fish-18

[fish-18]

rent-a-boyfriend. (yandere! phainon x female reader)

; yandere, modern au, slowburn (?), not proofread, tfw instead of the customer breaching boundaries it's the employee :(, he kisses you drunk and gets touchy, not proofread.

; desperate to prove to your mother that your dating life is thriving in college, you begin to rent out a boyfriend from a shady website to trick her into thinking you're in a dedicated relationship. that's fine and all, but he's starting to act like your actual boyfriend rather than a rented one.

when stelle sent you a link to a website titled rentaboyfriend.com/profiles, out of all things, you had first assumed that she was joking around with you, as per usual. you heaved a sigh, putting down your phone as you stared at her smiling face across the table. 

“really now?” you frown, “i get that you’re trying to make me feel better, but this is not making me laugh, stelle.”

she sputters, hurriedly swiping through her phone before turning it around for you to see. she opened up the website, you realize, as she scrolls down countless and hundreds of different men’s profiles, different heights, styles, hair, etc. “i’m not trying to make you feel better, i’m offering a solution! look!”

stelle shoves the phone closer to your face, “didn’t you say that your mom’s been depressed thinking about your lonely ass? peep the name, you can rent a boyfriend here!”

you roll your eyes, “first of all, she’s not depressed, just worried. second of all, what do you mean i can rent a boyfriend?” you grab hold of her phone to scroll down at your own pace, “i thought renting only existed for apartments and items, not…. this. how are you even sure this isn’t a scam?”

she proudly huffs, “because i’ve tried this before!”

“oh, i see.” you dryly reply, staring down at her in unamusement. “so that’s why you had a date for march’s birthday last year.”

“what can i say? a magician never reveals her secret,” she shoves herself into your side of the table, forcing you to make space, “well, not unless it’s to help out a good pal. wink wink.”

“do not say wink wink, are you crazy?” you laugh, thumb hovering over one profile that caught your interest. “but… let’s assume that i did rent a boyfriend to placate my mother… what if she asks me about him again and again?”

stelle looks at you as if you’re downright stupid, “then just keep renting him out, duh? keep doing this for like, eight months minimum and play up a tragic story to your mom’s ears so that she’ll think you’re too boohoo over him to get into another relationship.” leaning back into the cushion, she flashes you a smirk, “and then no relationship pressure until you graduate, boom! i’m a genius, i know.”

you hum, staring down at a square-sized picture of a white-haired man with crystalline eyes. stelle, for all credit that is due, is right. 8 months is enough time for a loved and dedicated relationship to make your mother think that you’re genuinely heartbroken over him by the time he’s out of the picture. and perhaps your pride will be the one weeping in your stead, but sacrifices must be made for your fabricated love story. 

turning to face stelle, you give a noncommittal punch to her side, “If this doesn't work, i’m ending our friendship.”

RENT-A-BOYFRIEND RULES.pdf

physical touch (e.g., kissing, hand-holding, hugging) between a client and employee is allowed; however, the boundaries must be stated during the sign-up process to avoid any breaches. in the case of a boundary breached by either client or employee, please contact rentaboyfriend.com/costumer_service for more details.  for each appointment availed, 100% of the payment must be paid on the date of booking. falling in love and experiencing jealousy with and over the employee is strictly prohibited. the employees are workers with personal lives outside a client’s slotted time, personal information and feelings are not part of the conduct.  sexual intercourse is strictly prohibited. any initiation reported to the head department will lead to a termination of either the client's or the employee’s rent-a-boyfriend profile.  the client or employee may reschedule their appointment one week before the date. 

by agreeing to our terms and services, you hereby acknowledge that the relationship you are pursuing with an employee from rent-a-boyriend is not real. at the end of the appointment, the experience you had is part of the service, and is by no means a real, love-fostering ‘date’. 

you: mother, i got a boyfriend.

you: :)

I. lights, camera, action.

you picture stelle’s raised brows and her trying to hold in her guttural laugh as she eggs you on, “wow (y/n), first date already and he’s in your apartment? Attagirl!” and in perfect sync with her would be march’s uncontrolled giggles as she childishly repeats the motion of her index finger going in and out of her other hand that has formed into a circle. “I never knew you had in you, (y/n)! Remember to practice safe sex, okay?” 

and for that ungodly made-up scenario in your head, you choose to omit this detail from your friends and instead claim that you’re meeting up with him in the nearby theme park. a white lie that they’ll forget about in a few week’s time. while you yourself would have greatly preferred that to be the truth, reality often comes barreling in to disrupt you. 

that is to say, the moment you sent the text message to your mother announcing your so-called relationship, she’s been spamming your phone day and night begging to meet him through video call. at first, you tried to calm her by lying about your boyfriend being terrified to meet her, only for it to completely backfire as she promised to be on her best behavior when meeting him. you still remember the embarrassment that coursed through your veins as you texted your rental boyfriend about the meeting place, and you know the embarrassment will stick to you for days to come. 

and while calling in a different place is not a bad idea either, you’d rather not be in a public space where the script that you generously printed out could be seen by passing bystanders. if you could, you’d outright tell him that you’re not luring him into your apartment to violate guidelines and that you are not a pervert by any means, but saying those words out loud would only worsen the situation. 

you can only hope that he trusts you when you said that this video call is a one-time thing. 

your mother’s visage loads into your laptop screen, smile lines present as she beams at you in utter delight. she’s in the living room, and you can even spot your grumpy senior cat lounging in the background. you bow your head in greeting before smiling at her, “good afternoon, mother.”

“hello, my darling!” she leans in close to the camera, no doubt peering in to survey your background for any signs of the aforementioned ‘boyfriend’. “and where is my future son-in-law?”

your face heats up, flustered at her bold choice of words, “mother! don’t refer to him as such. we’ve only been together for a week, you’ll scare him!”

she only throws her head back and laughs, askewing her glasses without care. in her moment of distraction, you discreetly pull out your phone from below to view your recent messages.

phainon: i’ll be there any minute now

phainon: again, so sorry! Traffic took a while :( 

you: it’s okay. Take care. 

you sigh, nerves beginning to fray. you resume your focus back to your mother, pointing at your phone in hand, “my boyfriend said he’ll be here soon. I will wait for him at the front door.”

your mother frantically nods, “of course! You lovebirds must be dying to see each other, haha!”

“i’ll be turning off my camera and mic for now. when he arrives, please do not call him son-in-law, mother.” you cringe, dreading to imagine the tense smile on your rented boyfriend’s face.

you pick up two folders from the other side of the room, plopping them down just beneath the coffee table where your laptop sits. while you’re confident in your date’s memorization abilities, you prefer to play it safe. And true to his words, he comes knocking on your apartment door a minute or two later. 

standing up, you feel your palms getting clammy as you rush to welcome him in. the oak door creaks open, revealing phainon in all his boyish charm’s glory. pristine white hair, sparkling blue eyes, and wearing a casual fit consisting of a white shirt and baggy jeans. rather than a ‘hi’ or a ‘i hope it wasn’t too much of a hassle to get here’, the first thing you say to him is, “do you have the script memorized?”

he chuckles at that, setting aside his shoes before stepping in. “of course, how could i not with the effort you put into it?”

the effort in question is the FAQ section you added to the several-page-long document you sent first thing after introductions. in generosity, you even added an alternate option wherein he tries his best to act like the shittiest guy in the world so that your mother will beg for you to break up with him. 

but he had kindly refused, stating that he didn’t want to be the subject of several aunties’ conversations for several years. you understand where he’s coming from. auntie gossip feels like its own curse. 

you smile, ushering him further into your apartment. “thank you for accepting my ludicrous offer, phainon. have you eaten yet?”

he shakes his head no, observing the trinkets and personalized furniture you have displayed, “it’s no problem to me, (y/n). in fact, i’m eager to play actor for your mom.”

stopping right outside of the living room door, you glance at him over your shoulder. “remember the script, okay? my mother is not a harsh person, quite the opposite, actually. but she’s intelligent and quick to pick up on any discrepancies. the moment she notices a fault and a lack of consistency in our stories, it’s over.”

“and there’s a printed-out script on the floor, but if you need to read it, signal it to me first.” 

he salutes you like a sergeant, back straightened and all. “got it! I’ll keep that in mind.”

you inhale, grabbing hold of the knob, “ready?”

phainon grins, “always.”

the script you created plays out like this: while studying for your first midterm, you resorted to a secluded library with a nearby cafe. amidst your dutiful reading, you felt hunger and went to the cafe for a quick snack. the person manning the counter during that time was phainon, and you immediately formed a crush on him, adding that place into a near-daily routine. after a month or two of ogling at him, you one day steeled your nerves and asked him for his number, which he dutifully complied with. you flirted with each other through text for a while before phainon decided to ask you to be his date for a nearby festival. and the rest is history.  

when you first presented this storyline to your two friends lucky enough to know you’re about to fake a relationship, they both wore faces of disgust, as if what you had shown them was human feces scooped up with your bare hands rather than a document.

“i thought i begged you to stop watching those romance dramas that sushang introduced you to?” stelle, the enabler for your whole scheme in the first place, crinkles her nose, swatting away your phone like it personally wronged her. 

“like come on, a person asking for a barista’s number would be reported asap! get real, (y/n). Are you just going to infodump that on your mom?” march squints her eyes shut, dramatically shivering. “you should just say that you met through AstralGram!”

“that’s objectively ten times worse. sit this one out, march.” you huff, shutting off your phone, “you both don’t get it. my mother adores this type of relationship. she’s a chronic xianzhou romance drama watcher with a premium subscription.”

“right. sure, whatever helps you sleep at night.” stelle pulls out her phone, getting ready to gamble, “just remember to update us.”

assholes, the lot of them. out of pure spite, you won’t. after the success of fully making your mother believe that you are now in a committed relationship, you like to think that your two assholes of friends don’t deserve to know that. for now. wrapping up the plastic container in a cute, patterned cloth, you turn around to give it to an awaiting phainon on the living room couch.

“here, as a token of my gratitude,” his calloused hands reach out to accept, briefly brushing against yours. 

“you didn’t need to do this, (y/n). but still, thank you.” he cradles the clothed container to his abdomen, peering up at you in gratitude. 

“it’s the least i could do.” you give a thoughtful hum, looking at your cat-themed wall clock ticking away, “next week, we’ll meet in a restaurant as per my mother’s wish. i hope this is fine with you?”

“and you’ll send her pictures of us on the date, right?” phainon clarifies, stretching his body out. 

you nod. “of course, the date will be fully paid by me. should you lack formal attire, tell me now so I can transfer extra funds to your account.”

phainon gapes at you, blue eyes wide open, “...i’m deeply sorry if i’m just assuming things, but wow, you are loaded.” 

you look at him in confusion, “with the website’s payment rates to afford just one appointment, i would hope so.”

you stare at your phone, confusedly blinking at the 58th cat meme that phainon had sent you ever since he managed to pry out the name of your senior cat back home. the first time he had sent you a meme, you believed that it was an accident on his part. but now, it appears that his chattiness simply carries on over to texts, regardless of who he’s sending nonsensical clips to. so you give him another laughing emoji reaction rather than a reply, because the image did make you laugh. 

but he sends another meme just 10 seconds later, making you look at it in astonishment.

you: where do you get all these materials?

phainon: you finally responded!

you: ? 

you: I’ve been responding to each one of them?

phainon: laughing reacts don’t count

phainon: i thought you ghosted me :(((

you: phainon, that is not ghosting. and what would i gain from ghosting you? I need you. 

phainon: .

phainon: you need me????

you: yes, because i rent you to be my boyfriend?

he doesn’t grace you with a reply thereafter, so you shut off your phone and redirect your attention to a struggling march with calculus, back bent over the table as she tries her best to take in the formulas. beside her is a thriving stelle typing her way through a multi-paged essay, a perfect dichotomy to the pink-haired girl’s misery. and just across from you is dan heng,

who is already staring right at you, arms crossed.

you tilt your head, “is something wrong?”

“you have a boyfriend?” dan heng asks, brows furrowed, and you hope that the flinch you give doesn’t reveal your scheme. 

giving him a small smile, you nod, “...who told you that?”

march and stelle are quick to abandon their respective work in favor of listening in through side glances. you wish you could ask for their help, but alas, this is a battlefield you must fight alone. 

“i found out through auntie. hm, i was wondering who the guy entering your apartment a few days back was.”

of course he did, childhood friends be damned, dan heng lives just a few doors down the floor as your mother wanted him to live nearby to watch over you. just like when you were children.

“s- she told you?” you mentally curse out your stutter. if dan heng ever finds out that you were faking it, would he tell your mother? you shiver just from entertaining the thought. “are you… mad?”

dan heng sighs, a weary sound, as if his soul is thousands of years old, “no, not mad. just… disappointed, i suppose.”

chewing on your lip, you press further. “why?”

it takes him a moment to reply, and when he does, there is a strange note of melancholy in his voice, “it’s... nothing, don’t worry about it.”

II. my boyfriend is a fake one, but i care regardless. 

a cumulative 8 dates later, alternatively, two months, it is now a well-known fact around your circle of friends and acquaintances that you have a boyfriend, with march and stelle being the only exceptions to your lie. you never revealed his name, only giving a vague description of his appearance, in fear of someone finding out about the rental boyfriend site. and you substitute his name by simply just referring to him as your ‘boyfriend’ or ‘lover’. 

the false relationship begins to bleed through personal parts of your life in order to maintain the facade, trickling further day by day. your old lockscreen, a photo of your cat when she was still a kitten, has been swapped out for a selfie with phainon taken during a beach date, both smiling widely - your hair partially wet, and phainon’s abs peeking through his sheer shirt. his contact name on your phone has undergone changes, too. a formal 'phainon' transformed into a cringy, eye rolling, 'babe'.

you’re required to slip him into a conversation every now and then, lest people start to think that you broke up. if they start thinking that, then the news will get to dan heng, who will then report back to your mother over your failed relationship. it’s too early for separation. 

a topic about working out more will have you remarking, “oh! I believe that my boyfriend has a routine for the upper body, i can ask him for you if you’d like.”

your mother will send a picture of an item saying, “i think phainon would love this!” and you’ll reply through text with, “yes, i agree :)”

some random student hitting on you in the hallway gives you a valid reason to reject them, “sorry, i have a boyfriend.”

a conversation with your peer during free time in class leads to a topic about relationships, and they’ll complain about their significant other’s bad habit before asking about yours. with a practiced smile, you laugh, “he has none.”

you hold slight envy toward your rented boyfriend in times like these, while you’re here needing to mention him at least once per day, he’s free to live life as he pleases, not tied down to an obligated lie around others. you imagine then what it’d be like to be in his shoes, a rental boyfriend, taking pictures together as if you’re enjoying the time of your life with your client and appearing lovey-dovey to send it to her mother before going back home with a new check having just arrived in your bank account.

perhaps in an alternate reality, should such a thing exist, you’re the employee living a hassle-free life, attending dates almost daily. you laugh at the thought, finding it unfit for you. 

well, you’re happy that phainon is at least free from this mess outside the slotted date each week. 

still… you sneak a look over his side profile, dimly lit from the theater you’re currently in. perhaps once a week is too much for his schedule. he is, just like you, a college student with his own set of deadlines and classes struggling with. he may be paid, but is it at the cost of his academics, you wonder?

you can’t bring yourself to focus at the movie when phainon’s head is bobbling up and down while he tries to abate the sweet respite of sleep. you lean to whisper in his ear, “are you alright?”

he immediately shoots upright, casting you a wobbly smile and speaks in a reassured tone that, in fact, does not reassure you, “sorry, sorry! Just a little tired.”

you ponder to yourself if what you’re doing is meddling with the guidelines of your rental boyfriend when you ask, “what’s wrong? You don’t look too well.”

phainon pauses, head turned to you as he’s illuminated by the light coming from the screen. you see him visibly gulp, you spot his fingers twitch, and the askew strands of hair sticking out. he doesn’t look fine, probably hasn’t been for days now.

the decision is made then, you don’t wait for his reply when you tug at his wrist and point in the direction of the exit, “let’s get out of here, come on.”

his eyes widen, and he stutters (the first time you’ve heard it from him), refusing to stand up from his seat, “but what about the movie?”

you huff, tugging on his wrist harder despite knowing you have no physical strength against him, “it’s most likely some slop. I’m saving our time here, let’s go.” you give him a pleading look, bottom lip jutting out as you try to mirror his signature kicked puppy expression, “please, phainon?”

phainon closes his eyes and with a resigned sigh, mutters, “fine.”

phainon’s cheerful exterior leads to cracks of vulnerability harder to break through. as you sit with him inside a mostly empty diner, you start to think that he’ll never speak up about his recent troubles. nursing an iced tea, “this is fine, too. We can just sit here in silence until time is up,” you offer, gazing at his troubled eyes. this is a first for you, your friends easily trust you, so they spill out their darkest thoughts and troubles like waterfalls cascading, dan heng included. 

to see phainon so guarded… 

he hasn’t even touched the food you ordered for him. from what your memory recalled during past dates, he adores a classic burger with fries on the side. did he get sick of it? or is he craving something different today? you harshly chew on your bottom lip, worry gnawing away at your conscience. but if he doesn’t eat, would that not lead to even more lethargy? should he pass out here and then, do you even possess the strength to carry him to safety? maybe you should take his gym routi-

phainon reluctantly picks up a fry, his usually bright blue eyes downcast with dark bags beneath. and just like that, the dam breaks. shedding some of his bravado as he begins to speak of his life, of his experiences that shaped him - that clings to his skin every waking day.

you and him stay in that diner way past the agreed time slot you booked him for, but you couldn't care less when phainon is bearing his heart out to you. he paints himself in colors that, for once, don’t serve to make him shine brighter. a stroke of green, as he expresses envy toward his peers back in college that didn’t need to scrape the bottom of the barrel just to attend, you think he felt envious toward you at some point, too. a hurried gray while he recalls his family, whom he had lost to a wildfire when he was still scrawny and little. 

a beautiful purple, he tells you of how he grew up in an orphanage after, and how he had to take up odd jobs around the city to save up for a dream he wished to fulfill; leaving amphoreus to study in a place far away. a deafening black for when he discovered how to make easy money through the rental boyfriend website his college friend introduced him to, no more picking up odd jobs and heavy labour. 

a navy blue for he rebuilt himself from the ground, tweaking aspects of himself to parade around to be the general ideal type of man that most would flock to; up to date with trends, flirty but charming, good looking, and nice.

at the end of it all, his bright colors of sunny yellow, slate white, bright red, and teal are overshadowed by the neutral tones he reveals to you. You had been sorely mistaken, you realize, having assumed that he is what he portrays himself as rather than seeing what he actually is: a method actor called upon the stage the moment he enters one of his countless appointments, dedicated to his role of playing the picture-perfect boyfriend. 

your heart squeezes in pain, knowing that you’re part of his burdens, no matter if you’re just a speck. your eyes are peeled back, beginning to view him as less of a guy you just pay to pretend he’s your perfect lover, and more of a friend who deals with his own problems just like everyone else. pure ignorance on your part. 

he looks at you as he finishes his long-winded talk, searching for an inkling of annoyance or disgust in your eyes as you stare back at him. at that moment, you could only offer a classic, “I’m sorry.”

phainon shakes his head, defeated, “you have nothing to be sorry for, (y/n).”

you wish you could let him go right now, announcing to him that he’s free from you as a client to lessen his burden. someone else will be quick to replace you as his client, after all. but your mother’s approval weighs above all, even above your own priorities. your hands ache to reach across the table to hold him comfortingly, wishing that you can tell him it’ll only be 6 more months until he’s free. 

for now, your lips part to give him the barest minimum, “you can just play up the boyfriend act for the photos to send to my mother. everything else,” you smile, “just treat me like you would a friend. that’s the least i can gift you, phainon.”

his breath hitches. he pauses, wetting his lips before looking at you in earnest, eyes shining from unshed tears, “thank you.”

and if the scheduled date the following week takes place in a restaurant that specializes in serving dishes from amphoreus, if only to give him a crumb of home? you will turn a blind eye to phainon’s astonished face and pretend that you hadn’t known this would happen.

but as his fingers tenderly interlaced themselves with your own as he walked you to the parking lot, his gratitude was more than felt. 

“what? my mother’s number?” you frown, pausing mid-bite, “are you… hitting on my mother, phainon?”

phainon refutes the moment the accusatory words leave your mouth, hands forming an ‘X’ as he violently shakes his head from left to right, “what? no! it’s so i can talk to her through text!”

you merely raise a brow, not seeing where he’s going. it causes him to hurry his explanation.

“she’s been pestering you about another video call, right? I mean, i don’t mind…” he blushes, looking at you as a giddy smile forms on his lips, “but…! give me her number so i can earn brownie points and be the best boyfriend ever.”

ah. “so you’ll sacrifice your free time to distract her from bothering me? you see, she's a very talkative person.”

he nods, scarily resembling a happy puppy from his white tufts of hair and goofy smile, “yeah, your paper is due next week, right? Don’t worry, i’ll talk to her like a good son-in-law.”

you exhale at his jokingly proclaimed title, making you recall back to when your own mother referred to him as such. “sure, whatever floats your boat.”

III. an unscripted moment.

you wake with a blaring awareness that the mere act of swallowing hurts, and your entire body is burning up. your back feels sticky from dried sweat, and your body screams at you as you reach for your phone on the bedside table. It’s 11:34 AM, friday. no classes, but a date with phainon as per schedule.

you groan, eyes burning up the longer you stare at your screen. with sluggish movements, you quickly type up a message to send him before shutting your eyes once more, praying that slumber will quell your horrid fever. 

you: i'm cancelling the date today.

you: don't worry, you still keep the money.

the influx of notifications coming from your phone in relentless ‘ping’s are fruitless. 

the second time you blearily blink your eyes open, you hear the faint, yet never-ending, sound of knocking coming from your apartment door. body still burning up, you whimper in pain as you sit up, immediately feeling your skull going around in circles. it induces nausea in you. once more reaching your phone, you’re greeted by an onslaught of spam texts from phainon that are still ongoing.

- 11:34AM - 

you: i'm cancelling the date today.

you: don't worry, you still keep the money.

babe: woah? good morning to you too beautiful

babe: nice joke btw i laughed

- 11:40AM -

babe: i said i laughed at your joke

babe: so take back what you said :( 

babe: (y/n)?

- 11:55AM - 

babe: hey. are you mad at me?

babe: (y/n)???

babe: give me a laugh react and i’ll take that as no

babe: or at least read my message

- 12:10PM -

babe: whatever i did wrong im sorry

babe: so respond to me 

babe: please?

babe: or at least let this be a joke you’re just dragging on

babe: i won’t even be mad

babe: just

babe: happy 

- 12:31PM - 

babe: please answer me

babe: im starting to get worried

babe: are you in danger?

babe: or maybe you don’t want me around anymore

babe: haha

- 12:45PM -

missed call from babe.

missed call from babe.

babe: pick up

babe: im begging you

- 1:12PM - 

babe: i wish i could visit your apartment to check up on you

babe: but fuck. Would that be too much?

- 1:33PM - 

babe: i asked auntie if you were in your apartment

babe: told her you weren’t responding to me

babe: and she said you weren’t replying back to her either

babe: i’m sorry but i need to visit you

babe: i can’t you lose you like this.

- 2:00PM - 

babe: i’m at your front door

babe: answer me. Please?

- 2:22PM - 

babe: (y/n) i know you’re finally reading all these messages

babe: your reading receipts are turned on

you: i know, phainon.

you: i just woke up, i’m sorry for making you worry. 

you: hold on, i’ll unlock the door for you.

despite wanting to remain in the comfort of your bed, your sickness won’t quickly abate if you continue to rot here and allow your guest standing outside. with slow, measured steps, careful not to worsen your headache, you eventually reach the door to welcome phainon in.

blessed with looks he may be, right now, he looks like a mess. his usual part in his white hair is nowhere to be found, resembling a bird’s nest rather than a hairstyle. his eyes are shrouded in a mix of worry and devastation, and his usual stylish outfits are severely downgraded into a bright yellow hoodie and… purple pants?

you have always been one for honesty, ironic considering your relationship is a hoax, so you look at him and croak out, “you look like shit.”

your words are static noise with phainon’s worry worsening as he looks at you from head to toe, hand holding onto you like you’d wither without him, “have you eaten yet? your body is burning up.” to double-check, he presses his other hand up to your forehead, gasping in shock when he does so.

his lips wobble, acting like he’s in just as much pain as you. rather, seeing you in pain puts him in much worse agony, “lay down on your bed,” he ushers you further down the hall, “i’ll cook you something warm. did you finish all your backlogs yet? I can do them for you.”

weak hands try their best to pry off phainon’s steady grip on you as you sluggishly mutter, “it’s okay, phainon… you don’t have to be here.” a yawn, “i’ll be fine, i promise. the payment won’t be deducted from you.”

instead of a relieved expression you envisioned, phainon’s face sours, “it’s not about that,” he retorts, tone curt. “i want to take care of you, so please let me.”

with the firmer shove, yet still mindful of your weakened state, “go back to your room and rest. It’ll take a while for me to cook, okay?”

you sigh, feeling the room melting around your vision, “yeah, fine. whatever. don’t complain if you end up regretting this.”

his usual liveliness resumes when you hear him laugh, “i would never.”

you don’t resume sleep, having overslept more than enough for today. yet looking at your phone only irritates your headache further, leaving you no choice but to play background music while staring up at your ceiling, contemplating your past actions this week to see where you went wrong that led to you being bedridden. 

you hate getting sick. you try to prevent it as much as possible by eating your daily dose of greens, fruits, and protein, and you always make sure to bring an umbrella in case of an unexpected weather. you try your best not to stay up too late if preventable, and yet… 

phainon knocks twice before entering your room. his left hand carries a steaming bowl that, upon further inspection, is tomato soup. his hair pushed back using your headband, and he’s wearing the pink, glittery apron that march gifted you earlier this year. the hot pink layered on top of his yellow and purple combo fit makes you laugh, triggering a coughing fit. 

he hurries to set down the bowl and fishes his phone out of his pants before patting your back, “what’s wrong, are you okay?”

you let last few coughs before hoarsely replying, “i like your fit.” he looks down on himself like he hadn’t thought of what he was wearing prior, “oh.”

red dusts the tip of his ears as he pulls back, clearing his throat and hurrying out of the room, “anyways! i’ll go get the other bowl and cups, let’s eat together.” he’s gone before you can even laugh a second time. 

your focus is soon shifted when you spot his phone on the bedside table. He left it behind, the screen flashing open as a push notification came, briefly exposing his lockscreen. even in your fever-addled mind, you recognize the exact picture,

it’s the beach date picture, the same one set as your own lockscreen. 

you blink in wonder. it had only appeared on the screen for a split second. was that a product of your imaginative fever-induced mind? if not, why would he set that picture as his lockscreen?

IV. what to do if your rented boyfriend starts to act a little too seriously?

the first thing you had done after signing up for the rent-a-boyfriend website was to read their guidelines. you had incinerated each and every word into your retinas, ensuring that you wouldn’t forget a single thing, no matter how much time passed. among the guidelines that stuck with you the most was;

falling in love and experiencing jealousy with and over the employee is strictly prohibited. the employees are workers with personal lives outside a client’s slotted time, personal information and feelings are not part of the conduct. 

you kept this in mind from the moment you had chosen phainon to be the unfortunate victim to your false relationship. you even assured him through email that you’re not the type to fall in love so easily, especially not under a measly 8 months. 

this stands true even now.

falling in love and experiencing jealousy with and over the employee is strictly prohibited. the employees are workers with personal lives outside a client’s slotted time, personal information and feelings are not part of the conduct.

phainon is an amazing actor when he needs to play the boyfriend role. he deserves flowers for that. had he not been living under unfortunate circumstances, you’re sure you would’ve seen his handsome face playing as the male lead for one of the xianzhou romance dramas that your mother watches in the evening. he suits every romance trope, oddly enough.

falling in love and experiencing jealousy with and over the employee is strictly prohibited. the employees are workers with personal lives outside a client’s slotted time, personal information and feelings are not part of the conduct.

but even you cannot turn a blind eye to the gradual, sinking feeling that slowly began to accumulate in your stomach after your fever incident. you recall the rules inscribed upon the website, clients are strictly prohibited from falling in love with their rental boyfriends.

falling in love and experiencing jealousy with and over the employee is strictly prohibited. the employees are workers with personal lives outside a client’s slotted time, personal information and feelings are not part of the conduct. 

pray tell, what can you do if the rental boyfriend is the one in love with you?

days leading up to the long-awaited semester break, or alternatively, nearly 4 months into your rental boyfriend antics, your mother messaged you one late evening. you had been losing your mind over a stern professor, crying immaturely over the directions they had given for finals, or lack thereof, that had you losing days’ worth of sleep just to fulfill.

at that moment, the notification from her had brought salvation to your suffering, making you forget about such troubles, even if for a brief moment, just to see what she had to say. the content of her message, however, made you raise your brow. 

mother: semester break is soon, right?

you: yes, mother. :) 

mother: and you’re coming back home, right? ☺️

you: of course, mother.

mother: that’s wonderful!

mother: i’ve been thinking about it for quite a while

mother: and i was wondering

mother: maybe you should bring phainon with you!

mother: i can cook your favorite meal for him to taste

you: what

you: apologies for my abrupt reply. 

you: however, bringing my boyfriend along to meet the family… mother, is that not too soon?

you: phainon and i are barely hitting the four-month mark.

you: the last thing i want is to scare him away.

mother: oh, you’re overthinking this!

mother: phainon is a sweet boy! he’s been telling me that you’re under his loving care 💓

mother: he even sent me a picture of you when you caught that fever ;)

you: he truly is, yes. but…

you: give me more time to think about this, please.

you recount this situation to your date with phainon a few days later, deeply troubled at how you’re going to tell your mother that your rental boyfriend cannot, in fact, be brought back home. he has his own life, friends, and duties. he’s either going to stay in his own apartment here or visit amphoreus for the month of december.

phainon, in an ideal world, would have laughed at you and agreed that he wouldn’t be available for semester break. probably throw in a tease or two about company rules and whatnot. instead, the phainon in front of you merely sips his drink, blinking with no surprise or mortification whatsoever. “oh, i know. auntie told me yesterday. but don’t worry! i already told her i was coming.”

that’s not what you were… you inhaled sharply, “what? Wait.” you rubbed your temple, frustration reaching an all-time high, “that would be near impossible, phainon.”

