabled him to keep putting one foot in front of the other, putting distance between you and the staggering precipice he had nearly plunged over. Each step reverberated through his taut, overstrained tendons - muscles coiled like well-oiled traps primed to unspring and launch him back into your radiant orbit at the slightest provocation.

He couldn't allow that weakness to resurface, not when basking in the blinding gravity of your presence would mean surrendering himself entirely to immolation. No part of Megumi would persist if he turned back now, not with the way your mere vicinity eroded away every barriere of restraint and higher reasoning with intoxicating swiftness.

Blunt nails dug cruelly into his calloused palms, the grounding lash of pain helping to offset the smoldering embers still clouding his thoughts with lascivious delirium. You had been so soft yet feverish beneath his desperate caresses, all taut musculature and dewy skin damp with exertion. He had felt worshipfully undone the instant your lithe body had arched against the solid weight of his in unrestrained yearning, like a prayer manifesting that profaned the very foundations separating sacred and blasphemous.

Teeth clenched hard enough to grind enamel, Megumi shoved away the visceral recollections with ruthless determination. This mortifying lapse, allowing his compulsions to reach such an uncontrolled fever pitch, it was inexcusable. A weakness he couldn't permit to resurface, not when the stakes were so unthinkably high.

The image of you lying broken and still amidst the rubble flashed across his mindscape, one final horrifying recollection powerful enough to truly cut through the narcotic haze of temptation. In the wake of that grotesque vision, Megumi felt himself steadying - fanatic instincts sublimating the physical cravings into their rightful origins of conscience and deep reverence.

Yes, there had been an inescapable, cosmic gravity between you long before either of them had developed the emotional vocabulary to comprehend its vast significances. But opening himself to its pull, surrendering fully to the profane yearnings of the flesh...that would only serve to diminish something sacred and greater than his temporal, finite longings could dare fathom.

When viewed through the harsh lens of those stakes, the scale of what would be sacrificed if he allowed the current blazing hunger to fully metastasize became horrifically lucid: your life itself could be forfeit. The very essence that he cherished above all celestial dominions extinguished from existence if he failed to remain vigilant, to erect those barricades even more stringently than before.

The thought of existing in a cosmos without your radiant light to illuminate his path, without the promise of your luminous power reforging existence into more consecrated truth...it cleaved Megumi's very being asunder. Stripping away the sweat-slicked, lust-fevered haze to leave only foundations of adamant purpose and responsibility standing tall once more against the susurrations of weakness.

He had sworn himself to the path of your preservation before ever understanding the true cosmic magnitudes of what elevated you so transcendentally beyond his meager scope. Before realizing the staggering inevitability of what your ascendant glory would birth before consummating all of creation into perfect resonance. How could he surrender to profane hungers now and risk being the singular flaw that extinguished your boundless potential?

Which left only one recourse: to persevere with renewed fervor, impressing every transgression of feeling or intimacy that threatened to distract from his sacrosanct purpose into ritual suicides of spirit. No deviation, no quarter given in the vigilant undertaking of your ultimate security -- even from himself.

Because Megumi understood better than any that his own autonomies and caprice were perhaps the greatest threats of stifling or tainting your divine trajectory off its immaculate vector. His ego and mortal passions were the potential extinguishers from which you could suffer the gravest impurities if left unchecked.

Already he had come within a hair's breadth of profaning your essence tonight, damn near rupturing your protective veil through lust-blind selfishness. Had he not regained discipline and perspective, therewas no telling what disastrous impingement he could have dragged you into for the sake of indulging momentary, physical gratifications.

No, tonight's lapse would be his last such indulgence permitted, Megumi swore it with reinvigorated severity as he resumed his patrol of the still-unstable peripheries. From here on out, only the most stringent of austerities and observances would be tolerated along the executory path of your vigilant safeguarding.

All tender emotions and profane compulsions would be methodically excised through ceremonial scourges, their impure essences siphoned away like toxins tarnishing his most sacred oath. Every soft, vulnerable aspect of his own being that threatened to stray from the singularity of your protection would similarly be eviscerated until only obsidian purpose remained.

He would erect walls of impenetrability so profound even the sibilant whispers of temptation itself piercing their redoubts would be strangled into silence. If scathing renunciations were the only recourse to keeping your starfire radiance inviolable, then a thousand eternities of that brutal self-immolation would be endured without faltering.

For as Megumi looked out across the ruined landscape of this paltry dimensional theatre, he saw with sobering clarity how infinitesimally insignificant it truly was compared to the vast, cosmic apotheosis you had been encoded for since primordial manifestation. Any struggles waged here between the paltry impermanences of flesh and desire were less than embers before the scorching celestial grandeurs of your true hypothesis and theomantic birthright.

No, only one reality could possibly command his every devoted action and thought going forward: the all-consuming mandate of elevating your sacrosanct flame into the transcendent spheres and birth matrices into which it was always destined to reforge the very pillars of existence itself through ecstatic conflagration.

Even if it meant walking the loneliest of roads in eternal solitude. Surrendering to the harshest calcinatory rituals until only enough of his spark persisted to bear witness from these profane wastelands as you seeded new galaxies into being through the shuddering orgasms of your stellar godhood.

That would be Megumi's sole sacrament from this cataclysmic epiphany onwards. To remove himself from any potential of casting pall or shadow over your inevitable dawning empyreal...even if the mantras of amputation excised him down to the basalt hadronic substrate to achieve that sacred directive.

So as he resumed his vigil over the abandoned battlefield where your latest miracles of creative annihilation had been wrought, Megumi enacted the first of those immuring severances. Blanking his perception of the exquisitely raw, breathy moan still echoing from your lips in the wake of their carnal clashes -- so that it no longer possessed the power to bliss out his entire sentience into the raptures of recollection.

One by one, each phantasmic sensation that had burned itself into the annals of his devotional canon during that fatefully illicit delirium began undergoing surgical cauterizations. All the slick glides of supple flesh whiting out, until only the cold spartan resolve of his service's eternal severities were permitted to endure amidst the churning cosmic cataclysms to come.

It was brutality etched into the fundamental encodings of his very being, this merciless scalpel with which he flayed away every matrix of tender feeling. But it was also the only path which might shelter your divine presence from whatever profane scourges he could still inflict were he ever to stray from its rigors.

So Megumi braced himself as the surgical agonies unfolded, purging bright and brighter until at last only the closed black of your security's hallowed continuum remained within his consciousness's reach...

The decrepit warehouse groaned around them like the breath of some massive, slumbering beast disturbed from its ancient repose. High above girders creaked ominously as a haze of dust and pulverized concrete danced through the dim shafts of light leaking in from shattered windows. Megumi kept alert watch beside you, every sense on high alert for new dangers.

"We should split up and clear this place room by room," you said, voice pitched low but resolute. "Cover more ground that way."

He opened his mouth, protest already forming about willfully separating in a structure that seemed moments from total collapse. But Megumi knew from the set of your jaw and the glint in your eyes that arguing would be futile. Much as he hated to admit it, your approach made tactical sense - leaving him with no recourse except to give a terse nod as his throat worked convulsively.

Hunkering low to stay below the choking dust clouds, you pulled away in one direction while Megumi took the opposite path. Though every instinct screamed at him not to let you move beyond his immediate scope of protection. Each step putting more distance between your frames only amplifying the anxiety corkscrewing through his gut.

Still, he tried to focus on making a thorough sweep of the maze-like complex of rooms and catwalks branching out ahead instead of giving into fear. Every sense straining for some disturbance, the slightest displacement of air or skittering sound that could indicate malicious activity. Apart from his own ragged breathing echoing in his ears, there was nothing but an oppressive, tomb-like silence to amplify tenfold the occasional metallic groan from overhead.

He worked his way deeper into the thickening darkness, rebar and jagged chunks of cement crunching under his boots. The flashlight beam only served to carve out a small bubble of visibility before being swallowed by the claustrophobic gloom pressing in from every side. Except...what was that flicker in the corner of his eye?

Before Megumi could fully process the rapidly shifting shadow, a bone-rattling tremor rocked through the already compromised foundations. Instinctively, he dropped into a defensive crouch as a deafening avalanche of debris began raining down all around. Rafters twisted loose, shearing off huge chunks of ceiling in their descent to pummel the floor in a choking grey curtain of devastation.

