#anyway i think it would be very heartbreaking if the detective died before the love confession so

[loremaster]

i went crazy (as i am known to do) and drew BOTH of each daily prompt for @raincodeshipweek! nothing past PG-13 here. double check the tags for ships below - or if you want to be surprised, jump in and see them all here:

Hurt/Comfort - Clockmare - I remember a while ago @pixelatedraindrops did a poll over which of the two to draw sick in bed… Halara's cat allergies won out, but I thought the opposite scenario of Fubuki needing recovery from overusing her rewind powers was cute too! This is a very cute ship that needs more love!

Healing - Kokolight - This is *THE* ship that's all about healing. (Emotional healing at least.) Yuma learns a lot from Vivia about how to embrace the uncomfortable parts of life… and Vivia learns a lot from Yuma about how not to let that diminish your spark. Plus, by the end, they understand what each other’s been through more than any other characters... almost. Also, dat height difference. Good shit.

Dancing - Aetheria trio - Similar bonding over shared grief here! But this time there's three of them! Big 3 of Cups energy. It's a shame we never really got to see much genuine interaction between Yoshiko, Waruna, and Kurane during the game's story… but sometimes the most fun parts are what we get to imagine for ourselves, hmm? Anyway, yeah. These three are bonded for life. (Too bad it wasn't a very long one...)

Domesticity - Viviakou - There's nothing funnier than two guys with opposite behaviors. Vivia wedges himself into the crack between the bed and the wall as far as he can. Yakou spreads out and takes up more room than the bed even has. Plus, he snores. Disasters, both of them. …I was going to try and come up with another ship for this prompt, since - spoilers - there'll be more Viviakou later on... but I thought of this image and laughed hard enough I couldn't not draw it!

Sun/Rain - Yakou/Amaterasu Researcher. - One of the happiest moments of Yakou's life was when his wife got him a boat for his birthday. A whole boat!!! A portable office! Never had he felt so loved before. …Never has the sun shone that brightly again. He hates the rain.

Stars - Clockbolt - Fubuki is staring out wistfully at the rain clouds, lamenting that she cannot see her star - the one her parents bought for her. But luckily - “Don't worry, Princess, I'll be your star…!” says Desuhiko. Bolder, brighter, and much, much closer than her faraway prize…Yeah, I think Fubuki would eat that up. This is a fun ship. I like that Desuhiko - against all odds - treats Fubuki like a person. And ironically I think that would make her like him more!!

Flowers - Furroughs - What else could I have drawn for 'flowers,' honestly? It's a cheap bouquet of Black-Eyed Susans! I can't see this as a healthy relationship, honestly, but that's what makes it fun! Imagining them as childhood friends who used to be really close but grew apart in adulthood strikes just the right chord of melancholy with me. Even more heartbreaking if you see them both as trans - imagine Yakou's so excited to have a friend like him, and then as soon as Seth transitions he's like "you don't know me. never speak to me again." Mmm, I do so love to put Yakou through the wringer.

Memories - Yumagami - Sometimes you don't know what you've got until it's gone. I imagine Yuma goes through phantom pains after their pact gets broken, not knowing whose laughter keeps ringing through his ears, what's up with that tingly spot on his cheek, or why he can't look at a barrel without his face feeling hot. (Though, he's probably astute enough to put together the clues...)

First Times - Viviakou - The first time Yakou heard Vivia say that catchphrase, it didn't feel very good.

Final Moments - Viviakou - ...The last time didn't feel very good either.

Swap - Vivia/Amaterasu Researcher - Okay, hear me out. If Yakou had managed to run up that hill, make a deal with Kodaka, and get him to swap their places - that is, he dies while his wife survives and becomes Chief of the Nocturnal Detective Agency - I think Vivia would think the same of Mrs. Furio that he did of Mr. Furio (that is, helplessly smitten). EXTREMELY underrated. Please ship this with me.

Alternate Universe - Zilara - My personal pet rarepair!!! Alas, our two confident creature-lovers have been kept from each other by the cruel hands of fate. So, I cope by drawing them getting fancy little drinks together. This is an homage to Boba AU, of course, but honestly, while drawing this, I was picturing them as students at the local prestigious college campus. Maybe they're members of frat Alpha Beta Omega or something.

Past/Future - Makoyuma - This one's more of a concept/pitch than a fully explored scene, but hear me out: time travel AU. What if Yuma meets a mysterious masked stranger who turns out to be a tech-savvy time traveler from a destroyed future... but then also turns out to be himself, somehow? How is there someone who looks exactly like him, 5000 years from now? What's the connection between Yuma and Makoto? And why are they so drawn to each other?