“why so?” he prods, expertly dodging your swatting hands as he steals a fry from your meal. 

“because you need to book a flight? And there’s less than two weeks left for that?” you stress, “and what about amphoreus? your friends back there must be worried sick over you. you truly don’t need to sacrifice this much for me, phainon. i will tell my mother that yo-”

“you worry your pretty head too much,” his thumb tenderly rubs at the crease formed between your brows. he stares deep into your eyes, "relax, it’ll be fine. I want to be there, (y/n).”

“remember, don’t mention any unfavorable traits about either myself or you. they don’t know how i act outside our house, and they don’t know your work description. avoid speaking about our fabricated love story as much as possible so we can play safe,” you call out from behind phainon, worriedly looking over your childhood home just a few feet away. your hands itch to hold something, but phainon had already graciously carried your luggage for you.

he simply nods, focused on making that both your luggages don’t swerve in the other direction as he hoists it up the stairs. clearing your throat, you prepare yourself in front of the closed door, casting phainon a side glance as you caution him one last time, “let’s be on our best behavior.”

“just for you.” he winks, knocking on the door first before you could. you roll your eyes.

the muted clicks of heels fast approaching tenses you up, knowing that your mother will be opening the door for you and your boyfriend. you take a deep breath right as the entrance creaks open, displaying your mother in all her glory. her glasses perched on her nose bridge, wearing a black turtle neck, and a long skirt with red bottom heels. she gasps excitedly, eyes locked onto you before even taking a look at the man on your side. 

“hello, mother.” you give a tight smile whereas phainon does a perfect bow, “good evening, mrs. (l/n)!”

“welcome home, you two!” her hand eagerly reaches out to take care of all the luggage but phainon politely refuses as he hauls them all inside. stripping off your shoes, you take a look around your home, finding it strange how quickly it had become unfamiliar from the months you’d been away for college. while you had grown up vaguely aware that your family possessed, it had never truly sunk into your mind until you met march and stelle during the last year of high school. opulence bleeds through every corner of your spacious house, not blaringly so, but subtly, akin to a glimmering gem beneath light.

phainon’s hand quickly finds purchase in yours, happily swinging them back and forth while you follow closely behind your mother. he leans in to whisper into your ear, “you’re adorable.” you throw him an unamused look. he tilts his head, all coy, “what? Don’t tell me you’re not seeing the picture frames all over the walls?”

“not another word.” you whisper back, bumping his side into the hallway. 

your mother leads you to the dining room, a massive elongated table that makes your father feel like an emperor every time he sits at the head. an overkill purchase on his part, considering you only had one other sibling, but you suppose that man will buy anything for the sake of his ego. 

“phainon, you sit next to (y/n), of course.” she pulls out two seats, eyeing your interlocked fingers with twinkling eyes. “oh, and you’ll be staying here until the end of the month, yes?”

phainon eagerly nods, tugging you along to your designated seats, “yes, mrs. (l/n)!”

you hold back the urge to ram your face straight into the wall, already feeling drained as you wait for the long night ahead. 

late past midnight, there’s a knocking on your door that rouses you from your desk. having retired back to your childhood bedroom the moment family dinner was done, leaving phainon with your family downstairs with nothing but a withering glare on your face as warning. but he merely nodded, sending you kissy faces, before going back to arm wrestling with your father to prove that he was ‘worth your love’ while your sibling howls in laughter.

“who’s there?” you call out, staring at the door.

for a moment, the knocking stills, silence wafting in the air. 

then it picks up again.

you huff, now staring indignantly, “pardon me, i asked who’s there?”

silence. knocking.

nerves fully riled up, you throw your phone down before stomping over until you’re right in front of your door. “are you going to keep knocking or what?”

finally, “it’s me, phainon…” he twists the doorknob left and right, rattling it. 

you frown, noting the low volume of his voice and the slur in his words. “phainon?” you open the door, light from your bedroom pooling into the dark hallway as you stare up at your rental boyfriend’s face. “do you need something?”

you observe his features; flujshed cheeks, unfocused eyes, and fringe covering his other eye… there’s no doubt in your mind, phainon is at best, tipsy, and at worst, wasted. it must be from the rum that your father adores, you conclude, finger brushing his hair from his face. “hello? Are you still with me, phainon?”

he blinks slowly, eyes trying to focus on you but it’s a useless endeavor. “i…” he leans closer, towering over you and smelling like dark molasses, permeating through the air, “can we uh, talk? please?”

you pause. “why? about what?”

“just, i-” he fumbles with his words, inching closer and closer, “i wanna talk about something…”

“is it important? it’s,” you glance behind to look at the wall clock, “twelve-fifty in the morning, phainon.”

“yeah, it’s- it’s really important,” his foot wedges inside, like he’s scared you’d close it on him, “i promise.”

you open the door further, encouraging him inside. he follows through with swaying footsteps, blue eyes fixated on you. you sit him down on the edge of the bed, sitting right beside, “what is it?”

he doesn’t answer you right away, merely looking around your room with this awed look on his face. his gaze sifts through your old shelf filled with dolls and dollhouses, and just beside is a shelf dedicated to all the trophies and medals you acquired while studying. a little further left is the door entrance to your walk-in closet, where some of your clothes from kindergarten are still somewhere inside, buried beneath your newer, shinier clothes. 

phainon then sinks into your bed, back resting against the lush mattress of you beloved bed. you think you heard him inhale the bedsheets before speaking, “your mom…. she said that i’m your first boyfriend.”

he turns his head, red flush still present while beholding you, “is that.. Is that true?”

your lips purse, “well, that’s what they believe, yes.”

he inches closer until his bare forearm makes contact with your pajama-clad ones, “and your dad, he… welcomed me to the family. said that he always wanted you to be happy, you know? and.”

you stay silent, allowing him to continue. “your sibling, they congratulated me… joked about waiting for the wedding.”

your face sours, recoiling from guilt at the massive farce that you’ve been playing right in front of your family, “that’s…” you bite your lip, “it’s whatever. probably a result from the festive atmosphere, don’t let them get to you, phainon. this is just business at the end of the day.”

his face falls, a vacant look overtaking. 

“...is it really?”

“it is.” you reply, not missing a beat, finally catching up to what he’s here for. “phainon, don’t be ridiculous right now.”

“i’m not ridiculous, (y/n).” he softly chastises, sitting up as he corners you to the edge of your bed. “don’t tell me you’re not feeling what i’m feeling every time i see you. this feeling is mutual, isn’t it?” and you’re so dumbstruck at the entire situation that you can’t seem to formulate a response to his ludicrous actions.

phainon climbs on top of your body, calloused hands cradling you as if you were a star he bottled up with his own two hands. he leans in just mere centimeters away from your lips to whisper madness meant to be shared only with you, “i love you, i truly do. i want to be your real boyfriend. i want to go around my campus and yell out your name. i want to say your name every time someone asks me if i’m taken. it makes me want to crawl out of my skin when i go on a date with someone who isn’t you. i want to spend each and every morning until death in your arms. i want to graduate and get a job to provide for you. i love you so, so much (y/n), you’re all i ever wished for. i’m so tired of pretending to be this pristine guy i’m not.”

a heaving gasp, nails digging into his skin that only serves to make him groan out in pleasure, “phainon-”

he leans in to kiss you, sealing and tainting your first kiss with his filth. your childhood plushie resting on your desk being the sole witness.

years down the line, i will make you look back and say that you're glad you found me through that website. then your eyes will glisten in affection as you lean into my embrace and say, "i love you, phainon." as easily as breathing.

rent-a-bf phainon, if he was allowed to be absolutely manic: are you talking to other people be honest w me

(y/n), thinking: wow his boyfriend acting is getting so real these days. they should cast him in a xianzhou drama.

[fish-18]

⚠︎Letter⚠︎

☎︎002-001

Stalker x reader

⚠︎Warnings: Yandere, stalking, drug usage(movie chloroform)

This is an oldie, so no drawings of the guy:>

Unless someone wants to see it

Word count:1.6k

If you’re reading this letter, I hope you read it to the end. 

You have the right to know everything written in here.

The first time I met you was exactly three months ago, it was a fraction of a second. you walked past me with hurried steps, I was deep in thought.

At that moment, a question that popped in my head.

Can someone know everything about a person when the other doesn’t?

……Only one way to find out. 

It was an experiment, and I chose you to be my participant.

To be honest, it could’ve been anyone walking there, you were just unlucky, I guess.

So I took the plan into action and turn around to follow you home. The first thing I learned about you was that you walk really fast, as if you’re in a hurry. 

But I was faster, you were relaxed, I can hear the little tune you were humming along with the music from your earphones. You liked that song a lot back then, but it changed to another lately, right?

Anyways, you were in your little world, I didn’t even have to hide the sound of my footsteps. Well, nobody is prepared for a stalker, not even me, perhaps.

I learned so much about you just that night, you would play with the straps on your bag, twist your fingers in them. Did you notice that little habit? It looks like you want your hand to be held.

And the way you breathe was quite adorable, sometimes you take deeper breaths as if you forgot to breathe.

You were a complete stranger to me, not my type, even.

But those little details were quite intriguing, so I continued on with my “research”.

Can someone know everything about a person when the other doesn’t?

For the first two weeks, I followed you through you going between work and home, at 8:30 sharp, but you often leave late, looking tired, were you being picked on? I later knew that it was in fact, true. Poor you, but it’ll get better, I’ll make sure of that.

By following you, I learned quite a lot, your favorite foods in the convenience store, how you would get all excited when you see a stray cat, or someone walking a dog. 

But that wasn’t enough, I can see you have a mask on when you’re outside, always smiling, always so composed.

So, I did what I have to, I broke in your house. It was so easy, who hides their spare keys in somewhere so obvious? So I took it and had someone make a copy, they didn’t suspect a thing, even laughed and told me to be careful with my keys, after all, who would know they’d encounter a stalker in real life? It’s amusing.

I haven’t felt such emotions in a long time, the fear of being caught, the excitement of sneaking around, the interesting feeling when I think about how nobody suspected me.

Strangely, I didn’t feel guilt, I mean, never had. 

(Click)

Anyways, I went in your apartment, it was way smaller than what I’ve expected, and quite messy, must I add. But it holds a certain charm to it, how you really are is so obvious just by seeing this room, I find it cute, how your pajamas are lying on the bed, how you forgot to leave the cap of your toothpaste on. Always, you go to work in a hurry and come home so late, do you have time for anything?

The first day was a little dangerous, I was so into the photo albums and the trinkets you collect in your room I almost forgot the time, I went past you when you were on the ground floor, but you didn’t seem to notice me, you looked so tired, no matter how much make up you put on it couldn’t hide those dark circles.

I felt bad for you, but I can’t help out yet, the experiment will last for three months.

Can someone know everything about a person when the other doesn’t?

After that, I often visit your house, in fact, I visit every day when you were not there. I would go in, look at all your things, then leave before sun down.

It was when I tried to go in your computer and faced a password did I realize that I don’t know your name yet. 

So I went through all your stuff, finding some mail and your passport, found your password, your name and your birthday isn’t a good combination, by the way, someone bad might figure it out.

It’s too late for that, apparently.

The stuff you have in there is just, so interesting.

First of all, you should block that guy who’s keep messaging you instead of dragging it on! Why are you giving him hope? He’s disturbing you and that alone is enough for him to die a thousand times.

Next, interesting taste in fictions. We might make a good couple.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think about it too much at the time, the need to do an experiment was replaced by the excitement rather than attachment or emotions towards you, of course, I felt attached to you, but it wasn’t strong……not yet.

Then after a month or so, I went through everything I could find, including your computer, I even read all the manga and stuff to get to know you more……and I hate to admit it, but it wasn’t half bad, some had nice plots.

But at some point, I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing you, so I went back to stalking you. I’ve gone a little rusty, but same as always, you didn’t feel it, it was a little frustrating to be honest, I don’t want you to notice me in this experiment, but at the same time I wanted you to turn your head around and use those beautiful eyes to look at me, to notice me, to show all those emotions and little details to me. I must have gone crazy……if I wasn’t at the start. 

We are only halfway through the experiment, and I’ve known so, so, so much about you, all those adorable little quirks, the real side of you, you became so beautiful in my eyes when I started stalking you again, for a moment, I thought you were an angel, not the biblical accurate ones you’ve seen in fictions, the ones people think about.

It was then I realized, I have fallen, not that deep yet, but…... 

If I stopped the experiment could we still be strangers back then? 

Can we?

No, it was too late for that……

Just following you wasn’t enough anymore, just going through your albums isn’t enough anymore, just looking through every post you made on social media isn’t enough anymore.

I have to……no, need to touch you.

It was the biggest risk I’ve taken by far, It would be the end if I was caught.

But it was so tempting, to touch your hair, your face…..to hold your hand and kiss your nose. 

I enjoy petting your hair a lot, whenever I touch them, I can’t get my hand off it it, and how comfortable you look when I pet you even when you’re sleeping. 

And the way your nose would scrunch up whenever I kiss you, as if it tickles you is just so cute.

That was just so adorable I couldn’t help but kiss you again and again, in your forehead, your eyelids, your cheeks, and your lips. They were soft, but a little dry.

It became routine, everyday when you’re fast asleep I would go in your house and just look at you, if I was feeling bold I’d touch you some more.

But it’s not enough, it’ll never be enough.

I haven’t slept well ever since I met you that day, I was making notes, or planning things, you never leave my head, every second of my life was surrounded by you, but the fact that you don’t know me was driving me crazy, you did all of this unconsciously.

By the time I realized, it’s only a week until this experiment ends. I learned about anything I could possibly learn about you, the way you talk to the people you like, the way you talk to the people you dislike, the little habit you have when you’re tense, I fell madly in love with you.

But there’s one thing I don’t know about you.

What would you do when you talk to me?

What face would you make when you see me?

Some stranger who knows all about you?

I think I have an inkling.

I can predict what you do easily, it’s amusing.

Anyways, I took a little time off from you and got some……supplies, I’ll put it that way. I’ve decorated our new place in the way you like, I hope you would appreciate it. I should be in your house by now, remember to take a deep breath.

I’ll come and get you in……

5

                  4

                                           3

                                               2

1

(Suddenly, you feel someone breathing on your neck)

(when did the door click open? )

“Ah ah ah, don’t run.”

(An arm was wrapped around your waist)

”The experiment was successful, I know aAaaLlll about you.”

(A cloth covered your mouth and your nose, you try to struggle, but it’s getting dizzy.)

“But it’s time for you to know about me. After all, it’s only fair for you to know all about me when I know you so well.”

(Your consciousness is fading, you tried to attack the person behind you, but you don’t have any strength anymore.)

“Can’t wait to have those pretty eyes looking at me.”

(You lose conscious)

[fish-18]

A Love Square ♡

"That man..I can't forgive him.."

???

"Y/N, over here!" A man waves you over.

Pat, pat, pat—light footsteps approach, quick but cheerful.

"Ah, there you are, [?]..!" Your eyes widen in delight, lips curling into a warm, happy smile.

"Say… did you do what I asked?"

"Mhm! [REDACTED] agreed without a problem!"

"..Hm… Then, N/N, want to pick up a few things on the way home? My treat." He flashes that same old smile that always makes your heart flutter. I want to rip it off his face.

"Oh yeah! Watch out—your wallet might end up crying today!" You jump in delight, eyes sparkling. Others would think it’s because he said he’ll pay, but… I know it’s because he called you by that name. That same sweet, sickening name that sends my own heart fluttering.

…N/N… Won’t you let me call you by that name too?

"Y/N, could you do me a little~ favor?"

"Hm? Sure, what is it?"

"Could you…"

"Alright! Sounds easy enough."

"Thank you, N/N! You're the best~!"

| | | | | | |

"N/N~ want to go on a date with me to the aquarium?"

"Eh—what? I mean, sure!"

"Great! It'll be this Saturday. You don’t have classes then, right?" He knows you do.

"..Yeah. I’m free. On Saturdays, haha.." You let out a weak chuckle, the kind meant to cover up a lie—though it doesn’t hide a thing.

"Also, ask [REDACTED] to come too. It'll be more fun, promise."

"Ah… Sure..!" You force a strained smile.

He grins, eyes crinkling at the corners. A genuine smile—though not for the thought of a date with you. No, it’s for his upcoming date with [REDACTED].

N/N… please, open your eyes.

He’ll never love you.

Not the way I do.

He doesn’t see the way you cry every time he leaves you behind.

He doesn’t see how you push everything aside for him.

He doesn’t appreciate you.

But I do. I see it all. I know.

I love you more than anything.

I cherish your efforts, your resilience.

I worship the very ground you walk on.

Please… look at me. Just once more.

Don’t look at him.

Look at me.

"Ah, shoot. It’s raining…" He holds out his hand, watching raindrops fall into his palm.

"I didn’t bring an umbrella today."

"We can share. I brought one." You offer kindly. Don’t. Not to him.

| | | | |

"Oh, hey, Y/N, and… [?]. You two haven’t gone home yet?"

"We were just about to. How about you, [REDACTED]?"

"I think I’ll wait for the rain to let up. I just got my hair done—don’t want it ruined, y’know?"

"I see…" You slip your umbrella into his hand. "You and [?] can go on ahead, then."

"You two can share the umbrella. Your homes are in the same direction, right?"

"Oh, no, no. It’s fine. I’ll just wait for the rain to stop. You and [?] were about to leave, anyway. I don’t want to impose…" They fidget, clearly uneasy.

"No, I can wait." | "Y/N can wait."

"Yeah, what he/they said," you and [?] reply in unison.

"It’s his umbrella, and yeah, I’ll just wait here. I’m sure the rain won’t take lo—"

BOOM.

Pitter. Patter.

"..Uhm, I suddenly remembered I’ve got some unfinished things to take care of—hah, totally forgot, ahah…" You laugh nervously, eyes darting anywhere but theirs.

"But Y/N, it’s clearly your umbrella, not [?]’s—"

"Oh! Would you look at the time! I really, really need to finish that paperwork!" You blurt out before dashing off in the opposite direction.

"So… shall we go?" He extends his hand toward [REDACTED].

They didn't take it. Serves that bastard right.

"Yeah… let’s go." They smile, though it’s only out of politeness.

"Agh… maybe I shouldn’t have given up that umbrella," you mumble.

"Are you alright?"

"Hm..? Oh, ###. Didn’t think you’d still be here this late."

"I… had some things to catch up on." And to make sure you get home safe.

"Pfft—really? I never expected to hear that from you of all people."

"Oh? Pray tell, what sort of perception do you have of me, Y/N?"

"Well~ let’s see… last to arrive, first to leave, top of the class, perfect scores, any work submitted days in advance. You know, you."

"..I… I didn’t know you thought of me that highly…"

"You—are you blushing? You’re blushing, aren’t you?" You lean closer, eyes narrowing in amusement.

"I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Is blushing in the room with us right now? I don’t think so."

"Aww, look at you, you’re so red~ Covering your face doesn’t help when I can clearly see your ears. They’re bright red, y’know~"

"No point covering your ears too. I’ve already seen everything." You grin cheekily, a ray of light in this grey, rain-soaked world.

"W-Whatever. Here."

"An umbrella?" We can share… under the same umbrella.

"Mhm. I heard you muttering earlier about not having one."

"We can share. I-if you want… you don’t have to, if you don’t… y’know what, never mind. Forget I said anything." He presses the handle toward you, half-burying himself in regret.

But then you laugh. That sweet, cheery laugh. "You’re turning red again. This is new—I always thought of you as the cool, suave guy. Thanks…" Now it’s your turn to flush.

"Assuming you weren’t just being polite—I’ll take you up on that offer."

\/\/\/\/\/

Ah… what did I do to deserve this?

Just you and me.

No [REDACTED].

No [?].

Ń̶͕̙̲̮ͅo̷͖͐̀ ̴͖̘͔̼̪̙̰͋͌̽̔̏̄̋̍o̴̡̨̫̾̉̈ͅn̴̬̫͛̅̆̒̌̿e̸̻̼͂̐̽͠ ̴̤̈̐̄̑́t̵̻̠̤͎̱͊o̷̤̜͂ ̴͎̻̦̇s̵̟̜̞͓͉̒͗́͐̄t̵̺́͊̚̕e̶̢̙͇̰̮̥̰̮̽̉̾́͗͊ạ̶̭͔͔̋͌̂̀͑́͑l̶̙̯̤̭͇̔̓̉̽̃ ̷̧̡̙̺̉ͅą̴̖̹͖́̈́͠w̵̧̗̺̙̮̘̌͋́̊̎̿̕ạ̵̱̤͈̞̊͂̓̅̄̔ͅy̵̘͆̊̉̽̇̄̕ ̶̩̙̐̄̋ỷ̶͖̩͍͎̯̇̾̇o̷̙̫̿͆̐̆u̸͕̭̤͔͔̱̦͙̇r̸͓̪͂ ̶͈̰͓͎̹͙̔̂ͅa̶͓͆ṯ̸̡̨̿͒̈́͂̃̆̕͝t̷͎̟͔̃̔e̸̢͍̳̖̠̽́̀̊̎͝n̸͚̗̆̈́̉̏t̸̖̜͕̥̆͋͒͝i̸̲͋̍͌̈́͆̚o̸̮̗̗̬͖̲̍ń̶̤͂̆.̴̡̰͉̓͋̅̅͜

When you found out I lived in the opposite direction, you bowed again and again in apology.

But love, it’s alright.

I’d do anything for you.

I’d walk across the whole earth if you asked me to.

All I want… is to be by your side.

Ah… your hair, your body—so close.

I can still smell your shampoo, the faint trace of detergent clinging to your clothes.

I should buy the same ones.

Then we’ll match.

Just like real couples do.

[fish-18]

This has been in my mind lately. Would you write about.. an yandere who does not thinking or caring about his well being only looking out for the mc. Is a lurker. Won’t eat or sleep and have a panic attack if they ignored him. Tldr : caring (scary) yandere without the captive tendencies. i would like if both of them are med school students.

Yandere Med Student x Reader

Matt was always there. Not in the loud way the others were—he didn’t vie for attention in class or flex his scores in the study group. He just…appeared. In the corners of your periphery, at the back row of the lecture hall, in the dim, quiet seats of the library you thought no one bothered with. Always with that soft stare, those fidgeting fingers tapping against a closed textbook he never seemed to actually open.

You realized something was off when your classmate, Jenna, offhandedly mentioned how Matt didn’t show up for last week’s anatomy quiz.

“He never misses exams,” she whispered, brows furrowed. “Wasn’t he hovering by you that day?”

Yeah. He was. You remembered him offering you a homemade sandwich when you skipped lunch, hovering awkwardly by your locker, waiting until you finally accepted it with a tight smile.

And you also remembered seeing him later that night, sitting on one of the benches outside the dorm complex. Same clothes. Same stiff posture. Same stare.

It got worse after that.

Matt didn’t sleep. You’d notice his red-rimmed eyes during back-to-back lectures, hands trembling slightly when he offered to carry your books. He wouldn’t eat, unless you pushed your untouched snacks at him with a forced “you should have some too.” Even then, he picked at it like it wasn’t important. Like his body was a minor inconvenience.

But the moment you didn’t answer a text—forgot to wave back, missed a smile in the hallway—he spiraled. You caught him once outside the anatomy lab, doubled over in a panic attack, shoulders shaking like a leaf, muttering apologies to no one.

“I didn’t mean to bother—don’t be mad—please—please—”

That was the terrifying thing about Matt. He didn’t want to own you. He didn’t want to lock you up or keep you away from anyone else. No. He just forgot he existed if you didn’t acknowledge him. His whole world narrowed to the threadbare moments when you smiled at him, when you said his name.

And when you didn’t?

It broke him.

Utterly.

Completely.

Masterlist

[fish-18]

nice guy phainon.

; yandere, modern au, college au, female (y/n), ooc, he's a WEIRDO, this is for you anon <3, the term 'nice guy' should be enough of a warning pls proceed with caution, not proofread, this isn't a shitpost this time i fear i'm vv sorry.

Whispers in the corridors say that when Phainon first set foot onto campus grounds, the angels high above sang in his honor, creating a perfect symphony that accentuates the radiance his figure brought forth as he stood proud and tall. The son of brilliance, a freshman who was sure to bring new glory to the university. An eye candy crafted by only the most remarkable craftsman. 

Looking back at the heaps of praise that his peers and professors alike showered him with daily, you concluded that they are to blame for his egregious ego, not knowing when to back down. You clicked your tongue, manicured nail flicking the bean on your espresso martini before taking a long-awaited gulp. 

Tilting your head back, you down it in one go before settling it down on the sleek marble countertop with a gentle clink. You sigh. Raising your hand, you call out, “Another one, please.”

Cipher’s teasing voice pipes up from beside you, claw-like nails digging into your shoulder. She gets into your personal space, smelling of peppermint and oil, oddly enough, “Slow down there, hotshot! Don’t wanna get you wasted so soon.”

“I’ll be fine,” you swat away her grabby hands while loud pop music blares from the speakers, drowning all your worries with a catchy rhythm. “I deserve this after hell week and dealing with him, Ciphy.”

“Who?” She questions, making a pleased sound when her own cocktail is served alongside yours.

“Don’t act obtuse.” You playfully flick her ear, muffling your laughter when she yelps. “You know who I’m talking about.”

“Your loyal Samoyed dog, you mean.” Cipher snickers, loudly sipping at her margarita. She turns around to look at the sea of dancing people when the already loud crowd spikes up in volume, cheers and hollers bouncing against the disco ball and shimmering tiles. “Uh oh, something’s not right…”

“Hm?” You follow suit, squinting your eyes at the impenetrable wall of people as they crowd around the club’s entrance. You feel the telltale pit in your stomach form, knowing that there’s only one person in the university who has that much of a magnetic pull to a crowd. 

You frown, casting your partner in crime an unnerved side glance. “Ciphy…”

Cipher didn’t even have the opportunity to give you a response before the sea of people parted to reveal pristine white hair and a tall, fit figure that you have the misfortune of knowing. Your frown deepens, gripping onto the barstool on your left as you make eye contact with him.

Like clockwork, his eyes crinkle into crescent moons, signature shade of blue glimmering with unbridled delight as he smiles. “(y/n)!”

You bristle, body tensing up as he immediately hounds you, paying no mind to the expecting people who wanted him to party with them until dawn breaks. With a visibly tense smile, you reluctantly greet him, “Phainon… Hello.”

He stills a foot or two away from you, eyes tearing away from your own as he homes in on your boots. His mouth parts to gasp, scandalized, “Oh, your shoelaces are untied!”

Without hesitation, Phainon dramatically kneels on one foot as his hands reach out to redo your left shoelace. His action creates a loud thud, prompting an even deeper frown from you, brows nearly stitched together, and a barely hidden snort from Cipher. Faintly, you hear her mumble something along the lines of, “...loser.” 

You agree.

Phainon’s calloused hands are dipped in utter reverence with each loop and knot he makes, masterfully undoing and redoing your high-laced boots’ laces, pink tongue peeking out from deep concentration. He finishes not long after, flashing you his signature smile while affectionately patting down the leather material.  

Yet he makes no move to rise, as if he’s perfectly content kneeling on a dirty club floor littered with vomit while different speckles of color filter past his vibrant blue eyes that never seemed to stray far from you. His hands never left their claim on your shoes. Then, he wistfully sighs before mumbling something. 

Against your better judgment, you lean down in hopes of hearing him better, “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

He, too, leans close until the distance is nothing but a mere inch. From up this close, you can see the pink hue that sits on his cheeks with his pupils blown wide. You think you hear Cipher gagging. 

“I said, uhm…” His hand reaches up to sheepishly scratch the nape of his neck as the pink hue strengthens. He dons a shy smile on his lips. “I can drive you back to your apartment after this… If you want.” 

You lean back to glance at Cipher. You blink, a nonverbal code that begs for her not to run off while you’re here dealing with a friend that you clearly kept under lock and key in the friendzone. Then, as if nothing ever happened, you refocus your attention back to the man on the floor.

“I’d hate to trouble you, Phai.” You begin, softly putting a hand on his shoulder in consolation. A touch that he seems to melt against. “I mean, you probably came to this club to drink for yourself too, right? Don’t let us stop you, haha…!”

Right as you’re about to retract your hand, he keeps you in place by placing his own on top. 

You come to find that his eyes are a whirlpool of deep-laden longing when he softly mutters, “Not at all. I only came here because of you.”

How did he…? Oh, Titans, what wrath did you incur in your past life to be put in such a precarious situation? And why isn’t Cipher speaking up?!

“Phainon, thank you for your offer, truly.” You subtly push the stool back, hoping to create distance between you and him. “You’re a really nice friend, I swear, but we’ll be fine, don’t worry!”

You ignore the pained whimper he let out at your supposed oblivious words; he truly acts like a dog in times like these. You stand up, no longer bothering to finish your second espresso martini as you quickly grasp Cipher’s shoulder, forcefully maneuvering her to the exit. “Again, so sorry, but we have to go. See you next term, Phai!”

Quickly turning around, you hear him scrambling to get up as he calls after you, desperation thick in his voice, “Wait! But how are you going to get back to the dorms!?”

Cipher finally speaks up, completely irritated, “We’ll call a Taxi!”

As if to throw him a bone, you wave without looking back, “Bye again!”

Muffled beneath the thick fabric of her sweater, Cipher viciously curses him out. 

You breathe a sigh of relief once you settle into the taxi cab, tense body melting into the car seat. “Cypherrr,” You whine out, “Why didn’t you save me earlierrrr!”

In the passenger seat, you see Cypher sigh. “Honestly, I thought you were joking around when you told me that he was pushy… but to witness it with my own eyes, eugh, pathetic, really.”

You give her a crooked smile, “He’s not that bad… just persistent, that’s all.” 

