#my hair has been so blue in the past decade that i forget its not naturally blue sometimes

[so-very-small]

not talking to the giant of the house at all except for every six weeks where they bleach the roots of my hair for me. sometimes they even give me a little trim.

[just-jessie0]

Pip of a Raptor - The Death of the American Dream (Chapter 2)

“Alfred don’t forget your helmet,” Linda called out to the chubby-faced fourteen-year-old who darted around the compact living room, gathering various supplies, and stuffing them into his backpack. He twisted and turned to avoid the worn corners of the coffee table, scraping its edge, and displacing the crocheted runner his mom had made to conceal the stains and warping from nearly a century of use.

“I know, Mom,” Alfie replied absentmindedly, his mind focused on ensuring he packed all the necessary gear for the bike ride to Jon’s house. After rummaging through his younger brother’s scattered toys on the floor in the corner of the room, he located his mask and neck protector, adding them to his backpack.

The past week had been agonizing for the poor boy. Upon returning home and explaining his report card, Alfie had been placed under house arrest for the first week of summer. As soon as Jon left after dinner, Linda confiscated Alfie’s cell phone and threatened to confine him indoors for the entire break. After Alfie complained, whined, pleaded, and finally groveled, Linda decided that a week without his cell phone, along with some manual labor and Monday night math study sessions throughout the summer would teach him to try harder in his studies next year. Alfie reluctantly agreed, knowing he wouldn’t receive a better deal.

During the past week, he mowed, weeded, vacuumed, dusted, did laundry, and organized closets. His already rosy cheeks had turned scarlet due to all the sun, and tan lines from his socks and shorts had begun to appear on his legs from all the outdoor work. His sandy hair, closely buzzed, did little to shield his head from the strong rays, which even stung his scalp.

After a long seven days and some persuasion from Alfie’s grandfather, Linda acknowledged that the Alfie had learned his lesson. If he vowed to maintain his Monday studies, he was free to enjoy the rest of his summer days.

“… and don’t forget to ask Mrs. Breyer if she needs any help with the preparations for the baseball fundraiser,” his mom continued from the kitchen, “Mrs. Breyer has been such an angel helping Grace and I with all the scheduling for the league, and I know how stressful all that planning can be without the proper…” Alfie’s eyes shifted back to the issue at hand.

Where was his camouflage jacket? He could have sworn he left it by the old fireplace. Maybe Austin had moved it again; he always touched his things without asking.

“Mom, did Austin take my jacket?”

Without waiting for a response, he headed into the small dining room, which was rarely used for anything other than storage. He sifted through some cardboard boxes that were lined up against the wall until he found his jersey and his brand-new red dot sight which he received for his birthday, still wrapped in its packaging.

He was so excited to show the sight to Jon. Jon always had the coolest toys, like the Rival Range Nerf Guns with the mount or the Lego Star Wars Super Star Destroyer, but he didn’t have a red dot sight for his paintball gun, and that was their plan for the day.

He quickly ripped the packaging off the scope, crumpling it up and shoving it back into the box before placing the scope in his pack. Slinging the backpack over his shoulder, he made his way back into the living room and started the frantic hunt for his sneakers, once again weaving around the cramped room. He was so focused on his task that he didn’t notice the looming figure limping his way into the room until Alfie ended up running straight into the man’s hip.

The round-faced child met the gaze of an equally round-faced senior. Despite the years slightly curving his spine, Alfred Sr. still stood half a foot taller than most other adult men. He wore a simple white T-shirt tucked into worn jeans, held up with blue suspenders. His hair had thinned and fallen out decades before Alfie was born, and the kitchen’s light reflected off his smooth head.

“Where’s the fire, kid?” Alfred Sr. said, giving Alfie’s head a grind with his knuckles before shuffling past him and settling into his old leather chair in the corner of the room, directly across from their ancient box TV.

Alfie turned to his grandfather smiling.

“Me and Jon are going to bike down to Mr. Brown’s house and hang out by the pond,” Alfie said with a pitch in his voice which hinted at the child’s excitement at the prospect of adventure. He momentarily abandoned the search for his sneakers, fully focusing on the imposing figure in the chair. “We’re having a paintball match!”

“Jon and I,” Alfred Sr. corrected, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“He will also be asking Mrs. Breyer if she needs help organizing the baseball fundraiser,” Linda said, entering the room and approaching the pair. She gave Alfie a knowing look before crouching down to hand her father a steaming mug and a multivitamin.

“Coffee, Dad?”

“Thanks, sweetheart,” he leaned forward and kissed his daughter’s cheek before falling back into the chair with a gruff sigh. “And he’ll remember, won’t you, kid?”

“Yeah, I will,” Alfie said, beaming up at his granddad. Alfred Sr. leaned down to whisper in the boy’s ear as his mother walked back into the kitchen.

“You’ll also remember to watch your six,” the man said, winking as he took a sip of his coffee. Alfie furrowed his brow and nodded seriously, determined not to forget the sage advice.

“I won’t,” the child responded with determination. “I’ve also been working on my situational awareness, just like you told me.” He stumbled over the phrase, as if his ears had heard the term but his tongue still found it unfamiliar. The young boy straightened his back. “Jon couldn’t even sneak up on me last time,” he added smugly.

“I’ll be damned, kid,” the grandfather said, clapping the young boy on his shoulder. The force of the push combined with the weight of his backpack was almost enough to topple Alfie over, but he managed to regain his balance with a giggle. “One day you’re going to be the best marksman in the military. I know it. Commies won’t stand a chance with you on the force.”

Alfie puffed up his chest with pride.

“Go have fun, kid.”

“Bye, Pop-pop.”

He turned away from his grandfather and entered the adjacent kitchen, where his mother handed him his long-forgotten shoes, along with his cameo jacket.

“Mrs. Breyer?” Linda raised an eyebrow.

Alfie fought an eye roll. “I know, Mom.”

Quickly lacing up his weathered sneakers, Alfie snatched his helmet from on top of the washing machine and bolted out the open door at the back of the house, the outside screen door clattering against the door frame with each swing.

It was mid-morning, and the day was already humid. June was still too early for the worst of the mosquitoes, but the onion grass grew tall and honeysuckle bushes were in full bloom and Alfie could already feel the slimy sensation of nasal drip in the back of his throat. He rubbed at his itchy eyes and sniffled. No one else in his family had allergies, and he knew he would have to ask his mom to pick up some Benadryl from the grocery store the next time she went.

Alfie stepped onto the driveway and made his way to the small shack on the other side of the pavement. The door’s hinges had long rusted away, requiring some persistent tugging from the child before it finally yielded. As he peered into the dimly lit shack at the jumbled heap of handles, tires, pedals, and brakes strewn across the floor, a wave of annoyance washed over him.

He placed his helmet on the pavement behind him before stepping into the shack to begin untangling the four bikes that were laying on top of each other. His little brother, Austin, had to be the one responsible for this mess.

He managed to extract Austin’s stupid baby bike from the conjoined bike mutation, carefully setting it on its stand on the driveway pavement. Next, he started pulling on the back tire of his mom’s bike. Or maybe it was his dad’s; he couldn’t really tell.

He knew he could tell that Austin wasn’t listening when their dad had shown them how to put the bikes on the bike rack last summer. Alfie had told him to listen, but Austin insisted on practicing his ninja moves instead of paying attention. Alfie couldn’t deny that his little brothers spin kick did dramatically improve within that 15-minute time frame, but he still didn’t understand why his dad never yelled at him.

Austin got away with everything. He never paid attention and he never said his ‘please’ and ‘thank yous’. When he refused to eat his dinner last night, Mom got up and cooked him hot dogs.

She never did anything like that for him. When Alfie refused to eat his Brussel sprouts, his father gave him a sermon about starving children far less fortunate than himself, insisting that he remain at the table until he finished everything on his plate. Alfie sat at that table long into the evening with his plate from dinner still in from of him. In that moment, frustration had welled up at the injustice of Austin and his special hot dogs, while his own Brussel sprouts had grown cold, taunting him from his plate. Eventually, his frustration had given way to boredom, and he reluctantly picked up his fork, skewering a mushy sprout and jamming it into his mouth.

Alfie huffed, wheeling his parent’s bike out and placing it on its stand next to his brother’s.

He was still surprised that he managed to get all nine of the Brussel sprouts down and he only almost threw up twice.

He went back inside and repeated the process with the other parent’s bike before bending down to inspect his own, the unfortunate victim at the bottom of the bike pile. The chains and gears seemed to be in good shape, and there wasn’t any chipping of the paint. He gently ran his finger along the frame, checking for any minor scuffs.

Pop-Pop had helped him paint it. For his twelfth birthday, he had asked for a motorcycle. Not a real motorcycle, he was quick to clarify, just a kids’ one, which had to be less expensive than a real one. He knew they existed because Jace Kechel had bragged about receiving one for Christmas that year.

“Please,” he had pleaded with his parents, “I’m going to get all A’s this year, and I promise I won’t ask for anything else ever again!”

“Sweetheart, motorbikes are dangerous. You’re too young, and even if you were older, I wouldn’t want you to have something like that,” his mother had replied.

Alfie remembered the sinking feeling in his chest. In his twelve years of life, he had already learned that he couldn’t change his mom’s mind when she believed his safety was at risk. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but continue his plea.

“What if I help pay for it? I can start a dog-walking business in the summer,” he had suggested, his voice rising as he grasped for hope. “And what if Jon and I start a lemonade stand?”

“Where will you get the money for the lemons?” His father had chuckled.

“Please, Mom!”

“Darling, the answer is no. Besides, those types of toys are very expensive, and I doubt we’d find any stores selling them unless we drove all the way to King of Prussia.”

“Motorcycles for kids,” his dad said with a smile, shaking his head. “We were just grateful to have marbles, remember, Lin?”

“Didn’t even need those; all I wanted was to jump rope with my girlfriends.”

Alfie had wanted to be just like Jason Lee Scott from the Power Rangers, a heroic teenager riding his red motorcycle, fighting evil aliens with the power bestowed upon him and his superhuman team by the mighty Zordon. But he knew he’d never be as cool as Jason Lee Scott without the motorcycle.

The following day, his grandfather took him to Walmart to buy aerosol cans of red and gold paint. Alfie wasn’t entirely sure what his Pop-pop had in mind until they laid out a paint-splattered blue tarp on the driveway pavement and brought Alfie’s bike out from the shed, removing the wheels from the frame, and placing them aside. Using painter’s tape, he began to tape off certain sections of the frame.

“You don’t need any of that expensive crap,” Alfred Sr. said, giving the red paint can a vigorous shake, the little ball inside clacking from side to side. “All you need is a little imagination and some elbow grease.”

Soon, the once black frame had transformed into a deep blood-red, with metallic gold wheels, resembling Jason Lee Scott’s iconic motorcycle. Once the bike and wheels were complete, Alfred Sr. taught his young apprentice how to create spray-painting templates from cardboard. Together, they traced the visor shape of the Rangers’ motorcycle helmets, creating separate sections for each part of the helmet, which they’d used to painstakingly paint Alfie’s bike helmet to match the headgear worn by the superheroes on the show.

Jon had teased him about the helmet, likening it to something his younger brother might wear, but Alfie didn’t care. He loved it and wore it proudly.

After conducting his thorough inspection, he returned the rest of his family’s bikes to the shed. He grabbed his dad’s paintball gun, which was propped against the wall, closed the door, and then placed his helmet on his head, securing the neck strap. Swinging his leg over the bike, he kicked up the stand and pushed off the pedal, propelling the bike down the driveway, carefully avoiding the cracks and potholes that had accumulated over the years and ventured onto the rural Pennsylvanian street.

[midas-lost-it]

Gotham's Haunted (by a Little Shit)

The theater had once been majestic, there was no doubt of that.

Even if its walls collapsed every now and then, even if the rotten floors seemed to want to swallow you whole like time has done with the place, even if the stairs made noise with non-existent steps, and the rats and vandals had left their mark there like the actors from past years.

You could see it in the way the stage stood, almost untouched by decadence, as if haunted by glory days.

You could hear it in the rumours surrounding it.

All the vigilantes of the city saw and heard, though, was that there was a seemingly abandoned building with lots of space and suspicious noise coming at suspicious hours.

And with their work, they had to deal with it as if a crime was already in place, or about to.

It's the paranoia that kept them alive for so long, or at least that's what Bruce said.

So, one night, a couple of them went to investigate.

All was normal- for an old, abandoned building, that is.

And then they heard it.

"Excuse me, do you know when the next play is?"

Nightwing was closer, so he reacted first, turning to the voice. There, sitting in one of the old seats, was a dark haired teen, who shielded his eyes from the light Nightwing shone his way.

"Calm down, dude, I'm just messing with you."

Nightwing debated for a moment if he should get closer -nothing was safe in this city, much less in his line of work- but ultimately decided to do it, nodding to one of his brothers to come too. Just in case.

"Well, you surprised me," said the vigilante. "Didn't expect to find someone just appreciating the view..."

"Yeah, no shit, me neither. Of course the night I come here you guys crash too.."

"So, what are you doing here, kid?"

Bold of Red Robin to call him that, seeing how the boy seemed around his age.

"A dare. My friends and I heard this place was haunted, and they thought I should check it out."

"Wow.. what kinda friends do you have?"

"Seen anything interesting yet?"

The boy shrugged, blue eyes -don't let Bruce find him- glued to the front as if he was actually watching a play unfold before them.

"A pair of rats fighting here, a couple masked boys there," he smirked. "More than I expected, really."

"I take it you don't believe in ghosts?"

A chuckle came from their new friend then, as if he had heard an old joke, echoing through the whole damn building. He finally looked at them.

"I don't really have another choice..."

And he faded away.

-

"Bruce? Bruce, uh, there's a-"

"Meta," Tim said before Dick could finish that sentence. "We just found and lost a meta..."

"Yeah, what Red Robin just said."

"How do you lose a meta so fast?" Jason commented, having gotten there while they were trying to process the strange interaction.

"You forget to cherish him!"

"...The fuck-"

-

Duke was watching the footage of the other guys' "spooky" adventure, when he got a new message, just as the echo-y last phrase was heard. Then another. And another one.

They hadn't stopped sending him "we cherish you" texts since the meta suggested.

And really, it felt nice, but he didn't know if he wanted to thank the boy or throw his phone at him. He'll figure it out when they find him.

[reinvent-and-believe]

48 from dialogue prompts + 50 from wordless i-love-yous for geraskier?

Dialogue Prompt 48: “You make me want things I can’t have.” Wordless I-love-you 50: buying them a special treat when you go out shopping

--

It catches Geralt’s eye while he haggles over an outrageously priced jar of alchemy paste with a none-too-impressed herbalist on the outskirts of Novigrad, a buxom widow with thick-braided auburn hair by the name of Irmina.

“This for sale too?” He picks up the brooch from the countertop where it rests in a beam of golden light streaming through a dingy window. He examines it. It’s simple enough metalwork, a brass oval with a scalloped edge, but inlaid in its face is a single pressed yellow flower framed by tiny white blooms encased in resin.

The herbalist’s dour demeanour brightens immediately. “It is indeed!” she answers, her brown eyes shining in a plump, suddenly pleasant face. “Made it myself just last week. It’s something of a hobby of mine, making pretty knick-knacks from the flowers we can’t sell. Got plenty more like this if you’d like to peruse ‘em, master witcher! Forget-me-nots and arenaria, hellebore, violets, any flower you might like.”

A buttercup, he realizes belatedly. That’s the yellow flower in the center.

“No.” He sees Irmina’s brow furrow in offense, so he hastens to appease her. “No need, I’ll take this one. I...I’m partial to buttercups.”

Her freckled face breaks into a sly, knowing smile. “Oh, aye, I’m sure someone is partial to buttercups.” She winks, waving away his stammered attempts at an answer. “Never you mind, I know a man besotted when I see one, and it seems a witcher’s not so different. Tell you what. Fifty crowns for the paste and I’ll throw the brooch in for only ten.”

-

Leaving the herbalist’s shop with an overpriced paste, a lighter purse, and a useless trinket, Geralt curses himself for a fool.

He’s not sure why he bought it.

He knows buttercups are Jaskier’s favorite, of course. “None but the noblest of flowers for my sobriquet!” Jaskier had squawked indignantly when Geralt once made the grave mistake of referring to the pesky things as weeds after he’d stopped Roach from chomping on a patch of the bright, poisonous blooms.

They are weeds, buttercups. They serve no function. They can’t be used in any of the potions, decoctions, or oils Geralt brews, nor do they have any particularly helpful curative properties for humans.

“As ever, my dear witcher, you have no sense of poetry,” Jaskier had sighed in a most put-upon voice when told as much. “Their function is they’re pretty. Their function is to enrich our lives through the beauty of the natural world.” He’d looked to the sky, tip of his tongue between his teeth showing through his frown as was his custom when puzzling through the right way to turn a phrase. “From a strictly utilitarian perspective, perhaps the buttercup has less value than, say, moleyarrow, or verbena, or chamomile, even. Some plants provide nutritional or medicinal or alchemical qualities of various sorts. But some exist to make life worth living! To transform the banal into the sublime.” He’d plucked a buttercup from the roadside, twirling it between his long fingers. “It’s graceful and balanced, effortlessly beautiful. It’s vibrant, bright like...like sunlight, on a summer afternoon! And when you see it growing alongside the various and sundry flora, it fills you with the loveliest burst of warmth, like a lover’s smile.”

“So...it’s a pretty weed.”

“You’re incorrigible, witcher, that’s what you are.” Jaskier had huffed dramatically before tucking the buttercup behind Geralt’s ear, his face alight with a delighted grin.

Like sunlight on a summer afternoon.

-

The Kingfisher Inn is crowded when Geralt arrives. He goes to the bar, orders an ale from Olivier, and leans against the counter to take a look at the stage.

Jaskier loves playing the Kingfisher. In many of the inns he plays across the Continent, he’s relegated to a corner to try to sing over the clang of dinner, his only option to win the common folk over a raucous drinking song or a filthy ditty. And while the bard doesn’t shy away from such vulgarities, the patrons of the Kingfisher tend to be of a more artistically inclined ilk, responding with appropriate gusto to the virtuosic art songs that he rarely performs outside of competitions or Oxenfurt.

Or so he’d explained to Geralt when he’d suggested they meet up at the inn.

Jaskier sits atop a tall stool on a rather large stage framed by crimson curtains, his sky-blue doublet a vivid contrast. The audience, enraptured, listens to his ballad, a melancholy tale of a fair maiden who’s violently killed before she can profess her love to a farmhand in her village, a beautiful, strong, kind man whose hair shines like a blaze of pale fire in the sunlight. Her love for him tethers her to this world, and her spirit—bitter, weary, and endlessly yearning—calls the men working in the fields to join her dance at midday, when the sun is in its zenith, hoping against hope for the chance to finally confess to her beloved.

In the end, the brave, noble farmhand sacrifices himself, hoping to stop the spirit’s killings by listening to her song and joining her as she beckons. And as they are reunited, as she finally kisses the lips she’s longed for in a blinding blaze of sunlight, they pass on together, their spirits becoming one.

It’s a contract Geralt worked a few years ago, a noonwraith outside Oreton—or at least something close. As ever, Jaskier has taken artistic liberties, romanticized the actual events (“Sometimes, in our pursuit of Truth, we must sacrifice the facts,” Jaskier loftily explained on more than one occasion. He seemed quite taken with the profundity he seemed to find in the statement. Geralt called it pretentious once and Jaskier hurled a chunk of bread at his head). Once it might have bothered Geralt, but he’s grown accustomed to Jaskier’s rather malleable relationship with veracity in his ballads. There’s no denying the impact of his storytelling: when Geralt glances around the inn, he sees several patrons discreetly dabbing at their eyes.

It’d been an ugly case, leaving him feeling empty, drained. Noonwraiths haunt his thoughts far longer than most the monsters he dispatches. They’re victims of circumstance more than anything, young women who’ve been transformed into bloodthirsty, violent spirits through no fault of their own, through the violence inflicted upon them. Nearly forty men had fallen prey to her before the farmhand distracted her with his kiss—though Geralt would hesitate to classify his grotesque, gruesome sacrifice as such—so the witcher had a chance to strike her down with silver. Jaskier has spun the miserable tale into something beautiful, moving, something that clearly resonates with his captivated audience, that speaks to a greater force at work than the chaotic, banal evils the witcher sees every day, and Geralt thinks he understands, for a moment, what the bard had told him of Truth and facts.

(Geralt doesn’t know what greater Truth is served by changing the beloved farmhand’s hair from the dull brown it really was to “a blaze of pale fire,” but then, Geralt’s not a poet.)

The final notes hang in the air, all eyes fixed on Jaskier for a rapt, breathless moment before the room bursts into wild applause. Jaskier stands and bows deeply, once, twice, a third time, surveying the room as he offers his thanks. When his gaze catches Geralt at the bar, his expression of showman’s grace vanishes, a flash of something that looks almost alarmed for a split second before it’s replaced by a small, gentle smile.

Geralt nods and raises his mug toward the stage in cheers, draining the remainder. Jaskier is quickly swept into the swarm of captivated fans, accepting their praises with a gracious, if distracted, smile.

The witcher turns back to the barkeep to order himself another ale along with a glass of wine.

“Geralt!” Jaskier swerves to avoid a near-collision with a frenzied barmaid on his way to join his companion at the bar. He grabs the wine glass with a groan of appreciation, taking a swig before asking, “Is this for me? Gods, but you’re a marvel, darling, I thank you.” He takes another sip and sends a disarming, roguish wink to a pair of girls staring at him and giggling to each other. “I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive, but it wouldn’t have mattered, I suppose, they only had one room to let when I checked in and it hasn’t cleared out since. You’ll share mine, of course, but I’ve been here a week so, you know, best brace yourself, I’ve quite made the place my own.”

Geralt snorts. He’s stayed in enough rooms that Jaskier has made his own over the past decade to predict with some certainty what mess he’ll soon venture into.

(Doublets draped over furniture after they’ve been discarded; crumpled sheets of paper tossed near, never in the fireplace; a few near-empty bottles of wine; a shirt hung to dry over the modesty screen between the sleeping and bathing areas; bottles of a dozen oils and perfumes and soaps scattered haphazard near the tub; an unmade bed that may well contain an abandoned undergarment or forgotten stocking left by some well-satisfied guest.)

“Have you eaten? Shall we? I’m starved, felt jittery all afternoon and didn’t eat a damned thing which was all well and good until I got onstage and suddenly wished for a fainting couch. Or we could take your things up to the room first, of course. Oh! We could have them bring our dinner up to us, it’s awfully crowded down here tonight and I’m not sure I’m up to socializing all evening, to be honest, I’ve been dreadfully out of sorts, did you notice, Geralt, that I’ve…”

Jaskier continues his ramblings, and the witcher can’t help a twinge of worry for his friend. It’s not unheard of for Jaskier to be in a heightened state over a particularly important performance, but usually afterwards the nerves dissipate and he seems more himself. Not to mention, why would playing in an inn prompt such anxieties? Even if the Kingfisher clientele trends toward the more refined than the country folk he often plays for, it’s still rather a low-stakes environment to trigger such stress.

