selfetishizing

[selfetishizing]

show me your chest on mine

loid forger/yor briar | 🔞 EXPLICIT 🔞 | 2 chapters | 9.1k words

pining, scars, mentions of war, resolved sexual tension, love confessions

An active imagination and late night contemplations.

Chapter 1 | AO3

Yor waits until she hears the click of his bedroom door before twirling in her pink pleated cocktail gown. Her skirt lifts up. Pinions sprout from her ankles. She flutters and sticks her tongue out to taste the sparkles and confetti falling from the ceiling.

What a joy life is, Yor  thinks, to be able to spend time with him!

She does this very routine of spinning on calloused toes and humming happily after every date with Loid once she has convinced herself that it’s the best date she had ever been on, and that she is close to piercing Loid’s ever-distant heart (just another inch to the left!). Though Yor was certain that tonight was going to be the night that Loid throws himself at her heels and confesses his true undying love for her, she couldn’t have been more satisfied with progress. The hours she had spent braiding and then unbraiding her hair, swiping dress after dress over her bare form in front of her reflection, and stabbing emeralds and pearls through her earlobe proved to pay off.

Yor crashes onto her duvet face first, kicking her feet and giggling into her pillow as she—as silly as it sounds— reminisces thirty minutes ago:

The date was not special. She was beautiful (so Loid told her after a quick once-over) and he was fetching (so Yor did not tell him) and they had dinner. Their relationship had progressed to the point that hand-holding did not trigger her impulse to clench her fist and launch it toward a somatic site. Tonight, her palms did not sweat in his hold—a huge development on her part. She could not say the same for Loid, who would steal glances at her and only make his inferiority to her all the more obvious. It was strange. As she got better over time at receiving lovers’ touches, Loid seemed to regress, losing the poise and suaveness that she always admired about him. Loid had become very uncool. It was dangerous to their fake marriage. It was adorable. It was infuriating. So they clinked wine glasses filled with apple juice and toasted to Anya learning to sort her light clothes from dark, another finished article page, and another file delivered to a cubicle. They shared a slice of fresh cream cake: Loid fed her a strawberry and she watched him turn into one as she wiped away the juices from her lips with the back of her hand. He was so uncool. Then, they walked home. Loid refused to spare her even a glimpse. Though it was endearing and boyish at first, she had become apprehensive. Tonight was supposed to be the night he would tell her. Where did his daring go? Yor had thought it must have been a miscalculation on her part. It must have been the dress. The plait. Or simply, it could have been the fact that he had gotten rather bored of her.  “Is this what it was like after dozens of dates with your wife?” whispered Yor in childish frustration. “You…don’t even want to look my way anymore.” Loid gazed at her—of course he would after a silly lament like that—stopping them in their tracks. Yor was pouting—this she knew by the way his brows knitted. He opened his mouth to speak before, to her dismay, looking away from her again. “It’s something like this,” he said, stare flitting from her eyes to her lips. She was too hot with embarrassment, with longing, to heed his breath on her cheek. “Though, usually by the third date, I wouldn't have to ask.” And he was near, so near that when she finally took notice of their proximity, he had only left the scent of his cologne in her hair when he pulled away just before they could touch. Loid cupped a hand behind his neck and apologized.  “I don’t know what possessed me to do that,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry, Yor. I must be getting ahead of myself.”  This time, Yor wasn’t vexed by his wayward eyes. Yor understood him. It turned out that they weren’t so different from each other; Loid was just beginning to take after her, and her, him. Yor nodded, leaving the rest to time. He had given her fodder for daydreams. The least she should do was give him grace. And they walked home, shoulders brushing every so often. Yor could have sworn she heard him exhale at each gentle thrill.

So there she had it. A near-kiss that, surely, will develop into a real kiss. The next date will seal the rest of her life—their life together. 

Loid will be kind, polite. He’ll hug her first, then tuck the errant strands of hair behind her ear. Like porcelain, he’ll cup her face in those big hands that seemed to carry the weight that she was slowly beginning to grasp. Loid will look at her with all the love stored in his heart and she'll melt there in his arms just at the smallest contact with warmth. He’ll say something sweet— You’re so pretty— and she would close her eyes, inviting him to press his lips onto hers.

The moment that they touch, Yor knows, will be glorious. Fireworks will explode. Pulses will be one. His lips will tickle hers and she’ll laugh against him. He’ll try to silence her with more kisses but she’ll just keep laughing to spite sleepless nights like tonight—nights she’d toss and turn in her bed over ruminations on their undefined relationship. There will no longer be a need for he-loves-mes and he-loves-me-nots. He will gift bouquets to cultivate in glazed hand-painted vases. She’ll keep them alive for as long as they love each other— forever— make crowns out of daisies for Anya, for Loid, twining the stalks tightly like the invisible bonds that drew them under this roof.

He will kiss her again and again until all she can taste are strawberries. Kisses will run down like thick syrup down her chin. She will wipe them away, fingers staining red, and lick them clean. His kisses will be so cloyingly sweet that she will be lulled to a pleasant sleep. And Loid will watch her slumber, waiting until she wakes up to kiss her all over again and send her back to those silly things, those wondrous daydreams.

Yor waits for that night. For now, memories will have to suffice.

The pressure of Loid’s hand on her back as he led her through crowds. (Yor unzips her dress, lets it pool at her feet. She is floating on a cloud.) His scent, strong, clean, lingering on her cheek. (She unties the cream ribbon in her braid; her hair falls down her back  in waves.) The bob of his throat as he unbuttoned the collar of shirt, loosened his tie. (She unclasps her bra. She is cold and hot at once.) The hum of his voice purring in her ear. (Yor hugs herself, leaning her profile over her shoulder as if Loid was behind her, coaxing her.) His breath, still hot on her mouth, moments before eclipse. (Yor makes sure that she is all there. She brushes the tips of her fingertips across the ridges of her arm muscles, down the contour of her sides. Yor doesn't mean to sigh when she traces the curves of her chest, holding them full in open palms.)

When she looks down at her body, she is awash in pink. In the veil of romance, shadowy hands map over the expanse of her torso, exploring unmarked territories and planting lilies. They give names to them— stunning, lovely —compliments he has uttered to her many times. His words tickle her ear and she gasps sharply, cupping her mouth immediately to swallow it back down into the pit of her belly.

Loid is all over her—his cologne, his fingertips burning her skin, his whispers caressing places most intimate. Yor, trembling, burrows  in her bed, feverish with want .

Imagination seemed to be a formidable opponent as she writhed against herself, resisting the throes of pleasure. It was wrong—yes, she knew Loid didn't deserve to be subject to her debauched fantasies. But what was she to do with all of the love given to her by Loid? What else was there to do but sprinkle it over herself—pixie dust— to somehow summon him over her so that she would no longer have to wrestle with anticipation, with loneliness? 

Yor wonders if there's a word for being close and far at the same time as she presses her thighs together, biting her knuckles to muffle her moans. She feels desire curl in her stomach so intensely that she has to lay on her side and hook a leg over a pillow, grounding her pelvis against it for purchase. Though she resigned herself to not using her hands to temper her salacious reveries, the body always finds a way to release. Her hips rock slowly at first, relenting hesitantly in her futile attempts at control. Electricity shoots from her core and strikes ripples throughout her body. She whimpers, ashamed by how desperate she had become in her pursuit of skinship—ashamed at how good it felt with just the mere thought of Loid beneath her, taking in the force of each of her thrusts and returning it tenfold. He’d make noises she had never heard before—grunts, groans, whines. Her name in long airy drawls, stretched out into song, into prayer. His urgent pleas— more!— as she fell onto him over and over again, pumping herself of all of the affection she held for him.

Loid, always so composed, so collected, crying actual tears! Crying from tension, from pain, from pleasure with every snap of Yor’s hips connecting to his own! What would it take, she wonders, for him to sob ? A whisper? A finger rubbing wedding wings and infinities on his chest? A split-kiss? Her hand caught in the silk of his hair, tugging, grasping, as she had her way with him? 

Yor, in a hazy stupor, sits up and straddles her pillow, practicing on her model. She closes her eyes and listens to everything in her thrum. She waits a moment, lets her recollections of Loid suspend from the ceiling for reference, before tentatively squeezing her heartbeat.

Her phantom lover manifests. He wraps his arms lazily around her waist and pushes her flush against him. Yor gasps and he chuckles insouciantly, sneering at her credulousness. The cold flicker of his eyes tell her everything she needs to know—that she is a wicked girl. Indelicate. He is mocking her lack of restraint. Her longing. Their languishing. 

“It’s something,” he whispers lowly, collapsing his open palms on the flesh of her buttocks. He grips. Hard. “Like this.”  

And he takes her. Again, and again, and again.

Humiliation becomes tangible and she, lust-drunk and delirious, bounces pathetically on it. Yor throws her head back and sighs his name, an incantation and repentance in a single breath. She is liquid, has melted all over the petals of her pillowcase. He plays with her, kneads her, until all strength leaches from her, until she is but a shallow imprint and damp sheets. She is nothing.

A cry of frustration, of rapture tears from her throat as the mounting pressure reaches its precipice. To have felt the frisson of dreams, only to be left unfulfilled… 

A knock at the door. “Yor?” 

Bittersweet.

Chapter 2 | AO3

Twilight can’t sleep.

Not that he sleeps most nights. If ever there's a moment left to himself, his mind will almost always run strange equations and probabilities. He visualizes these numbers as candidates moving across a politicized landscape, and Twilight would close his eyes and lay in his bed, plotting every possible outcome and how it would affect his workload, and how his workload would cut into the time reserved for his girls.

(The pawns’ movements were unpredictable. He could never get a checkmate.)

Sometimes, ghosts will visit him: it will be his mother, a woman whose face he can no longer remember. Some nights, she’ll assume the appearance of a woman he’d seen matching that description: a tailor, a baker, or a stranger he had passed on the street. It will be a comrade from the war: a boy in a uniform two times his size, rattling on knobby knees. It will be lives he has taken: suits with bullets square in the forehead, aristocrats wan from sleight-of-hand poisonings, and boys from the other side of the border—boys distinguished by the colors of their uniforms, the make of their guns. 