She whirls around, scrutinizing you, “Then tell him that you’re not interested!”

“I did!” Childishly, you kick her from behind, ignoring the glance sent your way by the middle-aged driver. “I told him I wasn’t interested in dating right now, and do you know what he told me?”

She leans in conspiratorially, “What?”

You clear your throat, voice taking on a deeper tone as you mimic Phainon, “That’s okay, we can still be friends, right? Besides… I don’t mind waiting for you, hehe.”

Cipher flinches back as if scolded by hot water, her pretty face contorting into sheer disgust. In disbelief, her eyes dart from you to the driver. Then back to you, then to the driver once more. “Did ya hear that, mister? Unbelievable, no?!”

He nods sagely, eyes focused on the road. “Kids these days…”

She jumps in her seat, nearly hitting her head on the car roof, “Tell me about it!”

“But! we’re still friends because he’s really nice and promised he wouldn’t push it, so…” You look down in shame, knowing that she’s judging you. Hard. “He’s a kind person, Cifera. I promise.”

“He’s clearly hoping for some miracle.” Cipher sighs, settling back into the soft cushions, “But if you say so…”

Night classes in university aren’t the end of the world. You once thought this to be true during freshman year, but you’ve come to appreciate the small perks in your now sophomore year. There isn’t an abundance of students milling around with ear-grating volumes, no blazing heat from the sun, and no squeezing past people with questionable odor in crowded corridors. 

However, the few upsides alone don’t negate the dangers that come with the pitch-dark night. In the past, it had never bothered you with your friends by your side. But now…

As you look down at your dead phone with tears prickling your eyes, you feel fear wrap its hands around your throat in a suffocating grip, threatening to bury you alive then and there. You sniffle, hands clasping your phone closer to your chest as you feel the cool breeze of air. 

Cipher, a junior, is in a different city this term for her internship. You can’t call her. Aglaea, an Alumna, is overseas for a board meeting, and Hyacine is still inside the building’s laboratory researching for her midterms. Castorice doesn’t have class today. Your apartment is several miles away, and you’d hate to ruin your pink-haired friend’s flow state all because of a childish fear that you long should’ve outgrown.

Nonetheless, you’re quite literally all alone. 

You sniffle again, wiping away the tears that have begun to roll down your face. This is so stupid- you’re so stupid for crying over this. You’re a grown woman, not some kid weeping over monsters under the bed. Standing up, you look into the pitch-dark street, with the street lamps not even working properly. You exhale shakily, feeling as if the abyss is staring right back at you. 

But those monsters in the dark only exist in bedtime stories. They don’t exist. 

You clutch your bag with a deathly grip as you begin your treacherous walk back to your apartment, praying to anyone listening that you won’t end up on the news the morning after.

“..y!”

You stop in the middle of the street, too scared to turn around. That’s a faint voice, right? You’re not going crazy, are you? People claim that your mind plays tricks on your vision when you stare too long into the dark, but does that work for hearing, too?

“Hey!”

Clutching your bag closer to your chest, death feels imminent. Is this where your youthful life ends, at the clutches of some serial killer that roams the dark streets near a university? You close your eyes, heart thundering against your ribcage as you exhale and inhale in maddening desperation. 

You had expected to be mauled until you’re no longer recognizable, but you’re instead met with the gentle touch of a familiar hand settling on your shoulder. Reluctantly, you open your eyes, and concrete pavement stares back at you. A shadow is cast overhead, swallowing you whole,  and there’s an inkling in your chest about who it could be. For once, you wish your instincts were right.

Turning around, a sun mark, and white hair you know deep in your soul, chases away all the fear you previously harbored. Suddenly, the absence of light doesn’t seem all that terrifying anymore, not when the personification of the sun stands before you. You breathe out in relief, “Phainon…! h-how..?”

He beams at you, enough to light up the entire block, “Saw you walking just now and thought I’d say hi,” then, his expression morphs into concern, blue eyes piercing into your own searching for something, “But… are you alright? You look quite shaken.”

You can do nothing but give him a wobbly smile, preferring to be crushed into the concrete than to admit your fear out loud. “It’s nothing…! I couldn’t book a taxi today because my phone died and I forgot my powerbank, so uhm, it took a toll on my emotions, you know?”

Phainon nods in understanding, “Ahh, got it! I get what you mean. I just finished submitting my essay after my own night class,” He gestures to his backpack, most likely containing his laptop, “I felt like crying on the spot, haha.”

Then his expression quickly turns bashful as he looks down at the pavement, “But, uhm… It’s night. If you don’t mind… I can, uh, drive you home….”

You beam at him, hoping that your face doesn’t expose your entire gratitude for him, “Really!?”

He lights up similarly, having taken your positive reception as agreement, which is true. “Of course! But uhh, the backseat is filled to the brim with several plushies, hope you don’t mind taking the passenger seat? I have a power bank inside for your phone, too!”

“Not at all.” You shake your head, looking at him as if he’s a savior who descended from the skies. “Thank you, Phainon, truly. I’ll pay for your gas in our algebra class tomorrow.”

He shakes his head from side to side, truly a picturesque presentation of a Samoyed, “Nope! Not a chance. I offered, so don’t worry!”

You smile exasperatedly, knowing that a battle against Phainon is not a battlefield you can win, “Fine, fine. If you say so.”

He rewards you with one of his sunny smiles, one that showcases his dimples in full glory. Phainon grabs onto your bag, giving it a gentle tug as he tilts his head at you, “Let me carry it for you. Please?”

Needing to plead just to carry around your belongings is admittedly an amusing sight for you, enough to bring out a chortle as you shrug off your bag, allowing it to fall into his hands. For now, you’ll allow him to take an inch, perhaps even a mile. Just this night, you’ll turn a blind eye to the longing that never seems to leave his eyes whenever he looks at you.

He bows down with a flourish, “Let’s go, your majesty.”

You weakly kick his leg, “Stop that.”

He laughs.

The moment your phone’s charge reaches an abysmal 5%, you’re impatiently powering it on, desperate to vent about your horrendous day to Castorice. The gentle, almost inaudible, hum of Phainon’s car fills in the gaps of comfortable silence, having long since exhausted all basic questions for conversations. 

Mentally cheering, you’re welcomed by your lockscreen; a group photo of Cipher, Castorice, Tribios, Aglaea, and you taken four years ago. Your heart squeezes in affection, a long time coming since then, really. Opening up your text messages, you waste no time typing.

You: are u still awake?

You: just had the worst day this semester

You: literally cried like some kid omfgggggg keel me now.

Cassie: What happened? I’m still awake, don’t worry :)

You: didnt know that hyacine was pulling an all nighter in the chem lab

You: and my phone died before I could book a taxi or some uber

You: so…. i was left alone 

You: and had to man up if i wanted to go home :<

Cassie: Omg.

Cassie: I truly should have matched my schedule with your night class, I’m so sorry

Cassie: It was a nightmare for you, wasn’t it?

Cassie: :( 

You: oh dw cas <33

You: it all turned out fine in the end

Cassie: That’s great to hear

Cassie: Are you in your apartment now?

You: no

You: currently in phainon’s car 

You: he offered to drive me home :DDD

Cassie: Oh? Did he pick you up?

You: ??? no

You: he had night classes too and just saw me losing my mind

Cassie: ?

Cassie: But Phainon does not have night class this term…

… what? 

Ice floods through your veins. 

Slowly, you try your best to look at him through your peripheral, only to note with horror that he’s already looking at you. A teasing smile dances across his face, as if what he’s doing is nothing more than a mere prank between close friends - as if he’s not aware of how your heartbeat is nearly about to collapse in on itself.

Inhale, fear seeps into your lungs, more potent than any addictive substance.

Exhale, fear dares not exit. It stays, building a home and making a mockery of your cowardice.

Distantly, you hear your phone ping, a message from Castorice. Your thumb itches, aching to reply to her message - wanting to let her know that you don’t feel so safe anymore. 

“Scared?” You hate the amused tilt in his voice. 

You swallow down the bile in your throat, “...You can drop me off here, Phainon.” 

As if it had a difference, you add, “Please.”

He shakes his head resolutely. Then, his car makes a sharp left turn, entering streets that are no longer familiar to you. You whimper, “Phainon… I’m begging you.”

Phainon ignores you, blunt fingernails drumming against the steering wheel. Each sound only serves to heighten your fear.  “I tried to be patient. I really tried.” 

A right turn this time, then, he continues, “But you just pushed me away every time. It really hurt, you know? I had to act like my heart wasn’t ripped apart at the seams whenever you insisted on us just being friends. Had to act like the world wasn’t caving in on me. Smiled and laughed for you just the way you liked it. Acted like your friend when you wanted me to.”

You press yourself further into the seat, clinging to the illusion of creating distance from him. Faintly, it smells like your perfume. It makes you want to puke. 

“Phainon…” You shakily inhale, gathering every inch of your courage to speak to him, “Phainon, I told you I wasn’t looking for a friendship. It- it’s not because of you specifically. I would have rejected anyone else the same. You’re… you’re still my friend, after all, and well, I-”

“But I don’t want to be just your friend.” He childishly interjects, eyes trained on the road, but you still feel pinned down by his stare. “I want to be your everything, (y/n). You don’t understand.”

You don’t think you ever will. 

Taking a deep inhale, the fear sits in the deepest pit of your consciousness, you dare ask, “W- where are you taking me…?”

Phainon speaks with a sense of finality, as if he had thought through this time and time again. Mulled it over and rotated inside his head for over thirty-three million five hundred fifty thousand three hundred thirty-six times, “You’ll see when we get there.”

[fish-18]

Ersatz, baby

m!shape-shifter!yandere x gn!reader. 4k words. yes. I'm so sorry.

TW: Obsession, possessive thoughts and behaviors, mentions of violence, gore, consumption of humans, idk how to tag it but the shape-shifter eats humans and has considered eating the reader so like heads up about that

Heeeeey

Somebody PLEASE tell me if the length of this piece is detrimental to the experience of reading it it’s like 4k words. Here’s something I’ve been kicking around for ages. Frankly I am shocked I have something at all after a year

“Odd couple” is the best way to describe the friendship between you and Sasha. You’re awkward and responsible and outwardly boring. He’s highly social, wild, and intriguing. You’re genuine to a fault. He’s an expert in facades; he is a facade. You’re human and he’s something utterly not.

The freak accident of affection between you two is...still hard for him to wrap his head around. It seems to be your fault. If you weren’t so pitifully earnest toward him he would have just gotten rid of you. You were aware of his true nature, and definitely scared of it, but you kept going out of your way to be the Good Roommate™, to play friends. He had to let you live, just to see what the fuck your deal is. Now it’s too late. Now he wants you around.

You are the only person in the world that he has shown his real body to.

Some of his victims have seen it, but you’re the first person he intended to see it. The decision was quiet, perhaps a little impulsive. A simple exchange of “What are you, Sasha?” and “I don’t know. Wanna see?” had you both going to your bedroom and locking the door.

For the first time in his life, his heart pounded as he shed his clothes. He almost didn’t want you to turn around and look. It might be better if you only knew the carefully curated version of him, the handsome appearance he painstakingly crafted for the easiest social life. Even though you already knew he wasn’t human and pretended it didn’t matter, what if you saw him now and knew with absolute certainty that you didn’t want to look at him ever again? He would have to swallow you whole. He wasn’t sure if he could do it.

Regardless he said, “turn around.”

He showed you the unvarnished form that he had inherited from his mother. To be frank: It’s a predator’s body. Worse that that, it’s a monster’s. There are features and junctures of him so uncanny it must hurt the logical mind to observe them. If you were ever looking for the perfect rebuttal to the existence of a loving God, look no further than his cruel mouth.

He crept onto you bed looking like this, towering over you, your bed-frame screaming to protest the weight. He’d have to cut you off at the source, if you were to scream. And though he could smell the fear wafting from your skin, could practically feel the constricting blood vessels and tightening muscles in you, you still asked him, “Hey, is it more comfortable? Do you prefer being like this?”

Honestly? He isn’t sure there’s a body that’s comfortable and natural to him anymore. He’s so used to a human state that anything else feels awkward, even when it’s easier to shift to. As you took his massive claws into your hands and examined them with gentle curiosity, though, he was struck by the warmth of you. It was a long time since anyone had really touched him. It might’ve been even longer for you, loner that you are. Which meant you were the only person who could understand the way he felt in that moment.

He flopped over next to you, letting out an embarrassing dog-like whine, but you just laughed sweetly, and shifted pillows around to accommodate his bigger size. His feet and tail still dangled awkwardly off the bed. “You can relax in here,” you said. “You’re always welcome, since you’re my friend.”

You rambled about your classes and professors until all the adrenaline had left your system. He didn’t say much in response, but you didn’t mind. After a while, you could almost meet his preternatural gaze. You even dozed off like this, with a monster beside you, you utter weirdo. He put his head closer to your chest and felt your sleeping breaths for hours, thinking that your throat would be butter-soft under his teeth.

Sasha knows very little about what he really wants. He’s not sure if he’ll stay in his major, or in school, or even in human society. He knows for certain, though, that he wants more time to study you. He wants just your quiet voice and humble body heat and the understanding that, whatever he is, it isn’t going to chase you away.

So you two keep doing this. Every few days he’ll skulk over to where you are and make room for himself, and the two of you will talk for hours. Sometimes he shifts. He doesn’t always want to, but you get more comfortable with him that way. You...seem more keen to pet him when he looks and acts like an animal, and he wants you to touch him so bad he’s worried he’ll start asking for it. Could he ever live it down, if he started asking to be coddled? No. So he wags his tail and butts his head against you like that isn’t it’s own special brand of pathetic.

It’s not like you’re one to judge, though. You’re just so happy to have a friend that comes to hang out with you. You’ve never had very many of those, but of course Sasha knows he’s extra special. There’s much he’s learned about the world from his strange perspective, and you’re always excited to listen to his stories.

You do understand that he needs to eat a lot. You see him clear out four bacon cheeseburgers as a snack once, and he cracks jokes about how breakfast was red bull and adderall, but you know that it’s just a part of his biology that works against him. So you go out of your way to cook more meat, and give him bigger portions than anyone else, ignoring the way your blatant favoritism must look to the other roommates and occasional visitors. He doesn’t bother explaining that your idea of a big meal is like his idea of an appetizer, and he never will.

He doesn’t talk about the people he eats, either. He’s starting to think you don’t realize he does that.

(If you really don’t know, if this is the way you treat him when you don’t know, there’s no fucking way he can tell you.)

As for you, you talk about your courses and your classmates. From the way you talk around it, he’s mostly figured out the sad shape of your childhood and he decides that’s why you’re so weird and naive.

Mostly, you tell him about your hobbies, and your taste in TV shows. That’s when something in you is unlocked, revealing you to be more witty and giggly than your initial impression. It’s gratifying to know most other people don’t discover that side of you, like being the only prospector who knows where gold is. You tell him about everything you used to watch and play with your best friend, back when she had time for you. He’s a little confused by just how fervently you love things, how you start to care one day and then never, ever stop.

He never did it before, but now the two of you watch garbage TV together. (You tried to invite your best friend to join you, but to Sasha’s satisfaction, she gave you that cringing sort of smile and told you she didn’t have time.) Every Friday comes a new episode of Crater County, this schlocky supernatural police procedural, so every Thursday night you ask him to watch it with you. He’s a busy man, of course, but he’ll fit it into his schedule since he knows you so look forward to it.

This Thursday you must have forgot.

Somehow, in the early morning on Friday, you slip away without Sasha noticing. He wakes up to the honks of geese and distant cars, and the ever-present hum of electricity. As he thinks of pestering you to make ham and eggs, just to watch you get annoyed, he notices the conspicuous lack of your heartbeat.

He knows better than to doubt his hearing. But he still goes into your room across the hall to find the bed unmade and unoccupied. He almost goes to check your pillow for warmth, only stopping when he realizes it’s...stupid, to do that. He stays in the doorway for a long moment, overly-conscious of your scent. Then he goes to pace in the empty kitchen.

It hadn’t occurred to you to say goodbye to him, or leave him a portion of breakfast as you usually do, so you must have been in a hurry. Distantly, he remembers your fast food job. You probably got called to cover for someone at the last minute. Even so, shouldn’t you have said something to him? So that he wouldn’t wonder? Because he’s—

—well, you called him your friend.

It bothers him the more he thinks about it, while he showers and gets coffee and goes to class. The two of you haven’t talked since Monday and it feels weird. You always tell him when you’re going out, so what happened? Where can he even find you?

Not that he would need to find you. Sasha isn’t clingy. Clingy is his ex making alt account after alt account to pester him on instagram with stupid questions like, “are you seriously trying to ghost me you asshole?” And Sasha isn’t doing that. He hasn’t even texted you yet, because you haven’t texted him, and you always text first. If you don’t go through with the trouble of asking for him, he absolutely will not bother coming.

You haven’t sent so much as a “hey!” in the last seventeen times that he’s checked, so. Guess you guys aren’t hanging out. Whatever. It’s not like he doesn’t have stuff to do. He’s behind on several classes, a habitual skipper, and there are four other people begging him to come out tonight. He hasn’t hunted in a while so he should probably do that too.

He should go and talk to other humans, re-acquire their speech patterns and body language. He should catch himself when he makes gestures you would make, stop himself from making them. That’s why he goes to lunch with a friend group he met last month, and fits in with them seamlessly—or, almost seamlessly. No one can say he isn’t a good talker, slick as oil and quick with comebacks, but he’s a little more sensitive than usual today. While he’s in the middle of charming them he slips up and says something you would say.

“Isn’t that a Crater County reference you just made?” One girl says to him, stopping the conversation cold. “I thought you hated nerdy stuff like that.”

Sasha laughs shortly. “What? Says who?”

“Says you. You laughed at someone’s Supernatural tattoo at the party, remember?”

“It was a fucking horrendous tattoo. And I don’t like Crater Country or whatever, either, I just know some lines because my,” his throat feels like a desert, but he continues, “my roommate is obsessed with that shit.”

They brush over that thought soon enough, shifting focus to upcoming concerts, but Sasha can’t get comfortable again. He feels like he forgot how eyes work, and his are going to slip and turn reptilian in the middle of this well-populated restaurant. He’s scared his hands are going to morph into paws. In the end, he excuses himself before he can finish his meal.

Since he’s still quite hungry, Sasha decides he’ll drop by the butcher and get a few pounds of beef chuck to tide him over until dark. He’ll go to that fancy shop with all the grass-fed cruelty-free organic stuff, because he’s passionate about the well-fare of livestock, and definitely not because it’s just down the street from your job.

But since he’s there, anyway, he’ll pass by and peek through the windows to see what’s happening there.

Your restaurant is packed. A sports team, or special event or something, has filled every table in sight, and more people queue up at the register. You’re boxing fries and passing them over to waiting customers’ trays. Even though you’ve got mountains of food to work through, you’re smiling. It takes only a few seconds to find out why, following the arc of your eye up to a man in the same uniform as you.

The guy is tall and average-looking, and he keeps leaning toward you to talk like he doesn’t know how to speak loudly even though he works in a goddamn kitchen. Sasha doesn’t know him by face, or by word of mouth, since you’ve never told him about a co-worker that can make you giggle so much.

Why hadn’t you told Sasha about the funniest man of the century, huh?

More importantly, why hadn’t you noticed the way this asshole was looking at you? Staring so intently, exaggerating his expressions, mirroring you. All the same tricks Sasha has used before but with none of the grace, and yet somehow you liked it from this guy when Sasha had seemed scary to you.

He just can’t understand. That wouldn’t be such a problem if he hadn’t believed that he did understand you, and the way your mind worked. You had said Sasha was your friend and you had sat in the truth with him, relieved to see him for what he truly was, and you had been asking after his health and his happiness, wasting nights with him, cooking for him, cuddling up with him, and now here you were forgetting about his existence with another friend that he didn’t know about.

Sasha has been cheated on by a partner in the past. They left him one night and came back in the wee hours smelling like a fresh shower, with traces of someone else’s odor still clinging to them. It hadn’t felt like anything, to know that they were sneaking behind his back. Not a betrayal, no sting or ache in the heart he supposedly had. He broke up with them a week after, and that, like all his other breakups, was simply annoying. Sasha had always felt like he wasn’t with any of the people he was with. He was watching them, and touching them, and living among them, but there was some kind of invisible barrier between him and all the world. So when they broke a connection, well, what was there to even break? How could he care?

And why did being cheated on come to mind when he saw you happy with some other guy?

Sasha would later find out that you pulled a twelve hour shift that day, and, pushover that you were, you didn’t take a break long enough to check your phone. But he doesn’t stay to watch you, he really couldn’t. A pit had formed in his stomach, some void, some black hole that he had to attend to.

He leaves you there in your job and your apparent fun, none the wiser, and goes to the butcher. He gets himself a rack of ribs, and a few pounds of steak, and a heart just because the shop had one on hand and they were happy to serve a customer with such deep pockets as him. He gets a couple of cheeseburgers for the ride home and finishes them in a few bites.

As soon as he knows your other roommates aren’t home, he tears into the paper packaging of the prepared meats and gorges himself over the kitchen sink, soiling his shirt with myoglobin. It all tastes like ash, disappearing into him the way so many things do. When he’s done, when every last shred of flesh and sliver of bone has been swallowed, his stomach growls.

He’s always been this empty. Maybe that was the thing you saw that made you so afraid upon first meeting him—the bottomless trench that he actually was.

You said he was your friend. You knew what he was and didn’t back away. But you have so little else in your life. If you gained anything more, real friends, real family, a lover, wouldn’t someone as hollow and alien as Sasha be easily discarded?

There’s nothing for it. He has to go and hunt now.

Your co-worker is pitifully easy to discover. By checking the likes on your posts, he finds the creep has been hounding you for three weeks now. His unmitigated social media addiction leaves the entirety of his existence splatter across the internet. Sasha learns and forgets his name. He knows exactly what place he’ll be at tonight, with whom, for how long. He shifts to look exactly like you, heads out and stops at the right street corner with a bulky gym bag, waiting.

It’s so easy. Sasha can play You, but this guy hardly deserves all that effort. It’s enough to show up magically with your face, even if your clothes and piercings seem out of place. All Sasha has to do is bat lashes and flash a smile that he has already memorized—your stupid sincere grin that had made you, like the sun, difficult to look at directly—and this idiot thinks the person in front of him is really you, out on the same night by coincidence. He’s happy to see you, and happier still that you want to go somewhere together. He lets Sasha take him by the hand, convinced that the two of you are going out for drinks through innocuously empty backstreets. It doesn’t strike him as weird that you’re so energetic and flirty all of a sudden. Asshole.

He at least has the decency to carry the bag, no doubt hoping to come off as a gentleman.

“Why a duffel bag, anyway?” He marvels.

“To change clothes before I go home, silly,” Sasha tells him, leading him further into the night.

It turns out the co-worker is deeply uncomfortable with silence. He cracks jokes that aren’t funny, to which Sasha politely chuckles for what is only ten minutes but feels like an hour.

“When you kept turning me down,” he says, predictably, “I was worried you had a boyfriend or something.”

“Why would I not tell you if I had a boyfriend?” Sasha croons in your voice, fighting with all his will-power to not crush your co-worker’s hand. They’re finally on a quiet street, between two condemned houses, where there are no cameras and no pedestrians.

“Haha, I don’t know. You’re like, really private. That roommate you talk about all the time? The one going to the same school? I honestly feel like I know more about her than I know about you.”

“You mean, ‘him’? Sasha?” Sasha blinks owlishly with your eyes, his heart melting a little when he imagines you gushing about him to other people.

The guy laughs nervously. “No, I mean Maya. Is Sasha another roommate? Have you mentioned her before?”

Really. Maya. That “best friend” who basically pretends you don’t exist, who takes up valuable real estate in your mind when some people who have spent months getting to know you don’t even get a text.

Sasha gives up on looking friendly.

Your co-worker has finally sensed something is off, wincing as he tugs his hand out of Sasha’s vice-grip. Stretching out his fingers, he asks, “Hey, how much farther ‘til we get there? I swear we’ve passed like, three bars already...”

He doesn’t get to say more because Sasha lets out his teeth and goes for the throat.

It must be said that a warm meal always beats a cold one, but other that that it’s a shitty fare, gristly and lacking in flavor. This guy’s blood, fresh from the veins, is flat and forgettable. Even the marrow of his bones disappoints. At least he didn’t put up a fight...though maybe some enrichment could have saved this boring dinner.

Sasha feels more bloated than full when it’s all over. He wipes down and changes into fresh clothes, stuffing all the bloody garments into the duffel bag. He still feels kinda gross, and considers a long, hot shower while picking muscle fibers from between his teeth.

Are you going to worry about your co-worker? Are you going to miss him? Will you cry if they identify his blood on clothes found in the dump? Will you even tell Sasha why you’re crying?

Sasha snaps out of his deep thoughts when his phone buzzes. The text from you reads:

hey! i forgot to ask, are you on for crater county tonight?

What the fuck. Renewed frustration flushes through his system. What is he, your backup plan? He has a life—actually, many more lives than you! You should know better than to screw around with his time. He shouldn’t even dignify your bullshit with a response, but he does anyway—

At a party

And your answer is,

oh ok

we’ll watch it some other time

have fun!

…

Stay safe ok! Call me if you need something

It’s such a low blow he has to wonder if you’re doing it on purpose: you’re telling him all the same things he’s heard you tell Maya when she blows you off. He can hear the disappointment and embarrassment in your voice, the way you assure her of your eternal affection and concern while she practically dismisses you. Once he’s imagining your face, then, all he wants in the world is to look at it.

He’s a good runner. He’s barely out of breath when he arrives home, tossing aside his sweaty hoodie and kicking off his shoes while he quietly closes the door behind him. The dishwasher is running. He can just make out the low moan of the central air system, and one lazy heart thumping in the living room.

For a moment you don’t notice that Sasha is there. He gets to watch you quietly. You’re languishing on the couch in your bedclothes, staring blankly at the No Signal screen on the TV with a bowl of popcorn untouched on the coffee table. It surprises him. He hasn’t seen you with an expression this dull in a while.

But it disappears in an instant.

“Sasha!” You bolt upright, your face brightening like the sky at dawn when you find him standing in the doorway. “Did the party end already?”

He doesn’t know what to say.

You glance back at the TV. “Um, I swear I wasn’t going to watch without you! I was just…”

“Were you waiting for me?” He asks.

Your expression flickers, betraying the anxiety in your eyes before you have the chance to look away. Why did he even bother to ask? You’re here for him, like a puppy waiting for their owner, and suddenly he’s flushed and queasy—no, it’s not sickness that he feels, it’s butterflies. He’s so delighted he feels dumb, all of his frustration and embarrassing angst vanishing in an instant because all he can think of is how sweet you are.

“Ah,” he laughs dryly. “I’m screwed.”

Before you even know to cry out, he’s thrown himself at you, arms coiling around your waist. The two of you fall back on the couch.

When you get your bearings, you scold him. “Sasha, don’t just do that! You scared me!”

He mumbles, “I had a bad day.”

“...you did?” Your left hand cups his head, almost protectively, and your right strokes his back. “What happened? You’re not hurt, right? Are you hungry? I have some stuff in the fridge—”

“Can we just stay like this?” He asks.

“U-um. Well...” You must be thinking of your other roommates, who could walk in on this scene and “misunderstand” the relationship you have with him. You don’t want to cause weird rumors or tension. But he wants you so much he can’t pretend to be above it anymore. He squeezes you just a little bit, betraying his own desperation, so you say tenderly, “Of course we can.”

It’s scary to be honest. Sasha considers it contrary to his nature. However, he has never in his life avoided adapting or transforming to get what he wants. If he has to bare himself again to endear himself to you, he’ll do it.

“You’re the best friend I have,” he admits, “and I didn’t see you all day, and I missed you.”

Your heart quickens. “Sasha…”

“I know I’m being clingy. I just can’t help it. Say you missed me too. Say I matter to you.”

“I did miss you,” you murmur, your smile bleeding into your voice. You pull him closer. “It feels wrong when we don’t talk all day. And I worry about you, you know. I never see you make a proper meal.”

“I like it better when you make it. So keep cooking for me. Please.”

“I was going to do that anyway,” you say.

His whole body thrums with satisfaction. You care about him so much he can feel it all the way through. He’s soaking up your warmth and savoring your smell, face pressed into your neck. Twisting his hands into your shirt, he finds that he resents your clothes. He even resents your flesh and bones for barring direct access to your heart. Right now, though, he’s almost content with a body in his grasp, a pulse fluttering under his lips.

God help him, he’s been starving for this.

[fish-18]

An Omega All Along (Request)

Delusional Male Alpha Yandere x Gender Neutral Beta Reader CW: Noncon, delusional yandere, general yandere behavior, scent claiming, scent marking, knotting, biting, claiming bites, a/b/o, omegaverse, mating cycles/rut, overstimulation Summary: You confess to your best friend and crush. He rejects you because he wants an omega, not a beta like you. Years later he is lonely and cannot find any omega that fits with him. He snaps and is convinced you are an omega after all. Word Count: 1.3k (I hope you all enjoy this, I am trying to be as productive as possible and write in all of my spare time!)

You had been best friends with a wealthy man named Casimir your whole life, and developed an extremely strong crush on him. Who wouldn’t? His charming demeanor, friendly personality, and kindness towards everyone was extremely appealing.

Even more so when it was wrapped up in his well toned body with lovely locks of spun gold and bright green eyes like gleaming jade.

He was also, unfortunately, an alpha. Unfortunate because he insisted that he should only be with an omega. You were a beta, when you confessed to him you were swiftly rejected.

You shared interests and hobbies, you got along perfectly, you even smelled nice to him despite lacking the pheromones of an omega. But you just weren’t an omega so he didn’t consider you as a potential mate.

You understood and moved on and the two of you had remained friends, though slowly drifted apart.

Years later Casimir realized his mistake. He was still alone, no omegas he met ever had an alluring scent, none shared his interests or just clicked really at all.

His loneliness and desperation got the best of him and he snapped. You were the perfect mate for him! So that meant you must have been an omega all along! Yeah… that was it… you were just a late bloomer… it happened sometimes.

