#THIS FIC CONSUMED ME BODY AND SOUL AND I THINK THERE MIGHT BE A PART TWO I REALLY DON'T KNOW I JUST HAD TO WRITE THIS

[aethon-recs]

23 Tomarrymort Recs for 2023 (Longfic Edition)

Happy New Year! 🤍 Here is a round-up of some of the most engaging multi-chaptered works/longfics that I came across in this ship in 2023.

I found each of these fics, in their depiction of the ship, to be a fresh or surprising take on our familiar beloved characters of Harry and Tom|Voldemort, truly groundbreaking in some way in their approach to the ship. It's amazing to me that even after 20+ years of this ship existing, there's still new themes / tropes / dynamics to explore, and the authors are all so talented in making me think about the ship in some new way — just incredible examples of what it means to be a transformative work of fanfiction.

Criteria for this list: multi-chaptered, Tomarrymort-centric, with at least 1 update published in 2023. As with a previous longfic rec list, I tried to find longer fics that were relatively under-rated (which is hard to define, but below 2K kudos for the most part).

See here for Part 1 (2023 Tomarrymort one-shots), and hope you lose many many happy hours to the unbridled joy of immersing yourself in one or more of these incredibly addictive, lovely longer fics!

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23 Tomarrymort Recs for 2023 — Multi-Chaptered Fics

A Darkness by Any Other Name by river_marrow (M, 30k, WIP) 

Decades after the war ends, Harry is thrown through the Veil, and finds himself in an alternate reality where the leader of the Muggleborn uprising is the Dark Lord Voldemort.

A Dead God's Faith by @selfishrot (M, 35k, WIP)

Blood and spittle rush to follow Riddle’s words that are dragged out through a wrecked throat. “I will consume you.” Harry felt a thrill run up his spine, along with the usual fear and anger that accompanied Voldemort's threats. “Be gentle, I can feel your soul ripping its stitches.”

And the Living Will Envy the Dead by @k-s-morgan (M, 81k, WIP)

When Harry looks at Tom, he feels overwhelmed. There is a spark that makes him hopeful, the fear that nothing he does will save Tom from himself, and the horror at what his lies might lead to. When Tom looks at Harry, he feels nothing. Until he does, and then Harry’s world starts drowning in blood.

At the expense of the world by @itsevanffs (E, 24k, WIP)

"He had a lover, you know," Jenkins says to Remus once Harry's behind a wall and out of sight again. "A boy, and a gorgeous one at that. Nobody really knew where he came from, and Tom didn't seem to favour him either, at first, but by the end, he was besotted."

Bitumen by @crowcrowcrowthing (E, 32k, WIP)

Harry finds out the hard way that Dementors can’t digest Horcruxes. Now separated from his body, his best option is to seek out a similar soul for help. A love story about immortals with too much time to kill.

Creatures of the Dark we are by @hikarimeroperiddle (M, 25k, WIP)

Banished to his cupboard at age 4, Harry learns to listen only to the Voice in his head. Its teachings wrap all around Harry until no more than dark magic and devotion remains, along with visions of a wraith with red eyes.

Exceeding Expectations by @mosiva (E, 56k, complete)

Harry Potter’s life ran along very different lines than Tom Riddle’s. He knew nothing more of the man than he read in the Daily Prophet. Then they get stuck in a lift together.

Exegesis by liquoricepantomime (M, 38k, WIP)

In exchange for peace, Voldemort asks for Harry Potter. And so, there is a new legacy that forms — of The-Boy-Who-Was-Sold, and his childhood spent in a castle, with a man who has killed his parents. A man who is mad, and whose ire reigns fiery hell. A man he will marry, and yet knows nothing about.

found by @honbug (E, 112k, WIP)

Tom knows from the beginning that he is destined for greatness. Nothing and no one will stop him from achieving his goals. (And then, of course, there are the dreams.)

hook, line, and sinker by @purplemineralwater (E, 21k, WIP)

Harry asks Professor Riddle for help in killing Voldemort. Riddle is endlessly amused.

if we were lovers by @reggieblk (E, 277k, complete)

When Harry arrives at the most prestigious theatrical school in the country, he doesn't have many expectations. The most unexpected thing he encounters is Tom Riddle, and subsequently, falling in love with the only other person who deals with feelings as well as him. But maybe, just maybe, he and Tom will find out that not all love stories have to end in tragedy.

Lover's Spit by @pinktom & @k3uuu (E, 123k, WIP)

Following his father's arrest on a dull hot Sunday in North Yorkshire, 10-year-old Tom Riddle becomes a dark internet sensation.  If Harry Potter listened to his father, he would never speak to Riddle again. But eight years after the arrest, an unexpected and painful encounter leads Harry to reconsider events — and arrive at a conclusion all his own. 

One Year In Every Ten by @saintsenara (E, 189k, WIP)

A decade after the final battle, a serial killer emerges, with a message that proclaims the Dark Lord has risen again. Harry is assigned to the case.

Oversight by @dividawrites (E, 21k, WIP)

Voldemort’s resurrection ritual doesn’t go as smoothly as he’d planned. He requires assistance and there’s only one person he can ask—the boy tied to his father’s gravestone.

Paved With the Best Intentions by @perhaps-sunlight (M, 113k, WIP)

Instead of dying during the Battle of Hogwarts, Voldemort de-ages into an infant. Until he becomes old enough to be legally executed, he will be magically bound to Harry.

Prison Blues by @metalomagnetic (E, 68k, WIP) 

Harry and Voldemort find themselves locked up in a mysterious prison in an A/B/O alternate universe setting.

Revolution of Configured Stars by @tollingreminiscentbells (E, 110k, WIP)

In a Voldemort Wins AU, Harry Potter was spared, and enters his seventh year at Hogwarts wanting to do Arithmancy research and keep his head down. However, after a chance encounter, it looks like it may not be so simple. Marvolo Gaunt seems to have his eye on Harry. The trouble is, Harry has no idea why. 

Tender Reigns Our Night by @noumena-writes (M, 93k, WIP)

Sent on a Ministry mission to fight for magic's survival, Harry goes back in time with two simple objectives: find and destroy any existing Horcruxes, and stop Tom Riddle ever evolving into Voldemort — using any means necessary. Harry thus finds himself working alongside Riddle at Borgin and Burke's, examining dark artefacts and desperately trying to fulfil his orders.

the demiurge, the leontoeides by @ramabear (E, 125k, WIP)

Thomas Gaunt reaches through the dimensions and plucks an eleven-year-old Harry Potter from his world and brings him home again.

the eternal flame by @duplicitywrites (E, 25k, WIP) 

There’s a well-dressed older man who enters the orphanage asking after Tom Riddle. The man’s green eyes fix on Tom’s face, searching and searching.  “My name is Harry Gaunt,” the man says, the tenor of his voice soft and faltering, a reflection of Tom's deepest, most secret anxieties, “and I’m here to adopt you.”

the righteous dead by @aspengray (T, 23k, WIP)

Harry is resurrected, sewn together with thread and magic. He remembers nothing except that he loves his savior, a man named Voldemort.

The Longing by @aglassroseneverfades (M, 33k, WIP)

Harry is not thinking of his parents right now as he trudges up to Voldemort’s eerie castle. He is thinking instead, as he often does, of a name that burns too brightly on his wrist in the pre-dawn light. He is wondering if somehow the fruitless tugging on his heart means that somewhere, some way, Tom is watching over him. 

With a resolute heart by Act_Naturally (M, 157k, WIP)

A Hunger Games-AU featuring Harry and Tom as competing champions.  Harry has a saving people thing. It’s not conducive to surviving a battle royale. He doesn’t fancy his chances. Especially against Tom Riddle.

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[pipermca]

hello I have a question not on the ask meme :D how do you figure out plots? plots are one of the hardest parts for me. interested in your method! also happy new years! cheers! thanks for being such a kind and awesome friend =D

Plots! Ask a hard question, why don't you! 😅

I'm a plot gardener. I usually let ideas marinate for a while before I start to write. While an idea is marinating, the idea will sometimes develop and grow into something that I want to write. That's when I actually start writing. (Whenever I start a fic I usually know where I want it to go. The destination may ultimately change as I write, but I always have SOME end in mind.)

Most of my ideas either start as a "what if" or as a single visual/vignette. A Thousand Years started off as a "what if" (what if one of the Lambros got thrown back in time and had to figure out how to get back to his brother?) I needed to figure out how that happened, how they'd get back, and how that would affected them. The plot grew out of that. Datastream started off with the image of two bots back-to-back, their heads wired together (just as seen in Myla Xan's amazing artwork!) Why would that be needed? What problem were they trying to solve? And so on.

Interestingly, Mind, Body, and Soul started off as a "what if" (what if the Datsun/Praxians weren't brothers like how everyone writes them, but were romantically involved in a trine?) Then, with that idea in mind, I started thinking about what the story might be there... And I was consumed with an image that served as the genesis for the whole entire 300k fic: Bluestreak, collapsed to his knees before an open door in an empty apartment, completely emotionally crushed. (We eventually saw that image at the very end of chapter 20.) The whole story eventually developed around those kernels.

Happy New Years to you, too! Thank YOU for being so amazing, and for letting me yell at you when I need to. 😄

[yeehanfrf]

Week 1 Recs: One Shot, One Kill

The Week 1 Fic Rec Friday theme was "One Shot, One Kill," or fics that clock in under 10,000 words. Here are all the bite-sized fics recommended by the Yeehan community, organized by rating, then alphabetically by title.

General Audience

A Dragon's Treasure by SetsunaNoroi [5,958 words] Reccer comment: "It's a bit of comfort read; short, sweet, humourous, charming, and hits a lot of what I enjoy reading in a YH fic."

Hanzo can't help himself in developing feelings for Jesse McCree, but that doesn't mean he has to share them. With his sins, he is better off alone but still he can't help but want him. It should be fine as long as he just never says anything. Unfortunately his dragons have different ideas and keep trying to lay claim on the cowboy. Mostly McCree is just confused.

In Hot Pursuit by AsheRhyder [3,928 words] Reccer comment: "Loser man Cassidy fumbling the bag with Hanzo ft. Papa Reaps."

Cassidy can flirt, but he's never had someone actually take him up on the offers his silver tongue makes.

Hanzo is determined to win whatever game they're playing, especially when the prize is a flustered cowboy.

Gabriel and Jack just want to play cards.

To Grow Old Together (Is the Ultimate Declaration of Love) by PlanetaryRose [697 words] Reccer comment: "v short but v v sweet"

“I don’t just love you Jesse, I adore you, you are my heart but it is more than that. I want to spend the rest of my days with you, to grow old with you and have you forever by my side and in my arms.

You consume me in every way, mind, body, and soul. I would spend the rest of my days with you, dedicate my life to you.”

Teen and Up

Dreamlike by mataglap [4,063 words] Reccer comment: "4,063 words of achingly sweet fluff!"

Hanzo is used to bad dreams, and he never would have expected that a good dream would end up haunting him the most.

Finding Home, Building Home by coinin [1,975 words] Reccer comment: "rly sweet slice of yeehan, punches u in the face in under 2k words!"

It's taken a while, helped along by teammates, arguments about furniture, and quite a bit of cat hair, but Jesse's finally made a home.

Midway by robocryptid [2,329 words] Reccer comment: "2329 words that I go back to often because it hits a perfect balance between funny, sweet and romantic."

Cassidy and Hanzo go undercover at the fair to track a mark. Obviously they blend in best if everyone assumes they're a couple. It goes exactly how you think.

Silver Screen by DerpyMcButtface [1,990 words] Reccer comment: "Some people might hate me for recommending this one bc it’s SAD, but I really love the premise, and it’s VERY well written."

It's far, far in the future. The heroes are dead, old, or getting there fast. They're making movies now, about Overwatch, but not everyone's happy about that.

Mature

All the Love You Ever Get by SaltCore [3,387 words] Reccer comment: "3387 words to make you cry (mind the tags!)"

Some carry the last words they'll ever hear their soulmate say like a brand on their skin. Whether it's a blessing or a curse is for the philosophers to decide.

Hanzo, for his part, would rather fate had passed him by instead of leaving her mark.

Electric by mataglap [2,212 words] Reccer comment: "Caught up in a thunderstorm, gets spicy"

They get caught in a storm. Things get slightly out of control.

Fire from the Gods by Adolphus Longestaffe [1,372 words] Reccer comment: "very short but beautifully written"

Used to be every time he looked away you got afraid he didn’t love you no more. Now every time he breathes out you’re afraid he won’t breathe in again.

Shrimp Heaven Now by Liquid_Lyrium [5,916 words] Reccer comment: "utterly silly fun"

Hanzo is single-handedly trying to get them thrown out of every Red Lobster in town. McCree is just along for the ride.

Explicit

blisters by cosmicevil [3,141 words] Reccer comment: "A gut punch every time I read it"

Hanzo is going to figure it out.

Debriefing by MittenCrab [6,332 words] Reccer comment: "The scene from this fic haunts me (in a good way). I think about it quite a lot. 6332 words by MittenCrab. A lot of feelings. So many feelings."

“You did not debrief,” Hanzo says finally. It’s more a statement than a question.

[McCree’s mission goes badly when he crosses paths with Reaper - the man who was once everything to him. Wounded and frustrated, he meets Hanzo at one of their safe houses, where he discovers that debriefing can be a lot more fun than he’d previously imagined. (PWP)]

Familiar Habits by Philosophics [8,176 words]

After joining Overwatch, Hanzo finds it difficult to sleep some nights. It is nothing a hot cup of tea cannot fix, but he never expected that he would have company.

(or: hanzo is very thirsty, in more ways than one)

It Will Come Back by CorvidFightClub [3,434 words] Reccer comment: "3,434 words, it’s fuck or die with bonus werewolf :D"

McCree and Hanzo are captured by a gang somewhere in the American Midwest after a mission. The situation becomes more dire when Hanzo finds out the gang isn’t the only thing he has to worry about.

On the Mouth by super_duper [3,292 words] Reccer comment: "I always come back to this one bc it's such a perfect balance of virgin and manslut Hanzo"

Jesse and Hanzo have a thing. Jesse would like it to be more than a thing. Hanzo has a secret.

Slippage by robocryptid [1,389 words] Reccer comment: "some more angst with smut and questionable comfort in 1389 words"

Cassidy compartmentalizes. Hanzo knows it, because he does the same.

It’s supposed to be simple, and it’s anything but.

your good side by motorghost [2,053 words] Reccer comment: "this one by motorghost is so delicious!!!"

Hanzo feels himself changing because of Cole. There's lots of ways to thank him, but when you only have nightly webcam chats, your options are limited. Luckily Hanzo is more creative than Cole knows.

Thank you to everyone who sent in a recommendation! Keep an eye out for next week's theme: "Feel-Good Hour," for all your heartwarming fluff needs!

[theredofoctober]

Ouroboros— Dead Ringers Fic, PART ONE

Cross posted from AO3

Pairing: Beverly/Elliot, FF, twincest

Synopsis: Genevieve goes away to pursue a failing picture; in her absence, Elliot appears on Beverly's doorstep, and they become more intimate than they have ever been

TW/CW: incest, toxic relationships, cheating

Rear after the cut ✂️

Chapter One: Beverly

"Baby sister. Baby sister."

Elliot was at the front door, scratching like an awful, beautiful, persistent little dog, begging to come in. She knew Genevieve was away for work, though I didn't tell her; she might have read about the new film, somewhere, or merely sensed it, the way Elliot sometimes knows things I know without me ever needing to speak a word aloud, just as I know things she never says aloud, although she almost always does, with a vicious, savage, flesh-eating, all-consuming love.

We destroy each other, in proximity; we are like cursed Gods when we are apart, wretched, and hollow, and searing all we love down to ash and blackened bone for want of one another, for need of nothing else.

I am soft and yielding and brow-beaten in all things but my sister. I am soft, and I always yield to her. We eat each other like the snake that devours its own tail.

Like all perfect things, there is no end to us but to die.

"I can't let you in, Elliot," I said, although I had my face pressed to the wood of the door in craving for her touch on my cheek, and her smell in my lungs, and the silk of her dark, beautiful hair against me. "You have to understand. It's what's best for us."

"It's what's best for the actress!" snarled Elliot, from the other side of the door, and although the fury in her voice shook me I knew to my soul that she was right. "We need each other, Beverly. You might be put together, and subdued, and have all the proper fucking words, and know all the proper fucking faces to make, but as far as the world's concerned you're not good enough, and you're crumbling to pieces on the inside. I know you are. You're miserable, and I'm the only one that will ever make it better."

She was spiteful, and childish, and every word she spoke was undeniable.

"You're ill, Elliot," I mumbled, weakly. "We make each other worse. So very much worse."

From scratching my sister went immediately to knocking, so loud I began at once to fret what the neighbours would think.

"That's a lie!" Elliot called to me. "We're our best selves when we're together! Wild, and mad, and bright, and perfect. Everything we touch, and weep, and fucking shit turns to gold, and you know it. So let me in. I love you. Love you. Love you."

By then I was crying; I couldn't help it. I wanted to climb in bed with her between warm sheets and hold her so close that our bodies melted into one. But still I didn't let her in, knowing that if I did I'd fold beneath her like a sinner kneeling before God, and she's the one that sits in church as though she believes in it.

Does she believe it in? Wholeheartedly, sometimes, I think; at others, it's all a charade, a game, a balm for her guilt. Besides, it's difficult to truly believe in a deity when the only ones you trust are real are your sister, and yourself.

Yet I am no saint, lying to a room full of the bereaved when I am so sure that it is only myself that's really dying.

"You can't come in," I whispered, but my fingers were working at the catch on the door, poised for an excuse to be weak, to break, to drink full and descend, as I've always done, as I promised I never would again.

"You can't come in," I whispered.

Elliot shoved at the door, sensing, sharply, that I'd dispensed with the locks, that I no longer wanted to hold her at bay, that I could not bear another moment with this partition between us.

"I'm coming in," she said, "because you want me to come in."

She stood in the doorframe, a nightmare battled down into beauty.

Is it vain to think that my twin is beautiful, given that she has my face?

I remember the ignition of pleasure between my legs as Elliot clung to me, desperate, and pathetic, and beloved, her mouth hot and sudden on my neck as Genevieve sat awkward and hateful as a stone in the car, waiting for me.

The craving I had for Elliot then—her sweet, sweating, moaning, writhing body on mine, violent, and tender, and ferocious—was so strong that I could have inhaled my sister as she would some vile powder.

I could have eaten her as a starved man might a preacher's daughter, hungry to corrupt, as I was corrupted by the very thought of Elliot, the dream of her as Aphrodite before me.

We'd joked about fucking. Mocked strangers with it as though, within our sibling love, there had never been an opiate curiosity to taste skin and tongue and cunt of the other with the knowing, from fingertips in panting dark, that it was how we, ourselves, tasted.

Our love is a tangled, strangling, black-thorned forest of a thing in which we are all to each other.

We are one, one, one being, and any separate from us is an interloper, trespassing upon that which is only ours.

I had denied it so many times that I force myself to believe that I can ever love anyone as dearly as my sister, but I know—

I knew as I looked at her, this crazed genius, as jagged-edged and deliciously insane as Lucifer in the cunning skin of a woman, I knew that I could never love anyone as I did Elliot.

To love her was to love myself, and apart we simply did not truly exist.

"Baby sister," said Elliot, and stepped into the house—

Oh, Genevieve...

—and the door closed, a jarring bang caused by the poltergeist that was my sister, wonderful, and wicked, and mine.

"Elliot," I breathed, and my arms were around her, and hers were upon my face, soft, so soft, her lips on my brow, the corner of my eye, my mouth, and like so many petals I disintegrated into the hell and the heavenly ecstasy that was my twin.

[rollercoasterwords]

i was just rereading the last chapter of the hand that feeds - as i often do when i need to feel like a knife is digging in my chest and i need to some absolutely scrumptious gut-wrenching angst - and OH MY GODDD!!! i forget how fucking good that ending is and then i reread it and im telling you - literal goosebumps!!! the first section ending with 'This is a story about war.' i literally get chills everytime i read that!!! and the final few lines:

'A butterfly lands in the palm of her hand. She watches it flap its wings once, twice—and then it flies away.

Here is a secret.

Are you listening?

