#they are gone but not the memories. keep them and keep have faith

[crustyfloor]

I love how ALNST portrays the coexistence of hate and love in the main relationships, just like those "Hatred is easier than a vague word such as love" photocards. And grief these characters have to go through and how they handle it because this series focuses on how people live on after they experience loss, in their own ways each of these standees represent that grief and the intricacies of their complicated relationships. All of my ships are divorced

I hope the mixed feelings Mizi has for Sua are elaborated on more in the future. Mizi had been almost, if not entirely, dependent on Sua in their time together. Sua was there to fill the gap of loneliness Shine left Mizi with after she was sent to Anakt garden alone. Sua taught her a lot and helped her study. Sua protected Mizi from the world and kept them safe in their bubble. She was someone who Mizi looked up to like her god; her faith in Sua and the love she had for her was like a religion. Sua was always there for her, and Mizi was happy to blindly follow her. And she left Mizi exposed and vulnerable like an abandoned fawn when suddenly, all of that was gone, and Sua was dead.

It would be interesting if it's confirmed that Mizi resented Sua after. In round 5, Luka's relentless taunting caused her to lash out, but Mizi wasn't angry at Luka; that anger, that despair, was her pouring out her feelings toward Sua because of Sua's death. After being taunted with the familiar comfort of Sua's presence, with the fact, that some of the happiness in Sua's smile could have been fake while she was unaware.

The thing is, Mizi and Sua had been the closest to each other for so long, but Mizi had little to no insight into who Sua really was or what she was really thinking. Other than some brief instances where she would perceive Sua, she knew Sua was a little quiet, probably a little gloomy, but didn't second guess her at all, knowing Sua wasn't mean to her. And she trusted in the fact that Sua didn't have bad intentions. Mizi could've never guessed that this would be the result, could never catch onto that emotional distance Sua had intentionally kept between them. When Mizi comes to an understanding that Sua knew what would happen all along. that's where the hurt stems from. Sua's actions, leaving Mizi in the dark and not being truly open, are a part of her coping mechanism/way of protecting herself. Sua wanted to shield Mizi so desperately, to shield her own heart from the fear of living aimlessly and in constant anxiety, that she had been content to die like this, to leave Mizi in this kind of disarray, even when she knew to some degree and was sad that her death could possibly subject Mizi to this kind of suffering, to having come to terms with those complicated feelings and it did crush Mizi as it all went down.

Mizi had the resilience to get back up and keep moving forward without Sua. As much as Mizi adored her, as much as she is making amazing progress in liberating herself from that past, who knows if she's moved from that yet, if she's forgiven Sua yet, the hurt from having been lied to for all that time. The betrayal of that trust Mizi had naively placed onto Sua, as if Mizi never even knew her in the first place. In some artworks, Sua is so distant from Mizi, even though they're always the most intimate, there is a clear disconnect as if Sua is a figment of Mizi's imagination, stagnant in the only way Mizi knew her, and she never changes. And Mizi suffers from the fact that she can't embrace that memory of Sua the way she used to. The standee similarly portrays this; Sua is simply hovering over her and watching in an eerie, enigmatic way. Yet Sua's presence is a comfort Mizi can't let go of even when it hurts that it isn't the same as it used to be. Even when the innocence of their bond is tainted by the understanding Mizi has now, she can't reject her. Mizi is nothing if not completely devoted to Sua, even to the end.

my ivantilll... my curevantill

Ivan and Till's push-pull, hate-love dynamic has been apparent even in childhood, and this standee says a lot about that dynamic, especially regarding round 6 obv. From Till's perspective, Ivan confused him, provoked him a lot, and fought with him a lot, but Ivan was also someone he considered a friend. Someone in his life that he cared about because despite their fighting they also shared quiet moments, Ivan was there for Till when it mattered (for comfort, even), where Till would've otherwise been alone, Ivan was always with him, those were memories Till would cherish even if he didn't show how much he cared to Ivan directly.

His despair going into round 6 wasn't just because of Mizi's disappearance, he hadn't expected he and Ivan would be in a position where they'd have to compete, and faced with the decision of having to either compete to win against his last friend, after losing all will to live, or to forfeit his own life, once he couldn't keep going anymore and stopped singing, Till had the intent to give up. Only for Ivan to make the final decision for him and forfeit his own life in such a brutal way right in front of Till. Even though there is little said about his perspective at the time as of now, To me, it seems like Till wanted to make that choice, but Ivan effectively yanked Till out of his own head to be bombarded with the confusing mix of gentleness and violence as the full force of Ivan's complicated feelings were thrown at him, and then to face the reality that Ivan is dead and he is alone.

Till has been oppressed by the aliens all his life, and he's always fighting them for the right to his agency and freedom. Till's anger comes from Ivan's selfishness in that moment -(How could you do that and just leave me behind? kind of sentiment), the way Ivan took away Till's choice in the situation, the one time he ever willingly withheld Till's freedom was because of an impulsive action that Till can't begin to understand, everything happened too fast, Ivan had no idea what he was doing either and was erratic with it. With that, the questions and the feelings Ivan left him to figure out on his own afterwards were too much for Till to confront after having averted his attention from them for the longest time, that's why the weight of Ivan's feelings, the reality of it all outside of Till's head, metaphorically and quite literally weigh on Till to the point of breaking him.

Ivan's affections and lesser acknowledged feelings for Till clash and often contradict himself. His hold on Till in the standee is gentle and not at all, all at the same time. It's so fascinating to me how it can look like Ivan is trying to be comforting in a very (Ivan-typical) pushy or forceful/hostile manner because he wants to show he cares, however, he has never been the best at expressing himself, and Till is sensitive, but far more prone to avoidance or biting back in response to confronting the vulnerability of his own emotions. Because of this, they misunderstood each other's intentions a lot in the past, and Till doesn't know what went on in Ivan's head when he did what he did, but that confusion scares Till. The way they're positioned with Ivan gripping Till so he's forced to face him and Till being frightened by what he sees, too angry and too shocked to properly express himself, they're two forces pushing and pulling at each other (almost like they're fighting, in my opinion. It's also a show of their complicated dynamic because of their fundamental misunderstanding of each other) Even Ivan's lack of expression to Till's reaction to him is interesting to me. Sure enough, he supports Till while he's collapsing and pushing back, but staring down on him in an odd way (much like that frame from blink gone with his face, it's intimidating and observant), Ivan was unconvinced his actions would impact Till. And now, he doesn't register Till's feelings in the moment. He's under the impression that Till can just "move on" after that, as if forcing Till to live on in his stead would really not shake him, as if all that time they used to spend together realistically could've possibly meant nothing to Till. This standee is so symbolic and just as confusing as them, and Till's waist is mesmerizing (gets shot)

HyuLuka's standee shows their dynamic so well; HyunA is avoidant and not facing Luka. Instead, she faces forward and looks past Luka the same way she does with everything that holds her back. To keep moving forward, she tried suppressing her emotions, avoiding confronting her past. She wants to move on. However, she's standing still and has a hand on Luka's head to silently comfort him (not even gripping his head, just resting her hand there) because, despite all of those years, after being forced to live on in her grief and her suffering, HyunA has grown, but she hadn't truly "moved on" from her past with Hyunwoo or Luka, until she met Mizi. Even though HyunA didn't want to face her past and those repressed emotions before, when she started coming to terms, she couldn't help but reach out like it's instinct, like she did when they were kids. because she can't help but still love and care for him, her revenge, albeit intentionally cruel, is also an example of this.

This also shows another instance of Luka's dependence on her; Luka clings to HyunA like a child, much like he always does. He doesn't acknowledge that HyunA has changed or how his actions could've affected her in childhood. Because he's utterly devoted to her and desperate for the comfort of knowing they are "together" always. Through what little scraps he can get to remind himself of her existence, like with those posters, and so he never grows out of his childish indifference as long as he can continue depending on her

HyunA's revenge is one effective torture method for Luka, because it's reiterated time and time again that she knows who luka is, she knows about all of this and took that comfort away from him in the most brutal way, so Luka can't deny it, because the truth is right in front of him. It's a big question of whether Luka can ever symbolically leave that "bird cage" and learn to live on his own without continuing to use HyunA as his coping mechanism. Depending on what Luka does with those final words she left him with, he can come to an understanding and agree to move forward or continue obsessively clinging to the only comfort he's known for years, just like he is in this standee

I also find it interesting how HyunA's role is set up in depictions like this (and I find that Hyuluka frame from sweet dream to be similar in a way), with the clear leverage she has over Luka, who doesn't care about the danger because he loves her so much more than he cares about himself, (Just like the way he does register the gun pressed to his head in wiege, but still moves towards HyunA) but she never does "kill" him even though she has the knife over his head (or in more symbolic ways, give in to the hatred she wants to feel for him) and she doesn't abandon Luka. Even though she has the choice to do both, she doesn't because she loves him. She can't stand to look at him smile at her cruelty, so she just stares at him with that vacant look that appears sometimes, like in All-in when she's experiencing ptsd and she can't even move until Mizi starts shooting at the robot guards, so she just absently stays. It really speaks to HyunA's nature. She's endlessly compassionate. She doesn't want to stop loving as a human because she can't stop loving.

[stylesispunk]

Blind faith | part iv

priest!Joel miller x nigth club dancer! Reader

masterlist | previous chapter | next chapter

summary: the one where the cardinal comes to visit priest joel due to the whispers around town but he ended up breaking the vows he swore to keep once.

wc: 13,8k

warnings: age gap (joel is in his late 40s and reader late 20s), forbidden relationship, sexism, mysogenya, angst, fluff, SMUT (yes, they're doing it but kinda sloppy though). I remind you all once again, english is not my first language and i'm not the best at writing smut, i'm actually awful. The chapter is kinda rushed at the end.

a/n: hello loves! okay, this is the chapter I was the most excited about. Where the lines are crossed. I know that some people may have thought this story would be about smut and all but i really wanted it to be something beyond that. I know I said you would found some more answers in this chapter, but you will find them in the other or maybe no haha. Okay, I really hope you like it AND PLEASE TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK it's discouraging when you don't receive it. Reblogs and comments are appreciated. 💌

dividers by @/saradika-graphics

Sun blazed your skin first thing in the morning. You could feel it. Eyes barely opening, stirring, and bones aching despite all the sleep. You didn’t register it at first, the warmth irradiating through the windows, the softness of the pillow your cheek rested on, neither the scent of pine and wood enveloping you. You stirred once again, the smell hit you once again as you opened your eyes and took a look of your surroundings. Four walls that seemed foreign,

You stretched, the sheets pooling around your waist as you sat up slowly, taking in the unfamiliar yet comforting space. Joel’s bedroom. The realization sent a flutter through your chest, a warmth that rivaled the sunlight spilling through the curtains.

You glanced down, realizing you were dressed in an old, soft T-shirt, his. A pair of comfortable shorts that definitely weren’t yours. The scent of him clung to the fabric, faint but unmistakable.

Swinging your legs over the side of the bed, you stood up, your muscles still sore in a way that reminded you of last day at the beach with him. You smiled at the now memory you would hold into.

But now, he was gone. Your heart dipped slightly as you padded barefoot out of the bedroom, looking for him. The house was quiet, save for the distant sounds people outside. Your eyes scanned the space until they landed on the kitchen table.

A plate with two pieces of toast, a glass of orange juice, and a small folded note.

You bit your lip, warmth spreading through your chest as you stepped closer, picking up the piece of paper with careful fingers.

Had to step out earlier. Eat something, sweetheart. I’ll be back soon.

Sweetheart.

You exhaled a soft laugh, shaking your head as you pressed the note to your chest for a moment, allowing yourself to feel everything, the giddiness, the comfort, the way Joel, even in his absence, made you feel so seen.

Settling into the chair, you picked up a piece of toast, taking a small bite as you let your eyes linger on the note once more, the warmth in your chest refusing to fade.

Oh, perhaps you were falling in love.

You sighed, setting the note down carefully on the table before finishing your breakfast. The moment felt delicate, something to be tucked away in the quiet corners of your heart.

Once you were done, you made your way back to the bedroom, changing out of Joel’s clothes and slipping into your own. As much as you wanted to stay wrapped in the comfort of his scent, you knew you couldn’t linger here forever.

You ran your fingers through your hair, smoothing out any signs of sleep, and took one last look around the room before stepping toward the door. Just as your fingers brushed the handle, the sound of it unlocking from the outside made you freeze.

Joel stepped inside, his broad frame filling the doorway, the golden morning light casting a glow around him. His eyes immediately found yours, and his lips curved into the softest smile—one that made your stomach flip.

“Leaving already?” he asked, amusement lacing his tone as he took in your dressed form.

You swallowed, gripping the strap of your bag a little tighter. “I didn’t want to overstay.”

Joel’s smile didn’t falter, but there was something unreadable in his expression as he took a slow step closer. “You could never overstay, sweetheart.”

Your breath caught. The way he said it—so easy, so certain—made something bloom inside you, something that had been waiting for the right moment to break free.

“I didn’t know if you’d want me to,” you admitted, voice quieter now.

Joel’s gaze softened.

“Did we-uhm- How I ended up sleeping on your bed?” You asked, a bit shy of his reaction.

“Well, you fell asleep on my couch and I thought I would take you to my bed to sleep more comfortable.” He replied, while moving around the house as if was looking for something.

“Did you sleep with me?” you asked, almost hopefully at the idea of it.  

“No. I took the couch” he said, not even looking at you.

“Oh.” You cough, “Great, thank. I-I I think I should go. Carmen must worry about me.” You said, already walking towards the door.

“Wait!”  You turned into your heels to have a glimpse of him. He stood firmly, stopping what he was doing.  

“You should be careful when you go out. We don’t want people-

“To think you are with the whore’s town. I get it.” You said, disappointed.

Joel’s expression shifted instantly—his brows knitting together, his mouth parting slightly as if the words had physically struck him.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, his voice gentle but firm.

You scoffed, hugging your arms over your chest, the sting of the moment settling deep. “Isn’t it?”

Joel took a step forward, his hands twitching at his sides like he wanted to reach for you but was holding himself back. “No, it isn’t.”

You swallowed, looking away. You hated that your throat was tightening, that your chest ached at the mere thought of what people would say—of what they already did.

“Then what did you mean?” you challenged, meeting his gaze again.

Joel exhaled through his nose, rubbing a hand over his face before finally stepping closer. “I meant that people talk. And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

You stared at him, searching for something in his eyes, something to tell you this wasn’t just guilt talking.

“So, it’s not because you’re ashamed of being seen with me?” Your voice was quieter now, but no less certain.

Joel’s jaw clenched, his fingers curling into fists before he slowly, deliberately, unclenched them. “Never.”

The word sat between you, heavy with meaning.

 “Okay.” You spoke.

Before you could open the door, before you could even turn, Joel grabbed your hand pulling you into an embrace, inhaling deeply as if he was trying to memorize your scent, to hold onto something before it slipped away. His arms wrapped around you, strong and secure, pressing you against his chest.

You froze for a moment, caught off guard by the suddenness of it, but then you melted into him. Your hands found their way to his back, fingers gripping the fabric of his shirt as you let your head rest against his shoulder.

Joel exhaled shakily; his breath warm against your temple. “I’m not ashamed of you,” he murmured, his voice rough, like the words were scraping their way out of him. “I could never,” he paused for a mere second, “You had been the best thing in my life for so long. The best person I’ve ever met.”

Your throat bubbled a little. There were words you want to take away from it, words you need to say out loud, but you were still so afraid of them. To face them, to make Joel regret to even met you in the first place, so you just kept them under your tongue. Secured, so you could still enjoy from the feeling Joel’s touch caused on you.  

You swallowed hard, fingers fisting his shirt a little tighter. “You don’t have to say things just to make me feel better.”

Joel pulled back just enough to look at you, his eyes dark, serious. “Do you think I am lying to you?”

You hesitated. Not because you didn’t believe him, but because you wanted to. Too much.

He sighed, shaking his head before lifting a hand to cradle your cheek. His thumb brushed against your skin, gentle in a way that made your chest ache. “I ain’t ever lied to you, sweetheart.” His voice was quiet, but firm. “And I never will.”

You felt your lips curve into a small, almost shy smile, the weight of his words settling deep in your chest. Your fingers loosened their grip on his shirt, smoothing over the fabric instead. For a moment, you let yourself sink into the warmth of his touch, the way his thumb lingered against your cheek like he wasn’t ready to let go either.

But then, reality crept back in, reminding you of everything waiting outside this little moment, the things neither of you had the courage to say just yet. You exhaled softly, eyes flickering down before meeting his again.

“I have to go now, though.”

Joel’s expression didn’t change, but you felt the way his body tensed slightly, his hand reluctant as it dropped from your face. He gave you a slow nod, his jaw tightening like he was biting back the words he really wanted to say.

“Alright,” he murmured, voice lower now.

You took a step back, putting space between you even though you didn’t want to. Your fingers itched to reach for him again, but you clenched them into fists instead. You turned, hand on the door, when his voice stopped you one last time.

“You’ll come back?”

Your heart squeezed. You shouldn’t. You knew that. But still, you found yourself whispering

“If you want me to.”

The walk back to the house felt longer than usual that you didn’t even notice that some people had noticed you had left the priest’s house wearing the same clothes as the day before. You didn’t notice how whispers begun. Perhaps you acted foolish and naïve or maybe it was the weight of Joel’s words lingering in your chest, or the way your skin still burned where his hands had been. Either way, by the time you reached the house, you had taken a deep breath, steeling yourself before stepping inside.

The smell of fresh coffee and eggs filled the air. Carmen and Billy sat at the small wooden table, their plates half-full, cups of coffee steaming beside them. The moment you stepped through the door, their heads snapped toward you in unison.

“Where the hell were you?” Billy blurted out, fork pausing halfway to his mouth.

Carmen’s eyes narrowed, scanning you up and down. You weren’t disheveled, but something about you must have given you away—maybe the glow on your skin, the way you hesitated for just a second too long before answering.

“I—” You cleared your throat, shifting on your feet. “I just—”

Carmen’s lips parted slightly, her eyes widening like realization had just struck her. “Oh my God.”

Billy looked between the two of you, frowning. “What?”

Carmen’s gaze locked onto yours, a slow smirk creeping onto her face. “You were with him, weren’t you?”

Billy blinked. “With who—? Oh.” His brows shot up, and suddenly, you were being stared at like a mystery waiting to be unraveled.

Your face heated instantly. “It’s not—it’s not what you think.”

Carmen crossed her arms, amused. “Really? Because I think you spent the night at priest’s house.”

Billy choked on his coffee. “Jesus Christ.”

Carmen chuckled “That’s a good expression.”

You groaned, rubbing your hands over your face. “Nothing happened.”

Carmen raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. “Then why do you look like you just spent the night tangled up with him?”

Your heart skipped at the way she phrased it, at the thought of being tangled up with Joel—because the truth was, part of you had wanted that.

Billy groaned. “Carmen, don’t put images in my head, please. He is hot.”

You exhaled, trying to compose yourself. “I just fell asleep there, okay? That’s it.”

Carmen gave you a knowing look, but she didn’t push. Instead, she leaned back in her chair, smirking. “If you say so.”

Billy muttered something under his breath, shaking his head as he stabbed his eggs a little too aggressively.

You sighed, walking toward the counter to pour yourself a cup of coffee, ignoring the way Carmen was still watching you like she knew something you didn’t.

But the truth was, you knew exactly what she was thinking.

And the worst part? She wasn’t wrong.

You were falling in love with Joel.

Billy let out a dramatic sigh, shaking his head before pointing his fork at you. “Okay, look—I’ll admit it. He’s a hot priest. A really hot one.” He jabbed the fork in the air for emphasis. “But, darling… he’s a priest at the end of the day.”

You froze mid-sip of your coffee, your fingers tightening around the cup. Carmen shot Billy a warning look, but he kept going.

“He’s not just some guy you can mess around with,” Billy continued, his voice softer now. “You know what this means for him. For you.”

Your throat tightened. You did know. You had been trying not to think about it, trying to pretend you could just enjoy this feeling—enjoy him—without reality creeping in.

“I’m not messing around,” you said quietly.

Billy exhaled, running a hand through his hair. “I know you’re not. That’s what worries me.”

Carmen reached over, squeezing your hand gently. “Billy’s right, Estrellita. We’re just looking out for you.”

You forced a small smile, but your chest felt heavy. Because no matter how much you wanted to ignore it, they were right.

You were falling in love with a man you could never have.

The bass pulsed beneath your feet, the heat of the lights casting a golden glow over your skin as you moved, slow and deliberate. The music guided you, every roll of your hips, every arch of your back calculated to entrance, to captivate. You had done this a thousand times before—this performance, this dance. But tonight, it felt different.

Because tonight, your eyes kept drifting to the entrance.

You scanned the dimly lit club, searching through the smoke and the sea of faces, hoping—expecting—to see him standing there. Arms crossed, jaw tight, watching you with that barely restrained tension he always carried when he was near you.

But Joel wasn’t there.

Your stomach twisted, disappointment curling in your chest even as you forced yourself to keep moving, to keep dancing. You knew you shouldn’t have expected him. He was a priest, after all. Whatever had happened between you—whatever was happening—wasn’t supposed to. Maybe he had come to his senses. Maybe he had decided to stay away.

Carmen, standing just off the stage, caught your eye as you spun around the pole, her smirk knowing. When your set ended, she was already waiting near the stairs, arms crossed.

“You keep looking for him,” she teased as you slipped past her.

You didn’t bother denying it. Instead, you sighed, grabbing a towel to dab at the sweat on your skin. “He’s not coming.”

Carmen tilted her head. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

You weren’t so sure. Because as much as you told yourself it was better this way, that hollow feeling in your chest refused to fade.

Another day, another night.

And oh, you were already love and it scared you.

Your steps faltered the moment you noticed the crowd outside the church. The murmurs, the whispers—it all crashed into you at once.

Women stood in small clusters, their heads tilted toward one another, their eyes flickering to you before quickly turning away, pretending they hadn’t just been talking about you. Some didn’t even bother to hide it, their lips curled in disgust, their judgment palpable in the air.

You didn’t have to hear their words to know what they were saying.

She was seen leaving his house yesterday morning.

What kind of woman does that?

With a priest, of all people!

And then there were the men, their voices lower but no less cruel.

"She’d give herself to a priest before one of us?"

"Guess she thinks she’s too good for the rest of us."

Your stomach churned. The heat of embarrassment burned your skin, but underneath it was something colder. Anger. These men—these people—had no right to talk about you as if you were some shameful secrets, some object for them to claim.

And then you saw Joel, dressed in black, his collar stark white against the fabric. A reminder of what he was. A reminder of why this was all happening.

But he wasn’t alone.

Beside him stood another man, older, dressed in the same priestly garments. There was an air of authority about him, the way he carried himself, the way others seemed to step aside as he moved.

The Cardinal.

Your breath caught in your throat.

Joel was speaking with him, his expression unreadable, but then, as if he could sense you, his eyes lifted. Met yours. Something flickered in his gaze. Worry. Regret. Guilt. And yet, he didn’t look away.

Your eyes met, and he swallowed as if nervous about your presence. The cardinal followed Joel's gaze to you, and you could sense the suspicion a man with that power held in the church. How, just by looking at you, he could tell you were the problem he'd come here to talk to Joel about. That you were the temptation lurking in the Father's face.

The Cardinal’s gaze was sharp, assessing, stripping you bare in a way that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with judgment. You didn’t shrink under it, even as your heart pounded against your ribs.

He knew.

Even if there had been nothing to confess, even if no one had spoken outright, he knew what the town had already decided: that you were the problem. That you had tainted their priest.

Joel’s jaw clenched. His hands, which had been relaxed at his sides just a moment ago, curled into fists. He looked torn, his body tense as if he were fighting the urge to move toward you—to reach for you.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

The moment stretched, suffocating and endless, until the Cardinal finally turned his attention back to Joel, his expression unreadable but his posture heavy with authority. He said something—too low for you to hear—but Joel’s reaction told you enough. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, his eyes briefly closing as if steadying himself before nodding once.

You didn’t know what had just been decided, but you knew it wasn’t good.

A wave of nausea rolled through you. You weren’t naive enough to think this wouldn’t have consequences. You’d just been hoping—selfishly, foolishly—that they wouldn’t come so soon.

That maybe Joel would have had more time. That you would have had more time.

Joel turned away first, back to the Cardinal, his expression carefully schooled into something unreadable. And with that single movement, it was as if a wall had been put between you.

As if he had made a choice. And it wasn’t you.

You barely made it to the bench before your knees gave out beneath you. Sitting down, you folded in on yourself, hands clenched together in your lap, fingers twisting at the fabric of your skirt. The nausea churned in your stomach, rising in your throat, but you swallowed it down, refusing to let it win.

But God, seeing Joel from afar—seeing him look right through you—felt like someone had reached into your chest and ripped something vital from you. It was a different kind of pain, a sharp, splintering ache that settled deep in your ribs, making it hard to breathe.

You barely noticed the woman sitting beside you until she let out a soft sigh.

"Poor thing."

You stiffened immediately, shoulders tensing as you turned your head, ready to snap at whoever had dared to sit so close, to offer their pity like a gift you had no intention of accepting.

But the woman beside you wasn’t sneering. She wasn’t whispering cruel words behind a fake smile. She was just looking at you. Softly. Kindly.

Mrs. Langdon.

You recognized her from the market, from the church gatherings. She was older, with graying hair pinned into a neat bun and warm, wise eyes that held something you weren’t used to seeing from anyone in this town.

Not judgment. Not malice. Just understanding.

Still, you bristled, wrapping your arms around yourself. “If you’re here to tell me I should –”

“Oh, hush.” She waved a hand, dismissing your words like they were nothing more than an annoying fly. “You think I don’t know what small towns are like? People always looking for someone to talk about, someone to cast stones at. You just happen to be their favorite target right now.”

You frowned, glancing at her warily. “And you don’t agree with them?”

Mrs. Langdon let out a dry chuckle. “I would rather die than agree with these people. They haven’t seen the world outside this place, that’s what they are like this.”  

You blinked at Mrs. Langdon, her words striking you like a sharp gust of wind. You’d always assumed that the people in this town—the ones gossiping behind their hands, the ones judging every move you made—were simply following some unspoken code of right and wrong, of tradition. It had never occurred to you that someone might look at them and see what they were: trapped.

“See the world outside?” you repeated, still a little skeptical, as your eyes darted back to Joel. He hadn’t looked at you again since that brief glance earlier, and now, with the Cardinal standing beside him, it felt as if the distance between you had grown tenfold.