...The last prompt for the official Ship Week is a free day - so I'm going to take the day off! Though, there are a lot of other ships I lament not shouting out here - Kokobolt, Kokomare, Twimare, Fubugami, just to name a few!!! But I'm gonna give myself a break for now. Don't worry, you'll see more art from me soon - maybe even print versions of this, and some of my other Rain Code fanart. And if there's a specific ship or scenario you really can't wait to see... my commissions are open! ;D

[florvinhara]

❣ !! :D (😘❤❤)

agskdgsks thank you SO much!!! 💖💖💖 (both for the prompt AND for screenshotting/resending ahjdhdjs) hope you enjoy!

a dying kiss (the detective dies pre-love confession)

----

There's so much blood.

Enough that it paints the air with a misty red haze, enough that Adam can taste it there, metallic and cloying, making his head spin from the sheer quantity.

It belongs to both his team and their enemies, and now that the battle is won- of course it is- he will go around to each member of the unit, assess their injuries and memorize each one as if he had borne it himself, watch the wounds heal. It is a sequence of events he is all too familiar with, but he is not overly fearful for the safety of his companions; they are strong, protected by experience and the nature of their existence. Except for-

As he scans the battleground, searching, an entirely different scent surrounds him, an intoxicating, heady smell that makes dread weigh his heart down like an anchor. And then he sees her, fallen in a halo of her own blood, and any vestiges of pride he had felt at their victory freeze into icy terror.

He's at Luna's side in an instant, hands hovering uselessly before he pulls her closer, into his arms like he can belatedly shield her from harm. 

Her eyes flicker open, breathing shallow as if it takes enormous effort for her to focus her gaze on his face. Relief battles everything he knows about mortal wounds; a foolish hope that eclipses reason cascades over him, and he allows it. 

Luna looks at him, eyes sorrowful but accepting, full of an emotion he cannot bear to name in this moment. "Adam," she says weakly, "I-", and a fit of coughing overtakes her before she tries again.

He knows what she intends to say, the words that have been filling the space between them for months. But to hear them now, of all times- “Don’t say it,” he pleads, begging for the first time in hundreds of years. “Not like this.”

"Adam," she murmurs.

"You can tell me later," he promises. An unspoken just stay alive hangs in the air.

“Okay,” Luna whispers. “Later, then.” It is a final kindness that she allows them both, to imagine a world where there will be a later, to briefly escape the heinous reality of these last moments in a place where the force of Adam’s will is enough to save her. And god, if it were- if it were.

As in, it is not.

As in, he is helpless, and he feels the sickening noose of it tightly around his throat.

As in, each slowing beat of her heart is mercilessly counting down the minutes, the seconds they have left, and after 900 years he never envisioned having too little time.

"Hey. Come here?" Luna asks, reaching up to him. Anything, he thinks, leaning closer into her space, relishing the feel of her hand on his cheek, though his heart wrenches at how cold her fingers are. Tilting up, she presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth, softer than he deserves and unbearable in its brevity. "Later," she starts, then pauses with a wince. "Later, when I tell you-" her words are hurried, gasped out as if each one costs her immeasurably. "I'm gonna go all out. Fireworks, doves. It's gonna blow your mind." 

She is trying to make him laugh, even now, and he cannot bear it, pressing his forehead to hers and closing his eyes so he does not have to confront the future that has been torn from them. Distantly, he hears a quiet exhale, feels her hand slip from his cheek, recognizes the heavy absence of her heartbeat in his ears, and when he pulls back to look at her, she is gone.

"No," he demands, orders, implores. "No, come back!" But his words, too loud in a world that is so horribly quiet without her, fall on unhearing ears. A familiar darkness encloses his heart like iron chains, but it is so much worse now that he has known the light. 

[dracowars]

obsessed | tom riddle

pairing: tom x reader

word count: 2,9k

summary: where y/n dislikes tom's obsession of becoming the dark lord

a/n: my first tom imagine for @creeping156tin !!! i hope you enjoy it as much as i enjoyed writing it <3

warnings: angst, claustrophobia, mentions of blood

universe: harry potter

A loud, painful scream suddenly pulls you out of your deep, peaceful sleep and you shoot up from your bed, your dorm room almost completely wrapped in darkness except for a few dim candlelights.

"What was that?!", your roommate asks you in fear and lights up all the lamps in your room with a spell. The other two girls also look around anxiously and neither of you know an answer to the question.