But if he met up with you again, for the first time in over a year, he was sure he would find you presented as an omega just for him.

He reached out and the two of you hung out at his house. He drank in your scent subtly. No obvious omega level pheromones but that was okay! Clearly your scent was just a little weaker than other omegas! He wouldn’t hold it against you!

Casimir started giving you scent marked clothing for you to wear but you didn’t even detect the scent marks very well, they smelled a bit like him, but your nose was unable to properly detect the full brunt of his musk. The two of you had started hanging out more frequently so you thought he may have scented them to be a protective friend, not realizing that he had covered the garments in claiming pheromones.

You accepting them was enough to contribute his belief that you were an omega… though you didn’t seem to be affected by his smell the same way other omegas were… but you just had a weaker nose… that was fine, he would just have to scent things a lot more strongly to accommodate his precious mate!

There were also still no heats no matter how often he was around you, but that was okay too! Some omegas had mild or nonexistent heats, some were barren or suffered hormonal disorders, and that would also explain your more mild scent. It was okay, he wouldn’t bring it up or shame you for it, it wasn’t that big of a deal to him.

He still had ruts though, and the next time he had one he tried to kiss and sniff you. You were shocked and turned him down, pointing out you no longer harbored any romantic feelings for the alpha.

He responded by saying that was silly, the two of you had pretty much been dating, he scented your clothes and you accepted it, he gave you gifts, he protected you and kept other alphas away from his omega.

“Uh… I’m not an omega dude…”

He laughed, you hadn’t even realized you were an omega! No wonder you had rejected his advances. Once he explained it to you it would be obvious to you!

“Sure you are! You smell amazing just a bit fainter, and you don’t have heats because of a hormonal issue, you’re clearly an omega though! I don’t care that you’re a bit different, I love you just the way you are!”

He pulled you into a more aggressive kiss but you pushed him away, still denying that you were an omega and your, quite frankly, obvious feelings for him.

You kept denying it. You were clearly in denial! Or worse… maybe you felt defective! That wouldn’t do at all, what kind of alpha let their perfect omega feel so defective that they wouldn’t even admit they were an omega? He clearly had to prove it to you. Prove you were an excellent mate. What better way than to knot you up and show you how good you made him feel and how good he could make you feel?

He grabbed you, ignoring your struggles, and took you up to his bed. You shouted and cursed. He loved how bratty you were being. A nice bratty omega that just needed a good dicking. He could provide that easily. He’d be the best alpha for you. Other alphas may not appreciate an omega with weaker traits, but he wasn’t so close minded.

He took your clothes off without much issue, continuing to ignore your struggles and telling you everything would be okay, he would make you proud of your omega status.

The rutting alpha lubed you up really well, he figured if you lacked strong heats and had hormonal issues that your slick production might be a little less so he had made preparations.

Casimir played with your entrance, massaging more and more lube into you, making sure you were absolutely dripping with it just like any omega would be dripping slick. It was okay that you couldn’t make any, he would knot you up nice anyway.

At that point you started crying, but he knew it was the best thing for you. If you were crying it meant that you needed this more than he had originally thought. You needed to be shown you were a good and worthy omega. He was so stupid for rejecting you years ago, he hadn’t realized how you were a perfect omega not just some beta.

It was his fault things had gotten to this point so he had to take responsibility and fix everything. And that’s exactly what he was doing!

He pressed his cock into you, easily with how thoroughly you had been prepped. Your face was forced into the pillows as he lost control of himself and began fucking into you at a rapid pace. You were so warm. So tight. Being inside you was where he was meant to be.

Casimir nuzzled into the side of your neck, inhaling your scent as your moans filled his ears. You couldn’t help making such provocative sounds when his cock kissed your depths so perfectly with each thrust.

He sucked and kissed a hickey into your neck as he made love to you and you shuddered at the sensation, it pulled you over the edge making you climax hard.

“See? You’re the best omega! The only one for me!”

You halfheartedly mumbled a shaky “n-no” but he was sure you’d see things his way once his knot was in you. You didn’t have to wait long.

The two of you came in unison, he bit a claiming bite over the hickey he had marked you with as his knot tied the two of you together. He rut into you, the friction his knot created bringing you to tears as he made you cum again and again.

“Do you see how you’re my omega now?”

Your senses had been fucked entirely away and you were hardly aware of your surroundings or what you were responding to so you just agreed with him.

“Mhmm…”

When his knot finally went down he pulled out of you and sat you on his lap and held you close while licking at the fresh claim on your neck. You were barely conscious as he gave the two of you a bath, and when he brought you back into his bed you fell asleep in his arms.

[fish-18]

Hello! May I offer a Yan!Phainon request with prompts 🦴 Love me. Only me. 🦡 They will never love you like I do.?

Selfish

Contents: Yandere!Phainon with prompts: 🦴🦡

more Phainon content here

TAG LIST/PROBLEMATIC TAG LIST

PROMPT LIST

WARNINGS: SOFT YANDERE, MANIPULATION IF YOU SQUINT, PHAINON BEING A LITTLE WEIRD AND OFFPUTTING BUT ITS BECAUSE HE IS SO IN LOVE AND ITS KINDA ENDEARING TRUST ME GUYS TRUST ME.

Self control is a tricky thing.

When one has a mask as well built and practiced as Phainon's, it becomes difficult to exist outside of it. When genuine emotions come at play, it feels strange and overbearing. Phainon is sure that his love for you isn't a part of his mask, something he has to force upon himself. It's easy when feelings are positive. Joy, cheerfulness, resilience, love. Those are all things that he can convey, that he can process and that he can enjoy.

And then comes the hard part.

Jealosy, possessiveness, anger. Those things make Phainon feel like he's rotting from the inside out.

The thought of loosing you already feels like it drives him insane. His smile becoming a tad more forced every single time another man comes within centimeters of your presence. You are a privilege, a gift, and he is merely the lucky sword that gets to bask in your radiance and protect your smile. Others just don't seem to comprehend it, that you are nothing short of divine, that you don't deserve less than being worshipped and revered.

"___," He says with that warm smile of his as he takes your hands in his own. "You know... I'm so lucky to have you."

"And I'm lucky to have you too, Phainon." You say, eyes crinkling at the corners as his smile widens. You feel unsettled by the sudden shift in energy.

"You took the words right out of my mouth," He chuckles. "My love, do you... do you even understand the extent of my feelings for you?" His grip on your hands tightens. "I don't think there is anybody in this world who treasures you more than me," You tilt your head in confusion, another chuckle leaves his lips. His hands free your own and one of them finds the small of your back. He guides you until you can look at the pavillion, at all the little people walking and talking. Faces familiar and not familiar. His thumb rubs soothing circles over your skin as his arm circles your shoulders, pressing you closer to him. "Those people under us... walking, talking, laughing. You may share joys and tears with them, I will grant you that, but never love." His voice grows colder. "They will never love you like I do."

You don't know what to say, only frozen in place as his words hang around the air. Echoing in the empty halls. You slowly nod.

"Of course," You whisper, complacent. Phainon likes that, a dark part of himself relishes in when you display submission. But he would never admit it out loud. "I would never love them like I love you either." He squeezes your shoulders reassuringly, bending down to press a kiss to the crown of your head.

"Love me. Only me. I will always ask you for that, ___. My only, most selfish desire is your love," He murmurs against your hair. "I don't think I could stand the thought of sharing you without going mad."

Hope you enjoyed this!!! First time writing for Phainon, I hope I did him justice. I think he is very hard to completely grasp as a yandere because he comes off as a person that is so genuinely charming and nice. I'll try to play around that more in future requests sent for him.

Have a great day/night.

TAGGING: @hvcrver @ishqani @iivellich @han11dh

[fish-18]

A Love Square ♡

"That man..I can't forgive him.."

???

"Y/N, over here!" A man waves you over.

Pat, pat, pat—light footsteps approach, quick but cheerful.

"Ah, there you are, [?]..!" Your eyes widen in delight, lips curling into a warm, happy smile.

"Say… did you do what I asked?"

"Mhm! [REDACTED] agreed without a problem!"

"..Hm… Then, N/N, want to pick up a few things on the way home? My treat." He flashes that same old smile that always makes your heart flutter. I want to rip it off his face.

"Oh yeah! Watch out—your wallet might end up crying today!" You jump in delight, eyes sparkling. Others would think it’s because he said he’ll pay, but… I know it’s because he called you by that name. That same sweet, sickening name that sends my own heart fluttering.

…N/N… Won’t you let me call you by that name too?

"Y/N, could you do me a little~ favor?"

"Hm? Sure, what is it?"

"Could you…"

"Alright! Sounds easy enough."

"Thank you, N/N! You're the best~!"

| | | | | | |

"N/N~ want to go on a date with me to the aquarium?"

"Eh—what? I mean, sure!"

"Great! It'll be this Saturday. You don’t have classes then, right?" He knows you do.

"..Yeah. I’m free. On Saturdays, haha.." You let out a weak chuckle, the kind meant to cover up a lie—though it doesn’t hide a thing.

"Also, ask [REDACTED] to come too. It'll be more fun, promise."

"Ah… Sure..!" You force a strained smile.

He grins, eyes crinkling at the corners. A genuine smile—though not for the thought of a date with you. No, it’s for his upcoming date with [REDACTED].

N/N… please, open your eyes.

He’ll never love you.

Not the way I do.

He doesn’t see the way you cry every time he leaves you behind.

He doesn’t see how you push everything aside for him.

He doesn’t appreciate you.

But I do. I see it all. I know.

I love you more than anything.

I cherish your efforts, your resilience.

I worship the very ground you walk on.

Please… look at me. Just once more.

Don’t look at him.

Look at me.

"Ah, shoot. It’s raining…" He holds out his hand, watching raindrops fall into his palm.

"I didn’t bring an umbrella today."

"We can share. I brought one." You offer kindly. Don’t. Not to him.

| | | | |

"Oh, hey, Y/N, and… [?]. You two haven’t gone home yet?"

"We were just about to. How about you, [REDACTED]?"

"I think I’ll wait for the rain to let up. I just got my hair done—don’t want it ruined, y’know?"

"I see…" You slip your umbrella into his hand. "You and [?] can go on ahead, then."

"You two can share the umbrella. Your homes are in the same direction, right?"

"Oh, no, no. It’s fine. I’ll just wait for the rain to stop. You and [?] were about to leave, anyway. I don’t want to impose…" She fidgets, clearly uneasy.

"No, I can wait." | "Y/N can wait."

"Yeah, what he/they said," you and [?] reply in unison.

"It’s his umbrella, and yeah, I’ll just wait here. I’m sure the rain won’t take lo—"

BOOM.

Pitter. Patter.

"..Uhm, I suddenly remembered I’ve got some unfinished things to take care of—hah, totally forgot, ahah…" You laugh nervously, eyes darting anywhere but theirs.

"But Y/N, it’s clearly your umbrella, not [?]’s—"

"Oh! Would you look at the time! I really, really need to finish that paperwork!" You blurt out before dashing off in the opposite direction.

"So… shall we go?" He extends his hand toward [REDACTED].

She doesn’t take it. Serves that bastard right.

"Yeah… let’s go." She smiles, though it’s only out of politeness.

"Agh… maybe I shouldn’t have given up that umbrella," you mumble.

"Are you alright?"

"Hm..? Oh, ###. Didn’t think you’d still be here this late."

"I… had some things to catch up on." And to make sure you get home safe.

"Pfft—really? I never expected to hear that from you of all people."

"Oh? Pray tell, what sort of perception do you have of me, Y/N?"

"Well~ let’s see… last to arrive, first to leave, top of the class, perfect scores, any work submitted days in advance. You know, you."

"..I… I didn’t know you thought of me that highly…"

"You—are you blushing? You’re blushing, aren’t you?" You lean closer, eyes narrowing in amusement.

"I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Is blushing in the room with us right now? I don’t think so."

"Aww, look at you, you’re so red~ Covering your face doesn’t help when I can clearly see your ears. They’re bright red, y’know~"

"No point covering your ears too. I’ve already seen everything." You grin cheekily, a ray of light in this grey, rain-soaked world.

"W-Whatever. Here."

"An umbrella?" We can share… under the same umbrella.

"Mhm. I heard you muttering earlier about not having one."

"We can share. I-if you want… you don’t have to, if you don’t… y’know what, never mind. Forget I said anything." He presses the handle toward you, half-burying himself in regret.

But then you laugh. That sweet, cheery laugh. "You’re turning red again. This is new—I always thought of you as the cool, suave guy. Thanks…" Now it’s your turn to flush.

"Assuming you weren’t just being polite—I’ll take you up on that offer."

\/\/\/\/\/

Ah… what did I do to deserve this?

Just you and me.

No [REDACTED].

No [?].

Ń̶͕̙̲̮ͅo̷͖͐̀ ̴͖̘͔̼̪̙̰͋͌̽̔̏̄̋̍o̴̡̨̫̾̉̈ͅn̴̬̫͛̅̆̒̌̿e̸̻̼͂̐̽͠ ̴̤̈̐̄̑́t̵̻̠̤͎̱͊o̷̤̜͂ ̴͎̻̦̇s̵̟̜̞͓͉̒͗́͐̄t̵̺́͊̚̕e̶̢̙͇̰̮̥̰̮̽̉̾́͗͊ạ̶̭͔͔̋͌̂̀͑́͑l̶̙̯̤̭͇̔̓̉̽̃ ̷̧̡̙̺̉ͅą̴̖̹͖́̈́͠w̵̧̗̺̙̮̘̌͋́̊̎̿̕ạ̵̱̤͈̞̊͂̓̅̄̔ͅy̵̘͆̊̉̽̇̄̕ ̶̩̙̐̄̋ỷ̶͖̩͍͎̯̇̾̇o̷̙̫̿͆̐̆u̸͕̭̤͔͔̱̦͙̇r̸͓̪͂ ̶͈̰͓͎̹͙̔̂ͅa̶͓͆ṯ̸̡̨̿͒̈́͂̃̆̕͝t̷͎̟͔̃̔e̸̢͍̳̖̠̽́̀̊̎͝n̸͚̗̆̈́̉̏t̸̖̜͕̥̆͋͒͝i̸̲͋̍͌̈́͆̚o̸̮̗̗̬͖̲̍ń̶̤͂̆.̴̡̰͉̓͋̅̅͜

When you found out I lived in the opposite direction, you bowed again and again in apology.

But love, it’s alright.

I’d do anything for you.

I’d walk across the whole earth if you asked me to.

All I want… is to be by your side.

Ah… your hair, your body—so close.

I can still smell your shampoo, the faint trace of detergent clinging to your clothes.

I should buy the same ones.

Then we’ll match.

Just like real couples do.

[fish-18]

Entangled Hearts

“It’s always me, my crush, and the one they can’t stop looking at.”

You’ve always admired your best friend. He was the typical heartthrob—well, not just in high school anymore, but even now in college. Smart. Cool. Good-looking. Friendly. A perfect personality.

It was as if God had crammed every admirable trait into one man.

Of course, you weren’t so bad yourself.

You’d had your fair share of confessions, kept your grades above average, and you like to think your personality wasn’t lacking either. Friendly, but not too much. Simple.

But still—standing beside him, his radiance always seemed to overshadow you. Not that it bothered you… not really. He was your best friend. And perhaps, your ten-year crush.

Besides, those people fawning over him would never know him the way you do. You were confident in that.

After all, he had a side he rarely showed anyone. A side he entrusted only to you… and to his would-be victims.

Violent. Ruthless. Almost psychopathic—no, sociopathic. That was him, behind the perfect smile.

But one thing did bother you.

He never looked your way. Not once.

Always chasing after his so-called “future spouse,” always using you as a stepping stone to get closer. And each time he asked something of you, your chest tightened with that familiar ache—because he couldn’t see the way you looked at him. He couldn’t see how easily you flustered under his gaze, how you shy away from his touches, how every word, every smile, made your heart race.

Or maybe… he did see.

Maybe he knew. Maybe he chose to ignore it. Maybe he was simply using your feelings to his advantage.

“Y/N, you have the same classes as them, right? Try befriending them. Introduce them to me when the time’s right.”

“Sure!”

Like a puppet on strings, and he the puppeteer.

Tugging, pulling, controlling. Untangling your knots when you grew conflicted. Caring for your fragile, breaking body… but never once letting go of the reins.

"[REDACTED], this is [?]—my best friend since, well, forever."

"And [?], meet [REDACTED]. We share a few classes, so things just kind of worked out that way, right, [REDACTED]?"

"Mhm! Y/N’s a total sweetheart, they’ve helped me out more than once." They chuckle.

"Is that so? Well, Y/N does have a kind heart… sometimes."

"Wha—what do you mean sometimes? I’m always kind!"

"N/N, is there anything you want? I’ll treat you as thanks."

Like an owner rewarding his dog for a job well done.

"Hmm… I’ll take the usual."

And the dog eats whatever treat is dangled in front of its eyes.

But dogs are loyal creatures. And so, like the loyal dog you are… you never question it.

Never resist.

Always obey—no matter how absurd, how insane, his demands may be.

If only you realized. There’s someone far better for you—someone who’d tear the world apart just to keep a smile on your face.

[fish-18]

i've always like your works! Since youre opening a request Can i perhaps request yandere phainon as a college friend x female reader, well he technically not that close to reader just know each other, they even attending different major, but he always kept himself close to reader which is make reader annoyed, somethings like welcoming himself to study with reader whenever reader try to study alone in library and it turns reader uncomfortable with his presence, the rest plot is up to you! ^_^

Tempest - pt. 1

College!AU, A/B/O!AU: Yandere!Dark!Alpha!Pahinon x Beta!Reader

wordcount: ~5600

tws: MNDI, College!AU, a/b/o!AU, yandere, obsessive/possessive behaviour, heat/rut cycles, overall psychological pressure, stalking, scenting, kidnapping, Phainon is kinda ooc here, he knocks you out with a hit on your head, so violence.

(If you find some more, please let me know.)

As usual, thank you all, my dear sweethearts, for your support!

NOT SUITED FOR MINORS. Not proofread. Author does not endorse or condone any of the actions depicted in real life. Not proofread. Also, English is not the author's first language, so there might be some mistakes. Please remember that you are responsible for your own media consumption.

Ethel Cain - Tempest

The Grove of Epiphany University, nestled within the sprawling, ancient architecture of Okhema City, was a whispered promise. Here, knowledge was currency, traded in hushed murmurs between students hungry for understanding and professors who stood as unwavering beacons, ready to illuminate the winding paths to greater discoveries.

You were one of the unique students.

To be a beta in this era was to be an anomaly. In a society dominated by the primal, often volatile, dynamics of alphas and omegas, your species was a fading echo, a rarity. You were a quiet island in a tumultuous sea of overwhelming scents and unspoken urges, untouched by the searing heats that plagued omegas and the brutal ruts that consumed alphas. 

This immunity was your quiet triumph, a shield against the relentless biological tides that dictated so many lives. And your scent, a faint whisper of black tea, was barely discernible to most. It was a quiet counterpoint to the vibrant, often cloying, aromas that saturated the university halls. You’ve been enjoying your quiet life, hanging out with your friends during breaks, and studying under the famous professors.

It was so peaceful.

Up until recently.

He appeared in Professor Anaxagoras’s advanced philosophy seminar, a course you’d taken out of a genuine interest in the elusive nature of truth. You chose your usual sanctuary: a seat near the back, a familiar spot that offered both a clear view of the lecture and a comfortable distance from the bustling symphony of scents that permeated the room. Your own sense of smell, while present, was mercifully weaker than that of alphas and omegas, a small blessing that allowed you to revel in the quiet calamity of your studies. You truly cherished your solace.

Then, a discordant note tore through that everlasting calm.

His scent hit you first, not as a mere intrusion but as a violent seizure of the air itself, tearing through the fragile harmony of the classroom. Bitter bergamot lashed like acid against your tongue, pepper stung sharp as ground glass in your throat, each note striking with deliberate cruelty. The undertone of something burning was a final, merciless blow to your guts. The sweetness that lingered before was obliterated, replaced by a suffocating fog that pressed down on your chest and filled every fragile breath. It clung to your skin, seeped into your clothes, buried itself in your hair, until you could no longer tell where you ended and it began. Heavy as lead, it smothered every thought, dulling your awareness even as it pried open your nerves, sharpening panic to a fever pitch.

This was Phainon. The enigmatic head of the student council, a figure of almost unnerving intelligence and composure. His reputation preceded him like a shimmering halo: brilliant, ambitious, a mind like a steel trap, capable of dissecting any argument with chilling precision. He was the university’s golden boy, practically a living legend. He was a brilliant student, all the tests marked with no less than A. He volunteered at every single event, his presence a magnet for admiration. He aced swimming, cutting through the water like a predator, and had single-handedly brought the coveted gold cup to the university, his triumphs celebrated with almost religious fervor.

So why did Phainon smell of destruction so strongly that even you, a beta, could sense it?

And this golden boy, this paragon of academic and athletic prowess, chose the seat directly beside you. The disgusting stench of his signature scent, that dry heaviness, clung to him like a second skin, a dark aura that pulsed with an unsettling energy, a subtle vibration in the air around him that made your teeth ache and your skin prickle. It was a scent that whispered of hidden depths, of something beautiful gone completely burned out.

So unfitting for someone like him.

By the end of the lecture, your head throbbed with a severe headache that felt like a dull ache behind your eyes. You could barely hold yourself from the urge to cover your nose with your hand, to somehow block out the suffocating stench that had permeated every breath you took. The air felt thick, and it was hard to breathe as if you were sitting in the very middle of a roaring fire. So as soon as Professor Anaxagoras’s voice finally echoed through the haze of your discomfort with a “Class dismissed,” you bolted out of the classroom and into the sanctuary of the nearest bathroom. The cold tiles were a permanent saviour, and you leaned against them, needing to catch your breath, to purge the cloying smoke from your lungs, to reclaim even a sliver of your own air.

But in your panicked hurry, you didn’t notice the way his nostrils flared.

Phainon inhaled you like a drowning man breaching water, chest shuddering with the force of it, his throat working in a slow, deliberate swallow. A tremor coursed down his frame, predatory and obscene, the kind of shiver a beast gives when it finally scents blood. In an instinct too raw, his pupils blew wide, then rolled back into milky whites, a grotesque flash of rapture that left him swaying with restrained hunger. His fingers clawed at the fabric of his perfectly ironed trousers, nails biting through the weave until the seams strained. The tendons in his hand stood out like cords, stark with the effort of holding himself together. His hips twitched in an involuntary motion, a rutting impulse he strangled into stillness by sheer force of will.

You smelled like home.

Throughout the rest of the semester, Phainon’s presence pressed against you like a damp weight you could never quite shake off. He did not speak to you in class, not even once, yet the scrape of his gaze found you all the same, sliding across your skin as though he meant to peel it back and see what lay underneath. In those moments, when the room grew heavy with the scent of roaring fire, you felt it – the awful certainty that you had been singled out, that you were no longer invisible, that something starving pursued.

However, the true terror lurked outside the lecture halls. What used to be yours – your quiet habits, your solitary refuges – became infested with ash scent. The library, once a sanctuary of dust and silence, soured under Phainon's intrusion. You would tuck yourself into a dim corner, paper and ink your only companions, when suddenly the faint bitterness of something aflame would bleed into your lungs. You never heard his approach, not even once. He simply appeared, folding himself into the chair beside you as if he belonged there, his books spread wide, his posture careful, his nearness deliberate. You could swear that every fiber of him strained toward you under the guise of the still water of his appearance.

What could he possibly want from a person like you?

Your stomach knotted tighter each time. You told yourself that he was studying. You told yourself that it was just a coincidence. But the air around the persistent alpha thrummed with a predator’s patience. It felt like a quiet hum that pinned you down no matter how deeply you tried to bury yourself in your pages.

You started noticing the fractures in his mask. The way his eyes, blue as a summer sky gone too wide, tracked not your face but the movements of your hand, lingering on the twitch of your wrist, on the pulsing veins under the skin. The faint flare of his nostrils whenever you shifted, however slightly, as if he could siphon the ghost of your scent from the very air. And it dawned on you, blooming like a bruise you could not press without wincing: he was smelling you.

Why me?

The question became a constant, echoing refrain in the hollow chambers of your mind, a silent plea against the rising tide of paranoia. You were truly unremarkable, content to blend into the background. You had no ambitions that shone like flares, no intoxicating pheromones that drove alphas insane, no omega softness that demanded protection or desire. Nothing that could possibly lure the attention of someone like Phainon

It wasn’t because of your beta nature, was it? Betas were rare, yes, but not that rare. You had seen them scattered through the university, at least eight of your own kind, ordinary and overlooked, blending into classrooms and lecture halls just like you.

So why?

You tried to hide. You changed your study spots daily, sought out new, obscure corners of the university’s sprawling grounds, and even resorted to studying in your cramped dorm room. But like a phantom limb, his presence would always find you. You’d step out of a lecture hall, and he’d be leaning against the wall, seemingly waiting for nobody in particular, yet his eyes, sharp and stormy, would lock onto yours, following your every movement with an unnerving precision that suggested he knew your exact schedule. 

You’d grab a quick meal at the campus cafeteria, and Phainon’d materialize at the same table, apart from his usual friend group of star students, his fork scraping against ceramic with an almost rhythmic precision, his gaze fixed on you like an invisible thread that pulled at your very soul.

And then, the ultimate violation, a detail that screamed of trespass: a faint, undeniable whisper of that cloying burning scent clinging to your dorm room. A phantom presence on the wood that was your shield against the world.

You cried yourself to sleep that night. Your dorm room, your last bastion of safety, your private world, was utterly violated, its boundaries dissolved. The thought was a venomous seed, growing with every shadow cast by the moonlight, every whisper of the wind against the glass, every creak of the flooring in the hallway. Your once-comforting room had become a stage for an unseen observer, a silent witness to your most private moments. You started checking the lock on your door multiple times before bed in a desperate ritual. You jammed a chair under the handle, a futile barricade against an invisible threat. These measures brought no true comfort, only a fleeting illusion of safety before the terror crept back in. You swore you could still smell him even in your sleep. Even when he wasn't physically there, the ghost of his sickening scent clung to your door, to your clothes, to your bed sheets, to your very bones. 

You scrubbed your skin until it bled. You washed your clothes almost every day. You changed sheets regularly. You opened the windows in the evening.

But nothing, nothing, could erase Phainon’s scent. 

The psychological toll was immense. Sleep became a fractured landscape of shadows and cloying dreams morphing into waking nightmares where his unnerving gaze pierced through the darkness. You were constantly on edge, your senses hyper-aware, perpetually scanning for the tell-tale sign of his approach, for the first whisper of that dreadful scent, for the subtle shift in the air that announced his presence.

The world, once a place of quiet comfort, had become a hostile entity.

So, in a frantic gesture, you decided to ask the principal, Director Aglaea, to transfer you, to shield you, to do something to protect you from Phainon. Her office breathed deeply with old dust and immense knowledge around you when you told her your fears. The golden light glistened beautifully on her hair, but you found no solace in this enchanting sight.

“I think you are overreacting,” was the thing Aglaea said with a breaking certainty when you stood before her, shaking, on the edge of crying.

“What?...” was the only thing that you managed to utter. 

“You know, Phainon speaks highly of you,” she continued with an unwavering gaze and a subtle note of surprise in her tone, “It's quite unusual, you know, for an alpha of his caliber to show such intense interest in a beta. Not common at all.” Her words rang out like a warning, a subtle reminder of your place, a veiled command not to upset the delicate balance of power. Your heart hammered against your ribs like a frantic bird trapped in a cage, desperate to escape, desperate to scream the truth.

But the words died in your throat when she continued:

“Still, it’s quite alright to be wanted by an alpha, isn’t it? Especially by one as influential as Phainon. He's been invaluable to the student council, truly. A remarkable young man...” Her gaze drifted over your shoulder, a clear dismissal as if you were a minor distraction, a fly to be swatted.

“Moreover, the relationships between betas and alphas are not unheard of. Rare, for sure, but possible,” the director ended her speech with a nod that felt more like a guillotine fall, severing any last thread of hope.

“Director Aglaea, I-” you finally found your voice, a desperate, thin thread, “-he... he smells like something burning. It’s sickening. I-I just can't-” You blurted it out, the secret a desperate weight on your tongue, praying for a flicker of understanding, a hint of concern.

Aglaea blinked, her thin smile faltering for a fraction of a second, a ripple in her carefully constructed composure. Her brow furrowed, not with sympathy, but with mild confusion, swiftly replaced by a dismissive wave of her hand, a gesture that swept away your hopes as if they were dust motes, insignificant and easily brushed aside. 

“Huh? Burning? My dear, that’s highly unlikely. Everyone, and I mean everyone, finds his aroma quite invigorating, very savoury. Bergamot and black pepper…” Her eyes, cold and assessing, swept over you.

“I think you should see Hyacine. She knows her ways around betas. Some sort of sensitivity deviation, perhaps. Something must be wrong with you.” The casual cruelty of her suggestion, the immediate invalidation of your horrifying reality, felt like a physical blow. 

Is something wrong…

Tears pricked your eyes.

…with me?

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to attend.” She finally dismissed you, her words a sterile validation of your torment, her focus entirely on Phainon’s brilliance, not your burgeoning fear. Aglaea’s indifference hurted like a fresh wound, a stark reminder of your insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe’s power dynamics, a chilling confirmation that no one would help you.

Only Anaxagoras, your professor, seemed to see the truth, the insidious cracks beneath Phainon’s gleaming facade. You caught his gaze across the quad one day, his crimson eye, usually so full of intellectual fire, now clouded with a weary sadness that bent his shoulders. He was a beta himself, and perhaps that allowed him a clearer vision of the insidious nature of Phainon’s desires. 

Anaxagoras had seen the darkness blooming in Phainon. 

But your professor was powerless, bound by unspoken rules, by the sheer force of alpha’s intellect and influence, by a system that protected its rising stars at any cost. Phainon, the golden boy, the intellectual prodigy, the future of the Grove of Epiphany, was untouchable. Anaxagoras merely offered a small, almost imperceptible nod after you exited Aglaea's office – a silent acknowledgment of your shared understanding, a quiet apology for his helplessness, before turning away.