This is a story, and a story is not its end.'

my god reading this part after the emotional turmoil of the previous chapters is literally an out-of-body metaphysical experience. i feel like im dying!!! i love it!!!! :)))))

anyway it just sums up the fic so well and feels like such a thematic like thesis?? it just so perfectly presents such a compelling outlook on life and what defines its meaning and true value. like what makes a tragedy isn't its violent ends or its hateful and tense moments!! its the love and the family and the joy that truly make their lives a tragedy!!! and i love how you so beautifully execute that!!

anyway im getting serious brainrot right now, so i really just had to rant!!! now i have to reread!! kicking my feet and giggling for the angst!!!! <3

AHHHHH screaming u literally Get It. like...YES the ending to thtf is truly so special to me and one of my favorite things i've ever written. gonna use ur brainrot as license to ramble lol SPOILERS obviously

ok so the thing about the ending of thtf is that it is not at all what i originally had planned! like, i don't think it was until i was maybe...halfway? or like two thirds done with the fic that i just sort of had a moment where i was like NO i cannot end it this way it doesn't feel correct...and then i had like a eureka moment where everything fell into place and that last line appeared fully formed in my mind TRULY it was spine-shattering

so like. ok. when i started writing the fic i KNEW that i was not going to do any kind of afterlife epilogue, just because...well personally i was raised to believe in heaven and hell and center my life around that, and i lost that faith as i grew older, and now the idea of an afterlife just. is not something joyful or happy to me. like i know many people believe in some form of afterlife, but personally try as i might i have never been able to, and so i have had to seek meaning in life while believing that like. death is just it. i think ur brain dies and ur done and gone like i don't believe in souls or ghosts or anything lol. but even aside from like whether or not u believe anything happens or exists after death to me personally it's just been so much more meaningful to seek meaning in life absent any conception of an afterlife.

so i knew there wasn't going to be an afterlife. but i also knew i wanted to kill both dorcas + marlene in these very tragic and abrupt ways. like i specifically did not want to give them peaceful deaths. marlene dies afraid and alone and begging a god she doesn't believe in not to kill her here and now with so many things unfinished. dorcas dies consumed by rage and revenge and violence without ever getting a chance to heal from any of it, leaving behind friends and family who love her. and i wanted that partly because i love tragedy, yes, but also because...that is so often what death is. and that is so often what is terrifying about death. like most of us don't get any control over how or when we go, and it could be today or tomorrow and it could be peaceful or violent or painful. and that's so scary!

but i didn't want to end on that note, obviously. because the point of the story i was writing was not just to go "death is terrifying and the End and we don't get to choose when or how it happens!!" what i wanted to say was--death is terrifying and lonely and we can't control it, but life is beautiful and worth living anyway, perhaps even moreso because death is so out of our control. all the painful and scary and beautiful and joyful moments we experience are life, they are living, and there's no one experience that is objectively Better or Worse. like...grief and pain and sorrow are part of the experience of human life, just as much as joy and love and happiness.

anyway, so originally i was going to end with a little epilogue chapter from mary's point of view, sort of her and emmeline after the end of the first war like reflecting a little bit on their friends' lives and moving on. but honestly...that didn't quite fit with what i was saying, because again, what i wanted to say was that life doesn't need to be like...this endless continuing thing to have meaning. like you don't need to be remembered or leave A Mark on the world in order for your life to matter. i didn't want to make it seem like marlene and dorcas's lives were meaningful because of the people who would continue to live after them (although i do think that can be meaningful!! it just. wasn't what i wanted to say).

so what the final chapter ended up becoming is really this synthesis of like. my own worldview regarding life and death--and i feel like writing this story honestly helped me to like pin down that worldview which was a little more nebulous and difficult to articulate before. but like--last chapter. i wanted to take all these moments, both good and bad, from marlene and dorcas's lives--again, to emphasize that the "good moments" are not somehow inherently more important or meaningful than the "bad," that all life is experience and humanity and just...worth it. even the painful moments have meaning. and i also wanted to chop those moments up in time, to show that--hey! time doesn't matter.

like, we're so bound to this very linear view of timelines where life is like...i dunno. a straight line or a road or something. something you start and then you follow through to its end, and it's supposed to be like...a journey with a Final Destination. and we get scared of the End of that linear journey and we try to find ways to prolong it or tell ourselves that it doesn't have to ever end, that it can just keep marching forward in time.

and i mean, i'm still young. maybe my views will change. but as much as we are bound by linear time, i don't think that we need to measure life by those standards. all the moments of your life, good and bad and beautiful, they all exist somewhere in the fabric of the universe, forever. maybe that's a little optimistic streak of the spirituality i was raised with, but...yeah. all moments in life are meaningful, and they all exist somewhere in time, and so why does it matter what the "last" moment is? maybe death will be peaceful, or maybe it won't, but it's okay, because your death isn't your life. and that's what i'm trying to get at with the very last line--literally, a story is not its end. you can go back to any moment of a story and experience it again, you can skip around and read your favorite parts, and a story wouldn't be a story without every word and page in the book, y'know? so why should we fear the very last page? and why should we despair over the conflicts and the bits of the story that make us cry? it's all part of the story! it's beautiful! i love life and i love being human! and dorcas and marlene's lives were beautiful and tragic and wonderful and that's what being human is, and they died alone but they didn't live alone, and just....yeah! this ending is so so special to me <3

[streetlights-was-taken]

LIKE A HOOK INTO AN EYE. (first draft; scrapped)

first draft of the prologue and the first scene of the first chapter for LIKE A HOOK INTO AN EYE. I'm thinking of scrapping these because the fic isn't really working for me; hence why I'm posting them here, and not on AO3.

one day I'll return to this story and figure out how to write it better. I will most likely still use the same premise (and will probably keep the title and summary), but the story itself probably won't be written the way it was here, for reasons I'll explain in another post.

anyway, here's my initial attempt at gothic horror, actor au vnlmi. cw for: character death, witch curses, ghost haunting (?), grafting someone else's body part into yours

LIKE A HOOK INTO AN EYE.

people think that grief slowly gets smaller with time. in reality, grief stays the same size—

To honor Aether’s dreams, Lumine endeavors to bring to the stage the last unpublished play he wrote before his death. The only copy of the manuscript lies in the hands of a musician who wants to free Lumine from her haunting.

But how can she let him, when this haunting is all she has left?

PROLOGUE: DEATH (first draft)

Lumine didn’t kill him, but she might as well have.

Logically, it’s nobody’s fault. She’s cognizant of the blamelessness that comes with accidents. “Shit happens,” as Aether would say, with a cheeky smile and a shrug and that annoyingly endearing go-getter attitude that would have him “conveniently” forget any trauma or obstacle standing in the way between him and his unyielding, awful, all-consuming dreams.

Aether was brave and stupid like that. It killed him to pursue his dreams, but he’d die if he didn’t take those steps forward. Aether had an envious appetite for life. And he was, always, a hungry man.

Sometimes, Albedo doesn’t understand why Aether acted the way he did, not the way Lumine did. Aether had a way with words, a way of saying the most incomprehensible things that made you understand.

“I dream the way you love,” he once said, an off-hand comment from when they bought apples from the Sunday Market near Dornman Port. It didn’t even occur to him how easily he distilled both of their identities into six words. “Some say it’s maddening, but I like that about us. My dreams are your dreams. Your love is my love. We fit together the way only twins like us can.”

Aether often linked his left pinky with hers, warm flesh against synthetic skin. And for a second, they return to being one entity.

When they were still in their mother’s womb, their little fingers were fused together, bridging their two bodies. The doctor had to surgically remove it from one of them during birth. Like a wishbone, one split into two. Aether retained all of his appendages, while Lumine lived with a prosthesis fortified with condensed resin. It was state-of-the-art, made with expensive Khemia technology.

Aether often linked their fingers together to declare, like a promise, “We’ll always share everything, Lumine. What’s mine is yours. My wishes are your wishes.”

Aether and Lumine were born as extensions of one another. She is — was? — the moon to his sun. Aether understood everything about Lumine, and Lumine understood everything about Aether.

Aether, who is now six feet deep in the ground. He doesn’t even have all his bones with him.

Their former guardian, M, once told them that they inherited a witch’s curse from when their birth mother angered a sullen witch. She was cursed to gaze into the abyss, and that one of her children will inherit the same gaze. And when they do, they will pull the other with them, until all three of them have fallen.

The Gaze is a pull towards the abyss — towards death. M said that you cannot break a curse that you are born with. It is written into your being. You would have to rewrite the way you see — the way your soul is wired to perceive. But by then you wouldn’t be the same person anymore, and what would you even sacrifice to get to that point? The cost is never worth it. You would be trading one curse for another.

And so, you can only resist. Many people, according to M, have resisted such curses and lived long lives. M said the best way to resist is to gaze outward. There is a horizon beyond the abyss; there is something worth yearning for.

“I won’t kill you,” Aether had promised. “And you won’t kill me. We’ll live and we’ll grow old and when we die, we’ll be happy. We’ll find something that can save us from this curse. Gaze outward, Lumine.”

She did. On that day, they held hands and watched the sunset together, eyes fixed beyond.

Lumine didn’t kill Aether. Aether was the one who wanted to hike in Dragonspine, just the two of them, because he was struggling with writer’s block and he needed a change of scenery.

Lumine didn’t cause the blizzard in Dragonspine, didn’t cause Aether to slide horrifically across the cliffside during the terribly planned hiking trip. Aether knew this. He would tell her not to blame herself. She tried to hold his hand. She reached out when he fell.

Lumine didn’t kill Aether, didn’t intend to and didn’t want to. But she also couldn’t catch him in time.

It took the knights three days to find the body. Albedo, usually so well-composed and self-possessed, broke down when he saw the still corpse. Lumine was inconsolable.

And just like that, Aether has gone to the abyss. Not by a witch’s curse, but by bad weather and an unlucky hiking trip.

For the first time, Lumine is truly alone in the world.

—

Aether does not return to earth whole. A small, sterilized jar of bones and flesh sits cold at the back of a freezer, wrapped in moist gauze and damp with saline solution. Lumine hesitates everyday at breakfast and pushes the thought at the back of her mind.

Later. She’ll deal with it later.

After his death is announced to the public, Lumine encounters a man with brilliant teal eyes who gives her a little black notebook that once belonged to Aether.

“He left it in my studio,” he says. “I think he’d want you to have it.”

Lumine flips through the pages. It’s a poetry book.

“He left a lot of things in my studio, you know, CDs, notebooks, some of his drafts are even on my computer. But—” the man sighs, slipping a card into one of the pages,“—this is the only one I have with me today. When you want the rest of them back, come find me. I think I still have a draft of his last manuscript. I’ll keep them safe until you’re ready to get them.”

Lumine hides the notebook in her pocket. She thinks about reading through it, but whenever she looks at Aether, lying peacefully in the casket, a terrible thought tugs at her more urgently than the rest.

She would die with him. A part of her would be buried with him.

She couldn’t let him return to the earth whole. Aether can’t leave her alone.

Aether’s little finger sits in cold ice at home while they lower his body to the ground. This flesh were theirs. For everything that separated Lumine from Aether and vice versa, these bones belonged to them both.

The next day, Dainsleif informs her that she inherited all of Aether’s fortune, his responsibilities in the Abyss Foundation, and, of course, his plants. Lumine is two times richer than she was yesterday, and only half whole.

The little black notebook sits by Lumine’s windowsill, conveniently forgotten.

—

Lumine doesn’t open the notebook again until she’s forced to confront it.

The inheritance overwhelms her. The moneys sits untouched, the Abyss Foundation is ran by Dainsleif these days, and the plants are withering.

The knights ask Lumine to take some time off indefinitely, because a paramedic who can’t be present in the field is a liability. They don’t say that this is the real reason, of course. Neither do they mention the new responsibilities and wealth they assume (correctly) that she acquired, how that should be taking up her time instead, and anyway — dead sibling aside — she is much better off now, materially, than she was before. She doesn’t need to slave herself off of the meager salary of a first responder.

They don’t say any of that. Instead, they say that they’re concerned for her mental health, that it’s okay for her to grieve, that Noelle can handle things while she’s away.

Both things can be true at the same time. But one reason being true doesn’t negate the other.

They don’t force Albedo to do the same thing, because Albedo is responsible enough to actually use his time off when he needs it. He hasn’t worn the uniform in four months. There are rumors that he’ll quit the knights soon. Lumine wants to do the same.

She’s dead on her feet, unmoored and without purpose. How is she supposed to live without Aether? She’s scared to know, until one day she’s scared she’ll never know. Suddenly, the sight of the little black notebook no longer haunts her, but gives her hope.

Bolting from her bed in the middle of the night, Lumine grabs the notebook in a feverish daze. She wipes the dust off. A page falls off on her bed, just a small scrap of writing. It reads,

I borrow moonlight for this journey of a million miles

Lumine throws the notebook away, as if it burned her. A sharp paper cut slices through her skin, a centimeter off where the palm meets her synthetic finger. The pain registers only second to the loud beating of her own chest.

“No, don’t do this to me, Aether,” she whispers. Her prosthetic finger suddenly feels foreign to her, too cold and artificial.

Her hair has gotten long after months of neglecting to have it cut. From her reflection by the window, she could almost pretend it’s Aether staring back at her wild eyes. He tilts his head at her, as if to say, Go on. Read.

She swallows thickly and opens the notebook again. Another page reads,

While I walk on the moon keeps pace beside me; friend in the water Now that my storehouse has burned down, nothing conceals the moon

Aether smiles patiently from the window as Lumine cries herself hoarse for the rest of the night.

—

Lumine opens the notebook again one week later, after replacing the saline solution in the jar that housed Aether’s (her?) severed finger. She still hasn’t decided on what to do with it yet.

Aether’s notebook of poetry functioned as a diary. It’s difficult to be vulnerable with your own words, but Aether found a way to channel his own helpless thoughts through other people. He always did that — live, through and for others.

This is what made him an excellent scriptwriter. He admired, and sometimes encouraged, the desire to live someone else’s life. To escape into someone else’s story and make it your own. He got that from M, Lumine is sure. M wrote children’s books, and Aether lived many lives through her stories.

Lumine, at least, isn’t alone in her grief. Aether was the darling of Mondstadt’s entertainment industry. When news of his death broke out, a local channel aired reruns of his movies. Finchster trended a hashtag for him.

Albedo stayed for dinner that day and marathoned the movies with Lumine. Aether loved to write happy, feel-good stories. Stories about love, friendship, family. Some of them are punctuated with intense drama or high-stakes adventure, and some of them are your run-of-the-mill romance and slice-of-life. But all of them, always, end on a hopeful note, if not a happy ending.

Aether smiled on tv. They re-ran his interviews in-between the movies. “I do want to challenge myself creatively,” screen Aether said. “Actually, in my spare time, I’ve been trying to write a tragedy. A proper one — I imagine it will be performed in a stage play than in front of a kamera. I used to do community theater in college, so it will be good to go back to my roots. But I’m an optimist at heart. Most of the time, I write happy endings because I want people to see themselves in the stories I write.”

Albedo’s eyes shined with tears. “Even when he’s not around, he’s still trying to cheer us up.”

In his little black notebook, Aether copied words from poets and wrote down names of people he knew. He borrowed other people’s words to write unsent letters to his loved ones.

The last poem, written a month before the accident, and read four months after, is addressed to Lumine.

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen, their warm scent is the scent of ripening, and my sister, entering the room quietly, takes a seat at the table, takes up the task of peeling slowly away the blemished skins, even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully. She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh. For this, I am grateful. I explain, this elegy would love to save everything. She smiles at me, and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills, domed with thin slices she brushes into the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove. What can I do? I ask finally. Nothing, she says, let me finish this one thing alone.

Lumine tears the page from his notebook and crumples it up, throws it in the bin. She reminds herself that this was written before the accident. He was probably writing about the way she showed her care for him.

But how dare he? How dare he write to her like he wants her to… to...

(She did peel those apples from the Sunday Market. Made apple pie, boiled the cores and peeled skin, made the most out of everything the fruits had to offer, bruised and near-rotting though they were. But—)

In that moment, Lumine spies the ghost of her brother overshadow her reflection in the glass window. “Even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully,” she reads, but it’s Aether’s image that mouths the words in the reflection. “For this, I am grateful.”

Who does Aether think she is? Who does he think he is to ask this of her? He’s the golden child. Lumine is his shadow. That’s how they decided they would be. She was the moon to his sun. She could never just finish things the things he left behind, could she?

Oh, but this is very much how Aether would think. He’d do anything for his dreams, even go as far as to ask his sister to accomplish them in his stead. So long as they are fulfilled, even from beyond the grave. And he would be grateful, wouldn’t he? Because Lumine could do it. Lumine salvages everything that can be saved, even when they’re rotting and dying. Even if they’re six feet deep in the ground.

Lumine didn’t kill him, but if she doesn’t keep his dreams alive, she might as well have. Aether still has bountiful dreams he left behind for her to carry through.

And his dreams are beautiful indeed. Lumine loves her brother for them. Aether dreams, and Lumine saves. That’s how they always worked. Lumine brings people from the brink of death for another chance at life; an anti-psychopomp. But Aether, with his words and his stories, is the one who inspires. He makes you believe in a life worth living.

Life has a funny sense of humor, then, to cut him off from the same experience.

An hour later, Lumine takes the torn paper out from the bin and smooths it flat. The creases will never leave. She can’t undo them just as she can’t undo death. But the words are still here, and Aether’s dreams are still here. That has to be enough.

Lumine didn’t kill Aether, no, but she never kept him alive after his death. Four months after the funeral, Lumine still doesn’t have that last manuscript he wanted to show the world. She remembers him talking about it. He wanted to flex his creative muscles, wanted to do something different from his usual stories.

Everyday, the calling card and the memory of brilliant teal eyes loom over her. But she’s not ready to face it, not yet, not alone. Not until—

One step at a time. She knows what Aether wants her to do, but Lumine can only be so brave when she’s alone. She can’t do this alone.

With a trembling heart and a grief-driven bravery, Lumine spends the next two weeks in Snezhnaya and calls up an infamous underground doctor.

She returns to Mondstadt with stitches marring her left hand, one finger lighter than the rest of her tanned skin, sun-kissed from the days she spent outside as a first responder. The nail is decorated with bright yellow nail polish.

—

Albedo will be leaving soon. Lumine can do nothing about that. He’s heading for Sumeru, she thinks. He can’t move on if he stays here. Aether wouldn’t want to tie him down.

“You can come with me,” he tells her. Sometimes, on the days he stares too long at her mismatched fingers, he comes close to pleading. “If you want. You don’t have to stay there for long, but getting away from all this might help. It’s okay to leave your grief behind, even for just a little while.”

Lumine shakes her head, because now she has something to do. Aether said so, in his poem. This elegy would love to save everything. Let me finish this one thing alone. So how can she go? Who will publish Aether’s manuscript? Who will take care of Aether’s garden, and his charity work? Who will keep watch of the house? The dust will build, and the air will go stale, and Aether never liked the house to be lonely.

Albedo must think her crazy. Lumine can’t bear the pity in his eyes, ill-disguised as they are. Perhaps he never meant to hide them at all. Albedo is not that type of person — after all, how else did Aether fell in love with him? He loved straightforward people.

Still, Albedo is right. Grief doesn’t have to stay.

So at night, Lumine lays on her pillow and dreams of how she can keep Aether alive. His dreams, if not his body, because his body is decaying six feet deep underground. So it’s up to Lumine to finish things for him. She loves him so, so much, after all.

It is fortunate, then, that Lumine loves the way he dreams.

Unyielding, awful, and all-consuming.

She starts with his garden. A simple task. She just needs to take care of Aether’s plants, and they have been looking rather lonely without their gardener. Albedo has been keeping them healthy all this time, but he’s leaving soon. So she feeds them fertilizer and waters them everyday until the leaves turn yellow and crisp, for which Albedo gently scolds her for. One of the more delicate flowerpots wither from her care.

“You need to leave them alone,” he tells her. “They’ll be fine without water for a few days. They like to be left alone.”

With great reluctance, she leaves them alone for the day and spends the rest of her hours reading poems. She writes her first letter to Aether, a response, folded neatly in between the bouquet of cecilias that she leaves by his grave the next morning.

You died just hours ago. Not suddenly, no. You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself: from your window, fishermen swirled sequins; fishnets entangled the moon. If only I could go to you, revive you. You must be a little alive still.

“What can you do?” she recites. She already has his poem memorized. “Nothing, I say. So let me finish this alone.”

The grave doesn’t respond. Of course it couldn’t. There’s nothing Aether can do now. Six feet in the ground. Can Aether even hear her? The thought weighs heavily in Lumine’s mind.

“But I failed already. I killed one of your plants,” she confesses. “I’m sorry. Maybe it will keep you company, now that it’s gone. But I’ll try to be better, this time. I’ll save the rest of them.”

Lumine vows, from this day on, that she will live his legacy for both of them.

This elegy would love to save everything.

—

On the day Albedo leaves Mondstadt, Lumine resigns from the knights and signs up for acting classes. She’s no stranger to the world of theater, but… it’s been a while.

There are scribbles at the back of Aether’s little black notebook. Scratched lines, discarded paragraphs, the debris that remained from when he sketched out the outline of his final, unpublished script. Usually, Aether wrote for tv and film. But for this story, he intended it for the stage. A proper play.

