#the more I think about it the more the rot sets in

[hyukascampfire]

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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[tartagliove]

i've been thinking about farmer boy!ajax...

stardew valley au ✧ fluff ✧ 0.6k words

The little cabin before you could use some work. There are holes in the roof, where tiles have been torn off from wind and rain and time. They match the porch that wraps around the front of the small building, wooden floorboards missing and broken—the perfect trap for you to twist your ankle in. You'll have to watch your step.

Despite all of this, the cabin is charming in its own little way. Windows line each wall of the house. Although dust and cobwebs cling to the glass, they just need a good scrub before sunlight will stream inside all day long. You'll get the best view of the sun rising and setting upon gently sloping fields, which someday will be vibrant with colors and life.

That's the dream, at least.

For now, it's just you and the run-down cabin that could use a bit of love and work before you turn it into your new home. You, your cabin, the birds that warble a high-pitched melody from the trees, and the ginger-haired boy who leans against the rotting wooden fence that lines your property.

You flinch in surprise, spinning to face the stranger.

The first thing you notice is that he's not a boy at all. He certainly looks young, with tousled coppery hair, blue eyes that remind you more of the ocean than the sky, and rather fair skin that is interrupted by constellations of freckles. But the well defined muscles that flex and shift under a pair of denim overalls, and the handful of scars that litter his body only point to years of hard, physical labor.

He holds himself with ease, resting his forearms on your fence. This only serves to broaden his shoulders as he takes his time studying you as you've been doing to him. His eyes seem to blaze a trail as they roam across your body, taking in the nearly pristine sneakers and the stiff new backpack, along with the long-sleeved shirt that clings to your arms from humidity and sweat of the countryside.

"What's a pretty city-dweller like you doing out here on an abandoned farm, hm?" he asks, one brow raised, amusement dancing on his lips.

You fiddle with your fingers, the flutter that runs through you at the hidden compliment overridden by embarrassment that he's already able to tell where you're from. You look nothing like the seasoned farmer that he is, his fingers calloused and scarred.

"It's not abandoned," you say, a bit of indignation in your voice as you straighten your back and stare at him in determination, unwilling to flinch from his all-consuming gaze. "Not anymore, at least. I live here now."

A smile properly stretches across his face. "Oh, really? That makes us neighbors, then. I’m Ajax."

He offers his hand, and you take a few steps forward to grasp it. His grip is warm and firm; a bit rough compared to your own. You shake, once, twice, then release, pulling your hand behind you as if it will help you forget the feeling of his wrapped around yours.

He chuckles and tosses you another grin, pleased. "I’ll see you around then, farmer."

His taunting tone is irritating. The heat you’re feeling is certainly not due to the way he walks away, well-defined back framed by the blue straps of his overalls.

You don’t learn much about your new neighbor from this interaction, but you are sure about one thing. He certainly is not just a farmer boy.

[asheepinfrance]

thank you @cha11engers for helping. All is owed to you

INT. White Room in a government facility. Our only setting. It's got a sterile feeling, like a hospital waiting room. In it, two chairs face one another. Between the chairs, a large, metal door.

In the left chair is a GIRL. young, skittish, wearing plain, oversized white clothing. She’s fidgeting, head down, visibly nervous.

Across her, CONNOR MURPHY, a young, male, in the same outfit though his hair and clothing are more disheveled with time. He’s calm, unfazed: clearly, he’s been here a while. He’s observing the girl across from him silently. He is cool but fairly unnerving. A man on the verge.

(after a beat)

CONNOR

So… what’s your deal?

(The GIRL looks up like she hadn’t noticed she had company)

GIRL

My deal?

CONNOR

Yeah, your deal. Like, how’d you end up here?

GIRL

I- I don’t- I mean one second I was home, and the next I’m here, so… and what is ‘here’, anyway?

CONNOR

We think it’s some kind of… court or something like that. Think of it as… pest control.

(He laughs. It’s dry)

Post-suicide pest control. We show up, plead our case, and they… whoever they are… get to choose where we go. Reincarnate or rot. Simple, really.

GIRL

If only suicide victims end up here, then don’t you already know my deal?

CONNOR

Huh… I guess I do.

(After a tense pause)

GIRL

You said- you said they choose where we go... so, reincarnation, right? And what about the rest?

(A beat)

CONNOR

What do you think?

GIRL (processing)

Oh.

CONNOR (mocking)

Oh.

GIRL

Well… what about you? How long have you been here?

CONNOR

You see a calendar in here?

GIRL

No…

CONNOR

So your guess is as good as mine, then, isn’t it?

(He’s slightly angry, though it’s masked by that same coolness. Closer to snapping)

I wouldn’t say too long. Days, weeks, months, maybe. Probably not years, though… probably.

(GIRL is dejected, horrified. A potential-end-of-life crisis.)

GIRL

So I just wait here, dead, to what? Die? I mean, they can’t do this! I- I’ve got family who must be worried sick and they'd want me to-

CONNOR

What makes you so sure?

GIRL

What?

CONNOR

If you’re here, they may not have even noticed you left. What makes you so sure they care? What makes you think they know at all?

GIRL

Because I… Because! I just know. I mean, I’m a good person, I don’t deserve to just go and have no one notice. I deserve better than that. I deserve better than all of this!

CONNOR

You think you deserve better or you want to deserve better?

GIRL

Is there a difference?

CONNOR

I think we both know there is. I mean, all of us want to think we’ve done well, but… here we are, learning maybe we haven’t. We deserve what we get or we wouldn’t get it at all.

GIRL

And you’re fine with that? Knowing your life so far has possibly amounted to nothing?

CONNOR

I am now.

GIRL

So you weren’t before?

(CONNOR smiles without any joy, and observes GIRL again)

[goldenrodchef]

I...think now might be a good time to share how my dad makes pokeballs.

All you really need is an apricorn and a tumblestone, and maybe a latch for convenience.

First, crack the apricorn in half. They're pretty brittle, so it's not too hard to do.

Then, use the tumblestone to scoop out the insides of the apricorn, so that only the rind remains.

There'll be tiny flakes of the tumblestone left inside. Do not clean them out, they're essential to the process.

After a few minutes, the tumblestone flakes will bind with the apricorn rind, giving it the properties of a pokeball, along with preventing the rind from rotting.

All you need now is something to keep the two halves together, and you have a pokeball!

