#so like... I GET it‚ I just don't like looking at it lmao

[illbegottenfaith]

stutter (a puzzle pieces by saint motel inspired fic)

something about you and your features reawakens theo's stutter (theo nott x reader)

a/n - LOVE how I usually naturally write in British English (for the most part) but the title of this fic is apparently the American English variant?? sorry but stammar just doesn't have the same sound as stutter and it rlly messes with the flow of my sentences lmao

tropes/warnings - fluff, theo has a stutter, tw alcohol, slightlyy mean reader? very mild tho lmao

word count - 3.2k

taglist - @allie-sturns @hzdhrtss @friedfreyfries @bushnellswife @rose-of-the-grave @thaliashifts @pariahsparadise @babene-e @fratbrochrisgf

Theo’s stutter had never been bad exactly - just bad enough to be noticed. Bad enough to make him hesitate before speaking, bad enough to make his father sigh whenever he tripped over a word at the dinner table.

"Think before you speak," his father would say, voice clipped, disapproving. "There's no point in opening your mouth if you don't know what you're going to say."

As if Theo didn’t already try.

So he adapted. He learned to pick his words carefully, to stay quiet unless absolutely necessary, to keep his voice even and deliberate. The less he spoke, the less he had to risk tripping over his own tongue. He stopped rushing and started living his life at a careful, highly controlled pace.

Over time, with extensive help from the best speech therapists his father could find, he grew out of his stutter. By the time he was old enough to be surrounded by classmates who would’ve torn him apart for it, it was already buried beneath layers of indifference. He built himself a reputation on cool control - on quiet, dry wit and the ability to cut someone down with a single unimpressed look. He spoke when he wanted to, not when people expected him to, and that was enough to keep it from ever being a problem.

Until you.

Because for some infuriating reason, with you, it found a way to slip through the cracks.

You and Theo were like two puzzle pieces that never quite fit right.

You didn’t hate each other - not really - but it seemed like a stretch to call yourselves friends. Try as you might, your personalities seemed fundamentally disconnected. He had little patience for your sense of humour, or lack thereof in his opinion. On the bad days, you had a snarky quip ready for even his most innocent comments. It was the most maddening thing for your friends - just as seemed that the two of you had finally learned to get along, Theo would take the mickey out of you, or you would turn your nose up at his boorish antics, and the cycle would repeat.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), all of that changed two weeks ago. It had happened on a brisk Wednesday night. His dorm was fresh out of bottled water and it was too late and too cold to sneak down to the Kitchens to get some. Mattheo was keeping everyone up fretting about what-if-someone-gets-extra-thirsty-in-the-middle-of-the-night-then-what and no one could get him to shut up. Naturally, Theo had been rather unceremoniously evicted from his cosy, dry bed to fetch water from the girls’ dormitory, after a unanimous (and unfair) vote.

So there he had stood outside the girls’ dormitory, shivering, waiting for one of your friends to bring out some water. He had glared at the distorted view of the moon through the common room walls, fuming about how it already was the middle of the night and none of his roommates seemed the least bit thirsty, not that Mattheo would listen to reason.

Finally, the door had swung open, and out of the shadows peered your wan, tired face.

Maybe it was something in the way your lips twisted in displeasure as your droopy eyes struggled to stay open. For some odd, inexplicable reason, he felt a pang of regret over having woken you.

If you were slightly more awake, you might have noticed the glazed look in his eyes. But as it were, all you had done was shove a small jug into his lax hands, manually curling his fingers around the handle when his grip refused to tighten. Of course, you and your roommates were too environmentally conscious to be entertaining single-use plastic.

“Hold still,” you had muttered as you tipped your room’s jug into the smaller one, filling it up. In the pale moonlight, it had been as though he was seeing you in a completely different light for the first time, both figuratively and otherwise. You hair looked unbearably soft from the way it cascaded down your shoulders. Almost as soft as your pillowy lips, which were now parting to release a sigh. And did your skin always smell this sweet, he wondered, as you stepped closer?

“You want a cookie?” you had asked waspishly when he had kept staring at you once his jug was full. That had snapped him out of his trance. After bidding you a hasty, clipped goodnight, he had crept back down to the boy’s dormitories, head reeling, heart thudding. Before finally nodding off in the wee hours of the morning, he had put the whole thing down to sleep deprivation.

But when you looked just as adorable in your 9 am Charms lesson the next day, bags under your eyes as you poorly stifled your yawns, he knew he was well and truly fucked.

That had been two weeks ago. Now, he’d be hard pressed to muster up any real sort of annoyance over the reactions you elicited from him, knowingly or otherwise.

You were all in the Great Hall, having breakfast. Your friends were talking about some book they had read recently. Mattheo and Draco were having an arm wrestling match right over their eggs. Enzo was yammering in Theo’s ear, not that he was listening. Theo had long since learned to tune out Enzo’s chatter until lunch, when he was sufficiently awake to actually process it.

No, what he was doing was watching you - watching the way you chewed on your bottom lip instead of your breakfast, a faint crease between your eyebrows as your eyes flitted across the parchment. He cast his eyes around the table listlessly, desperately wishing for a change in topic, preferably one that had to do with you.

His prayers were soon answered. Ivy turned away from her conversation to look at you.

“How’s the essay coming along, Y/N?”

You finally peeled your eyes away from the essay you were proofreading, sliding your gaze disinterestedly to Theo and the rest of your friends. He watched your sleepy, downturned eyes momentarily rest on his, a familiar electric jolt twinging in his chest. There was no denying it - what had previously seemed uninteresting or unimaginative was now hopelessly irresistible to him.

You scowled, flipping back to the first page. “Terrible. Awful. I don’t know what possessed McGonagall to let me take N.E.W.T level Transfiguration.”

Because you’re brilliant at it, Theo wanted to say, just like how you’re brilliant at everything else.

“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” Ivy said reasonably as you haphazardly started gathering your things.

“It is, it really is. Even worse, my guinea pig escaped so now everyone has something to practice on except me.”

“I can be your Guinea pig,” Theo murmured. Mattheo gave him a hard shove in the shoulder blade.

“What?” You distractedly pushed a lock of hair out of your face.

He grimaced, a throbbing pain now settling in his upper back. “I said,” he forced out, “serves you right. Losing your guinea pig.”

You rolled your eyes. “Charming as ever, Nott.”

You hurriedly placed a kiss on Ivy’s cheek, glowering at Theo as you walked off. Just as he opened his mouth to ask (yell) where his kiss was, Mattheo shoved a bun into his mouth.

"Real subtle, mate," he said sarcastically.

Theo shot him a glare, but the delicate flush dusting his face betrayed him. "Shut up."

Mattheo only smirked, taking a bite of his own toast. "Whatever you say."

Some nights, trouble had a face. Tonight, it was yours.

He saw you before you saw him - tucked inside an alcove at the far end of the corridor, bathed in the flickering glow of a lone torch. It was the late kind of hour when nothing good was bound to happen. A half-empty bottle of firewhiskey dangled loosely from your fingers, the deep amber liquid catching the dim light as you swirled it absentmindedly.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen you like this - pushing limits just for the sake of it. It wasn't immediately apparent, but anyone who paid close enough attention would see you had a habit of toeing the line between reckless and untouchable.

He should have walked away. Should’ve let you self-destruct in peace.

But Theo was never that smart when it came to you.

"You’re not exactly being subtle," he said, stepping out of the shadows.

You didn’t jump, didn’t startle. Instead, you turned to face him with a slow, deliberate ease, like you’d been expecting him all along.

"Wasn’t trying to be."

He raised his eyebrows.

"Could’ve fooled me."

You smirked, raising the bottle in a lazy toast before taking another sip.

"What, you gonna tell on me?"

Theo scoffed. "If I wanted to get you in trouble, you'd know."

"Mm. So you’re just here to nag, then?"

"Not nagging," Theo said. "Just pointing out that if you’re going to break the rules, you should at least be smart about it."

You hummed, swaying the bottle between your fingers, humming poorly. You were definitely well past tipsy. "Smart’s overrated."

"Yeah? So’s liver failure."

That made you laugh, short and sharp, like you hadn’t expected him to be funny.

He shouldn’t have cared about that. Shouldn’t have cared that his words - his stupid, judgemental, throwaway words - had gotten a laugh out of you.

But he did. And that was the problem.

You studied him for a moment before holding out the bottle. "Want some?"

He looked at it disdainfully. "Generous."

"Hardly," you said. "Figured it might loosen you up a bit. You’re wound tight, Nott."

Theo exhaled, crossing his arms. He knew all about being tightly wound when it came to you. "Right. Because getting pissed in a dark corridor is the key to inner peace."

"You should try it sometime."

"Hard pass."

You shrugged. "Suit yourself."

Then, just to be a menace, you took another slow swill, letting your lips linger at the rim of the bottle before licking a stray drop off the corner of your mouth.

Theo didn’t react. Wouldn’t react. You weren’t doing anything special. Just drinking. Just looking at him with that same lazy amusement, like you had him all figured out.

And maybe you did. Maybe that was what rattled him.

"You’re - " He started, but his tongue tripped over the word, catching slightly before he forced it out. "You’re d-drunk."

Your drooping eyes widened fractionally. Your lips parted in your efforts to concentrate as a slight frown creased your forehead, not all that different from the one at breakfast a few days ago,

Theo felt the heat crawl up his neck before he could stop it. His mind scrambled for damage control, but the way you were watching him - head tilted, intrigued, like you were piecing something together - made it worse.

"You good?" you asked, something teasing yet concerned in your tone.

Theo cleared his throat awkwardly, trying to regain control of his rogue tongue. "Obviously," he muttered, shifting his weight.

You let the silence stretch a beat too long before raising an eyebrow.

"You sure? ‘Cause for a second there, you almost sounded - "

"Drop it," he cut in, swiping the bottle from your hands before you could protest. He took a slow sip, letting the firewhiskey burn its way down, using it as an excuse to steady himself.

You watched him succumb to the buzz of the drink. "You’re changing the subject," you noted, smirking.

"Yeah?" He felt less wired, less sober. "You’re still an idiot for doing this in the open."

You watched him lean against the wall opposite yours, eyes gleaming in the dim alcove. You let him have that one. But just as he thought you were letting it go, your gaze flicked up, sharp and knowing.

"Don’t act like you’re any better," you mused.

Theo frowned. "What?"

You nodded toward his pocket, where a cigarette pack was sticking out slightly. "Don’t you go through, like, three packs a day?"

He pressed his lips into a thin line. You had him there. "That’s not the same."

You widened your eyes mockingly. "No, you’re right. I might get liver failure in thirty years. You’re aiming for lung failure by, what - next week?"

Theo clicked his tongue, tucking the pack deeper into his pocket. "Cute."

"Not as cute as you stuttering over your words a minute ago."

Theo groaned, dragging a hand down his face. "I hate you."

"Sure you do," you murmured, grinning as you took back the firewhiskey.

The Slytherin common room was empty when you both stepped inside, drenched from head to toe. The fire crackled in the hearth, but the warmth did nothing to dry the water you trailed in as you stalked toward it.

Theo watched you try to wring out your sleeves with an air of great suffering, muttering something about "bloody weather conspiracies" under your breath as you peeled off some of your outer layers.

"This is all your fault," you grumbled.

Theo exhaled sharply, dragging a hand through his wet hair. "Yeah? How’s that?"

"You control everything else," you shot back, flicking a few stray drops of water at him. "Figured you had a deal with the bloody sky, too."

He smirked. "Don't give me ideas."

You rolled your eyes, crouching slightly to warm your frozen hands by the fire. Your clothes clung to your frame, and Theo forced himself to look away before his thoughts could wander into dangerous territory. Instead, he shrugged off his soaked sweater and tossed it over the back of the nearest couch.

"Relax. You’ll live," he said idly.

"You better hope so," you threatened. "If I don’t, I’m haunting you forever."

Theo snorted, undoing the cuffs of his shirt.

"I don't think you have the attention span for that."

You shot him a look. "I'd find a way," you said darkly.

"Sure," he agreed sarcastically.

You huffed, standing up straight again.

"And here I was, thinking you actually liked me."

The words were meant to be teasing, flippant, meaningless. But something about them made his pulse stutter.

Maybe it was the way you said it, light and careless, like the idea was so ridiculous it wasn’t even worth entertaining. Maybe it was the way the firelight flickered against your golden skin. Maybe it was the way a stray droplet trickled down your throat, inch by agonising inch, before disappearing beneath the collar of your shirt.

Maybe it was the fact that he did actually like you.

Theo didn’t know what made him say it - either the warmth from the fire or the cold still clinging to his skin or the fact that he could feel the exhaustion of restraint pressing against his ribs. But before he could stop himself, he was opening his mouth, lips forming words he had barely formulated.

"You look - " he started, then faltered.

Shit.

His tongue tripped, his brain suddenly too slow to catch up. He could feel the syllable stuck in his throat, unable to escape, the word stuttering into nothing.

"Y-you l - l -"

Silence.

"Oh, my god," you murmured, slow and smug, realisation dawning on your face.

Theo exhaled sharply, his stomach twisting as he tried to force his expression into something impassive, something cool, something...unaffected. In short, he tried attempting what was an impossible feat when your very features were enough to leave him dizzy.

A wicked smile unfurled across your face. He wasn’t getting out of this alive, was he?

"Do you not know how to talk?" you demanded, eyes glittering with suppressed mirth. "Is this your first day on planet Earth?"

Theo clenched his jaw, crossing his arms in a futile attempt to feign indifference. "Shut up."

You refused to let up. "No, really. What was that? You looked - what? What do I look like, Theo? Enlighten me."

He forced himself to roll his eyes as his fingers curled into his sleeves. "You’re insufferable."

"J-j-j-j - " You stuttered mockingly, eyes alight with mischief. "What are you, an idiot? Does your tongue need rewiring?"

Theo should’ve turned away, should’ve thrown himself onto the couch and forced himself to think about literally anything else. But he couldn’t help it.

He watched you - watched the way you grinned to yourself, watched the way your fingers twisted in the fabric of your damp clothes, watched the way you were so completely and utterly oblivious to the way you made his mind unravel.

It wasn’t just attraction. It wasn’t just the heat in his chest or the feeling in his bones or the fact that his name sounded so damn good dripping off your honeyed lips while you teased him.

It was everything.

It was the way you filled every empty space like you belonged there, like you’d always belonged there. It was the way your laughter lived in his head rent-free, the way you made even the most infuriating drivel you spouted feel like something he couldn't bear to go without. It was the fact that no matter how much you poked and prodded, no matter how ruthlessly or relentlessly you mocked him - he still wanted you. Desperately.

He should be embarrassed. The Theo of a few years ago would have been - would’ve burned with the humiliation, would’ve clenched his fists at the reminder of all the times he’d stood in front of his father, struggling to string together a coherent sentence under the weight of that unimpressed gaze.

But you were different. He could hear it in your voice, buried beneath the teasing - the unmistakable warmth, the absolute delight you took in making fun of him. Not because you wanted to humiliate him, but because it amused you. It endeared him to you. Because you liked getting under his skin.

And, Merlin help him, he liked that you liked it.

"Go on," you continued mockingly, roughly drying your hair with a towel, still oblivious to Theo watching you like you hung the stars and moon. "Careful with the big words, now."

Theo just stood there, staring at you, utterly gone. He wasn’t even trying to school his expression anymore.

When you finally looked up from drying yourself, your teasing faltered ever so slightly at the look in his eyes.

You blinked. “What?”

Theo shook his head, leaning against the wall thoughtfully.

“Nothing.”

You stilled. Because for the first time, you actually noticed. Theo wasn’t scowling. He wasn’t enduring your teasing with quiet exasperation.

He was watching you with something softer - something warmer, something dangerously close to adoration. It lingered in the lines of his face, in the almost-smile playing at his lips, in the flicker of fondness he couldn’t quite suppress fast enough before your eyes met his.

You stared back, speechless. Theo swallowed, tearing his gaze away, turning sharply as if shaking himself out of it.

"You should dry off before you actually get sick," he muttered, forcing his voice into something steady.

You stared at him for half a second longer, something unreadable in your expression.

"Right," you finally said, clearing your throat.

Neither of you acknowledged the moment for what it was. But the resurgence of Theo's stutter remained a secret kept only between the two of you.

[duckprintspress]

Given how common it is for book posts that say "just give me the book blurb! stop with all the other things!" to get tens of thousands of notes, I feel the need to say, as a tiny micro-publisher: if only sharing the book blurb sold books, trust me, we wouldn't be wasting our time with all the other shenanigans.

But just sharing the blurb doesn't work. Most people scroll right by.

And so we try every single method we can think of, including sharing the blurb among them, to try to get whatever eyes we can on the book.

Of course the description of the story is the best way to sell the book and get people interested, but it only works if y'all actually read it. And getting most people to the point where they'll read anything that isn't already immediately and actively part of their existing interests is fucking hard, so we use splashy graphics and short hand to try to hook people, and then hope that when they read the blurb, that hook will go from "oh, that's worth a glance" to "oh, that's worth a buy."

Also: just because the exact post you saw promoting a book didn't include the blurb doesn't mean other posts about the book don't!

Sorry. I just have seen so much of that recently (and not just because of that poll about "what convinces you to buy," I actually found that whole poll extremely interesting and informative) that I'm kinda losing patience with it.

Just posting the blurb doesn't work.

Signed, someone who sells books for a living, or at least tries to.

[wendichester]

hey!! going off of the chihiro imagine you've just done, what about one where its based off of the diner? dean or sam x reader. shes a hunter, has a weird past with this other hunter who wont leave her alone. she could be out in public somewhere where this guy corners her and starts being weird, sam/dean notices and confronts him n beats tf out of him?? like they dont know eachother so its her first encounter with sam/dean (i hope this makes sense lmao) thank you!!

⊹ ࣪ ˖ don't be afraid,

summary. past has a way of finding you, but this time, dean is around

pairing. dean winchester x reader

wordcount. 629

notes. billie's songs are always sooo good! could write a whole god damn series based off of them

Your past has a way of finding you.

No matter how many times you leave town, change your number, burn bridges—it always finds a way to slither back in.

And tonight, it’s come in the form of him.

The bar is dim, crowded, full of people who mind their own business. The kind of place where a hunter can blend in, shake off a bad job, maybe even have a drink in peace.

But peace is a luxury you don’t get to have.

“Damn, sweetheart. Still playin’ hard to get?”

You don’t need to look up to know who it is. The voice alone is enough to make your stomach twist.

Your fingers tighten around your glass, your jaw locking as you exhale slowly.

“You need to leave,” you say, keeping your voice even.

But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Instead, he slides into the seat across from you, grinning like he belongs there.

“Oh, come on. Don’t be like that,” he coos, head tilting. “You know we make sense.”

Your grip tightens.

Don’t be afraid of me. I’m what you need.

“I know we don’t,” you snap.

His smirk only widens.

And that’s when you stand. You’re done.

But the second you turn, his hand clamps around your wrist.

You freeze.

The bar noise dulls, your breath catching as old fear creeps in—because you know this feeling, this sinking dread in your gut.

He tugs you closer, voice lowering. “Let’s not make a scene, yeah?”

But he’s made a mistake.

Because someone else has been watching.

“You deaf, pal?”

The voice is deep, steady, laced with something sharp.

Your stomach flips when you turn and see him.

Leaning against the bar like he owns the place, green eyes locked onto yours—not at you, at him, the hand still wrapped around your wrist.

Dean Winchester.

You don’t know him, not really, but you’ve heard the name before. And right now? He’s looking at your unwanted guest like he’s already figured out ten different ways to put him in the ground.

“Let go.”

Your stalker barely spares him a glance. “This ain’t your business, man.”

Dean’s lips twitch, like he almost finds that funny. But the way his shoulders roll, the slow way he straightens up—it’s a warning.

“She said no.”

A muscle in your stalker’s jaw ticks, but for once, he actually listens. His grip loosens. You yank your arm back, stepping away quickly, pulse hammering.

And that’s when—

Crack.

Your breath stutters as your stalker crumples to the floor, blood already leaking from his nose. He groans, clutching his face. Dean shakes out his fist, gaze flicking down like he’s unimpressed.

“You’re lucky I didn’t break your damn jaw,” he mutters.

Your stomach is still catching up, adrenaline buzzing through your veins as your stalker glares up at him. Dean just cocks his head, expression blank but lethal.

“Go.”

And, for the first time, the guy actually listens.

You watch him scramble to his feet, wiping his bloody nose before shoving past the crowd and bolting out the door.

Dean exhales, rolling his shoulders before finally turning to you. His expression softens, just slightly.

“You good?”

You nod, trying to steady your breath. “Yeah. I—yeah.”

Dean watches you, like he’s assessing for damage. Then he huffs, shaking his head. “Guy doesn’t take a damn hint, huh?”

You let out a sharp laugh, shaking your head. “You have no idea.”

Something flickers in his eyes. A shadow, a silent I know the type. Then, after a pause—

“You drink whiskey?”

You blink. “Yeah.”

Dean nods toward the bar, lips curving.

“Then c’mon. Let me buy you one.”

And, for the first time in a long time, you don’t hesitate.

Because for once, your past ran away from you.

