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fatesundress · 2 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He evidently does not.

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

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

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

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

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

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

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

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

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

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wonder why.”

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

“What, Tom?”

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

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

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

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

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Curiosity—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

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

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

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

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

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

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

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

“A professor?”

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

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

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

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

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

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

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

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

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

“So?”

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

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

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

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

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

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

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

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I —”

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

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

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

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

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

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

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

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

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

“Tom.”

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

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

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

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

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

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

The day everything changes starts the same as any.

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

Tom has cracked the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have no need.”

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

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

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

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

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

“Why would he lie?”

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

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

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

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

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

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

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

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

“Should I?”

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

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

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

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

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

Summer blisters when it comes.

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

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

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You always are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are regardless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are not his keeper. You know that.

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

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

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

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

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

You’re almost positive you did not.

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

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

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

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

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

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

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

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

It happens again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You take to the library.

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

The third sign is the end.

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

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

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

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

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

He’s something else entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve been good at it.”

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

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

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

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

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

He sees all of you.

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

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

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

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

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

“I cannot.”

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

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

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

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

“Do you want me to lie?”

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

“Her death is the first step to —”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“...What?"

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

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

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought I would have time.”

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

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

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

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

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

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

“You have lost me, Tom."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

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

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

Be well.

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

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

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

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

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

You find that to be true.

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

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

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

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

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

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

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

Due February.

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

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

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

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You drink, and don’t look away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I take that back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indifferent it is.

“Can I help you?”

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

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

“Am I?”

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

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

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Mari?

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

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

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

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

“Well then —”

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

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

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

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

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

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

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

“I haven’t protested.”

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

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

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

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

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

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

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

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

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

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

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

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

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

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

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

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

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

My door is always open.

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

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

It’s a tempting door.

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

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

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

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

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant.

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

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

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

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Renauld?”

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

“Well, yeah —”

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

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

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

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

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

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

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

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

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

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

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

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

And… he does.

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

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

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “You seen the shite the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a bloody Unspeakable.”

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

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah? How about you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

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

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

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

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

But something about it itches.

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

You are green, through and through.

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

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

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

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

That makes it much worse when you sleep together.

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

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

“Yes.”

“Right.”

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

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

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

You’re incredibly daft about it.

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

The itch exacerbates.

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

You wake up and he isn’t there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.R

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

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

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

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

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

But you do, because he told you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes."

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

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

“I earned this,” you hiss.

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

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

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

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

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

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

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

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

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

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

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

“Yes,” you agree.

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

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

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

He was your first in everything but this.

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

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

“How long?” he asks thickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“N-no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A finger presses inside and you moan.

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

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

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

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

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

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you give me more?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe you already do.

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

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

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

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

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

You whimper.

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

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

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

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

“You can — uh — you can — ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He brings you to his bed after and you let him, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

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

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

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

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle x you #tom riddle x y/n #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle smut #tom riddle angst #(the trifecta)#tom marvolo riddle #voldemort #voldemort x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle oneshot #harry potter fanfiction #wizarding world #ftltutbh

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steddietogo · 2 years ago

Text

So. This is my own take on Steddie meet cute at the Grammys (gets a little thirsty in the middle for a second so warning I guess??)

———

The buzzing in his veins feel too much to contain in Eddie’s body, his cheeks ache from grinning too hard. He grabs Jeff by the shoulders to shake him and Jeff takes it without complain, too busy floating in his own cloud nine to do anything about it. All four of them are.

They’re being carted off from one interview to another, it’s all hazy in his mind, all he can think of is that they won a fucking Grammy.

“We’re here backstage with Corroded Coffin with their first ever Grammy from the best rock performance category,” the interviewer is saying, then he turns to face the band, and shit. Eddie has to sling an arm over Gareth to keep himself upright. “So how are you guys feeling right now?”

“It feels very validating to get the recognition for all our hard work—” and everything else Jeff says barely registers. Eddie is staring, he’s distantly aware of it. But he should hardly be blamed. The man before him is dressed in a deep caramel suit, jacket cinching around a trim waist and bubble gum pink lips stretched in a smile as he diligently listens to what his band has to say.

“— and Eddie, he’s really put his heart and soul in this song in particular,” the mention of his name unceremoniously drags him back to the land of the living where his bandmates know him too well and are actively trying to sabotage him before the sexy interviewer. Gareth is innocently blinking up at Eddie with his I’ve-never-done-anything-wrong-in-my-life eyes, urging him to speak.

“Um,” Um? Seriously? “Mob Mentality is an especially significant song to me personally—” Eddie’s given this spiel a hundred times, not that any word of it is untrue, but the practiced response lets him zone out just the right amount to fully drown himself in the shade of hazel of the interviewer’s eyes, imagine them looking up at Eddie from between his thighs, full of tears— goddamnfuckstopit.

The man must notice, because there’s a gorgeous smattering of pink dusting his cheeks Eddie could swear wasn’t there before.

After, Eddie is pretty much bodily dragged away from there, legs refusing to carry him away. He twists even as he’s walking, desperate to keep the man within his sights for even just a second longer. To keep him looking at Eddie, which by some miracle, he still is. And like an idiot Eddie waves, wiggling his fingers at him.

The man raises his own hand in return, and then he’s turning away, leaving Eddie to mourn the loss of his attention. But then he hears it— Steve. The camera guy calls him Steve. Sexy interviewer’s name is Steve. That in itself would be enough to sustain Eddie’s daydreams for some time.

———

Predictably, its all over social media the very next day. Or more accurately there’s one particular clip circling the net like there’s no tomorrow.

Eddie Munson simping for hot guy at the Grammys.

The comments were the worst (best) part. Eddie hasn’t dated since coming out to the public. And the fact that most of the comments people have about him openly showing interest in another man is just nonchalance or excitement makes him feel much better about it.

Eddie’s heart skips as he sees the face from last night in the clip, looking even more gorgeous than in his dreams if it were even possible. And then there is also Eddie in those clips, practically undressing him with his eyes, right there in public. He looks like he wants to open him up and lick him like melted chocolate in a wrapper.

Eddie was so screwed.

———

Top comments:

user 80085: that man is stronger than me because I don’t think I’d survive Eddie Munson looking at me like that

CorrodedFC: Eddie Munson Rendered momentarily speechless? by an interviewer?? More likely that you think

you_call_me_munson: they need to date. Right this second or I’m stealing one of the hotties for myself

———

Part II

#steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #stranger things fanfiction #famous eddie munson #steddie Grammys edition

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hwanghyunjinenthusiast · 2 years ago

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✨️1K Followers Celebration Day 2: NCT bias wrecker - Jaehyun✨️

In the a.m.

AN: I was originally planning to post another fic today but, it got too frustrating so, I scrapped it for another day. Fortunately, my brain seems to have plenty of ideas when it comes to Jaehyun. Also, yay to the first NCT fic on the blog :D

Synopsis: Some harmless scrolling on Instagram takes a turn you could've never seen coming.

Heads up: Jeong Jaehyun x Fem! Reader, friends to lovers, Reader going through it because of her feelings for Jaehyun, Reader mentions wanting Jaehyun to choke her one time, Jaehyun being a little shit, mentions of facesitting, dirty talk, video call sex, guided masturbation of sorts (f. receiving), mutual masturbation, praise kink (f. receiving) and Jaehyun calls Reader pet names a lot throughout this.

Word count: 2989

I will block you if you are a minor and/or have no easily visible indication of your age on your blog if you interact with me in any way.

You don't expect much when you open Instagram.

It's been a relatively uneventful Tuesday night, all things considered. Your laptop sits on your desk, reminding you that you very much have work you should be attending to, but you try your best not to pay it any mind.

Your mindless scrolling comes to a halt when you notice a post from Jaehyun.

It's honestly embarrassing how much just seeing him affects you. Your heart stuttering in your chest as you take in his carefully dishevelled, dark hair and his handsome, almost apathetic expression. You're probably reading more into a singular picture than strictly necessary, but the way his face is angled makes it look like he's looking down at you, and that only causes you to spiral further. Insides squirming violently.

It definitely doesn't help that you wish his hand was around your throat inside of his phone, too.

You're honestly just speechless. You knew you were really looking for ways to procrastinate if you resorted to Instagram of all platforms but, it's a blessing in disguise since you were graced with this.

However, because you're an idiot and you weren't careful, you like the post without thinking. A post he made months ago.

Would it be too much to hope for the Earth to open up right now and swallow you whole?

Panic takes over then. Maybe you could just uninstall Instagram, and he wouldn't notice or get the notification. Maybe you could just unlike it really quickly and he'd never even know-

Luck is not on your side, however, because you notice a message from Jaehyun, and you've never wanted to cease to exist more than right now.

Maybe you could just pretend you magically passed out seconds after liking his post. That wouldn't seem too suspicious, would it?

However, because you're still an idiot and a curious one at that, you open his message.

Jae💕: See something you like?

The fucking nerve of this man. You resent the way your body betrays you. Your face heating up considerably as you just try to comprehend what the fuck is happening. Is he...flirting with you? It wouldn't be the first time. Jaehyun enjoys flustering you, and it works more often than you care to admit. However, flirting with you when you're pretty sure it's around 3 a.m. in Tokyo seems like a little much, even for him.

You: Shouldn't you be asleep? Isn't it like 3.am. there?

Jae💕: Couldn't sleep. Then I got the notification that you liked my post. Isn't it pretty late over there too?

You groan into your pillow. Jaehyun doesn't need to know about you lusting after him so late at night.

You: Yeah, I was doing some work but, I'm pretty much finished for the night.

Jae💕: And you were thinking about me after finishing your work? I'm flattered, baby

Jaehyun has called you baby before. It's nothing new. Honestly, the pet name would make you cringe if anyone else was saying it, but, as you're coming to discover, apparently anything and everything he says and does renders you a flustered mess.

You: No! I was just scrolling, and I accidentally liked it. Don't flatter yourself

Jae💕: Sounds like denial to me~

You: You're so annoying 🙄

What you don't anticipate, on this already fever dream of a night, is for your phone screen to light up with his name. You only hesitate for a few moments before answering.

"I'm annoying, huh? That hurts my feelings," he teases. You can hear the smile in his voice, and the mental image of his dimples hits you like a truck. Though he said he couldn't sleep, his voice sounds gravelly and, you feel yourself squirm instinctively.

"Something tells me your feelings aren't all that hurt," you retort, hoping against hope he doesn't notice the breathy edge to your voice. Talking to Jaehyun always left you feeling a little lightheaded.

"Now you're calling me a liar too? I was being serious earlier. I am extremely flattered that I was running through that pretty mind of yours,"

Yeah, you're definitely going to uninstall Instagram after tonight. You don't even want to begin to unpack him calling anything about you pretty.

With a heavy sigh, you respond, "You're never going to let me live this down, are you?"

"Nope," and he has the nerve to chuckle.

"You really are so annoying. You're lucky I like you and you're cute,"

You were wrong. Now, you've never wanted to cease to exist more. Why in the fuck would you ever say that? Especially tonight? Yeah, sure, some harmless flirting isn't out of the norm between the two of you, but tonight feels decidedly...different. You can't help but feel you're treading a very dangerous line here.

You're half-tempted to just hang up before he responds, "You like me and think I'm cute, huh? If you wanted to ask me out, you could've just said that."

"That's not- I wasn't trying to- I didn't mean to say that,"

"You don't have to get all shy, baby. If anything, the feelings are very much mutual,"

That stops all your higher order functions all together momentarily. What. Jaehyun likes you? Is this actually happening?

"W-what?" Your brain intelligible supplies.