It takes Lumine back to the days when they were still in college, participating in community theater. She likes to think that he wrote this play for her. He always wanted her to star in one of his stories.

“I always write them with you in mind. There’s no one I trust more,” he used to say. Then, he would joke, “One day, I’ll write a script that will compel you to act for me. Just you wait.”

Unorganized scraps of the final story fill up the back half of his notebook — character notes, themes, sources of inspiration, quotes from other books, snippets of dialogue. Cruelly, it is the most compelling script Aether wrote. Lumine regrets not indulging him when he was still alive.

Because finally, with this, Lumine can see herself in Aether’s story.

Lumine steels herself in front of the mirror. “I’ll act this out for you, Aether. Just you wait.”

Her (His? Their?) little finger tingles. A wave of calm settles on her, relaxing her body for the first time in months. This feels right.

Aether smiles back at her from her reflection, proud and encouraging.

ACT I: MADNESS (scene one; first draft)

Four years pass.

The bass is everywhere. It thrums in her skin, in her bones. In Aether’s bones, too.

Lumine is no longer a stranger to the world of celebrity shindigs — a necessary part of working in the entertainment industry, an event that masks as partying but functions as networking with your future coworkers. Half the time, it’s genuinely as fun as they make it out to be.

But Lumine has long avoided going to one of Venti’s infamous afterparties until now. They say that those are always fun. All play, no work.

Lumine isn’t here to have fun though. After four years of preparation, she is here to finally put Aether’s last dream into motion, and the first step is to hold Venti to the promise he made years ago at the funeral.

More importantly, parties are an opportunity to scope out the person Lumine is looking for. Someone who is her opposite on the stage: the comedy to her tragedy, a fighter to her lover, a character driven by agency instead of fate. Someone who is governed by—

Still, the bass thrums. Lumine finds her little finger tapping to the rhythm of the beat. Aether must have missed this. The music, the dancing, the socializing. It must be lonely, to only exist in reflections and shadows, as an extension of another body.

She permits herself one dance and lets the percussion of the music move her limbs. The dance floor pulls on her, like a magnet. Bodies move to and fro, to and fro, and by the time the song ends, Lumine feels lighter than when she stepped into the room. Loose, like she just shook off invisible weights dangling from her head.

Someone taps her on the shoulder and then she’s face to face with brilliant teal eyes. They are eye-catching under the strobe lights.

“I was wondering when we’d have the chance to meet again. You’ve been avoiding me, Lumine.” Venti smiles at her, sounding amused.

“Are you here to party, or to mourn?”

“Hello, Venti. We meet again. You said you’d keep Aether’s manuscript for me until I’m ready.”

“Are you?”

Lumine shrugs. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You could have texted me if you just wanted the manuscript. My number hasn’t changed. I could email it to you anytime.”

“Maybe I want to do both. Who says you can’t mourn while you’re partying?”

Venti hums; studies her. Whatever he finds must have intrigued him enough to stretch out a hand. “Very well. Since you came all the way out here, mind if I keep you company? It’s not good to party — or mourn — alone.”

Lumine doesn’t decline. Venti is a bit of a mystery to her, a puzzle she didn’t feel brave enough to figure out until she’s ready to face Aether’s final play. She knew of him — of the music he produces and the parties he throws. She knew that Aether was friends with him since the beginning of both of their careers.

Aether must have trusted him immensely if he left his little black notebook of poetry with him.

Venti leads her to one of the booths, where a young man with blond hair is already sitting, watching the room with clear eyes. Upon seeing Venti and Lumine, he procures two glasses and a bottle of expensive wine from under the seat for them. He takes out a familiar-looking pill from his jacket pocket and swallows it dry.

“Mika, don’t take more than you can handle,” Venti scolds gently. Almost motherly. “I know your limits.”

“I’m not overdoing it,” Mika says, though he does throw Venti an apologetic look.

“I know.” Venti slides into the booth and begins pouring wine into the glasses. “Have you confirmed who will be attending the next sparasso?”

“I’m working up to it.” Mika sighs, looking back at the dance floor as if he’s warring with himself over something. Then he stands up and takes a deep breath, bracing himself for his inevitable task. “I’m sure Tartaglia will confirm, at least. I’ll follow up on the rest of them now. It’s nice to finally meet you, Miss Lumine.”

He disappears into the party, leaving Lumine alone with Venti.

“That was my assistant, Mika. He’s a good kid, but he can be conscientious at times. It’s for the best though, since I’m pretty scatterbrained myself. I don’t know what I’d do without him.” Venti slides the glass of wine towards her. “Do you drink?”

Lumine raises an eyebrow. “Not even vodka? Wine isn’t exactly the choice of drink for ragers.”

“It’s a drink for celebration and death. I thought it would be fitting for our most unique occasion.” Venti waves his own glass with a flourish before taking a sip.

In his poetry notebook, Aether described Venti as the swoony type; long hair, bedroom eyes, cheeks like wine. A free, uncontrollable spirit. Mondstadt’s celebrity culture share the same impression.

Lumine thought she would find him dancing wildly, or playing party games, or getting high. But this booth is a quiet bubble, a sanctuary amidst the chaos around them. Venti watches the dance floor serenely, in no particular hurry to join or empty his glass. There’s something gentle about him. Nurturing.

Lumine blurts out, “You’re different from who I thought you’d be.”

“What did you think I was like?”

“From the stories I’ve heard? A party animal.”

“We’re all animals here. But I like to make sure everyone is having fun. It’s sort of my job, you see.” There is a delighted twinkle in his eyes as he says this. “But I suppose I do have a reputation to keep. Nobody leaves my parties dissatisfied.”

“So I’m your new pet project then? Can’t have me giving your party a bad review?”

“You could loosen up a bit,” Venti agrees. “Aether was never like this when he was still around.”

“Did Aether ‘loosen up’ often?”

“I’d say it’s more like he let himself become more honest. More true to himself.”

Venti smiles at the fond memories this brings up. It makes Lumine want to know. “Tell me about him. What was your relationship like?”

Venti met Aether at a hobby club. They were both just starting out then; Aether in the writer’s room for a tv show, and Venti busking on the streets to promote his upcoming debut. Venti frequented the club for fun, while Aether visited every now and then for stress relief.

Lumine vaguely recalls Aether mentioning this to her before in the early days, but it never seemed important enough to remember. He doesn’t talk about it often enough for Lumine to recall what exactly their shared “hobby” was.

“The entertainment industry can really drain you, you know? So we needed an outlet to let off some steam.”

“What did you do together? In that club? Aether never told me he had other hobbies.”

“Why don’t you visit me at my studio sometime? It’s easier to show you.”

Venti muses over his drink. The glass is already empty, so he fills it with more wine than it contained earlier. “He gave me a cactus once. Said that it’s the perfect plant for me, since I wouldn’t be able to kill it.”

Lumine frowns down at her own glass, still untouched. The wine beckons her; a dark, deep red that shimmers with the party lights.

“I killed his plants,” she shares. “All of them. I tried to keep them alive, but there was always something going wrong. Fertilizer burn. Watered them too much. I don’t know, I think I did too much. It’s funny, now that I think about it. You can love something to the point of ruin.”

“He liked to keep low-maintenance plants. I think they just didn’t fit with the way you care. There is nothing wrong with it. You were simply incompatible.” Venti clinks his glass with hers. “Boundless love is something to treasure. Too many people show restraint these days, you know? I find it admirable.”

“Sure, it sounds amazing, but it’s hard to handle that kind of love. It’s suffocating. It killed the plants. I don’t know who fits this kind of love.”

“I wouldn’t find it suffocating.” Venti’s lips quirk up, like he remembered an inside joke he’s not interested in sharing. “We could fit together.”

“Could we?” Lumine tilts her head. How would he know? The first and last time Lumine saw Venti was four years ago, during Aether’s funeral. “You don’t know me.”

“I know a little bit about you, now that we've met properly. That should be enough.”

Lumine doesn’t realize when it happened, but she somehow scooted closer to Venti inside the booth. To hear him better, probably. She can smell the faint cologne on him — something sweet and bitter, like dried fruits.

“What have you heard, then?” she asks.

“I know that you like to star in tragic films, in contrast to your late brother’s penchant for happy endings,” Venti says, counting facts with his fingers. “I know that you were once a paramedic before you were an actress. And I know that you haven’t had a drink since you entered this room. Do you drink?”

“A little.”

Venti slides the glass of wine again. “It’s a special blend. You won’t get a hangover from this one, I promise.” He waves jazz hands in the air, grinning. “This bottle is like magic.”

Lumine’s left pinky twitches. Perhaps Aether missed this as well. The drinking, the companionship. There is no judgement in Venti’s presence, just a soothing invitation that holds no expectations. He would not be offended if Lumine decides not to drink.

But Aether would have, so Lumine does. The wine flows smoothly down her throat. Sweet and bitter and a hint of metallic. Venti regales her with more stories of his friendship with Aether; of the times they’d commiserate over the writing process; of the many, many concerts and afterparties they’ve gone to. They, too, bonded over poetry.

There is a warm feeling in Lumine’s chest that grows with each story. Aether is missed. And yet, she doesn’t want to mourn that. Aether was loved. She wants to be happy about it. Her head starts to feel like cotton, but her heart feels so, so light.

She sips; her glass is full again and oh — when did Venti refill it?

“Have you read his notebook?” Lumine asks. Venti shakes his head.

“Aether dedicated a poem for you. I remember how it goes. Come to me now: loose me from hard care and all my heart longs to accomplish, accomplish. You be my ally.”

Lumine is floating. She should be looking for… something. Someone? She can’t remember that now. She’s supposed to find someone, but now she’s just reciting poetry. One of the short ones from Aether’s little notebook. It’s nice.

Venti is saying something, reciting a poem back in response. Lumine has never heard it before. She wants to memorize it. “How does that go? Say it again.”

“She who did not come, wasn’t she determined nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart? If we had to exist to become the one we love, what would the heart have to create? Hm, I’ll text you how the rest of that goes, but I think that poem suits you.”

“How so?”

“You have a lonely gaze. You look like you want to be someone else right now.”

The words sink like an anchor, and Lumine knows she will be thinking about this for hours later. Her hands itch to do something in response. To hold his hand, or to strangle him, Lumine’s not sure. All she knows is her body growing restless. Her mind wants to wander to somewhere else less painful.

Venti pulls her out of the booth. “Come on. We’ve mourned long enough. It’s time to party.”

“Maybe I still want to mourn,” Lumine says, petulantly, but she finds that she doesn’t mean it. Shouldn’t she mean it? She never stopped mourning.

“We can reminisce again later. I will let you mourn as much as you want. But for now, dance with me.”

Venti leads her to the center, where the bodies sway to and fro, to and fro. It’s hot and sweaty and dark and easy to get lost in. Easy to lose one’s mind.

It’s perfect.

Lumine smiles and lets herself get caught in Venti’s orbit, dancing, laughing, and she can’t even remember what she’d been sad about earlier. She was… grieving, wasn’t she? It feels so foreign now when the beat of the music is dictating her heartbeat.

Lumine vaguely recognizes the song. It’s a club remix of Venti’s music — not the one he personally sings in his concerts, but one of those he composed and produced and sold for other singers to perform.

“Life is one big party!” Venti shouts, and then the crowd is shouting with him, chanting the lyrics in unison. Lumine shouts with them.

“Pa-pa-pa-pa-par-taaaay!”

It’s building up, going higher and faster, higher and faster, and the drop is going to be so sick that the dancers around them are collectively waiting with bated breath, anticipating, working themselves into a frenzy. The lights are there and then not and then there, and then there’s just shadows and heat and neon lights flashing, flashing, and then the beat drops and everyone is jumping and thrashing more than dancing and fuck. Fuck. Lumine is swept into it. She lets herself be swept into it. They all move as one organism.

Venti is closer now, so much closer, body against body that Lumine wants to breathe him in. His smile is charming, wine-stained. Easy.

Lumine feels easy, calm and ready to take the whole world all at once. She feels like floating. Like, like— “I can do anything right now,” she says, feeling the need to tell Venti. There’s no way Venti could have heard her with the raucous around them.

“Ah, you’re that kind of drunk, huh,” Venti answers back, grinning, and oh, so that’s what she’s feeling. Drunk. She shouldn’t be able to hear him either, but his voice is as clear as the waters from Springvale. He spins her around, but in the tight space between bodies, all he ends up doing is pull her against him. “Alright. What do you want to do then?”

It strikes her, suddenly, that she found the person she’s looking for. The one who will bring Aether’s play to life, with her. The hero to her tragedy.

It has to be Venti.

Lumine grins and hooks an arm around his shoulders. “Let’s go up to the roof. I want to ask you something.”

She leans close to whisper her own invitation, confident that he will understand his role. He will say yes. For, surely, Venti is a man governed by “Eros.”

—

Lumine blanks out after that. She might have had a couple more glasses, they might have sneaked onto the roof even though the building definitely wouldn’t have allowed it. There was a cool breeze, and Venti joked about something, but she doesn’t remember what they talked about, or how she came home. Vaguely, all she remembers is complaining about how there’s too many lights in the city to see the stars. You can’t see the Northern Crown constellation from here.

But true to Venti’s word, his wine is made of magic because Lumine wakes up in her bedroom with a clear head. No nausea, no headaches, completely sober. There’s two new messages on her phone. The first contains a familiar poem from last night. The other is an email with a PDF attachment.

There it is. Aether’s final manuscript.

Lumine spends the whole morning reading. By the time she reaches the last page, she despairs.

Just as how Lumine has no memory of what else she talked about with Venti on the roof — except for a vague recollection of him saying yes to her offering a role to play — the script provides a similar non-conclusion.

The script has no ending. Aether never finished the story.

END DRAFT.

fic inspiration:

the myths of dionysus as god of wine, theater, and madness; as well as his connection to orphism, death and rebirth, and so on. I have a whole spreadsheet of research materials, but the OSP video is the best primer

cult of dionysus (song) by the orion experience

description of dionysus from the bakkhai (translated by anne carson): "swoony type, long hair, bedroom eyes, cheeks like wine"

the temptation of thanatos (タナトスの誘惑) by hoshino mayo, translated by latteandcookies. this is the inspiration for the play aether wrote. it's a short story, but cw for suicide. fun fact: it's also the inspiration for yoasobi's song racing into the night

240520 UPDATE: I decided to make public the spotify playlist related to this fic.

poetry references:

[you fit into me] by margaret atwood

growing around grief by lois tonkin

I borrow moonlight... by saikaku ihara (his death poem; from the book, japanese death poems compiled by yoel hoffmann. page 268)

mizuta masahide's death poem (also found in japanese death poems, page 234)

my sister, who died young, takes up the task by jon pineda

on wanting to tell about a girl eating fish eyes by mary szybist

come to me now: loose me from hard care... fragment by sappho, translated by anne carson (page 5 of if not, winter)

blank joy by rainer maria rilke

[firebrands]

consider the hairpin turn (steve/tony, bucky/tony)

Two boys, one to love you sweetly One does so discreetly

Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes/Tony Stark | mature, cheating tw | on ao3

for @desitonystark​, ily.

**

Tony doesn’t mean for it to happen. But, he figures, most people never mean to be sleeping with two people at once.

He’s never thought of himself as a bad person, just someone who does bad things. This is probably a line he learned from his therapist back when he used to see her. Still, it’s a comforting thought as he picks through half-clean clothes strewn on the floor.

Tony’s almost at the subway when he realizes he’s left his wallet at home. Thankfully he’s got some cash tucked away in his day-old jeans that should be enough for a cab to work. As he’s trying to hail a taxi, his thoughts turn sourly to Bucky, whose fault it is that he’s so sleep-deprived.

Finally sitting on the moldy leather of the back seat, Tony realizes that he’s wearing Bucky’s sweater. He’s an hour late for work but he tells the driver to bring him back home, instead.

*

Tony’s sitting beside Steve, glass of wine in hand, when he feels his phone buzz in his pocket.

Steve’s watching the movie, eyes still on the screen as he takes a sip of wine from his own glass. Tony watches the movement, feeling utterly and completely captivated by Steve’s presence.

Steve seems to notice, and turns to Tony with a small, curious smile on his lips. “What?” He asks.

“Nothing,” Tony says.

Steve chuckles and leans forward to press a quick kiss on Tony’s lips. “Not enjoying the movie?”

“No,” Tony says, then backpedals. “I mean, I am.” His phone buzzes again. “Do you mind if I have a cigarette real quick, though?”

“Sure, go ahead,” Steve says, still smiling at Tony. “I’ll make some popcorn.”

Tony slips out onto Steve’s balcony and fumbles with his lighter for a bit before the flame catches. He takes a long drag before pulling out his phone.

See you tonight?

Tony frowns at his phone for two reasons. First, because of the strange thrill of anticipation, and second, because Bucky rarely ever texts ahead. 

He texts back: 

Miss me already?

Tony only has a moment to savor in his triumph: next thing he knows Steve’s arms are around his waist and he startles so badly that he almost drops his phone.

“Done smoking?” Steve asks, pressing feather-light kisses on the back of Tony’s neck.

Tony turns so he’s facing Steve. “Popcorn done?” He asks, doing his best to keep any tremor from his voice. He takes the opportunity to exit from the messaging app and locks his phone.

Instead of answering, Steve leans down to kiss Tony. Steve’s hands wander down Tony’s waist, settling first on his hips, and then further down to squeeze his ass. Tony moans and presses himself closer to Steve, urging him on.

*

“You could just stay over, you know,” Steve says, fingers light around Tony’s wrist.

“I know, but my clothes--” Tony answers, and it’s a standard conversation at this point, which makes him hate having it even more.

Steve is silent as Tony searches around the room for his underwear, feeling a little silly to be walking around in his half-buttoned shirt and socks on.

After a few minutes, Steve stretches and yawns. “Let me walk you home,” he says, already motioning to stand up. 

Tony’s used to this, too, and is quick to stop the movement with a hand on Steve’s shoulder.

“It’s fine, it’s only a few stops away,” Tony says, before he bends down to kiss Steve on the lips. “See you on Saturday?”

“Saturday?” Steve asks, wrapping his arms around Tony’s waist and pulling him back to bed. “That’s later.”

Tony laughs as Steve peppers his face with kisses. They wrestle around for a moment and Steve pins Tony under him, smiling triumphantly.

“Steve,” Tony says, a small smile still on his face.

Steve presses the tip of his nose against Tony’s. Tony sucks in a sharp breath when he sees the fondness in the way Steve is looking at him.

“I love you,” Steve says, leaning forward to kiss Tony. 

Tony kisses back, kisses hard, and hopes that it’s enough to make Steve forget that he didn’t say it back.

*

Tony isn’t surprised to a half-empty glass of water on the kitchen counter when he gets home. He’s even less surprised to find Bucky lying on his bed in Tony’s sweatpants, his own clothes folded neatly on Tony’s dresser.

“You’re still feeling at home,” Tony says, rolling his eyes as he begins getting undressed.

“‘Course I am. It’s basically still half mine, anyway,” Bucky says, smirking at Tony from where he’s lying down.

Tony huffs, unbuttoning his rumpled shirt and kicking off his pants. Behind him, Bucky chuckles, low and dark.

“C’mere,” Bucky says, pulling Tony onto his lap. “Let me help.”

Bucky expertly undoes Tony’s shirt and slides it off Tony’s shoulders, pressing kisses against Tony’s neck as he does.

“How was your day, doll?” he asks, kissing down Tony’s back, now.

“Good,” Tony mumbles out, already losing himself to the sensation of Bucky’s hands sliding up his stomach. He shifts a little and feels Bucky’s cock pressing against his ass.

*

Tony’s lying awake, listening to Bucky breathe softly beside him, and he tries to figure out how he got to this point. It’s always a fun game to play with himself, in the little pockets of morning when everyone’s asleep and Tony’s left with his thoughts. How did we get here? How do we get out?

Bucky’s arm tightens around Tony’s waist and he shifts to better settle against Bucky’s chest. Tony falls asleep thinking of Bucky cooking dinner in Tony’s apartment, moving independently around the cupboards, familiar with the space.

When Tony wakes, it’s from a dream of Steve squeezed beside him on the subway, hand warm against Tony’s.

Tony turns to his side, and the bed is empty, sheets still rumpled. His sweats are folded up neatly on his dresser. Tony yawns and rubs at his eyes, willing himself to get ready to work, when he’s startled out of his haze by the doorbell.

“Coming!” he shouts, pulling on a shirt and stumbling towards the door. He throws the door open and finds Steve standing in front of him, two cups of coffee in a small tray.

“Good morning,” Steve says, smiling brightly.

Tony stares for a second, then comes to. “I was just dreaming about you,” he laughs, and does a quick scan of his apartment to see if there’s anything Bucky left behind. The word incriminating floats into Tony's consciousness, but he casts it aside.