Until you suddenly hear numerous voices and steps outside your room and you quickly jump up, your friends accompanying you as you quietly open the heavy door. Carefully, you peer out of the narrow gap, only to see how all the other students in your house are running around in front of it, frightened.

"What is going on here?", you ask one of the students who you get hold of first, and look at him expectantly but somehow also a little bit scared.

"Somebody is supposed to have died!", he answers you shortly and as fast as you stopped him, he sprints off again, following the others.

Taking a look at your friends, who are still standing close behind you at the door, you can see the pure fear in their eyes. And even though they do not look like they want to leave your dorm any time soon, they nod understandingly as a sign that they still want to come with you. After all, there have always been a lot of rumours going around Hogwarts that were ultimately false anyway.

Hastily grabbing your cloaks in the colors of your house, you follow the other students out into the dark and cold corridors of Hogwarts. One of your friend is clinging onto your left arm while you are busy seeing where everyone is going.

Although you are never really afraid of anything, you now have a very uncomfortable feeling in your stomach area. The high-pitched, deafening scream from earlier still gives you an incredible amount of goosebumps all over your body and thousands of questions fly through your head.

If someone was actually killed, then who? And above all, by whom?

The four of you continue to follow the crowd, which already seems pretty strange to you as this succeeds without further problems because no teacher is patrolling the corridors like usually, and you finally stop in a long, illuminated hallway. Half of the school is probably in this certain hallway right now and romps into a big pile.

The feeling of fear is suddenly overshadowed by worry as your thoughts wander off while you get closer to the crowd. They wander off to Tom Riddle, your best friend.

The questions where he is and whether he is okay or not buzz through your mind and your knees become much shakier than before.

What if something happened to him?

Not wanting to further think about the possible worst case scenarios, you continue on your way. Everyone in the crowd is whispering wildly and you can only pick up a few snippets of words here and there that do not help you at all. The longer you stay among them, the worse you get. However, you are abruptly freed from this bad feeling when a loud shout echoes through the corridor all of a sudden.

"All students have to go back to their rooms immediately! There is nothing to see here", you recognize Armando Dippet's, the headmaster's, voice in the exclamation that silenced everyone.

But due to the fact that the headmaster himself is here right now, the feeling of uncertainty returns inside of you because it cannot mean anything good if he has to be here at this late hour. Apparently not only you think that way, because suddenly the murmuring around you gets louder again.

Across the hall you spot Dippet and several other teachers, including Dumbledore, who are currently trying to hold the students back. At first it is quite difficult for you to see from what exactly they are holding them back, but in the next moment you notice the door to the girls' bathroom and how it opens.

An unknown person steps out of and you catch a glimpse through the now opened door to a stretcher with a white cloth on top of it. You have to swallow hard at the sight, but you do not have time to see more as you are rudely pushed aside.

"It's Myrtle!"

"The Chamber of Secrets has been opened!"

The teachers from each house immediately begin to bring the students back to their common rooms after the exclamations, which is why you are pushed around even more now. Meanwhile you have already lost your friends in the crowd and the whispering around you is getting louder and louder with each second, so that you slowly but surely lose your orientation.

But suddenly everything around you falls silent when your gaze lands on him.

"Tom!", you loudly call out his name and try to somehow fight your way through the crowd. However, he does not seem to have heard you and just keeps staring in the direction of the bathroom before turning away to walk into the other direction.

Finally being able to free yourself from the crowd, you take a deep breath and follow your boyfriend as quickly as possible so that you do not lose him in the labyrinth of corridors and staircases.

"Tom! Wait!", you yell after him when you spot him at the end of an empty hallway. He flinches briefly before he turns around and recognizes you, relief written over his face.

Your steps echo loudly from the walls as you fall around his neck and deeply inhale his scent, calming you down right away.

"What are you doing here, Y/N? You should be on your way back to your dorm by now", he says with such tension in his voice that you immediately break the hug and get away from him, looking at him worriedly.

"What is it?", you ask him directly, his expression how you have never seen it before. Kind of obsessed.

"Nothing. What should be, sweetheart? I am fine", he assures you and places his hand against your cheek, placing a gentle kiss on your forehead which is apparently meant to calm you down. You softly press his hand back on your cheek with your own as he tries to loosen it.

"Somebody was murdered, Tom. How can you be doing fine? That is terrible!", you express frightened and look deep into his eyes, in which you can see nothing but a crazy twinkle. "There is something else that is bothering you. I can see it, Tom. Tell me."

Finally removing his hand from you, he stares at you for a moment, completely speechless. It just does not go into his head how you can see through him so easily, how you can detect everything within seconds. He was never used to beeing looked after by someone, but since you came into his life, his otherwise dark and cold soul started to feel a little bit brighter and warmer with each minute he has spent with you so far.