“New song?” he asks casually. Jaskier always beams when he notices such things, when he makes an effort to ask about his music.

Instead, Jaskier blushes, looking away with an expression that almost seems guilty. “Ah, yes, well, I wasn’t certain when you’d be arriving, of course, I thought I might try out something different, a sort of test audience, as it were, to feel out the piece before I use it for anything important.” The look he’s fixed on Geralt seems almost wary. “Did you...like the song?”

Geralt shrugs. “Not quite how it happened,” he grumbles, out of habit more than anything.

A smile, genuine and rueful, breaks out on Jaskier’s face. “Gods, I’ve missed you, my friend,” he says, shaking his head and looking away quickly.

“Hmm.” He reaches quickly into the coin pouch at his side, thrusting the trinket from the herbalist into Jaskier’s hand with a brusque, “Here.”

“Whatever have we got…” He cuts off as opens his palm. “Oh.”

There have been so few times over the years that Geralt has seen Jaskier speechless that he begins to worry he’s offended him. He turns the brooch over in his hands, once, twice, his thumb swiping gently over its smooth enamel face. He doesn’t look up.

Even in the crowded room, Geralt can smell the shift in his demeanor, the muted sickly-sweet anxious smell becoming something sharp, metallic, pained, like he’s been stabbed. “You’re upset.”

“I...no.” Jaskier shoves the brooch into his trouser pocket, a tense smile on his face, not at all reaching his eyes. “Thank you, Geralt, it’s lovely. Shall we take your bags to the room now?”

“I didn’t...I didn’t get it to upset you.”

Jaskier laughs, a broken thing, and Geralt grows even more alarmed. “You didn’t, it isn’t that, sometimes I want things I can’t have is all.” He grabs the saddlebag sitting at Geralt’s feet, not meeting his eyes as he rushes past him up the stairs to the last bedroom in the hall.

Geralt follows after a moment, giving his companion a respectful distance. There’s a tightness in his shoulders, a knot in his gut that only grows as he watches Jaskier’s hand tremble on the key as he unlocks the door.

It was a stupid idea. He knew it was stupid when he bought it, yet he bought it anyway, somehow ruined everything anyway.

“Here we are.” Jaskier’s voice is filled with a forced cheer as he sets the bag down, hand never leaving the doorknob. “I’ll go fetch us some supper. Or, actually, you know, now that I think of it, I’ve a few errands to run before it gets too late, meant to do it earlier but you know how it goes, lost track of time…”

“Jaskier.” Geralt moves toward him but stops himself, helpless. “Please. I’m sorry I upset you.”

Jaskier stands in the doorway for another moment. He takes a deep breath, closes the door, and walks slowly to the writing desk in the corner. He pulls the chair out, moving the doublet strewn across it before sitting. He doesn’t look at Geralt.

“You didn’t.” Every word is calculated, deliberate. “What kind of ungrateful wretch gets upset over...over an exceptionally thoughtful gift from a friend after a time apart?”

Geralt sits on the edge of the bed. His elbows rest on his knees, fingers locking together as he stares at the floor. “You’re not a wretch. The fault is mine.”

“Dammit, Geralt, there isn’t fault, I only—why did you bring me a gift?”

Geralt frowns. “I’ve bought you things before,” he says slowly.

“Things, yes!” Jaskier vaults from the chair, pacing listlessly about the room, no longer trying to mask his inexplicable distress. “Lute strings when I broke a string and I was low on coin. The lute is my livelihood, it made financial sense for you to replace the string so I could pull my own weight, help you when we pass through several towns in a row with no contracts. Boots when you noticed the hole in the heel of my old pair, because I slow you down limping about in footwear that’s falling apart. Room and board, sometimes, because you know I’m good for it, I’ll cover you the next time.” He’s stopped pacing, stares silent into the fireplace.

“Wasn’t keeping a tab.” Geralt’s voice is quiet. “You needed strings and boots and food and a room.”

Jaskier doesn’t turn to face him, but Geralt sees his hand slip into his pocket, pull out the brooch. His head bends, studying it.

He’s not offended or annoyed or angered by the gift. He’s hurt. But why?

Except...

Jaskier looked guilty when Geralt brought up the song. Like he’d been caught red-handed. Did you like it? he’d asked. Incredulous.

The noonwraith singing her song in hopes that her beloved hears her confession. That he’ll hear her song of longing and come to her.

Hair like a blaze of pale fire, not dull brown.

Sometimes I want things I can’t have.

“Geralt?”

The witcher snaps back to attention, eyes fixed on Jaskier, finally facing him.

“Why did you get it for me, Geralt?”

Geralt frowns. “It’s...pretty,” he starts lamely. “I thought you might wear it when you play. You wear gaudy things.”

Jaskier snorts, a small, crooked grin on his lips.

“It made me think of you,” he confesses quietly, his eyes tracing the wood grain of the floor. “Sometimes...things don’t have to have a function. It was a buttercup and it was pretty and it…made me think of you.”

When Geralt dares to raise his eyes, Jaskier’s staring at him, brows drawn together and mouth slightly agape. After a moment, he walks toward the witcher, sitting carefully beside him on the bed. He reaches his hand towards Geralt’s and presses the little brooch into his palm.

“Will you pin it on me?” he asks softly.

Geralt nods.

His fingers feel thick and clumsy as he fumbles with the delicate clasp. The top few buttons of Jaskier’s doublet, as ever, are undone, but it closes neatly just beneath his exposed neck. Geralt slips a finger beneath the satin fabric to pull it away from his throat, cautiously piercing the fabric with the thin pin and sliding it into its slot, locking the clasp with shaking hands.

His hand doesn’t move from Jaskier’s chest. A sword-calloused thumb, seemingly of its own volition, grazes lightly over the bobbing Adam’s apple.

“Geralt.”

He looks up, almost pulls away but for the flushed cheeks, the tongue that darts out to wet pink lips, the hooded eyes beneath dark lashes fixed on Geralt’s mouth. Jaskier’s breath is warm against his face. When did they draw so close?

“Are you going to kiss me, Geralt?” The breathy whisper is laced with wonder.

And he didn’t...didn’t buy the brooch to entice Jaskier into anything, didn’t mean to solicit any sort of reward, and he opens his mouth to tell him so, yet as his rough hand moves to gently cup the back of Jaskier’s neck the words that tumble out instead are, “I’d like to.”

And Jaskier throws back his head and laughs, a euphoric, intoxicated sound, as his lovely hands cradle Geralt’s face. He brings his forehead to rest against Geralt’s as they still, breathing each other for a moment before Jaskier surges forward to capture his lips.

His kiss tastes like sunlight.

[pheita]

Misery loves Company Part 5

This took longer than expected because ... life, family, being put in horny jail lol. You know. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Warnings for: nudity, masturbation (yeah, someone is naught here)

Tagging @ashen-crest @abalonetea @cometkov @chris-the-dragonslayer @contes-de-rheio @kainablue @adie-dee @writingamongther0ses @catharticallysarcastic @stormbrightwriter (let me know if you want to be tagged/taken off the list)

"Lyran...., wake up, sleepyhead." An unfriendly growl came from Lyran as he rolled over onto his back. Still tired, he blinked at Arritit. "What is it?" "Let's start with why you're on the floor?" She sat down next to him on the floor, thankfully dressed all ready. "You claimed the bed for yourself." "Huh?" She looked over her shoulder at the bed, frowning. "Like a bug on its back." Lyran stretched all four of him for clarification. "It couldn't have been that bad," Arritit just laughed. She reached her hand down to him so he could pull himself up. "You slept standing up, so it was that bad." A yawn followed. Skeptically, she looked at Lyran. "Why don't you try to get some more sleep and I'll get the water skins?" Her suggestion wasn't finished speaking before Lyran was off to bed. With one arm he waved toward the purse on the table. "Take the money from last night, which should do it. Wake me when you get back." "With pleasure." The anticipatory tone already warned Lyran that she'd come up with something, but he just didn't care. Grateful for a few hours of sleep in a bed, he rolled onto his side. The sound of the curtains being drawn ajar by Arritit was the last thing he heard, and then he was back in the land of dreams.

The next time Lyran woke up, the scent of tea wafted towards him. Stretching his muscles slowly, he rolled over to his other side. "I knew food would get you awake," Arritit laughed. A frown in the morning was not what Lyran had expected as his first reaction, but here he was. That being said, it was certainly well past noon. "How much time do we have?" "Three hours until we should leave. So, you can gather everything up and get something to eat at your leisure. The water skins are already filled, too." The feeling that she had again cheated a poor merchant out of his good money came over Lyran when he saw her satisfied smile. He went to his wallet and checked. "You hardly needed any money." She shrugged, the smile now a broad grin. "What can I say. I poor woman has to make sure my fool of a husband who insists on taking the southern route doesn't die of thirst." "You didn't really.... Forget it, of course that's how you got the price down." "I'm just charming." "You are. Like a rose." A small flame appeared in Arritit's palm. "Did you say something?" "Nothing you don't already know, dearest Ari." Hungrily, Lyran eyed the tray. From the looks of it, someone had had mercy and turned the missed breakfast into a free lunch. The flame in her hand disappeared again and, giggling, she sat down to it. "But you should do something about your hair. The weather isn't getting any more pleasant and your curls are driving me crazy just looking at them." "I'll think of something. Even if it's not that bad. Try getting through a particularly hot summer in Wealmoore with curls like that." Her face revealed that she could well imagine it. "True, in comparison, the weather here is a gift." "Quite my speech," Lyran laughed, grabbing something from the tray. His gaze roamed the room. Surprised, he noticed that Arritit had been so free to gather his things all in one pile already, so all he had to do was pack them up. "You know that Neeto expects us to bring trouble?" Her question came out of the blue. His head jerked toward her. "So it's come to your attention?" "I'm a little older, my dearest Lyran, I have a few decades more experience traveling like this." "Which doesn't necessarily mean you see it. Especially not after I don't know how many mugs of ale." The giggle from her was equally unexpected. "I've been drinking juice in between. I'm not completely crazy." She let it hang in the room while she took some of the food. In her mind, Lyran went over if there was anything in the last few weeks that could have gotten through to the merchants, which is why he was seen as a possible troublemaker, but Lyran couldn't think of anything. "Other than that little incident the day before yesterday, you haven't attracted any attention along the way, have you?" In mid-motion, Arritit stopped and tilted her head. "No, I tried to keep a low profile as best I could. You wonder why the merchant thinks we're bringing trouble." "Easy to see." She pursed her mouth and slid closer. "Maybe because he has several people with him who aren't part of the merchant caravan? He meant we're not the only travelers joining." Chewing, Lyran let the information run through his mind. A moment later, he nodded. "Depending on who the other travelers are, I think he expects us to clash." "So we'll try to keep as much distance from the other travelers as possible." "This could get interesting," Lyran simply commented.

Hours later, they were finally on their way. The Fenetan were as stubborn as Neeto had mentioned and only began to move when it was convenient for them, whatever that meant. For this, neither he nor Arritit had been prepared for how large these animals were. The females were larger than the males and were twice the size of Lyran. There were baskets with the goods attached to the sides, and ropes tied across the animals' backs. The large ears and short trunk were the only things that connected them to elephants, but they had sharp claws on their front paws and thin, fluffy fur. It was no surprise that the children of the other group of travelers were eager to pet the Fenetan. Lyran had been tempted, too, as soon as they were in sight. It was even apparent that Arritit wanted to cuddle the Fenetan, but as cautious as the traders were, it was clear that it was not a good idea. As dusk fell, they made good time in spite of everything, even the children seemed to be okay with it being so late. Lyran and Arritit had settled in the back third of the caravan, last of the travelers, and some distance from the others. The look Arritit gave to children over and over again had immediately caught Lyran's attention. "What are you thinking about?" he asked quietly. "Something is wrong with the other group." Astonished, Lyran looked ahead. There were four children, perhaps six to fifteen years old, dressed in good clothes, as one would expect of someone who could afford to travel with a caravan. They included the parents, with the baby in front of the mother's torso in a sling, and five other adults, for whom it was unclear how they fit in. Alone, the hair color and complexion of the other five did not match the family, as did the fact that these five people were carrying concealed weapons. "As long as it's not a problem for us, we shouldn't care." He shrugged his shoulders and looked to the back, where Neeto and two of his people were bringing up the rear of the group. The way Neeto kept glaring at them was a problem on the other side. "But I have a feeling our friend knows what the others are about." A grim grumble of agreement was the only response. Her gaze fixed on one of the five, whom Lyran also assumed was the leader of the small group. Even if he didn't say it aloud, these five were yelling guard in every language known to man. The only question that remained was why a family of six needed guards and was traveling with a merchant caravan. After only a few hours, the Fenetan simply stopped, which then called it a rest for the night. Some of the merchants helped the family set up a tent, which only brought questioning looks between Lyran and Arritit. At least they had stopped near a river so that everyone could freshen up a bit. As soon as it got quiet in the camp, Arritit snuggled up to him. "Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow will be busy," she murmured, looking toward the other travelers' tent. Quiet giggles came from Lyran. He pulled aside a stray strand of hair. "So it' s just the two of us." She understood the unspoken part, that he was also a little paranoid about the others. Protectively, he put an arm around her waist. Almost simultaneously, they took deep breaths. "You really brought everything?" "As always, dearest. As always." Arritit nodded curtly. If it came to the extreme, they would have a problem as long as she was not allowed to use magic, Lyran was more than aware of that.

The night was short but uneventful. The dawn was the same as the dusk before. They walked as long as the Fenetan walked and as soon as these unfathomable animals stopped, the camp was set up. The sun was already further over the horizon and Lyran estimated that it had been four or five hours, including the break in between, that they had walked. "What are you thinking about?" inquired Arritit as she handed him the water. "If we keep going like this, it will take us five or six days to get to the city." She nodded and looked up at the sky. "I've been thinking about that, too. The way the sun is standing, I think we can use a little more time before we rest a bit." "If you want to freshen up a bit too, the river runs that way," one of the traders pointed, "It's not far. Still within shouting distance if anything should happen." Before Lyran could respond, Arritit had thrust the other water skins into his hands and marched off. The merchant just laughed. "I thought so." "Not much of a surprise to me either." While the entire group prepared to sleep away most of the day, Lyran laid everything out and followed Arritit's lead. The river was easy to find, thanks to the small well-trodden path, and so Lyran arrived quickly. He stopped briefly when he thought Arritit had called his name, but not hearing it again, he continued. At a group of trees, he got out. The river was in front of him, with some boulders reaching into the water from the river's edge like a small island. Again, he thought he heard Arritit calling him and searched the area. Behind the boulders he saw movement in the water and went towards it. A glance up showed Arritit's clothes, so she had to be here. This time, he was sure she was using his name, but she didn't really seem to be calling for him. Cautiously, he looked around the boulder. He was prepared for a lot of things, but not for her standing naked in the water with her back leaning against the boulder, one hand on her breast and the other clearly between her legs. The sensation of literally feeling his eyes grow wide accompanied the realization that he heard Arritit speak his name because she was fantasizing about him. Heat ran through him. Lyran knew he should turn away and leave, but something stopped him. The way the early sunlight shone on her, reflected off the water, and then the knowledge that she was getting off while thinking of him, clearly had its effect on him. He bit his lip as he made his way back after all and saved himself towards the trees. His back was against the tree trunk, breathing harder than he should. The erection was clearly making itself felt. Almost frantically, Lyran pulled at the waistband of his pants and reached for his cock. Long, controlled movements of his hand were meant to distract him from everything, but his mind kept finding its way back to the image of Arritit naked in the water. The thought that it was all wrong accompanied him as his movement turned to frantic. The urge to come as quickly as possible grew stronger with each passing second. The idea of Arritit lying under him and enjoying it came up. With a suppressed groan and biting his lip, Lyran came. His head fell back against the tree. He didn't care that they would surely find traces of what he had done. Deeply, he exhaled as he came down from the orgasm. Lyran's gaze went up toward the leaves. "Fuck, what am I doing here... This is not good. Absolutely not good..."

[ssson-of-sparda]

Fathers Do Cry (DMC Vergil one shot)

Summary: Vergil remembers his last Father's Day with Sparda and doesn't really realise how similar to him he has become.

Tags: Father's Day special / DADGIL! / Vergil acting like a dad to Nero

Author’s note: I woke up this morning suddenly inspired. Doesn't happen very often so enjoy ;) ps: I just love Dadgil!

***

His big blue eyes staring without blinking, the child was observing his father sitting by the fireplace in the parlour. Full of admiration, he was detailing all the features of his serious face, all the details of his confident posture and all the different luxurious fabrics that made his purple finery and as he did, he repeated to himself, wished, prayed, that someday, one day, he would grow up to be just like him.          “Aren’t you going to speak, Vergil?” The father’s powerful voice asked as he finally acknowledged the boy’s presence with a small amused smile, wondering what brilliant thoughts were occupying his eldest son’s sharp mind this time.            “I made this for you, father.” With a solemnity that didn’t suit a five-years-old but that somehow fitted Vergil’s young yet wise spirit and his will to be perfect son in the eyes of Sparda, the boy handed a paper sheet to his father.         “ And what would that be?” The man said as he took his son’s gift. “It’s father’s day so … I made you a poem… or tried to.” The adorable embarrassment tensing the child’s traits in funny grimaces made the father's smile wider but Vergil, suddenly too preoccupied with the blue paint stuck under his fingernails, didn’t notice it as he didn’t notice the paternal pride and the love shining in his eyes.               “I thought your mother wanted you and your brother to make a gift together this year.” “ You know Dante” Vergil sighed. “He has no artistic talent whatsoever. He wanted to make you a wooden sword to play with us.”    “ That’s actually a very good idea.”  Vergil frowned; suddenly worried that Sparda would not like his gift and preferred Dante’s – if he had made one of course. “Except when the sword looks like two twigs glued together. You should have seen this, father. It looked ri.di.cu.lous.” Sparda laughed at his son’s attitude, finding amusement in this sibling rivalry. “Why don’t you read me your poem then?”              “ I learnt it by heart actually. The paper is for you to remember this day by … and also because I wanted to illustrate it. Look.” Vergil approached his father, seized the poem from his big hands and climbed on his lap to show him the delicate aquarelle he had painted around the lines. “Impressive. Did your mother help you with this?” Vergil shook his head. “No, I did it on my own. I used a book I saw in that old man’s house I often go to as a reference.”       “ The old academic that lives down the hill? I thought you found him boring.” Vergil shook his head again, furiously this time and with a serious frown. “That’s Dante. Me, I really like him. He teaches me a lot of things. And he has lots of books. It’s incredible.”

Sparda ruffled his son’s silver hair whose hairdo was always made in order to somehow mimic his, thinking what a promising young boy Vergil was. Maybe more promising than Dante to be honest – though he knew he shouldn’t think that.   But there was something that Vergil had that Dante lacked. Perhaps rationality beyond his age … or some kind of maturity … wisdom maybe? He couldn’t really pinpoint what it was exactly. All he knew is that it was something unique and special, just like his son, something that made Sparda certain that one day his eldest would grow up to be a great man, a man greater than him, a man worthy of the Yamato and capable of handling its burdening power.

“Can I recite my poem now?” Sparda smiled at the sparkle in Vergil’s eyes. “Sure.” The boy quickly took back his previous position in front his father, cleared his throat, put his hands behind his back and stuck out his chest.

Sparda listened to every word, fascinated and amazed by his little one’s talent and profoundly moved by all the love, all the meticulousness and the time he put in each line and in each word. “Oh Vergil. The world is not yet ready for someone like you.” The father said as he let a tear roll down his cheek. “Why are you crying, father?” Vergil worried. “Because fathers cry, my son.”

That day was the last time Vergil truly celebrated Father’s day for a few weeks later he had no father, no one to make poems to, no one to admire by the fireplace. Just a memory that he feared would sooner or later fade but that he would cling to dearly for as long as he could.

“Why don’t we bring flowers to Daddy’s statue in the park today?” Eva asked when Vergil was six, when Vergil was seven, when Vergil was eight only to be welcome by a heavy silence that was no longer hiding brilliant thoughts but a painful sadness. But each time he did as Eva suggested, maybe more for her than for him, maybe because he still loved and admired Sparda even if he had left him, maybe because he thought that his father might see him and smile from wherever he was now, the same way he had smiled when he had read him his poem on his last father’s day.

And that’s certainly why, more than three decades later, he was back in this park, on this very special day with a bouquet of purple peonies he had bought on his way here and a memory that never faded. A memory he could still recite.

"Whether the sun shines or the sky cries,                 Whether the day breaks or the night wakes,       My father always as a rampart stands Protecting my house with his bare hands.

He is strong, he is brave                 And the day he always saves.     A knight in cockroach armor     To scare my terror away."

Vergil scoffed at the lines, at the way they rolled off his tongue, finding them funny and childish and not worthy of a Blake or a Fielding at all unlike what he thought when he wrote them as a child. The over-confidence of youth probably.

“Did you just come up with that?” Vergil turned around to see Nero walking towards him with a smirk. A surprise but not a bad one. “Cause the rhyming sucks a little. I expected more of you.”                “ And I suppose you’re an expert in poetry now?”         “ I may read have read one of your books.” He said as he tapped the pocket of his marine blue coat hiding Vergil's most sacred book with pride. “You still have it I see.”     “Hey! It’s a real page turner! Can’t get my nose out of it.” Vergil had a crooked smile, understanding perfectly what his son meant.

Son? Even a year after this reveal he still couldn’t believe this boy before him, the one he had lived such a terrifying yet incredible adventure with, was his own flesh and blood.

A sigh almost escaped Vergil’s lips. How did he make such a fine young man? Someone so selfless, so generous, so loving when he was nothing like that.              “ What are you doing here, Nero?” He asked, trying not to think more about this.      “ Well it’s father’s day, no? So … I made you something… or tried to.” The embarrassed grimace Nero suddenly made made Vergil’s smile grew larger but Nero, too worried to keep the gift covered with the pieces of newspapers he had taped together, didn’t see it as he didn’t see the paternal pride and the love shining in his father’s blue eyes. The same paternal pride Sparda had displayed when Vergil was a little child with a small paper in his hands.  “Thank you Nero.” The man said as he gently took the present from his son's hands, wondering what it was even though the long shape didn’t leave much place for imagination.

He cautiously unwrapped the thing, already feeling a happiness he hadn’t felt in years warming his heart. And when he saw a katana-like wooden sword that purposely looked like Yamato he couldn’t help but smile and let a tiny drop of water blur his blue eyes. “It was Dante’s idea. Though he might have suggested gluing two sticks together.” Nero said as he scratched his head. “It looks amazing.” Vergil’s honesty was like a knife in Nero’s chest but in a good way. It was as if all the stress and all the stupid fear he had felt while making this toy sword had been stabbed away. He felt relieved, joyful even that his always so stern father was genuinely grateful and seemed to appreciate his gift. “That way, you won’t have to tear my arm apart again cause look, you have two now.” Nero tried to joke but his words just erased the smile on Vergil’s face.