Twilight takes them all in stride. He welcomes them into these penitent walls, lets them stand around his bed, hanging their featureless faces over him as he wracked his brain for names, voices. 

(They never come. They never leave.)

Tonight, however, he was visited by a peony pink vision of Yor. She stands at the foot of his bed, hands politely folded in front of her skirt. The plait of her hair rested neatly on her right shoulder, ribbon star-bright under the faint glow of the waxing moon. He blinks, once, twice. Yor is still there.

Her expression is unchanging. Bordeaux eyes twinkle like jewels. Night glistens on the pout of  peach lips; Twilight blushes at the fleeting impulse that takes him. He refrains from indecency by imagining a smile there instead of his open mouth.

Outside, a magnolia branch raps on his window, on the cage of his thumping heart. Wind pushes past the jambs; white petals flutter like feathers from an angel and draw toward Yor in some ceremonial homecoming. They sway as they descend to his toes. Yor is still.

Somehow, the sight of her unsettled him more than the past. Yor, whom he was beginning to learn—every quirk and every wrinkle—was unreadable to him now. Why had it been her, he wondered, that haunted him? She was in the other room, beating, being; specters, on the other hand, were not of this world.

It does not take him long to process the absurdity in his mind. Twilight theorizes that with dusk came a certain death—the shedding of an old self for rebirth the following morning. In front of him is Yor before the midnight threshold, just as he left her. 

Twilight has the inclination to call out to her, beckon her to bed next to him so that she may rest, release back into the ether. Instead, he turns on his side, screwing his eyes shut as he remembers their walk home together, side-by-side.

He should have kissed her.

Twilight wonders about the other characters he had played in the past before—shy research assistants, cocky old-money heirs, steely accountants—and wonders if muscle and mind remembered those discarded identities at that pivotal moment of contact.

Loid Forger was confident, suave. And Yor tonight was dazzling, willing, waiting. 

Loid should have kissed her.

Twilight, pushing his pillow over his face, groans. It would have made sense. They'd gone out together so many times, held her hand in his own. He danced with her, let his fingers trail down the curve of her spine. He had let his touch there remain; he relished in knowing that Yor never thought anything of it—that it would be a moment thought to have been lost to time. But Twilight knew that quiet strokes were his to keep even long after this mission was complete.

Maybe he’s beginning to understand himself. There was selfishness in distance; as much as he pushed it down, there was hope that he'd be able to emerge as himself to Yor and Anya. No longer would he have to dote, to care under false pretenses. Yor would kiss him, learn to love him as him—whoever that is. Not Loid, nor that boy before the first bombing.  Twilight isn't so sure himself.

What he is sure of, however, is the burn of his ears, the thump-thump, thump-thump of his heart whenever she’s near. And for quite some time, he had known this: by the way he hides into himself when she gazes at him, smiles; by the way he stutters when she tilts her head and calls out a name he refuses to claim; the way he aches in bed at night just at the mere thought of her… Every facet of his being, those hidden and on display…

He was in love with Yor Briar.

It was a love so strong that he became ill with miserable desire. Though they had spent all evening together, he was tender from missing her. Morning is too long a wait. The irrational urge to leave his bed and whisk away dreams to have her under his palms, warm and requiting unlike the afterimage before him, swept over him like a spring storm. 

Twilight mutters to himself. What was he going to do? Knock on her door? Wake her up? What would be his excuse then—“Hi, sorry about earlier. I forgot to kiss you, but I remembered just now as I laid in bed thinking about you. Shall we?” Knowing Yor, she would believe every word, failing to pick up the motives underneath seemingly innocuous invitation. He wanted more than a kiss. He wanted to consume her, wholly, fully, have her always be a part of him—body and soul. 

So intense was his desire that he became feverish from longing. He curls pathetically on his side and groans, pressing his damp forehead into the heels of his palms. The central nervous system worked in strange ways. It couldn’t distinguish embarrassment or fear from excitement. From the top of the head to the toes, one’s entire body flushed from a self-induced affliction caused by memories and confused feelings. It’d cause perspiration, arrhythmia, a closing throat struggling for air. Something close to death.

Twilight could have wept from the sensations—pleasantly warm and bitterly frigid—attacking him.  Briefly, he wonders why the body worked against itself in such instances. What made nature so averse to love? What made him so averse to it?

Somehow, he gets out of bed, walks to his bedroom door. His hand is on the knob, and just before he passes through, he looks back at the vision of Yor. She faces him. A smile encourages him to go on. 

He turns his wrist, steps out. The apartment, bathed in azure, looks entirely foreign to him. The fractals of light from the window splintered onto the walls as if beamed through a prism, prophesying near-futures in imagery Twilight—learned and cunning as he was—could not make out.  What happens from this point forward will decide the rest of their lives under this roof. This he knows by the way he, like a man possessed, draws to Yor’s bedroom door. 

A home in metamorphosis: this was the decisive act that will fracture the chrysalis—the decisive act that would conceive  an entirely new man. Like the morning soon approaching, crossing over into Yor’s bedroom would shed yesterday’s Twilight, leaving it to hang on a coat rack to be destroyed along with the shifting scenery of the apartment.

Holding his breath, he primes a knuckle to knock on her door.

The rustling of sheets, then a sob.

Twilight steps back, cowardice pushing him back against a wall. He closes his eyes, sucking in hair through grit teeth as he reconsiders his foolish attempts to satiate his yearning.

You're far gone, Twilight muses. Not of this world. Up in the galaxy between two undiscovered moons amidst abandoned orbiters. You’re stranded. Alone. Maybe you were the ghost this entire time.

Far gone. Stranded. Alone. It doesn't matter. Right now, Twilight is so close. Yor is so close. Behind that door, she is there, awake, stirring, and… 

Another sob.

“Yor?”

Before he could understand the weight of rapping on her door, the name sizzling hot on his tongue, everything stops. He stands motionless, shocked he had been so brazen. Twilight tells himself that this was for the mission for the thousandth time—that the fate of the world hinged on whether or not Yor would let him in. If he could not get his affairs settled tonight, how was he going to face Yor come morning? How was he going to face her, he naively wonders, for the rest of their lives?

So he waits, though she may have begun to feign sleep. He knew it would have been more cruel to walk away and leave her to weep into the night. This time, he’ll be there for her, even if a barrier is between them. 

Yor is light on her feet. He hears the drum of her soles against the wood, faint as droplets falling from eaves right after a sunshower. Twilight remembers about her pastel gown from this evening; he imagines a fairytale ballerina behind that door practicing all five positions, stepping gracefully to and fro as she contemplated facing another unremarkable suitor.

Twilight smiles despite himself, hiding it away with a hand in the event that his fabled lover presents herself to him. Quiet as Yor was, there was no mistaking the creaking of the floor beneath her weight as she paced nervously around her room. She was just as bashful as he was. It was reassuring, endearing, considering how much she— how much he—had changed over these past few months.

Yor, whom he had always thought good-natured and gracious, pouted at him tonight. Pouted over a make-believe ex-wife. Pouted over his unfocused gaze—that it looked everywhere but her. Jealousy is a dazzling color on Yor—this, Twilight realized after seeing the way her cheeks puffed and rounded, her lips pursed and puckered—ripe for the picking.

Yor’s beauty was unquestionable. Her cuteness, however, could fell a man—wring him of all thought and color and feeling until he was all out and empty; reduce him to heartbeats when he’s by himself at night, ill with visions of her darling visage.

Maybe it was just a matter of reframing. Twilight had thought that if he gave himself to Yor, he would be lost completely. What he failed to realize was that there was the real chance of reciprocity in honesty. 

“Loid.” She peers through the tiny slit of her door, hand curved over its edge to indicate that she will not close it on him. “Hi.”

“Sorry. Were you asleep?”

Yor pauses a moment, deciding whether or not she should tell the truth. She shakes her head.

Honesty.

“Did you need something?”

“No, I—” Honesty! “I couldn't sleep either.”

Choosing honesty gets you nowhere, it seems, as Yor only receded further back into her quarters until only half of her face peeked from a narrow space. Did his response from their date make her more conscious?  Was she terrified too—of love and its rejections? Its possible requitals? 

“I was thinking about what I said tonight,” says Twilight, taking a chance. There are tremors in his throat. He persists. Despite, despite, despite. “I was thinking about you.”

The door opens slightly—an assent to a more subliminal plea. Yor rests her cheek against the edge of the frame, frantically looking for the right words to say. She settles with, “Wait here,” and scuttles back into her room, door gently clicking behind her.

Twilight can hear the swish of clothes sliding against the floor. He smiles, tickled by the thought of Yor haphazardly kicking her gown underneath her bed to tidy up for an unexpected guest. She's so kind, ponders Twilight, to think of him as someone worth neatening for. Someone of some importance to her.

Twilight coughs behind a fist, erasing the elation from his expression as Yor approaches the door again. It clicks open and she steps to the side, gesturing for him to go in.

Twilight can see her fully now: the long black wave of her hair untwined from its bow. Strands stick to the pearl of her face like tendrils of a flower, swirling spirals down to her neck, her shoulders. She looks feathered, blurred softly by starlight. Ethereal. Yor had always been charming but to have caught her in the liminal space just before morning, in this so by so room made familiar, made dear now that he has passed through it, he realized there was divinity in woman. Forward as it may be, selfish as he has become, Twilight thinks that he could gaze at her forever: Yor in her nightgown, undone by day, stripped of pretenses and dazed by the intimacy of two pulses in her secret hideout…

How cute.

Postcards from her brother flipped to their written side taped on the wall alongside Anya frescos. Family portraits in gilded frames: Briar, Forger, Briar-Forger. Jewelry and other knicknacks he had gifted her displayed proudly on her desk, her nightstand. White lace curtains swaying fitfully with the wind from an open window, each panel of fabric dancing and entwining each other like two shy lovers. Yor sitting down on the floral covers of her bed, a hand folded atop the other. 

“Make yourself comfortable,” she whispers, light as a breeze. She preoccupies herself by folding and unfolding a crocheted throw, unsure if she’d like it laid over her lap or on her pillows. He opts for distance, sitting on the red chair at her bedside, recouping his lost courage. She looks at him from beneath hooded eyelids, demure, girlish, sighing whenever their stares meet. “It’s funny. We’ve lived together all this time, and yet this is the first time you’ve really been inside my room.”