"Talk to me, Tom. They said something about the Chamber of Secrets. Have you not been talking about it for two weeks?", you mention and want to step closer to him again, but he immediately takes a step back and lets the cold of the night envelop your body.

"You wouldn't understand anyway", he scoffs, averting his gaze from you while convulsively clenching his hands into fists and all of a sudden he no longer looks like the Tom Riddle with whom you fell so deeply in love with.

"What did you do, Tom?", you shakily breathe out, fear flowing through your body because of the fact that might really have something to do with this. Since his response is taking an unnaturally long time to come, tears already form in your eyes, but your voice is failing you as you try to speak up.

"I finally made it, Y/N. I finally opened the Chamber of Secrets", he admits and your breath gets caught in your throat, the satisfied smile on his lips disturbing you. "I can finally sleep in peace again. It was amazing, Y/N!"

Staring at him in disbelief as he is basically enjoying what he has done right in front of your eyes, a tear finds its way down your cheek and you barely dare to say your next words.

"Please tell me that you have nothing to do with her death", you utter, hurt evident in your voice, and look at him with a heartbreaking expression on your face.

"It is not my fault that this stupid girl was in that bathroom, but believe me I would do it again every damn time", he explains in all honesty and tries to convince you that nothing is wrong with his actions. "I would open the chamber again every time, Y/N. I knew you wouldn't understand!"

In fact, yes, you could not for the life of you understand. None of his words make any sense to you. You have had this conversation many times already in the past. And every time it ended the same way: you were deeply hurt and he just left. For him everything revolves around his dream of becoming a Dark Lord who rules the whole wizarding world.

"Tom, you killed someone! Of course I do not understand! What do you expect from me? That I am happy for you?", you yell at him, now with much more anger than sadness in your voice.

"Well, yes. That would be an idea for once instead of trying to reprimand me again and again", he rolles his eyes in annoyance and gives you a derogative look.

"All I ever wanted was to protect you from doing something stupid that you may never be able to to reverse, but obviously I miserably failed", you sob as you cannot longer keep your tears under control.

"I never asked you to", he hisses with no emotion.

"I have always taken care of you and this is how you thank me!?", you angrily scream in his face, but he does not even move an inch. "Stop this stupid rambling about becoming a Dark Lord or.. Or otherwise I will never talk to you again, Tom."

"Then leave! I don't need you. Get out of my life!", he yells at you when he can no longer hold back his emotions and you feel your heart break in two, but do as he pleases and leave without another word.

Two weeks later and almost no one talks about the incident anymore, even though a fellow student was brutally killed. However, it is more than fine for you if it means that you will not be reminded of him and his hurtful words towards you every time.

"Hey, Y/N. You look so pale today. Is everything alright?", your friend asks you as she worriedly looks at your still full plate, which you have not touched yet, just like the weeks before.

With a forced smile you nod at her, signalising that you are fine, when in reality you are anything but fine. You have never felt this bad in your life.

Maybe you and Tom were just best friends and not meant to be, but you always felt a different kind of feeling towards him that was definetely beyond friendship. And for a while you even imagined that he could maybe feel the same way.

Oh, and how wrong you were.

Listlessly moving your meanwhile cold food around on your plate, you listen to the conversation of your group of friends who are animatedly talking about today's Quidditch game. But somehow your brain cannot process any of their words correctly since your thoughts keep wandering back to him.

You have not seen him since the terrible incident, neither in class nor in the hallways. Even though you forbid yourself it, you still worry about him despite everything that happened between you. You do not want to give him the satisfaction that he is still continuously on your mind, but you just cannot help it.

"Y/N! Will you be at the Quidditch game today as well? We want to make a detour to the lake afterwards", one of your friends asks you enthusiastically and without really thinking about it, you agree with a nod. A little distraction will not hurt you.

Later in the day, after your class in Muggle Studies, you make your way back to your dorm to prepare for the Quidditch game later. Stepping up the stairs you spontaneously decide that you want to let your thoughts dangle a bit more so you make a detour through Hogwarts to get to the courtyard to get some fresh air.

With your books tucked under your arm, you run down the stairs and slowly walk through the long corridor to the clock tower. With your gaze focused on the deserted hallway in front of you, you are about to reach the junction to the courtyard when a person steps into your field of vision. A person you did not expect.

At the other end of the corridor is none other than Tom himself, who, just like you, abruptly stopped walking when he spotted you on the other side. For a short moment you stare at each other from the distance.