"You really think I just call everyone baby and flirt with them. I'm a little surprised it took you so long to catch on,"

Now that you think about it, he has always treated you...differently compared to your other friends. Johnny and Mark had teased you about it from time to time, but you always thought they were just being little shits. Guess you should learn to take your friends' word more seriously moving forward.

"You could've just been direct with me,"

"Where's the fun in that?" He laughs, but his tone shifts to a more serious one, "I wasn't sure if you felt the same way. I know I joke, and I tease, but you-you mean a lot to me, and I didn't want to jeopardise the friendship we had. I was content to have you in any way you wanted me, even if it was just as your friend."

You were reeling. You couldn't respond to him even if you wanted to for a few seconds. Your brain trying to pull itself together enough to say something.

"You know, this isn't how I was expecting my Tuesday night to go,"

His laugh is warm and throaty and quiet, and all the months of pining finally boil over.

"In case it's unclear, I like you too. Like a lot. Um, yeah,"

"Well that's a relief. I was worried there for a sec," god, you wish you could see his face. You know he's probably grinning ear to ear. Well, you could...

"Jae?"

"Hmm?"

"Could we video call instead?"

"Sure but, do you mind me asking why?"

"I want to see your face,"

You're sure that'll inflate his ego for weeks to come, but you can't bring yourself to care.

You're already proven correct when you see him with the world's largest shit-eating grin and the butterflies in your stomach flutter more violently.

His hair is even more dishevelled than in the picture, and you can see his sleeping shirt cling to his shoulders in a way that heats the blood in your veins.

"Here I am, baby. It's nice to see you too, if I'm being honest," it only hits you when his usually mischievous eyes are heavy with something else entirely as he takes in the sight of you on his screen what you're wearing.

"You're such a perv. I was trying to be sweet,"

"I'm being sweet too! I just have eyes. Also, I saw that look in your eyes. Don't play coy with me,"

"I have no idea what you're talking about,"

"Really?" His grin takes on a more sinister edge, "because I definitely noticed you looking like you wanted to sit on my face as soon as I popped up on your screen."

You're sure you look stupid with how you're gapping at him. Too stunned to speak and your body, once again, betrays you when you feel yourself clench at his words.

He's not wrong but, he doesn't need to just say it like that.

"You can't just say stuff like that, Jaehyun," you whine, and you see his eyes flash so briefly you're wondering if you imagined it.

"Why not? We both know it's true. It's just unfortunate that I'm not there right now to give you what you so obviously want," he drawls, lidded eyes dropping to take in as much of your generous cleavage as he can.

The butterflies shift lower.

"You'd let me sit on your face?" Maybe you're finally learning to just embrace the unexpectedness of this night. You two like and obviously want each other. Fuck it.

He chuckles again, but his voice is already a few octaves deeper, and you feel yourself growing slick. Thighs rubbing together in a way you hope is some level of unnoticeable.

"Happily. I'd do a lot of things to you if you'd let me,"

You're finding it really hard to think straight right now.

"Really? Like what?" You're too far gone for him to even feel ashamed how delicate your voice already sounds.

"And you were calling me a perv earlier," You're not sure if you want to punch him for attractive that arrogant, dimpled smirk of his is or kiss him. God, you really wish he was here too.

He continues before you can butt in, "Well, I'd take my time with you." Your blood feels molten as his lidded gaze takes in every detail of your face, stopping briefly to stare at your lips, "I'd kiss you until your lips were bruised and all you could think about was me."

This time, Jaehyun notices you squirming, and he pounces.

"Aw, is my poor baby already getting all hot and bothered just from me talking about kissing you and letting you sit on my face?"

A desperate whine tumbles out of your mouth before you can help yourself. Between him calling you his fucking baby constantly, what he'd do to you and the gravelly quality of his voice, it's no wonder you can feel yourself begin to leak onto your panties.

"Jaehyun,"

"I asked you a question, baby," his tone is still mostly playful, but you can hear the command clear as day.

"Yes,"

"That's a good girl. Why don't you show me just how hot you are for me?"

Honestly, you should probably feel some semblance of hesitance, but the exhilaration that comes with his praise would likely make you do anything.

You angle your phone as best as you can, the low light of your bedside lamp illuminating the visible wet spot on your panties.

"Fuck, baby," he groans and your pride swells at seeing him just as affected by all of this as you are.

"Can you show me how you touch yourself?"

Your unoccupied hand flies to your panties without much thought, ready to slip a few fingers past the waistband-

"Wait, don't touch yourself directly yet. Touch yourself over your panties,"

"But Jaehyun," you whine, sounding a little pathetic to your own ears, "I'm so wet, and it aches."

He shuts his eyes for a few moments, jaw clenching as he tries to find his words.

"I can't wait to get my hands on you," he mutters, but you don't think he meant to verbalise that particular thought. Either way, the feeling is very much mutual.

"I know, baby, but if you're good for me, I'll reward you, okay?"

You nod almost frantically, and he tuts in response, "Words, baby. Don't make me remind you again."

"O-Okay,"

"Good. Now I want you to touch yourself how you usually would, but over your panties,"

You do as he says. Drawing slow circles against your clit. The brushes of the fabric of your panties and the pressure from your fingers making your eyes flutter. More and more of your wetness drips out of you, making your panties stick to you. Your hips jolt up into your touch sporadically, quiet moans falling from your lips.

"You look so pretty playing with your pussy for me, princess," Jaehyun breathes, his own hand slinking down his body.

You keen at the praise. Adding more pressure to your ministrations against your sensitive clit, "Jae-Jaehyun ah please. I'm so - it's so -" you whimper, your train of thought leaving you with each brush.

"I know, baby. I know. You're doing so well," groans, his heavy gaze intently focused on the mess you're making between your thighs. His cock throbbing in the confines of his boxers with every twitch of your hips and quiver of your thighs.

"Can I see you too?" You ask, clamping down hard around nothing when you notice his arm moving. Putting two and two together and coming to the realisation that he's palming himself.

"Well, since you've been doing so well. I suppose you deserve some kind of reward," he says after some faux deliberation. Angling his phone downwards. Your thighs squeeze your hand hard, never feeling excruciatingly empty as you take in the way his cock strains against his boxers.

Considering the menace he's been all night, you expect him to tease you. Touch himself over his boxers until you're begging to see him properly. However, Jaehyun loves to keep you on your toes.

The air is knocked out of your lungs when he haphazardly tugs his boxers down. His cock smacks against his toned abdomen, flushed and hard and looking good enough to make saliva pool in your mouth.

"Too bad you're not here to sit on it but, I guess we'll have to make do for now, princess,"

Jaehyun is trying to kill you. That's what this is. An elaborate plot to stop your heart right here and now.

"Jaehyun, please. Can I touch myself pr-properly please? I've been so good. Please," you whimper. Slick walls throbbing incessantly when you notice his cock twitch in his grasp.

"I don't know, baby. How badly do you want to?"

"So badly. Please, please, please, I'll do whatever you say. Whatever you want,"

His eyes glint at that, and nervousness and anticipation course through your veins. Maybe he was more calculating than you gave him credit for.

"Since you ask so nicely, go ahead. Take your panties off for me, and let me see you play with yourself properly,"

In a likely incredibly ungraceful display, you impatiently tug your panties off with one hand. Tossing them aside and shoving your hand back between your thighs. Your eyes shutting when your fingers finally come into contact with your poor clit. Whimpers and curses and moans of his name falling from your lips with every circle.

"Fuck, you look so fucking pretty, princess," he groans and, you open your eyes to look at your screen. Fresh wetness gushes out of you when you realise that he's stroking himself. His tip now broaching into an angry red territory, and he's slick with pre-cum.

"I wish you were here," you whine out, increasing the pace of your fingers in time with each stroke of Jaehyun's hand. The obscene sounds emanating from your phone's speaker going straight to clit.

His chuckle is even more gravelly than before, "Me too, princess. Watching you like this...fuck. You're driving me insane," he mutters, hips jolting up to fuck into his fist. You've never envied a hand more than in this moment.

"Th-the feeling is mutual. I'm so-so ah,"

"Are you close, baby?"

"Ye-yes," you whimper, your toes beginning to curl, and the knot that's settled in your core tightening more and more and more.

The moan that falls from his lips is low and drawn out. His hand picking up its pace considerably as he watches you begin to fall apart on your hand.

"You're going to be a good girl and cum for me, right?" Oh god. The whine that's ripped from your throat is desperate and pitchy, your wetness drips down your thighs and begins to pool onto your sheets.

All your brain can manage is a jumbled mess of what you think is his name and 'please' and choked noises of pleasure. You're so close you can practically taste it.

You're distracted from your encroaching release when you hear Jaehyun's own sounds of pleasure. It takes a considerable amount of effort to open your eyes and, you're glad you do.

You open your eyes just in time to watch Jaehyun cum. His cum spurting onto his toned abdomen, parts of his thighs and all over his pretty hand. Strained, breathy gasps flooding your ears and the soft blush on his face, all combining to send you over the edge.

You try your best to muffle your cries as your hips twitch away from your hand. Insides spasming sporadically and even more wetness gushing out of you. Smearing your thighs and adding to the mess on your sheets.

It takes you both very long moments to regain your higher order functions. The stickiness underneath you and between your thighs quickly becoming uncomfortable but, you can't bring yourself to care right now.

"This is probably the most unconventional way anyone's ever confessed to me and asked me out,"

The laugh he gives you makes the butterflies roar once more. Considering you just watched each other cum, you suppose you have no real reason to be shy anymore.

"It's definitely the most unconventional way I've asked someone out. Luckily, the Japanese leg of our tour ends in about a week, so I can take you out properly then,"

"A whole week huh," you pout.

"Unfortunately, princess. Hey, I'm not opposed to more calls like this until we're able to meet in person," he responds with a wolfish grin.

You resent the way your still sensitive walls clench at the suggestion.

#jeong jaehyun smut #jung jaehyun smut #jaehyun smut #nct 127 smut #nct smut #1k followers celebration day 2 #1k followers celebration #1k followers milestone

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yoinkschief · 11 days ago

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I did it - I finally did it, I made concept doodles of the different leaders

I've been meaning to do this for a while now, I've just kept forgetting to and then get distracted with much more pressing matters n shit so yk but I decided fuck it they don't need to be good so long as they just get my idea across,,, and then later on when I have the time, energy and patience to I can fully render them

These are all also leaning into who they are in my HCs, simply because I think it's kinda boring to just go "well what if we put person a in person b's body and keep everything else the exact same" like where's the nuance in that,,,

So all the same story beats still happen, just minor differences, like Tord still leaves and has the robot explode causing the damage (but different contexts now) and Tom is still possessed by the rage demon or whateva and Edd still gets powers and Matt still becomes a vampire,, they just are put in different plot points in the story

I don't like the idea of just reskinning characters, yk, if I were to change story beats for things like "instead of matt getting bitten by the vampire bite it was tord" I wouldn't want it to just be the same shit happens because Tord wouldn't react the same way to it as Matt would, yk ?? I don't wanna give the character's the others personalities, just their plot beats

But in this things stay relatively the same

Except in this Tom, in a desperation to live after failing to dismantle Tord's robot in an act of rage against Tord returning and pretending like nothing happened, makes a deal with his more demonic half and gives up part of his soul to live

Edd gets blown up trying to use Tord's robot against Tord's wishes and something something main characters can't die or whatever so he painfully finds out that his "poweredd" powers grant him a very fucked up version of immortality,,, I made it look goopy because I can and I'm madly in love with my partner and they've given me this idea so fuck them blame them if you want

Matt gets no lasting consequences for his actions because he's a vampire and they have MAD regenerative abilities, but he does still blow up but this time when him and Edd are fucking around in Tord's little office ?? whatever the hell it is he has stuffed in his room as a secondary room, yk when him and Edd are touching all those buttons they're not supposed to, that's what caused the robot to malfunction and Matt ends up getting the brunt of it - I mean so does Edd, and since this would be Tom's world that would probably why Matt and Edd's relationship grows sour since Edd got caught up in the blast too n whatnot I dunno I'm mostly spitballing here I haven't sat down and properly thought out these AUs yet so yk

take all of this with a grain of salt this is ALLLL subject to change in the future but for now this is what I have in my head for everything :p

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neptune-scythe · 14 days ago

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ok no longer rendered speechless from Confessions

the thoughts have cooked, and it's the way they made the very conscious choice to include Buck in Eddie's moment of joy, and not just because Buck is fundamentally rooted in every aspect of Eddie's life, especially the good parts

but it's the way they gave Buck a negative experience in that moment.

an experience Eddie could have so easily broken his moment for, to give everything to Buck in that moment and push aside his own needs and desires and existence

but he didn't

he just

welcomed Buck into his moment.