You were alone in your own misery.

The library was quiet as usual, a cathedral of dust and paper, each footstep muted against the worn floors. You had claimed your usual corner, the nook between two overflowing shelves, a place where the dying evening sunlight barely reached and silence wrapped around you like a soft cloak. For once, you believed yourself unobserved.

Until the smell and liquid shattered that illusion.

You were halfway through highlighting a passage when a warm, sticky spill coated the back of your sweater. Pomegranate juice mixed with milk, a cloying pink against the pale fabric. You yelped, recoiling, and looked up only to see Phainon, hands frozen mid-motion, eyes wide in apology, looking like a soggy puppy caught in a mess he couldn’t comprehend.

“Shit! I- I’m so sorry!” His voice cracked slightly, uneven, “I didn’t mean- I tripped!” His words tumbled out, fast and clumsy, but there was something else beneath them, something you couldn’t place at first. His gaze lingered not on the sports bottle rolling on the floor, but on you who were peeling off the wet cloth from your figure.

“… It’s fine,” you muttered, voice brittle. 

“I promise, that wasn’t intentional! I stumbled! I'm so sorry! I- I wash it. You shouldn’t even- here, give it to me,” he said, reaching out with hands that were too insistent, the pressure of his grip a warning wrapped in civility. You hesitated, then handed him the sweater, shivering immediately as the thin fabric of your plain white tee did nothing to shield you from the chill of the library.

“Damn, you’re shivering!” he said,immediately tugging a bomber jacket from his own form. Phainon draped it over your shoulders before you could protest. The weight of it settled like a claim, his scent seeping through the fibers, a quiet declaration you could not avoid. It was thick, warm, and carried the faintest scent of him but you had no choice.

It almost made you gag.

“Th-thank you,” you muttered, your voice trembling, partly from cold, partly from the pressure of his musk on the fabric. His lips twitched in a satisfied smile, eyes darting to your face, then back to the bomber almost as if he were savoring the sight of it on you.

“I’ll wash your sweater and give it back next week,” he said with voice unnerving in its intensity. He folded your sweater into and put it into the backpack with painstaking care. But you’ve noticed how his fingers lingered longer than necessary, curling slightly around the fabric as though memorizing it.

You watched him, trapped by the weight of the bomber, shivering, wrapped in a warmth that was too much, too close, too deliberate. The library’s silence pressed against the edges of the scene, the sound of distant voices from the outside doing nothing to break the oppressive atmosphere that wrapped around the two of you.

“So um… Wanna grab a drink? As an apology.”

Phainon leaned closer, his disgusting scent now tinged with something more sweet, something truly foul, something that you could not identify yet, brushing against your face, a breath that felt like a curse.

“Oh, um… I’m sorry, I… need to go already,” you mumbled out a desperate excuse. You clutched his bomber, your knuckles white, willing him to simply walk away, to leave you to the silence you now craved.

“Oh, I see,” His smile didn’t falter, but something in his eyes darkened, a subtle shift that sent a fresh wave of dread through you. 

“Then let me escort you to your room at least!”

Phainon took a step closer, and the smokey scent intensified.

“The campus can be... unpredictable after dark. It would be irresponsible of me, as head of the student council, to allow you to walk home alone… and wet.”

His hand, warm and unsettling, briefly brushed your upper back. A fleeting touch that meant to be soothing felt like a lava on your skin. 

“I'm sorry but-”

“I insist.”

Your thoughts would race against each other: what could he possibly do when you two are on the student grounds? Even if he tries something, you should be safe, there are other people around. He already knows where you live anyway, what more can he achieve? Maybe you can persuade him to stay away? Maybe he’ll lose interest in you after this small walk-and-talk? Maybe there is a chance to fix it? Maybe you can talk it out? And you can give him his awfully smelly bomber back. 

…

Maybe there is something wrong with you.

And at the same very moment that thought hit, you nodded absentmindedly.

The walk to your dormitory was an agonizing descent into a deeper layer of your personal hell. Phainion walked beside you, close enough that his arm occasionally brushed yours, close enough that the cloying bitterness of something burnt out made your stomach churn. 

You wanted to ask him about his antics but he just spoke…

“Phainon, I wa-“

“Right now we are planning the student clubs fair!”

...about the university…

“Please, can we-“

“Being the president is cool, but a little bit tiring!”

…about the student council…

“I wanted to a-”

“Look at this statue! Oh how lucky we are to study in such a university!”

…about the beauty of the old architecture…

“...“

“Oh, and by the way, I got a gold medal from that one swimming competition!”

Your eyes watered with every failed attempt.

As you reached the familiar facade of your dormitory, the relief was a sharp sensation. You fumbled for your keycard with the trembling hands. Phainon stopped beside you, blocking the last sliver of fading light from the street lamps.

You opened the door.

Then, a sudden, brutal shove to your back. The sheer force of it sent you stumbling forward with a yelp, your worn sneakers scrabbling uselessly on the polished linoleum before your knees slammed against the cold floor. A searing pain erupted as skin broke against the unyielding surface, a sharp sting that momentarily eclipsed the terror. Your body seized in panic, every nerve screaming, when the heavy door behind you clicked shut with an ominous finality.

“You know,” Phainon murmured in low rumble that seemed to vibrate through the very bones of the building, echoing in the hollow space of your chest, “It’s taking too long.”

Your breath hitched, caught in a suffocating knot in your throat. The implication was an undeniable truth that slammed into you with the force of a physical blow, rooting you to the spot, blood roaring in your ears.

“Honestly, I tried my best,” he continued, his voice barely audible, a secret shared between predator and prey, the ultimate confession delivered with chilling calm, “but you didn’t even tried to notice.”

With those words, you managed to twist your torso and sit on your ass amidst the growing puddle of your own terror, your blood screaming in your veins upon the sight in front of you.

Phainon stood there, shielding a door with his broad shoulders, perfectly still like some menacing monolith. A sick, toothy smile stretched his lips in an unnatural way, pulling them too wide, revealing too much, like a predator displaying its fangs. Alpha’s face was flushed, forehead slick with an unholy sheen, as if he had a fever, or was consumed by some internal inferno. His gaze was fixed on you, unblinking, pupils dilated, two black pools reflecting your stunned figure. He tugged at his own choker as if it were a noose, or a leash he was about to throw away. 

“And my rut is nearing.”

He stilled. The whole room seemed to breathe around you, inhaling and exhaling with the rhythm of your pounding heart, the dormitory room transforming into a claustrophobic cage. 

But then you made an irreversible mistake. Your body, screaming for escape, instinctively tried to scramble backward, dragging itself against the floor. 

That provoked him.

First, you saw Phainon move, his swift form bolting towards you in sudden shift too fast to follow in the dark of your room. Then, sharp pain of something hitting the side of your head. Then, a suffocating abyss that swallowed you whole, accompanied by the last agonizing whisper of something being burnt alive filled your lungs, your mouth, your very being.

There was nothing wrong with you.

Your weight was barely there in his arms, cuddled up to him like a precious gift. Your scent, that delicate whisper of black tea, was an intoxicating current, pulling him under every time. Phainon buried his face in your bloodied hair first, inhaling deeply, letting the calming aroma fill his lungs, settle in his bones. It was a stark contrast to the cloying smell that clung to his own skin, a scent only you seemed to truly register, a shared secret that thrilled him to the core.

Truth be told, Phainon was almost pathologically self-conscious of his own scent, as though every breath he exhaled condemned him. It clung to him like guilt, like memory, like past that never dispersed no matter how many windows he threw open.

Where other alphas carried the steady pulse of cedar, earth, or leather – anchors that drew others near – his was a suffocating noose of burnt charcoal and bitter ash. It was not an aura but a pyre, a funeral that refused to end. By the age of 16, he had learned to hide it with scent blockers, to disguise it in layers of bergamot and pepper. A masquerade of normalcy, though every drop only reminded him that he was unclean with tragedy.

Phainon remembered the first time they named him Alpha.

It happened after the flames, after the sky lit crimson over Aedes Elysia, after his home became nothing but a charred wound on the earth. His glands had bloomed open in that very fire, thick smoke in his throat, skin sticky with ash and soot, the stench of lives ending etched into him forever. His nature declared itself at the precise moment his world was annihilated. 

A cruel joke of biology – what use is dominance, when everything you might have protected lies in ashes?

Phainon lived like a pretender, masking his own scent, clawing at the smelly spots on his body like it was possible to tear them out along with the bitter past that tortured him countless nights. They pulsed and ached under all the scent-blocking balm that he applied every day, always painfully swollen, but never used properly. His rut became a shallow memory from when he just presented. It never happened again, not with the amount of hormonal pills that he was taking. Not with all the masking that he did.

Not until you happened.

The first time Phainon caught your scent in the hallway, his knees nearly buckled. It was not even strong – no commanding alpha flare, no omega sweetness. 

Just… you? 

This fragile, ordinary miracle – a simple exhale of black tea, soft herbs, wool warmed by skin. Familiar, ordinary, unbearably tender. It smelled like the sweaters you wore, like mornings unbroken by tragedy, like a kitchen light left on for someone expected home. It smelled like the future, his future, that had been denied him once, and perhaps would be again, if he did not cling fast enough.

His chest tightened, his eyes watered before he even understood why. His lungs burned with the need to drag you deeper inside, to memorize that fragile note that cut through the smoke choking him.

For the first time since the fire claimed everything, Phainon felt something stir beneath the wreckage.

You were a beta, he understood later. A rare kin, but utterly unremarkable in the brutal taxonomy of scent and dominance. And yet you smelled like salvation. Like the promise of a life that could have been. And he hated the way his heart leapt, the way it broke inside his ribcage with every inhale he managed to take near you. Because it wasn’t fair. Because you did not know what you carried. Because the more he breathed you in, the more the ruined parts of him stitched themselves to you, thread by trembling thread.

You were not just someone. You were a reprieve, a reprieve he could not, would not, let slip away.

In his desperation he began to dream that if he could only press you close enough, inject himself deep enough, perhaps your calamity might overwrite his ruin. Phainon craved to let his body be consumed by you, to be buried deep among the dark, curled tea leaves at the very bottom of the cup, gently dissolving into the soothing liquid, becoming irrevocably one with your essence.

“Ack-!”

He shivered as the flames licked his loins, a faintly familiar tremor intensified like a visceral hum beneath his skin. His rut was nearing and your scent, so close now, so accessible, was a potent accelerant, fanning the fire of his escalating desire. It provoked him, pushing him closer to the edge, to the glorious precipice of instinct. His canines ached with a phantom bite, an unfamiliar urge to share the future with someone.

Phainon needed to move, or else he would claim you right here, in your unprepared dorm room.

He shifted your weight slightly in his arms, securing his grip. His flat was close, a safe haven near the university, meticulously prepared for you to become one. Every soft blanket, every muted light, every food you enjoyed, curated not for himself, but for this very moment. 

Your door clicked shut behind him.

The transition from the sterile lobby to the dim twilight was seamless. His senses, already heightened by the approaching rut, flared. A solitary student, an omega who was heading to a late study session, glanced up, his eyes widening slightly at the sight of Phainon. But then, the boy’s gaze flicked to your form in alpha’s arms, quickly dismissing the unusual scene after a faint smile and a curt nod. 

He was Phainon, after all. 

He lulled you in his arms during the walk towards his flat, shushing your unconscious form like a great partner, frowning at the sight of blood in your hair. He knew that his method of collecting you was a little bit harsh. A touch unrefined. But how else was he to proceed? He simply didn’t know how to court you properly.

He’d tried to educate himself. He’d spent hours, days even, burrowing into the internet’s obscure corners, collecting dusty, forgotten books on the anatomy and social behaviors of betas. Phainon dissected scientific papers, searching for a tangible manual, a definitive guide to acquiring a beta. But none of it described anything he needed.

Like, seriously, was he supposed to just talk with you? Exchange pleasantries over lukewarm coffee? To just be around you? What about scenting, marking, claiming, utterly possessing?

He’d doubted that those advises would work, but he tried nevertheless. The book had been very clear: betas valued consistency, cherished shared time. Not flashy gestures, not the overwhelming dominance alphas were taught to flaunt, but presence.

So he gave you presence.

Phainon'd lingered nearby in the lecture hall, angled his body so you would catch him in your periphery, brushed past you in the corridors as if by accident. He sat across from you in the cafeteria, quiet and careful, certain you would recognize his patience as a gift.

But you didn’t. You ate faster, shoulders tight, head ducked as if retreat could save you. The sight made his chest ache with something between confusion and desperation. Perhaps, he thought, it was not you but him. Perhaps you simply weren’t accustomed to the strength of alpha pheromones. That would explain the tremors, the watery eyes, the way your breath caught as if the air itself betrayed you.

Another book insisted that familiarity softened resistance. Phainon decided you needed to become accustomed to his scent. He pressed his hands against the glands at his neck after long runs, when his pulse was strong and the musk heavy, then smeared it discreetly along the frame of your front door. It was meant to calm you, to prepare you. You were a beta, and betas were not as sensitive as others, so he reasoned you would need more. He thought you would sleep more peacefully surrounded by his protective musk, even if it smelled of ash.

But instead, Phainon heard you cry.

That first night he lay beneath your bed with his heart in his throat as the sound of your sobs pounded through him harder than any rut. You curled on top of the sheets in your street clothes, trembling like a small kitten in the rain. Every gasp, every hitch of your breath tore him apart, and yet he bit down on his lip until the iron taste of blood filled his mouth. He wanted to purr, to soothe, to let you know that your alpha was there, guarding you against everything else. But he stayed frozen in the shadows under your bed, hand clutching at his trousers as if that could hold him together, chest convulsing with the effort not to crawl out and wrap you in his arms.

What had gone wrong?

Phainon did not understand.

But it didn't matter anymore.

You were here. In his flat. In his nest.

The sight of you there broke him open, left his chest hollowed and trembling with something rawer than hunger. He had arranged the pile with the clumsy desperation of a starving man trying to cook for a banquet, typing “how to make a nest for your omega” into search bar with shaking hands. It had felt strange for an alpha, humiliating even, but betas weren’t supposed to know. Betas weren’t supposed to feel this need clawing through their marrow, this ache to soften space, to prepare, to build warmth until it was enough for two. So, in a desperate attempt to be a good mate, Phainon had done it himself. He had torn through stores, rejected cushion after cushion that didn’t hold his scent correctly, layered his own shirts, his blankets, everything until the air was thick with him. He hoped it was to your liking.

And there you were, unconscious and folded against the worn fabric of his t-shirt, already sinking into him, already marked by proximity.

Phainon’s breath fractured.

For the first time after the destruction of his home, he felt truly complete. His rut was beginning to truly bloom at the feeling, a roaring fire, consuming him slowly. Your black tea scent was a delicious provocation, igniting the final spark.

Soon, you would understand. Soon, you would belong. Soon, your futures would intervene, creating a new, promising destiny.

His hands reached for your clothes. 

.

To mate... (WIP)

Warning: the second part will be much darker.

Likes, comments, and reblogs are appreciated! Taglist is closed for this one. (sorry~)

So… a little heads-up, my darlings! Things are about to get a lot darker in the second part. I'm using these requests as a chance to practice for my other fic, Gebo, so be prepared. Still, I'm writing it so you can skip ahead to the ending. To make sure everyone stays safe, I'm thinking of posting just the epilogue here on Tumblr and putting the more intense parts on my AO3. That way, everyone will have a safer option.

P.S. Second part of kiss Headcanons coming soon!

[fish-18]

Some unhinged eldritch Phainon blurb I wrote at the witching hour. Inspired from the summer hikaru died (god I love the manga and the anime just fed my delusions more lol). Mentions of death, body horror, body snatching, Phainon being weird (aka having adhd), non consensual touching, mild nsfw etc. it's not proof read or edited, so enjoy the 2k word vomit.

Phainon hasn't been the same since he went to that mountain three summers ago. 

The most beloved son of your small farming village, the person people turned to help with small problems, the boy who used to play with the little runts in your neighborhood and your best friend of many years changed all of a sudden. 

He was found after being missing for more than a week that summer all bruised up with a broken limb. You remember bawling your eyes out at the sight of him sitting in the hospital bed in a stupid gown, looking at you as if you are the most precious thing he had ever seen. You didn't mind it much when the hug you had crushed him into tightened up a bit. It was negligible, forgettable, but looking back on it, that was your sign that the boy who went up the mountain never came back down. 

And he never told you why he went there in the first place. Something about an old tradition his dad, and his dad, and his dad before him used to do. It was sacred, necessary and he had to do it, even when the weather report said that it would be the stormiest day in all of that year. 

Phainon came back though. He weathered a rough week up the mountain, got scolded by his mom and his friends alike for scaring the shit out of them, started school again and everything went back to normal. 

It should have gone back to normal. 

It started out small, this feeling that something didn't fit as it was meant to, like some pieces of furniture that aren't meant to be in the same room. Phainon was handsy with you, touching you in a gesture meant to be between friends, a safe protective hand that you were familiar with. 

But this Phainon couldn't be without you for one second. His hands needed to touch anything remotely belonging to you or you. His hands would encircle your shoulders, hanging off them like wet laundry. Sometimes he would grab you by the waist, his head fitting into the crook of your neck. 

You scolded him for being like this, swatting away his hands at times when you couldn't take it, but then he would start crying, saying that you didn't like him anymore, didn't want him anymore. Strange, you thought as you tried to make him stop crying in the corridor for everyone to see, he never used to say things like that. 

Your classmates since elementary cooed at how close you both had gotten, clinging to each other like paper to glue. Like a baby chick following after its mother. They laughed and made fun of Phainon, how he must have his wits rattled that he was clinging to you this much. You laughed good-naturedly, trying to mask your unease by ruffling the boy’s ivory hair, thinking that you needed to give him time to readjust. 

But he hasn't left your side since then. 

He would sometimes follow you all the way home, making sure you got home safe even though his house was on the other end of the road.

“There are talks of strange and weird stuff happening around the village,” he said as paddled alongside you on his worn bike. “It's best to be vigilant about things like this!”  You couldn't argue about it. Things had gotten strange. Corpse turning up in strange places. People dying in bizarre manners. All after Phainon came back.

Worst of all nobody had any idea why this was happening. So you chalked up his sudden protectiveness for prevention. You should have gone with your gut and questioned the situation more.

He hung out at your house a lot too. Rather than staying at your house every other day of the week he started visiting regularly, sometimes bearing gifts or wanting to do homework together. Other times he barged in like he owned the place. 

“Do you not want me around anymore?” He would ask all puppy-like, his big blue eyes innocently staring at you, but the Phainon you knew wasn't a big cry baby like this one was. You with your big heart would eventually surrender and show him up to your room as he happily trailed after you, the doubts only creeping up more. 

From staying at your house to eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, sometimes even staying the night when it got too late, you saw Phainon 24/7 around the clock. 

You couldn't sleep properly whenever he stayed at your house. Something always watched you whenever he slept in your room on the floor, and the thought of him doing that was just absurd. There was no way he was constantly watching you all night long without sleeping a wink. 

Besides he doesn't have those molten, cold, golden eyes. His are the softest cornflower blue. So it couldn't be him,

Right?

You thought that after reaching the final year of your high school life Phainon would tame a little. Be more restrained in his so-called ‘friendly’ affection. But he only increased the bar that could be tolerated. 

Seeing Phainon sticking to your butt every single second  was no longer weird or strange for your school, neighborhood or families. They all only saw a boy too attached to his childhood friend who will soon leave for college and nothing more. 

They didn't dig deeper like you and some others did, didn't see the wrongness of it all. How could they? He had three years of practice, three years to rifle through memories to perfect his act, and three years to make everyone believe that ‘Phainon’ had come back from that mountain alive and well. 

You tried to talk to Cyrene, another one of your and Phainon’s childhood friends, but no matter how many times you brought it up she only gave you an uncomfortable smile and fake assurance that you were just overthinking things. But you knew her. She wouldn't outright lie to you or try to deflect the problem if she didn't think it was the right thing to do.

Cyrene was warning you in her own way that you shouldn't dig further, be blissfully ignorant of the warnings, because if you didn't…

Phainon's moodiness had increased when he saw that you had started to drift away. He clung harder, fiercely following you everywhere where he could. 

“Let's eat at this restaurant this time after school! Huh? What do you mean you have to study? You are already so smart! Any of those big city colleges will be happy to take you. And…if you don't get into any, then there's always this village! You could stay here back home, with me.” He said stuff like this on the regular, poking and proding at you when you were trying to study in your room. 

The knot in your throat was only getting tighter with each doubt. Those eyes you couldn't see when you turned the road, that constant feeling of being watched even when you took a shower, that coldness on your bare thighs when you shucked off the blanket one particularly hot night. 

You couldn't take it anymore. This torture that the boy you had been treating as your Phainon night not be him after all. 

And the lack of answers wasn't helping. If he wasn't Phainon, then who was he?

You needed to know, otherwise you were sure you would go insane. 

So you did what any sensible person would do– you asked him directly.

“Hey, Phai?” You asked when he was blissfully eating that cheap ice cream from the roadside stall that you both had been eating from since you were kids. For him to eat it like it was his first time was nothing short of terrifying. 

“Yeah?” The cream clung to the corners of his mouth. He looked at you with that love struck expression he had since he came back and it does nothing to soothe your nerves. You took a deep breath and asked him the question that had been weighing on you for three years– “Who are you?” 

A silence as long as eternity stretched between you two. You think you saw a hint of gold in those otherwise blue eyes, but it was gone as soon as his smile returned. “What do you mean? I am Phainon. Who else would I be? Maybe you had too much ice cream and are having a brain freeze.” 

He bit into your melting ice cream in your hand while you stared at him with utter confusion, licking at your hand a little. The recoiling sensation you felt, the same one you had when you felt something going up your shirt at night and groping you in places it shouldn't, rushed into your senses. 

You backed away from him and the immediate broken expression he had on his face, on Phainon's face, was gut-wrenching. 

You apologised profusely, saying that your mind was elsewhere, but you thought he knew why you ran away from him. 

You knew he wasn't Phainon. The boy had been dead for three fucking years and this…thing wore his skin and masqueraded around as him and no one knew. All except for the people who were murdered. 

Those strange bodies had definitely been his handiwork, you were sure of it. But with nothing except the fear of being next on the chopping block you didn't come out of your house for the entire week. 

You didn't go to school, didn't eat anything, didn't shower, and didn't answer the door when he came to check on you. 

“Please, open the door,” he had the audacity to plead in your Phainon's voice. "At least eat something. Look! I brought–” 

“I don't want it!!!” You screamed through the door. You couldn't be within breathing distance from your friend's corpse. That monster, whatever it was, would kill you like the others. It was just the matter of when. 

Then that night came. The air was chilled for a month like July, and you felt even colder underneath the heaps of blankets you hid under. 

A knock came by your window. Once politely, gently rapped against the glass. But after five knocks it grew desperate, enraged. 

“(Name) open up the door.” The voice wasn't like anything you had ever heard. It didn't belong to any man, or woman. It was a garbled mess, like someone chewed on it, and reverberated it your head. 

It asked three more times, each met with silence on your end. After the third it grew quiet. 'Maybe he left,' you thought and peeked out from the small opening in your blanket. 

The room was deathly silent and cold, and then something whispered right by your ear– “I am in your room.” 

It clamped your tearful shrieks with a strong hand and tore you out from your fortress of blankets. The window hadn't been smashed or the door opened. You didn't know how it got in but it did and you looked at it in horror. 

Its eyes were no longer blue. It had shed that mask, and instead you were met with eyes so golden, so wrathful that you thought it might burn you to death. His palm seared into your jaw preventing your movement. His chest had a crack that glowed with the same gold as his eyes and was the only source of light in the entire room. 

“(Name)!! I can finally see you,” it used your friends voice, the fucking bastard, greetings you like you were old pals who hadn't seen each other in weeks. Your tears never clung to your lashes. They evaporated under the heat of this being. 

“It wasn't fair you know,” he pulled you closer, making you sit on his thighs that were bigger than the last time you had remembered. “I was trying to be nice, not trying to scare you. But then you had to hole yourself in your room and not make me see you anymore!! You were really mean.” 

It was ridiculous how he was pouting about unfairness without caring that he was potentially melting half of your face. He smiled and like concrete cracks emerged on his face, “Don't you know that I can't spend a single day without seeing you smile? Oh, well. I’ll have to punish you for making me go through that.” 

Your eyes widened and your efforts to wrench yourself out of his grasp doubled. Please don't kill me, the words echoed in your mind and maybe he heard them because what he said next made you want to stop breathing – “Oh nonononono, I won't kill you!!! How can I? You are the most precious person to me, my guiding light, my everything. Since having this body you are the only thing that has breathed life into it, how could I snatch away my only source of oxygen?” 

Its hands lowered and burned at your quaking skin, repulsed by the softening heat. He toyed with the waistband of your night shorts and looked at you with lidded eyes. “Y’know, he only had the thoughts of you in his final moments. The only cherished memories he had was of you. Maybe that's what made me fall for you. Who knows? I feel sorry for the guy,” his fingers touched the skin underneath and you cried harder. “He’ll never get to fulfill his dreams of having you. But don't worry, I'll fulfill them in his stead. Since I am ‘Phainon'.”

It pushed you against your own bed, your voice now unmuffled now pleading with him to stop; it never listened. But as it lowered down further you realised that it couldn't kill you. 

It had already committed worse by falling in love with you. 

[fish-18]

Love is Blue - Yandere! Phainon x Reader

A/N Not a part of my monster series but I guess it could count since Phainon is no longer exactly human. This one is relatively long. Be patient with me. I'm still remembering how to write. Pre 3.6.

Warnings - recovering from depression, angst, mentions of imprisonment.

~

Under the endless Okheman morning light, you found yourself struggling. Everything was too bright. Your eyes squinted in pain whenever the windows opened to let in the light, and when you went outside, there was little else you could do but shield your eyes with hats, veils, even colored glasses you had Chartonus forge.

Cipher called you "Little Scarab" with the way you hid from the light. But eventually scarabs come out to greet the dawn, however reluctant they might be.

Today, you needed to socialize. The weight of loneliness was oppressive, and you found your mind spiraling more than once in the sanctuary of your room. You donned a veil and parted from your chambers. Bathers bowed and darted past as you walked through the great halls. Your shadow was like a ghost drifting through wind. Even the Maiden of Death, Castorice, was never avoided so outright. You couldn't blame them. They were just ordinary people, and you had long since lost your humanity in the eyes of others cycles ago.

Unlike the Chrysos Heirs of the Flame Chase journey, your heart held no coreflame. Instead, it augmented the power of whomsoever held a coreflame in your presence. Thus, you entered a pact with the Imperator and seamstress to assist the Chrysos Heirs in battle against the Black Tide, your presence imbuing your companions with power insurmountable. You were dragged to every battlefield, dangled before warriors of ill-repute, all to lure their fantasies of triumph out and strike them down. Traitors would always pay for their betrayal to the Flame Chase.

Hysilens and Castorice understood you the most. You spent more time with the latter, as Hysilens was often trailing after the Imperator, but in the quiet corners of feasts, the two of you would connect. She sang for you. Sometimes you sang along.

Castorice had developed an interest in woodworking recently, and gifted you numerous rudimentary sculptures. Wood was already dead, after all. Her hands could touch something, create forms out of soft ash wood and experiment with cypress and bay. You sat with her often as she worked idly and talked, or let the silence wrap you in comfort. Her presence gave you peace.

Today, you sought her out, but gave in to curiosity when a deep voice rang around the corner of the hall. You peeked your head out to see Mydei scolding one of his Kremnoan soldiers for picking a fight with an Okheman youth. The scene was mildly interesting, and you found yourself amused by the sight. Approaching, you let your shadow dispel the tension in the air. Your reputation preceded you.

Mydei turned to you and bowed.

"Endynamotor," he said, referring to you as your title. Empowerer. How ironic, for how powerless you felt.

Your title was a double edged sword. At times, it made you feel as if you belonged with the others. Dux Imperator gave it to you for that purpose after all. But sometimes it made you feel as if you were a tool to be used, an enhancer for the true heroes of this world. A vessel for Destruction.

There was one person who understood how that felt. He was long gone from this timeline, off fighting the source of everyone's misery, burning rage into a blade that could touch an Aeon. His departure allowed you to free yourself from the rift in time and space he created to keep you safe. You would never be touched by the Black Tide in that prison, and more importantly, you were safe from the creator of all this madness, safe from Lygus.

Now that Lygus had abandoned his role as an observer and stepped into the story, you were no longer protected. But he believed Phainon was burnt to ash in the previous timeline, and you were not worth the effort of killing when he was no longer there to torment. Oh, how wrong he was. You knew he was still alive.

Yet for the moment, you could walk freely in the City of Okhema. You washed away your dark thoughts with the waters of Phagousa, the rumbling of waterfalls pulling you from the voice in your head. You came back to the present.

Mydei stood firm, but his subject shrunk away, pitifully excusing himself when Mydei gave him a pointed glare of dismissal.

Alone with Mydei, you remembered how to smile, and politely greeted him.

"You are ever busy, your Highness."

Your voice felt foreign to you. You were still getting used to using it after eons of silence. Yet however foreign it may have sounded, it was still yours, and it was a mark of your lingering humanity.

The Kremnoan prince scrutinized you.

"Mydei. Call me Mydei, or don't refer to me at all."

You remember the other incarnations of Mydei from millennia ago. They were all this austere, but never acerbic. You tilted your head, curious.

He bristled in shame, realizing how he sounded and corrected himself, "Excuse me. My people tend to grate on my nerves."

A group of children ran past and caught your eye. You both watched in mild disinterest in order to avoid looking at one another directly. Your smile remained empty, but a glimmer of compassion stirred in you at the sound of their laughter.

"All is forgiven. I understand the difficulties a ruler may face can often wear down one's patience."