Twilight manages a chuckle, twiddling his thumbs as he takes in Yor’s quaint dwelling. The warmth of it all overtakes him and he feels tender with faint nostalgia for something he can’t quite name or remember. “It is, isn’t it?”

It doesn’t take long for vulnerability. Yor tilts her head, warming up to his comforting tone. “Is it everything you thought it’d be?”

He hums. “It’s very you.”

“Very me.” She smiles. “Hm. What’s that like?” 

“Well,” breathes Twilight, “it’s inviting. I feel like I’ve known this place my whole life in some distant past, some other life. As soon as I walked in, it was like—whoosh! ” He mimics a wave with his hand. “I’ve definitely been here before. Sat in this very chair. Had this exact conversation.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” Yor titters, pivoting her body in his direction. “A man like yourself must have been in countless girls’ rooms. Mine is no different.”

Intrigued and somewhat flattered by her observations, he, unabashedly, urges her on. “What makes you say that?”

“You’re always sure of yourself and never leave anything unfinished. That’s what they call persistent, right? A trait among public enemy number one for girl parents.” She taps on her lip with a finger, seriously contemplating his question. Yor is so lovely. “And you’re handsome and pleasant to be around. There’s no doubt that you are popular with women. So surely you've seen a lot of rooms and decor… Among other things.” 

Among other things. The phrase hangs in the air, watching them with big beady yellow eyes. Yor avoids its stare, but Twilight acknowledges it, makes its acquaintance. The implication is not lost on him. Yor is no fool—a man at her door at this hour can only mean one thing. Courteously as he tries to play it, Twilight— Yor— knows he is, at the root, a debauched man. The lives he has led flow away from his  body like a river’s downstream current until he is nothing but his rudimentary person—a creature starved of heat, of friction. 

“Persistent, handsome, and popular,” Twilight drones. A corner of his lip tugs up. He cannot stop himself. “You make me sound like some mindless flirt. Is that how you see me?” 

“Of course not!” She shakes her head with such vigor that Twilight has no choice but to believe her. “I haven't the capacity to tell you even the half of it, Loid. Frankly, I think it’d be too embarrassing. But since you're here, I think you ought to know I haven't had a good night’s rest because of you.”

“Me?”

Light catches in the reflection of Yor’s eyes. She is set ablaze. Twilight, caught in her flame, can only hook a finger on the neck of his shirt, pull it forward, and throw his head back as he lets the evening air cool his sweat-sticky skin. 

“Yes,” whispers Yor, lips stained with the sanguine juice of some forbidden fruit. Twilight nearly moans. “You.”

“Shall I leave?” he asks. Twilight is at the brim and he knows with one word, one gesture from Yor, he will implode, spatter himself over discarded clothing and silken sheets. Twilight will let her devour him until he is nothing but the frame of his pathetic vessel.

Tense with affliction, Yor allows a beat of silence to decide her fate. Then, scripture pours from her mouth—“Stay”—and their future is forged, there, in the room Twilight knows his love will be made known. The apartment rearranges itself like a rune morphing ancient ruins into a palace, and Twilight gropes through the opaque dreamy mist that has clouded over his body, the maze that has manifested in the space between him and his lover. Somehow, he is beside Yor on the sanctity of her bed. He is home.

Twilight stays. More than stays. He lingers, leaves trails of himself with the pads of his fingers along the soft descent of her jaw.  They trail south, down the slope of her neck to her clavicles. He plays with the brown ribbon on her collar, wrapping it around his hand as he tugs it off. Her tiny breaths puff hot on his hands; Twilight steels himself to move more slowly, delicately.

Conscious of her blooming complexion, Yor moves to hide her face with a hand. It is quickly seized by Twilight. He guides it to her chest and intertwines their fingers from the back of her hand. He gently presses their held hands against her heartbeat, eliciting a sharp sigh from his dear darling wife. Twilight cannot help himself. He untwines from her and flits his fingers at the hem of her nightgown's skirt, hiking it up to her upper thigh. The drum of his touch on her knee is enough to make her tremble. 

“You tell me I'm persistent, but I’ve been avoiding you all this time. When I look at you, I become painfully aware of myself. I want to be perfect for you, but in truth, I’m awful.” Twilight leans his face close to hers, lips brushing the shell of her ear. I love you, he wants to confess. So simple is the phrase, succinct, raw, and yet he cannot bring himself so vulnerable. Everything comes out carnally, all wrong: “I want you so bad that I can’t think straight. That I can’t breathe.”

With the firm precision of a ceramist, she molds her palm over the hand on her knee, sliding it up the strong sculpt of her leg and curving it toward the inside of  her thigh. She applies light pressure, allowing Twilight’s imprint to cast on her body, marking herself as his.

“Show me,” she rasps with a dash of daring. Her eyes flutter shut, gentle as the bat of a hummingbird's wing. She knights her champion. 

Mesmerized by her command, Twilight kisses her sweet. Kisses her again, and again, and again, confessing with every push and pull of their lips.

He sups the nectar from her split swollen lips like a man  left to meander a landscape desolate of life—parched. Silvery syrup runs down their chins; he catches it with the flat of his tongue, licking the contour of her neck to her collarbones. Yor quivers, stifling a moan. He yanks the sleeve of her nightgown down to plant wet kisses along the round of her bare shoulder.

“Loid,” Yor sighs, turning that miserable name into something warm. Beloved. She tilts her head in his direction, the dark cape of her hair enveloping him, pressing him closer to her. He cups her face, admiring bitten lips and half-lidded rubies. 

“I’d like to see you,” Twilight pants, mouth open on the column of her throat. “May I?”

Her eyes drop, brows furrowing as she scrutinizes the shape of her existence. Twilight immediately perceives the nervous habit that unknowingly presents itself to him. In lieu of reassuring words, he kisses her on the cheek. Her lips lift, a crescent indenting where his lips had been. His admiration and affections have been sealed in wax, ripped apart, conveyed, accepted. Yor reaches out, weaves through the close-crop of his blond hair, and guides him toward her. She plants a kiss of her own square on his forehead, returning the gesture tenfold. Twilight feels a blush rise to his cheeks.

“I like you a lot, so it’s alright, I think. It’s okay,” she tells him, brushing the hair away from his face. “I trust you.” 

Yor catches sparkles from his feathered wisps in a fist and sprinkles it over herself as if it’d transform her into someone else—a lady with soft edges and milk-smooth skin that flushes pink under the lightest of touches. A lady worth standing at Twilight’s side.

Holding her breath, she pulls the top of her nightgown down past her arms. She tightly screws her eyes shut as she moves it over the mound of her chest down to her waist, refusing to see herself jut so obscenely before him. The sleeves of her nightgown fall on her bed defeatedly, lifeless arms spread out like a wraith at the mercy of Twilight’s judgment. 

Yor is a woman sculpted from clay rather than marble—this, Twilight concludes as he appreciates the jagged and raised skin scored over the expanse of her bust. Rather than subtractions, she is a composite of additions—of stories untold, of trials conquered, of countless disciplined hours. Scars never lie. As he runs his fingers over the white-marred skin stitched over the hard ripples of her abdomen, he knows hers is a shared tale of survival and of loss. Harsh light casts over her, carving dark shadows over the frayed canvas of her body. The effigy of Yor is so hauntingly, so achingly honest; it is in that moment Twilight decides that she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

He peels his shirt off in one fluid motion. Twilight looms over her, allowing her to take in the breadth of his kneeling contrapposto. His is a series of wounds cleaned and sealed with bottles of whiskey and lighter flame, stitched closed from the loose threading of a uniform. He is attrition embodied, War’s perfect soldier. Wonder, fear, and attraction swirl in her blown eyes as she reaches out to touch him. Before she can lose heart, he leans down until her nails graze his chest. Twilight shakily exhales as Yor tentatively travels forgotten paths on his flesh under her fingertips, exploring the country she was told to despise.

Twilight watches her with vague interest, mindful of the places her fingers stay and when she chooses to avert her eyes. With a swipe, Yor unseams him, and the memories he thought he had long discarded inundate him. She arrives first at the small nick on his upper bicep—the front doorstep of his childhood home. It was summer, and he was happy. School was out for break and he had excitedly run home to ask his mother permission to play with the other musketeers. A thorn from of the rosebush just outside of his front door caught in his sleeve, and blood spread through the white of his shirt like pigmented watercolor. He stayed home that afternoon. His mother cleaned his arm and sewed a garden onto the tear of his shirt.

Yor follows the long spiked pink scar carved at his right side down to his navel. He was sixteen then, newly enlisted in the army. He was fighting with a boy from the Ostanian infantry in the forest. They were all mud, sweat, gasps, and gunpowder as their bodies writhed and wriggled against each other in a desperate fight of undefined loathing. He remembers how easily the boy’s blade had sliced him as if he was nothing more than a whetstone for sharpening, and how he had thought about death as he caked clay onto his open gash. One of the greatest acts of love, Twilight came to realize, was mercy as the other boy limped away from his expiring body. 

Love and loathing. Two boys were buried in the forest.

“I haven’t made some terrible mistake, have I?” she laments, voice nearly breaking as he lays her down on the mattress, head supported by his open hand. 

Silver tears spill and pool at her clavicles. And maybe he understands. She is twenty-eight and she will never be soft. She is still grieving the woman she should have been just as Rowan is sixteen—will be sixteen forever—and Twilight grieves a childhood so short-lived. 

Flawed as they are, as they embrace, chest against chest, twin flames, Twilight feels as though he has found the missing pieces of himself in the woman splayed before him. Wrapped in the warmth of her arms, Twilight deliriously believes that the war must have been some grand and twisted conspiracy for them to meet under this roof. The intimacy of an embrace frightens him, but he cannot bring himself to part from her. Not now. Not ever. 

“We fit too well,” their lips meet, long, sweet, languid, “for it to be a mistake.” 

She mewls behind a hand as he gropes her other breast, relishing how her plushness spills between the spaces of his fingers. His hand rolls, fingers pinch as he sculpts her into the image of bliss. Twilight catches a bud in his mouth, hardening with the heat of his yearning. He releases her with a gentle pop, a shimmery string connecting his lips to her bosom.