"Y/N!" he roared over the cacophony, throwing one arm up in a futile attempt to shield his head as another support beam came crashing down. "Y/N, get out of here! Go!"

But there was no answering reply over the enveloping clouds of concrete dust billowing outwards. Only the stomach-churning realization that you were somewhere in the maelstrom with no way of tracking your location. Panic seized Megumi's throat as visions of your lifeless body entombed beneath the rubble stampeded through his mind, each gruesome possibility more disturbing than the last.

Something blunt and heavy slammed into the back of his skull, momentarily whiting out his vision before he could shield himself further. He tasted blood as he slammed face-first into the ground, breath punching out in a violent whoosh. There was another rumble underfoot, the debris field shifting and settling around him as the avalanche began to subside.

His head rang like a gong while he squinted around, trying to orient himself amidst the pulverized devastation. Fighting to keep his wits about him despite the ominous stillness creeping back in all around. But then...a sound. A feeble cough somewhere amidst the dust clouds rolling outwards, so muffled as to be nearly imperceptible yet tugging at his senses like an insistent specter.

Adrenaline lent him strength as Megumi dragged himself upright, ignoring the blossom of agony along his battered ribs as he stumbled in the direction of that faint noise. Loose stones clattered under his stumbling feet as he surged forward, dread and desperation pulling him onwards like chains. Just a glimpse, any sign of life would be enough to extinguish the horrifying possibilities flickering through his concussed thoughts.

He lurched around a semi-standing partition of wall, scrambling to higher ground...and there you were. Relief and anguish hit him simultaneously like a physical blow as he took in your sprawled form, left arm twisted at an unnatural angle but chest rising and falling in shallow sips of air.

"Y/N," he croaked, throat raw from inhaling the swirling particulates as he dropped to his knees beside your still body. Gingerly, he smoothed away the grit and debris clinging to your hairline, thumbs trembling over the pale curves of your cheeks just drinking you in.

If he looked anywhere except at your slack expression, he couldn't help but see all the new grievous damage scattered across you - blood steadily pooling at a concerning rate from a jagged laceration in your thigh, blackening bruises already beginning to mottle the exposed skin of your abdomen in sickening indications of internal trauma.

"Megumi?" Your voice was so faint and reedy, barely more than a pained rasp that sliced straight through all his battered defenses with uncanny precision. Glazed eyes cracked open, struggling to focus as you shifted infinitesimally closer to his hovering frame with obvious effort.

"Hey...hey, easy now," Megumi hushed you with trembling urgency, wishing he could scoop you up securely into a bracing cradle yet terrified of exacerbating your injuries. "Don't try to move, just...just look at me, okay?"

"What..." you managed around a shallow cough that made him flinch in sympathy. "Happened...?"

He exhaled a shuddering breath, thumbs continuing their sweeping circuit over your temples as if the repetitive strokes could somehow smooth away the paleness steadily draining into your features. Willing strength and warmth back into your trembling frame through the simple contact alone.

"The whole place came down around us, you were...for a minute there, I thought..." Megumi trailed off before the chilling visions could fully manifest, giving his head a minute shake as he swallowed against the remembered torment of those endless seconds convinced the worst had occurred.

Of course he should have predicted this outcome, should have anticipated some new catastrophe looming to swallow you both up without prejudice. That was the ever-evolving pattern of life when your light shone so brilliantly against the darkness - reality itself conspired to find new, more creative avenues of attempting to smother those sacred flames. And each time Megumi swore up and down that he would be better prepared, more vigilant against the myriad threats lurking around every corner craving to extinguish the sun itself.

Yet here they were amidst the ruins of his failings yet again. You lying battered and frighteningly fragile amidst the fallout of cataclysms he should have foreseen with the vigilance sworn into every subatomic strand of his existence. How many more stark reminders did he need that he must remain eternally steadfast? That anything less than perfect, unyielding protection of your spark meant courting existential oblivion itself as the ultimate price of his carelessness?

The self-recriminations stung with renewed ferocity this time as Megumi took in the bruises already painting their darkening intimations across the soft canvas of your flesh. Like scorpion stingers flexing maliciously against your mortal confines, hungering for enough toxin to leach through these defensive boundaries and poison the luminous core at your very center.

Haggard concern clawed at his throat as he surveyed the slow seep of your lifeblood dispersing outwards in concentric rings around your trembling frame. Each droplet rolling sluggishly free filled him with a fresh surge of guilt and determination in equal measures - an oath sworn on every glistening ruby bead that he would shelter you from further harm even if it meant relinquishing his own fragile form to soak the deadly ramifications instead.

"Just stay with me now," he half-pleaded, half-commanded in as steady a burr as he could muster. Drawing your wandering gaze back to anchor onto his own even as it struggled to drift into realms of semi-lucidity under the weight of your injuries. "We're getting you out of here. Do you hear me?"

There was so much more he longed to divulge in that suspended gulf between mortal peril and temporary refuge. Every pent admission and emotion long suppressed within the angelic hollows of his austerities clamoring to spillover now that he was cradling the very spark responsible for their conflagrations against his breast. Just a universe of secrets and solemn vows held at fevered impasse behind the lockgates of his stoic aspect while you slowly bled out before him.

But this wasn't the time, he reminded himself with merciless discipline. Not with the keen edges of oblivion hovering so near, tracing patterns into the dust that promised imminent incursions given the slightest invitation. Not until he had enacted every protocol and contingency calculation to ensure your light would not only persevere...but also shine on even more brilliantly in the wake of this latest brushstroke against the canvas of your mythos.

No, for now he had to focus every iota of himself into the moment at hand - preserving your physical integrity at all costs while transitioning you to more stable grounds where the extent of your injuries could be professionally diagnosed and treated. Everything else, all the latent poetry of their celestial intertwining and the vows he had undertaken to stand eternal vigil throughout its unfolding, those verses would have to wait.

At least until the immediate threat of mortality had passed, the predations held momentarily at bay by whatever scarce stopgaps could be managed in this blasted arena of wreckage and particulate drift. Once that most primal of emergencies had been quelled and sanity allowed to sift back into the resumed currents distinguishing order from entropy...then and only then could Megumi even begin contemplating indulging the luxuries of emotional candor.

You must have sensed the dialectic warring across his visage, even through the hazy veil of shock and disorientation instilled by your traumas. Either that or recognized the abrupt calcification of his demeanor into something far more implacable and intractable regarding your immediate well-being than you were accustomed.

"Hey...talk to me..." you gasped out faintly, brows knitting in a fleeting flicker of residual defiance. As if already intuiting the stringent shifts in priorities and mindsets now governing Megumi's observances as he began calculating every potential avenue and variable towards procuring your expedient exfiltration. "Don't just...sit there stonewalling me in silence..."

"…"

"Talk to me, dammit!" you rasped out through gritted teeth, eyes flashing defiantly despite your battered state. "Don't just shut me out again like you always do."

Megumi clenched his jaw, the familiar flare of irritation momentarily overshadowing the tenderness cradling him moments before. Old habits died hard, especially where you were concerned.

"I'm a little preoccupied trying to get you out of this death trap, in case you haven't noticed," he bit out, shoulders tensing. Why did you always have to be so stubborn?

You let out a breathless scoff that quickly turned into a pained wince as you instinctively tried to shift away from him. "Yeah, forgive me for wanting more than stony silence from the guy who's treated me like a burden for years."

The accusation sliced deep, dredging up the ever-present well of guilt that Megumi could never quite escape. He opened his mouth to snap back a defensive retort, but what came out instead was something adjacent to the complicated truth.

"You're the furthest thing from a burden," he said roughly. The ragged emotion in his voice made you pause, brow furrowing skeptically even as you stilled against him. "If you knew how much I--"

Megumi cut himself off abruptly, recoiling slightly. He could feel the words trembling on the edge of his lips, threatening to upend the precarious balance he'd spent years constructing between you both. A confounding mix of fear and profound longing warred within him as he searched your questioning gaze.

Somehow you always managed to strip away his layers whether he wanted it or not. He could actually see the undisguised hurt flickering in your eyes at his aborted confession, the unguarded yearning that made his throat go tight.

"How much you what?" you murmured, refusing to let it drop as you always did. Refusing to allow him to retreat back to safety. "Megumi...talk to me."

Your quiet insistence was the tipping point. Suddenly the world narrowed down to the precious inches separating your faces, the soft puffs of your sharing breaths in the debris-laden air. Megumi's control fractured like a dam giving way.