Mydei relaxed his posture and uncrossed his arms. His armor caught the glow of Georios' fires in the hallway. It illuminated his features, and you were reminded of the gold ichor of him, how it swirled within his torn flesh, burst into starlight and burned all who... No. You didn't need to think about him. He wasn't here.

Mydei sighed. "That's the problem. I'm not their ruler. The last King of Castrum Kremnos died long ago. Yet they seem to think me their new one just because I am the last in the bloodline."

You could hear the bitterness in his voice. You know that if Mydei could, he would've erased his tyrant father from the annals of history, giving him a second death. But the Kremnoan people were proud.

Your lashes fluttered shut. The light of day was blinding.

"You were born to be a leader, and no one can truly escape their fate in this world."

He seemed to agree with you, albeit taciturnly.

"You don't seem to be faring well in Okhema," he changed the subject. "Have you considered going to the Grove of Epiphany? There are fewer people. It's not as bright. Aglaea can arrange everything for you."

"I know. And I thank you, but I need to remain here for the time being. The Imperator summons me often enough for it to become an inconvenience if I lived at the Grove. Besides, the scholars would likely find me a nuisance."

Mydei opened and closed his mouth. You appreciated the offer, knowing he was just trying to look out for you, but you knew if you were isolated again, you'd surely crumble. The noise was necessary, even if it hurt your ears. The light was necessary, even though it stung your eyes.

"If you are willing, walk with me, Mydei," you said.

He followed in stride as you passed drunken revelers and gossiping locals. You felt his large posture shield you from their eyes. Deliberately, if his frequent glances at you meant anything.

The calmer parts of Okhema were no less busy, but here, there were quieter souls, all relaxed in the eternal morning light. Blankets on grass, scrolls in palms, giggling maidens chatting with Verax Leo, asking who in Okhema loved them.

The carefree atmosphere dipped into your chest and pulled out your heart. The freedom was healing. You remembered an image from lifetimes ago, of swirling white hair amidst a sea of golden wheat.

Mydei broke the silence.

"Did Aglaea make those for you?" He nodded at your clothing. You could tell he was trying to be polite. Fashion wasn't really one of his interests.

"Yes, although this one I helped stitch. Hence the mediocrity. I pricked my finger many times," you grinned. How good it felt to be able to do so. In your prison, the lack of sensation made your mind stagnate, and thus learning new skills had become your pastime since gaining freedom.

Mydei grunted in amusement.

"Well, it suits you," he complimented you.

He was never good at complimenting others, and so you felt honored by the appraisal. Your eyes crinkled.

"Thank you, Mydei."

You turned his way and offered your gratitude. Perhaps, if your life had been different, Mydei would've made an excellent companion. You enjoyed his gentlemanly restraint. It never suffocated you.

He glanced away and crossed his arms again, likely bashful about his clumsy delivery. He was skilled in battle, not conversation. He was about to speak again when a shriek sounded from the floors below. The golden threads in the air became visible as they tightened. Aglaea was increasing security. Something was wrong.

You and Mydei ran down the steps towards the origin of the scream. A woman stood before a black mass of flickering pixels on the floor.

"Aleksos! My son! Aleksos is gone!" she screamed. Mydei approached her and pulled her away from the mass of the Black Tide creeping into the city. So it was already here. Time was running out.

"You have to save him! Dux Endynamotor, your highness! You must bring him back! I beg of you!"

Her shrieks were too much for your ears. You winced as she cried. There was little you could do once the Black Tide swept away a wayward soul.

"Mydei, please take her to Hyacine. She's visiting Okhema presently and in her usual infirmary. I'll manage the rest."

Mydei looked as if he were about to refuse. You unpinned your veil and let it fall to the floor. You were serious.

He nodded and picked up the woman who was quickly losing consciousness due to shock. He brushed past you and ran to the infirmary.

Alone in the lower levels of Okhema, you faced the hole in the ground, your expression reserved. Summoning a wisp of blue energy from the moonlight in your soul, you wrote a seal in the air before the pool of darkness. The alchemy was considered old, but it did the trick, dispelling most instances of deterioration. Except this time, your magick did not seal the abyss. Instead, it was sucked in. Your eyes widened in horror. The Black Tide was stealing your power? How was that possible?

You backed away, feeling the air grow cold and the light dim. The eternal sun couldn't reach you here.

The Black Tide surged, its gaping maw opening as if to swallow you whole. You retracted in defense, almost unable to move as fear petrified you. The blackness lashed at you, but never touched you. A flash of blinding light pierced through the mass. The tip of a white hot blade scorched the air in front of your face. You inhaled the scent of burning flesh as it singed the tips of your hair. Just as quickly as it was before you, it retracted again. Your stomach dropped.

The Black Tide receded, but a figure stood in its wake. One you were loathe to see again.

Phainon slit the air with his blade and chased back the threat that tried to take your life. His eyes burned as they looked at you.

"I found you."

You tried to scream but nothing came out. Your voice was scorched like the air around you. Your reckoning had come.

He floated towards you. His blade lingered behind him, suspended over the source of the Black Tide that sputtered as it perished.

His eyes never left yours. He reached out and touched your hand, lifting it and intertwining your fingers. You felt your power be siphoned earlier by the Black Tide, and you quickly realized it was him who was borrowing your power. He traced the magnetism until he found its source, you, then used it to amplify his already god-like strength and crush the threat as if it were an ant under his foot.

His other hand reached up to cup your face. The heat was searing, and yet it didn't burn you. His right arm was different, torn at the bicep from which grew a golden limb of pure destructive power to replace what was lost. His touch remained the same, oppressing and reverent. He cradled you like a cloud in the sky, with resolute tenderness.

"I searched for you as I fought. I touched the sea of stars beyond Amphoreus and burned over and over as I raged against the Destruction. I knew you would take advantage of my absence. I just didn't realize you'd be so clever. Those veils of yours were woven by Aglaea, weren't they?"

You felt your body grow numb as he spoke. He was correct. You deduced that the Black Tide would follow you if you didn't employ the aid of the other Chrysos Heirs. Aglaea's weaving was capable of hiding you from the force that swept through the land, devouring everything in sight, essentially making you appear as a nominal presence amidst a sea of real people. What you didn't know was that Phainon would use that absence to trace his way back to you. Through rifts in Amphoreus, he'd spied on you, admiring your tenacity as he plunged his blade into the bodies of beasts of the Antimatter Legion. He'd smile at the sight of you freely walking around and chatting with the other Chrysos Heirs like you used to, long before he locked you away.

He never regretted that decision, no matter how much he loved your smile. You were safe. That was most important.

His thumb brushed your cheek where tears had started to fall.

"Don't cry. You knew I'd find you. You know I'll always protect you."

You sobbed, head falling forward as you grieved the loss of freedom. He knew how anxious you were, and he knew how much you hated losing that which you held dear, but your will was no match for his own. His will had circumvented that of Amphoreus' creator, creating thirty million cycles and launching a new Deliverer into this Era Nova. How could you possibly oppose him?

He wrapped his arms around you and held you to his chest, rubbing your back in soothing motions. He cruelly killed his comrades and stole their coreflames millions of times, and yet he always remembered kindness with you. Well, at least some of it. Never enough to allow you your freedom. His head tilted as he pressed his face into your hair and kissed it. His eyes flashed from gold to blue momentarily.

"You're safe now. I'm here. You don't need to fear anything anymore."

He pulled you away and leaned down to kiss you. He tasted as sweet as always. You found your grief quelled by his kiss. There was no emptiness when he was around, only him filling the space, filling your mind. It was always when he left that you suffered, misery swallowing you like a cold riptide, dragging you out to sea.

Still, he was the source of your suffering. You would never forget that. But he would never accept your defiance. You learned that giving in felt better than drowning.

He kissed your cheek, licking his lips of the salt of your tears. A bittersweet flavor.

"It's time to go back."

His previous soothing was for naught as fear overwhelmed you. You cried and sobbed and gripped at his torn flesh, hard as stone and oozing with golden blood.

"No! No, please... I beg of you! I can't go back to that lightless place!"

He caressed your neck. You wanted to run.

"Then I'll steal the stars to light it. You'll be safe," he chided.

You screamed in rage.

"I don't want to be safe! I want to be free!"

Phainon paused. His eyes darkened to the color of a low flame. Their blue made you remember the morning sky of Aedes Elysiae, that dawn you were always eager to greet. The birds would have minutes yet to sleep, quiet hanging in the air, but the scarabs would crawl out of the earth to watch the sunrise with you. And then, as the sun rose out of the horizon, a new cycle of sun and moon would begin, one chasing the other; a new day would begin.

"For once, I'll reason with you. After all, I've seen how you've prospered this time. But if you can't convince me, then you know what I must do."

You knew it was a lie. He already made up his mind, but he always gave you the illusion of choice, the ability to hope. Perhaps it was his way of keeping you sane, of keeping your mind intact. Unfortunately, it had only served as a cruel reminder that the Moon may eclipse the Sun, but without it, it would always lie in darkness.

Deep down, acceptance would find a way to twist your will to his favor. It was always easier to give in to his warmth.

Love made fools of you and him.

And so, you foolishly listed your reasons to stay in this doomed timeline, the possible last Era Nova before the true one came to be.

"I want to see it with my own eyes. I want to be a part of that history again. I don't care if it takes another thirty million cycles!"

"It won't," he said assuredly.

You wanted to hit him. You couldn't find the words to refute him because in your gut, you knew he was right.

He gazed down at you impassively.

"But I need to make sure you're safe until that day comes. When the true Era Nova begins."

It was the same excuse as always. You couldn't remember how many times you've heard it.

The final pin was in place, and the butterfly would fly no more. He was resolved to keep you bound to him. You wouldn't mind if it weren't for the loneliness eating at your sanity.

He seemed to read your mind for he said, "Don't worry, my beloved. I have found a way to make time move differently there. I don't want to leave you alone, but when I must, time will pass quickly. Just wait for a few breaths until I return."

You wanted to believe him if only for the peace of mind. You could never again be of sound mind, but neither could he. The cracks in his flesh were proof of his fate, and the cracks in your willpower were proof of yours.

You quietly lowered your eyes.

His own returned to the color of melting gold.

"Come. Do not bid farewell. All will be well in time, and then we'll return. I'll see to it."

He pulled you closer and tore his blade into the air, ripping it open like a wound to reveal the dark passage to your prison. Golden threads latched onto the seams, futilely trying to close the rift. A shout called from the end of the hallway. Mydei had returned, this time with Aglaea and her Garmentmaker. A flash of black and blue whizzed past you. Cipher pounced at Phainon, no recognition in her eyes whatsoever. He lifted a steely hand and knocked her down in one movement.

Mydei bellowed your name as he rushed forward with the Garmentmaker. Phainon lifted you through the rift and pulled the threads taught until they snapped back and closed the fissure for him. Then, in his arms, he carried you forward into that familiar dead space.

By the time Hysilens and Castorice had made it to the scene, you were long gone. Aglaea's head was held low. Cipher had proclaimed vengeance and clawed at the place the rift was, driven by an animalistic urge to destroy. Only Mydei stood motionless, staring in deep thought, trying to remember why your kidnapper's face felt so familiar.

When they once again ascended to the main levels of the building, the bright sky of Okhema made each one of them flinch.

The shade of blue mocked them.

[fish-18]

for your ahem, collecting the amohoreus characters like pokemon au, imagine reader buying a cat exercise wheel for cat phainon :3 after seeing all those cat videos of cats going WHEEEEE on the wheel, wanting to get lil mr blue balls to do more exercise :3 hehehhe

Haha cat excise wheel for our almost fat blue car😂 could be read as part 2 of this ask

Imagine:

After that zoomie incident, you still haven’t surrendered in trying to make Blue exercise at least. So when you saw a cat exercise wheel on sale online, you bought it immediately.

Imagine the surprise on Phainon’s face when you excitedly showed him his so-called new toy. A death machine is what he saw because you want him to what now?

You immediately place him and encouraged him to run, cheerfully saying his name on the sidelines while you also took Mydei and Tribios for more moral support.

Moral support? More on embarrassing supporters. He can see Mydei’s growing smirk as you keep encouraging him to run. Lady Tribios may have done it with good intentions, but Mydei definitely likes to watch him feel embarrassed.

Where did you even get these ideas in the first place?! Your concern are deeply appreciated but please for the love of the Titans, stop making him do weird things!

“Go Snowy! Show them how fast you can run!”

Taglist: @speedycoffeedelight @kiransalt @sunsethw4 @wispfish @syntaxandpi @hoo-hoo @aerisevx @wixsvem @reminiscingthesea @hquntinghunter @n8mareee @larettajudith @vashyuu @superbfuryfest @shio225 @line-viper @hiqhkey @fuji-sen @takeyomikamakura @raaawwwr @hoshinosama @shonwithnohope @naOyak1 @whatamoodhoney @violetisreadinghush @shio225 @blushho @bloodrrose @kazudare @monoclesnapple @elymint @lovesickdaydreamss @mangooes @ra404 @knufd @shiholyn @toyomittsuu @O-uchi @redheadedsilly @ofcdimi @wegottastayfocus @dreamyhazx @vskhn016 @fish-18

[fish-18]

Three summers ago, your childhood best friend Phainon went up the mountain and came back a different person. Now you know why. What came back wasn't him at all.

Yan! Eldritch horror Phainon (Khaslana) x reader; wc: 8.4k

tw: depictions of unhealthy/toxic relationships, mental health problems, body horror, gore, non-consensual acts, etc. nothing explicit (as of yet (⁠~⁠￣⁠³⁠￣⁠)⁠~), all characters are 18+, mdni.

note: sorry it took me so long to post! Eldritch horror au has finally evolved into a full-fledged writing shit post (⁠・⁠∀⁠・⁠). Btw, it's based on this post here. Super nervous about posting this, I hope I haven't fucked it up. Let's all love Phainon/ Khaslana (⁠●⁠♡⁠∀⁠♡⁠) and enjoy my artistic slop.

In the tongue of old, in ancient texts, and upon the desecrated statues corroded with time around abandoned temples, HE was called Khaslana– the bearer of the primordial burden. 

HE was called Dawn Bringer when he brought about the first rays of warm sunlight over the shadowed lands. HE was named the Sun General when he rode upon his chariot to strike down the monsters, a band of heroes following him along on this long crusade against the tide. HE was worshiped as the god of worldbearing when he offered up his body to the old gods, asking for everlasting dawn to shine upon the broken lands. 

Village elders, their eyes lined with crow’s feet and mouths full of stories, told many tales with the children of the village in the shared warmth of bonfires, all of them reverent and still devoted to a deity who no longer shouldered the dawn. HE had long since given it to the heavens and now slept beneath the earth, a well-deserved rest that no mortal could dare disturb; that is what they told the children when the days spent tilling the fields were too long.

His dad, Hieronymus, on the other hand, was a man with scars etched into his eyes that even a child like you could see, and spoke of the stories you had heard since birth as if they were facts, not fiction —a truth that all but he were deluded about. He shared the same blue eyes as his son, a clear blue after early sunrise, or like the calm waters of the creak where you both used to go swimming. Yet his eyes were duller, heavy with a burden, the weight of it sagging his broad shoulders. 

He once sat you both down one night behind their backyard, a small fire was lit to keep you all warm, as if both of you weren't already swaddled with four layers of warm clothes at his mother’s insistence. 

 Phainon didn't handle the cold well. His hands would always become cold and red come winter, his cheeks full of fat resembling little ripe tomatoes that you would tease him relentlessly for whilst attempting to squish them. It was one of the few things you would miss, one of the few things he would shed, like a cicada molting out of its skin on a hot summer day.

“Khaslana, throughout the ages, has favoured our family the most in the village.” His dad’s voice was gravelly, the air choked with the scent of cigarette smoke, and unusually quiet that night, as if he were sharing a well-guarded secret under the curtain of stars —a secret not meant for any ears to hear. Especially yours.

“Why Phainon's family, Unca?” You had asked, curious eyes gazing at his ember-lit face. 

He had smiled, his face lined with more scars, more burden. “That's because we give him the biggest offerings, the biggest prayers. Which none of the other villagers do. That's why we get more gifts.” 

“So, Khaslana is like Santa?”

“No, dummy,” Phainon had said, bonking you on the head with the stick he roasted his marshmallows with. “Khaslana is real, Santa is not.”

“Santa isn't real?!” For a nine-year-old, it was quite a devastating revelation. 

His dad had laughed while he ruffled a bird’s nest out of your carefully pinned hair, glancing at his son in shared amusement. “Don't listen to Phainon, (name). Santa is real, but he only gives gifts to good children,” he had explained carefully for you. “Khaslana, though, is a being that simply favours our family more because we are their best worshippers.” 

You looked at him, a man who had fed you more sweets than you were allowed to have, the dad of your best friend, and another parental figure, and held his words like they were as precious as the star hung above them. “So, if I also give them a big offering, will I also get a gift?” 

He looked at you after those words left your mouth, keeping silence like a vigil for a good while before he burst out laughing, clutching his sides. You had seen his dad do pretty weird stuff after drinking a few too many cups, but his laugh never felt hollow, so empty that it made you look at Phainon for answers. 

He was mirroring your confused expression, his head tilted to your side as well.

His dad finally stopped laughing, but that smile, that stretched, forced smile never left his face, when he said those words that now haunt you in your dreams– “You can, if you want, kiddo. But better come up with a good offering, our lord does get quite lonely up there. He might come and steal you away as a bride if you don't hurry.” 

You never could ask what he meant, why his words felt like a bad prophecy. 

Phainon's dad would later turn up dead, his head missing, a year after that conversation, and in the same spot, Phainon would be found five years later, and not quite himself either. 

But you wouldn't know that until three years have passed, that your best friend’s warm body has long since gone cold.

You wake feeling hot, beads of sweat accumulating and rolling down your forehead. The air conditioning was set to the lowest setting all night, yet you woke up with your t-shirt wet, as if you had taken a swim in the river. You run a hand over your sweaty face. 

The sun has broken in the dawn, the first rays of light rushing through the sheer blinds. The floral scent of mosquito repellent you had lit the previous night still lingers in your room. Gravity pulls you back down, your head cushioned by pillows that don’t feel quite right. You haven’t been able to sleep in your bed since that day, after all. Those golden, frigid, inhuman eyes follow you everywhere you are, even the sanctuary of dreams isn’t spared from it. Either that or you would be dragged back into the cruel torment of bygone memories and wake up crying for his gentle blue irises that you will not gaze into again. 

Two hours pass, and by then the sun has already stretched its arms towards all of the village. Your mother calls you down for breakfast, along with the reminder that you are going to be late for school. Sitting up in the bedroll on the floor, you stare at your shaking hands. 

You cannot keep dodging him. He has already been courteous enough not to take it further than he could have the last time you saw him. That windless night, your room blanketed in cold darkness, the suffocation pressing into your ribs, and the heat of his paranoia and rage at your fear for him. How could you remain calm when the skin that you were intimately familiar with, as if it were your own, turned to dust at your frightened touch, cracks forming to reveal molten gold so hot that it still burns whenever you think of it? 

Still, you do not know what caused him to pause mid assault. You only remember through the haze of evaporating tears the flicker of soft blue that passed beneath the tyranny of gold, his boiling hands hovering with a lag like an overclocking operating system. He had let you scurry out of his scalding hold, your back pressing against the wall as you gawked, mouth open, when he returned to human. 

 The moonlight had caressed his blonde hair with a silken ivory touch, and his eyes had faded to a blue darker than black, a chasm with its maw open in a lure. His face never betrayed any emotion, any signs of Phainon were buried deep if they were there, but he only showed you the cold indifference of a silent, petulant god to whom you had done a great disservice.

Do not run. He spoke in a voice belonging neither to a man nor a woman, and it had coalesced into a single haunting melody too inhuman to comprehend.

But the intention behind his words was clear, if not apparent– you will not get a second chance. 

So, you do what your weary, sleep-deprived mind can allow. You freshen up, iron your shirt, pack your bag, and get ready for school like it's any other ordinary day. 

Phainon is standing at the entrance, chatting with your mother, when you leave the dining room with the food untouched. His eyes immediately find yours, cornflower blue, not molten gold, and the smile he gives you almost makes you run back to your room. Almost.

“What took you so long?” she chides you lightly as she smacks your arm. “Do you know how long Phainon has been waiting?” It's not him, though, you want to answer, but remain silent. 

 He laughs in the polite way that Phainon did, his mimicry perfect to the finest detail. “It's okay, Auntie, I am used to waiting for her.” His eyes are especially bright today, seizing you up from the threshold of your house, not coming in but not leaving either. He is waiting for permission, one that you aren't happy to give. “Aren't I?”

You smile back, your facial muscles taut. “I am sorry. I overslept.” 

You pick up your shoes and throw your mother a glance. She is looking at you, her eyes full of apprehension and unsaid worries she has kept since you locked yourself away for the entire week. You don't want to hear them right now. You are sure to break apart under her gentle caress. 

“I will be back late,” is all you say before you grab his all too warm, familiar hand in your home and rush out of the house like it has caught fire. 

His touch on you, his fingers digging selfishly at the morsel of skin, burns with agony, with barely held possession, scraping at your insides and filling them with hot lava. 

The door shuts behind you two, and you both stand under the scrutiny of the sun. You break away first, and his hand comes after you with longing, only to retract back when he catches the poorly concealed melancholy on your face. 

“....I am sorry,” Phainon’s apology is desperate, curled out of his chest like smoke. You are sure he would bare his heart for you, the organ thumping bloody in his hands, just to prove how sorry he is. It's just you don't know whether it would be his heart or the body he had so casually turned into his home. But it's not his heart that you want.

“Let's get going,” you answer, already taking out your bike from its spot. 

You both remain silent the rest of the way, the sweet scent of wheat and summer dancing in the air. You almost cry how much it smells like him, and how much you wish you could smell it again. A single tear glides away with the smothering wind as if it were never there. 

You bike your way to school with Phainon behind you on his cycle.

Like it's any other day.

“Thank Oronyx, you are still alive!” It's not the first thing that came to mind when you thought about how you would be received, but it isn't off the mark either. 

Cyrene rushed the minute she saw you parking your bike in the rack. Her bright pink hair seems almost orange under the morning sun as she jumps at the opportunity to smash you into a hug. Her hugs have always been tight, but this time, they're tighter, like a noose hung around your neck, ready to break it with a single tug.  

Phainon stays behind you, close, watching, his eyes sharpening at every breath, every tremble, every moment of your body, like he is attuned to it. 

“Cyrene. Can't. breathe.” You paw at her arms in surrender, and she mournfully lets you go as she entwines her arms together with you, her eyes alight and blue. She starts walking towards the classrooms, Phainon following closely behind.

“It's just not the same without you here! And this big oaf was pouty all week,” she glares at him from her shoulder with a moue. It surprises you when he doesn't talk back; his expression remains unmoving and calm. “Talk about being cold. Forget about talking, he wouldn't even pick up my calls or meet me after class. He even refused when I said that we should visit you at your house together.” 

That's because he already gave me a visit before he could ask you; he won't take it well if you say all of this. You remain quiet, your lips pressed together in a fake smile, your eyes anywhere where you couldn't catch his, and say a hasty ‘bye’ to her when you reach your and Phainon's class. 

Hyacine spots you first and waves enthusiastically from your desk. Around her, Castorice and Cipher also turn around to see you entering the class, surprise and relief evident on their faces. 

“You're back!” Her pink pigtails are especially curly today, and they bounce in her shared positivity when she comes to hug you, too. It's like you have won a war against cancer rather than the supposed cold that you were nursing. 

“Thought we lost you for good, kid,” Cipher says, making her voice scratchy like an old man’s, as she pats your shoulder with a strong hand. “It's been tough without you here. Look at the mess you left me to work with!”

“I have only been gone for a week …” you say with exasperation. Castorice remains behind them both, but the smile she gives you says enough; she is relieved that you are okay. You smile back, glad for the non-dramatic welcome you got from at least one sane person. 

“Do you know how worried we were when you didn't pick up our calls? Little Ica has been depressed all week, not seeing their favourite person.” Hyacine pushes her white, iridescent, giant plush key chain that she has been lugging around since elementary school in your face. Cipher and Castorice both nod in affirmation. You mumble a small ‘sorry’ to both Little Ica and the others as you look away from them in guilt. 

You could have answered their calls or their messages if they weren't buried under the massive pile of missed calls and unopened voice messages. Once, you made the mistake of picking up a random call after making sure it wasn't his number, only to be met with a static so deafening that you thought your eardrums would bleed. Even the texts, all from numbers you didn’t know, were becoming more nonsensical, bizarre, and downright chilling, so you threw your phone straight at the wall, causing it to break. 

Of course, you cannot, in good conscience, and for personal safety, say all of that.

A warm hand pulls you towards them, your head knocking against his hard chest. “Okay, okay. Enough with the questions.” Phainon says blithely while pushing away the plush toy from your face. Jealous bastard. “She had one common cold, and now she is fine. Can't we leave it at that?”

Cipher scoffs, her arms folded in front of her. “Says the one mopping around like a child who lost his mommy.” 

Phainon shrugs, a small grin playing on his lips, but the warm fingers on your shoulders that are tightening ever so slightly say otherwise. “Well, she is back now.” 

“Thank god for that! Hey-” Cipher’s snickers usually are a signal that she is up to no good, but her timing this time couldn't be any more wrong. She comes up behind you, her feet swift as ever, and grabs you, your back hitting her. The immediate glare you see light up in his eyes makes you panic. She throws her arm over your shoulder, her smirk still not gone as she pushes her face near your ears as if she was spilling some classified government secrets. 

“Did you know? The class prez even tanked his test last week! His mom came all the way for a chat with the teacher too. Talk about being down bad–” 

“That's enough, Cipher.” The voice, the freezing cold voice of his suddenly transports you back into your room, hiding in a corner in your blanket, only to be wrenched out of them to cower under his glaring radiance. 

Similar to how he grabs your hand right now, still too warm to be human, as he pulls you back towards him. Where you belong. 

“Don't forget she is still sick. Let's get back to our seats, and you, back to your class. Homeroom is in three.” 

Cipher gives an exaggerated sigh, it doesn't seem like she picked up on Phainon’s anger, and says ‘yes, prez!’ before giving him a mock salute. She walks out of the class while pulling up her cat-eared hood over her pale hair. 

Hyacine goes after her with a promise to save a seat for you during lunch. Castorice, the only member of the group in your class, stares at you for a second longer than necessary, as if she has something to say. 

She folds her gloved hands in front of her tightly, her gentle eyes downcast under someone's fiery gaze, and walks to the front row where her seat is without a word. 

I’ll have to talk with her later, you think as you sit and ready yourself for another gruelling school day. 

You cannot do this. 

It's too much for your dumb human brain to tolerate– the constant eye contact with your back, sending messages in class through the ancient art of chits, pulling up by your desk after every bell, smiling that cold, stupid, smile full of teeth–

The contents of your empty stomach are expelled promptly from your body. You wipe the bile messily from your lips. Your legs feel numb in the cold, dirty washroom stall, and you cannot get them to pull you up without thinking of going back to class. To him. 

It's insane, no matter how you put it, no matter how much you decorate it with sparkles and affirmative words– he isn't your Phainon. 

He is gone, has been gone for three damn years, and you only got to know by pure coincidence, or you could say late intuition. Phainon had played Phainon so well, the parallelism so remarkable that it guts you even more that no one else knows this terrible secret, this horrifying truth, maybe except you.

 Phainon went to the mountain those three summers ago, and he stayed there, rotting and forgotten in that forest, his insides getting chewed on by the forest and its ilk, and what came back was– 

What is he exactly? 

Phainon looks like him, talks like him, moves like him, but even if you change the stuffing of the teddy bear from cotton to wool, that doesn't mean that it's the same teddy bear as before. Its insides are completely different. Replacing them and calling it the same is an ill-mannered joke. 

A cruel joke. 

A knock comes on the door, and you jolt at the sudden noise. When you don't answer, a knock comes again, this time in threes. 

It cannot be him….right? Doesn't he have general boundaries and basic decency, or did he come to check since you said five minutes but took ten? 

A voice comes from the other side, soft and delicate in its cadence, and it's a voice you know all too well.

 “It's me, (name).” Castorice. You almost cry happy tears at how relieved you feel, how light you feel that it's not him standing behind that door with that look plastered on his face. 

You quickly open the door and see her standing there, about to knock again. She looks surprised, her bright lilac eyes widened, but not in alarm. It is gone as a small smile graces her face. “You didn't look too good,” Castorice says as she pulls out a tablet and a water bottle, which you take kindly from her hands. 

You can count on Castorice to come through when you are in a bind. She always has been kind and warm, even when she has kept some marginal distance from others; her hands have never been bereft of her purple gloves. She looks at you, her eyes assessing, both in worry and apprehension, as you chug as much water as you can from the bottle. 

When you finish, you know she is going to ask the most dreaded question you have been waiting for the whole day– “Is everything okay?” 

Your throat constricts, yet you answer, “Y-yeah, why do you ask?” 

“Because you look too pale. Also…” she looks away, her lips playing with the words resting on her tongue. “Phainon is strange today.” 

“Strange?”

Castorice nods, her gloved hand playing with the wisps of her bangs.“Yes, like the air around him has gone cold. Dead, even. He was fine until a week ago, before you got sick, but now it's like he has become a different person. Hyacine feels it too.” 

She looks straight at you, and you feel all strength leaving your body when you meet her eyes. “Do you know anything about this?” 

Do you? How can you tell that the Phainon has never been fine, that the thing she calls ‘Phainon’ has been wearing his skin and deceiving her, and everyone else, for three years? How do you tell her that the last time you ever saw him was the day when the summer was at its peak, and he was determined to go, no matter how many times you tried to dissuade him? That you failed to stop him, his unfair demise, just like with–

No, you do not know anything. You are the last person who does. You couldn't even tell that he wasn't who you thought he was. 

You shake your head, your fingers curling on the inside of your palm, you hope to draw blood. It doesn't sting as you hoped it would. “No, I don't.” 

You emerge just before the lunch bell is about to ring, Castorice has long since gone back to class, and you know that you will find him standing, waiting, like a pup waiting for his master, like he has been doing for the past three years. 