LIKE Y'ALL

Ok ok

the moment of joy, taking just a few minutes to just do something for the fuck of it because it makes him happy is obviously an amazing step that would be enough right there

BUT THEY TOOK IT A STEP FARTHER

they said

not only is Mr. Eddie Diaz taking a moment for joy, he's keeping that moment of joy when he could drop it for the sake of being there for his friend. But instead he's just letting his friend into his moment of joy, he's acknowledging that the two can coexist, both feelings, both experiences ... that there's as much space for him as there is for everyone else in his life

and that's just huge I think

like the episode starts with him saying "I put my desires before his needs" and implying that there is no space in the world for Eddie Diaz and his feelings/desires/needs, and they end the episode with Eddie allowing himself to experience a moment of joy purely for himself WHILE ALSO making space for someone else and being exactly what he needed just by physically being there and existing

because his desires and other peoples desires can be equally important

his needs and other people's needs can be equally important

and someone else said something about how neither of them have to do anything to support each other or provide any kind of service to be valuable

all they have to do is just exist and that is good enough for the other

(I cannot remember who made that post but that shit has been in my mind rent free every since so shout out to whoever that was)

and its just literally that

but also the fact that they make space for each other to exist however they are in that moment

they can be on the complete opposites of the emotional spectrum and sit together in silence and that is good enough

it's more than enough

it's everything

it's all they need

IT'S INSANE

IT'S SO FREAKING INSANE

like imma be so fr right now

I do not believe in love

I don't think there's any scenario where love is eternal and fulfilling and reliable and worth anything

and there is not a single ship or romantic partnership or queerplatonic partnership or friendship or any other kind of relationship that I can't think of a billion ways it would end tragically

except for Buddie

genuinely I cannot think of a single scenario where they would ever stop loving each other or supporting each other or being the most important person to the other

they are just so fundamentally perfect for each other, so engrained in each other's lives by choice

I honestly have no fucking clue what love is, but I think its whatever they have

and low-key if they never become romantic that is a o k with me because that perfect impenetrable bond they have will still be there and that is good enough for me

they're insane

they're perfect

they're so special and unique

no one is doing it like them

nobody ever

I still don't believe that that kind of thing exists in the real world but I will continue to loose my shit over it

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lemonhemlock · 4 months ago

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I think a thing that bothers me the most is how fragmented TG (the fandom) is now. After season one, many of us had issues with character writing, but it still felt like we were largely on the same page. Now, some people can accept Aegon got bad writing but not Aemond, Alicent, or Helaena. They are all “good” or “bad”characters depending on how much they hurt Aegon this season. I’m so glad he got the time to be well rounded, and that TGC delivered on all his scenes, but I think people forget Aegon has received some poor writing as well even this season. His whole outburst about Jaehaerys’s death is not about his son, but the impact on his legacy- I thought this very odd at the time, but realize it’s because they can’t have him mourn Jaehaerys for a long time either. Nobody on TG is allowed to focus on this dead child, least of all his mother! Aegon goes out drinking with his friends next episode 😭 seemingly unconcerned. But somehow only Alicent and Aemond are called out for this, when it is a clear problem that Daemon is more affected by this loss than the greens. It feels like such an uphill battle to even discuss the faction and family anymore.

This is such a good point!

I know I am so contrarian about this rn, but I have had some issues in connecting with Aegon's grief scenes over Jaehaerys this season. And it's such an opinion I DON'T want to have, bc I'm fully on the Aegon/TGC bandwagon and I do think TGC is a competent actor.

But it's something about the general clownery of the framing, how everything is gloomy and dark but at the same time no one gives that much of a shit over Jaehaerys? It's very weird to describe. I know Olivia also shows Alicent crying and swallowing sobs and trying to conceal her grief, but, if you think about it, Alicent is just Kind Of Like That in a lot of her scenes anyway. Big doe wet eyes, filled with regret and unspoken emotions etc so that her acting similarly after B&C kind of doesn't hit as much?

And, in that context, having Aegon rage over this event is rendered kind of.....hammy and, honestly, comical. I'm reminded of the scene of the small council where everyone is somber and quiet and he kind of looks like he's pretending to cry. In other moments it's fine but there are frames where I can't take it seriously and it registers in my brain like a parody.

I realise how I sound right now, like I'm not satisfied with the subdued performances, but I'm not satisfied with the expansive ones either. IDK. I have a huge problem with the framing and direction this season, I think it's a huge impediment in making me enjoy the supposedly emotional scenes.

All of this to say that I agree, Aegon has also received some bad writing this season, especially him ALSO being kind of over Jaehaerys the next episode. But people tend to overlook it, because when you draw the line, the writing for him is still so much better than what he got in S1.

And, yes, this is why I can't really join the choir in blaming Alicent and Aemond for how they act with him, because it's not a naturalistic and organic progression, it's shoehorned in with little buildup or motivation and not even drawn to its natural conclusion. For example, Aemond should have been toast the minute Aegon woke up, because Prince Regent or not, Aegon is still the King and has the power to remove Aemond if he fears him. He doesn't have to justify himself in front of anyone, just give the order to arrest his brother and name someone else as regent, then just go back to sleep.

#ask #anon #hotd critical [characterisation]#we're all in the same boat of being fucked over by the writers here

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 months ago

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reading update: july 2024

full disclosure: I started out July in a bit of a mental lurch, really feeling stuck in a rut. there are a lot of reasons for that, absolutely none of which need to be shared with the general populace of tumblr dot com, but suffice to say that I was feeling listless and reading was not a high priority. I was pretty content to accept that this was going to be another month where I didn't finish a lot of books. I was too busy for most of June, and now too unfocused and bummed out in July.

and then that ended up not being the case. I think I can chalk that up to three things:

very early in the month I realized that none of the reading I had been planning on getting to was grabbing my interest at all, so I did something drastically different: picked up a YA memoir that I bought at pride on the recommendation of a bookseller. not my usual kind of reading at all, but YA is very readable and memoirs grab me fast because I'm nosy, so I figured it might be great for getting out of a rut. and boy, was I right!

Akwaeke Emezi also has a new novel out, and if you don't know then please note now that I'm a person second and an Akwaeke Emezi fan first. their newest novel was a sinister joyride, non-stop twists and turns that I couldn't put down until I saw the characters through to their bitter ends.

and, of course, over in the Dungeon Meshi manga I got to Mithrun. I've only had Mithrun for a couple of chapters, but if anything happened to him I'd kill everyone in this dungeon and then myself. even if I hadn't been able to read anything else, that would have kept me running back to the library for more Dungeon Meshi.

all of which added up to a fairly voracious appetite for books being reignited in my brain, and my second most book-heavy month of the year so far (still haven't beat May, but there's time). sick!

so - what have I been reading?

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 7-10 (Ryoko Kui, trans. Taylor Engel, 2019-2022) - mannnnn I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said elsewhere, but Dungeon Meshi is so. fucking good. the way that Kui starts to raise the stakes of the story and grow the world beyond the core band of adventurers is so conscientious and well-done, timed perfectly so it never feels like having an undercooked heap of fantasy exposition thrown at you all at once. instead everything proceeds at a perfect simmer, leaving me feeling like the frog in that pot of boiling water who didn't notice how dire things had gotten until it was very suddenly too late and I was screaming bloody murder at a book. things have gotten so dire that I'm yearning for the days when fighting a red dragon was our biggest problem - and yet, through it all, every character remains rendered with humanity and compassion, no matter how scary, dangerous, or outright alien they first appear. I'm not naming any spoilers, but I need [REDACTED] to fix shit ASAP in Vol. 11 and [SUPER REDACTED] is on my shitlist fucking forever. also Mithrun sweetie you're perfect, do as many crimes as you want.

Heart and Hand (Rebel Carter, 2019) - my romance novel of the month, as picked by my lovely patreonites! this self-published historical romance promised some messy f/m/m, following a biracial (half Black, half white) young lady, Julie Baptiste, as she responds to a marriage ad that takes her out west to the fictional town of Gold Sky, Montana. Julie's sort of a standard historical heroine - she doesn't care for the silliness of high society and vastly prefers the company of books, looking forward to becoming Gold Sky's schoolteacher - but her marriage has a twist: rather than marrying one man, she's agreed to marry two, a pair of friends who have been inseparable since they served together in the Civil War. this book is charming, for sure, but I can't help be more intrigued by what isn't there than what is, namely: are these men having sex with each other or not? Rebel? hey, Rebel? why is there no DP in this two husbands mail order bride book? that was, like, he bare minimum that I expected. for the love of god, why did those men never put both of their dicks inside Julie at the same time? why did we spend so much time on emotional conflict that could be easily resolved if anyone just talked to each other when Julie's two beautiful husbands could have been having sex in front of her? HELLO?

also, listen, this is such a nitpick, but I am FROM Montana and it feels personal: I know that the general poverty of frontier life isn't sexy, but god these people are WAY too well off. at one point Julie enjoys some fucking BANANAS, something that I goddamn assure you were not easy to come by in late 19th century Montana. a banana. as fucking if.

All Boys Aren't Blue (George M. Johnson, 2020) - as is proudly advertised on the back cover of my copy, in recent years All Boys Aren't Blue has been the second most-challenged book in America behind Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer. reading through All Boys Aren't Blue it was initially hard to see what exactly was so objectionable, until I realized that a queer Black person living their life with compassion and joy is the scariest thing some of these motherfuckers can possibly imagine. Johnson writes about their life growing up in the nexus of racism, homophobia, and masculinity with wisdom and endless compassion, directly addressing young people who may find themselves in similar positions to offer them assurance that they, too, can be okay. more than anything, All Boys Aren't Blue is a plea for young people to live their lives without fear and shame. it's a beautiful blessing of a book that I hope brings comfort to every innumerable kids who need it.

Little Rot (Akwaeke Emezi, 2024) - how do I even begin to describe Little Rot? definitely not for those who feel squeamish about sex crimes, I guess that's an important place to start. this novel starts with the breakup of a long-term Nigerian couple, Kalu and Aima, and follows both of them into a weekend that starts with drugs and sex parties and spirals increasingly out of control from there, drawing more and more characters into a complicated snarl of money and power. Little Rot has the seedy, lurid draw of an episode of SVU if SVU ever grew up and realized that cops don't do shit, reveling in the nastiest that Emezi's imagined city of New Lagos has to offer. cannot say this book is for everyone - few of Emezi's novels are - but god, it's a thrilling study in corruption.

