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[hawthvrn-blog]

— @attwoods ( rhysand attwood )

the heady scent of flowers in bloom on a hot summer’s day lingered in the air. as callie leaned back, she could feel a light petal brush against her shoulder, twining with her hair, and the cool metal of her patio chair chill her shoulder blades; the intricate pattern woven into the iron transferring onto skin slightly flushed from the sun. that same flush traced the tops of her cheeks, where it rested against the sunglasses that would mirror her brunch partner, rhys, back at himself. between them, a table littered with fresh fruit — scattered grapes with glittering pearls of condensation, dewy melons that were so sweet they had made her jaw ache, and strawberries so bright they nearly glowed like jewels, almost too pretty to eat. everything, this morning, was a mix of the balmy — the brilliance of the sun and soft, warm bread — and the cool — the bite of metal under her legs, the frost of the glass between her fingertips. they sat partially sequestered by a trellis of vines to their left, allowing callie and rhys the occasional peek of a passerby, and allowing them an occasional peek of the two agents, too.

licking sugar from the side of her lips, leftover from the the rim of her prosecco punch, callie glanced over at the boy across the table. “ are you ready to order ? ” the tang of pineapples still rested in the hollows of her cheeks, chased by the sweetness of peaches and the lingering hint of vodka. alcohol wasn’t something callie drank anymore, at least not often. but sunny days, and picture perfect cafes were meant to be moments of indulgence. they hadn’t done this in a long time: driven out to l.a. on a hot summer morning with the privilege of nothing but good food, bottomless drinks and some time away on their minds. perhaps it was the weight of exams finally off her shoulders, or even that this sun-speckled cafe seemed so far removed from a dark debriefing room or a shadowed bar. setting down her menu and drink, callie really looked at the boy with brown hair and straight shoulders in front of her. “ a penny for your thoughts, rhys ? ”

[hawthvrn-blog]

phvntcm:

“ don’t call me that, ” he said to the streaks of ash on his chest left behind when she had razed him to the ground, “ that’s not my name. sino  — yo no recuerdo qué mi nombre es. yo me pregunto, yo pregunto todos, y hay solamente — ” emptiness. or, more precisely, the absence of it, a vast black sea whose bottom would never be found, impenetrable, absorbing all light with little mercy, whose end was indistinguishable from its beginning, not unlike his own. they were easy to mistake for each other, emptiness, the absence of it, gabriel. callie was absent. he was not empty. he was alone, choosing his words with all the precision of a needle stitching up a wound, or a shot from a rifle aimed a single hair away from his head, fluent in a way that was liquid, in a way that he was robbed of when she so much as looked at him. ‘ no puedo. ’ “ you don’t get to say that. yo hago. no usted. ” what do i get to say, then ? he was playing a dangerous, precarious game: silence was not absolute; it was not emptiness. callie had said, ‘ i’ll be right back ’. she would return. he could not converse with the dark as if it was a substitute for her, even if she had taken everything from him but this. ‘ i can’t. ’ he was inlaid with fury as some oysters were inlaid with mother-of-peal, he glowed with it even when no one was looking at him, and she had made him furious. ‘ i can’t. ’ cobarde. it was a weak answer, it did not ring bright and high and clear, and he did not know callie to be anything, but he knew her not to be weak. ‘ i can’t. ’ it was a malformed answer, unsuited for the question he had begged of her, unacceptable.he refused it. she could. she would. ‘ no puedo. ’ it was his own answer, plucked from the top of his tongue. it had rested between his teeth so long that the absence of it felt like emptiness. she robbed him ceaselessly, over and over again, without remorse. his remorse was so heavy it would have brought him to his knees if the weight of his unspoken agreement not to sink back under wasn’t equal and opposite, forcing him to remain standing, back facing the wall, dark eyes fixed on the dark at the end of the corridor. “ yo tenía los amigos. ”

he heard the gentle click of her door before he saw her. he heard her feet, muffled by the soft floor under them, ( he had fallen to it, he did not doubt its ability to make someone’s footsteps disappear ) before he saw her. he heard her say ‘ i don’t ’, another harsh contraction, another not, cannot, will not, do not, before he saw her, and then gabriel lifted chin and looked down at her and he was not longer capable of language. ‘ i can’t. ’ he understood her. the sob, dry and choked and burning hot, leaving soot stains on his last hoodie, that had accompanied her words could not be translated and still, he could claim fluency in it, even when she was looking at him. it was the sound of haphazardly treated, enduing, unending despair. he knew nothing else so well. when she had come close enough for him to feel her again, to be certain she was human and not haunting him, gabriel reached out, tracing the right edge of her jaw wordlessly with the tip of one finger, almost but-not-quite not, barely touching her. his eyes, the girl callie reminded him of would have said, betrayed him. half-apologetic for the humidity of his skin, for surprising her, for daring to touch her in the first place even if it was reciprocation. immensely grateful. in the kind of pain he thought ancient, resolved only by the appearance of the one person he couldn’t have. he drew back, hand still suspended in the space between them. she was still too close, when he looked down he was forced to meet her eyes and answer for what he had stolen back. 

‘ i can’t. ’ what could you possibly have to make right ? ‘ i can’t. ’ who could have possibly told you that you were wrong ?  ‘ i can’t. ’ callie. there were inklings, before, sea salt-stained, stinging of aguardiente, perfumed by orange peels. they were insignificant the first times gabriel had heard them, causes to tilt his head and question her without words and immediately drop the second he no longer cared for her company, but now, they were undeniable, raw and pink and whole like the fever-built flush that still stained his cheeks. overly sweet things were usually poisonous. he had forgotten to tell her that, to warn her, the guayabas that grew in colombia, not out of place in his mother’s palm, or trapped under a paring knife, were sugarcane-sweet, but the ones that were any sweeter had rotted on their branches. he bit his tongue, teeth set on edge.

he knew, even in the back of his mind, where the throbbing, unchanging pain shadowed his ability to think, that he needed to thank her, for answering him, for the something she had that he needed to take before his fever worsened, but he remained wordless and unmoving, hand dropping back to his side, fingers twitching, shaking, without anything to hold onto. he acted as the son of god in gethsemane had two thousand years before him, bearing witness to his own end, allowing it, refusing fear, surrounded by a garden lush and fragrant like eden before it. he had always practiced resurrection with the steadiest of hands, but they failed him now. he would choke on his own heart, pounding so violently she must have felt it through the empty space that lay between them, through the fabric of his hoodie and the unbearable heat of his skin. ‘ i understand. ’ he couldn’t make himself say it. he refused to accept his own crucifixion. it had come at his own hand; no one had betrayed him. not even her. 

“ tú puedes. tú has. ” 

a part of callie had expected to find an empty hallway; she had expected gabriel to disappear like the ghost he was. maybe then she would be given the chance to assure herself that this whole encounter was a fabricated reality that her mind had created out of her restless consciousness and uncovered fears. but was there, still against the wall, a dream, a nightmare come to life. there was no greater proof than the finger that traced her jaw, yet that, too, had to be a not quite, it had to be a maybe, further blurring the lines of what what was real, who was real, and where the mask ended and the flesh began. his touch was fierce in its tenderness — the two of them having turned something fragile, something soft into sharpened weapons and loaded guns. even this brief contact was a burning flame, his fingertip far too hot, even though callie knew in the throes of fever, they would feel close to freezing. his reddened cheeks pillowed eyes that had glossed over with torment — and something else. they belied his touch, tricking her into thinking that this was an apology, that this was his apology.

there was no more pride, and there was no more shame. it was her turn to beg. “ tell me what you just said, please. ” callie had run before, because she hadn’t wanted to face his reaction — an avoidance and admittance both, a duality that reflected the complexity of the words she’d said to him just before. however, now, hearing and not understanding, was a slow form of torture she could not bear. perhaps the worst sort of pain was knowing even if gabriel translated it for her, she would still never know what it meant. a hell all of his making, and her, tantalus, standing knee deep in water and an arms-length away from what she wanted most, knowing it would never be hers. it was never simply words, uttered to fill the silence, spoken for the sake of noise, when it came from gabriel. the way he said them, the way he waited for her reappearance to say them, told callie that they meant more than she could ever understand. was this retribution, then, doled out by a head and body in agony, delivered with a hoarse tone and a roughened fingertip ? was this punishment for the half-truth she’d laid before him, hoping that it would be enough to satiate his pain, that it was enough to provide for what he needed ? and was she obligated, too, to heal this unknown anguish that had made him ask for her and her hurt instead of water or medicine or the sweet bliss of sleep ? 

avoidance was becoming the theme of the night: instead of facing him, instead of rising to the challenge of that one, quick touch, callie glanced down at her first aid kit, opening it to hand him a bottle of water. she shouldn’t have told him to stand, under some sort of delusion that she’d be able to escape, this hallway, this night, the promise she’d made him, if she was only able to get him away. looking at him now, she couldn’t even fathom the struggle he’d undergone to get this far. his hair was still damp with sweat, but his skin was dry now, consumed by his fever. he should close his eyes. so his migraine wouldn’t get worse, so callie wouldn’t have to face what she saw in them, so he couldn’t confuse her more with what they held. her voice, when she spoke, held no traces of the gasped sob she’d released into the front of his sweatshirt, held no hint of her previous plea. it should have been quiet, and it should have been distant. yet it was still far kinder than she wanted, than he needed, than this moment deserved. “ you can— if you want, you should sit down again. ” callie pulled a glass thermometer out of its anti-bacterial pouch, also handing it to him, careful that he could hold it tight in his other hand. she didn’t have another. “ and drink some water before putting this under your tongue, please. ” 

callie could feel it again, the insistent thrumming in her veins, the howling voices in her head telling her to run. because she’d finally found the answers to her previous questions, and they were ones she didn’t want to hear. she wanted to push the medicine in his hands — hands that were now full — insist that he only take two, and escape back into the darkness. small trembles still lingered in her hands, and she had to press her lips together to keep them from doing the same. what was right and what was wrong was coalescing far too quickly. and she’d hated herself before, she’d loathed her reflection, she’d despaired at ever coming to terms with the soul that inhabited her body, but callie had never felt as terrified of herself as she did in this moment. and when she finally gave voice to her thoughts, when she finally parted her lips, and when her throat stopped constricting enough to let in air, even she didn’t know what she was going to say. even callie didn’t know if it was meant for him or for her, if it was an apology, an assurance, or a confession. “ i’m trying to make it hurt a little less. ”