“There is not a single day I don't regret what I did to you.” This was Vergil’s way to say he was sorry. Nero was certain of it. He didn’t need to know his father that well to know it. After all, he was somewhat the same. “Hey, it’s in the past. Plus it grew back, so no harm done.” He winked, trying to ease the atmosphere with a bad pun worthy of Dante even though there was a time he would have ripped Vergil’s chest open for what he had done. And a part of him knew he would never forget and maybe never fully forgive what happened.               But right now he was just happy to have a family, to have a father and to finally be able to celebrate a day he has so long hated.  “ This world doesn’t deserve you, son.” Vergil solemnly declared. He had never called Nero that way and that name felt strange yet beautiful to both of them. It made the son and the father smile in ways they never thought they would smile at each other. “ Damn, are you crying old man? I thought devils never cry.” Nero suddenly harrumphed when he finally noticed the water growing in his father's eyes.                   “ Well, fathers do cry." Vergil declared as he allowed a tear of joy and pride to fall along his pale cheek. The first in a very very long time but one he will never regret or brush away. "Father do cry.” He repeated with a glance at the statue of his father behind him.

[mrspillow]

Sorry (Jellal Fernandes x Reader)

"Hmm... strawberry cake..."

Suppressing a small laugh you turned your head to Erza, your best friend of childhood days that never seemed to miss the opportunity of shoving cake into her mouth.

You had seen the amounts of baked goods the redhead could swallow within minutes, not even speaking of hours, but when it came to strawberry cakes, it turned ridiculous.

"I do not know how you aren't fat already, Erza", you mused and put your chin onto your palm, still watching that food orgy of hers "But I guess that's okay, Ichiya likes your body just the way you are."

Even though she was wearing armor, you could see the shivers running down her spine and her face growing blue as she choked on that cake.

"Stop that", she didn't like being teased with a matter as serious as Ichiya, not even by you "You know exactly he gives me the chills every time."

You shrugged and turned back to the field inside of the Domus Flau arena in Krokus, watching the pair of wizards fight it out. Although you were no part of a guild, you were busy cheering on for Fairy Tail whenever they entered the field.

Yeah, sure, there were shouts of boos and the mocking of the other guilds but with Erza alone, they couldn't be any worse than the best.

You just knew it.

Even when the both of you were just kids and surely no force to reckon with, she wasn't just a surprisingly powerful mage but also kind and caring for those in her family. She was everything that made you change minds back then and you couldn't have been more grateful. It was only then that you realized just what exactly it was that you were doing and you felt so dirty the moment it became clear as day.

You snapped out of your stupor before it became obvious you were lightyears away and focused on the matches ahead of you.

Snatching the list from Gray's hands (who was too absorbed into fighting off Juvia - as always) to take a glimpse at the letters, you let out a sigh of defeat.

"Can I have a piece too?"

Just as you felt your eyes sliding shut, Natsu bumped into you, nearly making you fall over the handrails but at least, you were awake now.

"Is it finally over?" you leaned back and let out a yawn "Thank God!"

After all, you weren't that much into stuff like tournaments, Fairy Tail was basically the only reason for you to come into this cave of pent-up masses.

Nobody answered you, either tired as well or already on their way through the door and out of the arena, back to their sweet sweet home. You got up quickly and grabbed Erza (still next to you but with a very empty plate - you could only guess Mira had sacrificed her even more cakes) to get out.

It was just then that you noticed how far the sun has gone westwards making you suppress another yawn that made its way up. You got to go to bed soon enough anyway so no need to rush.

The way back out was surprisingly swift and without running into any hostile guilds (lucky you). So you were out before Natsu broke something or bumped into somebody.

"Let's go grab something to eat, (Y/N)? You coming?", you heard Gray's voice from behind you, making you turn around and give him a bright smile - only to decline.

"I'd love to, really, but there is that thing I need to get done yet. Don't worry, I'll be back soon, just start without me.", your voice was sweet enough that you nearly even betrayed yourself, if it hadn't been for that tiny tiny voice in your head.

Why don't you just tell them?

But you brushed it off without a second thought, no need to worry your friends about your self-made worries and troubles.

"Okay...", Erza didn't seem as convinced as you would've liked "You sure?"

A simple nod was enough to soothe her and so, you made your way back into town, taking a stroll through the streets devoid of people or friends. You were alone with your thoughts and the memories that came with them.

You sighed making eye contact with the horizon to take in the way the sun was drowning beneath these parts of bustling streets and places.

You hadn't missed the silence that came with the night for you had heard it over and over again in those sleepless nights.

It shamed you to this day that you hadn't noticed the way he was using you, cocooning you in soft and sweet words to make your finger bleed from hard work and your skin shining from the sweat and tears spilled for him. The worst part of it all was that damned silent voice within you, asking again and again if what you were doing was right.

How could you build weapons of mass destruction meant for thousands with a straight face?

How dared you think sacrificing people to a black wizard could be a way to achieve paradise?

How did you fail to notice that you would never be able to sleep after you were so willing to make these sacrifices more for him than for Zeref after all?

Who knew.

Did I know?

You wondered for years if maybe, just maybe, you had known what you were doing. You probably weren't even able to throw the cloak of ignorance over your shoulders to save yourself from the cold feeling of guilt.

Shame, shame on you.

You hated the way he made you feel so far away from everything like he had built a place away from the wars and the screams of the world, simply made for the two of you.

And again, you failed to notice how it was only the mist caught in between your fingers.

"(Y/N)?"

At first, you thought it was only the back of your mind, playing tricks on you by reviving past days and voices. But after some seconds, you had noticed the silhouette nearby and wondered if you had heard his voice.

Maybe you were going crazy.

At first, you noticed the dark blue hair, sticking out to spite the cloak it was put under, then that tattoo you would notice everywhere.

Jellal Fernandes.

Surprisingly enough, your panicking mind took it upon itself to react, stumping you with the bright - borderline hysterical - laugh that came out of your mouth.

You just couldn't help it. The way he appeared after decades with nothing to say but your name just about the moment you had wallowed in self-hate and guilt was just ridiculous.

Jellal stood quiet, not even his face gave away whatever irritated look he might have had, giving your laugh an untimely end. And that was just about what you needed to come back to your right set of mind.

"What are you doing here?" You didn't bother the biting hate in your voice or the way his shoulders slumped from your tone.

"I came because Erza told me you would be here.", he started when he had straightened again "She said it wouldn't be a good idea but I came because I wanted to speak to you."

You didn't trust the way this man looked so sad. You couldn't.

Not even enough to sit next to him when he scuffled over to the next bench and gestured for you to take a seat.

Not ever, not in a thousand years would you take that seat.

So you stood like a tree, unmoving and unwavering in your place, staring at him and ready to defend yourself by any means.

Would he try anything funny?

From the way, you knew him back then? Definitely.

Surprisingly though, he didn't try to press you into sitting down, instead starting to talk about whatever it was that lead him back to you.

"It took me a very long time to properly realize what had happened in the Tower of Heaven" he started "I did things in there that I never remembered to have said or done, horrible things. And when I remembered, it was like watching through the glass as someone else moved my body."

For the blink of an eye, his hand hovered over his head before he opted to pull down his hood and revealed the dark blue hair. Jellal sighed before he put his face in his hands for a few moments as if he was trying to get ahold of his last pieces of sanity.

"And when I understood what I had done, I felt so, so guilty. I tried to sacrifice hundreds - no, thousands of people, I manipulated you, Milliana, and the others to work for my cause. The worst of it all was the way I led you to believe in the lies I told you over and over again. I remember that look of adoration in your eyes and I misused it for these terrifying things."

The way he spoke of these sins the two of you committed so easily made you relive the shame of it over and over again. It was like your mind couldn't stop.

"I need to atone for these sins, for the things I did to you, and I wanted to start by telling you how sorry I am for the way I treated you and led you into believing these tales.

I do not ask for you to forgive me or to see beyond that, I came here to apologize because that is what you deserve."

For the first time since he started talking, he looked into your eyes as if waiting for your response and your mind came to an abrupt halt.

What exactly was it what you were feeling?

Hate?

Sadness?

Anger?

...No.

For the first time in forever, you could sympathize with him - that person who you had thought of as a monster for much longer than you wanted to admit. He had been taken advantage of and used to do whatever malicious things asked of him. He did not have a choice.

What did he feel like when he discovered how many people had been suffering under him? Was it sorrow? Betrayal? Shock? Or even anger?

And only when you were ready to answer was it that you too were looking into these dark eyes.

"I remember every damn word you spoke whenever you looked at me so fondly and I remember how you laughed at me for even believing in your farce. " you didn't try to cover up the bitterness sneaking in when you recalled your heart break into pieces just like that.

"And now that you are sitting in front of me, asking for forgiveness, I don't even feel the hate anymore." it had stilled to numbness in your heart, always there, but only with that hollow feeling, never leaving.

"I cannot forget", you further explained feeling unshed tears prick in your eyes "My memories have become a part of me and they will never leave again. A Sorry won't fix everything."

By then, two or three tears escaped over your face before you could wipe them away, not escaping Jellals gaze.

He turned to look at the ground for a few seconds, then he moved off the bench and cast a sad smile at you, only to walk away from you as if that was his clue to disappear back into the night.

Only when you understood where he going, you set into motion, reaching out for his hand.

"But..."

The blue-haired male revolved when he felt your hand in his, soft as in those memories he still held close. His eyes became wide at the side of your tearing and red eyes, paired with that tiny, hopeful smile directed at him.

"But... I won't give up on you."

His mouth carved up to mirror your smile as he squeezed your hand just like sunlight kissing your skin.

[doiefy]

blue // na jaemin

“The winter has passed and the spring has come We have withered and our hearts are bruised from longing”

- blue, bigbang

In which one ceases to age until they find their soulmate, with whom they then grow old. In which everyone has moved on without you.

genre: soulmate!au, fluff, angst, slow burn

pairings: jaemin x female reader (written with a female character in mind, but it can easily be gender neutral!), features relationships with other dream members, briefly mentions haechan x jeno

word count: 11.6 k

warnings: language, mentions of alcohol and smoking, mentions of war, mentions of death, discussions of Korea under Japanese occupation, some of the historical references may be inaccurate.

taglist (DM, comment or Ask to be added): @simplicitysbabe Big thank you to @neojaems​ for beta reading this for me !! <333

spotify playlist

Your test comes back blue.

When you rip open the envelope containing your results, you find the little coloured square hidden between pages and pages of lab protocols, testing procedures and other nonsense you know no one actually has the time to read. Then there are the stupid pamphlets, the ones with overtly bright and bubbly messages reassuring people that they’ll find their “special someone” soon, slogans most likely written by people who found their soulmates before they even turned twenty. You scoff, shoving the useless papers back into the envelope and recalling the first time you tested back in 1945, right after the war. The receptionist wrote your results down on a piece of paper and nonchalantly told you to have your emotional breakdown outside.

Now you stare at the blue marking on your paper blankly. It simply means you haven’t aged biologically in ten years, but when you haven’t aged in decades, it means nothing. While the world progresses, you remain frozen in the same body, playing a cruel game with fate. And as with any game that one cannot win, you’ve slowly become bored with it, allowing it to take its course while you sit idle nearby. You feel only disappointed, and not even perplexed or surprised in the slightest. Something about meeting Jaemin just seemed too good to be true; after a lifetime of misfortune and failure, something about the bad news feels… expected. Inevitable. As if unconsciously, you knew he wasn’t the one.

Na Jaemin is not your soulmate. And you spend the walk home contemplating how you’ll tell him this.

When you unlock the door to your shared apartment, you know he’s already home, and earlier than usual: his shoes are placed meticulously on the rack by the door and his jacket is hung up next to the messenger bag he takes to work. The living room smells faintly of the pine and vanilla candle you bought last month, and you smell traces of shampoo and bodywash from the bathroom.

“I’m home!” you call out as you kick your shoes off and put them neatly next to Jaemin’s. There’s a muffled response of your name before the door to your room opens. Then his arms are around you, his face buried in the crook of your neck as he mumbles a tired greeting.

“Bad day?” You ask softly, pushing all your other thoughts to the back of your head. He looks exhausted. His hair is tucked messily under the hood of his navy sweater, still damp from the shower he took earlier. His eyes lack the usual brightness you often find yourself so immersed in, replaced with the fatigue and weariness he almost never brings home.

“I hate this company,” he sighs as you run your fingers through his hair. You feel him relax in your arms a bit. “My boss is a dick, everyone in my department hates each other and the coffee tastes like actual ass. Maybe I should just quit while I still can.”

You frown. “Jaem, you’ve been with them for literally a month. You can’t possibly be thinking about quitting already.”

“A month! A month in and I’m already having mental breakdowns under my desk at lunch. Imagine what will become of me if I spend a year there,” he scowls, but his expression softens when you kiss him reassuringly on the cheek. “Alright, alright, fine, maybe not quit, maybe I’ll just take a long, long, vacation and then retire… Move to the countryside with you…” He trails off dreamily and for a moment, you lose yourself in the fantasy he’s painted for you. The mental image of a quaint house by the ocean is quickly shattered when you remember the test results hidden in your bag. The sunflowers you envisioned surrounding the cottage are blown away in the wind, their bright yellow petals swallowed by the blueness of the sky.

“Oh, you wish,” you laugh, quickly pressing your lips to his in hopes that he won’t see your expression, that he won’t see the sadness and regret you’re fighting to suppress. “Maybe, baby, maybe one day we can do that.”

“Maybe,” he laughs, his face lighting up with the energy and liveliness that has been missing. “But enough about me. How was your day, love?”

“Mm. The same old,” you say, pulling out of his arms so you can finally take your jacket off. You crash into the couch where you fold up your scarf and toss it aside. “Stressful.”

He stares at you for a hard moment, visibly concerned as if he can tell there’s something troubling on your mind. “Is something the matter?” He asks carefully, sitting down next to you. He holds you at arm’s length so he can look at you properly. “Is this about the test?”

“What? Oh, no, not the test. I doubt the results will come in until sometime next week.” The lie slips out easier than it should, and you feel guilt slowly start to twist your insides. Just a white lie, you tell yourself. It can’t hurt anyone but yourself. He’s been through enough today. He’s tired. Not tonight. It can wait. “I’m just tired,” you shrug. “I need some dinner and a nap, then I’ll be all good again. Do we still have anything in the fridge or should we order takeout?”

“I already ordered chicken from Yong’s. I had a feeling that today would be a bad day for the both of us,” Jaemin grins. His smile is smug at first, then endearing when he sees your shock.

You practically pounce on him in excitement, and the two of you go crashing into the couch cushions until you have him pinned beneath you. “Oh my god, I fucking love you, you know that?”

Jaemin groans, curling into himself as he gives you a wounded look. “And that’s how you show your love? By trying to break my bones?”

“Besides the point,” you huff. “You aren’t going to say it back?”

“Yes, of course. I love you too.”

Unsatisfied with his answer, you lower your face so your lips are hovering just inches above his. He looks up at you starry-eyed, his fingers ghosting over your cheeks; you can’t help but notice the way his gaze travels briefly to your lips.

Then you realize how dangerous this is. You know that he’s not the one. You know that you’ll eventually part ways with him when he finds out, no matter how reluctant you’ll feel. Every moment you spend with him like this will come back to haunt you when he’s gone. It will become another reminder of what you’re about to lose, yet here you are, falling deeper into his embrace, intoxicated by his scent and lost in the depth of his eyes. You are only tying more strings between the two of you, strings that will need to be stretched and snapped. You are only making it more painful for the both of you.

But for tonight, you don’t care.

“Say it like you mean it,” you whisper.

He holds your face gently, and those sparks you felt upon your first meeting with him are still there, igniting each time he looks at you, blazing into an open flame when he tells you, “I love you.”

You kiss him with more urgency this time, your lips meeting his in a clash of teeth and tongue. He puts his hands around your waist and pulls you impossibly closer to him. For just a moment, you’re focused on only him and his presence. For just a moment, you forget about everything; the sheet of test results is just another piece of paper in your bag, the blue mark just another colour. Because tonight, he is all that matters to you.

You met Na Jaemin almost three years ago.

Though the details have faded with time, you remember your first conversation well. It began at a friend’s art show beneath the golden glow of the studio lights, the two of you surrounded by brilliant splashes of colour and bold strokes of texture. Renjun had insisted on introducing you to Jaemin before you even arrived at the gallery, and you couldn’t have possibly refused. Your friendship with Renjun goes way back to the 40s, and you often think he knows you better than you know yourself. “I think he could be good for you,” he told you quietly just before leaving to speak with his other guests.

At first, Jaemin seemed timeless. It was as if he didn’t belong to any particular time period, as if he had lived to see several generations rise and fall, but had never risen or fallen with any of them. Dressed elegantly in a fitted turtleneck and a wool coat, he appeared youthful and contemporary; yet the way he spoke hinted at a certain maturity, at wisdom and sagacity. There was something charming about him too, something about the way he recounted events of the past and drew you in with only his words.

Next to a breathtaking oil painting of the sea, you discovered your commonalities. He was almost two decades younger, but like you, had spent his entire life searching for a partner without much success. You were delighted to learn that he had also worked in teaching—though he mentioned changing careers frequently whenever things became too mundane. He was effortlessly intriguing, and every word he spoke was lively and animated. He infused your conversations with colours, painted everything in bright yellows and aquamarines that matched the swirling paint strokes of the artworks around you, left you wanting to know more without even trying.

You left the gallery that night with his number in your coat pocket. Needless to say, Renjun was thrilled.

Weeks passed before you saw him again. Your busy schedules always managed to get in the way of your plans, but the two of you still kept in touch, chatting late into the night and well into the early hours. As the months went by, you dared to hope that maybe he was the one.

You immediately scolded yourself for being naive. With all your past partners, you had been hopeful in the same way, only to be let down in the end. Your test when you were with Donghyuck came back blue, as did the one with Mark. Both have since moved on, found their soulmates and written their happy endings. Even if you still stay in touch and meet up for an occasional coffee, you know that you are only a distant memory to them in some way or another.

The prospect of the same thing happening with Jaemin had never occurred to you—you’d been so caught up in getting to know him, so blinded that you’d completely forgotten. And then you saw him differently. As if he were a flame that could be snuffed out in an instant, a feather that could be sent flying with the slightest breeze, the slightest breath. You mulled over it for weeks and always did so silently, until it finally came up in conversation.

Almost a year had passed since you’d met him. With the summer coming to an end, the two of you had driven down to the Han River where you sat in the open trunk of his car, sharing a can of cheap beer from the convenience store. There were no words, only the faint melody of an old pop song buzzing from your phone and his hand around yours.

“Move in with me,” he said at last, glancing at you expectantly, trying to gauge your reaction. It wasn’t completely out of the blue—you’d been searching for a new apartment for weeks—but it still took you by surprise. “Too fast?” He asked when he registered your shock.

“No, not at all,” you shook your head and squeezed his hand. “Don’t get me wrong Jaem, I’d love to. It’s just, I don’t know about any of this. About us. If we’re actually…”

He hummed a quiet response, his brows furrowing slightly in contemplation. “Soulmates,” he said with a melancholic sigh. “You don’t want to go any further before we know for certain. I understand.”  

You nodded. “It always hurts, you know? You think you’ve finally found them only to realize you’ve been completely wrong the whole time.”

“I know,” he said, and his empathy flooded you with warmth and reassurance. “You always think you’ll be prepared for the next time. You always think it will hurt less as time goes by. But it doesn’t.”

“Exactly.”

You tipped the last of the beer into your mouth; it tasted faintly sweet on your tongue before dissolving into a pleasant bitterness that hit the back of your throat. When you were finished, Jaemin took the empty can and fiddled with the tab, bending it back and forth until it snapped off.

“I want it to be you,” he told you after a few minutes of silence. “I want it to be us.”

“And if we aren’t?”

He kissed you, hard enough for you to see stars. It wasn’t desperate or longing, but it seemed to convey a hundred different thoughts all at once, a hundred different emotions for you to decipher. When he finally pulled away, his voice was thoughtful and he was seemingly lost in a pleasant daydream. “Oh, love, the universe has already cursed us to search eternally. We may as well spend eternity together.”

“Seriously, Jaemin, what if we aren’t?”

The tremor of your voice snapped him out of it. The glimmer of hope disappeared from his pupils and the dream slipped from his hands.

“We’ve been alive for so long,” you continued, trying to keep your voice steady. “I don’t think I can go on like this. What if we aren’t meant to be? What will we do?”

You didn’t regret your time with Donghyuck or Mark or Jungwoo or any of the people you were lucky enough to have met, but you’d watched all of them from afar, watched them grow while you stayed frozen in time. Each new generation that came along was only a reminder of your loneliness. You felt a certain emptiness each time you invited new people into your life, one that deepened when they eventually left you behind. Or worse, when they gave you their pity. You couldn’t stand it when people told you that it was unfair or that you deserved better, all while they lived comfortably with their soulmates. You weren’t jealous, nor could you ever be angry at them for something beyond their control. Your anger was directed at the invisible forces that toyed with the world, the mischievous hands spinning the universe in some strange direction that left only you disoriented.

His expression took on a faint sadness and when he spoke again, his voice was calm, barely a whisper. “Then so be it. If you need to move on, it would be selfish of me to stop you from doing so.” He stared out at the waters wistfully, at the yachts sailing downstream. “And besides, you’re right. Maybe it’s time we settle down… even if it’s not with each other.”

Your birthday came a few months after that night, but you held off on testing. The bus you took home from work passed by one of the labs, but you never got off at the stop, always watched the doors open and close from your seat. The test isn’t that accurate anyways, you told yourself; it could produce only an approximate biological age, so maybe the longer you waited, the better.

But in the end, it was simply an excuse to escape reality, to avoid your confrontation with fate itself.

You moved in with him just before the end of the year.

New Year’s Eve wasn’t a big deal for you (you’d lived through too many for it to be exciting), but you spent the last minutes of the year with him, surrounded by cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked. Jaemin had still made some sort of effort at festivities despite your indifference: pale pink and gold candles lit around the living room, golden champagne in delicate glasses set on the table.

You were almost asleep when the clock struck twelve, wrapped up in one of his oversized sweaters and a white throw blanket. The celebratory music blaring from the TV was muffled in your ears, a pleasant symphony that lulled you deeper into sleep until Jaemin awoke you with a kiss.

“Happy New Year, Y/N.”

“Happy New Year, Jaem,” you mumbled, a smile ghosting your lips as you focused on the comfort you felt in his arms; on the new year, on your new home, new hope.

You know something’s wrong.

Jaemin doesn’t come out to greet you, even after you announce your arrival. He’s home—his shoes and coat are put away neatly like any other day—yet it’s deathly silent, terribly still. No music playing in the living room, no voice down the hallway. Only the occasional chirp from your broken smoke detector, which you’ve been meaning to fix for weeks. As you bend down to unlace your boots, you can’t help but worry.

You find him in your shared bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the comforter. The sun has almost set and the shadows stretch across the room, blanketing him in darkness and masking his expression with ambiguity. He doesn’t move when you turn on the lamp on the bedside table. He doesn’t move when you sit next to him.

There’s a familiar sheet of paper in his hands.