The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (editor Joan Nestle, 1992) - this is a massive and fascinating historical document, assembled by Nestle as part of her work with the Lesbian Herstory Archives. within this collection are letters, interviews, academic essays, poems, and transcribed oral histories from all manner of self-identified butch and femme lesbians. while some of the contributors are recognizable names in the history of American queer activism (including Pat Califa, who's a bisexual trans man now lmao), others are women who were just trying to live their lives with as much authenticity, comfort, and dignity as was possible in their time. (although, notably, the vast majority of these women are white, and all but a very few are Americans. racial and cultural diversity is not one of the collection's strong suits.)

the personal narratives span all over the twentieth century, and I was really delighted to see the very frank discussions of what would be written off as "bad representation" by a lot of queer resources today: butches overdosing on toxic masculinity and getting in messy bar brawls, femmes committing outlandish acts of adultery, lesbian sexual awakenings taking place between fairly young children, and one extremely memorable instance of a butch getting unexpectedly pregnant and decided to do a little sex work on the side since she couldn't get more pregnant than she already was. I was particularly fascinated by the many, many accounts of "second wave" self-identified lesbian feminists who tried to do away with butch/femme identities and "politically incorrect" expression of lesbian sexuality altogether (that's everything but mutual cunnilingus, btw) in pretty eerie echoes of contemporary radfem arguments. at close to 500 pages it's definitely better suited to skimming and stopping to read whatever catches your attention rather than trying to read cover to cover, but I think this is a really invaluable piece of history.

American Mermaid (Julia Langbien, 2023) - this was a novel, for sure. American Mermaid is a novel about a broke, anxious high school teacher named Penelope whose novel, also called American Mermaid, is a runaway success that gets optioned for film. Penelope quits her teaching job and moves across the country to Hollywood to work on the script with two dude bros who don't really Get what American Mermaid is about, and set to work turning Penelope's weird, unsexy female empowerment novel into an MCU-style action romp with a hot young lead. the novel's strongest when it's deep in the spirals of Penelope's frantic mind, probing the conflict between her fairly desperate need for cash (she wants to be financially independent of her conservative father, she has good reason to suspect breast cancer is in her future, she wants to start a family someday) and the artistic affront she feels at watching her story be disrespected and dismantled. where it's weaker is in the extensive chapters of the story-within-a-story; while useful for context, I straight up didn't need to read that much of Penelope's novel. and the plot overall kind of felt like it fell off the rails near the end once Langbien finishes making her point about how Hollywood sucks. it's not bad, but it's also just... fine. it's fine!

How to Taste: A Guide Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life (Mandy Naglich, 2023) - how do I put this so nicely? this book is for people who are kind of dork ass losers about food, a group that I do very much count myself as a part of. I first became acquainted with Naglich's work when she appeared on a podcast called the Sporkful, which claims that it is "not for foodies, it's for eaters." I'm a fairly devout listener, and after listening to Naglich describe her efforts to become a master cicerone (one of the world's most elite beer tasters, a distinction that is taken Very Fucking Seriously) I thought sure, whatever, that's a book I can get behind. Naglich is maybe a big more entertaining as a podcast guest than a nonfiction author. in places the book can be dry or roughly constructed in a way that suggests another pass by an editor or maybe a co-writer would have helped. and straight up, there are just weird fucking typos in this book that are like. crazy to me, I cannot believe they got through. the cheap-ass cover art also suggests this was not exactly a high budget production.

but having been very mean about it, there are a lot of extremely interesting tidbits about the world of professional tasting here! it sounds awful and you couldn't pay me to do it, but here's the cool thing: Naglich is extremely aware that what she does is insane and she knows that the average reader doesn't want to learn how to identify where a coffee bean was grown just by sniffing the bean from across a room. what she offers instead are really approachable ways to be more conscientious about how you interact with and appreciate food! and she also shares some really cool info about tasting snobbery that IS bullshit, to help you sort out the stuff that actually matters and emphasize that fun and personal taste ultimately trump any "rules." it's a very dorky book but I, personally, did have a good time.

Sex Criminals Vol 3: Three the Hard Way (Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, 2016) - every time I read another volume of Sex Criminals I find myself thinking "man, hang on, do I ever actually like Sex Criminals? am I enjoying this?" but then I end up placing a hold on the next one. I don't know, it's charming! it's like so very VERY 2010s in its dialogue, by which I mean it's like. you know. it's giving Joss Whedon before we all found out how bad he sucked and collectively booed him. but man, I love a story that's down to get weird, and Sex Criminals is sooooo about being weird. and yet also very normal where sex is concerned! considering this is a series all about people having freaky world-altering powers that activate when they cum, sex is treated as an incredibly ordinary thing, warts and all. I like that! I like seeing that! idk, I don't need every comic to be perfect, as evidenced by the fact that I'm actively enjoying Azrael: Angel of the Bat. sometimes the vibes are just good.

#bookblr #reading updates

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empty-movement · 1 year ago

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May I ask what scanners / equipment / software you're using in the utena art book project? I'm an artist and half the reason I rarely do traditional art is because I'm never happy with the artwork after it's scanned in. But the level of detail even in the blacks of Utena's uniform were all captured so beautifully! And even the very light colors are showing up so well! I'd love to know how you manage!

You know what's really fun? This used to be something you put in your site information section, the software and tools used! Not something that's as normal anymore, but let's give it a go, sorry it's long because I don't know what's new information and what's not! Herein: VANNA'S 'THIS IS AS SPECIFIC AS MY BREAK IS LONG' GUIDE/AIMLESS UNEDITED RAMBLE ABOUT SCANNING IMAGES

Scanning: Modern scanners, by and large, are shit for this. The audience for scanning has narrowed to business and work from home applications that favor text OCR, speed, and efficiency over archiving and scanning of photos and other such visual media. It makes sense--there was a time when scanning your family photographs and such was a popular expected use of a scanner, but these days, the presumption is anything like that is already digital--what would you need the scanner to do that for? The scanner I used for this project is the same one I have been using for *checks notes* a decade now. I use an Epson Perfection V500. Because it is explicitly intended to be a photo scanner, it does threebthings that at this point, you will pay a niche user premium for in a scanner: extremely high DPI (dots per inch), extremely wide color range, and true lossless raws (BMP/TIFF.) I scan low quality print media at 600dpi, high quality print media at 1200 dpi, and this artbook I scanned at 2400 dpi. This is obscene and results in files that are entire GB in size, but for my purposes and my approach, the largest, clearest, rawest copy of whatever I'm scanning is my goal. I don't rely on the scanner to do any post-processing. (At these sizes, the post-processing capacity of the scanner is rendered moot, anyway.) I will replace this scanner when it breaks by buying another identical one if I can find it. I have dropped, disassembled to clean, and abused this thing for a decade and I can't believe it still tolerates my shit. The trade off? Only a couple of my computers will run the ancient capture software right. LMAO. I spent a good week investigating scanners because of the insane Newtype project on my backburner, and the quality available to me now in a scanner is so depleted without spending over a thousand on one, that I'd probably just spin up a computer with Windows 7 on it just to use this one. That's how much of a difference the decade has made in what scanners do and why. (Enshittification attacks! Yes, there are multiple consumer computer products that have actually declined in quality over the last decade.)

Post-processing: Photoshop. Sorry. I have been using Photoshop for literally decades now, it's the demon I know. While CSP is absolutely probably the better piece of software for most uses (art,) Photoshop is...well it's in the name. In all likelihood though, CSP can do all these things, and is a better product to give money to. I just don't know how. NOTENOTENOTE: Anywhere I discuss descreening and print moire I am specifically talking about how to clean up *printed media.* If you are scanning your own painting, this will not be a problem, but everything else about this advice will stand! The first thing you do with a 2400 dpi scan of Utena and Anthy hugging? Well, you open it in Photoshop, which you may or may not have paid for. Then you use a third party developer's plug-in to Descreen the image. I use Sattva. Now this may or may not be what you want in archiving!!! If fidelity to the original scan is the point, you may pass on this part--you are trying to preserve the print screen, moire, half-tones, and other ways print media tricks the eye. If you're me, this tool helps translate the raw scan of the printed dots on the page into the smooth color image you see in person. From there, the vast majority of your efforts will boil down to the following Photoshop tools: Levels/Curves, Color Balance, and Selective Color. Dust and Scratches, Median, Blur, and Remove Noise will also be close friends of the printed page to digital format archiver. Once you're happy with the broad strokes, you can start cropping and sizing it down to something reasonable. If you are dealing with lots of images with the same needs, like when I've scanned doujinshi pages, you can often streamline a lot of this using Photoshop Actions.

My blacks and whites are coming out so vivid this time because I do all color post-processing in Photoshop after the fact, after a descreen tool has been used to translate the dot matrix colors to solids they're intended to portray--in my experience trying to color correct for dark and light colors is a hot mess until that process is done, because Photoshop sees the full range of the dots on the image and the colors they comprise, instead of actually blending them into their intended shades. I don't correct the levels until I've descreened to some extent.

As you can see, the print pattern contains the information of the original painting, but if you try to correct the blacks and whites, you'll get a janky mess. *Then* you change the Levels:

If you've ever edited audio, then dealing with photo Levels and Curves will be familiar to you! A well cut and cleaned piece of audio will not cut off the highs and lows, but also will make sure it uses the full range available to it. Modern scanners are trying to do this all for you, so they blow out the colors and increase the brightness and contrast significantly, because solid blacks and solid whites are often the entire thing you're aiming for--document scanning, basically. This is like when audio is made so loud details at the high and low get cut off. Boo.

What I get instead is as much detail as possible, but also at a volume that needs correcting:

Cutting off the unused color ranges (in this case it's all dark), you get the best chance of capturing the original black and white range:

In some cases, I edit beyond this--for doujinshi scans, I aim for solid blacks and whites, because I need the file sizes to be normal and can't spend gigs of space on dust. For accuracy though, this is where I'd generally stop.

For scanning artwork, the major factor here that may be fucking up your game? Yep. The scanner. Modern scanners are like cheap microphones that blow out the audio, when what you want is the ancient microphone that captures your cat farting in the next room over. While you can compensate A LOT in Photoshop and bring out blacks and whites that scanners fuck up, at the end of the day, what's probably stopping you up is that you want to use your scanner for something scanners are no longer designed to do well. If you aren't crazy like me and likely to get a vintage scanner for this purpose, keep in mind that what you are looking for is specifically *a photo scanner.* These are the ones designed to capture the most range, and at the highest DPI. It will be a flatbed. Don't waste your time with anything else.

Hot tip: if you aren't scanning often, look into your local library or photo processing store. They will have access to modern scanners that specialize in the same priorities I've listed here, and many will scan to your specifications (high dpi, lossless.)

Ahem. I hope that helps, and or was interesting to someone!!!

#utena #image archiving #scanning #archiving #revolutionary girl utena #digitizing #photo scanner #art scanning

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writefightandflightclub · 10 months ago

Text

Ride or Die (Santiago “Pope” Garcia x fem!reader): Chapter Two (of 11 - COMPLETED SERIES)

Series summary: Together, you and Santiago have been “soldiers” then “friends” then “lovers”; but can you ever figure out what comes next, especially when Santiago can’t (or won’t) stop running?

Series genre: a LOT of tasty angst, tasty smut, best friends to… lovers?

Warnings: see series warnings, here. Please note this series is 18+ / NSFW / MDNI. Minors or ageless blocks interacting will be blocked.

Series info: this is a COMPLETED SERIES. Posting schedule and series masterlist are here.

Author’s note: Thank you SO much for the response to Chapter One! And if you're still with it, I hope you enjoy chapter 2! It has been a LOOONNNNGGG time coming! 😆 This one is slightly shorter, with a bit of exposition to bridge between the OG instalment and the meat of our newly embarked upon continuation! The next chapters are where things really kick-off, but I do hope you enjoy this stoking of some tension, and, of course, finally seeing Santiago again - for the first time since the jarring conclusion to chapter one!!!!!!

Word count: 4.8k for this part

“It’s okay,” Frankie rumbles, looking at you levelly. “You can ask me about him.”