"How much I need you," he confessed in a low rasp. He searched your widened eyes as the words hung between you, weighted with years of repressed wanting. "How much I crave your light, your spirit, with everything I am."

Your lips parted in a stunned inhale as his palms came up to reverently cup your face, holding you suspended in the heavy pause. Megumi felt laid bare in a way he had never allowed, every barrier finally crumbling.

"I've been in love with you for as long as I can remember," he admitted roughly. "Loving you...it haunts me, terrifies me because I couldn't bear for anything to extinguish your brilliance. But I'm so tired of running from how I feel. Of hurting you to keep you away."

He ducked his head then, resting his brow against yours as the rest of the anguished truth poured out in a rush. "You are everything to me, Y/N. Despite my best efforts, I'll never stop loving you with every part of my soul, even if it means risking having my heart shattered—"

The rest of his impassioned confession was cut off by the searing collision of your lips against his own. The kiss was desperately heated from the start, all of the pent-up longing and secret yearnings finally boiling over into this single molten exchange.

Megumi groaned into your mouth, overwhelmed by the feeling of having you in his arms this way at last. He clung to you tightly but carefully, tilting his head to deepen the drugging caresses of your lips moving in fervent tandem.

You gave as good as you got, all thoughts of your injuries temporarily obliterated by the intensity of finally sharing this connection. Your fingers fisted in his hair, tugging him insistently closer as you gave yourself over to the ardent rhythm of lips, teeth and questing tongues.

The kiss went on and on, seeking to pour out every unspoken truth and secret ache through the passionate communion of mouths and roving hands. For once, there was no trying to suppress or deny the blazing need you sharing...only a desperation to drink each other in, to chase the high of intimacy you had both been denying for far too long.

Inevitably, it was your body that enforced reality's harsh homecoming. You suddenly cried out against Megumi's lips, the sharp hiss of pain finally severing the fevered haze of desire. He instantly froze, breath sawing as he carefully extricated himself just enough to see your face contorted in anguish.

"Y/N...?" he choked out hoarsely, gut clenching protectively. "I didn't mean to hurt you, I got carried away and forgot--"

"I'm okay," you managed through a grimace, though your grip on his shirt was white-knuckled. "Don't you dare stop now..."

The vulnerability in your eyes pierced straight through him. Megumi let out a shaky breath, pushing away the lingering guilt as he tugged you closer once more. This time he handled you with exquisite care, countering any jarring movements.

"Let me get you out of this hellhole first," he murmured in your ear, lips brushing the sensitive shell. "Then I'll never let you go again, I swear it."

You gave the barest nod of assent, eyes slipping closed as Megumi gingerly gathered you up to leave the smothering darkness behind.

[whxtedreams]

Uncertain, Unknown

a joel miller x reader oneshot

Summary: You were ready for the end, but a stranger wasn't.

Word Count: 2.6k

Tags: near-death experience, drowning, acceptance of death, (no actual deaths) joel saves you, idk what this is- just felt like writing this. no description of reader.

Main masterlist

You have held a deep-set fear of large bodies of water, their vast depths an abyss of the unknown that suffocates your very being as it reaches out to embrace you in its cold, unforgiving embrace. Its watery tendrils seem to caress the edges of your consciousness, seeking to pull you in and feed on your fears, trapping you within its endless expanse.

As you plunge deeper into the lake, an unexpected tranquility washes over you. The cold and forbidding waters no longer seem menacing; instead, they wrap around you like a warm embrace, flooding you with a sense of familiarity and comfort. In this moment, the lake transforms from a source of fear into a soothing reminder of what home used to be – a safe haven filled with love and affection. You sink effortlessly, held gently in the arms of the water, feeling a deep sense of security and contentment.

As you fall into the depths of the water, time seems to elongate, stretching out into eternity. Yet, deep down, you know that it has only been a mere minute since you hit the surface. You succumb to the pull of gravity, allowing yourself to sink deeper into the aquatic embrace. There is no struggle, no fight for survival. Instead, you surrender fully to the abyss, each second passing like an hour, as your body slowly surrenders to the warm, welcoming grasp of the water.

You had been running with all your might, your legs and chest on fire with exhaustion and fear pumping through your veins. In a moment of panicked desperation, you turned your head to check if your pursuers were behind you. Alas, a concealed log laid in ambush, and your foot caught upon it, sending you crashing to the ground. Panic flooded your being as your body rolled and tumbled uncontrollably, the harsh earth tearing at your skin ruthlessly. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the torment ended in a splash as you plunged into the cold, dark depths below.

You are going to die, and you don’t fight it.

You’re so tired.

The lake seems to come alive, its depths reaching out and grasping at your body, tearing at your skin and constricting your chest with an implacable grip. The lake's sinister intentions become palpable as it seeks to consume you, to claim your essence for itself. Weary and exhausted to the core, you surrender to the lake's malevolent embrace, allowing yourself to be consumed by its fearsome hunger.

As your body instinctively craves air, the lake relentlessly smothers it, its relentless grasp stifling your every breath. Your lungs burn with desperation, and each attempt to inhale only draws in more suffocating water. The lake's relentless hands envelop your face, leaving you with no escape as it ruthlessly suppresses your very breath, depriving your body of the oxygen it so desperately needs.

As you sink deeper into the lake's abyss, a surprising sense of gratitude washes over you. Despite the circumstances leading up to this, you are thankful that this is how your life will end – not torn apart by the infected or cut down by the malevolent force that shadows the earth. As the water envelopes you completely, you find solace in the thought that this peaceful end is preferable to the horrors that awaited you on the surface.

Your mind drifts back to the events of the morning - a time when everything seemed so normal, so mundane. How innocently unsuspecting you were about the cruel fate that awaited you. Now, as you reflect, you can't help but feel a profound melancholy - you realize that that is the last time you will wake up in this world to witness the beauty of a sunrise.

The memory of the infected still pierces your mind like a sharp sword. The guttural growls, the chilling shrieks, and the rustling of leaves as they closed in on you - it all replays like an awful nightmare. Despite your abilities, you knew that taking on four infected at once was a certain death sentence. So, with sheer terror coursing through your veins, you did the only thing you could - you ran. And running is something you knew how to do brilliantly. But even the most masterful escape was not enough to save you from your impending fate.

Above the murky depths of the lake, a series of thunderous booms reverberate through the water, causing a surge of pressure that pressed against your body. You feel a mixture of hope and trepidation wash over you as you ponder whether drowning would claim you before the unknown entity reaches you. Suddenly, something hard and solid wraps around your wrist, its grip unrelenting. The shock of the contrast between the soothing water and the harshness of this newfound grasp causes you to gasp in surprise. As the solid form forcefully pulls you upwards, encircling your middle, you struggle fiercely, attempting to free yourself from its tenacious hold.

As the mysterious entity pulls relentlessly, you feel the shift in the water's demeanor - the soothing embrace transforming into a bitter, furious grip, angry at the prospect of losing its new victim. The water screams loudly in your ears, the intense pressure leaving you with a throbbing headache. The temperature plunges to near freezing, and the realization of the water's true nature sends waves of panic coursing through your body, making it increasingly difficult to stay calm and collected.

As your head breaks the surface of the water, you desperately gasp for air, yet you find yourself hacking and choking on the water still trapped within your lungs. The shock of exposure to the outside air mixed with the remnants of ingested water leaves you struggling to catch your breath, your body convulsing in protest.

The strong arms that had pulled you from the depths adjust themselves around you, seeking to hold onto the lingering vestiges of your life as they guide you back to the safety of the shoreline. As your back makes contact with the muddy ground, urgent hands swiftly push away the strands of hair from your face, gently turning you onto your side. With each subsequent cough, more and more murky lake water spills from your mouth, mixing with the damp earth that cradles your weary body.

"There you go, you're alright," The reassuring voice washes over you like a calm tide, its soothing tone wrapping around your nerves like a protective blanket. The hand rubs your back firmly, providing a solid and comforting presence as you struggle to expel the water from your lungs.

Your clothes cling to your skin, their cold and soggy embrace causing you to shiver violently. Yet as the hand gently rubs your back, you become acutely aware of the stark contrast between its warmth and the bone-chilling cold of the lake water. The sudden realization hits you - the water was never truly warm; it was merely a cruel trick, a twisted ploy to lure you into its sinister grasp.