This moment does not last long when the painful memories appear in your head again. You lower your gaze to the floor, avoiding eye contact, press your books against your chest as if they could protect you as a shield, and turn to the courtyard.

Fortunately, you do not hear any footsteps behind you and you assume that he does not dare to follow you, which is why you slow down your pace and take in a deep breath when you arrive outside. There is no one around, only the birds happily chirp over your head, until you hear loud steps behind you all of a sudden.

"Y/N!", he calls you and you freeze in your movement, your heart racing.

With shaking hands you turn to him, despite the countless warnings in your head. Tom is only a few meters away, a sad look on his flawless face.

You do not say a word, just wait for what he has to say to you. If he even has anything to say at all.

"I am so glad I found you", he exhales heavily and runs his hand through his brown hair. You immediately notice the dried blood on his hand.

"You are bleeding", the words pour out of of you unintentionally, obviously showing him that you still care about him after all. You prevent yourself from thinking about the cause of his injury.

"O-Oh, yes. Well, that is not that bad", he laughs nervously, but your eyes stick to his injured hand until he hides it behind his back. "We need to talk, Y/N."

"What is there to still talk about? I have nothing to say to you."

"I know", Tom sighs, not quite sure what to say himself. Silence spreads between you again until you break it with a loud scoff.

"Good. If you have nothing to say either, then I can go", you accuse him before walking past him, but you are promptly grabbed by the wrist and pulled back.

"I love you", he confesses out of nowhere and even though these are the words that you always wanted to hear so bad, tears form in your eyes and you angrily swat your hand out of his grasp.

"That is not fair, Tom! You can't just tell me something like that after you broke my heart and destroyed our friendship!", you whine and quickly wipe the tears away as he gets closer to you.

"I was so damn stupid, Y/N. I did not know what I had until I lost it", he explains dejectedly and watches how one of your tears slowly rolls down your cheek. "I am so sorry. I am not worth crying for."

"It is too late for that now", you sob and want to turn away again when he suddenly grabs your face with his hands and pulls you into a gentle kiss that says more that words could ever express. And the worst part of it is that you do not fight against it, you just let it happen. You might even enjoy it a little even though this is definetely not how you imagined your first kiss with him to be.

"I really love you, Y/N. I realized it now", he whispers after he broke the kiss, a small smile on his lips because you did not reject him.

"Tom-", you try to answer, but he stops you by laying his finger on your lips.

"I know what you want to say. I closed the Chamber of Secrets again and finished thinking about becoming a Dark Lord once and for all. Your are much more important to me than that", he tells you and you can cleary hear out the sincerity in his voice.

He is back. Your Tom is finally back.

Happily, you jump around his neck and tightly squeeze him, wettening his cloak, and in the next moment you punch him hard against his chest. Laughing, he takes your hand in his and places a kiss on top of it.

"Now please tell me what you did with your hand and do not lie to me, I warn you", you admonish him while he lets you take his hand to have a closer look at his small injury.

"You wouldn't believe me if I said that I wanted to get you flowers, right? But funny thing is that it is exactly what I tried."

[monstersandmaw]

Male vampire x male character (nsfw) Part Four

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

Sorry for taking 84yrs to post this. I thought I had shared it. Sorry. Hope you enjoy all the same.

Wordcount: 10,904 (story total: 23,704)

Heads up in this part for continued, but easing, tense familial relations, some angst/heartache (not heartbreak though), and some (consensual) blood drinking.

Part One (sfw), Part Two (nsfw), Part Three (nsfw)

Alec let out a shaky breath and crossed to the sofa, sinking down onto it as his legs finally gave out. “Vampires,” he said, hardly daring to believe the word he was uttering.

“Yes.”

“And you’re one?”

“… Yes.”

“And my family…?”

Sebastien’s voice was tight on the other end of the line as he said, “Hunts my kind. Well, those of us who aren’t registered with the ‘Guild of Hunters’ —” his tone turned acrid as he spat the words out, though he kept his voice low and quiet.

“What does that even mean? I don’t know what any of this means… And did you know about my family? I mean, before? When you started dating me?”

Sebastien took another deep breath. “Yes. I knew. And it was a long time before I fully convinced myself that you did not.”

If Sebastien had thought it was some kind of trap, that would explain his reticence at the beginning for sure.

“And were you planning on telling me any of this?” Alec snarled. God, his chest hurt so much. The deception was like Jeremy cheating on him all over again, only this time the betrayal was coming from two fronts at once: from his love life and from his family. Not that he’d had all that solid a relationship with the latter to start with. Perhaps this explained why.