The materials are really cheap. Common tumblestones are about a dozen for 10₽, and since they take a long time to wear down all the way, you're set for a very long time with even just one. And brown apricorns are about 5₽ each here. That's 15₽ for a single hand-made pokeball, far cheaper than the standard retail price of 200₽ for a factory-made one.

Of course, that's only a standard pokeball, and it doesn't have some of the fancy stuff that factory pokeballs have, like registration to a trainer ID. But you can get patches that apply that stuff from many pokecenters, so I don't think it's a big deal.

For more complicated pokeballs, you'll need different types of apricorns and tumblestones. A friend ball, for example, needs a green apricorn and a fern tumblestone.

But this is just the basics. I'm not an expert, this is all just stuff I've learned from my dad and mom. They could probably tell this all better than I could.

But, um. I hope this helps.

[reiwanwan]

Sweet mourning lamb

When Tommy Shelby sits alone by the fire, haunted by the weight of war and business, an unexpected visitor steps out of the darkness—his sister, Delilah. But Delilah is dead. As she delivers a chilling warning, Tommy is forced to confront a truth that defies logic, setting both him and Delilah on a path where revenge and fate collide.

Inspired by Ethel cain’s album, Preachers Daughter. Try to guess which song of hers inspired the first part of the story! Also I changed my writing style a bit for this.

Word count: 5.3k

Content includes : Blood, Mentions of killing, Violence, Religious beliefs, Mentions of drugs and alcohol, Death. Might be heavy and disturbing to some readers so please do proceed with caution.

i. A prayer

The church smelled of wax and old wood, the air thick with incense that had long since stopped masking the rot of something deeper. A place of worship, of confession, of supposed salvation. Yet Delilah Shelby stood at its entrance as though she were being swallowed whole, a shadow of herself wrapped in a threadbare coat, her fingers trembling from something more than the cold.

Her boots, scuffed and damp from the night, made no sound as she stepped inside. It was quiet. Always quiet. The hush of a graveyard, the breath before an execution.

She came here when it hurt. When the grief inside her became a living thing, crawling beneath her skin, gnawing at her bones. Polly was gone, and there was nothing in this godless world that could bring her back. But there was Lucas Woods. The preacher. He stood near the altar, bathed in the glow of candlelight. He was waiting for her. As if he knew she would come, like he knew what she had done.

“Delilah,” he murmured.

His voice was like the low murmur of a hymn—soft, and careful. She exhaled, closing her eyes briefly as if to steady herself, before making her way forward.

“I failed,” she admitted, her voice hollow. “I—”

She swallowed hard. The words felt thick in her throat. “I went back to it. I started drinking and taking opium again... I thought I could—I thought I could stop, but then I heard about Tommy and Michael, about the war that’s about to come, and it just—” Her breath hitched. “It started to hurt again.”

Thomas had called her from her home and vaguely mentioned a “war” that was going to happen between them. Delilah had known about the dispute between him and Michael. And she knew that “war” meant that serious shit was about to get down. That also most definitely meant that one of them was going to die. And death was something she didn’t want for either of them.

Lucas watched her with half lidded eyes, his gaze was lazy. “You told me once that grief and worry is a sickness, and that I must suffer before I can be saved” she whispered, her hands trembling, “And I—I think it’s eating me alive”. But deep inside, she knew that salvation was never meant for her.

Lucas tilted his head slightly, his dark brown eyes solemn as he stepped forward, bridging the space between them. Gently, he lifted her chin, his fingers soft as a whisper against her skin.

“I was with you there, I invited you in twice, I did. You love blood too much.”

Her brows furrowed as she looked at him with glistening teary eyes, Lucas often spoke in metaphors that were slightly confusing to understand. “What do you mean?”. He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he let the silence stretch between them like the taut pull of a noose. When he finally spoke, his voice was as gentle as a lover’s confession.

“The first time I invited you in, I found you sprawled outside these very doors. Cold. Drunk. Sobbing.” His thumb traced the curve of her jaw, almost reverently. “I let you in to pray, did I not?”. Delilah’s breath shuddered out of her.

She remembered that night. The way the rain had seeped into her clothes, the way her body had felt so small, so insignificant against the vast, uncaring world. She was grieving the death of her Aunt Pol. How she had died so unfairly by the hands of the IRA. The one she believed was the pillar and backbone of her family. Delilah remembered weeping pathetically on the muddy ground and it was Lucas who had found her and brought her in for warmth.

“And the second?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. Lucas’ smile was small, almost pained.

“The second time was when I let you into my heart.”

Something inside her twisted. She searched his face, finding nothing but that same quiet devotion in his eyes, that unwavering gaze that had always felt like both salvation and damnation. Delilah had suspected that she might’ve fallen in love with Lucas the first time he put his hands so painfully gently on her shoulders and told her to pray. His brown eyes, so forgiving and polite. Her throat tightened. “And the blood?”.

He regarded her for a long moment before answering. “The blood is those who hurt you”. Her stomach squeezed and turned cold. She made the connection instantly. It was too painfully obvious.

Lucas said nothing. He didn’t need to.

For a long, excruciating moment, the weight of it pressed down on her chest, suffocating. She had spent so long trying to ignore it, trying to drown it in whatever poison she could find—this unbearable love for a brother who had done nothing but carve her heart into something unrecognizable.

But he was the one who had been there for her all her life. The only one who held her when she cried after her mother had passed, when her father would disappear for long periods of time. The one that made her heart feel safe. How could she not love him the way she did?

She felt Lucas’ hands on her face again, cradling her gently as if she was fragile and would break any second. His touch was warm, grounding. “I heard you,” he whispered. “Saw you. Felt you. Gave you. Needed you.”

“Loved you.”

His thumb softly pulled down on her bottom lip as he slowly leaned in. A soft and lingering kiss against her cheek. Then, his lips at her ear, his voice sinking into her bones like a prayer.

“You poor thing. Sweet, mourning lamb.”

Her eyes flutter shut as he murmured sweet nothings into her ears with his deep, syrupy voice.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he whispered.

“It’s already been done.”

His lips met with hers, interlocking naturally. She felt herself sink into it, into him, desperate and aching, her fingers curling into the fabric of his coat as if he were the only thing tethering her to this world. He grabbed the softness of her nape, his other hand cupping her head, he groaned when her fingers tightened on his brown locs.

Delilah was slowly losing herself in his touch. Maybe this was all she needed, she thought to herself. She shut her eyes tightly and allowed herself to drown in this moment. She started to hear multiple voices, all sorts of different sounds, all around her spatial awareness. She grabbed onto his lapels tighter in hopes that the voices would go away. There was no time to pay the voices any attention. But the voices started becoming more coherent. It was calling her name.