Steve notices Tony’s gaze. “Looking for something?” he asks. 

Tony flushes at being caught. “No, just making sure my apartment isn’t that much of a mess,” he says, laughing a little and stepping aside to let Steve in. Steve sets the coffee down on the table. “How do you feel about a picnic?” he asks.

Tony picks up his cup of coffee, smiling down at it for a moment before he counters, “how do you feel about a shower?”

*

Tony watches the Hudson zoom by. Beside him, Steve is tapping his finger to the beat of the music.

Tony remembers Steve tapping the handle of his cup, the first time they got coffee together. He remembers looking up from his little hoard of books in the library at the man blocking his sunlight. He remembers the way the grin formed on his face when Steve had introduced himself and asked if he could borrow one of the books in Tony’s pile.

Steve’s hand on his arm draws him back to the moment.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

“Just thinking about the first time we got coffee,” Tony says, because plain honesty gives him relief.

“That’s so sentimental of you,” Steve laughs, and gives Tony’s arm a squeeze. “What made you think of that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tony shrugs. “It’s just a good day, is all.”

“And we’ve only started,” Steve says, and raises Tony’s hand to his lips.

Tony smiles at Steve, feeling something he doesn’t want to give a name to swell inside him. “Thanks for planning this, Steve.”

“Thanks for agreeing to come,” Steve laughs, and moves his hand back to the gear stick.

*

Steve pulls Tony to rest in between his legs as they appreciate the view. Tony leans back against Steve’s chest, secure with Steve’s arms around his waist, and he feels like his heart could burst from how happy he feels.

“This is really nice, Steve,” he says, turning his head to kiss Steve’s cheek.

“It is, isn’t it?” Steve smiles back, and turns to kiss Tony properly.

Steve’s tongue is in his mouth when he realizes: I love him .

Tony pulls away with a jolt, and Steve looks a little confused.

“I love you,” Tony whispers, feeling equal parts amazed and horrified.

Tony watches a smile bloom on Steve’s face and he wishes he could capture that moment and play it back for every time he hates himself.

“I love you, too,” Steve says, and Tony can’t remember a time he’d ever felt so whole. A delighted laugh bubbles out of him, and Steve begins laughing too, and then they’re laughing and kissing and rolling over the sandwiches Steve had laid out and nothing else matters.

They hold hands the entire car ride home, which is kind of a traffic hazard, but the smile on Steve’s face is worth it.

*

Tony spends his Sunday alone, lying in bed, eyes shut as he plays and replays the memory of Steve smiling at him.

He curls further into himself and thinks that it’s finally time he made a decision. He drags himself out of bed and pours himself a glass of whiskey, staring at Bucky’s name on his phone.

He pours himself two more glasses and has three cigarettes before he presses the call button.

*

Tony stares at his shaking hands. All he's been are bad decisions; surely, no one can fault him for making a good one, this time. Because it is a good decision, it's better for both of them, to part like this, to part before they hate each other, he thinks. A clean break, a fracture that will hurt like a bitch until eventually bone stitches back to bone and it's like nothing ever happened. Hopefully.

He sits on his windowsill, lit cigarette burning away in his hand, and he knows Bucky hasn't gone inside his car, hasn't left.

Half of him wants to run outside and kiss him. Half of him knows it's better to stay inside, stick to his decision, to hold fast to their agreement of distance.

But all he's been are bad decisions, so he kills the cigarette, pulls out his phone, and presses Bucky’s name on his speed-dial list.

Bucky’s voice cuts out in the middle of the first ring. "Tony?"

"Come back," Tony says, and surely his voice is shaking, now. He wants to scream from how much he hates himself, for wanting this so badly. 

“Okay,” Bucky says, and he doesn’t put down the line, letting them hear each other breathe as Bucky walks to Tony’s front door.

“I don’t--” Tony starts, and Bucky surges up against him like a rogue wave, his arms around Tony’s waist in a second, holding him close so tightly that it takes Tony’s breath away.

Tony’s hands are around Bucky’s shoulders and he doesn’t know how he got there, wasn’t thinking to do it. But that’s what it’s been, with Bucky, hasn’t it? Action before thought, pure instinct. 

He doesn’t know how long they spend standing there in each other’s arms, Tony’s eyes pressed hard against Bucky’s shoulder, taking shallow breaths against Bucky’s chest. 

Bucky digs his face deeper into Tony’s neck, his back bent from how he’s wrapped around Tony, as if wanting to envelop him, as if wanting to subsume him.

Eventually, they part, and Bucky opens his mouth to say something, but Tony won’t let him, doesn’t care to hear whatever excuses he has, instead just moves his hands to wrap around his neck and pull him down for a kiss. 

They stagger towards Tony's bedroom, and Tony wants to believe that this is all just happening to him, not that he’s making it happen, or that he’s part of it, wants no culpability just as much as he wants Bucky on him, in him, with him.

*

“I’m sorry,” Tony whispers.

“What for?”

The silence in the room is punctuated by the sound of traffic. Tony’s thankful for how dark his room is, so he doesn’t have to see the way Bucky looks when he says, “this someone else, you like him a lot, don’t you.”

Tony nods, then realizes Bucky can’t see him, either. “Yes,” he breathes out.

“I’m hoping there’s a ‘but’ here,” Bucky says, and he laughs, but it sounds pained, and Tony reaches out to touch him.

“I can’t,” he says, quietly. “I tried to… I tried not to. But I did.”

“You’re preaching to the choir here,” Bucky laughs again, rough and mirthless.

Tony swallows, and Bucky shifts so he can cup Tony’s jaw in his hand. “I do love you, you know,” Bucky says, leaning in to touch his forehead to Tony’s.

“I know,” Tony says fiercely. “I know you do.” Tony breathes out and raises his hand to hold Bucky’s. “I love you too.”

[malarki]

Harry Potter FanFiction I greatly enjoy (it’s just tomarry and sevitus)

Fair warning, I’m not good at describing stuff, and most of these are not complete (yet) but if you have similar tastes as I do then you’ll definitely like these stories.

Meddling of a Mischief Maker - by Athy

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5380535/chapters/12427268

I enjoy this fic because it shows a more human Voldemort with him still being an asshole as per usual. They do a good job of having Voldemort believably change into a not crazy murderous bastard haha. It also has Sirius interacting with Voldemort and for some reason I find those scenes hilarious in any fic I read.

“Harry's being a horcrux is a bit reworked here in this AU Story set during the summer after 5th year. A Mischief Maker intervenes in the Ministry during Voldemort and Dumbledore's duel, changing the course history. MorallyGrey!Dumbledore, Sirius, Restored Souls, HP/TR”

Draw Me After You (Let Us Run) - by ToAStranger @toast-ranger-to-a-stranger

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22327684/chapters/53334382

This story is a delight, it’s tone is very good and they do a great job of writing in the characters ‘voices’ for their pov’s. I especially like the posh way Voldemort talks and acts. This story is also hilarious on top of just being a very good slowburn, AND it has Sirius, which as you might have guessed, I love dearly. They also don’t bash any of the characters, and instead make them well rounded but flawed individuals, which I really appreciate.

“Harry Potter,” comes the soft, sibilant hiss of a voice he has heard in his dreams, in his nightmares, in his waking hours for years.

Slowly, carefully, Harry twists over and pushes up onto his hands and knees. He stays there, short breath fogging in front of his face, and his pursuer lets him. Harry has no doubt of that; he’s being allowed this respite. This small moment to catch his bearings, heart pounding in his ears, blood singing.

“It seems I have finally caught you.”

Consuming Shadows - by Child_OTKW @childotkw

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7040089/chapters/16011331

I’ve read two of childOTKW’s fics and both of them are fantastically written and attention grabbing stories. This one was the first one I read, and it has a very interesting take on lily Potter (one which I really enjoy) and the plot can leave you on the edge of your seat at times. The characterization is great, and the process of Harry and Tom getting to know each other is done very well.

“His attention skipped passed the students and moved to the politicians’ pavilion. His gaze locked with crimson, and he nearly faltered under the sheer hunger in those eyes.

It unnerved him how fixated the man was on his dirtied, exhausted figure.

But what troubled him more was the slight smirk he could make out on the man’s lips. It was almost pleased.

On the night of the attack, Lily managed to escape with her infant son, but at the cost of her husband’s life. Distraught and distrusting of her friends, she fled to France with Harry, to raise him away from the corruption in Britain and the rising influence of the Dark Lord. She trains him to the best of her abilities, shaping him into a dangerous, intelligent and powerful wizard.

But when Britain re-establishes the Triwizard Tournament, and Harry is forced to return to his once-home, he finds himself questioning whether he really wants to kill the Dark Lord. Voldemort finds an unexpected challenge in the child, and as his intrigue and amusement grows, so too does the desire to possess the spark in those defiant green eyes.”

A story that is kind of similar but not really: The Train to Nowhere

You Belong To Me (I Belong To You) - by child_OTKW

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11270490/chapters/25203408

This is a story inspired by the manwha ‘At The End Of The Road’ by Haribo. A comic I read before reading this, which is very good I recommend it. They do not take the exact plot from the comic though, obviously changing significant details for it to work properly as a Tomarry Fic, but one main thing stays the same, which is that this is a body swap. Honestly I really enjoy childOTKW’s works, and this is no exception. The characterization is wonderful as always, and Harry is Fantastic. Plus I’ve always been a fan of time travel fics. (Fair warning this is another slow burn and Harry centric)

“What I find absolutely fascinating,” Riddle said, stalking closer, “is you.” He marched forward, backing Harry up until he was pinned to the cool wall of the common room. “Do you know why?”

“No. And I’ll be honest here, Riddle, I don’t particularly care.”

The taller boy grinned at him, small yet infinitely pleased. “That. Right there.” One hand rose and brushed some of Harry’s fringe from his face. “Nathan Ciro was a spineless little boy too afraid of his own shadow to dare even glance in my direction. But you…”

He leaned closer, “You look at me like you want to stab me.”

“After an accident, Auror Harry Potter wakes up in the body of fourteen year old Nathan Ciro, a tormented Slytherin who recently tried to end his own life. Seeking answers to his strange predicament, Harry returns to Hogwarts, and causes quite the stir through staff and students - especially when they come to realise he is not the same boy as before.

He tries to avoid suspicion, but as his quest for the truth draws more and more attention to him, Harry begins to think that he might not like what he will discover.”

Some Bonus AU tomarry

A Thousand Paths Among The Stars - by Haplessshippo @haplesshippo

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12015060/chapters/27191238

This is a star trek au and it’s honestly my favorite tomarry au fic. Granted, I am a huge sci-fi fan. There’s also a bit of a twist at the end, or at least it surprised me, due to the way we usually expect tomarry plots to go.

“Harry Potter, newly appointed Captain of the Marauder and son of the famous Captain James Potter, was falling apart at the seams. His crew didn’t respect him, he was lost in the empty expanse of space, nightmares plagued his sleep, and his Commander deserved the Captain position more than he did. Good thing multiple attempts on his life and a vicious warlord after his head was all it took to turn it all around.

Alternatively, that space fic in which Harry Potter almost dies too many times, Tom Riddle slowly becomes the most smitten fool on the ship, and the rest of the crew are all just a bunch of assholes with popcorn watching the show. And exploding ships, don't forget the exploding ships.”

The Matchmaker - by TanninTele

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16507676/chapters/38664089

I am ALSO a huge true crime fan, and this story has a criminal that kinda reminds me of one that might appear in Hannibal (but with less murder). I enjoy the characterization, though tom is pretty tame in this compared to more cannon fics, considering he’s not the criminal and instead an investigator. Harry is also different from how people usually portray him, but I still like it.

“'The Matchmaker' is a serial abductor whose modus operandi consists of pairing two same-sex individuals together in a coffin, six feet underground - buried alive. He isn't a killer. He's a kidnapper with morals, and Detective Chief Inspector Tom Riddle finds himself obsessed with solving the case.

Unfortunately for Tom, the Matchmaker is just as intent on knowing him.”

And on to the Sevitus Stories

Far Beyond A Promise Kept - by oliversnape

https://archiveofourown.org/works/547431/chapters/974693

A classic, Harry stays with snape and unintentionally proves all his assumptions wrong and makes snape care about him. Both the stories have this aspect, but this one has snape a bit nicer from the get go. Probably because it takes place during the third book, so they’ve only known each other two years. It’s quite wholesome though, and I rather enjoy the progression of their relationship.

“Snape never wanted anyone to know of his promise to Dumbledore, but has realised that he can protect Potter much better by taking a less passive role in the boy's training. Actually liking Harry Potter has never been part of his plan. mentor/guardian.”

Crime And Punishment - by melolcatsi

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24102232/chapters/58018174

Snape and Harry have way more of a rocky start in this one, and Snape having to pick Harry up from the police station Really Doesn’t Help Snape’s opinion of him. This story very realistically shows the progression of their relationship, going from enemies to family, and near the ‘end’ (it’s not finished) it becomes very wholesome with Snape trying to help Harry with his mental and physical health after years of abuse/ neglect.

“Harry is accused of burglary. The Dursleys leave him to rot. Dumbledore sends Snape to remedy the situation. Harry finds himself in the care of an irate Snape. Not slash, gen-fic w/ focus on Sevitus relationship. Angst galore. Warnings: coarse and suggestive language, mentions of abuse/neglect. Un-betaed and un-Britpicked.”

[baepsaesbae]

Taming Temerity

Pairing— Min Yoongi x reader 

Genre— SMUT +18, incubus!Yoongi, demon au, Valentine’s Day au 

Warnings— Dom!Yoongi, brat!reader, fingering, oral (f receiving), multiple orgasms, hickies, shibari, tickling huehuehue, swearing, explicit unprotected sex (use protection when fucking a demon), ass slapping, creampie 

Word Count— 4.3k                                                                                    

 /təˈmerədē/: excessive confidence or boldness; audacity || You try explaining Valentine’s Day to Min Yoongi, your incubus boyfriend that feeds on your sexual energy. At first he doesn’t understand the point, but if it’ll make you horny then he’s willing to do anything.  

A/N— This fic is part of the Valentine’s Day collab Be My Bangtanvine with @kimtaehyunq @ppersonna @ughseoks @jinned @joontopia and @feliix​. Make sure to check out their stories too! 

“I never understood this holiday. You know it’s just a corporate scam for suckers like you, right?” Yoongi expressed his disdain as his gaze fell on the extravagant Valentine’s Day section in the grocery store. 

“So you’ve mentioned, Mr. Party Pooper,” you rolled your eyes, “Some people just like getting chocolates and flowers from their partners. I don’t see any problem with that.”

“Do you want chocolates and flowers? I can get them for you any time, just say the word,” Yoongi offered.

“That’s the point, it should be a little surprise. I wouldn’t have to ask you to do anything,” you tried to explain.

“At that point you’re already expecting something, doesn’t that just defeat the purpose?” your companion was genuinely confused.

“You know what? I don’t expect a demon like you to get it,” you were getting frustrated.

“No need to throw the ‘D’ word around like that. I’m an incubus sure, but we specialize in lust, not love. However, I’m always down to try new things. You of all people should know that,” he ended suggestively. 

You started to think about how your relationship started with Yoongi. Your body went on autopilot mode on the drive back home as flashbacks flooded your mind. 

It all started about six months ago when you randomly started to have sleep paralysis consistently. You’d foolishly open your eyes and see a dark figure in the corner of your room that gradually came closer before settling on top of you. The extra weight on your chest made it hard to breathe. Once it got to that point, your eyelids would close and you’d be whisked away to a sensual dream. You’d wake up refreshed and energized, completely forgetting about the terrifying events that led up to your wet dream. 

One night, you miraculously were able to break the cycle. As soon as the dark figure approached the bed, you threw a pillow at it. At that point, you weren’t sure if you were in a dream or not, but you dashed to turn on your bedroom lights. The light revealed a man standing frozen in place by your bed. You remember screaming for help and shouting things about a pervert stalker. 

“Help! Somebody help there’s an intruder! Someone please--” suddenly your mouth refused to open.

“Well this is awkward,” the man rubbed the back of his neck, “Let’s get a few things out of the way first. I’m not a pervert or a stalker. In fact, I’m not even human, I’m an incubus. A new one at that.”

Your eyes widened in horror at the mention of a demonic entity. You backed up into a wall trying to get away from him while muffled screams desperately tried to escape from your sealed lips. 

“I’m sure you have a few questions. Normally I would just put you to sleep but you’re wide awake now and honestly I don’t have the kind of mana to deal with all that. So we’ve found ourselves in quite the predicament,” the demon sighed as he sat on your bed. With a wave of his hand, your mouth was finally able to open again. 

“What the fuck do you mean you’re a demon? This must be a dream right?” you were bewildered.

“Come sit by me, I can show you that I’m real,” the demon patted the bed.

“Trusting a self proclaimed demon is probably a bad idea but this is just a weird dream anyway,” you reasoned out loud as you sat beside the intruder. 

The man raised one of his hands to cup your cheek; you shuddered at his cold touch. Something changed when you looked into his eyes. Suddenly, you felt like kissing this total stranger. In fact, you felt a lust that you’ve never felt before. Before you knew it, you were straddling the man, rubbing your crotch against his as you passionately made out.   

“Lay back and take off your pants, dear,” he commanded. You did as he said without hesitation.

The man licked his lips as he spread open your legs. He slowly dragged a finger along your covered slit. Pulling your panties aside, he dove in tongue first, causing you to shudder at the warm and wet sensation. His tongue flicked around between your folds as his thumb began to circle your clit. Pleasure coursed throughout your body as your hands entangled themselves in his hair. You felt two hard protruding bumps atop his head...horns?

“Reaching for my horns already? Naughty girl,” the man smirked as he inserted a finger into your wet pussy. You squirmed at his action. It wasn’t enough, you needed more.

“Oh? What’s wrong?” he asked with fake innocence as he slowly finger fucked you, “Is one not enough? Do you need more?” You silently nodded in response.

“Nuh uh, I need to hear you say it,” he teased.

“Please, I need more,” you begged as you helplessly tried to grind against his one finger.

“Hm one finger isn’t enough huh? How about two?” he added in his middle finger as you moaned, “Or do you want three?”

His ring finger slid in with ease. Finally, you felt full; lewd sounds escaped from your lips. Your back arched as he picked up his pace, curling his fingers into you with every pump. Something tight wound up in you, indicating that you were close to your high.

“Keep going. Faster,” you panted as your legs began to shake.

“Your wish is my command,” he obliged. You cried out as your orgasm hit you. Waves of euphoria rippled across your body as he slammed his fingers into you a final time, leaving his fingers pressed up against your g-spot to prolong the event. 

You focused on catching your breath while the alleged demon smiled down at you. It wasn’t a creepy smile, it was one of triumph. His fingers were still inside of you.

“You can pull them out now,” you said weakly.

“I tried. Your tight little pussy is clamped onto them. See?” he showed you how your lips stayed gripped onto his fingers, “If I can’t pull them out, I might as well go back in.”

He pushed his fingers back in, making you gasp. You were still extremely sensitive, any movement of his would push you over the edge yet again. 

“If you do that-- fuck-- I’ll come again,” you warned him.

“Let’s see how many you can handle,” the man challenged as he picked up his speed yet again.

You came three times that night. All just to his hand and occasionally his mouth. The demon looked satisfied with his work as you laid blissed out before him. He slunk down beside you, laying on his side with his head propped up on his arm.

“These got bigger,” you observed as you reached for his horns. The tiny black stumps had grown longer and had a more defined horn shape. They felt cool to the touch and were ridged, similar to those of a ram. 

“They’re not the only things that got bigger,” he winked, “This is where my mana is stored. Essentially I get stronger when I consume energy.”

“Consume energy? Are you going to eat me?” you questioned with intrigue. You still believed you were in a strange dream. 

“Already did. I told you, I’m an incubus. We feed off of sexual energy. I rather enjoyed the meal. It’s too bad this will be the last time I can see you though,” he pouted.

“What? Why can’t you visit me in my dreams like you normally do?” you could get used to having dreams like this.

“Because you know that I exist. After tonight, you’ll forget all about me and I’ll get reassigned to a different human,” he answered nonchalantly.  

“Does that mean I’ll get another incubus demon?” 

“Not exactly. There are many different kinds of beings that dwell in the underworld. You could get any one of them. Most of them aren’t as fun or as handsome as me though,” he tried to lighten the conversation. 

“I don’t want to forget you, nor do I want this dream to end,” you admitted.

“Silly girl, you still think this is a dream? There actually might be a way to have me stay with you. All you have to do is make a contract with me. Interested?” the demon offered.

“A contract? Am I gonna be selling my soul to you or something? I would prefer to keep that if possible,” you tried to joke.

“I’m not that kind of demon. The contract would simply bind us together. You let me consume all of your sexual energy and I give you the best orgasms you’ll ever have. Seems like a fair deal to me,” he explained.