“I hadn’t planned on becoming your boyfriend at all,” Sebastien snapped.

“So, what, I was just a quick diversion? A casual fuck you kept coming back for because I’m such a fucking chump? Is that it?”

“No,” Sebastien sighed. “Not at all. I fell for you. Like the horrid cliche I am, the vampire fell for the hunter, and by then I had no idea how to tell you. I’ve not been with a human before, so this is all very new to me.”

Alec ran his fingers through his dark hair to buy himself a moment. “You… You haven’t?”

“No.”

“How… How old are you?”

“Do you really want the answer to that?”

“Yes!” His phone was slippery in his fingers now from the sweat on his palm but he couldn’t bring it away from his ear long enough to put it on speaker. He needed answers.

With another cavernous sigh, Sebastien said hurriedly, “Very well. I was born in 1897 and turned on the battlefields of the Great War — World War I, that is. I was dying, and a vampire named Felicity who had been working as a field nurse turned me. My first run-in with your family was not long after I moved from France to America. They were working with the American Hunters’ Guild on a case which had nothing to do with me.” He let out a shaky breath and said, “I got in the way and I nearly died. Those were the days before the treaty, of course, and before I moved to England.”

Despite his still-spinning mind, Alec managed to croak, “What treaty?”

“Those of us who get our blood from sanctioned blood banks and do not live-feed are exempt from being hunted like animals.” He spoke like he was quoting from a law code; cold and clinical; detached.

God, the way he said it made Alec’s skin crawl. It was as if he were being permitted to exist on the grounds of good behaviour and, he supposed, that was exactly the case. Even so, Alec couldn’t help the next words that just fell out of his mouth. “So you weren’t planning on feeding from me?”

“Of course not,” Sebastien retorted but then appeared to rein himself in with yet another steadying inhale. “No. It’s been decades since I’ve fed from a human directly. I didn’t plan on starting with you.”

Alec slumped back into the sofa cushions and stared up at the ceiling of his tiny apartment. “Fuck.”

After a long silence, Sebastien’s gentle tenor sounded in his ear. “Are you alright?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve never been close to my family - my dad was always an arsehole, but… I can’t believe Theo’s involved in all this. He was such a sweet kid, and we were really close until…” he swallowed thickly around the rising lump in his throat.

“Until?” Sebastien prompted when he stalled again.

“I can’t believe this is all real,” he muttered. “Until he turned sixteen and started to ‘work out’ with dad. I was at uni by then, getting my fine art degree, but whenever I came home he was just… different. Harder. Sharper. More focused. Guess it makes sense now… Well, as much as… you know…” he gestured vaguely to the empty apartment with his hands, “… as much as all this can make sense. Fucking… vampires…”

After a heartbeat, Sebastien added softly, “Quite literally.”

Despite himself, Alec snorted. “So… where does this leave us?”

Now it was Sebastien’s turn to feel clearly uncomfortable. Eventually he said, “Alec, I don’t think it’s wise for me to see you currently. Not with your family being what they are.”

His heart twisted, even though he’d been half expecting it. “You still think they’d… what, stake you, or whatever it is that vampire hunters actually do to you lot?”

“There are many ways to kill a vampire,” he said flatly. “And your family knows all of them, probably more. You need to work this out with them first as well. Talk to your brother. He seems the more reasonable…”

“I can’t believe Ellie’s in on it as well. And my mother? Fuck…”

“Talk to them.”

“Will I still see you at work at least?”

The awkward silence told him all he needed to know, even before Sebastien said, “I just sent in my letter of resignation.”

“That was quick,” he hissed, stomach dropping. “You only just left.”

“Supernatural speed,” he replied bitterly. “Comes in useful for typing papers and getting out of awkward situations…”

That sparked another question in him. “Supernatural powers, huh? Can you turn into a bat too?”

“No.”

Then he thought of Sebastien’s Halloween outfit. “Wolf?”

He thought he detected a faint smirk in Sebastien’s response. “No, sadly. No shape-shifting for me. Felicity is not of any extraordinary bloodline, and thus, neither am I.”

“Right,” he grunted. “Of course. Is she… is she still around?”

“Felicity? Yes. We meet every now and again. She and her wife spend most of their time in Venice these days.”

“Her wife? She a vampire too?”

Sebastien swallowed audibly. “Yes.”

“Did Felicity turn her too? Would that make her wife your sister?”

“No.”

He frowned. “Did she know her as a human though?”

“Yes.”

After a moment of spinning thoughts, Alec asked, “Did… you turn her?”