You sigh, squirming in place - on the rear porch steps of your sister’s home - as your game is finally unmasked. Your pretense dashed.

The hubbub of the lazy, Sunday BBQ is nothing but background to you now as Frankie zones in on your true wants, rendering you as an observer - rather than a participant - in the annual gathering you usually draw an abundance of joy from.

Not so today, despite your best efforts at going through the motions. At pretending like everything is fine.

Up to now, chatting idly with your bud in this safe little bubble, you’ve cycled through a gazillion conversation starters; each to emphasise just how interested you are in Frankie, and Whatever He Has Going On. Clearly though, you have failed to convince. Your friend simply knows you too well. Knows your weaknesses.

Your one true weakness. Santiago “Pope” Garcia.

You look at kind-eyed Frankie apologetically from beneath your lashes, sorry that your flimsy chat has failed to mask your disinterest in... um, whatever it was he was saying.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Cat.” Then, so help you, you ask the question you’ve actually been burning to ask all day. “How’s he doing, Frankie? Really?”

Confirming the shift in tone, Frankie sets his plate of food aside and nestles his bottle of beer on the corner of the lowest porch step. Now you’re having a conversation. The pilot tents his fingers together in his lap, giving your question the full merit it deserves. “Pope?”

Who else?

“He’s… fine,” Frankie nods, studying your face as he says the words. Noticing -no doubt- the way you chew on your lip as your gaze wanders, fixing on the man in question. As you watch him mingle comfortably, effortlessly, amongst the throng of people on the lawn. Making connections, as per usual.

Your stomach drops. An unease jostles in the pit of you. The niggle of regret.

You shouldn’t have invited the guys here today. Shouldn’t have agreed to have them be present at your family gathering. Shouldn’t have agreed to follow-up it up with a squad weekend at the beach house - no matter that it’s tradition. But, then again, who were you to disrupt the usual way of things? And, more so, who were you to pretend that you didn’t want to see him again? After all this time?

In truth, you had wanted nothing else but to see him again. That is, until you had laid eyes on him, and then, very quickly, you had pivoted. Wanted nothing more than to keep your distance.

Why?

Because by all accounts it’s true.

Santiago is fine.

Santiago certainly looks fine. He looks fine in all senses of the fucking word. He looks as though he’s thriving, in fact.

Your face falls at the implication: that he’s thriving without you.

With effort, you hum, schooling your expression into something neutral; however, Frankie’s already on to you. “Is that what you wanted to hear, chiquita?”

You turn your head towards your friend and exhale a small, pitiful laugh. Pondering Frankie’s question, you set your own plate and beer down too – a signal that shit’s getting real.

Is it?

Is that what you wanted to hear?

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted to hear, Cat.” With a dejected sigh, you lean your head on Frankie’s shoulder, hooking your arm into the crook of his elbow. “Does that make me cruel? If I don’t wanna hear that he’s happy?”

Your buddy doesn’t answer rightaway, but he does rest a reassuring hand on your thigh in response, his plush bottom-lip protruding as he pouts – apparently mulling over whether or not to throw you a bone. “Okay. Look,” he begins - always a soft-touch for you - and you instantly perk-up just a little. “He had a rough spell when you left and-” Frankie huffs out air, shaking his head as though he might have gone too far in divulging already “-fuck, actually, you don’t wanna know.”

You head snaps up from Frankie’s shoulder as it begins to shake with mirth, your curiosity piqued.

“What?” you probe, as Frankie turns his head to look at you, a smile cracking his sharp features. Apparently, Frankie has a small part of him which is cruel too. “We stumbled upon his heartbreak playlist. And it was not pretty.”

“Come on now,” you protest, a little too defensively, your mouth suddenly dry. “I hardly broke the fucker’s heart.”

Frankie pumps his eyebrows. Shrugs his shoulders. Then, his bark-brown eyes mist over, just a little. “More likely than you think, chiquita.”

With that, your eyes flick right back to Santiago’s figure on the other side of the yard, as if trying to reconcile Frankie’s assertion with the reality you see before you. After all, Santiago “Pope” Garcia looks fine. In all senses of the word.

Right this second, for example, he’s engaged in a highly tactical water fight with your kid nephews. About to enter the killbox any moment, you wager, given that 5 and 7-year-olds don’t seem bound by those pesky rules of engagement. His cargo shorts are – naturally - far too tight, and he’s wearing his crisp blue shirt as though he forgot what buttons did half-way through getting dressed, the fabric split in a deep, plunging “V” across his tan chest.

Despite all that, however, the thing which captures your attention most, is the beaming, wide-open grin he has painted on his face.

He looks...

...Happy.

Genuinely happy. The bastard.

This is the first time he’s seen you since he stormed out of your apartment all those months ago. The first chance he’s had to make things right - and he hasn’t spoken a word to you all day. Despite being in your family’s yard. Eating your sister’s food. Playing with your goddamn nephews. You broke his heart, apparently. So Frankie tells you. And yet this fucker dares to looks happy.

So… Is that what you wanted?

For him to be happy?

Without you?

Or… is a small part of you cruel?

You’re not sure about the answer to that question, but you do know that your eyes turn mildly devilish as they flick back towards your buddy, your voice hushed and downright conspiratorial. All of a sudden, you’re not concerned with being the bigger person.

You decide you’ll willingly catch that bone Frankie is throwing. “Tell me more about this playlist, Francisco.”

You need this, you justify internally. You need something. Some sign that Santiago is hurting too.

You’ve needed this for months, in fact; but, goddamn - you especially need this before you and the squad spends a whole weekend together up at the beach house.

You need it badly.

Why?

Because you’re not fine.

Not fine at all.

Not fine without him.

This is your family's yard, and it’s your family’s party, and it’s the first time you’ve seen him since he stormed out of your apartment all those months ago… and you’re emphatically not happy about it. Have found that, despite what you had hoped for, your reunion hasn’t solved a damn thing. Hasn’t eased the knot in your chest. Hasn’t allowed you to feel any sense of resolution.

“Fuck.” Your eyes brim over with the realisation, wet and glassy, and a tight lump balls in your throat.

“Come on,” Frankie mutters - softly but urgently - as your eyes begin to swim with emotion. He nods up towards the interior of the house, and you are endlessly grateful when, with minimal spectacle, your buddy bundles you inside, his arm slung casually around your shoulder for comfort.

You’re not the retreating type. At all. You have always been comfortable running headlong into things that scare you. Even so, it is a marked relief when you do slink inside. A relief that you were able to save face. Keep your pain hidden. But, most of all, it is a relief that you no longer need to suffer Santiago’s abject joy.

It is a relief in the same way it is to retreat from the blazing sun, and you immediately find sanctuary in the cool, shaded interior of the house.

Still, given the tumult of emotions inspired by his general proximity today, you are less and less sure that you can handle this trip.

The only thing pushing you to go through with it, in fact, is the knowledge that there’s one thing harder than being close to Santiago… and that’s being apart from him.

Perhaps Frankie’s wrong. Perhaps you didn’t break Santiago’s heart when you left. But, one thing’s for sure. Leaving him had certainly broken yours.

Truth be told, even after all this time, you’ve barely begun to put yourself back together.

You’re in pieces; which - to be fair - is always how Santiago liked to see you, isn’t it?

A friend. A soldier. A lover.

That’s the only way you can stand to view him now. In mere fragments. In the shrapnel of stolen glances; because trying to see him all at once? That’s like trying to stare directly at the sun.

He is too bright for you and it burns. Even with all this distance.

***

You’re surrounded by laughter and chatter, yet you feel an unease. An unrest in the pit of you.

Will’s ballcap is tugged down over your eyes under the guise of staying warm - a flimsy excuse, considering the raging fire pit in the centre of you all, acting as the warm sun to your orbits of beer, passed amiably around from hand to hand via the cooler at Will’s side.

Naturally, the conversation has veered sharply towards the crude - it reliably does when you are and the boys are all together.

“For real, Pope. Since we’re, uh, sharing,” Tom interjects, already looking far too pleased with himself. “Do you ever play up the knee thing to… encourage women to go on top?” Tom’s question earns shocked titters from Will and Frankie and, despite yourself, a softly exhaled laugh from you.

“Why are you so obsessed with me?” Santiago asks Tom with an assured grin, and, upon being subject to the group’s attention, he leans forward in his camp chair. He drains the dregs of his beer and tosses the emptied bottle into the gathering pile in the sand, the label already peeled off by his nimble fingers.

Tom presses him for an answer, and you see Santiago’s pearly flash of teeth glinting in the firelight. “Play it up, buddy?” Santiago emits a deep, throaty chuckle which bobs in his corded neck. The sound is echoed by the other boys too, the threshold for laughter pleasantly lowered by the alcohol.

Their movements are growing increasingly pack-like - a little less measured and a little more instinctual. Less individual and more unified. Moving as a team even as they sit still, with their spread legs and dropped shoulders and dipped chins. Alert eyes glinting in the dark with each lick of flame. Their energy would intimidate you, you think, if you didn’t know them. If you didn’t feel safer here than anywhere else in the world.

Still wearing that grin, Santiago scoops his hand over his stubble, his finger and thumb tracing around his mouth. “It’s practically a pick-up strategy.” His voice is warm sand and it scrapes you. Leaves a mark.

Frankie titters off to Santiago’s side - a chaotic, beer-addled laugh. To his other side, Will grins too, his laughter striking a robust and deep note, even whilst shaking his head as though he’s somehow above it all. Together, their sounds form a cacophony you can feel deep in your chest - like the rumble of bass from a speaker, or the subdued roar of the ocean.

If they are a pack, you - for once - are at odds. You feel it now more than ever, and it jars you. You are hyper-conscious that no display of mirth falls from you; and, in fact, the corners of your mouth turn down.

Instead, you dwell on this roar - this rumble and hum under your skin. If you feel like the tide, like you are being swept up, Santiago is your shore. Everything about him draws you in, and you feel you could wash him away with the force of your need for him.

Regardless of that, you continue to do precisely what you’ve been doing all night. You try to bury everything. To subdue your feelings. To calm this frenzy deep in the pit of you. In this moment, thinking about Santiago pursuing people other than you - listening to the damn stories - you take that urge quite literally, digging your bare toes deeply and intently into the sand as though you could disappear wholly into it.

But; even that reminds you.

Everything reminds you.

Santiago.

You’ve thought of nothing else all night.

How could you?

And, you feel the lack of him.

The roughness of the sand against your smooth skin is a poor substitute for the rasp of his stubble. For the grit of his voice against your throat. The warmth of the curling, licking flame is a poor substitute for his body heat. His curling tongue. His fingers. The way you bury your feelings has nothing on how he buried himself in you.

You fall into memories, tacky and hot, tumbling, and yet Will’s voice rips you abruptly back to the present.

“How in the hell do you spin that one, man?” he asks Santiago with a genuine curiosity, his ice blue eyes dancing with amusement.

Santiago risks a sheepish glance at you then, as though sensitive that his prowess with women might offend you in some way; but your eyes simply glance off of his like a flung spark from the fire pit, desperate to turn towards the dark and rid yourself of any heat which he may ignite. Desperate not to linger on the way the shadows and the light pool across the harsh planes of his face. The way his dark eyes are flickering and alive, and entirely capable of burning.

And so, Santiago continues, relishing his moment. “Come on. It’s easy,” he breezes. He clears his throat, fully readying to inhabit his role. He shuffles in his chair and changes his demeanour, his body language, his voice. Shifting and contorting himself until he is layered with seduction. His frame even grows bigger, bolder, his legs spread. Chin raised and eyes hooded with a slow, sultry blink of those long lashes.