[hawthvrn-blog]

bclivar:

        “ of course not. ” the words rushed from his mouth like a waterfall, surging out to reconcile the rift between them before it could grow any wider. he didn’t even know it was happening, at first, the simplicity of the comfort between them thinning beneath the surface. “ it’s finals. just kind of forgot how busy it gets. ” it was like ice at the beginning of spring: outwardly, the exterior was fine. unbroken. there was seemingly nothing to worry about, and tentative steps could be taken off shore. but underneath, just beneath where the water slowly started to warm, was where the danger began. this felt like that first crack, the first warning that something wasn’t quite right, even as callie reassured him that there weren’t any fractures beneath his feet, it was safe. he should feel safe. but he didn’t. 

        he gave her a false smile that rang true even though he didn’t feel it. though he could never know fully what callie was feeling, what she was thinking, rafe knew how to trust his own gut. you didn’t grow up in places like chihuahuita in el paso, didn’t run with gangs for years on the streets of boyle heights, you didn’t live like rafe had without building up some kind of intuition. he wasn’t traditionally smart, not by a long shot. callie’s time spent in all those labs ? he was sure that part probably was true, as intelligent as she was, the focus for which they’d selected her for this team, and counting as busy as they all were with finals. but where she had a knack for taking care of the team, for the formulas and chemical names that would never come easily to him, he had the sense to know she wasn’t telling him the full truth. he’d learned how to evaluate someone’s mood from constantly watching tony, how to sense when someone was feeling dangerous or calm or somewhere in between. callie was settled, balanced, sweet; she always was, but there was an undercurrent of something. he could read a room; where callie could do the same and extend the golden hand of kindness across a crowd, he knew how to twist that trust. make them fear him. even that required some kind of ability to sense what he was getting into — and he knew by now when to follow his gut.

        “ i have been studying, actually, ” he replied gamely, allowing himself ( and her ) to play into the notion that everything was normal. everything was fine. he even managed to smile again, producing a laugh from somewhere within himself. “ doesn’t sound like me, right ? but i have been. if i get an A in somethin’ other than spanish, it’ll be a miracle. i think i’ll pass out from joy if i get a solid B in — well, anything. ” for once, his words held a note of truth. he was studying, yes. he hoped to do well, of course. but the sentiments felt like jumping through hoops, ticking off boxes as they both pretended to maintain this conversation about how busy they were. too busy, even, for a text. 

she could not do this. callie could not stand before him spitting half-truths. yet she could not leave either. not when she felt like this, as if they were connected only by a fragile thread that with the slightest movement, the smallest breath would sever. she did not dare move for fear of fating them to a doomed end. yet with each moment that passed, each word that rafe lay down between them, callie could feel that delicate filament between them stretching impossibly thinner. and with helpless eyes, she watched in silence even as it neared the pointing of breaking. maybe, callie thought, they could stay like this forever, living carefully, meticulously to maintain this gentle thread that pulled tight between them. but even she knew that eventually her strength would wane, eventually her disillusionments would weaken, and she would be left with the truth and the regret buried in the marrow of her bones with nowhere to escape but out, out, out. callie had foolishly chased, hunted a truth where success was equated with possession, blinding her fully to the consequences of such a prize. 

this felt like the last time things would be this way between them — teetering and unstable. traces of their old familiarity lingered in his face, which she’d framed so many times with her hand; at first, for him to stay still, then later, for comfort. that intimacy twined through the rhythm of his words and the way his tongue and lips and teeth wrapped around them. callie had heard it rough, when he was in pain, when he was angry; she's heard it soft, that first time he’d thanked her, that last time when he’d given her his past. the ease of her smile, his smile were vestiges of a relic worn down and forced to become remnants by truth and honesty. truth, a monster nipping at her heels, keening, begging to be set loose to wreck havoc on her life. and honesty, atropos, weilding her shears, to cut this thread between them. callie’s pursuit of rafe’s honesty had been the start of the end, and her unwillingness to give him hers in return, the moment those blades would snap shut. it bore a terror equal to death, of what they were, what they had become, but also of who she had become.

callie knew she should offer to help him study, would have offered to help if things were different, if he were anyone else. but doing so would only be delaying the inevitable — an ending brought upon not by fate, which she had sworn never to believe in again, but by choice — something she had placed her trust in, but had betrayed her anyway. some altered part of callie wanted to say the words she knew she should, because it would be the right thing to do, but some unchanged part of her wanted to, too, because it would always thrive on the selfish, and that was what stopped her cold. “ not at all. i know you try, rafe, i know you work hard. ” her own voice sounded so far away, yet so close at the same time, as if magnified from a distance to muffle against her ear, it was distant and intimate, as if callie could inhabit two bodies: one, here, terrified and mourning and so filled with regret, and another, there, delighted and devoted and still much too grateful. it was the latter girl that allowed laughter to coat her tongue. “ after all, i remember you insisting on going to class, even when i told you to skip. so you shouldn’t worry about your combat classes — as long as you don’t get injured again.  ” it was like putting on an old coat, one she’d worn so many times the weight of it on her shoulders barely registered. yet the elbows were worn, the collar had started to sag, and the sleeves were getting too frayed, and she knew, she knew, she would need to retire it soon, but she could not let it go. because it was fading, yes, but it was still warm. “ and as for everything else, ” her face softened. “ you’ll be just fine, rafe. ” 

[hawthvrn-blog]

haphczard:

raw laughter shook noemi’s shoulders. it wasn’t humorous or joyful, but instead it was heavy. callie’s word snatched up twisted feelings that hadn’t been allowed to the surface in so long, they almost felt foreign. “ god, every day. every single day, ” her lips formed a tight line as she pulled her knees into her chest, shrinking herself even more. the ocean always made her feel small, but today she was certain she’d done a good job of that without the help of waves, “ i think that’s why i’m so wildly stressed about these exams. i mean, i’m just waiting for myself to fuck it all up, you know? ” she sighed, the air from her lungs felt cool against her burning skin, and the taste of truth wasn’t all that bitter on her tongue. noemi wasn’t one for opening up, but she’d found that sometimes life gave you people who made authenticity come naturally. for her, callie was one of those people. “ it’s very on brand for me to, like, fuck things up once they get really good. it’s never intentional, i just –– ” she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, rubbing for a moment as though the action would make her see her own thoughts clearer, “ self-destructive habits or carelessness or something a therapist could diagnose, but i’m too broke to pay to talk to someone by the hour. ” she rested her cheek against her knees, looking at callie, studying her carefully.

regret was a common word around the special ops team of ioa. a mission gone wrong had them carrying the weight of two worlds on their shoulders; not being there sucked before the mission, but it was even worse after. “ cal, ” noemi sighed, “ i like to think things happen for a reason. and i like to think things, eventually, have a way of working out. so if we all do what’s right, work as a team instead of a group of agents forced next to each other, it’ll be okay. ” she reached an arm out, placing one of her hands gently over callie’s and giving her a reassuring smile. “ everything will be okay, ” she repeated the girls words back to her, then added, “but i hate that it’s––… weighing so heavily on you. especially now, with even more stress regarding finals and what not. ” she pulled her hand away and went back to holding herself, gaze shifting back to the water, “and for what it’s worth–– i have complete faith in everything being okay for you. complete faith in you in general, honestly. ” she inhaled fresh air and exhaled any reservations she’d felt on campus, any hesitation to keep things to herself. noemi was tired. tired of keeping a cork on things, letting them bottle up until she exploded at exactly the wrong time. 

the only issue was this: speaking your issues into the universe made them real. it made them tangible, solvable or unsolvable. a lot of her hesitation came from the simple fact that she just didn’t want to deal with her personal life on top of everything. “ i have to get atlas ready for his next evaluation. on top of getting myself ready, ” her hand moved to pet the damp fur on top of atlas’s head. she quietly patted her towel and watched as he stood from his spot and loyally moved towards her, circling twice before laying down in front of her and putting his head in her lap, a comforting procedure they’d done a million times. “ only i literally can’t focus on anything because my mind’s all fucked up about some pre-teen bullshit, ” the words came so fast that she wasn’t sure they’d come out in the right order. she blinked, swallowed, and let silence hang in the air as a number of things jumped around in her mind. she was homesick. mateo was being overbearing as ever. rafe still refused to like her. odessa was gone. she’d been getting phone calls from an odd miami number. and then there was rhysand. the biggest of all the question marks. “ remember when we were at that street fair? and i jokingly told you about my type? and you thought i was talking about rafael ? ” she paused, letting the memory come back to callie before answering her own question, “ i was talking about rhys. and that was before i really–.. pinpointed it, i guess. cal, i think i’ve got like a––… a schoolgirl sort of cursh. –– nope. no. that’s not the right wording. i like him. like i see him and i have this undying urge to make him smile. to make him, i don’t know––… happy. but then when he does smile i can’t stop thinking about it. it’s––… ridiculous. actually ridiculous. ” she focused on atlas, calmly drifting off to sleep, “ what’s more ridiculous is that there’s–.. something there. something that has potential. which is terrifying. horrifying really. ” she sighed, shaking her head solemnly, “ because i told you. fucking up is on brand for me. i’ve done it before. i don’t want to do it again. not with him. ” there was a small silence as she breathed in, exhaling with a groan, “ and now atlas and i are going to fail all of our evaluations because i can’t think straight. ” 

the sting of an unexpected consequence was strangely bittersweet — like rich honey coating her tongue even as sharp stings land on her hand, her arms, her legs; callie's honesty had been a marvel and her spoken truth progress, yet she had not anticipated the way it would make noemi feel, had not prepared for the way that in turn would make her feel. in opening herself up to the other girl, she'd dimmed a bit of noemi's vibrance, and that pained callie more than keeping the burden of her thoughts. yet through the pain there were pockets of deep joy. how bittersweet. noemi's hand on her own was, too, both pain and comfort. though her friend's hand was soft, if not slightly roughened by the sand and salt, it still stung, like a bee's bite, like a prick from a pin; yet it was warm, so warm, and made all the more reassuring by the accompanying smile. callie couldn't help but smile back, even though the edges of her eyes were pinched, and not from a grin. ‘ everything will be okay. ’ only hearing it repeated back to her now did callie realize how long and how often she’d said the same thing to herself. while starting a stranger in the mirror at eighteen, while forcing her parents to move across the country for her own peace of mind, while lying to them about where she was going and what she was doing, while watching the video of a boy being shot dead — execution-style. hundred, thousands of times those very same words had echoed throughout her mind, but never had they felt more real, more possible than when noemi spoke them back. the revelation, the elation, at coming so close to something she’d been searching for so long almost dulled the hurt of what noemi said next: ‘ complete faith in you ’ it was all bittersweet.