As you struggle to turn onto your back, your head heavy and fatigue setting in, you muster the strength to look up at your savior. He sits beside you, panting heavily, his own chest rising and falling with each labored breath. Despite the frigid waters that cling to his clothes and the wet strands of hair that fall onto his face, his gaze remains focused solely on you, unwavering and intense. The hand that once firmly rubbed your back now lays beside you.

As your breathing steadily slows and your consciousness begins to fade, your thoughts turn to the one who has saved you. In that moment, he appears like an angel to you with an aura of divine intervention surrounding him. Whether he is a fallen angel or a heavenly being sent to rescue you, you care not, for the overwhelming sense of gratitude and relief washes over you, lulling you into a peaceful slumber.

You awaken to the unfamiliar feeling of harsh concrete beneath you, replacing the cold and damp mud that cradled you when you drifted off to sleep. The windows are eerily boarded up, allowing only a limited amount of light to trickle in and leaving you completely disoriented as you try to determine whether the sunlight outside indicates a sunrise or a sunset. Confusion mixes with a lingering sense of disorientation as you struggle to piece together how much time has passed while you were unconscious.

You muster the strength to push aside a hefty jacket that rests on your body, sitting up slowly and tentatively. It's not your jacket, that much is certain. The realization hits you like a wave - it must belong to the one who rescued you. As you recall the events leading up to this moment, you remember that he wasn't wearing a jacket when he pulled you out of the water. In this cold and unfamiliar environment, the jacket offers some comfort and warmth, a small lifeline to cling onto.

The dim flicker of light filtering through the boarded-up windows provides enough illumination to make out the contents of the small storage room you find yourself in. The shelves, once perhaps stocked with supplies, are now bare and covered in a thick layer of dust that speaks to years of disuse. Broken pieces of wood and metal lay scattered about on the ground, undisturbed and forgotten by time. The thick, stale air hangs in the room like a heavy pall, an ominous stillness that weighs heavily on your senses.

The quiet of the room is disrupted by a sharp huff followed by the heavy and purposeful thud of approaching footsteps. They come to a standstill just outside the closed door, and for a brief moment, there is dead silence. Suddenly, three gentle yet firm raps echo through the room, jolting you from your contemplations.

His voice breaks the silence, his words carrying a mix of both hope and concern. “You awake in there?” he calls out, his tone low and steady. After a brief pause, the door slowly creaks open, its hinges protesting the movement. His eyes sweep the room until they finally land on you, sitting in the exact spot where he left you. Relief washes over his features, his shoulders relaxing as a faint smile quirks up the corners of his mouth.

As the door swings open fully, the bright afternoon sunlight floods the room, illuminating every corner and casting harsh shadows upon the walls. Caught off guard by the sudden brightness, you instinctively raise your hands to shield your eyes, squinting as you attempt to adjust to the dazzling light.

He leans against the arch of the door nonchalantly, his arm braced against the frame in a lazy yet protective manner. He casts a watchful gaze onto you, studying you carefully as you attempt to catch a glimpse of your surroundings beyond him. His tall stature and strong build serve as an imposing yet comforting presence, casting a shadow over your seated form that shields you from the intense light streaming in from outside.

His voice breaks the silence once more, a mixture of relief and concern tinting his words. “That was some mighty cold water you found yourself in,” he says, the lingering worry evident in his tone. “Thought we were both gonna freeze” he adds, his sigh reverberating through the room. He pushes off from the arch, rising to his full height and placing himself before you, his shoulders broad and firm.

He crouches down before you, his eyes searching your face intently. As your silence lingers, he asks, “You got a name? Or am I going to have to make one up if you won't talk?” The question hangs in the air, filled with curiosity and a hint of a challenge. His gaze remains steady, patiently awaiting your response, wondering if you will finally break your silence.

You hesitate for a moment, the syllables of your name feeling unfamiliar as they roll off your tongue, having gone unspoken for so long. Finally, in a soft, tentative voice, you respond. The words are barely spoken, yet they hang in the air, carrying with them a hint of vulnerability as you offer this small piece of yourself to this stranger who has saved you.

He nods in acknowledgment, a small gesture of introduction. “Joel.” The name rolls off his tongue with a certain ease, his voice carrying both strength and warmth in equal measure. As he straightens up, his knees crack audible protest, yet he gives no sign of discomfort, perhaps used to the sensation of pain. He stands before you, a tall and steadfast presence, solid and reliable like a pillar amidst the chaos of uncertainty.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” He begins as he leans over you to retrieve his jacket. “Looks like you’ve got two options. Either stay here or I can smuggle you into Boston QZ. But I gotta move, wasted a lot of time dragging you out of that lake.”

He stands with his arms crossed over his chest, the muscles rippling under his shirtsleeves. It's a relaxed yet assertive pose, one that exudes a sense of authority and control. As he waits for your response, his eyes never leave your face, watching you intently, silently urging you to speak with a slight lift of an eyebrow.

You grapple with the decision, torn between the logical course of action and an inexplicable pull deep within you. Something within you whispers fiercely, urging you to say yes, to join this stranger named Joel. Despite the risks and uncertainties that lie ahead, the force of this invisible pull is simply too strong to resist. A flicker of something wild and untamed dances in your eyes as the answer slips past your lips.

As Joel reaches down and takes your hand firmly in his, an almost gentle strength radiates through his grip. He lifts you easily onto your feet, the warmth and solidity of his touch providing a stark contrast to the cold memories of the lake. The lake had wrapped around you like a warm embrace, flooding you with a sense of familiarity and comfort. But in this moment, the lake cannot compare to how safe Joel makes you feel in his presence. 

Following closely behind him, you reflect on the events that have transpired since your encounter with Joel - how this stranger has not only rescued you from freezing waters but also taking you to the safety of a QZ. A sense of gratitude mixes with uncertainty in your thoughts, unsure of what the future holds, but trusting in Joel nonetheless.

Your thoughts turn to the false sense of safety the lake had offered you as you sank to your death, how easily it had lured you into its depths. Now, as you follow Joel out of the abandoned gas station and into the uncertain unknown, you make a silent vow to yourself. Regardless of what lies ahead, you will follow Joel for now. With each step, you cling to the hope that he will lead you toward sanctuary, and away from the shadows that seem to lurk everywhere around you.

Your mind is filled with thoughts of caution and doubt, wondering if Joel is simply leading you into a false sense of hope and security. Trust is not given lightly in this new world, and yet, you find yourself following him nonetheless, desperate for a lifeline in this sea of uncertainty. As you try to quell the unease in your heart, you silently hope that Joel's intentions are sincere, and that he will provide the protection and guidance that you so desperately need.

notes

i’m back from the dead. haven’t sat down and written anything for a while, stardew valley took over my life for a little bit there and then my wifi broke.

don’t really know what this is, but i felt like writing it. just a moment, nothing too long or short. no smut or fluff really, just an interaction and the start of a new life.

[thefugitivesaint]

They Are Insecure For A Reason | Defector

"One of the less-amusing ironies of the violent institutional response to the nonviolent protest movement on campuses across the country is that the goals of the people protesting are much easier to understand than those of the variously curdled elites dispatching uniformed violence workers against them. The irony is in the fact that the students, with their specific demands and comparatively disciplined approach, have been cast as somewhere between essentially unserious and actively terroristic. In contrast, the institutions pivoting and pandering and giddily giving themselves over to the incoherent and spiraling political panic surrounding the protests represent principled leadership and forebearance; the gray elites insisting that these protests are actually about their dull abstractions of choice are the voice of seriousness; the police forces, rioting and ravening as ever, are somehow in fact order.