“One doesn’t tend to turn one’s own intended. Between a sire and their turned, there can grow… tension. Not always, but it can be enough to ruin a relationship that was seemingly solid before. Something about exchanging blood changes the soul… or so we think, anyway. It was an honour to be asked to sire her.”

“Right.” Alec felt slightly sick. “Will I at least see you before you leave?”

“I think it best if we don’t. Not while your family is still… ‘investigating’ me.”

“Are you really in danger from them?”

“Quite possibly. My name is on the treaty, but…”

Something twanged painfully again in his chest, swiftly followed by the fizzle of fear through his veins. “But what?”

“But vampires and hunters are not supposed to sleep together, Alec…”

“Don’t bang the enemy? How very Romeo and Juliet,” he snorted. “Fuck. Why does every good relationship I have turn to shit?” he asked, not of Sebastien but of the universe itself. “What did I do?”

“Alec —”

“—Don’t. Don’t make it worse by apologising or something. It’s fine. We were only together a month. I’ll get over it. You’ll move on. Heck, you’ll fucking live forever, right? What’s a month to you anyway? Nothing, right?”

The bitterness in his own voice nearly choked him, and without thinking, or even saying goodbye, he just hung up and let his phone lie in his limp fingers on the sofa cushions. It lit up and rang a moment later, but he didn’t answer it. Six more times Sebastien tried before finally giving up.

Kay was an absolute blessing in the next few days.

He didn’t tell her immediately about the whole vampire thing, but after he’d calmed down enough to be able to look at Theo without immediately busting a vein in his forehead, he hashed the basics out with him, and then told her everything. Alec told her about his newly-discovered, secret family occupation which, apparently, stretched back centuries. He told her about the fact that his eldest sister and younger brother were monster hunters in their spare time, and he told her the real reason Sebastien why had vanished overnight without a trace — yes, Alec had gone to his apartment building, only to be politely informed by the doorman that Dr. Dulac was no longer in residence and did not leave so much as a forwarding address.

That, above almost everything else, shattered Alec’s hopes of seeing him again. Like thistledown in the wind, Sebastien had simply flitted away somewhere else.

She took it about as well as he had to start with, but when she saw the seriousness in his eyes, and when, three weekends later, she came to his apartment for a definitely-not-awkward dinner with Theo, she saw video footage that Theo and his father had captured from various hunts of supernatural creatures beyond only beautiful vampires. Then she believed him. Ghouls, ghosts, reanimated corpses, demons… you name it and Theo could tell you about it.

Alec spent Christmas with Kay’s family, and Theo met him for New Year drinks in the city, joined by Ellie. It wasn’t anything like the family dynamic he’d always longed for, but the new degree of openness between them went some way to mending his still bruised heart. Slowly. Gradually. Piece by tentative, honest piece. He never joined in, but Theo started to tell him a bit about what they did. It still sounded barbaric to him, but at least it was true.

He had no word from Sebastien, and the number he had saved in his phone had been disconnected.

With the arrival of spring, Alec found himself more than usually dissatisfied with his job. He was a good teacher, and he enjoyed seeing his students’ talents evolve and grow, but the ever-increasing admin ground him down, and the politics of the faculty and the university as a whole wore on him.

“Have you seen this?” Kay asked one afternoon as they shared a takeaway coffee beneath the drifting cherry blossoms. Petals spiralled down like pastel pink and white wedding confetti, and he watched with an absent smile as a terrier snapped and sprung around on his hind legs trying to catch them while his owner stood and talked with her friend nearby. “Oi!” Kay asked, digging him in the ribs.

“Hmm?”

“Have you seen this?” she asked, shoving her phone under his nose.

He blinked, refocusing his eyes, and read the article’s headline aloud. “Council offers artists the chance to win a sponsored exhibition in the town hall with this unique competition.” He blinked. “So?”

“So?” she gawped. “You can’t be serious?”

“Send me the link. I’ll forward it to my students. They might like that.” That earned him a smack upside the head, and he scowled. “What was that for?”

“Alec, you might be the dumbest smart guy I know,” she said. “I showed it to you so that you could enter it, you giant idiot.”

He blinked. “Me?���

“I saw those charcoals you did the other week of the cathedral! They were amazing!! And the abstracts too… I still want one, by the way.”

“It’s already wrapped up for your birthday,” he groused. “You really think I should do it?”

She rolled her eyes and drained the last of her coffee without gracing him with an answer. Of course she thought he should.

“When’s the deadline?”

“Next Thursday,” she said without looking at him.

Alec licked his lips and swallowed. “Will you help me pick some images to submit?”

Her answering grin was feral.

