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enjakey · 3 days ago

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Beneath the Blue

Pairing: marine engineer!Jake x marine biologist!Fem!Reader

Hey guys, I realise this fic is like really long (24k). I’m so sorry but it’s just something I’ve been holding out on. Life’s been stressful and writing was the only thing that kept me afloat and I kinda belted this out during my sleepless nights. This is definitly not proof read.

So I guess I wanted to give you guys like a guide on how to read the fic. Each section or chapter is marked by bolded words in the beginning of a paragraph (you’ll understand when you read it). If you’re only here for the cutesy stuff, you can go ahead and skip to the fourth chapter but you’ll loose all context of the story and how everyone is related to each other. The first two chapters is just a lot of world and character building. The third chapter is where things actually start.

If you’re interested in marine biology and sea creatures, this is a perfect read. I talk a lot about sharks and whales and sea creatures. There’s a lot of insight on what marine biologists do in general. There’s suggestive stuff in the end of the seventh chapter and smut in the tenth chapter if you want to skip to that. Jay, Heeseung and Jay are a huge part of the fic (but not the plot?). There is mentions of PTSD and a storm.

I want to mention that this story is not just about Jake and Y/N’s romance but about a group of people’s love for the ocean. The other characters are important for me too and the world I’ve built is dear to me. Hope you guys enjoy! I Put a lot of time effort into this! Please like and reblog and comment.

Summary: taken under the wing of the great marine biologist Henry Sim, Y/N finds herself getting close to him and his family. She’s friends with his first son, Jason, but is apprehensive of his second son, Jake. Jake, who is notorious for his bad behaviour and disappointing decisions, finds himself being drawn to Y/N and her undeniable love towards the ocean. When the two are put together in a group of researchers for an expedition for three months on the ocean, she doesn’t expect herself to fall for him- let alone, fight storms for him.

Y/N was one of those unfortunate kids who had to be in a hospital during her birthday. She was eleven at the time, the age where she was learning to read and write on her own and didn't fuss with her mother to help her bathe or dress up. She considered it her golden age where she was just starting to learn about her interests by surfing the internet through her father's phone and transitioning from cartoon shows to movies. At school, she would talk about action films, starring Tom Cruise or Angelica Jolie, rather than the deemed childish Disney movies where the Jonas Brothers were thrown into a music camp or in which a girl hides her identity by switching wigs.

An unwanted growth, widely mistaken as a malignant tumour by many doctors, was manifesting on the bone just above her eyebrow and she had reached the age where surgeons could successfully remove it without life-threatening complications. Y/N was initially scared, refusing to get out of bed in the morning and crying while she was taken to the Operating Room. In that moment of panic and fear, she didn't feel like the brave and mature girl she thought herself to be but somewhat similar to the girls on the playground who still talked about Barbie dolls and played around with make-up sets as though they could ravishingly decorate their faces with cheap lip gloss and colourless eyeshadow.

When she woke up from an anaesthetic daze, she took a moment of silence to compare herself with the other children in her class. If any kid was in her situation, being taken into surgery by a group of a dozen strangers who were only trusted because of a piece of paper- their certificate- that was meant to credit their skill, they would flail the way she had. The girls she avoided, the mean and blonde-haired ones who snickered at anyone who didn't wear skirts and pink bows in their hair and bragged about their powerful daddy's luxurious car, would probably react the way she did, perhaps even a little more dramatically. The boys she arbitrated, the cocky and lanky ones that talk about Fortnight and whatever online games they played, would probably wail like babies. But Y/N was different, whatever that meant for a girl her age, withholding herself from succumbing to middle school's criteria for popularity and burrowing herself into a circle of comfort. She was the girl that wore glasses and carried around a thick book about animals to read during lunch and she was the girl that only had one friend because they were both weird and quiet. She was the girl that cried before the surgery because she didn't trust the surgeons and not because she was convinced her parents were selling her to an organ-harvesting cult.

While she assumed most children her age would be amused by artistic renditions of unicorns and rainbows painted on the wall, she found them rather tacky. Their eyes were too shiny and their smiles were too wide and the only thing she found realistic were the tiny chips of paint in the bright colours. There was a painting of Jake the Dog from Adventure Times sitting right above her hospital bed, staring down at her with lifeless and beady eyes while she tried sleeping during the night because the hospital wanted to keep her for observation for a day or two after the surgery, increasing the service bill at the same time. Then, there was the poorly mimicked roar of a lion stained to the wall on the right side of her bed, making her wonder if these paintings were done by previously admitted children. To the wall on the right side of her bed, right below the window, was the painting of a grinning shark and a randomly doodled jellyfish.

"That looks like the Black Sea Nettle," she pointed at the jellyfish with her nimble finger.

It was early in the morning and her mother had willed her awake from her slumber so one of the doctors could check on her vitals and change her bandaid. Y/N chewed on a green apple slice her mother handed her because she refused to eat the red apples, and patiently waited until the doctor, or Doctor Karev, as he called himself, could finish writing on a piece of paper they called a chart and changing the cotton wedged between her eyebrow and white gauze. She glanced at the painting from the corner of her eye, finding it eerily similar to a picture she saw in the book her father gifted her on her ninth birthday- The Encyclopedia of Animals.

"And that looks like a Bull Shark," she said and shifted her finger slightly so it was pointed at the cartoonish shark with a bulging stomach.

"Oh, yeah?" Doctor Karev scoffed and grinned similarly to the painted shark. His gaze didn't lift from the writing pad he held towards his face, a pen scribbling information that probably wasn't important. Her mother stood beside her, a proud smile on her face as she brushed Y/N's hair with her palm. "What can you tell me about it?"

"I know that their bite is much stronger than the Great White," she offered, shrugging and looking at her lap.

"Really?" Doctor Karev almost sounded sceptical. "Where'd you learn that?"

"A book," Y/N mumbled and pursed her lips.

Doctor Karev bent his knees enough to reach her level, tilting his head affectionately to grasp her attention. His pen was now hanging in his pocket, his writing pad pressed between his hand and thigh. "You're a smart girl, aren't you?" He praised her, impressed by her skill of comprehension. "You wanna become a marine biologist?"

"Marine biologist?"

The pair of words put together were foreign to Y/N but somehow, they sounded like they were meant to be beside each other, creating the word for the profession she had been dreaming of since she saw the picture of starfish lounging on a sea bed. Her eyes were filled with somewhat of a fascination, a sparkle reflected by what she considered a discovery and fate of luck and her smile grew ten folds, stretching her cheeks until the corners of her lips reached her ears. She looked like she was watching the stars while she looked at him, blinking and burning from a close distance as she marvelled at the masses.

"Yeah," Doctor Karev enthused. "You know, study the ocean and sea creatures and all that jazz."

"I'm gonna become a marine biologist!" She nodded, giggling like a baby that had been handed a lollipop bigger than its face. Except Y/N's lollipop was a profession, a dream to chase until it was fulfilled. Her mother laughed with her, shaking her head at her antics. "Mom, I wanna be a marine biologist!"

Doctor Karev chuckled and stood straight, making his way to the door of her hospital room and looking over his shoulder to steal one last glance at the girl he might have just paved a future for. "By the way," he said. "Happy birthday kid."

It was a crystal blue sight Jake could never get used to, and it was the fact that his family owned it that he could never wrap his head around. The aquariums ranged from floor-to-ceiling tanks holding hundreds of litres of water and aquatic species to small fish bowls holding the tiniest, most common breeds of fish. Any type of fish he could think of- sharks, whales, stingrays, eels, jellyfish and cephalopods- it was probably all there, confined between glass walls, concrete and artificially plated corals. And it could all be placed in the palm of his hand, the happiness of customers and livelihood of every creature in the building he stood in, under his control.

In all of Jake's life, he had only ever seen his father angry four times- three of those incidents pertaining to tragedies faced in The Marine Foundation of Korea, his most prized possession.

The first was when he was forced to step into court for the first time in his life. During the first week that it opened, a kid tripped and fell into an eel tank and was almost choked by a Black Spotted Eel. The kid was lucky they weren't electric but Henry Sim was still faced with a million-dollar lawsuit which they won after giving security camera footage that showed the boy clearly wandering off into prohibited territory and climbing ladders into the opening of the tanks. It wouldn't be the first lawsuit they faced as a similar one followed two years later when a little girl started crying because her necklace fell into the dolphin pool and one of them devoured it.

Two years later, one of three Whale Sharks had passed away in front of a live audience causing the building to rumble as the carcass made contact with the forged ocean bed and children to wail in confusion as one of their favourite shark buddies was sinking to the floor. Hundreds of people took videos and the news went viral online, causing critics to criticise the maintenance and care for the captive creatures. As this information circled to tourists, they didn't have customers and a proper flow of income for the following six months until they announced the new exhibit for the endangered Vaquita Dolphin. Jake remembered the terrible nights of those six months when his father would come home drunk or would shatter glasses onto the walls. He wondered how his mother coped with him. He wondered how he and his brother didn't perceive him as a monster yet.

A year later, The Marine Foundation of Korea would face another tragedy. One of the shark tanks exploded in the middle of the night, causing Hammerheads and Tiger Sharks to swim through the halls of the first floor in shallow waters. Guards were panicking and emergency services took hours to reach the aquarium before they could assess and plan a rescue. The aquarium was shut down for two months and they spent time reinstating the shattered shark tank and brewing up safety measures for when similar situations would occur again. That night, they lost two Hammerhead Sharks and one Tiger Shark and had to pay thousands of dollars as compensation. Though his father didn't violently drink, he had become dangerously silent in those two months, scaring the living daylights out of his wife and children.

Henry Sim, the founder of The Marine Foundation of Korea and the most remarkable marine biologist known to all generations, had faced lawsuits that almost made him go bankrupt and was hated by the internet for months until he publicly apologised yet he would say his biggest disappointment wouldn't lie in the way his aquarium was run. Rather, he would say his biggest disappointment lay in his son, Jake Sim, who refused to take in his footsteps and fulfil his dreams of creating an empire of nepotism to take over the world of marine biology someday.

"You never listen to me," Henry seethed with a balled fist resting on his ebony table. His voice was entirely stark for the disappointment he felt towards his son.

If Jake concentrated enough, he could hear the movement of each aquatic species in the tanks he was surrounded by. The bubbly and almost ear-blocking white noise engulfed him sometimes and he would be transported to an unnamed beach where the sand was white and the waters were so clear, he could see the corals growing underneath. He liked to imagine himself floating in the waters in shorts and an oversized white t-shirt, eyes closed as the sun beat down on his porcelain skin. That was all the ocean was to him; someplace to enjoy and someplace to destress. But to his father, it was a career he made billions in and it was a career he wanted both his sons to endeavour in.

"I've been telling you since I was a kid, appa," Jake sighed, standing on the other side of the ebony table. "I want to study engineering. Marine biology, researching new species, the ocean… All of that has always been a hobby for me. Besides, you have Jason to take over your legacy anyway. I don't get why you're so hung up on me studying it, too."

In the corner of his father's office stood a small, well-kept fish tank with a lone seahorse in it. It was the Knysna Seahorse, to be exact, the rarest seahorse in the world which Jason, his brother, gifted their father as a gift. He had paid quite an amount of money to get a hold of it and the reason for the gift? It was because he had finally graduated with a marine biology degree a few months ago and Jake was to finally attend the same university.

But he didn't want to and his entire family was very well aware of the fact.

"Don't you understand what I want for you two, though?" Henry slammed his fist against the table but Jake offered no reaction. "Don't you see the future I see for you two? Brothers taking over marine biology's legacy? It’s not too late for you to change your major."

"No," Jake stomped a foot to the ground, eyes squinting to slits. "That's your dream. Not mine. I get that you and your brother never got along and that you want your sons to get along and run a business. But I don't want that. Jason and I are fine as it is and you coming in between my dreams is just gonna drive me away from you further."

"Jake-"

"If eomma were here, she would understand," Jake took long strides towards the door, a hand digging into the pocket of his slacks as the other twisted the doorknob. "I just wish you'd understand," and his voice muffled under the slam of the door, leaving Henry dumbfounded in his seat, mouth agape and glasses sliding off his nose.

With his son leaving so disrespectfully, using his wife's death as emotional manipulation, he wanted to shun Jake right then and there. He wanted no relation to him whatsoever but he knew it was his anger speaking. And he knew that if he hastily cut him off his earnings and stopped paying for his education, he would regret it and Jason would condemn him as a worse father than he already was.

So, Henry let him walk away and he went back to work, fixing his glasses and clearing his throat as if nothing happened. Jake was still young, he'd tell himself. If he wanted to follow his dreams, he should let him. Henry was selfish, he accepted it and his ego clashed with his conscience but he brushed it off and walked out of his office with more errands to complete. The moment he entered the hall with tanks of jellyfish surrounding him, the sounds of their bodies pushing through water syncing with his racing, angry heart, his assistant joined his side with a clipboard and pen, her heels overpowering the serenity of his silence.

“What’s next on today’s itinerary?” Henry asked with his hands clasped behind his back, strides becoming slower with every step.

“You need to meet with the university students today, sir,” Hae, his assistant, stated as though she expected him to remember the important occasion.

“Don’t speak to me in that tone,” he grumbled. “Of course I remember.”

“I’m assuming the talk with your son went badly?”

“I don’t know what to do with him, Hae.”

With this sigh echoing the moment, the pair made their way through the shark exhibit that costed him millions of dollars to fix all those years ago and sauntered past the stingray tanks, wondering how he was going to be an inspiration to a group of marine biology students while he felt like a failure of a father. He wondered what else he had to contribute to the field of marine biology when he had prioritised it for his entire life. It was the reason why his son hated him and it was the reason why he lost his wife- it was his lack of presence and immense ignorance that put him in a place where he truly had nothing else to lose. He had the money, the cars, the friends to brag with and an eldest son who was succeeding in life without his help- but then there was his youngest, defying him in all manners and reminding him of the mistakes that haunted his life.

However, a beacon of hope, a ray of sanguine had entered his life that day and he wouldn’t realise it until he was laying on his deathbed. In the group of future marine biologists he met that day was Y/N, standing amongst the crowd meekly with a notebook and a pen to jot down everything that she thought would help her education and career. She was the one answering questions in a whisper when no one else knew the answer, her hand barely raised in the air. When Henry saw her, her hair tied in a ponytail and clothes put together in a hurry that made her look pathetic, he could only smile. Because as he looked at her, he saw himself- the version of him that was left in the gates of his college, the version of him that had to be left back in order to become the tycoon that he was now.

So before the group of university students left, he found himself asking Y/N for a conversation and pulled her towards the gift shop while the rest of her classmates waited at the gate, murmuring and whispering about what they could be talking about. Henry placed a heavy hand on her shoulder and smiled at her the way a mentor would smile at his mentee. He had a proud smile on his face as he said, “I think you’d make an amazing marine biologist one day.”

“What?” Y/N, the poor girl, having been put down by her classmates her whole life, was gaping at his statement. Her eyes reflect a sense of hope and surprise under the golden lights of the gift shop.

“Yes,” Henry nodded enthusiastically. “I would like it if you worked with me, I could easily offer you a job,” he said. He shuffled his hand around in the pocket of his blazer and pulled out his business card and handed it to her, certain that it would come in handy for her future. “When you’re ready for a job or an internship- anything, just call me and I’ll help you out.”

Henry walked away from her, leaving his future student dumbfounded. Her eyes fixated on the business card in her hands, her thumbs and forefingers outlining the corners of the rectangle. It was a navy blue colour, his name, number and The Marine Foundation of Korea carved in golden ink. It looked like her ticket to a new life, the life she had chased since she was a little kid carrying around an encyclopaedia of animals. It was the golden ticket in her Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.

It was a good analogy in her head. Henry Sim, the man with greying hair and diminishing eyesight, was Willy Wonka and she was Charlie, the lost boy that simply wanted a taste of something better, something great. So when it was time for her to get an internship, Henry had taken her under his wing.

“You must be Y/N.”

When Y/N started off as an intern, she started questioning whether she had made the right choice. Some of her friends were off travelling the seven seas to research unknown species of the depths and others were working in labs established on beach sides. They were living in tropical islands like the Caribbean or Hawaii and their instagrams were filled with them in diving gear and sea creatures in their natural habitats. Y/N had always dreamt of a life as such, to swim with sharks and study their behaviours or to explore the depths of the ocean floor within the safety of a yellow submarine. She imagined she would travel the world by the time she graduated college and she imagined spending most of her days on a boat, whale watching or spotting dolphins.

There was that one semester in college where she got an experience as close to what she imagined. She, along with a few other promising students, were selected to spend a semester on sea where they spent learning how to dive and sail ships. It was a memorable four months, really, to spend it with a group of people she later called friends and bonding with people on sea over half cooked fish. In that time, though the most astonishing creature they spotted was a Red Octopus, she assumed she was being trained for the future she had always dreamed of, only to end up within the confines of an aquarium- Asia’s largest aquarium, granted. Her job description as an intern included watching other employees take care of the confined species or listening to Henry, the founder, teach her more about the marine species while she took notes. There were the occasional times she was asked to write a research paper, which she did with Jason but she would much rather prefer doing the same in a lab on the beach or on a boat sailing across the Pacific Ocean.

During this time, she pondered if she should have just followed her father’s footsteps in becoming an astronomer. She would look back at her childhood when her father would teach her about constellations and planets while she looked through the giant telescope that was perched on their roof and she would wonder if such a job would make her happier. She recalled the stories her mother would tell her as a Greek historian and wondered if she should have majored in History instead. She even wondered if she should have followed her friends into their jobs instead of taking the internship in the first place. Her uncertainties came to a halt a year ago, though, when Henry promoted her as manager.

In the five years that Y/N started working in The Marine Foundation of Korea, she learnt the names and voices of everyone working there. As the manager, it wasn’t only her job but also her duty to do so, to know who she was working with and grow a personal relationship with the people around her. She knew that one of the janitor’s kid had a heart condition and she would visit him in the hospital once in a while. She knew that one of the divers working for the aquarium was in a long term relationship and was planning on proposing to his girlfriend soon- she could recognise his voice even while he struggled to speak underwater. She also knew that her boss and legal guardian, Henry Sim, had ambitions he could never fulfil because of his youngest son.