“Yes,” Mrs. Langdon continued, her voice soft but firm. “You’d be surprised how small their world is, how tightly they hold onto their little rules, because it’s all they know. But people like you,” she turned her gaze to you then, her eyes softening with a tenderness that made your heart ache, “people like you are the ones who see beyond. You’re the ones with the courage to live.”

You swallowed, trying to hold back the sudden rush of emotion that threatened to break through. She didn’t know the half of it—how terrified you were, how unsure you felt. You had no idea what it meant to be with Joel, to stand by him in a world that was determined to tear him down.

“And do you think I’m doing the right thing?” you asked quietly, unable to stop the words from leaving your lips.

Mrs. Langdon studied you for a moment before she answered, her voice thoughtful. “I think you’re doing what your heart tells you to do. And that’s all anyone can ever do, in the end.”

You looked at her, her words settling over you like a soft blanket. “Thank you.” You smiled, “You are the first person who had been kind to me here.”

Mrs. Langdon’s smile deepened, her eyes kind and warm. "Well, I'm glad to be the first, but I won't be the last," she said, her tone both gentle and reassuring. "There are people here who might not say it, but they understand more than you'd think. You just have to find the ones who can see beyond the surface."

You nodded, the weight on your chest lifting just a little. It felt like a small crack in the wall that had been built around you since arriving in this town, a small sliver of hope that maybe, just maybe, there was room for you here too.

"You know," she continued, her voice dropping a little lower, "I’ve seen the way you look at father Joel.”

You froze, her words catching you off guard. Mrs. Langdon studied you carefully, her gaze soft but knowing.

Those aren't just any eyes, sweetheart. Those are eyes of love."

You felt your heart tighten, but it wasn’t from shame. It was something deeper, a recognition of truth you hadn’t wanted to fully admit to yourself.

"I don't know what you're talking about," you whispered, not meeting her gaze.

Mrs. Langdon didn’t push, but her expression softened with understanding. "You don’t have to say it out loud. I can see it. And Joel, well, he sees it too. He has the same eyes for you. He knows all your secrets, everything you're afraid of, everything you're hiding. That man has a heart, just like you."

You swallowed hard, trying to keep the wave of emotions from taking over. But the thought of Joel knowing you so completely, knowing all your fears and all the love you tried to bury, made something inside you break somehow.

"He deserves more than this," Mrs. Langdon continued, her voice quieter now, filled with a gentle sadness. "He deserves a life where you don’t have to hide, a life where he can live freely. But the church, it’s... it’s not that kind of place.”  

You fidgeted with your fingers trying to process her words. It was the truth, wasn’t it? Joel was bound by something, by vows, by his position, by the very fabric of who he was. And as much as you wanted to fight it, as much as you wanted to believe you could carve out a space for yourself in his life, there was no escaping it.

"I want him to be happy," you murmured, your voice raw. "I want him to have everything he deserves."

"Then don’t let the priesthood take it from him," Mrs. Langdon said firmly, her tone softening as she placed a hand on your shoulder. "Don’t let him carry that burden alone if it means losing what he could have with you. If you love him, let him have the life he deserves. Let him choose."

Tears threatened to spill, but you held them back, blinking hard to keep them at bay. Her words were like a knife, cutting through the walls you’d built, exposing the truth you had been trying to ignore.

“I don’t know if I can be the one to take that choice from him,” you whispered, more to yourself than to Mrs. Langdon.

"Sometimes," she said quietly, "love isn't about what we want. It’s about what the other person needs to be free. Let him find his freedom, and in turn, let yourself find yours."

You met her eyes then, and for the first time since you’d gotten to this town, you felt a sense of clarity. It wasn’t going to be easy. There would be pain. But maybe, just maybe, love was more than staying in one place. Maybe it was about letting go when the time came.

"Thank you," you whispered, wiping the tears that you hadn’t even realized had fallen.

Mrs. Langdon's smile remained warm, a touch of kindness in her eyes as she spoke. "You should come have tea with me this afternoon. It's just my husband and I, nothing fancy, but it would be nice to have some company. Father Joel comes over for dinner every Thursday, so we aren't lonely," she said with a gentle chuckle, her voice carrying no trace of judgment, only genuine invitation.

You found yourself surprised by the offer, the warmth of it sinking deep into your chest. "I would love to," you responded, your voice a bit lighter than before, the weight of the conversation easing just a little.

Mrs. Langdon nodded, the corners of her eyes crinkling in a smile. "My house is the blue one, close to that club you work at. You can't miss it," she added, her tone still kind and welcoming. Not judgment, just kindness.

You smiled at her, feeling something like hope flicker in your chest. It was a small gesture, but it felt like the beginning of something you hadn’t expected—something that might help you get through the turmoil of everything you were feeling.

"Thank you," you said quietly, a genuine smile pulling at the corners of your lips. "I’ll see you this afternoon."

With that, Mrs. Langdon gave you a nod and stood, her presence as comforting as it had been when she first sat beside you. As you watched her walk away, you realized that even in a town that had felt so cold, there were still people like her who could offer warmth. And for once, it made you feel like you weren’t so alone.

The afternoon passed in a haze of quiet reflection. You found yourself walking towards Mrs. Langdon’s blue house, the small but charming building tucked just behind the club where you worked. The sun was starting to dip, casting soft shadows across the street. As you approached her home, a sense of calm you hadn’t known you needed settled over you.

Mrs. Langdon greeted you at the door, her warm smile a welcome you couldn’t help but return. “Come in, dear,” she said kindly, ushering you into the cozy space.

The smell of fresh tea lingered in the air, and there was an immediate feeling of peace in her home. You stepped inside, taking in the simple but inviting interior. Her husband was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book. He offered you a quiet, polite smile.

"Come, sit with us," Mrs. Langdon said, pulling up an extra chair beside her. As you sat down, she poured you a cup of tea, her movements deliberate, soothing.

You were starting to feel at ease when the door opened, and you heard a familiar voice.

"Evening, Mrs. Langdon."

You froze for a moment, heart leaping into your throat as you turned to see none other than Joel stepping inside, a small bag of groceries in hand.

His gaze caught yours almost immediately, and for a split second, the world around you seemed to stop. You felt his presence as though it were a physical thing, pulling you in like gravity.

Joel paused in the doorway, his expression unreadable, his eyes locking with yours. He had clearly not expected to see you here.

Mrs. Langdon smiled brightly, oblivious to the tension in the air. “Father Joel, perfect timing! I was just about to serve tea. Come, join us.”

Joel looked between you and her, his eyes narrowing just slightly as if caught between two worlds. He set the bag down carefully on the counter and nodded, stepping further into the room.

"Good evening," he said quietly, his voice low. He hesitated for just a moment before sitting down, across from you, at the small table.

The silence between you two was palpable, charged with everything that had been left unsaid. Mrs. Langdon filled the silence with easy conversation, talking about the weather, the garden, her husband's new book—anything to keep things light. But you could feel the heaviness between you and Joel, the weight of unspoken words hanging between you like a storm cloud.

You glanced at him once, your heart fluttering despite the tension. His face was a mask of calm, but you could see the flicker of something else behind his eyes—something too familiar, too intense to ignore.

And just like that, you were back in the world you’d tried to escape. Joel. The priest.

Not Joel the mand you loved.

Joel’s voice was steady but laced with tension as he continued to explain to Mrs. Langdon and her husband about the Cardinal’s visit. “So basically, he came here today to check on some matters, to discuss... some things. I’m sure you both understand the pressure, and I had to reassure him that nothing inappropriate was happening. But I’m not sure he believed me,” he added, his voice growing more frustrated.

Mrs. Langdon nodded sympathetically, her eyes flicking to you, but she said nothing, allowing Joel to speak. Her husband, who had been quietly listening, gave a small nod as well, but his expression remained neutral.

“I bet those ladies were bothering him with stuff. Always snitching.” She said because she knew perfectly well the reason why the cardinal had come was because of them.

Joel’s words kept going, but you were hardly listening anymore. The room felt suddenly small; the air too thick with unspoken tension. You could feel the weight of the conversation hanging around you, pressing down on your chest. It felt suffocating, like there was no air left for you to breathe.

The mention of the Cardinal, of everything that was happening, made your stomach churn, but it wasn’t just the situation that hurt. It was the realization that Joel was caught in something much larger than the two of you—something that neither of you had any control over. His gaze kept flicking toward you, but you couldn’t bring yourself to meet it.

Your breath hitched, and you pushed your chair back slightly, rising from the table. “Excuse me,” you murmured, barely louder than a whisper, “Mrs. Langdon, may I use your bathroom?”

Joel paused mid-sentence, clearly caught off guard by your request. He looked at you, his eyes searching your face as if trying to understand what was happening, but you avoided his gaze, feeling a wave of shame and confusion wash over you.

Mrs. Langdon, smiled warmly. "Of course, dear. Joel, could you show her where the bathroom is?" she asked, her tone light and unbothered, as if she hadn’t noticed the tension that had settled in the air.

Joel nodded slowly, standing up from his chair. “Sure,” he said, his voice a little quieter now, his gaze lingering on you for a second too long before he turned toward the hallway.

You stood up as well, trying to gather the fragments of your composure. You forced a smile in Mrs. Langdon’s direction, but it felt weak.

The walk down the hallway felt painfully long. Every step you took seemed suffocating and small, the weight of everything pressing down on you more with each passing second.

When you reached the bathroom, Joel hesitated for a moment, his hand on the door. He seemed torn, unsure of whether to say something or just let you go inside. Finally, he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper.

“You’re avoiding me” he said, the words catching in his throat.

You paused, your heart pounding in your chest. His words hung in the air like a heavy fog, and you couldn’t help but feel the truth in them, even if you didn’t want to admit it. You opened your mouth to respond, but no words came out at first. You could feel the heat of your skin, the tension in your shoulders, all the emotions swirling inside you in a chaotic mess.

“I’m not avoiding you,” you finally whispered, your voice barely audible, a lie you weren’t even sure you believed yourself.

Joel didn’t move, didn’t say anything for a moment, his eyes searching your face, waiting for you to look at him. But you couldn’t. You couldn’t face him right now, not with everything hanging in the air, not with the way things were unraveling. The guilt, the confusion, everything crashing together.

And then, before you could step further into the bathroom, Joel did something you didn’t expect. He stepped in after you, closing the door behind him with a soft click, and suddenly, the small space felt even smaller. The air thickened, and you could feel the weight of his presence just inches away from you.

He didn’t speak immediately, but the look in his eyes was enough. The way he watched you, not with anger, but with understanding. And maybe a bit of frustration, as if he couldn’t figure out what was keeping you from him, what was stopping you from just being closer to him.

You took a deep breath, trying to steady yourself, your hands shaking slightly. “You shouldn’t be here, Joel,” you said, your voice trembling now, though you tried to keep it firm.

“I know,” he replied, his voice low, almost as if he was sharing a secret. “But I am.” His eyes softened for a moment, as if he was seeing right through you, to the parts of you that were breaking but too afraid to show it. “You can’t keep pushing me away.”

You stayed still, hoping, praying, he would just walk away and make all of this easier for the both of you.

“I know what you are thinking,” his voice was quiet, but there was something raw in it. Something pleading as if he was on his knees waiting for you to take him.

You squeezed your eyes shut, willing yourself to stay strong.

“Please talk to me” he murmured, and the way his voice cracked shattered you.

You exhaled shakily closing and opening your eyes as he still stood there.

You swallowed hard, gripping the doorframe for support. “You know what is the right thing to do. We can’t see each other anymore.”

Joel’s jaw clenched, and he took a step closer. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

You shook your head, voice trembling. “I don’t want you to lose everything you had built because of me, Joel.”

His expression softened, and he lifted a hand as if to touch you but stopped himself. “You’re not something I should have to lose too.”

The words sent a fresh wave of emotion crashing over you, and you turned away, trying to steady yourself. “You made a promise—to God, to yourself. And I—” Your breath hitched. “I know love you too much to be the reason you break it.”

Silence. Heavy, aching silence. Your eyes widened the moment you realized the words that had slipped out from your lips.

When you finally turned back, you found Joel staring at you, stunned. His lips parted slightly, like he wasn’t sure he’d heard you right.

“What?” His voice was barely a whisper.

Tears welled in your eyes. “I love you, Joel.” You gasped for air, “I am in love with you.”

The words hung between you, fragile yet powerful. His hands clenched at his sides fidgeting his clothes as if he were physically holding himself back. You could see it in his eyes—the war raging inside him.

Finally, he exhaled a shaky breath. “Say it again.” He stepped impossibly closer, “Say those six words again.”

You hesitated, your heart pounding. “Joel—”

“Please,” he cut in, his voice rough. “Just one more time.”

Your lip trembled, and this time, you let the words pour out, raw and unfiltered. “I am in love with you.”

His breath hitched, and before you could react, he closed the space built between you, his hands framing your face, destroying the walls you had been trying to build between the both of you. His lips crash onto yours in a kiss so desperate, so full of longing and yearning, it stole the breath from your lungs.

He wasn’t careful or hesitant, he was just simply pouring all the feelings he had kept under all the keys, on your lips. Everything you had denied yourselves. And in that moment, nothing else mattered because what was happening was an act of love, a pure feeling. There was nothing wrong with it.

Joel’s kiss was all-consuming, desperate, like a man grasping at something slipping through his fingers. His hands trembled where they held your face, thumbs brushing away the tears that had escaped down your cheeks.

You clung to him, your fingers curling in his hair, as if anchoring yourself to this moment, to him. You could feel the weight of it, the war he was fighting within himself, the battle between faith and love, between what he had vowed and what his heart was screaming for.

But right now, he wasn’t Father Joel. He was just Joel.

Yours.

Your Joel.

The man you were in love with.

A man devoted to you.

He pulled away, just enough to rest his forehead against yours, his breath shaky and uneven. His hands slid down to your shoulders, then your arms, as if memorizing the feel of you.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” he murmured, his voice thick with emotion, holding back his smile.

Your heart ached at the conflict in his eyes. “But it’s the truth.”

Joel let out a ragged breath, his grip tightening as if he was afraid to let go. “You don’t know what you’re doing to me, baby.”

Your fingers brushed over his jaw, feeling the tension there. “Loving you is so easy, Joel.” you whispered, biting your lips in a small effort to suppress the smile.

He kissed you again. Slower this time, deeper. It was full of longing; of everything he had tried to bury but couldn’t anymore. When he pulled back, his eyes searched yours, as if looking for an answer he hadn’t yet found in himself.

“I’m in love with you, too. God, you’re so—”

“So what?” you asked.

“Perfect. Made for me.” He replied.

“No, I’m not.” you said, knowing the secrets you still held back, caged inside the pain of your heart.

“To my eyes, you’re.” He said, caressing your face with his thumbs.

You looked so beautiful to him, under his stare that he was afraid that from now on he would love you forever. Like he was ready to be devasted by you and concept of love all over again just to be able to taste your lips and to caress your face with his palms that on your cheeks seemed innocent.  

You swallowed hard, feeling this situation pressing down on your chest. Your hands, still trembling found their way to his wrists, holding onto him like he was the only one who could keep you steady in a world that suddenly felt falling into pieces.

Your voice was barely above a whisper when you finally asked, “What comes now?”

Joel's breath hitched, his grip on you tightening like he was afraid you would regret this and shatter his heart in the process. His eyes seemed darker, searching yours as if trying to find the answer himself. He exhaled shakily, his forehead still resting against yours. “I have no idea.”

The honesty in his words made your heart ache. This wasn’t simple. This wasn’t easy. Love never was—especially not yours. But the way he looked at you, the way he held you, like you were something sacred, made you want to believe that somehow, you could figure it out together.

His fingers traced slow, gentle circles on your arms, like he was memorizing the shape of you, the texture of your skin, the feel of you, in case this was the last time he would ever get to hold you like this. "I should say we stop now, that we walk away before it’s too late." His voice was rough, strained. "But I don’t think I can. I don’t want to."

Your heart pounded, “Joel…”

He shook his head, a small, breathless laugh escaping his lips. "I spent so long fighting this—fighting you, since the first night I saw sleeping on the bench because I thought it was the right thing to do. But tell me, baby... If this is so wrong, why does it feel like the only thing that’s ever-made sense to me in so long?"

Your lips parted, but no words came out. Because he was right. Because the truth was, no matter how much you had tried to convince yourself otherwise, being in his arms felt like the only place you were ever meant to be.

"What do we do?" you whispered, your fingers tightening around his wrists. "How do we do this?"

Joel exhaled, leaning in, his nose brushing against yours. “I’d say…one step at time.”

You closed your eyes at the tenderness in his voice. "And if we fall?"

His lips barely ghosted over yours before he whispered, "Then we fall together."

And a small chuckle escaped from your lips.

The days passed in a torturous slow blur for the both of you. The pressure of your secret affair pressed down on you, each stolen glance between you and Joel carrying a longing that never faded, only deepened and strangled your hearts. The Cardinal was still in town, his presence looming over everything like a shadow, forcing Joel to keep his distance, to maintain the image of who he was supposed to be.

But even in the smallest moments, you could feel him.

You’d catch his eyes from across the street, hungry and kind flickering over you like he wanted to memorize every detail before looking away. You’d see the way his hands clenched at his sides when you walked past him after service, as if he was holding himself back from reaching for you. And sometimes, late at night, you swore you could still feel the ghost of his touch, his lips, the way he whispered your name like a prayer in that small, stolen moment in the bathroom.

And then, one afternoon, fate offered you mercy. You were passing by the church, the sky grey with a warning of a heavy rain, when you saw him. Alone.

Joel stood at the church steps, his broad frame leaning against the doorway, his expression tense, lost in thought. But the second his eyes landed on you, something in him changed. His shoulders straightened, his jaw clenched, and for the first time in days, you saw it, that deep, burning desperation.

He walked inside the church, you followed him and before you could even react or take a breath, his hands were on your face, rough and warm, pulling you in before his lips crashed onto yours.

The kiss was feverish, urgent. A moment of recklessness after days of restraint. You clung to him, your fingers digging into the fabric of his cassock, needing to hold onto him just as desperately as he held onto you. The world around you blurred, melted into nothing, because nothing mattered but the feeling of his mouth on yours, the heat of him searing into your skin.

But then footsteps interrupted the moment.

Joel pulled away instantly, his breath ragged, his hands dropping from your face as if burned. You barely had a second to process before a voice, rough and commanding ranging behind him.

“Father Miller.”

You turned sharply to see him. The Cardinal.

His piercing gaze flicked between you and Joel, unreadable but heavy with something cold. Suspicion, maybe.

He wasn’t naïve.

Joel, didn’t hesitate changing his posture, “Your Eminence,” he greeted smoothly, stepping back just enough to put distance between you. His voice was steady, composed, but you could still hear the slight strain in it.

The Cardinal’s sharp eyes settled on you. “And who is lady here?”

Joel straightened; his expression carefully neutral. “This is—” He hesitated for only a fraction of a second before continuing, “She’s new in town. I’ve been offering some guidance.”

The way he said it, as if you were nothing more than another wandering soul seeking his help, sent a sharp pang through you. You understood why he said it. Knew that he had to. But it still stung.

The Cardinal’s eyes swept over you, assessing, unimpressed. “Is that so?” His lips curled into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Well, let us hope you are a good influence, rather than a distraction for the father, here.”

You swallowed hard, the weight of his words settling over you like ice. Joel’s hands clenched at his sides, his jaw tightening, but he said nothing.

The Cardinal barely spared you another glance before turning back to Joel. “I need to speak with you. Now.”

Joel hesitated, his eyes flickering to you for the briefest second before nodding. “Of course.”

And just like that, the moment was gone. You stood there, heart still racing, watching as Joel followed the Cardinal back into the church. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t.

You still were a forbidden fruit to him.

You sat by the mirror in the dressing room, running a fingertip over the rim of your glass, lost in thought. Your reflection stared back at you, lips slightly parted, skin still warm from the memory of Joel’s touch. You could still feel the ghost of his lips against yours, the way he had held you so tightly, like he was afraid you’d slip through his fingers if he let go.

You wanted him. All of him. You wanted his arms around you all the time because he felt like home, a place you missed.

“Earth to troublemaker.”

A familiar voice snapped you from your thoughts, and you turned to see Billy leaning against the doorway, arms crossed. His sharp eyes flicked over you, picking up on every little detail—the way you were sitting too still, the way your mind was somewhere else.

“You look like a woman with a big secret to share,” he said, a smirk tugging at his lips.

Before you could answer, Carmen appeared behind him, slipping into the room with a bottle in her hand. “She doesn’t just look like one,” she teased, raising a brow. “She is one.”

You huffed, shaking your head as they both settled in beside you. Carmen poured herself a drink before nudging your knee with hers. “So, are you gonna tell us, or are we gonna have to guess?”

You hesitated for a moment, rolling your lip between your teeth. But you knew there was no point in keeping it from them. Not from them.

They were your friends and your family here.

Finally, you exhaled, your voice barely above a whisper.

“I kissed him.” You confessed, “Well, he did.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Billy grinned, shaking his head. “I knew it.”

Carmen, on the other hand, simply gave you a knowing look, sipping her drink. “About damn time.”

You blinked. “That’s it? No lecture?”

“Oh, I’ll get to that,” she said, smirking. “But first, tell me everything.”

Billy leaned in, grinning. “Yeah, don’t leave out any of the good parts.”

And so, you told them. About the way Joel had kissed you like he was starving for it. The way he wanted to fall if it means you would be discovered, but at the same time you felt guilty about the consequences of this illicit affair between the both of you.

Carmen swirled the drink in her glass, watching you carefully. “So, he wants to fall,” she mused. “But you’re afraid of what happens when he does.”

You exhaled, pressing your fingertips to your temple. “It’s not just that. I—” You hesitated, feeling the weight of your own thoughts. “It’s selfish, isn’t it? I want him. God, I want him. But I know what this could mean for him. For both of us.”

Billy scoffed. “Sweetheart, do you really think he doesn’t already know that?”

You looked up at him.

“He’s a grown man,” he continued. “Older than you, he knows damn well what he is getting into.”

Carmen nodded in agreement. “Billy’s right. If Joel kissed you—if he’s looking at you the way you say he does, then he’s already made his choice. The question is—” she leaned in slightly, her gaze searching yours— “have you?”

Your breath caught in your throat.

Had you?

Your heart had already chosen. But your mind, the part of you that still clung to reason, still feared what this could cost.

Billy clicked his tongue. “See? You’re overthinking.”

“You should be thinking,” Carmen corrected him, before looking back at you. She squeezed your hand, her voice softer now. “You love him.”

The words settled in the air between you all.

And though you didn’t say it out loud, the answer was there, in the way your heart pounded at the thought of him.

Yes, you loved him.

But you didn’t want to hurt him.

Carmen exchanged a glance with Billy before turning back to you. “Hey, hey,” she murmured, reaching out to gently pry your hands from your head. “Take a breath, sweetheart.”

Billy let out a sigh, pushing himself up from his seat. “Alright. You’re not dancing tonight.” He didn’t say it as a question, just a fact.

You shook your head, your chest tight. “I just—I can’t.”

Carmen gave your hand a reassuring squeeze. “That’s fine. You don’t have to.”

The weight of it all pressed down on you—Joel, the secrecy, the risk, the way your heart ached just thinking about him. And now, after speaking it out loud, after admitting it to them, it felt even heavier.

Billy clapped his hands together. “Alright. I’ll let the rest know. You just sit here and—” He waved a hand at you. “I don’t know. Breathe.”

You let out a weak laugh, despite yourself.

Carmen brushed a piece of hair from your face. “Do you want to go home?”

You thought about it. The idea of lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, letting your thoughts swallow you whole.

You sighed, rubbing your temples before finally nodding. “Yeah. I think I just need to be alone for a bit.”

Carmen hesitated, her eyes scanning your face like she was trying to read between the lines. But she didn’t push. Instead, she gave your hand one last squeeze. “Alright. But be careful, okay?”

Billy scoffed. “Like she doesn’t already know that.”

You mustered a small smile before standing up, smoothing down your dress. The club was still buzzing with life around you—music, laughter, cigarette smoke curling in the air—but you felt like you were somewhere else entirely.

You stepped outside, the cool night air hitting your skin as you started down the dimly lit street. The quiet was welcome, a stark contrast to the noise still pulsing inside the club.

But after a few blocks, a strange feeling settled in your chest.

Like you weren’t alone.

Your steps slowed. You glanced over your shoulder, but the street behind you was empty. Just the faint glow of streetlamps and the distant murmur of the city.

Get a grip, you told yourself, shaking your head. You were just tired. Your mind playing tricks on you, tangled up in guilt and longing.

Still, your heart pounded a little harder as you picked up your pace, heading straight for home.

The memories came in waves, brushing against the edges of your mind like a heartbreak song you once loved but hadn’t heard in years.

You remembered the warmth of his hands, the way they fit so easily around yours. The way he used to trace idle patterns against your skin when he thought you weren’t paying attention. The way he laughed—really laughed—like it was something only you could pull from him.

There were quiet mornings, sunlight spilling through lace curtains, and his voice, thick with sleep, murmuring your name with tenderness. There were stolen glances across crowded rooms, Nights spent whispering about nothing and everything, your bodies tangled, your hearts so close you could swear they beat in time.

And then, something shifted. The warmth cooled. The sweetness turned sharp.

The same hands that once held you so carefully became distant; caught in something you couldn’t quite reach. His laughter turned into a cruel smirk; his words turned heavier. Daggers reaching for you. And then, one day, you looked at him and saw not the man you had come closed to love but the thing standing between you and everything you were meant to be.

Now, the memories came differently. Not like a song, but like an echo. Distant, blurred at the edges. A reminder of something you had once cherished. And something you now wished to forget forever because it took everything you know because of it.

You moved through the quiet of the house, the fabric of your nightgown felt tight against your skin. The night air was cooler than other days, slipping through the open window, but it wasn’t enough to calm the thoughts spinning in your mind.

You had tried to push them away, tried to bury them beneath exhaustion, but sleep refused to come.

And then—a knock at the door. Soft, but insistent.

You sighed, running a hand through your hair. Billy. It had to be. Checking in on you, making sure you hadn’t collapsed into some pit of regret. You pulled the door open, already preparing a reassurance.

But the words died on your lips.

It wasn’t Billy.

It was Joel.

His presence filled the doorway, broad shoulders casting shadows against the dim glow of the hallway. His hair was tousled, his lips parted slightly like he had been running, or like he had been thinking too much and drinking too little.

But it was his eyes that held you in place.

Soft brown with a lopsided smile, kind to you.

“Joel—” you started, but you didn’t know what to say.