Even this performance of heat hurts you; burns. Burns brightly enough that you have to look away from him before your skin is singed by it. “Hermosa,” he rasps, voice pleasantly scuffed by beer and smoke, the sound so rough and gritty you swear you can feel it scrape your skin. Your core clenches around the full, deep, dark tones of him, as though they alone could fill you.

The fire throws out careless sparks like cracked whips, and, like them, you cling to a dying heat. This vestige of the way he spoke to you in the dead, dark night at one time, your bodies all salt-slick skin. “You’re right,” he purrs, and you see that his body has shifted - angled towards Tom.

You feel embarrassed. You feel alight, as though somehow, they could all find you out in this moment. Could sense the wet slick pooling between your legs. Smell it somehow. Like all of a sudden their eyes will converge on you and they will know - hear the flutter of your pulse in your throat. Sense the throb building in your core. Feel you barrelling from dull ache to desperation.

“About what?” Tom asks, playing along as Santiago sneaks a hand up his thigh.

Santiago’s smile is lopsided. Charming, but full of challenge. “Thinking that I’m a bad idea.” He’s hamming it up, for sure, but the syrup and grit in his voice is taking you right back there all the same. Right back to between those sheets, and a disobedient heat snakes down your back.

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“Well,” Santiago offers with faux regret, voice husky, and you can’t help but lift your eyes back to him. Can’t possibly look anywhere else now. Can’t help but observe the smirk twitching his appealing mouth and the way his thick brow arcs up. “‘Cause my knees are shot from years in the military, so I’m afraid you’ll have to get on top and ride me senseless.”

God in heaven.

Looking at him was a mistake, even like this. Even as he feigns seducing Tom, of all people. There’s just something about the rough edge layered into his voice right now. Something about the firelight painting his sharply-angled face with shadow. The flickers causing his smouldering eyes to glint with an echo of that formidable, latent heat.

You feel this vestige of warmth in you ignite. Feel it begin to blaze and catch. You feel memories of him, his skin, his touch, amassing grain by grain. Ever so suddenly you are the shore now. Parched. A hot, baking expanse seeking its relieving tide.

God, you want him.

You feel your core shiver around the memory of him slipped into you, deep and dirty, teeth on your throat, and it’s almost too much to take.

You need him, even though you’re still so damn angry with him.

Or… no. No, that’s not it. Yes - you want him because of it.

You need to fuck the residual anger from beneath your skin, for it has festered there for months now. Months, and you need it to move. Need it to give. Need it slaked and sated and gone.

It’s not a healthy desire, you think, and you feel a little shame at that. You are grateful then - as Santiago effortlessly drags you back into the inescapable pit of him - that the boys’ laughter tears you abruptly from this impossible yearning. Gives you a lifeline. Reminds you where you are. How far you’ve come.

You got out. And that meant leaving him behind too, didn’t it?

“You’re such a fucking dog, man,” Will snickers.

The chair over, Frankie’s shoulders are shaking with laughter too, his head tipped up to the sky and his eyes disappeared with it. You wish that you could laugh like that. That you could feel light, but instead you feel heavy and sick.

“That works?” Tom asks incredulously, and you take another hasty swig of your beer, the froth hissing against your lips and a hoppy taste flooding your tongue. You briefly wish it was something stronger.

“Don’t go getting ideas, Tom,” Santiago says smugly, slapping his buddy emphatically on the thigh. “Works when I do it.”

Oh, you bet it does. You bet it works.

Tom throws Santiago a stink-eye then, before sitting slightly taller in his chair, his face contorting in a clear attempt to smoulder. “My knees are shot from years in the military...” Tom echoes, trying to inject a similar level of grit into his voice... and, the contrast? The failure? It is… an instant relief.

Tom’s attempt is laughable, in fact. And so, when your favourite pilot’s dense, throaty chuckle sounds out to your side once more – this time, you can’t help but crack a smile too. Indeed, the laughter which spills out of you is a welcome vent, and so you reach for it wholeheartedly.

There is an eruption of good-natured, teasing banter from the boys now - and Tom looks miffed that his attempt to tease Santiago has almost entirely backfired. Then, grasping for this welcome escape route a tad too eagerly, perhaps, you submit your own dig. “You might wanna run that script again. Give us a little less of that insurance infomercial vibe next time, buddy.”

Frankie can barely breathe from laughing now, his hand coming to clutch his belly, and it’s pleasantly infectious. The atmosphere is safe and cocooning and familiar, and for the first time tonight you almost forget. You almost forget the thing that you haven’t been able to forget for months. That Santi isn’t touching you, and that, God; you need him to.

But then, your relief is snatched from you all too suddenly. “Well sure,” Tom aims, his shot primed to land. “You would know how it goes, right? First hand? Did Pope use that line on you too, right before he and that guy from the bar practically double-dipped you?”

The group fucking brace.

You can feel it.

It’s the exact same energy as when you’ve all grabbed for purchase in the helo or the humvee, right before a collision. The world seeming to flow in slow motion, your stomach being tossed up in the air and rolling as you lurch and sink.

Most of the time, sure. You pride yourself for being able to take the boys’ banter on the chin. For having a thick skin. For being able to muster a scathing comeback, rolling off your tongue without a thought.

But this? This has you beat for a second. This has a sinkhole opening up in your middle.

You meet Will’s eyes for a split second in desperation, but he looks at you helplessly, and you know. You know you need to say something. You know you need to, before they witness -before he witnesses- you falling apart. Before you let your silence reveal that you’re not over Santiago. That this hang isn’t ‘just like old times’. Not like ‘before’. That maybe, it can never be how it was again.

Finally, something comes to you, and you grab for it; once again, a little too eagerly. “At least I got some, Tom. I doubt you could even seal the deal these days.” You push the words out and hope they sound light, even as you feel a tremor in your body. In your throat. Even as you feel Santiago’s eyes on you without looking. Can imagine them, dark and knowing, and worst of all… apologetic. Maybe even pitying. “Oh hey! Just like your ‘career’ in real estate!”

“Ohhhhh shiiittt,” is the prevailing sentiment from the group, hands flung up into the air as Tom realises he’s just been owned by your spectacular throwdown.

Good, you think. Good. You’re glad the asshole’s getting his comeuppance but, even so, your petty victory does little to fill the hole in your chest, your heart still hammering and your fingers still trembling subtly against the cool, wet neck of your beer.

To your surprise though, Tom doesn’t even bite back. Not this time, and that makes you feel even more annoyed, somehow. It makes you feel as though your anger is misdirected. As though Tom’s not the asshole here. As though he’s not the dude you’re fuming at after all.

Still, your comment served its purpose well enough, you think, as steady, safe banter erupts again. You are pleased that you avoided the full impact of this collision, brakes slammed on as you still teeter on the cliff edge; but your heart feels bruised and rattled in the roll cage of your chest all the same.

Mainly though, you are pleased that you are no longer the focus of everyone’s attention. However, your skin warms when you notice one man’s eyes remain on you, his gaze fixated and hooded and intense, and a shiver of heat dips down each notch of your spine.

You look away. You tug Will’s cap a little further down over your eyes and you wait. You wait for the topic to shift so that you can excuse yourself without the cause being quite so obvious. You wait, until you can’t take the heat from this fire a second longer. Then, and only then, you make your excuses and dip out, retreating into the empty, quiet shell of the house.

You pad into the kitchen, the cool interior immediately relieving against your hot skin, gooseflesh snaking down your arms and making your hairs stand on end. The dim light is certainly a respite from the searing brightness of the fire and the sting of the smoke in your eyes. But most of all, of course, it is relief from him.

Santiago.

It’s rough. Rougher than you expected. You simply can’t take this distance from him. You’d thought, before, that the miles between you - between here and Colombia - had been hard to reckon with. But this distance? The vanishingly small distance where he’s right here yet has never felt further out of your reach? That’s a thousand times harder. This petty distance – this rupture, this wound – hurts far more, because it feels far harder to heal. Far more festering than a clean break, and seeing him has already torn out every self-applied suture.

You don’t like that things seem to have been irrevocably changed. You don’t like that your two bodies - which used to be so in sync - are now so awkward around one another. Purposefully aloof, rather than tactile. Remaining so separate, rather than together.

It has been slowly amassing all day, the weight of this pain. Of this lack. And now, after feeling the absence of his touch so intensely - of that blessed togetherness- ironically, you finally need a moment alone.

You cross the room and fold yourself over the kitchen counter, hinging at the hips. You rest your head in your hands, laying your forearms flat along the cool, marbled surface.

For a brief moment, it is even a relief. You breathe deeply. Put him out of your head. But, after only one moment more you find yourself missing the pain. You’ve become fond of it, in a way. You haven’t been able to let go because, in truth, you’ve wanted to feel the continued burn of this loss - like a scar.

It is the only proof you have left that he touched you at all.

That you came close to having something with him. Within touching distance of it.

But now…

You sigh deeply. You hate this torment. You hate not knowing how to be around him. The way the familiar is recast as unfamiliar. Your certainty now uncertainty. Your home now a hotel.

You’ve spent the whole day so far keeping your distance. Talking only to the group, always some buffer of Tom or Will or Frankie in between you. Always leaving one seat between your bodies. Avoiding prolonged eye contact. Going out of your way to make sure the two of you were never left alone.

Being left alone with him is the last thing you want; and the first, of course.

And, as if on cue, a low whistle sounds from behind you. You know the sound without looking, and your body stiffens. “An ocean view and now this?” Santiago jokes cautiously as he approaches behind you, clearly faced with a perfect view of your ass as you fold over the counter. “Pretty sweet deal. You should get Tom in on this real estate action. He might actually sell something.”

Despite everything, all of it, you can’t help but laugh at that. You appreciate the dig at Tom a hell of a lot more than you should, actually.

“Listen. Are you… alright?” Santiago asks next, much more softly. You hate the way his voice prickles the hairs on the back of your neck; but also, you don’t hate it at all, of course.

You inhale and stand, pushing your torso up from the counter. You look up to the top of the cabinets, not blinking until the would-be tears have dried, and only then do you turn towards him.

Santiago.

Only then do you face your sun, praying that you will not be singed.

All day, you have had a buffer in between the two of you. Clouds, to dim his brightness. But now, it is just you and him, alone in the kitchen of the beach house.

This bland domesticity sure is a far cry from the field, yes. From your original shared domain. But, it also serves as an all too painful reminder of the last time you saw him. Of the last time his lips moved against yours. Of the last time, in that kitchen, that he’d had you. Taken you, bunched up naked against the fridge as he filled your slick heat with his fingers. As he kissed you and tongued you and claimed you back, as if he ever intended to keep you.

It is a reminder of the time he had told you he loved you, and with finality, you had both realised that it still might not be enough.

You turn towards him, finally, and you brace.

Brace like you’re about to collide.

Like there will be an impact when your eyes meet.

Your brace like you’re expecting hot tempers, hot feelings, hot words. Wounds splitting and salt being rubbed in.

Still, that’s not at all what you get.

Instead, Santiago’s eyes are as wet as your own. All of his boldness and bluster is gone, and he’s standing on the very perimeter of the room as though he is the one who dares to venture no further. As though you might burn him if he gets too close.

“I missed you,” he rasps, and despite the softness and the sincerity of the words, they feel like a rough struck match against your skin.

You try desperately. Try desperately to fling this offered spark away before it catches, but it is futile.

He missed you, and his admission already has you blazing for him.

He’s standing mere feet from you.

And, despite everything, all you can think about is closing this oh so petty distance.