ꔛ. navigation 𓂃˖ ࣪ all drabbles ; compatibility readings ; support my work .ᐟ

want be part of the taglist.ᐣ ⋆.˚ ★— @iloveeveryoneyoureamazing ⋆ @deans-daydream ⋆ @taurus0queenie33 ⋆ @ambiguous-avery ⋆ @krabog ⋆ @itsdearapril ⋆ @nymphet-quenn ⋆ @bluemerakis ⋆ @titsout4jackles ⋆ @lyarr24 ⋆ @hauntedrose555 ⋆ @chevroletdean ⋆ @dulcescorderitas ⋆ @blackmarketfruitrollups ⋆ @impala67rollingthroughtown ⋆ @rulesareshadesofgrey ⋆ @nervoussystems ⋆ @daryls-luvrr ⋆ @sunnyteume ⋆ @drakelover78 ⋆ @angelblqde ⋆ @mostlymarvelgirl ⋆ @whisperingdaze ⋆ @funkenniffler ⋆ @bossyblondie ⋆ @lieutenantchaos ⋆ @iluvnewtie ⋆ @dyhsversion ⋆ @lovewolfspirit ⋆ @kayleighwinchester ⋆ @s0urw00lf ⋆ @cursednevermore ⋆ @onelonelybitch ⋆ @americanvenom13 ⋆ @iluvdeanwinchester ⋆ @idk6505 ⋆ @devilslittlehelper ⋆ @cloverleaf20 ⋆ @giggles1026 ⋆ @idontwannabehere7 ⋆ @beakaleak32 ⋆ @ocelotlist51 ⋆ @lelapine ⋆ @pwin098 ⋆ @lacysretribution ⋆ @globetrotter28 ⋆ @i-love-gvf ⋆ @lemonswinchester ⋆ @4k1vrr ⋆ @bejeweledinterludes ( continues in the comments )

[onlymexsarah]

Burning Flames IIX || Eris Vanserra

Pairing: Eris Vanserra x Archeron!reader Summary: Since you became High Fae there were only two things that scared you: your deadly power and your attraction toward the male you should hate most after Tamlin, Eris Vanserra. Warnings: ANGST, mention of death, language and my english :) A/n: And she is not death! I'm talking both about me and the reader, lmao. I'm sorry for the waiting, god knows how this month had been full for me, but don't worry, even if it will take me months to finish this fic I will! I have everything planned out and I won't leave you unsatisfied🫶🏻 Let me know if you liked this chapter, what you think of the fic so far and if you want to be added at the taglist ;) Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3- Chapter 4- Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7

You were nothing and you were everything. You were drowing and you were flying. Everything felt infinite and yet so small. Dorkness filled you, but a bright light seduced you to follow it.

Stay.

A voice as familiar as your soul filled the infite, little space around your entire existence.

Come back to me.

Home. The voice was home and you had been wandering what felt like forever looking for it.

Stay a little longer. Fight to live, please.

Home was calling for you. It was guiding you away from that bright, warm light.

Please, Little Flame. Don't leave me.

Your existence smiled, and then you launched yourself toward it. You wanted to go home. There were so many things you still had to do that you remember no one of them. You could see it now, the golden string leading you home. You grabbed onto it and hold it tight. Gold erupted around you, warm hugged you, and then your entire existence burned.

***

Your niece was the most beatiful creature you had ever seen. Currently sleeping in your arms you got lost observing how the beauty of both Rhysand and Feyre had crafted that tiny, little, breathtaking child.

You had asked Rhys how to hold him without hurting his wings at least a dozen of times. They were so fragile and thin that you were afraid they could get broken even with a wrong look.

"You had wasted money on that crib, Rhys." Mor softly said, not wanting to wake up Nyx. "He'll always sleep in someone's arms."

You wanted to speak in, to joke too, but your sore throat didn't allow you. It turned out that while Eris had tried to hold back from killing you, his fire had burned part of your vocal cords, and Madja had forbidden you from speaking for at least a week.

"Poor boy," Madja had said. "he must have suffered an atrocious pain to fight the Crown and not kill you."

"He is going to be a heartbreaker with those eyes." You joked in your head, knowing that only Rhys could hear you.

The male laughed while he poured a glass of wine to Mor. "Just like his father."

You rolled your eyes playfully as Cassian entered in the living room with a serious look on his face. He approached Rhys while giving you and Mor a quick smile. "I'm going to visit Eris."

Your eyes snapped on him, your whole body going rigid. Eris. Only the name sent shivers all over your body. You hadn't seen him since you blacked out in his arms, after you stupidly, recklessy, kissed him.

The heat that rose on your face was enough to make you look away, toward Nyx in your arms, hoping that your hair hid your blush.

You had tried not to think about him in those last days. Not to think about how he had kissed you back. How soft his lips were. How he tasted of honey, making you wonder if he tasted like that down-"You should go too, Y/n."

Rhys' voice snapped you out from your unholy, undecent, inappropriate thoughts. You watched him visibly confused, knowing there was no point in hiding that you were absolutely not listening.

"Eris had arrived at Hewn City this morning under my request." He informed you while his violet eyes seemed to look like through your soul. "I think your presence might be...welcomed. You saved his life after all."

You really hoped not to have flinched at his words, knowing that Mor was right beside him, looking at you curiously. Gods, what did she think of you? Saving the life of the male she hated. What would she think if she find out what you really think of him?

"If you think so." Your voice was barely a whisper, knowing that their fae's ears would catch it up.

The truth was that you had been dying to see him again. When you had woken up in Azriel's arms you had barely had the time to breath again that Feyre had started her labour. There had been no time to ask about what had happened, and when the baby was born Azriel informed you that Eris had gone back to his court, not remembering much about what had happened.

"I'll take him." Mor said standing up from the couch and gently taking Nyx from your arms and giving you a warm smile. "Be careful."

You gave her a nod before taking Cassian's arm and let him winnow you inside the Hewn City, right outside a poolished, black door. You guessed was Eris' suite, and the confirmation came when an angry Keir rushed out of it.

Mor's father stopped on his feet as soon as he saw you two, and gave you in particular a sneer. "If you take away some of her clothes he might be tell you something."

You had barely widened your eyes when he stormed away, probably sensing the death glare that Cassian was giving him now. You wondered if now that he was a fresh, mated male he felt more eager to tear apart other males, but you guessed that Keir didn't want to know the answer.

"Let's get this over." Cassian's breathed as he opened the door and entered before you, shielding you with his wings as he always did.

You thought you were past the point where they would still think that Eris was a danger to you, but after what happened with Briallyn you couldn't blame them. Mor had told you that Azriel had found you nearly dead in Eris' arms and, her words not yours, Gods knew what he would have done to you if Azriel hadn't arrived.

Jokes on you, you really hoped that Azriel hadn't seen how you had tried to save yourself. Not that the shadowsinger would ever let anything slip from his mouth, but still it would be...what? Mortifying? Yes, mortifying that you didn't feel ashamed at all.

Eris was reading a book by the roaring fire, an ankle crossed over a knee, as if his presence there were nothing unusual. As if he hadn’t been kidnapped, enchanted, and manipulated by a vengeful queen and a death-lord. As if you hadn't shagged him until blacking out.

Cassian shut the door behind you, and Eris lifted his amber eyes, meeting yours. Did he remeber? How much? Did he want to kill you for what you did? Would he start laughing and mocking you?

His gaze lowered to your neck where you knew you had a nice, red necklace made of burned flesh and purple bruises where his hand had choked you. You saw his jaw clenching and his posture stiffining as he looked back at Cassian. "I can't stay long."

His whole body and tone screamed that he didn't want to be there, and by the way he had stiffened as soon as he saw you, you were perfectly sure to be the reason why.

"Good." Cassian said dropping into the seat opposite him, trying to make room for you on the loveseat without succeding.

You gave him a smile, shaking your head to say that it didn't matter as you sat on its armrest. You saw Eris studying your interaction carefully as he closed the book in his hands. His eyes fixated on you, his amber eyes scorcing your soul with the intensity of his gaze, then they fell on your lips.

You ashamely shivered as his eyes seemed to relive the kiss you had shared. Mother...he remeber, you thought feeling a hint of heat appearing on your cheeks. Then, his hand tightened around his book as his eyes met your again. "You cannot speak."

It was a statement. Not a question. He was not thinking about your kiss, he was noticing how you still hadn't opened your mouth to speak. You were about to do so when Cassian spoke before you.

"You gave her quite the necklace, you prick." Cassian sneered, suddenly in a mood. Your gaze snapped on him, burning him with your eyes as he kept looking at the prince. "Her lungs and vocal cords were all burned."

You cleared your throat, preparing yourself for the pain that was going to come. "I can speak, you overprotective asshole." Your eyes immediately stung with tears as you felt sharp rocks rubbing the inside of your throat. You hated how your voice sounded rough, low and weak. "I was just advised not to."

You could have sworn Eris flinched as soon as he heard you speak. Eris Vanserra, heir to the Autumn Court, flinched at the sound of your voice. You weren't sure if you should get offended or feel touched.

"Don't worry, nothing permanent." You gave him a smile as you whispered, the only way to not ending up crying for the pain. "I'm fine."

Something shifted in his face. The worry, the hesitation were gone. If it hadn't been for his red hair you would have mistaken him for someone of the Winter Court. His face was a mask of pure coldness, his eyes, where flames usually danced, were now unmoving.

"I suppose you want to know what I told Briallyn." Eris said Cassian, as if the conversion you had never happened.

“Rhys already looked into your mind. Turns out, you didn’t know much.” Cassian gave the male a slashing grin.

You froze on your seat. Did Rhys saw the kiss? Was this the reason why he had watched you carefully those days? Why he wanted you to go and see Eris?

Eris rolled his eyes, not touched at all by the violetion of privacy. "So why am I here?"

Something was off with him, and it was not only his behaviour toward you. He seemed to not care about that conversation at all, he seemed like he wanted to do anything rather than talking about that.

"We wanted to know what you told Beron. Since you're sitting here, in one piece, I'm assuming he doesn't know about our involvement in your rescue." Cassian said, and your head snapped toward the Illyrian male.

That was not the reason why you were there. You had just wanted to know if Eris was alright. You were smart enough to trust that he obviously wouldn't have told Beron anything important, but for Cassian to imply just that was insulting.

"Oh, he knows that you...assisted me." the mocking in his tone, the hint of a smirk on his lips, were a relief compared to the emptiness you had seen in his eyes while Briallyn controlled him. "Always mix truth and lies, General. Didn't those warrior-brute teach you about how to withstand an enemy's torture?"

His words hadn't time to register in your head as Cassian spoke. "Beron tortured you?"

You watched Cassian confused. Why was he implying that? You knew that Beron was a monster, but Eris was his son. He would have probably tortured whoever he thought responsible for his kidnapping.

"Who cares what my father does to me?" Your eyes snapped to Eris as he stood up, tucking his book under an arm. No. You were undertanding wrong. "He believed my story about the shadowsinger's spies informing him that a valuable asset had been kidnapped by Briallyn, and that you lot were disgusted to arrive and find it was me, rather than someone from the Summer or Winter Courts or whoever stoops to associate with you."

The more he talked the more you felt sick. Beron had tortured him. Beron had tortured him. Beron had tortured him.

Beron.

Had.

Tortured.

Eris.

While you were uncoscious. While you were celebrating Nyx's born. While you were resting and healing and laughing, Eris was being tortured by his own father.

Tortured.

Did you even understand the meaning of that word? Could you even imagine what Beron actually did? To Eris. To your Eris.

Cassian was talking, Eris was answering, but you hear none of that. Blood was pounding in your ears. Fire was running in your veins. Red was filling your vision.

You wanted to scream. You wanted to burn. You wanted to leash out your fire and let it find Beron. Let it burn him and the entire castle. Anger. Anger was all you knew. Anger was all you had ever known.

You saw Eris wincing as he moved. Were he still hurt? Did he not get to a healer?

Beron had tortured him. How dared him touching what was yours? How dared him hurting what gave you happiness?

You will kill him. You will find Beron and kill him. You will burn his flesh piece after piece. You would let Eris' hounds eat him alive. Then you will heal him completely and start again. And again. And again. You will keep doing it until you crashed his brain. Until he wouldn't know what to beg for.

Fire. You would use the very thing Beron thought he controlled. You would shape it as his biggest nightmare and use it against him.

"Y/n." Were those voices? "Stop." Were those hands on your shoulders?

You were an arrow aimed straight, and the target was inside the Forest House in the Autumn Court. You would find him and stop him existence.

Look at me.

The words vibrated in your soul as amber filled your vision. Those were eyes you were staring into. Amber eyes. Beautiful, enchanting, living amber eyes.

Stay with me. Focus on me.

Eris' voice filled you whole, and then you realized that it was Eris standing in front of you. His hands had been the ones holding you. His eyes had been the ones you had been staring to.

He was speaking to you, but not really. His lips weren't moving, his breathing didn't shift.

Breath for me, Little Flame.

Little Flame. You recognized that name. It was Eris' name. It was your name. You blinked once. Twice. You took a better look at his face and knew that you would kill everyone who hurt him.

Smoke rose from his tailored shirt, and you needed another blink to notice the flames circling the both of you, making the world outside disappear. Making you two disappear from the world.

Gods. It was your flames that were slightly burning his shirt, and with a panicked wave you pushed the fire walls two feet more away from you. Since when you had that control? Since you don't want to hurt him.

"Your shirt." you whispered as the pain in your throat brought you completed back to the real world. "I burned it."

"Your neck." he replied so softly that you barely heard him. "I burned it."

His hands winced on your shoulders, and you felt his need to both push away and hold you tighter at the same time. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, and as he leaned closer you let your foreheads meet in the middle.

Your hands were shivering, begging you to seek revenge. You gripped his shirt's collar, inhaling the scent of him. Honey, burned wood, cinnamon, cedar. It felt like the home you had always dreamed about.

"I'm going to kill him." You didn't recognize your own voice when you spoke. It was the voice of death. You watched as Eris opened his eyes and met yours. "I'm going to make him suffer and then kill him."

Something shifted in his eyes. Something you couldn't decipher. Something cold and yet warm. Something dangerous but soft. He was having an internal battle, his hands were slowly letting you go and you didn't want it.

"Let me heal you." You whispered, hoping to smooth the anger inside you.

"Make the fire disappear." it was his only response as he took a step back, leaving you confused and lost. "Now."

You had to blink twice because you almost didn't recognize the male in front of you. His voice had turned cold, he had straightened his posture and his eyes were nothing but demanding.

You gulped as you started to call the fire back into you. Suddenly you realized you were still standing in the suit inside the Hewn City. A confused, worried Cassian was looking at the two of you from a spot beside the window.

When did you move from the couch?

But you didn't look at the Illyrian male. You didn't look at the burned forniture that needed to be replaced, or at the smoke that rose from it. Your eyes stayed on Eris, pinning him with your stare.

"Let me heal you." You whispered again, testing the air between your bodies.

He clenched his jaw, his hands fixed in two fits at his side, as if he was preparing phisically for what come next. "Take your pity and leave."

***

He saw your eyes widening. He saw your breathing catching and your eyebrows furrowing, as if you tried to understand what he had said. You were taken back, you tried to mutter words but with your burned neck nothing came out.

Good. Lets be quick.

He had to strike before it was too late, and he did. He had come too close to you. He had come too close to killing you. And he needed to put distance between the two of you again. He didn't need you to hate his father, he needed you to hate him. He needed you to hate him as much as he hated himself for what he did to you.

"It's not pity." you sounded almost insulted by his implication. "You're hurt, I can heal you."

But why would he deserve to be healed by you when you couldn't heal yourself from what he did? He deserved nothing. Nothing. Not to be healed. Not to be cared for. Not you.

"Don't bother to do something I wouldn't." he saw the physical punch his words gave you. He saw the lies he said placing roots inside you.

Gods, he could be so cruel when he wanted. He knew exactly how to hurt people without touching them, and he was doing it to the last person who deserved it.

He had been so close to killing you. He had seen the life leaving your eyes, and he couldn't have done nothing to stop it. To stop him. The Gods had played a sick joke on him. The very right moment he had got close to you, when he had started to believe that he might become someone worth of you, they had reminded him the danger he was to you. They had reminded him that you would never be safe beside him. Too many enemies. Too much of his father's blood run into his veins. And he would have cut them open if it meant he could spill all of it away and replace it with something else.

The worst, most terrifying thing was not how he felt about you, he was too gone to be ever saved from it, but it was that you cared for him. In his way to get to know you, you had started to care for him, and where did it brought you? Right into death's hands. His hands.

You had kissed him to save him. You had kissed the very lips that were now spilling hurtful words to you. You had kissed him and let him take all your air to save him.

He couldn't let you be so reckless. Not for him. Not when he just found out that the universe must have born from one of your kisses, because nothing could ever feel as godly as your lips on his.

"I thought..." you gasped as you tried to speak throught the pain he could clearly see. "I thought we were..."

Dangerous were the words that could follow. But he needed to hear them. He needed to hear them in order to destroy them.

"What?" It was easy using his mockying voice. It was easy protecting you from him. "What did you think we were?"

He saw in your eyes you were searching for the right word. He dreaded you would find it. Not now. You couldn't know now. Because if you did, he wasn't sure he would control himself and go away.

"Friends..." your voice was broken, but not from the pain of your throat. "I thought we were friends."

Friends.

After five hundreds years of living on that earth Eris finally understood the meaning of the word 'devastated'. He felt devastated. His soul was being ripped apart and he was the one doing it.

You had considered him a friend.

Nothing could ever compare to it. Not mates. Not partners. Not family.

Friends.

Something you choose to be. Something you work hard to be. Something that in his world had never existed. Had someone ever considered him a friend? Had he ever considered someone a friend?

He would endure the horrors on his life another thousands times if it meant being worthy of being your friend. Worthy of being called such. Worthy of your trust, and not because a bond told you so but because you had decided it on your own.

And you did. You had actually choosen to give him your trust, to call him your friend. And now he was breaking it. Stripping himself from the honor of that word.

He laughed. At you. At himself. At the Mother for having given him something so perfect while he would never be able to have it. He laughed because he felt he would cry otherwise. He laughed because he wanted nothing more than kneel in front of you and beg for forgiveness.

"I don't need your pathetic excuse of a friendship. I need your power." Never in his life had words left such a bitter taste in his mouth. "Do something useful and keep training it."

He didn't need the bond to know how much his words hurt you, because you were letting him see everything on your beautiful face. You were letting him see how he was breaking the trust you had in him piece after piece.

You gulped, and he traced every movements with his eyes, wondering if this would be the last time he saw you for a very long time.

He saw in you eyes that you wanted to say something, but he guessed you decided that he was not worth the pain in your throat, and he surely was not.

He watched as you silently walked out of the suit, unaware that you were taking away a piece of his heart with you. A piece he had willingly, stupidly gave you.

He watched as the door closed behind you, as the silence that followed filled his ears. As the damage he had done took form in the emptiness he felt inside him.

“You know, Eris,” Cassian said, a hand wrapping around the doorknob ready to follow you. “I think you might be a decent male, deep down, trapped in a terrible situation.”

Eris scoffed, hating the pity look that the General was giving him. Cassian out of everyone should hate him. Both for what he presumely did to Mor and for what he just saw.

"You should be happy your little 'sister' won't speak with a monster like me ever again." If with you every word had been strecthed, with Cassian was easy. A dance they had been doing for centuries. "A pity you are mated to her twin. I heard Illyrians have the habits of fucking their sisters."

Cassian studied the burned furniture around them, the only proof of the rage you had felt. The only proof that something glimmering gold tied Eris to you.

“I grew up surrounded by monsters. I’ve spent my existence fighting them. And I see you, Eris. You’re not one of them. Not even close. I think you might even be a good male.” Cassian opened the door, turning from Eris’s curled lip. “You’re just too much of a coward to act like one.”

FInally the Illyrian walked away, giving Eris the pleasure of the solitude. Alone he couldn't hurt anyone but himself. Alone no one could hurt him but himself.

He winnowed right back in his bedroom back at the secret cottage he owned deep in the forest of the Autumn Court, close to the border of Winter. Everything was still, unmoving. He had not been able to go there for over two months.

Every window was rightfully closed, every fire out, and in the darkness of the house he could not bring himself to regret what he had done. Memories of your lifeless body hunted his mind, because you had died.

He had never noticed how a second was long, and he had not been prepared when for twenty-three long seconds your heart had stopped beating. For twenty-three long seconds his life had lost any meaning. For twenty-three long seconds he had wished to be dead.

Eris had grabbed into the bond, he had grabbed it with teeth and claws, and had begged you to stay while Azriel had held him down with his shadows and Cassian tried to reanimate you. He had yelled at you to come back. He had show you the image of the cottage, of the Autumn's forest around it, of his hounds peacefully sleeping in the grass. He had promised you to show you all of it if you came back.

You could not breath, he had realized while Cassian tried to make your heart beat again. You could not breath for the damaged he had caused you. So Eris had grabbed a hold on your power too, he had found the last strike of flames left in you and healed you from the inside. It had not been much, but it had been enough to allow the air to enter in you again.

You had died for twenty-three seconds.

Eris could live without a mate. He had done it for five hundreds years. He had never wanted one. Never needed one. But it had been in the brightness of the day, as the sunlight hit the falling leaves of the trees, as the sounds of his hounds running through the forest filled his ears, that he realized he could not live without you.

A/N: I do have a question: The Eris in your head has long or short hair? I was talking about it with a new dear friend of mine and I am curious about your opinions!

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[crippleprophet]

let me open by saying I Know How This Sounds (fem whose undergraduate chemistry professor recommended ze take turmeric to cure zyr arthritis, etc) so no hard feelings if you keep scrolling, but hopefully folks who know me know i'm speaking honestly about my experiences, even if those don't end up being the same for other people. so!