A lot of this disjunction can be explained by the undeniable disparities in power between those two sides, the first organizing toward a legible goal and the second existing essentially to oversee the unending work of saying no. Only one side can effectively call the cops on the other; here, as elsewhere, the impunity that comes with that exclusive access to violent recourse has made those with it not only cynical and lazy and cruel, but also paradoxically insecure and perpetually terrified at the prospect of any erosion in authority. It is, on its face, difficult to make the argument that it is fundamentally unserious to object to dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on a hospital, and much more morally and politically serious to object to that objection on some point of administrative order, or simply because it is too loud." ..... "There is something terribly clarifying in how eager the people in power at these universities have been to betray the trust of everyone invested in those institutions. Institutions that otherwise exist from one exploratory committee to the next will change university policies on the fly so that their local uniformed violence workers will get their chance to thump some young skulls; administrators whose notional jobs are upholding communities of learning and care gladly consent to being upbraided by clownish golf hogs and half-fascist nullities in Congress and then do exactly what they were told to do, whatever the damage to those communities. If the students and professors in these protests, which are now nationwide, have a sort of advantage simply by being the only parties involved that actually care about anything, they are also up against an opposition that is all the more implacable because of how proudly cynical it is." .... "The order they are after is all around us—a Homeowners Association with a S.W.A.T. team at its disposal, a business that grows at a steady rate without making anything anyone could use, a world in which things simply happen and continue to happen, a pristine desolation that is safe precisely because of how empty it is. But what they are afraid of grows even as they starve it, which is why these people, with all their power, are always so insecure. It is why, despite the relentless imposition of their annihilating concept of safety, they can't ever quite feel safe. They know how bad it would be for them to be seen clearly; they are fucking terrified of being treated as they treat others. They know that people can recognize their demands as what they are, and that there are still spaces in which to reject them. And they sense, maybe, that this false and failing security can't last. "The more they try to silence us," a Columbia grad student told the Times last week, "the louder we get."

[komsomolka]

Comrades! For nine days we have listened to the speeches of the opposition, and I must say quite frankly that they spoke here not as fellow fighters, revolutionaries, our comrades in the class struggle. Their speeches were hostile, implacable, malicious and slanderous. Yes, Comrades, slanderous! They have tried to represent us Bolsheviks as supporters of a mailed-fist regime in the Party, as people who are betraying the interests of their class and the Revolution. They have attempted to brand as Party bureaucrats the best, the most tried and trusty section of our Party, the glorious old guard of Bolsheviks, men who built up the Russian Communist Party, men who suffered in tsarist prisons, men who with Comrade Lenin at their head have waged a relentless struggle against world Menshevism and Trotsky. Could anyone but an enemy make such statements? Is the Party and its functionaries not one single whole? Then what is this all about, I want to know? What would we say of men who would try to incite young Red Army men against their commanders and commissars, against army headquarters — and at a time when the unit was surrounded by the enemy? According to the Trotskyites, so long as I am a mechanic I'm 'all right', but if tomorrow I should become the secretary of a Party Committee I would be a 'bureaucrat' and a 'chairwarmer'!

How the Steel was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky

[sepulcher-of-the-light]

© Lucas Garcete, Yarasa

Me enfrento a este implacable sol de los días; yo, acostumbrado a las cuevas, a la honda llamada de las estrellas. Estos edificios no sostienen el peso del mundo como las raíces, pero el ocaso los viste de sombras que los embellecen. Cuando la noche se cierne, la sangre vertiginosa de mis alas interroga a las venas de la luna. La luna, exhausta en la noche donde crece mi sed y soy libre.

I face this relentless sun of the days; I, accustomed to caves, to the deep call of the stars. These buildings do not support the weight of the world like the roots, but the sunset dresses them with shadows that embellish them. When the night hovers, the giddy blood of my wings interrogates the veins of the moon. The moon, exhausted in the night where my thirst grows and I am free.

[city-of-ladies]

"If there is one fact about the amazons that is indisputable, it is their consistently outstanding performance in combat. Not unexpectedly, practically the only author to cast doubt on this was Burton, for whom the idea that black females (not to speak of males) might excel on the battlefield was hard to accept: “The ‘Amazons’ boast themselves invulnerable, but readily retreat: an equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick, would - I lay, to speak Yorkishly— clear them off in very few hours.”Elsewhere he damns them with faint praise:‘The women are as brave as, if not braver than, their brethren in arms, who certainly do not shine in that department of manliness.”

The first inkling that the women soldiers of Dahomey might be first-class fighters comes from Labarthe’s informant who, in 1776, watched them perform shooting drills at Abomey and found them “very resolute”. By 1830, as Conneau learned at Whydah, their “bravery [was] a noted fact and [was] proverbial with the natives.” By the next decade the amazons’ reputation was established among Europeans too. At Cana in 1843 Freeman saw a “brigade” of them fire their guns. Not only did they shoot well, he says, but they “appeared totally void of fear”. The next year de Monléon remarked that the women had “often given striking proof of courage and audacity”. In 1845 Duncan saw amazon officers being rewarded for their “valour”.

Regarding the terror the women aroused among neighboring peoples, Chautard relates an anecdote from the 1880s. A group of amazons traveled from Whydah to Agoué, a port town beyond the kingdom near what is now Togo, perhaps as an escort for traders. The whole population crowded the town square to see the legendary ladies up close. The female “general” confronted the local male warriors and challenged the very best of them to a duel with swords to determine which sex was stronger. “In less than two minutes”, she boasted, “his head will adorn the tip of my sword!” To the shame of his sex, says Chautard, not one warrior volunteered.

The adjectives applied to the amazons over the decades were brave, courageous, valorous, valiant, fearless, intrepid, cruel, pitiless, merciless, implacable, relentless, bloodthirsty, fierce, ferocious, furious, audacious, impetuous, ardent, fanatic, disciplined, devoted (to the king), indomitable, redoubtable, formidable, vigorous, resolute, tenacious, determined, persevering. Often they were said to surpass their male colleagues — in valor, in intrepidity, in courage, in bravery, in cruelty, in discipline. “In this singular country”, Vallon reported, “the women’s army is accounted much more warlike than the men’s.” According to Bouët, there was no memory of any of the amazons fleeing combat whereas men had often been punished for doing it."

Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey, Stanley B. Alpern

[rhiannon-girl]

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than zombies. People try to crush your soul and destroy your happiness, but zombies just want to have a little nibble of your brain.

J. Cornell Michel - Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Thirty One Days of Horror Movies! Day Twenty One :D

It Follows!

After learning from her partner that, following their first time together, she's inherited a supernatural curse that takes the form of an entity that will stalk and eventually kill her, university student Jay finds herself desperately trying to find some way to save herself and other potential victims from the relentless paranormal being that is determined to hound them

Putting a supernatural twist on the old trope cliche that "If you have sex in a horror movie, you will die" by having the films villain be quite literally a Sexually Transmitted Demon, It Follows feels like a knowing homage to 80's horror as a whole

While the premise might sound silly on paper the movie manages to in fact get some solid scares out of its central horror concept....the fact that this entity quite literally NEVER STOPS and does not need food, rest or shelter it will simply tirelessly hunt you until it catches and kills you, which creates some nerv-shreddingly tense and anxious energy

There's plenty of nicely creepy moments throughout and the movie makes, in my opinion, the wise decision of never really explaining what the entity is or how it came to be, it's simply an implacable force of death, making you feel for the protagonists who are caught up in this increasingly hopeless situation

If your looking for a solid horror movie choice for this Halloween month, go give It Follows a watch :D

[mursartifice]

cersei lannister

a song of ice and fire character portraits, #3

“their father had been as relentless and implacable as a glacier, where cersei was all wildfire”

[nicklloydnow]

Illustration by @steve_fagiano_art

“Chigurh stands up to God with an unflinching, uncompromising belief in predetermination—no free will or human choice, no mercy or sentiment, no giving in or letting go or giving up. Principled in the purity of his work, he defies sentiment and falsehood and betrayal. A pure born-again agent of death, anti-Christ Calvinist Chigurh is a man of his deadly word, a relentless avenger, an implacable killer defying God, no less than the diabolic Judge in Blood Meridian. "How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of" lago was never so clear-minded, Ahab no more manically fixated, Kurtz no less obsessed with his mission to exterminate losers. "The horror! The horror!" What more can a man say of pure evil?” - Kenneth Lincoln, ‘Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles’ (2010) [p. 144, 145]

“Chigurh again adopts the Socratic method in his final encounter with his fellow hitman Carson Wells. Although Wells isn't given the privilege of a coin toss, Chigurh nevertheless engages in an incisive dialogue with his victim. While holding Wells at gunpoint, Chigurh asks, "If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?" When Wells replies, "I don't know what you're talking about," Chigurh elaborates: "I'm talking about your life. In which now everything can be seen at once." Knowing that the moment of death has arrived, Chigurh wants Wells to examine the path that led him here, claiming that the present situation "calls past events into question" (175). Even though Chigurh admits that he and Wells are in the "same line of work," he finds it necessary to distance himself from the other hit-man: "You think I'm like you. That it's just greed. But I'm not like you. I live a simple life" (177). This distinction between the two hired assassins suggests that Chigurh transcends mere criminality. The "simple life" he leads imbues him with the ascetic austerity of a monk pledged to evil, a satanic reversal of traditional, spiritual roles hinted at by other descriptions of Chigurh as a "faith healer" and a "prophet of destruction" (7, 3). In his study of the portrayal of evil in literature and cinema, Paul Oppenheimer points out that evil often "begins in criminality" but then "surpasses criminality, and finally, by comparison with criminality, overwhelms and belittles it, causing it to seem oddly cumbersome and even childish" (21). Chigurh lives by a different "rule," not motivated by the usual spectrum of human desires and thus remaining largely inscrutable.