One could call her the all-knowing within the walls of the aquarium. Not only was she intelligent, she was the keeper of all the employees’ worries and burdens.

In those five years that she spent reaching her level of success, to be able to buy her own apartment in an expensive neighbourhood and to be able to afford to buy a new phone without double-checking her bank account, she had learned a lot of tricks to perfect the skills of managing the establishment that she ran when the owner wasn’t present. A once shy and timid girl became the hard-headed, thick skinned superior that demanded precision in completed work and pristine publications of whatever research papers they release. But when she wasn’t acting that way, she was calm and walked down the crystalline hallways of Korea’s beloved and prestigious aquarium with a welcoming smile.

Of all the people she knew that worked amongst the aquarium, of the few people she found herself acquainted with, the voice that was breathing into her ear from behind her did not belong to anyone she was familiar with. She could feel his chest ghosting against her back, his smirk louder than his voice could ever be. His hair brushed against her cheek and Y/N found herself spinning around with a scowl on her face.

“Jake,” she stated with discern, her obvious distaste towards him sitting heavily on her brows. His smirk only grew wider, his hand clasping behind his back as he leaned closer to her than before.

In the years that she’d known Henry and Jason Sim, she had grown rather close to them. They accepted her into their family by some sort and she was invited to every dinner they hosted in one of those fancy Chinese or Sushi restaurants- whether she attended or not was up to her. If she did attend though, she would be introduced to guests like she was Henry’s own daughter and Jason had always treated her like a sister by the way he kept her company throughout her years as an intern. Her parents, too, had grown quite fond of the father and son.

Jason and Y/N’s friendship, Henry always used to say, was unexpected. He expected them to work together and get along with each other for the sake of their jobs and business, but he was never expecting the siblingly bond they had created. Oftentimes, the pair would find themselves going out for lunch together during breaks or driving to the beach just for the sake of having some entertainment. They would regularly find themselves at each other's houses in the middle of the night with beers and soju in hopes of having movie marathons. Somewhere in that friendship, Y/N learnt a lot about the missing Sim brother.

He was studying Engineering somewhere in Australia, she learned, and he had only visited his family only a couple of times in all his years of education. There was the one time he flew back to Seoul to spend the New Year with Henry and Jason where she heard he got embarrassingly drunk and broke a glass table. Then there was the other time he visited for Christmas but disappeared within an hour without a word. Speaking of Jake meant hearing stories as such, where he was disrespectful, unexpectable and had no sense of respect. She heard that he once cussed at a shareholder because he was being too nosey.

Y/N had only ever met Jake once. Well, they didn’t exactly meet, she had just seen him passing by in a crowd. It was at another one of Henry’s lavish dinner parties where round tables were cloaked with gold cloth and napkins folded into cranes. Golden chandeliers lit above groups of conversations and amongst one of those stood Jake with overly styled hair and a suit too expensive to be bought with his own money. He was talking to some investors- or business men, she didn’t know- with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a wine glass he languidly sipped on. She was told by Jason that it was one of those rare times Jake didn’t make a scene during a party but she also heard he took a random girl to a hotel room for a one-night-stand, never to call her again.

“You say my name with such loathing,” Jake pointed out, his eyes narrowing as his teeth peeked behind his smirk. “I��d get if my dad and brother talked to me that way, but what did I ever do to you?”

Y/N took a step back, crossing her arms across her chest and tapping her heel lightly against the carpeted floor. She looked at him vexed, her mouth pursing into disinterest. Jake stood back straight, moving his hands into the pockets of his jeans and tilting his head in curiosity. If Y/N didn’t know any better, she would call him a pervert and get him thrown out of the premises by one of the guards just because she wanted to.

“I’ve heard enough stories to make a judgement,” she stated firmly.

“Is that any way to talk to your boss’ son?” He taunted.

“I frankly don’t think he’d care.”

Jake chuckled, lowering his gaze to his feet and shaking his head. His smile was bright, the crystalline waters that surrounded them reflecting on his face. A HammerHead shark from the tank behind him swam across him, followed by a Sting Ray and those animals held more of her attention than he did. “Sorry we got off on the wrong foot, Y/N,” he said and sauntered away from her, assuming he was making his way towards his father’s office. Her eyes followed him but she looked away when he glanced at her from over his shoulder. Clearing her throat, she found herself walking towards another floor of the aquarium.

Jason was right, she thought, his accent really is annoying.

Instead of the tunnel she was observing before, she was now in a fairly confined room with rectangular fish tanks one over the other, covering the span of all four walls, apart from the door. In the tanks were miniscule jellyfish that were soon to be moved to one of the larger tanks for the public to gush at. Of all the places in the aquarium, this room was probably the one she visited the most. Not because it was her favourite or anything but rather because these creatures needed most inspection. If the temperature was changed even a little bit or if the water was getting too dirty, there was a chance that a whole batch of these jellyfish would simply disintegrate.

It had happened once before, not under her watch but some other intern, who failed to notice the decrease in temperature in the room. It was a waste of a lot of Henry's money and it was also one of his favourite species that had met their demise. Because of the intern’s mistake, he yelled at him in front of the majority of the other staff and fired him. Since then, Y/N had always been cautious around her work. Perhaps it was why he was always so fond of her- she never knew why.

“Y/N?”

She flinched when she heard Jason’s voice, his head peeking into the room from the small crack of the door.

“What is it with you and your brother scaring me today?” She breathed, her hand placed over her chest.

“You met him?”

“Yeah he was walking down the tunnel, made nice.”

“He annoyed you, didn’t he?”

“Yup.”

“His first impressions are always bad.”

Jason was leading her out of the room, bringing her to the ground floor where she saw tourists and customers flocking towards the ticket booth. If there was one thing about Henry she never understood, it was the fact that he refused to digitalise the ticketing system. In fact, he refused to digitalise many things in the aquarium. He had the physical copy of every research paper published by the The Marine Foundation of Korea and his logs were still done by hand. Technology hates me and I hate technology, he would always say and this mostly stemmed from the incident where he accidentally deleted all his pictures from Google Photos.

“Isn’t an excuse to breathe down my neck,” she argued as he led her to his office.

“Damn.”

“Yeah,” she pressed. “He talked to me like he’d heard of me.”

“Obviously he’s heard of you.”

“No, I mean,” she paused, looking to her side to make eye contact with him. She wasn’t sure how to explain it, so she stuttered and used animated hand gestures to make her point. “Like he knows me.”

“Yeah, well, dad and I talk about you to him all the time.”

“What the hell?”

“In like, a business way,” Jason defended. “He asks how work goes and you sometimes come up in the conversation.”

“And what do you tell him?”

“That you’re good at your job?” He raised his brow, a confused smile meeting her look of disbelief. “Don’t take it the wrong way, he’s honestly probably just jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“Dad trusts you more than him, you know?”

Before Y/N had the chance to respond with a confused remark, perhaps even a puzzled expression, Jason was pushing open the door to Henry’s office and they were met with the sight of Henry sitting on his desk and Jake standing beside him with a grin, leaning towards whatever he was being shown on the monitor screen. Jason and Y/N settled in the chairs on the other side of the desk, the former confidently crossing one ankle over the other knee and the former confused as to why she was there in the first place. Jason had to tug her sleeve to keep her from squirming and looking around confused. There was a moment of silence that passed, Y/N’s gaze zipping between Henry and the tanks his office was surrounded by. Henry murmured to Jake while pointing at his monitor, analysing something Y/N and Jason weren’t aware of. Jake nodded along, pinching at his bottom lip in thought.

“Y/N?” Henry called. She answered with a curious hum, her brows raising. “You’re free next week? Thursday?”

“Yes, why?”

“Well, you know,” Henry brought his attention away from the monitor and towards her, pushing his glasses farther up his nose with his pinky. “I told you about it. An old friend of mine is opening a restaurant with a huge tank. He wants us there on opening night.”

“Oh, right. I remember,” she nodded.

“What, Mr. Bahng didn’t invite me?” Jake stood back straight with his arms crossed, his grin refusing to leave his expression. He looked between his father and brother, only glancing at Y/N once before continuing to tease them.

They, of course, did not find him amusing. “All of us, Jake,” Jason replied with a roll of his eyes.

“Yes, and it’s going to be a rather quiet gathering,” Henry continued. “So I expect you to be on your best behaviour.”

“When have I ever let you down, father?” Jake chuckled; Henry rolled his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Y/N,” Henry looks at her with tired eyes. “He’s got all sorts of fish in his tank, he’s even got a Whale Shark in there-”

“Woah, what?”

“Yeah, I know, it cost a fortune but anyways,” Henry waved off. “He wants to know fun facts- his words, not mine- about all the species he’d got in there so could you be a dear and…?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Y/N grinned and patted Henry's hand that rested on his desk. “Anything but having to socialise with strangers.”

“Can I join her?” Jason chimed, pointing his thumb towards her.

In that moment, Henry glanced between his son and favourite-slash-best employee and they resembled children asking whether they could take a break from studying to watch cartoons. His eyes twitched, thinking that he didn’t want to deal with annoyance other than his younger son. “No,” Henry said. “You’re socialising with strangers. So are you, Jake.”

Jake, who was about to open his mouth to protest with a finger raised in the air, gulped and dropped his hands down to his sides and nodded with pursed lips.

The opening night to Mr. Bahng’s restaurant was a spectacle. What was planned as an intimate gathering turned into a media spectacle. Paparazzi flocked the entrance of the restaurant and bodyguards had to hold back the public as the handsome sons of Henry Sim, the founder of The Marine Foundation of Korea, walked the red carpet. Minor celebrities, a few actors and foreign entertainers attended the evening- some spotted the Jenner Sisters and others hollered at Jason Momoa and Leo DiCaprio. DiCaprio was an old friend of Henry’s- they met through ocean conservation funds and over the years, he had earned a permanent place on Henry’s invite list and vice-versa. Y/N had the pleasure of meeting him once, barely for a few minutes, for a hand shake and to be introduced as the aquarium’s manager and top researcher.

Y/N walked the red carpet with her arm looped with Jason’s, her free hand holding the hem of her sparkly dress in order not to trip in the ruckus. Her hand would occasionally come up to shield her eyes from the camera flashes and Jason had to repeatedly catch her frame because she was tripping on her heels. They were both dreading to see how the paparazzi pictures would turn out the next morning. Jake, on the other hand, walked confidently with a hand in his pocket and the other waving and blowing kisses at everyone. Photographers and netizens were gawking at the Australian engineer graduate, asking for pictures and photographs but ultimately being turned down. He was famously known on the internet for his looks, Prince Charming-like looks and mannerisms. His personality? It was a mystery to all those on the internet, further feeding into delusions of young fan-girls. It was only Jason and Henry that filmed for interviews for the world of marine-biology, often showing up on the news to promote The Marine Foundation of Korea or to talk about their next big break-through in marine sciences.

Henry and Mr. Bahng were the last to walk the carpet- they were the highlight of the event, after all. When they finally entered the restaurant, the glass doors were shut and bolted behind them, bodyguards taking their place in front of the premises like they were protecting The Sphinx. What was inside the restaurant might as well be as valuable as The Sphinx- there were barely any lights to illuminate the subtle interiors of the restaurant. Circular tables spanned the floor, glass windows towering the walls for the public to see inside if it weren’t for the black curtains. Everything else was painted black, too- the walls, the tables, the black marbled floors. The tank however… The tank glowed blue, just like the tanks in the aquarium. It spanned the entirety of one of the four walls in the restaurant. Schools of fish swam by, accompanied by Stingrays, Hammerhead and Leopard sharks. A lone Mola Mola swam by, its eye holding a vacant stare as it scanned the spans of the restaurant on the other side of the glass.

The showstopper, however, would only make its presence when Y/N finally made her way towards the exhibit. Her heels clicked against the black marble, one hand holding the hem of her dress and the other clutching her purse. The loose strands that fell from her hair up-do fanned her shoulders and just as her bangs bristled her eyes, the Whale Shark swam past the tank. It glided effortlessly across the water, its massive and speckled body moving with a hypnotic grace, throwing Y/N into a trance. She stood in awe, eyes scanning for when she could see it again, acting like she didn’t see Whale Sharks everyday in the aquarium. It was the ambiance of the restaurant that made the tank more mesmerising, if she had to be honest. She’d never seen anything like it.

Jake didn’t get a chance to admire the premises yet, sucked into meeting the guests and investors with his father and brother. When he found a chance to slip away, he made his way to the bar and ordered himself a double shot of whiskey. He promised himself that it would be his first and last drink, remembering his promise of behaving for the night. The last time his father brought him to a public gathering, which was almost two years ago, he almost set the venue on fire and broke a glass table. Scowling at the memories he dug up, he took a seat on a black stool at the bar, wandering his eyes around the guests and seeing men and women of power mingle in unexpected cliques. Finally, his gaze landed on the tank, the main attraction of the night, its hue misting the ambience and painting his skin in a sparkling blue. He admired it, watching the Whale Shark languidly make its way back and forth across the tank, sucker fish clinging onto its skin and a lone Leatherback Turtle following it.

Eventually, his eyes dragged towards the far corner of the restaurant where he found the back of Y/N’s silhouette. She, too, was admiring the tank. Gripping his glass of whiskey, he made his way towards her, a sly smile gracing his lips and the whites of his eyes twinkling brighter with the blue hue. As he walked closer, he could make out the familiar color of her dress that he spent the whole limo-ride staring at. It was a sparkly blue and silver dress, thin straps that barely held the dress up her bust. Her hair was put up in a messy bun, two hair pins with silver sea turtles holding it in place. Her earrings matched her hair pins and her heels matched the silver of her dress. The blue hue colored her skin and he swore he was looking at a still-life painting.

“Where’d you get the dress from?”

Y/N looked over her shoulder to catch Jake’s smirk that she learned to despise through Jason’s anecdotes. The smirk that led to his many one-night-stands, his smirk that led to all the decisions that made his father angry at him, the smirk that led to disasters was the same smirk that was walking towards her. Her serenity pulled into annoyance and Jake could see it in her eyes, her brows wrinkling and her lips sneered.

“Hey, I’m just playing nice,” he offered, trying his best to shrug and surrender his motivations. He took another sip of his whiskey, keeping his gaze fixed on her expression.

Y/N turned her body to face him and now, his eyes were wandering down her frame, staring at all the curves of her body that her dress showed off, just as he did in the limo. “It’s an old dress, I wear it a lot,” she admitted. Then, she knocked a nod towards the glass in his hand. “Let me guess, fifth drink of the night?”

“Come on, the night just started,” he rolled his eyes, the gnarly smirk refusing to leave his expression. “It’s my only drink of the night. Promised dad I’d behave, remember?”

“Right,” she swallowed. The hand that was holding the hem of her dress moved to clutch her purse, both her hands pressing into stomach. A water came around with a tray of appetizers, ironic that it was all seafood. Jake finished his drink and handed the empty glass to the waiter, taking two pieces of appetizers- one for him and one for Y/N.

Silence engulfed them as they stood side by side, both now facing the tank and staring at the creatures and coral spanning across her, the only sound being the loud swishes of the water and their chewing. Y/N was not staring to admire anymore; she was staring to distract herself from the awkward presence, to pass time in any way that she could.

“Aren’t you supposed to be socialising?” Y/N asked, hoping he’d realise and leave.

“I’d rather stare at this than socialise,” Jake said, both his hands digging into his trousers.

He wasn’t sure what stories his father and Jason fed Y/N about him for her to hold onto her negative impression of her. She probably thought he hated his family’s line of work, to read about water and the ocean beds and fish all day. In reality, he loved marine biology, he truly did. But he wasn’t going to apologize for not seeing it as his career. Jake still went to the aquarium of every city he would visit, spent time reading the articles and journals his father published and watched marine documentaries in his free time. He even had a small fish tank in his apartment back in Australia- he had two Firefish Goby and two Cardinalfish. He loved marine biology so much, he specialised in marine engineering. He wasn’t sure if Y/N knew that.

“Can I ask you a question?” Jake turned to her. She raised her brows in curiosity, coaxing him to continue. “Why this?”

“What?”

“I mean, why this?” He pointed at the fish tank just as the Whale Shark swam past them again. “Fish tanks, standing in one place, staring, the aquarium. Why, when you could have gone to bigger research centers like in Hawaii, or something?”

Jake almost regretted asking the question when he saw the expression on Y/N’s face turn solemn. She brought her bottom lip between her teeth, chewing as though she was chewing her brain to find him the answer to his question. Not so she could give it to him but because she wanted to give it to herself. Why? She asked herself that, too.

“I don’t know, Jake,” she sighed. “It seemed right at the time and… I guess, I just didn’t know? Who would pass up an opportunity to work with Henry Sim, you know? He chose me. And I’m not saying I regret it, I’ve found family in him and Jason but I ask myself why, too. I miss being out on the waters.”

Ignoring all that she said about his father and brother, knowing it would trigger him, he smirked at her again. He knew how she felt, it was the same thing Jason used to tell him a few years ago. As mesmerising as aquariums were, being out in the sea and seeing marine creatures in the wilderness is like cutting to a surgery intern. Jake had only gone on an ocean expedition once his whole life. His father took him during high school while he was applying for universities in hopes of changing his mind about his major. Jake remembered loving it, being enamored and lost in what the ocean had to offer, to witness its mystery with his own eyes. But unfortunately for his father, it still wasn’t enough to replace his love for engineering.

“I get it,” he assured her. “Don’t worry though. It won’t be this way for long.”

Before Y/N could ask what he meant, to make him elaborate, they heard Henry hollering their names from across the restaurant. He was waving their hand at them, Jason standing beside him sulking in boredom. Jake and Y/N speed-walked towards him, joining him at the table along with a scholar of jellyfish biology.

“Bahng is going to give his speech soon. Sit,” Henry told the pair.