2 Tbsp of a common kitchen spice is doing as much or more to manage my ME/CFS as any of my meds or self-medicating drugs

@lakeeffectbitch outlines a way of trying this with a control in their reddit post (link); i just went directly to the one they thought might work so i'll put my experiences & the science/theory behind this under a cut for folks who want to avoid potential placebo effect :)

i'll get more specific about this in the "spoilers" but please be aware, especially folks with diabetes or other blood sugar conditions, that this substance may cause a blood sugar drop. it's less likely at this dose but probably keep a sugary snack on hand just in case

if you experience post-exertional malaise & want to try this but don't have spare money to spend on spices feel free to dm me & i'll see if i can help!

my experience:

i took 2 Tbsp ground sumac mixed with warm water on February 11. i tried taking it with a straw first because that's what my colonoscopy prep had said would make that go down easier but because the sumac particles were so big they didn't want to remain suspended & trying to get them in the straw was difficult, which then made it harder to swallow without, yknow, noticing that you're slurping down sediment

what worked better was getting the powder wet, putting a big clump of it on my tongue, then swallowing it with water like a pill

within about half an hour of taking the sumac it was like my fatigue just faded around me where i stood. it dissolved to the background & when i thought "oh i want to do this" or "i should do that" suddenly i found myself just doing it. i had spent the past week at least bedridden except for the bathroom, & though i took the sumac on a better day, i'd been planning to return to bed with a snack after taking it.

instead, i made myself lunch, and i sat on the couch to eat it. all of this was without taking an edible that day; usually i've gotta take at least 25mg delta 8 + 25mg cbd to even consider sitting on the couch. also, it was storming.

from my write-up the day of: "everything felt very sharp & clear & lucid." i washed the dishes from my lunch. all of these activities were about 2 hours, & at that point i emphatically needed a nap. waking up felt like after taking a muscle relaxer & sleeping: my muscles were more relaxed, & my whole body felt like it'd gotten a bit of a break

i've taken sumac at least 8 times since then on at least 5 different days (this time by modifying this sumac tart recipe to include a lot of sumac powder in the crust, which has been much more enjoyable than the Glass O' Sediment lmao) & adjusting for factors like weather, the effect has been comparable every time:

i watched Inception on the couch with my husband, & understood when she explained things to me

i watched leverage on the couch all day when it was below freezing

i worked a bit on fanfics i've barely been able to touch in a year

i "meal prepped" measuring spices, gathering ingredients, & soaking beans to make beans & rice in the instant pot later that day. i literally can't remember the last time i was able to use my instant pot, after thinking about it i think it was when i made palak paneer last summer, but that was a one-off special occasion thing, i've used it maybe 3 other times since developing ME

i wrote this post

the science:

okay a lot of this shit was over my head before i developed ME so i'm gonna be summarizing at my level lol, look to @lakeeffectbitch for a higher-level analysis

but what i do know! (all images from "The malic acid inhibiting inflammation in ankylosing spondylitis by interfering M1 macrophage polarization" by Ji et al., January 2025)

sumac contains high levels of malic acid, which is found in certain fruits (apples, peaches, etc)

the drugs.com page classifies malic acid as an inactive ingredient, so there are no known drug interactions

mice with ankylosing spondylitis had lower levels of peripheral malic acid than control mice

ID: bar graph showing mice with AS had about 0.03 micromoles per milliliter of peripheral malic acid, compared to the control mice level of over 0.2 micromoles per milliliter. the difference is labeled significant via asterisks. end ID

mice with higher malic acid concentrations had lower ESR and CRP (inflammation markers)

ID: two graphs showing lines with a downward slope. the top graph, ESR versus malic acid concentration, is labeled: r=-0.6802, 95% confidence interval =-0.8843 – -0.2578, p=-0.0053. the graph shows ESR, an inflammation marker, decreasing as malic acid concentration increases. the bottom graph, CRP versus malic acid concentration, is labeled: r=-0.6068, 95% confidence interval =-0.8537 – -0.1371, p=-0.0165. the graph shows CRP, an inflammation marker, decreasing as malic acid concentration increases. end ID

mice treated with malic acid had lower levels of TNF-alpha than the mice with untreated ankylosing spondylitis. humira & similar biologics that treat autoimmune diseases are TNF-alpha blockers

ID: a bar graph of relative mRNA expression of TNF-alpha. M0, the control mice, has a relative expression of 1. M1, the mice with ankylosing spondylitis that did not receive treatment, has a relative expression of slightly less than 4.5. M1+MA, the mice with ankylosing spondylitis who received the malic acid treatment, has a relative expression slightly less than 3. this indicates that the mice treated with malic acid had lower expression of TNF-alpha than the untreated mice. asterisks between M0 and M1 and between M1 and M1+MA indicate significance. end ID

the mitochondrial function of M2 macrophages in mice treated with malic acid "was significantly enhanced"

analysis of the mice's spinal tissue blew my fucking socks off. trying not to jump to conclusions & i know journal articles are full of errors but that looks potentially disease-modifying.

ID: a 5x3 presentation of samples of mouse spinal tissue. the control mice, which are healthy, have thick, undamaged, glowing tissue. the mice with ankylosing spondylitis have thin, curved, cracked-looking tissue. the mice treated with celecoxib, a common prescription NSAID for arthritis, appear very similar to the untreated mice. the mice treated with 250mg/kg of malic acid per day have tissue in between the untreated and healthy appearances; the tissue is "glowing" like the healthy tissue but still narrower and curved, although less so than the untreated tissue. the mice treated with 500mg/kg of malic acid per day have tissue which looks even closer to the healthy appearance, with less curvature than the other treatment groups. end ID

since i started drafting this post i've started taking these malic acid supplements from Nature's Life – the full dose made me feel weird including some heartburn so i cut the capsules & take roughly 2/3 – 3/4 of it at a time (i drop the rest into a spare pill jar to make more doses from). it's been similarly effective for me

please be aware that the supplement instructions say to only take it once a day, i haven't had any issues but everybody is different & this avenue is definitely under-researched! (the mice were given 250mg/kg per day which for me would be like 27 grams but i am not a mouse lol)

[hyukascampfire]

everyone say it with me… betta late then never!!

first let’s watch our regularly scheduled broadcasting of rain suffering and hating me while reading

ash you're going to pay for this. I hate you.

fuck u ash.

You let him go. - SAY IT THEN FUCKING SAY IT

I refuse this. I rebuke this.

“I want to go. I’m ready.” damn it. damn it. damn it.

I hate you ash. I hate you so much, you'll pay for this. I hate you.

NO HELP ME I CANT DO THISS

I WONT LOSE U AGAIN WHAT HELP I CANT MY HEART HURTS

LOLLLLLL I WAS IN THE BACKSEAT OF MY CAR GIGGLING

off the bat, this is an insane quote. I love you, ash. I do. hehe

ASH. ASH. IF DEATH THINKS YOU ARE FLATTERED, HE MISUNDERSTANDS YOU. THIS LINE, IM SO GLAD IT HIT YOU TOO CAUSE IT HIT ME WHILE WRITING IT

ok, so I've prided myself on not knowing much of anything about this fic because I wanted to be surprised, so i'lll be writing my takeaways from everything. and from my understanding here, is it that everything she touches or is in contact with dies? I'm going to feel so dumb if I'm interpreting this all wrong lmaoo. you’re so smart cause this was literally right. now that you’ve read it, i’ll confirm that wasn’t yeonjun’s intention, but it was definitely his fault, because his proximity and affection for her caused things to die around her.

they are death made in the flesh. help. you're in their forest. I would genuinely be so scared. me too, i’d be running just like her

“There you are, love.” - oh I'm ready, I'm so fucking ready. THIS LINE THIS LINE I LOVE THIS LINE the foreshadowing and the fact that it implies that he’d been looking for her. and when he calls her love >.<;

is it fucked that I find this hot. & FINE ASF. & him wearing a cape just made him a thousand times more hot. LMAOO THE THIRSTING OVER HIM IS SO REAL and no it’s not fucked because he’s hot and he can’t help it. this yeonjun specifically was sexy asf while i was writing him like yes my panties were wet yes i needed him badly and i think it shows in what i wrote sometimes 😭 also RAIN YOU GET ME SO BADLY WITH THE CAPE idk if this is a fantasy reader thing but the cape is just hot

Should you run or thank him? Is Death as prideful a creature as the other kinds that inhabit Aethera? - I like this quote a lot. ily

Morbid curiosity is like that, though. - I really like all the subtle hints at death in this i love people who notice things. like youre just a noticer and i love it

A deep, familiar voice from behind you gives you pause. “Want some help with that?” Soobin says. He stands  in the doorway, his head nearly brushing the top of the frame. It’s made too small for him. Most things in your tiny village were made too small for Soobin. There had been a time where you’d been taller than him, that had hardly lasted long enough. - are you wearing pants... WHEN I TELL YOU IT TOOK SO LONG FOR ME TO UNDERSTAND THIS CAUSE I WAS LIKE… yes he’s wearing pants?? duh??

  “Cow shit isn’t an ingredient.” - LMAOOO loled when i wrote this poor guy

“I think you are very, very beautiful. Would you stop ignoring me, now?” - help ok why do I ship them now... never tell anybody you heard this from me but in my heart he definitely had an unrequited crush

“Don’t like you?” he asks, “What reason would they have for that?” - boy why are you acting like you don't know...it's your fault LMAO POOR YEONJUN HE DIDNT MEAN TO

he was human??? — “You were human?” oop me and her are the same. this made me giggle

THE DANDELIONS MY HEART. SHE DIED GIVING BIRTH??? — YOU FOUND HER YOU FOUND HER. also, "or a blade of grass in the forest" help. their love story is so tragic and i know that i wrote it like it came from my head but it still hurts. and yeonjun’s backstory especially. he loved her so much :(

I'm betting it's the reader. you clocked that. like i said youre just a KNOWERR

if only we cold know that death was actually like this, the comfort I would feel if it were. yes. exactly this. a big source of inspo for this fic was my own fear of death. it felt nice to portray it as something not so final and scary, but maybe something to look forward to. i’m still scared of it and definitely always will be, but it would be so comforting to know for sure that there’s something after death.

and one sec lemme compile all the little bits from the smut scene cause it’s my favorite part I LOVED READING THIS PLEASE

“Crawl to me, then.” - OH? THIS LINE IM ILL sir yes sir!!!

“Tell me to stop. Please, tell me to go. Because I don’t know how.” - HELP HELP HELP DONT GO DO NOT GO GOD I LOVE HIM I LOVE A DESPERATE MAN. i just love how he wants her so badly and lets it be known. HOT HOT HOT

“No, you don’t understand what you’re asking for. All I’ve ever done is ruin. All I’ll ever do is ruin. I won’t ruin you; not again.” - NOT AGAIN?????????? hell yes

“I want you so fucking bad. You are in the marrow of my bones. Fuck, I have done nothing but want you, but I am foul. I will only hurt you.” - what if I pass away huh?? what if I do that?! LMFAOOOO

“I want you to beg me for it,” he says, grinning down at you with cruel intention. “Beg me, and make it so pretty.” - I'm hot is anyone else hot or is it just me... i love you so bad for giving me the opportunity to read all this

“I could give it to you, or I could not…” He hums. “Wouldn’t that be so cruel of me? To leave you wanting?” - HELPPP MEEE RIGHT.

Think about it: do animals just fly into anybody else’s windows and die? Do the trees that they pick from just end up dead? It’s his fault that they all treat you the way you do.” - and ykw I cant be mad at him for saying this because the logic part of me agrees with him. he just cares for her and doesn’t want her hurt. soobin loved her so much. DAMN. but i also understand why what he says hurts her as well yk? it’s the worst. and this being the last time they speak is so awful, but sometimes it happens that way. :((

You were expecting wary looks, anyway. - awh no I feel so bad for her ): she tried to not blame them for being scared of her but omg it makes me so sad for her. she always just wanted be a part of the community. it’s messed up

It was by your hope that he’s gone. - SOOBIN NO. SSOOBIN NO NO NO. FUCK OFF ASH MY SHAYLAAAAAAA. WAS HE EVEN WEARING PANTS PLS WAS HE EVEN WEARING PANTS LMAO IM CTFU

The day moves along without you. You’re not sure how long you sit, but it stretches somewhere between a few minutes and eternity. No matter how long you wait, there are no answers. No matter how long you mull over it. - ok Bella swan WAIT LMAO YES

i loved reading this thank you queen. 💋💋💋

THE TERRIBLE HALF-TRUTHS OF THE UNDEAD ҜING

⠀(🍂 ) 𝓡EVENANT in folklore, a revenant is a spirit or animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living ... ( 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡 )

1︎5.5k revenant!yeonjun · ƒ ! r ft. soobin ⸺ ✴︎ 𝖿𝖺𝗇𝗍𝖺𝗌𝗒 ... smut, violence, angst, death, animal death & vivid descriptions of animal death, major character death, unprotected sex, cumming inside, dry humping (because bring it back), biting, dom yeonjun sub reader, mentions of death in childbirth, reincarnation, teasing, breast worship, yj calls reader ‘my love’, def some typos

🪶 ⦂ how fun is this collab? :,) this fic was so fun to write. i personally believe that tsfawc enjoyers will love this one,, but you'll have to read it to confirm that, right? hehe. and of course, go read everybody else's if you love this one! they're all set in the same world, and everybody worked so hard on these fics. send some love their way!

rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd!

𝒪𝑁𝐶𝐸 𝒰𝑃𝑂𝑁 𝒶 𝒯𝐼𝑀𝐸, in a land far, far away, where the treetops touched the soft clouds of the sky and the water sparkled under the glowing sun, where mountains rose high, and long, deep caves ran through them, where the sea met shore in collisions of swirling, foamy punches, where the undead walked among the living, where the winged flew above the finned, there was a land where things beyond reason and rhyme existed perfectly true. Among those strange beings and within the veils of Aethera, there was a girl loved by death. 

He sits on your shoulder, a dark, boding shadow and glared at those around you with promise in his eyes.

That’s how it seems, anyway. That’s how everybody looks at you. They dodge you, whisper about you, evade your gaze as if he might reach his claws for them next if they linger for too long.

Crows with dead eyes arrive at your doorstep like some lover’s cheeky gift, other poor creatures like fat grey mice are left to rot in the wheatfields, and yarrow stocks wilt outside the wall of your room. If Death thinks that you are flattered, he misunderstands you. You are terrified of nothing more than dying. The first time, it was a sly joke. Then it happened again, and you watched their eyes change. And it happened again and again, and your people are a suspicious type. Something can only be a coincidence so many times.

When you began to sneak into a little shack with a village boy, you thought that maybe, somehow, this would all pass. He died too. There’s really no coming back from that, is there? You don’t blame them. You’re not the freak that they all believe you to be—none of them get close enough anymore to know that, though.

The wickerbasket’s handle creaks under your fist. You usually only forage along the shallow line of the forest; you pluck from bramble bushes topped with plump berries that crawl between trees during the summer, and when the crab apple tree’s branches hang heavy with the fruit, you snatch those up too. You’re more useful to your family out here, in the woods that they deem just as cursed as you. Where you won’t be their burden.

Crisp autumn leaves crunch under your boots. You scan between them—more grey and rotted this late in the season than fresh and orangey—for the edible mushrooms and roots that you usually forage at this time of year. The basket’s already pretty heavy with a variety, black morels and sorrel and burdock, as you bend down to pull a truffle from the dirt against a tree.

You drop it down with the rest of your finds. The basket smells like earth, no doubt your hands do too. You dust your palms off on your skirts and go to rise back from your squat.

A deep, billowing horn pierces the forest’s silence. It’s both far away, wiggling between the whispers of rustling leaves, and much too close. It draws out. Long. Bone-chilling. You freeze, scanning between each tree trunk and praying that you won’t find what you fear you might.

You are much deeper into the woods than you usually are. Than you ought to be. And you know what that horn means—you know that it means something far worse than what you’d been afraid of, coming into these woods. Much more primordial than the hide-behinds you were scared you might find this deep, much less avoidable than the faerie rings you stepped around.

Why would The Wild Hunt be here? A shudder runs down your spine, and you curl your fingers into your skirts and lift them as if to prepare to run, but you don’t. Your feet find root in the forest floor and all you can do is stand terribly still in catatonia. Their horn sounds again, and a procession of wicked whoops and howls follow. Wild hoofbeat rumbles under it all—the hunt and their rides. You hope that they’re just passing through, and you won’t so much as see one of those wild riders. There were plenty of folktales that the matrons of your village would bolster to terrify you as children, but you knew even then that their stories of the riders, with their flesh falling away from them and their pale or beady eyes and their gnarled maws and frightening figures as they rode on the backs of equally terrible steeds, were not fabricated. They are not a bogeyman or a wailing banshee; they are death made in the flesh, and they are here. In your forest. 

Your legs won’t work. You curl your clammy fingers tighter around your basket and lean into the tree beside you. How deep had you wandered into the forest? Hopefully not too far; when you gain the courage to run, you hope that they do not send their hounds to snap their foul breath on your heels. Maybe just standing here and blending into the trees is best. The Hunt would love a chase, and you don’t want to become their next.

The next call comes and you throw that all to the wind. Your heart pounds against your ribcage as you let your basket clatter to the leaves and you take off. You fly over roots and shrubbery and between the trees, your blood roaring in your ears faster. You’d oblige if you could.

Above the loudness of your frantic mind, the harrowing whinnies and The Hunt’s ruckus dulls until it’s faraway again, and then it’s gone. Well, you don’t stop to check if they’ve really passed through the forest. You just run.

“There you are, love.”

His voice cuts through your frantic escape and stops you dead in your path. You almost go crashing down over the ground with the force that you dig your heels into it. Though the voice is non-threatening, you don’t turn to face the source.

He speaks again. You already know who it is. He, old as the earth you stand on itself, leads that band of wild riders. Is the king of the undead, collects souls for reaping.

And he’s the one who’s plagued you with his attention. Death.

“Why do you keep your back turned to me?” he says. “I frighten you. That hurts.” His voice lilts with amusement and sharpness. “I wish that you would face me.”

You’re not fond of the way that he speaks to you with a familiarity. But then again, you’re not fond of dying, either. Your legs are boneless beneath you. Turning, you slowly indulge him, though it takes a great amount of willpower to not run again like your jittering jaw and trembling hands ask you to.

The King of Death stands tall and utterly preternatural, leaned against a crooked tree in the woods behind you. His smile cracks across his face in a jagged way that suggests he finds you amusing, but none of that meets his eyes. They’re the color of the greyish, rotted leaves beneath you. The dark shadows beneath his eyes are the only thing belying the weight that his infinite life might have on him. That, and the hollowness that rings from him.

And though he sounded entirely playful, you are shaken by the sorrow that you find in him now that you’ve turned. Even more so, you’re not sure why you feel it echoed somewhere in the hollows of your bones. “I’m sorry,” you say. It trembles terribly. You want to say that you’re sorry you caught his attention, but it seems you’ve always had his attention. It’s more that you are petrified down to your marrow that the time’s come that you face this… strange infatuation. Here he stands: the one who leaves hollowed out husks of creatures at your doorstep. Should you run or thank him? Is Death as prideful a creature as the other kinds that inhabit Aethera? “I don’t mean to…”

He pushes off his tree, fixing his cape that cascades over only one of his shoulders. It’s tattered and falling apart like the rest of his clothing, though you think that the bronze stitching and swirling oakleaf patterns in the black say that they might have been immaculate at some point. Or maybe they weren’t, and they had started that way. He is Death, anyway. “You’re sorry?” he says. “Why are you apologizing to me? You’ve hardly done a thing to warrant it.”

Faltering, you wet your chapped lips. You’re not really sure. Holding back another apology for fear that you’ve offended him and he’ll now strike you down for it, you say, “I thought that, maybe the hunt was…” Wow, you sound stupid. You can see in the sly smile his lips form that it amuses him. That’s almost worse than angering him: intriguing him. What you really should be doing is boring him so that he’ll find you a waste of his time. Then, maybe, he’d give up haunting you.

“After you?” he finishes. Shaking his head, he says, “My hunters only answer to me.”

“Oh,” you say plainly. Part of you wants to ask why that should comfort you, especially when you’re the one that he sends little bits of death to, but rationality keeps those words in the back of your throat. You don’t really want to know. “Why are you passing by here?”

Something akin to old longing passes through those witty eyes, and then he eats up the distance between you with languid steps of his long legs until he’s nothing more than one last step in front of you. The closeness consumes the air in your lungs, leaving nothing for you but short and shallow drags. The forest has gone dead silent aside from the sound of it. His voice is even more magnetic now that he’s so close.

You recoil when he brings a hand up to brush the pad of his thumb over your cheek and then cup your jaw, as if afraid that he might snuff you out here and now. His fingers are softer than you thought they might be, and the lines of his face sharpen into what you think is hurt. Hurt that you flinched?

“We go here and there,” he says, “but it’s been a very long time since we came here.” There’s a certain thickness to his words; a certain tension coiled over them from something that you’re not privy to. And yet, there’s a farawayness, too. You bet he’s full of a lifetime of secrets. Lifetimes of secrets. “But I think I’ve found myself a reason to finally return.”

Breathy and still struggling to flatten out your breathing, you ask him, “Why?”

The Undead King’s smile turns wicked once more, and he doesn’t answer you. It’s awfully eerie.

“Do you have… business here?” you try again. It’s a roundabout way of asking, do you have someone to take away?

“I have business wherever the living go,” he says, letting your face go but not giving you any more room. You narrow your eyes. He’s quite good at non-answers. “Nothing is more certain than that I will greet every living thing eventually. I’ll come to take you, too, when the time comes.”

Your mouth dries up. The entirety of your home, all the people you’ve ever known, fear you for all the death you bring. Not one of them fears it more than you do. You’ve seen it enough to fear its frightening finality.

The drop of your face must’ve told him how much that scared you. “Dying is not such an awful thing, love. Living pales in comparison.” Searching your eyes, he adds, “But I’ve not come to take you.”

That’s easy for him to say: that death isn’t something to fear. His words don’t calm your thundering heart, but you offer him a, “Thank you…” It trails off toward the end when you realize that you don’t have his name. If he has one, anyway.

“Yeonjun.” He tilts his head, strands of sparrow hair brushing over his watching eyes. “Most don’t know it, but you’re not most people, are you?”

Your breathing had just begun evening out. It’s a shame, the way that it kicks back up at the way he looks at you. “What do you mean?” you say, but of course you know. Nobody else is given dead things like you. It’s not like you yourself are very strange; you like pretty dresses and sharing gossip with friends just as much as any other girl your age.

Giving you another one of those knowing smiles that he uses just like words, he steps back. “I’m sorry that I scare you how I do.”

You don’t answer him. What could you say to that? That he doesn’t? That would be a lie, and he would know it.

Yeonjun’s eyes flit over your face, over your cheeks made pink by the autumn cold, lingering on your lips for a few unexplainable beats, and then landing on your eyes where he searches and finds something that sends his throat bobbing with a thick swallow. “I don’t mean to be your monster. It’s only that…” He steps back again. “You remind me a terrible amount of someone I once knew.”

“Who?” Though your shoulders relax a bit with some distance between the two of you, you do your best to not let your guard down. All the stories that you recall being told, all those cautionary tales passed down through word of mouth around a fire, end with some stupid girl thinking that the monster could be changed or tricked. You’re willing to bet that the man in front of you, no matter how human he looks or how enchanting his words are, could be neither.

That doesn’t explain the ache in your chest when he holds your eyes for too long. But you shove that feeling way, way down. It’s nonsensical.

His voice takes on a parting tilt when he says, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Death takes us all.” Yeonjun dips his head at you. His smile wavers. You’d think that crooked smile on his mouth was indelible had you not seen it twitch down at the corners only for a moment. If you’d have blinked, you’d have missed it. “You think I’ll hurt you,” he says, “well, don’t let me stop you. Go ahead, run. I apologize for your basket.”

Death takes us all. You’re not sure what that’s supposed to mean, coming from him, but it sends a cold wind up your spine and goosebumps crawling over your skin.