Phainon looks way too comfortable standing there, leaning against the windows, but you can tell by the strained movement of his arms and his limbs as he walks towards you, the balls of his feet skidding against the floor, that he is restraining himself. That is something he has in spades.

“You were in there for quite a while,” he says, his voice casual. “Everything okay?”

You nod, staring at his school shoes. 

“Do you need anything? Water, snacks, medicine? Do you need me to take you to the infirmary?” 

“No,” you start to walk towards the class when he suddenly grabs your arm, warm and foreign, your skin feels raw with fear. Phainon lets go when he sees the expression carved on your face, his brows knitting in displeasure. “I-I am sorry. I was a bit too hasty,” he lets go of your arm and instead latches onto your shirt, but it doesn't make it any better. “Please, don't be mad. Please don't hate me.” 

I could never hate you. You feel appalled at how easily such a thought comes to you. 

It's instinctual, not something you have control over. There couldn't be a single day, or a single second, where you could feel genuine hatred for the one person you have loved selflessly for years and years, and you don't think you will stop now. 

Even if it's not him? You remain quiet, to both him and the annoying voice in your head. 

“Stop stretching out my shirt,” you try to swat him off, but he clings to you like a damn mosquito. After a few minutes, when you have come to realise that he will not let you go or leave, you sigh for the hundredth time, as all life force leaves your beaten body. It's agitating how they both behave the same way and also don't. 

“Fine,” you say, and his ears perk up. “I don't hate you. Happy now?” 

“Very,” he says. The boyish grin on his face makes you ill. With what, you don't wish to elaborate or have knowledge of it.

He lets go of your shirt, and you begin to smooth it out, but it doesn't seem like the conversation is over. “Hey, let's go to the fields after school,” Phainon says suddenly. “I have something to show you.” 

Is there something you forgot to show me last time? You think cynically but answer him anyway, “Okay.”

It’s not like he will take no for an answer. You have seen what happens, and you can only push his capriciousness so far.

His smile is so big that it splits his face in half, and his eyes shine with a deep blue (it feels so wrong) when he tugs you by the arm, leading you back to class. 

Or to your slaughter upon the altar. There isn't much difference left between the two. 

You let yourself be led.

Five years have passed since you last visited the shack. It was a storage unit for grains before Phainon’s dad repurposed it as a playhouse for the three of you. 

You, Cyrene, and Phainon have always played in the fields, sometimes getting lost in them as they were as tall as trees when you were little. The shack was a small respite from the country life, a hidden nook for the three of you to play, sleep, and eat to your heart's content. You remember one time staying the night in the shack for a sleepover and getting bitten all over by mosquitoes. The sobs you and the other two let out when you found each other pocked with red marks still brings out a snicker from you.

Why did we stop coming here? You think about it as Phainon leads you, his hand in a tight grasp with yours. Maybe you will ask Cyrene later. You wanted to invite her too, as you were still afraid to be alone with him for more than a few seconds longer than necessary, but no matter how hard you looked, you couldn't find one trace of her. 

“Just a bit more,” he says, as he moves stray ears of wheat from his view. All around you is a golden sea, endless and sprawling. Phainon’s family has owned this land since the olden days when the village was established, and is one of the first residents.  

Past the fields, you see the big old tree, its canopy casting a big shadow across a patch of land, where, under its embrace, there is one piece of childhood memory you haven’t visited in a long time.

The shack is just as you had left it. Old, dusty, dilapidated, with the roof caving in, and several patches of wild weeds and grass grow around it. Although it looks like the roof has been recently patched. 

“We are here!” He announced, looking back at you expectantly. “I took some liberties with remodeling the place a bit. Don't worry if it looks a bit shabby on the outside, it's super nice and cozy inside.” 

Phainon seems proud as he tells you, and all you can think of is how he has stained another cherished memory of yours with his burning hands. 

Calm down, you scold yourself. It's not a big deal. 

Yeah, no big deal, it's just a tiny little hovel where you used to play and spend time with Phainon until he went and died on that hill. 

Phainon gingerly pushes you inside the cramped shack. Maybe when he took that creative liberty, he didn't realise that the body he had stolen wasn't as small as it should have been to fit. Nonetheless, he persists, and so do you, and you both collapse on a mattress that wasn't there before when you last visited. 

Phainon snorts while cushioning your fall, a strong arm balancing your back. “Sorry, I didn't realise this place had become so small.” You push away from him immediately, turning your face to hide the sudden, growing heat. 

“It’s because we have grown bigger, stupid,” you say, and catch yourself immediately regretting it. But Phainon doesn’t seem to mind or care.

“Yeah, you are right,” Phainon says. He touches the old stack of comic books sitting near him, his eyes narrowing with wistfulness that shouldn’t be there. 

Then, all of a sudden, without warning, he is shedding his school shirt. Your eyes widen when he throws it somewhere like it's a ball. “What are you doing?!” You scream, flabbergasted by his nonchalance. 

Phainon raises an eyebrow, “What? It is hot in here.”

You don't have a retort for that. It is actually hot, sweltering even, and mid-day has long since passed. “S-still! You shouldn't do that!” 

“So you want me to die from the heat? Fine, I'll listen and stand in the sun until it melts me away like wax.”

“What are you even saying? As if you aren't hot enough as it is.” 

It's too late to take it back. The context is apparent to you both, yet the devilish smirk that appears on his face as the skin beneath his eyes crinkle in mischief, you know you have screwed up. Big time. 

“To think I could make you say something pervy like that,” he hides his face behind his palm, but it flares up your embarrassment even further. 

“Y-you know what I meant! Stop twisting the words.” 

“I am not twisting. If anything, you are twisting my heart saying things like that,” that damn bastard is even coquettishly fluttering his lashes like some maiden in love. You smack him hard with your bag, and he laughs. It's the same cheerful, sonorous laugh you have been hearing for the past eleven years, but hearing it now, again, is strange. Phainon keeps saying ‘stop’ in between broken barks of laughter, and in the end you decide to end your siege by throwing back his crumpled shirt in his face. 

“Cover yourself, you moron,” you say when he grabs the thrown shirt with one hand. He acquiesces, wordlessly wearing back the shirt but leaving the buttons opened, the shadow of a smile still on his lips. A golden sun peaks from his neck, but is covered when he tugs on the collar.

The memory of you first seeing the tattoo floods your mind. He had just graduated from middle school, and his white-mess of a hair was shorter back then. He had worn turtle necks all week before you threatened to strip him bare in front of the entire school if he didn’t fess up. You also remember how you had felt when he stretched his pale neck out for you to see the inking closely. Maybe he was red in the face, maybe you had something warm deep in your stomach pounding madly in its cage, but you distinctly remember him staring down at you, his white lashes fluttering softly against his cheeks. You also remember trying to hold yourself from bursting when his mom beat the hell out of him with her sandals for getting inked. 

“Have you lost your mind?! Getting a tattoo before entering high school, and on the neck of all places?!” You certainly did lose your mind when he tearily apologised to her, vowing to never let any needle touch his skin again. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have other ways of driving the poor woman mad. 

You tear yourself away from Phainon to look around the place.

 Many things have changed, and many things have been replaced. Toys that Phainon had carved from wood and lined along the broken window are still there. The astral chart Cyrene had stuck on the wall, drawn with a broken blue crayon on paper, has yellowed beyond recognition. The three of you used to stargaze all night when Phainon had developed a sudden obsession with it after reading about it in a comic. Cyrene had sat him down and carefully mapped each one on a piece of paper while she pointed them out from their heavenly abode. 

You notice the small trunk sitting underneath it, and you immediately gravitate towards it. 

It was as Cyrene had left it, the old box with its edges dented and scarred, like an ancient treasure finally unearthed. You take it with shaky fingers (you don't know why they are shaking), and open it after blowing off the dust. Inside, along with several cheap romance novels, neatly stacked in a corner, are the hand-painted oracle cards Cyrene had made all those years ago. 

“Hmm, what are those?” you almost shriek in horror at the closeness of his voice. Phainon scoots beside you and throws you a confused look as he juts his chin towards the deck in your hands. 

“You …. don’t remember?” you ask cautiously, slowly levelling your breathing. 

Phainon shakes his head. “Not really. They do look familiar, though.” 

You spread them out on the mattress as he looks curiously at each card. Everything that Cyrene touched always glowed with radiance; such is her talent that even after almost a decade, they still look the same as the day they were painted. She used cheap paper and those chalky paints that she got from the convenience store three miles from your village. How can someone’s hands be this blessed? She would probably be happy that you managed to recover them since they were thought to be lost forever. 

“These cards are really pretty,” Phainon says as he picks up a card to admire it up close. “Did you make them?”

“No, Cyrene did.” The admission chokes you up a little. 

Phainon would have remembered them, but it doesn't seem like this imposter does. He stares at you, his expression unreadable, and your mouth goes dry. It unnerves you more when he smiles and says, “Is there anything else in there?”

You blink, pushing away the unease. “No, just some romance novels.” 

“Oh, maybe we could read some together!” he takes out one book after another; he is careful with their fragile binding as he inspects the dust-covered novels. You have half a mind to remind him that Phainon never liked those kinds of novels. He always gagged when Cyrene read them while giggling at a particular romantic scene; she is romantic at heart after all. Phainon used to call her ‘childish’ and ‘immature’ for reading such novels while he hypocritically gravitated towards action-packed adventure novels featuring heroes who, after overcoming several adversities, always triumphed at the end. Talk about the kettle calling the pot black. 

“Hey, look! I found something,” Phainon holds up a book, coincidentally: the book that Phaion hated the most, in front of you like some trophy. “Can we read this together?” 

You want to laugh. “Sure,” you say as Phainon makes space for you.

Time passes with each turn of the page. You can recite each word of the novel by heart, that is how much love you and your other best friend shared for this book. Yet, watching the person who, in his childhood, swore off romance novels like a plague, reading every word with child-like wonder squeezes your heart painfully. 

“Phainon,” he stills beside you when you speak his name. You haven’t said it since that night, and your face burns with the warmth of its remembrance. 

You see him look at you, his fluffy white hair sticking to his sweaty forehead, his cerulean eyes blown wide but never gold, and he takes in deep breaths, his attention solely on you. “Yeah?” 

“Did … the things you said, back then…” You shouldn’t ask, you cannot ask, but the memory of this creature's admission, the truth he laid bare to you in a paranoid frenzy, haunts you every time you stare into his eyes and find him gone.

(“He died thinking about you, maybe that's what made me love you too.”)

“Was it all true?”

Somehow it feels like all breathable air has been sucked out from this place. You hold his stare, and your breath, while you wait for any emotion to pass by his neutral facade. “Yes,” he says it with flourishing finality, with self-assured confidence that maims you in your uncomfortable seat. 

“What all I said that night, it's all true.” 

The sun sets, and he takes you back home. 

“Thank you… for coming with me,” he looks so much like him underneath the street lamp, standing there in front of your door, so big and tall, and meek like the boy you used to run after. “I didn't think you would agree.” 

There is a lot you could say, a lot you want to say, there are questions that demand to be answered, as cruel as they may be. But all you do is smile at him and tell him to get back home, as it's getting late.

The cicadas chirp as loud as ever, louder than they are supposed to. 

I hate summer, you think when you see Phainon’s retreating figure from your porch becoming smaller and smaller, fading away as the sun is swallowed by night. 

The countryside isn’t as romantic and enchanting as the influencers on the internet might make it out to be. Not when you have to paddle three goddamn miles just to get a decent cup of ice cream from a 7-Eleven in this sweltering heat. 

But the allure of a sweet treat doesn't fix your sour mood when you are armed with a grocery list that you aren't sure you can haul by yourself. Why did you let yourself be caught on one Phainon free day? And where is Phainon when you need his absurd muscular strength? 

But it's not ‘Phainon’ that you are talking about, is it? You want to stomp on the intrinsic voice in your head. You have enough things to worry about. 

The cart isn't even half filled with the list items when you spot something in the snacks aisle. It's the brand of cookies that Phainon liked, those teeth-rotting baked lumps of sugar that he could munch on all day if he could. There is a limited edition sale promoting some collab with an obscure anime you haven't heard of. 

Does ‘he’ like these? You think as you put them in your cart without a single thought. Phainon can eat anything, you have noticed, and is fast about it too, licking his plate off the remaining crumbs when you last visited his place for dinner. Maybe he has a sweet tooth as well. You hope he does. 

You pull up at the billing counter and an exhausted, sleep-deprived guy greets you in a robotic tone like he couldn't care less if you left with your stuff without paying. He looks new because you know all the kids your age who come to school, since there is only one in the entire district. His mess of dyed blonde and red hair is tied in an even messier bun, his sun-tanned skin complementing such sloppiness. The worn-out merch t-shirt he wears is too tight for his body, his crimson tattooed biceps peeking out as he scans the bar code languidly. This explains why there has been an influx of female clientele as of late. 

He is partway through finishing when you feel the pinpricks of a stare you are all too familiar with. You glance back furtively and find two middle-aged women, both from your village, conversing near the drink aisle with their shopping carts filled to the brim. They think they are being sneaky, but you know they are looking at you. 

You can also tell that they are talking about you and what their conversation topic might be. It's all that the adults with too much free time can talk about– that and those unsolved murders that still pop up from here and there. 

Their gazes are becoming bolder, their whispers becoming loud enough to scream in your ears. Their voice drones out, and you find yourself back in the chair of your therapist’s office, where you were an hour or so ago. 

(You always expected a shrink’s area of practice to be immaculate. Beige or white walls, potted succulents adorning the built-in shelves, and a long couch where anyone could fall asleep before reciting why their life sucks while an older man with a graying moustache pens everything on a clipboard, the tiniest of details jotted upon his inferences. 

But this place isn't like that. It's above a mom-and-pop noodle shop, the smell of seafood and vinegar tickling both your nose and stomach. An older lady, no more than fifty, sits on a ratty couch opposite you, asking preliminary questions that she asks before every session, and you keep your eyes trained on the splotch of stain behind her on the wall in the shape of a star while answering her questions. 

What star would it be if you had to guess? Vega? Sirius? Or Betelguese? Maybe you could ask Cyrene later.

Your mouth moves in tandem with your brain, speaking when you can or humming when you can't or don't want to talk. If you were back in the city, in Okhema, from where you had shifted to this small farming village almost eleven years ago, it wouldn't be strange for a kid your age to go to a doctor just to yap about your current mental status and your pressing problems. The elders here don't think the way the city folks do. 

There is a prolonged silence that shouldn't be there. You turn away from the star stain to look at your therapist, who is not amused. She closes her worn diary and sets it over the coffee table you are sure will die if she sets the little thing the wrong way. The table doesn't break, and the sigh she exhales isn't mirthful. 

“I thought we were making progress,” she says quietly, more to herself than you. “You have been regular, but you are not engaging.” 

‘That's because only you thought that,’ you sneer inside while crossing your arms. It's not like you asked to be put here, coming each week for the longest hour of your life just to waste it on pointless drivel. You didn't ask to sit here on this shoddy couch, in a room that stinks like a fish market, only to satisfy your parents with answers they would like (you are sure she is breaking her therapist-client confidentiality, you saw her taking extra money from your dad). 

You have nothing you want to say, and nothing you could say overturns what has already happened. And even if you did say it, she will not believe you, and worse, will tattle to your parents. 

She keeps on talking, and you keep on staring at the stain.)

A heavy thud pulls you out. You look up to see the guy with the golden glare, and the frown he gives is enough reason to run without saying ‘thank you’. You rush out of the store, the bag full of groceries and miscellaneous items that you are sure to be scolded for. 

You don't see her coming from behind you when you unlock your bicycle from its spot. A hand, pale and strong, rests upon your shoulders in a comfort that immediately disarms you and makes you afraid at the same time. 

“You should stop right now,” a voice, smooth and sonorous, comes from behind you. 

You whip your head to see the most gorgeous woman you have ever laid eyes on. She wears a huge trimmed sun hat, the gold spun hair resting beneath the article curling against her blushed cheeks softly. She wears a white and gold dress that looks straight out of a magazine cover, the outfit tailored and form-fitting. She regards you from behind her cat-eyed sunglasses like she has walked out of a runway, taking you in. 

You feel small in your own skin when you question back– “Ummm, err…Stop what?”

“Whatever it is that you are doing with that being,” she says, and you feel like you have stopped breathing. 

She knows? You cannot tell if the voice is incredulous or jovial, but it loops in your mind like an unskippable ad, and you don't like it. 

“I-I think you have the wrong person,” you quickly put your purchase in the basket in front of your cycle. 

The lady chuckles, “It's okay. I know it must sound strange coming from someone you don't even know,” she takes your open hand in hers, her palm pleasantly warm. Comforting. “But trust me when I say this, I can help you.” 

Somehow, you have ended up in a booth inside a local desert shop with the lady. 

She discarded her wide hat when she sat across from you. Not one hair out of place. You need to ask about her hair care routine. But what surprises you more is when she puts her sunglasses on the table and looks at you with eyes that you can only think of as ethereal. 

They are two-toned, glassy, and her faraway gaze suggests her blindness. With the way she carries herself, you couldn't have guessed.

“What would you like?” She asks, already holding up the menu in front of her. 

“It's okay! Y-you don't need to bother with this,” you stammer. 

Behind the laminated cardboard, you cannot tell what expression she wears, but her tone remains neutral. “You aren't bothering me,” she tells you and beckons the waitress over with a wave. “If it were, we would be here having this conversation.” 

Somehow, you feel flushed with shame as if you are helping cover up a crime you had no hand in. The waitress, with her customer-service smile, comes up with a notepad, and the lady is quick to tell both orders. 

Minutes later, an absurd-looking parfait sits in front of you in a huge glass. There is a little flag sitting atop the melting ice cream. You remember the ones you bought and mourn their melted fate and your wallet. 

The lady sips on her coffee, her lipstick pristine after wiping the cream from her lips. “I should introduce myself– my name is Aglaea,” the woman called Aglaea says. “I have just recently moved here and own a small tailor shop just around the corner.” 

She hands out a card, it's in the same gold and white colour scheme, but the name is what knocks your socks off. ‘GARMENTMAKER’ is embossed in elegant gold cursive writing, and you look back and forth between her and the piece of paper with your mouth open. 

It isn't just any small shop, nor is it small by any means. It is one of the most sought-after clothing stores in Okhema with its month-long waiting lists. Normal people can't even afford it with their meager salaries, and she says it's a ‘small shop around the corner’? 

Your bewildered look must have thoroughly amused her as she chuckles, still elegant and demure, her eyes crinkling with mirth. “You seem quite surprised, but that's okay, you can visit whenever you like,” Aglaea says as she winks at you. “Maybe I will give you a discount if you bring any friends over.”

“T-thank you,” is all you can muster up before stuffing it in your pocket. “But, I still don't understand what you meant by that?” 

The suggestion isn't lost on her. She smiles, resting her hands on her lap. “I meant what I said. You should distance yourself from whatever entity that has latched on to you,” she says. “And don't deny it. I think you know better than I about what I am talking about.” 

You do, somewhat. The entity she must be mentioning should be Phainon. There is no one else who comes up in your mind and fills you with dread. “But, how do you know about him?” 

“Ah, seems like I was right in assuming it was someone close to you,” Aglaea remarks. “And, as far as I know, there is a simple explanation for that.” She sits up a bit straighter, her posture still beautiful but there's stiffness in her shoulders that wasn't there before. 

“My eyes are …. special, in some sense.” 

Her glossy blue eyes fall on you and suddenly her story doesn't seem all that crazy. No set of eyes can look like they can make out the material of your very soul. None like Aglaea’s. 

“Long ago, I was in a similar situation just like yours, and somebody who should have died came back,” her eyes rest upon the condensation of your melting treat. “It took me some time and a significant loss to realise that the person I knew had long since gone. But by that time the damage was done…” 

“Is that why your eyes are…?”

She nods, “It isn't complete blindness. I can make sense of the things happening around me, but it's like a fog has spread over my vision.” 

“I-I see. Sorry for bringing it up.” 

“Nonsense,” she waves her hand dismissively. “What's done is done. It's now gone and has left its scars that could heal with time, but it has also left something else,” she tapped underneath her eyes. “I can see things now that shouldn't exist.” 

“‘see things’?” You parrot, and she smiles again. 

“I can tell you more if you are interested,” she says, suddenly standing up, and you follow her, your hands straining not to clutch onto her. She glanced at the analogue clock behind you, hung on the wall. “My apologies, but I have to leave now,” she looks at you apologetically. “We can continue to chat on a different day. My number is on the card, please feel free to use it.” Her concern seems genuine, and the underlying feeling that you get from her peeves your interest. She knows something. 

Aglaea calls your name with soft fondness; her eyes are already hidden behind the glasses again, but you now know that they see more than they let on. “Give me a call when you feel like you need help. I will wait as long as I am able.” 

With that, the elusive lady leaves you in the booth, alone, with your barely touched ice cream. The wafers have softened under the wetness of the ice cream when you take a bite. “It's too sweet,” you think out loud, filling the void she has left behind.

‘Just like Chimera cookies.’ 

[fish-18]

thinking about vampire phainon (p≧w≦q)

summary- you are lost in a forest and uh oh! your phone is out of battery but there is a huge gothic mansion for you andd..there is a huge puppy like vampire?

inspired by @box-artist vampire phainon heh.. drools.. cw- biting, hickeys, clingy ass phainon, suggestive?, good boy phainon, non-canon au and snowy best doggie. and pasta

The rain had been coming down in sheets for hours, and your phone had died somewhere between “you’re fine” and “wait, this path looks weird.”

google maps had given up on your ass.

By the time you stumbled out of the woods, soaked to the bone, there it was—rising out of the fog was a massive, ivy-covered Victorian mansion.

a black wooden mansion with ivy's surrounding the pillars of the house, stained glass windows, and slight accents of white flowers on the house.

Its windows glowed faintly warm against the storm. You peek inside in the hope of getting a glimpse of the inside of the house, but despite the roaring, blinding thunder—you failed to even get a single glimpse of the inside. The only thing in your sight was the glowing colours of the stained glass.

The heavy oak doors groaned as you pushed them open, stepping into a grand, dimly lit hall. Velvet drapes framed tall stained windows, no wonder you couldnt get a glimpse, candlelight flickered across polished wood, and the air smelled faintly of old books and… white roses?

You barely had time to marvel at the sheer size of the place before you feel a large, looming presence behind your back.

The kind that prickles down your spine, locks your knees, makes you aware that you are very much not alone.

You froze. Every horror movie instinct screamed, Don’t turn around.

and of course you turn back.

and…well, not exactly what you expected from the whole “mysterious Victorian mansion” setup.

The man—if you could even call him just a man more than a giant—was huge. Broad shoulders, towering frame, long dark coat draped around him like he’d just stepped out of a reniessance painting. His hair was soft-looking, pale, and a little mussed, his eyes a strange, warm blue that should have been predatory but instead… sparkled?

"A human!! It's been so long since I've seen one! :D"

huh?

"...hi?"

He tilted his head, and for a second, you swore the movement was almost puppy-like.

“You’re drenched,” he said, his voice a deep rumble that carried way too much concern for a stranger. “Oh—wait, don’t tell me. Lost in the woods? Phone died?”

how does he know what a phone was?

Your mind scrambled for a response, but before you could ask him how the hell he knew what a phone was, when he looked like he should be writing poetry by candlelight in 1892. he was already moving, not in a threatening way, but with the kind of eager, bounding energy you’d expect from a golden retriever spotting a tennis ball.

“Come on, come on,” he urged, looping around you in a way that made you feel herded toward the sweeping staircase at the far end of the hall. “You’ll get sick if you stay like that, and don't worry, I'll give you some silver in case you don't feel safe around me D:"

He glanced back over his shoulder, flashing a grin that revealed unmistakably sharp fangs, and you felt a fuzzy feeling in your abdomen.

wait...he has fangs?...sharp fangs? and what did he mean by silver?

holy fuck he's a vampire?? Your legs refused to move. The hall felt bigger now, shadows pressing in, the thunder outside rattling the glass in the stained windows. You swallowed hard, eyes flicking to those fangs again. “I promise I’m nice!” he said quickly, as if sensing your hesitation. His hands came up in an exaggerated surrender pose before he winced. “Oh—wait, maybe that’s not convincing since, uh… y’know.” He tapped one fang sheepishly, then made a sort of awkward grimace-smile combo. “But really, I don’t bite people unless they really deserve it. Or, um… unless they say it’s okay.”

You had no idea what to say to that.

Before you could decide whether to bolt back into the storm or keep staring at him, petrified but not at the same time, he was already shrugging out of his long coat and draping it over your shoulders. The thing was heavy, smelling faintly of rain and that same white-rose scent clinging to the air. It hung almost to your ankles...and it had white fur stuck on it?

As you followed, the sound of your wet shoes squelching against the polished floor echoed embarrassingly loud. He didn’t seem to notice, his attention instead fixed on you like you were the most fascinating thing to have crossed his path in decades or even centuries in this case.

“How long were you out there?” he asked, voice warm with genuine concern. “The forest can get dangerous during storms. You didn’t see the wolves, did you?”

Your steps faltered. “…There are wolves?”

"Uh.. anyways... I'm Phainon!” He thumped a massive hand against his own chest. Your eyes quickly glance at his chest before looking at him dead in the eyes again. “That’s me. What’s your name? :3”

"Hm...How about you earn my name?" You said with a slight smile, feeling a bit more comfortable with this puppy vampire you just met. His blue eyes slightly sink, but then sparkle again, seeing the smile on your face.

"Oooo a challenge!! I accept, human!—three laughs and i'll get your name please"

Before you could agree—or correct him, he was ushering you toward the side of the grand staircase where a set of carved double doors opened into a parlor so absurdly cozy it almost gave you whiplash. A roaring fire in a marble hearth, thick rugs, shelves of old books and even older trinkets… it was all warm glow and soft shadows.

“Sit, sit,” Phainon urged, motioning you toward an armchair that could’ve swallowed you whole. “I’ll get you something warm to drink—oh! And maybe a blanket too." he came back with a steaming mug; he crouched down in front of you instead of towering above, his big frame folded in an almost comical way. God, he is still so huge despite him crouching infront of you.

You took the drink, your fingers brushing his, and you swear you felt your heart quicken and you bite the inside of your cheek to make sure you dont smile at him this early.

1st morning

The rain was gone, replaced by pale sunlight filtering through the stained glass. The colors bled across the parlor walls like someone had spilled liquid jewels everywhere. The fire had gone out, but you were still wrapped in Phainon’s coat, the faint rose scent lingering.

You sat up slowly, half-expecting the events of last night to be a very strange dream. But the giant, pale-haired vampire slumped awkwardly in a too-small armchair across from you, head tipped back and mouth slightly open and it made that possibility impossible.

and then...a soft snore escaped him.

As if sensing you were awake, his eyes blinked open—bright, impossibly blue even in the morning light. He perked up instantly, but winced a little due to the sunlight and quickly closed the curtains, causing the house to return to its gothic colour scheme.

“You stayed!” he said, sitting forward so quickly the chair groaned in protest. “Good. I was afraid you’d sneak out and I’d have to go into the sun to find you. And that would’ve been… bad.”

Your lips twitched. “You were asleep. How would you even know if I left?”

“I have really good hearing,” he replied matter-of-factly, then smirked widely, again revealing his fangs. You immediately look down at your lap, flustered, and your heart rose up by a mile.

why are you so flustered??

And then he continues—

“Also, I sleep with one eye half-open sometimes. Like a fish.”

A small laugh slipped from you before you could stop it. His entire expression lit up like he had won the lottery.

"Goddang it.."

“That’s one laugh!” he said, pointing at you triumphantly. “Two more and I win.”

“Oh, so we’re still doing that?” you asked, leaning back into the chair.

“Of course! I don’t give up on challenges.” He rose to his full height, stretching until you heard something pop in his shoulders. “But before I make you laugh again, you need food. Or breakfast. Or—do humans still call it breakfast? It’s been a while.”

You raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t had a guest in a while, huh?”

He grinned, a little sheepishly this time. “Not a living one, no.”

Your second laugh came quicker than you expected. fuckk why do you keep laughing so easily?? screw phainon

Phainon froze mid-step, then spun on his heel like a cat hearing a can opener. “Two!”

"I won't be laughing at all now!" You exasperate and huff, crossing your arms, looking at him in a teasing manner.

Phainon narrowed his eyes at your declaration, but there was nothing truly menacing about it—more like the exaggerated squint of someone pretending to be offended. “You think you can resist me?” His voice dropped, not in a threatening way, but in that deep, smooth rumble that made your stomach flutter despite yourself. “Challenge accepted… again.”

He turned fully toward you, and the shift made you instantly aware of just how much space he took up. Broad shoulders filled the doorway, coat hanging loose around him like it barely contained his frame. You suddenly understood why the chair last night had looked like it might give up under him—Phainon was built like a man who could pick up a whole tree and carry it for fun, which he could probably do/

When he grinned again, those fangs caught the light, and you felt your pulse skip. The thought that they could pierce skin in an instant made you… yeah, very aware of how close he was.

Phainon noticed your glance—of course, he did. He leaned forward slightly, tilting his head. "Are you okay? Oh no! are you sick? You are all reddish now D:"

Your mouth opened, but nothing came out except a sound that was dangerously close to an embarrassed choke. You immediately looked down, muttering something that sounded vaguely like “shut up” under your breath.

Poor Phainon thought he did something wrong.

♥ ♥ ♥

2nd morning

You were curled up in the parlor with a blanket (which you suspected he had heated near the fire beforehand, because it was perfectly warm), pretending to read a book while keeping an ear on his movements.

When he finally emerged, he was holding… something.

It was vaguely bread-shaped, steaming, and smelling… well, edible.

“I present to you—breakfast!” Phainon announced proudly, setting it on the table like a priceless artifact. “I made it myself. No poison, no blood, nothing weird, promise.”

You raised a brow. “That’s… reassuring?”

He plopped into the armchair across from you, grinning wide enough that the tips of his fangs showed. “I even measured the flour this time.”

“That implies you didn’t measure it last time.”

“...Correct.”