Mr.Bahng’s speech went on for longer than most would like. He stood in the middle of the room with a drink raised in the air, thanking his family, friends and colleagues for making his dreams come true. His daughter stood beside him, trying to calm his influenced-state but it had all only turned into a comical predicament. Y/N caught Jake eyeing the daughter, knowing she must have been one of his old conquests. Most women she knew of her age who ran in the same circles were all probably one of Jake’s old conquests. She wasn’t going to shame these women, she understood the appeal- the wide smile, the sparkling eyes, the smooth hair and dashing facial features. However, she wouldn’t miss a chance to shame Jake, especially around Jason.

Sick and bored of it all, Jason signaled to Jake to grab a drink with him at the bar. As the pair stood up, leaving Y/N alone with Henry and the jellyfish scholar, Henry questioned the pair.

“No more drinks for Jake,” he warned.

“One more can’t hurt. I’m fine,” Jake defended himself, only to be met by an eye roll and a wave of his hand, telling them to go away and come back soon.

The brothers ordered whiskey for themselves. They’ve been told all the men in their family were whiskey enthusiasts. So is their father- apart from the phase he had when he was an angry drunkard, hammered with cheap beer and vodka most of the nights. Now that it had subsided, he was back to whiskey and that too, only rarely.

“Have you not told Y/N yet?” Jake asked his brother as they settled down onto the tall stools. By then, Mr. Bahng’s speech had ended and the room erupted in small talk again. Y/N’s ears were probably being ripped off by the jellyfish scholar but knowing her, she was definitely enjoying the conversation.

“Told her what?” Jason looked at him with utter confusion.

“The research team? Summer expedition?” Jake tried jogging his memory.

“Oh, right!” Jason nodded, sipping on his drink and hissing when an ice cube touched his teeth- it was a pet peeve he’s had since he was young, but he loved the taste of cold beverages. “We wanted to surprise her. Dad knows how much she’s been waiting for this so we’re gonna tell her on a better day.”

“Oh, God. I was on the verge of telling her,” Jake frowned.

“But she doesn’t suspect anything, right?”

“Nope, not a thing.”

“Crisis averted, then!” Jason assured him. “Dad and I are still figuring out how to tell her. Got any ideas?”

“She hates me, I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear any good news from me,” Jake chuckled.

“Y/N doesn’t hate you,” Jason Looked at him baffled and confused, mouth pulled upwards in surprise.

Jake scoffed. “Yes,” he said. “She does. And it’s because of the crap you and dad feed her.”

“Jake, she doesn’t hate you. I know when Y/N hates someone and she doesn’t hate you,” Jason chuckled. “She’s just a bit apprehensive of you and I don’t blame her. You’re a character-”

“Thanks, man-”

“And she takes time with certain people. To be fair, people like you aren’t her scene.”

“I’m not her scene? The fuck does that mean?” Jake laughed, finishing the last of his drink.

“Jake, you’re the drink and let’s party kinda person. She’s not. She likes peace and quiet and books and fancy sofas to sit on. She’s just quiet, dude. Give her time.”

“Yeah, fair enough,” Jake rolled his eyes.

Just then, Y/N found her way to Jason’s side, the click of her heels stopping at the stool beside him. She had an annoyed expression on her face, her eyes tired and almost lifeless. “Your dad’s calling. We’re going home,” she deadpanned and turned to walk away, the hem of her dress in one hand as her hips swayed with more vigour. She was sleepy and tired and if the limo didn’t drop her off at home, she was going to crash in Jason’s bed.

Sunlight danced across the crests, water stretching endlessly into a mosaic of light and motion. Gentle swells rolled beneath the research vessel while occasional whitecaps broke against the hull of the boat. Y/N lay stretched on the warmed deck, salty breeze tickling her stomach and bringing frizzy curls to her hair. Clad in a striped bikini, she left little to the imagination. It was an early morning for her, seagulls mulling over the Indian Ocean and skies still painted with a pink hue. Everyone on the team was still asleep and she took the opportunity to seize the morning.

The first person to wake up was Sunghoon, one of Jake’s friends, who happened to be an oceanographer and drone operator. He studied ocean currents and temperature changes and learned how to pilot drones in order to collect data on plankton blooms. Without him, the entire whale research expedition would be impossible. Sunghoon greeted Y/N with a drowsy smile, clad in only a pair of shorts himself, taking in the morning sunlight.

Following him was Jay, one of Jason’s friends, who was a cetologist and acoustic analyst. He was rubbing a towel against his wet hair, waving at Y/N who started to put on her shirt out of a slight insecurity that crept onto her cheeks. Behind him, Jason and Heeseung joined with plates of toasted bread and a carton of orange juice. Jason threw a piece of bread towards Y/N and she swiftly caught it, thanking him for breakfast.

Heeseung was known as a young prodigy in the field, perfecting his skills in steering and working as the boat captain and field technician. Jake, too, came aboard as a field technician- a marine engineer himself. In fact, If it weren’t for Jake, Henry Sim would probably have never agreed to this whale research expedition in the first place. Jake wanted to test out new equipment that was hitting the market and who better to test the equipment than The Marine Foundation of Korea? It took a lot of convincing and buttering up his father to convince, yet here he was, heading an entire project by himself with some of his closest friends. If Y/N had squinted hard enough at the predicament, this was basically a vacation for a bunch of fish nerds.

She sat on the deck with her legs brought to her chest, chewing on the soggy piece of bread and watching as Jake finally made his way towards the group of boys with a bowl of scrambled eggs in his hand. Vaguely, she could hear Sunghoon say, “your father must finally be proud of you,” and Jason circling back with a sarcastic comment. It made the group rumble with laughter and Y/N felt herself cracking a smile too.

It was probably around three months ago when Jason and Henry broke the news to her. She was coming back from having a measly lunch at a convenience store nearby and had entered Henry’s office to collect a few files. When she opened the door, Jason and Henry had been waiting for her with a cake in their hands and beaming smiles on their faces. “If you’d walked in any later, I would have started eating this thing without you,” Jason chuckled at her, pulling out a plastic knife from his pocket.

Y/N looked at the pair with confusion, eyes darting between the greeting brows of Henry and the grinning mouth of Jason. Then, her eyes fell towards the chocolate cheesecake they were holding, the word “Congratulations!” pipped on with melted chocolate. She recognised this cake. It was the same one they’d buy for every one of her birthdays she spent with them over the past five years. However, the absence of “Happy Birthday!” threw her off- also, the fact that it wasn’t her birthday.

“What is this for?” She asked, feeling as though this was almost a mistake. This cake was expensive and she almost felt guilty. “Guys, nothing’s happened,” she widened her eyes, shook her head and waved her hands in front of her to demonstrate no.

“What do you mean, Kkomaya?” Henry chuckled. “You’re gonna be part of a research team. That’s a huge thing to celebrate.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

Jason handed her a piece of folded paper that was tucked away in his blazer. It read the details of a whale research expedition that would take place during the summer and span into autumn season. Y/N could barely skim through the details when her eyes landed on the plethora of signatures that filled the end of the paper. She recognised Henry, Jake and Jason’s signatures and some of a few government officials that signed off on the research expedition and agreed to fund for it. Right beside Jake’s signature was an empty dotted line, waiting for Y/N’s signature.

“You’re joking,” she gasped.

“Sign it so we can cut this cake and celebrate, Y/N. My hand’s getting sore,” Jason chuckled again.

“Oh, right. Sorry!”

What followed next was a string of excited screams, giggles and jumping around until Y/N finally signed the paper and threw herself into Henry and Jason to hug. Then, they cut the cake and each enjoyed a piece, the rest to be distributed amongst the employees of the aquarium in light of good news. A few moments later, Jake entered the room, coyly making his way towards Y/N to give her a handshake. Since the night of Mr. Bahng’s restaurant opening, the pair had developed a healthy rapport. He would visit the aquarium sometimes, bumping into Y/N in the process and making polite conversation. He made efforts to be a little more respectful towards her, packing away his cocky personality only in front of her. She once asked him why he was spending so much time in Korea, leaving his job in Australia and he responded aloofly. She got her answer now.

Now, it was the end of May and Y/N was on a research vessel with an unfamiliar group. Though she spent a week getting to know them before leaving for the expedition, seeing them interact on the deck, throwing around jokes like they’d known each other their whole lives… she wasn’t sure how to act that way. She felt like the odd one out, the loose end. Jake and Sunghoon were childhood friends; Jason and Jay were college friends and Heeseung was Mr. Bahng’s oldest son so Jake and Jason had known of him since they were kids. She’s met him a handful of times before, including the night of Mr. Bahng’s restaurant opening. But she didn’t know him like everyone else did.

“Y/N!” Jason waved for her to come over and she did, lifting herself off the lounging chair and walking towards them. It was their third day together on this vessel and she still wasn’t sure how to approach anyone when they were grouped together. She hated saying it, but she relied on Jason to include her when it came to the socialising side of her work. The practicality, however? She was splendid.

“Today’s the day we need to actually start working,” Heeseung said to her as she approached them. Jason made space between himself and Heeseung so she could stand in the circle with them. “It’s mostly Jay and Sunghoon that’s gotta do the work today, figuring out the equipment and all. Jake and I will help. You and Jason stay in stand by, for now. You can go on dives, get your practice on. Just be careful, make sure one of us is scouting…”

And Heeseung rambled on, eventually moving on to telling Jay and Sunghoon what their itinerary consisted of. Y/N’s eyes wandered off to the ocean, water spanning for miles on end, no land near site. They were in the middle of nowhere- well, not literally. They knew their coordinates. But if their equipment were to damage or if one fell overboard, they were as good as dead. It’s moments and opportunities like these marine biologists spend their lives working towards- what Y/N spent her days waiting for.

“So, that’s final?” Sunghoon started. “Jay and I will get the hydrophones, then?”

“Yep,” Heeseung clasped his hands together and everyone started dispersing, mumbling words of encouragement and affirmations, pumping their fists in the air or clapping to get their spirits up.

Before everyone had the chance to disappear and get their gear prepared, Jason stopped everyone and said, “should we make, like, a group chant sort of thing?”

“Yeah, that’s not happening, mate,” Jake pursed his lips and patted his brother on his chest. Y/N chuckled and the rest of them laughed while walking away to continue their work.

It took Jay and Sunghoon a total of four hours to deploy the five units of hydrophones, both floating and anchored. While diving, they would constantly resurface for air and call for Jake, yelling, “What kind of new technology is this, you twat, I prefer the old ones!” Their anger bubbled, frustrated at the fact that a two hour process was taking them double the time only because of the unfamiliarity. After their fourth complaint, Jake ended up diving with them to help.

Heeseung stayed with Jason and Y/N to help test and calibrate the hydrophones. While they sent test signals, Y/N cursed under her breath, too, telling Jason, “we could have just used the old equipment. This new shit Jake brought us is not user friendly.”

“People thought that about the iPhone but they love it now, don’t they?” Jason offered, hoping to reduce Y/N’s distaste. She could only respond by rolling her eyes.

By the time they were done, the sun had started setting and the divers barely ate food. The trio that stayed on the vessel cooked a heavy dinner with whatever ingredients they had, feeding the divers the second they freshened up. The group assembled on the deck, the same place they were huddling in the morning, with blankets wrapped around their shoulders to shield from the chilly breeze.

“Where’s Jason?” Jake looked around.

“He’s finishing with the final sample recordings. He’ll be up in a bit,” Y/N assured.

Jason came back with six chairs, one for everyone to sit on as they debriefed for the night. Warm water was passed around as conversation fluidly changed from work to personal history. The stars were shining unfamiliarly, a sight Y/N couldn’t get in the city anymore. She was reminded of her father who used to point to the constellations and tell her their names. As a kid, she knew most of them by heart. Now, she was unable to recognise most of the constellations, only being able to pick out a few.

“Add in a bonfire and the night would be perfect,” Jay sighed, shivering as he hugged his blanket tighter.

“Oh, we used to go camping a lot in college,” Jason mused. “Those were the times, man. Young and alive.”

“I’d say you’re living it up right now as well, bro,” Heeseung laughed, referring to their boat that was in the middle of the ocean, whale watching and diving as a part of their job description and getting paid above average.

“True,” Jason scratched the nape of his neck in embarrassment. Jake further made fun of Jason and Sunghoon joined in, throwing pieces of crumpled paper from their notebooks at him.

“Look at the stars, guys,” Heeseung directed everyone’s gaze towards the sky. “You don't have nights like these in the city anymore.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Y/N nodded. “Gotta take it all in before we leave.”

“We’ve got three months for that, don’t worry,” Sunghoon assured.

“Hey, Y/N, wasn’t your dad an astronomer?” Jason clocked his head. “He used to teach you when you were a kid, where each constellation was?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“You told me, like, a really long time ago.”

“Your dad did physics in college? That’s so cool,” Jake pipped, sitting at the edge of his chair and directing his excited smile at her. He’s always had a habit of becoming excited at the mention of physics and math- the entire reason he went into engineering.

“Do you still remember some of the constellations?” When Heeseung asked, Y/N nodded. “Do tell us,” he encouraged.

Bringing her bottom lip between her teeth, she looked up and squinted her eyes to see if anything looked familiar. “Do you guys see the diamond shape?” She heard everyone confirm with a hum. “That’s The Corvus or The Crow. Dad used to say that the crow was a messenger from the sea.”

”Wah,” she heard Jason and Jay exclaiming as she continued searching.

“Do you see a teapot, perchance? Right there,” Y/N attempted to show them its correct location by pointing and once again, she was met with a group of hums. “That’s The Sagittarius. It contains the center of the Milky Way.”

”Wait, I’ve heard about this,” Jake snapped his fingers, trying to jog his memory. “Didn’t sailors use it to locate the galactic core or something?”

”You’re right, I’m surprised you knew that,” Y/N smirked and tried finding another constellation.

In the background, Sunghoon pondered aloud on what it would be like if he could name a constellation after himself and it brought the group into a laughing fit. Jake, though he laughed with them, kept his gaze on Y/N, admiring the way her nose tilted upwards and gaze reflected the starry sky. Jake, who once picked up a book on astronomy out of sheer curiosity and gave up on reading it due to its lack of logic and mechanics, found himself leering as she explained the stars to everyone.

“Do you guys see the red star? That’s Antares, the heart of The Scorpion,” she explained.

”Wow,” Sunghoon started and snapped towards Jake as though he had a revelation. “Wait, isn’t that your constellation? You’re a Scorpio, right?”

”Yeah, how’d you know?”

”I’ve known you your whole life, asshole. Don’t tell me you don’t know my zodiac.”

”I do, I do!”

”What is it?”

”Sagittarius! I thought about it when Y/N pointed it out, I swear!”

Then started the narration of Jake and Sunghoon becoming friends. Jake’s mother, Vivian, moved into the street that Sunghoon’s parents, Daniel and Emily Park, lived in. Both couples were newly weds, just getting back from their honeymoon. Vivian had already been pregnant with Jason at the time and because her and Emily grew close, she was there the day Jason was born. When their husbands were off to work, Emily would often spend her time with Vivian, taking care of her and Jason. Around a year later, Vivian fell pregnant again and Emily announced her pregnancy exactly a month later.

The two mothers spent all their time together thereafter, going to the hospital for check ups together and supporting each other through pregnancy yoga exercises. With each other's support, they didn’t worry about their husbands working overtime. They even hired a nanny together, shifting between houses to help with household work and with Jason, who was still too young to understand his surroundings at the time.

Jake and Sunghoon were born a month apart, Jake being the older one. Emily was in the hospital while Vivian gave birth and vice versa. Henry and Daniel were in wonder of their friendship- it was like it was out of the movies, utopian for the society they lived in today. It was a good thing the two families found each other in this dog-eat-dog world.

Jake and Sunghoon went to the same schools, same clubs and festered the same hobbies so they could do everything together. Their mothers used to joke that they’d end up falling for the same girl one day. “And what would you do if that ever happened?” Emily used to ask Sunghoon and he would respond with, “boy code- I’ll stay away from her if he likes her and I know he’d do the same for me.” In fact, he did and when a similar situation arose in middle school, neither of them got the girl because they valued their friendship more.

Around the time Jake and Sunghoon were old enough to perceive and build on their imaginations, they started pulling pranks on Jason. It was the nasty ones- like, putting saran wrap on the toilet seat or sticking gnarly notes on his bag before he left for school. Once, they rolled a skateboard into him while he was walking into his bedroom and he fell face first into the floor, breaking his nose and costing his parents an emergency trip to the hospital. Jason and Jake didn’t speak for a full month after that incident.

When Jake and Sunghoon turned sixteen, the Park family started talking about relocating to China. Daniel had better job prospects and he was convinced that his children, Sunghoon and Yeji who were four years apart, would receive better education. “And international exposure is always good for a child,” he’d tell Emily. Sunghoon would argue that he wouldn’t leave the country until college and Yeji would cry about not wanting to leave her friends.

It was around this time that Henry opened The Marine Foundation of Korea and started earning more. Their family moved to a more expensive neighbourhood but that didn’t stop Jake and Sunghoon from spending most of their time together. In fact, when Henry had gone on his drinking spree due to the lawsuits and backlash, Jake would run off to Sunghoon’s house, leaving his poor mother and brother to deal with his scary father. When it came time to decide upon college and careers, Sunghoon sat through arguments with Henry to allow Jake to pursue his passions in engineering.

When Jake and Sunghoon started senior year in high school, Vivian was diagnosed with uterine cancer- stage four. That year was filled with tragedy and character change from Henry. Though they spent a fortune on hospital bills, Vivian’s health rapidly declined. The two families started accepting the fate that was to come and Vivian came to an honorable death. What made the children’s period of grief insufferable was that the tabloids had picked up the event and started bombarding the Sim family with unrelated questions. It made Jake want to run away.

Around that time, Sunghoon’s family did end up relocating to Taiwan where Sunghoon pursued marine biology (being truly inspired by Henry’s work) and Yeji continued her high school education. Jake flew off to Australia to pursue engineering, despite his father’s wishes, and estranged himself from his family. For over a year, Henry and Jason only got updates about Jake from Sunghoon. Eventually, though, the three made peace.