“Delilah” the voice called.

Go away, not right now.

“Delilah”

Whoever you are, fuck off. I don’t need this right now.

“Show me your face”

Delilah remained keeping her eyes screwed shut. She recognised that voice. Her eyes flew open once she was sure who the voice belonged to. The church was gone and she was small again. A child.

She was crouched down with her knees pulled into her chest. Her small hands trembled as she raised them to her face, covering it, shielding herself from the gaze she knew was waiting for her. “Please don’t look at me”.

“Why won’t you show me your face, Delilah? Do you not love me anymore?” He said, crouching down to her who was curled into a ball.

“Because if I do, I’ll start crying again Tommy” she said, her voice cracking. She felt his hands, warm and steady, prying hers away. Forcing her to meet his icy blue eyes. He was young as well. The Tommy she remembered before France took the light away from her doting brother.

“I can see it in your eyes, you’re guilty” He said. Delilah sobbed softly when Tommy held her small face in his hands.

“Tell me, what have you done?” he wiped her falling tears with his thumbs.

Stop. Stop…stop. Make it stop.

“Why wont you tell me, Delilah? You don't love me anymore?” His voice slowly started to sound like her fathers.

Delilah shook her head, trying to get him to be silent. Tommy and her father loved asking her that when she was younger and she hated it a lot. They weren’t aware of how much it hurt her little heart. She always felt like she had to do something— anything as proof of her love. It almost never ended well. In pain most of the time.

Stop. Stop…stop. Make it stop.

“Why don't you listen to me, Delilah? Do you want to make Tommy sad?”

I’ve had enough.

Stop…

Stop…

Stop…

Stop…

STOP

Delilah gasped, her eyes widened and quickly pulled herself away from Lucas’ lips, trying to desperately catch her breath. Her chest heaved quickly, she could feel her heart pounding and held onto her chest to try and control its strong and painful palpitations. She turned her attention to Lucas who was already smiling at her lazily.

“After all I’ve done,” he mused, “you’re still crying for your brother.”

She could barely think. Her head, a dizzying and mushy mess. Her voice was hoarse when she finally spoke. “How do you know I’m crying for him…and not for you?” she asked breathily, trying to force a smile. Lucas’ eyes darkened, his coarse thumb brushed over her cheek, smearing away a tear.

“You’ll never cry for the one who doesn’t hurt you” he murmured. “Only the one who pains you”

He brought his lips closer to her ears and whispered, “The pain that only you can remember”. Lucas reached behind her head and that’s when she felt it—The cold kiss of a steel pistol at the back of her skull.

How long had it been there? Had it been there when he kissed her? How long had she clung to him?

She exhaled shakily. She knew what was to come, because when she lifted her gaze, she saw them. Mother, Polly and John. All standing behind Lucas and smiling so beautifully. She had spent so long running from the inevitable, drowning herself in opium, in whiskey, in prayers whispered into the collar of a preacher’s coat. Now, at last, there was no more running. It is as Lucas said, it’s already been done.

Her lips parted. A broken breath escaped. And before she could think of anything else the world went black. Her body went limp, falling back before she was caught by Lucas in his arms. He lifted her lifeless frame up and examined, bringing a chaste kiss to her lips. His fingers drew a cross on her chest with the blood from the back of her head as he prayed— The prayer that he had saved for Delilah.

“Blessed be the Daughter of the Shelbys,

Bound to suffering eternal through the sins of their fathers committed long before their conception.

Blessed be their whore mothers,

Tired and angry, waiting with bated breath in a ferry that will never move again.

Blessed be the children,

Each and every one comes to know their god through some senseless act of violence.

Blessed be the girl, born into blood, raised in grief.

Blessed be her restless soul, which will never find peace.

Blessed be the hands that held her, the lips that kissed her, the man who loved her.

And blessed be the bullet, the only true salvation I could give.”

ii. The priest

Lucas Woods watched as the body of Delilah Shelby bled out on the church’s marble floor. She looked like a beauty bleeding out in such a beautiful place of worship.

His mind was noisy. With thoughts that he couldn’t identify. But it was probably not that important. Lucas was the type of person who knew what he wanted and exactly how he wanted it. If he couldn’t pick out what it was that he felt while watching her, then the thought most likely didn’t serve him any good. Besides, there was no room left in his heart to grieve.

He recited every prayer he had ever known, In hopes her soul would forgive him. Not like he ever believed in any of the prayers that he recited. Not as if he believed that it would save her, but fear of the possibilities that there is heaven, not as if he believed any of them could get in but there was that little pathetic hope in him.

He bathed her in candlelight, traced crosses over her forehead, whispered to her in the darkness. He took off his robe, leaving it on top of her lifeless body and left before shutting the big wooden church doors, leaving her behind for the flies to keep her company.

Lucas had told her things he had never told another soul. The things he thought were unworthy to share. Lucas’ reasoning was that his value would not have changed either way— there was no benefit in knowing who he was and what he was inside.

Born to a Belfast family that never knew peace, similar to the Shelbys, Lucas had been raised on the promise of bringing justice to the weak. His father’s hands were always bloodied; his mother’s eyes were always swollen from grief.

“Some people have to be sacrificed for the greater good, Lucas” is what his father would say when he came home with blood on his clothes. His father was a preacher and often twisted the word of God to justify his bloodshed, poor little Lucas never could tell the difference between the devil, god and his own father.

The church had been his only solace, the only place where he could pretend, be a killer with a cross around his neck, for a moment, and not his father’s son.

But the IRA had taken him in before God ever could, stepping right into his fathers foots steps He had killed before he ever learned how to pray properly. And yet, when he met Delilah Shelby, he had felt something shift. Something softened. Maybe it was his damned heart.

She was not innocent—no one born a Shelby ever was—but she was something else entirely. The pain in her eyes, the quiet way she clung to him when she thought no one was watching, the desperation and sincerity in the way she sought absolution and repented even when she knew she could never truly be forgiven. Something about her desperation and loyalty pulled him closer. He had loved her.

Perhaps for his own selfish needs, for the way she made him feel like something more than a killer in a preacher’s robes, and more than his fathers obedient dog.

Loving that girl made him feel clean. The only ones whose hands were tender on his face. Maybe it was knowing how much she needed him. For whatever reasons he had, there was no denying in his heart, he had love for that girl. And maybe that’s why he had to destroy her. Because love like that doesn’t belong in a man like him.

iii. The awakening

Darkness consumed her. Not the soft, velvety blackness of sleep, nor the tranquil void of death she had once imagined—but something far heavier, more suffocating. It wrapped around her like a burial shroud, thick and endless, stretching into eternity without form or meaning.