“Where does it ache when you think of me? Here?” he asks in a low voice, licking a fat stripe along the side of her breast. His knee nudges against her core and she squirms beneath him. “Or here?” Yor’s breath hitches as she instinctively grinds down to rub herself against his leg, impatient and eager. The arch of her back against the bedsheets. The erratic roll of her lifted hips. Yor works herself on him with a fervor he had never known her to possess. Beads of sweat collect at her brow as she unrhythmically ruts on him for delicious friction. Twilight laughs quietly; he cannot contain the delight the sudden realization brings him. “Oh. You've done this by yourself before.” 

Yor blooms all the way down to the swell of her chest. She stutters as she thinks of something just as intelligent to say as Twilight smiles stupidly at her—dimples and all—flattered and pleased with himself. The words are weak, fragmented, meek, “I’ll pass away if you continue to tease me,” and she covers her face with her arms in humiliation. The smoke is practically steaming from her ears. It only encourages Twilight.

“You’re adorable,” he coaxes, taking hold of her wrists in a hand and pinning it over her head. Yor pouts, twisting beneath him as if she were completely powerless against him. Of course, she isn’t. It would be easy to break free from his hold. Twilight is much too familiar with the impact of her palm applied across his face, the high kick of her heel aimed at his chin. The danger of eliciting such a reaction from Yor entices him, and so Twilight, true to Yor's hasty description of him, persists. 

The fuzzy daze swathing her casts some lulling spell, and she relaxes as he superimposes himself over her. His desire nudges on her thigh, extracting a hum from Yor. 

“Where do you want me?” Twilight asks, words caressing the shell of her ear. As soon as he releases her, she wraps her arms around him, pulling him down flush against her, chest to chest, cheek to cheek. Profile tucked along the length of her neck, Twilight deeply breathes her in, mapping the trajectory of her day. Vanilla shampoo. Patchouli perfume. The musk of their tryst. 

“Anywhere. Everywhere." She ogles him pensively; she is all lust and,  audaciously enough, love as she submits to obscurity and anticipation. He slides down the plane of her body, nose parting her down the middle as if he were slicing her open, peeling away her skin to expose some celestial being beneath the layers of warmth. Twilight stops at her stomach and kisses the mole near her navel. Tickled, Yor giggles, abs tightening beneath him. “Well, maybe not there.” An intense heat  rushes southward; Twilight remembers patience and counts to fifty before moving between her thighs.

Dear God, Twilight thinks to himself as he tugs the skirt of her nightgown down. They move in tandem, she raises her hips up and Twilight slips it off, letting it flump onto the floor. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. The satin of her panties were pearlescent under starlight, designed with a tiny ribbon at the top, made transparent by prurience. Something about the juxtaposition of her virginal image and the licentiousness streaked over her longing is almost enough to make Twilight come right there.

“Look at me,” he tells Yor, breath hot on her core. Lazily, she lowers her gaze, bedroom eyes scorching the sweep of his face. He does not break their stare. “Watch.”

Countless times he has looked at her face, memorized every mole and wrinkle, but tonight, it is as if something finally clicked. Chaste as she may have seemed under moonlit halation, Twilight knew by the way she gasped as he licked her clothed heat that Yor was not so different from him. How many nights has she throbbed with loneliness when he was just a few steps away? How long has she muffled his name into the abyss of her bedroom, only for it to echo back and mock her?

Yor cries his name out, cadence stuttering as he thickly laves his tongue over her slit over the translucent film of her panties. Frustratedly, Yor grips a fistful of his hair, urging him to do more. Twilight only chuckles at her impatience, shooting vibrations to every nerve ending in her body.

Twilight kisses her nether lips before pushing the fabric to the side, sticking to her like a second skin. A snapdragon in oils: pinks, reds, and purples smeared over the pale of her night-dyed complexion.

“Please”  whispers Yor. “I won’t last any longer.”

Instead of obeying his wife’s urgency, he parts her with a finger, letting her sweet slick coat his finger. He locks eyes with her as he sucks down to his knuckle, messily dragging it out of his mouth to show her just how good she tasted. Pushing her thighs up to bend her knees over his shoulder, he burrows his face into her heat, devouring lips ajar. His tongue circles around the nub of her core, flicking, teasing. Yor is reactive as ever; she shivers beneath him, toes curling as he dips one, two fingers between her petals until she clenches around him. Shyly, she rocks her hips against his hand and open jaw, attempting to finish herself on his face and fingers until she sees bright white.

“Loid, I think I—”

“No.” Twilight stops abruptly, opting to lick up the soddenness along her inner thighs and soaked fingers instead of allowing Yor to reach the precipice of her bliss. “Not yet.”

Yor is not pleased; she retaliates to his absence childishly by tossing her pillow aside, cherry lips pouting. Now that she had experienced the pleasure of his mouth on her, for him to part at that crucial moment connoted a sort of loneliness, self-loathing  Yor no longer wanted to identify with. Twilight will let her finish, she decides as she hooks a leg around his waist, whether he likes it or not.

It happens quickly. A whirl, floating sheets, and Yor straddling him. So many times he has been in this very position: there, pinned under the weight of the opposition, wine-drunk proprietresses, nepotistic heirs. And each time, he was able to maneuver the situation in his favor using tried-and-true tricks methods learned from the battlefield. Weak spots and shifting force. Flirtations and fake tears. Yet, under Yor, he felt himself enter a sort of inertness. He can only gawk as Yor shifts on top of his pelvis, her arousal staining the gray of his sweatpants. 

“Can you handle it?” he asks—challenges. It was an audacious question. Try as he might to continue  his seductive drawl, there was no denying the trembling of his words—fleeting as the flowers he’d seen drift into his bedroom. He looks at her from the shutter of his lashes, and he reminds himself that it is okay to be nervous, to not know the next steps. Yor may have been right about him laying in many girls’ bedrooms, but the crucial difference was that there was truthfulness here. He wanted this, and in allowing himself that want, he could feel the rush of those vehemently raw emotions—anxiety, rapture, adoration—coalesce in his hollow body, letting it translate without script in the pads of his fingers. With shaking hands, he cherishes her, holds her waist and embosses her onto his flesh. 

Yor dips down to claim his lips, drawn and cloying, pulling back as if she had just broken through the glass surface of a pond. Her mouth is glossy with herself, and Twilight, embarrassed by his attempts to be as titillating as possible to her, wipes her bottom lip with a thumb. The weight of her cheek leans into his palm, ink hair descending like the darkest dusk. 

Yor kisses his thumb, slips it in her mouth to show him other ways she’d like him. His heart nearly bursts at this facet of Yor. The paragon he had built of her had shattered completely in the hall of his mind, pieces repurposed to something mutable and equally beautiful. He thinks it’s something akin to those clichés—those loves-at-first-sights and meet-cutes. Twilight is falling for her all over again, and naively he thinks it will be like this for the rest of his life.

“Yor." The tone is undecipherable. He isn’t quite sure why her name had slipped from him in the first place. Maybe he was scared that she would no longer answer. To his relief, she responds in earnest, toying with the waistband of his sweats. She shoots him a look and he nods a little too ardently for his liking. Yor scoots back, allowing him to pull himself free from the constraints of his clothes.

His length, stiff with desire, points upward. To Yor, it must have looked so red and angry and intimidating by the way she blushed and averted her gaze.

“Hey,” Twilight coos, patting her leg affectionately. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“I want this,” she says with the stark determination of a sergeant. How solemn. Twilight clears the chuckle that threatens to escape his throat. “I’ve just—Not with anyone. I never thought I’d get this far. I’ve had ideas about how I’d like you, and you’re here now, and that— ” her gaze drops to his groin, “that is very real. Immensely real. So real that I’m questioning whether or not I’m here with you. Are you a dream? Must I wake up now?”

It’s hopeless. He is laughing heartily now, fully-bellied and deep, as he listens to his dearest Yor babble about his hardness. “I’m real. Can’t you see what you do to me?” 

“I don’t want to disappoint you, is all.”

He holds her face in his hands, gently squishing her cheeks until her lips puckered. “I happen to find you to be the kindest, most beautiful and endearing spirit I’ve ever had the fortune of knowing. I don’t think anything you’d do would disappoint me.”

“If I fell asleep at this moment? What then? You’d be devastated.” 

“I’d tuck you in. Kiss you goodnight. I’d watch your sleeping face until sunrise,” he drones, fingers gliding through her disheveled tresses. He brings a lock to his lips and wishes for good health and good fortune.

“And if I hurt you?”

“I probably deserve it.” His hand is on the plush of her hip, grounding her lower half on his. Yor is oblivious to his plight. She sways, her heat brushing against his as she thought of another impossible scenario. He sucks in a breath, resisting the urge to take her right there. “Yor,” he begged, trying to distract Yor from her misguided train of thought.

“What if I’m actually the worst person you know? Like mean? Evil? A murderer… Or something like that.” Unknowingly, as she adjusts her seat on his lap, her folds perfectly hug the base of his length, eliciting a sharp curse from Twilight.

“Fuck,” he whimpers, throwing his head back. She rubs on him hot, so hot that he is lightheaded and sees stars stipple in the black cape of her hair. He grips his cock in his hand and positions it so that it is enmeshed between the stick of her panties and her viscid slit. 

Sex hangs thickly in the air, and Twilight, intoxicated by it, can only watch as Yor drinks in the feeling of the vehement throb of his length sliding against her. She treats it like a battle; there is nothing gentle in the way she grinds on him. The song she sings is harsh and succinct as she clamps her thighs tight around him, considerate of the fast pace she had set up for herself. Yor is fluid; every part of her body moves in ripples and waves. With every action, a reaction: a roll of her hip translates to a jiggling chest, to Twilight, mewling kittenishly, reaching to fondle her. It whets her appetite, lights a blue flame that engulfs their coupling in a single heretic pyre.

“Yeah. Just like that,” he hisses, just barely controlling his volume. Close. So pathetically, delectably close from this alone. Twilight stutters weakly at her mercy as she undoes him bit by bit.