He stepped forward, just enough that you could feel the warmth of him. His gaze flickered over you, over your bare arms, the delicate slip of your nightgown, the soft rise and fall of your breath.

His voice was low when he spoke. Rough.

“Can I come in?”

"Joel," you repeated, his name barely a breath on your lips.

He swallowed hard, his gaze tracing your face like he was trying to memorize it. Like he had missed you more than he was willing to admit. "I know I shouldn't be here," he murmured, voice rough with something unspoken. "But I had to see you."

Your fingers curled around the edge of the door. He was waiting for you to say yes, for you to tell him to leave, for anything.

But you couldn’t turn him away. Stepping aside, you nodded. "Come in."

Joel exhaled, almost like he had been holding his breath, and stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him, enclosing you both inside the four walls hiding a secret.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. You just looked at each other, the space between you charged with all the things left unsaid.

Then, slowly, he reached for you.

His hand traced a featherlight path down your arm, fingers brushing against your wrist, like he was grounding himself in your touch. His hands were always so warm, so steady. You had missed them.

“You’re tired,” he murmured, eyes softening as he took in your face.

You let out a small laugh, shaking your head. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Joel hummed, his thumb rubbing soothing circles against your skin. "Me neither."

You should have been nervous. This was dangerous. But as he pulled you close, pressing a tender kiss to your forehead, all you felt was safe.

"Let me stay," he whispered against your skin. "Just for a little while."

You nodded, the simple gesture carrying so much weight between you both. Joel’s lips remained pressed against your forehead, his warmth seeping into you as if he was anchoring you to this moment, to him. You closed your eyes, letting the world fall away, just for a while.

Then, slowly, as if unsure of his own movements, his lips moved, gently brushing over your cheek. The softest touch, but it sent a shiver through you. His breath was warm on your skin, and you could feel the subtle tremor in his movements, as though he was trying to be careful with you, as if you were something pure and precious, he didn’t want to break.

He kissed your other cheek, lingering for a heartbeat longer than necessary. The space between you both felt charged, heavy with everything unsaid, but also full of something more—something you both craved but had kept at bay for so long.

Then, his lips found yours. No rush, no urgency. Just a quiet, tender kiss that felt like coming home after a long time apart. His lips moved over yours softly, exploring, as if he had all the time in the world to savor the moment. And you let him. You let him in, even if it was only for a little while.

When he pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against yours, you were both breathless, eyes still closed. The world outside felt distant, and the only thing that mattered was the steady beat of his heart against yours.

"I’ve missed you," Joel whispered, his voice thick with something deeper thana simple desire. It was raw, unguarded. A confession you both needed but were afraid to admit.

You swallowed hard, not trusting your voice. Your chest felt tight, but in a good way, like a promise. The weight of the past, the secrecy, all of it felt momentarily lighter.

"The cardinal left this afternoon” he murmured, as his fingers ghosted over your waist, holding you like he was afraid you might disappear from his fingertips.

Your breath hitched. That meant there was no more need for stolen glances, no more pretending not to see each other. But it also meant the weight of reality would settle in soon.

Your hands found their way to his chest, feeling the steady thrum of his heartbeat beneath your fingertips. "So, we don’t have to hide that much anymore," you whispered, though something in your voice made it sound like a question.

Joel exhaled sharply, his grip on you tightening for a moment. "Not as much," he admitted, his thumb brushing idly against your hip. "But it doesn’t mean it gets any easier."

You knew that. You both did.

His eyes searched yours in the dim light, a quiet storm brewing in their depths. "Tell me what you want," he murmured, his voice low, rough, like he was bracing himself for the answer.

You hesitated, not because you didn’t know, but because saying it out loud would make it real.

But when you looked at him—at the man who had kissed you like a prayer, who had whispered your name like it was something sacred—you knew there was only one truth.

"I want you, Joel," you breathed.

Joel didn’t wait. The second the words left your lips; his mouth was on yours.

This kiss was different. It wasn’t just longing, wasn’t just stolen moments in the shadows. It was something deeper, something that carried the weight of every glance, every touch, every unsaid thing between you. It was burning, you felt it on your lips, ablaze when they crushed together.

His hands framed your face, thumbs brushing over your cheeks as he kissed you like he never wanted to stop. Like he had been waiting for you his whole life.

You melted into him, your hands fisting the fabric of his shirt as he pressed you closer. His lips moved with a slow, deliberate tenderness, drawing you in, pulling you under. You parted your lips, allowing your tongues to intertwine with such a fervor it made you weak.

When he pulled away, just enough to let you breathe, he didn’t go far. His forehead rested against yours, his breath warm against your lips.

“You have no idea what you do to me,” he murmured, his voice wrecked, thick with emotion.

You smiled, brushing your fingers over his jaw, feeling the way it throbbed beneath your touch. “I think I do.”

Joel let out a low, rough chuckle, shaking his head. “Not even close, baby.”

He searched your face, as if giving himself one last chance to step away, to be the better man. But when he saw the way you looked at him—soft, certain, full of something that made his heart ache—he knew he was lost.

His lips crashed into yours again, and this time, there was no hesitation, no second-guessing. His hands tangled in your hair, pulling you impossibly close, like he was afraid you’d disappear if he let go. He kissed you like a man starved, like he had been waiting for this, for you, for longer than he was willing to admit.

You pressed against him, your fingers curling into his shirt, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath the fabric. The heat between you was undeniable, the space that once existed now erased completely.

His hands roamed over your back, to the curve of your ass, slow but firm, memorizing the shape of you. He pulled away only long enough to rest his forehead against yours, his breaths heavy and uneven. A groan rumbled from his chest, his hands gripping your waist, anchoring you to him.

Joel guided you backward slowly, his hands steady but desperate, like he was afraid to let go even for a second. The world outside, the consequences, the things he’d wrestled with for so long, they all faded, drowned out by the sound of your breath mingling with his, the warmth of your body against him.

He didn’t just kiss you. He poured everything into it, every stolen glance, every unspoken word, every moment of restraint that now felt pointless. His fingers traced your jaw, then down your neck, reverent, like he was memorizing the feel of you beneath his hands.

When your back met the edge of the couch, you gasped, and Joel took the opportunity to trail kisses down your throat, his lips slow, deliberate, savoring every inch of you. His name left your lips in a whisper, barely there, but he heard it, God, he felt it.

His hands settled at your waist, gripping just enough to make your skin burn under his touch. He pulled back for a moment, just enough to look at you, his chest rising and falling as if he was barely keeping himself together.

“We don’t have to,” he murmured, his thumb brushing along your cheek. “Tell me to stop, and I will.”

But you didn’t. Instead, you reached for him, fingers slipping into his hair, guiding him back to you.

“Please,” you breathed, lips brushing his, “don’t stop.”

And just like that, he was gone, lost in you, in the way you fit so perfectly against him, in the way you sighed against his lips.

For once in his life, Joel Miller let himself have something good. And that something was you.

Joel’s restraint unraveled with every kiss, every sigh, every way your body pressed into his. His hands roamed, exploring like he was trying to commit every inch of you to memory, like he needed to know you this way, to feel you this close.

He lifted you slightly, his strong arms guiding you onto his lap, and you let him, melting into the warmth of him. Your fingers traced the lines of his jaw, the roughness of his beard, before tangling into his hair. He groaned softly against your lips, the sound sending a shiver down your spine.

His hands tightened on your hips, his grip firm but reverent, like he was still holding onto the last shred of control he had left. He pulled back just enough to look at you, his brown eyes searching yours, darkened with something deeper than just desire.

“This isn’t just—” he started, his voice rough, but you silenced him with a soft kiss, your hands cradling his face.

“I know,” you assured him. “Me neither.”

That was all he needed to kiss you again, deeper this time, like he had nothing left to fight, nothing left to prove. Just you and him, in this moment, finally giving in to something that had been pulling you together long before either of you dared to admit it.

You sighed into his mouth, your body arching into him, and he exhaled sharply, gripping your waist as if he was afraid you might disappear. His forehead pressed against yours again, his breath shaky, as if he was teetering on the edge of something he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in a long time.

“This—” he started again, but stopped, shaking his head slightly, his thumbs brushing against your skin.

You cupped his face, tilting his chin so he had no choice but to look at you, to see the truth in your eyes. “Joel, it’s okay,” you whispered. “I’m here.”

His eyes softened, his fingers tightening ever so slightly on your hips. “You’re gonna ruin me,” he admitted, his voice barely above a murmur.

You smiled softly, brushing your thumb over his cheek. “I think you were already ruined,” you teased, but there was nothing playful in the way you looked at him. “I just found you.”

A quiet laugh rumbled in his chest, but it faded quickly as he leaned in again, capturing your lips with a kind of desperation that hadn’t been there before. This was no longer hesitation. This was acceptance.

His hands roamed all over your body, memorizing every curve, every reaction. And when you sighed into him, when you whispered his name with that mouth of yours, he was already gone.

This was the moment neither of you had dared to imagine, the one you had spent so long denying yourselves. But now, there was no turning back.

Joel held you like you were something fragile, something precious, his hands steady even as his breath wavered against your skin. He wasn’t just touching you, he was learning you, worshipping you, mapping every inch with slow.

His lips trailed over your jaw, down your throat, pressing soft, lingering kisses like he wanted to leave something of himself behind imprinted on you. Like he wanted you to remember this, to remember him, long after the night faded.

Your fingers tightened in his hair, and he groaned, a low, wrecked sound against your skin.

“Jesus,” he muttered, pulling back just enough to look at you, his forehead pressing against yours. “I haven’t done this for so long” He shook his head slightly, swallowing hard. “You make me forget how to be careful.”

You smiled softly, brushing a thumb over his cheek. “Then don’t be.”

Joel let out a breath that sounded like surrender before capturing your lips again, deeper this time, his hands sliding over your body like he couldn’t stand the thought of not touching you.

This was more than need. More than desire. This was home.

Joel's hands traced paths over the thin fabric of your gown. His fingers ghosted over your shoulders, down the length of your arms, following the delicate lines of your body like he was trying to memorize you through touch alone.

His calloused fingertips skimmed the curve of your waist, the dip of your spine, the gentle rise and fall of your breath. He wasn't rushing—no, this was something else. Something deeper.

“You feel like a dream,” he murmured against your skin, his lips brushing the corner of your jaw, his breath warm and steady. His fingers toyed with the fabric at your hip, his thumb stroking slow, absent-minded circles.

You shivered, not from cold, but from the weight of his attention. The way he was looking at you, like he was trying to commit you to memory, like you were something rare, something he wasn’t sure he deserved but couldn’t help wanting.

Your hands curled into the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer, needing more. He sighed against your skin, his lips tracing a slow, deliberate path down your throat, his touch following the shape of you.

“You’re perfect” he murmured again, his voice low, rough, like he was giving you a way out even as his hands betrayed him, still exploring, still learning.

You didn’t want him to stop. Instead, you tipped your head back, giving him more, inviting him closer, your fingers slipping into his hair.

He followed the pattern of your neck, placing kisses down to your shoulders, slowly moving to your chest. He paused only to move his eyes upward in a sort of permission, to which you nodded. He pulled back the straps of your nightgown, leaving you bare to his eyes.

He couldn't believe it. Having you like this before him felt like a prize he didn't deserve. One of his hands cupped one of your breasts while he kissed the other, circling it with his tongue. “You’re so damn soft,” he murmured, his nose brushing against your jaw, voice thick with something almost reverent. “I’ve been thinking about you like this longer than I should’ve.”

You shivered, pressing closer, feeling the warmth of his body, the way his breath grew uneven as his fingers kept moving, tracing the places he’d only dared to dream about before.

His lips found your throat again, pressing slow, open-mouthed kisses down your skin. He sighed against you, his grip firm but careful, like he was still afraid you might vanish.

“You have no idea what you do to me,” he admitted, voice hoarse as he kissed the edge of your collarbone.

You smiled, hands slipping into his hair, guiding him back up, your lips meeting his in a kiss that made his breath catch.

“Show me,” you whispered.

Joel let out a low groan, his fingers tightening on your hips before sliding beneath the hem of your gown, pushing the fabric up ever so slightly. His hands were warm, calloused, the roughness of his touch making you shiver as he traced slow, reverent circles against your bare skin.

His lips never left you, brushing along your jaw, down the curve of your throat, pressing gentle, open-mouthed kisses that sent a slow burn through your veins. He was taking his time, savoring every inch of you like he was afraid this would slip away if he didn’t commit it to memory.

You exhaled shakily as his hands smoothed up the backs of your thighs, slipping beneath the silk of your gown, higher, until he was gripping your waist beneath the fabric. His breath was ragged against your skin, his forehead pressing to your shoulder as he held you close, fingers flexing like he was still trying to ground himself.

“You sure about this?” he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper, but the weight behind his words settled deep in your chest.

You cupped his face, tilting his chin until your eyes met. The way he looked at you—like he was desperate, like he wanted to devour you but was still holding himself back—made your heart ache.

“I’ve never been more sure,” you whispered.

Something in him broke then. Whatever restraint he’d been clinging to shattered as he kissed you again, deeper, hungrier, his hands roaming, pulling you impossibly close.

Your gown slid higher as he guided you back, his fingers tracing slow, teasing paths over your skin, leaving a trail of warmth in their wake. The fabric pooled at your hips, forgotten, as Joel’s lips found your collarbone, his hands gripping your thighs, his breath heavy against your skin.

“You’re driving me insane,” he murmured, almost like he was talking to himself, shaking his head as he kissed along your shoulder.

You smiled against his lips, running your fingers through his hair, tugging lightly. “Good.”

Joel let out a low chuckle, his hands sliding higher, his touch reverent, unhurried. “You’re gonna be the death of me,” he muttered, pressing one last lingering kiss to your lips before trailing lower, letting himself get lost in you.

His lips trailed lower, slow and deliberate, like he had all the time in the world to explore you. His fingers traced the path his mouth had taken, over the delicate fabric of your gown, mapping every curve, every dip, every place that made you shiver beneath him.

Joel’s breath was warm against your skin, his hands sliding up your sides, thumbs brushing just beneath the swell of your breasts. His touch was teasing, reverent, like he was still memorizing you, still convincing himself that you were here, that this was real.

Your fingers tangled in his hair, tugging him back up to you, and he let out a quiet groan as your lips met again, slow and deep. His hands settled at your waist, gripping you firmly like he needed to anchor himself to you.

The fabric of your gown was soft beneath his fingers, but he was more interested in what lay beneath. His touch dipped lower, palms smoothing over the curve of your hips, tracing gentle circles that sent warmth spreading through you.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, his eyes dark, searching. His thumb brushed over your cheek, his expression unreadable, like he was warring with something inside himself.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured, almost like he hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

Heat bloomed in your chest at the softness in his voice, at the way his gaze drank you in like you were something precious, something he had no business holding but couldn’t bear to let go.

You smiled, brushing your lips against his in a slow, lingering kiss. “So are you.”

Joel huffed a quiet laugh, shaking his head like he didn’t believe you, but he didn’t argue.

As soon as his clothes were removed, there was nothing to keep you apart. You curled your fingers in his hair as he kissed you down your body. You could feel all the emotions, but body ablaze, whimpering under his touch.

You felt his mouth against your upper thigh, tracing kisses as he tangled your hips up for him. You were already dripping as he licked the route up there to your cunt before sucking your clit and pressing his fingers against you.

You whimpered while holding his head between your legs. His cock hardened at the sounds escaping your lips, as the way you clenched around his fingers and he sucked as if he was starved, forcing your legs apart to have more access. His free hand moved up your stomach to your torso, grabbing one of your breasts, rubbing his nose against your clit. Under pleasure and instinct, you buried your heels into his back, dragging him closer until he could taste all of you.

He took his time fucking you slowly with his hands, the same he used to pray. He took his time to taste your wetness on his lips before locking eyes with you. You were flustered, and your eyes shone from pleasure.

“Fuck…” you whimpered, “Right there.”

“You’re so beautiful. I need you to breathe.” He whispered, he begged even, going forward between your legs, plunging into you easily. You moaned, leaning forward to kiss him. His lips were now on your breasts, tracing more kisses until he found your lips again as he found his way to drove himself down into you, cautious as possible.

His lips traced the corner of your mouth, then along your jaw, down the column of your throat, where he lingered, pressing warm, open-mouthed kisses to your pulse point.

Joel groaned softly when your hands explored him, dragging over his shoulders, down his stomach. He caught your wrist, bringing your palm to his lips, pressing a slow, deliberate kiss there before guiding your hand back to his chest, where his heart pounded beneath your touch.

His patience frayed when you shifted against him, your body seeking more, pressing into the warmth of his. He tugged you closer, until you were straddling him, the thin fabric of your nightgown the only barrier between you. His hands splayed across your hips, his grip firm, grounding, as he guided you against him, coaxing a gasp from your lips.

"You feel so damn good," he rasped, pressing his forehead against yours.

His mouth was on you again, trailing lower, brushing over the swell of your chest, the sensitive skin of your collarbone.

“Now are we cursing?” You moaned, into his ear before he reclaimed your lips. He leaned down and sucked your nipples, lightly biting your breasts.

Joel groaned against your skin, his grip tightening as he pulled you impossibly closer. His lips traced every inch of you, memorizing the way you responded to him, the way your breath hitched, the way your body pressed into his touch.

“Don’t tease me, baby” he said, pounding into you. Grinding as deep as into you as it could encouraged him with your moans and nails scratching down his back. Those scars would leave the mark of the sin he was committing but didn’t care now.

He slid his hand down to your pussy and rubbed along your clit, making you fuck yourself harder on him by thrusting back against him.

He moved faster, with reverence, his forehead resting against yours, his breath mixing with yours between moans. It was slow, deep, unhurried, as if he wanted to make this moment last, as if he needed to savor every second of having you like this.

Joel whispered your name like a sacred prayer, his hands never stopping their worship of your body. His lips found yours again, swallowing every moan, every sigh, as the rhythm between you built, as the fire burned brighter.

You clung to him, to the feeling of him, to the way he made you feel, like you were something treasured, something sacred.

And when the pleasure crashed over you, and you came, he continued to fuck you, hovering you over the couch, leaving kiss on your neck. Soon after he followed, burying himself deeper, whispering your name with a broken groan. Joel collapsed against you, his breath heavy, his heart racing in sync with yours. He didn’t move, didn’t pull away, just held you close, his arms wrapped around you as if he was afraid to let go.

You ran your fingers through his hair, soothing, grounding, pressing soft kisses to his temple. He sighed against your skin, pressing a lingering kiss to your shoulder before finally meeting your gaze.

Faith was in this, in the way your lips lingered on his skin, in the way your fingers traced lazy patterns over his back, as if grounding yourself in him. It was in the way you looked at him, softly, with tenderness with love.

Joel swallowed hard, his fingers tightening on your waist, like he was trying to hold onto something fleeting. His eyes searched yours, and for a moment, he looked almost lost, like he didn’t know what to do with the warmth between you, with the tenderness you offered so freely.

"You’re looking at me like that again," he murmured, voice rough, almost hesitant.

"Like what?" you whispered, brushing your thumb over his cheek.

"Like I’m something worth keeping."

Your heart ached at the quiet vulnerability in his words. You cupped his face, guiding him closer, pressing a lingering kiss to his lips.

Joel sighed into you, melting against you in a way that made your chest tighten. His forehead rested against yours, his breath warm and steady.

"You are," you whispered. “You’re worth keeping.”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he just held you tighter, pressing another kiss to your shoulder, then to the curve of your neck, like he was trying to find his own answer in the feeling of you beneath him.

You wanted to stay here, in the present in the warmth of his arms, in the quiet where nothing else mattered but the slow, steady rise and fall of his breath against your skin against yours. But your mind wouldn’t let you. It wandered, slipping from the safety of the present into the tangled mess of your past, to the secrets still buried between you.

Would he still love you after all of it?

The thought made your chest tighten, a shadow creeping in at the edges of this perfect moment. Joel had given you so much of himself, let you see parts of him no one else had, and yet… you still hadn’t told him everything.

@jasminedragoon @mandaloriankait @jellybeanxc @spencercmlover @lilac-boo @disco-fairy75 @correapunk @existentialdreadofhumanity @secretcheesecakenacho @laliceee @exzidss @missladym1981

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[prettybugsinbandages]

Blot!reader pt. 7

Part 7 to this

This is a darker story. I suggest you refrain from reading it if you're in a fragile mental state or unable to handle darker themes.

The entire cabin sat in suffocating silence, the air thick with grief, pressing down on everyone like a heavy blanket. Though each person reclined in the lounge with eyes closed and limbs still, it was only a performance—none of them could sleep. Not really. The loss was too sharp, too fresh. Everyone processed it differently, but one truth echoes in their hearts: the tragedy hadn't begun the night you died. It had taken root long before. By the time they truly knew you—truly loved you—you were already gone.

Yuuka took it especially hard. She had always seen you as family, someone irreplaceable, and yet, she hadn't been able to do anything to save you. She sat, hollow-eyed, looping over every memory in painful detail, desperately searching for a moment she'd missed—a sign. Was there a day you came home different? Later than usual? Quieter, colder? She tore herself apart wondering if she had ignored the moment your light began to dim.

Ace wrestled with a different torment. His guilt ran deep. He had known you from the very beginning, or at least, that's what he'd convinced himself. In truth, he saw you—passed by you—but never really looking until it was already too late. You were forgotten the moment you weren't in the room. The thought haunted him. He should have known you better. Should have seen the signs. Should have asked more questions. Lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, he kept repeating that same aching mantra: I should've done something. I knew them. I should've known.

You never spoke about the neglect you endured, not directly. But in the aftermath, the pieces fell into place. It became clear to those who mourned you that something had been very wrong. Whatever deal you'd made to rise so suddenly in the eyes of the world—whatever force had pulled you from the shadows into the spotlight—must have come with a price. And so they wondered, each in their own quiet despair: What final blow pushed you over the edge? Who, in their carelessness or cruelty, handed down your death sentence that night?

When you told them about the Blot—about everything you knew and everything you felt they needed to know—their responses were varied as they were heartfelt.

Kalim, Ace, and Yuuka held onto you with unwavering faith. They clung to the belief that you were still you, that the Blot didn't change who you truly were. They hoped, desperately, that it might fade, or be cured. That things could somehow return to normal.

But others—Vil, Leona—responded with wariness. They had seen what the Blot could do, had felt the darkness clawing at the edges of control. To them you were walking a dangerous line. They didn't say it outright, but the fear was there, unspoken but heavy: Had you been building this Blot inside you for months unnoticed? Were you already a ticking time bomb?

And the unthinkable loomed in their thoughts: If you were to overblot... if the darkness overtook you completely... would they even be able to stop it?

None of them could say it aloud, but the truth lingered in every glance exchanged, every tense silence.

None of them were sure if they could raise their pens against you.

Not if it came to that.

When the talk turned to the possibility of breaking the contract, of severing the tie that bound you to the Blot, the group was split even. They knew, perhaps more clearly than you did, that the Blot wasn't just a threat—it was also your lifeline. Whatever bargain had been struck, however dark, it was keeping you here. Keeping you alive.

Leona, ever pragmatic, offered to try. He mentioned his Unique Magic—how he'd broken so-called unbreakable deals before, even Azul's ironclad contracts. Nothing was truly unbreakable, he said.

And so, with quiet determination, he reached out and took your lifeless hand in his. The moment his fingers brushed the ring, the temperature plummeted. The metal, already ice-cold, turned searching. It burned your skin with such intensity that you cried out, jerking away. A small yelp—but it was enough. Enough to freeze everyone in place.

A warning.

That was the last attempt. They decided then and there—spoken or not—that they wouldn't try again.

Especially not if removing it meant risking your life.

It was unmistakable now; the Blot did not intend to be cast off. it had clung to you with possessive desperation, punishing even the suggestion of separation. It lashed out—not with fury, but with something: quieter. Sharper. Intentional.

Even in sleep, where you should have found escape, peace eluded you. Your dreams were restless landscapes of whispered arguments and echoing what-ifs, and always, always, you felt watched. The Blot's presence lingered like static in the air, wrapping around you—and them—with a warmth that was oppressive now. it pulsed with something old, something aware.

They felt it too. All of them.

This thing, this force that had given you life again, now seemed to loom like a second shadow. To you, it hummed softly—a low thrum that followed you into sleep. A presence. A heartbeat.

The ring itself pulsed faintly now, like something alive. At first, it was steady, a subtle rhythm you barely noticed. But tonight—tonight it was faster.

Uneven. Anxious.

Almost... afraid.

The world you found yourself in was a place that refused to stay still, a kaleidoscope of shifting shapes and colors, constantly rearranging itself. It couldn't decide what it wanted to be, but there were a few constants—persistent patterns, repeated hues and forms, that twisted in ways you couldn't make sense of.

Then, you hear it. A voice. Ortho? Malleus? Someone else?

The syllables stretch unnaturally long, each word mangling into the next. The rhythm of their speech is off, warped, the tone repeats your name—but something's wrong. Too many echoes. Too many wrong echoes. You blink, and the voices morph into your own, distorting, mocking, mourning. They plead with you in voices that sound like they belong to someone else, but their sharp edges make you flinch, as if they're cutting into you from within.

Are you dreaming? You can't tell. You're not sure of anything here.

You're not sure of yourself.

As you move through the space, you catch glimpses of your reflection—though it's never whole. Shattered glass splinters at your feet, distorting the image in jagged pieces. In broken fragments, you're not what you remember. You're something else. Your flesh is gone in places, hanging from exposed bone, rotting, decaying. Your neck is bent at an angle recognized as impossible and inside you, insects crawl—skittering through the hollow where your heart should be, where your life should still pulse.

The sight is too much. It's suffocating.

You can't bear to look any longer, but the reflection clings to you, mocking you with every step. You stumble backward, heart pounding, your body aching as if each moment is strenuous. Your legs are unsteady, as if the ground beneath you is not quite solid, and you twist around, turning on your heel.

You run.

But it's difficult.

Breathing is a struggle. The hollow ache in your lungs is a cruel reminder there is no air to pull in.

When you look down, the fragments of your reflection remain—clothing torn, tattered, beyond recognition, and the sight of your chest, cracked open like a broken shell, takes the last of your strength.

The world is wrong. Everything is wrong.

No wonder you can't breathe; you don't have lungs anymore.

The gravity of the place feels distorted, pulling in strange directions that you can't describe, warping the space around you. The world is devoid of color, but your eyes are assaulted by a dizzying array of hues—too many, too fast, too intense to comprehend. It's as if the colors exist beyond the spectrum you know, beyond the limits of your perception.