“Jaem, I…”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

It isn’t accusatory or hostile; his voice is laced with nothing but sadness, yet you feel so much guilt, guilt that closes around your throat and squeezes the air out of your lungs, leaving you breathless. You kept it from him for days, and now this is the way he must find out about it. From a piece of paper you were careless enough to leave where he might find it. From a piece of paper detailing the DNA extracted from a sample of your blood. You should have told him.

“I didn’t know how to,” you let out a shaky breath. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Are you serious?” There it is, the cold edge that begins creeping into his voice as he stares down at you. He flicks a finger in the direction of the date printed at the top of the paper. “It’s been a week, Y/N. You kept this from me for a week. Why?”

“I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you, okay?” It comes out sharper than you intended; you immediately begin to drown in guilt as soon as you see Jaemin’s expression fall. You didn’t mean to lash out, and now you make up for it by taking his hands in yours. They're ice cold. “Look, the day I found out, you were already tired from work. I didn’t want to bring it up and make everything worse—”

“So you lied. Said the results hadn’t come in yet,” he says flatly and you rush to defend yourself, only to realize that he’s right.

“I’m sorry.”

The rest of your words don’t come. With a tired exhale, you bury your head in your hands, too overwhelmed to say anything else. You can only hope that he’ll understand, that he’ll empathize and that he’ll forgive you, even if you don’t exactly believe you deserve any of it right now. You hold back the tears. Only when he pulls you into his arms do they fall. He takes your hands, gently pulling them away from your face so he can wipe your tears despite your protests. There’s no coldness in his expression now, only concern.

“I needed time to process everything,” you continue, but you choke on the words. “I couldn’t even accept it myself, I couldn’t—”

“I know, love,” he says quietly as his thumb brushes against your cheek. “I know. It’s alright.”

Your silent sniffles turn into unrestrained sobs as he pulls you into his embrace, your pent-up emotions finally released in the form of silvery streams on your cheeks. You aren’t sure how much time passes. The sun meets the horizon in a hazy line of faint pink and orange. The sky darkens. Outside, the city lights up in a multitude of hues, the amber light from the street below seeping into your room. The minutes go by, but Jaemin never lets go of you until your tears have run dry.

“Better?” He asks, albeit his voice is shaky, his gaze trembling when he looks up at you. You nod.

“We’ll figure this out,” his eyes seem to say. You can tell he’s just as terrified as you are, just as unsure and as lost. Though for now, you simply hold each other. You say nothing about the paper that lays discarded on the floor or what it entails, even if you both feel the need to address it, to face its implications. In this moment of brokenness, neither of you have the strength to do so.

You eventually collect yourselves. You make dinner and force yourselves to eat before passing a meaningless hour in front of the TV. You clean up, wash up. Sleep early in preparation for tomorrow. Jaemin never leaves your side.

“Where do we go from here?” You whisper into the darkness of your bedroom.

“Tomorrow, love,” you hear him say just before slipping into unconsciousness, into restless sleep.

According to Lee Donghyuck, the chances of meeting your soulmate are 1 in 10 000. Or at least, scientifically. Theoretically. Donghyuck was a man of logic and reason, and had your lives not revolved around soulmates like the earth revolved around the sun, perhaps he wouldn’t have believed in fate at all.

“Remove fate from the equation,” Donghyuck mumbled to himself thoughtfully, jotting a few numbers down on a paper napkin. “And let’s assume your soulmate is around your age.”

“Can’t you rule that one out too?” You pointed out,  but he was too busy, already lost in his thoughts.

“If your soulmate is determined at birth and instantly recognizable at first sight… And they’re actually alive somewhere in the world…”

You watched the quick movements of his blue pen with intrigue. He spun the pen restlessly, allowing its barrel to cross over and under and between his fingers, at times so quickly that it became nothing but a blur of colour. Finally, he scribbled a final verdict and inked two definitive circles around it. “If fate hadn’t been so kind, the chances would have been one in ten thousand. One lifetime out of ten thousand.”

“That slim? Ten thousand lifetimes, that’s nearly impossible,” you said, skeptical but amused at his train of thought nonetheless. You took the napkin from him and looked over his calculations, though some of the numbers were too big for you to check without a calculator. You trusted that Donghyuck had done them correctly though. “You know, if you told that to someone who’d spent a century searching for their soulmate, they’d probably beat you up. You’re lucky I like you.”

He giggled. “We’re lucky it’s only hypothetical.” He took the napkin from you and crumpled it, smudging the neon blue ink on the tips on his fingers.

With Donghyuck, things were simpler. He was young, young enough to not be in a hurry, young enough to speak his thoughts so freely. He never pitied you or worried about offending you, and he never treated you as if you were out of place among the new generations. He offered you perspective. You knew that you weren’t meant for each other, but you were still content to spend your time with each other. To wait together.

“So… I might have found a new place.”

You don’t miss the surprise on Jaemin’s face when you tell him over dinner. His eyes widen a bit in curiosity, his brows arching upwards and his mouth falling slightly agape. He sets his fork down against his plate, folding his hands together the way he does when he’s deep in thought.

“Already?” He inquires. Maybe you imagine a hint of disappointment in his voice, a slight dip in his tone. He looks at you with a sort of sadness, as if trying to imagine what it would be like with you gone, to come home to an empty apartment every night. “Seriously, Y/N, you’re welcome to stay if you need to. We said we would take the changes slowly.” His words aren’t just out of consideration for you.

More than a month has gone by silently, and within that time, the frigid cold of winter has finally given way to spring. Nothing has really changed when you think about it, as if your test results are meaningless. And you suppose that they have become just that, a meaningless scrap of paper at the bottom of the recycling bin in the kitchen. Jaemin still holds you the same way, though his touches are just a little bit more fleeting. Your conversations still extend late into the night, though they feel just slightly melancholic. You hang onto his every word even while telling yourself not to, that maybe there is no point in doing so when everything is already coming to an end.

“I don’t know if I’ll take it… at least not for sure. And even if I do, I won’t be moving in until April. I just thought I’d tell you ahead of time,” you tell him, reaching across the table to take his hand. “I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I think I need some time alone. So I can adjust to all of this.”

“No, I understand. It’s just a little jarring, you know? Don’t know what it’ll be like without you here.”

“It’s literally only a block away,” you giggle, and he smiles. “I’ll still be here.”

After the coolness of February comes grey skies and a drizzly March, heavy rainfall washing the white snow to grey slush. Eventually, the clouds part across the sky for the sun, allowing the brilliant blue of the sky to peek through. April comes sooner than expected, producing blooms of yellow and white in the flowery courtyards of your new apartment complex, bursts of bright colours along the cobblestone paths.

You stand surrounded by boxes in the middle of your new studio apartment, watching the people pass by on the streets below. The windows are cracked open for air and you can hear the bustle outside, the yells of the street vendors, an occasional shriek of a child’s laughter. The new bedframe and mattress you ordered stand leaning against the wall in the corner, waiting to be assembled. Jaemin stumbles through the door with another box and sets it down before dusting his hands off on his jeans.

“That’s the last one,” he says. He collapses on the couch that the previous owner left behind, out of breath. You sit down next to him, allowing him to rest his head on your lap. He finally looks around, then at you. “Everything you hoped for?”

You nod happily. “I’ll miss having you around though,” you chuckle, playing with the soft strands of his hair, freshly dyed—after losing a drunken bet to Renjun a week ago, he reluctantly let the latter bleach and tone his hair bright silver. But you think it suits him; it accentuates the darkness of his eyes and paleness of his skin, gives him a cold and chic edge offset by the gentleness of his smile.

“I’ll still be here,” he repeats your words from two months ago. “And you’ll be much closer to work, right? No more crazy subway routes and early mornings. At the cost of me being your personal alarm clock, of course.” He grins, and you smack him with a red throw pillow.

“I won’t miss that,” you roll your eyes teasingly.

“Whatever you say, love.” He lifts his head off your lap to press a kiss against your cheek.

You spend the rest of the afternoon with him, unpacking boxes, hanging up clothes, building the bedframe and fitting the mattress with clean sheets so that at least you’ll have somewhere to sleep tonight. When the sun sets, everything is lit in an ethereal glow, and you stare out the floor-length windows, admiring the sky. Jaemin joins you after a moment, wrapping his arms around you as the two of you rock back and forth to the steady rhythm of the music playing from his phone.

When he leaves in the evening, he gives you a final hug, jokingly telling you not to miss him too much. When he’s gone, you find yourself staring out the window once more, at the blocky silhouette of Jaemin’s building a few blocks away. He pointed it out earlier, thrilled that you could see so far from this high up.

You quickly learn that on cloudy days, it is nothing but a smudge of grey in the distance.

While Donghyuck always tried to ease your worries with reason and strokes of pen ink on his skin, Mark took you on long drives around the city, hoping that the wind blowing through your hair would clear your mind.

On late nights when you couldn’t sleep, you often found yourself in the passenger seat of his 1975 Hyundai Pony, listening to static-laced 80s rock music while he drove you around the streets of Seoul. He would always roll the windows down in the summer and watch the contentment on your face, one hand around yours while the other guided the wheel.

Mark Lee was even older than you—and with all the wars and tragedies he’d lived through, he understood what it felt like to be kept awake by the nightmares. To be kept awake by thoughts of loved ones being blown to bits, to be haunted with memories of the past. With how long he’d been searching for the right person, he knew the urgency you felt and the longing to finally settle down with a soulmate. He understood.

The stories he told you were woven between puffs of cigarette smoke and gentle kisses on your forehead. He told you about Canada and the mountains that surrounded Vancouver, where he’d spent some time in the 40s. He told you about his family, about his brother’s grandchildren who looked older than he did. It was strange, he’d admitted with a small laugh and sadness in his smile.

The two of you often pointed out buildings along the side of the road, reminiscing what stood in their place before the bulldozers and big trucks rolled in. Just down the street from his apartment, the old drive-in cinema was being replaced by an upscale theatre. Next to it, a park was being cleared for a new shopping centre. Even the studio he’d rented out last summer had been demolished so a new entertainment agency could build its empire. Once in a while, he would drive by and stare ruefully at the construction site—the classical compositions he’d once recorded there were being replaced by a new type of music, with catchy beats and pretty pop stars dressed in shiny outfits.

His music had been drowned out by a new industry, and likewise, many of the things you remembered from your childhood have been lost to time. Talking about the past with him helped you remember. It was a sort of reassurance even as you moved on.

Mark eased a bit of your pain, staying out with you until the early hours of morning to make sure that you were alright. The next morning, he would almost always call to ask if you’d slept okay, unless there was an issue with the old landline phone in his office. All concept of time disappeared when you were with him, along with your memories and the demons haunting your dreams. But eventually, he would drop you off at home and bid you goodnight, leaving you to watch him drive away. Eventually, the night came to an end.

He couldn’t stay with you the whole night, nor could he stay with you forever.

Your evenings are often interrupted by Jaemin’s messages asking you to come over. Sometimes he says that he misses you, or he wants to see you for dinner. Other times, he kisses you breathless against the closed door as soon as you’ve stepped inside, always with an unmatched fervour and urgency as if you might slip right through his grasp and disappear.

Tonight, however, it’s neither.

It’s half past midnight when your phone is set off in a series of quick vibrations. Wrapped in nothing but a towel with your hair still dripping, you type in a reply, hesitate, press send. You get changed, slipping into a pair of jeans and an oversized T-shirt before grabbing your keys.

Jaemin is uncharacteristically quiet when he opens the door for you, his gaze downcast so you can’t see his expression. He’s deteriorating; you can see it in the way he turns his back to you after locking the door, the way he walks inside with a halfhearted invitation for you to follow.

“What’s wrong?” You ask when you’ve sat down across from him.

“I think I found them,” he mumbles and you notice how he averts your gaze. “My soulmate, I mean. I think I found her.”

“Wait, then why with the long face? Jaem, that’s great—”

He cuts you off with a sharp bark of emotionless laughter. His expression turns bitter when he pulls his sleeve up to reveal a mark along his wrist: two linear streaks of dark purple that twist together like the centre petals of a rose. He stares at it, almost with contempt. Apart from the standardized DNA tests, markings are the only other way to identify soulmates, though they almost never show. No one has any proper explanation for them and you have no explanation for why Jaemin has one now.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think she’s great. She’s smart. She’s funny. We have the same mark so I know it’s her,” he says shakily. “But god, I must have really fucked up in a past life to deserve this.”

You feel dread. It hits you all at once, because the way Jaemin speaks is so distant and unnerving, as if he’s lost himself in a trance and forgotten all about you. You’ve seen this dazed look before, only twice, when he was truly distressed and truly lost. This isn’t like him.

He found her. He should be happy. You should be happy for him. He should be happy.

“What is it?”

“I think I’m broken. Something’s wrong with me.”

“What do you mean?” You ask, and you try to keep the urgency out of your voice for his sake. He doesn’t say anything. “Jaemin?”

“I don’t feel anything when I’m with her. Nothing.”

You don’t register his words. They don’t make any sense to you. They are barely coherent. No, you think. That can’t be possible.

“Maybe we rejected each other in a past life and then both offed ourselves. Or maybe this is just the universe’s way of saying ‘fuck you.’ Maybe—”

“Stop that,” you tell him firmly. “Whatever this is, there has to be an explanation for it. Marks don’t just appear out of nowhere, right?” You pause to take a shaky breath, suddenly realizing that your words aren’t meant to comfort only him. “We can look into it. We can figure out what’s going on. This is the 21st Century, remember?”

“But what am I even supposed to tell her?” He demands, his tone exasperated and his brows furrowed together. “‘I know you’ve been looking for me for your whole life, but I can’t see you as anything more than a friend, sucks for you’? What do I do, spend the rest of my life drowning in guilt and self-pity because I couldn’t love her the way she wanted me to? Because I could only pretend?”

You have no answers for him. Perhaps he hasn’t felt anything for her because he hasn’t let go of you. Perhaps it really was a mistake, a freak accident in the cosmos that put the wrong marks on the wrong people, designating a pair that was never meant to be. Your thoughts run wild, but you can’t put anything into words for him. Even if you could, you don’t think you would have the strength to say anything aloud.

Instead, you hold him in your arms, wiping away the tears of frustration that have formed at the corners of his eyes, running your fingers through his hair. You can only hope that his soulmate will do the same for him some day, perhaps in some future where the cruel forces watching over you cease their endless games. Genuinely, you hope.  

The tone goes off a third time. You glance at the clock across the room: 11 AM. He has to be up by now, you think to yourself as your fingers continue drumming a repetitive rhythm onto the kitchen counter.

“Hello?”

Just before the automated voice can tell you to leave a voicemail, he picks up. Donghyuck’s voice is groggy, as if he’s just woken up—or maybe he’s just about to go to bed. With his disaster of a sleep schedule, you can never be sure.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Oh hey, you, I know you.” You hear him chuckle on the other end of the line. “How are you, Y/N? I haven’t heard from you in ages.”

“I’m alright, the usual, I guess. How about you? How’s Jeno?”

“Jeno adopted another cat because he’s fucking insane, so now we have three little furballs running around the house. But yeah, it’s going great! So great,” he drawls with a familiar bite of sarcasm. You smile to yourself. “If he brings home another one because ‘Oh Hyuck, look it’s so cute, can we keep it?’ I will literally choke him in his sleep. Anyways, what’s going on? You never call me.”

“You never pick up,” you huff, earning a small laugh from him. “Okay, I wanted to ask you something. What do you know about soulmate marks?”

Thoughtful silence. “Not much. I mean, I’ve got my theories, but nothing has really been proven. Why, did you get one?”

“No, not me. Jaemin.”

“Oh, Y/N… then that means…”

“It’s alright, don’t concern yourself with me, Donghyuck. I’m more worried about him, honestly.”

“Hm?”

“He found his soulmate recently, but it’s not exactly… it’s not going as expected, let's just say that. He said he feels almost nothing when he’s with her, and to make things worse, apparently now it’s mutual. God, Donghyuck, they’re so awkward with each other, it physically hurts me.”

Donghyuck is silent again, and you hear the faint clicking of his keyboard. You can almost see his contemplative gaze and the soft blue glow of his computer screen lighting his face. “Did they know each other at all before the marks appeared?”

“Yeah, they were coworkers.”

He hums. “Okay… that could be why. Marks have a tendency to appear if soulmates have been around each other for extended periods of time without realizing it. It’s like nature’s way of telling them that the person they’re looking for is right in front of them. As for why they haven’t felt anything for each other? I dunno… reincarnation can really fuck with people. Any previous sentiments for your soulmate stick with you as you pass on, even if you’re both reborn completely different people.”

I must have really fucked up in a past life to deserve this. Jaemin’s words echo in your head.

“Obviously, there’s still opportunity to fix things,” Donghyuck adds quickly before you can get too lost in your thoughts. “It just takes time. Honestly, I wouldn’t be too concerned”

“I know, I know,” you groan. “I’m just upset that after everything he’s gone through, this is the shit he has to deal with.”

“Yeah. I can’t even imagine.” He pauses. “You know, a lot of people would just run off if they were in the same situation. He’s lucky to have you.”

You give a breathless laugh and shrug. “I feel like it’s the least I can do.”

“You never give yourself enough credit,” Donghyuck says, a hint of melancholy to his voice. There’s a sudden noise in the distance that cuts him off, and he curses beneath his breath. “Shit, the new cat’s not trained yet and I think she’s doing something stupid in the kitchen. Jeno will kill me if anything happens to her.”

You suppress a giggle. “Go ahead. We can catch up some other time.”

“Of course. See you, Y/N.”

The line clicks.

If Donghyuck taught you to be hopeful and Mark taught you to be strong, Jungwoo taught you to be brave.

Kim Jungwoo was your first love, and in many ways, you consider him to be irreplaceable. Perhaps it had simply been the result of young naivety back then, but you thought he was unlike any other person you’d ever met. In hindsight, he was different. A bright light dancing his way into your life when you were only a child in the 30s, a free-spirited boy who went where he pleased despite living under such an oppressive regime.

The Kims lived only a few doors down. You frequently saw the boys in their front yard kicking a beat-up soccer ball back and forth between them. Jungwoo was the middle child, and he sat right in front of you in class, his back always perfectly straight against his wooden chair so as to avoid the teachers’ chastisement. He was a quiet boy, and he never said a word unless it was to answer a question. But even then, his voice was small—not exactly shy or scared, just quiet. He quickly learned to raise his voice when the teacher hit him on the back of the hand with a ruler and demanded he speak up, when the wood scraped apart the skin of his knuckles.

At the time, when Japanese was all too foreign on your tongue and you struggled to understand anything taught in class, you thought he was a genius. He always had the right answers when he was called upon and there wasn’t a trace of an accent in either of his languages. Not that you heard him speak Korean much; you didn’t dare speak it unless you were hidden in your own homes, where your parents could discuss the uprisings without having to worry about the police roaming freely outside. Though, they still spoke in hushed voices as if anyone could hear them, as if terrified for what could happen if someone did hear.

The first time you spoke to Jungwoo properly was in middle school. After a humiliating incident at school that left you in tears, he ran to catch up with you on the way home and spoke to you in timid Korean, offering to help. You were still teary-eyed and beyond upset, but you let him guide you through your homework. He rambled to you about the Japanese grammar you couldn’t understand and explained the mistakes you’d made for your teacher to lash out at you the way she had. It didn’t stop you from making the same mistakes the next day, but at least he was patient, unlike the adults at school.

“You’re not stupid,” he told you one afternoon on the way home. Again, you were in tears.

“But the teachers think I am,” you grunted. “And I feel stupid. I can’t understand a word they say. I never have the right answers. Everything I say is wrong. If that’s not stupidity, I don’t know what it is.”

“Y/N, all we do at school is memorize meaningless facts that don’t really matter,” he replied with a shrug. “Just because you can’t shove all that information into your head doesn’t mean that you’re stupid. Look at Doyoung. He was failing school but he’s still one of the smartest people I know. He just… learns differently.”

“So? That doesn’t make me smart either. They still think—”

Jungwoo scoffed. “Who cares what they think? I think you’re wonderful, and they’re the real freaks. Miss Ito, especially.” He wrinkled his nose. “She smells funny.”

“Hey, be nice, Jungwoo,” you chided, but you were laughing. He was effortlessly funny and it was such a pleasant contrast to the way he acted at school. He was always so disciplined and perfect when the adults were watching, but he seemed to let loose around you. It made you feel… special, in a way. Validated, accepted. Something you never felt at school.

You walked home with him almost everyday from then on. You became inseparable, even when your school shut down and sent all the students to gender-segregated schools, even when your parents worried that you were spending too much of your time with him instead of studying. Even when war arrived.

The Second World War plunged your lives into darkness; Jungwoo quickly became the only light to guide you. He was there for you while your parents were away, while they laboured in the factories making helmets and guns and bullets so that they could at least put food on the table. He was there when the light at the end of the tunnel went dim, though he was miles away from home.

Jungwoo had never struck you as a fighter or rebel, even if he had the physique of a soldier. He had the drive and the courage and the steel to fight, but you only saw gentleness in his monthly letters to you. The last letter you received from him still sits in a drawer somewhere, the last words he wrote sealed in a plastic envelope so that they won’t fade away.

You took the test a few months after the war ended, only because he had pleaded with you to do so. Even if I don’t make it home, he wrote to you in the same curving script he’d used to teach you years ago. Promise me.

When the receptionist gave you a piece of paper with an X marked next to your name—there were no colour indicators back then, only X’s and hollow circles—a part of you felt relief that you couldn’t quite explain. Another part of you was disgusted, convinced that you were being selfish and apathetic. You thought that maybe you had no regard for him; that you only cared for yourself and a stranger you were still searching for. He’d risked his life to join the rebel army, fought on the frontlines with the Allies, and you repaid him with nothing.

It would take you years to come to the conclusion that your reaction was only natural. It would take you years to heal and start seeing other people. In due time, you would stop frequenting the church in your hometown and your fingers would cease to brush against the memorial stone in the yard, upon which his name was carved. Just one name among many.

Jaemin’s hands are all over you: in your hair, around your throat, pushing you against the wall as he kisses you. His fingers tangle into your hair and he pulls on the strands, forcing your head back a bit so he can continue trailing his lips over your neck and collarbones.

“We can’t be doing this,” you tell him when you manage to pull away. His arms come around your waist anyways and he buries his head in the crook of your neck. You can smell the alcohol on his breath, and you glance behind him to see empty soju bottles on the kitchen counter.

“I’m not with Jieun,” he snarls. “Besides, like I said. I think we’re fucked. We aren’t meant to be.”

“Don’t say that,” you hiss, taken aback by his sudden coldness. “This isn’t fair to her.”

“It’s mutual, remember? I bet she’s out there doing the exact same thing with some other guy. She doesn’t need me.”

“Jaem—”

“We’re fucked. She told me she doesn’t need me, and I told her the same.”

You’re horrified. “You did what?”

“Hilarious, isn’t it? We had our first fight, and we aren’t even together yet.” He scoffs, pushing a hand through his hair in irritation. “Some type of soulmate.”

You’ve never heard him talk like this. He’s out of his mind. He’s lost it. “Fuck, Jaem, how much did you drink?”

“Not enough to feel better, clearly,” he snaps.