He watches you go. You don’t look back when you do, but his gaze sits on your back until you’re sure you’re out of his sight. When you return to your home, your mother asks where the basket full of ingredients for supper went.

You imagine what her face might look like if you told her the truth. But that was impossible, so instead you tell her some stupid story about a wolf that startled you so bad that you ran home paying no mind to where your basket was. It’s close enough to the truth.

༺ ꘏ ༻

It doesn’t matter what you do; you can’t get his face out of your head. While you cut butter into flour and then roll out dough, simmer fruits over flame and you slice cheese off blocks, you replay that meeting in the forest. The memory spins and turns over no matter how hard you try to put it away from your thoughts.

It’s not every day that somebody meets the likes of him. You can’t blame yourself; he had such captivating eyes. Dark, playful, and endless. There they are again. You sigh and dust your hands off. Maybe you are just as strange as they all think that you are. Morbid curiosity is like that, though. Taking the most normal of us and making you wonder what you absolutely should not wonder about.

And you absolutely should not wonder about him.

The sun has begun to hang high in the sky, but the breeze that crawls through the window you pulled open before you got to work is a crisp one. Autumn’s really come, now. Outside the window, a huddle of children play around in the leaves that you’d raked up. You’ll have to rake those back up, but you hardly have the heart to tell them to take their playing elsewhere. Their giggles and small voices waft in with the breeze, and a traitorous part of you yearns for a family that you know you’ll never have. No man would risk that fate, not after what happened to the last man who paid you any attention. You grit your teeth at the memory.

Having a face for the thing that’s made your life the way it is is strange. Seeing him in the flesh, with handsome eyes and a taunting mouth, looking something near human, you think you’ve come to resent him for it. How dare he ruin your life? He, more than anybody, should know how fleeting life is. What is in it for him to deface what little time you have? You keep going back to that thought: why did he ever even appear to you in that forest? There is not one story in which you remember Yeonjun showing his face to those he hasn’t come to claim. Death makes his visits swift and purposeful.

Moreover, why on earth would he even look your way? You wish there was a plain way to ask him why, or even to plead with him to stop. Whatever it is he’d ask of you, you think you might give him. To get back to living, you would.

A deep, familiar voice from behind you gives you pause. “Want some help with that?” Soobin says. He stands  in the doorway, his head nearly brushing the top of the frame. It’s made too small for him. Most things in your tiny village were made too small for Soobin. There had been a time where you’d been taller than him, that had hardly lasted long enough.

“As if,” you dismiss and gesture at his dirty hands. He’d no doubt been out working his family’s field, his tunic sleeves rolled up to his elbows.  “Cow shit isn’t an ingredient.”

Anybody else might’ve scoffed or taken offense, but he just laughs and invites himself in anyway. It never fazes Soobin. He doesn’t let you push him away.

It’d be better if he did. How long before he ends up dead, too? Alive one moment, and then a husk without a soul next. You don’t think you could handle seeing cold, dead eyes where the annoying, warm shine should be. Of course it would be better if he stayed away, if he had half the mind to. Even most of the children have heard enough from their mothers to stay a healthy distance. He’s not too much better than a child, though.

“Isn’t it?” he says. His cheek is smudged with whatever sort of dirt he’s got on his hands and under his nails. “I’m done with work for the day. Want to go out to the field?”

You two have always ran off and avoided your life in between willowy, flaxen wheat stocks. They were just tall enough at this time of year to hide you away. But, for some reason, your stomach does a quick flip at the thought of being outside. It’s silly; couldn’t he find you here, too? “I’m busy,” you say. You’d already kneaded this roll of dough plenty, but you dig your fingers into it and begin again.

“Busy?” he scoffs, “Since when are you too busy to get away from work?”

Gritting your teeth, you let the sounds of your kneading answer. Now, more than ever, he should keep his distance. You know one thing that you’re sure nobody else does: Death’s come to visit. 

His brows shoot up in your peripherals. “I don’t get answers today?”

“I’m sorry,” you say, giving up working the over-kneaded dough only because your arms ache. “Why don’t you go talk off the ear of some other poor village girl? I’ve heard as much as I can handle today. And then when that one’s tired, you can bother the next, I’m sure.”  You soften the words with a quick smile his way. No matter how many times you say something sour in hopes that it’ll send him away, as soon as you glance up at his face, you reel it in.

His company is all you’ve ever had. The least you can do for him is make sure he doesn’t end up like carrion, even if he chooses to take that risk himself. You don’t know why he does.

Voice playful, he says, “I’m glad to hear that you believe I’ve got ladies falling at my feet, but I’d rather not annoy a pretty girl, so you’re my only option.” He pokes at the sleeve of your simple cotton dress. “Should I drag you out of here? Don’t your arms hurt doing all that?”

“Oh, you are a refined man, aren’t you?” you say, shuffling out of his reach. Damn him, he makes it difficult. “Well, I am a pretty girl, so you should take yourself elsewhere.”

Soobin smiles easy. “I’m bored out of my mind. You’re just going to let me suffer?”

“That’s not my issue.”

“I’d argue that it is,” he says. “Come on. Why are you giving me a cold shoulder?” Leaning, he tries to get a look at your face. “Did I upset you? I wasn’t aware that you cared much about what I thought.” When you spare him a sharp glance, he says, “I think you are very, very beautiful. Would you stop ignoring me, now?”

You wish you could fall into the easy banter that comes with being around Soobin, but you can’t. You can’t let him be around you. “Soobin, stop it,” you say, draining your voice. You don’t look at him while you say it.

Going quiet, he seems to notice that today’s different. His gaze is heavy as he stares at you for a few long moments. Crossing his arms over his chest, he asks, “What happened?”

You swallow. “Nothing. I’m just doing something.”

“Oh, alright,” he says, tone inflicting in a way that says he doesn’t believe you one bit. He pushes off the counter. “I’ve put up with you pushing me away for years. You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Soobin,” you warn. If you look at him, you fear you’ll be forced to watch the only one who never cared much what a risk it was being around you leaving. So you don’t.

Your friend raises his hands in the air defensively. “Okay, then.” He makes for the doorway with languid, lingering steps. As if he doesn’t want to leave. “Tomorrow..”

That’s both a threat and a promise, knowing him. Sighing and watching the rowan tree out your window sway, you bid him a curt goodbye.

If only that jerk took offense to things. It would make things an awful lot easier for you.

༺ ꘏ ༻

Being out in the wheat fields brings you peace when you’re alone, but you find it to be terribly lonely. The earthy, sweet scent of it wraps around you, and the stalks whisper against each other in a soothing way.

When you look beside you, the patch of wheat imprinted with the shape of your bodies is empty on his side. You are quite weak; it makes you want to go knocking at his door for his company. But that would be the selfish thing to do, so you card your fingers between the golden straw instead.

A chill trickles down your spine. You feel his presence before you even see him; it’s a feeling that you used to get fleetingly, as if something far away was tugging at you. But then he became real, a living thing in front of you that can touch, and that is much different.

“Why is it that I always find you out in the wilderness?” Yeonjun says. His voice comes from behind you.

Has he been watching you? You stand and dust your bottom off, heart kicking to life. “It’s nice out here,” you say. In truth, you haven’t come outside since that day. You’ve dodged Soobin and made a million excuses as to why you won’t go anywhere past the fences of your home. “I like to… watch people go about their days. It’s interesting.” It’s true—you always watch from afar how the village folk interact. How groups of girls your age link arms and whisper to each other, how neighbors come together to fix up a shoddy fence. You watch them be a community that you are not a part of. Watching it tastes bitter sometimes, but mostly you take pleasure in imagining yourself there with them. You’re not sure why you try making small talk with him, but what else? Should you go running again? If you were to listen to your pattering heart, maybe that’s what you’d do. He’s hardly shown you any bad will, though, and he’s the one that’s come to you. Maybe it’s silly to wait until something bad happens to be cautious.

A thousand pounds in stones sit at the center of your chest, though, and his voice makes them feel lighter. Why on earth that is, you’re not sure. It’s a nice relief regardless.

He smiles. It's different from the ones he showed you before. It’s knowing; more sweet than cracking over his face like the smile you would expect from the likes of him. What use might he have in being sweet? “Could I join you?”

Blinking dumbly at him for a second, you nod. “Oh, uh… Yeah.” Settling back down into your spot, you spare him a few curious sideways glances.

The breeze billows over the gold stems, moving them like gentle waves over the ocean and blowing your hair in it too. The flattened bits rustle under his weight. He doesn’t even turn his face toward the village; instantly, his gravitational eyes are on you.

“Do you come here often?”

“I do,” you answer. Mostly when you and Soobin have too much to do and not enough will to do it. “It’s nice. The village doesn’t like me much, so it’s easier out here.” You don’t mention that mostly you don’t come here alone.

Yeonjun’s face becomes far away. It looks strikingly like somebody forced into an old, unpleasant memory. “Don’t like you?” he asks, “What reason would they have for that?”

“They fear me. Things go wrong around me, that’s all.” You pluck at the hay absentmindedly. “Things die. They’re smart to stay away.”

The hay whispers much louder for the long moment he remains quiet, digesting what you’ve said. Maybe deciding what to say, considering that it’s his fault.

“Die?” he asks, voice inflected with surprise.

Turning to him, your brow creases. Shouldn’t he know? He’s the one that’s done it to you. “Everything that gets too close ends up dead. Everything,” you say, resting your temple on your knee. “So, I guess, I just keep it all at arm’s length.” You look back at your tiny village, a collection of familiar, un-familiar thatch-roof homes. 

Continuing to blink at you, his eyes narrowed in a strange grimace, Yeonjun says, “Death follows me, too.”

What? A laugh of disbelief bubbles up in your chest. Of course, death follows him. You cover your mouth with a hand to obscure your laugh, but you just giggle at him harder.

A laugh twitches at the corners of his mouth, too. “I mean it,” he says. The lines of his face become distant again, eyes both trained on your face and melancholic as if the sight reminds him of something.

It ignites a question in your mind about something he said in the forest. “You said that I reminded you of somebody,” you say, testing the waters. “Who?”

A muscle feathers in his jaw. He looks away, as if he can’t look at you while he says it. “I loved a girl from this village once. When I was human, no less than you.”

You falter, mouth falling open to ask all the questions that flurry through your thoughts. You settle on one. “You were human?”

“I was,” he says ruefully. “And I had everything. I had the love of my life. I think that even the most bitter of creatures on this island had envy for our love. She would braid dandelions into my hair, and then I’d braid them into hers.” He swallows thickly and pauses, as if the wound was still festering and fresh. “And then she died. She died starting our family. She died because of me, in my arms.”

You don’t know what to say, so you just look into his shining eyes as if that’ll help. You’re not very useful with people, much less comforting them.

“I couldn’t accept that. I wouldn’t. So I went where I shouldn’t have gone, and angered something much bigger than myself. They thought it would be a fitting punishment for me to live an eternity, the King of Death who could not bring back his dead lover.” The harrowed look that he gives you, only briefly, has your chest heavy all over again. “They have a sense of humor, the forces.”

You imagine what it would’ve been like for him to lose his lover in that way. How far he’d gone to try and have her back, but death does not give back. Where had he gone to have been turned into this? An immortal thing, forced to roam the world and scoop up the souls of the living for an eternity? To be bound in ancient bones and made to remember forever how you had lost your lover?

The grandness of what you want to say is too big, but all those words feel pitying and patronizing in a way that you don’t think will actually bring him any comfort. Rather, you doubt anything you say will be able to patch up a wound older than you could imagine. Simply, you offer him a raw, “I’m so sorry.”

Yeonjun lets a crooked smile replace the trembling at his lips. “As long as I live, so too will she,” he says, placing his palm over his heart. “Death doesn’t so much happen when we leave behind our bodies, but when we’ve left the minds of the living.” Narrowing his eyes at you, he brushes hair behind your ear with his knuckles. “I know she lives on, somewhere out there. Somewhere. I’ll find her.”

That intrigues you. “Is there some way that you could bring her back?”

The grim light in his eyes tells you his answer. “My curse is to take life,” he says, “not to give it. But the one who made me this, he is cruel in a twisted way. If I were to find her, as a human or an animal or a blade of grass in the forest, only then could I rest.”

It is cruel. “You’ve been searching, then,” you conclude. “When you find her, you’ll both be able to rest.” But how could he find her, if as he says, she could be any living thing? Where would he even begin?

Slowly, he shakes his head, throat bobbing. “Death needs a farrier.”

She would become what he is. You swallow thickly. Was it not him who caused the deaths that follow you? Or, at least, it was not on purpose?

Opening your mouth, you go to tell him that you’ll help him look. You’re sure you’ll be of no help. He’s spent an immortal lifetime searching, and he still hasn’t found his dead lover. Nobody would know better than him where to look.

The ground shakes beneath your palms with impact, and something cuts through the wheat. The noise of its bleating becomes nearer until the both of you scramble up to find out what’s in such distress.

A deer stumbles around wildly. It looks lame, but you don’t see anything wrong with its legs. Your throat tightens at the awful sound, piercing and sad. Frozen, you watch it try to stay upright before it finally collapses down, legs still kicking as though it still wants to run but its body has begun weakening on it. “Oh my god,” you say, stumbling back. The sounds; its sounds are awful, echoing in your bones and constricting your thoughts until they’re a pinched panic.

There’s an arrow lodged into its ribcage, deep and at a terrible angle. You already know that it’s pierced some vital organs, if not its heart. It continues to writhe on the ground, not ready to give up. You’re not sure if you should approach it—you don’t want to scare it, and you can tell by the look in its wet eyes that it already wants to be away from you.

Or, maybe it had come to you. How else had it found the two of you in the middle of this field?

Yeonjun’s already on it. He puts his knees into the dirt and dried wheat to kneel by it, running his hand over the beast's pelt in long strokes. The small buck flinches at first but relaxes once he learns that his touches are gentle, not the gnashing of hungry teeth ready to make him a meal.

Blood runs like lead through your veins. You say, “Can we help it?”

He shakes his head. “He’ll die.”

Whip-lashed, you swallow thickly. He says it so unphased, and you’re sure he is. You can hardly make yourself mirror that serenity that he exudes as he runs his hand over its flank, but you get on the ground beside him anyway.

The buck’s breaths slow to desperate drags for breath. For a few long minutes, the two of you sit in silence and stay with him until he no longer fights, until his breaths are ragged. You feel his side, still warm and alive, but you see the life going from his eyes. You sit here, talking to each other about nothing just so it hears gentle voices as it goes, for a while.

Eventually, he’s gone. Quiet and at peace, no longer hurting. This time, when you look over to Yeonjun who still smooths over the deer’s skin even as he goes, guiding him delicately into whatever greets us when we go, you see death as a gentle thing.

༺ ꘏ ༻

Though you never seek him out, Yeonjun always finds you. In hidden places, away from prying eyes, he appears behind you and makes himself known. Well, you have a feeling that he watches you for a while before saying anything. It’s hard not to feel the strange tingling of his gaze over your form. It’s akin to the sixth sense that’s supposed to keep you safe out in the dark hearts of forests, an innate feeling that tells you some beast with a rotten, pale maw watches you between the trees.

Yeonjun doesn’t feel rotten, though, preternatural and eerie as he is. As you shirk your duties and talk with him for hours, you stare into ancient eyes and watch his crooked mouth move around his words and you feel an odd comfort. As if he’s the only one who’s ever understood you, or maybe that your strangeness pales beside him and for once you’re nothing but who you are. So many nights, the sun fell on your talking until the night insects buzzed from the grasses and your eyes were heavy.

Sometimes, as you dozed off with your back to a hay bale or a hardwood wall of the abandoned home beside yours with its sagging thatched roof, you caught such festering longing in his his eyes that you’d let your lashes fall and pretend to sleep so that you could imagine what it was that he longed for. No doubt his lost lover. When you imagine him, bound in bones and coming back to haunt the living for an eternity as he mourns her infinitely, searching for her in impossible places, your chest aches with a gnawing intensity.

It’s a terrible, cursed existence. Even the nothingness of death becomes a paradise beside it.

“Is it scary?” you ask into the air, sat criss-crossed on the thick duvet of the bed. He sits across from you, looking perfectly lazy. Moonlight pools in like sterling mist through the shutters.

“What?” He watches you, sitting in your plain dress, as though you’re the only thing in the world.

You’ve begun to wonder. Wonder about those looks he gives you.

Shifting, you fix the shoulder of your soft chemise where it’s slipped down when you catch his eyes lingering on it. His throat bobs. “Dying,” you elaborate. “Is it really nothing? After we go, all of it was for nothing?”

A slow smile tugs his full lips, made a bit red in the middle where he likes to worry it. It’s such a human habit to see on something so far from human. “Hardly,” he says. “It’s like going home, right where your soul is supposed to be. Who do you think rides with me?”

Furrowing your brows, you tilt your head toward one shoulder and let your hair pool there. “The riders are dead?” You had thought they were undead in some way like Yeonjun, other sorts of revenants come back to life with their own purposes. Then, are their creepy horses dead, too? A chill goes down your arms. Sometimes, sitting here with him when his face is made soft by the orange glow of the fire he puts on, you forget what he is.

“They are.” He nods, leaned back onto his elbows, his eyes alight with a hunger that makes your insides feel funny. “It doesn’t stop once we’ve died. You don’t need to be scared, my love. So many things end, but then so many things begin. The earth no longer holds you down, the weight of being is gone. You don’t know anything like it; you don’t know leaving behind the pleasures of earth to know the ones that only the afterlife can show you.”

His eyes laced with something entirely else, he adds, “And it’s not the end. Not for everything. For some it’s only the beginning, and for others, those who have not yet fulfilled their purpose, they come back to the flesh. They return.”

You can’t tell if he means himself, or something else. The weight in his eyes, dark, endlessly swirling pools, makes you wonder again why it is that he’s lingering here: the place that he had not visited once since the death of his lover, for the fact that it still hurts too much. Why his shadow of death, his fault or not, was tangled in your soul enough to brush its fingers over the things around you.

“It’s scary,” you say, breathy. The thought of eternity.

Soft hairs brush over his eyes as he tilts his head at you. “Do I scare you?”

“No.”

“No?” he echos, pushing himself up so that he leans back onto his palms. “Isn’t that strange? Pretty little thing says she’s not afraid of death, but her heart races when I’m near. Her sweet heart jumps at just the brush of my leg. Are you sure you’re telling me the truth, love?”

Your blood roars in your veins, inflaming your cheeks and making your head dizzy. Nobody’s ever looked at you like that before. Hair prickles on your skin. “Yes,” you breathe.

Feral delight sparks in his eyes, black as pitch. His smile turns up all feline at the crooked corners. “Crawl to me, then.”

Like how fire licks up oxygen in any room it is in, his words steal the breath right from your lungs. What does he think you are? You blink at him wide-eyed and dumb for a moment.

How can he say that as though it were nothing? Moreover, how does the ravenous flare in his eyes, his head tilted back as he watches you down his nose expectantly, do that to your belly?

Your mind glazes over with something thick and heady, and you damn the nerves in your belly and begin to crawl from your end of the bed to his. His tongue darts out to wet his lips, making sure you feel every inch of the taunt in his eyes as he trains them on you. When you’ve gotten to him through the thickness in the air, you settle into his lap and bracket his waist with your thighs.

Yeonjun takes the soft fat of your hips in his fingers. “Fuck,” he says. It sounds like he’s barely holding the gates on something endlessly consuming. Something that might break loose on the two of you, and leave you changed forever with its hungry, gnashing teeth. His head hits your collarbone. “Tell me to stop. Please, tell me to go. Because I don’t know how.”

“Don’t,” you say. “Don’t stop. I want it, Yeonjun. I want this.”

He straightens, pupils blown and eyes as tense as his set jaw. “No, you don’t understand what you’re asking for. All I’ve ever done is ruin. All I’ll ever do is ruin. I won’t ruin you; not again.”

That rings bells somewhere outside the heavy fog that’s infiltrated your mind, but they don’t sound too alarming when he looks as though he wants to drag his teeth over your heart to taste its beating. It doesn’t touch the ground, when you want him to, so badly. So badly that you taste it on your tongue and it tinges your words as you tell him, “I do know what I’m asking for. I want you. Yeonjun. Don’t you want me too?” Voice and confidence wavering, you pull back. Maybe you’ve read this all wrong. A tickling shame crawls over your skull. “Do you not want me?”

“You think I don’t want you?” he says, straightening up and meeting your gaze. His breath is hot on your mouth. “I want you so fucking bad. You are in the marrow of my bones. Fuck, I have done nothing but want you, but I am foul. I will only hurt you.”

He takes your hand and places it over his chest, where a heart should be. Beneath your palm, you do not feel the thumping of an alive thing. Yeonjun has no heart. You knit your brows and examine the strain of his features. Does he think that you’ll be disgusted? Maybe the girl you were in that forest might’ve been, but being near Yeonjun has changed you in ways you couldn’t start to put your finger on. “I’m asking you to,” you say. “Show me what you want to do to me. What you’ve wanted to do to me.”

Searing silence burns between you as he drinks that in, and then he shoves you onto your back. Supporting himself with an arm beside your head, he curls his fingers into your hip and nudges your thighs wider. He doesn’t lift the hem of your chemise like you expect him to. No—Yeonjun begins to grind himself into your cunt through all the layers of your clothes. Though your dress is bunched up and his pants lay between any real contact, Yeonjun’s hard and that friction tastes fleetingly sweet.

“I want you to beg me for it,” he says, grinning down at you with cruel intention. “Beg me, and make it so pretty.”

You let little sounds linger in that back of your throat and become hungrier each time he grinds against you. It’s so much, mind swimming and sparks spraying up your spine, and yet each time it is not near enough. Damn that foxish smile on his face; you beg for him anyway. “Yeonjun,” you breathe, curling your fingers around the wrist of that hand with which he pins your hip. “P…lease, will you help me? It feels so good; I want more, please.”

He raises his eyebrows at you and an eager grind comes right over your throbbing clit. 

You know he wants more than that, but mortification already is making your voice unsteady and your cheeks burn. “Yeonjun,” you huff, hips wiggling.

The king of the undead delights fully in your shame and rewards you with more of those pointed, dry grinds. Your legs tremble; he’s giving you so little, and yet your need takes it and magnifies it into something grand.