the sky was cloudless, so clear and blue and bright, the only thing that dared to defy and refute the melancholy that had slipped into the conversation of two girls’ sitting under its immaculate luster. noemi was talking fast and the way she said bullshit made callie look towards her friend again. she hated this; she loved this. as the sound of waves continued to roar between them, callie wanted to ask for more, more pain and more trust and more comfort and more truth, but she didn’t want to push noemi too far. caught between two equal desires, callie stayed silent. when noemi started speaking again, callie found herself nodding, then smiling, when she remembered her own incredulous reaction — and her suggestion in jest. her grin slowly spread across her eyes, as if it was the sun rising on a new morning, brightening her eyes, truly crinkling the corners this time. and even as noemi finished, even though callie knew it probably wasn’t the right thing to do, this incessant, abrupt giddiness that had bubbled in her throat, as if mimicking the waves at their feet, rose past her lips and, too, spilled onto the sand. perhaps because she’d never had these sorts of talks before, never had anyone to have them with if it didn’t benefit them in some way, noemi’s confession was liberating — honey, without the bees. even when she was young, callie could not recall ever having conversations like this with any of her girlfriends; nothing real, nothing meaningful. it was all a blur of boasts and manipulation and dares; all too eager to grow up before they realized what it even meant. how ironic, how incredible that now that she was older, different, callie would be given the chance again, someone like her, with someone like noemi.

rhys. it had been a surprise, and not who callie would have thought of for noemi, but that only showed how much she still had to learn, about her teammates, about others. “ rhys. ” callie’s mouth struggled with pronouncing that one syllable around the smile that still split her face. she pressed her lips together in an attempt to bring some sort of solemnity to her features, to her next words. “ it shouldn’t be terrifying, noemi, it doesn’t need to be. ” her grin softened. “ if you don’t want to— mess up again, there’s no reason to. nothing is predetermined or fated to happen, i believe in that so much. and if there’s potential. there’s no reason, none at all, why this time, things can’t go differently. ”  another one of those phrases, just like the one the noemi had repeated from her before, familiar in its repetition, haunting in its persistence. “ have you told him ? does he know ? ” callie could not keep the hope from her voice — not for her friend, when it should have been, but for herself. if things worked out for noemi, maybe callie could finally start believing in these words, too, maybe they would finally feel like more than a thinly veiled lie hidden behind smoke and mirrors.

[hawthvrn-blog]

phvntcm:

gabriel revelled in his untouchability, more like an apparition when he was treated as though hands would float through him when they attempted to find his shoulders, his back, his thighs, his chest — he was a mirage, intangible, impermanent, inhuman — he could not be touched. stray attempts at fist fights left bruises he could mask with carefully chosen shades of new skin, as though they had never grazed him at all. his hands could not be held, nor his legs bound together, nor his eyes forced closed. he was never embraced, met with arms spread wide to draw him closer, no one tangled their fingers in his hair and pulled. what few touches he allowed himself to feel were quick, and dirty, and left no evidence. callie touched him. callie traced under his eyes with her fingertips, staining them with salt. callie wrapped her arms around his waist and he could feel her forehead pressing into his chest, he recognised the shape of it like he recognised the throbbing pain in the back of his head, and he was quietly furious at her audacity and his own hypocrisy. i don’t understand you. i will never understand you. i don’t want to be understood. he did not dare to breathe and displace her. he knew he had stood like she wanted, and it took a matter of seconds for him to convince himself he had gone back to bed alone like she wanted too. he was dreaming. she felt solid wrapped around him, if he drew his hands up from his sides to rest on her back, he was certain they would not slip through her skin, but he swore: this was not real. the cruelty of comparing her to a girl he wished was dead and his in equal measure, who had driven him to ruin, who had taken his life and never repented for that most carnal of sins, did not merit an embrace. especially one she didn’t end immediately, even though she had said it herself: he was burning. he had a fever. she was a doctor. if he had been clever enough, and they were sitting across from each other trading orange slices and sharp looks, he would have questioned her methods: he was not as intelligent as she was, they were not trading thinly veiled hostilities they called lessons, his mind was dulled by his headache and the weight of her on him. gabriel did not speak. he exhaled, chest falling involuntarily. 

she hated him. he knew that to be true. she hated him, and he told her she reminded him of someone he had loved once, and in return she was holding him close to her heart.

callie touched him, and the only thing he could think, returning to it, over and over, playing on a loop in his head, was ‘ i am unloved, and i have been unloved for so very long, and i hate you for showing me this without any warning. ’

he abandoned caution — he had to, with his throat exposed to her like that, he was vulnerable — forearms skimming over the tops of her shoulders before they settled into place on her back, not pushing her closer to him but resting comfortably. it would be a mistake to think of her as breakable when he was the one who could barely stand, but looking at her, fearing her, and being held by her were two different things. gabriel withered. he bloomed, unmoving and silent except the laboured sound of his breathing and the motion of the tides pulling his chest, rise and fall, inhale, exhale. he didn’t dare close his eyes, lest she mistake it for something more than what it would have been: suffering. just tell me what you want. to understand. i thought i told you that. heart in his throat, or maybe her teeth, he bowed his head, chin level with the top of her head. he had been starved; she had made him realise that now too. and like any creature that had been starved so long it knew nothing but hunger, he would make himself sick gorging himself on his newfound spoils. he couldn’t let go of callie, clinging to her as if she was the only thing holding him up. she could have been. he had no one to do that, before. no one touched him. no one touched him like this. not his friends from the institute, when he could still call them his friends, when they had been eight and not the ugly, incomplete number that followed their loss. not scorpius, or aurum, june would never touch him again, odessa had never laid a finger on him — she didn’t have to — and that was what he hated her for most. gabriel was adrift, still uncertain of whether or not he was wandering in a dream, if his agony and the softness of her hair under his chin were real or imagined. a sharp jolt of pain somewhere in his head warned him: you do not have the strength to pursue this. and still. he would, shivering from his fever and weakened by the memory of the last time he had been held close to someone’s chest for so long, endlessly hot and seeing stars and losing his will to continue breathing unaided. 

head still bowed, cheek resting on her temple now, speaking at a whisper because his lips were too close to callie’s ear, gabriel understood, suddenly, what he needed to know before he could ever understand her. “ show me where you’re hurt. ” this is what i need. 

callie less so heard gabriel’s demand than felt it as a whisper on the shell of her ear. what she would give to dismiss it as the ramblings of a fever-soaked brain — just like she would categorize much of what he said tonight when the sun finally rose to slice like a blade down this strange twilight that they found themselves in — but he’d been too purposeful, it had been too similar to what she had asked of him earlier for her to mistake it for anything other than the deliberate truth. callie knew it was too late; too late to pretend that she did not hurt, not when she had once begged him for blame and fought him for blood, not when he had demanded then, too, to know what she had done to deserve it. he wanted her hurt — of course he did — as proof that he was not alone, as repayment for her seeing him like this, callie had no doubt. but he had been the one to seek her out, callie reminded herself. she owed him nothing except the cold detachment that came with deft hands and a clinical appraisal. so why had she stepped forward, much too close, to hold him, for much too long ? she stopped breathing, for just a beat, when the weight of gabriel’s arms settled over her, far too heavy, yet nothing compared to the weight of unanswered questions, uneasy sleep, and eternal words tied like chains to an anchor around her ankles. callie could no longer tell who was holding the other up, and even if she wanted to pull away, the only movement she was capable of was matching the rise and fall of his chest, in and out. she could feel him shivering — was he still cold ? of course —  and she felt him exhale, something he had withheld from her on that cliff, just like his tears. callie had expected the same oblivion she had felt back then, but that sort of elusive peace did not come easily nor did not come alone. loathing, fear, curiosity, envy: emotions that were too turbulent to have coalesced into anything but hate. a brewed concoction of her own making that callie had eagerly drunk from and learned to survive on. but now, by her own doing or by his or by some terribly unholy combination of both, it had been snatched from her possession by the cure she’d long avoided, leaving her far too vulnerable without her poison. 