You didn’t laugh. Not even a smile. You just tore off a piece of the bread and chewed slowly, watching him over the rim of your cup. His grin faltered ever so slightly.

The whole morning was like that—Phainon trying, you not budging. He’d “accidentally” trip over a rug (you were pretty sure it was on purpose), tell you about the time he accidentally fell off a cliff (??) and a bunch of concerning stories more than funny.

You set your cup down. “I don’t think that’s a story you should tell while someone is eating bread you baked...Phainon 😨”

His grin widened. “Because now you’re picturing me pulling fighting bears for fish?”

You groaned and pulled the blanket up to your chin, deliberately avoiding his gaze. You could hear the way he shifted in his chair—leaning forward, elbows on his knees, and looking at you eagerly.

“You’re really going to keep pretending you’re immune to my charm, aren’t you?” he murmured.

Your eyes flicked up, meeting his for the briefest second. “Charm? Is that what you call… whatever this is?”

“Mm. I could call it something else,” he said softly, almost to himself. “But that might scare you off.”

Something in his voice was different now. it was lower, smoother, with a weight that made the air feel suddenly thicker. You swallowed, unsure whether you wanted to retreat or lean in.

Phainon leaned back with an exaggerated sigh, stretching his long arms over the back of the chair like a lazy cat. “Fine. Keep your walls up. See if it stops me from getting you to laugh.”

It was infuriating how confident he sounded, and what did he even mean?? . . . . . An hour later, the parlor was quiet except for the occasional crackle from the fireplace.

You’d finished your tea, the bread was gone, and you’d buried yourself in one of the thick, brick-shaped novels you’d found on a shelf. Phainon had wandered off earlier with a muttered “back in a bit,” and you’d half-expected him to forget you entirely.

The creak of the floorboards gave him away before you even saw him. He was carrying a stack of folded blankets and what looked like… a ridiculous amount of pillows.

“…What are you doing?” you asked, watching him dump the pile onto the sofa across from you.

"I think its called a pillow nest.."

"You mean pillow fort?"

you found yourself watching him work—his movements strangely gentle for someone with hands that big, the way he kept adjusting the blankets until they fell just right. When he finished, he stepped back and gestured toward it like he’d just unveiled a masterpiece.

“Thereee, Try it! :D”

You eyed him suspiciously but stood, shuffling over. The moment you sank into the mess of warmth and softness, you had to admit… it was perfect.

He must have caught the flicker of approval in your expression, because he practically lit up. “See? Told you. Best nest-maker in all of—”

“It's called a pillow fort,” you interrupted, turning back toward your book before he could see the way your mouth twitched.

But you heard him chuckle as you feel him behind you, then as you turn back—you are eye to eye with him, lips centimeters away, breaths on each other's skin, and heartbeat increasing. And then just for a second, you swear you saw his eyes glance to your soft cherry-flavoured lips.

Your breath caught, though whether from surprise or something else, you couldn’t say.

Phainon didn’t move at first—just stayed there, crouched in front of you, his height still somehow making you feel smaller than an ant. His gaze lingered for one, two heartbeats too long, flicking between your eyes and your lips in a way that made your chest tighten.

Then, almost imperceptibly, his grin softened.

“You’ve got uh..” He hesitated, reaching up slowly, like he was giving you time to pull back. The back of his knuckle brushed your lower lip, feather-light. “Crumbs.”

You blinked and continued to read your book, ignoring the tightness in your chest.

holy shit hes a cutie

♥ ♥ ♥

3rd morning

You weren’t even sure when you’d fallen asleep—only that the fire had been low, the pillow fort had been warm, and your eyelids had gotten heavier with every lazy flicker of flame. Somewhere between one page and the next, your book had slid from your hand, and then you fell asleep.

When you stirred, it wasn’t the morning chill that greeted you. It was… warmth. Heavy, solid, fluffy warmth pressing against your side. Blinking your eyes open, you froze.

A pair of round, dark eyes stared back at you from a very small, very fluffy face. Snow-white fur puffed out around its cheeks like clouds, and its tiny black nose twitched as it snuggled even closer. A jingling name tag caught the light.

Snowy :D

You blinked again. Then turned your head slightly.

And found another pair of eyes on you—these ones cerulean blue and sparkling.

Phainon was leaning against the arm of the couch, one arm draped over the backrest, watching you with that slow, warm smile that seemed to take up his entire face.

You groaned softly, burying your face halfway into the Samoyed’s fur. “I just woke up and I see two Phainons.”

He chuckled, deep and quiet, like it was a private joke meant only for you. “That’s a compliment, right?”

You mumbled something incoherent into the snowy's fur.

Snowy gave a soft, happy huff and pawed at your blanket, as if demanding you stay put. You reached up to scratch behind his ears—only to realize Phainon was watching that motion a little too intently, as if he could feel your touch through the dog.

“What?” you muttered.

His smile didn’t falter, but there was a hint of something else in his gaze now—something softer, heavier. “Nothing...you look happy"

“I was,” you said pointedly, “until I woke up to an audience.”

“Snowy’s the audience. I’m just the stage crew.”

You gave him a flat look. “You’re the entire audience, be for real.”

Snowy gave a tiny yawn and nuzzled into your side, making you let out a small squeal as you bury your face into his fur with a smile.

At this point, you had forgotten to go to home, and surprisingly lasted 3 days without your phone.

Phainon’s gaze lingered on you a heartbeat longer before he straightened, clapping his hands together.

"Alright!! i'll be making pasta! :D"

"You know how to cook pasta?" "I love pasta, so i learned how to make it myself :3"

And then, He walked toward the kitchen, you caught the way Snowy’s tail wagged just watching him go. And, annoyingly, you felt the same little flutter in your chest.

The sound of Phainon rummaging through the kitchen was… chaotic. Drawers opening and closing, cupboard doors creaking, the occasional clunk of something clearly too heavy to be dropped like that.

Snowy’s ears would twitch every time a particularly loud sound rang out, but he stayed right where he was, head in your lap, occasionally licking your wrist like you might disappear if he stopped.

You ran your fingers absentmindedly through his thick fur, the warmth and softness almost lulling you back to sleep. But then you head phainon humming.

It wasn’t loud, but it was surprisingly nice. Deep enough to vibrate faintly through the walls, he sounded like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

Your book lay forgotten on the armrest. You were too busy leaning just slightly toward the sound.

A few minutes later, he appeared in the doorway, flour dusting his dark suit, and his sleeves were rolled back to his elbows, a faint flush in his cheeks from the heat of the kitchen, and his hair tied back loosely with a pink bow clip.

"How..do you have a pink bow clip?"

"I found it in the woods while hunting meat for Snowy!" He grinned when he saw you smile at him. “Don’t move—pasta’s almost done. And I didn’t even burn anything this time.”

Snowy gave a bark, as if congratulating him.

You arched a brow. “How many times did you try before?”

"Too many to count, pretty girl"

He disappeared again, and you found yourself with your mouth open and eyes widened. You were burning up from the heat or his nickname.

pretty girl. pretty girl. pretty girl. pretty girl. pretty girl. pretty girl. he called you a pretty gir-

Snowy's bark returned you back to reality from your malfunctioning state as he returned with two steaming bowls, you were almost embarrassed by how your stomach fluttered more than your appetite. He set one in front of you, then sat down on the floor beside the couch instead of taking the armchair like before, knees drawn up, shoulder brushing against yours.

“This better be good,” you said, poking at the pasta with mock suspicion.

“Oh, it’s perfect,” he said easily, leaning a little closer. “I made it for you.”

"Ohh Snowy, how do you deal with such an infuriating owner D:"

"So mean!!" Phainon cried as Snowy gave out a small bark as a protest or an agreement, you couldn't tell because of how damn good this pasta was.

also sorry if you dont like mix sauce pasta.. i love mix sauce spicy pasta so..😭

The sauce clung to the pasta in a silky, rich coat, the tangy brightness of tomatoes cutting through the creamy smoothness of what could only be a perfectly balanced white sauce. There was garlic in there, faint but enough to give each mouthful a warm, savory depth, and just the slightest sprinkle of herbs—oregano, maybe? Basil? and some spice as well.

“…Okay,” you admitted after swallowing, “I was ready to insult you but-”

“But?” He was watching you like your answer will decide everything inhis life.

You jabbed your fork in his direction. “It’s good. Like… really good. Annoyingly good.”

That slow, pleased grin spread across his face, his sharp canines just barely peeking out. “Annoyingly good is my specialty.”

Snowy gave a small huff from where he’d curled up at your feet, like he was taking credit for this masterpiece too.

You took another forkful before you could think better of it. “Ugh. You’re going to make me stay here longer just so you can keep feeding me, aren’t you?”

Phainon tilted his head, his blue eyes softening in that way that was both disarming and dangerous. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

You rolled your eyes, but your lips twitched against your will. “…You even look smug.”

“Only because you’re enjoying it,” he teased, nudging your knee with his own before twirling his own fork lazily. “Besides, I told you—I like having you here. Makes the place feel…”

"Suffocating?"

"-Lovely, wait what?? NO!" He panicked at your response, saying gibberish at this point to defend how you are not a suffocatign presence in his mansion.

And then you finally laugh, tears forming at the corner of your eyes and a good blush on your cheeks, along with sauce on your lips.

You were beautiful.

You glanced at Snowy for distraction, but the fluffy traitor was already dozing, leaving you alone with Phainon's yearning stare at you.

"Wait, you added garlic in this, right? Then how are you eating this??"

Phainon chuckled at your concerned face and just said, "I only added garlic in your pasta sauce, don't worry, pretty girl, and...YOU FINALLY LAUGHED!! TELL YOUR NAME NOW!! >:D"

"(Name).."

"(Name).. such a pretty name for a pretty girl"

"You can't be saying words like this, Phai!"

For the first time, Phainon looked stunned and his mouth shut up. And..you also quickly shut your mouth continuingto eat the pasta in silence avoiding his gaze.

"I like it...Phai...call me that from now on."

"Phai <3"

You saw his pale skin turn redder and the temperature of the room increase.

♥ ♥ ♥

4th morning

You woke up to the faint smell of the fire still lingering in the parlor, but the space felt quieter and..suffocating.

The blanket was still warm—someone had clearly draped it over you sometime during the night, but there was no clattering from the kitchen, no humming echoing faintly through the halls. Even Snowy seemed more still than usual, curled up at your feet with his chin resting on your ankle.

You stretched and listened. Nothing.

It wasn’t until an hour later, when you wandered into the hall, that you saw him.

Phainon was halfway up the grand staircase, one hand on the banister, a faint smile plastered on his face, when he noticed you. But it didn’t quite reach his eyes this time. “Morning,” he said, voice as warm as ever, but it was just… gloomier.

“Morning,” you replied, hesitating. “No pasta today?”

“Not today. Got… things to do in my room.” His gaze flicked to Snowy, who had padded up beside you. “Snowy, keep her company, alright?”

The Samoyed gave a small bark in reply, and then Phainon was gone, disappearing into the upper floor before you could think of something else to say.

Your fingers sank into his fur, slow and absentminded, whispering so quietly that even you almost didn’t hear it. "Snowy.. do you know what happened to him?"

And unfortunately, you can not understand dogs as Snowy simply barked gloomily. Man.. these two are connected by Bluetooth or something??

You squinted at Snowy. “...That was not helpful.”

He gave you the most tragic pair of puppy eyes you’d ever seen. You sighed, hugging the big fluffball closer. “Fine. We’ll figure it out ourselves.”

Phainon’s absence seemed to stretch into every room, like the air itself had lost a layer of warmth. Even the fire you tried to stoke back to life seemed reluctant to catch. You found yourself wandering from the parlor to the library to the kitchen, aimlessly touching things he usually left scattered around—half-finished cups of tea, a scarf draped carelessly over a chair, the little dish he used for sugar that was inexplicably shaped like a skull.

All were untouched.

Snowy followed you like a shadow, tail occasionally brushing your leg. You couldn’t decide if he was trying to comfort you or keep an eye on you like he’d been told.

By the time midday rolled around, you’d had enough.

You stood at the base of the grand staircase, arms crossed, glaring at the empty upper landing. If he thought he could just vanish upstairs and mope in silence without telling you what was going on—

Snowy whined softly.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you muttered. “I’m not snooping. I’m… checking.”

You climbed the stairs slowly, each creak in the wood making you more aware of how quiet the house had become. By the time you reached the hallway outside his room, you could hear faint movement inside.

You knocked gently. “Phainon?”

Silence.

Then, after a pause, his voice—closer to the door than you expected. “…Don’t come in, (Name)."

"Phai.. are you okay?"

"I-I'm okay..don't worry, pretty just working on something"

"If you say so, Phainon."

You lingered a moment longer, hand still on the doorframe, feeling the urge to push—just a little

There was a muffled scrape from inside, then the faint sound of fabric shifting, as if he’d just moved something out of sight.

Snowy pressed his cold nose against your ankle. You looked down at him, then back at the closed door. “…Fine. I’ll leave you to your work"

You tried to keep your voice light, but it came out thinner than intended.

The walk back down the hall felt longer than it should have, your footsteps sounding too loud against the quiet.

The rest of the day passed in a strange rhythm. You’d catch a shadow flickering under his door, hear the faint sound of a chair scraping, then nothing for an hour. He didn’t come down for lunch. He didn’t even yell from upstairs to ask if you’d eaten.

By the time evening rolled in, the fire downstairs had burned low again. You curled up on the sofa, pretending not to keep glancing at the staircase.

Snowy hopped up beside you, laying his head in your lap. His tail gave a small wag as if to say, He’ll come down.

“…Yeah.” You brushed a hand over his fur. “I just—”

The sound of slow, deliberate footsteps cut you off.

Phainon appeared at the top of the stairs, looking… tired. His hair was slightly mussed, his shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, and the bottom of his lip was chewed on a little with small blood dripping down his lip. And..it was obviously his.

“Hey,” he said softly, almost hesitant.

You sat up a little. “Hey yourself. Productive day of… secret things?”

He gave a small, real smile, but still subdued. “Something like that.”

"Well, you want to sit beside me?"

"I was just checking up on you, pretty. I'll go back to my room :)"

You simply nod at his words, trying to seem okay with his reaction but in fact you were incredibly disappointed.

Lonely.

♥ ♥ ♥

5th Morning

You woke to a silence so complete, it felt like the walls themselves were holding their breath.

The fire was cold now, only a faint dusting of ash in the grate. The blanket on your shoulders was the same one from last night, but it didn’t feel freshly warmed—just leftover heat from your own body. Snowy wasn’t at your feet this time. In fact, the room felt painfully empty.

You sat up slowly, listening. No clinking cups from the kitchen. No footsteps pacing above. Not even the faint hum you’d grown used to hearing from somewhere deep in the halls.

The mansion had always been quiet, but this was different. This was the kind of quiet that made you second-guess whether you were alone at all.

You padded barefoot into the hall, expecting Snowy to come barreling around a corner at any moment. He didn’t. The staircase loomed ahead, still and dust-moted in the soft morning light. No figure leaning casually on the banister. No blue eyes catching yours in that half-smile.

You tried the base of the stairs first, calling up softly. “Phainon?”

No answer. Not even the creak of movement.

Snowy finally appeared from somewhere down the hall, padding toward you with slow, deliberate steps—ears tilted slightly back. He didn’t bark. He didn’t wag his tail. He just sat at your feet, staring toward the upper floor like he was waiting for something that wasn’t coming.

A prickle of unease crawled up your neck.

You went halfway up the stairs before you realized it—the air was cooler up here. Not cold enough to see your breath, but cold enough to feel it sink into your skin. You stood outside his door, straining to hear anything.

Nothing. No scrape of a chair, no rustle of fabric.

“Phai?” you tried again, softer this time. “If you’re in there…”

Still no answer.

Snowy pressed close to your leg, and you could almost swear he was trying to herd you away from the door. You stayed there another long moment, waiting, before finally stepping back.

You descended the stairs slowly, each creak sounding too loud in the empty house.

Snowy stayed at your heels this time, his nails clicking faintly against the polished wood. You kept glancing over your shoulder—half expecting to see a tall, broad silhouette at the landing, leaning there with that happy, puppy-like smile of his. But the space behind you stayed empty.

You wandered through the main floor again, past the library, the drawing room, the tall windows whose light seemed too pale today. The shadows stretched differently, thinner in some places, thicker in others, like the house itself was breathing in ways you couldn’t quite catch.

Snowy nosed your leg, his ears flicking.

You squatted down, scratching gently behind them. “Where is he?” you murmured.

Snowy only whined softly, then padded toward the back hallway—the one you hadn’t explored yet.

You sigh and slowly start walking towards the room.

You followed Snowy down the back hallway, your steps muffled by the thick, faded runner beneath your feet. The walls here were different—less polished than the front of the house, the wallpaper peeling slightly at the edges, the frames on the wall crooked as if no one had touched them in years. Dust floated lazily in the shafts of pale morning light slipping in through narrow windows. The air felt heavier here, carrying the faint scent of something metallic under the old wood and faint lavender.

Snowy padded ahead with an unhurried but deliberate gait, glancing back every so often to be sure you were still following. His tail was low, not tucked but not relaxed either, and his ears twitched at sounds you couldn’t hear.

You passed a set of closed double doors with frosted glass panels, the kind that blurred shapes but let through light. You almost stopped there, thinking you saw a flicker of movement beyond, but when you looked more closely, it was only the shifting of the shadows from the trees outside. Snowy didn’t even glance at them. He kept moving, leading you toward a door at the far end of the hallway.

This one was plain, no carved wood or brass embellishment—just a matte, slightly scuffed surface with a tarnished knob. The paint around the frame was chipped, revealing darker layers beneath, like the door had been here much longer than the rest of the hall. Snowy stopped in front of it and sat, looking from you to the door, then back again.

Your fingers brushed the doorknob as you put your cheek against the door.

"Hello..Phai?"

Silence.

"Phainon, C'mon, answer this please, you are worrying me"

This time, you hear a breathy growl and a breathless answer.

"Pretty?..No what are you doing here..go away!"

Your stomach sank. “You think I’m just going to walk away when you sound like that?”

He gave a low, humorless laugh that faded almost immediately. “Sweets just go..”

The air in the hallway felt colder, like the temperature was dropping by the second. You noticed the faintest flicker of shadow under the door, and then you turned the cold doorknob.

The room beyond was dim, lit only by thin slats of light cutting through the shutters, dust motes spinning lazily in the golden beams. The smell was different here—warm skin, sweat, something faintly metallic beneath it, and a low, thrumming note in the air that made your pulse skip.

Phainon stood in the middle of the room, barefoot on the old hardwood. His white shirt clung damply to him, sleeves rolled to his elbows, the front unbuttoned enough to reveal the deep line of his chest. The skin there was flushed, slick, marked by a scattering of old, pale scars that caught the dim light like silver threads. His breath came in ragged pulls, each exhale hitching like it cost him effort to keep standing. His hands were curled tight at his sides, nails biting into his palms, knuckles pale.

He wasn’t looking at you at first—his head was bowed, hair shadowing his eyes—but when he did glance up, it was like staring into a storm barely contained. His irises seemed darker, his pupils blown wide, his lips parted as if every breath was a fight to keep control. The sight rooted you in place, an unshakable awareness in your gut that you were staring at something unguarded and dangerous all at once.

“…Shit,” you breathed without thinking. “How are you like this?”

His jaw tightened, his breath shuddering. “Sweets,” he rasped, the word low and frayed, “go. Please—just go.” There was no teasing lilt, no gentle warmth in his tone this time—only strain, like the sound of someone holding back an avalanche with their bare hands.

"What the hell?? Phainon, are you sick?!" You quickly run to him despite his warning as you put out your hand on his cheek to check his temperature, and he was burning up.

Phainon flinched hard, his hand snapping up to grip your wrist—not rough enough to hurt, but firm enough that you couldn’t pull away. His breathing hitched again, and you could see the muscles in his jaw working, his teeth grit like he was holding back words he didn’t dare speak.

“Pretty,” he said, voice hoarse, “you don’t… you don’t get it.” His eyes flicked to your lips, then back up, and the sharp swallow in his throat made your own breath falter. “You can’t touch me right now.”

“Well, too bad,” you shot back, even though your pulse was skittering. “You feel like you’re on fire—what the fuck is happening to you?”

He shook his head once, a sharp, almost desperate motion. His grip loosened just enough for you to feel the tremor in his fingers. “Not sick,” he muttered,

“Phai…” you whispered, feeling the first prick of unease mix with the stubborn urge not to leave him like this.

Fuck it.

You quickly led him to the bed in the corner of the dimly lit room. Everything was messed up. The pillows were scattered, the bedsheets were half put on the bed, and papers were everywhere on the floor.

As the gigantic man flops onto the bed with a whine. You quickly turn your back to get something, a wet cloth to put on him, but then a strong hand pulled your hand in his.

His fingers wrapped around yours like a man drowning, and the sheer strength in the grip made you stumble half a step back toward him.

“Don’t,” Phainon ground out, his voice low and strained, threaded with something that made your pulse stutter. You glanced over your shoulder, and the sight of him sprawled there was almost enough to make you forget what you’d been doing—shirt clinging to the sharp planes of his chest, collar loose enough to frame the thick line of muscle down to his sternum. His skin glistened faintly in the muted light, the flush spreading from his throat down over his collarbones.

"Phainon, you're burning up-" His breathing hitched again, eyes squeezing shut as if the contact itself was both a relief and a torment. “Just—don’t leave,” he whispered, the fight in his tone thinning into something more desperate.

Your throat tightened, that uneasy knot in your stomach tangling with something heavier. “Then tell me what’s going on.”

He opened his eyes at that, the flicker of something wild in them.

"Blood...haven't had blood in a long time.."

A cold ripple went down your spine. “You could’ve told me—”

“I didn’t want you to see me like this.” His grip on your wrist tightened, just enough to make you aware of the disparity in strength. “It’s not safe when I’m this far gone. For anyone.”

You swallowed hard. “Then let me help you.”

That got a reaction—a low, almost pained laugh, short and humorless. “Help me? Sweets, the only thing that would help me right now is the one thing I can’t take from you without—” He stopped again, his gaze dragging from your face to your throat in a way that made your breath falter.

“…Without what?” you asked, even though part of you already knew the answer.

"Without taking too much.."

You shifted closer, kneeling beside the bed so you were eye level with him. Your hand slid from his wrist to his cheek, brushing away the damp strands of hair clinging to his skin. And then, you tilted your head, baring the pale line of your neck and letting the collar of your shirt slip lower, exposing the curve of your collarbones.

A low, almost broken whine slipped past his lips as he surged forward—fast enough that your pulse spiked, but slow enough for you to see the restraint straining every inch of him. His hands came up to cradle your face, then slid down to your shoulders, pulling you flush against him.

The heat of him was overwhelming, his breath ghosting over your throat as he hovered there, trembling. His voice was a rasp in your ear. “Gods, you smell…—” He cut himself off with another shudder. “Sweets, I—”

“Phainon,” you whispered, your hand curling in the back of his shirt. “Do it.”

He broke.

The sound he made was halfway between a groan and a growl, his mouth pressing to your skin with desperate reverence before his fangs pierced you. The pain was sharp, but it melted almost instantly into a strange, heady warmth that seeped through your veins.

He whined against your skin, low and unrestrained, drinking deep in messy, impatient pulls like a man starved. One hand gripped your waist hard enough to make you gasp, the other fisting in the fabric at your back as if anchoring himself there.

You swore you could feel his pulse syncing with yours, the heat of him bleeding into you until the world narrowed to the wet sound of him feeding and the quiet, needy noises he couldn’t seem to stop making.

Your knees felt weak, but you didn’t pull away. If anything, you tilted your head further, letting him in. “Good…” he murmured between swallows, the word half-slurred. “You taste…—” Another whine cut him off, muffled against your skin.

His mouth trailed lower, then back up, fangs grazing in a way that sent a dizzy shiver racing down your spine. Each bite was hot and wet and unrestrained, his lips dragging over the curve of your throat like he couldn’t decide whether to drink or just claim you entirely.

You barely had time to catch your breath between the sharp pricks and the slow, greedy pulls. His tongue traced the line of a fresh mark, soothing it, before he sank his fangs in again—messier this time, his jaw working like he couldn’t get enough.

“Phainon…” you breathed, voice breaking, the sound more a plea than anything else.

He groaned at the sound of his name, the vibration rolling against your skin, and then he was pressing, hungrier, mouth finding every patch of exposed skin along your neck and collarbone, biting, sucking, and kissing in frantic need. You could feel your pulse flutter under each new mark, the heat pooling in your chest and spreading outward until your limbs felt weightless.

The room seemed to tilt around you, the air thick and heady. All you could focus on was the wet drag of his lips, the intoxicating pull at your veins, and the soft, almost broken noises you couldn’t stop making.

When he pulled back just enough to look at you, his mouth was red, his eyes blown wide and fever-bright. “…Sweets,” he rasped, breathless, like your name alone was enough to unravel him.

His lips were back on you before you could answer, crushing, messy, fevered—like he was trying to drink you in with every sense he had. The sharp nip of his fangs bled into open-mouthed kisses, the wet heat of his mouth trailing from your jaw to the hollow of your throat. Each press was unsteady, desperate, tasting of hunger and something achingly human beneath it.

Your fingers tangled in his hair without thinking, pulling him closer, and the low, needy sound that tore from him nearly undid you. His hands were everywhere, gripping your hip, sliding up your back, holding you as if he let go for even a second, you’d vanish.

He broke from your skin only to mouth at the corner of your jaw, hot breath fanning over your ear. “Please…” The word cracked, and then he was pressing hurried kisses along your throat, jaw, cheek—like he couldn’t decide where to settle.

“I’ll—” His voice hitched between kisses, the heat of his mouth smearing along your skin. “I’ll be your good boy… just—” He whined then, a sound so raw it went straight through you. “Just don’t leave me.”

Your pulse kicked hard at his words, heat coiling low in your stomach. The grip you had on his hair tightened, anchoring him there, and you managed a breathless, slurred murmur, “Won’t leave you…”

The effect was immediate. His whole body seemed to shudder, breath catching before a slow, almost relieved growl rumbled out of his chest. “Good…”

In the next moment, the world tilted. You barely had time to gasp before he’d swept you off your feet, pressing you down onto the soft give of your bed. The mattress dipped under his weight, his broad frame caging you in, eyes fever-bright and fixed on you like you were the only thing that existed.

Then his mouth was on you again, hot and insistent, fangs sliding into a spot lower on your neck. The pull was immediate, greedy, his jaw working as if he couldn’t get you fast enough. Each draw sent a dizzy rush flooding through you, warmth spreading outward in molten waves.

He didn’t stop at just feeding, his mouth wandered, dragging over the curve of your throat, catching on your collarbone before returning to your pulse with an unrestrained hunger. The wet sounds of him drinking mixed with your uneven breaths, the tension between you coiling tighter with every messy, lingering kiss he left behind.

When he finally drew back just enough to breathe, his lips were red, his gaze heavy-lidded, and he had a crazy, drunk look on his face. "So good...my pretty girl..."

HE WANT THAT COOKIE BADDD

[fish-18]

Yan!Dan Heng x Reader x Yan!Phainon brainrot

CW: yandere content, slight nsfw content (no sex), Phainon joins the Express, reader is Trailblazer, takes place after Amphoreus but written before 3.5

--

It was too hot.

It honestly felt like you were put in an oven or on a grill with the lid on, the heat having nowhere to go. You had half a mind to wonder if the air conditioning was busted before you remembered your situation.

Namely, the fact that two men had climbed into your bed - just like the night before, and the previous night, and the one before that - and refused to leave. The two bedrolls on the floor lay there empty, as pristine and unwrinkled as the day they were brought inside, never having been used for their intended purpose.

Instead, these two found your bedding much more appealing, something about it being more plush, or so they supposedly claim. That was total horseradish, that of which you were sure. You knew for a fact that Dan Heng never cared much for the cushy luxuries in life, exemplified by the cot that he slept in when he still inhabited the archives, the same bedding he now neglected like a bitter ex lover.

As for Phainon, his claims - in comparison to the cool and aloof Vidyadhara - sounded just slightly more credible, but given his eagerness to call for you to get into bed with him, it was safe to assume that he was taking full advantage of this opportunity.

You debated if you used one of their bedrolls that they’d leave you be for the night, but the logical part of your brain told you otherwise. Sharing a small and thin mattress on the floor with two other people did not sound comfortable, especially considering the borderline game of tug-of-war they were often playing with your body.

So there you were sandwiched between Dan Heng and Phainon in your bed, which was thankfully just large enough to accommodate, sweating your ass off. Ughh. I need a bath.

Wriggling out of their grasp was not an easy feat, their limbs determined to hold you in place, their hands damn near digging into your sides, unhappy groans and moans coming from them when you tried to move. But with one last sigh you managed to slide out of bed. Literally. Right onto the floor.

The water - though admittedly warmer than the temperature under the sheets that you were just complaining about - felt like heaven. At least in this bathtub you had more room to yourself. It was so nice and relaxing that you felt your eyelids grow heavy. Now that you thought about it, you didn’t even know what time it was. It certainly felt much too early, but it’s not like looking out of a window would give you any hint. Before you could even get out, your mind eased into the warmth of the bath. You didn’t even have the cognition to hear the panicked rustling coming from outside the bathroom.

--

You were in the same position again. You weren’t sure when exactly it happened, but when you came to, you were no longer alone in the bath. It was a tight fit; you pressed up against Phainon and Dan Heng taking up the space in front of you. You were starting to overheat again.

“Why’d you leave?” You heard Dan Heng mutter as he pressed his face deeper into the crook of your neck. “We got worried.”

“You know you don’t have to keep an eye on me all the time.”

This time it was Phainon who answered. “I wanted your face to be the first thing I saw in the morning.” If his words were not enough to convince you, he pulled your body closer to his.

“It was you who promised that you’d be with us today, tomorrow, the next day and the day after that.” Dan Heng butted in, reminding you of the promise you made upon reuniting.

“Could you maybe like… Move around a little, though? My leg’s kinda falling asleep.”

“Don’t ruin this for me.”

--