#santiago pope garcia x reader #triple frontier #oscar isaac #ride or die series #santiago pope garcia

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onceuponaoneshotfanfic · 7 months ago

Text

I'm Setting Off, But Not Without My Muse

I'll Write Your Name Chapter 7

Roy Kent x Latina!Popstar!Reader

4.8k words

Warnings: Language, heavy kissing, pining

Keeley lounged on Roy’s couch, looking comfortable and familiar with crossed her legs and messy hair. She smiled when Roy handed her the soda he’d brought from the kitchen, throwing Roy back to all those lazy days they’d spent together on that couch, days of kisses and laughter and love. Days he missed.

“My sister should be here soon,” he murmured as he threw himself down on the couch beside Keeley. “Remind me what you and Phoebe are doing again?” He resisted the urge to grab her hand or press his palm to her thigh, the way he used to.

Ignoring or missing Roy’s pining, Keeley grinned and sipped her soda. “We’re going to a museum,” she explained slowly. “And we’re going to take turns closing our eyes and trying to draw the art we see. Whoever does the best wins, and loser pays for lunch.”

“Where the fuck did Phoebe get money from?” Roy snorted.

Keeley blinked at him, as if it was obvious. “You, you dolt. Girl’s a little millionaire with all your swearing.”

The sound of knocking at his door stopped Roy from retorting; not that he had a defense, to be fair. His wallet was constantly empty thanks to Pheobe. Maybe the knock at the door saved him from admitting Keeley was right, he thought to himself as he opened it.

Those familiar eyes sparkled at him. “Hey, Roy.” She stepped inside, looking comfortable in a simple sweater and jeans. The moment she saw Keeley on the couch, it was like a switch flipped. Her hand was on Roy’s hip, tugging him to herself so she could plant a lingering kiss to his cheek. “Missed you,” she hummed.

Roy froze. Even after all this time, all the kisses, he still had moments where her seemingly easy affection caught him off-guard, rendering him frozen like a statue. This was definitely one of those moments, with his ex-girlfriend on his couch watching with quirked eyebrows and amused eyes.

Just as suddenly, she stepped back and smacked her palm to her forehead. “Shit,” she chuckled awkwardly, her eyes focusing on Keeley again. “I’m so sorry. I forgot I don’t have to do that in front of you.” She adjusted Roy’s shirt where she’d grabbed him. “My bad, Kent.”

“Don’t stop on my account,” Keeley teased, shooting them a wink. “Kiss him all you want. I doubt he’d complain too much.”

“Keeley-” Roy started to growl, wondering if both women could spot his heavy blush and the way his fists clenched at his side.

But Keeley wasn’t focused on that. Instead, she patted the spot next to her, urging the popstar to sit beside her. “So, have you two planned your holiday yet? I know Lanie’s been on your ass about it.”

With a glance at Roy, the singer settled by Keeley, noticeably stiff compared to the former model. “Uh, Roy found some spot in this little lakeside town,” she said quietly. Roy wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her sound so timid. What the fuck had her so shy? “That’s why I’m here,” she added quickly, eyes on Keeley. “So we can finish planning everything.”

“That sounds lovely,” Keeley said in a soothing voice, almost as though she was trying to comfort the singer. “I think you and Roy-o are going to have a great time.” She shot Roy another wink. “Sounds very romantic.”

Roy cleared his throat. “I think it’ll be a great writing spot,” he said. “She can focus on the album, I’ll get some reading done.”

There was that smile, that small grin that made Roy soften. “I’m excited,” she admitted to Keeley, although her eyes were still on Roy. “If nothing else, it’s nice to get away before the tour begins. Because now, with this album, I’m not going to get to relax much before it starts. At least I’ll get to relax a little on this trip.”

“Or not relax,” Keeley hummed with a wink.

Roy didn’t know what he hated more: Keeley implying he’d be interested in anyone other than her, or feeling embarrassed in front of his fake girlfriend. Probably the latter, he realized when he saw the alarmed look that appeared on that pretty face. Now she was going to spend their little getaway worried that Roy was going to make some sort of move on her, he panicked with silent groan.

Fucking Keeley.

“Shit, sunshine, what’s in this one? Bricks?”

I rolled my eyes and grabbed the admittedly heavy backpack out of Roy’s hands. “Old notebooks,” I corrected. “I’ve gotta dig through these things to find some usable lyrics, remember?”

Roy’s little grunt was the only answer I got. He loaded my suitcase into his giant black car before taking back the backpack and tossing it inside. He squinted at my empty hands for a moment before gazing back at my house. “I made sure the place was pet-friendly, you know.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, cocking my head. “What, did Keeley make you rent a dog for our vacation? Make us look all domestic?”

“No,” he huffed, obviously fighting the growing curve in his mouth. “For Sydney. I figured you’d be bringing her along.”

My heart melted as I blinked at Roy. I knew he liked my cat- and she, amazingly enough, liked him in return- but I wouldn’t have expected him to include her in our plans. Most of my real boyfriends tolerated Syd well enough, choosing to mostly engage in mutual indifference. Roy, on the other hand, seemed to genuinely like having Sydney curled up in his lap during Scrabble games and was keen to feed her if he woke up before me.

Stupid thing better not get too attached, I thought bitterly as I mumbled something about going to pack Sydney’s things really quickly. He won’t be around forever.

As I gathered some cat food and toys and urged Sydney into her travel carrier, I wondered if I was worried about Sydney or myself. With Roy’s help, I packed the cat and her things into his car, reminding myself all the while that this was a business trip of sorts. We were going for publicity, I scolded myself as I buckled into the passenger seat. This was for work.

My reminders were interrupted when Roy turned on his car and my own voice suddenly filled the vehicle.

The tips of Roy’s ears were red as he quickly turned off the car stereo. “Phoebe,” he mumbled simply. “She always turns it up way too fucking loud.”

I fought the smile that was desperately trying to break through. “Sure, Kent,” I chuckled. “You weren’t blasting my song on your way to pick me up. You absolutely didn’t sing every word at the top of your lungs. Totally believe you.”

Damn, why did he have to wear bashfulness so well? “Fuck off, sunshine.”

Slouching in my seat and defeated by the smile on my face, I turned to him. “What is your favorite song by me? If you don’t mind me asking.”

His fingers tapped the steering wheel as he turned off my street, off on our little adventure. “D’you think I have a favorite?”

“Of course you do,” I scoffed. “I saw the way you sang Our Song. You’re a bigger fan than you let on, Kent.”

“Touche.” He bobbled his head as he stared straight ahead. “You’ve got some really good songs. Nothing New was phenomenal. I’ve listened to it a few times and it just leaves me fucking breathless.” A frown crossed his face. “But it might be Happiness,” he said quietly.

My eyes traced his profile. “Why that one?”

He sighed and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “It’s mature,” he said slowly. “Accepting the end of this relationship, acknowledging the good and bad of it all, hoping for forgiveness that goes both ways.” He sighed. “I’ve got to admit, I used to think you were just… fluff. I mean, Pheebs always likes your sugary pop stuff, that’s what’s on the radio. But after Nothing New-” He shook his head. “I went and listened to some of your other things, and fuck, you’re a great songwriter.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes. “And I liked the Gatsby references, sunshine.”

I tried to tell myself that my warm cheeks were the result of feeling humbled by kind praise, not feeling flustered because Roy was telling me he liked my song. “Thanks,” I murmured. I picked at the hem of my shirt. “It was kind of a hard song to write. Emotionally, I mean. But it felt really good once I’d finished recording it.”

“I bet,” was all he said.

The rest of the drive was calmly quiet. I rested my head against the window, watching the city fade away and become green, green, and more green. Roy didn’t say much, other than ask how Sydney and I were doing. After a while, I took out a notebook and began jotting down some words, words that just kind of flowered onto the page before I could even really comprehend what they were saying.

Roy eyed me curiously as I scribbled. “Lyrics?” he asked simply.

I nodded, scribbling down the last couple of words. “Just a few lines,” I admitted. “Who knows if it’ll become anything. But you never know, so I’ve gotta write everything down. Sometimes the silliest little lines can become something special.”

“Read it to me.”

I swallowed hard, staring at the words I’d jotted down. “It’s just a couple little scribbles-”

“Come on, sunshine.”

Unable to say no to his gentle tone, I cleared by throat and slowly read, “Wait for the signal and I’ll meet you after dark… show me the places where the others gave you scars… Now this is an open-shut case, I guess I should’ve known by the look on your face… Every bait-and-switch was a work of art.”

When I dared to look at Roy, he wore a large, infectious grin. “What the fuck,” he chuckled, smacking the steering wheel. “What kind of a mind d’you got in that pretty little head? You just came up with that right now? Out of fucking nowhere?” He let out a sharp breath. “Fucking amazing.”

His words were overwhelming, drawing a deep blush to my cheeks. He sounded so real, so genuine as he praised the couple of lines I’d jotted down. I decided to believe he really meant it. Friends could gush over each other like that- right?

I also decided to ignore him calling me pretty.

“Thanks, Kent,” I murmured, slouching into my seat. “Dunno what it’ll become but…”

“Well, whatever it is,” he said, “it’ll be fucking great.”

He knew he’d guessed right when he saw the smile on her face at the sight of the instrument. She turned to him, eyebrows raised and cat in hand.

It was a nice house. Bright and airy with a gorgeous view of a lake, a couple of cozy bedrooms, a sweet little kitchen, and, most importantly, an inviting sitting room with a piano. As soon as Roy saw a photo of the instrument online, he booked the house, figuring it would be a perfect spot for some songwriting.

“There’s a piano,” she said simply.

Roy nodded, warmth in his chest as he took in her pleased reaction. “Figured between that and your guitar, you’d be all set,” he explained. “Is it fine? The piano? I didn’t know what kind you like, or if this one’s any good.” He was blabbering now, suddenly anxious that he’d done just the wrong thing.

But she shook her head, letting Sydney go so she could approach the little bench. She sat and began plucking at the keys, creating a simple little melody that Roy felt like he knew. She glanced at him, the music never stopping. “You ever play?”

“No,” Roy scoffed. “Only thing I’ve ever played is football.” Not knowing what came over him, he strolled over and sat beside her, watching her fingers move with ease over the ivory. “Is this one of your songs?”

She nodded and opened her mouth, letting her sweet voice fill the house.

Roy nodded along. He’d heard this one before; it always sounded so childish when he heard it over the speakers, and half the time he skipped right over it, ignoring Phoebe’s complaints about ever skipping her songs. But maybe it was hearing the authoress in person, or maybe it was how down-to-earth it sounded like this, or maybe it was the way the setting sun was hitting her pretty face, whatever it was, Roy thought the song sounded nothing short of charming.

School bell rings, walk me home

Sidewalk chalk covered in snow

Lost my gloves, you give me one

"Wanna hang out?"

Yeah, sounds like fun

Video games, you pass me a note

Sleeping in tents

It's nice to have a friend

She turned to him, still playing, and nodded to the keys. “You try.”

“Fuck no, I-”

All it took was her raising her eyebrows expectantly, and Roy found his fingers touching the cool keys. She paused, freezing her fingers and nodding down at them.

“Set your fingers like this,” she instructed. When Roy had taken the same position, she looked at his face. “Just copy my movements.”

She moved her fingers slowly, delicately, and Roy did his best to mirror them. He hit some wrong keys, and he was so stilted and awkward, but he created something resembling music. Slowly, the tension in his shoulders started to dissipate, all the embarrassment in his head gone, making room in his brain for the simple melody they created together. A quiet, almost domestic bliss settled over the two of them, the kind of quiet that didn’t need a single word. He tried to remember the last time he felt such a calmness; probably with Keeley. He didn’t realize how much he missed it, just the pleasure of someone’s company.

And Roy definitely wasn’t complaining about the glowing little smiles she offered him.

It was nice to have a friend, indeed.

It was the sun, I told myself as I forced my eyes back to my notebook. I was suddenly feeling warm because I was lying out in the sun. That had to be it.