It is significant that Wells is given a premonition of his own death exactly three days before it takes place. While examining the damage caused by a shootout between Chigurh and Moss at the Eagle Pass motel, Wells notices "two bulletholes in the windowglass" of a "second floor level" apartment across the street. After knocking on the door and receiving no answer, Wells lets himself in and finds the corpse of an old woman: "She'd been shot through the forehead and had tilted forward leaving part of the back of her skull and a good bit of dried brainmatter stuck to the slat of the rocker behind her. . . . A second shot had marked a date on a calendar on the wall behind her that was three days hence" (147). The path of the stray bullet converges with the path of the unsuspecting woman, much as Chigurh's coin converges with the equally unsuspecting gas station owner earlier in the novel. The woman's death reminds Wells of the inexorable machinations of fate: "Not what you had in mind at all, was it darling?" he asks (148). Wells correctly interprets the mark on the calendar as a portent of the day of his own impending death.

During the final encounter, he tells Chigurh, "By the old woman's calendar I've got three more minutes. Well the hell with it. I think I saw all this coming a long time ago. Almost like a dream. Déja vu." Well's words reveal that he had a vision of his own death long before he saw the calendar. Nevertheless, the question posed by Chigurh, namely, "How did you let yourself get in this situation?" suggest that it was still within Wells's power to make different choices, live by a different "rule," and thereby change his fate. Chigurh encourages Wells to engage in a final moment of self-reflection: "I thought you might want to explain yourself. . . . Not to me. To yourself" (178). Chigurh's questions seem to be directing Wells toward something akin to the existentialist concept of authentic existence, which, though "not clearly defined by the existentialists . . . implies an attitude of sincerity and honesty and the absence of self-deception" (de Silva 1). Furthermore, it is a mode of existence based on "a realization that one is what one makes oneself by one's acts" (Manser 20). It is worth mentioning that Sheriff Bell strives for the same realization: "It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is somethin I dont want to be wrong about" (295). Despite the fact that Bell and Chigurh are diametrically opposed in a Manichean battle between good and evil, respectively, both men insist on the importance of authentic existence arrived at through knowledge of the self.

Existentialist themes are also apparent in Chigurh's attempts to make his victims come to terms with the inevitability of death. He accuses Wells of believing that he can keep death at bay: "You think that as long as you keep looking at me you can put it off." Wells denies thinking such a thing, but Chigurh insists, "Yes you do. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it. I'm trying to help you" (176). Behind the "existential preoccupation with the theme of death" is the belief that "living authentically is living constantly in its presence, for then alone can we attain 'freedom in the face of death" (Dutt 80). When Wells accuses Chigurh of thinking that he is "outside of everything" and reminds him that he is "not outside of death," Chigurh replies, "It doesnt mean to me what it does to you" (177). The reply can be read in two ways, the surface reading being that Chigurh has adopted an existentialist approach to death. More subtly, however, the words hint at the idea that Chigurh is no ordinary mortal and may perhaps be Death itself, albeit a modern version that carries a pneumatic stun-bolt gun instead of the traditional scythe.

Wells grows weary of the conversation, announcing, "I'm not interested in your opinions. . . . Just do it. You goddamned psychopath. Do it and goddamn you to hell." Despite the verbal command, Wells's body language suggests that he is not quite ready: "He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face" (177). Although there is some discrepancy between Wells's words and his reaction to the shot, the fact that Wells commands it enables him to reclaim a certain degree of control over his fate, however insignificant it may appear. Furthermore, McCarthy makes a point of informing the reader that the "new day was still a minute away" (178), thereby emphasizing the fact that the old woman's calendar was not entirely accurate. The fact that, by asking Chigurh to shoot him a minute early, Wells refuses to die on the prophesied day suggests that even within a universe ruled by seemingly inexorable forces of fate, minute degrees of free will and personal agency remain.” - Petra Mundik, ‘A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy’ (2016) [p. 268 - 270]

“The Coen brothers built a story of war between two teams: one team represent the human mind wish to understand the world and the second team represent the universe as a chaos. During the first half of the movie the war looks good for the human mind team but then the human mind team lose – a beatiful metaphor for absurdism.

(…)

Result of the war:

Anton kills Carson, Llewelyn is killed by Mexicans, and the sheriff is retired loosing hope in the world.

The Coen brothers message in this film is that they do not think humans mind will ever be able to understand the world and we are doom to internal ignorance. Depressing.”

[deadboyfriendd]

12 September, 1894

I killed a man today,  

I did not hold him at gunpoint nor did a knife by my hands enter his body, but I felt his final breath dissipate from the earth like the mirage radiating from the sand just the same. The same hands that relies on this pen to write to something as sweet as you bears the sword that pulls the breath from living lungs. 

I want to help people. I want to keep this town safe, but I do not want to kill. Not anymore. 

I fear there is too much loss in this place. I see it in Nellie’s eyes when she bows her head and prays to a God she does not fully believe in. I heard it in between the cracks of Michael’s voice. There is a nothingness here and I fear it more than death itself. There is no God and we are his prophets. 

This morning I stood in the gray light and for a moment saw the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with to sorrow it. 

Is anything ever truly stolen if we are never guaranteed ownership in the first place? Is life really able to be taken if it is not ours in the beginning? Or then, are we simply set free?

So tell me, then, if all time is borrowed and all world and all earthly things are simply rented: then, I might ask, may I borrow some of you? May I hold you between my hands and relish in the time like it is mine? Might you be able to do the same with me? 

Might your borrowed lips meet against my borrowed flesh? And may my borrowed sorrow be lifted from by body back into the reserve of the world? Might you be the one to pull it from me? 

Might we be gods, or, at least, spend this borrowed existence pretending that we are? In that case, my love, might we pull love from the reserve and quench our sullen, borrowed hearts of the feelings for which they thirst? 

In that case, darling, I offer myself to you in my entirety, 

Steve Harrington.

[snapmite1998]

Chapter 17: Siege of Dathomir

Amidst the chaos and destruction on Dathomir, the Sith brothers—Maul, Savage, and Feral Opress—moved like an unstoppable force, their crimson lightsabers a storm of lethal efficiency. Each slash and thrust was executed with a grim precision, reducing the Republic's brave soldiers and Jedi defenders into grievously outmatched contenders in a battle now tipped towards despair.

Clones fought valiantly with their blasters, and Jedi parried with lightsabers that hummed in protest against the Sith onslaught, but Maul and his brothers were relentless predators. Individually, they struck with the power of an avalanche; together, they were a hurricane that seemed impervious to resistance.

In the midst of the battlefield, Maul advanced upon a fallen clone commander, the commanding officer among the beleaguered troops. His silhouette, lit by the angry embers of the burning Acclamator behind him, cast a towering shadow of menace over the prone figure. The clone reached feebly for his weapon, his training imploring him to continue the fight, but found himself overpowered and immobilized by Maul's oppressive presence. Without hesitation, Maul plunged his ignited lightsaber through the clone's back, the crimson blade erupting through his chest, bringing a swift and final darkness. Savage and Feral continued their grim dance nearby, saber blades flashing in arcs as more soldiers fell to their wrath.

With a casual brutality that reflected the harshness of his being, Maul removed the clone's helmet, letting it fall to the ground beside them before activating the recording device embedded within it. His eyes, alive with a dangerous satisfaction, focused on the lens, knowing the message would reach Republic command. Gazing directly into the helmet's camera, his fierce visage filled the screen with malevolent intent. "Citizens of the Republic," Maul intoned with low, menacing clarity, allowing the words to sink into the cold depths of their doom. "Your siege of Dathomir has resulted in the slaughter of countless clone legions and the greatest the Jedi Order had to offer lie shattered before us."