“ i can’t. ” it came out as a sob, a fog of breath against the front of his shirt. it blindsided her, how close she was to weeping, as if she was mourning — as if she was losing a precious part of herself by admitting to his humanity, as if she was regaining a wretched part of herself she’d long thought discarded. she couldn’t give him what he wanted, what he needed. not for the same reasons she’d denied his game when they’d been on the edge of reckless waves, nor for the reasons she’d sought to claim a part of him instead of letting him draw the truth from her on that cliff. callie couldn’t — because where she hurt was not simply a migraine or a fever or anything that could be cured methodically. she couldn’t — because there were so many others more deserving of her truth. she couldn’t — because she did not deserve to be hurt. callie had always known, no matter how fervently she hated him, that she had solely perpetrated the worst violences in her own life; she’d always known that she was the villain in this story, and the ghosts that haunted her were hers alone. “ i can’t. ” she repeated, loosening her arms and stepping back, slowly. too long had passed since he’d told her what he wanted — only mere seconds. “ i’m not hurting, anywhere. i can’t— ” i can’t be hurting, i can’t tell you. was that the truth ? callie didn’t know, which was the reason she’d been able to voice it. “ i’m just trying to make things right. ” it was her turn to shiver now, the still air of the hallway suddenly cool without the warmth of gabriel in front of her. her forehead was warm, a weak imitation of his own fever, after laying it on his chest for so long. “ i just want to do the right thing. ”

back on the cliff callie had thought, desperately, that she could keep her secrets if she reminded herself of his humanity, of the danger in telling him — she’d been wrong. and if she stayed, like she had promised, like he’d begged her to, she would do something irreversible. callie took another step back, her eyes catching on the door to her room. it looked out of place, too normal, in this strange palace they’d built themselves out here in the middle of the night, and it’s familiarity called to callie, tempting her to escape. she didn’t want to hear gabriel’s reply — she feared it; she didn’t want his consolation, even worse, she didn’t want his condemnation. she didn’t want to hear him plead with her again. 

so she ran. 

“ i’ll be right back, gabriel. ” the words raced each other past her lips as callie stepped forward and opened her bedroom door, swiftly closing out the bright hallway. darkness and an agitated stillness settled around her. careful to keep her movements quiet — even though it felt as if her lungs were shrinking with every breath she took, even though her fingers refused to stay steady — callie grabbed everything that she would need: a cooling pack, a thermometer, water, medicine. as she turned to exit her room, again, callie paused, facing the wooden door stained black by shadows, deep breaths racking her frame, knowing that if she stood like this for even one second longer mattie would wake up and see her. she wanted, more than anything, to crawl back into bed, to welcome the restlessness of sleep and her nightmares with open arms, but she couldn’t leave him. she’d promised. callie’s fingers only stopped shaking when she grasped the doorknob — and turned. her voice was quiet as she stepped back out into the hallway. “ i don’t have everything i need here, but you should really take something before your fever gets worse. ”

[hawthvrn-blog]

phvntcm:

he faltered. she had warned him she would touch him, so he didn’t flinch, but — had he not done what she wanted ? he knew the cost of his disobedience so well. they had scarred him as a reminder. in this light, an improvement over a beach lit by a distant city and a raging fire, she must have been able to see the jagged, poorly healed — but ancient, and faded, as if done to the body of someone else and he had the fogged-up mirror image — shining pink slash just above his hip, jutting out over his waistline, easily missed if she didn’t know where to look.

he was struck by an unbearable adoration for her. it was not as sudden or brutal as an ice pick to the skull, the way his headache was, but it bordered on desperate, misshapen and misplaced, as unsuited for callie the object as it was him the subject. “ you remind me of someone. ” especially when he closed his eyes. then, he could almost convince himself she was stroking his cheek reverently, bloodied by a weeping war wound garnered in pursuit of something great, not prodding his bruises, rubbing salt into his cuts, to see if, why, he still cried. callie was a clinician, methodical, feigning that she was anything but cold — he kept his eyes open. his throat was raw with the effort with which it took him to speak in a language they would both understand. “ the first time you met me, you said not getting what i want was something i might need. ” his memory was vicious in its persistence. he had treated the little fox he did not know by her own name as if she was an entirely separate person from her, callie, and his acknowledgement of their overlap was singular, couched in one word called across the training room floor and left there to rot after. “ the first time i met her, she said she could give me everything i could ever want. ” this was cruel, he knew it was, but he was unwilling to relinquish what little control of this moment he had taken back from her. “ i was so fucking stupid then that i believed her. i was in love with her. nunca más. but you — i would be fucking stupid to believe you, wouldn’t i ? ” there was no venom in the question, even the swear was soft and made softer still by how slowly he spoke. nunca más. gabriel inhaled deeply, rising onto his knees, blood rushing to his head and making him dizzy when he looked down. the floor was shockingly distant, far too close to a four story drop for his liking. he swayed, breathing becoming heavy again. could he stand ? was that what she wanted ? would she release her hold on him if he did ? he stumbled the second he stood straight again, crashing back into the wall again, weak and off-balance, but he remained standing. he had told her he couldn’t sleep. he wanted nothing more now than to sleep. he knew he wouldn’t. he couldn’t, irreparably broken and unable to close his eyes for very long when he was alone for fear of being confronted by the wandering ghosts he had so willingly collected, held as trophies, prized hostages, in his room.  

“ you said, ” his voice broke on the second word, his ‘ said ’ splintered and guttural, “ you weren’t going to leave. ” his room, almost exactly a floor below, was empty and haunted; scorpius had fucked off somewhere, to someone else’s bed, knowing them, and if callie left him there he would be alone and ‘ alone ’ was the word he missed when he pleaded with her not to leave him. gabriel was not to be trusted. he didn’t trust himself. his lungs were burning, the pain from his head mercilessly spreading, radiating into his chest. he couldn’t think. she had lingered, even after she pulled away and he stood, he could still feel the edge of her thumb under his left eye, how gently she attempted to dress him again. was that what she wanted ? would she tell him everything if he put the hoodie she left heavy around his neck back on ? he struggled back into it, sleeves getting twisted, falling strangely over his arms.

he had stood. he had dressed. so — he counted backwards now. ‘ why did you take so much from me ? ’ one was still raw, and it was unsettling to be speaking it again so soon. ‘ callie, what did you do. ’ two he repeated word for word, and it was as though they had not moved from that immovable cliff face. what did you do to deserve this pain ? what did you do to me ? what did you do ? ‘ teach me something. ’ three could have been stolen from any of their conversations, the demand he always made of her, but the last time — the only time — she had left even that sacred question unanswered they had been drinking on sand that could have been black ash and they wouldn’t have known, considering how dark it was. her debts to him were the kind that could consume and ruin. they had ruined their collector. he knew, just as he knew his endless notes on his peers were useless, just as he knew he was desperate and rotting, that it was easier to believe that she owed him anything than the truth: she owed him nothing. he willed himself back into blindness when this was over. 

“ i don’t understand you. ” later, if she asked, and she wouldn’t, gabriel knew neither of them would speak of this night ever again, the same way they refused to acknowledge the night they first met, he would say it was desperation, fed by his fever, encouraged by the pain that had found its way down from his head and into his body. “ i will never understand you. ” never was a strong word, hadn’t he told her that ? the full weight of his indictment was hindered by how delicately he was forced to speak, by both his inability to open his jaw wider, at risk of tearing his head in half if he tried, and the fact english continued to elude him. “ but — i need you — i need — but — i need you — don’t — please. i swear to god, please. help me. ” 

her agreement had been verbal — i’m not going to leave — but it should have been signed in blood, carved into her bones. it was a deal made with the devil, one he was insistent on holding her to, reminding her of her promise in a voice so deep and fractured. there were many things callie hated about gabriel: his arrogance, his penchant for wearing sunglasses at night, his seeming inability to care about anyone other than himself, his habit of playing games and luring her into them, but she hated this the most. callie hated hearing him beg and the visceral plea lacing his tone, not because it was materialized revenge, not because it made him less of a ghost, but because it stirred a deep desperation in her; it reminded her that empathy was the worst sort of damnation she could have chosen. how long had it been since she’d come out of her room ? it was as if by crossing that thin threshold between the darkness and the light, callie had entered a suspended dimension, a place that existed only for them, under these particular circumstances, in this thin sliver of time. tomorrow, this hallway would return to normal and so would they — she wished it would never come, she wished was just a second away. he needed to be resting, and she needed to get him medicine, and they couldn’t spend the rest of the night out here. 

a deep sort of despair and helplessness rattled callie’s ribs as she stood, so she could face him, so she could help him as he had implored her to do — even though she had no idea how, because the agony etched into his every spoken syllable and every stilted, unsteady movement was borne out of a deeper pain than the physical. he had struggled back into his hoodie, his body sagging against the wall next to her door, as if it was the only thing keeping him upright. seeing him like this, callie almost, mistakenly, thought him fragile for the first time in her life. was this what gabriel had felt that morning on the cliff side ? this sort of virulent despondency ? if so she had been right to think them so alike, because the instinct she chose to act upon now, was the same one he had chosen then. callie’s movement was quick — just as his had been — as she closed the space between them and wrapped arms around his waist, laying her forehead on the furnace of his chest. the last time they had stood like this, they had been under the morning sun; the last time they had been so close, he’d had his arms around her; the last time they had embraced, it had been short. but this time, callie held on because she was scared he would fall, because she could not say what she wanted to otherwise. “ okay— okay, gabriel, okay. i’ll help you, i’ll help you. i’m not leaving, just tell me what you want. ” he didn’t understand her ? she didn’t understand him. for every fact she could rattle off, there were a thousand more secrets that she could not decipher. callie could know everything about him and still understand nothing besides the pieces of flesh and bone he’d fed her. how truly she had failed in every aspect when it came to this boy in her arms.

and he knew it, too; gabriel had said it himself: he would be fucking stupid to believe her. when he’d first started speaking, callie had already known the ending would not be a happy one; she’d listened to too many of his anecdotes, relived too many of his memories to still believe those existed to him. yet, even knowing that, what he said still affected her, deeply, profoundly, acutely. ‘ i was in love with her. ’ someone who had promised gabriel everything, someone he’d believed, someone he’d loved. gabriel was right — when they had first met, callie had given him nothing. instead, she’d claimed his name, the first thing she’d ever taken from him, the first thing he’d ever offered her; gabriel didn’t believe her, and he shouldn’t, because their first exchange proof that she couldn’t be trusted, that her word meant nothing. callie had waited with muted dread for what would come, his final judgement, but it never did. it was as if he knew the silence would tell her more than his words ever could; callie already knew the inevitable ending to this tale, the only logical ending it could have: he did not, could not love her. and the rising tide of emotion in her chest at that realization could only be described as a war between relief and panic — she hadn’t forgotten what he’d said first: ‘ you remind me of someone. ’ was this what she had been seeking from his veiled words and weighted entreaty ? was this his answer to her silent question, who are you ? he’d given her another piece of the puzzle, but it was yet just a different version of himself with sharp edges and jagged ends. something he knew she would not be able to reconcile with the other parts of him that she held, leaving the answer that she was searching for always out of reach. his proclamation and his query left a trail of questions in its wake, ones that littered callie’s mind like breadcrumbs, ones that would lead her to the girl he had loved no matter how far callie tried to wander: what was her name ? had she kept her promises ? and most dangerously, why am i like her ? 