For what she could only assume was more than an hour, she was aware of nothing but this abyss. No pain, no thought, just the cold, unfeeling void. She wondered, vaguely, if this was what it meant to die, or how it felt. If she had finally escaped the blood, the grief, the war that followed her like a specter. There was no peace in this emptiness, but neither was there suffering. Perhaps that was enough.

Delilah’s ears picked up a sound. Faint at first, distant, like an echo through water. A dull, rhythmic thump, steady and unrelenting. It pulsed through the void, rippling outward, drawing her toward it. It took her a moment to recognize it.

A heartbeat.

Her heartbeat.

The realization struck her like a hammer to the chest, sending shockwaves through the darkness. Sensation flooded in all at once—a slow, dragging pain that curled through her skull, a dull ache spreading through her limbs like fire smoldering beneath the surface of her skin. Her breath hitched, sharp and ragged, as a new awareness settled over her.

She was alive.

Or at least—she was something close to it.

Her fingers twitched against the hard cold surface beneath her, the texture rough and unyielding, pressing against her palms with an unbearable weight. Cold air wrapped around her, carrying the heavy scent of incense, candle wax, and something darker—something metallic. It clung to her, thick and suffocating, stirring something deep in her chest. Blood. She groaned helplessly.

Her lungs burned as she sucked in air, as if she had been drowning for an eternity and was only now breaking the surface. Her body rebelled against the motion, heavy and sluggish, as though she were made of lead. Her head lolled to the side, the sharp, dragging pain intensifying, throbbing at the base of her skull. She tried to move, tried to lift her arms, but they felt like dead weight, resisting her every attempt to reclaim control.

Something warm trickled down her forehead.

Slow, thick, and wet.

Her breath stilled. Forcing her muscles to obey, she dragged her hand upward, the movement strained and unnatural, her fingertips brushing against her temple. Her skin was slick, the texture strange and foreign. She pressed her fingers against it, feeling the warmth, the stickiness, the undeniable reality of it.

Her hand trembled as she pulled it away.The dim light overhead cast a dull glow over her skin, illuminating the color smeared across her fingertips. Deep crimson, nearly black in the flickering candlelight. It pooled in the creases of her palm, clung to the lines of her skin, refusing to fade. Blood. Her blood.

A sickening realization settled over her like a weight. She had felt the bullet, had heard it—the crack of the gunshot, the way the world had gone silent in its wake. The moment of impact had been sudden, sharp—then nothing.

And yet, she was here. Alive?

The floor beneath her was cold, the air thick with the scent of iron. Her breathing came shallow, uneven, her chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate motions, as if her body was still trying to understand what had happened. She should be dead. She was dead.

Then why did she feel like this?

Her vision swam as she forced herself to sit up, the world shifting violently around her, tilting at unnatural angles. A fresh wave of nausea rolled through her, but she pushed past it, planting her hands against the floor, steadying herself. Her body felt foreign, her limbs sluggish and uncooperative, as though she had been stitched together all wrong.

Slowly, she rose to her feet, her movements unsteady, legs trembling beneath her. The sensation of blood running down her skin was maddening—warm, constant, unnatural. She needed to see.

Her gaze flickered across the dimly lit church, her surroundings unfamiliar in her disoriented state. The air felt heavier than before, thick with something unspoken, something watching. But there was no one else here.

A bitter laugh threatened to crawl up her throat, but she swallowed it down, forcing her body to move. She needed to find a mirror—needed proof of whatever had been done to her.

Each step felt wrong, as though she were walking through water’s tough tides, her body resisting the motion. The shadows in the church stretched long and sharp, flickering with the unsteady candlelight. The air was too still, too quiet, pressing in from all sides.

She reached the far end of the room, her fingers grazing the cool surface of an old mirror. The glass was fogged with age, its surface marred with scratches, but it was enough.

She hesitated, but slowly—she looked.

A sharp breath escaped her lips.

The woman staring back at her was a grotesque mockery of the one she had once been. Her skin, once warm and full of life, had taken on an unnatural pallor—too pale, too still, as though all warmth had drained from her body. Dark veins curled beneath the surface, spreading from the wound at her temple, reaching down her neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her dress.

The wound itself— A small, perfect hole, right at her hairline. The skin around it was raw, cracked, as if something had forced its way through and refused to heal. Blood had dried in uneven streaks down her face, crusted in places where it should have clotted, but never fully did. It oozed, slow and thick, an unnatural, endless trickle.

Her eyes were wrong. She leaned closer, her breath fogging the glass. The irises, once a deep brown, had darkened, their edges swallowed by shadow. They looked sunken, hollow, as if she had been awake for centuries. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, or if something inside her had shifted—something that could never be undone.

This was not survival. This was something else.

She exhaled sharply, dragging a hand down her face, smearing blood across her cheek. She could only laugh at her own reflection.

It was quiet at first—soft, bitter, but it grew, shaking in her chest, a sound born from madness and exhaustion. A laugh with no joy, no warmth. Just the cold, sharp edge of realization sinking into her ribs like a knife.

She should be dead. But she wasn’t.

She turned from the mirror, dragging a hand through her blood-matted hair, her mind racing with the weight of what this meant.

There was a sudden shift in the air. The sensation of something unseen watching. She stilled. Slowly, she turned and there, standing in the flickering candlelight—was Polly.

Polly stood with her arms crossed, an unreadable expression resting on her sharp features. She looked exactly as Delilah remembered, before and after she left—proud, knowing, untouched by death. But Delilah knew what this meant. Polly always had something to say.

Her stomach twisted. She didn’t even think it was possible.Her lips parted, her voice hoarse when she finally spoke.

“I’m dead, aren’t I?”

Polly quirked a brow and tilted her head, “What do you think?”, amusement flickering in her sharp gaze.

Delilah let out a slow breath, glancing back at the mirror.Her reflection had not changed.She clenched her jaw, shaking her head.

“Fuck”.

Delilah clenched her jaw, dragging a hand through her blood-matted hair. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “I’m still standing here, aren’t I?”. Polly exhaled a quiet chuckle, shaking her head. “Look at yourself, sweetheart,” she drawled. “And tell me—does that look alive to you?”. Delilah glanced back at the mirror, her stomach twisting. She let out a slow breath, licking her lips, tasting iron.