Though he pretends he’s on some high ground, you hear his shuddering breaths each time his fucks his hips against you. He feels that roiling, liquid need in his belly just as vehemently as you do. The room fills with your breathy pants and grinding bodies. You catch your lip in your teeth and begin to meet him half-way. Your moans are low and sweet, and each one sends his jaw tighter. 

You twist and grind against each other like fumbling teens until you’re coiled up so tight that he has to pull himself away. Your throbbing cunt protests, but you know he doesn’t want you cumming like this.

“You want me to show you what I’ve wanted to do to you?” he says, working at his pants. His eyes are so drunk on you, and his cheeks betray his state. “Open your legs, my love. Let me show you a little death.”

Throat gone dry, you slowly let your thighs fall open. The dull throbbing between your thighs roars to life. He slides your skirt up your leg, stopping when he frees your knee to pepper a few hot kisses into it. Once he’s got it bunched up at your ribcage, he runs his tongue over his dry lips to wet them. “Fuck. Such a pretty pussy. I want to fucking eat you up.”

“Yeonjun,” you whine. His name is all you can muster out, anticipation sharpened to a knife point.

Flashing his teeth, he purrs, “You like that, you filthy thing. I bet you’d like for me to fuck you till your brain’s gone and all that’s left is my name. Isn’t that right? Is that what you want?”

Your thoughts stall and you nod, making your mouth into a filthy pout. God, how you want that. Maybe he’s right about you being filthy. Coming from him, it sounds like a delicious thing to be.

The pretty, leaking tip of his cock brushes your clit as he slides it up and down your slit to collect the mess there. Your thighs jump to close before your mind gets the better of it. He does this a few times—up and down, letting you feel and get used to the size and length of him all the way till his cockhead kisses your clit and you squeak.

“Are you comfortable, love?” he asks, shifting your hips with strong hands. “Do you need anything from me?”

It’s so at odds with his other, nastier words. Your head spins, the moonlight blurring. “I’m okay,” you tell him. “I… just want you. Want you to put it in, want to feel you.”

His cock catches on your hole, and he begins to push forward with promising pressure. But then he pulls back, smiling downturned. You whine; why can’t he save his capriciousness for later? You’d almost had it…

“I could give it to you, or I could not…” He hums. “Wouldn’t that be so cruel of me? To leave you wanting?”

You flutter around nothing. Every inch of your body buzzes. Alive. You are more alive now, at the promise of Death’s touch, than ever before. The irony might be something to wonder about if you weren’t dribbling down onto the bed sheets with crude need. “Stop it,” you say. Your voice is whiny. You’re glad you can hardly hear yourself past the pounding in your bloodstream.

That delights the King of Death. He wrinkles his nose at you, burning you alive with his eyes as he presses his palm to your belly and guides himself into you with his free hand. You wrap around each inch of him slowly. The air between you bows under the weight of your gazes; he holds your eyes the whole way, inch by inch until he’s seated fully into you with his groin flush to your body. He stretches you to fit, and yet it’s just right. You could ask for no more or no less; you might even think your body was made for him, were you not too busy circling your hips to feel him.

“Good?” he says, squeezing your hip. “Do you need a moment?”

Pursing your lips, you test out the shape of him with another wiggle. “Maybe… Maybe a second.” Truth be told, you need a moment to grapple with the sparks sprinkling over your mind more than you need a moment to adjust to his stretch. You let out a shuddering breath.

He traces circles into your belly, just beneath your navel. The pad of his thumb goes round and round, warm on your flesh. “As long as you need,” he says, but it’s more like a triumphant, playful coo. There’s that lopsided smirk. One day, you’d like to kiss it off him. Taking that hypnotizing finger, Yeonjun trails it up your stomach, over your ribcage. He hooks it beneath your dress and drags it higher, revealing the soft swells of your breasts to the air. You shudder, body so, so hot that your nipples peak and tighten against the cool air.

“Such pretty tits,” he says, brushing his knuckle up the underside of one. “Everything about you. Such a pretty, pretty body. God, I don’t know if I want to worship it or ruin it.” His breaths fan over your skin as he bends down and pops an eager nipple into his mouth, lavishing it before releasing it with a lewd pop and letting his mouth fall all over your breast. Lick here, nip there, until you’re squirming adequately and squeezing him like a virgin. Then he blows cool air over it and watches with eyes like a cat toying with its prey as you shudder harder, your chest jumping. “Fucking look at you,” he sneers.

“Junnie,” you say, lost for breath. You think you’ve walked yourself into the lion’s den.

His breathy laughs fall over your breast. Taking his teeth, he drags them over your skin, right over where your heart thunders a rhythm fully for him, and then he bites. Nothing more than a shallow mark, the shape of his teeth in your soft tit. He lingers there, admiring the sight before he straightens himself up again.

“Fine.” He pulls out of you slowly, but you know what comes after that, so you savor every second of it. “I suppose you’ve wanted after it long enough. Let me hear your sweet voice again, my love.”

Yeonjun fucks you just right. His cock nudges right up on your sweet spot as if he’s done this before. Like he knows where to find it. You gasp and whine—you’re just happy he’s finally giving you something. 

“Oh, fuck,” you mewl. His shoulders wear the red crescent marks of your nails. “That’s—so good right there.”

Ever egotistical and cocky, he croons, “Yeah?” Rolling himself back, he makes it his mission to hit it ruthlessly.

A sharp, pitchy sound comes tumbling past your lips. You bring your hand up over your mouth, letting your eyelids dust your burning cheeks so that you can brave the flipping in your spine and deep in your belly. It’s nearly insufferable—the way pleasure licks up your spine, how it spreads out into your veins and takes control of you.

“No,” Yeonjun growls. “Don’t you dare close your eyes. Let me see that look in your eyes when you cum.”

Your eyes are heavier than they’ve ever been, but you open them. The sight that greets you is worth the effort. Yeonjun’s lip twitches and then he throws his head back, the column of his neck on display as his Adam's apple jumps around a thick swallow.

If that sight wasn’t enough to send you teetering down into whatever depths of lust and ecstasy that he crawled out from, then the angle he hits as he pushes one of your thighs to your chest is. The world frays, deep tremors starting at one small point in your cunt and then exploding up through your stomach and down the back of your thighs. Your chest arches off the bed and you mewl helplessly, fighting and embracing your orgasm in an intoxicating death.

“Oh, fuck,” Yeonjun growls, strained with something whinier as he watches you shake beneath him. “Fuck. I’m gonna—fuck, I’m gonna cum…” His voice chokes as his hips become stuttered more than pointed, the slick sounds of your own release tangling up with his grunts and pants until he shudders and stills, cumming into your puffy, fluttering cunt.

You both catch your breaths as if there’s no air in the room left for a while. His hair’s damp on his forehead, as is yours on your neck, and his eyes droop lazily. More lazy and content than you’ve ever seen him.

Collecting you to his chest, where only your heart thumps away frantically, he presses his mouth to your ear and says, “Do you think death is so scary now?”

With your limbs nothing more than boneless and liquid pleasure floating slowly through your thoughts, you smile.

A little death can be more visceral than living, you think.

༺ ꘏ ༻

The tree stump beneath you makes your tailbone ache. You sit criss-crossed, watching Soobin work away at the soil and tend to that section of the fence that’s begun to rot and sag. Your mouth moves endlessly, filling the space that would otherwise just be made up of his grunts of hard work.

“You know, you ought to help me if you’re just going to sit and watch,” he says, straightening to swipe at his forehead, sweaty despite the cold in the air.

“Totally improper,” you say, smiling at him cheekily. “Are you saying that you can’t handle yourself, strong man?”

He glares at you with the venom only somebody made to put up with hours of chatter could muster. “What’s got you so talkative?” he says.

You know he means why you’re suddenly not glaring him away. You can’t tell him that you’ve spoken with Death himself, so instead you say, “Nothing.” Letting your legs dangle down, you smile at him.

Yeonjun hadn’t done any of it. It’s a comfort, to some degrees, to know that. It’s not your fault that they died. Being around them, being around Soobin, won’t make them turn up dead. The rest of them still don’t know that—and they wouldn’t believe it, anyway—but the black shadow hanging over your shoulders dissipates.

For the first time in so, so long, you do not feel marked by death.

“Sure.” His smile tilts. “A week ago, you wouldn’t even look at me.”

Rolling your eyes, you decide to give him a hard time. “Not true. You just have a way of getting on my nerves.”

“I take pride in that.”

“Take pride in what? Being insufferable?”

Crinkling his nose, he says, “Knowing how to bother you best.”

“Get back to work, stupid.” Your heart soars. It’s good to have friends. To let yourself have friends is an ever better thing. Is this how it is? To be with others and not feel like their burden, or like they’re crossing their fingers behind their back to ward off whatever bad things you might bring onto them? He’s made it his mission to hover around you no matter what, but this feels different.

Maybe, for so long, part of it has been your own gloom that’s obscured it all. Maybe if you didn’t bare your teeth to anybody who got too close, it could’ve been like this always. You hate to think that your own isolation could be some part your own fault. But how were you not to show your teeth when someone tried to reach their hand out to you?

It doesn’t matter now. You shove that all down and let yourself feel the slight warmth of the sun’s glow on your skin where it peeks through the clouds. It’s a nice day, you shouldn’t ruin it with those thoughts.

The sun’s begun making its descent when Soobin’s done. He takes a long drink of water, hissing with relief and crumpling down to the ground with his back to your stump.

“Are you making any way with that girl you were talking to me about?” you prompt.

Giving you a long look over his shoulder, he says, “Don’t.”

“What?” You laugh a little, raising your brows down at him. “I’m not doing anything.”

“You know what you’re doing,” he says, voice flat as he picks stickers out of his fingers.

Soobin’s had a thousand different crushes. There was that daughter of the shepherd, and then the wealthy merchant’s daughter and her long pretty hair, and then the neighbor… Well, you could go on. None of them ever really came to fruition for the poor guy. He thinks that it’s because he’s a poor farmer’s son, but you always tell him that it’s because he’s got an insistent mouth, and that he should be more grateful that you deal with him. Your lips turn up at the corners a little thinking about it—he’ll find the one eventually, but you like the indignant look on his face when you say it.

“I mean it!” you say, nudging him with your leg. “Tell me. I want to know.”

“You won’t even tell me what’s happening with you. Until one of us quits keeping secrets,” he says, placing accusation heavy over the words, “I’ll keep my dealings to myself. What’s it to you, anyway?”

Feeling the weight of his head as he lets it loll lazily against your thigh, you decide that it couldn’t hurt to tell him. The itch to tell somebody crawls under your skin. Especially to tell him. “You know the other day? When I was… being awful?”

His body shakes with a vindicated laugh. “If you’re nothing else, at least you’re self-aware.”

You skirt around that with your own, more awkward, laugh. It’s nice that he thinks so, but you don’t feel it. “Stop,” you huff and nudge him again. “I was foraging out where I usually go. But I guess I wandered out farther than I thought I did. You remember when they used to tell us stories, right? Like the bogeyman. That he’d come snatch us up if we didn’t listen.” Your mom especially had loved that one, back when she cared what became of you. Would she care again, if you told her that everything was fine? “Well, I don’t know if you remember the one about The Wild Hunt, but… Anyway, I was picking some stuff, and…”

Sitting up from his exhausted slouch, Soobin looks like he’s suddenly come back to life. “What?” he interrupts. His voice is strangely serious.

“What?” you say, brow creasing. “They travel here and there… but they were here. In the woods. Like, I heard them.”

Tersely, he asks, “What were you doing that deep in the woods?”

“I mean, I just kept on finding nice stuff until I just… was deeper.” You survey him. You hadn’t thought that he’d react like this. “So I ran, and then there was this guy,” you say, watching realization fall over his face. He knew those stories as much as you do—knew where you were going with this. He is as starkly superstitious as the rest of your people, you forgot. Pushing past the grimace on his face, you say, “And I knew that he was the king. The one from the stories. It was so weird; it’s like you can feel it. And I spoke to him, and then…”

Stood up now, he cuts you off once more. “Are you kidding?”

“Why are you being like that?” you say, messing with your skirts to quell the defensive bite in your tone. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything? Are you trying to get killed?” He throws up his hard-working hands. “We have rules for a reason. Don’t go out into the forest, don’t make deals with faeries, don’t follow a banshee scream. And then you go and talk to the king of death? How am I not supposed to be upset about that? You know that…” Soobin blinks a few times as if second-guessing what he’s about to say, but he says it anyway. “You know that he’s the reason that they treat you how they do. You know that he’s the one who ruined your life. Why would you ever mess with that?”

You push yourself up from the ground, eyes burning. That stings like a cut. “He didn’t do it. None of it is his fault,” you say, furrowing your brows. “What are you trying to say, Soobin? Just say what you want to say. Come on.”

“He didn’t do anything?” He scoffs, letting a heavy silence hang suspended in the air for a moment before saying, “Is that what he told you? And you just believed it? Listen to yourself, does that make any sense? He’s played with your life like it’s some fucking toy, and now he’s come to rub it in your face. Think about it: do animals just fly into anybody else’s windows and die? Do the trees that they pick from just end up dead? It’s his fault that they all treat you the way you do.”

Mouth opening and closing, you don’t know what to say. 

He sees the hurt in your burning eyes and tries to reel it back in. “What I’m trying to say is—”

“I know what you’re saying,” you say, grabbing up the lunch you’ve been nibbling on. “I know exactly what you’re saying. I just never thought you’d say it out loud.”

“Say what?” Soobin says, his voice raising behind you as you storm off.

That you think it’s my fault, you want to say. That they all die because I am a plague, and you are a charity worker for being my friend. Instead, you just leave and try to choke down the tightness in your throat.

༺ ꘏ ༻

You curl your arms around yourself, the night biting cold. Yeonjun had dragged you from bed, and who knows what hour of the night it is? If the heaviness beneath your eyes is to judge it by, it’s far too deep in the dead of night to be outside with your boots half-laced and nothing but your sleep chemise on.

You might’ve just stayed wrapped up in your blankets if you weren’t so lonely as you’ve been. Soobin’s been scarce. The most you see of him is in the fields from morning to afternoons. You hope that he’ll stop by your doorstep and knock so that you can groan about it but swing the door open anyway each time, but he doesn’t. He thinks that you won’t want to see him, and so he allows you your space.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s hard to be the one to come back after a conversation like that, though. You watch him from the windows and hope he understands at some point instead. It’s an awful lot easier.

Other than preparing meals and window watching, you’ve been up to nothing much at all. You hadn’t realized how much you had, but you feel him in his absence. 

“It’s cold…” you say. The fog of breath that punctuates it makes your point. Whatever he’s brought you out here for, you have no doubt it’ll be something strange. The grin on his face tells you as much.

Leading the way, he heads for the Darkwood. “Only you would come rushing out without a cloak for your shoulders.”

“Well, only you would drag me from my nice, warm bed at this time of night. For what?”

“Can’t anything be a surprise with you?” he says, shooting you a cheeky glance over his shoulder. “Surprises are fun.”

“Surprises!” you say, working your legs to catch him. “Not surprises that involve you bringing me out into the woods. You know, it’s awfully suspicious. Somebody who sees this might think that I am the type to… sneak out with men.”

“Aren’t you now?”

Your lips tug down. “You know what I mean.”

He laughs in his airy way, a twig snapping under his foot. You’re well in the woods, now. Probably somewhere near where you’d first met him.

Lifting a brow, you look at him expectantly. Maybe a will-o’-the-wisp will come floating through with its light bouncing off the trees. That would be a nice surprise, you admit.

Yeonjun circles you. His presence behind you tingles in the way it always does, but true chills erupt when his breath puffs against your ear. “Close your eyes. I have something I want to show you.”

Your mind wanders back to what Soobin had gotten so twisted up about. It might be naive and reckless and against everything you ever learned, but you let your eyes fall shut to blackness. If he was going to hurt you, you imagine he’d have had that opportunity a mind-numbing amount of times before.

“Are they shut?” he asks, waiting for your nod. His voice comes from in front of you now. “I want you to keep them shut. You can’t open your eyes, or it will all go away. Okay?”

“Okay,” you breathe, mind full of a bounty of questions. You don’t even know where to begin to assume what he’s got going on, so you stand there shifting your antsy feet.

There’s a strange, rustling sound that catches you off guard with your eyes closed. It drags on for a long moment. Curiosity pries at your eyes; you want nothing more than to just crack an eye open to spy the source of the ruckus. 

It’ll be gone if you do, anyway.

You let out a surprised squeak as something rises up beneath you, as if risen from nothing more than the dirt and roots of the forest floor, bringing you up from the earth. You wobble and send your hands out to find a perch.

A horse. It’s a horse, its mane so tangled and windswept, but matted and clumped with leaves that crunch under your palm when you find them. It reeks of mud—everything around you begins to smell of earth and decomposition.

You know that if you open your eyes, you’ll find yourself sat upon the pale white steed of the Undead King, its eyes white and its knobby knees almost as famous as the leader of The Hunt himself. It chuffs beneath you.

“Are you ready?” Yeonjun says over your shoulder. You can hear the feral grin in his voice. It’s the leader of The Hunt, a creature of folklore, that sits behind you now. He curls an arm around your waist and tugs you closer to him, securing you against the wall of his chest. “Hold on tight, my love.”

The call of the wild, that horn, bellows again like it had the first time you heard it. Rather than coming from nearby as you thought it would, it dances between trees far off just like it had that time, too. Your heart jumps up into your throat.

Taking off with a howl, the Wild Hunt follows it.

You dig your fingers into Yeonjun’s at your waist. Weight melts away, and you know you’re in the air. Your belly swoops in tandem with the howls and hoots of the riders, heart palpitating to the hoofbeats. How there’s hoofbeats as you ride through the air, you’re not sure. The ghostly fleet manifests around you in vivid imagery, though you squeeze your eyes shut. They are wild enough to imagine just what they might look like: with their clothes and flesh in tatters, with their eyes beady or pale, with their hounds piercing the air with their calls and running alongside them, they are a perfect personification of freedom.

Whip-lash sends you reeling, body going rigid. You grit your teeth and squeeze your eyes harder, wishing that you’ll touch ground soon and that everything would become real again.

Yeonjun feels you go stiff. Bringing his head back to your shoulder from his own delight, he says, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Let it into your bones. Do you think I would let it hurt you?”

He is their leader. If it got too much, you know Yeonjun would be there to catch you. Curling your fingers into his, you release that tension and allow their drumbeat to echo through you.

And when it does, your blood begins to sing along. The wind whips your cheeks and your hair, and you begin to laugh with them. The Hunt twists and turns and dances through the air, an apparition in the night, but nothing more than that.

It comes to a slow, eventually, until the noise and even your steed crumbles back down into the dirt it appeared from. Your eyes pop open hoping to catch at least a glimpse of them, but only the dark forest and pale moonlight answer. Your legs threaten to give out on you, veins still thrumming, but, oh, do you feel alive.

You feel more alive than you ever have, more than you ever could have hoped to have known. Mind spinning, you stumble. Yeonjun catches and steadies you before you can go scraping your knees on a rock.

“Oh my fucking god,” you say.

The laugh that Yeonjun breaks into has you sending him a glare, but you break too. Everything about him is ironic; and how ironic indeed that Death himself should show you how to be alive, rather than to just live?

༺ ꘏ ༻

The air is so fresh in your lungs when you step outside that it nearly burns. You clutch your basket of warm fig tarts. Songbirds trill and fly between tree tops that slowly become more bare the deeper you fall into the season, singing their sweet songs that sound like new beginnings.

Raising your hem from the ground churned up into mud from the afternoon’s trickle, you prance into town with a lively pep in your step. You spent all last night making these—Yeonjun had kept you company, watching you how he always does as you pored over making them just right. His cruel snicker when the jam had simmered over flame for too long and became too thick bounces off your bones in a sweet melody. You’ve come to adore his wicked delight, the way his smile cracks over his face and the facetious raise of his brows, more than you fear it.

Sending small smiles to the people that you pass, you stop by a huddle of kids digging sticks into the mud. They look up at you with curious eyes, stopping to gawk.

“Hey, guys,” you say, pulling back the cloth laid over the sweets. “I’ve made some fig tarts. Do you like fig? I bet you’ll like them; they’re sweet.”

The kids stand up, eyes big as they share a look. They don’t let out so much as a peep before they scurry off home.

You blink. Well, you’re used to weird reactions, but that was… different. Picking up your deflated shoulders and hesitant limbs, you make a shoddy attempt at not letting it dampen your good morning. You were expecting wary looks, anyway.

You head down a little further toward the far side of your home village, the side that breaks off after a fenceline into a great, grassy field. There’s a bustle, mothers washing their clothes in pails and hanging them up to dry and a few others whispering at each other lowly as they go about their days.

An old woman so old her back curves and her fingers have gone knobby makes her way to wherever the day’s duty demands her to be. Your neighbor—an eccentric old lady bound in her times. You decide on her: the elderly are forgotten by the young. She might enjoy knowing that her neighbors still know she exists.

“Hello,” you say, showing her your basket with a hopeful, excited heart. “I have some treats that I was wanting to give out. I know they might not be much, but would you like one? I’m not the best baker, but I do it often enough.” A face like that, dragged down by her years on this earth and not long to death, has no doubt spent many years making meals for her family. You imagine your goods would be nothing beside hers, but it’s the gesture, no?

“Oh, girl,” she says, voice crackling as she clutches her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “I’m afraid it’s best if you found yourself missing from this place. Hurry yourself up and spare the drama.”

The incessant cawing of a crow from a clawed tree fades into the background as you furrow your brows and lower your basket to ask, “...Huh?” Your belly goes up in knots; terrible knots done up tight and fast. You haven’t got a clue what she’s talking about. Elders always did speak a bit strange, though. It could be nothing much; she’s a stern old lady.

But her eyes are not angry and glaring in the way that a harrowed old hag might turn her nose up at the youth. They drag down with a cold pity.

“Listen to me, girl.” She points at you with one of those worn, sun-spotted hands. “You had best leave. The boy’s gone, and they are already not fond of you. Who will they point their fingers to?” the woman says. “I hardly know you, but I would hate to see it.”

The rest of her words fade into the roaring in your ears, the feral drumbeat of your heart like a wardrum in the cage of your ribs as it beats against them as if to escape from you. You don’t feel the basket in your hands, don’t feel the solidity of the earth beneath your feet, and don’t feel a single one of your thoughts like tangible things. They flit as if liquidated into a rotten, sick mush.

Nothing. You can think of nothing. Nothing real; nothing holding you to the earth.