It had been almost a decade since Vivian passed away and over three years since Jake and Sunghoon completed post graduation from living across the world from each other, yet their friendship still ran strong. They called and texted each other religiously, making sure their friendship lived on through whatever they were doing in life. Being on this research expedition was like a dream for the pair- everything had somehow worked out perfectly.

“Do you miss your mom?” Heeseung found himself asking the Sim brothers.

“Yeah, of course,” Jake shrugged and slumped further into his chair. Sunghoon reached over to comfortingly pat his knee and he cracked him a smile.

“I miss her all the time,” Jason said. “I’d like to think she’s in a better place.”

A long time ago, when Jason first told Y/N about how his mother passed away, she noticed that there was never an air of solemness or pity when he spoke about her. It was tragic and unfortunate, but Jason never let that reflect in himself. He always spoke about his mother with confidence or a smile on his face, celebrating her existence as a smart woman and amazing mother. He never let anyone show him pity about the fact that he lost his mother too young. He simply chose to idolise her, keep her alive through his happiness and through his achievements. She realised, after narrating basically his whole childhood, that Jake was the same. When he spoke about his mother, he didn’t let his voice cloud with pity and he described her with love and adoration.

“Isn’t it lucky that you ended up doing marine engineering?” Sunghoon said to Jake.

“I love engineering but I do love the ocean, too. Shit’s in my blood- dad shat on me for no reason,” Jake rolled his eyes and Jason threw back a piece of crumpled paper at him. Annoyed, Jake bounced his leg up and down. “You know what we forgot to mention?”

“What?” Sunghoon asked.

“Do you remember when Yeji had the biggest crush on Jason?”

With that, Sunghoon let out the biggest groan and threw his head back, hiding his face under his hands. Jason leaped at the memory while Heeseung, Jay and Y/N begged Sunghoon to show them a picture of his sister. Jake started scrolling through his phone to see if he could find any.

“What do you say, Jason?” Jake wiggled his eyebrows at his brother.

“Dude, grow up,” Jason rolled his eyes. “She was a kid.”

“Not anymore! Isn’t she, like, working right now, Sunghoon?” Jake teased.

“I’ll actually kill you,” Sunghoon deadpanned.

“I think they’d make a great couple, though!”

“Dear lord, not this again,” Jason groaned. “The four of us talk all the time, we literally have a group chat. Stop making it weird.”

From what Y/N could gather, this seemed like a conversation the three had frequently. Jake would mention the pairing of Jason and Yeji and Jason and Sunghoon would get riled up and throw a fit. Jake would then continue to list down the reasons as to why should start dating for the millionth time and the other two would turn him down for the millionth time. After seeing a picture of Yeji, she understood why Jake said they would make a great pair.

The first time Y/N saw Jason and Jake side by side, she told them that they looked nothing alike. And they truly didn’t- everyone would always be surprised when they told them they were siblings, only one year apart. Jake had stronger features, a sharper nose, defined jawline, almond eyes, thick lips and curtain-like hair. Jason, however, had lighter features with a button nose, round eyes, fluffy hair and puppy-like lips. They were both handsome, there was nothing to deny, just in polar different ways.

“I think this is a sign for us to sleep guys, It’s gonna be early morning for all of us from here on,” Jason announced and was the first to get up.

Everyone followed him to the sleeping pods, six beds fitted to the walls like bunk beds. If they stared hard enough, the room almost looked like a jail-cell but none of them really took it to heart. They wouldn’t be spending much time there anyway. Y/N slept in the bed above Jason’s and Jake slept opposite to her. That night, she found herself drifting off to sleep while desperately trying to focus on his features, the softness of his expression as he slept.

“This is our first drone test,” Heeseung announced and Sunghoon planted himself beside him with the drone and controller in hand. It had almost been a week since they deployed the hydrophones and it took them a week to perfect how to use them. Improvements were going slower than expected but a majority of the reason for this expedition was to test the new equipment so they learned to not complain as much. Finally, they decided to move on to the next piece of equipment, the drone, that Sunghoon was going to manoeuvre.

“Are we ready?” Sunghoon called. Everyone answered with a hum, dressed in scuba gear in case they needed to dive at the spotting of any whale, they told themselves. In the few days that they were at sea, they found it concerning that they spotted everything but a whale. “Alright, let’s go, then!”

Everyone watched with curiosity, intent and awe as the drone lifted higher into the sky, becoming a speckle of dust to their eyes as Sunghoon controlled it with grace. Jason monitored its camera through his laptop, paying close attention to anything that it could capture. They all stood around watching the screen for around ten minutes, Sunghoon still standing at the edge of the doc as he controlled the drone.

When the fifteenth minute came around, everyone started to lose hope, dispersing to do their respective work with grumbles and sighs. The twentieth minute came around and Jake asked Sunghoon if the new version of the drone was better than the hydrophones. He confirmed with a nod, his lips slightly parted as he concentrated his fingers on the controller and his eyes towards the sky where he could still see the drone. Bored, Jason and Y/N started playing thumb wars and Heeseung and Jay started discussing what the next day’s itinerary would be- Sunghoon let out a gasp.

“Guys, look!”

Everyone ran towards the laptop screen and vaguely, they could see the outline of a large fish, slowly gliding through the ocean currents, around twenty feet away from them. It wasn’t blue- a deep brown and grey, rather. It could have easily been a Bryde’s Whale. At this realisation, everyone elated and Jason ran to check if the hydrophones were picking up any sounds or echoes.

“I’ve got nothing,” Jason shook his head.

”What do you mean? Let me check,” Jay took over and after a few seconds of listening, he too concluded the same thing. “Are you sure the hydrophones aren’t glitching again?” He asked Jake.

“No, I’m sure,” Jake assured.

”Guys, it’s not too far from us. You can go check it out,” Sunghoon hollered to everyone, noticing that the silhouette was moving closer and closer towards the vessel.

Within the next ten minutes, Jay, Jason, Jake and Y/N were diving headfirst into the water. The rush of the ocean engulfed Y/N, the cold making her realise that this was her first time diving in the ocean since her semester on sea during college. The past few years, she’d kept in touch by diving in swimming pools and facilities but this… the real thing was always better.

Bubbles streamed past their bodies as they tried cutting through the water, their goggles making everything hazy as they got used to the pressure. At a distance, they could see the silhouette of what they hoped to be a Bryde’s Whale. Sunghoon and Heeseung kept an eye on them through the video the drone was transmissioning.

For a breathless moment, a moment where they all hoped that it was a whale they were finally seeing, they truly believed that they were in luck. However, as they swam closer to the giant body, theyr recognised its gaping mouth, unhurried movements and pointy fins as something else. For a moment, another breathless moment, they were disappointed, weight filling their chest in a way the ocean’s pressure couldn’t crush them. But seconds later, they decided to enjoy their discovery- Y/N, especially. It was fleeting, barely a few seconds, but it felt like something unspoken passed between them in that shared moment.

“Guys, it’s a Basking Shark,” Y/N said. “Heeseung? Sunghoon? Can you hear me?”

“It’s a Basking Shark, alright,” Jay said, his voice crackling through the earphones before Y/N could receive his words.

“You know the rules, guys. No touching, only looking,” Jason reminded them.

The group of four stopped swimming, floating in the blue abyss and watching the Basking Shark’s movements. It opened its mouth to inhale water- its way of catching food. It stayed open that way, allowing them to get a full view of its insides. White and dark stripes disappearing into its stomach. Slowly, slowly, second by second, the shark swam their direction, as calm as the wind and ocean before a storm. The divers moved to stand out of its way as it swam past them.

“How many feet do you think it is?” Jake asked.

“This is a big one,” Jay said. “I think 30, maybe 33 feet.”

Y/N knew the answer to this question. Normally, she would be the first person leap at answering. But she was too enamoured by the creature as it swam between them, momentarily making her lose sight of Jay and Jason who were on the other side. She could still see the bubbles floating upwards from their breathing. In a moment of poor judgement, she let her fingers raise to inch closer to the fit on the shark, eyes sparkling with eagerness and anticipation. What would it feel like? What would she feel?

As her fingers reached out, inches away from the shark’s rough skin, she felt a hand wrap around her wrist. Startled, she swung her head around to find Jake’s eyes staring daggers at her. Through his mask, she saw him shaking his head. They hovered that way, his hand on her wrist, eyes moving away from each other and towards the shark, watching it drift away from them and the vessel.

The group made their way back to surface, hearts beating with exhilaration. Sunghoon and Heeseung stretched out their arms to help everyone up, fighting the heaviness of the water. “That was amazing,” Jay enthralled as he ripped his mask off.

The other three settled on the deck, backs slumping onto the railings of the vessel as they heaved to catch their breaths. Their masks were thrown beside them and their wetsuits slipped down their torsos. Jake ran his hands through his hair, trying to restyle its shape; Jason forced himself to stand up so he could make his way to the shower; Y/N sat there, unmoving, staring at her bare hands like she’d just woken up from an unbelievable dream. Then, she lifted her head to look at her surroundings, meeting her gaze with Jake as her head turned. He cracked a smile at her and she turned away, embarrassed.

Nine days. It had been nine days since the Basking Shark incident and they were nowhere close to seeing a whale- Blue Whale, Humpback Whale, Sperm Whale… nothing. There was a moment where Jay was convinced he’d picked up the sounds of whales singing but the noise ended up being interference from debris. However, it wasn’t to say that nothing good came out of the past empty days.

The equipment they were testing had come around wonderfully. Everyone, with due time and patience from Jake, started learning how to use the technology and were on their way to perfecting the techniques. One day, a curious Green Sea Turtle surfaced next to the vessel and stared at them for a full minute before diving away. While hauling one of their retrieval baskets, they realised they'd caught an Isopod and it made Heeseung recoil in horror due to its eerie similarity to cockroaches- that day, they found out Heeseung had a huge phobia of insects. Y/N caught a glimpse of a pod of flying fish through her binoculars. Jake caught a glimpse of a Thresher Shark while everyone else was in the lab and he had headed up for some fresh air.

Sunghoon seemed to be some sort of octopus whisperer. A few days ago, he’d spotted a tiny translucent octopus stuck to the side of the vessel and he stretched himself to reach it. It was small enough to fit on his pinky and wrap its tentacles to cover his fingerprint. It was almost transparent, apart from specks of pigment that floated in its body like dust. Its body pulsed softly in his hand, delicate tentacles fanning out onto his palm to test the surface. Then, he slowly lowered it back to the water. On one of their dives, Sunghoon spotted a Blanket Octopus, a rare sighting that would get the media riled up when the footage was released, and he swam after it until he was too far from the vessel.

That morning, Jay woke up to the sight of a pod of dolphins swimming past the vessel, jumping into the air to create dark outlines onto the orange and pink sky. The rhythmic splash of their bodies against the water seemed to stir the rest of the crew from their sluggish morning routines. One by one, they emerged onto the deck—first Jason, then Heeseung and Sunghoon, followed by Y/N and Jake. The usual grumbles of early wake-ups were quickly replaced by soft gasps and murmured excitement as they took in the sight before them.

“That’s what I call a wake-up call,” Y/N gasped.

“Maybe that’s a sign of luck, guys,” Jay offered. “We should do something tonight.”

“Like what?” Sunghoon asks.

Jay perked up. “Like a night dive?”

Sunghoon, who had been taking a sip of water, nearly choked. “Diving?” He coughed. “At night?”

“Why not? We’ve been out here for weeks, and we haven’t done one yet,” Jay reasoned. “The bioluminescence, the different marine life—it’d be an entirely new experience.”

Jason nodded in agreement. “Plus, it’ll be a good change of pace. We’ve been so focused on the whales that we haven’t really taken in everything else around us.”

Heeseung, ever the cautious one, sighed. “You do realize diving at night is way riskier, right? Low visibility, stronger currents—”

“We’ll take precautions,” Jay cut in. “We’ve got the lights, safety lines, and we won’t go too far from the vessel. It’s a controlled dive, not some reckless plunge.”

A moment of silence passed as Heeseung weighed the risks, scanning the eager faces around him. Finally, he exhaled through his nose and shook his head. “Fine. But if anything even remotely goes wrong, we call it and get out. No heroics.”

A round of nods and murmured agreements followed.

“Then it’s settled,” Jay grinned. “Tonight, we dive.”

Excitement buzzed like static as the sun dipped below the horizon. The group prepared for their night dive with thick dive suits and dive computers strapped to their wrists. Jason, ever meticulous, went through each regulator one by one, testing for air flow. "If your regulator sputters, switch to your alternate immediately and signal me," he reminded the group.

Sunghoon handed out waterproof dive torches while Jay and Heeseung secured backup glow sticks to their vests, just in case their primary lights failed. “If it gets too dark, stick close and don’t panic,” Jay advised. “This is a controlled dive, no one goes deeper than 30 meters. Stay within sight of your buddy at all times. If anyone gets separated, stop where you are, shine your light upwards, and wait for us to find you. Do not ascend alone unless it’s an emergency.”

Jay paired with Jason, Sunghoon paired with Heeseung and, like fate had it, Y/N paired with Jake.

Slowly, they approached the edge of the deck, staring down at the ink-black water, the reflection of the stars rippled into infinite nothingness and for a moment, just for a moment, they felt themselves regretting their decision, letting fear conquer their senses. Sunghoon looked at Heeseung, panic and fear glistening against his eyes. Jake, catching his expression from the other end, assured him with a thumb raised in the air and adjusted his mask.

“We got this, guys,” Jake announced, trying to lift everyone’s spirits. “It’s gonna be an experience of a lifetime.”

As the words left his lips, Y/N’s gaze lifted to meet his through the hazy plastic of her mask, her lashes fluttering as hesitation creased her brow. Even through the dim glow of their dive lights, she could see the warmth in his eyes, the way his expression softened—like he was seeing only her in the vastness of the ocean. Then, as if drawn by an unspoken pull, his fingers brushed against her wrist before slipping lower, finding her hand with effortless ease. Slowly, deliberately, he wove his fingers through hers, his grip gentle yet certain. Her breath hitched as she glanced down at their hands—at the way they fit, tethered in the silent depths—before letting her gaze drift back up to him. He wasn’t looking away. He held her there, in the weightless moment suspended between them.

“Just stick with me, yeah?” He whispered to her. “I promise it’ll be the best time of your life.”

“Alright, everyone,” Jay hollered. “Everyone dive in three… two… one.”

What followed were a sequence of splashes and bubbles rising to the surface of the water due to the impact. The first thing they saw was blackness, their eyes still adjusting to the minimal light of their flashlights. As they splashed around, disturbing the calmness of the water, they saw specks of blue- little emeralds glistening at their friction.

“It’s plankton,” Y/N squealed. “It’s bioluminescence!”

“Can’t get better than this, huh?” Jake squeezed her hand, tuning out the excitement everyone else was emulating.

“This is unreal,” Heeseung moved his hand to trigger another spark of bioluminescence, mesmerized by the living light show.

As they descended further, with patience and caution, they saw the silver body of a Barracuda flash by. Startled, Y/N moved closer to Jake, wrapping her wrist around his bicep. Jason, Jay, Heeseung and Sunghoon had moved deeper and the pair followed, eyes spotting clusters of coral reefs with their blooming polyps. From the reef emerged a biofluorescent Hawksbill Sea Turtle, snapping its mouth open and closed in hopes of finding prey. It moved languidly through the water, ignorant of the divers coming closer to it.

“Didn’t think we’d see this today,” Jason said. “Biofluorescence is common in corals and sharks but it’s only been seen in turtles around 2015. Take it in, everyone.”

As everyone tried keeping their eyes on the turtle, already on the verge of leaving their sight, Jay signals everyone to look towards a rocky outcrop. A flash of pale white flickering into deep brown and they hover in place, watching as a cuttlefish pulsated with shifting hues, blending seamlessly into the seafloor before striking at an unsuspecting shrimp. Just a few feet away, a small octopus stretched its arms along the coral, its skin rippling from sand-colored to a deep maroon as it crept toward its prey.

Y/N, captivated, gestured excitedly at the display, her bubbles rising in bursts. Jake caught her expression and grinned behind his mask, watching as she pressed closer to the scene, eyes wide with childlike wonder. Sunghoon, playing the photographer, raised the underwater camera to capture the display of nature’s most skilled shapeshifters. When the creatures finally retreated into the shadows, the group exchanged excited looks before continuing their dive.

As they moved deeper, the ocean’s silence felt heavier, interrupted only by the sound of their own breathing. It felt like they were in a sharksploitation film, the Jaws background music being the only thing missing. As though Y/N’s thoughts were being read, Jason, who had been slightly ahead, froze and pointed his light downward in a startled haze.

Whatever it was that caught Jason’s attention, it was huge and left a trail of bioluminescence in its wake. They could feel it looming just beyond the reach of their lights. A ripple of tension passed between the group as an immense shadow suspended in the water. No one moved- they were sure not one of them was breathing.

Jay’s fingers curled around his dive knife out of instinct, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Heeseung, usually calm, hovered frozen in place, his eyes darting between the dark shape and Sunghoon, who was holding onto his camera for dear life. Jake exhaled slowly, bubbles escaping in a steady stream as he tried to make sense of what they were seeing, Y/N clinging to his arm to comfort herself. Steadily, Jason tightened his grip on his flashlight and angled the beam forward. The light cut through the darkness, catching the edge of something vast and smooth. The shape shifted, its outline rippling like a ghost emerging from the abyss.

It was a Manta Ray.

At the realisation, their muscles loosened and Jay kept his dive knife away. They watched it swarm past them, its wings stretching impossibly wide. Just like a ghost, it glided through the water like it owned the place, its pale underbelly flashing in the light. It moved like a specter, unbothered by their presence, its cephalic fins unfurling like delicate ribbons as it turned. With the added effects of the blue bioluminescence, it felt like they were watching a dream. Y/N say them all the time in the aquarium but to see them alive, gliding in their natural habitat, was a different kind of sight.

“How big do you think that is?” Jay murmured.

“Five meters?” Y/N answered. “Easily six… she’s huge.”

