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sed-haec-hactenus · 19 days ago

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i hope i never see you again.

a final confrontation, and an explanation long overdue.

word count | 4.9k link to work on ao3

sylus x reader mentions | heavy angst, no fluff, reader is not mc

You'd like to think that you've long since come to understand the man standing just an arms-length away from you, what with his silver hair that still somehow glistens even beneath the aged, orange-tinted porch light; the way that even without his arms through the sleeves, his blazer sits immaculately atop a button up, slacks cuffed perfectly at his ankles; the way his face – which was always so inscrutable in the threads of your memory – remains so, even now.

It's strange.

As you gaze up into his unfairly captivating eyes, you swear to yourself that this polaroid image you spent so long so carefully crafting of him – layers upon layers of a man that you toiled so painstakingly hard to even have within your reach – too, remains the same. You can almost wholly delude yourself into believing that to be true. You can feel it; taking one step closer, just past the threshold and onto the porch, just outside of the security of your home, both the physical and the one you built around your bleeding heart, and your fool's paradise would be a fantasy no more.

Your fingers twitch against where you hold the door open, your last line of defense.

The smell. The polaroid – your polaroid – has caught; the image comes into focus, and the edges are smoldering. It's burning.

The fringe of his hair, though seemingly perfectly coiffed at first glance, is just barely mussed; like someone's run their fingers through the silver strands. Just beneath the lapels of his blazer, you notice now that the thin chain that usually bridges the collar of his button up is missing; like someone had forgotten to put it back in its rightful place after having removed it in the first place.

His lips, your eyes inadvertently flit down to, are canted slightly downward, subtly displacing his habitually knowing expression with one you're realizing you can't quite read.

Like someone was here before you, with gentle hands and languid touches that left behind this whisper of disarray, and he was unable to smooth every last morsel over.

It's blistering.

"Don't.”

Your voice is rough, harsh, and his mouth stays parted for a second too long, closes around what you know was going to be your name, but you don't want to hear it. Not now, and not like this.

Your lower lip catches in your teeth, a silent question pressed against it. It seeps through the gaps, and the absence of it writhes into an unspoken accusation anyhow.

Why?

Sylus, ever the epitome of composure, doesn’t speak right away. You know that he knows better than to look anywhere other than at you, yet as you hold each other’s gaze, the air between the two of you becomes so tense, so palpable, you feel it in the back of your throat. It’s still. Thick. Thick with everything, all the confessions and admissions, he’s far too late to say.

His shoulders rise and fall with a low sigh of resignation.

“I never meant for things… for us to end like this. You, of all people, should know that.”

A humored laugh escapes you before you can stop it, and you shake your head in utter disbelief. Something vicious and nasty and unnamed starts festering in your chest, clawing against your ribs, threatening to tear you apart entirely.

“That’s low, Sylus, even- no, especially for you,” you say bitterly.

You watch as his mouth twists, contemplative. He tries again.

“Let me at least just explain myself, please, Y/N,” Sylus says, tone measured. But you can see it in his eyes–he’s wavering. You could despise yourself for recognizing it at all.

“What’s even there to explain?” you scoff, unable to mask the hurt that permeates your voice.

“Everything, Y/N.”

That unnamed something creeps further up your throat just as swift as the polaroid burns. “No. I think I know exactly what I really meant to you, Sylus.”

And how couldn’t you?

You, who was enamoured by his out of place, yet commanding existence in your unostentatious life. You, who tried your hardest to stay hidden, unobserved, in the furthest corner of an art gallery away from the curated noise and polished crowd, yet still kindled a curiosity in the man whose presence alone demanded an audience. You, who noticed his appearance at your side in the warped reflection of a gilded frame, only realizing you’d been studying the brushstrokes of the painting aimlessly when he inquired about your honest thoughts in a low, amused voice. You, who thought, “It’s all performance,” then heard his quiet chuckle, “Surely, you don’t mean just the piece,” and decisively turned to regard your mysterious company– only to find his impossibly carmine eyes already looking at you.

You, who felt like you were truly being seen for the first time in a long time, in a way that invited you in; a vow woven so intricately into one glance, it made something in you localized to your heart believe that this was the beginning. That you were the beginning.

Perhaps that’s what it is. Maybe this unnamed something that sits, waiting, behind your tongue is not grief at what you’ve lost, neither is it the misery adorned across your chest, nor is it the betrayal that’s haunted you in the depths of night, rather it is acceptance you’ve not only turned a blind eye to, but abandoned completely in favor of blissful ignorance. For acknowledging its actuality means accepting that you made your choice. You took the path less traveled and it brought you to this moment now.