“What?” Your voice hardly reaches your ears, but what does is weak and broken and like a plea for her to tell you that it’s not really what you think it is.

And if you could see or hear anything beyond your fraying little rift in reality, you would’ve heard the man coming up to you. You would’ve heard the words coming from his angry, sneering mouth, and would’ve done something when he picked up a pail of water, and you would’ve been shaken by the nasty ice water that runs down your frozen body and plasters your hair and clothes down as he pours it over you. But none of it cuts through your stupor.

He yells some awful, stabbing things at you, and a few others join him. They tell you that you are nothing but a plague, tell you to leave and to not come back here.

But this is your home. Where else would you go?

With your sopping wet dress clutched in your shaking fists as though that might keep you grounded, you choke down the tightening of your throat and sift through their faces, searching for his face. Those brown eyes, brown and always shining with nagging playfulness, do not come up anywhere. Jaw trembling, you search harder. Out on the field where he should be at this time of day, at your doorstep demanding that you go spend the day doing nothing with him, in someone’s yard helping them fix up a broken fence, no matter where you look, neither his broad silhouette nor his cheeky, dimpled face is there. You continue to stand stricken dumb, looking for him even though you know by the churning in your belly that it’s true, and you’re just hurting yourself trying to find him right where he should be.

Fine. Alive. Untouched by your disgusting, destructive presence.

When you can no longer fight the strangling tightness in your lungs and your dress is as heavy as your heart, you take off. The hem of your dress drags in mud and sticker bushes and catches on stray twigs, and you don’t know where you’re going, but you just run. You’ll give them what they want. 

You stumble, probably like some lost, undead thing, until you find yourself at the edge of the forest. Only then do you let the wall of whittle-edged tears roll down your face. And you assume you sound like a choking, dying animal with how you choke and heave on them, but he was the one you might’ve dropped your head and cried to, so what’s the use of making it pretty? No; you let it all fall as it is.

Soobin’s dead. Soobin’s dead, and it’s nobody else’s but your own fault. You clutch your chest to staunch that old ache that’s grown teeth and tears at your heart; you have and will always be the end of everything that comes near. You are just as much the plague that you began to pretend, to believe, you weren’t. It was your stupid hope that maybe you could have something and not watch it become carrion that drove that pick. It was by your hope that he’s gone.

The hair on your arms begins to raise. You pick your head up and find Yeonjun standing in front of you.

There’s a few beats of long, dreadful quiet as he takes in the state of you. He drags his eyes down and they become liquid flame—something different from the impious delight that he is made of. He becomes the King of Death.

“What happened?” he says. The chills on your arms prickle furiously at the words, furling out distant and yet furious like the center of the fire.

You shake your head, wiping your soaked cheek.

“What the fuck happened?” he growls again, taking your face into his hand. “Who did this? Who did this to you, my love? I need you to tell me who the fuck did this to you.”

Letting the venom in your mouth out, you shove his chest and say, “Get away from me. Don’t fucking touch me.”

Yeonjun’s face twists up, looking scalded. Not surprised, though. “Don’t do this,” he says. “Let me hold you while it hurts. Don’t push me away. I can’t… I won’t lose you again.”

All the pieces that you had been putting into the corners of your mind snap together at that. As many suspicions as you had, though, it feels sour hearing it confirmed from his mouth. That you are his dead past lover, reincarnated or whatever you are. That it was his presence—because even though he stayed away for centuries, a part of him still lingered with you—that now has torn down everything you ever thought you could love. He, standing there in front of you like a kicked puppy, is the ruination of your life in the flesh. The flipping of your stomach is nauseating.

“I hate you,” you spit. “I hate you so much.” You repeat it a few more times, and you sob it into his chest as he takes you into his arms. “Is this what you wanted? You’ve been waiting for this forever, haven’t you? To find me again, so that you can die and fucking leave me here. So that you can make me exactly what you are, while you get your peace. You are a liar and a thief. All you’ve ever done is steal and take. How could you do it? Huh? Tell me…” Your voice trembles and staggers off. “Tell me how you made love to me, how you made me believe that you loved me, and all you ever wanted was to save yourself? You betrayed me.”

Pulling back, Yeonjun says, “No.”

“Yes,” you say, stumbling back away from him with a shaking, accusatory finger pointed at him. “Yes you did.”

Fingers itching to reach out to you, he holds them back by curling them into fists. “No. That’s not fair. I have spent an eternity loving you. I spent the entirety of my immortal, monstrous life searching for you, just so that I might find you in any form. I would have been glad to find you as a leaf in a tree, as long as I found you. But, then, I find you alive. Alive and back, as if… it never happened.” He steps toward you, aching to be near you. His voice wavers. “Please, don’t do this to me, love. Please, just let me have you again. I’ve waited… I’ve waited and I’ve waited, and I finally have you, and now you’re looking at me like I… Like I’d ever hurt you. Finding death—finally getting to die would be worth nothing if you weren’t there with me. It was never about that.”

“I could never love you,” you say, matching his steps forward with steps away from him. “I could never love a monster that does… Does nothing but kill. Take.”  You know your words are cruel, but you need them to be. You need him to hurt, you need him to go so far away from you that never again will you cause another living thing’s death. 

“You did.” Yeonjun’s mouth cracks into a pained smile, sharp at the corners. “You loved me just as much as I love you, once.”

“Just leave me. Leave me, and I wish to never see you again. If you love me, then you’ll give me that.” 

He looks at you, clever eyes intense and glassy, for a long time. And then he says, “Would that make you happy? Would it make it so that you could live a happy life, and find yourself something to live for?”

What’s left for you? A small village that won’t ever embrace you? No, it wouldn’t fix your life. But you open your mouth and tell him, “Yes.”

“Okay,” he says, brushing his knuckles over your cheeks reverently. He swallows in your features, running over them for what he knows is the last time he’ll be seeing you—the very last time he’ll see the face of his undying love. When he finally opens his mouth again, his voice is gentle. “I’ll leave you. If my being here hurts you, then I won’t be selfish. I love you, darling.”

Don’t go, you want to tell him. Please don’t leave. Please, hold me. But your mouth is dry, and you let the radiant hurt in your chest stop you. You let him go.

༺ ꘏ ༻

There’s only one place you can think of going to. It’s the only place your vagrant feet take you.

His spot still is held sacred by the flattened, gold wheat stalks. Your best friend, still living here on Earth in at least one way even if he’s not here to listen to your stupid rambling. And he would maybe complain, but he’d always listen.

The last thing you’d done was fight with him. What an awful thing—what an awful way to repay him for being the only one who ever dared to get close.

You sit in your spot, beside his, and rest your chin on your knees. If only the ground beneath you would open up and swallow you whole. You’d deserve it.

What’s left for you? Is there a place in the world that would keep you happily once they see what you do? No. There is not. You wish you knew what to do; you wish you had somebody to ask.

Releasing a long, tight breath, you just sit and wait for something to give you answers. A gentle breeze makes your hair dance, but it does not whisper anything to your ears. Something’s circling over head, but it doesn’t caw in the cadence of his laughter.

The day moves along without you. You’re not sure how long you sit, but it stretches somewhere between a few minutes and eternity. No matter how long you wait, there are no answers. No matter how long you mull over it.

Conceding, you begin to push yourself up from the ground. A rustle in between the foliage stops you before you stand.

A tawny hare leaps out in front of you. It sniffs around you, nose twitching. Then it stands back on its haunches. It stares straight at you, an intelligent light in its eyes that knits your brows. The wild thing stands there with a purpose that is uncharacteristic of a forest animal.

But entirely familiar in the face of your best friend. That shine in its eyes as it stands there, nose still twitching, makes your chest tighten up.

“Hey,” you say, as if it might answer you. Your eyes well up with hot tears again. Of course, it doesn’t. 

Maybe you’ve gone mad, but you know that it’s him. That idiot, coming to show you that he’s okay in the afterlife—to visit one last time and to let you know that you shouldn’t worry for him or cry for him. Look at him, full of life once again, he seems to say. The hare blinks its beady eyes. It lingers there for a long time, the ease of peace found in his gaze that Soobin hadn’t had in this life, saying that there is still something waiting out there for us once we go. You reach out a hand. He does not flinch as you scratch behind its ear.

“Okay,” you whisper. “I’m glad to know you’re alright. I know what I need to do, now.”

He blinks.

You laugh a hoarse, breathy laugh, familiar in only the way that Soobin could achieve. “You look stupid.”

Indignantly, the hare stops a bratty foot in a way reminiscent of one of Soobin’s huffs before it settles back down onto its forelegs and scurries off. He goes to live out this new form of life, because it’s true: life does not end in death. He’s shown you that.

Maybe, like this, he’ll find that pretty lady that loves him the way he deserves. That loser.

༺ ꘏ ༻

You spend only one night in your home and you know that what you’ve chosen is right. After spending your day out in the field, you sneak under night’s cover into your husk of a room and let yourself sleep there under the covers one last time. When morning breaks through the window, you gather your weary bones up and leave. 

You run into your mother on the way out. She doesn’t yell at you to leave, but her eyes have gone cold. Colder than you’re used to. You’ve killed again, in every way that counts. So you don’t bother with bidding her or any of them any grand goodbyes. You couldn’t handle the relief you might find falling over them, should you.

Plopping down to the floor, you take a few bites of the cheese and bread lathered in sweet jam that you’d swiped from the kitchen. The grass is long and willows in the wind, bending and dancing prettily. It’s so soft; you enjoy the feeling of it beneath your fingers in your quiet serenity. The scent of it, fresh over the baseness of dirt, you breathe into your lungs.

It would be the loveliest place to spend the rest of eternity.

For the first time, Yeonjun appears in front of you rather than behind you. He materializes from nothing, his elbow on his knee as casual as if he’d been sat there the whole time. The darkness beneath his eyes seems heavier, but then again you know that exact heaviness. It sits right in the very center of you.

You both are quiet for a bit. You let the tall grass whisper, instead.

“Bread?” you say and slant your lips into a smile. Bringing it up, you offer it to him.

His smile wrinkles his nose and curls at the edges. Entirely him. Yeonjun accepts the bread, ripping a bite out before throwing it away into the sea of green. Once he’s chewed, he leans in and captures your lips in a kiss that’s utterly at odds with his sharp mouth. Your lips move over each other gently, save for an indulgent nip or bite here and there.

He pushes you back into a bed of sweetgrass, never letting your lips go. Not to breathe, not to say something that’ll pale in comparison to the sweetness of your mouths on one another. He kisses you until he’s had enough to fulfill a lifetime without it, and then some more.

“My love,” he whispers into your skin, his breath hot on your collarbone. “Mine,” he says, pressing a kiss into the column of your neck, and then he says it again with a hot kiss to the place where your dress suggests your breasts. He says it a handful more times as he pushes your skirts up your thighs. “My love forever. I waited for you so long, and I would do it again.” Lowering his voice to a honeyed whisper, he adds, “I would find you no matter what.”

Laughing softly, you run your fingers through his raven hair to better see his eyes. You know he would.

Gently giving you one more of his lingering kisses that make your skin tingle, right into your bare shoulder, he presses into you. You loose a soft breath, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. The beating in your chest slows to a content purr as he begins languid thrusts in and out of you, rolling pointedly and unhurried.

Yeonjun makes love to you in a thousand dusted kisses and sweet words, your hands holding each other’s soft edges. Yeonjun traces the lines of you, taking the pads of his thumb down your cheeks and your lips and then his hand over the swell of your breasts and down your belly and over your thighs. Clamping down on him as your belly grows tight in the way it had the first time you had done this, your thighs begin to shake.

 Breathlessly, as you hurdle over the edge, all that you can say is, “I love you, ‘Junnie.” 

Yeonjun smiles at you and then presses his face into your neck. He doesn’t even brace himself against the grass to chase his own peak. Neither of you want this to end; you want to hold on to this moment and let it span forever. Slowly, Yeonjun rolls up into you until his hips finally stutter and he cums into you, his cheeks pink. The weight of him above you as he shakes with your shared ecstasy, and even as you both have come down and are nothing but lazy, is the only thing in this world. He is the only thing in this world.

Once you’ve both evened your breathing out, you roll apart and face each other, still just two forms bending the grass into your shapes. Blinking slowly and digesting his features one at a time—the angle of his eyes, softened but never tamed, the line of his nose, the line of his mouth always so proud and playful, and that pretty dot below his left eye—you let them solidify fully in your mind.

“Yeonjun,” you say, finally meeting his eyes across from you. “I want to go. I’m ready.”

The gentle, knowing look that he gives you soothes over the way your heart begins to race in your chest in rebellion. “I know,” he says.

Of course he had known. Yeonjun had been called here to ferry you into the afterlife. He had known the moment he appeared in front of you that his last soul to reap would be you; an ironic circle of karma that should be cruel, but you two make it something sweet. Chewing on your lip, you will your hands to not shake as you curl toward him. You’re no longer scared of going. You know that if you’ll be with him, it will be okay. It won’t be so scary. A hot tear rolls down your temple and then drops into your hair. “Will you be with me? I won’t be there alone?”

He tucks some hair behind your ear reverently and then leaves his hand there. “I don’t know,” he answers. “But I won’t leave you. I’ll stay right here with you.”

You lay there for a long time. Chatting and giggling and just looking into each other's eyes, until your heart becomes slow and all you feel is the wind singing in your blood. Yeonjun presses one final kiss to your forehead.

Maybe, in some years, somebody might dig up your bones and find you immortalized like this in your love. Your bones bowing toward each other, as if even death were not enough to stop you from reaching for each other. Or maybe they’ll just find yours, and Yeonjun still curling into them how you know he will for an eternity more.

Either way, the going is still slow and gentle, as death always is.

🪶 ⦂ tears. omfg i cried writing this which could totally be me being a bitch baby but it DAMN. omfg.

rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd!

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[bunni-v1]

“When they are together, you never feel as though you are an outsider to two soulmates, but instead a part of them that they cannot bear to lose. They are both softer to you than they are with each other because they need you to know just how loved you are. If you ever felt left out, I think it would kill the both of them.”

… oh really now. How intriguing.

if that’s the case how bout a scenario in which this happened, how bout a reader with with low self esteem with some good ol’ self loathing in that regard, who thinks themselves at least in the back of their mind like they aren’t good enough for their two amazing partners. Who feels like an annoying third wheel even though their self aware enough to know that’s not true.

because let me tell you not all of the self awareness in the world stops those types of thoughts from stinging or feeling true, for the reader I imagine it would be a constant thing in the back of their head- something they can ignore most times. But sometimes, sometimes those murmurings feel like the cruel and other truth. During one of these lower periods I imagine the reader would try to let shadow milk and pure vanilla alone together- they’re the soulmates after all! They can’t get in the way of that, they’ll just be over here outside the kingdom fucking off and not being a annoying.

meanwhile these two after no more than a day with minimal sightings of their beloved are like- “…?!? Where is our little cookie, our darling, hello???” Lmao

I think this can lead to some interesting scenarios and outcomes, chew on this as much or as little as you like. Love your writings either way, see ya!

🍓Bro, I'm super depressed lol. I'm really isolated in Japan, and I struggle to socialize with others, so making friends hasn't been much of an option for me. I know it'll get better, I hope it will, but it's just really dragging me down. Luckily, that shitty mood is perfect for writing angst, and what better angst than feeling left out, amirite?? Seriously though, I'm fine. Don't worry about me.

TW: None(?)

Info: Shadow Milk x Reader x Pure Vanilla; angst to fluff

Soulmates are a concept only heard about in romance novels- ones that you'd read curled up against Pure Vanilla's side. They were cheesy things, making you cringe at times from the sappy, poetic nothings the authors would come up with. Yet, you liked the idea of soulmates. You even, for a moment, thought that maybe Pure Vanilla was yours. He always smiled when you suggested it, his face full of love and admiration. 'How romantic', he would muse, then smother you in a million kisses. Thinking about it now, maybe his deflecting of the subject was a sign.

You were not Pure Vanilla Cookie's soulmate, nor were you Shadow Milk Cookie's. No, that title belonged to the two of them - a shared connection through their souljam that kept them tied to each other. A privilege that you did not have, one that you felt jealousy burn deeply in your dough over.

It's not as though either of them made you feel left out; in fact, they did everything they could to include you. There was no reason for you to feel neglected between their constant smothering. You did, though. You did quite frequently.

Maybe it was the way they seemed to understand each other so seamlessly, unspoken conversations happening with the glance of an eye. Perhaps it was the fact that they had an easy flow of conversation no matter the situation that you simply lacked when you were all together. No, those things didn't bother you, not really. What it was is the way they look at each other. Such longing and affection that you have never seen directed your way - a connection that you could never have with either of them.

You always brushed the feeling off, knowing better than to let those thoughts consume you. They'd be rather disappointed if you gave in to such silly lies. What, with how much they proved you wrong, it would be stupid to listen... This time, though, this time it was all consuming. Like flames eating up a paper house, you could not stop the spread of sheer isolation in your bones.

You had been late to a planned dinner, gotten too wrapped up in your work. It was fine; you knew they would forgive you, but you hoped that they hadn't waited up for you too long. You'd dressed yourself up nicely in a few minutes and ran to the dining hall, only to stop short of the doors when you heard their conversations. Nothing out of the ordinary, of course, just idle prattle that was typical of them... but somehow, it stung. When you peeked in through a crack in the door, it burned in your chest to see them so gleeful without you. You felt as though you should turn away and allow them to eat without you; it wouldn't be any different if you were there or not. They clearly did not feel your absence.

You would've, too, if not for Shadow Milk catching a glance at you for a moment and practically tugging you to the table. You were quiet during dinner, and their conversation did not slow down for you. It was like salt in the wound, but you swallowed the pain so as to not alert them. It was better to suffer in silence for the betterment of them both, you believed, so that is what you would do.

You quietly gave them their space, turning down invitations and outright avoiding places they would frequent in favor of quiet corners of the kingdom. Neither of them sought you out for two days, two full days. It only solidified in your mind that they did not need you around, and perhaps... perhaps they didn't want you around. They might've been keeping you at their side out of pity because you loved Pure Vanilla first, then Shadow Milk. The thought made your stomach twist sickeningly, eyes stinging with tears you refused to let fall. This was the fate of someone in love with soulmates, after all, it was not your place to come between them.

That didn't mean it wasn't breaking your heart.

What you weren't aware of, however, was how they had been feeling. Shadow Milk noticed your quiet demeanor first, feeling uneasy when you had first been late to dinner, then were practically silent the entire time. You'd hardly finished your food as well, and it was your favorite (He'd made sure of it too). All red flags that something or someone was giving you issue, yet, he stupidly decided not to press it when Pure Vanilla insisted they allow you to handle things on your own.

That hadn't worked out too well for them, now had it? You were, undoubtedly, avoiding both of them. That wasn't going to fly for much longer, not when Shadow Milk was so deprived and starved for your attention. He was going to get to the bottom of this, and Pure Vanilla was going to help, too.

"Perhaps we should give them more time. Sometimes they like to be alone," Pure Vanilla insisted again, trying his best to keep up with Shadow Milk Cookie's rapid strides across the streets of the kingdom.

Shadow Milk rolls his eyes, "Two days, is enough for any normal cookie to worry - is this how you handled everything before me?"

"Well..." He trails off, shame heating his dough.

Another scoff from Shadow Milk Cookie, and he picks up the pace, "If I were my sweet little starlight, where would I be...?"

He thinks it over, tapping his chin dramatically a few times. You weren't in the library, the garden, the pagoda, or even the quiet little shady spot behind the castle. If you were avoiding them, though, being there wasn't exactly smart - and you were Shadow Milk's smart little cookie, after all. Truthfully, you could be anywhere in the kingdom, and while Pure Vanilla would happily overturn every single rock to find you, he just didn't have the patience for that.

Pure Vanilla was equally stumped and far more worried than his other half at your sudden change in persona. You had never acted like this, not once. It was odd, and it made his skin crawl with worry. You could take care of yourself, of course, but why were you avoiding them? How did they hurt you? How could they fix it? Well, they would have to find you first to get the answers to those questions.

As Shadow Milk mulls over what to do, Pure Vanilla recalls somewhere you'd shown him once. He's not sure why the memory comes to the forefront of his mind, but he's happy for it. It was a small clearing a short walk from the kingdom's gates, 'the perfect getaway' you'd called it. If you would be anywhere... well, it was worth a try.

Finding the place without your guidance was hard, made even harder by Shadow Milk's constant complaining. Still, the two pressed on, through the gates and the trees and the beaten down path until finally they saw you. Sitting peacefully as you read some novel, leaned up against a tree with a saddened expression on your face. You looked tired, too tired. What could you be feeling to make you look like that.

You turn when you hear shuffling a few feet from you, tensing a bit at the sight of your lovers. They looked worried sick, brows furrowed and frowns etched deep on their faces. Oh, you felt so guilty seeing them like this. Knowing you were the cause of it all because of silly little emotions you couldn't keep in check. You go to apologize but are cut off with a squeal as Shadow Milk tackles you into a tight hug. Pure Vanilla rushing after him in a panic.

Your world spins for a moment, but you manage to hug the cookie back just as tightly. You felt stupid for being so upset, especially when this was his reaction to your absence. You had only tortured everyone with your petty actions.

"Where have you been, Starlight? Don't tell me you've been avoiding us, because if you have been-"

"Shadow Milk." Pure Vanilla scolds sternly, pulling him back as he kneels next to you with a soft smile, "What's going on, my love? You have both of us worried."

You sigh, avoiding their eyes, "I know... I'm sorry."

Shadow Milk's eyes narrow at you. "What's the issue then?"

You hesitate, wanting to curl in on yourself and hide. They wouldn't let you though, surrounding you at both sides. Everywhere you looked there was one of them in your line of sight. You couldn't escape it, they would be getting an answer out of you one way or another, so you give up.

"I... might've... sort've... been a little jealous..." You admit.

They both seem surprised at the idea, as if it had never crossed either of their minds that this could be the issue. Shadow Milk even starts to giggle about it, in complete disbelief at your statement. Pure Vanilla doesn't pay him any mind, placing a gentle hand under your chin to get you to look at him. His expression is gentle as he takes you in, and you can see the relief in his body as you take him in.

"What is there to be jealous of?" He asks, and there is no room to argue with him. It only makes you feel more stupid.