Jake felt Y/N’s grip on his arm loosen and like instinct, he turned towards her in. He was met with the sight of her in awe, watching the Manta Ray disappear into the void. As they hovered in awe, Heeseung was the first to react. He gestured frantically, his flashlight beam cutting through the water and landing on something just below them. His wide eyes and rapid pointing sent a jolt of confusion through the group. Jay followed the direction of Heeseung’s light, angling his own beam downward.

A Vampire Squid.

It wasn’t supposed to be here. These creatures lived far deeper, in oxygen-minimum zones, not a mere 20 meters below the surface. Yet there it was, its deep crimson body illuminated in their lights, its webbed arms curling inward as it drifted.

Jason exhaled a string of bubbles, exchanging a stunned glance with Jay. Y/N's mind raced—was it sick? Disoriented? Had something forced it to the surface?

Before they could react, the squid suddenly pulsed its body, releasing a shimmering cloud of bioluminescent mucus—a defense mechanism against predators. Tiny blue specks scattered around it like an underwater firework before the creature vanished into the blackness.

The team remained frozen, the eerie afterglow of the squid's defense lingering in the water.

“What the hell was that doing up here?” Jason finally asked through their comms. No one had an answer.

“I’m not getting a good feeling from this,” Heeseung announced. “We’ve seen plenty. I think it’s time to go.”

With steady nods and eager movements, they swam back toward the vessel, an unspoken unease settled between them. A buzz of confusion filled their dialogue when they broke the water and fatigue settled into their bodies. Some looked back at the Manta Ray and awed, others still concerned about why they saw a Vampire Squid so far up the surface, questioning if they should be worried. Jason theorised that it was probably nearing its life-cycle; from what he could see in the passing moments, it looked quite old.

In practiced silence, they stripped off their gear. Masks clattered onto the deck. Wetsuits peeled away with sluggish motions. Someone yawned. One by one, they disappeared below deck—some for a quick shower, others just to sit and breathe.

Y/N, clad in her bikini and a flimsy shirt, found herself sitting on the edge of the deck, her bare feet skimming the water. Each ripple sent a flicker of blue light swirling around her toes—the bioluminescence responding to her every movement. She could hear the guys deep in a conversation on the other side of the deck, discussing the next morning’s regime. She didn't listen in. She just watched the reflection of the stars, absentmindedly swirling her foot through the water, watching the glow chase her movements.

Then, footsteps. She didn’t have to look to know who it was. The air around them shifted as Jake settled beside her, resting his forearms on his knees. For a moment, neither of them spoke, just watching the light dance beneath them. She could see him pouting from the corner of her eyes, a habit she noticed in him before they even started the research expedition.

“Dinner?” She asked, not breaking her gaze away from whatever was in front of her.

He turned to look at her, damp hair falling in front of his forehead. “Yeah, yeah,” he nodded.

“Hey, I have a question,” Y/N found herself chuckling before she could ask him. Slowly, she turned to look at her, shifting her position so that she could lean back on the palms of her hands. “Heeseung doesn’t know you hooked up with his little sister, does he?”

At the question, Jake found himself cackling, too. “What?” He laughed. “No way,” he shook his head. “I think he’d murder me.”

“Yeah, he definitely would,” Y/N agreed. Then, she let a moment of silence pass between them, mustering up the courage to ask him her next question. “What is it about hookups with you, anyway? Just… why so many?”

“Is that who you think of me as?” Jake’s chuckle never left, his eyes widening as he continued. “We just came back from that… interesting dive and you wanna talk about this?”

“It was a bit scary,” she admitted. “I loved it, but I don’t wanna think about it until tomorrow.”

“Fair, fair. Alright, I’ll indulge you,” Jake bit his lip- another one of his many habits- and allowed his gaze to meet hers.

In that moment, in a fleeting split second, the wall that Jake built to keep caution around her had crumbled. All these months, Jake spent trying to be respectful around her, walking on eggshells to try and gain her respect. And somewhere along the way, she started looking at him like he was his own person- not the annoying little brother Jason complained about and not the disappointing son Henry seethed about. She could see the effort he put in, not only for his work or his family, but also for her. She wasn’t sure why. She almost missed his cocky demeanour.

“I don’t know why you’re so against it-”

“I’m not against it,” Y/N defended. “I’m just not that kind of person.”

“Right,” he breathed. “But I guess… well, I suppose I should begin from where it all started,” at that, Y/N chuckled and nodded to coax him to continue. “So, it was the second semester at college and as usual, I was at some house party. By this time, I’d lost my virginity in high school and everything, right? But I hadn’t really slept with anyone in college. So that night, I met this girl- really pretty, really flirty-”

“And you slept together.”

“And we slept together,” he said. “And me, being the fool I was,” Y/N continued laughing, finding his narrative style quite comical. “Thought that maybe she wanted me to call her the next morning. But apparently she didn’t want that. And nineteen year old Jake was heart broken-”

“And he started going to the gym, came out a cocky ass and started sleeping with everyone because some random girl broke his heart-”

“Hey, hey, hey, don’t make fun of me,” Jake nudged her side, leading her to continue laughing. Her eyes struggled to stay open and her smile refused to die. Jake bathed in her joy. “And to be fair, I started going to the gym in high school,” he pointed a finger at her.

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” she grinned and rolled her eyes.

“But, yeah, anyways,” he continued. “I was hurt by it, obviously. And then I told my friends about it and they were all assholes, by the way. Not the kind you want to have long term relationships with. But, yeah, I told them and they kinda brainwashed me into thinking that I got lucky that this was a no strings attached thing. And to be honest, a few days later, I kinda liked the whole idea, too, I guess? And the party I went to after that- hooked up with another girl. And I guess, the cycle just continued.”

Y/N blinked at him for a second, bringing her bottom lip between her teeth. “No one gets hurt?”

“No one gets hurt,” he assured with a shake of his head.

“How would you know, though?” She asked. “The girl in the context- what if-”

“You just kind of know,” he breathed. “You always kinda know. It’s like a sixth sense… only hook up with people you’re sure who want the same things as you. But don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t ever want to settle down. I mean- I’m pushing thirty. It’s just that… I don’t think I’ve found anyone yet.”

Y/N hummed. “The sex is that good?”

Jake’s grin returned, this time a little mischievous, dangerous. His eyes had a sparkle in them, his pointy teeth peeking behind his smile. “Y/N, the sex…” he rumbled, voice low and breath fanning against her ear. He leaned closer to her. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

Y/N gulped.

Assuming his previous position, his grin still plastered on him, he looked her up and down, taking in the tips of her toes that were still touching the water and running his gaze back to her eyes. Perhaps he was being delusional, clouded by the conversation they were having, but he was sure he saw the spark in her- the spark that manifested through her hooded eyes and flushed cheeks. He could see her squeeze her legs together, nails digging into her palms as she chewed her bottom lip. Her gaze stayed on his hands- his hands that were pulsating with his veins, fingers long enough to wrap her around him.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never-”

“No, I have- Jake, I’m pushing thirty, too,” she rolled her eyes, shaking herself out of her daze. A cool wind breezed past them and she could feel her nippled perking through her shirt- she was sure Jake had noticed. “Dated this guy a couple years ago. I met him as a customer in the aquarium, actually. We dated for, like, a year. The sex was good. Jason hated him, though. Said he acted like a frat boy and looking back, I guess he kinda did.”

Watching her shrug and look away, he licked his lips. His breath was near her neck now, his presence ghosting against hers. “Y/N, you deserve better than good sex- whatever that was.”

“And you’re some expert on sex?” She teased.

They didn’t know when the air between them had changed.

Maybe it had started in that moment- when the world was nothing but rolling waves and flickering bioluminescence. Maybe it had started long before that, slipping in between stolen glances across the vessel, lingering eye contact that lasted just a second too long, and quiet moments between chaos that neither of them dared to name.

They’d be lying if they said there was absolutely no tension building between them over the past few weeks. It had been there, simmering just beneath the surface, waiting.

It was in the way he always seemed to be nearby—not in an obvious way, but in a way that made it impossible for Y/N to ignore. If she was adjusting equipment, Jake was there, his arm brushing against hers as he reached for something. If she was rinsing off after a dive, he’d pass by, running a towel through his hair, his skin damp and glistening with seawater. It was the way she felt his presence before she even saw him.

It was the way their bodies gravitated toward each other—shoulders bumping when they worked side by side, fingers grazing when they passed tools back and forth. The way she’d instinctively reached for him during dives, her hand wrapping around his forearm in the darkness, trusting his steadiness as they maneuvered through the water. It was the way he never pulled away.

Maybe it was the way his eyes lingered on her lips when she spoke, or the way she caught herself staring at his hands—the way they moved, the way they curled into fists when he was frustrated, the way they rested so naturally on his neck when he was deep in thought.

It was everything.

Slowly, silently, inevitably, it had been building up to this moment.

Jake found himself hoisting himself back on his feet, rubbing his hands against his thighs to brush off any dust. “I’m gonna try sleeping,” he said, ignoring the laughter that the rest of the boys started filling in the air. Yet, he didn’t move, eyes fixated on her and the way she seemed to curl further into herself. He waited for her to say something- anything that gave him a hint on what was to come next.

“Okay,” she said, finding herself getting back on her feet as well. “I’m gonna sleep, too.”

“Okay.”

The pair stared at each other for a brief second, his eyes darting between her features and hers fixated on his eyes. The air between them was charged with something neither of them dared to put into words. It was a quiet understanding, an unspoken decision made in the space of a breath. Then, with a nod, Jake led her back to the sleeping pods. They moved quickly, their strides quick and deliberate, as if slowing down would give them time to second-guess. Jake barely spared a glance at the others—Heeseung and Sunghoon talking near the railings, Jason and Jay checking something on the equipment—he breezed past them like they didn’t exist.

By the time they reached the sleeping pods, her heart was hammering against her ribs. She watched as Jake stripped off his shirt, catching her widened eyes of shock and explaining to her that he always slept this way. And she watched as he climbed onto his bed, running his hands through his hair and clenching his jaw from what she assumed was frustration. Then finally, finally, after pretending like they weren’t there for a purpose, he looked at her. He looked at her with conviction, slender eyes coaxing her and lips begging for her.

“Y/N…” his exhale spelt out her name.

His rand reached out for her to hold and she looked at his palm- his empty hand that was waiting to be filled with hers, his empty fingers waiting to wrap around her. So, she complied and took his hand, climbing into his bed and adjusting her straddle on his lap. There was silence, mostly just their heavy breaths filling the air, wondering if this was the moment they’d been waiting for- if this is what Jake was hoping for.

She felt his hands creep up her thighs, slowly and surely attaching themselves to her hips, dipping under her shirt to find her waist. His fingers danced on her skin, almost like he was playing a piano, waiting for her to do something other than to hold onto the hem of her shirt.

“Jake?”

“Yeah?”

He could feel her pulsating through her bikini and his dick twitched in his shorts. He gulped as he watched her hands move towards his chest, the cold of her fingertips sending a jolt down his spine. He let her stay that way, her hands exploring the crevices of his chest. Lifting his head that was resting on the wall, he found his neck moving towards her, and she did the same. Their heads tilted, lips parted and eyes hooded- they knew what was to come. They couldn’t wait for it to come.

“I promise you won’t get hurt,” he whispered, just as his lips brushed against hers, their noses touching. His hands moved higher up her torso, touching her ribs just as she let out a ragged breath-

And just as fast as their moment came, it left when they jolted away from each other. They heard footsteps and grumbled murmurs of the rest of the group mumbling it was a good day and goodnight to each other. Panicked, they scrambled off of each other and Y/N was rushing out of his pod and back into her own- anything to make the predicament seem normal, unusual. Before Jay had burst the door open and everyone piled in, Y/N’s head was already on her pillow, pretending to be asleep.

She could hear Jake greeting everyone and wishing everyone a goodnight- she paid no mind. That night, she couldn't sleep.

The group of six had spent almost two months out on the ocean, in the middle of nowhere, on a metal vessel that they’d been calling home, and they’d still hadn’t spotted a whale. However, they felt no sense of discouragement, focusing on testing the new equipment and going on more dives and collecting more samples for research. They collected samples of plankton blooms, recorded the eerie songs of distant marine life, and encountered creatures they never expected—an elusive blanket octopus, a deep-sea jelly drifting near the surface, even a rare oarfish shimmering like a silver ribbon in the depths. The once-crisp excitement of the expedition had softened into something quieter—a steady rhythm of work, patience, and anticipation.

That day was like no other. The air felt no different and the ocean, as usual, stretched infinitely around them. The sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. Jason was at the research station, analyzing the latest data from their dives, his brows furrowed in concentration as he scrolled through results. Sunghoon and Heeseung were near the stern, arguing about whether or not a gull that had landed on their railing was the same one they’d seen three days ago. Annie sat cross-legged on the deck, flipping through her notebook, jotting down observations while absentmindedly twirling a loose thread on her sleeve. Jake was beside her, leaning back on his elbows, quietly watching the sun reflect off the water.

The late afternoon had been slow, peaceful, the kind of moment where time stretched lazily—until Jay stiffened, his head snapping toward the hydrophone. His heart kicked against his ribs as the sound hummed through his headphones, low and distant but unmistakable. Impatient, he holler for Jason who came running to him, questioning what was so important.

“Do you hear that?” He sucked in a breath as he handed the headphones to Jason.

Jason, eyes widened with hope and shock, nodded. “No way,” he breathed. “No way!” He yelled which caught the attention of the rest of the group.

“What is it?” Y/N craned her head to examine the ruckus, watching as everyone had gathered around the deck. Jay came over with binoculars, waving it around in the air. Somehow, without needing any explanation, everyone understood what the excitement was about. It was happening. It was finally happening.

Keeping her notebook aside, she made her way towards the rest of the group, leaning against the railing in anticipation.

“I think they’re a few kilometers away, we should be able to see them soon,” Jay concentrated on his sight through the binoculars, face squirming with concentration.

Everyone simply watched the horizon, waiting for a disturbance to break the surface of the ocean. For a few moments, they saw nothing and Y/N went back and forth from listening to the sound on the headphones, a melody so ancient and otherworldly that it sent shivers down her spine, and looking back at the horizon. She was on the brink of losing hope, watching as Jake and Sunghoon broke apart from the group with their heads hung low, looking at everyone like they were fools for thinking they were lucky until-

It finally happened.

Gasps of awe filled the air as the others scrambled to grab their binoculars and cameras. Sunghoon nearly tripped over a crate in his rush, and even Jake—usually calm and composed—had an unrestrained grin on his face as he followed Y/N to the railing.

A towering column of mist rose into the air, catching the evening light like a shimmering ghost. The sound of the exhale followed a second later, a forceful blast from beneath the waves. The water churned violently as the massive shape surged upward. For a split second, the ocean seemed to hold its breath—then, a whale erupted from the surface. A colossal Humpback Whale launched skyward, water cascading off its slick skin in torrents. The sheer size of it was staggering. Its massive pectoral fins spread wide, and for a breathtaking moment, it seemed suspended in midair—a creature far too large to belong anywhere but the sea, defying gravity itself.

Everyone froze. No one breathed.

Then, in a heartbeat, everyone burst into a rumble of excitement as the whale slammed back into the water, sending an explosion of white foam and waves rippling toward the vessel. The force of it sent their stomachs lurching, but no one cared. Y/N’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes blown wide.

“Oh, my God,”she said, unable to get her feet to move as Jay had scrambled back to the computer to see what the hydrophones had managed to record. “It’s singing!” Heeseung had screamed repeatedly as Jay fought to not let excitement shake his posture.

Sunghoon bolted for the camera rig, yanking the telephoto lens into place. “Holy shit, that was a full breach! I need a better angle—someone hold this steady!” Heeseung grabbed the tripod as Sunghoon adjusted the settings.

Jason scrambled toward the data log, frantically typing timestamps and environmental conditions into the system. “We need to record the water temp, salinity, GPS coordinates—someone grab the readings!”

As the crew erupted into action around them—rushing for cameras, hydrophones, and data logs—Jake didn’t move. He barely even breathed.

He was watching her.

Y/N stood frozen at the rail, her hands gripping the metal so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. Her eyes, wide and shining under the soft glow of the afternoon sun, stayed locked on the spot where the whale had breached. She looked completely lost in the moment—like the world had narrowed to just her and the ocean. The excitement, the rush, the frantic calls of the others—it all faded into white noise for Jake. He saw her throat move as she swallowed hard, lips slightly parted like she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. She didn’t even reach for the binoculars or her notebook. She just stood there and let everything happen.

Jake had seen her fall in love with the ocean over and over again these past few weeks. On the night dive, when she saw bioluminescent creatures flicker to life for the first time. In the quiet hours before dawn, when she let her fingers trail through glowing waters. Each moment had stripped away something guarded in her—had pulled her deeper into the thing she loved most.

And now, as she stood there, wholly consumed by the sight before her, Jake felt something in his chest tighten. She was beautiful like this—untethered, weightless, alive. In a moment of fleeting adoration, Jake wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She leaned into his chest without hesitation, mouth still agape, eyes still locked on the sea. Jake felt her exhale, felt the way her body melted into his. Slowly, confidently, he pressed a kiss to her forehead. His lips lingered, his eyes closing like he wanted to keep this moment exactly as it was. The weight of unacknowledged moments, flickering electricity had shifted into something else over the past few weeks- something, softer, lighter, deeper.

Y/N had stopped second-guessing the way she naturally gravitated toward him, the way her body angled toward him whenever they stood together, the way she reached for him without thinking. And Jake? Jake had stopped holding back.

He still teased her, still challenged her, still made her roll her eyes—but now, his affection was deliberate. When she handed him something, his fingers would brush hers and linger. When she got caught up in her work, he’d bring her water without a word. When she sat alone at night, tracing patterns in the bioluminescence, he’d sit beside her in silence, just to exist in the same space.

Finally, Y/N tilted her head up to look at him, her expression open in a way it hadn’t been before. No teasing smirk, no quick remark—just something warmer, something unspoken but completely understood.

Jake’s lips quirked into a quiet smile. “A lot of firsts for you these days.”

Y/N exhaled a small laugh, nodding.