Curiously, she strokes his cock with a finger through the cloth of her panties, causing Twilight to jerk his hips upward. Yor palms the base and presses it firmly along her slit. Her eyes roll back and her lips part in a wordless cry. Her body goes slack for a moment, creating an opening for Twilight to gain leverage over the situation. He fucks himself between her hand and her wet folds, thrusting ungracefully, erotically. Every sinful, rhythmic cant of Yor’s hips is met, and the world crashes down around him. 

“I’m close,” says Yor, riding him through her peak. They piece the negative space: she plasters herself in the outline of his body for purchase as he grips her hips tight, sure to leave a bruised afterimage in the morning. 

“I love you,” he breathes, capturing a moonbeam in her hair. The words penetrate her skin, her flesh, her bones and she is full. She is complete. So enraptured is Yor that she kisses him delicately on his cheek, imbuing new life into Twilight. He reaches for that faraway image—a billowy tableau of a girl in wedding white prancing along a meadow blooming with peonies and chrysanthemums. Twilight gazes at Yor with glassy eyes; he wonders if it’s alright for him to imagine such lovely things. She smiles warmly. He bows his head at the altar of her heart, and he weeps.

──────────⊹⊱❀⊰⊹──────────

The day starts without him.

Twilight wakes to skittering and an indented pillow at his side. Laughter rings throughout the apartment, crescendoing and decrescendoing as Anya chases Bond down the hall. Blearily, he watches as Yor walks into her bedroom with a towel around her neck. She is glowing, floating.

Should have woken up earlier, Twilight muses. He blushes when his motive surfaces. He pretends to be slumbering, pulling the covers to his nose when vignettes of the night before trickle into his sleep-laden body. 

Yor had already caught him. She sits at his side and caresses his cheek with a cool finger. “Good morning.”

“Woke up late,” he mutters timidly, refusing to look at the magenta peeking from the neckline of her shirt. 

She laughs. “Yeah. But that’s okay. I’ve got Anya all packed and ready to go.”

“Were you waiting for me?”

Yor shakes her head. “I’ve got things under control. It looked like you needed the rest anyway.”

Twilight tilts his head and she’s there, cuddling his side, head slotted in his shoulder, watching their unspoken feelings come alive. He lets out a contented breath. With that one exhale, he expels a rush of colors that splash into his monochrome world. Everything is dyed a pastel orange. Yor’s skin blushes candy apples as she waits patiently. Waits for an answer, a disaster. Waits for him to say the word, make a move.

“I think I’ll call in sick today. Replenish my energy,” says Twilight. He hugs her head close, cheek nuzzling her forehead. “You know, you’ve kinda got a fever running.”

Yor smacks a hand on her face. “Do I?” 

“We should both stay home. Take care of each other.”

"But I feel fine.” She is so clueless. Twilight wants to kiss her sore.

His head is spinning glittery gold, unraveling and twining their bodies together. Her bedroom is made into their own slice of paradise. Bluebirds are chirping. Church bells are ringing. Samba hearts are pulsating. Their shadows are dancing on the walls. They’re laying in their makeshift linen reeds, woven together, embracing.  

Should he snap a picture? Stick-and-poke it onto his bicep under arrow hearts? Stitch it into the breast of his shirt where it can never get lost? 

Cute. Too immature for the feelings Yor is making him feel.

Pretty. Too naive for the way Yor slowly beams and flushes when the message finally registers.

"Hey. Marry me?" he asks, kissing the top of her head.

"Silly. We're already married!"

"I'll marry you a hundred more times. Honeymoons every morning. Doesn't that sound nice?"

"Or maybe we could share a room."

It’s her mirth, the crinkles of his eye and the rose flush of her cheeks. Her arms that always hold him— that never let go. It’s her big heart. her smile, her laughter, her kindness, her off-beat humor, her love for life. Love for others. Love for him.

What a joy it is to live alongside her.

[selfetishizing]

Sought you by ✨️🌿☕️

[selfetishizing]

Family

[selfetishizing]

the nearness of you

loid forger/yor briar | rated T | oneshot | 5.7k words

mild hurt/comfort, mutual pining, romantic tension, scars, tending to wounds, identity reveal (sort of)

A wife in tatters.

AO3

In the hour before Anya’s bedtime, Twilight had come to the startling realization that his daughter is growing up. The hem of her favorite onesie had hiked up to the bump of her ankle, bump of her wrist. Anya, heedless to many things, the intricate and crucial things—a father’s silent suffering, a mother’s concerning absence—hugged him good night, telling him that he’d be in “big, hugiant trouble” if she caught him staying past midnight waiting for Mama. Bond, whom he wished could speak and voice the wisdom that seemed to be held within his marble eyes, nudged his nose against his calf as if to show his sympathy for his companion’s indifference. Then, they had left him in a quiet apartment to fill the Yor-shaped spaces with his thoughts.

The first hour after the first snore, Twilight contemplated calling Yor, whom he presumed sat lonely at her desk, saving the country one file, one staple, one document at a time. It could be no one else. It had to be Yor to help carry this obfuscating weight that their precious girl was outgrowing her clothes—that they were becoming older themselves. That they were drifting apart.

Tomorrow, he'd tell her, they’ll go shopping together as a family for shiny new dresses, skirts, blouses, and pajamas. He will buy them in bulks—small, medium, large—so that he will never have to experience this silent heartbreak, this wearying awareness that he, shrewd and tenacious as he was, was powerless against the hands of Time. WISE would have to understand the incoming banknotes; this agony would last him for the entirety of Operation Strix.

Twilight dialed the phone and watched the numbers reel back and reset. He listened to each ring and hung up, assuming that Yor must have been on her way home.

He grieved the onesie in his lonesome. It would have been nice to hear Yor’s voice.

The second hour, he tidied up the apartment. Watered the plants. Wrapped leftovers in plastic. Played with his daughter’s toys. He created homes out of blocks, families out of plush—a fox, a bunny, a kitten. 

Hearing footsteps outside, Twilight darted to the door, knocking the blocks over in his haste. His hand hovered over the knob. He listened a beat longer and knew by the slow drag of feet, by their unhurried stride that it was not Yor. Yes, he knew her by step, by breath. She would have silently stepped across the hall, keys jangling  in her pocket. She would hum on particularly nice nights or mumble to herself when she was especially exhausted. 

It was past midnight. Yor was not home.

Twilight wasn’t sure why he had decided to stay up that particular night. Yor had been late before. He knew that she could take care of herself. She had brought an umbrella to work that morning. She wouldn’t come home shivering. No colds would be carelessly caught.

As he cleared the rest of the dinner table—a silver candelabra, blown-out candles, unopened wine bottles—the answer he had swallowed whole made itself known. Somewhere, deep in the pit of his stomach, it was there anchored by reason. It would tremble at the raise of her lip, travel far enough to the heart where hundreds of buzzing bees would prick at his arterial lining for the chance of release.

Release had come close many times: mornings when she’d asked how he’d like his coffee; Saturday afternoons as she napped on the couch; nights he’d bandage the tip of her fingers after prepping dinner. It was a seed burgeoning into honeysuckles—honeysuckles that, as far as Twilight knew, had already grown in parts of his body and made his blood sweet as sap. They were honeysuckles that nearly sprouted from his mouth at the sound of his name or the touch of her palm. 

Twilight could cut the vines and twine the flowers. He could dress up, slick his hair back, and have his shoes shined downtown. He could bow down like a gentleman, kiss each of his darlings’ dainty hands. A bouquet for Anya and a bouquet for Yor—their names written in his neatest penmanship on parchment. Anya would snap the honeysuckles from the vine and break their pistols off, supping them of their nectar. Yor would bring the flowers to her face and take in their scent, and Twilight, absently staring, would catch himself and clutch at his chest. Then, they would know everything. They would know all of the words he doesn't say. 

It would be so simple to tie those feelings up with chiffon lace. Surely, it would save him the embarrassment of voicing those stubborn emotions that more often than not translate to knuckle biting,  bedroom pacing, and worried, sleepless nights like tonight. But he knew by now that every day spent with them had watered the garden hardly contained within the bed of his skin. Giving each of them a bouquet would not capture even a fraction of how much he yearned to truly be on their side of the world.

──────────⊹⊱❀⊰⊹──────────

Yor returned home at three in the morning.

The rain had stopped two hours ago. She was drenched. Her umbrella, dry, dropped to the floor as she stumbled in her heels looking for her lost balance in the lightless apartment. Before Twilight could open his mouth to speak, she clutched at the breast of his shirt with the abject fear of falling, pleading with him through ragged breaths to hold her, to not let go.

He didn't. Twilight hugged her close, arms fastened around her back just beneath her coat. She winced. Her body burned hot from shivering, and her cheek, pale and wan, was cold on his collarbone. 

Twilight called to her softly, called again to stir her. She could only sigh. 

A hand slid from her back, up to her side, trailing to trace the curve of her face. Twilight hesitated. Yor pushed herself against him as if to feel for pressure, for validation that this warmth was his. The grip on his shirt loosened when she was sure that she had made it home. After a deep breath, Twilight stroked her jaw, coaxing her to spare him a look—just one—to know that all was right.

All was not right.

When she finally moved her head up to stare at him, Twilight nearly gasped. The color had wrung from her skin. Her eyes, usually so bright with curious wonder, had shrunk half a flame. The lip that would whisper his name could only quiver with dread. She shook in his embrace as she discerned his expression, anticipating a question and readying a stolid defense. Twilight would not have it. Yor, always so strong and resolute, felt so small in his arms. He absolutely would not have it.

He caressed her cheek and he swore his heart had stopped. Red smeared over her skin. But where? How? His hands cautiously slipped down the plane of her back. Yor mewled, and he knew. 

All at once the corpuscles in his body rushed in surges to the tips of his fingers down to his toes, to the heart, the head. He must have been flushed red with how quickly the blood ran in his veins—how quickly rage consumed him. Twilight inhaled shakily, tempering those thoughts of twisted necks, mutilated legs, snapped elbows, and headless torsos; of bodies cold and ashen as Yor was now in his hold.

“Who?” he whispered sharply, using the last of his constraint as he eyed the front door. Ask, and she’ll answer.

“An accident.” Ask, and she’ll lie. But the eyes? No, they never lie. She smiled despite it all. This he knew was true. He slipped her coat off from her shoulders, letting it pool at her ankles. She held on tighter. “I’m so tired. I just wanted to come home.” 