The Blot's voice—its presence—flooded your ears, your mind, seeping into every corner of your thoughts. It shuddered around you, writhing, as though the dream world itself couldn't hold its form any longer. It was a reflection of the Blot's own stress, its instability. Just as it's form trembled and shifted when thrown off, so too was the fabric of this space.

You could only assume that by being so deeply entangled with the Blot, you had somehow slipped into its mind—or maybe its world. It wasn't clear.

Words collided in the air—some soft, others shrill—whispers, shouts, incoherent fragments. It was like it was speaking from everywhere at once. But amidst the chaos, one voice pierced through the noise, Its tone raw and desperate. It screamed in your head.

"Why? Why are you doing this?" The Blot's voice cried.

Its panic was visceral—almost childlike, trembling between frustration and pleading.

It didn't understand.

"Why are you telling them? We were fine! We were together! You... you were so kind to me this morning before the hike..." It stuttered, its words stumbling in confusion, the longing sharp as it clung to your closeness from that morning.

It didn't understand.

You ran—but you didn't know for how long.

How long had you been hiding from the Blot? From the reflections that mocked you? From the rotting body that you could feel but not escape?

Every step felt like a step toward something other, something incomprehensible. You were a ghost, running from the dark surrounding you.

The collision—the crash—was deafening, shocking you back into clarity. The monolith before you splintered at your touch, shuddering and shifting. It was an immense crystal statue—though it was never still. It shifted, reformed, nearly a living creature in constant flux, impossible to make sense of. Was it a figure? A being? Or something that had once been but had long since lost its meaning?

The statue hummed, a deep, resonant sound like the tuning of a cosmic fork, vibrating through the air, through you. Its surface was smooth, glasslike, but etched with thousands of names, faces, forms—rewriting itself over and over again. It was as if the statue was an archive, trying desperately to preserve its own history, its purpose.

You wanted to reach out, to understand, but before you could touch it, the ground beneath you buckled. The wailing grew louder, sound warping and twisting until it seemed to come from every direction at once. The Blot's presence flared, its grip on you—on everything—shattering.

And then... it was gone.

And darkness swallowed you whole.

Static crackles across your tongue—acidic and sharp, like chewing electricity. You blink rapidly, over and over, your eyes straining against the suffocating nothingness that surrounds you. There's no darkness, no light. Just everything and nothing, layered over each other in a space that doesn't obey rules. A contradiction you can't comprehend.

Then—clarity.

A voice begins, soft and distant, like a recording warped by time. It's not speaking to you, not exactly. It's narrating. Telling a story that feels familiar in your bones, though your memory protests.

Long before time's tapestry unraveled into the mortal world, there existed the Angel of Faces, a being crafted by the divine will to be a mirror of mortal perception. The Creator designed them without a fixed form, a blank slate destined to reflect the countless faces imagined by mortalkind—a bridge. They were the Messenger of Truths, delivering divine revelations in guises familiar and comforting, ensuring mortals could bear the weight of celestial messages.

Images crack open before you—like shattered glass, jagged and glinting, tumbling one after another into focus. They don't move like real things—more like illustrations torn from pages of a storybook.

You see them—a being of indescribable beauty, ever shifting. Their form changes like water caught in starlight, their features never still. They descend from the sky, trailing light behind them, wearing faces borrowed from dreams and fantasies. As they meet mortals, they speak in soft tones and gentle smiles, becoming what people expect to see.

The scene carries the nostalgic warmth of fable, but something about it gnaws at the edges.

Mortals, however, are imperfect storytellers. Each encounter reshaped the Angel of Faces, adding new features, quirks, and expressions. Some saw them as a serene guardian; others envisioned a stern judge or a deceiving trickster. These conflicting descriptions layered upon the angel like masks, making their true self indistinguishable, even to themselves.

You watch the whispers spread—around campfires, across market stalls, through grand halls. People speak of the messenger, the celestial, the angel. You see them again, curled up in a fetal position with their wings cocooning them, their form folding and reshaping themselves as mortals impose identities upon them.

A healer. A warrior. A muse.

Each expectation a mold. Each opinion a new mask.

And though the angel's face remains serene, poised—graceful even—you notice it now. The flicker. The micro-twitch. A wince that doesn't belong. Pain—subtle but unmistakable—buried beneath the surface as they fracture to match fantasies of others.

Over the ages, this shifting identity became a curse. They could recall every face ever worn, every lie spoken to soothe mortal fears, yet no memory of an original self remained. In despair, they sought reassurance from the Creator, pleading for a singular, immutable form. But the Creator remained silent, bound by cosmic law to let mortals shape the angel's existence. They were the bridge between the divine and the flesh—the only way divinity could properly understand mortal and vice-versa.

Then, a throne.

Massive. Towering. Its presence dominates the space. The angel kneels before it, wings unfurled behind them—crushed and colorless, like a butterfly pinned beneath glass. Their head is bowed. You can't hear the words exchanged, but the feeling crashes over you like a wave.

Agony. Sorrow. Desperation. Pleading.

And beyond it all: silence.

A cold, heavy silence that presses into your ribs. The kind that follows disappointment from someone who once loved you. Or worse—pity.

You can feel the weight of the Creator's silence. Not anger. Not wrath. Just... regret. And it's so much heavier than anything else.

Resentment festered. If mortals could define them, why should they not seize control of that power? They abandoned truth, embracing deception. In time, they learned to wield their ever-changing faces as weapons: impersonating kings, prophets, and lovers, sowing discord with whispers of false promises. Their once-pure voice became a chorus of lies, harmonizing with the ambitions and fears of those they encountered.

Scenes follow in rapid succession, kaleidoscopic in nature and fragmented, but you know the angel is there—though their wings are gone, though their face is someone else's.

A king laughs on a golden throne, his kingdom shining. A secret lover slips out of a bed in darkness. An assassin vanishes into a crowd. A prophet raises trembling hands before a weeping congregation.

Then, ruin.

The king's palace, turned to rubble. The lover, now a wife—yet the old wife is miraculously absent. The assassin's victims, nameless in a list. The prophet's followers, bloodied and broken in their belief.

None of them ever saw the angel beneath the face they wore. They never looked long enough, painfully unperceptive—or perhaps unaware.

If no one knew what the angel truly was, then stories couldn't cage them. Rumors couldn't wound them—shape them. And so, they wore more faces. Hid deeper. Buried themselves beneath perception. And when they were wronged—betrayed—they sought retribution. Over and over again.

But the revenge never tasted sweet.

Only hollow.

Thus, the Angel of Faces fell—not through rebellion, but through erosion of identity. Cast from the heavens, they now wander the mortal and infernal realms, a living mask who changes with every glance. They are feared as a master manipulator, a thief of faces and fates, cursed never to be remembered as themselves.

Legends say if you meet someone whose face you forget the moment they turn away, you've crossed paths with the Angel of Faces or their vassals. Pray they haven't taken an interest in wearing your face next.

More faces, more identities flash by, countless and unclear. You can't see them distinctly, but the truth sinks in. You know now. You know who they are.

The Angel of Faces. A creature lost in masks, wandering through mortalkind, trying to feel whole.

A being warped and corrupted by their own nature.

No matter what name they claimed, no matter what role they played—no one ever saw them. Only what they were supposed to be. What others wanted.

A crown. A smile. A blade.

But never themselves.

The images fracture and collapse around you—but not into darkness. This time, they pull you in. Like pages of a book folding shut around you, dragging you into its chapters.

The sun is high, warm and golden, filtering through thick branches overhead. Shadows dapple your skin—real, textured, soft. The breeze smells of pine and something faintly sweet. It feels safe here. Familiar in a way that aches.

But you aren't alone.

Ahead of you, moving slowly through the trees, is a figure. They look like a hunter—simple clothes, dirt on their boots, a bow strapped across their back. It's a quiet disguise, inconspicuous. Something they've worn before, probably in times of mischief or survival.

You follow, but your steps make no sound. You don't rustle the leaves. You leave no footprints. It becomes quickly apparent you aren't really here. Just a silent observer.

The hunter reaches a clearing—a wide expanse of green, peaceful and untouched. At its center stands a single oak tree, massive and ancient, its roots twisting deep into the hill it rests upon. The sunlight catches on its leaves like gold.

You've never been here. Not in memory.

And yet—your chest hurts with recognition.

The ache isn't sudden. It's long, settled. Like a name you forgot but still miss. Like a song you can't hum, but remember how it made you feel.

You miss this place.

But you miss it the way a house misses laughter. The way empty arms remember who they used to hold.

You follow the hunter in silence as he steps into the embrace of the oak's shade, the heavy stillness of the clearing wrapping around him like a familiar blanket. He lowers himself onto the earth with a tired sort of grace, his limbs moving like someone who has worn exhaustion too long to notice it anymore.

You rest just opposite him, your back finding the warm bark. The sun flickers gently through the leaves above, dappling the ground in gold, and for a moment there's peace.

But then it begins crashing over you; a torrent of emotions strong enough to nearly sweep you away.

Regret.

Longing.

Fear.

And grief so ancient it's fossilized into the soul—grief that has learned how to survive by becoming quiet.

It coils in your gut like smoke, pressing against your ribs, too heavy, too consuming. It isn't yours—you know that—but it moves through your body like it belongs there.

It makes you want to rip yourself open just to see if the feelings bleed out. To see if they're real. To see something—anything—clear for once.

You try to drown it out—to focus on the soft hush of wind through leaves, the warmth of soil beneath you, the steady breathing of the man sitting across from you, against the other side of the tree. The quiet hum of the world moving around you. But then—

Footsteps.

Soft, but sure. Grass shifts. A twig snaps.

You tense. Your body doesn't move, but your mind begins to brace itself. You squeeze your eyes tighter, silently begging: Leave. Just walk on by.

But they don't.

They stop—right on the other side of the tree. A beat of silence.

And then—they sit.

Like they belong here.

Like they were always going to.

The bark dug into my spine. My shoulders stiffened, and I pressed harder against the tree, jaw tightening. Whoever they are, they've broken the rhythm of the moment, shattered the fragile stillness I've carved out for myself in this place.

I didn't want to look.

But I had to, didn't I?

Not out of curiosity, not out of fear, but because I felt myself compelled to know who would dare come here, to the one place I'm allowed to not be anyone.

I recall turning my head slowly, angling to peer through the crooked gap in the oak's wide trunk, through what now seemed like a portal to the heavens.

And you sat there quietly, knees drawn up to your chest, head resting in your arms and eyes closed like you belonged there. A mortal, nothing important, nothing special.

I remember shifting to my knees, the bark rough against my palms as I leaned forward, peering through oak's crooked hollow. The memory is soft around the edges, worn thin by time—but you were there, seated as though you belonged.

You must have known the whispers by then—the carefully cultivated reputation, the layers of distance I'd wrapped myself in like a cloak. I'd made myself a shadow, a storm behind furrowed brows and quick footsteps. The kind of presence no one dared to interrupt.

I rose slowly and deliberately, brushing the dirt from my knees with practiced indifference. I took a short walk around the tree, boots pressing quietly into the grass until I stood directly before you. Still, you didn't move. Didn't even glance up. As if my presence meant nothing.

Strange little thing.

Even without knowing the truth buried beneath this face—this shape—I'd made sure the mask was fearsome enough to ward off the curious.

Yet you sat there like you'd missed the message.

I braced my arm against the tree, leaning over you, letting my shadow stretch across your form like a storm rolling in. I remember thinking it would be enough. Surely, this would send you away.

Perhaps I'd grown a little too confident in the image I wore.

And yet, still—nothing.

You didn't move. You didn't cower. You looked at me, eventually, and blinked as though bored by the drama of my entrance. The sky behind you was warm with late summer light, and I remember hating how it caught the edges of your face, like a portrait too breathtaking to forget.

"This is my spot," I said—sharper than I meant to be. The words came out brittle, my tone edged with irritation I hadn't yet admitted was born from something deeper. "Are you a fool? Everyone in town knows not to bother me."

I'd come from a fruitless hunt that day. Old faces Old temples. A bad memory scraped raw by ruins once gilded in my name. And yet you met my bitterness not with fear, but with a half-lidded stare of quiet disbelief—as though I'd just asked something absurd.

Then, you asked me if I had put my name on the tree. On the hill. On the grass beneath our feet.

I had not.

Of course I hadn't.

"You don't seem all that intimidating," you said, head tilted, voice a touch too amused. There was a challenge in your eyes I hadn't seen in ages—cocky and warm like sunlit water that dares you to relax and step deeper.

"We can share."

I argued, of course. Drew lines in the dirt with stubborn words, even threatened you with a bow I never truly meant to raise. I told myself it was principle. Territory. A matter of pride.

But it wasn't.

And still—you stayed.

So I stayed, too.

And it became a game of attrition. A quiet war beneath that old oak tree. Day after day, seeing which of us would yield first. Who would grow tired of the silence. Who would falter.

And yet—

Somehow you slipped into the rhythm of my days. I never meant for it to happen. I never invited you into the quiet rituals I built to keep the world at bay. But time has a way of folding itself around people like you.

Before I realized it, my hours bent at the knee, reshaped by your presence beneath that oak. The days grew long with half-conversations spoken through the gap in the trunk, voices low, laughter occasionally catching on the wind like birdsong.

The mischief faded first—those little pranks, the constant games of pushing and posturing. They dissolved, quietly, as if they had never belonged between us. And in their place: stillness. Companionable silences. Glanced exchanged through the bark. A strange sort of truce that no one decaled.

Summer vanished. Slipped through the cracks like water. The tree grew bare and brittle, its crown stripped of leaves and clothed in frost. Snow came in thick, crystalline blankets, and for a while, I thought that would be the end of us.

Without the tree to claim—without a battleground—I thought you might forget. That I would forget.

So I returned to what this guise knew. I buried myself in the role of a hunter—sharp-eyed and silent. A ghost that moved through the forests and frozen paths. You vanished. Life moved on.

But gods, the winter had teeth that year.

It sunk into me in ways no season ever had before.

I missed you.

You, a mortal—one of the very creatures who had carved me hollow with stories and lies. And yet the ache of your absence bloomed in my chest, slow and unrelenting.

One day—without thinking, without deciding—I found myself beneath the tree again. My feet knew the way better than my heart did.

The air was cold enough to bite, frost curling at the edges of my sleeves, and I stood there like a fool in the snow—ready to accept the silence I'd earned.

But then—you were there.

Waiting.

Lashes kissed white with frost, hair tucked beneath your hood, the pale winter sky behind you like the canvas of a masterwork. You looked like something out of myth—something I might've made up just to keep the loneliness at bay.

"Why are you still here?" I asked. My voice was rough, choked with breath that bloomed white into the cold. The question burned in my throat, but I had to ask it anyway.

You looked up at me with that ridiculous smile—soft, knowing, a little smug—and it tore a laugh from me before I could stop it.

"I won. It's my spot now." you said, brushing snow from your clothes with exaggerated nonchalance.

And every instinct I'd once held sacred—against every philosophy I'd sworn by—I followed you.

I told myself it was curiosity—that I needed to understand. That a mortal like you, warm-eyed and strange, couldn't possibly be real. That something so unspoiled had to be a trick. A lie—like faerie food.

"Where are we going?" I asked, hands clasped neatly behind my back, trying to sound disinterested—detached.

You hummed, tugging your hood a little tighter against the wind.

"Your home," you said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "I looked all over town when the cold came, but I couldn't find you.

Your voice wavered just slightly at the edges—the way it always did when something mattered more than you wanted to admit.

"You like to disappear," you added, gaze turned toward the path ahead. "But you can't hide from me."

Hiding?

Had I truly been doing that?

Avoiding the truth nestled deep in my chest—that I'd grown fond of you in ways I never intended? That I was no longer as indifferent as I'd have liked?

"Perhaps I had been." I murmured, more to myself than to you. My head dipped in a quiet concession, and I stepped ahead, reluctant but resolved, guiding you toward the place I called home.

Or rather... the place I'd borrowed.

The home had once belonged to a huntsman who drank himself to death, his loneliness thick enough to choke on. I'd slipped into the shape of him, claimed his bed, his hearth, his name. Mortals rarely question a presence that mimics familiarity well enough.

I've lived in countless homes—shacks, palaces, temples of crystal, and cities carved in marble. Each built around the face I wore at the time. But none of them ever fit right. Every roof felt too low, every bed too soft or stiff. They had pressed against me like ill-fitted skins. none could hold me—not the real me.

And yet... this one somehow, felt different.

You filled the space in a way I never could. Your voice, your laughter, even the way you sulked when the wind crept in under the door—it made the walls feel less like cages.

There were nights when I forgot what I was. Where I wasn't an angel buried under names and masks and vengeance—I was just something warm, watching you speak beside the crackling fire.

And then, as if we had blinked, winter was gone.

Melted into memory.

It struck me quietly one day beneath the old oak—that was the longest I'd kept an identity. The longest I'd stayed still without splintering a town or vanishing into the fog, without punishing someone for the weight of their perception.

That evening, you met me beneath the tree again, a satchel in hand and a grin tucked at the corners of your mouth. You'd saved for weeks, you said, pinched coin where you could, though I knew most of that money had come from me. Quiet gifts slipped into your pouch when you weren't looking. What use did I have for currency? I did not eat. I did not burn fuel. I had no need for comfort.

But you—you used it to buy a book.

And when you opened it, when your fingers brushed the yellowed pages, something shifted.

Because I recognized the words. I remembered them.

My stories. My tragedies. My sins—etched into ink by mouths that had never known me, retold by voices who feared and worshipped in equal measure.

And you were reading them. You knew.

My breath caught in my throat, unfamiliar and painful. That age-old instinct reared its head—run. Disappear. Start again.

I always ran when I was seen too clearly.

My hands trembled. My stomach churned with something not quite shame, not quite terror—a horrible ache. Familiar. Like home.

I stared at you, bracing for betrayal, or disgust, or fear—for the look that always followed.

But instead—

"I—I'm sorry." I heard myself say.

The words tumbled from my lips without permission, jagged and strange, like something living had crawled out from deep inside me.

A part of me recoiled in disgust. Apologizing? To a mortal? I'd never done that—not sincerely.

And still, I searched your face. Desperate. Panicked. Waiting for you to shatter the fragile world I'd built. To call me monster. To finally see me.

The sky spun above us. The forest pressed in. And I—

I felt stuck in my skin. I wanted to tear it off—to leave the hunter behind and vanish into mist, into shadow, into myth.

Because that's all I've ever known how to do.

Flee. Run. Hide.

It's all I've ever done.

But you only shook your head, quiet and steady, and gently pulled me down to sit beside you beneath the tree.

And then—like it was the simplest thing in the world—you spoke words I never imagined I'd be allowed to hear. Words I thought were forbidden to something like me.

"You have no name, no face, no anchor to the world... Do you want one? Should I give you one?"

Your hands were warm—foolishly so, impossibly so—and when they rose to cup my cheek, I leaned into them without protest. Without thought. Just instinct. Bone-deep exhaustion seeped from my limbs, and I slumped into your waiting shape like a story trying to remember how it was first told.

Centuries folded in on themselves inside me: Regret, violence, tenderness, exile, desperation. I carried them all, and suddenly, I was too tired to bear the weight alone.

"That is impossible, my dear," I murmured with the heavy certainty of someone who had begged one, long ago, and learned never to ask again. "Not even the Creator could grant me that."

But you simply hummed, a sound as light as wind through leaves, unburdened by the rules I'd spent lifetimes bound to.

"The Creator is governed by cosmic law, sure. But mortals...mortals were given free will. And they were given dominion over you, weren't they? So I ask again—what do you say?"

Those words hit something ancient and aching inside me—something that had never been named but always lingered, humming under my skin like a prayer I couldn't remember anymore. My lips parted before I could stop them.

"Yes," I breathed. "Yes, please."

And so it began.

We spent four months and eight days fashioning me like a myth retold by firelight.

You scratched categories into the dirt with a stick, had me toss pebbles with my eyes shut to choose hair, height, voice, eyes. We ran through fields and libraries and markets so I could feel what drew me, what felt like mine. We spoke for hours—about food, about stars, about what kind of kindness I might carry. We peeled back the layers and decided who I wanted to be when I wasn't forced to be anything at all.

And slowly, I became.

A name began to rise in me like spring after a cruel winter. A shape. A soul. A self.

And in that self, I found something terrifying:

I had fallen in love with you. And love—what a cruel thing. What a luminous, sickening thing. It turns every other feeling into a shadow. It renders contentment into longing. It corrodes reason and whispers delusion in a voice sweeter than truth. Love is the death of logic, the ruin of kingdoms, the doom of angels. And I needed it. I needed it with an ache that made me stupid. Desperate. Mortal.

So I wrote you little poems under moonlight, clumsy with feeling, desperate to condense eternity into twelve words. I slipped them into your books, between the recipes you collected and the strange ideas you left half-finished in the margins.

I loved you the only way I knew how: endlessly. I would have loved you until our veins braided like roots in the earth and our hearts beat the same rhythm beneath our ribs.

Because you were my Creator. You were the one who saw me not as myth or threat or shapeless horror, but as someone who could be.

You made me real.

And without you, I had no reason to be anyone at all.

I never should have let you give me everything.

Never should have placed you in the path of what I was—what I've always been.

Because while the Creator could not command mortals, could not lace them with cosmic law or shape their choices—it could still ensure. It could correct. It could balance the scale.

And it did.

Because you crossed the line that wasn't meant to be drawn, let alone stepped over. And I stood at your side and let you.

A defiance. A devotion. A crime.

A mortal, after all, was never meant to rewrite the purpose of one of its creations.

To grant meaning where none was given— To name what should have remained nameless— That was a violation. A defiance of divine structure. An offense that demanded retribution.

I remember the night it happened as though it were carved into me. The details seared into the marrow of my being, relentless in their clarity. No matter how much time passes, that memory remains untouched by erosion.

We walked in silence, your hand cradled in mine. I had planned to tell you everything—about what I had done, what I had been, and what you'd done to my heart. I was ready to surrender the whole truth. But your hand was warm, your thumb brushing the backing of mine in small, thoughtless circles, and I found myself stalling to make the moment last just a bit longer.

My divine heart beat with a violence I'd never known—no battle or vengeance or miracle had ever stirred it like this. With you beside me, all of it—every war, every mark, every century—faded into background noise and it no longer seemed as loud in my head. You were more than grounding. You were anchoring.

You made me real.

You chattered about something that had happened earlier that day—some nonsense about a goat loose in town with two children clinging to its back like miniature bandits. The scene meant nothing to me, but your laughter rang like a melody I hadn't known I needed until I heard it. That sound—pure and unburdened—was rest. A kind of rest I'd never been allowed.

And the moonlight? It loved you as much as I did.

It bathed your skin like a blessing, caught in your hair, made your eyes gleam with mischief and warmth. I remember thinking the entire world looked like a backdrop created to cradle your beauty alone—just a stage where you moved freely and unknowingly beautiful.

You looked up at me, your expression full of unbearable joy you always managed to carry, even over the smallest things. It unsettled me, in a way. How could you be so happy in such a broken world? How could you carry such softness without it cutting you open?

And perhaps... perhaps that tiny shard of judgement—of not understanding you fully—is what made it worse. Perhaps that is what made it all the more tragic.

Because I hesitated.

I let the night go on too long.

I let myself fall too deeply into the illusion that maybe, just maybe, I could have all of this.

You. Peace. A name. A future.

And in that hesitation I doomed you.

They moved through time because they existed outside of it.

And your lips—those soft, precious things that said the most wondrous things—had just begun to part with a question or a laugh or a breath, I'll never know. It was lost in the moment your eyes widened, a flash of something ancient behind them—recognition. A silent understanding that something had happened, something final, even if you didn't yet know what it was.

Then came the executioner. A blade plunged cleanly through your back—swift, silent, a perfect strike. It didn't bleed you. No, the blade wasn't meant to be tainted with blood. It was meant for undoing.

It pierced you like a key, not a weapon—unlocking soul from flesh, unthreading the stitches that kept you in this world. You crumpled, so softly, like a page torn from sacred text. And oh, how I wanted—how I needed—to have moved faster. To have noticed sooner. To have thrown myself behind you and taken it all.

The executioner was beautiful. All things from the divine realm are. Beautiful in the way holy things are: absolute, motionless, terrifying. They never opened their mouth. Never broke their gaze. But their presence split the sky inside me. They were not cruel—not even angry. That would have been easier.

Instead, they were perfect. Silent. Unmovable.

And it was that stillness that shattered me.

I felt the weight of every sin, even the ones I hadn't known I'd committed—especially the one I'd inflicted on you. They pressed down on me until I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, as you sank to the forest floor like a puppet whose strings had been snipped with precision.

I looked in fury at them, searching for a sign of injustice I could fight back against, but there was nothing. Nothing but a slight nod—a movement so small it could have been the wind, and yet I felt it. A gesture I couldn't understand then, but now, maybe it was pity. Maybe it was a quiet apology. Because they are only summoned when a divine law has been broken so utterly that even the gods and angels must look away.

It wasn't your fault.

It was mine.

And yet they punished you all the same.

I collapsed beside your body, the earth rushing to meet me. The forest dulled around me, sounds folding into a high-pitched ring, like reality itself was recoiling at the sheer grief of the scene. I gathered you in my arms with trembling hands, and I knew it the moment I touched you—you were gone.

Not sleeping. Not wounded. Just... absent.

Your body was still whole. Still beautiful. The vessel I had admired, adored. But the soul within—that spark that laughed and argued and made me—it was nowhere to be found.

And I didn't know how to react. There was no emotion strong enough, no shape of grief that could express what tore through me.

My form betrayed me—unraveled into the divine shape you had never seen. The one I hated. Wings too large, body too incomprehensible, face too beautiful. My voice broke apart when I tried to speak, to demand why the Creator had taken you and not me. To beg for your return.

But no words came, and when I looked up, the executioner was already gone.

Just like you.

I was alone.

The woods—once warm, once soft—were suddenly hollow. The moonlight, once silver and loving, burned like acid on my skin. The whole world had turned against me.

And then I sensed it. Not just your absence, but your removal.

You weren't in this world. Not in the heavens. Not in the underworld. You had been taken—cast out into another realm entirely, one far beyond my reach. A place even somebody of my caliber couldn't go.

The Creator didn't just correct the error.

It hid the evidence.

You.

Gone.

Perhaps it was the carnal desire to be gone, to undo myself, to become nothing. My form began to break. That beautiful, temporary self you'd helped my build—it cracked and splintered until it was dust. Until there was nothing left but darkness.

I lost my face. My shape. My center.

What remained was a shifting blot of ink and shadow. A void. An echo. And without you, even that felt too much.