Delilah clenched her fists, shaking her head.

“Fuck” she said exasperatedly, releasing a soft and defeated laugh.

Delilah sat down on the benches and reached into her pocket, fingers brushing against something familiar—A pack of cigarettes. She pulled it out, along with a silver lighter, flipping it open with a flick of her wrist. The flame flared to life, casting shadows across her face. She placed the cigarette between her lips, lighting the tip, inhaling deeply before exhaling a long plume of smoke into the stagnant air.

“Being dead hurts,” She shook her head, smirking.

Polly smiled, watching her fondly. “You’re still here because you have something to say,” she said simply. “Something he needs to hear.” Delilah exhaled another breath of smoke, staring at Polly through the haze. Polly met her gaze, steady and sharp.

“You already know what it is.”

Delilah took another slow drag of her cigarette, watching the ember glow like a dying star. She exhaled through her nose, the smoke curling between them.

“And what if I don’t want to say it?”

Polly’s gaze didn’t waver nor did her smile, “Then you’ll never rest.”

iv. The message

The fire crackled, the embers rising into the night air like lost spirits, twisting and flickering before vanishing into the darkness. The flames burned low, a soft orange glow against the damp cold of the woods. Smoke curled upward in lazy tendrils, mixing with the heavy scent of damp earth and decayed leaves. The world was quiet here—no city noise, no voices, just the steady hum of insects and the rustling of branches overhead.

Tommy sat hunched on a fallen log, elbows on his knees, a cigarette hanging from his lips. The firelight carved shadows into his face, deepening the hollows beneath his eyes, making him look even more tired than he already felt. The weight of war pressed against him, the endless calculations of men and money and blood turning over in his mind like the cogs of a machine that never stopped. But for now—for this one moment—he let himself sit in silence, watching the flames dance.

Suddenly, Tommy heard the leaves shuffling and rustling, sounding like footsteps and that made his skin prickle before his mind even caught up. He turned his head, eyes sharp, fingers twitching toward the gun at his hip. The fire flickered, the shadows stretching, and then—she stepped into the light.

Tommy froze.

His cigarette slipped from his lips, landing in the dirt at his feet, the ember still glowing. His breath caught in his throat, heart hammering hard against his ribs.

Delilah.

She stood at the edge of the firelight, her skin pallid in the flickering glow. Her dark hair hung loose, disheveled, strands falling into her hollowed-out eyes. The dried blood on her temple had darkened to an unnatural black, a grotesque smear down her face. But it wasn’t just the wound—it was her.

The way she stood, too still. The way her breath didn’t fog in the cold air. The way her eyes blinked too slowly like a haunted doll. The way the firelight didn’t quite touch her.

His voice came out hoarse, barely a whisper.

“Delilah?”

She tilted her head slightly.

He was on his feet before he even realized it, moving toward her, hands reaching as if to steady her, as if to fix whatever had been done to her. “Fuck—Delilah, what happened to you?” His voice was sharper now, laced with urgency. “Come on, let me—Jesus Christ, let me get you to a doctor—” His hand hovers between them before finally gripping her wrist. Cold. Too fucking cold. His fingers flex, his breath stilling as if he’s afraid she might crumble beneath his touch.

She held up a hand, stopping him in his tracks. “Tommy,” she said, her voice eerily calm, “I’m already dead.”

His breath left him all at once.

Silence settled between them, thick and suffocating. The fire popped, embers snapping in the air, but Tommy heard nothing but the pounding of his own heartbeat. He stared at her, at the blood, at the way her lips barely moved when she spoke.

She blinked, her expression unreadable.

“I saw Mom.”

It wasn’t possible. He’d been drinking, maybe—no, he hadn’t. He wasn’t asleep, so he couldn’t have been dreaming. But Delilah—his baby sister—was standing in front of him, pale and still, with a bullet hole in her skull.

“And Polly,” she continued, glancing at the fire.“And John.”

Tommy’s hands curled into fists. Teeth clenching against each other. His logical mind fights against what his heart already knows: this is Delilah. But it’s not. It can’t be. And yet, she speaks his name like she never left, like she isn’t a ghost standing by his fire, telling him the truth he doesn’t want to hear.

His jaw tightened. “Who?”

She met his gaze then, and something in her expression softened. Not with sadness, not with fear—but with something almost amused.

“A priest,” she said simply. “From the church I used to go to.”

Tommy’s lips parted slightly. She stepped forward then, sinking down onto the log beside him, sitting as if her body still remembered how. As if she hadn’t been shot dead. For a long moment, Tommy said nothing.

Then, moving on autopilot, he reached into his coat, pulling out his cigarette case. He lit one with slow, deliberate movements, inhaled deeply, then held the case out to her. She took one. The small gesture felt wrong. Like something out of a dream he hadn’t woken up from yet. He exhaled, smoke curling from his lips, and muttered, “Dead people smoke now?” Delilah smirked before lighting up her cigarette, she took a slow drag, and exhaled. “You’re in luck, then”

For a moment, they just sat there, side by side, watching the fire. It felt almost normal—almost. “Lucas Wood,” Tommy murmured, more to himself than to her. Delilah nodded slightly. “You’ve heard of him?.”

“I know the name”, Tommy admitted. “Never met him. I don’t go to church.” A bitter smirk, “And if I did, it wouldn’t be to pray.” She huffed a quiet laugh, taking another slow drag of her cigarette, “Yeah it was him alright”.

Tommy exhaled sharply, rubbing a hand down his face. “I’ll get the police involved.” His voice was firm, but even as he said it, there was something hollow in his words. “I can’t send my men after him—I need them”.

Delilah scoffed softly, flicking the ash from her cigarette. “And what exactly do you think the police are gonna do, Tommy?” She glanced at him, her expression unreadable. “It’s no use. Lucas is an IRA member”.

Delilah smirked, “Funny, isn’t it?” She tilted her head, watching the way his grip on his cigarette tightened. “It was the same with Polly, What goes around comes around.”

Tommy inhaled sharply, his cigarette burning dangerously close to his fingertips.

Delilah’s voice softened. “Lucas is coming in a few days,” she said. “He’s going to tell you about my death himself.” There was a slight pause before she added, “That’s when he plans to take you, Tommy.” Tommy was silent for once.

She turned to him fully, studying his face in the firelight. “Do you understand now?”

“Will you listen to me now? you love me, right?”