The camera continued recording as fires blazed behind him, the flickering glimpses of the shattered Republic invasion force and the triumphant forces of Crimson Dawn.

"Tell your Chancellor and tell the Jedi Council," he continued, allowing each phrase to resonate with the implacable certainty of fate unfolding. "The Sith have have triumphed and will continue to do so, with power unrivaled. And soon, your galaxy will feel the wrath of the dark side."

With a flick of his wrist, Maul deactivated the recording, knowing the message would find its way to those who had dared to defy him, a herald of the fears that now gripped the galaxy with perilous consequence.

As the recording ceased, the battlefield continued its descent into chaos, the galaxy hanging on the precipice of change, where darkness sought to drown the light beneath an ever-encroaching shadow.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Albrecht Dürer, The Apocalyptic Woman, from "The Apocalypse" (Nuremberg 1511) :: [Robert Scott Horton]

* * * *

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

[alinefrank]

DRAGON EMBRACE || PETER PEVENSIE FIC.

Chapter 1

Masterlist

The place I come from wasn't always like that.

In ancient days, Narnia was known for its magical charms and its palpable joy that floated in the air like stardust. The creatures met around the fire to dance, and the murmur of spells and laughter filled every corner. Everyone lived peacefully with each other, however, in this paradise, where magic and happiness intertwined, an unexpected darkness came just like a relentless storm.

Jadis, an evil and cruel witch transformed this place and extinguished its splendour. The fire lost its brillance, and the spells that previously danced elegantly were extinguished in muffled whispers. The laughter and music vanished and were replaced by a heavy silence that hung in the air.

Today, the beautiful landscapes that our home offered us, are hidden among all the snow that covers them and carry the scars of a broken magic, the shadows that extend through the ancient valleys seem to tell stories of a past that lies buried in oblivion. Narnia, the magical town that once shone with the light of wonder, is now wrapped in deep sadness and an endless winter.

In the golden age of Narnia, there was a kingdom called Drakarionth, the land where dragons danced in the heavens and the blood of the rulers flowed with the nobility of the Targentia. The majestic winged beasts sailed the heavens, their scales reflected the colours of the twilight, and their roars resounded like echoes of ancestral power.

The rulers of Drakarionth were distinguished by their snow-white hair and deep eyes of an intense purple. His lineage was intertwined with the ancient magic of dragons, and his reign was marked by grace and authority that only the connection with these mythical creatures could grant.

In the halls of the palace, the symbols of the dragons were intertwined with the architecture, and the perpetual flames danced on the torches as a bow to the strength and majesty of the dragons. Every corner of the earth breathed the essence of a kingdom governed by the indissoluble bond between men and winged creatures.

However, the dark evil that hovered over Narnia brought with it shadows that eclipsed even the greatness of Drakarionth. The flame of the dragons burned fiercely, hundreds of Narnians went out to fight against the usurper, the knights of Drakarionth, with resplendent armour and banners waving with the dragon's emblem, bravely launched into battle, one of them was my father. However, the darkness that enveloped the malevolent force was deeper than anyone would have imagined.

Despite the fierce resistance of all those warriors, the evil of that witch proved to be implacable. The lands that were previously prosperous were consumed by the shadow, and the echos of the battle resounded like a lament throughout Narnia. The brave knights fell one after the other, and the hope of the kingdom slowly faded.

Finally, in the decisive battle, the king of Drakarionth, Valeryon Targentia, was defeated in front of his brother's eyes, the king had died and the whole town fell into despair. The kingdom, which once shone with splendour, was plunged into deep sadness while the ice took over everything, leaving behind a melancholy echo of what was once a prosperous kingdom.

The Drakarians fled to the Skoveragon valley guided by the only member of the royal family who was still alive, the prince named Aldric Targentia, he guided them to a place where they could live without fear of the witch discovering them, the remaining Narnians took refuge in the forest, away from the witch's castle.

The sound of war left an indelible mark on the collective memory of the people. The echos of weapons and screams still resonate, leaving the community with emotional scars that are difficult to heal. The normality they knew had vanished and had been replaced by a reality transformed by the cruelty of war.

"Rheira!" my father yelled at me, taking me out of the dream in which I had immersed myself, I sell through the window of our home. "Stop looking at nothing and hurry up or we will be late for the meeting with the Blackthorns.

I let out a sigh full of discomfort and rolled my eyes when I heard the tone my father used, I put on my thick cape to protect myself from the cold and walked towards the door.

My father left a beautiful red envelope on the table where he was sitting that he didn't care about and went to my mother to arrange her cape.

"Are you ready?" my mom asked me and I just nodded and settled my hair a little.

We left the house and started walking towards the beautiful cabin of the family that had invited us to dinner.

"Today, Rheira, is a crucial day for your future. It is imperative that you behave at the height of our responsibilities—I clenched my jaw when listening as once again, I was about to receive a sermon about my behaviour.

My face furrowed in a grimace, without fully understanding my father's insistence, I looked at him with confusion because this attitude had been present for a few days—Father, I have always treated Eamon and his family with respect. Why is this insistence on my behaviour?

My father sighed and rubbed his forehead, my mother squeezed his hand as a sign of support and my confusion grew to one more.

"It's not just respect, Rheira. What your father wants to tell you is that you must be kind and show a conciliatory attitude. Every gesture of yours counts—my mother's voice interrupted my father and tried to explain his way of acting to me.

I frowned until we reached the house, as soon as Mrs. Blackthorn opened the door for us, I smiled as sincerely as possible and tried to forget the growing discomfort that was forming in my stomach.

Upon entering the beautiful home of the Blackthorn family, the torches illuminated a huge table richly decorated with a velvet tablecloth and silver plates. The dinner smelled delicious and the fire was crisp in the fireplace making the interior of the house very warm.

The adults gathered in the kitchen and I stood in front of the fire warming my hands, Eamon sat next to me and didn't say a single word, I didn't know what to say so I just turned a little and watched him amicably.

We heard some steps coming hurriedly towards us and when we saw you want them, we saw the other 4 brothers of Eamon who played with wooden swords.

We heard a scream announcing that we were going to the dining room and I quickly went to the table where the places had already been assigned and again I sat next to Eamon which managed to increase my discomfort.

It's not that I dislike him, he's just too shy, his jet black hair and his red cheeks make him look pretty cute, he's tall and very good with the sword, but the poor man can't formulate a sentence when I'm present, in addition to being quite clumsy to ride on horseback.

I sat next to him and at the other end of the table, I saw my father send me a look that seemed to shout "be kind", I smiled at him and turned to the boy who was sitting next to me and with a friendly smile I looked for his gaze.

"Do you want some bread?" I offered him a slice.

He accepted and that made the conversation between the two a little easier.

Finally, when the empty plates were removed and the glasses were filled with wine, my father and Mr. Blackthorn stood up, attracting everyone's attention.

"Today we meet to celebrate more than just a hearty meal. We are here to witness the union of two houses, two lineages that are intertwined in an alliance that will strengthen our people. - My mother took my hand when Mr. Blackthorn began to speak and I felt as if the blood was freezing.

My eyes and Eamon's met in a moment of mutual understanding.

"It is an honour to announce that in three days, Rheira, my beloved daughter, and Eamon, the brave heir of the Blackthorns, will unite their destinies in marriage," my father announced and collided his cup with my mother's and everyone present while applauding and celebrating.

When my father finished speaking everything seemed to become silent and a modest beep appeared in my ears. I felt that my hands began to tremble and I dropped the cup by mistake. The noise made everyone remain silent and look at me.

"I..." I tried to talk but I felt that my dress was crushing me because of how tight it was, the dark colour of the wine had stained it, I tried to clean it with my hands but I couldn't, I placed my right hand on my stomach, I was dizzy and I wanted to vomit - I need to get some air.

I walked away from the table leaving everyone stunned, Eamon tried to hold my hands but I got out and went to the door.

"Rheira!" My mother yelled at me but I just ignored her and ran home.

I ran as fast as I could on the snow until I reached my home, I opened the door and I felt that everything was spinning around, I leaned on the table where we ate and noticed the envelope my father was reading before leaving home.