But that couldn’t be so. You might have chosen this road, but when the echoes of every single waking second spent with Sylus live behind your eyelids to torment you when you so much as blink, all paths would have converged into this one anyways. And no matter how carnal the desire, you’re no Orpheus. You can’t look back. You can’t bring back the person you were before Sylus.

The you that existed with Sylus, though, was so in love. So alive. And that, in hindsight, is what’s been killing you slowly. Romantic love was something you’d let linger in the recesses of your mind, never to see the light, for it was something that somehow always seemed so foreign, never meant for you. But the way that had Sylus looked at you the night of the gallery truthfully was the beginning. Words and glances exchanged like secrets in his car, your getaway, as the moonlit water of Whitesand Bay glistened just beyond the open window, with the wind catching on your outstretched fingertips, had you feeling a little like falling in love with this stranger who felt like anything but.

So you did. As did he.

If love was a religion, then he was devout, and you were his divine. With notes of sharp spice and hints of bergamot, he wrapped you so carefully in his scent, you were always certain you could spend eternity in this embrace. The charmingly ardent way he always spoke to you felt like he was meant to exist in the confines of a fantasy, and the unabating way in which he treated you with such admiration and adoration felt like he would worship the ground you walked if he could.

And you loved him the only way someone who would have never expected love in return could ever love their first– wholeheartedly, without condition. It wasn’t a love full of glittering spectacles, or grandiose gestures, for such declarations were never you, yet it was intense all the same. Like Sylus was scripture, you faithfully mapped every inch, memorizing him like a prayer to be recited at eventide. Your love let him exist without the need to pretend. A familiar, quiet kind of love where he could return home every night, forgo his defenses, and hang his armour by the door. For months on end, a love most fervent.

So foolish of you. To not have seen your own love had doomed you from the start.

It started with a mistake. One made so silently, entwined in the spaces of your love that, in retrospect, if you weren’t so closely attuned to all that he did, you would never have heard it. But you did; a sharp flick, the scritch of a match, followed by the low hissing of a flame held to your beloved polaroid that even the naïve you of then couldn’t ignore. A name. He’d said it so casually in a conversation so fleeting that you paid it no regard. Until it wasn’t something you could overlook twice.

This name– her name, quickly became commonplace in your relationship. At the second occurrence, you implored Sylus about the matter. Someone he’d become acquainted with in his work dealing with the imports and exports of Linkon City, he’d informed you. A colleague. How wonderful, you’d reasoned, that his profession presented him with chance meetings like this. Thus, it was never mentioned by you again.

But then, for all you had claimed to be so intimately aware of him, you finally began to see.

It lingered a little too long, her name. In the space you weren’t aware was between you two. In the way it would hang in the air a little too long. In the lilt of his voice that was so undeniably soft, you weren’t sure if it was worse that it felt like something not meant for your ears at all or that he didn’t even seem to register he was starting to say it in the same way he said yours.

That steady, holy ground beneath your feet was shifting, he was slipping out of your grasp– and what were you, if not a bystander? His visits to your home in Bloomshire grew more frequent, yet simultaneously somehow, he was never actually there. He would still touch you, embrace you, and kiss you all the same, but the wail of your fragile heart told you something was different. That it had been different for a while, now. With the dampened light of the moon spilling through your blinds and the lull of sleep overhead, you would lie with him in the sanctuary of your bed, just as the two of you always had– your fingers feebly toying with the neckline of his sweater, and his own tenderly brushing over the skin of your eyelids. Only it felt less like you were a girl seeking wonted comfort in the familiar fabric of her lover’s wear, and more like you were secretly sewing into his heart your hope that he would stay. And it felt less like Sylus was a boy stroking the day’s worries out of his lover’s sight, and more like he was quietly willing you to close your eyes, so you wouldn’t have to see he wasn’t.

Then, it ended. Just as it had begun, it ended; quietly.

Rare was it for you to spend an extended amount of time in the center of Linkon, but work summoned Sylus away, and what with your traitorous feelings of guilty relief for the reprieve, you physically couldn’t stay home. A brief train ride later, you were less than surprised that Azure Square was teeming with life. Whether the bustling passerby and euphoric sounds of the city were the solace you needed mattered not, you were hearing and comprehending nothing more than the static of your own mind. The faces among the crowd were akin to figures moving in blurred strokes across an over-crowded canvas, immediately ferrying you back to the night of the art gallery.