He looked at her for a long moment, taking her in. The way the fire cast flickering shadows across her face, the way her expression stayed calm despite the weight of everything. Tommy’s hands found her cheeks, her skin was cold, his thumb nearly freezing from simply rubbing across it. “I do love you” he responded, his eyes never leaving hers.

She was already dead. And yet, here she was. Waiting for him to finish what needed to be done.

He flicked his cigarette into the fire, the embers swallowing it whole. He closed his eyes for a moment and pulled her in, holding her tightly in his arms, hands cradling her head as if he was trying to comfort her. Tommy pressed a lingering kiss to her temple.

“Alright, for you Delilah”

To be continued…

[its-echo-song]

Plague AU Ch. 7

Just a little reminder!!!!! This is fiction, these boys in this particular AU are not any sort of relationship to strive for- my writing about these behaviors does not equate to me endorsing them. That said, please enjoy some drama lmao

Three days, three nights, a singular bowl of stew, seven bottles of wine, and a self loathing that doesn’t seem to find its way out of my bones.

I want to rot, just me and several loose pieces of parchment with new, poorly done, drawings of a man I regret missing. Drawings I’m sure will also serve as tender for the fire at a later date.

But I can’t simply remain here, a drunken mess of apathy, hunger, and abandoned desire. No, I must make my way into the world again- I’m out of wine.

Unfortunately, wine costs money, money is scarce now that I’ve been missing from work for thirteen days and… I really don’t have my pick of professions. I eye the plague doctor outfit, dreading the stuffy heat- nowhere near as much as I dread the possibility of seeing Donny. I sigh and set to my task, pulling on the ensemble and making my way into town.

It’s strange starting the day without the routine I’d gotten so used to, a daily dose of brightness in a person before I step into a world full of death. It’s even more off putting realizing how much I’d relied on him, helping me carry boxes, move patients, or generally acting like an extra set of hands. 

I catch myself starting to call his name out of habit, the beginnings of it falling from my mouth like a stone to the ground when I realize I should not. I spend most of the day working on my own, occasionally being assisted by another keeper- one who doesn’t know the ritual the way Donny does. He gets in the way, needs direction, doesn’t just act the way Donny would- I try not to give in to the frustration that finds itself settling into my blood. Then, as I’m instructing him on where to move supplies, I finally see Donny. I don’t think he even realizes I’m here, which is for the better, but the sight of him alone is an icy shock of adrenaline throughout my whole body- enough to make me stumble over my words and restart my sentence.  I can’t bring myself to drag my attention away from him, wonderment at his state tugging me into a steady flow of flaws in logic. It’s not going to hurt anything to observe from across the room, I just want to be sure he’s okay.

Except he glances over his shoulder, catching me staring at him. I shift my gaze away, hopeful that he’ll assume I’m just another plague doctor, that he won’t realize it’s me. All things considered, from a distance I should be strikingly unremarkable.

I hazard a glance back over- I would bristle like a startled cat if I had the ability to. His eyes are still locked onto me but now he’s considerably less cheerful. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the slight scowl that appears as he turns his attention elsewhere.

My heart clenches in my chest- not that I’d deluded myself into believing he’d suddenly forgive me and all would be well but… well, hope is a foolish thing, doesn’t understand its boundaries even with stern reminders. Hope and I share the same stupidity, in this instance.

Several days go by this way, no contact with each other and nothing but quick glances at the other. At this point, the keeper who had started filling Donny’s role is getting better at his job- able to easily carry out his duties without much direction.

This is when I start to notice a strange behavior in Donny, nearly scavenger-esque like a jackal in the way he waits to swoop in and take the work from the other keeper. I observe this behavior, finding a finite amusement in both the determination he displays, and the astonishment of the other man who is eager to work less.

So as Donny tries to make his way over as if he doesn’t care at all, I intercept. I step in stride beside him, not missing the tension in his demeanor as I do so. “What are you doing?” I ask casually, like nothing has happened, as if we’ve always only been coworkers.

He glares down at me and I enjoy the redness in his face, a true marker that I’ve gotten under his skin in some aspect. “My job. Remember? What we’re here to do.”

“I thought Michael took care of it quite well, wouldn’t you say?”

He makes no response, only looks ahead of him as he walks.

“What’s wrong? Don’t like Michael?”

“I have no opinion.”

“You wouldn’t be jealous, right?”

He stops abruptly, grip tightening on the handles of the box he holds. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Well I’m just saying-”

“-you have no right.”

I hit the nail on the head, it seems. “Why be so touchy, then?”

He glances around him and places the box on the nearest table –too hard, it clatters loudly and I worry that something might’ve broken– then he turns to me with a fury I didn’t expect, nose wrinkled in disgust. “What do you want, Ha-”

I slap my hand over his mouth, sheer instinct and panic, the action preceded the adrenaline that spikes through my body. His eyes go wide for a fraction of a second, then he grabs my wrist and pulls it from his face, turning and marching with me in tow. I don’t have much option in this situation, wrenching from his grip would be impossible even on a day where he’s less irritated at me.

He pulls open a door, drawing me into a dim and abandoned hallway before slamming it shut behind us and shoving me in front of him. I stumble a few steps before turning to look at him, running a hand gently along the tender bruise that started along my wrist.

I didn’t realize how intimidating Donny was, not fully, not until now. He stands over me with a scowl across his face, fierce and steely. I feel adrenaline give way to sheer terror as I start to understand the situation I find myself in. “Why are you here?”

“I-I needed work.”

“So you come back? You come back and-” He sighs harshly, pulling my mask off and I gasp at the motion, watching helplessly as he throws it to the floor with a strange crackling sound– glass on cobble. “You come back here and stare at me all day? I’m just supposed to be okay being watched like that?”

I stumble over my words for a moment, taking a retreating step back. “I… didn’t mean to. I just… You’re hard not to watch.”

His glare softens slightly, calculation evident in the way his eyes flicker over me, measuring the weight of my words. He’s probably trying to decide if I’m honest or not. “Why is that?”

I swallow, flushing and staring down at my feet, unable to meet his eyes anymore. “I don’t- you’re just interesting, I don’t know…”

“You need to find somewhere else to work. I’m not your damn experiment anymore.”

My heart clutches in my chest, a sickly-sharp pang of sadness resonates throughout my core. “No- I don’t- I can’t.” I look up at him again, feeling a familiar pull that hasn’t left me since the first time I’ve seen him, cursing the feeling. “Please don’t.”

He flinches slightly at this. “What, are you willing to admit I’m not just research anymore?”