“So I’ll basically have a demon boyfriend? I don’t mind that, sign me up,” you nodded. You were groggy at this point and your eyelids were getting heavy.

“Boyfriend? I suppose you could put it that way. Let’s seal this deal with a kiss,” he suggested. He leaned in to your already puckered up lips. He paused mere centimeters from your face, “I’m Yoongi by the way. I apologize for not introducing myself earlier.”

You pulled him in for a soft kiss, “Hey Yoongi, I’m ___. I guess I’m your girlfriend now.” 

“Whatcha thinking about?” Yoongi interrupted your thoughts.

“About the night we met,” you answered as you pulled into your driveway.

“That was a good night. You were so cute when you called yourself my girlfriend,” he smiled.

“Shut up, I thought it was all a dream,” you said defensively as you unloaded the groceries.

“I was thinking about Valentine’s Day as you were driving in silence. I wanna give it a try. I don’t get the hype, but if it will make you happy then I’m willing to go along with it,” Yoongi stated. 

“Really?” your mouth opened with excitement, “Do I need to plan the date or are you taking the reins on this one?”

“I’ll start doing my research now,” Yoongi gave you a thumbs up. 

“Rise and shine gorgeous~” Yoongi sing songed as he opened the blinds.

You retreated back under the covers to shield yourself from the light. Yoongi tugged at the edge, making you even more aggravated. Curling up into a ball in the fetal position was your last line of defense. Once Yoongi flung off the blanket, you were done for.

“To start off your very best Valentine’s Day ever, I present you a bouquet,” Yoongi shoved a bundle of red roses in your face, causing you to sneeze. A few petals violently detached and fluttered helplessly onto the bed. 

“Thanks Yoongi, the flowers are pretty,” you managed to say with a stuffy nose, “I wish I could adore them more but flowers always trigger my allergies.”

“Hm, every romance film I watched always showed the girl loving roses,” Yoongi pondered, “Not to worry, my algorithm is flawless.”

“Are you a robot now?” you joked. The sweet smell of syrup and waffles caught your attention. Yoongi noticed this and excitedly yanked you out of bed. Normally you would bicker about the manhandling but you decided to let today be an exception. 

The living room was filled with pink and white heart shaped balloons. Yoongi dragged you to the breakfast table, where the usual placemats were replaced with red hearts and small metallic heart shaped confetti were sprinkled all across the surface. To top it off, the belgian waffles were heart shaped, outlined with whipped cream and topped with strawberries. The presentation rivaled that of an actual restaurant. 

Yoongi watched expectantly as you took the first bite. Your mouth turned into a smile as you tasted the fluffy waffle. The toppings complemented the dish perfectly, and you were hungry for more. 

“I made eggs and bacon too, though it was hard to get the eggs into a heart shape,” Yoongi sighed as he showed you his attempt to get heart sunny side eggs. The shape was wonky but it was impressive that the yolks were still well intact. 

“I don’t care what they look like, I’m sure they’ll taste great. Thank you, Yoongi, this is incredible,” you showered him with compliments as you continued to eat. Yoongi smiled with satisfaction as he took a sip of coffee, his favorite choice of sustenance from the human realm. 

“Enjoying your Valentine’s Day so far?” he asked from across the table.

“I’ve only been awake for about 5 minutes but it’s been pretty good so far,” you nodded.

“Well whenever you’re ready, go get ready for a day out,” Yoongi winked, “Dress however you want, it’ll be casual.”

You couldn’t help but wonder about what Yoongi had planned for the day. It was still a little chilly, so you put on a cute sweater paired with jeans. You accessorized with a beret and your favorite jewelry pieces. Yoongi waited for you in the living room, and his eyes lit up when he saw you. It wasn’t the usual dark lustful look he normally gave you, but rather one of fondness and genuine adoration. 

“Where are we off to now?” you asked in the passenger seat, which was a rare sight. Yoongi didn’t like to drive, he always complained about how it would be easier to just teleport. You always had to remind him that humans do not simply ‘teleport’ places and you’d surely turn a lot of heads if you did. Regardless, you enjoyed watching Yoongi drive. You admired his delicate features as he concentrated on the road.

“Can’t tell you, that you ruin the surprise,” Yoongi chided. 

Your eyes widened as he pulled into the parking lot of the local aquarium. It had been years since you last visited, and you were thrilled that Yoongi picked this place as a date spot.

“The aquarium! Ah, I’m so excited! But they aren’t inherently romantic, what made you think of coming here?” you questioned.

“I remember you mentioned wanting to come back here someday. I figured today would be a good time,” he shrugged. Yoongi’s thoughtfulness made you feel warm and fuzzy inside. 

Once inside, you took the liberty of pointing out every fish you thought looked pretty to Yoongi. He was amused by how much you enjoyed something as simple as looking at fish. Colorful fish chased each other around their tanks, darting between corals and other underwater plants. You loved watching them go about their lives as they vibed within the aquarium. 

“It would be nice to be a fish,” you said to Yoongi as you stared in awe at jellyfish that were nearly transparent as they carelessly floated around.

“A fish? Why?” Yoongi scoffed.

“They seem happy, and free in a way. All they do is swim around and eat, that sounds like a good time to me,” you explained.

“And worry about getting eaten by a bigger fish. I’d rather be a cat if I had to be any animal,” Yoongi countered. 

  “Okay, that’s probably a better choice,” you laughed as you imagined Yoongi as a cat. It fit him surprisingly well. 

After leaving the aquarium, Yoongi suggested walking to a nearby gelato shop. You were never one to turn down dessert, so you agreed. The air was crisp and the cold made your cheeks go slightly numb, but you didn’t mind. You happily swung Yoongi’s hand back and forth in yours, you couldn’t remember the last time you’ve been on a date that went this well.   

“___?” a voice called out to you. You looked around to see who called you. Out of nowhere, someone ran up and hugged you from behind. You let go of Yoongi’s hand in the commotion as you were spun around.

“What the--” you said in shock. Finally you were put down, and saw a familiar face grinning back at you.

“Oh my god, Jungkook!” you exclaimed as you hugged him back. He greeted you with a kiss on the cheek.

“It’s been forever! I didn’t know you still lived here,” you said.

“I know right?! God, like 13 years or something? I’m here visiting some old pals. We’re all single so we’re celebrating this stupid holiday together,” Jungkook laughed. 

“Aww that's cute. I guess this holiday is pretty dumb, but I’m actually celebrating it with someone this year! This is Yoongi,” you introduced Jungkook to your boyfriend. 

“Nice to meet you, I’m Jungkook,” the young boy extended a hand.

“Min Yoongi,” Yoongi replied curtly as he firmly shook Jungkook’s hand.

“Damn, where are you hiding all that muscle?” Jungkook joked as he clutched his hand.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Yoongi deadpanned.

“How long are you in town for? I’d love to catch up with you on another day,” you interrupted. 

“I’ll be here for a few more days. Is your number still the same? I can text you tomorrow?” Jungkook offered.

“That’s perfect, I’ll see you around!” you waved goodbye and returned your attention to Yoongi. 

You took a hold of his hand and continued walking to the gelato shop. Yoongi was noticeably quiet now, and his demeanor had completely changed. There was an awkward silence between you two as you ordered your favorite flavors. You both sat outside to eat the gelato.

“So who was he?” Yoongi finally spoke. 

“Jungkook used to be my neighbor when we were kids. We practically grew up together. He moved away sometime in middle school and I haven’t seen him since. He looks great, I almost didn’t recognize him. What? Are you jealous?” you teased.

“I almost killed him when he kissed you,” Yoongi said in a tone that let you know that he was not kidding.

“Yoongi! People greet each other that way sometimes. Sure, it was a little forward, but we used to be best friends as kids,” you scolded him. 

“Ready to go home?” Yoongi asked, completely disregarding your explanation. 

“Okay let’s go back you big baby,” you sighed as you threw away your trash.

You hummed along with the radio all the way home. Yoongi didn’t say anything the whole ride. You were surprised by his behavior, you figured an incubus wouldn’t mind seeing affection in public. He had never given you the silent treatment before, so this was uncharted waters.

“Today was really nice, I think you did a good job planning out our Valentine’s day together,” you praised Yoongi as you returned home.

“Glad you enjoyed it,” Yoongi said coldly.

“Why are you being so pouty? C’mere, let me give the big baby a hug,” you reached for him with outstretched arms. 

“You think I’d let you get away with that kind of behavior?” an annoyed Yoongi glared back at you.

“C’mon, it’s not like it really matters,” you teased, trying to push your luck.

“It matters to me. You’re mine,” Yoongi snarled, baring his fangs.

“You’ve made that abundantly clear,” you tilted your neck, revealing marks from his previous feedings, “I can’t leave the house without a crap ton of concealer to cover up your monstrous hickeys.”  

“You knew what you were signing up for when you agreed to be my permanent lover,” Yoongi shrugged, his anger dissipating. 

“Who knew dating an incubus would be so tiresome,” you playfully roll your eyes.

“So that random guy kissing your cheeks doesn’t deserve to die?” he asked quietly.

“No! I told you, we’re childhood friends. I haven’t seen him in years. It’s okay to greet close friends with a friendly peck on the cheeks” you crossed your arms, “You’re being annoying. No dinner for you tonight,” you said confidently as you both entered the bedroom.

“Oh? Since when do you call the shots around here?” his voice lowered.

“Since now,” you replied defiantly. 

“Keep being cheeky, see where that gets you,” Yoongi challenged.

You smiled slyly as you pushed him onto the bed. Standing before him, you pulled off your sweater to reveal your bare chest. Yoongi instinctively reached out to grab them but you slapped his hand away.

“No touching,” you tsked as you slowly stripped off your bottoms. 

You turned to shake your ass at him. The gesture was meant to be playful, but Yoongi took it as a wage of war. He instantly pulled you onto his lap; your panties rubbed up against his hardened crotch.

“I’m hungry,” he growled in your ear as he firmly gripped your ass.

“Not my problem,” you snapped, doing your best to maintain your composure. 

“You’ll let me starve?”

“Don’t act as if you didn’t eat me out until I begged for you to stop last night,” you admonished. 

“Enough,” Yoongi silenced you.

He roughly latched his soft lips onto your neck. His harsh suckling caused you to moan and tangle your fingers in his minty green hair. You cupped his chin in an attempt to kiss him, but he pulled away. 

“You think you get to touch me now? Foolish,” he threw you further onto the bed.

With a snap of his fingers, your panties vanished. They were replaced with strict constraints as your hands and feet were bound by an intricate silk rope pattern. You’ve never been tied up like this before. You’ve dabbled in using handcuffs or fastening a belt around your wrists, but this was something else entirely. 

“You wanted to play. So let’s play,” Yoongi cooed in your ear as his fingers traced your sides.

“Oh fuck, Yoongi no,” your eyes widened.

“You’ve been a bad girl,” he smiled deviously.

His fingers dug into your sides. You burst out into a fit of laughter. You wriggled around uncontrollably in a futile attempt to get away from him. Yoongi accidentally found out that you were extremely ticklish, and ever since that day he uses it as leverage against you. It wasn’t fair at all considering that demons aren’t ticklish. 

Tears welled in your eyes when he finally ceased his attack. Yoongi also knew that tickling was a turn on for you. Something about having another person’s hands all over you made you wet. 

“You look so helpless,” Yoongi chuckled.

“Maybe these ropes have something to do with that,” you retorted as you panted.

“Still talking back? You obviously haven’t learned your lesson,” Yoongi ran his fingers along your sides.

“No, please. I can’t take anymore,” you pleaded.

“I think you can,” he smirked before tickling you again.

This time he didn’t stop until you were on the verge of passing out. The bondage made it even harder to catch your breath. Yoongi gingerly kissed your neck as you howled with laughter.

“Will you be a good girl now?” Yoongi asked as he flicked your nipples.

“Mhm,” you managed to whimper.

“I haven’t whipped out any shibari in ages, but I’m glad I did. I forgot how appetizing it makes humans look,” Yoongi licked his lips. 

“I can’t move,” you complained.

“That’s the point, my dear ___,” Yoongi kissed your forehead. 

His hand trailed down your stomach to your exposed pussy. He was pleased to find that you were already dripping wet. He rubbed circles around your clit as he licked your neck. He ferociously kissed over his previous marks as he started rubbing you faster. Your energy tasted exponentially better the more aroused you became. 

Being in such a vulnerable and powerless position turned you on so much. You found yourself at Yoongi’s mercy. Yoongi easily slipped two fingers inside of you. He curled his fingers to perfectly graze your g-spot, causing you to moan loudly. 

“You want me to fuck you?” Yoongi whispered in your ear.

“Please. I need you, Yoongi,” you begged. 

“I know you do,” he kissed your lips gently.

With another snap of his fingers, the ropes moved their position. Now your wrists were bound to your chest, and your legs were already spread open. 

Yoongi dragged his dick along your wet pussy. He loved watching you squirm beneath him as you impatiently waited for him to dick you down. He relished the erotic scene that lay before him. Witnessing you at the pinnacle of your horniess was a blessing. He couldn’t hold himself back any longer.

He thrusted his hips into you with inhuman force. He didn’t give you time to adjust to his thick cock; you didn’t deserve that tonight. Your cries of pleasure were music to his ears. He grabbed your chin as he ran his thumb along your bottom lip. You automatically stuck your tongue out for him.

“Good fucking girl,” Yoongi growled as you began to suck on his thumb, your tongue swirling around it.

Yoongi tugged at the ropes, making them vanish instantly. Your freedom was short lived since he immediately flipped you onto your chest. He propped up your ass, giving each cheek a firm slap. 

This position was his favorite, and admittedly yours as well. He loved the backside view, and you loved how deep he got. You were sure to lose your mind every time he got behind you. This instance was no exception. 

You reached down between your thighs to maximize your pleasure as your fingers easily toyed with your clit. Usually Yoongi wouldn’t allow you to touch yourself, but you couldn’t help it. You were too riled up from being all tied up. 

You came undone all over Yoongi’s cock. The warmth of your juices heightened Yoongi’s lust, causing him to thrust faster. He released his hot load into you, groaning as he climaxed. 

Your chest heaved as you struggled to stay awake. One of the side effects of being fucked by an incubus is that they literally can fuck you to sleep. After Yoongi cleaned you up, it was cuddle time. He ran his fingers through your hair, making it even harder not to succumb to slumber. 

“Full?” you asked with your eyes half shut.

“I’m never satiated, but I can’t complain for now,” he answered.

“Great. Happy Valentine’s Day, Yoongi,” you yawned.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, ___. I hope I lived up to your expectations,” he patted your head.

“You surpassed them,” you nodded in approval.

“Go to bed,” Yoongi stifled a laugh, “I guess it’s not a pointless holiday after all.”

Published February 9, 2021. No editing, copying, translating, or reposting allowed. All Rights Reserved © 2020 Baepsaesbae.

[we-are-so-close]

Promised Life

Yandere!Illumi x female reader

Word Count: 2.6k

Warnings: 18+; Minors do not interact, Angst, smut, yandere behavior, noncon, dubcon, implied death, kidnapping, forced marriage, oral (female receiving), vaginal sex, breeding (please let me know if I forgot something)

Author's Note: This is pretty dark. And very smut heavy. And the longest fic I've written so far. Very nervous about it.

======================================

The sound of cries from the baby monitor woke you and your husband.

“Aw, he’s been doing a lot better about sleeping through the night,” your husband’s groggy voice whispered in your ear.

“I know. I’ll go check on him,” you said as you tried to rub the sleep from your eyes.

“Love you, babe,” your husband kissed you on the back of your head.

“Yeah, yeah. I love you, too...Butt,” you teased as you threw on your nightgown.

You slowly crept into the baby’s room to see him standing up in his crib.

“Hey, buddy,” you cooed as you turned on one of the lights next to the rocking chair. As soon as he saw you, he started jumping up and down, hanging on to the side of the crib.

“What are you doing, silly boy? It’s time for bed,” you picked him up and kissed his sweet little head. You cradled him; his head in the crook of one of your elbows with your other arm supporting his back side. You rocked him back and forth, his eyes getting heavier and heavier as the time passed. Eventually, he was asleep in your arms. You placed a soft kiss on his head before carefully laying him back into his crib.

“Good night, my precious boy,” you whispered.

As soon as you turned the light off, a cold chill shot down your spine. It caused you to freeze right in place. You hadn’t felt this aura in years. You haven’t felt this since…

“No!” You gasped. You felt as though you were in a clouded haze. You couldn’t think clearly, your breathing started to quicken. As much as you tried to move, you couldn’t. The aura you felt before is getting stronger, thicker. It’s too hard for you to breathe. Dizziness takes over and you collapse to the ground. The last thing you saw before you faded out of consciousness was your child’s sweet sleeping face.

Your eyes slowly opened. Darkness. Darkness was all you could see. And pain was all you could feel. Your head felt as if it was being split open. You tried to move your arms to lift yourself up, but you weren’t able to move. You opened your mouth to scream, but nothing more than a murmur came out. Your chest began to rise and fall rapidly. A wave of nausea washed over you.

“No,” was all you could muster as the tears started to fall and the sobs began to choke you.

A shadow moved closer to you.

“Awake already?” a familiar yet cold voice asked. “I shouldn’t be surprised though, you are just as strong now as you were when you left me five years ago. Although, I was sure that you would have realized the poison that was slipped into your evening tea .”

“We...I-I didn’t…,” you struggled to get the words out. Your brain couldn’t begin to process where to start.

He took a seat next you on the bed where you laid. He began to rub your head.

“Shh, it’s okay. I forgive you for lying. And for running away. Now that you’ve come back to me, we can be a family...” He leaned in close to your ear and whispered, “...like you promised.”

Five years ago, you and Illumi had been engaged. You were in love with him and you were excited to start a family. However, there had been some complications. Before marrying into the Zoldyck family, tests had to be run. You passed all of them with ease. All of them except one. The doctors told you that all of their tests had come to the same conclusion: infertile. Your heart shattered. You fled the manor before you could even face Illumi with this information, the shame you felt was too overwhelming.

You moved as far away as you could and tried to make yourself disappear. You had wanted to live the rest of your life wallowing in your own self-pity. The previous life you had dreamed of was not going to happen. You had accepted that. And you thought Illumi accepted it, too. He didn’t come for you like you thought he might. In your mind, he had given up on you and you had put that part of your life behind you.

You weren’t expecting to fall in love with another man so quickly, get married so quickly, own a house together so quickly, and you most certainly were not expecting to get pregnant and have a beautiful baby boy so quickly. Everything you had ever wanted happened so quickly, and you had forgotten about the life you had once promised to someone else.

“Illu-Illumi. I-Where…” you breathed in hard. His face hovered just over yours.

“You’re home, ______,” he stated with a smile. “And here in a few hours, we will finally become man and wife.”

“But..but,” you squeaked out.

“I know how happy this must make you. But you can tell me when we exchange our vows. For now, I will leave you to gather your strength and get ready. Until then, my love.” He kissed your temple and walked away.

The head pain mixed with your attempts to speak and the gravity of this situation was too much for you. Exhaustion overtook you. The next time you opened your eyes, the room was bustling with servants. You could hear the quiet whispers from them upon seeing you wake up. A butler appeared in front of you. A familiar face. She was one of the butler’s that was originally assigned to you when you first planned on staying in the manor.

“______, it’s so nice to finally have you back. Now, sit up.”

“What?” you asked, still slightly confused.

“Oh, for goodness sake, let me help you.” She grabbed your arm and yanked you up. Upon standing, you could see that they had already changed you into a wedding dress. It was lace. Long-sleeved and backless. The dress of your dreams. You had once discussed with Illumi what your dress might look like.

“Master Illumi had this made just for you. The least you could do is stand upright.”

The poison you consumed was still taking its course through your body. Your head hurt slightly less and you were able to move, but you still needed support to stand.

The wedding itself was quite short. Illumi stood next to you for support, arm wrapped around your waist. The vows you spoke were ones that Illumi had written for you. And you knew better than to refuse to speak. Having your own free will was more important than words that meant nothing to you. You were well acquainted with his nen abilities. You saw how it affected the unfortunate souls that were on the other end of his attacks.

After you both took your turns saying the vows, you were pronounced husband and wife. He gave you a peck on the lips and then turned you to face everyone. Everyone clapped and you felt immense sadness. The tears in your eyes threatened to break the surface. Illumi enveloped you in his embrace. Your face was resting against his chest as the two of you danced slowly. You now had enough strength to speak in short sentences, so you tried to reason with this man.

“Illumi, this marriage isn’t binding. I’m already married. I-I have a family now,” you muttered in hopes that it would somehow change his mind.

“It’s already been taken care of, ______. There’s no need to bring it up again.”

A whimper escaped your lips. He pulled you away from his chest to look you in the eyes.