[hawthvrn-blog]

True/False game. Make an assumption about me in my ask and I’ll tell you if its true or false. Go.

[hawthvrn-blog]

[hawthvrn-blog]

he has crushed your soul and smothered you until your breaths are mere gasps. i am a goddess, you rasp. you will scream your name until he has it carved into memory and echoing in his mind. (he will feel what you have felt) you will clutch his bloodied heart in your fists and eat him alive.

GODDESSES DON’T FORGIVE / j.m (via ghaffas)

[hawthvrn-blog]

bclivar:

        the look on his face was so earnest, so sincere. it was hard to reconcile the open, trusting gaze with the heavy-hearted boy that wore it; his body was littered with evidence of the life he’d lived, and he still found it within himself to have faith. to believe that this girl in front of him was who she said she was, was his friend, someone he could trust and confide in no matter the secret. cooped up in lab. it made sense. it lined up with her habits ( she was studious, smart ), added up as to why she hadn’t been around ( finals were approaching ), figured as to why she hadn’t reached out, either ( too focused ). he nodded slowly; despite all that was running through his mind to foster the explanations, he could still feel that horrible seed of doubt settling low in his stomach. callie may be studious, possibly distracted by the upcoming finals – but she was also thoughtful, always catering to the needs of others. he would never expect that, wasn’t greedy enough, but this utter quiet wasn’t in her nature. she’d say something cheerful and kind about being busy this week, just so you know, rafe, so you don’t worry, and he’d roll his eyes and tell her to stop being ridiculous.

        “ it doesn’t — ” he cut himself off, features screwed up into an expression like he’d just swallowed an entire lemon. his second attempt was quieter, more tentative, almost afraid. “ it’s not — ” doubt had already crept in, already started pushing these words up and out of his mouth from where they’d been bubbling within him for the past week. “ it’s not because of what i said, is it ? ” the quietly ashamed look in his eyes was barely there, but if you knew what to look for, it was almost painfully obvious. “ sorry. sorry, ignore that. stupid question. ” rafe’s head bowed slightly, the guilt turned anew toward his momentary lack of confidence in her. he’d never had any reason to believe anything other than the best about her. she’d never hurt him, despite the fact that the recesses of his mind were trying to convince him otherwise.

        the idea of himself as a bad person wasn’t something new to rafael. in fact, it was something he wore like a second skin; as a concept, it fit. people on the street took one look at him and thought trouble, anyone who’d ever known anything he’d done had certainly filed him under the classification without second thought. it was the obvious answer to judge first and never look back, not when the subject had enough blood on his hands to last a lifetime. and after so many years of weathering those looks, those snap judgements about the kind of person he was, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that rafael believed them. there was only so much that he could take, and it was far easier to simply accept the burden, little by little, than attempt to free himself of it all at once. this was no different: though callie had insisted otherwise, it was so much easier to do as he’d always done – assume the worst possible outcome. it wasn’t hard to believe.

if callie’s guilt over this — different from the one that resided in her heart and had long ago seeped into her soul by staining it red — was a serpent snaking its way around her chest, tightening so it became harder to breath, cornering her heart until it had to beat double-time, then rafe’s expressions, so honest in contrast to hers, was the snake’s bite, and his question the poison that now flowed through her veins. she didn’t know which one was worse, his faith or his doubt. the former was the equivalent of an honor that she had stolen, coerced him to give her, and the latter an unbearable hesitation borne out of a misgiving of his own worth. it was the shame that clouded his eyes and tone, as rafe was finally able to finish his question, that made the choice for her. if it was a decision between her own pain and guilt — friends, ghosts, she’d grown familiar with over the years though time had never dulled their sharp blades and the way they struck against her — and this shame and self-contempt that he seemed to hold, that she could not bear to see draped across his brows like a shadow, then there truly was no choice at all. so why could she not make the sacrifice she knew she should ?

some would call it self-preservation, but callie had long known it for what it was: indulgence and conceit. her avoidance of rafe was to protect herself, to allay her own guilt, to convince herself that if she withdrew enough, she would not have to bear the burden of a trust she was unworthy of. she had sought it out and won it, not out of kindness, but out of a need to prove to herself that she possessed it — proof that she was undeserving. but she had accepted it, selfishly, she’d made her own promises in return, selflessly, and though they were ones that she wanted to keep, callie still dreaded the moment she would be called on to do so; every moment spent with him was a risk she couldn’t afford, not when her confession lay so heavy on her tongue whenever she saw him, waiting for the right moment to escape, to ruin her once more. 

if she wanted to save her secrets, she would lie — say yes. but she had already told him too many of those, everything left unsaid far more significant than any of the words she’d ever spoken to him. and besides, hadn’t she decided already ? there was no choice: the uncertainty in his gaze and in his tone threatened to rip her mask in two and pry open her jaws so she could scream the truth. and that was what she would give him, even though it wasn’t the one he deserved, even though it hid its own lie. “ rafe, it’s not stupid, and this has nothing to do with what you told me. ” it had everything to do with the secrets he’d shared, but never in the way he implied, as if it was him who disgusted her instead of herself. “ i’ve just been busy. ” but you know you can always come find me. it was something callie couldn’t bring herself to voice aloud, because she would not be able to endure the disgrace of something so false. instead she deflected, her laugh brittle, though her eyes were still warm — as they only could be when looking at him, despite everything else — “ you should be busy, too. i hope you’ve been studying while staying out of trouble. ” 

[hawthvrn-blog]

phvntcm:

and — he knew what, exactly, about her ? a name, in its various forms, none of which belonged to him, and the names he had given her to replace it, kitten, little fox, beautiful traitor, cruel saviour. the length of the space between her pupils, the slope of her nose, the tone, clear and high, in most ordinary circumstances, with which she spoke. she was beautiful in the way botticelli’s venus was, windswept rising from the sea foam: classically. she studied medicine at the international operative academy. she shared her room with matilda. she hated him. ( somewhat reasonably. ) she cared for the lives of others, near-total-strangers who found they had become targets, as though theirs were her own. she had a penchant for morality. she was unselfish. he was undeserving. he knew — callie was so close to him he felt as though he was electrified, one misplaced spark away from being engulfed in flames. her fingertips cut through the cold. gabriel doubled over, chest heaving, unable to breathe, eyes wide with panic even though she had told him to close them.

her room faced north, but her window was at least fifteen metres from the ground. there was a staircase two doors down. there was another seven metres or so east, a fire escape that lay mostly abandoned because it was dark inside at all times. over his shoulder: her door. at his feet: another. and another. he counted silently, choking, drawing in a shaky inhale and holding out his hands so he could see his fingers trembling, evidence that this was real. verification. twenty-nine. if something — someone — wanted him so desperately they were willing to take him by force, and they wanted to strike when he was weakened by his body’s betrayal, there were twenty-nine points of entry and exit on this hall. thirty if he was willing to break his bones and callie had a suitable rope in her room. his breathing steadied. 

it was an ugly but unshakeable habit. every room he stood in, every hall where he collapsed, every quad with unnaturally bright green grass, every bar with cameras mounted on the wall, every beach party. he always counted quickly, wordlessly, so deeply aware that any just-as-fast gesture he missed, any alley or path through the crowd or staircase he skipped over, could be his undoing. he refused to be caught off guard ever again. he refused to be anything less than meticulous. and — his throat was closing, as though he was poisoned instead of panicking, and he clutched at the wall behind him, scrabbling desperately for something he knew was real, something he could touch, fingers locking around callie’s wrist — he kept notebooks with names and features and stray observations not for study, the reason he would swear his life on if she ever read what he wrote about her, but for control. he had convinced himself he knew everything about the people whose names littered his notes, he was so careful to record everything, unflinching in his pursuit of knowledge. but — they had known everything about him and he knew nothing about them. callie knew so much about him and he knew so little about her. he had refused to be held captive by someone who knew everything when he knew nothing ever again, the same way he had sworn never to be caught off guard, the same way he had sworn never to be caught. he was rotting, that was what this was, not one of his childhood migraines, something was wrong, he was deeply, virulently wrong.

“ don’t leave me. ” gabriel didn’t recognise his voice when he spoke. it was lower in pitch, nearly half an octave, deep and pleading and dangerous. he had never outgrown his accent. he remembered, distinctly, someone, one of his father’s aides, promising him that the longer he stayed in their country, speaking their language, the more he would sound like them. he wanted to tip his head back and scream, suddenly, violently, at the top of his lungs, in an effort to dislodge the imposter speaking for him. he was delirious from both pain and the fever he’d worked himself into. he wasn’t going to survive this. he still had callie’s hand grasped tightly in his. she had asked him a question. not, ‘ show me where it hurts .’ something else. he couldn’t bear to ask her to repeat herself. he couldn’t bear to ask her to save him from this, a immense, irreparable vulnerability of his own making. not when she was the one who had exploited it.

gabriel had been so dedicated; he had counted doors and millimeters and vowels, all of them, and still, it was though he had never woken up finally alone. “ you can do whatever you want to me, just don’t leave me. ” his own voice, higher, innocuous and unaccented and painstakingly crafted, was suddenly foreign. a sharp twinge of pain in his head when he inhaled was a solemn, solitary reminder that this body was still his, he had not been forced from it. 

regaining control, he let go of callie’s hand and forced himself into stasis. he knew where he was — the ioa. the hallway outside callie’s room. three-one-two. there were twenty-nine points of entry and exit in the vicinity. he knew he was alive, he was not dreaming, he was sick, she had said it herself. his head hurt. he was cold, but he was so, so hot. gradually, cautiously, gabriel returned to movement, tugging at his sleeves and withdrawing inside the last of his hoodies, pulling it over his head and leaving it atop that pile callie had made. she could help him. she had helped him. he shivered.  

and — he expected what, exactly, from her ? that he would be so lucky as to be allowed to walk free without having to shed any blood twice ? that she would tell him everything when she had refused him her name the first time they had met ? that she would miraculously heal him ? that she would stay by his side until his headache dissipated and his fever came down and he could breathe again ? that she would be everything he had lost when she so closely resembled the reason he had lost everything ? 