Very little mind was being paid to your surroundings as you nursed a cold drink, sat beneath a canopy, and lost in the corridors of thought. The little bell strung on the door of the coffee shop jingled as more faceless strangers filtered in and out, and you could hear the rhythm of footsteps passing even as you were miles away. For the umpteenth time, you caught the faint aroma of coffee as the closing door wafted it in your direction, and with it, came a whisper of spice and citrus.

Sylus.

Like the scent itself took you by the face and coaxed you out of retrospection, your gaze focused on the backs of two strangers no more than a few metres away. Coffee in hand, hair tied in twin ponytails, and clad in white uniforms you know you’d seen somewhere but weren’t familiar with, the joyous atmosphere surrounding these two girls made you feel even more reprehensible, so you turned away, willing the ache and the devil on your shoulder to follow.

And maybe if you had been free of the tendrils of insecurity curled around your neck– maybe if you weren’t being suffocated beneath the weight of your own love of all things, you would’ve soberly finished your drink, rode the train back in solitude, and let yourself choke. But you were already on your feet.

You’d never wished for anything as achingly as you pleaded in that moment to be wrong. Perhaps all of your conflicting emotions had finally coagulated, and they were clouding what would otherwise be sound judgement. Maybe you were making unnecessary bounds and leaps towards a conclusion you weren’t even sure of. You could feel your lips part, the breath that gathered in your chest, and the sound of your hoarse voice as you said but one word. A name. Her name.

There was no mercy. No warning. And when the graceful sweep of her ponytail over her shoulder gave way to wide eyes and a startled expression, you knew she wasn’t just a stranger.

Even now– as you restudy the man that was everything but a stranger to you, the last remaining embers of your polaroid crumble away to little more than ashes at your feet, fluttering into the depths of the chasm stretching the expanse of your porch.

“Enlighten me then, Y/N, on what you’re so certain you meant to me,” Sylus rebuttals.

Your jaw tightens, “N-”

“Don’t you even think of responding with ‘nothing.’ You know that couldn’t be further from the truth, Y/N,” he interrupts, the abruptness betraying how unlike him this all is.

With the hand not pressed to the door, you throw your hand up in exasperation, coughing out a clipped laugh, “But it is what I meant, Sylus! What more could I have meant if you were willing to spend months lying to me–to my face about everything, at that?”

He shakes his head in an infuriatingly calm manner, and you hate how composed he can remain, even moreso now that all of your self-restraint is unraveling. But– with the dam cracked, why stop now?

“Jesus, Sylus, I–I mean you even lied about your job,” you stutter over a thick knot of emotions, “and I didn’t even get the courtesy of hearing the truth from you!”

That discovery was nothing less than a direct slap across the face. You can vividly remember the sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach– not at the fact that he had been keeping anything of this magnitude from you, but that you’d been so gullible to have believed it. Imports and exports for Linkon City. Not even knowing what his home looked like or where he lived, for that matter. And for you to have been so extraordinarily insensible to have let that be okay because you loved him.

Even revisiting that revelation now makes your insides writhe. Your eyes slip shut, and the sound of the deep inhale you take is soft, yet simultaneously stretched thin.

“It’s almost repulsive how pathetically naïve I was,” you murmur.

Sylus doesn’t flinch. He never does. He holds your stare when you finally look back up at him, and quietly says, “I can’t even begin how to tell you that I regret not having been the one to be honest with you. Especially from the start–”

“Then why didn’t you?!” The question bursts out of you before you can even consider stopping it. You press your lips together, well aware that any final morsels of collectedness are slipping from your grasp.

He exhales slowly, and you don’t entirely miss how the breath shudders slightly at the end, “As much as I lament deceiving you, Y/N, I ask that you understand the sheer amount of danger I would have put you in for even considering telling you my identity.”

You blink once, “I do understand. Really– I do, regardless of my current feelings. But what I’m hearing now is you thought it was safer to pretend to be someone you’re not, and never were, instead of just being honest with me? That was your idea of protecting me?”

“Y/N,” Sylus says in a more terse voice, “Don’t twist it like this. You’re too smart to insult both of us by acting like that’s what I was doing.”

Whether it’s a result of your frustration, heartache, or both, you can feel the telltale prick of tears behind your eyes, “If I’m so smart, why couldn’t you respect me enough to tell me the truth?”

Something in his unflappable front flickers, but your gaze has fallen to the silent abyss beneath you, threatening to swallow you whole.

“You denied me the choice of deciding if the truth was something I could live with. If it was someone I could love.”

The silence from before envelops you now. Adrenaline simmers beneath your skin. The unnamed something you came to recognize as acceptance settles heavily in your chest, leaving you with nothing except all of your raw, naked emotions– and questions that you’re not even sure you want to hear answered, but desperately need to so your heart can have permission to end its suffering.