I don't remember what I did that night. Or the nights after. Or the years that followed.

Maybe decades. Maybe more.

But eventually, I started to hear whispers—of a shadow that moved like smoke. A shapeless thing that fed on grief and misery. A monster that haunted the edges of villages, stealing warmth and magic from the air.

And I understood.

Without you, without your name on my lips and your laugh in my chest, I had let myself be shaped by mortal fear and legend.

I was forced into a mold again.

I spent years searching for you—my heart, my breath, the axis upon which my very being once turned. I scoured every corner of the living realm, dared disturb the divine with my rotting body of misery, even descended into the underworlds where no light reaches. Always hoping—aching—that the feeling was wrong. That hollow emptiness where your presence should have been was a lie. That maybe I was only panicking.

But it was never a lie. You were gone.

And in that time... I don't know what I became.

Without you—my reason, my tether—I was a thing adrift. Disgusting in nature, I hid and only lashed out. I lived in echoes and shadows, unanchored and shapeless. A being wearing old regrets like skin. I can't remember the faces I wore, or the deeds I committed while searching. There are blank places in my memory, stained only with the knowledge that I must have hurt many in my desperation. I must have destroyed things, twisted fates, left ruin in my wake.

And may the divine forgive me—I would do it all again if it meant finding you.

But you are not here to forgive me.

Not yet.

So I wait.

I wait like a prayer made in flesh. I wait like an abandoned altar beneath a sky that no longer answers.

I wait for my creator to return—not the One in the heavens, but you. You, who named me. You, who gave me a face. You, who made me someone.

I wait for you to salvage me from this endless dark, to craft me again with warm hands and soft laughter. To call me into being like you did before.

Because I believe now, with all the fragile, fractured pieces of what remains of me, that the Creator—the Creator—was hasty. Rash in its punishment. Cruel in its corrections. It shattered us and called it balance, but it made a single, fateful mistake.

It forgot to scratch your name from the ledges buried deep within the grand library of all things that are, and were, and will be.

And all unnatural things, in time, return to how they belong. Like a tide pulling the wayward back to shore. Like a thread—cut too early—still tugging at the loom.

So I hoped. Oh, I hoped with the kind of hope that burns and scalds. With the kind of hope that only something eternal can endure.

It took a long, long time. Longer than most stars get. And in that time I did everything. Begging. Bartering. Lying. Challenging.

The Weaver of Fates hated me, hated the way I slipped between threads, rearranged destinies like pages in a book, like a god with a pen too eager. But like all living things, even the divine, they grew curious. Even they hungered for something new—an unexpected turn in the story. And so, for each fate I promised to rewrite in their name, I was granted one meager decade within their library.

And there—

Amid endless shelves, beneath eternity's whirring lanterns, swathed in dust and starlight and silence—

I found you.

Your thread.

Out of nowhere. Woven anew. Subtle, but unmistakable.

You.

I remember how I staggered. How the breath left me like a struck bell. How my trembling hands reached for the book that held your name like it was the only thing in the universe worth touching.

Because to me, it was—It is.

You were still out there. Alive again. Somewhen.

And the only thing left in me—after centuries of ruin, centuries of silence—was the desperate, carnal need to find you again.

My Savior.

You returned to the world through the smallest crack—a school and a fluke of magic, they called it. But I knew it was fate, twisting itself in impossible ways just to give me a second chance.

The world, however, is as cruel as it is careless. Your fate was once again marred by suffering—cut open by hands that saw you not as a soul, not as the brilliant, unshakable light I remembered, but as a vessel.

A means to an end. A thing to use.

The book said they'd grow to love you. That time would soften their edges, that eventually they'd see the truth of you and come to adore you. but now, my star—how could they not immediately fall to their knees before your purity? How could they ever lay a hand on your gentle spirit and think it anything less than sacred?

I couldn't allow it. Not again. Not after all you'd already endured because of me.

Please. Please rest, my beloved. Let me carry the weight for a while.

Come back to me, curl close to my side. Lay your head against my chest, feel my heart beating for you and you alone. Let it remind you that you're not alone anymore. That you're home, you're safe.

I felt it in the moment you stepped through again—the second your soul returned to this realm. The wind shifted. The light changed. The world, once fueled by my grief, suddenly shimmered with warmth and color.

And there you were. So breathtaking, it almost hurt.

A different form, yes, but still you. Your soul radiated through, unmissable, unmistakable. That light of yours—impossibly bright. Unyielding. Unchanged.

In that moment, I nearly ran to you, fell to my knees before you like a worshipper before their altar. I would have offered every piece of me right then—my hands, my heart, my every divine and ruined piece.

I wanted to pray to you, not the Creator.

Because only you had ever given me peace. Only you made me real.

And so, driven by that desperate ache, knowing what trials were written for you in the pages of fate, I made a choice.

A hasty, selfish, loving choice.

Please forgive me.

I became your guardian.

Not by divine assignment—no, the heavens had long since turned from me. I was no longer an Angel, no longer anything at all in their eyes. A fallen thing. A memory.

Shelter. Protection. A little more time.

Until I could earn back your love, until we could escape this wretched cycle together—somewhere quiet, somewhere safe. Somewhere the stars forgot. Hidden even from the Creator's gaze.

I passed my gift to you—the same one that had once forced me to slip through the cracks of perception, to disappear and be ignored by even the divine. I made you forgettable. Your name, your face, your presence—reduced to a whisper in the minds of those around you.

No one could hold you long enough to break you again.

But I was wrong. I was so wrong.

The night I found you in the snow, body broken and spirit dimmed, something inside of me that had been subtly blooming again tore.

My treasure—my heart, my only—shattered again, and I hadn't even seen it coming. You had become so invisible, so perfectly cloaked in my protection that even I could no longer feel the ache of your suffering until it was too late.

And still, even mangled, you begged to be seen.

To be known.

And perhaps—perhaps I had been cruel in my reverence. So intent on protecting you that I denied you the very thing you longed for: connection.

So I lifted it.

The concealment, the cloak, the silence. I peeled it back and let the world see you again.

And I watched you drown beneath the affection you so rightly deserved—both soft and overwhelming, subtle and blinding. Some of it pure. Some of it not.

And I remained in the shadow, unseen. As always. Just your guardian. Just the broken remnant of what you once loved. Waiting.

Always waiting.

For the day you remember me.

And love me again.

Hi?

Sorry this one took so long.

While writing it I kinda got a little worried I was messing up. This is technically a twst fic but this entire 8k word chapter is almost only about the Blot. Which is my own character and I realized some of you might just want twst content?

btw the religious themes have no intentional connection to any real religions. It's my own thoughts, my own story. I hope it doesn't offend.

Did this cook?? I'm so anxious because I really got to write about what I really like and my own OC!

taglist: @tachibubu @shirp-collector-of-fixations @goatsmilksblog @iris-arcadia @pumpkindevil @gabile18 @sugarxrt @fancyhawk45 @mewchiili @olxh @muffinenergy @citrus-cinnamon @boredselkie @tipsyon-tea @blerp-22 @is-it-night-or-day @xinfinityx @ashieeeesh @b0nesandskin @texas-fox @owl778 @ghostlysyntaxed @youwannatrade @jar-03 @brights-place @pebble-bb @boredwithlifeatthispoint @casperandcats @rinart89 @raineondrugs @o-ffic @chloemari-e @roseinbloom02 @mandalay7y @s0up-good @the-unhinged-raccoon @cecil-the-crybaby @mr-crawlings-wife @ironsaladwitch @kiki-kuku @annexblogs @linaaeatsfamilies @pokedragon7 @dondonrulerofall @heavy-blanket-enjoyer @bluewolfangel01 @m1lly69 @yesthisisrookhunt

[ultravi0lence14]

Don’t Delete The Kisses

dean winchester x fem!reader

1.2k | fluff

summary: dean couldn’t bare to leave you when him and sam went on hunts. but the thought of kissing you when he got back home kept him going.

the memory of dean’s kisses were all you had when he would leave for long hunts.

every time, you would wait by the bunker door as sam loaded up the impala, holding onto dean as he assured you that him and his brother were going to be okay.

you had faith in them, they had been doing this for a long time after all. but with all the times they’ve died, been brought back to life, and even sent to hell, you were bound to worry a little.

before he’d get in the impala, dean would always press a lingering kiss to your cheek, telling you that he would kiss your lips when he got home. you didn’t understand why at first, but dean finally admitted that if he were to kiss your lips before a hunt, he’d never want to leave.

the eldest winchester always was a protecter. being accustomed at such a young age when watching sam. so even though he knew you were more than capable to handle yourself, the feeling of leaving you alone in a massive underground bunker where he was too far to keep you safe always had him worried.

you never wanted to be on the battlefield, always wanting to stay at home with bobby, read lore books, and give tips and advice to other hunters when needed.

but bobby had passed away, leaving you in the hands of the infamous winchester brothers.

not wanting to leave the only home you knew at first, you were adamant on not leaving with sam and dean and living a life on the road. but after the bunker came into the picture, and dean crawled his way into your heart, the past two years had gone by in a blur.

sitting and waiting for the boys to call was all you did at first, but after realizing some alone time would benefit you, the copious amounts of books moving into the bunker became something sam and dean got used to.

before the phone would ring with sam and dean on the other line, you’d be found in your room, book in hand as you absorbed new worlds and forms of literature. when that got too much for you, you’d find yourself sat in front of a tv, a new show playing every other week as you went through them pretty quickly to sam’s concern.

but you would still have that nagging feeling of dean’s absence. it settled deep into your bones, having you miss him so dearly it almost hurt sometimes.

he was the first boy you ever truly loved, and you’d be damned if he was torn away from you.

so you waited. waited for the fateful moment when the roar of the impala could be heard. when dean would come down the stairs and instantly go and try to find you. for when he did, dean would not waste a second in crushing his lips to yours; finally getting the feeling of you close to him again.

today was no different. sam and dean had been on a case in missouri for the past week tracking a vampires nest, and you couldn’t wait until they came home.

castiel had stopped by a couple days ago, but he had to leave quickly when the angels in heaven needed his assistance. you were left alone, reading the lore books that you hadn’t picked up in the bunker while playing online sudoku with charlie.

you had ventured into the kitchen only a half hour ago, grabbing a small snack before finding comfort in your bed. a new book was opened on your lap while an episode of your favourite tv show quietly played in the background.

the calming atmosphere you had created was quickly broken as the door to the bunker opened, the sound of boots clambering down the stairs as sam and dean’s voices flooded through the air.

you smiled to yourself, sitting up in bed and patiently waiting for dean to find his way to your room. when the door creaked open, you couldn’t help a wider grin breaking out onto your face as dean’s tall frame stood in your doorway.

he didn’t waste a second. coming to you in two long strides as he pushed you back onto the bed and smashed his lips onto yours. his hands found a home on your face as yours quickly went to his hair, threading your fingers through the strands as his moved from your cheeks down to your shoulders.

breathing in heavily as you pulled away, dean moved off of you so he could lean against the head rest of your bed. moving to pull you forward until you were attached to his side.

dean’s lips instantly went to your forehead, placing a delicate kiss before resting his head on yours. “god baby, i missed you so fucking much.” he all but breathed out, allowing you to curl deeper into his side.

placing a kiss on the inside of his arm, which was wrapped around your shoulder, you lifted your head so you could properly look into his eyes. “i missed you too. far too much than i should’ve actually.”

all dean did was laugh, shaking his head as he moved his chin to rest on top of your head. “thought sam was going to punch me for how much i was talking about you.” all you could do was lean up to place a quick kiss on his lips, slightly leaning back so your faces were close. “that makes us even then.”

for the next couple of hours, you and dean just calmly rested in your bed, quietly talking to each other about the case and what you had been doing for the past week.

the two of you could’ve stayed there forever if it wasn’t for sam peaking his head in and asking what you two wanted for dinner. when you all agreed on something, sam offered to go pick it up, promptly leaving as you moved to get off of dean’s chest.

“thinking of making some cookies for dessert, wanna join me?” you sat on the edge of the bed, dean reaching over to wrap his arm around your waist. only moving to rest his chin on your shoulder after your proposal of a sweet treat. “i’d be stupid to say no. cmon sweetheart, sam will be back soon.”

that’s how you spent the rest of your evening. baking with dean as you waited for sam to come back with dinner. ending the night as you and dean watched a movie to help you fall asleep.

dean looked down at your sleeping frame, stroking his fingertips up and down your arm as he wondered how he got so lucky.

he had a place to stay, his brother helping him fight the supernatural, and his girl by his side. what more could dean possibly want in life?

dean sometimes found himself thinking back to all those years ago, when he broke into sam’s apartment at stanford to bring him back into the hunting life. he was a 26 year old who spent his time with meaningless one night stands, leaving them in the morning and spending his energy on finding his dad. back then, dean didn’t think his life would get this good.

brushing your hair back from your face, dean realized he wanted to cherish each moment he got to kiss your lips. he wanted to remember what it was like to kiss your forehead, or even the small section of your palm. for forgetting what it was like to feel your love seeping into his pores through your delicate kisses would possibly be the worst thing to ever happen to dean winchester

[flyingseacow]

Ok ok ok.

Finished Cult of the Lamb (right in time for the next update)

And now I got all these thoughts.

Like the bishops?

People are already doing so much interesting stuff with Narinder, so I got nothing new there. But the others?

Leshy is interestingly enough the most elaborate and thoughtful of them, the snippet about his crown was almost poetic.

Kallarmar however, he really surprised me. Based on his previous behavior, and what the others said (including ???) I had expected a frightened sniveling crybaby, not this calm sassy thing. Not only does he seems to be the most accepting of their new life, he is super calm and friendly with the lamb.

Then I realized.... Oh. Kallarmar has already gone through his worst nightmare. He has already died, multiple times. And since the lamb has done no new harm to him, he has no real reason to fear as long as he is a good little follower. (helps that he got the absolute cutest voice) Oh yeah, and the fact that not only does he claim he was pressured into helping with binding Narinder, but also that his relic summons a skeleton - one that seems very clearly to be based on Narinder?? I have thoughts.

And Heket? Heket seems angry, but reluctingly accepting of her new life. And I realized, after what happened with Shamura, Heket was the one keeping the bishops together. For a thousand years, she was the only real thing holding up the old faith. Shamura too wounded to handle it. Leshy too young and well, chaotic. Kallarmar just wanting to hide away in his temple. She must have been under so much pressure. And she is the next youngest in the group!

Shamura is just such a tragic character. I had expected them to be more damaged without their crown, but seeing how disoriented and stuck in memories and half addled thought they are? Damn.

When I gave them the spider silk their reaction was a gut punch. I had this clear mental image of them running the silk though their fingers, mumbling to themselves, barely aware of the lamb.

Ugh, I really hope Sins of the flesh gives more lore. I got all these feels.

[moonstruckme]

hi! congratulations on 8k! i know no one who deserves it as much as you! i hope you are having a lovely day. just wanted to request this if it hasn’t been done before:

hot cocoa☕️; ‘coming home’ with james

the way you write is so soft and gentle and reminds me of when my mom would dump laundry that just came out of the dryer on me as a kid so thank you so much for being a source of comfort to me:)

thank you either way!

Oh that's the best feeling, thank you so much!

cw: vague mention of reader's "friends and family," which in my head could mean chosen family, I tried to keep these people very obscure so sorry if that makes the writing feel unnatural

James Potter x fem!reader ♡ 857 words

James watches you with an odd sort of pride as you navigate the contours of a beat-up road on instinct and memory.

You’ve become more obviously familiar as your little road trip has gone on. It’s endearing, your posture changing and fingers sure as they turn the dial to a radio station you must know; you’re getting closer to home. James rolls down his window and breathes in the scent of dogwood trees and wet soil, and he imagines you smelling these things every day for so long they became a part of you. You curve around a pothole so naturally James doesn’t think you’ve noticed yourself doing it. 

He realizes the wind is messing up his hair, and puts up his window quickly. 

You notice his unease. “What?” 

“They’re going to think I’m a mess,” he says, flipping down the visor above his seat to fix his hair in the mirror. It always looks disheveled, but he was hoping to have it less so to meet your friends and family. 

You laugh. The sound relaxes James some, light and sweet and all things lovely. “They are not,” you say. “You’re going to charm the pants off of everyone without even trying, and then they’re going to vote to replace me with you.” 

He grins, slotting a piece of hair behind your ear that had come loose when he’d let the wind in. “I wouldn’t let that happen to you, lovie.”

“Not sure you can help it.” You look at him sideways, teasing. “Everyone falls in love with you instantly. I’ll seem bland by comparison.” 

This is something you’ve repeated often since inviting James home with you—not the part about you seeming bland, which is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard, but about everyone liking him. You have an unshakeable faith in his ability to get on with people. The word irresistible has been employed once or twice, and James doesn’t have the heart to correct you (Sirius’ parents seemed perfectly able to resist him. Argus Filch would probably still have James’ bollocks in detention if it were in his power). Every time he’s suggested you might be biased you’ve waved him off. 

Still, James isn’t very nervous. He’s going to meet the people that have been your home; loving you is something they’ll all have in common. 

“You could never be bland.” He leans over to smooch your cheek, chuffed when it squishes with a smile with your eyes still on the road. “Anyway, if they try to excommunicate you I’ll only go with you.” 

“Will you?” you ask, pleased. 

“Course. You’re my favorite.” 

You make an amused humming sound, reaching for his hand. Your fingers are cold, and James sets about warming them, rubbing his thumb over yours. “It’s that sort of sweet talk that’s going to have you sitting in my spot at the table by dinner,” you say, “just you watch.” 

“We’ll sit in it together,” he replies, stroking a line down to your wrist. “That’ll show ‘em.” James probably shouldn’t be talking about your people like they’re antagonists already, but he’s gotten distracted by the sweet bit of skin where your long sleeve has slipped up your wrist. He leans down thoughtlessly, pressing a kiss to the intricate linework of veins showing beneath your skin. 

James comes from an adolescence of dorms and locker rooms. Having had multiple serious conversations fully naked, nudity doesn’t tend to phase him. He is, however, an eighteenth-century gentleman for you and only you. The delicate bumps and creases of your wrists and knees make his heart flutter in a way he has to imagine is medically dangerous. 

These are feelings he’s going to have to get a handle on while meeting the people you grew up around. 

James sighs. “I should have brought a dish.” 

“Don’t,” you chide. Your fingers tighten on his, squeezing reassuringly. “You didn’t need to bring anything, there will be too much food anyway. Are you really still nervous?” 

“Not very,” he admits. “I do want them to like me, though. And…don’t get after me for chauvinism or anything, but I want them to think I’m taking good care of you.” 

You slow down at the side of the road, and for a second James thinks you’re stopping to console him, but then he sees the line of cars parked in front of you. You’re here. 

You turn the car off before taking off your seatbelt, turning to face him. “You take very good care of me,” you tell him, soft and kind with your hand on his cheek. “You don’t need to worry. They’re going to love you for all the same reasons I do.” 

James raises his eyebrows. “I’m not taking my shirt off for them.” 

Your eyes sparkle beautifully when you laugh. “Maybe not those reasons. But really, when has anyone not liked you?” 

“I could make you a list…” 

“It’d be exaggerated.” You roll your eyes, kissing him once before reaching into the backseat for your bag. “Ready?” 

James smiles, the warm impression of your lips still tingling on his. He'd go anywhere you asked him to.

[i-cant-sing]

i was just minding my business like scrolling to find new fics to read since i was so so bored and while i was finding some delicious fics (ahem ahem: yandere big brother bakugou x little sister reader) ur post suddenly idk the word (lumitaw (its a filo word)) and i was screaming and immediately dropped what i was supposed to read to read yours 😭😭😭

i got the worst memory ever to exist because i keep forgetting their names but i think i'll grasp them once the next chapter is out (hopefully) but yeaaah!!! baris reminds me of abbas in a way but ig he's a bit more.. brute yk what im talking about????? ig he's ok..

OH! and i have a theory about the painting, y/n's face getting smudged maybe because baldwin or SALAUDDIN decided to smudged it to forget how they look due to heartbroken (prob not baldwin,, but i feel like salauddin would do that ??) i guess im getting married again 😔😔 i feel like im betraying my pookie salauddin 💔💔💔🙏🙏 BUT ANYWAYS THANK YOU FOR THE UPDATE SNOW!!!! AMAZING AS ALWAYS!! can't wait for the next one already!! 😭😭😭 i think i'll send more of my thoughts if something crosses over my mind (prob when im in the shower)

ooohh i like your theory(portrait pictures at the end). i like it a lot. expanding on it:

Baldwin would probably cause the painting to be smudged because he's kissing it, kissing your lips, drunk off his mind, tears streaming down his cheek as he spends hours sitting in front of it, talking to the painting as if u still exist, begging u to come back from heaven, even apologising for all he's done, just please- come back, angel...

Meanwhile Salauddin would probably be staring at your portrait angrily. He understands why you had to leave but.... you couldnt have told him where you were goinh? Do you not think he couldve protected you? He wouldve used his whole army, gathered Muslims from all around the world to protect you. Did you... did you not have the least bit faith in him? deep down, he knows u did this to prevent a war between him and baldwin but.... Salauddin wouldve gone to war for you. Happily. This wasnt your decision to make alone. Now, he stands in front of your portrait, he has it in his palace now, and he doesnt say voice it out like baldwin, but he has complaints. HE keeps them inside, mentally talking to you, telling you just how stupid you were for sacrificing yourself, for jumping off that stupid cliff. How u shouldve just- just asked him for help ONCE, and he wouldve fought until his last breath if it meant keeping u safe. In his mind, u sacrificed yourself to protect Baldwin from murdering innocent muslims or anyone else u wouldve seeked help from.

And now? All Salauddin can do is pray for you. He wakes up late into the night and sits on the prayer mat, making dua for you for hours, reading Quran for you, has animals slaughtered on eid on your behalf, even doing charity and hajj (pilgrimage) on your behalf, just so that you can have more good deeds in your name. He still has the chess board u gifted him, but he's stopped playing chess. He never played the game again, it was only a painful reminder of you. The one person who he could never beat.

As for your painting, why it was smudged? Salauddin didnt want anyone to see your beauty, thats why he kept the portrait hidden in his room, but then he feared that one day when he's not around anymore, someone will see you. So, he used a rag soaked in turpentine to smudge your face, but couldnt do more than just the bottom half of your face. He thought that was fine, after all, thats how u did often appear when you were around, wearing a niqaab, a veil that covered your face.

Now that he looks at your eyes, he realises his mistake. He heard the wise tell him-

"Eyes are the windows to the soul."

He now knows it to be true.

This is what I think the portraits look like:

Notice that this is the earrings Salauddin gifted Y/n when she was in the market with him:

How Baldwin's been:

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for "using" a cucumber and putting it back in the fridge?

(🥒👌 to find later)

Please, I know it sounds nuts but hear me out. I feel awful and I need to know just how bad this is. Also, I intentionally left as much as possible vague as I am a minor and I do not want this to get removed for being too explicit. But the story will not make sense if I don't include certain things, please understand.

So I (16M) grew up in and currently still live in the bible belt, with extremely conservative evangelical parents. As a taste of what it's like, we have church 3 times a week, and church camp every summer. We are only allowed to access Netflix through a stupid content filter app and we can only use a restricted smart phone that is regularly checked at random by our parents. We get an hour and a half of computer usage every other day, and the internet on the computer is heavily filtered also. The only reason I have access to Tumblr and am able to post this now is because my best friend's older brother gave me his old android for my birthday a few years ago. His family is much more open minded, and I'm very close with them. I also think they have always felt a little bad for me with my family being the way they are.

I'm also gay. Obviously, my family does not know, and I intend to keep it that way. I won't go too deep into it, but it will suffice to say I struggled a lot when I was younger over this. The good thing is that in the last few years, I've been able to accept myself more and come to terms with what my own feelings about religion and faith really are. I came out to my best friend and his brother a little over a year ago, and they've been very supportive. I have yet to tell any of my other friends.

Recently, I've been trying out alcohol since my friends found a hookup. Something I have discovered is that I tend to get lewd feelings when I drink, which has nearly caused a few embarrassing moments around friends. Coincidentally, I have also been experimenting with... certain things. Being a minor, I obviously can't enter any of the adult stores around me, nor would I feel comfortable asking any of my friends to drive me there if I could. I also can't order anything online because my bank account is connected to my parents, and I don't have a shipping address I'm comfortable using for those items either. So instead, I use household objects that belong to me and can be sanitized easily. You might see where this is going.

Yesterday evening, I came home from best friend's house with a full bottle of wine in my backpack. We and a few other friends had already been sipping on a few beers that afternoon, and I still felt a little buzzed. After my family went to sleep, despite already having a little alcohol in my system, I proceeded to get wasted on this bottle of wine in my room. I don't have the clearest memory of all of this, but at some point, I got hungry and lewd-feeling. Went into the kitchen and, through some kind of thought process I can only imagine now, came back into my room with a cucumber. From the title of the post, you can hazard a guess as to what happened to this cucumber. Once I was done, I drukedly and quickly washed it in the bathroom sink and threw it back into the fridge. I went to sleep.

I started freaking out as soon as I woke up this morning. There were four cucumbers in the fridge, I was pretty positive at least two were going to be used for dinner tonight, and I had no idea which cucumber I did the deed with. To make matters worse, my mom was inviting the pastor of our church and his family over for dinner. I have practically no money currently, no license or vehicle, and no friends with vehicles free to pick up new cucumbers for me (and no reasonable explanation as to why I needed them to spot me for four cucumbers specifically). I also have no believable reason to give for why we shouldn't have cucumbers added in the salad mix. My mom knows I love them, and they haven't gone bad. Can't say I ate them because who the hell eats four raw cucumbers? And she'll interrogate both my brother and I until she gets a satisfying answer if I just throw them out. I didn't know what the hell to do about this and I was close to having a panic attack, so... I took a nap.

Evening came. Guests came over, dinner happened. We had porkchops with macaroni and side salads. Cucumbers were in the salad, and I along with pastor's family and my own, ate it like nothing was wrong. My parents, the pastor and his wife had an engaging conversation about politics, religion, and some mild church gossip after dinner. My little brother continued to read his book, and I had a very awkward and one-sided conversation about Young Sheldon with the pastor's daughter. Then they left. And I went to my room to mentally implode.

To say I'm horrified is a major understatement. I don't think anyone is going to get sick because I scrubbed all of the cucumbers with soap multiple times and cleaned the vegetable drawer with bleach when I woke up this morning. I guess I also don't know that the violated cucumber was one of the ones that was used for dinner tonight, but then it's only a matter of days until we have salad again, or if mom cuts one up for water. I've rattled my brain for any way I could get some new cucumbers without telling anyone the details of the event, but I have nothing. Don't even have the money, anyway. Gave up the last bit of cash I had for the damn wine yesterday, and I have $0.43 in total on my debit card.