I grit my teeth, fighting the rush of frustration that is prompted by the accusation. He was never simply research, but admitting to him is admitting to me– I don’t want to start down the same path as I’d walked before, let one person be the thing that causes everything to crumble. “I’ve never said anything different, I don’t know where-”

“We’re done. I’m not sitting around and being drawn for hours just for your fake science, I’m not willing to be lied to.” He turns and starts making his way back to the door and I grab at his wrist before he reaches it.

“Please! Donny!”

“What!?” He turns on his heel, pulling his arm from my grasp. “Goddamnit, what!?”

“I- I’m not just- it’s real science. I’m-” He turns away again and I feel the desperation welling up inside me, overflowing like water at a boil. “I burned them! I burned the drawings! I won’t draw you again!”

There’s a long silence before Donny looks down at me over his shoulder. His countenance shifts from the anger he’d felt to confusion, to sadness. “You… burned them?”

“Yes. I don’t- I don’t have any- I mean, none that you’d posed for. They’re gone.”

“Why would you do that?” There’s an edge of hurt in his tone now, I’m starting to question my choices.

“I- I didn’t- I thought you would be happy about that…”

“You’re right- nothing but research.” He steps through the door, not even bothering to close it behind him. I watch him walk away for a moment before I realize I’m not wearing my mask. I shove the door closed, turning and walking over to my mask, crouching beside it. When I pick it up I notice one of the eyepieces is cracked, spiderweb fractures dancing throughout it.

I sigh, fitting it back over my face and taking a moment to stand in the silence of the empty hallway.

I didn’t realize it’d hurt him the way it did. I feel like I should apologize but- why should I apologize for doing as I please with my own things? It’s not like he drew them.

I open the door, doing a quick scan of the room and realizing with a slight sinking feeling in my stomach that Donny is gone. I ask a nearby keeper where he went and she shrugs. “Home, I think. Didn’t really stop to talk to someone.”

I thank her and make my way to the box he’d placed on the table- a glass did break, there’s salt coating the bottom, shards of glass scattered throughout it. I bring the box back to the supply room – less of an official storage space and more of a small room with more than one cleared bookshelf– and start taking all the other containers out, placing them on shelves. I start picking glass out from the basket, placing the shards in a cloth I’d laid out to the side.

In hindsight, removing gloves to allow myself extra dexterity was not my brightest move. I should know better, now I’m staring down at a large slice cut into my fingertip and trying to grit my teeth through the intense burning of the salt. I swear roundly, several times, shaking my hand and clutching a fist with the other. Goddamn useless, shitty, day.

I wrap the wound in gauze, frustrated and feeling as if nothing good could possibly happen today.

I think, at this point, I need an early day as well.

I head outside, walking the familiar path, a pace that has purpose with it, fueled by emotion more than by energy.

When I get far enough away, I pull my mask off and allow the pain to finally hit in full. I walk off the path, down to the riverbed, and sit in the dirt. Here, I allow myself to cry. Not simply tearful, but wretched, in a way that makes me feel as if my lungs may burst, like I can’t find any air, like the world has completely closed in around me and I am left with my misery.

I sit on the riverbank until the sun sets, staring at the passing of time before my eyes, counting minutes by the number of clouds in the sky, then by how many stars appear.

Then I stand and continue on my way, walking on autopilot, not realizing until I’m there where my feet were carrying me.

[friendscfmine]

“Oh!  Yes,” Richard says.  “The Marshes—that’d be them.  Don’t worry about Randy, though; you’re not really missing much.”  He has such a complicated relationship with Randy Marsh because on one hand, the guy legalized cocaine in a single day, and that could be very useful.  On the other hand, he blew up the Tweaks’ yard after taking a shit in it.  So, Richard has to weigh how much of the nonsense he is willing to tolerate to benefit his own agenda.

“It’s a pity; he used to be such a brilliant mind.”  He shakes his head and tuts, then raises his eyebrows.  “But he’s been rotting his brain with drugs.”  The mention of drugs gives Richard a little thrill.  He knows it’s risky bringing it up at all, especially setting himself up as an anti-drug person.  She’s old enough to be too smart for that, but it’s also possible that she’ll overthink herself in the opposite direction.

“So, my advice would be to keep away from him and his farm, but I know I can’t stop you.”  He shrugs it off.  “I know how you kids get—I might as well be telling you to beeline straight for it by telling you not to go.”

She is right to assume that the Tweaks are not swimming in money.  They are far from the richest family in town, but he and Elayne have devised a way to retain customer loyalty, so they don’t have to worry about going completely broke for a long time yet.  Even with the Harbucks moved in next store, there will be rioting in the streets if Tweek Bros. Coffee gets shut down and people can’t come in for their fix.

“I’d say there are some small towns that do all right for themselves, honestly!  But certainly, change will happen whether you really want it to or not.”

He takes the paper from her and glances down at her shaking handwriting.  It looks a little bit like Tweek’s, and Richard smiles to himself at the thought, knowing that his wife will be able to parse it just fine.  She might even think their son wrote it.  “Thank you!  I’ll be sure to give this to her.  Like I said, she knows much more about it than I do, so I figure I better let her decide if it’s worth the trip or not.”

South Park being full of people who lacked a general sense of awareness really was such a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed Ava to stay in town without having to worry too much about hiding herself, where anywhere else she would have to be bundled up to the nines any time she wanted to go anywhere - or she'd have to go back to running around at night. On the other... The adults really did seem to lack any sense of what was going on in town. She'd been around enough of the kids at this point that she can tell that they have a little more worldly awareness than some of the people decades older than them.

Richard seems to somewhat be an exception to that rule, as he is at the very least a little more observant than the others. That has been a constant battle for Ava, trying to decide if it is worth it to try and avoid him at all costs, or if that would simply make things worse for Tweek. No matter what she felt about Richard personally, her fondness for Tweek would overrule her own feelings. She was a tough girl, it would take a lot more than someone being observant to truly make her want to fully avoid them.

Brows furrow at the name, feeling that it is very familiar, but being unable to fully place why. She knows a lot of the kids, plus Jimbo and Ned, by their first names only. Last names have never held too much importance to Ava, and therefore were usually forgotten far before she forgot a face and a name. "...I really only know the name of the kids." The fact that there was a family who moved to a farm did sound really familiar too, but she can't place which kid that is between her own nerves and the jumbling of information that she's had to process. At least three of the kids she knew - Tweek included - had some sort of big family drama she was trying to keep up with. It probably wasn't Craig, at the very least, from what she has pieced together it didn't seem like his parents would be staying together for much longer. "...Stan's family?" Ava guesses, taking the most likely route. "I've only met Stan, never met his parents."