"I just thought- you know... the two of you are..." They look at you curiously. "You're soulmates. Sometimes, it feels like there's no room for me."

Pure Vanilla frowns, ready to assure you, but Shadow Milk beats him to the punch. His arms worm around you and press you into his chest. "What a silly thought. Don't you know how much you mean to us?"

"Of course I do, but-"

"Then there's nothing to worry about! Dontcha know that we wouldn't have looked so hard for ya if we didn't care?" He hummed, and you can't really argue with that.

"You complete us," Pure Vanilla joins in finally, holding your hands tightly in his, "We would be worse off without you around, so please... tell us next time."

You nod after a second, finally relaxing into Shadow Milk's side. You were surprised they hadn't been harsh about it, but... that's more proof that you mean so much to him. They love you, and there's no reason to doubt that, not when they're holding you like this. Not when they make you feel so loved, even when you feel like you shouldn't be.

[crowborn666-writes]

malleus/leona/azul with a fem student who has adhd and autism. yet crowley does nothing about it despite being explained over again saying 'you're just not trying hard enough, etc"

(Oh hey, it’s my two biggest brain problems lmao. As hot as I find Crowley (yes he’s a hear me out), just once, I would love to hit him over the head with every broken object in Ramshackle. Just whack him WWE style. I’d probably convince Grim, Ace and Deuce to join in. ANYWAYS—)

(this was actually a bit hard for my AuADHD, explaining ADHD and Autism itself is quite difficult for me without references lol that and I'm horrible with finding the right words)

That’s Not How That Works

Characters: Malleus, Leona, and Azul

Genre: Fluff, Comfort, Platonic/Romantic

Summary: No, Crowley, you cannot “just get over it”. Yes, you are trying your hardest. Oh, and your friend wants to “have a word” with you in your office.