Admittedly, there is a very small part of me that doesn't even really care if they have eaten or end up eating the damn thing. I can't stand my family. My parents are invasive, controlling and neurotic, and don't give a shit about how I'm doing in so far as it pertains to god and the church. I'm a little more sympathetic to my brother as he's been stuck in this hell with me, but at 13 he's already begun to regurgitate way more religious dogma than I ever did at his age. And I know for a fact that they would want nothing to do with me if they found out I was gay. They'd probably kick me out on the street and spit on me if I had to guess. But even still, this is only a small part of how I feel. What I did was still so gross, and no amount of animosity I have for them can change how mortifed I am. I do have at least a semblance of a conscience.

So...AITA for all of this? WIBTA if I did nothing about the other two cucumbers? Please help.

[mx-pastelwriting]

RDR2 HC - Running away together & what would it take

RDR2 x GN! Reader

Summary: Running away together & what would it take for them to.

Warnings/Tags: Angst, Fluff, Established Relationship, Running away, Some Happy Endings

Characters: Dutch van der Linde, Arthur Morgan, Javier Escuella, Charles Smith, Bill Williamson, Hosea Matthews, John Marston, Josiah Trelawny

Dutch van der Linde

- A hard task in itself, prying Dutch away from his power over the gang, it's an almost impossible task. Though echoing Hosea's words to lie low would earn you some time in having a voice over Micah's, he would consider it.

- Nightly talks cuddled up in his arms, imagining life away from the one you have aloud; he entertains it, but not without saying some doubtful scenarios. Having to change your ways, almost manipulating him into taking that life as a real thing.

- Never leaving his side, hearing every thought, not giving Micah a chance to talk to him in private, in turn driving you crazy. Doing anything for that good life, leaving your intentions to change just to get your Dutch safe.

- Every day drained you; all that work had finally caught up to you. Slowly, you lost faith as the gang came into more trouble, making you come to a realization. You made your choice.

- A night of loving Dutch one more time, cuddled up into his arms, then having to leave them. Leaving him in a deep sleep with a final kiss. Taking your horse he had gotten for you a long time ago and what little clothes you had left from all the years of running. Finally leaving in the cold night, not daring to look back.

A year had gone by, and still you dreamt about that day and its many outcomes, but all you could do was smile at the memory of his messed hair loving him for that final night. Telling yourself over and over that it spared the both of you, there was no use to keep trying. Leaving to build your own life, living out your dream that you tried so hard to convince Dutch of so many times.

He would have loved it, just the two of you; he just couldn't see it. Getting up from your bed, dressing up for the day, and having to live off of the small land you fought to get months after. Making your way to the kitchen, readying breakfast before your day of work, but a knock interrupts you from the task.

Grabbing your old weapon, hoping it still worked, then walking slowly to the door, pointing the weapon from your hip. Upon opening the door, your mind and body went blank. Dutch was standing at your front door, looking like shit. "Dear," he says, voice cracking. Even after all this time, he charmed his way into your heart, igniting your love again.

-

Arthur Morgan

- You both have always talked about that kind of life and what it would be like, but it always ended as a joke and never as something to look forward to. Until you really thought about it, hearing Hosea's story of him and his wife fed into your dream.

- Bring it up to Arthur one night, making sure he took it seriously, not knowing what to say, only he couldn't leave the gang just like that. Over time, you pushed the matter, and he always listened but never said anything.

- Being with the gang for a long time, you watched it change as Dutch came into more trouble. Finally, it hit a breaking point when Arthur went missing from the meeting with Colm O'Driscoll. The camp had to calm you down, but it didn't stop the tears every night, fighting your mind to just leave, but it turned to worry that if he'd come back, you needed to be there for him.

- After days of the gang searching, you finally spotted Arthur's house with him on top, thinking you had just gone crazy. Hearing his groans of pain, you ran to him, crying aloud, causing the camp to spring into action, with some having to hold you back so the rest could work.

- After an hour of working on him finally letting you see him, never leaving his side as you waited for him to wake. Hosea brought you something to eat every day, knowing what you had been going through.

Snapping from your exhausted state as a groan came from Arthur, watching as he stirred from his rest. Tears once again spilled from your eyes while grabbing his hand and placing it to your cheek. Waking fully, he whispered your name, running a hand through his hair earning a hum from him as he rested his eyes once again.

"I thought you were dead," you whispered, kissing his hand earning another hum. "Okay," he whispered weakly, making you look at him meeting his blue-green eyes. Taking a minute for you to understand, you nodded, "Tonight." You responded, getting only a weak nod back. Quickly getting up to then plant a kiss on his lips before preparing your leave.

-

Javier Escuella

- Being so loyal to Dutch, as soon as you'd bring that idea of life up, he'd tell you of the time he tried to find that kind of life, with it ending with Dutch saving him, in turn needing to repay Dutch with his life. A life for a life.

- Still, of course, you stayed with him, but it didn't stop you from trying. From mentioning small things, such as telling him to look at the homesteads as you passed them or talking to couples who owned their land, hearing the stories of home life making sure Javier was near you to hear.

- Wishing aloud to love him behind closed doors, but he brought up the suggestion of a hotel quickly you shot it down with wishes of loving him in your own home. Unknown to you, it wasn't till the end that he would change his mind.

- Seeing as he buddied up with Micah breaking your heart, seeing what Micah did to Dutch, there would be no way he would sink his claws into your Javier. Realizing it even more after hearing Arthur's words confirming your Javiers changed, solidifying your thoughts. Having to do the only thing that was left.

- Grabbing a bag, you started to stuff your things into it. Hearing footsteps come closer, you didn't look up, knowing who it was. When asking what you were doing, you told him you were leaving him. Shocked, he begged, but you gave it to him in the end, giving him an ultimatum. You or Dutch.

Pain washed over his face. He looked to the floor, hoping it would have the answer, but you continued packing. "Amor," he begged, but you kept your back to him as much as it pained you. "I can't do this, Javi," you say, tears stinging the brim of your eyes. "Tell me," he says, putting a hand on yours.

"All of this, you hate Micah. What changed?" You asked, making him look away, but you brought his face back softly with your hand. Cupping his face, "I know you see it. He's not well. I'm not going to stick around anymore, Javi," you say, turning to zip up your bag.

"It's your choice," you say before grabbing a few more things. "I can't," he says weakly. "Okay," saying your final words before walking to the horses, putting your things onto yours before hopping onto your horse.

Taking a last look at the camp, not caring who chose to look. Hearing as the horse next to you stirred, looking to see Javier hop on his with his belongings behind him. Smiling at each other, you turned away from camp, taking off quickly to start your new life.

-

Charles Smith

- Having been in the gang for a small amount of time, he had never shut down the idea, though never did he start to make plans on it. Figuring it was from his friendships with Arthur and John or him just settling in having run with him before the gang, you were of course thankful for them taking you both in, but shaking off the idea was never going to happen.

- Taking long rides on the days he got off, hugging his waist while resting your head on his back, talking about many things: camp gossip, your past travels, the future. Sometimes passing by a homestead watching as the people worked away at their land, imagining out loud how that would be, it would be better than always running.

- He loved you dearly; it pained him whenever leaving you to do a job with the gang, but you hated it more when he came to you from a watch stumbling on his tired feet to then crashing into your arms falling asleep before he could even mumble, "I love you.".

- Making his choice after the bank job that had gone wrong, having to bury Hosea and Lenny's bodies, the both of you talked about the decision ending with a kiss and the start of packing your things. Though quickly interrupted by the law, causing you to run once again, making you both stick around the gang a little longer.

- Knowing it put the both of you in more danger, he tried to make it quick by using the gang to help the tribe, only meeting them once by going with him, you understood. Finally, the day came telling only Arthur and John and those closest to you, getting hugs and wishes of luck to your new life.

Waking to the cooing of birds wrapped in the warmth of Charles's arms, hearing him snore softly, kissing his scared cheek, waking him from his slumber earning a smile. Looking at you with tired brown eyes, taking a moment to admire your well-rested faces.

Wiggling out of his arms with an objection as he tightened them, making you both laugh before you headed off to the kitchen in your homestead, but not without getting dressed first from the night before. Having been years since that day, leading to a new life, though the past caught up a year later, causing Charles to go with John just to make Dutch and Micah pay for all those years ago.

Of course, coming back to you with a bullet in the shoulder and a promise to never leave you again, from John's home, you both made it up to Canada, living out your dream of a homestead. Ending your reminisce on the past as Charles wraps his arms around you once more, kissing your neck softly while you readied the morning drinks.

-

Bill Williamson

- It had never been an idea to the both of you from all the years you ran with the gang until going into town. Seeing how a couple talked about their lives after getting that first taste of that kind of life, you never looked back.

- Not telling Bill at first, wanting him away from Dutch a bit before springing it upon him after one of your hotel nights away, he entertained your thoughts, though laughing at some parts until he realized you were serious.

- His first feeling was anger at how he could never do that to Dutch, but you argued that Dutch doesn't control your lives. Finally, he calmed down, telling you he looked up to Dutch. Knowing how he wanted the limelight that Arthur and John had, you convinced him that even if it was painful to say and hear, he would never be them. His obsession can't control him.

- Even though he listened with understanding, even agreeing, he told you the time wasn't right. Giving your understanding back to his reasoning, you stayed with him. But things didn't stay still for forever.

- The bank job had gone wrong with the law running you out of Shady Bell, feeling as if it was years before you got Bill back in your arms after hearing tales of him on Guarma. Having enough, you started to pack your things, causing Bill to freak. Hearing none of it, you gave him a choice. Hoping he would pick the right one.

Standing in front of your horse, holding your bag tightly, "I've hit the end, Bill; I-I can't. I can't stay up every night hoping you're alive; it's not fair to me or you." You choked through your words, causing a scene for the whole camp to see, but you didn't care; you were done.

Seeing his hesitant look back at Dutch, who watched on calmly, you had your answer. His continuous seek for approval from Dutch would never stop, and you weren't going to be around to watch it kill him or you.

-

Hosea Matthews

- Having left before he would hear the idea once again, not shooting it down immediately though ending your talk with how his story ended, right back where he started.

- As time went on, his coughs had gotten worse, as well as his attitude towards it, helping with his cough fits earned a hand wave and a choked-out "I'm fine." But you kept pushing, knowing if it was the end for him, it should be anywhere but running with the gang.

- Bringing it up more, he entertained it a bit more, but other reasons would always pop up after, trying to understand you let it go after every talk. As the gang settled into Shady Bell slowly, you noticed that he became even worse; he barely came to bed, but when he did stumble in, smelling of booze, giving you a slurred "I love you" before snoring away.

- Not waiting for his final say any longer, you slowly packed your things over the days, making sure both of your horses were ready to go in the night. Thankfully, you met a couple who knew of a cabin not too far away at a cheap price. Saving up quickly, you bought the cabin, leaving it to wait for you. Taking note of when the watch shifts change and when the camp dies down for the night.

- Finally, you made your move. As Hosea stumbled into being his familiar drunk self, you went into action, calling his horse over by the back door quietly loading on what little you had left. Then, waking Hosea leading him to the horse with false words, finally, you were ready with Hosea in a drunken sleep on your back, fleeing into the dark swamp.

Riding through the night, keeping Hosea on the horse, with luck, you made it through the swamp and into the forest on your way to the cabin. Not knowing how long this would last not even sure if this was a new life. "Just enough for you to rest," you whispered into the cold night air.

Making it to the cabin, using all your strength to get him in the cabin, laying him on the bed, tucking him. Going back out, taking your things from his and your horses, then letting them rest in the small stable for the next few days.

Waking into the morning still hearing Hosea's snores with his warm arms around you. Slowly, you get up, readying his medicine, hoping he'll understand your actions. Being all for him in the end.

-

John Marston

- Having entertained the idea only came up two times. The first was for one of Hosea's cons, having you and John play as a married couple that lived on a farm just for another couple who actually lived on a farm to come along to buy into Hosea's con.

- As years went on, seeing how the gang dwindled, thankful for not taking your John, but not without a scare and a promise to stay with you. Getting out of the snow, helping John to Horseshoe Overlook, fighting to keep him down, and resting. John made a joke about you being his spouse and having a little farm. That was the second time.

- John wasn't the only one with that joke; being protective over him, Hosea started to joke about how the con act ended long ago, but you were still acting the part.

- Finally, John was ready for jobs again, so you loosened your protection, though you weren't afraid to give it to Dutch if he came back with so much as a small scratch. Furthering that joke in the camp led you two to talk. John agreed to the possibility, but it was different in his mind. You saw it coming sooner than him.

- Sadly, it wasn't until the very end you could live out that idea. The gang fell apart, pushing you both towards Strawberry, but not without making a rule for yourself. Never to live that life again. It was easier said than done. John helped the framer, and you fled, leaving your John behind.

Reading the letter over again as the carriage hit every bump on the road, making your impatience worse. Finally stopping, not wanting to look out the window, needing to see him up close, you hurried out.

Standing there face-to-face with your John, having been gone for so many months, your eyes stinging as you wrapped your arms tightly around him. "It's over," he whispered into your ear, making the threatening tears spill, tightening your hold, not wanting to let him go again.

-

Josiah Trelawny

- Living that dream already in Saint Denis, but unbeknownst to you, Josiah had dealings with a gang. Hearing the name of the gang from officers around town yet not thinking anything of them. Not even questioning his absence at home as his "office work" makes him travel a lot.

- Loving the stories of his travels made you susceptible to listening for things, but never did you think you'd hear about your husband from an officer's mouth on the street. Then the next day, another questioned you on your doorstep, being very hostile and pushing past you just to find nothing, but before leaving, accusing you of dealing with the "Van Der Linde Gang.".

- Hearing nothing from your Josiah in the few passing days got you worried—maybe you didn't know the man you married. Though finally, you saw him as he crawled up the stairs of your Saint Denis home, the sight brought you to tears.

- The damage to him was heartbreaking. He groaned and hissed through his teeth as you cleaned up his bloody wounds, then bandaged them up. Saying nothing, you let the silence fall with his story quickly following, but you didn't let him finish.

- Saying the name of the gang, seeing how his face turned pale. Telling him of what transpired days before, hit you hard speaking of what you knew out loud to him. Starting with a sigh, he told you everything with a voice filled with shame.

"Stop," you said, interrupting his explanation, doing as you said, looking to you. Not being able to handle the sight of him knowing every cut or possible broken bone was because of his deals with the gang. You started to question whether the life you built was even real; was the love you got from him even real?

"Love," he pleaded, placing a hand on yours looking into the eyes you fell in love with so many times. Still, you held your ground. "No more J," you say, making him look down watching as he nodded. Slowly, you wrapped your arms around his upper back and shoulders, hugging him as he sat in your home, where he belonged.

Hello, I hope you enjoyed if there is any grammar mistakes or misspellings sorry about that feel free to let me know in the comments, have a great day/afternoon/night!

♥ mx-pastelwriting does not consent to their fanfiction being copied, copied & credited, translated, used in videos and/or audios, screenshotted, used in AI.

Fanfiction is protected under copyright law when plagiarism is involved. If you plagiarize my work, either a piece or whole in any language, I will take legal action. Inspiration or the same idea does NOT apply to this, only word-for-word plagiarism in any language.

[super-ion]

Oh, hello! Welcome!

I take it this is your first time out in the deep black?

Oh no, no need to get defensive about it, Everyone has to start somewhere. We get many travelers paying tribute at our little church here. You've got the look of someone who's never been beyond low orbit. I'm guessing one of the third wave colonies?

(It's the implants. Secondwave culture is a bit more uptight about them and you don't look like you're trying to rebel)

You're wondering why we have valuable real estate set aside for a shrine of all things?

You're wondering what sort of god spacers worship?

Do you know what a god is? I'll tell you. A god is an idea given life.

So what's the idea that keeps us flying?

Most folk born planetside might think the god of spaceflight is all fire and noise. Nah. Any moron with enough money and explosives can build a rocket.

No, the idea that keeps us going out here is faith that ask these tiny little pressure vessels will hold together and find their way through the black.

Back in the ancient days, back before thinking machines and all that, the very first leaps off the ground were guided by computers that were hand made. I shit you not, little old ladies hand sewed the memory together.

Huh…? No, I mean like, hard coded read only memory, literal ones and zeros locked into magnets and wire.

That's my point though. Our god began life as the god of seamstresses. She's the god of sewing and weaving. She's older than civilization and she's gone by many names in many cultures.

Yeah, no, of course we don't hand sew our computers, that lasted all of like a decade. Hell, textile work itself went totally automated not long after. Point is she took men into space and brought them home safely. That sorta thing leaves a mark on a god. It changes them.

A ship. A station. A fleet. They're all systems. People and life support and sensors and actuators and control loops. It's all a web, a giant fucking tapestry of connections and she's the master weaver at the center.

But of course the web is massive, and she isn't literally weaving shit. She's all of the maintenance. Corrective and preventive. So it falls on all of us, the pilots, the mechanics, the algae farmers, the sanitation workers, everyone. We're the sewers and weavers. We're the ones patching and mending the tapestry. We're the ones adding to it constantly.

So that's what the shrine is for. That's the religion in out here in the black. Deep space is a bitch, and all we have to count on is the ship and the crew. She reminds us of that.

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

Genuine question, I don't mean this in any negative way I just want to understand. You have multiple posts abt Mu qing and feng xin talking abt what happened between them and Xie lian and how bad their actions were (which I agree with!) But it's been years since I've read tgcf so my memory is quite fuzzy and I don't remember Feng Xin every doing anything to willingly hurt Xie Lian? As in Xie Lian forced Feng Xin to leave and for centuries their was no further incident? Ofc I could just be misremembering but I'd still like a reminder.

(Love you analysis posts btw, great and refreshing reads)

Hi there!

While not intentionally harming Xie Lian, ultimately, Feng Xin did. While Mu Qing is overtly caustic and hateful to Xie Lian because he doesn't think Xie Lian is just a good person, Feng Xin is inactive, a coward, and saw Xie Lian as a prince to follow orders of more than than friend. Xie Lian desperately tries to give him trinkets to keep him at his side to show he does appreciate him as his friend, not just a former follower of the kingdom.

At Xie Lian's lowest point, when he has to struggle to survive, Feng Xin does see him as lesser because he is no longer that grand prince he's so proud to follow, he is struggling like any other unknown civilian with nothing. He is disappointed to see Xie Lian having to steal, essentially a Prince is above that, that image of the princely Xie Lian is gone and with it the faith that Feng Xin had in him. Xie Lian is not able to be at that level of humanity. Xie Lian demands him to stop following him, the kingdom of Xianle, but this was also a very obvious plea to stay as a friend despite their kingdom being gone, they could still have each other.

Feng Xin walks away from that because he is not thinking as a friend, he is thinking as a follower, a soldier of the prince he reprimanded for a lowly human action. Even if Feng Xin regrets this, he still showed how weak his faith in Xie Lian was, he genuinely did think Xie Lian let go of his own morals despite Xie Lian having tried his hardest to retain them while surviving.

This is what does help to break Xie Lian, because Feng Xin WAS supposed to be his friend first and foremost, and he proved the opposite by leaving and the implication he believed Xie Lian to be morally bankrupt.

[evasive-anon]

Jason was having a pretty OK time with the league of assassins, sure getting dunked in a lazarus pit sucked and Bruce turned out to be a scumbag who didn't care about him, but at least he isn't dead. He even liked most of the new skills he was learning there so on the whole being with the league seemed like a pretty good deal to him until Talia woke him up in the middle of the night and left him alone with two child assassins.

Or, a demon twins AU where when Talia realizes her father intends to have her boys fight to the death takes action first by deciding to take all her kids and leave the league. Talia either dies or is separated from them in the initial escape and now Jason just has a bag of supplies and a letter from Talia explaining the plan to get to Gotham. Jason has to get himself and two 7 year olds out of the Himalayas, across a desert, and over 12k miles to Gotham. Only now the league members hunting them down want them dead or worse and Jason isn't too confident that B will accept them given their kill counts.

Featuring:

Good Mom Talia. she loves her kids. Did she teach them to kill? Sure, but that's an important life skill.

Single Teen Mom Jason. He's the oldest and in charge but he also will not answer any questions about The Plan™ given he isn't committed to Talia's but also doesn't have a set alternative. Oscillates between looking forward to just dumping his new little brothers with Bruce so they'll be his problem and thinking of just moving somewhere random in the US and keeping them based entirely on how cute vs annoying they are at that time. Didn't realize how much he relied on Talia to help him with things until she is gone. He's really trying his best but he wasn't all that emotionally stable before this so hang in there.

Angry Smol Dami. He's still drinking the LoS punch and really dislikes that he is now considered a traitor. Can't stand that Jason won't answer any of his very relevant questions. Is actually very scared but will not show it. Misses his mom. Didn't even know he had siblings until his mom yoinked him out of bed that night and brought him to Jason and Danny and started all this. Physically the stronger twin. Thinks Danny is dragging them down in fights and also may blame him a bit because clearly his mother only did all this to spare him.

Danny, reincarnated with limited access to his memories and powers. Has been trying to keep his powers a secret. Talia knew about them but never told anyone but she may have hinted at it in her letter to Jason. Not the strongest physically but very good at stealth and social interactions. Didn't know he had and older brother or twin before Jason woke him up at Talia's instruction that night. Thinks Damian is mean and has faith Jason knows what he's doing even if that is very much untrue.

[crowsofdarkness]

Soldat: Chapter Nine

-gif not mine. credit to owner-

Pairings: Bucky Barnes x Female Agent! Reader. Slight Steve Rogers x Female Agent! Reader

Content Warnings: language, 18 + implied smut, angst, fluff, kidnapping, violence.

Summary: Agent Y/N has worked alongside Steve Rogers at SHIELD for some time all while keeping a dark secret from everyone. Until one day that darkness faces her head on and she's forced to make a choice. Continue fighting along side Captain America? Or find her home once again with Soldat?

Authors Note: This was originally published on my old blog as a trilogy so I will be in the slow process of adding it to this blog. This is the first of the trilogy and will take place during The Winter Soldier. If anyone is interested in being tagged, let me know.

Tags: @globetrotter28 @sakuracyberhex @chinggay85-blog @bookofriverr @misatxox @that-blonde-girl @cats-chaotic-mind @wintrsoldrluvr @sebastians-love @pumpkin-babydoll @ordelixx

Soldat Masterlist

Hell. 

That would be the only word I could use to describe what we all had gone through the last hour. Natasha, Nick, and Maria were all in their positions while Steve, Sam, and I had fought our way through the Strike team. I had opted out of using my powers, choosing to use my other ways to fight. Thankfully nothing had triggered me to use them. 

Steve had gone on the intercom to let everyone know the truth about Shield and Hydra, revealing that Pierce was behind all of it. His speech caused a rift between everyone in the building, some taking sides with Hydra because they were too afraid of the consequences while the others chose the side to stand up against Hydra and follow Steve. 

His speech also pushed Hydra to move their launch to happen in the next ten minutes. Which is where we were right now. 

“They’re initiating launch,” Maria’s voice came through our earpieces.

Sam and I followed Steve to the roof of the building, our feet taking us towards the helicarriers that had started rising from the water below us. 

“Hey Cap, how do we know the good guys from the bad?” Sam questioned. 

“If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad.” Steve called from over his shoulder.

He reached for my hand and after I slipped my fingers with his, we watched Sam release his metal wings before jumping off the edge of the building and taking flight. Steve wrapped his arm that was clutching tight to his shield around my side, pulling me into his chest. 

“Hang on,” he breathed into my ear before we both jumped off the building. 

Bullets rained down around us as we landed on our feet, hiding behind a few storage containers. Members of the Strike team had found us, causing us to fight back to back just like we had done many times before. 

“Hey Cap, I found those bad guys you were talking about.” 

I bit my lip at Sam’s voice that came through my ear to stop from laughing and asked if he was alright. 

“I’m not dead. Yet.” 

“Be careful,” I demanded with a smirk. 

Once we had fought our way through the Strike team, us standing tall, we started after the helicarrier that we were in charge of disabling. 

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked Steve, peaking over his shoulder. 

My body was pressed up against his back, trying to see exactly what he was doing because they had come up with this entire part of the plan while I was held captive at Hydra’s base.

He let out a quiet scoff as he took out one of the memory cards that we needed to replace with our copy that would immediately shut down the helicarrier. 

“Have a little faith,” Steve smirked. 

“Do you think she’s really going to do it?” I questioned, trying to keep the silence from taking over. 

“Who, Nat?” Steve asked, giving me his full attention only for a moment. “It’s the only way for us to let everyone know about Hydra.” 

I nodded. “I know but that just means all of our past is going to be out there, online, for everyone to see.” 

“But I already know about your past so you don’t have to be worried about what I will think. I’m still going to be by your side, no matter what.” Steve declared, letting the facade of Captain America slip away only for a second. 

All I could do was give him my best smile before nodding, letting him know that we should get moving. 

It was true; Steve did know about my past but there was one day, almost two years ago, that I forced myself to bury so deep in my subconscious because I didn't want anyone to find out. It was only between Soldat and I, no one else was around and knowing what I know now about Hydra wiping his memory, I didn’t have to worry about Soldat telling anyone. That moment of my life was the absolute lowest I had ever felt. It took me a very long time to feel like myself again. If it hadn’t been for SHIELD hiring me and working with Steve, I would have been dead. 

After disabling the helicarrier, we made our way towards the last and final helicarrier but the voice that came through our earpieces caused my feet to come to a sudden halt. 

“Guys, he’s here.” 

Sam’s words echoed in my mind and Steve reached for my hand, giving it a squeeze. “You alright?” 

Blinking twice, I nodded. “I knew we were going to run into him eventually so I don’t know why I’m so afraid to face him.” 

The fear of not knowing who we were about to face had my palms sweating and my heart hammering in my chest. Did they wipe him again after they found out I escaped? Or would he remember letting me leave?

“I’ll be right here.” 

Putting all the fighting and bullet noises on mute, I leaned up towards Steve and pressed my lips against his in a hurried but passionate kiss, one that he had no problem returning. 

“Thank you,” I muttered against them. 

“C’mon,” he urged me along.

We reached outside on the main launch pad in seconds as we tried our best to maneuver and block shots from the Strike team. Steve had called in Sam for a ride after catching his flying shield.

“Wait, we’re not doing what I think we’re doing?” I questioned while slicing my knife alongside someone's face. 