“Hm, I think it’s time we wrap this up. What do you say?” He wasn’t really looking for an answer from you. His mind was made up. After the song had ended, he announced to everyone that you were not feeling well and that both of you were turning in for the night. He carried you bridal style to his chambers.

He laid you on the bed and began undressing himself.

“When I found out why you left, I was more hurt than anything else. We could have figured something out, ______,” he stared stoically at the wall. “I was going to come find you, but I had some important family business come up. It took a little longer than expected, but I never forgot about you. And you did a decent job of hiding yourself. I only found you last year. And by then, you were married and with child. I wanted to take you back, right then and there. But I weighed my options and decided I would watch.”

A terrifying thought to realize that he’s been watching you for a year. Even more terrifying was that you hadn’t noticed.

“I grew angrier by the day just watching you live your silly little life. I wanted to just kill you all. But then I saw the bond you formed with that child. The way you cared for it was….endearing. It helped me to reaffirm why I wanted you as a partner all along.” He was completely undressed and now his focus was on you. “So, I watched you some more. I watched your interactions with the child and decided that now was the time to bring you back to where you belong.”

He ripped your dress, exposing your breasts and underwear. You moved your arms to cover yourself, but it was futile. He was much stronger than you, even if you weren’t poisoned. With one hand, he was able to wrangle your wrists together and pin them above your hand. The other hand was moving across your body, giving you goosebumps. His touch was surprisingly soft and warm for someone so cold and uncaring.

He caressed your breast and pinched your nipple, eliciting a response from you. He put the other nipple in his mouth and teased you with his tongue. He sucked on it and could feel you trying not to squirm underneath him. He released it with a loud POP! sound, echoing in the room. You tried to bury your face in your arm so you wouldn’t have to look at him. But he grabbed your face and turned your head toward him.

“If you were able to conceive a child with a non-nen user, then you can conceive a child with me. We will do this everyday until you are with child.”

A look of terror on your face was ignored by your new husband as he ripped your underwear off. He let go of your wrists so that he could better face your entrance. He spread your legs and began working quickly. He started circling your clit with his tongue. He’d use the tip of his tongue for the quick little circles, but then he’d switch it up and use the pad of his tongue to lick from your folds to your bud. He was sucking you when he inserted a finger. A gasp escaped from your lips and you could feel him smile.

He came up to face you, finger still moving in and out.

“You know, the one good thing from watching another man fuck you is that I learned what you like and what get’s you off.”

Once again, you were ashamed and tried to hide your face again.

“Remove your hands or I’ll move them for you.”

And once again, you were reminded of how you would rather do things of your own free will instead of having them done for you. You obliged and he went back down on you.

He continued to lap at your clit while inserting another finger. You were trying your best to push all of this out of your head, to not make a noise. But his fingers were moving against the spongy part of your wall. The friction from his fingers and the movement of his tongue was enough to bring you to your climax. Your walls tightened and fluttered around him while your juices flowed down his hand

“Good girl.”

He removed his fingers and brought them to your lips.

“Open.”

Again, you obliged and took his fingers in your mouth. You sucked and licked, cleaning yourself off of him. He pulled his fingers out of your mouth and his lips met yours. He kissed you with such intensity. It took you by surprise. The passion he was displaying was certainly unexpected.

His cock soon began to fill the empty feeling in your cunt. When you gasped, he forced his tongue into your mouth. Back and forth, back and forth, the girth stretched your walls. It was pleasurable, though you did not want to admit it.

He bit your bottom lip before he drew away. “______, you’re so tight. But you accept me so eagerly. We were made for each other.”

He slowly pushed his way further into you. When he bottomed out, you moaned.

“Illu, too much,” you cried.

“But you’re doing so well. You will get used to it.”

Illumi stared in your eyes as he slowly pumped in and out. You wanted to look away or close your eyes, but you simply couldn’t. His fingers were intertwined in your hair, his face hovering above yours.

“Illumi…” you whispered. His lips got caught up in yours once more.

He pulled his torsos away from yours and pushed your legs to your chest. You didn’t think he could go any deeper, but this position proved you wrong. Each thrust hitting your cervix, causing more pain than pleasure. You hadn’t realized that your hands had moved to act as a buffer between his thighs and your legs. Habit, you supposed.

“______,” he spoke forcefully. You realized your mistake.

“’m...sor...ry…” your speech was broken from the continuous thrusting. Your hands moved above your head. He threw your legs over his shoulders and leaned in closer to you. His pacing was becoming faster. You could see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He was getting close. The thought of him cumming in you made your core burn. One of his hands began rubbing your sensitive bud. The stimulation was too much and you were creaming around his cock as you moaned out his name. Your walls fluttering around his cock was enough for him to reach his climax. Rope after rope of his seed filled your greedy hole. He was panting, something you can’t remember seeing before.

Your hand cupped his face. “I love you,” fell out of your mouth. Your eyes grew wide and a deep red crept across your cheeks. He smiled down at you.

“I know, my love.”

The two of you stayed still for a moment, except for his hips that continued to softly move against you. When he finally pulled out, a small whimper escaped your lips. He kissed your forehead.

Illumi carefully flipped you onto your side and spooned you. A strong arm caged your body against his, hand resting on your stomach. He kissed the back of your head.

“______, you fought the good fight. But you will not be able to overcome it. When you wake up tomorrow, all the pain of your previous life will be gone. Not even a distant memory. You will never have to relive those moments ever again. From now on, it will just be you, me, and the family that we create. Now it’s time to sleep, my love. You’ve had a busy day.”

Tears started trickling down your face. Your eyes grew heavy with sleep. It was indeed a busy day. Sadness overcame you, but you couldn't be sure why. You had just married the love of your life.

[the-lonelybarricade]

Hiii!! I've been following your work since the beginning and i just wanted to give u a big squeeze of a hug for blessing us with all of your fics 'cause i feel like we don't deserve u for blessing us with all these wonderful feysand content that u are sharing.

I hope all is well with ur life and in ur studies, and if it's not too much to ask, would you consider writing a feysand au where Feyre & Rhys aren't mates, but are happily in love and in a relationship--when all of a sudden, one of them meets their mate (preferably Rhys..?) or something like that 😚. Won't lie to u that im dying to know what events would play out and how Feyre would react if this scenario happened. Really no pressure to write this or anything just wanted to try my luck with this idea :DD. Thank u!

Bestie, ooof. What are you trying to do to me? Can you imagine how heartbreaking that would be for Feysand to be happy and in love, waiting patiently for the mating bond to snap only to find out they were star-crossed lovers all along? Well you don’t have to imagine it, because I already have. And if I’m going to be in torment over Feysand angst, I’m (affectionately) dragging you all down with me.

P.s. thank you for the submission lovely, I hope you enjoy <3

The Chains That Bind Us

Word count: 1,956

⟡⟡⟡

Feyre and Rhysand were happily married. For 300 years, they had basked in what seemed like an infinite stretch of rapture, working alongside and complimenting each other with a grace and chemistry that had always felt predestined. They had always been certain they were mates, but time had flowed on and neither had felt the inkling of that special, magic bond.

They have resigned that perhaps the mating bond will never snap, perhaps that’s simply not what they were to one another, but that was okay. It was enough to be husband and wife, to be High Lord and Lady, to be happy and in love. They didn’t need a mating bond to reaffirm what they felt for one another. Things were already perfect as they were.

Until they weren’t. Until they had journeyed together to Illyria to oversee the announcement of the first all-female battalion. It had been a long term goal of Rhysand and his brothers to finally battle back the long ingrained sexism of Illyrian culture, and the visit was meant to be a celebration. A liberating ceremony, in honor of their mothers and all the females who had been victims of prejudice.

But when the leader of the battalion stepped forward to be acknowledged for her accomplishments, Rhysand had gone rigid at Feyre’s side, his breathing suddenly ragged. His pupils were blown wide, eyes fixed, riveted to the female.

Feyre felt her whole world had imploded in that moment. Especially when that female’s eyes had met her High Lord’s and had frozen just the same, the two bearing matched expressions of awe and disbelief.

She was certain she was going to be sick. Such a thing would be far from befitting of a High Lady, so Feyre had immediately winnowed back to their River House, back into their bathroom where she was instantly emptying the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl.

Rhysand was there not too long after, holding back Feyre’s hair. They said nothing to each other, not until Feyre had recovered enough to turn and face her husband.

She was entirely unprepared for the way her heart shattered to meet his face, to meet those lovely eyes she had loved for centuries. Eyes that had only moments before been staring at another female with so much blind devotion it had torn her open.

“Feyre—” he started.

“I suppose we should have assumed that something like this could happen,” she interrupted, because she couldn’t bear to hear him apologize. Not for something like this, something that was entirely out of either of their control.

“It doesn’t change anything,” he insisted, but there was a strain to his voice that had never been present before. A bite that Feyre was convinced was the result of Rhysand battling against his instincts to return to Illyria, to that female.

“It changes everything, Rhys.”

She was already weeping as she choked the words out, because speaking them made them true. Those few centuries of bliss between them, they were a bubble, a perfectly crafted delusion that had finally popped.

“I love you,” Rhys seethed, as though arguing with himself. “I don’t even know that females name—”

“It doesn’t matter, Rhys. She’s your—”

“Don’t say it,” he begged, his voice a broken rasp. “Please, don’t say it.”

Somehow, that made it impossibly worse. That Rhys had been gifted this incredible, Cauldron-blessed thing, but was scorning it for her sake. Most Fae dreamed of the moment their mating bond would snap, and here was her husband acting as if it was his worst nightmare.

But Feyre knew what it was like for males. She knew he was clawing against every instinct in his mind, screaming at him to go to his mate, to know her name, to claim her. Feyre stifled another sob. Rejected mating bonds could drive a male mad. How could she ever think to do that to him? How could she deny him this piece of himself?

What broke her heart more than anything is that Feyre knew he would. Rhysand would reject his bond, would let that intrinsic part of his soul be torn away, for her sake. If Feyre asked, he would stay. He would stay and be miserable.

“I can’t do this to you, Rhys. I can’t force you to stay with me out of duty. I will not be your jailor.”

“You are my wife,” Rhys choked, reaching for her hand. He drew her palms to his face, allowing her to caress his cheeks. He shut his eyes as he nuzzled into her touch, causing his unshed tears to fall, racing down to collect at her hands. “You are my High Lady. You are the only one I want to be with.”

That wrecked another sob through Feyre’s body, which came out as a harsh exhale as she tried to restrain it. “You’d be a broken male without her, Rhys. The Cauldron—” she sucked in a strangled breath. Some truths were just too difficult to confront— “The Cauldron didn’t intend for us to be together.”

“Damn the Cauldron,” he growled, reaching for her with newfound conviction. “No one and nothing can decide who I love. No one can tell me that you are not who I belong with—who I belong to.”

Feyre allowed him to bundle her in his arms, to press her fiercely against his chest. She knew moments like this were fleeting, where they could hold each other as husband and wife. Already, their love was tarnished. Tainted. Blood spilled onto white snow. How long would it take for this mating bond to seep, to spill into the cracks, to spread until it consumed them? She couldn’t see an outcome where they could stay together unblemished, where they wouldn’t come to resent one another.

“Rhysand, listen to me love,” Feyre said, and found that her voice was steadier than she anticipated. “I care more about you being happy than I care about that happiness being found with me. Do you understand?”

“I would not be happier without you, Feyre.” His voice was ripe with earnesty. When she turned those eyes to meet his, those violet depths were burning, the silver constellations completely eclipsed by molten amethyst. He swallowed thickly. “Do I… want that female? Yes.” Feyre cringed to hear her husband admit it outloud. “But, that is just my instincts. I will be able to manage them with time. This bond is nascent. My love for you? It’s endured for centuries. The cauldron is not faultless; my parents were mates and they were miserable together. I could never imagine someone so perfect to walk beside me as you, Feyre. I do not seek another, no matter what fate has to say for it.”

Feyre allowed the comfort of his words to wash over her. She rested her head against Rhysand’s shoulder, inhaling his familiar scent, letting herself lavish in the rhythm of him, the beat of his heart steady in his chest.

“I will understand if you change your mind,” she whispered. “I do not hold you to your vows. If you become unhappy, if one day you cannot resist the pull you feel towards her… I will not hold it against you. I give you permission to… to leave me.”

Rhys let out a small, rueful laugh before he pressed a tender kiss to her temple. “How could I desert a love that is so selfless? The least I could do in the wake of such a declaration is promise to never see that female again.”

Feyre shook her head emphatically. “Don’t promise me that, Rhys. Just—just promise me that we’ll always be honest with each other. That we’ll always be a team, whether it be as rulers, or as lovers, or… or just as friends.”

“I promise,” he swore. “I vowed on my court and crown that I will love you for eternity. And I still know that to be true, even now. My soul… it might belong to someone else. But my heart, Feyre, it will always belong to you.”

There was something irreparably changed between them. They both knew it, could sense the way it lingered between them. The first crack, and possibly not the last. What they had was fragile now, but they had a gift for being delicate with one another.

The silence hung between them, a wretched, discomfiting presence that had never been there before. Both not quite sure what to say, not quite sure where this put them. She watched Rhysand’s lower lip quiver, understood that it was from the strain of not burdening her with his own turmoil over the situation.

Feyre tutted as she threw her arms around him, recognizing the signs of his crumbling. Rhys bowed his head in shame, burying his face into her chest.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped against her, releasing a sob of his own. “I’m sorry it couldn’t have been you. I wanted it to be you. I’m a failure of a husband, for putting you through this.”

“You are an excellent husband,” Feyre protested, threading her fingers through his hair soothingly. Her voice was still raw. “I don’t blame you for this, Rhys. I love you just the same.”

He lifted his head so their tear-stained faces were level. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, still glistening in silver. “What do we do now?”

They clung to each other so tightly, as if they pressed hard enough they could redirect fate, could mold their souls together and correct the misdeed of the Cauldron.

“I don’t know,” Feyre answered, burying her face in his shoulder as if it would hide her from the truth of the world. “I suppose we have no choice but to keep going. We’ll find our footing again. Together. And if we don’t… well, maybe we can wish on the stars.”

There was a huff of air at her ear. A laugh, she guessed, or something like it, something wry and humorless. Rhys moved underneath her, and Feyre pulled away to watch in confusion as her husband rose to his feet.

He extended his hand towards her. Curious, Feyre accepted, allowing him to pull her to her feet. In a blink, they were on the rooftop, beneath the stars. She hadn’t even realized the sun had set until she was staring up at the impossibly bright cosmos.

“Where better to find our footing than under those very stars?”

She turned to him, and Rhys was staring at her the way he had on starfall, all those centuries ago. Staring at her as if she were the brightest star in the sky, as though he looked to Feyre to cast his wishes.

“Will you dance with me, wife?”

Not convinced she was capable of speech, Feyre nodded. Using the hand he still held, Rhys twirled her into his arms. And though no music played, they found their own rhythm, lost in the cadence of each other, spinning endlessly under the stars.

As they swayed under the endless expanse of sky and starlight, Feyre mused how even the brightest of stars eventually burned out, but that didn’t make them any less worth wishing on. That didn’t mean they weren’t worth fighting for.

⟡⟡⟡

[elamarth-calmagol]

What actually is LACE? (an informal essay)

What’s LACE?

Laws and Customs among the Eldar, or LACE, is the most popular section of the History of Middle Earth books.  It's available online as a PDF here: http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/T-LawsandCustoms.pdf .  There’s a lot of LACE analysis in the fandom, Silmarillion smut fics are usually labeled “LACE compliant” or “not LACE compliant”, and I’ve been seeing the document itself show up in actual fics, meaning that the characters themselves are discussing it.

LACE is an unfinished, non-canonical essay split into several parts.  It covers the sexuality of elves, which is mostly what people talk about.  It also covers elvish naming (which I want to make a whole different post about), the speed at which elves grow up, changes that happen throughout their lives, their death and rebirth, and finally the legal and moral issues of Finwe remarrying after Miriel’s death.  The discussion about rebirth conflicts with Tolkien’s later writings about Glorfindel’s re-embodiment, but to the best of my knowledge, LACE is the best or only source for most of the topics it covers.

However, LACE is not canon since it doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion.  Counting all of the History of Middle Earth as canon is literally impossible, considering Tolkien contradicts himself all over the place.  It is only useful because it has so much information that is never discussed in the actual canon.  Many people consider it canon out of convenience.

Another important thing to remember is that, other than presumably the discussion of the growth of elvish children, the information is only supposed to apply to the Eldar (meaning the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar) and not the dark-elves such as the Silvan elves and Avari.

The rest is behind the cut to avoid clogging your feeds.

Problems with LACE interpretations

But because it’s hidden in the History of Middle Earth (volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring), barely anyone actually gets the opportunity to read it.  I don’t think most people are aware that you can get it online, so it doesn't get read much.

I feel like this leads to a handful of people saying something about LACE and everyone else going along with it.  I definitely did this.  I was amazed by all the things that were in the actual essay that nobody had ever told me about, or had told me incorrectly.  For example, most people seem to believe that elves become married at the completion of sexual intercourse (whatever that means to the fic author).  In fact, LACE explicitly says that elves must take an oath using the name of Eru in order to be legally married.  Specifically: 

It was the act of bodily union that achieved marriage, and after which the indissoluble bond was complete… [I]t was at all times lawful for any of the Eldar, being both unwed, to marry thus of free consent one to another without ceremony or witness (save blessings exchanged and the naming of the Name); and the union so joined was alike indissoluble.

I’ve seen a marriage oath being included in a few stories recently, but most writers leave out the oath entirely and just have sex be automatically equivalent to marriage.  What would happen if elves had sex without swearing an oath?  I don’t know, but I’d love to see it explored.

Then there’s a footnote that might explicitly deny the existence of transgender elves... or not, but I’ve literally only seen it mentioned once or twice.  Overall, I feel like all of LACE is filtered through the handful of people who read it, and we’re missing out on a lot of metanalysis and interpretations that we could have because most fans never see the actual document.

Who wrote LACE?

I mean within the mythology of Middle Earth, of course.  Since LACE appears in the History of Middle Earth and not the Silmarillion, we can be pretty sure that J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote it and it wasn’t added to by Christopher Tolkien.  But that’s not the question here.  Remember that Tolkien’s frame narrative for all of his Middle Earth work is that he is a scholar of ancient times and is translating documents from Westron and Sindarin for modern audiences to read and understand.  The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come from the Red Book of Westmarch, and I believe The Silmarillion is meant to be Tolkien’s own writings based on his research (though it might also be an adaption of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”, but I haven't looked into that).  So what does LACE come from?

Christopher Tolkien admits in his notes that he doesn’t know.  He says, “It is clear in any case that this is presented as the work, not of one of the Eldar, but of a Man,” and I agree, because of the way it seems to be written as an ethnographic study rather than by someone who lives in the culture.  Honestly, it talks too much about how elves are seen by Men (e.g. speculating that elf-children might look like the children of Men) to be written by an elf.  This changes once it gets to the Doom of Finwe and Miriel, but that could be, and probably is, a story told to the writer by an elf who was there at the time.

Tolkien actually references Aelfwine in the second version of the text.  The original story behind The Lost Tales, which was the abandoned first version of the Silmarillion, was that a man from the Viking period named Aelfwine/Eriol stumbled onto the Straight Road and found himself on Tol Eressea.  He spoke to the elves and brought back their stories to England with him.  So it makes a lot of sense that Aelfwine would also write about the lives and customs of the elves for an audience of his own people.

Does LACE exist in Middle Earth?

I keep finding fics where first age elves discuss “the Laws and Customs” openly, as if it’s a text in their own world.  I usually get the impression that it was brought by the Noldor from Valinor.  But did the document actually exist in that time period?  For me, the answer is definitely not.

First of all, LACE was probably written by a Man, meaning it could not have dated back to Valinor in the years of the Trees, because Men hadn’t awaked yet.  In fact, the closest thing to an established frame narrative for it is that it was written by Aelfwine, who comes from the time period around 1000 CE (though Tolkien doesn’t seem to have pinned him down).  This is at least the fifth age, if not later.

But what if you don’t believe that it was written by a Man?  It still couldn’t have been written in the First Age, because it discusses the way the relationship between elves’ bodies and souls changes as ages go by.  For example:

As ages passed the dominance of their fear ever increased, ‘consuming’ their bodies... The end of this process is their ‘fading’, as Men have called it.

A lot of time has to go by in order for elves to get to the point of fading.  As a bonus, here’s another reference to the perspective of Men. LACE also discusses the dangers that “houseless feas”, which are souls of elves who do not go to Mandos after their bodies died, pose to Men.  How would they have known about that in the First Age?  It further says that “more than one rebirth is seldom recorded” (which isn’t contradicted anywhere I know of), and that’s not something you would know during your life of joy in Valinor, where almost nobody dies.  That’s something you learn after millennia of war.  This has to be a document written well after the Silmarillion ends.