Tears had begun to run through my cheeks, but my curiosity was greater and I opened the strange envelope, it was a letter, addressed to my father:

“Honourable Aldric Targentia,

I trust that this letter will reach you in good condition and health. We face again the dark threat that requires the dexterity and courage that only Drakarian warriors possess. The end of Jadis is near. At this critical moment, I implore you to gather the most skilful warriors and blacksmiths, those whose swords have resonated with victory and whose anvils have forged the weapons that have defended our lands in the past. The time to raise the swords and hammers again in Defence of our kingdom has come. I trust in his wisdom and the iron determination that has always guided his people. May the banner of justice and the flame of hope burn strong in their hearts as they march towards battle. We are waiting for you at the stone table, to plan our strategies and light the fire of the resistance. That his spirit does not know fear and that his swords are as sharp as the will of his ancestors.

With respect and gratitude, Oreius.

Commander-in-Chief of the Narnian troops"

Anger invaded me and I felt that my teeth would break because of how hard I was squeezing them. The door of my home opened violently and my mother and father appeared, the latter took me by the arm aggressively and made me face it.

"The only thing I asked you was to behave!" his voice resounded throughout our home, my father's purple eyes reflected pure anger.

I let go of his grip and yelled at him with all my strength—I won't get married out of duty, father! I can't accept this—my voice was full of frustration while my hands trembled with rage.

"It's your duty, Rheira. This alliance is vital for the survival of the people. You can't ignore your responsibility—my father's screams would usually have made me tremble, but I was too angry to remain silent.

The room vibrated with the echo of our fight, the words resonating like swords colliding in the heat of the battle.

"And what about my happiness, father?" And what about my choice in this life? I protested, with my eyes calling for determination and with hundreds of tears sliding down my face.

My father, angry, answered with a harsher tone—You will learn to be happy, you will learn to love Eamond.

The tension reached its peak, and I was unable to contain my anger, I shouted with everything I had—I will not allow you to decide my destiny in this way! I won't marry someone I don't love.

My father's face hardened, and his voice resounded with severity—It's your duty, Rheira! You can't disobey!

"My duty," I spit with sarcasm. "My duty is to get married and yours is to die in a war. Is that your duty, father?

My mother, who had stayed away from our hair, approached my father with a face of fear. What is the Aldric girl talking about?

It seemed that from one moment to the next the words had vanished.

"So you not only hide things from me, but also from my mother, very well," I said giving the letter to my mother to read it.

My father tried to explain the situation to my mother before everything got out of control, but she finished reading it and threw the paper on her face.

"You won't leave," she said resolutely.

"It's my duty," my father's eyes avoided my mother's furious gaze.

"I'm not interested in what your duty is," he said, holding his tears. "Your brother died in front of you at the hands of that witch, I won't give him the opportunity to kill you too.

The three of us were silent for a few seconds.

"I'll go," my parents' eyes landed on me.

"You're crazy if you think I'll let you do it," the tone my mother used made me angry again.

"You prefer that I live unhappy in a marriage with someone I don't love, instead of letting me do what I want," I approached and faced her. "You're really hypocritical.

My cheek burned and the dry blow of my mother's hand against my face resounded throughout the home.

"It's very different," he tried to justify himself.

"You will do what we tell you you will do and in 3 days you will be in Dragonlithos marrying Eamond, whether you like it or not," my father spoke again.

The despair I felt inside me I had never experienced, my heart hurt and my head was spinning.

"Why should I get married?" My tears filled my eyes again. "Do I have to be unhappy for the people to stay together?"

But at that precise moment something clicked inside my head.

"You want to marry Eamond so that he is the future leader of the village," I whispered when everything made sense. "When you die, the one who will govern the town will be him and not me who am your daughter, that's why it must be before you go to war!"

In a chilling moment of despair, my father released the most hurtful words of the whole discussion—If you had only been born a man, you wouldn't have to do this. If you had only been a man I would have named you as my successor from the day you were born, but it was not like that and now I cannot make a woman the guide of our people. That's why you will marry Eamond whether you like it or not and you will lead as your mother does, from your home without getting involved in things that do not correspond to you!

My mother covered her mouth and let out a scream that reflected her surprise.

Completely wounded by the cruelty of words, I responded with bitterness and hatred—I'm very sorry not to be what you expected, father. Maybe if you had died in that skin none of this would have happened and you would not be ruining the lives of everyone you know. But I'm never going to be the heir you wanted and I won't side just because I'm a woman!

My father took me by the arm and dragged me to my room. He threw me against my bed and closed the door without saying a single word.

I don't know how many hours passed, the anger I felt in me didn't diminish, I knew what I had to do and it didn't matter what my father or mother thought.

I took a small bag that I used when I went on expeditions with my father and filled it with some dresses, I put on my armour and the sword I had received at 5 as a birthday gift. Once ready, I opened the door with the help of a small knife and went to the front door, Aslan's letter was still on the ground, I picked it up and kept it to get out of there and go for a horse.

I rode my mare and started riding leaving my home and my family behind. I didn't know if I would come back and that caused my already broken heart to break a little more. I would ride north in search of Aslan's camp. I don't know how many days it would take, but if I kept the pace I was carrying maybe I would be there in 3 days.

With the wind caressing my hair and the sun as a witness to my rebellion, advance into the unknown. Leaving behind my father's impositions and the weight of expectations.

The darkness was not terrifying, but it was a mantle that enveloped me in freedom. I closed my eyes for a moment, savouring the sweet feeling of emancipation.

I felt alive, as if every step marked the release of a past version of myself. The first rays of the sun illuminated my path and guided me to a future that would be sculpted by my own decisions.

The snow I stepped on became a map of possibilities, and each breath was a reminder that I was now the owner of my own destiny.

COMMENT, LIKE AND REBLOG IF YOU LIKE. LET ME READ YOUR OPINIONS.

[enddaysengine]

Shinigami (Paths Beyond)

When the cycle of life and death is disrupted, relentless and towering outsiders seek out the cause and drag offenders back to their proper fates. Old Planescape hands can be forgiven for thinking I’m talking about the marut, but today’s topic is shinigami.

There is a point to that intro, too. While the 2e marut stats still exist, they will be casualties of the OGL/ORC transition from here on out. While losing such a classic monster is a bummer, shinigami can admirably fill their niche. Maruts were beloved for being implacable and terrifying. While their aesthetic is very different, shinigami check off both boxes. Next time the PCs try to become immortal, they may be pursued by a small death god instead of a ruthless onyx statue. 

It is worth noting that while shinigami don’t have much in the way of elemental resistances in 2e, their fast healing 40 is high enough that they can tank the damage from moderate environmental hazards. The majority of the Plane of Fire deals moderate environmental damage. Sure, it probably will hurt like hell (literally), and it is worth protecting themselves if they know they are headed for the inner sphere. If push comes to shove, a shinigami can stride through the most hostile planes and be fine.

Who needs frightful presence when that’s scary enough as it is? (Although shinigami have a frightful presence as well, so they are bloody terrifying in every sense. Good luck. Fighting that.)

The party wakes one day to find a shinigami sitting cross-legged in the town center, watching people go about their lives. If questioned, Togusa the Judicator responds simply that he is gathering evidence and refuses to elaborate further. Over the next few days, the party gets the distinct impression he is watching them specifically. Worse, the shinigami somehow lurks at the edge of their dreams, keeping them under 24/7 surveillance. Following the monitor into its nocturnal mindscape reveals each party member is the reincarnation of an infamous historical figure who wasn’t supposed to be reincarnated. 

Æown Coppereye has terrorized the Five Kings Mountains for thirteen generations with his ruthless brand of justice. While not as renowned as the Whispering Tyrant or Arazni, the dwarven lich is still dangerous and frequently used as a bogeyman in children’s tales. While the psychopomps would love to see him join Purgatory’s ranks, he is clad in a robe of shinigami bones he stole from the Boneyard. It allows him to flit between dimensions and hides him from all of death’s agents, regardless of which god they serve. Mortal heroes must chase him across the planes if he is to be stopped.

Corruption in the Boneyard is a strange thing. Pharasma does not condone priests who spread cruelty and malice, but Eshi Ōko delights in such acts. The shinigami arranges for powerful artifacts to wind up in mortal hands, then watches the fallout as power goes to their heads. While Lord Eshi’s antics often lead to significant pain and suffering, he is careful not to disrupt the River of Souls or the cycle of life and death. Eshi has a network of adventures and criminals willing to assist his schemes or compromise their morals in exchange for access to the afterlife. Still, he is merciless to those who violate the cycle of souls or deal with oni and nindoru.