Twilight could have cried from the tenderness she seemed to have saved just for him. Gone was the wickedness in his body, relinquished to the dark, dark, night. He took her face in his palms, tucking the errant strands of her disheveled hair behind an ear. One of her earrings was missing. Twilight, shattered by this disquieting and crucial detail, waited for his tears to come. They never did.

“I’m sorry, Loid. You must've waited so long,” she murmured in his neck as he delicately lifted her up into his arms. “You even lit the candles for dinner.”

“How did you know?” Twilight asked, redirecting her guilt to the shadows where it could vanish alongside vice. He clung to softheartedness, to goodness, to kindness. Tonight, he'd give it all to her.

“I smell smoke on you.” 

“You can?” 

Yor cupped her hand over her mouth. “You haven't been doing anything naughty, have you?” 

“Heavens, no.” Twilight forced a chuckle. “I guess I should have put on cologne before welcoming you home this evening. You're exhausted, and you come back to a reeking husband. How flippant of me.”

“Silly.” She rested her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes as he carried her to the couch. “It’ll stain,” she rasped, too exhausted to put up much of a protest. Yor sunk into the cushions.

Twilight kneeled down to remove the heels from her throbbing feet. His fingers glided down the bend of her calf, noting the runs in her black stocking that weren’t there this morning. The heels, he imagined, had worn down from frantic mad dashes down crowded hallways to deliver reports and proposals. Yor must have tripped somewhere along the way knowing how clumsy she could be. It would explain the scrape on her right knee.

Twilight didn’t allow himself to think anything else of it. He'd crumble the very second he did. 

“May I go into your room, Yor?”

She seemed to have enough energy left to flinch at the otherwise innocent query. “I’m sorry?”

“Your clothes. Surely you weren’t thinking of changing without me tending to your…?” He could not bring himself to say it. To speak the very thing into existence would mean acknowledging the suppositions he had previously dismissed as soon as they were conceived. 

Twilight, insisting that she give in to his request, kept his hands on her knees as looked up at her imploringly. The more she turned his words in her head, the more flustered she became. The implication made the hairs on the back of Twilight’s neck stand. Surely, she wasn’t thinking something so unseemly.

He counted the moles dotting along the sides of her face and neck—five—as she pondered the question, connecting them to constellations he’d read about as a boy.

Cassiopeia—Queen of Ethiopia. Boastful and vain, she had boasted that she and her daughter, Andromeda, were more beautiful than the Nereids. Angered by Cassopeia’s remarks, Poseidon, god of the sea, had unleashed a disgustingly powerful sea creature, Cetus, onto her kingdom. Ethiopia would sacrifice Andromeda to the beast by chaining her to a boulder by the sea to restore order to the kingdom.

Twilight pondered the tale—the bonds between a mother and her child, the consequence of vanity, the peace offering that is a daughter. He thinks of Cassiopeia and Andromeda, Yor and Anya. The hero Perseus, who had rode upon the Flying Horse to save the princess, would cease to exist. Had Yor been Cassopeia, Twilight knew, she alone could have protected Andromeda. There would be no need for epic knights in shining armor. A mother would have been enough.

Twilight imagined a woman with Yor’s features—a pale woman with a black cape for hair, pursed red lips, crows feet at her eyes. He thought about a mother, about death, and the selfishness in succumbing to it. Does Yor forgive her mother? Does he forgive his own?

And perhaps Yor had been Andromeda this entire time, chained against a rock as the sea rages and tears her hosiery, her skirt, her skin. Her kingdom—the house she once knew with the iron fences and rose bushes— was reduced to rubble by manmade terrors unbeknownst to myths and their slithery beasts. Only a cellar with a frightened boy cowered in its dark corners remained, waiting for his dear sister to come back.

Yor didn’t need a Perseus to fight this battle for her. But maybe, Twilight naively supposed, it wouldn’t be so bad to have one fight alongside her. A Perseus to patch her wounds. A Perseus to listen and to hold her when words succumbed to sobs.

"There’s a nightgown folded on my bed,” she instructed carefully, voice hoarse, as if it were some secret mission.

“Alright.”

“My pillows and blanket too, if you could.” She bit her bottom lip, thinking a request as simple as that could be a burden to him. “I think I’d like to sleep here tonight.”

“I can carry you to your bed, you know.” 

“I’m so heavy, and—”

“Light as a feather.”

“But if you touch me again, Loid, who knows what I’ll do? I could kick you, or, or… I could slap you! You’d definitely bruise or bleed.” She was hysterical. From blood loss? Fatigue? “And if I melt?”

Twilight raised a brow, amused. “Melt?”

“Yes. If you touch me again, I fear my flesh might slide right off my bones. Might turn to goo.” Yor looked down at her lap, making sure that she was still all together. Then, she imagined herself liquified—a wash of taupe and pinks sluiced over the carpet—and gasped. “It would take forever to clean me up.”

Yor shifted on the couch, letting all of her weight fall to one side. Her eyes fluttered shut.

The entire room stilled. An austere foreboding, cold and misty, crept into the chasm that separated them. Moonlight caught in the dark curtain of her undone hair, sanctifying her with faint halation. Twilight clasped his hands together and called upon the angels—pulled them down by those golden threads stitched to billowing clouds— to do everything in their power to keep Yor awake. 

“You mustn't fall asleep,” he said. “Not until I’ve dressed you.”

“Just a little tired.”

“Yes, darling, I know,” cooed Twilight, slipping her hand in his. He rubbed the smooth swath of skin above her knuckles with his thumb, absolving her of the unspoken remorse that was written all over her, that was slashed onto her back. He would take it from her. He would bear it all.  “It will only take me a moment.” 

The fondness that he never knew he could possess with Yor shocked him, terrified him. What would be more difficult, he wondered? To turn his shoulder and leave this sentimental mood? Or for a subliminal confession he so desperately wanted her to understand to plague her mind?

Every red flag was raised and yet here he was, groveling before his fallen Madonna. One word and it would be done. Yes—Twilight took that risk, a leap of faith. He chose the latter—the novelty of infatuation, of being completely and thoroughly consumed by the off-chance that Yor, too, harbored symptoms of a heart starved of the kind of feelings reserved for two. 

Yor swallowed thick and squeezed his hand weakly. She nodded, and Twilight, the ever loyal husband, obeyed her command.

Quickly, he minced to his room, careful to not wake Anya. Underneath his bed was his personal first aid kit of gauze, sterilized needles, tourniquets, adhesive plaster, tweezers, wound washes, and antibiotic creams in a worn cardboard box so cleverly labeled “TOOLS'' in hasty print. Somehow one of Anya’s pink star-printed bandaids had made its way inside. The alarms went off in Twilight’s mind before he remembered that he had absently slipped an extra band aid that was in his pocket in there after he had patched up Anya’s knee. (Just the other weekend, she had somehow fallen off a bicycle with training wheels. It was an understated art how kids seemed to find the danger in otherwise safe devices.) He gathered an arm-full of these things and pushed past his bedroom door with his back.

Then, Twilight’s hand hovered over the doorknob of Yor’s bedroom, bracing himself for the metaphorical crossing between flatmates and something more. Her room, steeped in the indigo night, pulled him in before he could reconsider. The lace curtains billowed out toward him, swathed him in dove white. Before he knew it, he was caught in a whir of Yor.

This room was indisputably her. It was furnished simply: a bed, a dresser, a cabinet, and a vanity. A patched pilled quilt Twilight presumed had been from her childhood was tightly tucked down under the sides of her mattress. Her uniform—an impeccably ironed button down, a green vest and skirt—hung from a hanger on the corner of her cabinet. Anya seemed to imprint herself here too; another fox plush toy sat against her fluffed pillows, waiting to be cozied up against a warm, beating heart. Adorned on the walls were not posters or prints, but rather Anya originals in crayon, pastel, pencil, and acrylic.

Yor didn’t seem to hold on to a lot of things—or perhaps there wasn’t a lot of things to hold on to—before she lived here, but he knew by the multiplying photo frames—water-stained shots of Yuri, Forger and Briar family portraits, picture day at Eden Academy— that slowly, she was carving a permanent home here. 

Capless tubes of lipstick—reds, pinks, nudes— were strewn across her vanity along with ticket stubs to matinees they’d seen together after work. Lacquered dishes with tableaus of rolling fields and carnivals held her precious pearls, her golds, her handmade beaded bracelets. A green perfume bottle with a tasseled pump spray shimmered under starlight. Like a gem, its glean enchanted him into a sandalwood-induced stupor.

Twilight stared into the looking glass as a mirage of Yor nimbly braided her hair into a neat side-plait. She patted her face with loose powder and slid pink lipstick over puckered lips. Yor then dabbed the pad of her finger on rouge, dotting along the curves of her cheekbones and tapping the excess at the corners of her eyes. So mundane was the act, so effortless and easy, that Twilight felt apologetic for having peered into such a private ritual. 

Clearly, he had overstayed his welcome. Twilight nearly tripped over his feet as he moved to gather her beige nightgown and pillows, refusing to let curiosity get the better of him. Beneath her pillows, however, was a familiar trinket.

His engagement ring to her—that grenade pin! Twilight was unsure why she had decided to keep it after all of this time: he had wedded her properly thereafter with golden bands and bridal bouquets. He blushed immediately at the prospect that Yor wanted him to see it. Though slim, there was still the statistical probability that her request for her pillows was a subtle declaration of love—that the ring signified everything she had locked away in her heart and in his own. Could she have planned this? Left the ring under her pillow that morning for him to find? Did she anticipate working off hours so late into the evening? Orchestrate this entire scenario down to the last cut?

It was no accident, this much he knew. But how else would one rationalize those injuries? Why was she soaked when it had stopped raining hours ago? If someone had attacked her tonight, did she not have enough trust to confide in him?  If she did not care enough to tell him, then what was that grenade pin doing under her pillow?

Twilight all but stumbled out of her room.  He was WISE’s most cunning agent—its most calm and calculated—yet his mind could not quite wrap itself around the idea of Yor potentially reciprocating the feeling he knew he had concealed in some taped-up cardboard box tucked away in his house of bones. There, compartmentalized, were all of the trinkets he thought he'd forgotten: wooden guns, jazz records, a bloodied eyepatch, and burned polaroids. Underneath the old items lay a letter with his heart, scrawled and signed with a name long discarded:

Yor,

I love you most ardently.