“Trust me, Y/N.” 

“There’s no way he’s going to be able to lift both of us, Steve!” I pulled him to a stop once we were both in the clear. “You go. I’ll find another way up to you.”

“This isn’t up for debate,” Steve demanded. 

I didn’t have a chance to fight back because he had me wrapped in arms once again, jumping off the ledge while a bomb went off behind us. 

Screams clawed their way out of my throat as we fell hundreds of feet down to the ground below. The wind blew around us as we flipped around a few times before I felt some sort of tug, causing us to halt our fall to the ground below. 

“He’s got us,” Steve cooed in my ear. 

Daring to open my eyes, I peaked and breathed a long sigh of relief when I saw Sam flying us back to the landing above us. 

I resisted the urge to kiss the pavement once Sam had let us down on the ground and walked between the two men. 

“You know, you’re a lot heavier than you look,” Sam joked towards Steve. 

“I had a big breakfast,” Steve shrugged with a laugh. 

We weren’t able to bask in the second of happiness because Steve had been knocked off of the landing strip, my screams vibrating off the metal of the ships. 

“STEVE!” 

Looking to my left, my heart hammered in my chest as I saw a metal arm reach towards Sam’s wings as he tried to fly after Steve, and watched in horror as he went flying towards the other end of the landing. 

Suddenly, only for a moment, it was just the two of us; me and Soldat. 

Our eyes locked as I tried to search for any hint of remembrance from him. 

“Soldat,” I breathed. 

His face twitched slightly at the softness of my voice. 

“You don’t have to do this.” I tried to reach for him. “You remember me, I know you do.”

Gun fire erupted from behind me causing me to seek solace behind a plane that had yet to take off. 

“Y/N, are you alright?” Sam’s voice came through my com. 

“I’m fine. Where is Steve?” I asked, not daring to peek around the corner as the bullets continued to rain down around me. 

“I’m still on the helicarrier. Don’t worry about me, I’ll stop the last one. Y/N, stay with Sam.”

Steve’s voice came through the com and deciding not to argue with him, I peaked around the plane and saw Soldat fighting with Sam, both throwing punches left and right. Letting out a shaky breath, I ran up behind Soldat and kicked him behind the knee, him falling to the ground. I tried my best to ignore the pain I would feel in my body when Sam and I continued to fight with Soldat, both taking turns throwing punches and kicks. 

He turned towards me and I felt the wind get knocked out of my lungs when his booted foot met with my stomach, causing me to fly back, landing on my back. 

“That’s going to leave a mark,” I groaned as I felt blood coming from my lips. 

“Five minutes, guys.”

Maria’s voice came through the coms, letting us know that we were getting too close to the window and I wasn’t sure where Steve was at this point. 

Trying my best, I rose to my knees and watched in slight horror as Soldat ripped Sam from the sky, breaking off one of the wings from the Falcon suit. My body was frozen, unable to help him as Soldat kicked Sam off of the helicarrier, him flying blind down towards the ground.

“Sam, are you alright?” I asked, fear laced my words. 

It was silent for a few moments before his voice came through. “Cap! Cap, come in. Are you okay?”

 “I’m still on the helicarrier. Where are you guys?” 

“I’m grounded. The suit’s down. Sorry, Cap.” 

“Y/N, where are you?” Steve’s worried voice wondered. 

Before I could answer, hands wrapped into my hair and yanked me to my feet. My eyes met with the blank ones of Soldat’s and as we stood staring at each other, I felt something deep in my veins, something that I hadn’t felt in a long time with him. 

Fear. 

“If you’re going to kill me, why don’t you do it already.” I sputtered, the kick from earlier causing more problems on my lungs than I had thought. 

“Why are you here?” He questioned. 

I winced at the pain of his metal hand still entangled in my hair. “To stop Hydra.”

The sounds of yelling and gun fire started getting closer towards us, unsure if it was Hydra or SHIELD. 

“I know him,” Soldat’s voice was hushed but I could still hear it. 

“Yes. And you know me. We trained together for months back in Russia. Berge held me captive there; I was your student.” 

His grip on my skull seized and I let out a small breath of relief. “Soldat, I know you remember. No matter how many times they wipe you, you always remember.” 

Raising my hand, I hesitated only for a moment before cupping his cheek hoping that the feeling of my skin on his would bring it all back. Soldat’s body tensed under my hand, his eyes growing. Feelings of love, pain, happiness, and heartbreak engulfed around us, creating this bubble of just the two of us. I could feel Soldat’s pain from all those years as The Winter Soldier and the heartbreak of never seeing his family and friends again. All of his loved ones were taken from him because of Dr. Zola’s plan to make a better soldier; Hydra’s weapon. 

I could also feel the love and happiness from his memories with Steve, back in Brooklyn before the war. The love he had for his mom and sister and how he would do anything to protect them; Steve as well. 

What broke my heart, however, was feeling his pain from what Hydra did to him. They made him a super soldier, like Steve, which is how he survived the fall from the train. They cut off his arm and replaced it with a metal one. Hydra would wipe his memory and put him on ice after every single mission because they didn’t want him to remember anything or anyone.

“You have to remember us. We can save you, Soldat.” I whispered. 

Before he could say a word, members of SHIELD came from behind the plan we were standing next to, guns drawn towards Soldat. 

“Agent Y/N, are you alright?” One of the men asked. 

“I’m fine.” I spoke, not taking my eyes off of Soldat. 

Only having a few seconds to make this decision, I let out a very nervous breath knowing that what I was about to do would have serious consequences for us. 

“He’s on the last helicarrier. I’ll give you a way out.” 

His brows rose in confusion but I ignored his silent question, letting the warmth fill my veins and spreading towards my finger tips. 

“I don’t know how long I can hold them off for. Go. NOW!” I bellowed. 

Fire shot from my hands as I threw fire balls all around me towards the men with guns drawn, allowing Soldat to run towards the helicarrier.

There was a part of me that regretted allowing him to walk away and towards Steve, not knowing what would actually happen between them. But the other part knew I had to let him leave. If there was any chance for him to remember who he was, Steve would be the one to do it. 

The heat from the flames could be felt from miles away as I continued to shoot fire towards the men, trying not to actually hit them. I only wanted them to back away, to allow myself some time to run towards the helicarrier.  

“Agent Y/L/N, on orders from SHIELD we demand that you put your hands behind your back and come with us!” One of the men shouted. 

“There is no more SHIELD!” I bellowed back, the tone of my voice raising a few very high octaves. 

The men dropped their weapons and covered their ears as the sound of my screams. It caused the ground below to shake under our feet. The fire in my hands extinguished and I balled them up into fists. 

“I don’t want to hurt anyone, especially the good guys. So please, let me do what I have to do.” 

When no one objected, I silently thanked them with a small nod before I ran towards the last helicarrier. I had no clue if Steve was able to stop the last one or if Soldat had come in at the perfect time to stop him. 

“Steve, are you there? I’m headed to you.” I spoke into the coms but was met with silence. “Does anyone have any word on Steve?” 

“He did it!” Hill’s voice came through. 

“Fire now,” Steve’s soft voice came through the coms next as I continued to run towards the helicarrier. 

“Steve, no! You have to get off!” I demanded. “You and Soldat need to make it off before we do-.”

“DO IT, NOW!” 

My heart thumped in my chest as I ran faster towards him, hoping he was smart and was able to get off before Maria could finish the last part of our mission; I was wrong. 

I came to a sudden halt and looked up above in horror as the three hellicarries started firing at each other, explosion and debris falling all around me. They slowly started falling down to the ground, one of them crashing directly into SHIELD headquarters. 

Sam’s voice came through, saying he needed some sort of ride, but it was all but white noise to me. I tried my best to avoid the falling debris as I looked for any sign that they were alright. Another helicarrier fell into the river below, leaving the last one slowly falling towards what was left of headquarters. 

“Y/N, stay where you are! We’re coming to pick you up!” Nat’s voice spoke through the com this time. 

“No! Not without them!” I yelled back. 

“That’s not an option! The ship is falling towards you!” Sam’s voice came through again. 

My eyes looked up, however, what caught my gaze wasn't the falling ship. It was the body flying slowly through the air, down towards the river; a body dressed in red, white, and blue. 

“STEVE!” 

Screams erupted from my throat and without giving it a second thought, I jumped off of the landing strip, down towards the river. I mentally prepared myself for the long jump but what I hadn’t prepared for was a piece of the ship crashing into me from behind as I jumped, knocking me unconscious for the way down. 

Awaking with a startling cough, I felt the air creep back into my lungs as I rolled from my back to my knees, trying to gain my surroundings. Dirt and rocks were underneath my palms and my feet were getting drenched with water. 

Water. 

Looking over my shoulder, I saw someone pulling a body from the river and it suddenly came back. I jumped into the river to save Steve but how did I make it to shore? 

Steve’s body was laid down next to me but before I could see who saved him, I placed my hand on his chest to make sure he was alive. 

“He’s alive.” 

The sun blinded my vision but I knew from the voice who had saved us. 

“Why’d you save us?” I questioned. 

Soldat ignored me then went to turn to walk away but I stood and reached for his hand. “Where are you going?” 

“I don’t know.” He answered with a shrug. 

I noticed his non metal arm was hurt from the fight with Steve. Giving a quick glance over to Steve, I breathed a sigh of relief when I noticed he had turned to his side but was still unconscious. 

Turning back to Sodalt, I was simply shocked he was still here. “You can’t go back to Hydra. Pierce is dead. You can be free, Soldat.” 

“I don’t even know where I would go,” he bit his lip, hoping I wouldn’t see the way it trembled with the fear of the unknown. 

I did. 

He had only known Hydra and was the Winter Soldier. It terrified him to find out who he was; who he truly was before becoming this. Back to being Bucky Barnes. 

Looking back at Steve, it was at that moment that I had made a decision, one I knew my team would not be happy with or would understand. Steve and I had made a promise that once this was all over, we would finally take the next step in our relationship but Soldat needed someone; he needed me. 

“I know a place where you can lay low for a bit.” I stated. 

He shook his head. “I don’t need your help.” 

Ignoring the rudeness in his tone, I knelt down towards Steve and placed a soft kiss on his forehead, bidding him goodbye. Blinking away the tears, I turned back to Soldat and sighed. 

“I’m not letting you leave on your own. You need somewhere to lay low; we both do.” 

He hesitated for a second before nodding. 

We both started walking into the woods and away from the carnage that we helped create trying to take down Hydra. I knew that Steve and the team wouldn’t understand why I was leaving with Soldat, only I could understand. I could only hope that they could forgive me one day. 

[princesssarisa]

Recently, and partly for personal reasons, I've been thinking of Jo's grieving process after Beth's death in Little Women.

Namely the fact that just before Beth dies, Jo seems to have beautifully come to terms with the pending loss, but afterwards, she regresses into despair.

In Jo's poem My Beth, and in her conversation with Beth after the latter reads it, she says she realizes that she's not really losing Beth, because Beth's memory and influence will always be with her, making her a better person, and because she has faith that Beth will be watching over her in heaven. The last paragraphs of "The Valley of the Shadow" seem to set up Beth's death as sad, but not a soul-crushing tragedy, because the family has already done so much preliminary mourning, because they're relieved that her suffering is over, and because they have their precious memories of her and their religious faith to comfort them.

But then after Beth actually dies, Jo does fall into deep, soul-crushing grief and depression, which includes struggling with her religious faith, and it takes her a lot of work – through talks her parents, through her writing, and eventually by finding love with Friedrich – to finally emerge from the abyss.

I guess it shows that you're never really prepared for a loved one's death, even if you think you are.

But I suppose it's not just about Beth. It's that with Beth's death, all of the same-age companions Jo grew up with are gone. That's why the chapter of her depression is called "All Alone." Meg is married, Amy and Laurie are in Europe, and Jo may have lost Laurie's friendship (she hasn't, but she doesn't know that yet) since she rejected his marriage proposal. If they were still with her, then Beth's death might not have been so shattering. I suppose that's the book's essential, bittersweet message about growing up: siblings and friends drift apart as they all build their own separate lives (and as some die young, which was more common in the 1800s), but new relationships, i.e. spouses and children, fill the void.

(A slightly depressing message for those of us who genuinely don't want to get married or have children. As much as I like Friedrich, I almost would have liked to see an ending where Jo stays a "literary spinster," not because I think it would have been more feminist, but just because it would have shown her finding happiness with her surviving family and friends. It would emphasize that she doesn't "lose" them after all, and show that you don't need to "replace" those relationships with romance or else be lonely forever.)

But I don't think it's just about that either. Beth's death also leaves Jo without a fulfilling purpose in life. Since her writing career failed in New York after she gave up sensation stories, she made caring for Beth her life's purpose, so with Beth gone, she's aimless. She thinks she has no choice left but to "take Beth's place," as Beth urged her to do, and live a quiet, domestic life of keeping house for her parents. But while Jo does those household duties well for a while, and learns their value, she isn't content with them. It was a lovely life for Beth, but it isn't who Jo is. So beyond Jo's grief and loneliness, another cause of her depression is that she's unfulfilled. This explains why writing again, and finding literary success, is such an important part of her healing process, and why she finds her ultimate joy in the very active, un-quiet life of running a boarding school for boys.

For personal reasons, I've been feeling uneasy lately about Jo's backward swing from acceptance to depression between "The Valley of the Shadow" and "All Alone." It does feel slightly as if Alcott was saying "You may think you're ready to accept a loved one's passing, but when it actually happens it will break you." But it does help to remember that the situation is more complex than that.

@littlewomenpodcast, @thatscarletflycatcher, @fandomsarefamily1966

[brie-is-cheesy]

Obey me! Secret Santa for @maskedshinigami under the cut

Pairing(s): Poly! Obey me! × reader

Word count: 7455 or 7.4k words

You had been baking cookies at the House of Lamentation when suddenly, your D.D.D. began to vibrate violently. Without sparing so much as a glance at the screen, you hastily wiped your dough-covered hands on the pastel red, green, and white striped apron you were wearing and pressed ‘accept.’

“Hello?” you asked.

“Oi, human, what took ya so long to pick up, huh?” questioned Mammon. You simply sighed.

“I’m making cookies,” you gestured vaguely with one hand even though he couldn’t see you. “Do you want me to keep some aside for you before Beel inhales them all?” you snorted.

“W-what? You’d do that for me? Erm, I mean, of course you’d wanna win the favor of The Great Mammon. Don’t you worry your pretty little head, human, I’ll eat ‘em, just ‘cause ya asked so nicely,” he corrected.

You had to stifle your laughter the whole time he was fumbling. “If you called to ask for money again, I’ll hang up.”

“Hey! Have some faith in me, will ya?” he cried, and you could just imagine him with an offended look on his face and a hand placed dramatically over his heart. “Lucifer wanted me to tell ya ‘bout the Christmas ball at the Demon Lord’s castle tonight. It starts at eight o’clock sharp.”

“Again? I swear, he thinks I have the memory of a goldfish with how often he reminds me about things,” you rolled your eyes playfully.

“Yeah, well, I gotta go Christmas shopping with Levi. Later.” He cut the call.

Did he seriously just hang up on me? you thought.

Whatever. You knew he’d wait till the last second to buy gifts and then just end up getting everyone autographed photos of himself. He’s a lot like Asmo in that sense. As for Leviathan, he was cooped up in his room since the beginning of the holidays, so that explains that.

You cleaned up the kitchen as fast as you could and headed to your room for a change of clothes as you were sure an oversized hoodie wasn’t going to cut it for a royal ball.

As you stood in front of your open closet, you still couldn’t believe that you were here in literal hell and happier than you ever remembered feeling. This was something you couldn’t imagine even in your wildest dreams, and yet, it was your reality. How lucky were you to have been the singular human who was chosen as an exchange student? And that too out of the eight billion other potential candidates?

You shook your head, going back to focusing on picking an outfit you deemed appropriate. Hmm, what to wear? Ugh. You ran a hand through your hair. Why is it that even with a closet full of clothes, you can’t seem to find anything to wear? Suddenly, there’s a knock at your door. You shut your closet and open the door.

“MC, I need to borrow your hairbrush right now!” exclaimed Asmodeus, pushing past you and making his way to your bathroom.

“Okay? Don’t you have your own?” you questioned, slowly walking over to where he stood, busy untangling his hair with your limited-edition Ruri Hana hairbrush Leviathan got you for your birthday.

“Mammon pawned my diamond-encrusted hairbrush off behind my back! Can you believe it?” he turned to you, pouting.

“The one you got custom-made?” you asked, eyes widening in disbelief.

“Yes. It even had my name engraved on the back. What a scumbag!” he continued aggressively brushing his hair.

“Did you tell Lucifer?” you asked him, and it was like a light bulb had gone off above his head.

“MC, you’re a genius! I love you!” he gasped, pulling you into a bone-crushing embrace.

“Uh, not that I don’t love this, but you’re kinda smushing me, Asmo,” you squirmed in his firm grasp, but he just squeezed you harder, refusing to let go. Eventually, he pulled away and rushed out of your room with such speed that you had to do a double take.

Okay, now where was I? you thought, going back to your closet to solve the dilemma that is picking out what to wear.

After what seemed like an eternity, you finally decided on something burgundy, with dark brown shoes. You also added gold jewelry, both to go well with the Christmas theme and with your demon prince boyfriend. It was fancy enough for a ball but not enough so as to seem overly tacky.

You picked up your hairbrush—yes, the Ruri Hana one—and detangled your hair gently. Or at least, you tried to be gentle, but moving on. You decided on a formal hairdo, keeping things neat and relatively simple.

Suddenly, you heard a ‘ding.’ The cookies. You subconsciously licked your lips at the thought. You rushed to the kitchen and made a beeline toward the oven, grabbing an oven mitt while doing so. Upon opening it, you realized your cookies had not burned. You let out a sigh of relief.

You took the cookie tray from the oven and placed it on the counter space. Putting the oven mitt back in place, you decided to leave the cookies to cool a bit and promptly left the kitchen. As you turned the corner toward your room, you bumped into someone’s chest.

“Sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going,” you apologized without looking up.

“It’s quite alright,” said a voice you instantly recognized, a voice you knew all too well. You turned around and gasped. Damn, you gasp a lot. It’s not that shocking; get over it. Just kidding, you’re allowed to do whatever you want, but I digress.

“Solomon!” you exclaimed, a smile making its way onto your lips.

Solomon let out a surprised noise as you jumped on him. You circled your arms around his neck, bringing your lips to his. His hands snaked around your waist, lifting you up, and you both stayed like that for quite a bit. Even after pulling away, his hands stayed in place on your waist, and you rested the palms of your hands on his chest.

“What are you doing here?” you asked, your excitement evident in your voice. “Aren’t you supposed to be finding some ingredients in the human world?”

“It took a lot less time than I initially anticipated, and I wanted to spend the holidays with my darling partner. Is that a crime?” he raised an eyebrow in a teasing manner.

“Shut up. You know I don’t mean it like that.” You swatted his chest lightly, finally pulling away.

Now that he had a chance to properly look at you, at what you were wearing, he couldn't help but stare. And all he could say was—

“Wow.” His eyes roamed up and down your figure. He was admiring you.

You shuffled awkwardly in place. “Stop buttering me up.” You huffed.

“I mean it,” he said, grabbing your wrists and pulling you closer. “You look amazing.”

“Well, enough about me,” you blushed. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

“Oh,” he looked down at himself to see his usual clothes.

“Yeah, ‘oh’. You’d better get changed or Asmo won’t let you live it down. You’re lucky he’s preoccupied with his hair right now.” You stated.

“Right. Well, I suppose I’ll see you at the ball then?” he inquired.

“I’ll save you a dance.” You winked. He smiled at you and muttered an incantation. And with that, he was gone, leaving you to stand in the empty hallway, contemplating what to do with the time you had till evening, which was when you were to leave for the castle. Well, picked up by a certain angel boyfriend of yours, but who’s keeping track?

Suddenly, the doorbell rang. You walked briskly to the door, but before you could reach it, it opened, and with such force that it nearly came off its hinges. There stood Lucifer, looking as proud as ever. Seriously, he was basically preening like a damn peacock, and an extremely gorgeous one at that. You could only assume it had something to do with Diavolo. Even though his presence was unexpected, it was certainly not unwelcome.

“Lucifer? What are you doing here?” you asked, pleasantly surprised.

“I am here to take you to the castle,” he said, already turning around and walking in the direction of where you presumed his car was parked.

You followed him, having to walk faster than you otherwise would in order to match the pace set by his larger steps. Curse him and his long legs.

“I thought Simeon and Luke were going to pick me up?” you raised an eyebrow.

“Lord Diavolo has requested your earlier presence. He requires your skills in a matter of utmost importance,” he explained, opening the passenger side door for you. Ah, there it is. So you were right, that look on his face was caused by Diavolo.

As you sat in your seat, and Lucifer made his way to his side, you noticed something in the rear-view mirror.

“Is that Belphegor’s pillow?” you couldn’t help but murmur as you slowly turned around to further inspect it.

“Oh my—Belphie?!” you exclaimed in shock at the unexpected sight of the youngest brother fast asleep in the eldermost’s backseat.

“Belphie, you should wake up now. And fix your hair. I don’t want any further embarrassment in front of Lord Diavolo than is already ensured to be caused by Mammon,” he chided, and started the car.

Belphegor slowly sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He began doing as his brother said.

“Speaking of Mammon, did Asmo tell you what he did yet?” you asked him out of curiosity.

“What did that idiot do now?” Belphegor piped up, eager to hear what trouble his elder brother was causing.

“I simply do not possess the bandwidth to deal with whatever it is he did right now.” Lucifer rubbed his forehead with one hand.

“I’ll let Asmo tell you himself then.” you turned your attention to the road.

“Hey, no fair. I wanna know what he did.” Belphegor pouted.

You both proceeded to ignore him, which caused him to slump in his seat with his arms crossed.

The sky was dark as always, and you turned your head slightly to look at Lucifer, who was driving perfectly. If you didn’t know better, you’d mistake him for a robot.

It was a miracle Asmodeus hadn’t told him what Mammon had done. You were sure he wouldn’t have been as calm as he was now if he did know. Maybe this was for the better. Actually, scratch that–it definitely was.

The moon shone through the windows, the light falling on his face gently, making him look like an angel. You admired the contrast of his raven hair against his pale skin, his sharp features, and especially his jawline. You swore it was sharp enough to cut diamonds. Yeah, you were basically swooning.

Your trance was broken by Belphie, who planted a chaste kiss on your cheek, wanting you to shift your attention to him. You turned around as much as you could in your seat.

“Did you sleep well?” you asked, intertwining your hand with his.

“I did. I dreamt of you, you know.” He answered, squeezing your hand.

“Huh. And what exactly was I doing?” you asked him, your curiosity piqued.

“Well, we were on a date,” he said, his gaze shifting down towards your linked hands.

“Oh?” you questioned, tilting your head to the left.

“And then, I um, kissed you.” He brought his free hand up to cover his mouth.

“Like this?” You leaned forward slightly and pressed your lips to his, ever so gently.

You kissed him slowly, full of care, as if you were afraid he’d fall apart like a porcelain doll, only pulling away once you felt a hand rest on your thigh. It was Lucifer’s.

“Have you already forgotten what I told you two earlier? MC, we’re about to reach the castle, so you’d better turn back around,” he said, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on the road. You noticed the slight tightness in his jaw, though.

“Aw, there’s no need to be jealous, Lucifer. You know I love you,” you couldn’t help but tease him, resting your hand on top of his.

“What ever put that idea in your head?” he denied, but you saw the small smile tugging at his lips, which he tried desperately to conceal.

“Hm, nothing in particular,” you mused with a smile of your own.

It was little D. No. 3 who opened the main gate of the castle and let you in. You got out of the car, thanking Barbatos for opening the door for you, and taking his arm as he led the three of you inside.

As soon as he saw you, Diavolo pulled you into his arms. He hugged you tightly but was still extremely careful not to hurt you on accident.

“I missed you,” he whispered.

“I missed you too, love.” You hugged him back with just as much fervor.

It had been a while since you both last saw each other. He was busy preparing for the ball, preventing you two from meeting as frequently as you would have preferred. Nevertheless, you were here now, with him, and that’s all that mattered.

He reluctantly pulled away as Barbatos reminded him he still needed to give his opinion on a few finishing touches that were required.

“You should go rest in my room,” he told you.

“I want to spend more time with you,” you pouted, wanting to tag along with him.

“The young prince has matters to attend to as of now, MC. I will try my best to resolve them with him as fast as possible,” Barbatos assured you, taking your hand in his gloved one.

“I will be back before you know it,” Diavolo piped up upon seeing the dejected look in your eyes.

“Alright.” You relented. Barbatos squeezed your hand in a comforting manner. “I’ll see you later then.”

Lucifer, who was going to be accompanying Diavolo and Barbatos, gave you a small wave, which you happily returned with a smile on your face. You were led to Diavolo’s chambers by little D. No. 5, while Belphegor was led to a guest room by No. 7. When you entered, your gaze lingered on the seating area a few feet from his bed. The table was low, circular, and polished with intricate carvings of Devildom symbols. It was placed atop a plush, deep red rug, which had a gold border.

What made you look was the fact that there was the most beautiful teapot you had ever seen placed right in the middle of the table, not a single millimeter to the right or left. Though, you didn’t understand why someone, probably one of the Little D.s, felt the need to make it perfectly centered.

There were also several desserts stacked carefully on a tiered tray. They looked almost too good to eat, not that that was going to stop you from eating them later; the food in the Devildom was simply scrumptious.

As you diverted your attention, what stuck out to you in the expanse of red and gold was the note that rested on Diavolo’s dark wooden bedside table, tucked halfway under the expensive lamp that rested upon it. The paper was soft to the touch and a deep red, containing a message written in neat handwriting.

‘Dear MC,

Please enjoy the tea while you wait. I shall return as soon as possible.

Yours,

Diavolo’

You felt your heart beat a little faster as you read it. He was so thoughtful it made you want to hold him in your arms and never let go. *He’s too sweet,* you thought.

You sat down on his bed, tracing the writing with your finger. You looked around his room, which you were aware had been decorated to match your boyfriend’s royal taste.

You saw something peeking out from behind his red decorative pillow, stashed haphazardly between the soft demon goose-feather pillows. It seemed to be gift wrap, a beautiful light blue, with several snowmen, a pair of demon-like horns protruding through the black hats that rested atop each of their heads, scattered across the wrapping paper. Was he wrapping his gifts himself?

You felt warmth blooming in your chest at the thought of him taking the time to do something like that, what with his busy schedule as the crown prince of the Devildom, especially at this time of the year.