“Think we should get to work now,” he offered and she meekly nodded.

Jake let her go and moved with quick precision, checked the equipment on deck, making sure the hydrophone was secured and that no water had splashed onto their more sensitive instruments. “Sunghoon, tell me you got that on camera,” he muttered.

“Barely!” Sunghoon yelled.

Y/N stayed close to the railings, keeping her eye out on the huge mass of shadow moving past the surface of the waters, just in case a whale surfaced again.

After spending days with whale songs filling the air, making their mornings, Sunghoon sent out his drone again and detected an entangled whale. After debating whether they were allowed to intervene, something about rules and regulations, they agreed to help the creature. Fear that it would die without sooner intervention and the excitement of being inches away from a whale, possibly being able to touch it, the group devised a plan of action.

Heeseung and Sunghoon stayed on the vessel as look-out through binoculars as the rest manoeuvred a small boat towards the hurting whale. It was only a few feet meters away from them but reaching it through the rough waters seemed like a task, all of a sudden. The waters were usually never this rough- first time in all the weeks they’d been on the ocean.

The water was colder than expected as Jake, Jay and Y/N descended, the massive form of the whale looming beneath them. Up close, the entanglement was worse than they’d thought—thick netting dug deep into the whale’s pectoral fin, restricting its movement. Y/N and Jay worked swiftly, slicing through the strands while Jake positioned himself to keep them steady. The whale remained eerily still, its eye just barely visible through the shifting blue.

Then, without warning, it thrashed, perhaps because of the sudden attention it was getting from foreign presence or perhaps from the pain of entanglement. The sudden burst of movement sent a powerful current surging around them. Y/N was thrown backward, Jay barely managing to steady himself. Jake instinctively reached for her, pulling her close before she could drift further. For a tense moment, they remained suspended in the water, waiting to see if the whale would calm. Slowly, its movements settled, and they resumed cutting. One final slice, and the last of the netting unraveled, drifting away into the depths. The whale hovered for a moment before, with a flick of its tail, it surged forward- free at last- and the three watched as it swam away from them.

“I can’t believe that just happened,” Y/N said. “I can’t believe I just did that- we just did that.”

Upon arriving back on the vessel, the team moved on autopilot—securing equipment, hauling themselves aboard, and stripping off their dive gear. A string of celebratory huzzas were passed around as Y/N slumped against a chair. The air was thick with exhilaration and exhaustion, breaths still uneven from the dive. Sunghoon handed Y/N a towel as she squeezed the seawater from her hair, her mind still in the depths, replaying the whale’s final surge to freedom.

Jason was already hunched over the laptop, fingers flying across the keyboard as he analyzed the recordings. "The change in vocalizations—it's real," he muttered, half to himself, half to Jay, who leaned over his shoulder. Jay's grin was unstoppable. "We’re really hearing this in real-time. That’s insane."

The others busied themselves cleaning up, but the adrenaline was still too fresh to settle. Heeseung cracked open a bottle of water, while Sunghoon replayed drone footage on his tablet, scrutinizing every frame. "We actually did it," he murmured, half in disbelief.

Y/N, however, found herself drifting away from the commotion. She was exhausted and desperately needed rest for her eyes. Her arms went slump and legs felt heavy and when Jake spotted her heaving breath, he made his way towards her, offering himself as a pillow. The pair slumped on each other, Jake running a hand up and down her arm as she drowned out the commotion around her.

“Just a few minutes,” she mumbled and nuzzled deeper into his chest, hugging his torso. Jake chuckled.

Their peace didn’t last long, though. Jake felt it before he saw it, the subtle shift in the air, the way the horizon darkened like spilled ink bleeding into the sky. A low rumble rolled across the sky, so distant at first that no one paid it much mind. But then came the wind—sharp, biting, and sudden. The gentle lull of the ocean turned erratic, the once-glassy surface growing restless beneath them.

A storm was coming. Fast.

“Storm’s rolling in,” Heeseung called from the helm, voice edged with urgency. “We need to secure everything—now.”

Y/N’s eyes shot open as her mind registered what was going on and everyone started moving in sync, doing what their training had taught them to do. Like it came out of nowhere, sheets of rain lashed against the deck, making it nearly impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. The ocean had turned violent, monstrous waves slamming into the vessel with enough force to send them stumbling. Sunghoon and Jay held onto the railings, Jake and Y/N barely finding a way to make it to safety as Heeseung and Jason controlled the steering. They could see them, their faces contorting with strain as they helped each other manoeuvred the wheel.

A rogue wave—towering, relentless—rose like a wall before crashing down onto the deck. The impact sent equipment flying, knocking everyone off balance. A sickening crack sounded through the storm, followed by a sharp, agonized cry.

“Jay!”

As Sunghoon hollered, he ran towards Jay on the unsteady vessel, fully equipped with the knowledge that they could be thrown overboard by the waves and the wind any second. Jay was crumbling against the rain, body twisted in pain as he held onto his forearm. “I think I broke it,” he repeated over and over again as Sunghoon carried him towards Jake and Y/N.

Jake and Sunghoon exchanged a look that Y/N couldn't decipher, a sort of language the two friends had accumulated through their years of friendship. When the vessel rocked again, Sunghoon grabbed Y/N’s arm and tried his best to get them inside- to safety, hopefully. Jake dashed the opposite direction, towards the wheelhouse.

“Where is he going?” Y/N yelled over the winds and the thunder that started to crack, crouching out of instinct though she knew it wouldn’t be much protection. Another wave crashed against the vessel, water flooding the deck. The rain fell harder above them, leaving them no mercy. They were being tossed around like a

“Distress signal,” Sunghoon shouted back, holding Jay in place amongst the imbalance.

The storm swallowed the horizon whole, a monstrous force of wind and water that turned the sky into an endless void of grey. The waves surged like biblical monsters, heaving and crashing against the vessel with relentless fury, each impact rattling through steel and bone alike. The world had shrunk to chaos—water seeping into every crevice, bodies thrown against railings, desperate hands gripping whatever they could to keep from being flung into the abyss.

“Sunghoon, we’re not gonna make it,” Y/N could feel her tears, tears of fear and defeat, mixing with the rain, eyes squinting as she searched for him amongst the fog.

“No, Y/N,” Sunghoon yelled. “We’re gonna make it.”

Somewhere, through the deafening roar of the storm, a voice crackled through the radio—a lifeline lost in static—before the darkness was split apart by a piercing beam of light.

The helicopter had arrived.

The harsh fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a stark contrast to the wild, untamed darkness of the storm they had just survived. The six of them sat scattered around the hospital room, their bodies aching, their minds still reeling from the chaos that had led them here. The sterile scent of antiseptic filled the air, but beneath it lingered the salt of the ocean, a reminder that no matter how far they were from that vessel, the sea was still etched into their skin.

Jay sat in the center of it all, his arm immobilized in a sling, bruises painting his skin in deep purples and sickly yellows. He looked exhausted, but there was a ghost of his usual grin on his face as he tried to downplay the pain. “I guess this means I get out of heavy lifting for a while,” he joked, but no one laughed.

Because they all remembered.

They remembered the way the waves had swallowed the vessel, tossing them like rag dolls. The helplessness of gripping onto whatever they could, praying they wouldn’t be swept away. The panic when Jay had been thrown across the deck, a sickening crack cutting through the chaos. The way he had screamed. The frantic, trembling hands trying to keep pressure on his injury, the desperate voices yelling into the radio for help, the sheer terror that, for a moment, they might not all make it out.

Sunghoon sat at the edge of his hospital bed, staring at the floor with his elbows on his knees, fingers interlocked so tightly his knuckles were white. Jason and Heeseung murmured in hushed tones with a doctor at the doorway, nodding stiffly at whatever instructions were being given.

And then there was Y/N.

She sat beside Jake, her head resting against his shoulder, eyes open but unfocused. Her hands were clasped together in her lap, like she was grounding herself, trying to convince herself that they were safe now. That it was over.

Jake hadn’t let go of her since they had been pulled out of the storm. His grip on her hand was firm, like if he let go, she might disappear. The adrenaline had long worn off, leaving behind only exhaustion and the silent, heavy weight of everything they had endured.

For the first time in months, there was no vessel beneath them, no swaying of the ocean, no distant songs of whales humming through the water. Just the quiet hum of the hospital and the echo of a storm that still raged inside them. For the first time, Y/N wondered, had they all gone crazy without knowing it? She’d seen documentaries about this- how people stranded in a single environment could descend into a state of psychosis. Did that happen to them, sickness right under their noses?

When the doctor made her way towards the group, everyone lifted their heads and sat straight, reacting as though a professor had just walked into the classroom. Dr Ryu looked at them sternly, an absence of sympathy and solemness in her demeanour. Perhaps that is exactly what they needed. “You guys got lucky,” she said. “It could have been worse.”

Everyone responded with a sequence of nods, Jay wincing as he moved the wrong muscle. Jason shifted to his side, resting his hand on his back as support and comfort.

“Physically, you all should be fine. A quick recovery- Jay included,” Dr Ryu continued. “However, I highly recommend visiting a therapist. By the looks of it, this wasn’t something easy that you all had to go through and you now show increased vulnerability to PTSD or any related disorders. Please do take my advice seriously.”

Again, she was met with a sequence of nods and mumbles, assuring her that they would do their best in taking care of themselves and each other.

“We will keep Jay in for the night for observation,” Dr Ryu said. “Any of you can stay with him. The rest of you- go home. Go home to your families and just be in a more familiar space. Try to sleep- staying awake all night and mulling over it will not help. Your bodies are exhausted. Give it a rest and come back tomorrow.”

As she walked away from the group, a moment of silence fell over them as they went over what the doctor had said. PTSD? Who knew this was the turn their lives would take? To be fair, she only advised a therapist- there was no guarantee for anything at the moment.

“I’ll stay,” Jason said. The decision was made without much debate. Friends since a trip went wrong during university, it made sense that he stayed back. While working on a coastal biodiversity project, their boat engine failed during a data collection run, leaving them stranded at sea for hours. They were rescued by helicopters that day, too and looking back, their situation now looked eerily similar- just without the injury and the trauma.

Jason had already straightened in his seat, his expression leaving no room for argument. Jay rolled his eyes but didn’t protest. “You guys should go get some actual sleep. My apartment’s closer to the hospital anyway- you should spend the night there, give each other company.”

No one had the energy to argue.

Sunghoon sighed, rubbing a hand down his face. “I’m gonna pass out the second I hit a bed.”

“Same,” Heeseung muttered, already gathering what little belongings they had brought with them.

Y/N glanced at Jake, who had been uncharacteristically quiet. He still hadn’t let go of her hand, his thumb absentmindedly running over her knuckles. His eyes flickered toward Jason, something unreadable crossing his expression.

Jason caught it. “Don’t even think about staying, Jake,” he said, voice softer now but still firm. “You look worse than Jay.”

Jake huffed a quiet laugh, but Y/N felt the tension in his grip. He didn’t want to leave. None of them really did, but Jason was right- they needed rest, and Jay was in good hands.

Y/N squeezed his hand, a silent reassurance, before standing up. “We’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

Jason gave a small nod. “I’ll text you if anything happens.”

With that, they filed out of the room, exhaustion making their movements sluggish. The police drove them to Jason’s apartment and the second they opened the doors, Heeseung and Sunghoon occupied the guest bedroom and Jake dragged himself into Jason’s bedroom. Y/N found herself frozen in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror. She felt like a fool for feeling the way she did, for being naive enough to think that she could get past this like it was a bad birthday party.

Upon entering the room Jake was in, she found him sitting cross legged on the bed, back hunched over as he toyed with something on his phone. When he felt her presence, he kept his phone away and shifted his gaze to her. He patted the empty space beside him, coaxing her to sit with him and she did. She let her head hit the pillow and Jake leaned against the headboard, eyes falling on the ceiling. It was weird not catching sight of a night sky filled with stars- almost unfamiliar.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” he whispered, almost as if saying it quieter would make their predicament lighter.

“I know,” she responded. “It doesn’t feel real,” she rested her hand against his shoulder, softly rubbing his back in hopes of comforting him. He leaned his cheek against her hand, raising his own to hold hers and closing his eyes to find solace in the moment.

“Everything’s gonna be alright,” he mumbled.

“Everything is alright,” she tried. “We’re all here, alive and safe. Jay is fine.”

“Jay is fine,” he repeated.

“And we are fine.”

“You almost died.”

Y/N leaned up and rested against the headboard with him, deliberately keeping her face close to his, breaths syncing. Jake’s eyes stayed close, his cheek still on her hand. “But I didn’t,” she said, with conviction.

“You were slipping away.”

Y/N didn’t know how to respond. The weight of it sat between them, heavy and unspoken. She knew that feeling. The terror of helplessness. The way it lingered in your bones, no matter how many times you tell yourself you survived.

She shifted, sliding closer, until their knees brushed. “But I’m here,” she murmured.

Jake lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to her palm, and something inside her stirred. “I need to feel it,” he said, almost to himself. “That you’re here. That this is real.”

His hands found her waist, tentative and fragile at first like that night in the sleeping pods, testing the waters, walking on eggshells. When she moved closer to him, finding herself straddling his waist again, Jake found no motive to stop. He leaned upwards to find her lips, mouths colliding without hesitation- there was no adultery, no ploy of teasing or hurting, no uncertainty. They were two people, finding an anchor within each other, desperately holding on.

When he finally kissed her, Y/N wondered why it took so long for them to be in this position in the first place. And he kissed her with caution, slow movements memorising her crevices and making sure she remembered him. As their mouths opened and closed in sync, his hands roamed underneath her shirt, tracing her skin and counting her ribs before lifting her shirt over her head. In that moment, while he held her, she didn’t feel lusted over or sexualised- she felt as though she was being protected, cherished… loved.

“Y/N… I don’t just want you,” he breathed against her, lips moving down her throat and hands roaming her legs. “I need you.”

Slowly, wrapping his arms around her back, he flipped her over so she lay on the bed and he hovered over her. For a brief moment, he stopped to look at her face- her eyes that were filled with curiosity and anticipation, lips parted in waiting for him, hair strewn across the pillow. Then he kissed her again, one hand roaming towards her nippled and the other swiftly unzipping her jeans. In this moment, though he usually wouldn’t prefer to, Jake wasted no time- he didn’t want to tease her or waste his time with foreplay. He just wanted to feel her, know that she was living in his arms, breathing and letting her heart beat against him.

His hand shifted to move her jeans off her legs and Y/N shimmied out of them, chuckling in the process. “This isn’t that attractive,” she murmured.

“Shut up,” he said with a grin and kissed her again.

He let his fingers hook under her underwear and touch her clit. Y/N moaned into his and he moaned back, feeling the wetness of her folds and letting her back arch into him. Her hips grinded against his hand and he complied by exploring her folds, slowly and desperately getting her to whine and moan more under him.

“Heeseung and Sunghoon are sleeping,” Jake mumbled against her skin, lips exploring the nape of her neck and moving to the curve of your breasts. “You’ve gotta try to be quiet, yeah?”

“Okay,” she heaved and Jake could feel her nod, her chin touching his hair.

He slipped a finger into her hole and she squirmed, biting her lip to adjust to the length. Her hands flew towards his hair, tugging and pulling at the silky tufts. He moved his finger in and out, languidly and deliberately, eyeing your reactions and expressions as he did so. His thumb flew to her clip, rubbing steady circles only for more wetness to ooze out of her.

“Higher, Jake,” he heard her moan and he increased his pace. The sound of squelching filled the room, mixed with their moans. He kissed her again, his other hand continuing to toy with her nipples while he fingered her- now, fast and dirty, aiming towards a goal. He could feel her clenching on his fingers, clamping down everytime he pulled out too much, whimpering every time he curled at the right spot.

Jake moved so he could kneel between her legs, his fingers now moving slower as he brought his face closer to her heat. She could feel his breath on her, only making her ache for him more. She whined for him to hurry up and was only shut up when she felt his mouth on her. He sucked on her clit as his finger picked up pacing, adding a second one as her breath got heavier. He could see her chest heaving, her hands flying upwards to grip the headboard.

When her knees started closing instinctively, his shoulders kept them apart, one hand gripping her hip so tight she was sure she’d have bruises the next morning. And he kept going, sucking and flicking at her clit with his tongue, fingers moving in and out of her so fast that she’d forgotten how she ended up here in the first place.

“I’m so close,” she moaned. “So close.”

And just as she felt her high crashing down on her, he’d withdrawn himself completely and she let out a gasp. Her brows furrowed, she tilted her head to find Jake stripping his own clothes and she stared at the way his chest glistened under the moonlight, his dick springing out of his boxers as he moved to hover over her again. His hair fell onto his forehead and her hands moved to tuck it under his ear. She placed an innocent peck on nose, cheeks, forehead and chin before moving to his lips again, waiting for him to do something before getting annoyed at her lack of orgasm.

“Brace yourself, alright?” He whispered into her mouth and she felt his tip aligning to her entrance. He looked at her before going any further, waiting for a confirmation. When she nodded, he pushed himself into her and the pair moaned in unison.

“Is this the great sex you were referring to?”

“You can’t deny it.”

As he thrusted into her, sharp and with purpose, she regretted wanting to tease him or get a laugh out of him. She let out a gasp, followed by an incoherent string of moans as he thrusted in and out of her, his hand caressing the back of her head and her nails scratching his back. She wrapped her legs around his waist, a desperate way to feel him deeper inside her. He buried himself in the nape of her neck, peppering kisses behind her ear while she did the same to his shoulder.

“Faster,” she moaned and he complied, forgetting the slow and romantic pace he wanted to go with and pounding into her faster, harder- anything and everything to get her to cum with him. He let a hand slip in between their bodies, fingers finding her clit and rubbing briskly and whispering sweet lulls into her ears.

“You gotta cum with me, yeah?” He said and she could only nod, throat too preoccupied with the moans she couldn’t hold back.

She felt the knot in her stomach building again, back arching further and pussy clenching harder onto is dick- he could feel it too, that she was close. She threw her head back, waiting for the moment to fall upon her, waiting for him to say something. He only went faster, letting the hinges of the bed creek.