The sun felt good on my face, warm and inviting. I was supposed to be diving through an old notebook and searching for usable lyrics, but Roy kept distracting me. Not on purpose, of course. He just stretched out on our picnic blanket, eyes on the book he’d brought along, pausing only to take a sip of beer or grab a piece of fruit to pop into his mouth. But I couldn’t stop glancing over at him. He looked so incredibly relaxed, kind of like he had the night of his championship celebration, and he had this tiny grin on his face as he read, as if he was amused by the book in his hands. And then I noticed his hands, how strong and firm they looked holding the book open. And today he’d opted to wear shorts, showing off muscular legs I rarely got to see.

“Alright there?”

That gruff voice had me snapping back to reality. “Fine,” I choked out, shaking away thoughts that I really shouldn’t have been having. “How’s your book?”

Roy shrugged and flipped through the pages. “It’s good. I’ve read it before, but it’s nice to revisit?” He raised an eyebrow. “Like you and Gatsby, I guess.”

My eyes scanned the cover I hadn’t paid much attention to earlier. “A Wrinkle in Time,” I read aloud. “I’ve heard that’s a good one.”

“You could borrow it sometime. If you want.” Roy grinned. “When you’re not being pressured to write an entire album of love song for a man you’re not really in love with.” He shook his head, missing way I squirmed at the ‘L’ word. “Freaking Keeley, making you do this. You’re a trooper for saying yes, you know that, sunshine?”

“It’s fine,” I assured him with a little chuckle. “Who doesn’t love a challenge?” I paused, picking at the grass at the edge of the blanket. “Speaking of Keeley…” I let out a little breath, suddenly even warmer in the face. “She didn’t, er, send you any messages recently, did she?”

Something in Roy’s face fell for a flicker of a moment before relaxing again. He quickly shook his head. “No. Did she send you something?”

“Yeah.” I rolled my eyes, pretending my heart wasn’t slamming in my chest. “She says we’re both way too hot to be so… chaste when we’re out together.” I offered an awkward grimace. “She wants us to, like, get caught being hot and heavy.”

The choking sound sputtering out of Roy’s mouth had my face burning even worse than it already was. “Oh.” He blinked a few times, the gears in his head almost visibly turning. “Do you… want to make out then?”

Despite the absolute mortification I was feeling, I couldn’t help laughing at his words. “Jeez, Roy, that’s so high school of you,” I managed between chuckles.

The corners of his eyes crinkled as he finally joined me in laughter. “Fuck me, that was terrible, wasn’t it?” He shook his head, offering a sheepish grin. “But I mean…” His eyes shifted somewhere over my shoulder. “That papps Keeley tipped off is over there somewhere. Probably has a clear view of us.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless…”

The laughter left my lungs as I looked into those brown eyes, just as unsure as I suddenly felt. This shouldn’t be difficult; we’d been kissing each other for a couple of months now. And I’d filmed plenty of kissing scenes for music videos, I reminded myself. Steamy ones, even. Surely, I could manage to get a little heavy with my supposed boyfriend, couldn’t I?

“Anything for the job,” I joked, suddenly hating the way that had seemed to become our motto.

“For the job,” Roy echoed with a smirk.

Without warning, he grabbed my hips and tugged me onto his lap. A surprised squeal slipped past my lips, prompting a chuckle to rumble in his chest. His hands skittered up and down my back as he smiled up at me.

“This alright?” he hummed. His eyes were on my mouth.

I managed to nod as I rested my hands on his shoulders. “Sure.” I hoped my voice was casual and unbothered.

“Good.”

His lips felt so comfortable against mine, warm and familiar now. I let myself settle onto his lap and closed my eyes, focusing on being as natural as possible. Roy pulled me close, chest to chest, until I felt his heartbeat against my body; he could probably feel mine slamming against my ribs. He tasted like the beer and fruit he’d been enjoying all afternoon, a beautiful, summery combination I wanted to taste forever. Without thinking, I gave a gentle grind against his lap. His grip tightened on me as a curious little hum vibrated against my mouth.

My body was buzzing, on fire, drunk on Roy’s mouth and hands and body. While the little voices in the back of my mind kept reminding me this was an act, this was all pretend, the rest of my mind was screaming Roy’s name, wanting to take him back to the house and make this real.

Taking him back to the house felt like an especially good idea when his hands began to slide down my back, lower and lower.

“Should I…?” he rasped against my lips.

I nodded, refusing to open my eyes and break the spell I was under. “Probably.”

Roy’s hands cupped my ass tentatively, as if he was waiting for me to snap at him; he was probably remembering the night we “met”, where I warned him about his hand placement. Oh, how far we’d come since that night of snarking at each other and trying not to roll our eyes. Trying to assure him he was fine, I pressed down against him again, swallowing back my reflexive groan when I felt the beginning of a bulge against my increasingly needy parts.

Apparently he understood the permission I was giving him, because Roy’s grip on my ass tightened, fingers digging into the material of my jeans. I tried to remember the last time I’d been kissed like this- in public no less. It felt like something was waking up inside me. No, it wasn’t arousal from the kiss, from Roy’s hands on my body like he wanted me. It was a feeling that was settling deep in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that was making itself right at home as a melody and words began to bloom in my mind.

Dammit, it might be love.

For the last few decades, Roy Kent had spent plenty of time around impressive people. Politicians and rich people who made him want to barf. Actresses and models that looked good on his arm and in his bed. And, of course, some of the most famous, talented athletes in history, athletes he was proud to play against and stand beside. Hell, he was a legend in his own right, something he seemed to conveniently forget.

But he couldn’t help being impressed watching an artist at work, something he hadn’t had the opportunity to witness before now. He was a little nervous for her heading into this holiday, wondering if she’d be able to work under so much pressure. But once they arrived, it was like a dam had broken. She was constantly in her notebooks, scribbling furiously and scrambling through old pages. Or she was strumming away at her guitar or picking at the piano, creating melodies that Roy found himself humming as he relaxed around the house.

She didn’t play much for him, just little snippets here and there that she quickly critiqued and went back to work on. Still, he kept asking her to play him something; but they weren’t ready she insisted. Roy didn’t care; he found himself craving pretty tunes and a prettier voice.

A couple days into the trip, he was in the little kitchen, making some dinner while Sydney padded around, meowing up at him and drowning out the twinkling sounds of the piano. He mumbled back to the cat, reminding her that her owner would not be happy if he snuck her a treat without checking first. But the cat kept chattering, so Roy finally threw his hands up in defeat.

“Fine,” he huffed, unable to believe he was having a conversation with a cat. “Let’s go ask your mum if you can have a bit of fucking carrot.” He scooped up Sydney and let her climb onto his shoulders- a spot he had quickly realized she liked- and made his way into the sitting room.

She looked so comfortable in her sweats, her hair up in a sloppy hairstyle. She was so engrossed in her music, she didn’t notice Roy leaning in the doorway, a ghost of a smile on his face as he listened to her quietly sing.

Sydney’s little meow caught her attention. She stopped playing and looked up at the duo in the doorway, eyes a little wide. “Oh, hey,” she chuckled, smoothing down her wild hair. “Sorry, too loud?”

I spy with my little tired eye

Tiny as a firefly

A pebble that we picked up last July

Down deep inside your pocket

We almost forgot it

Does it ever miss Wicklow sometimes?

They said the end is coming

Everyone's up to something

I find myself running home to your sweet nothings

Outside, they're push and shoving

You're in the kitchen humming

All that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing

“Not at all,” Roy assured her, reaching up to scratch Sydney behind the ear. Damn cat, interrupting his private concert. “That’s really fucking nice. You should keep going. I’d love to hear it.”

A tiny smile graced her lips when she saw the earnest way Roy was looking at her. “Fine. But you stay over there. I want to pretend you guys aren’t here, alright?”

Roy did as he was told, staying in the doorway as she picked up that sweet little melody and focused her eyes on the notebook in front of her, the words almost indiscernible; she seemed to be able to read the rushed writing with ease.

She took a deep breath and snuck a glance at Roy before continuing to the bridge- her strength as a songwriter, Roy recalled from Keeley.

On the way home

I wrote a poem

You say, "What a mind"

This happens all the time

'Cause they said the end is coming

Everyone's up to something

I find myself running home to your sweet nothings

Outside, they're push and shoving

You're in the kitchen humming

All that you ever wanted from me was nothing

Her smile grew as she went on, looking less like a glamorous popstar and more like a girl, alone in her room, playing with music as if it was a toy, creating something out of nothing but emotions. It was nothing short of magical, Roy admitted to himself. This album was going to be something special, he realized.

Industry disruptors and soul deconstructors

And smooth-talking hucksters out glad-handing each other

And the voices that implore, "You should be doing more"

To you, I can admit that I'm just too soft for all of it

And he’d have to take credit for being its muse.

She looked straight at Roy, not hiding that radiant smile as she sang-

They said the end is coming

Everyone’s up to something

I find myself running home to your sweet nothings

Outside, they’re push and shoving

She played a sweet little outro, eyes still on Roy. Once finished, she offered him a tiny shrug, eyes bright with curiosity. “What d’you think?”

Roy’s in the kitchen humming

All that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing

They said the end is coming

Everyone’s up to something

I find myself running home to your sweet nothings

Outside, they’re push and shoving

You’re in the kitchen humming

All that you ever wanted from me was sweet nothing

“Fuck,” Roy laughed, finally walking over to sit down next to her, letting Sydney slip down into his arms. “That was lovely. Really lovely.” Before he could stop himself, the question he dreaded asking blurted out of his mouth. “Who’s it about?”

He felt so sure he’d stepped in it when her eyes flickered down, away from his gaze, before looking at him again. “Well, when I originally started writing this one, it was about my mom,” she started slowly. “I had been thinking about this time my parents visited, and we went to Ireland together. It was amazing, getting to show them places they never thought they’d visit.” She shook her head, as if the memories of that trip were fluttering through her mind. Then her eyes found his again. “But it’s also… well, about you, Kent.”

Roy nearly dropped the cat. “Me?” he asked incredulously. “Fuck d’you mean me?”

She chuckled awkwardly, rolling her eyes a little. “What you said about my mind, when I was writing in the car,” she explained. “And how you’ve been just, I dunno, really sweet about everything I’ve been working on here. And, I don’t know, you’ve become a really good friend.” She reached out and placed a hand on his leg, giving a small squeeze. “So I guess this song’s about the people who make me feel safe, happy, despite all the idiots in this world.” She wrinkled her nose. “Does that make sense?”

His heart felt like it stopped dead in his chest. It was such a candid, honest answer- and not the one he expected. He knew she’d have to change lyrics to fit him before finalizing songs, but he didn’t think she’d write about him. Roy wasn’t sure he’d ever been so… flattered? Sure. Flattery. That was the warm feeling nuzzling in his chest, the same warm feeling that was spreading to his cheeks as she blinked at him, waiting for him to say something, probably to assure her that he liked being her muse.

“Oh,” was all that came out of his stupid mouth. “Wow.”

He saw it. He had seen it when he brushed her off the first time she talked to him about The Great Gatsby. He saw it when he walked brusquely out of the room when she first played Nothing New for him in her living room. And he was pretty sure he saw it when he ignored her at the Greyhound’s celebration to pay attention to Keeley.

It was some mix of disappointment and hurt. Something that made Roy wish he was capable of being someone other than himself.

Still, she put on that tiny, shy smile and removed her hand from Roy’s leg. “Yeah,” she chuckled. “Anyway, sorry for interrupting your cooking.” She cleared her throat and stood, scooping Sydney out of his arms. “I better go feed her.” Not quite looking at Roy, she walked out, leaving him all alone at the silent piano.

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