“ please. please. don’t leave me. ” 

gabriel was crying, his eyes stung, his cheeks were wet and his lashes tangled together when he blinked, but exhaustion won out, and he didn’t make a sound, closing his eyes like she had told him to what felt like hours ago.

his grip around her wrist was surprisingly firm for someone who was in the throes of a fever, who was suffering from a migraine, whose lucidity would have been called into question if not for the way his eyes shone. but it wasn’t gabriel’s hold that shackled callie to to him, it was the lingering agony left in the wake of his plea. his words had been so steeped in melancholy that callie hadn’t noticed, at first, the way his tongue curled around them — different, carrying an accent. and the answers that she had sought, that had so eluded her when he spoke words she had no hope of understanding, seemed to almost be within reach, taunting her in the way ‘ don’t leave me ’ fell from his lips. never before had callie wished so fiercely that words, language could be a tangible object, as shining and extraordinary as the tears bathing his cheeks. she wanted to hold those three syllables in her hand, and demand from him, what does this mean ? who are you ? it was agony that she couldn’t; it was relief that she wouldn’t. gabriel claimed that she’d taken too much — everything — but he had willingly sacrificed it all, pieces of his memories for her to bite into like an orange slice. she had never claimed something he hadn’t given, and this, he wouldn’t relinquish. 

callie thought of the first time she’d seen him, hand around some other boy’s collar. how fitting it was now, she realized, that he had his hand on her wrist but the ghost, the one she fiercely wanted to keep and so viciously wanted to exorcise, had his imprint around her neck. his touch was far too hot, a byproduct of his fever, and it seared her skin. when gabriel spoke again, callie hungrily clutched at those syllables, as if picking them out of the air faster would help her understand them better, but in her eagerness — for she realized soon after with a sinking heart that they failed to hold the weight of the ones before — callie had forgotten the anguish that was buried within them. was this the sort of feeling she’d been so blindingly searching for ? how the old her — just a few years younger, an entire world apart — would have begged to feel this sort of pain on behalf of someone else, to feel so desperately that if there was something, anything she could do to relieve them of it, that she would, without hesitation. what an idealistic dream it had been to seek this exquisite kind of torture.

callie had wanted to reach out and stop him, even has he peeled out of his last layer of clothing — this was bad. despite the sweat lingering on his hairline and the heat blazing through his body, this sort of chill, the real kind and not the type his fever had tricked his mind into believing, would only make whatever this was, worse. callie reached out to grasp the hoodie he’d just removed; the material was too soft for her clenched grip, her curved nails digging into the seems. earlier, she had mistakenly, hastily urged him for his trust, even when she hadn’t earned it, and now, he was catching her in a lie and asking her to prove it. ‘ you can do whatever you want to me, just don’t leave me. ’ instinctively, the part of her that had been trained to reassure and the part of her that had been born to lie, wanted to make him more promises, give him more guarantees. but the way he'd sounded, begging, broken, told her this wasn’t just about his fever or his migraine or this pinpointed moment in a school no one besides them knew about. this would be a promise — once made — callie could never get away with breaking. ‘til death do us part. silence engulfed the hallway, leaving only the low hum of the light fixture above them. she had unknowingly crumpled the thick fabric between her fingers, as if punishing it for the choice he was forcing her to make — between denying who she wanted to be, who she should be and the cruel devotion he was asking of her. 

if she was to give him this, he would give her something, too. his eyes were closed and she had the advantage, but it wasn’t one she could take with good conscious. callie didn’t know this boy, despite all the facts she could rattle off about gabriel, and she didn’t understand the cause of his furor, his horror — only that he would discard her touch in one moment and then beg for her presence in the next. callie’s teeth closed around her bottom lip, hesitating. “ gabriel. ” his name, that was safe — or it should have been.  “ i’m going to touch you. ” a warning; she’d just given away her advantage, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to claim her due. callie reached towards his face once more — one hand still on her knees clutching his shirt — and used her thumb to lightly brush away the dampness on his cheeks. the movement could have almost been misconstrued as care, as tenderness, but he would know what it meant, because he had denied her once before. “ i’m here. ” an assurance and an exchange. “ i’m not going to leave. ” the last promise she would make to him.

callie’s hand didn’t move — her palm tucked against the curve of his cheek, her fingers resting on the edge of his eye, her thumb damp from his collected tears — as she brought her other hand and his still-warm shirt up. rising up on her knees, she tucked the collar, slowly, this time gently, over his head so it hung limply from his neck. “ you need to put this back on; you have a cold. ” and in an echo of another moment that had just passed, but that also felt eons away, callie pulled away and repeated her words: “ can you stand ? let’s get you to bed. ”

[hawthvrn-blog]

phvntcm:

clarity returned to him with its teeth showing, vengeful and ancient like the gods that would have demanded his heart from callie, and he was faced with the malicious ugliness of what he had done: he was standing across from calliope maxwell. hawthorn. gatinha. zorrica. he was begging her to help him as if she wouldn’t seize upon his weakness, as if she hadn’t wished to see him brought to his knees since the moment he first laid eyes on her, as if she didn’t hate him and that didn’t make him hate himself too. that was all she was good for. punishment. a heavy dose of cruelty, the flames at the foot of his stake. “ don’t — ” gabriel snarled, eyes wild, and his shoulder hit the wall, and he was rising on his toes as if that could help him sink into it, now desperate only to get away from her, “ touch me. ” he dropped the hoodie he was still clutching to his chest, and it fell to the ground, lying between them, a dividing line he willed to become a wall, or a river, or a cliff, something that couldn’t be crossed so easily. 

slowly, slowly, he could only move slowly for fear of retribution, he fell to the carpet lining the corridor, knees bent in front of him, hands rising from where they rested on the ground to cover his eyes. “ mierda ! ” his distress had become material, palpable, something he could hold in his hands if he dropped them from his eyes. he couldn’t get her voice out his head, even as his skull threatened to splinter under the weight of his agony. show me where it hurts. everywhere. but where ? i don’t know. the admission, if only to himself, if uninvited and unwanted, made his shoulders lower, his spine straightening. callie was not a cure. she was a symptom, documented evidence of the blackened heart of his that so invited vengeance. she had claws. she was clever. he’d always known that. she had made him miserable. “ please don’t hurt me. i’m sorry. lo siento. i’m sorry. ” he swallowed, and it caught in his throat. it felt as though he had bitten off something with a sharp edge that had cut him up inside. she was right. he needed to be in his bed, away from here, away from her. his eyes were wet. he felt hot, now, as though his body had finally conceded and allowed itself to feel the fever she said he had. 

on the floor outside the door to the room she shared with mattie, snapping at her like a stray, wounded animal, or a child who let his fears rule him, stripping out of another one of his sweatshirts — gabriel feared her like no one else. he feared what she knew, what he had given her so willingly, how quickly he spun out of control when she so much as looked at him, that he had built a place for her at his side that had belonged to someone else for so long, that he was in so much pain it felt as though he would collapse and drown and die and he had dragged himself to her, the resemblance she bore to such dangerous people he knew so well, her magnetism, their shared grief. he was dependent on himself and himself alone, a casualty of the way he treated lives ( his, mostly ) as though they were disposable, shed as easily as one of his shirts when the skin under it wasn’t feverish and left to rot. he couldn’t bring anyone with him when he left. but — he had given her so much, and he had collapsed across from her, and he needed her to fix him when he was broken. every ghost had a flaw that tethered them to life, a desire for something they couldn’t have. he could never speak to her again. he knew he would speak to her again the second she crossed his mind. 

his chest felt hollow. “ it’s been so long since i — i don’t like doctors, when i was little i was so afraid of my father’s, he had this long black stethoscope and it looked like a snake  — i’m afraid — ” his english was not strong. it faltered without misplaced rage behind it. “ it’s been so long since i — ” he looked up from behind his hands, blinking and tipping his head back until it hit the wall. so strange to be the one below her, but, wasn’t he always below her ? “ i don’t remember anymore. what i’m supposed to do. ” hesitation could be life-giving as much as it was a killing blow. “ when i get a migraine. if i have a migraine. i don’t know. i don’t know. i don’t know what’s wrong with me. i don’t know if any of this is real. ” his head bobbed languidly as he strained to look up at her and avoid the light that haloed her head. “ why did you take so much from me ? i’ve lost everything. ”

he was flesh and blood before her; callie was sure of it, because only someone so alive — even if they had been reborn — could possess such a brutal sharpness the way he did when he snarled his reply. and it was as if, once callie had realized the humanity of the boy before her, she could not go back to tricking herself into thinking him a phantom. a disgraced god, a fallen diety, knocked from the abstract yet absolute pedestal that she had kept him on so she could continue to curse his name. her eyes didn’t follow the hoodie as it fell to the floor, it couldn’t have, because there was something mesmerizing about this resurrection, painful, exposed, and tender. afterwards, callie would tell herself that this was not him; she would be able to convince herself that he wasn’t real, not truly, that this was just another mask, another version of him for her to collect and keep with all the others — a fever-bound mind did not a mortal make. yet the wildness in his eyes told a different story, and in order to keep her lie, callie had to look away. but she didn’t. he did it for her — back against the wall, hands over eyes. 