I love you, I love you, I love you. 

Rowan

──────────⊹⊱❀⊰⊹──────────

Wound wash in popcorn bowls. Heart-printed face towels for rags. Gauze cut by pink blunt-tip kiddie scissors. A wife in tatters and a husband desperately attempting to stitch the remnants back together.

“I have to—” 

“You can't.” 

And for five minutes, they exchanged various iterations of these very words. Yor had managed to unbutton the first three buttons of her blouse before stubbornly crossing her arms over her chest, refusing any treatment from Twilight. 

Twilight scooted to the edge of the wooden table he sat on, close enough for their knees to nudge. Their eyes met briefly.

Yor much preferred the Moon’s gaze. Moonglow, Twilight figured, could not touch Yor in those damning ways she'd come to know about during the war or in cautionary tales. It could not bruise, breach, break skin. It could not promise her love but at least it gave her assurance of forever. And who was Twilight to contend? 

“Yor,” he started futilely, voice softer than he would have liked, “you can trust me.”

The words, like steam, evaporated from her tongue. She clutched the bust of her blouse shut. 

“I do.” She was red in the face. He could feel her jittering. “It's just—oh!—I don't know! You weren't supposed to… No, not like this.” 

“I’ll close my eyes, touch you only where I should. I’ll be gentle, quick, so please,” plead Twilight, weary and desperate, “let me care for you.”

“You've cared for me the entire night—every day I’ve lived with you. You've welcomed me so into your home, your family, and yet here I am,” she rasped, voice caught on a chord, “proving time and time again that I—”

Twilight's heart dropped to his belly; he felt as though he ought to apologize. For what, he was unsure. There must have been some kind of shortcoming from within him if Yor was unable to articulate her troubles.  

Her vagueness, though, seemed purposeful: she would trail off before giving him any indication as to where the root of her problems lay. Twilight secretly thanked her for it. They could, even for a while longer, keep up this charade. He could still love her with her back turned—love her in sight. 

“You’ll hate me,” whispered Yor. “You'll despise me. I know it.” 

“There’s nothing in this world that could ever make me hate you.” The statement unknowingly gave way to the garden tucked away underneath the surface of his skin. Could she smell the roses on him? The freesias? Yor could not be so dense to not understand his heart with the way he leapt at her assumption, fitting himself to the gentle carve of her profile. Twilight is close, so close that he catches the moon’s glimmer on her eyelashes. He resists the temptation to eclipse it with a kiss. 

“You wouldn't understand.” 

“Then help me to.” Twilight just could not stop at words, no. When did his hand connect with her knee? When did his fingers move to guide her face back to him? 

Yor forced herself to look once more at his gaze, agonizingly adamantine. Resolute. She began the process of unbuttoning her shirt once more, keeping her eyes trained on him. 

“Anya grew out of her pajamas, you know,” he droned—a distraction—as he anxiously watched the tips of her fingers. “Wrists and ankles and all. They’re poking out the sleeves. I was thinking,” Twilight swallows thickly, “we should all go out this weekend. Buy some new clothes for her.”

Yor stilled, staring at him with unblinking eyes. She bit her lip and, almost as if to present herself to him, laid her hands beside her thighs. The dark sweep of her hair fell over the hunch of her shoulders. Twilight followed its movement.

Anger was a lit match that burned through the sprawling cord that maps over the expanse of her skin. He stared at the curve of the chest, her heart. Twilight traced the long jagged line of white raised skin down to her right side. Pink stars exploded and dwindled down her hip, dying dust disappearing underneath the waistband of her skirt.

Twilight could stitch a disjointed timeline from the color of her scars alone: faded cat-scratches from her childhood, raised cuts from debris, bullet wounds red and unforgiving, and knife lacerations that had just begun to scab over washes of blue and purple. 

Perhaps she could see it on his face, his steely countenance. He had become all hard edges and wrinkles as he scrutinized the marred canvas of her skin. The irony was cruel. Yor, always so gracious, so kind, was seamed with silvery stitches, stained with colors that belonged on sprigs. He was in pieces. 

“They grow up so fast,” said Yor wistfully, almost as if to lament the skin she had no choice in claiming. “They come and they go, don’t they?”

Twilight knew all too well that her words meant much more. Yes, he wanted to say, we did. And he’d hold her the way his mother had when days were brighter—the way he holds his daughter now. He’d hold the girl as long as she needed to be held: late into the morning, late for work; in the afternoon when the sun laid over them thickly; into dusk with the stars shut off, dark and still. 

There were things Twilight could never understand about Yor, things that she would never divulge to him. But there was nothing as certain and true as the kindness of skin, of a hand over hers, of a brush on the curve of her cheek. 

“I’m going to take your…” Bra felt too vulgar of a word. He improvised. “This off.” 

Resigned from her initial embarrassment, Yor simply nodded, moving to rest her chin on Twilight’s shoulder. She held onto the sides of his shirt, a half-hug. 

Faceless women. Powdery perfume. Wine-stained lips agape, mouthing different names on the nape of his neck. Bodies full in contour, stuffed with down in all the places meant for squeezing. It was muscle memory at this point—the snap of a clasp, the inevitable plunge into passion, and the hangover in the morning. But when it came to Yor, he couldn’t help but feel as though it was an act most sacred. There was no other urge than to press her wholly against him, to feel the pressure of her entire being on him as he wraps his arms around her, merging into one. Deeper than lust, than desire. This much, he longed for Yor Briar.

The straps slid off her shoulders, leaving pink indents in her flesh. His mind blanked. He stopped breathing.

Hands moved on their own, wetting towels in washes, laving it over her back. She’d wince. He’d whisper something sweet. Rinse and repeat. He created a cage out of action, keeping all thoughts and emotion locked away.

“Is it bad?” she asked.

“Not so bad,” Twilight assured. “Nothing that needs stitches, at least.”

“Oh.” It was empty exchanges like this as more and more questions hung over them. Together they cowered under their weight. 

“I know that this is… uncomfortable.” It was awkward, to say the least. He tended to her back, arms rigid so as to not touch her more than he needed to. She leaned forward, chest to chest, so that he could somewhat peer over her shoulder to see what he was doing. Skinship didn’t seem to bother her—rather, she was too exhausted to care or give it any deeper thought. The turmoil within Twilight, though, waged. “Just a while longer. I need to dress your wound. You’ve been a very good patient up to now.”

“I’ve been good?” It warranted a chuckle from Yor.

Twilight flushed, conscious of his entire existence. Too embarrassed by his words, he froze, hands dropping down to the small of her back. “Are you…making fun of me?”

“No. Not at all.” She laughed halfheartedly once more, pulling back slightly to look at him. “So this is what you’re like with your patients. You’re kind and your hands are warm. It’s hard to not like you.”

“Oh, please.” Briefly, he met her gaze, tore from her immediately once he remembered the precarious position they found themselves in. He looked past her. He would be a gentleman.

“That’s who you are. You’re warm wherever you go. You’re warm when you’re here, warm when you’re away.” He looked past her even as she moved to touch his face. “You’re warm even now, when I’ve been so cold. Yes, I’ve been cold to you, haven’t I?”

He said her name, so he thought. She closed her eyes. All it took was this for Twilight see her for who she was. Goodness, through and through.

“Sometimes I think… I think I was born like this. Cold-blooded. ” A beat of silence. “That I might be the way I am forever.” 

“I know you, Yor.” He blazed a trail to the side of her face, flames lapping her skin. She shuddered as he whispered low against her ear, lips brushing with every word. “I know you. And if... If you're cold now,” Twilight said, “I'll wrap your blanket around you.”  It sounded like a promise—one Yor was sure she would not be able to keep.

“That's the thing.” She shook her head. “I’m not so sure you do.” 

This he could not refute. Her past was a mystery to him. Dead parents and a younger brother. She had only herself. Twilight often chose not to speculate about her life; he knew he’d go down a downward spiral coming up with many iterations of her girlhood—rather, lack thereof. What kind of jobs did she take to support her younger brother? Who did she meet? How did she remain soft despite it all—the war that had unknowingly brought them together?

How did she get hurt tonight?

Who had hurt her?

Her eyes, glassy, stared at him in resignation. “I’m scared, Loid. Terrified that one day, you'll come to realize who I truly am."

Yes, he did not know the crucial makings of Yor. Didn’t know the smell of her childhood bedroom. The names of lovesick suitors that, over the years, tried to win her hand. He didn’t know the stations she’d tune in to as a girl on lazy Sunday afternoons under the syrup sun when all the initial excitement of the weekend had worn off. But what Twilight did know was the scent of her shampoo as they drove down cobblestone paths, top down, hair tickling his face as she watched the scrolling scenery in awe. He knew the way her face would glow as she smiled, how everything about her flowered. The feelings Anya, he harbored were certain. Wasn’t this enough?

Twilight gently wrapped around her. It was the best he could do despite the uncertainties that continued to gnaw at him. She melded into him, and, perhaps swept by the moment, did exactly what he had been thinking of doing the entire night.

They kindled, and the fire spread.

──────────⊹⊱❀⊰⊹──────────

It was relatively quiet as he cared for Yor. The small cuts she visibly had on her arms were covered in Anya’s pastel bandaids. He tied the wedding white gauze around her bust as if it were a ribbon to a gown. She was pink in the night, hot with pining much like Twilight.

Sucking on a breath, Yor raised her worn arms as Twilight slipped her nightgown over her head.

“You’re staying home tomorrow. No ifs or buts,” he directed as he slipped her skirt off from underneath.

Yor hummed in compliance, refusing to look him in the eye, refusing to acknowledge the audacity of that act of utmost affinity—the chaste press of lips.

Twilight was no better. He’d gone too soft, sappy. Too stupid. To make up for the many missteps of the night, he would be calm, collected. The anger and contentment conflicting within him would have to wait until he’s in the confines of his room where he could turn in his bed over thoughts of Yor.

He tossed the blood-soaked rags in the bowl and stood up, moving to position her pillow near the arm of the sofa so that she could finally lay. Twilight pulled the pilled quilt from her room over her body. She looked so small, so snug.