“Alcohol and whatever this is between the two of us isn’t going to make you feel any better. This isn’t going to fix your problems.”

“Then what do you want me to do?!” His words are sharp, his expression hard when he glares at you. “You tell me to move on and to give her a chance and to stop doing whatever—” he motions frantically. You’ve never seen him so wild, so out of control, and you’ve almost never seen him lash out at anyone like this. “—whatever the fuck this is, but do you even know how it feels? Do you even care?”

A sharp intake of breath, and then the world is crashing down around you.

The feelings you fought to suppress re-emerge, rising up to crush you and force you into relapse. Doubt. Regret. Guilt. The little voice in the back of your head is a raging monster now, and it shouts at you, screaming at you in a blind rage. Telling you that you’re heartless and self-absorbed and indifferent, everything you believed you were when Jungwoo died. Reinstating what you know isn’t true. You know he doesn’t mean it. You know that it’s just alcohol fueling the words spewing from his lips and nothing more, but they still bring back unpleasant memories, a sense of dread you can’t shake.

He realizes, albeit a bit too late. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

If you knew how much it hurts me to watch you do this to yourself. If you knew how much it hurts me knowing that there’s only so much I can do for you. “Don’t. I get it.”

For a few seconds, the room is silent, save the ticking of the clock behind you. It reminds you briefly of a memory that you can’t quite grasp, like a flash of deja vu before you spiral back down to the present reality where you stand in cold, frigid silence. The broken smoke detector chirps.

“I should go,” you say at last. You go to grab your keys from where you left them on the counter but he quickly stops you, his hand coming around yours. You look up at him in irritation, pulling away sharply.

“It’s late,” he says shakily, almost pleading. “You shouldn’t walk home at this hour. Not alone.”

“I’ll call a cab,” you shrug before slipping into your sweater and pulling on your shoes. You bid him goodnight and leave him dumbfounded in the living room.

You return home to a sleepless light and endless thoughts in a cold bedroom. A broken record replays his words in your head again and again, until you see Jungwoo’s face floating above you in the darkness. His features are faint, like wisps of smoke that loosely form sad eyes and lips pulled downwards in a frown. And then he’s the one asking, “Do you even care?”

You have no answer for the annoying voice in your head. You stare at the lines of light drifting across the expanse of the ceiling, wide awake as the sky brightens outside.

“How long will you be gone?”

It was the 3rd of August 1995. You knew because the next day would mark 50 years since Jungwoo’s death. The next day, you would be going back to your hometown and laying flowers on the altar in the Kim family home, revisiting the memorial you’d left behind when you moved to Seoul.

You shrugged as Mark passed you his lighter. The old zippo produced a small spark between your fingers, and then the sting of smoke was filling your mouth and nose. You didn’t smoke regularly—you’d stopped years ago—but you sure as hell felt like you needed one tonight.

“I dunno,” you said, taking a long drag from the cigarette. “A couple more days after the ceremony? If I stay any longer, Doyoung might get upset.“

“Upset?”

“He doesn’t like seeing me. Said I bring back bad memories. I think I remind him of Jungwoo too much.”

Mark grimaced. “Well it’s scary, seeing a childhood friend who hasn’t aged in fifty something years… Must he like seeing a ghost.” He paused, tucking a stray piece of your hair behind your ear so that he could see your face. “My nephews feel the same way about me.”

“You remind them of something?” You asked.

“Their father, I guess,” he explained. “My brother… wasn’t the most understanding of them when they were younger. Whenever they see me, all they can think of is their childhood and his abusiveness.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

He took a moment of contemplative silence “No, not really. I mean, maybe it did at first. But it’s not like I go out of my way to avoid them just because of the memories they associate with me. That would be unfair for me.”

“It would be,” you agreed.

“So then why avoid Doyoung? What he thinks of you is beyond your control. If you remind him of painful memories, that isn’t exactly your fault.”

You sighed. “I don’t know. I just feel like staying out of his way might help him heal. Maybe it’ll help him move on from everything he’s trying to forget.”

“Oh, Y/N.” Mark took your hand with a breathless laugh. His smile was both sad and endearing, as if he were in awe of you—what for, you weren’t too sure until he murmured, “You’re too kind sometimes.” He paused to exhale, smoke escaping his lips and bleeding into the atmosphere, dispersing into the starry sky. He stared into the sky for a few moments, silent.

“But it’s not always up to you to heal their wounds. At some point, they have to learn to heal themselves.”

“What the hell happened to him?”

Jaemin looks like a mess. His hair is disheveled and swept messily all over the place. His skin is unhealthily pale, unusually warm to the touch beneath your fingertips. You can tell he’s had a little too much to drink; he sits on the couch in a daze, his eyes fixated on an invisible point in front of him as if searching for something that is no longer there. He yelps in pain when you wipe at the cut on his lip.

“We bumped into a couple guys at the bar. One of them took a swing at him,” Renjun explains as he passes you the bottle of disinfectant. You carefully apply a drop to a cotton swab. “And it didn’t help that he was also drunk. Thank god Lucas was there to break up the fight.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” Jaemin groans in protest. “Just tipsy.”

“Tipsy? You couldn’t even tell me Y/N’s number.”

“I don’t remember anyone’s number.”

“Well, you couldn’t tell me your own name either. Got any excuse for that one, smartass?”

You ignore their bickering and continue cleaning the cut on Jaemin’s cheek, holding him firmly by the shoulder so he doesn’t move. The cotton quickly turns light pink between your fingers. You briefly examine the red marks along his jaw where he’d been hit, frowning. Jaemin has never been one to get into fights and especially not while under the influence, but the bruises on his cheek and his knuckles suggest otherwise. Hell, he rarely even gets drunk, but it’s becoming more and more frequent, to the point where Renjun makes sure to watch over him whenever they go out together. He’s derailing, you think to yourself as you brush his hair into some sort of order.

“Okay, let’s get you to bed.” You put his arm around your shoulder and help him up to his feet, nearly staggering beneath his weight. Renjun rushes over to help you move him into the bedroom.

“You should probably go home. It’s getting late,” you tell him when Jaemin has been settled in bed. You glance at the clock hanging in the kitchen as you clean up the first aid kit on the table: almost 2 AM. “I’ll stay with him… make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“I really tried to keep him away from the alcohol tonight. I swear I turned away for only a second to deal with Yangyang and he— Ugh, I’m so sorry,” Renjun apologizes again, shaking his head. “This whole soulmate ordeal is really getting to him. I’m worried, Y/N.”

“You know how he is. He always figures it out one way or another” you reassure him. “I’ll talk to him again though. Maybe he’ll actually… listen this time.”

“Well, call me if anything happens. I probably won’t be asleep anyways.”

“I will. Thanks, Jun,” you nod appreciatively.

By the time Renjun has gone home and you’ve finished cleaning up, Jaemin is already asleep. He stirs when you switch off the lamp and reaches out for you in the darkness, fingers intertwining with yours. “Stay,” he mumbles, pulling you a bit closer.

“I’m not going anywhere.” You say as you admire the way the moonlight filters in through the windows and draws pale lines across his cheeks. Despite the cuts marking his skin, he looks so much softer now, innocent, in a way. Again, you’re reminded of the Jaemin you met at the art gallery. He was none of this. None of this pent-up frustration released in empty beer bottles, none of these crimson bruises marking his otherwise smooth skin.

“You have to stop doing this to yourself,” you murmur. There’s no reply at first, and you wonder if he heard you at all.

“I’m sorry,” you finally hear his voice: small, feeble in the darkness. His words become more urgent as he keeps speaking, spilling from his lips uncontrollably. “I shouldn’t have said those things about you. I wasn’t thinking. You know I could never mean it.”

You hush him, wrapping him in the security of your arms. A single tear brushes against the back of your hand, then another. “It’s alright,” you assure him as you rub soothing circles against his back. “You were going through a lot. I understand, okay? It’s okay.”

He shakes his head frantically, his tears falling in steady streams now. You let out a low hiss when you see them stain pink with the blood from the wound on his cheek. “Still, that shouldn’t be an excuse. I’ve managed to fuck up everything since all of this started. I hurt Jieun, I hurt Renjun, I hurt you. I can’t even go to work and look at Jieun without feeling like such an idiot and getting mad at myself for being such a child. Without feeling like maybe I deserve this.”

Your heart drops, then shatters into a million pieces at the bottom of a dark abyss.

“Look at me,” you plead as you take his face in your hands. “Look at me, Jaem, please.” He finally lifts his head, his eyes meeting yours in the stillness. All you can see is brokenness, defeat and regret, a look you knew well. It’s an expression that once followed you around for years, appearing in every mirror and reflection you passed by. An innate, intimate part of you that you despised so much until you came to accept it. “Listen to me, Na Jaemin. You are one of the strongest, bravest and kindest people I’ve ever met, and nothing will ever change the way I see you. You don’t deserve any of this bullshit. You don’t deserve this.”

“If you knew what I told her, Y/N,” he lets out a shaky breath. “If you knew what we told each other when we found out neither of us had any feelings for each other… maybe you would think differently of me.”

“If that’s truly what you believe, fix what you broke,” you say firmly. “Apologize to her. Make things right between the two of you, unless you want to go through this all over again in another life. Things will only get worse if you don’t address them now.”

“And if I can’t?”

“If anyone can do it, it’s you, Jaem.” Trembling, you press your lips to his temple. “Whether or not you end up with her, whether or not you think you deserve this, I love you. And that will never fucking change.”

He leans forwards, his forehead touching yours, his nose brushing against yours and his lips just inches from meeting yours. But he never comes any closer, and you feel no urge to close the distance either. Perhaps it’s a sign that both of you are already starting to let go, to drift apart; this moment is nothing romantic or lustful, nothing more than comforting each other in your brokenness. Nothing more than trying to help each other numb the pain.

“I love you.” His voice trembles, but his words are steady, deep-rooted in sureness.

“Then promise me you’ll try, Jaem. You’ll try to set things right, for both our sake.”

“For you, love,” he murmurs, so quietly that you can barely hear him. His voice is lost to the faint rumbling of the air conditioning unit somewhere outside and the distant noises of traffic. “For you, I would do anything.”

You wonder if he’ll remember any of this in the morning. You wonder if he’ll take your words to heart, or if they’ll simply be enveloped in dreams fueled by drunkenness, reduced by sleep to nothing but a blur.

...it’s not always up to you to heal their wounds. At some point, they have to learn to heal themselves

You’ve done everything you can for him, you decide. Even if you continue to walk by his side, the rest is up to him.

One Saturday morning, Jaemin shows up at your door dressed in black jeans and a button-down shirt, his hair swept up neatly. There’s a kind of brightness to him; it’s not necessarily hope or excitement, but certainly a change from what you’ve seen the last couple of weeks. He’s meeting Jieun for lunch, he tells you nervously. He wants to see you before he goes. You tell him you’re proud of him. That genuinely, you admire him.

The next time you see him, it’s at a floral shop. He’s in the middle of picking out flowers, and he flushes when he sees you. A single rose seemed too cliche, he tells you sheepishly, and asks your opinion. He thinks she’ll prefer something a bit more unique but equally tasteful, equally elegant. You recommend orchids or gerberas. They last longer than roses, but they convey the same message. When he’s gone, you buy a small vase of irises for your apartment; your living room needs a bit of colour.

Weeks later, you find a small package in the mail: a parting gift, you realize when you tear open the padded envelope. It’s nothing too special, nothing fancy or expensive—just a piece of blue glass wrapped in silver accents, attached to a delicate chain that you loop around your neck. When you hold the pendant up to the sun, its blue tint shatters into infinite colours, tossing specks of luminous yellow and orange all over your bedroom. More than just a singular colour, it reflects the other hues around you. And for just a brief moment, you think you see your own reflection.

You watched Jaemin move on just as you’d watched Mark and Donghyuck: from afar, with reserve but at the same time, excitement. Close enough for him to know that you were still there for him, but allowing some sort of distance that grew as the days melded into weeks and then months.

For the most part, he seemed to be alright. His texts were always cheerful, covered in happy emoticons—he used them when he was too giddy with excitement to type actual words. “We figured things out,” was all he said one night, and it was all you needed to hear to know that they’d be okay.

You started to notice the fondness he’d developed for her; it was subtle at first, just a hint of affection in his voice when he told you about her over the phone. Though slowly, it developed into something more. It was just as Donghyuck said: time had forged a relationship out of nothing, out of empty words and empty emotions, growing a garden from a barren piece of wasteland.

The first time you spoke to Kim Jieun, it was over the phone during one of your calls with Jaemin. She’d chimed in on your conversation at some point to say hi, and the way she spoke almost reminded you of Donghyuck: bright, cheery, a little sarcastic in a playful manner. You quickly learned that she was easy-going though brutally honest at times, well-mannered yet well-humoured. Most importantly, she wasn’t judgemental, and she didn’t treat you any differently from Jaemin’s other friends just because you’d been with him previously.

Of course, there was still a sense of yearning, a bittersweetness whenever you saw the two of them together. Your fingers always danced fleetingly along the screen of your phone before pressing like on the photos he posted to his social media. You saw him less and less, only occasionally running into him at the bakery you used to frequent together or at a friend gathering. For the most part, you let the past stay in the past. He seemed happy. And honestly, you were happy for him.

“I told you he’d be fine,” Donghyuck murmured to you at one of Jeno’s rampant parties, once most of the guests had trickled out for the night. The two of you sat on the balcony, watching everyone stumble around in their drunken stupor: Jeno was passed out on the couch with two cats sitting perched on his chest. Renjun was trying to braid flowers into Jaemin’s hair, which he’d recently bleached yet another shade lighter to match Jieun’s platinum locks. Out of the corner of your eye, you watched Chenle and Jisung exchange a few bills and bicker over a bet—Chenle was still in denial that Jisung had won, apparently.

“I didn’t doubt you for a second, Hyuck.”

“But you were worried,” he grinned smugly.

“Why wouldn’t I be worried?” You sighed and knocked back the rest of your wine before motioning for him to pass you the bottle. You swiftly poured yourself another glass. “If I couldn’t have my happy ending, at least I wanted him to have his. As… cliche as that sounds.”

Donghyuck raised a brow at you. “What’s to say that you won’t get yours too? They can’t keep you waiting forever. The longest it ever took for someone to find their soulmate was 241 years.”

“Goddamn, are you trying to make me feel better or worse?”

“Better, of course! Okay, what I’m trying to say is that it’s rare for anyone to wait longer than two centuries. If everyone lived for up to three hundred years, we’d have a lot of dictators and other crazies running the world. The universe would spontaneously combust.”

“I know I’m barely even halfway there, but come back to me when I set a new world record,” you rolled your eyes, to which he responded with a small chuckle.

“So what now?” He glanced at Jaemin, who sat across the room with his eyes half-closed, an empty red solo cup in his hands. Jieun had her head on his shoulder, rambling drunkenly about something to Renjun. If you hadn’t known any better, you would have thought she’d been a part of the group all along; she fit in so seamlessly, and it warmed your heart to see her getting along with everyone.

“I don’t know,” you shrugged. “Nothing for now, I guess. Just waiting.”

“Whoever it is, I’m sure they’ll be worth it,” he hummed in reply.

“You think so?”

“People say that the longer you wait, the better. It’s all in your head, of course, but they have a point.”

You sighed, lifting your head to gaze at the stars hanging overhead. “I suppose they do. Maybe someday I get to find out.”

He patted you on the shoulder reassuringly. “You’ll figure it out. You always have.”

Donghyuck left a little later to get a drunk Jeno to bed, and then you had only the quietness of night to keep you company. Your mind drifted and you contemplated his words, repeating them silently to the wind. The night sky replied with nothing but a gentle breeze against your skin.

You could be patient, you thought as you watched the others inside. You fished the pendant out from beneath your shirt and stared at the reflection in the glass. It was as if you were grasping a piece of the night sky between your fingers: the stars and a crescent moon captured in a single, translucent oval. In the dark, the pendant appeared deep indigo, not too different in hue from the four coloured markings you’d acquired over the years.

But the sun would rise in due time, you thought to yourself mirthfully. Beneath the brightness of morning, you’d hold a different colour in your hands. You tucked the necklace back into the fabric of your shirt. You could wait.

read the epilogue, yellow

[puppypeter]

These are all dark fics, READ THE TAGS before reading the fics. It is your responsibility to check whether what you are about to read is something that you can stomach. While most of these fics are based around trauma, recovery etc many feature triggering scenes or flashbacks as well as darker themes. Please be safe and don’t read them if they can be triggering for you! Proceed with caution! Most of them are Hydra Trash, but still not just the ugly bits as I like there to be a plot. Hiding them below the cut:

between scylla and charybdis | 21590 words

Sam Wilson has been witness to a lot of things he wishes he could unsee. Civilian families shot dead in their cars because of miscommunications at checkpoints. Riley’s body spiralling to the ground in a smoke-plumed plummet. His own face in his bathroom mirror after waking up hung-over as hell at two in the afternoon, the day after the anniversary of Riley’s death, year after year after year.

And now, in an abandoned bunker on the outskirts of Boston, a seemingly unremarkable manila folder at the bottom of a filing cabinet.

Berceuse | 10730 words

There are strange, new things Bucky needs from Steve.

Dreamers Often Lie | 11040 words

As far as Bucky remembers, sex is something that is painful and terrifying if you wake up while it's happening. As the Asset, sleeping through sex was a rare treat. When Steve lets Bucky know he's interested in a sexual relationship, what Steve doesn't know is that they have fundamentally different ideas of what that entails.

despite the threatening sky and the shuddering earth (they remained) | 71532 words

“They really didn’t want the mask to come off.” Hill thumbed through the scans, and pulled out a film that she then handed over to Sam, face mostly expressionless but for the flat line of her pursed lips.

Sam accepted the film and held it up to the light, angling so both he and Steve could see it, squinting at the outline of the Winter Soldier’s skull, and the blips of unnatural white that showed up, God, in his brain, not to mention about half his teeth, plus the mask, with its thin protrusions—

“Those are pins,” Steve realized. He looked over at Hill. “The mask—it’s nailed to his face.”

Hill’s face was as unmoved as ever. “Like I said. They really didn’t want it coming off.”

Fire And Water For Your Love | 77084 words

When the Avengers investigate an abandoned HYDRA base on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D., they unexpectedly encounter a dark-haired man with a torn metal arm, who leads them to an even more shocking discovery deeper inside the base. The Avengers must reconcile what they have found with the lies S.H.I.E.L.D. has been telling for decades.

Give An Inch | 5070 words

The Captain has a warm smile and clear, open eyes. The Soldier knows these are tricks. He's fallen for them before and he won't do it again.

Humans As Gods | 4818 words

"HYDRA's scientists had been delighted to find their serum-reversal procedure had worked. Their jubilation was dampened by the discovery that Steve's smaller self might no longer be Captain America-sized but was still 100% Steve Rogers, and Steve Rogers was now mad enough to spit nails. A minor oversight in the design of the containment area meant that smaller-Steve had simply wriggled out of the now ridiculously-oversized restraints like an angry ferret escaping a paper bag, and punched the nearest technician in the nuts.

Chaos ensued."

HYDRA scientists successfully de-serum Captain America, only to discover that they are utterly unprepared for Steve Rogers. Meanwhile, the Winter Soldier follows his instructions to the letter. This works out just great.

The Only One That Needs To Know | 6571 words

Bucky can't control his body. He can only control what secrets he keeps.

I Was Wearing My Blue Coat | 11503 words

Following exposure of his past as the Winter Soldier, anonymous postings of explicit video footage, 63 charges of murder and the wrath of the Internet, James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes finally steps into the limelight and tells his story to Zenat Patel of the New York Times.

Compliance Will Be Rewarded | 4767 words

Someone told him once: "Compliance will be rewarded," and he remembers pressing his head against a man’s leg in open supplication. He remembers hands in his hair, and a gentle grip on the back of his neck. He remembers a man telling him "so good, so good for me aren't you?" And he remembers nodding his head in a desperate attempt to be exactly as good as he was supposed to be.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Bucky Barnes is physically free from Hydra, but the hold on his mind lingers still. All he wants is to go home, and he'll do anything he can to get there.

To Burn Your Kingdom Down | 12370 words

The Avengers go after a Hydra splinter cell with a nasty habit of brutalizing their prisoners. Steve has some ugly history with them, and when a rescue mission gone wrong leaves him and Sam in enemy hands, the situation gets uglier still.

Worth The Wound | 7709 words

The asset knows that maintenance is better than punishment. But with Steve, maintenance becomes more pleasant, soft and gentle and everything he could dream of. It was only natural that he decided to prolong that maintenance a little longer.

The Spaces In-Between | 6971 words | Part 1 of What We Tried So Hard To Hide Away

"Memories are like buckets of water: they weigh on the heart and the brain until the body fails. You're blessed to stay forgetful and young, Soldier."

Sometimes blessings feel like curses.

Illuminate The Scene | 7086 words | Part 2 of What We Tried So Hard To Hide Away

The doctors had wanted to keep the Soldier. Shock him and freeze him until he was fixed, or tear him to scrap if he couldn’t be repaired so that he wouldn’t be an entirely wasted investment. Steve is the only thing stopping them.

When the Soldier can't trust his own body, how can he trust anything?

All These Riots Of Broken Sound | 83790 words | Part 1 of Forever Is A Close And Honest Friend

When Steve and the team return to Avengers tower to find Bucky gone, they must venture into B.A.R.F. to figure out what triggered him to leave and hunt those who wronged him. Trapped in a simulation of Bucky's worst memories with rogue HYDRA agents waiting to strike, 100 years of secrets, lies, pain and love drive the team to their limit and push Steve towards a realisation that is a century in the making.

I Was Lost But Left A Trace | 3585 words | Part 2 of Forever Is A Close And Honest Friend

Disorientated, the Asset reached up to wipe at the moisture on its cheeks and was shocked to find it clear, instead of the crimson it has been expecting. It didn’t understand why this misidentification had caused uproarious laughter from the technicians.

“It is not blood,” the Asset told him, “but it is still a malfunction.”

This sobered the technician a little, and he nodded tightly.

“Yes. It is. But we will fix you.”

I’ll Always Be Blamed For The Sun Going Down | 9907 words | Part 3 of Forever Is A Close And Honest Friend

He knows he’s in the right place. He has heard the guys at the docks laugh and joke about the queers who come out after dark, looking to earn a little extra cash. He has seen the johns, when he’s been out late enough, skulking in the shadows like predators hunting for their next meal, looking for something in particular. Sometimes they look at him.

A small, rusty pen knife that his father had picked up in Europe during the Great War sits heavy in the breast pocket of his jacket. Just in case.

Book Of The Moon | 16019 words | Part 4 of Forever Is A Close And Honest Friend

In 1929, Bucky Barnes falls in love for the first time and resigns himself to never telling a soul, let alone Steve, the object of his affections. In 1943, half a world away from the man he can never have and fighting for his life and his sanity, something new begins to bloom.

Habeas Corpus | 18054 words

An unexpected incident in the field leaves Steve Rogers facing the infiltration of a Hydra base and retrieval of important intelligence, all while pretending to be the Winter Soldier. Unfortunately, there are important aspects of the Soldier's past that Bucky hasn't disclosed, and Steve has no idea what he's really walking into.