he was sick, callie had said so herself. but illness, even the most intense sort of pain, did not explain, did not compare to the anguish in his cry. the way his words, his pleas, his apologies seemed to rip him apart, wrecking the seams that held him together. and this felt like punishment; this felt like retribution. for all the times she had chosen to punish him for her self-loathing, for all the moments she’d felt righteous in aiming her hate at him, the world was repaying her back, he was exacting revenge. as if they were saying, so clearly, she could almost hear a voice, his voice, in her ear: ‘ this is what you do. you take, and you ruin, until it is too late. ’ and suddenly, gabriel was an apparition from her memory again — but not of herself, this time, of another girl, one that had not survived to the present. yet as striking as that thought was, as much as it gutted her, she could not make him stay in the past. she knew far too much about him, details that had disguised itself as inconsequential ( how sweet oranges from colombia were, the date of his birthday, the klimt that he treasured ), but which coalesced into creating a boy so real callie could still feel the shadow of his embrace. she wanted this awareness to pass, but he was talking again, still against the wall, still with hidden eyes. 

like a camera clicking into focus, the young boy was back, the one callie had first glimpsed in the ocean, ankles wet and shrouded in smoke and darkness. and she made the mistake of thinking this would be okay. that she’d be able to endure this if he was just a boy, if he just needed her help, if it just had a migraine and a fever and the unbearable agony of both. but he wouldn’t let her get away with it; he had never let her get away with anything. only once before, had callie felt like this, as if her bones would give out, as if her soul was ready to offer him her confession on a silver platter, when he had been just as unraveled as he was now, when he had asked ‘ what did you do ’ under the morning light. back then, even though callie had wanted to, she hadn’t fallen to her knees; this time she did — as if in prayer, as if in repentance — sinking to his height before him, disguised as a choice, but it had been a necessity. i’ve lost everything, i’ve lost everything. 

something soft and worn brushed against her knees; his hoodie. he didn’t want her to touch him, but she had to, to help him. it was a need so insistent that it left her no choice but to follow it. she picked up the fabric, thick, too thick for the summer. it was warm in her hands, a heat it had stolen from the boy before her, as callie neatly folded it, and placed it next to the two of them. she reached out to tug at the second hoodie, the one he’d just removed — good — and folded that one, too. it had been impossible for her to look away from him before, but now it felt too raw and she needed to look at anything but him, so callie’s gaze was still on the neat stack of clothes next to them, smoothing down the front of a hoodie that scorched her skin, when she spoke. “ i haven’t kept my promises to you, gabriel. ” there — his name on her lips an eternal reminder of the first one she ever broke. “ but you can trust me when i say that i can help you. ” the instinct to lie, to lay false assurances, so deeply entrenched in the fabric of her creation that callie could not spot the irony in her own statement; she glanced at him then, as she reached out, her hand steady only because her entire being was focused on that movement. the last time she had done this, placed her hand on his cheek, it had been a demand, this time, it was an apology. her hand was light on his forehead, and maybe she could have convinced herself that it wasn’t there, that she wasn’t purposefully disobeying him, if not for the sheen of sweat that soaked her palm. her fingers were chilled, his forehead a furnace. “ i’m not an expert in neurology, but i can give you something for the fever, for the pain. ” her hand pulled away, just slightly, so her fingers could trace downwards over his brow bone. “ close your eyes. ” callie lifted her hand from his face, and she let out a breath she hadn’t even known she’d been holding. “ can you stand ? ” if she could focus on this, on the physical ailments that assaulted him, she would not need to think of anything else, she would not have to face herself, she would not have to answer his accusation: why did you take so much from me ?

[hawthvrn-blog]

haphczard:

“ me too, ” noemi sighed, her fingers sifting through the sand surrounding her towel. impossibly blue waters of miami encapsulated the best memories of her childhood; the ocean, you could say, was her first love, her purest. there was something about the possibility that danced along the sea’s horizon, the line where space reached down to greet earth whispering promises of hope, of every different outcome to every different decision she could make. she’d learned to surf before she could ride a bike, learned to swim before kindergarten even began. even on another coast, even looking at a completely different ocean, she felt at home, “ kinda makes me feel small, you know? reminds me that there are much bigger forces at work than humanity. ” atlas barked as the tide yanked his ball just out of his reach; she furrowed her brow. stupid dog, she thought, looking at him with an untainted sort of adoration in her eye. it was strange, the way she almost envied atlas; his entire life was a game. even search and rescue was more like hide and seek, and he was capable of loving any human who treated him with kindness without hesitation, without questioning motive, without fear of watching things fall apart. ignorance is bliss.

“ bullet entry angles, ” she lifted her hands and brushed them against each other, watching sand sprinkle off of her skin and onto her towel, “ sounds absolutely riveting, cal. you know, dr. owen hunt of grey sloan memorial hospital would be incredibly proud. ” noemi glanced over at the girl next to her, suddenly overwhelmed with admiration, with gratefulness. callie had hands like mateo, hands that could heal, hands that were capable of fixing things that were broken. noemi was prone to the exact opposite, watching things turn to ash and slipping right through her fingers. “ your textbooks will be there tomorrow. this weather might not be, ” she leaned back on her elbows, tilting her face up towards the sun with her eyes closed, soaking in golden light and breathing in the smell of sea salt. home. atlas came trotting up, fur dripping and tongue dangling from his mouth, tired. he laid down on the towel at their feet, a towel specifically bought for him, and waited patiently with the tennis ball in between his paws as noemi sat up, opened a large bottle of fresh water, and poured it into a bowl. “ besides, atlas and i would’ve been no fun had it been just the two of us. we’d just be napping in sand. ”

noemi’s hair started to curl as it dried, slowly. damp locks still cooled her skin as they spilled over her shoulders when she leaned forward. she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, hugging herself into a tight ball and leaning her head against her kneecaps. being in the water, being out in the sun, being at ioa––… it all made her tired, exhausted. she closed her eyes with a lazy smile on her lips, “ i’m not so sure that’s a good thing. especially with exams coming up. i feel like i should be in major panic mode, but here we are. ” her emotional state was a complete wreck, and her mind was about as messy as the desk in her room. she’d been in a fog lately, trying to sort out her own feelings while trying to study for final exams; neither of which seemed to work. “ with the year we’ve had, i’m surprised more people haven’t taken a weekend to disappear. or a sunday to disappear. we all need a fucking break every now and then. besides, if i looked at one more cold case file, i’d lose my mind. truly, ” her eyes opened, and she blinked at callie, again feeling overwhelmingly grateful. there hadn’t been anyone else that made her feel so unburdened, so light. “ where’s your head at, cal ? how are you feeling about–… everything ? ” 

there were sounds all around them, the quiet lulling of the ocean, the insistent beats of atlas' breaths, the rustling of sand barely discernible as it shuffled along their towels, their skin. but all callie could hear was the quick fire of a gun. her first instinct was to demure, to hide, to lie. honesty had never been worn comfortably by the girl she used to be nor the girl she was trying to be. callie had concocted an elaborate ruse and had called it benevolence and selflessness for so long that the truth felt much too raw, far too unsteady. goosebumps danced along her arms, despite the heat that emanated from the sand below her and poured down from the sky. could she be truthful ? could she be real, for once ? and the answer, which callie had thought would be a muddle of excuses and jumbled rationalizations, came far quicker than she'd expected: only for noemi.

“ what am i not feeling, should be the question. ” the laugh that chased her words didn’t belong to her; it tasted too bitter bitter as it tripped off her tongue. “ after everything i think- do you ever feel like, even though you try to do your best, you always end up making the wrong choice ? ” she shook her head, her hair tangling in the fine grains of sand on either side of her towel, wrapping to lay across her throat. “ and there’s no way to ever know until it’s too late. ” until that decision had borne a consequence that would only accept payments of the soul, each repetition stealing a little more of callie’s mind. her eyes moved from the pale, rushing blue of the water to the deep warmth of noemi’s eyes. “ i guess i’m still caught up in the mission, even though it’s been weeks. ” a mere second when it came to the weight of a life lost — not even a minute in the decades callie would carry this residual regret. her eyes traced over noemi’s posture, and she wanted to mimic it, because if she was to lay bare her thoughts, at least she could protect her flesh, but she didn’t move. she closed her eyes instead. “ i’d like to think that, next time, if we all do what is right — what we think is right, at least — that everything will be okay. ” yet even in this moment of suspended truth, callie didn’t dare give voice to her doubts, but what if it’s not ?  

her eyes parted, squinting against the bright sun — the most prophetic sort of sign she could have received, and callie smiled. a day like this, pearlescent and sparkling, was meant to be treasured. “ everything will be okay. ” and maybe for the first time since their debrief, she truly believed those words; the same ones she had chanted day and night nearly four years ago. callie glanced back at noemi again, and something in the other girl’s countenance gave her pause. callie had never been good at paying attention to other people, a habit bred from indulgence and nurtured with conceit. but her improvement had been driven by fear; fear that a lack of attention would doom someone else, that heartless indifference — a friend to cruelty — would become her most lethal weapon. but callie wasn't nearly perfect, she wasn't even close. her eyes would never instinctively catch on an errant gaze or a stilted movement, not unless she was looking for it, and even then, she could rarely pinpoint it with absolute accuracy. it only spoke of how attuned she was to noemi, out of care, out of familiarity, that she saw the way the other girl sat — tucked in on herself, head bowed over her knees as if in prayer, as if she was hoping there would be someone out there to listen to it. “ what about you, what’s on your mind, noemi ? ”

[hawthvrn-blog]

phvntcm:

he knew, with the sort of urgency that could tear him limb from limb and burn him alive, that this was a debt that could only be paid in blood. heritable. cursed. he had no blood left— “ mamá ? ” it felt like fucking human sacrifice, as though she had lifted his heart over her head to call upon some ancient and vengeful god instead of pressing her forehead to his so quickly it felt like a kiss. mamá. this was a dream— he was half-convinced it was— unforgivable. lucidity eluded him. gabriel understood that callie must have been taught by her own mother—her father ? did callie have a father ? did she have a mother, even ? had she told him about them ?— her childhood fevers must have been treated as delicately as his were, buried under clean white washcloths soaked in ice cold water, fingers laced through hers, prayers whispered, lights down low — cures were as generational as a curse, or a debt— but when he opened his eyes, he couldn’t find her. he didn’t dare to look down. his blink was slow, easily mistaken for him closing his eyes again. he kept them open, some kind of reparation for calling callie by a name he knew was wrong, but they were heavy-lidded. there she was. he saw her through his lashes. gabriel couldn’t speak, but not because of anything other than reverence. “ gracias. ”

 he was unsure of what he was thanking her for: her resemblance, her concern, her orders, her diagnosis, the softness of her skin, anything, everything. “ eres tan tibia. ” she was, and he was freezing, and he had heard her say ‘ a hundred degrees ’ and he knew that he shouldn’t be shivering when his blood was boiling, and he knew he shouldn’t have woken her up and begged to be touched like this but she was warm and he was cold. she was admonishing him. he needed her to understand why he couldn’t do what she ordered, that it was not out of defiance or disrespect but agony that he fell at her feet. but english too eluded him, leaving him with a language he no longer dreamed in, that was as much his as any other he’d learned, a mother tongue that had abandoned him, left him for dead, kissed his forehead and lay cold cloths on damp skin— gabriel needed callie to know— gabriel needed callie. 