“Y/N?” She responded with a frustrated hum. “Cum with me- cum for me.”

And she did, letting her orgasm spill over her body and she could feel him inside her, filling her up to the brim. Jake moaned, feeling her body shudder at the way he fucked her, her eyes meeting his with desperation and ache.

“Jake…” she whined as he placed her body comfortably on the mattress again, falling on the empty space beside her and wrapping his arms around her torso. “So good,” she breathed, unable to unclutter her thoughts.

“I know that was supposed to be depression sex, but wow,” he said into her neck.

Y/N raised a lazy hand to hit him on the head. “Stop being funny,” she groaned and he laughed.

Jake, Y/N, Jason, Heeseung, Jay and Sunghoon stood in a line in front of Henry Sim. Over the past few weeks, they’d met with him a plethora of times- just to talk, not even about technical things, just talk. It was his way of looking out for them, taking care of them in whatever way he could. He offered to buy them meals, pay their therapy and hospital bills and even offered them a stipend if they needed it- all out of guilt and desperation to help them heal better, not knowing what else to do.

He was never critical, even praising their work to a large extent. And in all honesty, he was proud- it was great work. “This information that you all have gathered is valuable, I hope you know that,” he said to them, holding their report in hand.

“Yes, sir,” they answered in unison.

“It still feels unreal. Like we’re supposed to wake up tomorrow and check the equipment again,” Sunghoon said.

Jay chuckled, adjusting the sling on his arm. "Speak for yourself. I’d rather not get thrown around another boat for a while."

Heeseung smirked. "You’re just mad the whale was stronger than you."

Sunghoon, who had been absentmindedly fidgeting with the strap of his camera bag, let out a small laugh, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. The energy in the room had shifted, nostalgia seeping in through the cracks.

Henry exhaled through his nose. "The ocean doesn’t let anyone walk away the same. You six will carry this experience with you—whether you realize it now or not."

Jake, who had been quiet until then, glanced at Y/N. She met his gaze, and for a moment, the past months condensed into something unspoken but understood. The storm. The breach. The long nights and quiet moments. The feeling of something beginning even as something else ended.

Noticing their interaction, Henry cleared his throat. “The least I was expecting was the pairing of these two,” he pointed between Jake and Y/N. The rest of the group cackled.

“They thought they were being so slick,” Heeseung laughed. “We noticed everything.”

Rolling their eyes, Jake and Y/N continued to grin at everyone's smiling faces. The aquarium lights flickered slightly as a school of fish glided past the large tank beside them. It was a strange, almost poetic parallel—them, sitting still in this room, while life outside moved on without waiting.

Jason grimaced at the idea of his brother and best friend dating. Attempting to change the conversation, he cleared his throat. “So what now?”

The question hung heavy in the air as the group of six looked at each other. They knew what was to come- a set of interviews, press releases of what they experienced and perhaps even a short YouTube documentary. But what was to happen to their lives? What were they to expect?

No one wanted to answer that question. All they knew was that outside, the ocean awaited their return.

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mochinomnoms · 3 days ago

Text

Two's Company, Three's a Crowd, and Six is a Riot

iii. Royal consort to the wild usurper

[wc} - 6,261

[notes] - idk how i feel about Leona in this but it is what it is so that's what's happening! I was trying to balance this with a bit of mild angst but also make sure that the romance part was still there? i think it worked for the most part though. also, very excited for the poll i have a bias for one option in particular...

tags: @rosieboop @aliasrising @alienlatteinspace @wishicouldart @cottage-clockwork

edit: i notice I missed a few things regarding the ages and stuff so I fixed that. Also the timeline I realized isn't obvious, so here it is since it's more important here than in the others: Leona and Mousy have been together for 12 years, married for 6, acting as king regent and royal consort for 8 months but officially crowned 3 months ago. I hope that makes sense looool (as me more about this pls I worked hard on it....)

make a choice at the end...

back to chapter list

iii. royal consort to the wild usurper

Listen to: “Like Real People Do” by Hozier

The heat of the savannah that the dorm’s magic replicated reminded Grim of the trip he and (Name) took to the Cloudcalling Festival though considering the dorm’s patron Seventh, it made sense.

It wasn’t quite as colorful though, everything in Savanaclaw was in muted browns, yellows, and orange. It was just as hot though, something Grim detested with his fur. At least they had the pool in the lounge, though it was quiet.

Grim looked around with confusion, sniffing at the air for your—or Mousy’s—scent. It wasn’t too far off from what you usually smelled like, but Mousy had an underlying scent of rain, like where’d they’d just been had a storm growing.

He’d come to learn that the weather of the dorms remained the same year round, no matter the weather on Sage Island, so it wasn’t hard to pinpoint your scent.

Grim followed after it, still put off by the lack of activity. To be honest, the dorm was running the same as it usually would, nothing was out of the ordinary. Which is exactly what was throwing Grim off! Sure, Heartslaybul is always a bit more lively with Ace and Deuce, and Riddle did throw an unbirthday party last minute, but Grim expected that Savanaclaw would do something for Mousy.

They revered their dormleader as much as the other dorms did, even if he was a slothful lion, so why wasn’t anyone freaking out about their partner?

Did Leona keep it quiet? Was he hiding you somewhere? Grim couldn’t have that, you’re his henchhuman no matter what timeline. Disrespect on you was disrespect on him! And why can’t he find you?!

“Mmm…where’d they go? They did come back to the dorm…right?” Grim huffed, padding around as he wandered the halls, the scent of rain coming closer as he approached a familiar door.

Leona’s room. It was closed, though Grim could hear shuffling behind the door, which was enough reason for him to slam it open and point into the room with rightful fury.

“HENCHHUMAN—”

“GAAAH! GRIM!”

Ruggie let out a high-pitched shriek as he clutched the laundry basket in his hands to his chest like a shield. Upon realizing that it was just Grim, he relaxed, ears flattening against his head as he scowled at the direbeast.

“Dammit Grim, what’s your deal? Don’t you know how to knock?” Ruggie grumbled as he threw a brightly patterned cloth into the basket, one that smelled like you mixed with rain. “You know I won’t cover for you if you damage something of Leona’s, I ain’t getting stuck with that bill.”

Grim let out a soft mewl, surprising both himself and Ruggie, as he zeroed in on the patterned cloth that was on top of the laundry pile. It was the cloth you had wrapped around you earlier, gold and black striped as it fell off your shoulders and held together by a dark orange and deep rich brown striped wrap and beads at your waist.

Now that he really thought about it, it looked a lot like the clothes everyone had been wearing when you two visited the Sunset Savannah.

“Hey wait! That smells like my henchhuman! Why’d they take it off? I thought they’d be here…”

Ruggie let out a sound of realization as he looked between the cloth and Grim, bringing it up to sniff it closer.

“Oooh, (Name), that explains why this shuka smells so different. Though, it’s waaay too nice for someone like them to have lying around, where’d they get it from, Grim?”

“Hmm? Didn’t Leona tell the dorm about this morning?” Grim questioned, walking forward and reaching for the cloth—a shuka Ruggie called it—to smell it again. Maybe with a closer sniff Grim would be able to locate you. “Give it, I was followin’ Mousy’s scent, I need a refresher!”

Ruggie obliged, though he raised a brow and flicked his left ear curiously at Grim.

“Leona hasn’t told any of us ‘bout anything. Heard there was some sort of explosion, ‘n who’s ‘Mousy’?”

Soft footsteps and a gentle knock on the doorframe caught both Grim and Ruggie’s attention, the former perking up at the sight of you at the doorway.

Even without the vibrant patterned cloth and emblem, it didn’t take away from the rest of your outfit.

Your top was black and sleeveless, no doubt to accommodate the heat of your home, with a high neck and a thick band tied at the back of your neck. The shirt was tucked into your black pants, which looked thinner and flared at the ends, and it was covered in a gold geometric pattern that shimmered each time you moved.

Simple, like Tart’s was, but it looked much more expensive, even the wide band sandals you wore looked like they were expensive leather, and the various bands and beads around your wrists and neck looked a lot like Leona’s jewelry.

When you uncrossed your arms, Grim noticed a tattoo on your left (rather muscular) arm. A lion, like Leona’s, though it was a bit less extravagant and didn’t wrap around.

“W-wha…(Name)?” Ruggie gaped at you, looking you up and down as you approached, making him clutch the basket to his chest and back up slightly. “Why are you dressed like a royal? ‘N you smell different too…”

The hyena opened his mouth again for a moment, before shutting it and scrutinizing you further.

Grim could barely make the words out from under Ruggie’s breath, as his ears flicked while you let you a wry chuckle.

“Yeah, I didn’t think he’d tell anyone, Leona’s never been one to share. Accident with a looking glass and time travel things this morning is all.” Your eyes and dry smile softened as you noticed Ruggie’s tense posture, gesturing for the basket.

“He’s hiding from me in one of the nooks around here. Thought I’d give him some alone time, you want me to help with that?”

Ruggie’s ears perked up, his tail slightly wagging as he thought it over.

“I mean, as long as I still get paid for the laundry…I won’t say no. I still gotta make Leona’s lunch.”

You smiled, taking the basket from Ruggie’s hands as you stared at him for a moment, making him freeze. Surprising both him and Grim, you reached up to ruffle his hair and cooed at Ruggie.

“Sorry, it’s just been a while since I’ve seen ya, you’ve been busy with work back in my time.” Letting out a tired sigh, you pulled away to rub the back of your neck. “We’ve all had a hectic time, actually.”

Ruggie nodded, eyes lighting up in sudden understanding as he looked down at your clothes once again. He winced, making Grim tilt his head, still confused as he heard him mumble something under his breath.

“Yikes, no wonder he’s hidin’. Okay, yeah. I’ll get the lunch started, I already had the detergent ready to go. Though, this is your shuka right?” He gestured to your clothes on the top of the pile. “That has to be hand washed you know?”

You waved him off, finally glancing down at Grim with soft eyes.

“No worries, Grim here will help me. I’m sure we have a lot to talk about, huh?”

Grim pouted, his ears flattening as he whined, “I don’t wanna do chores though…”

“Ruggie will make you a sandwich too.”

“OKAY!”

“What?” Ruggie exclaimed, halfway out the door as he spun on his heel and glared between the two of you. “I ain’t doing extra work—”

“I will have Leona pay you triple for your work today.”

“—without getting your food order!” A big grin on his face, Ruggie got down on his knees and titled his head at Grim. “What kinda sandwich you want? Want a drink and side with that?”

“Tuna! Fancy tuna with fried pickles! And, um…” Grim looked up at you and tugged at your pants. “What’s that drink Ace always gets us at lunch?”

You hummed to yourself, thinking until you snapped your fingers.

“Ah! The iced sweet tea. Can you get him that Ruggie?”

Ruggie nodded and gave you two a salute, walking off as he happily hummed a tune to himself, singing “gonna get paaaaaid~” as he did.

You let out a chuckle looking at Grim from the corner of your eyes and nodded your head to the door.

“Come on, let’s go. The faster we finish, the faster we can go to Ruggie and make sure he doesn’t eat half of your sandwich.”

Leona was hiding behind the waterfall, where there was a warm resting nook that most of the dorm was unaware of. You knew about it though, you’d been there numerous times towards the end of Leona’s third year.

Still, he’d left to it right away, telling you to go drop off your shuka in his room to have Ruggie wash it. Grim’s spell had summoned you during a walk in the palace gardens with Leona and Cheka at the time, the pain from the cracks on your skin making you collapse into some of the foliage and mud as a terrified Cheka stared in horror.

“Uncle! Nini? What’s happening?!”

The poor thing has already been through so much. As much as it was fun to see Leona young again, you were really hoping that Malleus would find you away home soon.

It was nice to see Grim little again.

“And I totally coulda beat Ace with my super duper great fire spell! But I went easy on him, so he got the higher grade.”

Grim was yapping your ear off as you hung the damp clothes on the clothesline, rubbing your clothing between your thumb and finger.

“Yeah? Which class was this again?”

“Umm, it was…Magical Dueling! Yup!” Grim put his paws on his hips and let out a confident chuckle. “Yeah, the Great Grim is a real mer-mercial?”

“Merciful.”

“Yeah! That!”

“Right. Grim, you do remember that we take all our classes together, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you know that I know that we don’t have a Magical Dueling class, right?”

Grim paused, squinting his eyes as you cocked your hip and tilted your head in amusement, waiting for his excuse.

“...We take it during our second year?”

You laughed, reaching down to pat Grim on the head, who gave you a displeased look. Still, he gave a small smile as you two walked back into the dorm. It was hot and windy, so it wouldn’t be long until the clothes were dried.

Plus, it’d been about an hour since Ruggie left to make the sandwiches, which meant he should be done cooking by now, and Grim’s stomach had been rumbling for the past few minutes.

“Let’s just go eat. I’m sure Ruggie has your sandwich done by now.”

The dorm was still empty of most students, though you could hear someone walking on the wooden ramps and bridges every so often. It made sense, it was still the early afternoon and most students were in class.

Part of you wished that you could see Jack again, but he definitely was in class at this time, and wouldn’t be back for a while if you remember correctly. You kinda wanted to drop at Heartslabyul and see Ace and Deuce, but you didn’t want to add to the chaos with Tart already there.

Epel and Ortho were also probably preoccupied with your other Yous at their dorms. Sebek was out of the question, he was stricter about his schedule than Jack.

You just wanted to talk to someone else, you wanted to talk to your husband. At this point in time, you two were never far from each other, or for long. But the Leona of this time didn’t seem keen on talking, or even looking at you.

He absolutely recognized your clothes and what they meant.

“Maybe I’ll take his meal to him…get him to talk to me…” You mumbled under your breath, making Grim look up at you.

“Get who to talk to ya? Ruggie?”

“No, Leona.”

“Mmmrph?” Grim trilled at you, narrowing his eyes as the flames in his ears grew brighter. “Leona? What, he’s not talkin’ to ya?”

You shook your head as you both entered the kitchen, where Ruggie was finishing cleaning up and placing a cutting board and knife into the sink.

“Oh, hey! The food’s done—”

“Well that’s rude!”

Both of you jumped at Grim’s cry, an angry pout on his face as he hopped onto the counter.

“If Leona’s not gonna talk to you, then he shouldn’t get food!” Grim’s pout suddenly turned into a sly grin as he eyed the steak sandwich on the counter, next to his own. “Which is why I should take it! Give it here!”

Right as Grim leaped for the tempting plate of food, Ruggie quickly swiped it and held it over his head, making Grim dive face first into the counter instead.

“Hey!” Ruggie let out a growl as Grim returned one in annoyance, now jumping up in vain for the food. “I used his card to buy all this! I ain’t gonna lose access to it just because you ate his food, eat your sandwich instead!”

Noticing at how Grim got on all four paws and wiggled, you rushed over to snatch him midair as he jumped right for Ruggie’s face, the latter stumbling back. Miraculously, he still managed to keep the sandwich on its plate.

“Hey! Let me have it, Mousy! He doesn’t deserve it! He doesn’t want to hang out with you so he doesn’t deserve a yummy snack! GIVE MEEEE—”

You wrapped a hand around Grim’s snout, his demands for more food muffled as he still longingly reached his paws out for Ruggie as he cautiously lowered the plate back down.

“Geez, what are you on about?” Ruggie huffed, wrinkling his nose at Grim as he asked, “Leona didn’t just leave you here, right?”

It wasn’t often couples in the Sunset Savannah stray from one another, much less royals, they were almost always seen with one another. Granted, this time’s version of Leona wasn’t technically yours, and you not his, you were reminded each time you tugged at one bracelet in particular among the many around your wrist.

“...I think you can understand why he might not be particularly enthusiastic to see me.”

You gave Ruggie a dry, tired smile as you gestured at your outfit again, making him flush red and nodded, muttering to himself.

“Right, right…Well, you know where he is right? I need to deliver his food before it gets cold, is he in his usual spots?”

You doubted that Leona wanted to be bothered by anyone right now, but you were a bit tired of waiting around for him to come out hiding.

“No, you won’t be able to find him. It’s a spot that only he and I know about, so far as I’m aware.” Ruggie’s ears drooped as huffed, murmuring something about getting paid, making you chuckle. “I can take it to him for you.”

Ruggie squinted at you, eyeing Grim as he was dropped to the ground, the latter crossing his arms and stomping his feet.

“No fair…”

Rolling your eyes with an amused smirk, you bent down and gestured for Grim to come closer as you whispered in his ear. After a minute, Grim perked up and stared at you with an open-mouth.

“Really?”

“Really. Go on, Azul will be very weak against his ‘Angelfish’, so he’ll get you whatever you want if Angel asks for it.”

Grim eagerly nodded, reaching his arms out for his sandwich as you handed it to him. Shoving most of it into his mouth, Grim ran off as Ruggie titled his head at you in a curious confusion.

“What’d you tell him?”

“A secret, don’t worry about it.” You sighed, rubbing the back of your neck. “Let me go get my shuka back on and then take his lunch. Grim does have a point, Leona can’t avoid me forever.”

The furball was always loud and annoying, but Leona dealt with him because of you. He let you bring him around because the stupid little guy made you happy, and he liked you.

He liked you a lot. Leona might even bring it in himself to admit that he’s fond of you, fancies you even. He’d been momentarily delighted when his little ‘mouse’ popped up in the classroom, you’d grown into a pretty thing with his family’s crest plastered on your chest.

And by the ancient kings themselves, you grew to be utterly breathtaking, the circlet on your head wrapped in the braids on the crown of your head decorated with dangling charms that glittered each time you moved, while the rest of your hair flowed down just under your chin.

Then he looked closer at the eerily familiar circlet, and down your body. The clothes you were in were nearly all black, and you wore his sister-in-law, Niah’s, necklace. Big, beautiful, and intricately beaded to hold the Kingscholar crest, he knew you shouldn’t have been wearing that.

It belonged to the queen consort. You shouldn’t have been wearing that unless Leona became King. It clicked quickly for him, then, when you’d made eye-contact back in that classroom. You looked older than the others there, and your eyes spoke of sorrow.