There’s another beat of taut silence between you, and when you finally bring yourself to look back up at him, you can see where his expression is fraying at the edges.

“You’re right,” he says, the vague presence of something akin to quiet remorse in his voice, “I was wrong in assuming that in sparing you from the truth of who I am, I was sparing you from danger.”

There’s a pause that follows that feels deliberate, like he’s silently pleading with you to not merely listen to his words, but to feel the weight of a truth he’s well aware is much too late.

“What I thought was protection was nothing more than thinly veiled control. You didn’t, and will never, deserve that, and I’m sorry for that, Y/N,” he whispers.

Something in you longs to call him a bold-faced liar– wishes that you could scream at him for lying yet again, but there’s a painful throb when something else threads its fingers over and under the arteries of your bleeding heart. That lingering acceptance, once more. You yearn to say he’s being deceitful, but you know all too well that it hurts all the much more because you know he means it.

You don’t answer right away. You can’t. Saying anything that remotely mirrors the words ‘it’s okay’ would make you just like he was; a liar. So you elect to say nothing at all. But as you stand in your doorway with the biting winter air making itself intimately familiar with the skin of your cheeks – staring down the ghost of your wildest dreams and the reality of your ruin – you slowly realize that what you desire more than the truth is to be free.

The void beckons you twofold, so you let your stare fall away again. You shake your head, in not disbelief, but defeat. In the closet, another skeleton waits– born of his lies, and unwilling to wait any longer.

“... And her?”

Two words is all it takes to permeate the air with something far more volatile than before. Sylus, too, doesn’t speak right away, and a part of you grieves that he can’t immediately say you’ve got it all wrong. That it isn’t what it is. And even though you’re sure you look just as disheveled as you feel, you quietly let his eyes trace your features.

His expression shifts as he circles his response around on his tongue before he even opens his mouth to speak. You decide to spare him the effort.

“Was it always her?”

Sylus’ expression falls for a moment so brief you wonder if you imagined it, “She and I were not romantically involved while you and I were together.”

You feel your neck become increasingly warm from anger, and you instantly shake your head at him– bottom lip worried between your teeth.

“Don’t dodge the question, Sylus.”

“Y/N–”

“So– what, you kept the timelines clean? That’s real fucking rich.”

“The relationship that I have with her is complicated, and–”

You almost laugh. “How?! How is it so complicated that you needed to lie to both of us just to keep it tidy? Sylus, I don’t know how the truth will make me feel, but I know damn well another lie is far from fair to me.”

His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, his jaw clenches with the slightest jump of a muscle. Anticipation swells in you as you notice, for what is surely the first time, as his lips part to speak only to stop short; he’s hesitating. The ripple of torment that slithers its way down your spine is excruciating.

“There is no way for me to explain it without sounding disingenuous.”

It takes a herculean amount of effort to stifle the itch to immediately scoff, but you keep yourself quiet. There’s nothing you could say in this moment right now that would be worth easing the pressure on him, and frankly, you don’t want to.

Sylus’ chest rises in a low breath, “She was mine in a life that’s long since come to pass, and I’ve a bond with her that even I can’t explain. Her reappearance in my life now carried with it the presence of something that I still can’t unravel. Not when she herself wasn’t fully aware of the significance she bears to me.

“It would be remiss of me to pretend that my proximity to her was a mere coincidence, but it meant close to nothing because she was under the impression I was exactly who she’d been warned about. Then, everything changed.”

With each word that leaves his mouth, the world around you – the light of your porch, the chasm at your feet, you, Sylus – starts distorting at the edges. Like this isn’t a conversation you’re actively participating in, but more like you’re witnessing a scene that’s happening to someone else. It sounds unreal, and if it were anyone else telling you what he’s confessing now, you’d laugh. But this isn’t just anyone else. And for all the lies he’s woven so intricately around you, something in you deep down knows this isn’t one. You bite the inside of your cheek, trying to keep yourself grounded. Only now do you realize that the door stands abandoned behind you– your hands buried in the pockets of your sweater, keeping their anxious trembles out of sight.

Nothing, however, can hide the fear that’s laid itself bare in the look on your face.

“You deserve more than a bare bones explanation after all that you’ve gone through,” he admits solemnly, “and I would be the one to provide that to you if the circumstances surrounded you and I, but–”

Sylus’ voice tapers off before he can finish. Not that it matters when it’s all the same to you. You hear what needn’t be spoken aloud regardless.

But this is about her and I.