“ cuando yo era joven, yo tendría las migrañas. a veces con una fiebre. yome pondría tan frío. ” she wouldn’t be able to understand him if he didn’t speak in a language she knew. he closed his eyes again, speech slowing to a crawl. migraña was so close to english, wasn’t it ? he couldn’t remember the name for a headache that made it feel like his head was splitting in two. “ yo creo yo tengo una migraña. sino no he tenido una desde yo era nueve. no lo sé. yo sé yo tengo una jaqueca. y tengo frio. le duele. ” three words, plucked from an obscurity he had created himself: “ i can’t sleep. le duele. ” gabriel’s shoulders slumped at his immense failure, eyes wide again, trying to look through her, to find someone who did understand him. desperate, he stepped away from her, back into the wall and shrugging out one of his hoodies. it was an immense sacrifice. he made it for her, as an apology for his inability to follow even the simplest of orders and say even the simplest of sentences. she was right. he should have been in bed. callie should have been in bed too. neither of them were. 

callie had hated it when gabriel had called her by name, those few times he did — it had always felt too personal, as if being approached, being greeted, being touched by your own soul. she may have seen in him a mirror image of the worst parts of herself, but to have it address her back, for him to see her, was a macabre horror all on its own. two syllables, callie, which she would have given anything to hear now instead of the other two that he had uttered. it gave her too much. it was a sort of vulnerability she had never demanded from him; she may have stood on the the edge of the world with her fingers pressed against his bruised cheek silently begging him for his tears, but that had been to save the girl she’d become. there were no ghosts to save now, except for the one standing before her. mamá. she knew who he was talking about: the woman who had been smart, who had been so good at english; the woman who had promised the lonely boy in his heart friends. someone who, callie knew, had loved him.

she had always seen what he wanted her to see. that thought came unbidden, like a freight train barreling through this hallway, the impact of which callie would never recover from. it wasn’t the deception that stole her breath, it was the control. she knew far too much about him — everything she didn’t want — yet nothing all at once. and that made him more human than any ghost had the right to be. empathy was a painful reward for all the effort callie had put in to learn it. to feel another’s pain was the most potent sort of burden, the most tangible of connections. it was a singular divinity to feel as others did, to ache when they did. and callie had never wanted to see him this way; she should have stayed in her room. she was already on an edge — of the ocean, of a cliff, of a death that train had come delivering which she was not prepared to embrace — and then he thanked her.

if she had been just a little taller, callie would have thought that gabriel had closed his eyes again, but at her angle, she could see his eyes peaking out between lashes. who was he now ? who was he showing her ? that small child who had no friends, who played soccer, who had a mom that loved him; that phantom who found pleasure in taunting others, who found home in a crooked grin; or that holy figure, lit by the morning sun, who had decided to save all his tears for himself. when gabriel finally spoke again, callie couldn’t understand a thing, yet she listened intently, because she had a feeling that what he was saying would give her the answers she needed. but it was like trying to grip liquid gold with bare hands, scorching and fruitless. for all her efforts to listen to him — with a desperation that confessed how important this was — when she finally did, when familiar sounds greeted her ears, callie was briefly thankful that she hadn’t comprehended anything else. the way he shaped those words ‘ i can’t sleep ’ into a benediction was an imprint on her soul, far deeper than anything else he’d inked. 

he knew she wouldn’t have been able to understand. for all her judgements of him, callie had always known in the back of her mind that gabriel was unpredictable. what he had just said could have been a rattling of his ailments, another narrative drawn from his memories — it could have been a declaration of why he hated her but found himself stood here anyway. callie didn’t know if he was speaking in spanish on purpose or if whatever sickness plagued him, the same one that had forced him to call her a name so ill-suited to her, had left him unable to use anything else. it was good that he’d removed a hoodie, that was good, even though she knew, with the fever he was running, that it must have felt like a death sentence. callie could go through the motions of a regular checkup: looking for pupil dilation, feeling for a pulse, examining his throat and heartbeat. but of course they were standing in the middle of a hallway, and she had nothing else. “ show me where it hurts. ”

[hawthvrn-blog]

bclivar:

        @hawthvrn​ – it was half accident, half purposeful. over the past day, rafe had found himself wandering, though it was not quite aimless. his body gravitated toward places frequented by a certain brunette, the soles of his shows wearing paths down the same halls he knew she walked, but he had had little success. that was – until now, rounding a corner and being met with the girl herself. “ callie, ” he greeted, half surprise and half doubt that this was calliope maxwell, in the flesh. “ where’ve you been ? i haven’t seen you… ” the words tumbled from his lips without him meaning for them to; that was what she would get, he supposed, for hiding for a week. “ in a while, ” he finished lamely, an inadequate description for the isolation he’d felt. not isolation of him from others; he’d been seeing far more of the team, these days. but callie ? well, she’d been conspicuously absent. the bright, golden halo that seemingly adorned her head wherever she went had not lit the rooms he’d occupied over the past week, and it was hard not to notice when, exactly, the callie-shaped void in his daily life had begun.

        he remembered the soft, earnest words, easy to believe when he didn’t have reason to believe otherwise. if you need someone, i’ll be here. the honest, true eyes, framed by the open sincerity of doe-like lashes. i won’t judge you, even if you fail. then where had she been ? where was the quiet support, the casual conversation to keep their minds off things, or even anything at all ? he wanted to assume the best, he always did – even if he usually ended up defensively assuming the worst – but he always assumed the best when it came to callie, without fail. “ i’ve been trying to keep myself out of trouble. it’s been going okay so far. ” a peace offering, an out. maybe it was his fault they hadn’t seen each other, since he hadn’t been hurt much recently, he hadn’t needed to ask for her help. she wasn’t a dog, he didn’t expect her to come whenever he called, but she was his friend. they were friends. or so he’d like to have thought. but even he couldn’t miss the fact that he’d confessed, he’d told her, barely scraped the surface of what he’d done. and she had disappeared. the timing was too perfect, and it couldn’t be ignored. 

callie couldn’t remember peeking around corners, pausing by open doorways, and ducking into stairwells like this since her first few months at the institute. back then, it had been an unfounded fear that dogged her heels and nipped at her ankles. this time, it was no figment of her imagination, it was real, too real if the boy she rounded the corner to was any indication. it’d been a week. one week since she was bestowed a trust she didn’t deserve; one week since he’d forgiven her for something she was still guilty of; one week since she’d last seen those warm eyes, framed now by a light scar still over his left eyebrow. her eyes traveled to that mark, almost instinctively, as if by reminding herself of its presence she could go back to that room — his room — where for just a moment the world was shining and there were no shadows. the euphoria of his grace the crest of a high before the agony of the plunge, the guilt. callie’s face curved to carry a smile too late, but it no less genuine; even though she had dreaded this reunion ever since she had left his room that afternoon, callie could not deny that even just his presence effused a warmth that she had missed so tenderly these past few days. but of course, she was never allowed the joy of fruit without a tinge of poison, and just as quickly as he had pulled her into the sunshine — simply by being here — she was dragged out into the cold again by the reminder of her own duplicity. 

nights were now haunted not only by demons from her past and monsters shot out of a barrel of an everlasting gun, but slinking dread, a poisonous serpent wrapping ever more tightly around her chest. callie had grown used to keeping her phone next to her on the bed, in case he called, in case rafe needed her. and before, when it would flash in the darkness of her room, her heart would be heavy with worry, her movements quick, and her mind instantly awake. nothing had changed, yet, simultaneously, everything was different now. she clutched her phone in her hand before bed every night this week — squeezing the metal and glass so tightly callie knew that if she was someone else, someone stronger, that it would have cracked under the pressure — and debated endlessly, down to the second her weighted eyelids sequestered her from the world, on whether she should turn it off. callie never did; she could never abandon him, not like that. only in every other way. 

“ i’ve been cooped up in lab. you know, with finals coming up, i just can’t seem to get away. ” callie’s words, like everything else about her, were the outline of a truth, shaded in with a lie. but even that veneer of authenticity allowed her laugh to sound almost natural. “ no calls for a week, i’d say you’re doing a pretty good job so far. ” and if that was relief that managed to slip into her voice, callie would never acknowledge it, never admit to it. “ though i’ve missed— ” a bit of pure, crystalline truth. one she couldn’t allow to escape because it would trick her into thinking she was actually deserving of any part of him. “ i’m glad you’re staying out of trouble, staying safe ... since i’ve been so busy. i would have hated to miss any of your calls. ” the worst sort of deceit: one that laid the groundwork for future falsehoods, one that gave her an out. self-loathing coated the inside of callie’s mouth, and she didn’t dare part her lips when she smiled, for fear that it would pour out in a torrent of apologies that would never be enough — no, the only form of penitence that would absolve her of her guilt would be her truth in return. and she wasn’t ready, not yet, maybe not ever. 

[hawthvrn-blog]

everybody DIES / but not everybody lives

calliope maxwell x noemi mendes ( @haphczard )

[hawthvrn-blog]