You were in mourning clothes, and in your future, he’d finally become a king. At the expense of Falena and Niah’s lives.

He didn’t even want to think about Cheka. Did something happen to him too? After all this time of loathing and self-hatred, of cursing those who looked down on him for being second-born, he got what he wanted.

Did he want that? Did he want his family dead? Did he want to never see Falena, Niah, or Cheka again?

In the future that his Mousy came from, did he do something to them?

If his mother were here, she’d be pulling at his ear, reprimanding him for abandoning his mate to sulk off in his ‘hidey-hole’ like she would say. She’d always been by his father’s side growing up, like bonded mates were meant to do, up to the point of her untimely death. His father followed soon after.

He was still young when she passed, but he could still hear her voice, chastising him and urging him to go seek you out.

And he would…eventually. He wasn’t a coward, Leona’s pride wouldn’t allow that, but he just needed some time to think. To figure out how to ask you what happened, if he did something. Would you even know? Would you even tell him if he asked?

“Ugh…damn you Furball.” Leona grumbled to himself, tossing and turning in the blankets and pillows he stashed behind the waterfall. “You shouldn’t have been messing with ancient magic.”

There was a naturally formed window in the rock that let in fresh air as the sound of the falls and the occasional student walking past gave him some white noise, and yet he still felt stuffy.

It didn’t help that he could still hear Grim occasionally, your own voice just gentle enough to be out of hearing range. Leona’s pretty sure he was yelling something about sandwiches to Ruggie.

Whiny as ever, and a little shit like always. As much as your presence has thrown him into a mental spiral, Leona does wonder if the little guy followed you to Sunset Savannah with him. And how exactly you convinced him to agree to housing Grim.

Maybe you turned him into a playmate for Cheka or something.

Leona inhaled sharply at the thought of his nephew again, turning back around to face the waterfall. He froze at the sight of you, peering at the gap between the water and the stone wall, holding a plate of food in your hand.

You carefully reached above you to grab the indent along the wall, and slid your body through, carefully pressed against the ledge as you stared down at the pool below you. You did it with precision, like you’d done this many times before, over and over.

Until your foot slipped on a part of the rock that was wet, making you stumble and Leona bolt over. He didn’t even register that he was holding your waist and the hand that clutched at his shoulder until you huffed and looked up at him with a sheepish smile.

“Ah, it’s been a while since I’ve done this, I forgot how slippery it got back here.”

Your scent was one of rosemary and rain, though he could tell that you spent a lot of time with his future version. You reeked of his magic and musk, though there was something soft there, like sweet oranges, that reminded him of Cheka.

Leona swiftly let go of you once you were on steady footing, backing up and putting a healthy distance between you two. Though, the disappointment on your face made him falter as he sat down on his makeshift bedding.

Both of you stared at each other, neither of you speaking, waiting for the other to break the silence first.

If Leona was going to give future him credit for something, it’s that he did a damn good job in claiming you as his. The jewelry you were covered in was in his colors. Falena was assigned gold and red as the heir, which was traditional. Leona got a dark orange and sepia, also traditional for the second-born, but they were never his favorite.

But they did look very nice on you.

“Aw, staring at a little herbivore like me?” You gave Leona a teasing smile and walked closer, holding out the plate to him. It looked like a steak sandwich, the usual that Ruggie made for him. “Don’t eat me now, I’m offerin’ you a meal.”

Leona continued staring at you as he took the plate in your hands, his ears flicking and tail curling close to him as you decided to take a seat on the pillow next to him. He watched as you crossed your legs, resting your hands between them and traced one of the bracelets on your wrist.

It looked old. It looked familiar.

“You kept that?” You looked up in surprise. Leona was realizing it was the first actual sentence he’d spoken to you since you’d arrived. “It looks like it’s gone through it…”

“Ah,” You looked down at the bracelet, red, white, and blue with golden spacers between the beads. “Well, it’s been a long time since you gave this to me. I think…almost 12 years by now.”

You smiled down fondly at the jewelry as you continued.

“This one you gave me after your graduation,” You tapped a leather band with a protection spell engraved on it. “Said I needed it for all the trouble I got into.”

You moved onto another one made of braided strings that resembled a sunset. “This was for my graduation, same day you asked me if I wanted to come home with you”

Smile growing, you let out a soft chuckle as you pointed out a fourth, crudely made rainbow bracelet that looked more like something a kid would make for their friends on the playground.

“Cheka made this, used any and every single bead he could find. It was my 20th birthday present I think. It's been a while, but that sounds right."

Voice softening, you moved to your left wrist, which was decorated with a pair of bronze bangles and a matching cuff with an engraving of a rising sun.

“This wasn’t you actually, funny enough.” You had a smile and looked at him from the corner of your eye. “Falena and Niah gave it to me as an engagement present when you proposed with this—”

Holding up your hand, you presented him with a wedding set on your ring finger. A thick bronze band accompanied by a simple topaz ring.

“That’s not in the royal jewelry collection.” Leona cut you off, though you looked relieved that he finally started speaking. “Looks too new.”

“Yep. You had this made just for me, and a matching set for yourself as well.”

Your smile faltered as his eyes were drawn back to the necklace, specifically the crest on your chest.

Both of you went silent again for a few seconds, before you sighed, clutching the crest in your palm, as if to hide it.

“Ask. I know you want to know.”

“...That’s in Falena’s colors. It’s Niah’s, it’s the queen’s.” Leona hissed the last bit, his ears flattening as he stared at your face, watching as you turned away. “Why is my spouse wearing the consort’s necklace?”

Leona’s voice rose as he continued speaking, making you whip your head around and glare at him. For some reason, that look you gave him made Leona freeze. It looked a lot like the ones Niah and his mother would give him whenever he got in trouble.

“Leona. Did you just raise your voice at me?”

Clicking his tongue, Leona leaned back against his pillows and took a bite out of his sandwich, ignoring your pointed look.

“Tch, at least I know where Cheka got his attitude from.”

Leona choked mid-swallow, coughing as reached over to pat his back, freezing as he grabbed your hand to stop you. Though, as his coughing became more hoarse, he let go to pound at chest, allowing you to use one hand to rub a soothing hand on his back and pull his hair away from his face.

It took him a few moments, but he finally managed to breathe normally again, throat feeling rather raw. Leona looked at you from the corner of his eyes and asked, “Cheka’s okay?”

You furrowed your brows and nodded furiously, moving closer to sweep his hair over his shoulder and cup his cheek.

“Yes. Of course, Cheka is safe. He’ll be turning 17 in a few months now…he’s safe and doing as well as he can be right now.”

Leona closed his eyes, trying to imagine what a 17 year old Cheka would look like. A lot like Falena probably, though he had Niah’s eyes.

“...What do you mean by ‘right now’.”

His eyes met your own as you thinned your lips. You opened your mouth, before closing it again, and gently responded.

“Leona, I think you know what I mean.”

Taking a deep breath, let his gaze meet yours and asked, “How’d it happen?”

You took in a sharp breath, leaning back and clasping your hands together.

“Are you sure you want to know? I don’t think it’s a good idea with time traveling rules and all—”

“Yes. Tell me.”

Letting out a sigh, you nodded, swallowing and licking your lips before you spoke.

“It happened at the end of last year, Falena and Niah were meant to celebrate their anniversary at sea. They took a handful of servants onto a ship and had a private yacht set up. It was only meant to be a week, so you, me, and Neji were left in charge of regular duties while they were gone, but while out at sea…there was a storm.”

Leona watched as you paused, wringing your wrist in your hand.

“It happened about halfway through their trip, it was a freak storm that even had the merfolk surprised. It took two weeks for it to finally calm down enough for us to send search parties, but they couldn’t find anything…”

You shut your eyes closed, bringing a tightly closed hand to your lips as you took a shaky breath, continuing in a trembling voice.

“We thought that they might have sunk, even the Atlantica Royal family sent their own to search for the wreckage…but they couldn’t find it.”

Whispering the last part under your breath, you took a deep breath, wiping the corners of your eyes, before looking up and frowning.

“Oh, Leona, sweetheart…”

Bringing a hand up to wipe his cheek, Leona barely realized that tears started growing in his eyes. Despite himself, he relaxed into your touch, letting you rub your thumbs across his cheeks and squeeze, bringing him down to your level to press your forehead against his own.

“...Both of them?”

“Yeah…we held the funerals a month after. And…you were crowned three months ago as king regent.”

Silence fell over you two, Leona looking down as he processed everything you’d just said.

King Regent. Him, a king in his future, all because his brother died. Gods…he didn’t want his brother dead. Was Falena an idiot sometimes? Yes. Was he pampered and groomed while Leona was thrown off to the side and ignored? Yes. But he didn’t want his brother or sister-in-law gone, among the ancient kings in the stars.

“You became the royal consort then. That’s yours now.”

You nodded, letting Leona go, reaching down to squeeze at the necklace again. You didn’t look comfortable with it on, like the weight was a strain on you. Leona looked down at the plate in his lap

“Originally, my Leona and I were only going to rule for a few years, as Cheka was only 15, just about to turn 16 when it happened. But he didn’t want to take the throne just yet at 18, so the two of us will be taking care of things until he’s ready.”

Silence resumed between you two as you decided to lean against the wall, blankly staring at the waterfall. Both of you didn’t speak for what felt like ages. Leona looked down at the plate in his lap still, and tossed it to the side to shove himself into his pillows.

You let out a small gasp, giving him a disapproving glare as you crawled over pick up the plate, ensuring that the food wouldn’t fall to the floor.

“Don’t do that, this meat is probably expensive, Rugs would probably have an aneurysm if he saw you throwing it around.”

“Hmph,” Leona scoffed, raising a brow at the nickname. “I can afford it, it’s fine. He doesn’t care as long as I pay him.”

“Yeah? Well that reminds me, make sure you pay him triple for today’s work, I told him you would so he would make Grim some food.”

“Eh? I didn’t agree to that, why would I pay for the Furball’s—”

You waved a hand dismissively, though you had an amused smile on your lips.

“Oh shush, I thought you said you could afford it?”

Gods, you really did grow to be beautiful. Leona never was one that particularly cared about looks like a certain blonde did, but even he could appreciate how well you took to his homeland’s style. He wonders if the future him helped you with your hair: grooming each other was an age old tradition for close families back home, he saw Niah often braid Falena’s hair.

Even Cheka’s, though he was so little that they would get messed up after playing.

Cheka…you smelled quite a bit like him as well, but it was a lot fainter than his own. Hypothetically, especially with the death of his parents, his nephew should be attached to future you and Leona’s hips.

“Oi, you said Cheka was going on 17, but he wasn’t going to take the throne at 18.” Leona’s ears flicked as he asked, “How come my brat—”

“Nephew.”

“—Brat of a nephew, isn’t taking the throne? I know he’d been groomed for it.”

You perked up, smile growing as you leaned in closer, gesturing for him to follow suit. He did, with a fond warmth growing in his cheeks.

“Oh yes, but after all was said and done…he decided to accept the letter that Night Raven sent him and attend school. Cheka said he wanted to wait and explore the world outside the palace before taking the throne, so the two of us will be ruling for a bit longer now.”

Leona let out a scoff, though he couldn’t help that the corner of his lips quirked. “Seriously? NRC?”

You smiled and nodded.

“Yes, our—” Leona liked the way you emphasized that. “—nephew even took to your dorm. You tried your very best to talk him out of it, complaining about your time here and how awful it was, he shut you up when he brought up the two of us meeting at school.”

Leona let out a hum, resting his hand on his palm as he leaned against his knee. He still had questions about the kingdom, if there were any opposition to his coronation, why Cheka decided to run off to the school of all places.

But, he also had a golden opportunity here.

“And what exactly did you tell him?” Leona watched as you perked up, your smile growing big as you leaned in and cooed.

“Oh? Trying to get information out of me, hmm? Shouldn’t you try and woo your (Name) on your own?”

“Do you think the others are leaving it up to chance?”

“Ha, fair enough, though I hate to say that you already seem a bit behind if you’re asking me that at this point in the year.”

Leona frowned, ears pinning to his head and tail swishing in frustration. He didn’t like the sound of that.

“You saying I need to get moving, huh?”

You shrugged, your bangles jingling as you waved your hand. “Maaaaybe. I’m assuming that you didn’t piss me off in this time back during the whole contract stuff with Azul, so the me in this time didn’t try to wack your head off with your broom.”

“You did what?”

Leona couldn’t help himself lean in closer as you let out an embarrassed laugh, covering your smile.

“Ah, I ask you to help me and you told me to deal with it on my own. When i threatened to keep you up all night if you didn’t, you actually tossed me and Grim out of the dorm and told me to not show my face again.”

You laughed harder as you told the story, eyes crinkling.

“I was sooooo pissed off that I went back in, made Grim distract the dorm in the lounge, snuck into your room while you were distracted, and tried swinging it as hard as I could into your head when you walked in. We got into it after that, bruised each other up. I even gave you a black eye, though you gave me a massive bite to my arm.”

Leona straightened as you pushed your shuka further past your shoulders, revealing your matching Lion’s Guard tattoo. The second born was always assigned as the leader, though you were a rank lower than him based on it. You tapped it, gesturing for him to move in closer.

As he did, Leona noticed that right under the black ink, was the faintest prescence of a scar. He could just barely make out where his canines had dug into you skin, no doubt drawing blood.

“Hm, not a good idea for a little mouse to pick a fight with such a big carnivore.” Leona couldn’t help but drawl out a teasing remark, though you too it in stride as you covered the tattoo and scar again.

“Oh, don’t you worry. This Mousy packed a bunch, and back then, you gave me respect for holding my own against you, so you helped me out with Azul. We just got…closer after that.”

You smiled fondly as you reminisced, looking up at him and reaching you hand out to his face. This time, Leona didn’t flinch away and let you cup his cheek, rubbing a thumb just under his eye, where the tip of his scar lay.

“We took our time, it was natural. I can’t really say too much other than that.”

Natural, huh? He didn’t have a fight with you in this time. Maybe he was already screwed. Maybe he just needed to get that fiery part of you out.

Leona’s never been one for fate, he’s always desired making his own way through the world. Maybe he’ll just have to do that with you too. And…with Falena and Niah too…

“Hmm. Well, I have to wait until my own little mouse is back from where the Fur—”

“Grim.”

“—Grim sent them. I’ll come up with a plan, a nap’ll help with that.”

He didn’t wait for a response, instead opting to move over and stretch his body so that his head was in your lap, face looking up at you.

You took to it naturally, like your own Leona did this often, hands immediately smoothing his hair away from his face, combining through it with your fingers.

“...You really do look look so much younger like this.”

“...Yeah?”

“Yeah…” Leaning back once again to rest against the pillows and stone wall, stretching your legs out under his body to get more comfortable, you ran a soothing finger along the ridge of his nose. Leona wondered if you got that from him as well; he’d do it to Cheka when he was bothering him to coax his nephew into a nap instead of bothering him.

“Go on, take your nap. We can talk more when you wake up, yeah?”

Leona didn’t respond, though his tail wrapped around your leg as he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“I’ll hold you to that Mousy. You’ll be helpin’ me scheme for my own (Name).”

He didn’t need his eyes, he could hear the smile in your voice as you responded.

“Of course. Just for you sweetheart.”

comments and reblogs appreciated 🩷

#mochi fic #twst #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland x reader #twst x reader #leona kingscholar #leona kingsholar x reader #Two's Company Three's a Crowd and Six is a Riot #2-3-6

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fatesundress · 2 years ago

Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He evidently does not.

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

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

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

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

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

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

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

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

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

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wonder why.”

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

“What, Tom?”

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

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

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

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

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Curiosity—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

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

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

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

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

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

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

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

“A professor?”

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

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

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

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

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

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

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

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

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

“So?”

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

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

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

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

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

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

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

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I —”

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

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

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

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

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

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

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

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

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

“Tom.”

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

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

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

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

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

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

The day everything changes starts the same as any.

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

Tom has cracked the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have no need.”

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

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

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

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

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

“Why would he lie?”

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

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

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

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

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

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

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

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

“Should I?”

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

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

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

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

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

Summer blisters when it comes.

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

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

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You always are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are regardless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are not his keeper. You know that.

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

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

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

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

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

You’re almost positive you did not.

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

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

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

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

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

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

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

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

It happens again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You take to the library.

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

The third sign is the end.

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

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

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

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

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

He’s something else entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve been good at it.”

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

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

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

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

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

He sees all of you.

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

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

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

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

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

“I cannot.”

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

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

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

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

“Do you want me to lie?”

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

“Her death is the first step to —”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“...What?"

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

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

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought I would have time.”

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

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

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

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

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

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

“You have lost me, Tom."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

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

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

Be well.

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

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

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

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

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

You find that to be true.

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

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

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

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

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

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

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

Due February.

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

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

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

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You drink, and don’t look away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I take that back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indifferent it is.

“Can I help you?”

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

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

“Am I?”

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

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

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Mari?

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

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

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

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

“Well then —”

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

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

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

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

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

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

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

“I haven’t protested.”

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

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

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

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

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

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

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

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

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

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

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

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

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

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

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

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

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

My door is always open.

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

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

It’s a tempting door.

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

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

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

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

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant.

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

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

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

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Renauld?”

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

“Well, yeah —”

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

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

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

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

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

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

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

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

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

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

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

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

And… he does.

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

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

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

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

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

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

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

But something about it itches.

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

You are green, through and through.

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

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

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

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

That makes it much worse when you sleep together.

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

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

“Yes.”

“Right.”

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

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

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

You’re incredibly daft about it.

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

The itch exacerbates.

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

You wake up and he isn’t there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

R.R

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

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

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

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

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

But you do, because he told you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes."

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

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

“I earned this,” you hiss.

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

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

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

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

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

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

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

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

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

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

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

“Yes,” you agree.

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

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

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

He was your first in everything but this.

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

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

“How long?” he asks thickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“N-no.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A finger presses inside and you moan.

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

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

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

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

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

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will you give me more?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe you already do.

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

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

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

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

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

You whimper.

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

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

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

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

“You can — uh — you can — ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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