Bullies | 14979 words

Written for the MCU trash meme prompt:

I wanna see Steve being messed with by his secretly-HYDRA coworker buddies. I want them generally fucking with him, "accidentally" doing terrible things to him or getting Steve into awful situations, telling jokes that aren't really jokes, gaslighting, performing sexual-assault hazing under the guise that "that's what people do now," pressuring him into other sex shit, anything, just fuck Steve up.

Steve isn't failing to fully catch on because he's dumb or oblivious: it's just that he is Steve, so he wants to believe the best of everybody, and he doesn't want to believe that he could be working for/with bullies and that (as Natasha says) he essentially died for nothing.

Not Unwanted, Not Unloved | 50320 words

They'd resigned themselves to never becoming parents - until Bucky gets pregnant and drops off the grid without even a whisper to his mate about his condition. Steve will still raze the earth to find him, but that doesn't mean he likes what he finds.

The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine | 13889 words

Tony tells him they’re planning a party for Steve’s birthday. He knows how parties are supposed to go.

Lacuna | 62875 words

The Winter Soldier doesn't remember Steve Rogers, but he needs Rogers' help.

OR: The one where Bucky doesn't remember Steve, but falls in love with him anyway.

Not A Perfect Soldier | 93354 words

In a world where HYDRA was wiped out in the '40s, Steve is found by the Army rather than SHIELD. General Thaddeus Ross wants a perfectly obedient super-soldier at his command, and to that end, he sets out to break Steve to his will. As Steve struggles to come to terms with all he has lost, his life in captivity is only made bearable by the presence of another prisoner-- another super-soldier known only as "Soldat". Then the Avengers strike a deal with Ross to "borrow" him for missions, and Steve is faced with a team who dislikes him, an organization he doesn't trust, and the question of what he's willing to do to escape Ross's clutches.

For Want Of Him | 103174 words

It's the twenty-first century, and Steve Rogers has never been more alone. Everything he knew, everyone he loved, is now gone, and a dark, bitter loneliness claws at him, raking bleeding gashes into his heart. And then there's Brock Rumlow. Rumlow is like salt in his wounds; vicious, and cruel. But his dark brown hair and teasing smirk reminds Steve of someone long dead, and his New York accent sounds like home...He's a soldier like him...he understands. And Steve makes the fatal mistake of trusting him.

The Same Measure | 4943 words

The Winter Soldier was never allowed to stop unless an injury was too grievous.

To Be Unmade | 5114 words | Part 1 of Alexander Pierce Should Have Died Slower

For the asset, things only ever get worse. The external scars fade quickly enough. The internal ones dig deeper and deeper.

But the internal scars are called love, and doesn't that make them worth the hurt?

Do Not Put In The Icebox | 7143 words | Part 2 of Alexander Pierce Should Have Died Slower

When the asset malfunctions on a mission, Rumlow and Rollins learn more than they ever wanted to know about Pierce's hobbies.

And then everyone has pancakes.

The Knowing Makes It Worse | 4130 words | Part 3 of Alexander Pierce Should Have Died Slower

No is a bad word and invites punishment.

Or, Alexander Pierce is a very bad man who delights in manipulating and degrading the asset.

Love Is For Children | 5303 words | Part 4 of Alexander Pierce Should Have Died Slower

Bucky understands how the game works. He can't understand why it makes Steve cry.

But Natasha and the other Avengers are there to help.

I Just Wanted To Be Sure Of You | 4461 words | Part 5 of Alexander Pierce Should Have Died Slower

Bucky has Bucky Bear; it's only fair for Natasha to have something of her own.

Visiting a toy store wasn't strictly necessary, but if Tony wants to throw money around, no one's going to complain.

“Till The End Of The Line | 6069 words | Part 6 of Alexander Pierce Should Have Died Slower

It's hard to take a friendship right back up when so much has changed over seventy years.

Particularly when HYDRA's conditioning resurfaces.

*if you feel that any of these fics shouldn’t be in this list please just send me a message! :) I have read them all but over the past 1+ years so some of them I might not remember all the details of :)

[pizzazz-party]

Part 3: Ring’s Biology and Possible Origins

In the world of Ring Fit Adventure, there exist monsters, ghosts, cyborgs, robots, gods, a curious array of animals, human beings of enormous size…and Ring. Ring—a creature so entirely unique, he fails to fit into any of those categories.

Everyone has their own idea as to what Ring is, and as to where he came from. So here’s mine.

(Spoilers for the end of the main storyline. Various postgame dialogue spoilers beyond that.)

If we’re going to talk about where Ring might have come from, it makes sense to look for clues in what he’s presented as. Physically, and subtextually. So let’s take it from the top.

Stepping away from the confines of the game, Ring’s shape is based off a Pilates ring, a piece of exercise equipment who’s history dates back to nearly a century ago, as of the game’s release. It was invented to help rehabilitate wounded soldiers through physical therapy following World War I. Design-wise, though…Ring’s face draws heavy inspiration from depictions of Ancient Inca art. Specifically, he looks a lot like the figure atop this ceremonial tumi knife.

The prominent nose. The familiar jawline. A headpiece bisecting the brow. The blue commonly set into the eyes of the art. The ears—heavy earrings were unisex among the Inca nobility, resulting in long, stretched lobes. But most importantly—the statue is gold. And in the ancient Inca Empire, gold was revered as being sweat from the very sun itself. Metal nowadays is often associated with machinery, with invention. But raw metal has always been a fruit of the earth, as natural as any wood or leaf. The Inca took it a step further. They thought of gold as mystical.

Likewise, Ring’s design is meant to invoke these traits. Despite being made of metal, Ring visibly lacks gears or wiring or nozzles or hatches. His mouth may have a hinge and his flaming little hair piece may spin around. But in terms of “build,” Ring (the magical metal donut) has more in common with Pinocchio (the magical wooden puppet), than with an actual machine.

On a surface level, Ring really is best described as a “magical creature.” He’s obviously not made of flesh and blood. But he’s alive in a way that the closest comparison—sentient robots—just aren’t. Ring sweats, breathes, sleeps, eats. He ages. His metal face flexes and grows and shrinks as he speaks. Ring wields exercise energy, much in the same way that humans do, and more. He crafts, enhances, and stores things with it. Its raw essence flows through him like a fiery kind of lifeblood.

Ring’s not a human or a cyborg. He’s not a monster or a ghost or an animal. He’s made of metal like a robot, and that’s about it. And while Ring may (presumably) have the long life of a god, he lacks everything else. Right down to the proper shape and abilities. Ring, whatever the specifics, is a “magical creature” that exists in a class of his own. We never ever meet another being quite like him.

…At least. That’s what I used to think.

———

The thing with Ring is, it’s hard to tell whether he’s actively omitting facts or just forgetting them. He’s got a terrible memory. But he also as good as lies to us in the beginning, pretending as though Dragaux’s just some enemy to him.

So here is what I understand.

We meet Ring, and he and Dragaux are positioned as these perfect opposites, as perfect enemies. Ring builds others up, and Dragaux tears them down. Dragaux is flashy, an eyesore, the purple to Ring’s yellow, and yet he steals the stage every time. He’s a jerk, but he’s Ring’s jerk. We show up to every boss fight because we are invested in his story, his opinions, his downward spiral.

And that’s our first mistake, really. Because Dragaux’s accent color isn’t purple, it’s pink. Because Dragaux’s opposite isn’t Ring, it’s Trainee. And Ring’s real foil was never Dragaux, but Dark Influence itself.

———

Have you ever thought about how strange it is, this particular parasite. From a narrative standpoint, I mean. As much as it’s referred to as “Dragaux’s influence” or “Dragaux’s aura,” Dragaux is only its latest meal, not its source. And that meal has been lasting anywhere from decades to a century, at least. Dark Influence is, by nature, negativity incarnate. It could be as old as the hills. Older, maybe.

Dark Influence is voiceless, faceless. A parasite composed of pure negative exercise energy, it can theoretically exist on its own. But it thrives best when entrenched in the heart of a host. Its host—a physical creature that, once ensnared, starts exhibiting traits that belong to the Influence: like great swathes of flame in its signature color.

Does that not sound. Familiar.

Because Ring and Dark Influence? Fulfill eerily similar roles, in regards to their syncing partners.

Both of them harness their partner’s exercise energy. Both of them augment the abilities of their partner. But unlike Ring, who’s always actively helping Trainee in precise and creative ways…Dark Influence doesn’t care. I’m not sure if it can give a care about anything that doesn’t include “amassing power” and “spreading itself.” (And I think those are just instincts. I’ve yet to see proof that this thing has anything approaching a complex personality.) But whether or not it cares about Dragaux, it’s fully anchored within his body. It shares its strength with him because there’s nowhere else to store it.

Because unlike Ring, Dark Influence lacks a physical body of its own.

And that thought. How it “lacks” a body. Just sort of stuck around in my head. Because it’s funny, isn’t it? That Ring speaks and this thing doesn’t. That Dark Influence, this wildfire, is so strong and potent and infectious while Ring’s inner flames are so small and orderly and self-contained.

And then I started thinking about coins. Isn’t it funny, that they’re shaped like little rings. Isn’t it funny, that they sometimes just. Spring out of the ground.

How does a free-to-play gym turn a profit. How do all of these gyms, turn a profit.

If NPCs canonically collect coins on their travels just like Trainee… If someone isn’t just throwing away buckets of money into the mountains and rivers and skies… if golden little rings can just spring into existence alongside someone as they’re jogging…

What if it’s not a quirk. What if it’s not just a game mechanic.

What if everything—the coins, the EXP medals, the treasure chests with Ring’s face on them—what if they’re all byproducts that occur when a physical place is saturated with high amounts of foot traffic. With high amounts of exercise energy. People in Ring Fit Adventure constantly expel this stuff as they jog or work out or engage in fit battles. They don’t really direct it anywhere after its release. It just kind of gets absorbed into their surroundings. I always assumed that it helped make the land so lush and pretty, but what if it doesn’t stop there. What if, when large quantities of it gather, exercise energy naturally builds up and condenses itself into permanent, physical solids.

And I thought of Ring. Of the coins that are shaped like him. Of the medals that eerily share his face. Of the treasure chests especially, the way they scream and run and flex as though alive. (And I thought about Dragaux, who’s canonically brilliant, and how even his best statues fell short of capturing that same quality of animation.) I thought about how all three of these byproducts are golden. Just. Like. Ring.

Something like “dark” influence should have a natural counterpart. It’s a tale as old as time; perfect opposites, perfect enemies. But we never meet the Influence’s other half, do we? Just Ring.

Ring, our buddy, our pal. Ring, who’s a person in every way that matters, with hope and dreams and insecurities. Ring the “magical creature,” who, despite all of this, has more in common with Dark Influence than with any other creature in all of Ring Fit.

———

So here is the heart of my crazy theory.

Ring isn’t “partially” made of energy. He’s all energy, all the way down to his every last piece, whether it flows like a river or shines like a stone. And it could be that a long, long time ago, he existed much in the same way as the Dark Influence we fight in the game: as an unrestrained and formless entity. Not as a ring, but as a bright and brainless swathe of flames.

(Because if Dark Influence is insecurity and self-destruction and decay, balance would dictate its opposite be positivity, self-improvement, rebirth. A dangerously Bright Influence.)

And maybe it was just a natural process that got triggered when the conditions were right. But either way, somehow, someway, this particular Influence reincarnated into a shape that could better interact with people, without overwhelming or eating them. And that most natural shape condensed itself into Ring.

A baby Ring.

———

Even if you don’t buy into the existence of “Bright” Influence, Ring fully being some sort of life energy incarnate answers too many questions. It would explain why Ring is so good at manipulating exercise energy; it’s the most natural extension of himself. It would explain why Ring has the unique ability to sync with people; it’s how he originally used to exist, as life energy drifting in and out of living creatures. It would explain the aging. It would explain why Ring never mentions a parent or creator watching over him during childhood; because he came into this world totally alone. (Baby Ring belonged to no one before he belonged with Baby Drags.)

But Ring’s theoretical past life answers a few more questions. It could explain parts of Ring’s personality, his interests. (His dream of spreading positivity across the land.) It explains why there aren’t ten million Rings floating about, when coins and medals and chests are so relatively common. (Because there’s a key ingredient missing). It actually explains his five special powers. (Because I’m betting Influences have human-related origins. It’s either that, or “live humans being consumed” was part of the “perfect” conditions surrounding Ring’s birth. Which, cringe.) But more than anything, it addresses the sheer power imbalance happening between Ring and Dark Influence right now.

Dark Influence lacks boundaries and spreads itself like a virus, thoughtless and instinctive. Ring’s natural weapon against this thing should be to “infect” it right back. (I would expect some sort of sick light show to dance across Dragaux’s body during battle; yellow flames squaring off against purple.) But it doesn’t work that way. Ring the Person no longer works this way.

If Dark influence is a forest fire, then Ring is a fireplace set behind glass. At their core, these two are both energy. But the modes in which they exist divide them into separate skill sets entirely.

Dark Influence is wildfire of brute strength. It’s got range—in the spatial sense. It can spread to as many secondary hosts as Dragaux directs it to, so long as it’s fed well enough to reach for them. Compared to Ring’s measly one syncing partner, Dark Influence can sink itself into whole regions, can simultaneously feed off of so many people. It doesn’t have outright mind control powers; it’s more subtle than that. But its presence as negativity incarnate naturally works like a magnet to draw out the worst in people. There is nothing it enhances in a person that wasn’t already there, no matter how small the weakness. Coupled with the rush of power it imparts in its vessels, it makes bad decisions feel right. Even to good people. It’s, quite simply, a bad influence. (And then it consumes them.)

But other than that, Dark Influence doesn’t really do much.

Our bud Ring may only be able to light one house at a time, so to speak. But as contained as he is—Ring’s powers are more varied and nuanced, because Ring is more varied and nuanced. He’s always actively (and thoughtfully) applying energy to construct, convert, and amplify. For all its fearsome strength, the only thing Dark Influence can seemingly do on purpose, is feed.

———

(If Ring was once a being like Dark Influence, then that solves the final mystery of synchronization. If Dark Influence “infects” its host by sinking into the body, then Ring syncs with a partner by “planting” a piece of his essence inside them. This is why Trainee’s energy signature changes to mimic Ring’s; because she now carries a part of him in her beating heart. This is why Ring can freely access her energy; because this makes her a part of him now, too.)

———

So. Let’s pretend I’m not crazy. Say that all of these little details I’ve collected were intentionally laid out by the game developers. Say I’m correct, and that Ring really is, essentially, the child of Dark Influence’s greatest natural enemy.

The real question is: how self aware is Ring about all of this.

Because unfortunately, Ring not knowing his own backstory could be pretty on-brand for him. I love Ring, but from his point of view, it really could be that he just appeared one day, somehow—as an entirely clean slate. “Dark” or “bright,” these entities are brainless. Literally. No body means no brain. They can’t store memories, so they don’t have memories. Just energy.

Ring must know that he’s made from energy, too. He might even think of himself as one very lucky byproduct. But if this is really what Ring used to be (if there’s even a shadow of a chance that his predecessor used to eat people), then he might not know the full extent of his own story.

And maybe that’s for the best. I can’t imagine him choosing to get close to people otherwise. He loves people, cares so much about every single silly soul that he meets.

This would hurt him.

———

Whatever Ring’s origins may be, whatever he might have once been (if he’s ever been anything else at all)… I do know one thing. And it’s that I prefer him prefer him just the way he is.

Weird comments about my sweat aside, I wouldn’t have him any other way.

———

TL;DR: Our bud Ring has more in common with Dark Influence than with any other creature in all of Ring Fit.

If a flaming entity of negative energy can exist, then why not one made of positive energy? If positive energy condenses into permanent solids naturally and often…if Ring is made of positive energy…if Ring has more in common with Dark Influence than with anything else in this game…

Who’s to say that Ring himself, wasn’t once a flaming yellow mass of energy.

———

This marks the end. I could run wild with all the implications this theory leaves in its wake. But I’ve made my point. I’ve found every answer I was looking for. And they may not have been the answers I was expecting (or even wanting), but they’ve satisfied me all the same.

I’m done. Believe what you will.

Thanks for reading, and for sticking with me all this way. It’s been real.

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DISCLAIMER: My name is Pizzazz and I take this game way too seriously. This is all for fun! At the time of this post, I am on World 36 of the post game. I feel pretty strongly about my conclusions, but I’ll go back and edit this if/when/where applicable.

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RING ANALYSIS

Part 1: Synchronizing—How it Works and What It Tells Us About Ring

Part 2: Ring’s Powers—And What They All Have In Common

Part 3: Ring’s Biology and Possible Origins

[gohyuck]

teaser for the my fic that’s part of denise’s ( @hyucksie​ ) nct: almost collab and part of my interlude: neo zone series

pairing: journalist!serial killer!renjun x already dead!reader

genre: ...oh man. angst, quite a lot of it. all the fluff and smut between renjun and the reader occur in his dreams, as, in real life, he never met the reader prior to their murder and him getting assigned to report on their death

word count: tba (likely a minimum of 10k words)

warnings: alcohol, explicit sex, mentions of a dead animal, obsessive behaviors, stalking, characters with no concept of a moral compass, implications that characters may have been abused in their pasts, descriptions of jail that may be inaccurate or not fully true-to-form, serial killers/ serial killing

teaser continues under the cut, it’s 1.5k words long. please message me if you’d like to be added to the taglist!

Renjun is eleven when he watches his across-the-street neighbor run over his next-door neighbor’s cat in broad daylight. The driver of the BMW does not stop, does not even slow down to assess the damage to the cat or the car, only speeds past as if they haven’t altered the state of the universe, made an unforgivable change to their neighborhood, taken an innocent life. He experiences it all through the floor-to-ceiling windows that expose the Huangs’ formal living room to the world. They’re not unlike the same windows that show off their formal dining room, their actual living room, and their actual dining room. 

As much as he can see out, others can see in just as easily. Just as equally.

At least the bedrooms have curtains.

He doesn’t really react, not even as he stares at the dark red stain, the blood-matted fur on the asphalt. It horrifies him, of course it does, but he’s more afraid of the repercussions that yelling or screaming would bring down on him. As long as he is in the house where nothing is hidden, he is meant to be seen but not heard. Renjun knows this well.

The image of the dead cat, of its blood and bones, its fur and flat, empty eyes, sears itself into Renjun’s brain. It preoccupies him from that moment, twisting itself uncomfortably into strings of his heart. That poor cat, only out for a short hunt or pursuing a curiosity, its life cut short in a tragic and terrible way. An unforgivable murder. He never forgets it, never escapes it. 

Death should have a purpose, Renjun thinks. 

Innocent lives should never be taken.

-

Metal sliding against metal might just be the most unpleasant sound in the world. 

Yangyang clutches his notebook to his chest, running his fingers absentmindedly against the unbinded side to make sure that all the folded papers he’d stuffed within its pages are still there. He does this just a little too fast, only registering this as the air hits his fresh papercut, causing him to wince at the new sting that buzzes against his fingertip. Without thinking, he wraps his other arm tighter around his book and raises the affronted finger - left ring - to his mouth.

It’s like this - holding onto his leatherbound notebook as a lifeline and nervously laving his tongue over his new cut - that Yangyang Liu, previously a reporter at The Daily and currently a biographer on a mission, enters the most secure federal prison in the country. The barred gates screech to a halt once they meet the ends of their rails, and the guard at Yangyang’s side nods to his colleague on the other side of the open gate. 

“The biographer?” The uniformed man calls from in front of Yangyang. 

“This is the one.” Yangyang’s own officer - what’s his name again? - replies, yelling a little louder than what could be deemed necessary. His coworker says nothing more, only stepping aside for the other two to walk in. They do so.

Yangyang registers little of the gray walls and cold air that are suddenly all that are within his line of sight, mind already trapped within the holding cell he’s about to visit. He’s heard all the stories, read all the news clippings, seen all the court tapes, and yet… and yet he suddenly feels as if he’s about to start studying this man - this character - anew. It’s as if he’s about to turn to the first page of a book nobody’s ever read before. A story just for himself. 

“Sit.” The officer is none-too-gentle as he pulls a steel chair out of what seems like thin air and hands it to Yangyang, gesturing lazily towards a spot in front of a section of the cell bars. Before he takes a seat, the biographer takes in the scene with which he’s just been presented: a cell empty save for a cot and a chair, with a tiny window high up, far too high for any mere mortal to reach even with the aid of a chair. The world is silent for one long, slow moment before a lump on the cot - one Yangyang hadn’t registered at first - shifts ever-so-slightly. 

The biographer holds his breath, drums his fingers against his notebook in anticipation, and clutches the curved top of the back of the cold steel chair just a little bit harder. He still does not sit. He waits, and watches, and waits, and watches instead. The officer - guard, Yangyang supposes - grumbles something lowly under his breath, his already thin patience wearing away by the second. 

“Get up, Huang,” The guard finally barks out, seemingly at the tail-end of his wit. “He doesn’t have all day.”

The cot lump shifts again, though by a far greater degree this time around. Yangyang suddenly feels far more nervous than before, which is saying something, considering he has fear in his heart. He wishes it was the fear of God, truly, he does, but he knows far too well that it’s the fear of humanity instead. One of the worst specimens, in his view, is only a few metal bars and a thin blanket away from him at the moment.

Yangyang lifts his hand off the chair and to his mouth again, sucking on the papercut as if it’s a decade long habit of his rather than a newly acquired fixation in the moment. It seems as if the lump has decided not to move again, and the biographer takes this as a sign to finally sit down. His heels are starting to ache, anyways. 

As if sensing his movement, the lump shifts, this time turning fully to face the wall rather than Yangyang. The biographer thinks that he can make out a tuft of salt-and-pepper hair. He can barely piece together any visual of the man he’s come to see, but, from what he can ascertain, Renjun Huang is a slight, delicate looking man, hardly terrifying to any eye. He would’ve been stronger, perhaps, at the time of his crimes, but he couldn't have been that much more imposing. 

“I will not get up,” Renjun Huang finally speaks, and once he does, his voice is raspy with what must be a lack of use. Yangyang winces out of sympathy. It must be lonely. The blanket is pulled up, and the tuft of visible hair disappears under blue wool. “I will not, but I can speak. Not long. You’re the biographer?”

The shift from Renjun speaking to the guard and speaking to Yangyang is so subtle that the latter almost does not notice it. Once he does, he hums an affirmative, finally releasing his tight hold on his notebook in order to lay it in his lap and open it. He pulls a pen - blue, pilot G2 - out of his front pocket and clicks it open with satisfaction. 

“Yes,” He reiterates, even though Renjun is definitely sure of his identity by now. “I’m Yangyang Liu. I was hoping we could begin with -”

“Everyone thinks it started with the article about (Name)’s murder,” He coughs mid-sentence. The rasp is clearing, slightly, slowly giving way to a quiet, but firm tone of speech. He does not seem to process that he’s interrupted Yangyang, and the biographer is too full of intrigue to stop him from speaking any more. “That’s what they all think, but it isn’t true.”