Right, you shake your head, you should probably call Simeon and let him know he needn’t stop by the House of Lamentation, seeing as you were already here at the Demon Lord’s castle.

You picked up your D.D.D. and opened the phone application. Scrolling down until you saw his contact, you pressed on his profile and waited for it to connect.

You let it ring until it eventually got sent to voicemail. Huh, that’s strange. He usually answers your calls at around the second ring, and he always calls back if he sees a missed call, all the more if it’s from you. You wonder if he’s getting ready now; it’s a bit early, but you were all dressed up even a few hours from now, so you can’t say much.

You decide to call Luke instead, to leave a message, yes, but it was mainly due to the worry that Simeon not picking up had caused you. Now, you weren’t paranoid in the slightest, but this was very much out of character for Simeon, so naturally, you couldn’t help but want to make sure everything was alright, even though it probably was.

“Oh, MC, hello!” The younger angel picked up your call immediately.

“Hi, Luke,” you began.

“I heard Simeon’s D.D.D. ringing just now, and I just knew it had to be you. I was right, wasn’t I? He’s getting ready for tonight in his room right now,” he interrupted.

“Yeah, you were right,” you cracked a smile at his antics. “Could you let him know that I’m already at the castle? So he doesn’t need to bother with picking me up today?” you said.

“Don’t say that! It isn’t troublesome at all. In fact, I personally think he seems to enjoy getting the opportunity to spend extra time with you more than he’s willing to admit,” he reassured.

“Thanks,” you said, a smile still on your lips. “I appreciate you telling me that. I’ll be sure to keep it in mind.”

“Of course! Alright, I’ll see you tonight then. Bye, MC!” he said.

“Bye, Luke, see you,” you said, just as he hung up on you.

You sighed. Getting up from Diavolo’s bed, and let’s be honest, stretching out your limbs, you made your way to the gold and light and dark brown vertical striped sofa. Sitting down on the brown velvet armchair just opposite, you slowly poured yourself a nice cup of hell dust tea, courtesy of Barbatos. How in the three realms it managed to stay hot all this time was beyond your comprehension. Actually, now that you think about it, it’s probably just magic.

Taking a sip, you closed your eyes and relaxed. Huh, it’s sweeter than the last time he made it for me… you thought.

After drinking the tea, you decided to pass the time playing on your D.D.D., but that got boring pretty quickly. You exited the room, your D.D.D. left on the table, and walked to the royal library, hoping to read some books you’d find interesting.

You entered, pushing open the heavy wooden door. All of a sudden, you collided with something, or rather someone, which was how you ended up on the ground. A hand appeared in front of you, which connected to an arm, which connected to Satan... who was wearing green kitty-ear headphones.

Ookay, moving on. You took his hand, and he promptly pulled you up with a surprising amount of strength, considering he spent most of his time reading and interacting with stray cats.

“Hey,” you started.

“Hi,” he said, still holding your hand.

“Thanks for, uh, helping me up,” you said, shifting your eyes to the side because the awkwardness was engulfing you like Cerberus with his food.

“It’s no problem. Be careful next time,” he began.

“Alright, I will,” you said, meeting his eyes.

“You could have gotten hurt,” he frowned, cupping your cheek with one hand. His other hand was carrying the books he must have just checked out.

“I promise I will be super careful, ‘kay?” you brushed one of his blonde locks from his forehead.

“Okay,” he said, his gaze softening.

You smiled.

“Here,” he slipped his hand from yours, picked out a book from the large pile in his arms, and handed it to you. “I thought you’d like this. It’s your favorite genre.”

“Aw, thank you, Darling,” you looked at the cover. “I’d been meaning to read this for a while now, but I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere.”

“I know, I heard you mention it to Beel during dinner last night,” he said, giving you the smile that he reserved only for your eyes.

“Satan! Were you eavesdropping?” You gasped dramatically.

“Perhaps,” he admitted.

“That’s bad manners, you know,” you scolded him lightly, but he knew it was all in good fun.

“And talking while eating isn’t?” he quipped.

“I’ll have you know I chew what’s in my mouth before opening it,” you retaliated.

“Yes, unlike a certain someone we both are acquainted with,” he said playfully.

You both erupted in quiet laughter at that.

“QUIET!” yelled Little D. No. 4, who was in charge of maintaining the royal library.

You both stifled your laughter as you left the library, separating and heading back to your respective rooms, with him still wearing the kitty-ear headphones you didn’t dare comment on, and in your case, to Diavolo’s chambers.

You were not prepared for what you just saw. The last thing you were expecting as you entered Diavolo’s room to continue waiting for him to come back was Diavolo himself, much less his abs, which looked absolutely impeccable, by the war.

You could see water droplets rolling down and off them and dripping onto the floor, telling you he had just finished taking a bath.

Had he come back earlier or had it really been that long? If so, why didn’t you realise the passage of time? I guess time flies when you’re having fun. Speaking of fun, his

Had he come back earlier or had it really been that long? If so, why didn’t you realise the passage of time? I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

These are all thoughts you would have had, had you not been preoccupied with something that held far more importance to you, shamelessly ogling Diavolo.

Time passes quickly, and while you were busy staring at your shirtless boyfriend, he had already made his way to you, clad only in his slacks.

He approached you, and reached his hand out to close the door behind you while you finally managed to tear your eyes away from his heavenly body. Or should you day hellish since he technically is a demon? Actually, scrap that. You definitely shouldn’t. Even if he was the prince of hell, he was truly divine. Wiser words have not been said.

As it turns out, all your boyfriends have a way of catching you off-guard. There are uncountable incidents, this being one of them. Your heart seems to know this as it races. You, on the other hand, are pressed flush against the demon princes chiseled chest, frozen in place as you struggle to grasp how you ended up in this position.

You’re happy, filled with warmth as you finally come to your senses and wrap your arms around him. He seems contented with you reciprocating his affections. He kisses the top of your head, and you both stay like that for a while.

The only reason you pulled away was someone clearing their throat behind you. You turned around to see who it was that had caused the interruption.

“What is it Barbatos?” said Diavolo, but his expression told you he wanted to continue holding you in his arms.

You’re surprised he didn’t whine seeing as he looked like a sad little puppy. The only thing stopping you from petting him was the fact that he was still not wearing a shirt.

“I apologize for the disturbance but you need to be getting dressed for the ball young master.” stated Barbatos.

“Can’t I just go like this?” he whined. Ah, there it is. So you were right. How come you’re always right?

“That will not be possible, no.” he said with a close-eyed smile but you didn’t miss the irk mark forming on his forehead.

“Uhm, don’t worry Barbs,” you said, ushering him out before Diavolo inevitably got himself in trouble, “I’ll make sure he’s ready.”

“MC, I appreciate the gesture but I need to be sure the prince is dressed appropriately for tonight.”

“Come on Barbatos, have some faith in me will you? Don’t you trust me?” you persuaded.

“You know I do.” he finally relented, letting out a small sigh. “Alright then, I’ll leave this to you MC.”

“I won’t let you down.” you replied cheekily.

He sent you a small smile as he closed the door to Diavolo’s room, leaving you two alone. Not even two seconds passed and Diavolo was all over you.

His lips were hot on yours, his hands roaming up and down your side. You placed your own hands on his biceps.

Though, just as his tongue entered your mouth, you came to your senses, gave his arms a light squeeze and slowly pulled away He let out a small whine at that.

“As much as I’m enjoying this, I meant what I said earlier, you know.” you told him.

“I can just change the time the ball starts, though.” he pouted, his hands resting on your waist.

“Definitely do not do that.” you snorted, “Come on, you just have to wear what Barbatos picked out for you okay? For me?”

“Okay..” he gave in at last, reluctantly pulling himself away from you.

He walked toward his bed where a neatly placed outfit was laid out carefully so as not to cause even a single wrinkle to his perfectly smoothed out bedsheets.

While Diavolo started getting changed, your D.D.D. rang. You made your way to the couch, picking up your D.D.D. which you had placed on the table before your impromptu trip to the royal library. You noticed it was a quarter to eight. Only fifteen minutes left, you thought.

“Hello?” you said, bringing the D.D.D. closer to yourself so you could hear whoever was calling you better.

“MC! Where are you? I went to look for you in your room but you weren’t there.” said Leviathan in a worried tone.

“I’m at the Demon Lord’s castle don’t worry.” you reassured him.

“Oh, I wanted to tell you that they’re making ‘I Found Out that I’m Actually Half-demon and Went Out in Search of my Demon Father to Learn More About My Heritage but Accidently Ended Up Seducing an Archangel Who Fell and Became A Demon Because of Me so Now Family Nights Are REALLY Awkward.’ into an anime! Also, why can I smell cookies?”

“That’s great Levi! And uh, I made cookies, I set them on the kitchen counter to cool off before I left.” you explained.

“I’m in the kitchen now. They look really good.” he told you in awe.

“Heh, thanks. You can have some if you’d like. If you don’t mind, could you put them somewhere Beel wouldn’t look? I want everyone to share them.” you requested.

“I understand. I will protect them with my life.” he stated.

“I appreciate the enthusiasm but it’s really not that serious.” you sweatdropped.

“LOL are you kidding? Are we talking about the same Beel?” he laughed.

“I guess you’re right. Thanks, Levi.” you chuckled.

“For you? Anytime MC. I’ll see you tonight, then?” he said softly.

“Yeah, I love you.” you smiled gently.

“I-I-Iloveyoutoo.” he blurted and hung up, causing you to erupt in laughter.

“What is it?” asked Diavolo, walking over to where you were seated on his couch.

“Nothing, just Levi being Levi.” you brushed it off.

“So, how do I look?” he questioned.

You stood up and finally looked at what he was now wearing, and once you did, boy was it hard to bring your eyes back to meet his. It’s not your fault for boyfriend’s a total snack. More like a whole damn meal, if you ask me.

He was clad in an outfit that made him look otherworldly, ...which you suppose he already was but moving on. He wore a sheer black button-up shirt with black slacks and boots adorned with gold detailing.

His belt was gold with a black buckle. A luxurious coat with light gray fur and a gold trim and embroidery was draped delicately across his broad shoulders. It was burgundy, matching both his hair colour, and with you.

“You are gorgeous.” you stated as if it were a universal truth, all the while the blush on your face was a shade as fiercely red as your boyfriends hair.

“Thank you MC. You flatter me.” he said sporting a smile and a blush of his own.

“It’s true.” you brought your hand to his cheek and caressed it softly.

He leaned into your touch and just going off of the look he had on his face alongwith the contended sigh he let out, you could swear he would start purring any second.

You were interrupted once again. Though this time, the perpetrator had the decency to atleast knock before entering. You both parted, sitting down on opposite sides of the couch.

“Come in.” said Diavolo, using the specific tone of voice he reserved for when he had to address his subjects, and the door opened.

“The nobles have all arrived, young master. You and MC should head downstairs.” informed Barbatos.

“Alright. Shall we, MC?” Diavolo responded, standing up and extending his arm for you to take, which you promptly did as you too rose to your feet.

“We shall.” you said in a joking manner.

Once you reached the entrance to the ballroom, you stood there arm in his while you both were being announced.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“Yeah but I’m excited too so it cancels out.” you joked.

He let out a laugh and just then the doors opened, Barbatos signalling for you two to start walking. As you stepped inside the ballroom, you kept your gaze in front of you, your head held high.

Despite the several pairs of inhuman eyes raking across your form, you managed to shove down your anxiety and plaster a polite smile on your face. You both parted as Diavolo made his way to the center to give a speech, as princes so often do.

You looked around, Asmo was chatting animatedly with Satan and Solomon, Lucifer was at Diavolo’s side, Levi and Mammon were talking to a few nobles and Beel was over by the snacks and drinks, stuffing his face while Belphie was leaning on him inconspicuously.

If you didn’t know any better you’d think he was asleep, but even he didn’t want to be at the recieving end of one of Lucifer’s lectures on Christmas eve. Then, you spotted Simeon standing near one of the countless marble pillars and walked ever so gracefully towards the dark-haired angel.

“MC.” he greeted, bringing your hand to his lips.

“Simeon,” you blushed, “I called you earlier.”

“Yes, Luke had informed me.” he told you.

“Ah, good. N-not that I thought he wouldn’t. It’s just that it wasn’t really that important and he might’ve forgotten so I was worried that you’d go through all the trouble of going to the house of lamentation to pick me up and I wouldn’t be there and you would’ve wasted your time and-” you rambled.

“It seems you have been spending a lot of time with Leviathan.” he stopped you with a chuckle.

“Yeah, sorry, Levi’s influenced me way too much.” you laughed.

“MC,” said Simeon.

“Hm?” you hummed.

“You aren’t a bother, not to me.” he stated.

“Oh, um, so I take it Luke told you that as well?” you winced.

“Yes, and as a matter of fact, I can’t think of one instance with you in which I felt anything short of love and admiration towards you.” he said with a self-assuring nod.

“Thank you Simeon, that means a lot to me.” you admitted as he brought his hand up to cradle your face gently.

“Of course, it is my duty as your boyfriend to ensure you know how much I love you. You could never bother me.” he planted a soft kiss on your cheek.

You gave him a smile which he returned. He pulled his hand away and took a small step back as you saw Diavolo walking towards you both after finishing giving a welcoming speech.

“Hi.” you greeted.

“Hello.” he replied.

“That was a great speech, did you have Barbatos write it?” you teased.

“How dare you MC. I would never do that,” he gave you a look of disbelief which almost had you convinced but you just knew him too well to fall for it.

“Mhm.” you hummed skeptically.

“I had Lucifer write it.” he stated proudly. You burst into laughter.

“You’re making fun of me.” he pouted.

“Aww no darling,” you took his hands in yours, “i know how busy your schedule can get, and I’m sure Lucifer didn’t mind at all. In fact, he probably felt honoured that you’d trust him not to tarnish your reputation.”

“I do. I’d trust him with my life.” he declared.

“Me too,” you squeezed his hands, “with my life I mean.”

He squeezed your hands right back. Then, he turned to face Simeon,“you don’t mind if I steal them away for a bit, do you?”

“They’re all yours.” Simeon bowed his head slightly, and walked towards where Luke was chatting animatedly with Solomon.

“Ahem,” he cleared his throat, “MC.”

“Yes?” you said.

“Would you, uhm” you raised an eyebrow as the usually confident demon prince stumbled over his words.

“What is it Diavolo?” you urged.

“Would you like to join me on the dancefloor?” he asked.

“You’re asking me to dance with you?” you questioned.

“Yes.” said Diavolo, face tinged a light pink.

“Alright.” you agreed with a small nod.

He led you towards the other dancing couples, placing a hand on your waist and claiming one of yours in his own larger one. Your free hand rested on his upper arm.

You two swayed along to the best of the slow waltz music. Gliding from one corner of the ballroom to another. Seriously, you felt like Cinderella, only your clothes wouldn’t disappear by midnight.

Your attention is brought back by an utterly absurd sight.

“Is that-” started Diavolo.

“Lucifer and Satan-” you continued.

“dancing together?!” you both finished simultaneously, your voices betraying your incredulity.

“Are we dead?” you question.

“No, but if we don’t act soon, we might be.” he said grimly.

“What?” you asked.

“Look closely.” he told you.

“Damn, Satan’s holding Lucifer’s hand as if he wants to crush it.” you observed.

Diavolo gave you a pointed look.

“Oh. Oh. Right. I get Satan you handle our boyfriend, okay? Okay.” you said and marched upto the two brothers.

“Okay- wait, our?!” he blushed and following hurriedly after you.

Satan’s eyes widened when you pulled him away from his older brother and into a waltz, but softened as they met yours.

“MC. What happened?” he asked.

“That’s what I should be asking, Satan. So tell me, what happened? I thought you were over your grudge against Lucifer.” your eyes desperately searched his, looking for answers in their emerald hues.

“I know. I thought so as well. I suppose I can’t make millennia of hatred just up and vanish whenever I feel fit. My apologies, MC.” he hung his head in shame.

“I’m not the one you should be apologizing to. I understand how you feel darling. These things take time, and Lucifer knows that. He knows you’re trying, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” you lifted his chin with your hand.

“I will try even harder from now on. No, I will ensure that this does not happen again.” he solemnly nodded, a determined look in his green eyes.

“I’m glad to hear it,” you smiled, “but I need you to know that Lucifer won’t ever hold these moments of weakness against you, he loves you.”

“Thank you.” Satan managed to mutter, lowering his head again, tears brimming his eyes, threatening to roll down his porcelain cheeks.

“Of course.” you said sympathetically, heart clenching at the sight before you.

You then saw Mammon walking towards you.

“H-hey MC, come dance with The Great Mammon will ya?” he asked while blushing.

“Mammon.” you nodded towards Satan.

“You should go MC. I think- I think I’ll be okay.” said demon interjected.

“Oh, I just remembered, I gotta check on the shadow races. Sorry MC guess we’ll have to do this some other time, you understand.” he patted you on the back and briskly walked away.

“What a prick,”Satan sneered,“and an idiot too. He of all people should know there’s no shadow races around this time of the year. It’s far too dark here for their survival so they migrate to the human world.”

“I’m sure he had a good reason.” you felt warmth bloom in your chest at how much the avatar of greed cared for his brothers.

“Maybe, but it’s Mammon so what can you expect.” he dismissed.

Meanwhile, the second-born who was eavesdropping from a distance sighed in relief that his younger brother in his emotional haze hadn’t managed to connect the dots.

You sent him a wink alongwith a gratuitous smile, which caused him to become all flustered and turn away from you.

The music then came to a stop and so did you and Satan. You both bowed, and went your seperate ways, but not before you planted a chaste kiss on his lips.

You walked over to a table where Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Belphegor were sitting, and took the seat Beel pulled out for you.

“Thanks.” you smiled at him.

“No problem. Oh, by the way, your cookies were great.” he gave you a thumbs up.

“Were they?”

You wondered where Leviathan was though. Did he fail in protecting the cookies after all? Not that you were expecting much, I mean it was an otaku shut-in versus hungry six-pack(see what I did there?*wink wink*).

Suddenly, you felt a trap on your shoulder. Speak of the devil, quite literally in your case, and he shall appear. There stood a very sheepish looking Levi standing behind you which was kind of ironic considering you used to literally be a sheep, for a while atleast.

“Hey there Levi.” you said.

“M-MC I’M SO SORRY I COULDN’T SAVE THEM” he yelled, bowing ninety degrees.

“It’s fine! It was just cookies! You don’t have to bow! Seriously!” you panicked, waving your hands around haphazardly.

“But you made them yourself..” He slowly stood up straight again.

“And I can make them again. Don’t worry, Levi.” you reassured him.

“Wahh! You’re so nice MC! I thought for sure I was going to get chewed out tonight.” he breathed.

“You shouldn’t be so quick to forgive you know?” Asmodeus tsked.

“He’s right.” Belphegor added.

“Oh shush. Need I remind you it is due to this very quirk of mine that the consequences of your actions have worked out in your favour multiple times? Sit with us Levi,” you placed a hand on the back of Leviathan’s thigh, just above his knee and he immediately tensed up.

“Okay.” he said quietly, but he was grateful you weren’t mad at him for failing the cookies he had sworn to protect with his life.

“Fries?” you offered, raising one in his general direction.

“No, thank you.” he smiled, glad you seemed tension-free for once.

It wasn’t your fault, really. Living with the seven avatars of hell with the added bonus of Solomon’s shenanigans does that to a person. Hear, hear. you thought. Wait, what?

“I’ll take it!” Beelzebub piped as he swallowed the fry whole, but not without licking your fingers clean.

“Oh, um thank you?” you chuckled lightly in slight amusement.

“You’re welcome!” he chirped, happy to help. Oh, Beel.

“Do you wanna head to my room MC? We can binge TLS tonight!” he said, literal stars shining in his eyes.

“I apologize,” Solomon who seemingly appeared out of nowhere interjected, “but I fear I shall have to whisk MC away now.”

“No.” Leviathan grabbed you by your clothes, fabric bunching up in his grip.

“I’m sorry Levi. I’ll come see you first thing in the morning okay?” you promised.

“Fine.. goodnight.” he said getting up and releasing you, albeit reluctantly.

“Goodnight.” you pecked his cheek.

You took Solomon’s extended arm and let him lead you to where the others previously dancing were slowly dispersing. Leviathan stood as still as a statue beside the table, steam rising from his cheeks and a hand hovering over the spot you had graced with your soft lips.

No matter how many times you’d done that, and more, he got just as flustered each time, and you in turn were just as entertained. You turned your attention to Solomon as he placed his hand on your hip, in turn placing your hand on his upper arm.

With his free hand, he held your own ever so gently, not unlike how one would handle a delicate flower so as not to damage the soft petals. The tenderness with which he held you made you feel as if you were the fine china that your mother would seldom take out personified.

You both swayed along with the music, dancing slowly and just enjoying each other's company. You found yourself lost in his beautiful blue eyes, the brown in them making it feel as though you were viewing a gorgeously calm riverbed.

The simple act of gazing at him provided you with some much-needed serenity in your otherwise tumultuous life. You loved your boyfriends, but sometimes, all you needed was the company of another human.

The companionship of another human filled you with peace—the familiarity in the way he looked at you, the way he talked to you, how just listening to his heartbeat soothed your weary self. You were truly, utterly grateful to have Solomon in your life.

“I love you,” you spoke.

His eyes softened. And as the music came to a stop, so did you. He leaned his head onto your shoulder, both hands holding your hips.

“I love you too,” he whispered.

His lips brushing against your neck, his words sending a shiver down your spine, were enough to make you place your hand on his chin and bring him into a searing kiss—the kind that always left you weak in the knees, your heart racing, cheeks flushed.

His lips met yours over and over again, each kiss a declaration of his undying love for you. You entangled your free hand in his hair, and he broke the kiss. You brought the hand on his chin down to his neck.

He was the same as you, his pulse as fast as yours, chests rising and falling in an attempt to catch your breath, smiles forming.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I should be the one saying that,” you smiled.

He shook his head and placed a kiss on your forehead.

“We should head upstairs,” he told you and took your hand in his.

“Let’s go.” You nodded lightly.

After countless ‘goodnights’ had been exchanged with everyone, you and Solomon headed to your room in the castle. As you walked, footsteps echoing in the quiet, empty hallways, a comfortable silence washed over the two of you.

It felt like being wrapped in a fluffy blanket—cozy and warm and satisfied beyond your wildest imaginations. And as you fell asleep in each other’s arms, all droopy eyes and tired smiles, you knew this was exactly where you were meant to be, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

A/n: This is so late even Kakashi said ✨nope✨

I hope you enjoyed it! And I’m super sorry for taking so long😭

I wanna thank you and @douxkise again for organizing this secret santa, it was a lot of fun!🩷🩷

You can find more of my works here!

[lostsoulaltair]

OnS Chapter 146 - Analysis and Review. Warning: Spoilers Ahead!

Hello everyone, a new chapter dropped and I gotta say it was rather interesting except for certain character's offscreen.

The chapter starts with the Progenitors detecting Ky Luc's presence as gone, furthermore, the remaining progenitors have noticed they're under attack leading for Lest Karr to go to the battlefield.

Given Urd and Rigr's differences, Urd warns Lest to be careful but Rigr of course suggests that Urd doesn't have faith in Lest, leading of course to Lest boost with confidence that he will succeed.

Within this part, the dots have begun to connect, what do I mean? We got information regarding the spells in the most subtle ways possible, but at least we know two of the three.

Following up with the panels, the encounter with Lest and Ferid Bathory begins.

Then we jump to Yuu and Mikaela trying to decipher the First's spells, along this, Mikaela is the one monitoring the memories of the First whereas Yuu is pretty much eating. (Yes...literally...*sigh*)

One of the things I find fascinating is that there's limit to what Yuu can read in terms of the ancient language along what Mika can. Let's remember that when Yuu and Mika did a memory regression, Mika was unable to read yet Yuu was able to...but among this, there's another character able to read all the information Shikama had within his memories, who do I mean? Correct, Shinoa Hiragi.

Then we return with Rigr Stafford checking the spells of the first along his goal to fully decipher them nevertheless we still see the differences of ideals between Rigr and Urd, like the moon and the sun.

Given that Rigr saw the memories of the First, he's obviously inclined to literally grant his Father's wish just like Yuu is aiming to do so since Rigr has much more knowledge in the field of magic, sorcery and spells.

Still, focusing back in the panels, Rigr on the other hand is not interested on what Urd has to say, ensuring Yuu gets the calories needed to keep exploring the memories of the First; meanwhile Urd is analyzing further that the enemy is actually gaining the upperhand thus leading to something I found fascinating.

Rigr was in a mode of: you go do this and that but Urd literally took a firm posture and chose to stop following Rigr.

Now, what was what I mentioned at the very beginning of this post? True, we got information regarding of the spells, one of them is how to Resurrect Michaela.

Still, how would that be possible? Correct. Gathering the 7 Sinful Keys and sacrificing all the progenitors standing. Ironically, Rigr has been cunning enough to make the Progenitors head to such path. What Rigr did with Lest by dismissing Urd's warning is merely psychology and manipulation.

But given this, Urd finally took a decision, he managed to grab the Sinful Key and of course, before Urd could actually use it, Rigr used an illusion on which Yuu died but of course, Urd is fully aware now how Rigr attacks, meaning the illusion was futile.

Ultimately we have a flashback of Rigr and Urd back when they were children and slaves, Rigr was always optimistic whereas Urd was the opposite.

Within this, there's a lot of parallelism between many characters, what do I mean?

Thanks to a dear friend, the whole lore of OnS is always related to paralellism and change.

Urd and Rigr reflect the ideal vs the truth, Ashera and Krul reflect the same yet Ashera realized too late that the treasure of life he had, discarted it easily by following the devil and at the end, being unable to save his sister. The last pair being of course Mika and Yuu. Mika when he was a vampire, was always opposing Yuu but given that Yuu is one of the main characters; it was bound to happen the current result, yet with the case of Urd and Rigr, such pattern actually shattered. The greed carried down by Rigr is simply too much, there's no guarantee with anything even if hope is what lingers within him.

The sacrifices they will make are extremely high hence why Urd stated that their journey has gone for too long, nevertheless, they detected they were being watched by Shinya Hiragi no less.

Guren is fully aware of Yuu's location and the final panel being Ferid Bathory devouring Lest Karr.

I must say this was disappointing.

Lest Karr was a full representation of a pointless character within the plot given that we didn't have a backstory for him or his motives. Unless the author actually gives him a flashback even if he is trapped within Ferid's body.

More answers will come following this , what do you think dear readers?