"That... Seems to be a pretty common sentiment in town." Planet hopping had all but taken the familiarity out of staying in one place and not uprooting from her. "But that's 'cus of economic growth, right?" Watching as he adjusts the napkin holder, her hand moves, like she's about to nudge it herself. "Small towns don't do well unless they embrace a little bit change, and 's hard to let go of places that have been around for a while." She can't imagine Richard is raking in a hell of a lot every month, perhaps just enough to keep up with the bare minimum, but what does Ava know, really?

Now, Ava does reach out for a napkin, pulling one from the holder and a pen from her pocket. She goes silent for a few moments, taking her time to write each flower name so that they are readable. Her penmanship is still rough around the edges, but at least Ava thinks that Richard should be able to read it as she turns it around and slides it towards him. "Here, those are the names. In case she does wanna go out, or if she wants to write 'em down herself." Balancing the basics of as many written languages as she has so far makes her slower than she likes, and Ava makes a mental note to find a better way to do this so she doesn't have to ponder each letter.

[actuallyjustabiscuit]

Not my dumb bisexual ass liking a poly ship purely because I think their height differences are neat

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: November Wrap-Up.

Hi, y'all! I'm actually shocked that I managed to get through four (4) books this month, because it was NANO and I also WROTE A WHOLE BOOK!! The (written) book in its two notebooks is pictured beneath the pen and NaNo Earrings :)

All of these reads were NaNo-adjacent, somehow (I like to stack my reading with my writing project so all the Vibes are Correct)--either Space, or Haunted, or Fucked Up Fungi (I wrote a weird book this month)(I had a great time).

Photos and/or reviews linked:

A HALF-BUILT GARDEN - ★★★½ I enjoyed this! It was very slow and contemplative, and I was surprised by how long it took me to read (#NaNoProblems), but I'm glad I did, and Rhamnetin was a DELIGHT.

JUST LIKE HOME - ★★★★ Reread for me, holds up very well! Star rating unchanged from first time through. I actually do recommend rereading this one, knowing exactly when Daphne dies.

GRAVEYARD SHIFT - ★★★½ I enjoyed this one too! Short fun weird little insomnia romp. Love a good fucked up fungus and a motley POV crew.

THE NIGHT GUEST - ★★★★ This was DEEPLY fucked up and AMAZINGLY crafted horror/suspense, and I definitely had delayed nightmares about it. I also love a good spec fic in translation (this one's from Icelandic!). Cats are NOT safe, very graphically so, so proceed with caution if that's a warning you need.

Under the Cut: A Note About ~*★Stars★*~

Historically, I have been Very Bad™ about assigning things Star Ratings, because it's so Vibes Heavy for me and therefore Contingent Upon my Whims. (Example: I don't like that stars are Odd, because that makes three the midpoint and things are rarely so truly mid for me)(I have hacked my way around this with a ½). Here is, generally, how I conceptualize stars:

★ - This was Bad. I would actively recommend that you do NOT read this one, no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not worth the slog. Save Yourself, It's Too Late For Me. Book goes in the garbage (donate bin).

★★ - This was Not Good. I would not recommend it, but it wasn't a total waste or wash--something in here held my interest/kept my attention/sparked some joy. I will not be rereading this ever. Save Yourself (Or Join Me In Suffering, That Seems Like A Cool Bonding Activity).

★★★ - This was Good/Fine/Okay/Meh. I don't care about this enough to recommend it one way or another. Perfectly serviceable book, held my interest, I probably enjoyed myself (or at least didn't actively loathe the reading). I don't have especially strong feelings. You probably don't need to save yourself from this one--if it sounds like your jam, give it a shot! Just didn't resonate with me particularly powerfully. I probably won't reread this unless I'm after something in particular.

★★★½ - I liked this! I'll probably recommend it if I know it matches someone's vibes or specific requests, but I didn't commit to a star rating on Goodreads. More likely to reread, but not guaranteed.

★★★★ - I really enjoyed this!! I would recommend it (sometimes with caveats about content warnings or such--I tend to like weird fucked up funny shit, and I don't have many hard readerly NO's). Not a perfect book for me by any means, but Very Good. This is something I would reread! Join me!!

★★★★★ - I LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF THIS, IT REWIRED MY BRAIN, WILL RECOMMEND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE AT THE SLIGHTEST PROVOCATION (content warning caveats still apply--see 4-star disclaimer). Excellent book, I'll reread it regularly, I'll buy copies for all my friends, I'll try to convince all of Booklr to read it, PLEASE join me!!

[creamecream]

Fionna and Marshall Lee being fwb.

Fionna finds out she’s pregnant after an odd few days of feeling nauseous and tired.

Fionna freaks out, absolutely panics, and is very intent on not telling Marshall because she’s pretty sure he’d bail, just up and disappear.

Gary is the only one she’s actually told (besides Cake) and he also freaks out, offering repeatedly to just kick Marshall over and drag him to her until she gets her dues (child support, etc.) Fionna begs him not to.

Marshall at one point, while he and Fionna are out at a bar together, notices Fionna isn’t drinking and teases her with a “what, you pregnant or something?” Fionna nearly crushes her glass in her hand.

Marshall Lee has noticed something going on with Fionna, but she flips out when he probes even a little, so he hasn’t sat her down to talk about it yet, even though she is clearly trying to avoid him.

Fionna panics even more when it turns out to be twins.

[arsenicflame]

you know youre a little too deep in the brainrot when "would it be fucked up to be straight in the society of Heven" is a genuine thought you have had and seriously debated with yourself

[rawliverandgoronspice]

man, I love A Link Between Worlds... sometimes I remember it, its hyper-competent yet humble design and storytelling proposal, and I genuinely think that makes it among my favorite Zelda games ;;

[spotsupstuff]

doin' a fuckshite again ✌, i'll see y'all artistically in five to seven business days this fucking script is so bitchily long. i swear to fuck if its gon be over 8 pages.

anyway Fish is gon be in it <3 fucking Finally he shows off properly

anyway,

[daisyhooves]

just a small dump of stuff for the rain world mgs au because its been on the brain for a bit. the ideas they are in my head.

[daz4i]

i need to stop saying "i would rather die" whenever i don't wanna do smth. like yeah bitch we know. you'd rather do that over literally everything stfu

[snekdood]

i think ppl gotta get acquainted with the difference between systemic privilege and social privilege, which can overlap, but not always.