Renjun goes silent, then, but Yangyang knows that he has much more to say. He leans forward in his cold chair, face getting closer to the cold cell bars. 

“Where did it start, then? When?” He finally asks, blue pen poised over white paper. It’s as if his fingers are itching for a story, the way they’d always twitched in anticipation when he’d gotten good article assignments at The Daily. The novelty, the excitement had worn out over time. Yangyang had missed it until now. 

The guard is quiet, now, hardly even moving a muscle. Perhaps he’s tuned out entirely, lost in a world of his own. Maybe - though more or less likely than the former, Yangyang is unsure - he’s as fascinated as the biographer himself, watching and waiting for something to happen, for the first shoe to drop in order for the second to follow. The cell and its surroundings are so quiet that Renjun’s breathing is the only audible sound. It’s a little shallow, a little harried, as if he’s just finished a quick sprint and about to start another that he’s unprepared for.

Yangyang supposes that he has, in a way. He glances at the empty page beneath him to find that he’s accidentally placed a tiny dot in the corner of his open page. Fuck. 

Renjun intakes a shuddering breath, and Yangyang’s head snaps back up. He’ll worry about his organization later. He stares, intent, at the lump on the cot. It moves slightly, and Yangyang discerns that the decrepit man is about to speak again. 

He’s right.

“It began when I was raised…” Renjun Huang begins, licking his dry lips and swallowing his spit before he continues. “... I was raised in a glass house.”

[blackch-rry]

“His side of the bed”

p. sunghoon x female reader (1.2k)

warnings: angst? shitty writing. this is from months ago and idk why i’m posting it in the first place. it’s supposed to be multiple parts but i don’t think i’ll be doing that :) 

***

She always appreciated having the night shifts. Maybe there's something in the air when its long passed sunset that makes it so calming; addicting. If it was safe enough she would take nightly walks all by her lonesome. Walks that would last hours while her mind went off running.

 Her deepest wish in life is to let the free spirit that resides in her body float up into the sky and find a home on the clouds. There's something holding her back of course. There always is. It could be the pile of late assignments she has no interest in completing. Or it could be the obvious.

A broken heart that was shoved into the darkest, deepest, place in her. She doesn't like to admit when she's hurt or hurting. She guesses it's because her pain is something only she wants to feel. It's nobody else's business besides the person who put her in this state. There is a part of her that wants this pain to escape and travel somewhere far away. Possibly to him. Him. She would like him to feel this way too, because she thinks he has no idea at all.

The store's interior is new and freshly renovated, but the outside is a work of art only decades on earth could do. Green vines crawling every which direction. Cracks and broken chucks missing from numerous bricks. Personally, she prefers the run down, old, look. But she won't disagree that the inside looks much sharper and modern. 

Her co-worker just stepped down from the ladder on the farthest left wall.

"It's time for me to head out. Hopefully since it's a thursday," He pushes his sleeve up to check his wristwatch, "and almost eleven there won't be a lot of late night shoppers."

She always thought Jungwon had a nice smile since her first day on the job. He's a nice guy from what she knew. Apparently, they attended the same high school three years ago. She was a senior when he was a junior. "Don't forget to turn off the backroom light before you lock up, okay? You left it on last time and, ironically, Joy wasn't too happy about that."

Jungwon placed the last few books from his hands into their respectful places before heading back and grabbing his belongings. She halted him by placing a hand on his shoulder before he left for the night. "Thank you by the way. For saving my ass with Joy." She quickly put her hands behind her back and put on a smile of gratitude.

Jungwon would be lying if he said he hadn't noticed anything different with her the past couple of weeks. He noticed everything of course, how she lessened conversations with customers and shortened her responses to everyone. It's just the two of them working the later shifts of the day. Jungwon thinks she could be a great actress.

"It's no problem at all. Have a good night, okay?"

She did a slight nod of her head. She walked back behind the counter and continued where she left off. It was quicker than usual how fast she got distracted and rummaged through her bag for a certain notebook. She pulled out a dark blue pen and got to work. Draw a flower. A rose. Then, draw a butterfly. Write a phrase. I miss you on your side of the bed. No... cross that out...please.

She straightened her back when her phone chimed. Glancing at the time, it had been a little over thirty minutes since Jungwon left.

I won't be home when you get back. Probably be back around tomorrow night.

A text message from her roommate. As she typed out a couple words the bell above the door alerted her of someone's presence but she didn't lift her head from her phone; assuming it was probably some middle aged customer. She replied some minutes ago but got distracted, once again, by her Instagram feed. Definitely not employee of the month. All previous sounds were blocked out, but there was a sudden clearing of a throat less than four feet away from her.

She never thought movies made sense when a character would say 'It happened in slow motion', but she could say she felt her chest burn the second she saw him and the way his eyes met hers was painfully slow.

"Sunghoon..."

She hated how she said his name instinctively, no thought or hesitance at all. Her eyes shifted to his hands. A book. No, two.

"Wow, it's...been so long hasn't it?"

"A year isn't that long."

She guesses she made him uncomfortable because of the way he laughed off what she said. She can't seem to take her eyes off the books. Especially not when he puts them onto the space between them.

"Just these two?" Her voice is stable but low and quiet. She gets nothing but a nod in return.

"I didn't know you were back."

"How could you have? I didn't tell anyone besides, well, h-"

"Her? I figured."

She supposes there has been something eating inside of her since the very beginning of their end. It's not done yet, but it's made some sort of breakthrough that day. She holds in her scoff as best as possible.

"Two of the same book?"

"She wanted me to read it at the same time as her."

That made whatever was there eat faster. She hadn't even rung up the second book yet. He clearly noticed how slow she was going and sighed out of irritation.

"Does she make you do everything with her?"

"What's with all the questions?"

"I just find it funny. You always told me to stop wasting my time on books and letting my head get stuck somewhere non-existent. You never picked up a novel. It's-"

"Yeah, I know. I'm a hypocrite." He ran a hand through his hair. Something he did when he was running low on patience. She decided to state the painfully obvious.

"You're doing it because you love her. I mean, you're in love with her."

"Can you just tell me what the total is?" His card is sitting pretty in between his fingers. She knows his hands are ice cold. No... she probably makes them warm.

"$29.98."

He makes sure they don't touch when he hands over his card. She notices.

When midnight arrives, she double checks the backroom light is off and the door is locked. The short walk back to her apartment is relatively quiet if you don't count her inner thoughts.

She's got a free spirit somewhere in there, no doubt about it. But the reason why she's not letting herself get a taste of the wind has just moved back to town. The pain she hasn't let go of for more than a year is ready to see the sky, touch the stars. It's been ready, but she's grown so used to it she wouldn't know what to do, how to live on, if it escaped.

She's come to the realization that it's not fair how people could be so okay with leaving behind their other half. It doesn't matter if she's still in love. It never does.

No matter how many times she sleeps on her side of the bed, how warm it can get, his will always be cold and it eventually spreads to her as well.

[dearest-kibble]

I like your take on yandere Zuko a lot! I wanted to ask what would he do if his darling tried to escape from him?

 this is actually a part of something that is uhh,,, 9,000 words atm (and still going) so if ya’ll want the full thing, just let me know and up it’ll go.I’m so sorry this took so long, it should not have (it actually has a second part but it features me being a degenerate on main,,, so it’s going in a different spot,,, do not read it if you don’t want degeneracy)

Zuko leaves you with a candle for the night. It’s the one night you’ve been left alone in four, maybe five years. He claims it’s something about how he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands to himself tonight. It wasn't like he hadn’t touched you before. (But he hadn’t blushed like he did earlier that night when he lit your candle.) You watch the candle flicker from across the room. You haven’t gotten too close to it. It swirls with little flickers of pink and blue against a healthy orange and is probably hot enough to burn if you get too close. You’ve been sitting since he closed your door, and your forehead hasn’t stopped tingling from where he kissed you. You hate him. You love him. But you don’t want to be here, in this room alone with fire. You’d rather be anywhere but near his fire. You’d rather be anywhere than with him. But who doesn’t want to be with the man who protects them. Who loves them. Your grip on your wrist is tight and you hadn’t even noticed that your nails had begun to dig into your palm. In your hand a warm piece of metal sits. You’ve been turning it over since Zuko told you he had a present for you. You’d been getting the same present for years and you’d accepted. The gold hairpin with red tassels taunts you from your palm.

“Tomorrow.” A suspiciously raspy voice, coated in a regal gold echoing in your two, unmarred ears. And you sat. And sat and sat. And your nails began to draw blood. And the hairpin’s tassels, though red, were stained. It clatters to the ground, leaving your palm and mind for one second before you realize that you can feel silk on your foot. Your hands dart to the arms of your chair. Move move move. And your arms sit on top of wood that was carved a decade ago. It’s awkward and uncomfortable and cold. It’s nothing familiar. But maybe that's a good thing. You’d almost forgotten what anything but Zuko feels like. Something inside you misses the heat he emits, whispers that he warms your heart. Something a little larger than yourself screams that he’s burned you. And before you continue to think your feet push yourself out of the chair, the silk tassel falling off of your foot as the hairpin slips your mind. He’s burned you, he'll do it again. Your mind argues with your body before your hands make the decision to stop gripping the red fabric that Zuko insisted you dressed in. Burgundy silk shifts as you begin to walk past the flame that flickers in purples and greens, flecks of red shifting behind a screen of glass. You pick it up, the warmth through the glass so uncomfortably familiar that you can’t help but grip it a little tighter. The candle burns a little brighter. You suck in a breath. You shakily exhale. Holding the candle makes so much more of the room visible, it’s made of metal, almost prison like. You didn’t want to be here. You remember the boiling rock story, sneak out through a blind spot and make for a war balloon. The window wasn’t hard to find with your light source, your reflection on the glass isn’t correct, something is missing. Your topknot. You can fix that (No you can’t) when you’re on a war balloon. You open your window, letting the breeze blow in. The gossamer curtains flutter at the contact as you lift a leg to put through the open window. You feel even colder exposed to the night air. The moon is new tonight, favoring invisibility for the night. Your foot touches soft grass as you straddle the open window and ungratefully almost drop your candle. Your breathing darkens for a bit before softening and looking frantically at your surroundings. The flame in your hands gets a little warmer as you slowly start to slide along the grass of what you recognize to be the gardens.

Your foot hits something small and fuzzy and your breath hitches as you hear an agitated “Quack” Your gaze shifts down as you lock eyes with the beady black eyes of a baby turtleduck. It’s mother wakes immediately, gives you one look and bites your ankle with ferocity. Once again you almost drop your guide. You bite your tongue to keep from crying out in pain. You don’t move, and you taste blood in your mouth before the mother turtleduck slowly releases it’s bill from your heel. And the candle grows a little warmer as you move away from the pond. You’d been this way before once. Through the gate, over a small bridge and up stairs that you hadn’t been allowed to climb on your own. They’re exhausting now, and you would shiver if it weren't for the flame in your hands, yellow and purple with an edge of turquoise.

You stand on a flattened platform that used to have airships tethered to its ground. Now it has what you hear Zuko call dirigibles docked at the ledge. You’re after one of the smaller balloons. The ones that are white and no longer have an insignia that was branded into the retinas of all who saw it.

--

Zuko looks down at you, sitting in the basket of a war balloon, he frowns as he hoists himself over the railing. You stand as he gets in and smile. An instinct that had been burned into you is telling you to touch his shoulder. So you make you way over to his side. His gaze doesn't even meet yours. A heart you forgot could beat starts to pound as you look at him.

“Are you-”

“Yeah.” It's gruff, a little crackly as he speaks. “We need to leave.”

“Okay,” And you don’t press any further. He’ll tell you when he wants and you’ll listen. You don’t have a choice. You place your palm on his back and you can feel his breath deepen.

“Fire bending comes from the breath, right?” You’d heard it once. On a day you wish was easy to forget.

“That’s what Uncle always said.” If he’d let you go, you might not be here today. But you might not be anywhere if he let you go.

“Then breathe Zuko,” You let your palm linger until Zuko turns maybe an hour after you’ve been in the sky.

“Your topknot has fallen out, let me redo it for you.” He gives you a smile. You’re glad to see it. It’s always better when he’s happy.

“Thank you.” You kneel down in the basket. You hear one more puff of flame before he bends down and runs his fingers through your hair. The almost moan you let out might’ve been intentional, and Zuko’s hands rush with a slight heat. They still in your hair for only a second before continuing to comb through.

“You sound nice like that.” It’s painfully obvious he’s trying to make it sound like an offhand comment as he gathers your hair to bring on top of your head. You give no response as he wraps a silk around your hair. His hands stay for a little longer and he drags his nails along your scalp. Another, less intentional moan falls from your lips and Zuko’s grip tightens before he immediately pulls away, and turns back to the furnace keeping the war balloon afloat.

“Thank you for putting my hair up.” you’re sure your cheeks flush a little as you look at Zuko. (You had to pinch them)

“I’ll make you a hairpin once we land.”

“Please?” It may have been a learned response from the other times he’s tried to gift you pins to put into your hair, but this one felt a little different. Zuko rubs a thumb over your cheekbone before leaning in to breathe,

“Of course my love.” His cheeks are red and his thumb contains the same heat that his hand had earlier. He pulls you taut against his chest and doesn’t let go until you feel the balloon start to sink.

--

You knew you’d have to get rid of your guiding flame. The one you're sure that Zuko left to ensure your safety. Ensure your incineration. The question is, how? Are you to smash it against the stone of the platform? Wouldn’t that catch the baskets on fire, or worse wouldn’t that burn you? Was that what Zuko wanted to do? Did he want to burn you? He wanted to keep you safe, that's what he always said, but he’d burned you before. He said it was an accident. But it didn’t change the fact you were burned. Fire benders will always burn when they can. Why should Zuko be any different. He loves you. If he loved you he wouldn’t have burned you. But he gives you food, he does your hair, he gives you clothes. He protects you. He yells and he burns. He ended the war.

You’re screaming before you even hear the glass break, swirls of green and yellow and blue flare to swarm your vision with color that makes you want to vomit. The smell of smoke invades your nostrils and you feel tears fall down your cheeks. Breath escapes you as you try to remember all the times you’ve been told to “Breathe.” the only voice you can conjure is a soft crackle that whispers into your ear - you hear a cacophony of sounds, somehow they only add to your distress, none of them are telling you to just “breathe” and they only scream and yell and you can’t see anything but fire- and your wrist burns and the small of your back is being held - he’s burned through your silk again. And you’re screaming all over again and you hear the words but they aren’t soft and in your ear, he’s angry. They’re loud and you can’t fucking think other than you wish he’d stop stop stop the fire. He’s carrying you down the stairs and you know exactly what room you’re going to and you know that you’re finally going to see why he was a part of this family. He’s going to burn and burn and burn and you can’t fucking breathe. He’s yelling — screaming at guards who aren’t at fault but you can’t hear anything they say, only that he’s mad and it’s your fault. He sits you down in the room, you don’t think he knows you're crying and you probably deserve whatever he’s going to do, you shouldn’t run, you shouldn’t run. He burns a chair first.

“I can’t believe that you’d try to run away!” He sounds angry, he's screaming and it’s at you and you can’t stop it. Old scrolls next.

“From me,” he spits fire from his mouth, smoke curling from his lips. “I love you! Don’t you know that? I. Love. You.” He’s looking at you and there’s a flame burning in his hand and he has nothing in his hand but fire and he’s going to burn you like his family burned him. “You’re mine.” Red-blue fire dances on his fingers as a banner starts to ignite. An angry red scar is all you can see amidst the flames.

“Please, Zuko,” Smoke billows from his mouth and tears continue to drop as you struggle to think of anything but fire. “I-I,”

“You what?” His lips curl into a sneer and you don’t know what the fuck you can do to stay alive.

“I, l-” you choke on a sob. You can’t stop crying. And suddenly a darkness that had settled into his eyes clears. He drops to his knees and extinguishes all flames. The smell of smoke is still in the air.

“I made you cry.” You can barely hear his voice. You can barely hear anything. “I made you cry.” And he sounds angry again. And you cry some more.

“I’m sorry.” He walks a little closer to you, kneels. “I’m sorry.” And you take a gasp of breath and another tear falls. “I never meant to hurt you.” He’s bowing and you can’t help but feel that you should be bowing to him.

“I’m s-sorry.” You choke it out of your throat and taste blood.

“I scared you,” His hair is touching the floor as his head tilts to look up at you. “You shouldn’t be sorry.”

“N-” you bit your lip. “No, I shouldn’t have taken your kindness and thrown it.” And he stretches out his hand.

“No, you shouldn’t have to forgive me,”

“I’ll always forgive you.” The truth tastes bitter on your tongue. “Please,” another tear forces its way out. “Please, I’ll do anything if you forgive me.” Anything so that he’ll never be angry again. Smoke clings to your mind as you nod profusely.

“I forgive you.” He looks deep into your eyes and liquid gold drips down his face. “We’ll move our ceremony to the day after tomorrow? I want it to be the happiest day of our life.” He tries to crack one of his smiles. You really love his smile.

“Y-yeah.” You nod, still crying. “I’d like that Zuko.” And you lean forward a little, positioning yourself a little closer. “Can you carry me to our room, p-please?”

“Of course.” His head gives a curt nod before he stands up slowly. A miserable laugh escapes you, as more water drains from your body. He gently reaches out his arms for you to fall into before he arranges your body to carry.

“Thank you Zuko.” And you close your eyes softly as he kisses your temple.

“I love you,” You’re too tired to think. Too tired to even catch the tightening of his fingers as he carries you. The narrowing of his eyes as you forget those words that he needs to hear from your voice. Sobs from your lips come a little more quietly as you burrow your head into his chest which rises and falls with practiced breath. The rhythm of his heartbeat — though irregular — is comforting and slowly, you start to feel yourself calm down. You pass through a gate, and then another.

“Open this door.” It’s the voice you hear when he makes you sit in on meetings, before he adds in a much more familiar tone, “Please?”

“Of course Fire Lord.” The guard sounds urgent. Who wouldn’t after hearing him yell and burn and burn and burn.

“Are you alright?” He’s still holding you, but you can feel his body sink into your shared mattress. You just press your face further into his chest. He’s heating up. “I’ll put on a pot of tea.” He begins to set you down on the bed, fluffing a pillow under your head. “Tea is best when you drink it with another. Or, so Uncle always says.” He’s trying to make you laugh, with his impression of Iroh. “Oh! He told me a tea joke recently, it was about a man named Jin who uhh. Sang?” You snort a little at that. “There was another one, about uhh.” He trails off, snapping a little spark to life under his kettle.

“You can’t remember it?” The pillow which held your head was soft, maybe made of turtleduck feathers.

“No, but believe me - I've chaid.” He lets out a small chuckle himself and you can’t help but to return it, even on impulse. The room sits, steeped in the smell of jasmine tea and woodfire. Though comfortable, something about the silence makes you uneasy.

“A turtleduck bit me tonight.” Your hands feel empty without Zuko there. “I think I kicked a baby.”

“I always used to apologize to the turtleducks when I was a kid.” You can hear his smile. “Especially if Azula threw something at them.” The ceiling has very little to smile about, but your lips curl into an unfamiliar shape, one that didn’t feel forced. You heave a sigh.

“Yeah.” You don’t want to smile.

“Yeah,” You hear the pouring of water and the clink of porcelain. A few seconds and Zuko is sitting beside you on the mattress and handing you an intricately carved cup. He waits for you to sit up before grinning at you and taking a small sip. You hold the cup, it’s much too hot to hold and you place it down on the sheets.

“Is it too hot?” His eyebrow lifts in worry. “I can cool it off for you, er uh, probably.”

“No - thank you, I think I should just go to sleep.” Before you even finish your sentence Zuko is opening his mouth. He meets your gaze for a few seconds before closing it.

“You’ve had a stressful night.” Zuko flinches slightly before taking your hand in his and picking up your cup. He places it on a bedside table before kissing your forehead. “You should sleep.” He takes a deeper drink from his cup before placing it next to yours and running a hand through your hair. Breath catches in your throat before thinning slightly. The hand running through your hair drags over your body to find your stomach, briefly lingering on your collarbone before pushing on your stomach in an attempt to make you lie down. You ignore how warm his hand has gotten and how you’re sure your sleep clothes are ruined from the unintentional burning Zuko has caused. Slowly, gently you close your eyes and ignore the lingering smell of smoke.

“Day after tomorrow,” Zuko whispers incredulously before moving off the bed, grabbing something and lying down next to you. He’s ever so gentle when he pulls you into his side. “I really love you. Please, never leave me.” 

[twinkleallnight]

Remember me -3

Book: The Royal Romance AU

Pairing: Leo x Madeleine

Word count: 1206

Disclaimer: All characters belong to pixelberry.

Rating: Mature

Warning: Mention of death.

Prompt: Features @choicesaprilchallenge2021 Day 10-horizon.

Summary: Leo has returned, has been brought back to Cordonia after almost three decades. But he is not the same Leo we knew. He is devastated after his wife Katie’s death and his own brother Liam is not able to revive him out of the grief. Everyone looks at one person with all hopes: Madeleine. Will their story begin again at the twilight of their lives?

Catch up here

Present day...

The Lake... Madeleine crossed the tall boundary around the palace, beyond which grew the flowers and shrubs, wildly on the lakeside. The fence was made of wired mesh, which was camouflaged by a thick growth of the blue morning glory over it.

The flowers attracted Madeleine even today just like they did when she was eleven years old....

************

Past...

Queen Eleanor had softened the rough look of the fence with her aesthetic touch. It was serendipity when Madeleine had run away, trying to play a prank on Leo one day when she had first witnessed the blossoming wall…

“Caught ya!” Leo pounced on Madeleine while she was lost in the beauty of the bloom. She lost her balance and both of them tripped and rolled down the slope to the lake. When they finally came to a halt, Madeleine’s head was a bush with a few wild flowers hanging out of her golden tangles. Leo pointed at her head and doubled up laughing. “You look like a clown! Mad Maddie!”

Madeleine frowned at him and he quickly started picking the twigs from her hair. She blushed when he tried moving his fingers through her curls like a comb. “There. Now you are all good.”

“Thank you.” She lowered her eyelashes shyly.

He cupped her cherubic face with his stubby fingers. “I am sorry I didn't mean to let you fall like that.”

Her jade eyes shone brightly, “It is fine Leo. It wasn’t your fault. I lost my balance.” She turned around to look at the calm waters. “This place is beautiful. I never saw it before.”

“Yes, Mom is trying to beautify this side of the palace. She got the hedge maze done and Liam claimed it all. She has promised me that she is going to make a beautiful lakeside garden especially for me here.” Leo boasted.

“It is so sweet of her. She loves you so much even when you are her step son.” Madeleine covered her mouth with shock as soon as the words spilled out.

Leo kept smiling, unaffected.

She tried to explain. “I am so sorry! That was not my intention. It's just that I… I have a mother but she doesn’t care.” Madeleine was almost in tears. Leo clasped her shoulders and proudly said. “It’s okay. You know, my Mom is very loving. She loves you too.”

He stood up and pulled her up along with him and beamed at her, “You can share the lake side with me. We can plant your favourite flowers here with Mom.”

“Really?” Madeleine jumped in excitement as she hugged Leo.