It isn’t until you taste salt in the corner of your parted lips that you register the weight of the tears welling in your eyes and rolling down the slope of your cheeks. Their existence is made even more miserable with the frigid air. Then, a numbing realization dawns on you: somewhere, in the margins of this back and forth, he’s taken the liberty of claiming your proverbial knife as his own, turned it inward, and positioned it against your chest. Without force, yet without hesitation.

Waiting.

For one final truth.

“I loved you, once, Y/N,” he breathes steadily, “but I love her now, and evermore.”

Ah.

You feel it. The crescendo. The point of the knife curves gracefully, guided by steady hands as it glides past your skin, through your bones, and plunges with a sigh of finality into your heart.

Unconsciously, you stagger back a step. You’re unable to hold his gaze. Your eyes drop down to his chest, your attention blurring out of focus.

All of it.

The aching.

The evenings spent mourning.

The endless nights wondering when you lost him.

The unrelenting mornings asking when you lost yourself.

It all converges into a singular, overwhelming moment. You press your nails into your palm, desperate to feel anything else.

How foolish of you, to think you had ever understood the man standing so far out of reach. It’s incredible you never saw it sooner: You never truly had him to begin with.

You try valiantly to blink through the tears staining your vision, steeling yourself to face him as you come undone. Even when you’re falling apart at the seams, there will forever be this that remains constant. Because when you finally muster the courage to lift your chin and look him in the eye, it’s devastating– just how beautiful he still is to you.

Memories in snapshots flicker across your mind and briefly, you wonder if this is what people see in the moments before death wraps them in its embrace. You conjure images. Of the valleys your fingers left behind in his frosty hair with the haze of early morning hovering in your bathroom. Of a coffee table; where you had a habit of leaving the chain of his button up after you removed it when he’d arrive. And his expression, in the way the corners of his eyes seemed to soften just for you when he said he loved you.

Then, just as your beloved polaroid of him, this too, snuffs out. The memories stop. Abruptly. As if they themselves know you’re not welcoming them any longer.

A trove of them remains in the archives of your heart, though it feels less like that tenderness that’s been haunting you and more like you’re rotting from the inside out. Your body feels cold, but not because you miss the memories– or because you miss him. You feel cold because you can see.

While you were busy loving him, Sylus was already remembering someone else.

“You’re a cruel man, Sylus,” your voice cracks a little over the syllables of his name.

“... I know.”

In a last ditch effort to exhaust the last of your rage out on him, you rifle through snippets of the one and only interaction you had with her. Searching for even a granule of something that would allow you to absolve yourself of the loathing you’ve been drowning yourself in. That would prove she – just as he did – knew all along. But you can’t. The remorse that was sprawled across her face then– and the sympathetic way in which she whispered ‘I’m sorry’ was a testament for this.

The last sliver of anger in your body relinquishes into a hurt you know all too well. With it, the will to loathe her slips away and it leaves in its wake the quiet ache of knowing that against fate, you never stood a chance. How could you have been able to bring yourself to hate a girl who was just as kept in the dark? You’re too tired, and maybe too kind, for that.

You’re not quite sure what myriad of expressions you must be making, but you sure as hell can’t look at his for a second longer. Another step backwards leaves Sylus bathed in the orange porch light alone. There’s so much you’ve yet to say to him. So much that you still want to say. Nothing, however, feels adequate enough to convey in words the weight of what he’s done to you, so you concede.

“You’re a cruel, cruel man,” you echo resignedly, “and I hope I never have to see you again.”

With practiced ease, you slip further back into the shadowed refuge of your home that once upon a time, housed two. Keeping the door open has allowed for the winter outside to infiltrate its ambiance; the floor beneath your feet a frigid kind of cold. You’ll have to remedy this with wool socks when you’re alone tonight.

Sylus says nothing and the silence is resounding, even when the door creaks as you begin to shut it; slow, and certain. And you’ll implore yourself to acknowledge it as some sort of sadistic self-punishment later, but before you can close this chapter for good, your eyes find Sylus one last time, and when you catch a glimpse of something like guilt softening the edges of his face, you pause.

The sheer loneliness you’ve felt is something you wouldn’t ever wish onto someone else. Hence you’re not sure if you’ll ever find it in you to truly forgive him. Perhaps you never truly will. Maybe you, as well, are a cruel person for that. Time will pass, and you’ll spend it unlearning him, anyhow.

When the time does come to pass, and the dust settles with it, there is one truth that stands untouched.

“But I hope fate is kind to you this time around.”

You, too, loved him once.

#love and deepspace #lnds sylus #sylus #lads sylus #sylus x reader #sylus angst #love and deepspace x reader

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