#UR RUSTICA CINDERELLA FIC WAS SO DAMN FOUL

[mcdonaldsnumberone]

for something that never was

love headcanons bc i want taku of yaki dead

gender neutral reader

How does Shylock love? Shylock loves exactly as his craft demands him to—sometimes passionately, like falling in love with a fine wine and learning how to crave it and tame the craving like the treacherously hedonistic beast it is—sometimes violently, like the wrath of an old god from legend, akin to the sound of glass shattering when it slips from someone’s hands—sometimes tentatively, the hesitance in his fingers before he pops the cork of a bottle and the faint aroma of alcohol stains the room once more.

How does Shylock love? Shylock loves in a way like no other. He claims that he doesn’t let love cling to him too long; after all, life is too short and far too turbulent for him to be the kind of man to be hung up over something when there are far more entertaining things out there for him to spend his attention over. He loves the concept of love. It’s what brings humans and wizards alike together, a captive to the longing and misery that equals the beggar with the king.

How does Shylock love? When he realizes he’s falling for you, he dismisses it as nothing more than one of his many loves he must have had over the years. He loves liberally, freely, truly, cherishing even the most ephemeral of attractions as genuinely as the sort of love that could move mountains and part seas. All emotions are beautiful and worthy of celebration in their own right, and he drinks to you: cherishing you through your smiling reflection wobbling in the sepia-colored lights beamed in the ruby red wineglass of his.

How does Shylock love? Love to him is a give-and-take. The flutters of your eyelashes are exchanged for fleeting touches from his end. The tilt in your voice when you sing hello to him is traded for the wry chuckle he gives towards you when you crack a bad joke. A bartender and his client, stuck in a tryst of want and economy, and sometimes he wonders if the pressure in your hand when you press a bag of coins into his palm holds something more than mere numerical value for your drink. It clings to him like the remainder of a ghost, of memories past, of a deep stirring in his heart.

How does Shylock love? He loves as if he’s burning. He loves as if you’ve lit him on fire. He loves as if you’re the air, and he’s a drowning man, flailing and falling and feeling the sea called you. Your name rests like a prayer on his sinful lips, and he wants nothing more than to chant it over and over, until you’ll grant him a taste of Heaven by placing his head in your lap and condemning him to an instantaneous eternity of proximity. You’re within his grasp yet so far, and his love tastes like poison in the inside of his mouth—he swallows anyway.

How does Shylock love? He reaches out for you every day, every night. Shylock props the door to his bar open not so that he can entice more wizards into the comforting labyrinth of his bar, but so that he can meet your eyes when you quaintly walk in, your silhouette the same touch of a spell that makes his ancient heart race. He savors this feeling, his eyes falling upon you in a shower of enchantment, the same way he did when you first stumbled across his little haven.

How does Shylock love? Dizzyingly, as if he’ll disappear like sand between your fingers. Breathtakingly, capturing your mouth in wine-flavored and hushed “I love you”s whenever the bar closes and the night hour deepens with moonlit stains. Sincerely, with the heart of someone who had loved and lost for years beyond your own ability to think. Truly, yearning for you with a fervor that could only be matched by the love that licks at the sides and core of your own heart.

“Don’t say that we’re a lost cause. Saying that we’re a lost cause merely tells me that we are indeed a cause. And to me, a lost cause is still a cause worth fighting for, if it means you’ll stay with me for a second longer.”

x