“Yes! Why not!” He exclaimed. "It's my special place. And I want to share it with you."

Both the kids dusted each other's clothes and rushed back to the palace to speak to Eleanor.

After a few days, Madeleine chose Hydrangea to match the blue of morning glory and they planted a row of the flowers. The next time, she got Bluebells.

“Why are you planting all blue flowers?” Leo asked her as she placed some wet soil over her newly planted shrub.

“I love the blues, they match your eyes.” She said bashfully.

“And the greens attached to them?” Leo teased.

“That is the colour of my eyes.” She gazed into his sapphire eyes and then faltered when she realised Leo was staring back at her. “They also resemble the horizon." She pointed at the other end of the lake where the row of olive groves met the firozi skies. Leo sat with her to admire the beauty of the horizon till late in the evening. They left with a promise to come back with more plans and plants.

But the warmth of their favourite little outing place didn’t last long. Their world came crashing down with Eleanor’s sudden death. Liam was too young but for Leo this was the second trauma. He lost his mother once again. Madeleine tried to alleviate his pain by doing his favourite things.

One such day, she pulled Leo to the lake side to surprise him with the new planters of Iris flowers. She chose these specially to dedicate them to Eleanor. But it brought back his mother’s memories making it more painful. He felt more hurt. Tears rolled down his burning eyes as he picked up a planter and threw it away in anger.

“Blue and green never meet.” His lakeside garden dream was shattered. “It's all false. Nothing is true. It is all flawed. Blue and green never meet! The horizon is fake. It is an illusion! Look Madeleine…” He shouted. “its an illusion! It was never true.”

He stomped away in anger. A disheartened Madeleine held herself tightly as she cried out, her cries turning into sobs and sobs mellowing down to few hiccups. As the shine of sun turned to twilight and twilight dulled down to darkness.

But she never gave up. She kept adding little shrubs and bushes of blue flowers in the memory of Queen Eleanor, till it was complete one day. Till, Leo came back with her to his garden, their garden. Till they held hands and stood quietly looking at the horizons.

Present day...

Today, she could see a stooped old figure lethargically moving in that lakeside garden. She took a deep breath. Once again she was going to remind Leo of the happier times. Once again she was going to stand holding his hand gazing at the horizons, reliving the warmth of their yesteryears.

She closed the distance, crossing the gentian blues and the phlox shrub. As she neared the back of the figure standing in the greens, her heartbeat raced. Twenty six long years! She placed her shivering hand on his shoulder. “Leo?”

The tall man turned to look at her. His face had more wrinkles than she could count. The eyes she was searching for were dull and listless. The lips that smiled once were dropped at the corner.

“Yes?” he spoke in a shaky voice. Gone was the tinker in his voice, she noticed.

“How are you?” Madeleine knew better to keep her calm and continue the conversation.

“I am good, thank you.” He completed the formality in a monotone.

She looked down at his hands holding iris flowers at the green stem.

"You remember." She said in a whisper, her heart fluttering.

"How can I forget?" He said in a heavy voice, as if he would break down at any moment.

Madeleine tried to show support and placed her hand on his, holding the flowers.

But he suddenly snatched away. "What are you trying lady?" He yelled at her.

"Leo?" She searched his eyes. "You said you remembered?" She asked him confused.

He glared at her. "Yes. I remember. I remember Katie. How can I forget her?" He thumped his way up to the palace, mumbling incoherent words. Madeleine stood facing the serene waters while the flood from her eyes refused to stop.

The line of olive grove that met the blue sky seemed to be hazy and it faded completely, as the sun went down.

A voice echoed from over the surface of the lake. "Look Madeleine! The horizon is fake. It is an illusion! it was never true."

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[itstheendofthegoddamnworld]

The She-Wolf and the Young Dragon (Lyanna Stark x Daeron Targaryen OC)

I wrote this during my fanfiction module in my final year at university. 

Brief: An AU of GRRM’s novels ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, taking place before the events of the first book. A ‘what if’ scenario where one of the children of King Aerys II and Rhaella Targaryen, Daeron survives infancy into his adulthood, where he is the one to supposedly ‘kidnap’ Lyanna Stark instead of eldest brother, Rhaegar.

BRANDON

His father warned him many times before, that the Starks never did well down south. Yet no matter how stubborn he was, he would never listen.

It lingered in the warmer climate how out of place Brandon Stark was in comparison to what he experienced in the North. No matter how big the lands were, it would remain outdated in contrast to the rest of Westeros.

The Capital held a different atmosphere to Winterfell when he landed ashore from the mouth of the Blackwater Bay. The smell of the streets and manure was strong even when mixed with the strong current of the salt in the air.

Even from here, he could see the Red Keep in all its glory, as beautiful and imposing as he had predicted it to be. The dragons who had ruled for centuries made everything very impressive, even when no winged beast flew any longer in the air. The Targaryens had made King’s Landing their home and he knew for certain of the risk of walking into the dragon’s den. 

“Where is she?” His voice was thunderous when it bounced from pillar to pillar, booming across the hall with steps following, the five men he journeyed with were persistent in tailing behind. The Great Hall was quiet when the Young Wolf of Winterfell stormed through the double doors, noting of the fact that neither the King nor his Hand was around to witness, excluding the few Kingsguard and those of Prince Rhaegar’s own sworn swords that lingered; a deadly chill that passed. Good, Brandon thought, the Gods know how this would go if he were here.

“Brandon Stark, your travels to King’s Landing were swift?” At the base of the steps to the Iron Throne, the Silver Prince was dressed as if ready for long periods of mourning: his deep indigo eyes were just as drab and dark as his attire, his long silver-gold hair tied in a careful knot.

“Don’t you play me for a fool, where is she?” He barked. “I know you have her!” Hovering below the steps himself, glaring up at the Prince. Brandon Stark was all wolf and no man it seemed, yet he still felt inadequate beneath the Dragon.

“Why would you accuse me of kidnapping your sister?”

Brandon’s face grew ever-so-hot, “You gave her the roses at the tourney! My brother had been the one to hold me back before I had the chance to smack you off your horse. Or had you forgotten just as much when you were getting cosy with her that same evening?”

Ser Arthur Dayne was just an inch away from cutting the Stark heir in half if he dared lay a finger on his Prince - Brandon knew that himself. It would be all Seven Hells unleashed if the King had heard of such a crime. The Prince of Dragonstone didn’t seem alarmed nor angered by the accusations, albeit puzzled, before telling his close friend to lower his weapon.

“I think you have been left in disarray by this, Brandon.”

“How? You were taking part in the tourney, my sister had eyes for you even with a future betrothed waiting for her.” He glowered, holding his sword carefully. Prince Rhaegar’s jaw clenched noticeably before he gave a polite, strained smile.

“There has been a misinterpretation of information spread between who you believe was me and the one you seek. You see, I was not the only Targaryen Prince there.” Rhaegar explained calmly, observing how Brandon’s face scrunched up. “If you are looking for a man with my features, perhaps it is my brother you may be wanting to pursue.”

Brandon seemed reluctant to admit that, grudgingly removing his hand from his sword. Of course, it would make sense now, and now the only fool standing here is I.

“Daeron,” Brandon groaned, “he was the one to give the roses to my sister?”

“It would seem so. Those two did seem to grow close in a short amount of time. After all, who would’ve imagined the skilled mystery knight to win the tourney and my brother’s heart?” Said Rhaegar. “She had tended to his wounds after his defeat, I saw it myself... What took place in Harrenhal was what I had to explain to my wife.”

Poor Elia Martell was sweet and innocent: someone who should’ve been told everything in the end. At the end of the day, Rhaegar’s so-called infidelity was untrue and Elia could rest easy knowing her husband remained nonetheless faithful. “What would we do with them then? For all we know, they could be all the way to Essos by now.”

The Silver Prince moved before he stood at a level ground with Brandon. “If I know one thing about my brother, he wouldn’t be keen to travel east. Don’t take my brother for a fool. My father’s spies have eyes not just in Westeros but across the Narrow Sea, thanks to his growing paranoia. He’s still here, I know that for a fact - lurking in a shadow that keeps him and your sister concealed from wandering eyes.”

But for how long will that veil stay up? Brandon thought. You cannot hide anything when you lurk within these walls. “Help me find my brother before the wind catches our words and my father or Robert Baratheon do. Stay here in the Keep and I will grant you and your men housing, your stay here unscathed, and we will go find them together.”

Brandon wavered, but the consequences seemed far too grave; with too much at stake. “And of your father? What if he hears of this squabble between me and his heir?”

Rhaegar grimaced. “Then I pray to both the Seven and your Old Gods that his wrath is merciful.” No mercy would come from those haunted by madness. Brandon knew of no such thing. The Mad King was more an old dog than a sane ruler, one that needed to be put down soon enough. 

-

LYANNA

“Oh, my love.”

The laugh had tumbled from her throat by the time she had landed softly on the pillows beneath her, her long dark hair fanning around her with the following melodic chuckle shortly joining hers. Their bodies were tangled and laid naked as the day they had been born, beneath the cherry wood ceiling with the low candlelight surrounding them.

In the past, Lyanna would’ve held her admiration for the eldest born son of the Mad King at bay around her brothers, but she had never imagined the second-born to have captured her heart. In the dim light, he could’ve been the spitting image of Rhaegar, but the shadows cut false definitions of sharp edges to his face, giving him a more mature look like his brother momentarily. But his eyes were not like the Silver Prince: the second-born was more spirited and his eyes were the lovely colour of lavender, just like the ones Lyanna saw when travelling down on her travels to Harrenhal. She had gotten her brother Eddard to pick some for her and she smelt them whilst riding horseback, as sweet as the summertime and what the singers proclaimed. Had she been able to keep them before Benjen stole them from her tauntingly, she would’ve braided them into her hair, a freshness to keep her content for the rest of the journey down south.

The Young Dragon had eyes that brought her memories of Winterfell with her brothers: where Old Nan would talk about the ice giants beyond the wall and of the wilderness that followed. The cold bite was ever so bitter but the She-Wolf survived throughout. There was more to the North in his eyes that she wasn’t used to, a rigidness that was not found in him. Daeron had more Northerner in him than dragon, it seemed.

She remembered the night when Rhaegar sang with his silver harp at the feast and how the tears came quickly to her eyes, the same as most of the other ladies in the hall. His song was full of solemnity, yet Lyanna had to ignore the snickering from Benjen and when she and Daeron stole timid glances, sheepish but frequent. Rhaegar was a man a decade her senior and tied in matrimony. She would never compete with a married woman for a man everyone admired. What he’s not like of Rhaegar, I prefer. He will be everything his brother is not and so much more.

“You still have much energy, even at this time of the night.” She smoothed at the fair hairs on his chest, kissing at his shoulder fondly. She could imagine living here for the rest of her life with just Daeron and away from the eyes of those, the duties and responsibilities, living and making their own family. “You have tired me out, Daeron.”

“Few people get to ride a dragon; it can be rather draining.” Her husband winked, chuckling softly when her face warmed in reaction. Their laughter died down when his attention was drawn to her kisses resuming on his skin, quickly kissing her back with such feverish intent.

“The last of the dragons died a century before you were born, Your Grace. Lost in tragedy if we dare choose to forget, hmm?” Her eyes were blue as the winter roses she loved in the North, alive and full of mirth.

“You needn’t address me like that, my lady,” Daeron smiled, stroking away the hair from her face, “after all, we are equals.” In the eyes of the north and the Old Gods, they wouldn’t be, but Lyanna did not need to follow those customs. In the eyes of the Gods and men, we are one and together. A Targaryen, whose flame burns bright like his, just like those of greatness who came before him.

“In the eyes of the Faith, perhaps, but not to my father.” Lyanna sighed. “I believe he would find me more wild than dutiful.”

His hair was slicked from sweat when he pulled it from his face, tenderly kissing at her with such ardour. “The North I was told of was all cold and bitterness, but there was a flame within you that was only seen in those who carried the blood of the dragon. I never thought I would see it so brightly in you.” Daeron said. “When we return to the cities, we may wed in your custom, and revisit our fathers when the time comes.”

“And of your father, Aerys? Has there been no word of His Grace or his spies?”

“My father… grows more delirious the longer the days grow, his position falters whilst my brother is alive, his mistrust festers. Rhaegar is every right a King, but getting rid of my father will be troublesome without the right aid.” Daeron admitted bitterly. “That will be his problem, for now. He’ll be ready to find us when he has dealt accordingly with my father.”

“Rhaegar will not be able to conceal everything if he is not in on our secret already, not from my brothers alone. We will not be able to hide any longer.” Brandon will have to halt his wedding for a month if he hasn’t already. He would hunt to the ends of Essos to find me. She dreaded.

Daeron hesitated when he rose from their small bed, his bareness not a problem for either of them. “I fear my father may do something that will not only break him and our families, but tear the entire realm apart.”

Lyanna too rose from the bed and came to embrace him from behind. “If you have me, you have the North by your side, I swear it. We knelt to the Conqueror three centuries ago, we have stood with you since then.” Lyanna promised proudly. “Brandon shall marry one of Hoster Tully’s daughters, and therefore, he will have the Riverlands too. The Arryns from Ned, thanks to Jon. They would aid you if it is needed for their allegiance.”

Daeron’s lavender eyes widened in surprise when he turned to her. “And of your betrothed? Surely Robert Baratheon will not have our side when he accuses me of kidnapping his lady.”

“I am not his lady. I never was. Robert is all boar than man, and his appetite for other ladies would continue no matter his age.” Lyanna objected. “He will hear of my wrath before he dares lay a hand on you.”

The Young Dragon held her tightly in his arms, “I would hope no day would have to arrive, for any of us.” He drawled. “No stress should come to a mother and her potential newborn.”

Lyanna could imagine how her stomach would look when swelled with a child—their child—and the very image of her one day holding her babe in her arms. It made the She-Wolf eager for it to be a so-called reality. A son, she hoped for, a son who would share the blood of the North and Old Valyria. Two powerful houses, coming together as one.

“We still have not thought of names, if the time comes for it.” Lyanna changed the subject quickly, settling her husband to sit once more, his hand to her back and stroking the back of her long hair. “Were there any you had in mind?”

“My grand-uncle Aemon is at the wall, but he is everything a King should be had he not turned it away for my grandfather,” Daeron said with a sad smile, “I want to honour his name, for the man who was too generous and gave the crown to his brother.”

Lyanna smiled, “He sounds like a good man.” Daeron agreed, and for a moment, the wistfulness hung over his head as much as it did over his older brother, giving him a similar look to the Silver Prince. No matter how far he goes, he will always have some part of Rhaegar’s despondency.

“No matter what happens, we will endure this together, against everyone else. We deal with your father and my own when we return. For now, I want to enjoy your company as much as possible.” The She-Wolf softly spoke, enveloping her husband gently. Even in the coolness of their room, he was warm to the touch. But she would get used to it.

The Young Dragon had encircled her to his chest and pulled her back to the bed, caressing and kissing her with such glee. “My little wife, as brave as those of winter who came before her and strong as ice itself. The dragon and the wolf have a fitting name.”

[yeojaa]

IDK IF UR STILL TAKING REQUESTS🥺🥺🥺 sorry if IM botherinh😭😭 BUT MYBE A FINDERS KEEP HERS drabble where jk n oc get in to an argument after chap 3 n jk apologizes or something like that😭😭🥺😭🥺🥺

[ read part one / main story ]

pairing.  jjk x f!reader.  rating.  general.  tags.  this is soft angst. JK being his usual idiot self, reader being... well, sad, and yeah. just pain (but w a resolution. ish).  wc. 1.5k.  beta reader.  @hobi-gif beta’d a bit of this but i wrote most of it after so any dumb mistakes are my fault and my fault alone. 🤡  author note.  this isn’t 100% what you requested but... the first part kind of is, and then this is the resolution (because people requested it). if you’d like another drabble, please feel free to request!

In true fashion, Jungkook tries to fix the problem in the only way he knows how:  with money.

He puts the two of you up at the Four Seasons for the entire week, orders room service at all hours of the day and has treats from all of your favourite spots in the city delivered.  (Macarons, candied nuts, that one bakery that does those salted honey pies you inhale like a wild animal.)  He runs baths for you, fills the tub with your favourite scents (always Diptyque) and massages his tattooed hands all over your scalp.  He makes sure you wake up to the smell of French toast and fall asleep on a bed of roses, curled up in his arms and little else.  

He spoils you until you can hardly see the floor, designer shopping bags strewn throughout the suite.  (His sisters help him decide what to buy, mouths sealed shut otherwise.  They know better than to get too involved in his relationship with you.)  Dinner is somewhere new every night but always at a Michelin-starred restaurant, space booked out to the extent it’s just the two of you and a bouquet of your favourite flowers.

Of course, he thinks things are better.  Assumes they must be, because there’s never been a time where money hasn’t solved his problems.  No matter how much, throw enough of it at something and the problem will go away.

But you don’t go away.  Neither does your sadness.

“Baby.”  It’s your last night together before you’re back to some semblance of normalcy (not that Jungkook’s life was very normal to begin with).  He thinks he’ll miss it more than you will, if your lacklustre reactions have been any indication.

You’re fresh out of the shower - you’d turned down his offer of a bath, locked the door on your way into the washroom - and wrapped in a fuzzy white robe.  “What?”  You’re focused on running a comb through your hair, unbothered by your boyfriend who sits at the edge of the bed, legs wide and hands extended toward you.

It bothers him a bit (read: a lot).  You’re better than you were, offering tiny smiles when he begs for them, accepting his kisses without complaint. It isn’t you though.  Not the snark and the sass and the decades of friendship that normally thread your relationship.  A book with its spine about to snap, held together by cobweb.

Despite the time you’ve spent together the last few days - almost every hour, sans when you were at work - you’ve been distant still.  Not mean, of course (no, never mean, because you’ve always been soft on him) but different.  Softer and harder all at once.

“Come here,”  he coaxes, fingers curling around your wrist, pulling you between his knees effortlessly.

Normally, you’d curl around his shoulders, rake your nails through his hair.  This time, you only allow yourself to be with him, palms flat upon the ridges of muscle plating his back.  You don’t pass affection into his hair, don’t form a cradle for him to rest his head.  (It doesn’t feel like home - not like it should.)

Jungkook hates it.  Absolutely fucking abhors it.  He wants his girlfriend - his best friend, his love - back.  Not this spectre that’s taken up your space. 

(He almost forgets that he’s the reason you’re the way you are.)

“What’s wrong?”  The shape of his mouth curls, bottom lip pouting into that trademark expression that usually has you relenting, melting into a puddle of goo in his arms. 

This time, you shrug, movement dislodging the soft soft terry cloth from your shoulders.  “Nothing.”  Dumb as he might be - oblivious in the way only someone like he can be - he can tell you’re lying.  Offering the untruth right between your teeth, expecting him to accept it.

That bothers him even more.  It’s one thing to put up an act, entertain him as if you were a court jester.  It’s entirely another to treat him as if he’s a child, feeding him lies without a care.

(Notwithstanding the fact that Jeon Jungkook is, for all intents and purposes, a manchild.)

“You’re a shit liar,”  he retorts, grumpy, coloured green and blue until his insides feel like mud.  It’s strange, the discomfort that sinks beneath his skin and sticks his bones together.  Like wading through quicksand or a bog, stuck to a place he doesn’t want to be.  “Talk to me.”

“About what?”  You’re deflecting, refusing to meet his stare, holding yourself within the confines of your robe as if you can’t bear to open up to him.

That hurts more than he expects.  Slips sadness in alongside the frustration.

“About what’s bothering you.”  The fact he has to do this is driving him mad.  It’s akin to pulling teeth and he hates the dentist.

You scoff then - which he doesn’t expect.  The sound kicks him right in the stomach, a sucker punch he doesn’t see coming.  “You want me to talk about you?”  It’s an uncharacteristically mean answer, brought on by whatever’s been bothering you, turning blood to battery acid.

“Excuse me?”  

“You heard me.”  

For the briefest moment, he considers lashing out in response - giving back exactly what he’s getting.  But then he spies it, just there, past the usual warmth of your stare.  It’s hiding behind crystallised amber, peeking past the edges.  So much sadness it steals his breath right from his lungs, stripping him bare of red hot fury and leaving him lily white and lovesick.   

When Jungkook speaks again, it’s feather soft, terribly light, begging and pleading in a single utterance.  “Please.”

There’s silence for a beat, then another.  It stings for each second it continues, treading misery all over the thing that beats in his chest.  He’s not used to this.  (You’re his first and only love.  A part of him is grateful for that;  another hates even this.)

He almost asks again - readies it on the tip of his tongue.

Then you’re unloading, giving him everything he’d asked for and more.   

“I love you,”  you tell him in a reedy voice, uneven like the foundation you’ve built together.  Haphazardly thrown into place and hoped for the best on.  “But you’re an idiot.”   

(He deserves that, he supposes.)

Your voice is static, stretched thin and gossamer thin.  Cheek pressed to his curls, you find comfort in your hiding place, as if shielded by the dark.  “I’ve loved you for years and that’ll never stop.  But when you do stupid shit, it’s so hard.”  Your words are honeyed, thick and heavy as they lay into each strand, seep quietly into his ears.  Where they’d normally fill him with ecstasy, delight, send him on a sugar high - these ache, sink right to the pit of his stomach.  “I would give you anything.  Anything.”

“I know.”  Really, he does.  He’s known that since you were kids.  It’s why he’d fallen in love with you, even before he’d realised he had.

“Then why do you test me?”  

It’s not rhetorical.  You want an answer - something real you can hold between your hands.  Something to act as the salve for all the hurt, to bandage the wounds left behind by your uncertainty.  (He’s the same as you - needs to know he means as much to you as you do him.  But you show it in different ways and that’s what’s brought the two of you to this point.)

“I’m sorry,”  he answers, sliding his arms more securely around your waist, face buried into the soft fabric of the robe, into the warmth that lies beneath, into the heart that beats a rhythm identical to his.

“I don’t want sorry.”  After all, you’d already gotten one.  Weeks ago, when he’d pulled the stupid sophomoric stunt, he’d apologised.  Had been apologising every day since then, but in all the wrong ways.  “I want better.” 

It’s as if all of his bones have been cracked open, the weight of your words settling like sand, discomfort and grit snapping his head to attention.  “You want better?”  There’s nothing but alarm in Jungkook’s expression, eyes wide, throat knotted in worry.  “I—”

As always, you read him like an open book.  Hands smooth down the sides of his cheeks, palms searing over his reddened cheeks.  “Not like that.”  You’re reassuring him even as it should be the other way around.  (How ironic.)

He exhales a deep breath.  Doesn’t tear his stare from yours.  

“I just need you to be better.”  You’d never ask this of him if it weren’t important, if you didn’t feel his ignorance and immaturity splintering your insides into glass shards.  You’ve always accepted him exactly as he was, all the good and bad and ridiculous.  

This is different though.  You love him.  You’re taking a chance with him just as he is with you.  Laying your heart in his hands and trusting him to keep it safe, handing out the key in the hopes of building a home.  

So you ask - for both your sakes. 

He promises he will be and you believe him.  Have to.

For both of your sakes.