(Malleus covers both p equally, while Leona leans more to ADHD, and Azul more to Autism!)

~~~~~~

Malleus

He didn’t get it at first. I doubt ANY of the cast would know what the proper terms for your mental conditions meant. But once you sit down with him, trying to find the right words to explain in a way he would understand, he catches on quickly.

For the ADHD side, once you explain what dopamine is, and how your brain doesn't register or create enough of it, he understands why you find difficulty in completing long term tasks, and why you wait until the last minute.

He catches on quite quicker when you explain Autism. While obviously its more than just a hyperfixation, but all you really have to start with is "kinda like how you obsess over gargoyles" for his eyes to widen in mutual understanding.

You hear a storm rolling in the distance when you go on to explain how Crowley wouldn't listen, and kept pushing you to do things that would surely lead to a massive burnout.

"I'll take care of it." He speaks those words so calmly, you almost fear for Crowley's life. But when Malleus speaks again, his tone now matches the bright smile on his face. "You said autistic people bond through... what was that term again? Infodumping??? Right, why don't you share your most recent interests with me, I can carve a new gargoyle in the while I listen."

Leona

Was already pissed off with Crowley's general treatment towards you. Suddenly has the urge to de-feather a bird when you get into the topic.

It comes up when he stops by to visit, watching you try to clean up around your dusty dorm. You had suddenly stopped in the middle of what you were doing, looking between the cups on the table, to the dishes in the sink, and then the mess on the counters and-

He asks you what was up, and without thinking you explain.

"Well, I want to clean the cups off the table, but the sink is full. I can't clean the sink out because the counter's messy and the dishwasher doesn't work, but I can't clean the counter cause the trash needs taken out and we're low on trash bags and-"

He stops you before your tongue flies out of you mouth, gently soothing you before you could work yourself frantic.

So, while he's helping find a solution to the seemingly endless cycle of tasks, you explain the difficulties you have with your ADHD and Autism in this world. You explain all the little tricks you had set up at home, how each one helped a task become more manageable, and how hard it was to get them set up and built into your routine.

While he doesn't personally experience your struggle, he can only imagine how hard you're having it. He looks out for your signs of stress now, stepping in to help fix or assist with things, maybe even wordlessly pass you a bracelet of his to fidget with.

Azul

Honestly, I would NOT be surprised if he has had his fair share of experience with ADHD and Autism. Not personally, but through the twins.

Floyd is, well, a walking bomb ready to explode. That eel can almost never sit still, seemingly unaware of personal boundaries and able to switch moods at the drop of a hat.

Jade is more subtle, oftentimes so quiet most don't realize he's there until he speaks. But if he's in a mood or someone asks about mushrooms, it's nearly impossible getting him to shut up.

So, it's safe to say Azul recognized those things when getting to know you. What he wasn't expecting, was the way you seemingly recoil in pain when you encounter an odd texture.

That wasn't the only thing either. You struggled with discerning lefts from rights, which made for some funny interactions between the twins. You struggled with remember to care for yourself when you fell too deep into a hobby or task, seemingly not feeling the signals for, say hunger, until someone else brings it up.

Finally, he had to ask you about it.

You do your best to explain it to him, but once you do, he lets out a soft, understanding "Ohhh..."

You run off on a tangent then, frowning as you start to talk about Crowley and the fact he refused to even try to understand. It was nice having a routine to follow, sure, but not when there's so much being thrown at you on top of the lack of support.

Azul's blood boils, and he almost whips out his phone to contact the twins for... information.

He offers to write up a contract for you then and there, detailing you receive better treatment from Crowley, giving you some ease of mind and body against all the overwhelming sensations you deal with on the daily.

He'll even let you admire his coin collection while he writes it.

[p3achr-ngs]

Sevika with Silcos wife

Omg I just now got the motivation to write. The last post I made was February 13th LMAO. But to get to the point. She takes care of you even after silco died.

Sfw, fluff, female reader. In the beginning it's a tiny tiny bit of a silco x reader. But this is a slow Sevika x reader

Being married to silco wasn't exactly a walk in the park, but it wasn't all bad. you didn't feel safe going out without silco, due to his enemies. The times he wasn't there, rather it be because of meetings or paperwork, silco would send the next Best thing. Sevika.

You found her intimidating, a tall muscular woman with a robotic arm and a mean resting face.. it doesn't exactly give off friendly ' come up to me and let's talk' vibes. But that was a good thing since you don't want any shady people near you.

There are times when you try to talk to your husband's right hand woman, to get to know her better. Since she is your bodyguard for when he's not there. Which is a decent bit.

" so.. how did you meet my husband?"

You asked awkwardly, shifting in place at the bar you and Sevika was at

"Hm."

Sevika would grumble in reply. Not really bothering. Her job was to make sure you didn't get hurt. And she's doing exactly that.

Yeah... It's not awkward at all.

Though you never complained. She was a great guard. Like when you get a bit tipsy. Always wondering away.. but one time..a man came up to you. Trying to get down your pants, wouldn't take no for an answer type shit. That's when he felt a tap on his shoulder, just to turn around and get the nastiest punch in his face by Sevika.

Anyways. That's Sevika when your husband silco was alive.

But after?

Oh boy you were a wreck when you found out about silco dying.

Absolutely sobbing, dropping down to your knees and just shaking. Never felt this type of pain before, never felt so lonely and lost. You did lose your other half.

Sevika was there. Looking down at you, literally. She had a choice. Either keep you with her, or leave you and never see you again. She didn't have a boss anymore, you technically weren't her responsibility anymore.

But seeing you all so helpless and pitiful.. Sevika decided to keep you around as one last piece of her ' old' ( although not so old as she kept on blasting people yk) life.. to keep a routine. It's not like you were a pain in her ass and not like it was also your choice to have her near you...

Though... she could see the life that you gave him.

" your wife is a grown woman. Why do I need to babysit?"

Sevika would ask her boss. Huffing a bit. But when silco looked up at her from his desk, something in his eyes.. it kicked away an annoyance she had.

" she is the one thing keeping me human. I can't stand the thought of her getting hurt because of my choice's"

Shaking away the memory. Sevika crouched down to your level, hugging you. Rare moment of raw comfort from her. From that day on, you two were basically attached to the hip.

Silco would tell her. And that was that.

As time went on. You found yourself growing fond of Sevika. Quite fond of her.

It was hard not to be.

you two were always together... How she would gently guide you through the street and crowds with a hand on your lower back. Reminding you of.. him.. though it was different.

Or when she would work on her arm, smoking. It was quite a sight.

Though you still feel bad. Would your husband be mad if he saw you crushing over his right hand?

Yes. But he's dead now, and he'd probably be Glad it wasn't some shady douche and instead someone he trusted.

"come 'ere. "

Sevika's stern voice called out. Blinking, you nodded and walked up to her. Tilting your head.

But this.. this next part. Was new.

Sevika patted her lap.

" I need a pretty thing on my lap real quick. Makes me work better"

She said nonchalantly, leaning back in her seat and blowing out smoke.

You stared at her for a moment. Before slowly sitting on her lap. Sevika's non robotic arm came around your waist to give a small gentle squeeze before going back to tinkering with the other arm.

It was a comfortable silence... For awhile.

Until she broke it with an

" Silco was a lucky man. Reaall lucky. Was always jealous that he found you first."

[officeobject]

(Not sure if I've already reblogged this but oh well).

Also, I saw this before having watched the episode, saw the episode, and they don't even mention him being 19 - it's from a source outside the show (so, a lot of people wouldn't know), she REFERS to him as a teen instead of just saying that young adults (since she and her twin are like, NOT young adults) - are easy to manipulate, so that means she SEES him as a teen, not even as a young adult, and the fact that she even says that, AND the fact that she even mentions his age in any way at all, is sure something - oh, and since we don't get to know his age within the episode, and he LOOKS like a teen/looks like he could be a teen, and it's at some place full of minors, and minors were a big plot-point (and a minor was the REASON Moxxie and Millie even went OUT there), and that she CALLS him a teenager, then for all the viewer's know, he could've been some 16 year old!

Also, now, I hate most teenagers more than the next guy, but I HATE the portrayal of him in the episode - like, why are we supposed to laugh at him getting groomed?! YES he is easy to manipulate, there's a power-dynamic, and he's full of hormones and a brain that hasn't developed yet - AND GUESS WHAT, IT DOESN'T MAKE HER A BETTER PERSON, FOR MANIPULATING HIM ANYWAY! Dude has a reason for dealing with drugs, and the shame and illegality of that, and presumably self-esteem issues, and has some pretty girl he's attracted to, who acts sexual for him, AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO LAUGH AT THAT?!

And like, this isn't a teenager suffering their consequences from bad choices, or some jerk getting karma, or anything, this is some 19 year old getting therapy bills pilled up, and it's NOT funny, it's NOT satisfying, and the whole "teenagers easy to manipulate - lmao, so desperate" thing comes off as ageist.

They could've achieved something like that, in other ways - oh and by the way, no kidding there's an easy-to-manipulate teen dealing with drugs - THAT'S KINDA BECAUSE HE'S IN THE AGE MEANT FOR TESTING BOUNDARIES AND GETTING MORE FREEDOM AND FORMING IDENTITY AND DEVELOPING YOUR BRAIN ALL WHILE HORMONES RUSH AROUND - anyways, they could've achieved that, by making teens start drugs or whatever, just because they WANT to, or have some insisting on finding "the one" even though it's some guy who JUUUUUST touches the bar of being a nice person (by teenage standards which is even lower than the normal standards), or randomly jumping into a wall for a dare - in fact, I OFTEN write "youngsters be like" type of humor.

If wanting to write "man, that's a weird thing to say to a teen" type of humor, or something like that, then take inspiration from ME - like, make a character be like "awwww! Are you a good little teenie?!", or take inspiration from weird stuff you'd say when YOU were a teen, or make a character critique teens near a teen on accident, or make someone have a fear of teens to the point of comedy, etc.

And that's not even me MENTIONING, the OTHER weird stuff, from this episode!

"The lengths people go to justify Barbie grooming a teenage boy is so wild. It doesn't matter if he's 19 it's still weird as all hell."

Submitted by anonymous

[neeeooon]

Hii (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)

I absolutely loved the part 2 of the when they found out they had a kid, and I was wondering, is it possible for you to make a one shot, perhaps a continuation/2nd part for Reo? Like if he tells his current wife about it or not. And what the child feels about him. It's ok if you don't want to I'm just thirsty for Reo content lol. Thank you very much!

YESSS i was so happy to see this req lmao i didn’t think u guys would like those posts SO THANK YOU FOR THE REQUEST!! <3

the past becomes the present

ex-husband/baby-daddy reo! & fem!reader. continuation of reo’s part in this post. reo has a wife and kids. most characters have names

“did you know who i was at the doctor’s office?” reo’s wife, kaori, asked in a trembling voice. she knew her husband was married before, but it was brief and left him heartbroken.

you sank further into your chair under her scrutinizing gaze. there was no doubt in your mind that she was better suited for this life than you. “i didn’t. i knew reo got married again, but i always avoided those photos and articles… i didn’t know until i saw his number on your card.”

when reo hit you with the “i want partial custody,” you’d panicked, thinking he’d use his big, fancy lawyers to force you to submit. though you’d taken the bribe from his parents all those years ago, you put most of it into a sealed account for your son to open when he became an adult. there was only enough for living expenses and things that would give your son a comfortable life, not to blow on expensive lawyers.

“y/n,” reo’s voice pulled you from your thoughts, and you looked up to see something sparkling in his violet eyes. grief? hurt? disgust? you didn’t know, but all three were warranted. “i’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t talk to me about this back then.”

both kaori and you sat up straight in your chairs. “huh?”

“when my parents offered you that deal, when you ran, i should have looked for you to see why you left. all i did was listen to their lies. i had no idea you were pregnant…” he shot a brief look at his wife before reaching over and giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “i wouldn’t change anything, though. i have a new life. i’m happy. but now i know i have a son, and i want us to be a part of his life, too.”

you thought back to the three children playing with your son in the waiting room—reo’s daughters—and felt your throat begin to itch. ducking your head, you focused hard on the little string bracelet your son made for you. “i want that, too.” looking up, you felt warm tears dripping down your cheeks as you stared at your ex-husband and his beautiful wife. “but i don’t want to be replaced. i know sota would be happy with your family, but he’s my son, too. he’s all i have, and i know that you could take him without so much as lifting a finger, but please, don’t take him away from me.”

the raw desperation in your voice sent shivers down both mikage’s spines. kaori looked at her husband, then back at you. “y/n…” she sounded softer this time, like you were one of her daughters in need of comfort. “i would never take your son away from you. he’ll have a place here if he wants it, but you are his mother. you’ll always be his mother.”

you were sobbing into your hands by this point, and kaori gave reo’s hand one last squeeze before getting up from her chair and hurrying around the table to hug your shoulders. “why don’t we have that play date now, hm? my girls and your sota. it will be nice for him to get to know his dad a bit, don’t you think?” you held on tight to your ex’s new wife as you managed a small, yes, through your tears.

☆ 🧸

“wow! you’re really good!” your son, sota, exclaimed, eyes sparking, as he watched reo shoot a goal. the mikage’s had an entire floor of their penthouse dedicated to soccer, and since your son was a fan of the sport, reo offered to teach him some moves.

grinning at the praise, reo plucked the ball from the goal and lightly passed it to his son. “why don’t you try?” they continued playing together, your son’s ecstatic laugh reverberating around the room until the sun had dipped past the horizon. reo asked your son if he wanted to stay for dinner, but sota gave you a look that said “bedtime,” so you promised your ex-husband you’d both be back for lunch.

on the drive home, sora dozing off in the backseat, you quietly asked, “did you have fun today? with the girls?”

he hummed sleepily, and you saw him nodding in your rearview mirror. “they’re nice… mommy?”

“yes, baby?” he hesitated for only a moment, but it was long enough to send your fingers tightening around the wheel. “is mr. mikage my dad?”

during the meeting, kaori and reo mentioned wanting to wait until sota was more familiar with them before breaking the news. even you didn’t think your son would catch on so quick. clearing your throat, you forced a chirpy voice as you asked, “what makes you say that, sweetheart?”

sota’s silence made you anxious. then he sighed. “mrs. takeda at school says i have a handsome smile. mr. mikage has it, too.”

for real? he figured it out over a smile? you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. instead, you hummed lightly, trying to remain calm for him. “if he was, how would that make you feel?”

“awesome! mr. mikage is so cool! and ms. kaori and kumi and the twins, too! but they’re not as cool as you, mommy.” he exclaimed, and you could hear him wiggling around in his car seat.

he fell asleep before you got home, giving you enough silence to contemplate how this was your life. you carefully carried and tucked him into bed when you got home and immediately called reo’s new wife.

“is everything okay?” she asked immediately, to which you replied with a shaky sigh. “he knows. i didn’t confirm, but he knows.” it was her turn to release a slow breath. “and his thoughts?”

“he seems happy. he thinks very highly of your family.” you managed a laugh before pausing. “do we tell reo? i know he wanted to have a sit-down with sota soon…”

kaori hummed on the other line. “you didn’t confirm, right? i’ll tell him that sota suspects so he can change up whatever speech he’s planning.” you both laughed then, and you felt strangely… lighter. like a weight had been lifted off your shoulders.

“thank you,” you began slowly. “for everything. i don’t… i don’t deserve any of your kindness.”

“you were young and scared, y/n. what reo’s parents did was wrong, but i would never subject an innocent child to such cruelty. and you’re his mother, someone reo once loved, which means you deserve the benefit of the doubt. plus, i need a mom-friend!” your eyes stung once again, but you forced yourself to remain calm as you thanked kaori and wished her goodnight. part of you would always love reo, but you were so eternally grateful that he found happiness with someone as precious as his new wife.

☆ 🧸

you debated whether or not to give reo and sota privacy for when reo officially broke the news, but your son’s firm grip on your shirt was enough for you to stay. the three of you sat on the ground of reo’s office, your legs tight to your chest as you carefully watched your son’s expressions.

“hi, sota,” reo began with a smile. sota looked between the two of you, and you could tell he was growing scared. scooting closer, you wrapped an arm around his small shoulders and pulled him into your side. “you don’t have to be nervous, baby. we just walk to talk to you about something, that’s all.”

“am i in trouble? are you mad that i said i want you to be my dad?” his bottom lip trembled, wobbling worse when reo’s eyes widened. the man’s mouth opened and closed several times before he finally said, “y-you want that?”

you hugged your son when you felt his breathing speed up. “you’re not in trouble, baby! i promise.”

“he looks mad…”

“i’m not mad,” reo managed in the softest voice he could muster. you knew him well enough to know he was fighting back tears. “i just… i know you only met me recently, but i want to be your dad, too.”

your son’s face lit up. “really?!”

“really.”

“and kumi and the twins can be my sisters?!”

reo was chuckling now. “yes, they’re your sisters.”

“but,” sota paused now to look up at you. “ms. kaori is nice, but i want mommy to be my mommy.” you sucked in a shaky breath and squeezed sota into your side. “oh, baby. don’t worry about that; i’m not going anywhere.”

sota asked to play with his new little sister’s after that, and you watched the four kids run circles around a laughing kaori as she baked cookies for them. “he’s a good kid, y/n.” reo said at your side, and you rubbed your arm with a smile. “you did well.” he didn’t hug you, but you felt engulfed by his words.

blinking back tears, you turned and gave him a small nod. “thank you, reo.”

this is so long but it was SO fun!! reo and reader don't end up together, but i wasn't going to break his family up ❤️‍🩹

[navydoves]

Perfect Ice

✎ᝰ summary: ranked 6th in his league with numerous medals proudly displayed in his home, figure skater zayne finds managing his crush on you more difficult than any ice he has ever skated on.

✎ᝰ cw: fluff, some pining, zayne has perfectionism problems

✎ᝰ wc: 1.6k

✎ᝰ a/n: short drabble in case i start getting into ice skating aus lmao

⭐︎

there was something about the way the white ice illuminated your soft face that made you look so angelically perfect to him. you, with your heavy coats and thick boots, made quite an impression on zayne from the very first day. "this is your coach," introduced the greying old man that was now zayne's former coach. "treat her well and don't give her a hard time like you've done with me. my hair is the colour of the ice now because of you." an imperceptibly awkward smile flickered on zayne's lips. he didn't like change - not when it was this sudden at least - and your sudden appearance as his counsel made him feel... distended. out of place. strange. you didn't greet him cordially like he attempted to with his hand out and a polite verbal introduction. you instead stood there with your eyes flickering down to his smooth extended palm and shook your head.

"i prefer to keep my hands in my pockets when they're not in mittens. it's nice to meet you zayne, i've heard much about you." the smile on your lips was genuine, he noted, but you were a bit avoidant for some reason - not that zayne could judge. all he has been regarded his entire life was a socially inept, introverted guy who only danced and spoke to the ice.

he nodded slowly and retracted his hand back to his side before stepping back and murmuring about going back onto the ice. was this the introduction? just a simple hello and goodbye despite how this change would impact his career? he wasn't one to judge on looks but you looked young enough to be competing yourself, not coaching.

the thought lingered in the back of his mind and followed him through the training season. what could you offer to him that he wasn't already striving for? you were there for his every practice but never really gave him input on his skating, you simply just watched. it was only after a month that he began to hear your voice from the sidelines every so often.

"bend your knees more for better edge control, you hesitate to go low sometimes. is it 'cause of your height?"

zayne's eyes widened slightly at your words. advice? from you? and as a matter of fact, zayne did have a problem with his height. while his long legs did make for an elegant look in his form fitting, all black outfit, they were also difficult to manage on the ice during bends. his recovery time was late and always something he needed to work on, but zayne's perfectionism masked his weaknesses well enough that only those with well-trained eyes could see to them. you trained yourself to see him so opaquely so quick.

"… yeah … it is because of my height."

and from then on he was hooked. your perception of him became an obsession for zayne. you could see every flaw in every performance of his and you called it out every single time. you never did it disapprovingly, though, only ever informatively. like his mistakes were matters of fact that couldn't be argued over subjectivity. no. he messed up. he needed to do better. there was no more to it than that and you gave him no room to overthink about your words.

perfection was what zayne strived for. you had a clear eye for perfection. and in that sense, zayne started to see you as perfect. there was an undefinable point between the two of you that solidified his feelings toward you. it felt like one day he appreciated you as a coach and the next he yearned to appreciate you past the rink. you were perfect.

in the way you watched him glide across the ice from the side benches with your hands stuffed in your pockets and legs crossed - you were perfect. in the way you jotted down notes so messily to the point of incomprehension by all but you - you were perfect. in the way you smiled gently when he listened to your advice and did perfect executions - you were so perfect. he had seen beautiful women in his past, sure, but he's felt nothing toward a girl like you whose beauty was both internal and external, until now.

it was because of simmering feelings that he became closer to your true personality. coffee after practice? he learned then that you had a preference for tea. warm-ups? he learned then what your favourite stretches were. a casual glide on the ice? he learned that you couldn't really skate. that was a real shock.

and yet, as insane as the logic may have been, you only knew skating as far as you watched it. you studied movements and the anatomy of dancing on the ice, but you couldn't replicate those movements yourself. to most skaters, this would've been an immediate call to cashier your position and replace you with an actual, experienced trainer. yet to zayne, this only added to your perfection. you've mastered the knowledge of the ice so perfectly that you didn't even need to step on it. beautiful.

and as per his insistence, you found yourself slipping into the unfamiliar snugness of skates and stepping on the ice, zayne's hand guiding you gently. you shed the extra layers of coats and held his palm with the bare skin of your hand for the first time. enamored was an understatement on zayne's part. his eyes never wandered on women, but today he found himself appreciating the view of your smaller form next to his bigger, lithe one.

"it's very easy. left, right, left, right. i'm sure you know already, but on the ice i'm the one who's going to be coaching you, alright?" zayne whispers with slightly mirthful tone to his usually even voice. he kept his eyes on your knees and feet to make sure you didn't buckle on the ice. sure, you know how skate logistically, but your muscles didn't.

you smile back and nod. for the first time zayne could see a shy expression painting your face and he thought there was nothing more perfect than you looking like that while he invited you to his world. he tightens his hand around yours and glides with you smoothly across the ice.

"i guess it's not too bad when i have someone literally holding my hand throughout this," you chuckle softly while tilting your body to make a slight turn around the rink. chill air ran through your hair and cooled down your skin even through your clothes. ice was freedom.

"atta girl," zayne praises softly, causing your eyes to widen slightly. he liked that look in your eye, it soothed something in him. call it his inexperience with romance, but he believed a beautiful woman like you deserved to be cared for by someone who could ensure perfection for you. someone who lived and died for perfection would live and die being perfect for his woman.

"zayne, why have me skate now?" you ask with a slight lilt of concern in your voice and knitted brows accompanying it. "you have training early in the morning and you know how i feel about you cutting hours on your sleep."

zayne blows air out of his nose and shrugs. "i wanted to see you skate before you left. it would keep me up all night if i was left with the inconceivable notion that my coach couldn't skate. i had to see for myself."

you quirk a brow and gently wriggle your hand out of zayne's grasp. your body glides away from him as you could no longer keep up with his pace. you stick your arms out like a scarecrow, trying to maintain balance on the ice without help, and slowly, you attempt to glide up to zayne's drifting body. he watches you with a curious but amused expression lighting up his face. he felt like he was watching his other half, the half who didn't know how to skate but knew everything about skating. the exact, perfect, opposite of him.

he doesn't keep admiring you for long, though, as your body soon came tumbling down from a lack of balance. with quickness and ease, dexterity in every push of his skates, zayne catches you under your arms before you could fully fall onto the ice. your arms dangled up in the air and corked to the side and your legs went a bit limp as they dragged around on the rink. you tilt your head up to zayne and see his hazel eyes blown wide down at you. you grin and soon that grin turns into a hearty laugh.

perfection. perfection. perfection. you were perfection.

zayne feels a laugh of his own bubble in his chest and erupt gently from his lips. he releases you and lets you sit on the ice before joining right next to you. while his mind spoke against it, he let his heart win and decided to pull you closer to him until your back was flushed against his front. he felt like everything he'd done in hopes of winning your approval was uncharacteristic of him, and that this embrace was much more so. but when you tilted your head back to look at him with those gentle, yet confused eyes of yours - he realized that you made him made feel more whole and in-character than ever before.

he chuckles soflty and rests his chin on your shoulder before glancing to the side at you. "it would also keep me up all night if i let you go home right now. let me take you out to dinner, coach." ⭐︎

[ghostface001]

TKDB: Who initiates the first kiss?

Had this idea strike me and thought it would be fun! Let me know if you want me to expand on any of them!

Divider created by @thecutestgrotto! She's so talented, please check her out!

The King | Jin Kamurai

He initiates.

I think it takes a long time, but ultimately, he does it. In an intimate moment, one hand under your chin, he leans in and kisses you.

And it’s over in a second.

He waits for you to say something, or to make the next move. The ball is in your court, now.

The Advisor | Tohma Ishibashi

He initiates... technically.

Tohma leans in, a teasing glint in his eye as your faces are centimeters apart, but that’s where he stays.

It’s up to you to finish the job.

The Archer | Kaito Fuji

He tries to initiate.

Key word tries.

Kaito just gets too in his own head. If you want him to kiss you, you're better off initiating yourself.

The Knight | Lucas Errant

He initiates by asking.

He's a gentleman, after all.

If you say "yes, you can kiss me," and wait, he will kiss you first. But come on, he's too cute for you to not kiss him first after he asks so sweetly.

The Ex-Con | Alan Mido

You initiate.

It happens late into the night, after a mission. You were put in danger and he did what he had to do to protect you.

He's back to thinking you're better off as far away from him as possible.

And you do what you have to do to prove him wrong.

The Influencer | Leo Kurosagi

You initiate.

He's in the middle of digging dirt up on someone who had the audacity to try and get close to you.

Leo gets ugly when he's jealous. You know if you try to defend the other person, he'll turn on you. So instead, you show him he has nothing to worry about.

He makes fun of you for it.

The Rider | Sho Haizono

He initiates.

Another gentleman, he asks first.

But he asks so casually that you get flustered, and he goes for it.

The Ranger | Haru Sagara

You ask him.

He doesn't fully register your question because he's on the move, so he fully just leaves without answering lmao.

Once he realizes what you asked, he uses bahnti to run back to you and plants a big kiss on you.

The Free Sprit | Towa Otonashi

He initiates.

He doesn't ask, but depending on how verbal he is at the moment, he'll tell you he wants to kiss you.

And then he does. It's very simple.

The Slacker | Ren Shiranami

You have to initiate.

Ren will never make that first move.

He walks you back to your dorm after watching a movie together (he just needed to go to the school store, it has nothing to do with you, obviously) and as thanks, you give him a kiss on the cheek.

For the next week, he can't look at you without turning bright red.

The Gambler | Taiga Hoshibami

He kisses you first.

Calling it a kiss is... tame.

He won a hand with you at his side and pretty much devoured you right at the table.

He won't remember doing it.

The Sniper | Romeo Lucci

You initiate.

He's going on and on about BTHs and you go for it.

He yells at you lol.

But then afterwards he finds he likes this outlet for his frustrations better than yelling.

The Paralegal | Ritsu Shinjo

You initiate by bringing up the subject of kissing.

By the end of the business day, you have a fully written-up contract that he insists you read and add your own clauses to, and a consultation fee.

Once everything is signed and agreed upon, he flounders. The logistics are much easier than the real thing.

So you initiate the first actual kiss, too.

And you pay the consultation fee by paying for the dates.

The Actor | Subaru Kagami

You ask him.

He says yes, but then starts rambling about how "you don't have to if you don't want to, I hope I didn't make you think you had to ask just to be polite," etc etc.

And you finally just kiss him to get him out of his own head.

The Flutist | Haku Kusanagi

He brings it up to be flirty, but immediately backtracks and claims it was a joke.

You have to challenge him a little bit; "so you're saying you don't want to kiss me?"

And then he has to backtrack again lol.

After you're done teasing him, he finally kisses you.

The Poet | Zenji Kotadama

He asks you very poetically.

Very poetically.

You can be polite and listen to him wax on about the stars in your eyes, but you're going to be there all day.

It's better to just kiss him first and listen later.

The Vampire | Edward Hart

He kisses you first.

He technically ??asks??? but it's more like he "asks" while his lips are already brushing against yours.

When you say yes, he's another case of 'kissing' being too tame of a word.

The Reaper | Rui Mizuki

You initiate.

Even after his curse is broken, he has a hard time initiating touch; it became a habit to distance himself for his and everyone else's safety.

He'll never say no, but for a long time, he flinches every time you come near. It's not because he doesn't want it, he's just scared of his curse somehow coming back.

The Werewolf | Lyca Colt

He initiates.

He would ask about kissing because he overheard people talking about it and wants to know what the big deal is.

If you get flustered, he'll be confused but will wait for you to say yes before actually kissing you.

The Doctor | Yuri Isami

Another case of you having to initiate because he never will.

And you definitely have to ask first, because if you just get in his face, he will pull away and yell at you about germs.

When you do ask, he still yells at you about germs lol.

But later, after he's (mostly) calmed down, he'll tell you that if you really wish to acknowledge his superior intellect in such a manner, he won't deny you.

The Monster | Jiro Kirisaki

He'll just go for it.

If you pull away and ask what he's doing, he'll tell you.

"Oh, I should have asked, shouldn't I? Sorry." Completely monotone.

After that he'll always let you know beforehand if he wants to kiss you.

[bandgie]

Hurt Me

warnings! sex with chan lmao

notes! im rusty, enjoy this in my wake. im just in a 'I want chan to monopolize me and hold my life in his hands' typa mood rn. hope you understand

It feels different when you let Chan break you in. It hurts, yes, but you love the stretch. You love how he forces his cock in, inch by inch, into your tight cunt.

The lack of prep - of his spit - between your legs always makes your spin head.

It always starts with a nuzzle to your neck, a kiss to your throat, and his smile against your skin. You wrap your arms around his neck, pulling him down with you until you've got your shorts thrown off and your underwear pulled to the side.

He'll look at you, already salivating at the thought of tasting your cunt, but you'll shake your head.

You have to be the one to line up his cock. His erection feels hot and heavy in your hand when you stroke him. Chan can't deny you, can't deny you of anything. Not even when your pretty lips part to gasp at the intrusion. Not even when the back of your throat whines from the feel of your walls wrapping around him without any warning.

Still, he's gentle, or tries to be. Chan can only handle fucking you with his tip for so long before your pussy starts to give. He'll go in deeper, holding your thighs in each of his hands to really spread you open.

Watching it disappear inside you gives him a thrill. The erotic realization that he's inside you. You're breaking for him, cunt getting wetter and wetter with every thrust. But still, there's that push back. Your cunt's too tight, not well prepped for Chan's cock, but that's never stopped either of you.

It's why he goes in with his tongue first. Coaxing an orgasm from your body before fingering your cream back into you. But this...seeing your body open for him almost painfully from his length makes his head spin.

Something always takes over him. Whether it's your whines, the sound of your cunt gushing over and over, or the tears in your eyes - there's always something that makes him tip over the edge.

He doesn't mean to fuck you past your limit. The final inches that weren't wanting to give are forced to open when Chan lifts you by the hips.

You're squealing, sharp nails reaching for his shoulders to scratch down. It's too much, he knows that, but you're squeezing him just right. Your legs are wrapping around his torso like you don't want him to stop his relentless pace, but your nails are scratching him like you can't handle it.

Choked moans and soft pleas. It's all you can babble when your pussy is finally broken just how needed it. Chan typically likes to hear the sound - a song of praise - but like this, he wants complete control.

He lifts his upper body, still holding onto your hips fast to ensure you don't try to escape him. One hand clamps over your mouth, muting your voice.

And he's tempted to plug your nose with his thumb and forefinger. You'd turn a pretty pink just like your cunt, eyes teary and wide in panic. And when he'd grant you air, he can imagine the way you'd inhale.

Music to his ears, this imagination. A scary part of him wants to see you writhe. This little game of him breaking your cunt in does something to him, wakes up a part of himself he prefers to keep dormant.

But those lust-filled eyes, your eyes, are so taunting to him. Maybe, just maybe, this game you two like to play can be something more.

[thursdaysgrrl]

is it casual? \ jinx x reader

pairing: jinx x fem!reader

word count: 1.5k

summary: you realize you need more

warning: lovers to strangers arc, masturbation, fingering, jinx eating you out, arguments, too many mitski / chappell refs, veryy short + may add more to their story

a/n: i'm thinking of making this a proper fic so pls lmk if you want more of this jinx x reader dynamic <3

♬⋆.˚ "washing machine heart" by mitski; "picture you" by chappell roan; "loving feeling" by mitski; "casual" by chappell roan; "i don't smoke" by mitski; not me writing the shortest fic ever but adding 5 different songs lmao

track 1

you leaned over the railing overlooking zaun. at night, the city came alive, neon lights flashing with the same intensity of the stars in the sky, the sound of laughter and music overflowing from the streets into the cool night air. but jinx was still looking at you.

she nudged your shoulder, leaning into you as her fingers brushed yours. you took the cigarette from her, your index and middle fingers holding it as you took a slow drag. 

“you doing anything tomorrow?” she asked, breaking the tranquility of the moment.

“no,” you hummed, returning the cigarette. “why, you want to see me?” “just wondering.” jinx’s eyes became distant as she looked at the horizon, exhaling smoke through her mouth. you’d met her when you were a nobody, in charge of handling shimmer shipments for silco. you were around the same age, and she’d taken a liking to you; soon, you didn’t really have a life outside of her. silco was fine with that–it wasn’t like jinx had many friends, if any, so he appreciated you keeping her company. but to him, and to everyone else, that was all you were: a companion. you hoped, privately, that she thought of you as more.

your mind drifts, feeling slightly bitter. if anyone else were there, you knew she’d pull away. but you couldn’t really bring yourself to care. the moonlight made it look as if her pale skin was glowing, blue eyes shining under the stars. you watched her lips part as she blew out smoke. 

when you gently rest your head on jinx’s shoulder, she doesn’t flinch like she used to. it’s natural. 

“silco was mad at me today.”

“oh yeah?” you respond, voice edging her to continue.

“said that i ‘wasn’t taking this seriously’. like i’m some stupid kid who can’t handle herself.”

you gently rub your nose on her bare shoulder. “you’re not stupid,” you murmur, voice muffled by her skin.

“yeah, i know.” she moves away and you stand up straight, watching her run her finger over the railing as she paces. “i just wish he’d see that too, y’know?”

you follow, wrapping your arms around her waist from behind as your lips press a trail from her jaw down. she leans back into your chest. “you’ll get him to see someday. for now…” you look up, eyes meeting hers. she looks so soft in that moment you want to cry. “i’ll be your number one fan.” “thanks, toots,” she smiles, turning around to hug you. your fingers gently pet her hair but your eyes remain on the horizon. what’s out there? how far would you have to push to find out?

track 2

you lay in bed staring at the ceiling. you and jinx had parted ways hours ago, and by now it’s late night (or very early morning, depending on how you look at it). yet you can’t seem to sleep, tossing and turning in your bed. you admired jinx, and she knew that. but then again, you’d heard so many rumors that you were just a girl that she banged on her couch. didn’t she think of you better? you tried to tell yourself that you meant more to her than that, that everyone else’s opinions didn’t matter. but still…

you pushed up from bed, running a hand through your hair as you hunched over, sitting at the foot of the bed. god, this is so stupid. she was probably asleep, and you were sitting there, worried over nothing. of course she cared about you. you were her only friend, her only… what were you really? you didn’t know anymore. you didn’t know to begin with.

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jinx is awake, too. she’d gotten home and tinkered with a few projects, blasting music in her ears and blocking her thoughts. but the moment she climbed into bed, lights off and hands with nothing to do, her fingers began to wander. she hadn’t ever really done it with anyone before you, let alone let anyone touch her since vi and maybe silco. but you’d been gentle from the beginning. she thought of your long, thin fingers. plump lips kissing her shoulder. the lights in the distance reflecting in your eyes. god, she really, really needed you.

her hands trailed up and under her oversized pajama shirt, causing shivers to run up her stomach. she carefully cupped her breasts, closing her eyes. yes, there you were, straddling her hips with your legs, pressing her nipples between your fingers, your other hand traveling down her pants. 

“so wet for me, baby,” you’d purr as you teased her folds and sensitive clit with your fingers.

“p-please,” she begged out loud to the darkness, slipping her own fingers into herself, pretending they were yours. her other hand continued groping her breasts as she called out your name into the darkness, curling her fingers as her back arched. finally, her body collapsed and the heat blooming between her legs dripped down her ass to the soft fabric of her pants. she slipped her fingers out, pulling her shirt back down, but she couldn’t sleep.

she never slept when you weren’t there.

track 3

“hey,” jinx grinned as you entered her workshop. usually, you’d have to turn off her music to get her attention, but she immediately turned to you, a smile already tugging at her lips.

“what’s wrong?” you ask, confused as you walk towards her. she closes the distance.

“just missed you,” she hums, sinking to her knees in front of you.

“why–”

she cuts you off, already slipping a hand down your pants. “shh. just let me make you feel good, yes?”

you consider arguing–you’d come here with the intent to talk, but she clearly had other ideas, and you always chose hers over yours. you nod, looking down at her through half hooded eyes.

“oh, c’mon now,” she tuts, feeling how soaked you are through your panties. you can’t help yourself, whining as she tugs your bottoms down and panties along with them. she stands up, pushing you against her workbench, and you sit down, spreading your legs. she takes the opportunity to lift them onto her shoulders, tongue already teasing your wet pussy.

“don’t tease,” you whine, feeling pathetic as she toys with you. she always toyed with you.

“be patient, baby,” she hums, licking her lips before diving into you. your squeeze your thighs around her head, moaning slightly as your head tilts back.

it was going to be a long one.

───────────────୨ৎ───────────────

“jinx?” 

your voice comes out meeker than you wanted it to. somehow, you’d ended up in her bed and, after going for a few rounds, fell asleep. your arm instinctively reached out, but you found the bed empty. 

what do you do with a loving feeling if they only love you when you’re all alone?

track 4

you stumble into her workshop, now dressed in the clothes you’d entered in only a few hours ago. but you feel different. her music is blasting again, and she doesn’t notice you. over the noise you finally hear your thoughts.

“did you only want me here to fuck me?” your voice is drowned out over the noise and she doesn’t hear. “jinx, what the fuck?” the intensity and volume of your voice startles her, and she turns around, neglecting to turn down or turn off her music.

“what?” “why did you leave me?”

“you were asleep and i had other shit to do. stop being so clingy.” she looks annoyed, and you knew this mood: neglecting your feelings, refusing to listen, making you feel stupid. you were done.

“c-clingy? you’re calling me clingy? so what if i am–at least i treat you like a person!”

“i treat you like a person!” 

“no, you don’t. you treat me like an object.” you step forward. “a play thing.” forward. “something to get off to.” forward. “something to care about when you need someone to care about you.” you shake your head, almost chest to chest with her. “and i tried to be the chill girl. but honestly? i’m not.”

“why are you being like this?” she asks, angry and hurt and vulnerable. you didn’t talk to her like this.

“because i know what you tell silco. i know what you tell everyone. ‘it’s casual’!” you shake your head, turning away. “well, if this is casual, you can go to hell.” 

“wait–” she reaches for your hand, but you pull away.

“i did. but i can’t wait for you to care, not anymore…

… goodbye, jinx.”

track 5 (epilogue)

jinx watched the zaun lights flicker. they seemed less vibrant, somehow, without you there. took a long drawl of a cigarette. it tasted like you, she realised. she refused to exhale the smoke from her mouth.

she knew when you left that you were gone. but she didn’t really understand it until she stopped seeing you around, until silco told her you’d quit. some nights, she’d imagine you there. some days, she’d look for you. but rumor had it that you left the undercity, that you left the business of crime, and that you were starting new. starting new from your old life, jinx wondered, or from her?

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© 2025 thursdaysgrrl don't steal my work please !! (not that anyone would care enough to but js saying

if you liked this, please lmk. i may make a better (and longer!) version of this w the same characters but different scenarios to rlly flesh out their story & dynamic. ty my loves!

[harmonysanreads]

Been thinking about this for a long while and wanted to share but, Phainon with a lover (or he considers them his either way) who's a part of the astral express - a nameless just like him they joke.

Then obviously alongside Dan heng and the trailblazer they don't really see him as a hero. Sure they respect him, and they've had the lore of the chrysos heirs explained but then on the other hand nikador pales in comparison to even some of the weaker foes they've gone against. So ultimately they can be an escape from everyone else's expectations of him.

But they don't belong in amphoreus, that's so plainly clear with how they look to the sky and flick through their photos of other worlds with longing. Then there's the other fact of how they talk to their companions with what sounds like grief for his planet, like it might already be dead. He might not be fully aware of the true weight of what only being accessible through the garden of recollection means but the way it's said is enough to put him on the edge.

Maybe the final push he needed was when aglaea interrogated the three of you, when he thought he'd be arriving to your corpse. Or it might have been hearing you and Dan heng talking about whatever the luofu is. Or perhaps even joking about how "amphoreus is just belobog round two" with the trailblazer and saying how you should really return to there.

But he won't be with you if you leave will he?

On the other hand it shouldn't be too hard for him to join the astral express. His home is already gone, cherished only in his memory and even that could be changed if he overheard about the creation of memory bubbles in whatever penacony might be is true.

And you've already told him he's a nameless just like you.

oh wow this ended up longer than I intended lmao, specially for a first ask.

But while I'm here I also just wanna say thank you so much for causing me to fall head over heels for phainon??? like your works and drabbles have just caused me to go from a like of him to falling HARD and just.... let him get away from amphoreus if it's all gonna go bad for him there, get him out and safe. (and give welt major flashbacks at the same time too lol)

And it's especially difficult for Phainon to not daydream when it seems like you two just click so well. You get each other's sense of humour, balance and compliment your respective energies, can somehow understand the other as if acquainted for a lifetime. Is this what they call a 'match made in heaven'...? Please don't mind it when he starts calling you his soulmate 'in jest'.

It's truly a pity that you don't seem to see it. When you whisper with the Trailblazer and Dan Heng, longing for that outside world you seem so bewitched by, sigh whenever you think of the fate of Amphoreus - it hurts him, do you know? Moreso, it makes him feel... left out. The realization of how fickle whatever bond he's made with you might be in comparison to the ones you share with your other companions makes him feel rather jealous, admittedly.

Now, passing instances of these sudden hits of negativity he can shake off. But, when they accumulate over time and gradually develop to frustration, helplessness and eventual loathing towards the matters that seem to be impeding between what could be your shared happiness? That's when things get concerning.

We don't know yet if it'd be possible to get someone born in Amphoreus out of there so I'm unable to provide an input here. But this is a really neat concept.