So what about the sex part?  That’s all we care about, right?  Well, it is entirely possible that this was written down by the elves and Aelfwine translated it (though my impression is that he mostly recorded stories told orally to him and that elves were not very much into writing, at least in Valinor where you could get stories directly from someone who experienced them).  However, why would the elves write this down?  They know how quickly their children grow up.  They’ve seen actual marriages.  They don’t need that described to them.  And if they did have a specific document or story explaining the expectations of them when it comes to sex and marriage, why would they call it “Laws and Customs”?  That’s a very strange name for a set of rules for conduct.  I’m sure they had a list of laws written out somewhere in great detail, like our own state or national laws (that seems very in character for the Noldor, at least).  But I seriously doubt that those laws are what we’ve been given to read. LACE is not an elvish or Valinoran document.

Is LACE prescriptive or descriptive?

Here’s the other big question I’m interested in.  Prescriptive means that the document describes the way people should behave.  Descriptive means that it describes how people do behave.  And the more I worldbuild for Middle Earth and the culture of elves, the more I want to say that LACE is prescriptive in its discussion of sex, marriage, and gender roles.

But wait.  I’ve been saying for paragraphs that I think LACE is Aelfwine or another Man’s ethnographic study of elvish culture.  Then it has to be descriptive, right?

Does it?  How long do we think Aelfwine stayed with the elves?  Did he wait fifty years to see a child grow up?  Did he get to witness a wedding ceremony?  Did he meet houseless fea?  I don’t think he could have done all of that.  Maybe a different Man who spent his entire life with the elves could, but then when was this written?  When the elves were still marrying and having children in Middle Earth or when so much time had gone by that they had begun to fade already?

Whoever wrote this was told a lot of information by elves instead of experiencing it firsthand, the same way he heard the stories from the First Age from the elves instead of being there.  Maybe it was one elf who talked to him, maybe several different ones.  But did those elves accurately describe their society the way it was, give him the easiest description, or explain the way it was supposed to be?  If I was describing modern-day America, would I discuss premarital sex or just our dating and marriage customs?  Maybe people would come away from a talk with me thinking that moving in together equated to marriage for Americans in the early 21st century.  And I don’t even have an agenda to show America in a certain way, I'm just bad at explaining.  Did the elves talking to what may have been the first Man they had seen in millennia have an agenda in the way they presented themselves?

Or did the writer himself have an agenda?  Imagine going to see these beautiful, mythical, perfect beings, and you find out that they behave in the same immoral ways Men do.  Do you want to share the truth back home?  Or do you leave out things that don't match your worldview? Did Aelfwine come back wanting to tell people what elves were really like?  Or did he want to say “this is how you can be holy and perfect like an elf”?

Anyone studying the Age of Exploration will tell you that Europeans neber wrote about new cultures objectively, and often things were made up to fit the writer’s idea of what savages looked like. For example, my Native American history teacher in college told a story of how explorers described one tribe who (sensibly) didn't wear clothes as cannibals, because cannibalism and going around naked went together in their minds and not because of any actual incident.  Unbiased scholarship barely existed yet. Even Tolkien was extremely biased and tended to be imperialistic, as we all know.  There’s absolutely no reason to think that Aelfwine wasn’t biased in his own way.  (Of course, now we have to consider what biases a Danish or English man from the centuries around 1000 would have when it comes to things like gender roles. I assume he would have been more into divorce and female warriors than the elves are said to be.)

But is that what Tolkien intended? Probably not. He probably wanted LACE to be descriptive. But he also never got much of a chance to analyse the essay after the fact, which might have led to him discussing its accuracy and even the exact issues I just pointed out about explorers. Anyway, we know he's biased, and honestly, what he intended has never slowed down the fandom before.

Conclusion

In short, I take LACE to be a prescriptive document describing the way elvish culture is supposed to be, not a blueprint I have to stick to in order to correctly portray elves.  I also don’t believe the document that’s available for us to read existed even in the early Fourth Age, where The Lord of the Rings leaves off.  There maybe have been some document outlining the moral behavior of elves, as a set of laws, but thats not the Laws and Customs we have.

Of course, canon is up to you to interpret.  If you want Feanor discussing LACE with someone back in Valinor, go ahead.  If you want to throw out LACE entirely, go ahead.  It’s not even a canonical essay.  All of this analysis is honestly useless when you consider the fact that no part of LACE exists in any canonical book.

But that’s Tolkien analysis for you.

[vrishchikawrites]

If its not too dark, jow about fic where wwx's implied cannibalism is discussed/talked about by wangxian?

"Would you rather die of starvation?"

Wei Ying asks and Wangji looks away from the men before him to see Wei Ying studying them curiously.

"Starvation isn't fun," he says, "It is a sharp, maddening sensation that never leaves you alone. It feels like your body is attacking itself and eating itself inside out. When you starve, your sanity slips little by little, your head aches, your tongue dries up, and there's this gnawing pit in your stomach that overtakes your entire being."

Wangji feels dread coil in his stomach as he watches his husband.

"You reach a point where hunting for food becomes instinct. You eat anything that looks remotely edible, dried branches, watermelon rinds, crawling insects, anything. Starvation is like drowning- you can only hold your breath for so long."

The villagers exchange unnerved glances and Wei Ying turns to look at the two children on the bed, his gaze sharp and disapproving, "You cannot hold their actions against them."

"Gongzi," the leader of the men says tentatively, "Surely, it is unnatural-"

"Blaming innocent and ignorant children for what they did to survive is unnatural." Wei Ying says, "Their father acted out of despiration to save them and gave them instructions. Will you now blame children for obedience?"

"Hanguang-jun, surely you understand! Our village has faced draught ever since these children arrived and we finally know why! The Gods are displeased with us!"

Wangji looks at the children, feeling a stir of concern at their wan faces. They've already been beaten black and blue by angry villagers.

"I'll be taking the children," Wangji looks at his husband in surprise but doesn't voice any objections. It is rare for Wangji to deny his husband anything these days and Wei Ying's desires are often simple things, easy to fulfill with the greatest pleasure.

This may be a little more complicated to arrange but nothing Wangji won't happily do for his beloved.

He recognizes the stubborn expression for what it is.

Faced with a stern-eyed Yiling Patriarch and his powerful Lan husband, the villagers back away quickly, leaving the children in their care.

Wei Ying still has a stern expression but he does turn around when they leave, his eyes softening, "Apologies, Lan Zhan," he says softly, pressing a kiss to his cheek.

Wangji places a hand on Wei Ying's lower back, pressing him close for a moment in silent reassurance.

One of the children shifts and Wei Ying pulls away.

They'll talk later.

--

Wangji sets the comb aside and stares at the back of Wei Ying's head. His love is uncharacteristically silent, staring out of the window. The silence doesn't feel melancholy, just thoughtful.

He collects the strands of fragrant hair and places them over Wei Ying's shoulder, leaning forward to press a kiss to the bare nape, "Dear heart," Wei Ying hums, leaning back against him, "May I ask you a question? About your experience at the Burial Mounds."

Wei Ying is silent for a while before he laughs softly, "Aiya, Lan Zhan, I already know what you wish to ask." Wangji waits patiently for permission and Wei Ying huffs and nods, "Yes, you may."

"What did you eat?"

Wei Ying picks up Wangji's hands and presses a gentle kiss on them, lacing their fingers together. He lingers for a moment before sighing, "My Hanguang-jun doesn't deserve to hear of such grim things."

Wangji curls his fingers because that might as be a confirmation. His heart breaks for his beloved and he closes his eyes, "Your husband wishes to know, Wei Ying."

"Mostly some small critters, Lan Zhan," he admits, "Sometimes I'd dig up roots of trees. They were softer and easier to consume. I managed to catch a few birds. Bugs, earthworms, maggots, crickets- they were plentiful."

Wangji stays silent, his running his thumb cross Wei Ying's knuckles soothingly.

"Sometimes-" Wei Ying pauses, "If there was something fresh, yes, I had to harvest it."

"Wei Ying," he whispers, something in his chest twisting in horror, "You didn't feel ill? Some of the- they can't have been fresh."

Wei Ying scoffs, "Wen Chao dropped some of his victims off in the same area after a few weeks. That actually helped me find the direction to walk in."

Wangji swallows and presses his nose to Wei Ying's temple, "How much suffering do you hide from me, Wei Ying? Even now?"

His husband turns his right hand and kisses his palm in response, his gestures smooth and affectionate despite the topic of their conversation. "Lan Zhan, what purpose does it serve to remember or discuss these things?" He asks finally, "Does talking about it erase what happened? What does it do besides making you worry about me?"

"Would you be unconcerned if you were in my place?" Wangji asks. Unable to help himself, he pulls Wei Ying onto his lap and turns his husband's beautiful face towards him, "Isn't it my privelege to worry? Haven't you given me the right to know you, Wei Ying?"

Wei Ying smiles, one of his soft, private smiles that he only reserves for Wangji, "Aiya, Lan Zhan, you talk nonsense sometimes. Of course, you have the right to know me. I am yours, every part of my mind, body, and soul is yours." Wangji feels his ears become warm at the candid admission. Wei Ying, as always, he delighted by them.

"Wei Ying," he reprimands when his husband nuzzles his jaw in a clear attempt to distract him.

Wei Ying sighs and pulls away a bit, "Don't you think that life has given us enough pain already, Lan Zhan? Why add more by actively seeking memories of unpleasant times."

Wangji frowns but he can't deny the wisdom of those words. Wei Ying's capacity to heal has always amazed and worried him.

Slender fingers tap his cheek and he looks into his husband's smiling eyes, "I would rather remember the times I spent with you, just like this. Because Lan Zhan, all of our pain is in our past. It cannot touch us now. As long as Lan Zhan exists, Wei Ying is safe and loved."

Wangji cups his husband's face and draws him close, "Wei Ying is safe and loved," he agrees and kisses him.

That's all that matters.

[euphoricsunflowers]

steal me with a kiss — lee hoseok/wonho

a/n: this was the most self-indulgent thing i’ve ever written and believe me, as someone who’s masterlist is like half wonho, mostly everything i write is self indulgent. this fic has consumed so much of my soul, it’s probably my favorite thing i’ve ever written honestly so pls enjoy 👀👀 also big thank you to leila, jazzy, nae, and rosie for listening to me while i was writing this when i would not shut up about it <33

word count: 4.0k (i kNOW)

content: sub!wonho, dom!fem!reader, lots of kissing, hickeys and marks, oral (f receiving), fingering (m receiving), pegging, dacryphilia/crying, aftercare scene, some angst, he’s a bit different than i usually write him, not exactly bratty but up until the end he’s not the sweet bunny that i usually write him as :,)

summary: so pull me closer and kiss me hard, i’m gonna pop your bubblegum heart.

in short: wonho is a daydream and a nightmare all wrapped up with a pretty little bow. he’s the cutest thing to ever exist, his body is impossible to take your gaze off of, his smile wrecks your heart and his smirk makes you lose your mind. he’s an unforgettable beauty, and the worst thing is: he knows it.

you’re not sure what exactly you are with him, whether you’re dating or you’re just friends with benefits or if you’re just so wrapped around his finger that it’s impossible to escape.

you remember the moment you got hooked on the pink-haired beauty.

the scene is set at minhyuk’s party last year. you remember how minhyuk even warned you. he warmed you how the pretty boy with the muscles and the pink hair picks his target and steals their heart ruthlessly, sucking them in with cute smiles and dark smirks. it’s like he doesn’t even have a heart of his own.

you remember the way he pulled you away to a room where you were alone.

you remember how his hands wandered as you dragged your nails against his skin and wrapped your hands around his neck, feeling satisfaction from how you could feel his pulse, feel his breaths in and out even if you weren’t actually choking him yet. however, there wasn’t a single bit of fear in those dark brown eyes. you kissed him while he smiled against your lips with you still holding his neck. he tasted like the sweetest liquor and you wanted nothing more than to get drunk on this pretty thing, “you’re so pretty with my hands around your neck.”

you remember how he still smirked and winked when you murmured how you’d love to ruin him. his touch kept you just as locked against him as you kissed him until you were satisfied, pulling back to simply stare at him, his pretty lips all parted and puffy from your bites, eyes half-lidded giving him the impression of both the predator and the prey.

you remember how his hands wandered under your clothes, holding your waist against him, and you remember how perfect his body looked up close, how you’d kill just to get your teeth on his neck and chest, how you were already imagining him shivering before you even knew what this boy’s presence would do to you.

and you distinctly remember how he pulled away from it all so easily, left a kiss on your cheek, and disappeared out the door without a trace. ever since that moment, it’s been him in your head, his smile and his eyes and his lips and his body that floods your thoughts.

and you can tell that he loves it, he thrives off of the attention. he’s constantly flirting, sending you sweet messages just to keep you thinking about him (there’s really no need to, you already are most of the time), etc. it’s enough to drive you mad.

most of your interactions are just his teasing words, his pretty smile, and/or his intoxicatingly beautiful body, leaving you starstruck. it’s either that or he drags you away to make out. maybe you’ll wrap your hands around his neck or maybe you’ll bite his lip and taste the blood or maybe something else entirely and then disappear right from under your grasp once again. he’s an enigma.

and then he calls you one day, saying all the sweet nothings he always says before getting to what he actually wants you for, “you should come over, baby.”

“i’m busy, wonho, maybe next week,” you murmur, but it’s a lie. you know it’s a lie and, perceptive as he is, he knows it too.

“but you said that last week! are you avoiding me?” he pouts. you can’t see it but you know he does, he makes the kind of voice he does when he pouts.

“what? no, i’m not avoiding you—,” bullshit, you absolutely were, “— but i have things to do. i’m sorry the world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“yours does,” he mumbles under his breath jokingly (though he’s not wrong), “c’mon, i just want a little bit of your time! don’t you miss kissing me?” yes, yes you absolutely do. take away all of his smirkings and teasing words and he’s absolutely heavenly to kiss, perfectly melting against you in a way that’ll make your head spin. his bruised lips haunt your memories, his soft, dazed eyes are all you want to see.

“i- wonho, please,” you plead, but knowing he’d already won you over, “don’t talk like that. you’re playing so dirty.”

he giggles, “hmmm, but don’t you wanna kiss me? bite my lips? kiss me until i’m aching? leave bruises on my hips from how tightly you hold me-?”

you hang up the phone on him.

god, why did he have to talk like that? it makes your cheeks flush, so flustered from his words, so wrapped around the idea of doing all those things to him it makes your head spin.

wonho. the boy with the softest giggles and sweetest eye smile and the smirks that drive you wild and the body that would make anyone’s knees weak. maybe he’s so used to people wanting to be ruined by him and that’s why you interest him so much because there’s no other reason he’d give you so much of his attention.

he doesn’t exactly give it out to you freely, but it’s so much more than anyone else gets. you’re sure it’s because he adores the attention, so he doesn’t mind if you’re a bit more dominant than he’s used to (he might even like it).

it’s so obvious how much you’ve fallen for the pretty boy with pink hair, the lovesick feeling in your heart never quite dissipating. it’s obvious because even after all the attempts at trying to avoid him today, you’re there knocking at his door, and he’s pulling you in quickly as he shuts the door and pins you to the wall as fast as he can, keeping himself as close as possible to you as he murmurs, “hi, baby.”

it’s incredible how breathless it leaves you, but you pull yourself together almost instantly, pulling him closer by his waist, humming in contentment as your hands rub up and down his waist, feeling the muscles that drive you so desperately crazy, “hello there, my pink prince.”

he giggles, “you like my hair a lot, don’t you?”

“guilty as charged,” you murmur, raising one of your hands to grip him by the back of the neck, giving him no chance of escape as you press a kiss to his lips. he smiles because fuck he’s always smiling like the cheeky bitch he is. his smile is so beautiful but it’s always laced with the right amount of cocky energy to keep you on edge.

he pulls back just to murmur, teasing in the way he speaks, “you can kiss me harder than that,” and so you do. you grip his jaw so tightly you just hope it hurts, kissing him with the intention of leaving his lips aching with cuts and bruises. he moans as you kiss him, knowing it’ll drive you insane, and of course, it does.

once you’re done with his lips, having sufficiently bruised them up, you start to kiss down his jaw, bringing your hands back down to his waist to keep him against you, before pulling away, “was that hard enough for you, baby?” you ask with a mocking tone when you say the pet name he loves so much.

“nothing’s enough for me, baby,” he breathes a bit heavily, still with that stupid grin on his face, and you roll your eyes, “you know you love me.”

you sigh, because god he’s right but you want to wipe that smirk off of his face. ‘of course i do but god you really love to watch me suffer don’t you?’ your head is so clouded with feelings of him you can’t exactly boil down to one word. is it love? or do you just want to see him break, see all of his act break down? “you're going to drive me insane,” you mumble under your breath, “you can’t bring me here just to taunt me.”

“i can do what i want, baby, your heart is mine to break,” he murmurs, but you’ve had enough of his attitude.

it’s your turn to smirk, pulling him in by the collar of his shirt, whispering, “just like how your body mine to wreck, right, baby?” he whimpers. god, it’s barely audible, but he whimpers and it’s everything you’ve been wanting this whole time. you don’t say anything about it because he’d obviously pretend it didn’t happen. but it did, and it was the most satisfying thing you’ve ever heard.

his break in composure doesn’t last long at all, “well there’s a bright pink strap-on in the closet calling your name,” he murmurs, leaning in just to taunt you, “so why don’t you ruin me?”

it’s startling because the furthest you’ve ever gone was make out until your lips hurt and touch each other, groaning and moaning as your lips made messes out of each other, but he doesn’t look even a bit hesitant, so you decide you might as well take the opportunity. maybe he’s got you wrapped around his finger, but you’ll have your thighs wrapped around his head soon enough, “hm, how about instead you get on your knees and earn it?”

he slips for a second time, somewhat startled and almost flustered by your words, but he recovers just as fast as the first time, “of course, i’d love to,” he murmurs, sinking to his knees like it’s where he’s meant to be, his place being before you. he looks up at you with half-lidded eyes and a smirk, and all you want is to see him fall apart, it’s everything your soul craves, “can i?”

“if you say please? maybe,” you see the way he rolls his eyes at your words, still with that grin on his face, but he plays your game.

“can i please take off your pants and panties so i can pleasure you so when you’re satisfied enough you fuck me until i see stars?”

you groan, “that attitude isn’t gonna get you far, baby, but go ahead,” he fumbles with the zipper of your jeans, pulling them down along with your underwear so he could get them off of you. still up against the wall, you let him pull them off, watch him as he sets them next to his bed.

he crawls even closer to you until he’s so close to your cunt that if he leaned in just a little bit more he could give it a lick. he looks up for permission one last time, so oddly obedient even when he’s so cocky.

you nod, giving him the go-ahead to go in and lick up and down, fucking you with his tongue, sucking on your clit gently but increasing the intensity once it’s not enough. he holds the sides of your thighs to balance himself and to also be able to touch you, but what if you....“hands behind your back, wonho.”

“oh, you say my name like it’s a weapon, baby,” he leans back with a smirk to whisper while looking you in the eye. you force his head back to your heat with your hand, though you can feel him smile even more. despite this, he does keep his hands behind his back for the duration he spends on his knees eating you out. he’s cute with his hands behind his back, you muse. he’s incredibly skilled at it, and you wonder just how many times he’s been in between a girl’s legs. the thought makes you jealous in a way it absolutely shouldn’t.

“make me cum, sweetheart, and i’ll fuck you as hard as you want,” you mumble, gripping the bubblegum pink hair on his head as he works even harder to help you reach that high.

the second it hits, your moans halt for just a moment before becoming louder as you start to heavily grind against his face, using him for every last bit of pleasure you can before letting him go. he falls back onto the ground, breathing even more heavily than you, “sorry if that was too much.”

“don’t be, i like being useful,” he murmurs, before getting back onto his knees once he recovers somewhat, that stupid smile back on his face, “do you want me to keep going, baby?”

“stand up,” you order, and the second he’s up you’ve got his jaw in your hand, pulling him close, “go get that strap-on you were talking about, undress, and get on the bed. you’ve got lube right?”

he pulls your hand away from his face, pressing a teasing kiss to your palm, “of course i do, babe, don’t worry about it,” he winks before disappearing into his closet only to reappear with exactly what you asked for. he does what you ask, having a somewhat shy moment as you throw off your shirt and watch him undress, but he decides to make a show of it, sexily throwing off his shirt. he keeps that lust-filled, seductive eye contact throughout him taking off the rest of them, leaving his perfect body in all its glory as he sits on his bed, docile just like you asked.

you move from your spot in front of the wall for the first time, and without any conscious thoughts, your hands are already on him, rubbing his chest before you press kisses to it, “how about i mark you up? would you like that?”