“You were out in the rain too. You most definitely caught a cold.”

“Definitely?” 

“Yes.” Twilight swept his palm over her forehead. “Definitely. I’ll be here with you, though. I need you there with me this time. I need you strong when you see how fast Anya has grown.”

“It must have been hard on your own, seeing Anya grow.” Yor smiled with mirth and his heart swelled. He looked away, lifted his chin, and cleared his throat. “I’ve always been strong, though, so you don't have to worry—"

“No,” he interjected, a little too strongly. He kneeled down next to her, and he said, in the most tender voice he could muster, “Did you forget that you’re married? Married to me?”

“I didn’t,” she mumbled timidly. “But there's no one here to watch us. Nothing to prove to anyone.”

With a knowing smile, Twilight responded, “Precisely.” Yor blushed, turning to the other side to face away from him. He reached out one last time before retracting his hand out of contemplated bashfulness. “Get some rest. I’ll be in my room reading. Don’t hesitate to call out to me if there’s anything you need, alright?”

He waited ten heartbeats, waited for a last minute request. Waited to hear the inflection of her voice just before she’s taken by slumber—the voice that would lull him to rose-scented dreams.

As he got up, he imagined that she had said his name. Then, again, “Loid?”

“Yes?”

Her back was still turned away from him, face toward the back cushions.

“I’ve got so much to tell you, but I don't know where to begin."

“We’ve got the morning,” he told her, himself. “We’ve got the rest of our lives for me to learn all of you.”

Yor turned to him. Twilight bowed before her, laced their hands together. She squeezed. 

"For now," Yor said, closing her eyes, "thank you."

He leaned down and tucked a flower behind her ear. A wind overtakes them. Pink petals flitted.

[selfetishizing]

THANK YOU FOR WRITING MY REQUEST!!! i rlly liked the one about ash writing letters to eiji, if you’re up to it (no pressure) could you either expand on that hc or write a little smth about it :)? again ty and i love your writing so much it’s gorgeous

A film ticket. Sticky notes that have lost their stickiness. Hastily scrawled grocery lists. A magnet with the date of a dentist appointment that he had canceled. Book quotes written on convenience store receipts. Chiquita stickers. Religious pamphlets with their words blotted into silly poems. Candy wrappers.

This was his life one week without Eiji—a life shoved haphazardly into an envelope addressed to a Hilton hotel somewhere in Seattle. An envelope without a letter.

What was there to say that hasn’t been said? Ash had already written his “I-miss-yous” and “love-yous” in his neatest hand; about his lazy days spent with Joyce and Baldwin; Buddy’s bathroom habits. He had even sprayed that cologne Eiji was so fond of—something in French, sandalwood, lemon—over the paper. (Which he should have thought about more thoroughly. The ink bled and the words had become muddled. The sentiment, at least, was still there.)

Somehow, it didn’t seem enough. With how much time he had to himself, he ought to have written something more profound, more evocative of his yearning. The futility of language: as if it could convey how he felt toward him. That warmth, and those sparkles, and the cloying sweetness that coats his tongue whenever Eiji comes to mind. The indomitable human spirit! Despite the impossibility, the senselessness, Ash tries to put that inexplicable feeling into words. Tries, and tries, and tries.

Eiji,

Buddy is asleep on your side of the bed, raising Hell in his dreams. Today he trotted up to a group of elementary school kids on their way home with a huge stick in his mouth and it made me think, “You take after your father!” 

(You know, the way you’re just so social. Hopefully you are not going up to strangers with tree bark in your mouth. It would be hard to explain to Missus Okumura.)

I had a strange feeling come over me as I watched Buddy run back and forth down the street fetching the same stick. Surely there is a deeper metaphor to be had here. Buddy is a small little guy now. The stick was almost just as big as him, but in time, he'll be a huge fluffy dog with a long snout and yellow hair that clings to everything it touches. He'll be tearing up the yard and bringing dead squirrels home instead of playing fetch with his old man. And the scary thing is, this could all happen in a matter of weeks. WEEKS. Bud is growing up, and you are away. Come home soon.

All my love,

Ash

[selfetishizing]

TUMBLR FRIENDS!! it's been nearly 2 years omg....... just now seeing all the love in my absence.... thank you guys so much for giving my works and thoughts a chance. :)

rereading the drafts i created all that time ago is like communicating with myself in a strange way. i'd like to post all of these half-finished works and prompts in the coming weeks; i think i was too embarrassed and hard on myself to have the courage to share them. now i am older and wiser and i no longer Cringe. please look forward to them!!

[selfetishizing]

sorry for not responding to prompts! i've just finished my exams and am working on a new twiyor oneshot. i hope you all had a wonderful holiday! :)

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in for a penny, in for a pound — "for the mission," a family is found 💕

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Doggo

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sweet song

[selfetishizing]

waaahh thankq so much for recommending my fic (and for your kind words as well)!!!!!!!!! definitely gonna check these other fics out heheh!! :3c

Hello again!

I was wondering if you had any spy x family fic recs that are twiyor centric? AUs? I’m having trouble finding ones that are what I’m looking for. Ratings don’t matter. Anything from G to E would be appreciated! Thank you!!

boy oh BOY do i have twiyor fic recs !!!! it's like basically all i read LMAO and i am always on a hunt for more. i feel like i have read through a good chunk of what's on ao3 and i still feel starved. there's always my bookmarks you can sift through for twiyor fics, but for some more curated recommendations (and this is not gonna include all the ones i've lost my mind over, that's far too many, this is just what i can remember off the top of my head):

the living blues by @nire-the-mithridatist

rated T, 5/6 chapters, currently 14k words

GOD it would be such an understatement to say i am a huge fan of not only this work but EVERY WORK by this author because SHE HAS A WAY WITH WORDS OKAY. i avoid angst like the plague but i saw the happy ending tag to this fic and IT DIDN'T DISAPPOINT (chapter 6 is gonna be an epilogue)!!!!!!! AUGHHH this isnt even a good review im just yelling but yeah this is really good and also pretty much everything else by this author, i'll say it now so this list doesn't have numerous fics by the same person just do yourself a favor and read through what she's got if you haven't already

With Kid Gloves by crownofrosegold on ao3

rated G, 1/2 chapters, currently 2.5k words

4 words: Mr Darcy Hand Flex

the most yearning, pining, longing fic ever with the least physical touch ever. loid traces yor's gloves in his pocket with his thumb and its somehow intimate. yeah

it's been a hot minute since it's updated but the first chap can kinda be read as a standalone (to me) which is why i rec, even though i personally only go after finished fics for my own sanity :^) also its just too darn cute how can i not

How to Be a Supportive Husband by @nemaliwrites

rated T, 1/1 chapters, 910 words

short and sweet drabble of the most simpiest loid post reveal. what more could you want

MISSION: Bottom Feeder by SilverSupa on ao3

rated T, 2/4 chapters, currently 9.5k words

this one is just too good and funny LMAOO yor and loid are Peak Stupid and also Peak Attracted To Each Other so it's just. mm good mix. this one's also been a hot second since it's last update but i love it too much so its on this list

even when we're not together (will you stay with me?) by JaMills on ao3

rated T, 1/1 chapters, 4.5k words

gosh this is another one of those super good reads that make you sit and think after you're done. soulmate AU where they swap bodies as children until they meet. personally i'm not the most dedicated reader of aus where yor and loid meet as kids, but the way its handled here is just so good and adds to the story. it's also part of a series and the next installment is equally as good. this is another one of those authors that has a lot of quality stuff (although there's a good dash of angst which i keep my distance from JKFHISDH) so look through their page!

Enough by Frotu on ao3

rated T, 1/1 chapters, 4k words

EHEHE THIS ONE HAS ME GIGGLING AND KICKING MY FEET FR it is soooo cute. typical thing of yors coworkers getting into her head, she asks loid if what they have is enough, and... well.... you can read what happens from there ;] (spoiler: it's very cute)

a dream in charmeuse by selfetish (@selfetishizing ) on ao3

rated T, 2/2 chapters, 12k words

oh gosh, the prose in this is just?? so insanely good??? its such a pretty read. this is twiyor, yes, but it's also a deep dive into femininity and yor's understanding/rediscovery of it. i remember the first time i read it the opening scene of the first chapter was just so GOOD to me, i was like OMG i am not gonna forget this this is so iconic AND IT IS!!!!! i love me a good yor centric fic. we usually get more of twilight contemplation (i mean he has got the whole mission thing going on and hes our resident overthinker so, understandable) but this was such a nice look into yor's..,, like, fundamental building blocks?? if that makes sense?? its just good ok read it

"The Five Times Loid Forger Went Topless In Front of His Wife and the One Time She Reciprocated" Or “Bare-Chested in Berlint” by Talik_Sanis on ao3

rated M, 6/6 chapters, 17.5k words

that title should tell you all you need to know right LMAOOO it's just yor being incredibly horny, like embarrassingly so. she lacks a grip

again this is just 8 fics, where my bookmarks list are over 200 (yeesh) so feel free to look through those. i've also got some fics, most of which are twiyor lmao (brainrot i told you). and don't forget to show these awesome authors some love!

[selfetishizing]

it's a cruel, cruel summer! 🍌🐟

commissions open!

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first love / late spring terumob

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i'm your venus, i'm your fire, and your desire! 🍌🐟

commissions open!

[selfetishizing]

loid never asks anya to read minds for him unless it concerns a squabble with yor. he'd muse aloud "i wonder if your mother is still mad at me." anya would roll her eyes as her father cleared an imaginary lump in his throat. "i said, i wonder if your mother is still mad at me."

"it doesn't take telepathy, pa," she'd scorn, shoveling heaps of cereal marshmallows into her mouth, "to know when ma's mad."

loid, restless from his wife's indifference to him, would finally give and directly ask, "anya. is she mad at me or not?"

meanwhile, yor, in the living space, would wipe the coffee table so diligently that the legs would burn holes into the carpet.

"mad as shit."

[selfetishizing]

finals are approaching so i will resume responding to remaining prompts in around 3 weeks!

[selfetishizing]

“Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.”

— James Baldwin, 1984 interview in The Paris Review