“y/n,” he breathes with that same smile, “you can do whatever you please with me,” every word out of his mouth is enough to wreck any chance of this just being an innocent hook-up because god you need him to be yours. as much as you’re already his, he needs to be yours.

“but do you want me to leave marks?” you ask again.

“i want you to ruin me, baby, of course i do,” he groans as you make your choice to bite down on his collarbone, settling on just leaving one mark for now. you suck on the freshly-bitten skin and kiss it one last time as an apology before moving on, but you can tell from the way his breath picked up that he loves it just as much as you do.

“your body is so perfect, i just want to leave endless love bites, but we’d never get to the main event,” you say as he licks his lips in excitement, “and i can tell by your hard cock that you wanna get there sooner rather than later.”

“what can i say? i’m made to be loved and ruined,” his words once again leave you wrecked. how he always knew exactly what to say to someone like you (who’s not exactly a submissive person) is beyond you.

“and ruined you’ll be, now spread your legs, rest one on my shoulder,” he does as told, placing his right leg on your shoulder and keeping his legs spread wide for you.

you put some lube on your fingers, and glance over at him, just to make sure he’s ready. you work your first finger in there as he makes a face of discomfort, but the second you were about to pull out and try to comfort him, he starts moaning so, so softly, begging under his breath for more.

it’s a bit startling of a change, but it disappears somewhat quickly (not as quick as the first two times) when he gets himself together, “baby,” he murmurs softly, “more.”

“you’re so demanding,” you laugh endearingly, but the change of pace is deceptive; he’s still smirking even with a finger in his ass. you press another finger in, and his breath hitches, but he still manages to recover his composure rather quickly.

your movements are gentle and small at first, but you gradually pick it up, especially when he murmurs, “come on, you can do it harder than that,” he bites but there’s barely any venom in his words. he then has to hold a hand against his mouth to hold back the moan that followed you moving a bit more roughly. you don’t stop him nor do you call him out, but you can see him slipping away. It feels incredible.

“don’t you wanna fuck me now? drag your nails against my skin? pull my hair and make it hurt?”

“be patient,” is all you murmur back in return.

he groans in annoyance this time, pulling himself as close as he can to you, holding onto you to keep himself upright, “why are you trying to resist me? god, you know you want to ruin me, why are you holding back? what do you have to lose by giving in and giving me hell?”

his words leave you shuddering, wrecked with thoughts of him and only him. why were you holding back? because you wanted to not be the only one that’s a complete and utter mess, you wanted to watch him crumble to pieces because you didn’t want to think about how he’s got you so bad, but you’re as compliant with his demands as he is obedient with your orders, “flip over, get on all fours.”

you cover the strap in lube, careful (somewhat) in the way you enter him, slightly enjoying the strained look on his face even if you don’t say a word about it, “you can move now, don’t be gentle with me,” he mumbles, and you’re more than happy to fulfill that request even if he’s still so demanding for someone in his place.

you start to move and his whines become gentle moans as he gets more comfortable with the pace, but you try to be a bit harder and rougher and you also reach your hand around to jerk him off lazily, just for the added stimulation.

“you look so pretty,” the words leave your mouth absentmindedly, and it’s precious to see how everything is starting to affect him more, how he tries desperately to keep himself composed, but his cheeks are flushed and he bites his lip to try and hold back. he’s remarkably good at keeping his cool, but you’ll break him sooner or later. you just have to be patient.

“a-ah, fuck, you can be rougher, i want more, please,” he admits, pushing back onto your strap slightly.

“you’re gonna have to beg for that, baby,” you prompted.

“please! i-i’m pretty when i cry, so make me! i know you think about being so rough with me until i break and j-just sob, just make it happen already! please!” it’s not exactly begging, more just trying to tempt you, but that’s exactly what this boy is: tempting. every part of him naturally pulls you in, keeps you locked against him no matter who’s in control, it’s just something about him that makes him irresistible and it’s infuriating.

but you give in, like always, fucking him harder until you can faintly hear his cries under the sounds of skin hitting skin. even still, he’s not satisfied, “pull my hair,” he breathes, “hurt me.”

you groan but reach your hand out to pull his hair, loving the way he yelps, crying out as you mutter, “my perfect little bubblegum slut, aren’t you, wonho?”

“y-yes!” he whines, shouting out the words you’ve been aching to hear, “fuck, god, i’m yours!”

“then cum for me, baby,” you mumble as his body almost gives in as he pleasure crests and he cums, moaning like the pretty pink whore he is while his tears stain the white pillowcase and he grips the white sheets like his life depends on it. he cries out moans while his cum gets all over your hand and some on the bedsheets.

his body just completely gives in when he cums though, and he can’t hold himself up on his elbows and knees any longer, so he just falls against the bed as you pull out of him, leaving an absolutely wrecked version of the heartbreaking boy that once inhabited that body.

he’s shaking and reeling from his high as you get back on the bed with him, pulling him close to press kisses to his forehead and hoping to provide some sense of comfort as aftercare. his head rests against your chest as he tentatively wraps his arm around your waist.

you whisper, “you’re okay, angel, i’ll take care of you. whatever you want, now,” and though he was already crying, you can tell he starts crying harder, burying his face into your chest so he doesn’t have to face you, “what’s wrong? wonho? are you okay?”

he doesn’t hold back the second he doesn’t have to, “fuck, i think i’m in love with you,” he murmurs, so soft it’s hard to catch. the air is quiet and tense for a few moments, “i think i love you, y/n, i don’t know what to do.”

his confession leaves you speechless. after all this time of pining after the cruel-hearted boy with pink hair and a cute smile, learning that it wasn’t all one-sided feels like a dream.

“i, uhm, i guess you don’t feel the same,” he raises his head to smile at you one last time, but it’s not like the other ones. this one makes you so sad, aching to protect the vulnerable heart of the boy in front of you, “thats... okay. i guess my charms didn’t work as well on you. bummer...”

“i- no, wonho, i do. i do feel the same,” you bring your hand up to run through his hair, and he leans into your touch, “you’ve got me, angel, you had me from the first kiss.”

“at min’s party last year?” he smiles half-heartedly when you nod, “god, i really thought you’d just be another one, but i got so wrapped up in it all myself, so i kept just trying to keep you at arm’s length, but you just persisted and i don’t- i don’t know what to do anymore,” he sighs, adjusting to rest his head on your chest but looking at you this time, “do you, uhm, do you really mean that? you really feel the same? this isn’t just some way to get back at me, right?”

“i’ve spent too much of my time thinking about you and your lips and your body not mean that,” you hear him giggle, and it brings your heart a sense of peace to hear that, “genuinely, i’ve never met someone like you, wonho. you’re so confident and sure of yourself, but you easily became exactly what i wanted and i just didn’t know what hit me.”

“i didn’t know what to expect at minhyuk’s party, when your hands were around my neck, i didn’t expect to love it so much. everyone always wanted me in control, so that’s what i did,” he explains. it feels like he's just babbling at this point, but you still listen to his babbled as you play with his hair, “but i loved how it felt to say those things and to see it all unfold in your eyes, i wanted you to be unable to resist me.”

“well i suppose you were successful in that,” you murmur, holding him close as you, “but, you do realize that i only know that act, right? i’ve fallen for what i can see, but at some point, you’re gonna have to let me fall in love with you.”

he sighs, and you can see the most adorable of pouts on his lips (ah, you’re falling for him already), but he concedes, “i- please don’t break my heart-,” a strong demand coming from him of all people, “-promise me.”

“i promise,” you echo, “i promise.”

—

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[professorspork]

Remembering your masterclass of a mini-fic made me think of Ruby finding the tip of Crocea Mors after, operating on the blissful misunderstanding that Cinder stole her friend's soul in two and broke it in two killing Penny and. God her whole friendship with Jaune was built on oversharing about weapons and making his feel like more than just a hand-me-down, and now that memory is, in bloody pieces.

(Well if you’re going to bandy about compliments like masterclass I’m gonna just lose my mind completely and continue it, even if that means only barely addressing the thing you actually brought up. Sorry about that. And it’s possible that neither of us knows what “blissful” means.)--

It takes the better part of an hour to coax Ruby away from Penny’s body.

(Or at least, Blake thinks it does. It’s a little hard know for sure, because time is weird here. Like when you get lost in a good book and suddenly look up and realize you’re sitting in the dark because the sun went down without you noticing, only somehow in reverse-- the shock coming not from the passage of time, but from the nagging sense that it refuses to. There’s a stillness here that makes her teeth ache; makes the hair on her upper arms prickle like she’s being watched.)

She doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing she can say, nothing that can make it better, and she knows that, but. She’s never felt quite so unequal to a task in her life. She’s not Ruby, with her usually-boundless optimism and hope; she’s not Weiss, all aggressive support and unexpected insight; she’s not--

She’s not---

(She’s not thinking about Yang, she’s not, because if she lets herself the thought will consume her, and it won’t leave room for anything else. She can’t fall apart. Ruby needs her, and Yang would want her to take care of Ruby. So that’s what Blake’s going to do.)

But everything she can think of to say feels hollow and cruel. What can they do? Bury her, in this place time’s forsaken? Promise to come back for her, as though escape is possible? The last time Ruby was this miserable, at Schnee Manor with Yang-- 

--(don’t think about Yang)--

-- well. Blake hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but her ears are sensitive. And thinking back on it now, it’s nothing anyone said that snapped Ruby out of her spiral. It was breaking glass and Jaune’s boots on the stairs; it was the thought that--  

That Penny needed her.

“Ruby, we have to keep going,” she says softly. Rubbing at the nape of Ruby’s neck the way her mom used to, when Blake was young and couldn’t sleep after a nightmare. 

As though there’s any waking up from this.

“I can’t.”

“I know it’s hard, but we have to, we--”

“I can’t. I-- I c-can’t find any more bodies, Blake. I can’t.”

(Blake knows what it feels like, to be impaled. This is worse.)

“We w--” (She swallows back her won’t. She doesn’t want to lie.) “I’m alive. You’re alive. If anyone else fell after us, they might be-- I mean at the very least, Yang’s probably--”

“I know,” Ruby interrupts-- not testy, exactly, just simple and clear. “No offense, but if I thought Yang were dead, I wouldn’t-- I mean, I couldn’t--”

Blake can relate to that feeling, too. She squeezes Ruby’s shoulder, hoping it comes across as reassuring instead of like the needy grasp for her own reassurance it really is. “Then let’s go find her.”

“But I...” Ruby looks mournfully back down at Penny’s body; at the way her own is now covered in Penny’s blood, from clinging to her so tight.

The question’s out of Blake’s mouth before she can really consider what it is she’s offering:

“Do you want me to carry her? Take her with us?”

(She would do it, if Ruby asked her to. Gladly. She’s done it before; she’s stronger than she looks.)

The question seems to take Ruby aback; knocks a little bit of life back into her vacant gaze. “No, I-- no. Thank you. We should... let her rest. She never got to--” Tears gather again at the corners of her eyes, but she holds them off, this time. “-- I always told her she never understood the glory of naps. I bet she was looking forward to that.”

It’s a horrifying thought, really, but it’s the best they have. So they pick themselves up, and off they go-- Ruby casting forlorn glances over her shoulder every few steps, but always, always moving forward.

They travel along the tree line, so they’ve got eyes on the beach and the forest at once. Occasionally they call names-- arbitrary, hopeless, unsure of who might be down here with them-- but mostly they sniffle, and keep to themselves.

It’s Ruby who spots the glint of metal first. “Crocea Mors!” she gasps, running, which-- seriously? Blake can see the sword, but taken out of context like this she has no idea how Ruby could tell what she was looking at from so far off. Only maybe it’s not so surprising; the only person with better recall for weapons than Ruby that Blake’s ever met is Velvet. Then: “Oh, no--”

It’s Crocea Mors, alright. 

Half of it. Covered in blood.

“Do you think--?”

They both saw the stab wound in Penny’s stomach; both saw the lack of burns accompanying it. If Cinder did this, if she broke Jaune’s sword in two and used it to cut Penny down, then Jaune-- Jaune’s probably--

(But no, she can’t think like that. She’s only carrying half a weapon herself right now, and she’s still standing. It doesn’t have to mean anything.)

(Only now she’s dwelling on it, thinking about the thin line of gold that knit Gambol Shroud back together once before. Thinking about the gold on his shield. And it’s unbearable.)

“It was the last he had of--”

“It was his great-great-grandfather’s,” Ruby says, pointedly enough that Blake realizes if she’d managed to say Pyrrha’s name aloud, the girl before her would have shattered like the sword in her hand. “We’ve lost-- so many people, and all we can do is get used to it, carve them up and carry the pieces like it’s normal, and--”

A voice cuts through the quiet, interrupting them:

“Weiss? Ruby? Anyone?!”

Jaune’s alive Weiss fell that’s Jaune that was Jaune--

They take off running into the woods.

They find Jaune in a clearing, Crescent Rose mounted safely on his back, bracing his mouth between cupped hands as he hollers. “Blake? Yang? Hello?”

When he gets a good look at Ruby when they emerge from the trees-- at the crimson painting her front, at the severed steel held in her hands-- he goes silent.

Then he falls to his knees, and sobs:

“She asked me to, she asked me to, I’m so sorry-- but Winter’s-- it worked, it’s what she wanted, please, I’m so sorry, she told me--”

The words don’t make any sense... 

... until suddenly they do.

Blake thought that surely, after everything, she knew all of the ways that devastation could paint Ruby Rose’s features. The pain and sorrow and grief and rage and impotent, helpless shock.

She was wrong.

[isolemnlyswear]

Hi! I have a James Potter request where the reader and James are partners in potions class and they’re brewing amortentia and they smell each other, but the reader doesn’t do well with feelings, so she kind of ignores him the next day and idk what happens after that but I’d like a fluffy ending please 😗💕

never felt like this before

young!James Potter x fem!reader

a/n : well. this fic was a trip. it deleted twice, after i’d written almost all of it, and it took me long enough to write already. so, i present to you, my stress-bringer. please don’t let this flop i sound so pitiful but seriously-

taglist : @oldschoolkiddo @amourtentiaa @anchoeritic @faeinorbit @tomriddleswifey @inks-and-jinx @blacksbooksx @punkrific @truly-insatiable @cedricsbrowncurls @orifortheweeknd @fallin-4-ya

---

"Hope we do something interesting today, m’bored," James huffs, arm around your shoulder, and at first, you pay no mind to the gesture. You'd always been affectionate with him, as he’s one of your closest friends, but lately, there’s this burning in the pit of your stomach - this aching, both when you are with and without him, like your soul was screaming for more. More of what, you don’t know; rather, you don’t want to admit to yourself.

And then, suddenly, something snaps. You’re now acutely aware of the way his hands - God, those hands - are draped so delicately around you, and you want so desperately to... No, you told yourself. You can't possibly want more, you have a wonderful best friend who doesn't want anything more from you, so why should you?

“You in there, Y/N?” he teases, arm dropping to poke your side lightly, effectively breaking you from your trance.

“Hmm? Oh! Sorry, what did y’say?” you say with a shake of your head, receiving a chuckle from the brunette.

“You're in another world today, huh?” he says, tilting his head, and a blush spreads across the apples of your cheeks. He sighs contentedly, expression indicating a change in subject. “Said that I wanted something interesting to happen today, s’boring.”

“Well, maybe Slughorn will have some excitement in store for us today,” you reply with a cheeky smile, one that James returns, the glint in his cerulean irises shining with the warm light emitting from the corridor torches. 

“If not, you might just have to entertain me,” the brunette replies with a grin, and although the connotation of the comment was not an inherently flirty one - you assume - your cheeks are rouging at the remark, requiring you to clear your throat - and mind - as you step over the threshold and into the classroom, inhaling sharply. 

But when the oxygen fills your lungs, there’s a heavy aroma along with it; your eyes are narrowing at how familiar it is, and you turn to James. 

“What’s that smell?” you inquire, and he shrugs in response, taking in a thick breath of his own, sighing contentedly once the air hits his lungs. 

“It smells... good,” he remarks, and you nod in affirmation, parting your lips to ask exactly what the boy smells, but you’re interrupted by Slughorn. 

“Students, students! Settle down, would you? Alright, today is a rather... fun one, I think.” he says, wiping his forehead. 

“What will we be brewing, sir?” a curious Hufflepuff asks, and he laughs. 

“You won’t technically be brewing anything,” he starts, and miscellaneous sighs - some of relief, some of discontent - air from your classmates. You simply look to James, who raises a brow. “Can anyone tell me what this is?” No response. “Alright then. Does amortentia ring a bell? Anyone do their reading?”

“It’s-” you start, for you know the answer, but your lips clamp shut when you realize the significance of what you’re about to say. 

“Its scent mirrors what you most desire, sir.” You sigh in relief at the Ravenclaw who answers instead of you, and Slughorn nods in confirmation.

“Ah, yes. Now, come on now, take a whiff, and you’ll write down your specific smell. No wrong answers, here.” 

The rest of your peers scramble to smell the bubbling potion, but you’re frozen in place, heart beating erratically and breathing ragged until James taps you lightly on the shoulder. 

“You alright?” he asks, and you nod firmly in response, shaking your head before stepping up to the cauldron. 

You hover over it for but a moment, and then you breathe. Your lungs swell with the eupnea that bleeds into you, and layers of the aroma unfold the more you inhale, for you’ve found that the scent is intoxicating, and you can’t bring yourself to stop. You breathe until you can pinpoint the exact scent, and- 

A spice-filled shampoo, warm with cinnamon and musk. Broom polish, and something metallic - like the scent of something gold, something shiny. And licorice, a bit of pastry. The aroma overwhelms you, and you stumble back, running into the desk behind you. 

“Whoa there, watch it,” James says, laughing slightly as his hand presses against the nape of your back to keep you from falling any more, and you recoil from his touch, shaking your head. 

“I-I have to go,” you say, stepping over to Slughorn. “I, um-” your mind scrambles as you think of an excuse, “-I feel kind of unwell, mind if I-I go see Madam Pomfrey?” you lie - well, technically, you do feel unwell, but the cause of it isn’t something the hospital wing could fix - and Slughorn sighs, but nods, and you stumble out of the classroom and out to the bathroom, taking in gulps of non-amortentia related air; you can no longer smell the potion, but it lingers in your nose, and you want nothing more than to smell no more of the delightful scent.

Because that’s the problem - it’s utterly divine, and you know just why. 

Because you’re in love with James Potter. 

And the feeling that was burning in your gut before, it’s roaring like a fire now, and you crumple over as tears fall from your eyes. 

You’ve never felt like this before, and it’s just too much. You don’t want to depend on someone that probably doesn’t want you back. Merlin, James was so calm in that classroom that he probably just smelled a broomstick, or something harmless enough. Not his best friend. 

That’s just what he was. Your best friend. Not someone you could pine after, no, because it would ruin everything.

So you made the executive decision to avoid the brunette for as long as possible. 

Which wasn’t long - twenty-six hours later, when you were tucked in the corner of the library, and hadn’t spoken to James for a whole day, James suddenly stood over you, eyebrows knit in what seemed like confusion. 

“Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere, I-” he starts, and you feel tears welling in your e/c eyes. 

“Stop.” you cut him off with one word, lip trembling. And Merlin, you thought you’d be able to put up a front, but it’s impossible with how much you’ve missed him in a mere day. 

“What- oh, Y/N, what’s wrong?” The irritation that was there before is gone, and it’s replaced with pure affection as he sits down next to you, arm tracing delicate circles into your shoulder. And you try to pull away, but it’s not his arm that’s anchoring you to his body - you just can’t bring yourself to stop as you let your head fall weakly into his chest, inhaling his scent.

The exact scent you’d smelled a few days prior. You’re flooded with emotions, and you can’t help the sobs that escape from your lips. 

“J-james, can I just-” you say through strained breaths “-ask you something.”

“F’course, anything,” he replies, and you smile a watery smile. 

“What did you smell in-in the amortentia?” 

And it’s his turn to blush, while his free hand adjusts his glasses.

“Well, it’s - it’s why I wanted to find you so bad. I smelled you, and-” he’s cut off as you hug him almost bone-crushingly, arms tight around his ribs now. 

“I smelled you, James. And I don’t know- I don’t know how to deal with it, the way I feel for you is- it’s-” you try to find the right words, and James beats you to it.

“All-consuming. If it’s the same as what I feel, I hope.” You nod in response, and a moment passes before you speak. 

“What does that mean for us, then?” 

“It means that I love you. And if it’s, well, returned, then... I’d ask you to be my girlfriend, if you’ll have me.” he says, brushing a strand of hair from your face, and you smile, nodding eagerly.

“It’s returned tenfold, James.” 

“Well, that’s just impossible, my love.” 

“It’s very possible. I love you a lot, James Potter.” 

“I love you more, my sweet girl.”