In all honesty, Alec forgot about having even entered the competition until the letter dropped through his door six weeks later announcing that, to his utter astonishment, he had been selected as the winner. Tears blurred his eyes and he sat down heavily at the tiny kitchen table. He’d never entered any of his own art into anything like this in his whole life, and the first time he does, he gets a whole fucking public exhibition out of it?

“Maybe this year won’t be so bad after all,” he murmured. “New year, new start…” His chest still ached when he thought about Sebastien, and he hoped he was doing alright, wherever he was.

Theo had been searching for him, probably by way of apology for lying to his big brother for all these years, but he’d turned up very little. Sebastien had gone to Venice first, it seemed, presumably to spend time with Felicity and her wife, but had disappeared completely after that, with only rumours flickering here and there that he was in Paris, St. Petersburg, Prague, and then potentially Florence. Maybe.

“Venice seems like a pretty sunny place for a pair of vampires to live,” Alec commented, but Theo shrugged.

“They don’t burn up immediately in sunlight, or your professor would never have been able to take a day-job at the university. They’re sensitive to it, some more than others, but it takes a full day of constant sunlight beating down for them to burn properly.” The callousness of his brother’s response shook him, even after all these months, and Theo must have seen it on his face because he sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then added, “You really loved him, didn’t you?”

Alec shrugged. Yes, he wanted to say. I thought so. “I only knew him for a month or so,” was what he said carefully instead. “And even then… turned out I didn’t know him anyway.”

Theo, who had been lounging on Alec’s sofa with his legs spread and his head tipped back into the cushions while Alec made supper, asked quietly, “Did he seem… normal to you?”

“Normal?” Alec asked, not sure he’d heard his brother correctly.

“Yeah… like… did you ever suspect he wasn’t… you know…?”

“Human?”

Theo grunted and nodded his head. “Yeah. I guess.”

“No. Obviously not. Never crossed my mind. Why would it have?”

Theo scowled and turned his eyes to regard him. Alec knew that Theo looked like a younger version of himself, if maybe in better shape, and he wondered if he’d have the same steely look in his eyes if he’d been deemed ‘man enough’ to become a hunter, or whatever bullshit criteria their arsehole father had used to select which members of his family were to become soldiers and which would live normal lives.

“What?” Alec demanded.

“But you slept with him, right?”

“I’m not talking about that with you,” he said, briefly brandishing the wooden spoon at him.

Theo pulled a face. “I’m not asking about your sex life. Gross. No, I mean…”

In that moment, Alec spotted a flash of something in his brother’s blue eyes that softened him to the kid. He turned off the gas and went over to where Theo was now sitting hunched over with his elbows on his knees, running his hands through his hair. When he looked up at Alec’s approach, his face showed open vulnerability in a way he’d not seen since they were young children and Theo had got himself into trouble at school.

“What’s going on?” Alec asked, seating himself next to his little brother.

Theo bobbed his knee like a deprived caffeine addict and bit his lip. With glassy eyes, he croaked, “I keep asking myself if we did the right thing…”

“What do you mean?”

The bravado of Theo’s early twenties melted away to become a worried, frightened, guilty little boy again and he said, “I mean… if what we do is right…”

“You mean… hunting?”

“Yeah,” he croaked.

“What set this off?”

His brother quirked him a humourless smirk and said, “You always did know when something was bothering me.”

Alec remained quiet, just watching him.

“We teamed up with some hunters from Edinburgh for a ‘vamp gone rogue’ case and we finally found her yesterday. She… She’d been turning people; trying to amass some kind of small army to take over from another vampire further up north. She was insane… like, completely, sociopathically insane, but… the people she turned… they were just…” he blinked, and Alec saw with a jolt that his eyes were full of unshed tears. “They were still just people.”

He feared he already knew where this was going. Still, he asked, “What happened?”

“Father wanted to put them down. They were terrified, chained up… still on the point of lashing out…”

Bile rose in his throat. “Oh god…”

“One of the hunters said she knew of a vampire who could help rehabilitate them; help them adjust to their new lives. One of them didn’t want to live as a vampire though, so father just…”

Theo didn’t need to finish that for Alec to know that father had ended the newly-turned vampire’s life in a heartbeat. “And the rest?”

“The other three went with the hunter. I don’t know what happened, but… I trust her. It’s just… father taught me and Ellie that vampires are mindless killers when they feed… that you can’t get close to them, that all they want at the end of the day is blood no matter what they tell you…  but…” he looked up at Alec. “You’ve been fucking miserable since the whole Sebastien shit-fest. I know you’ve been trying to hide it, and you’ve got the exhibition coming up next weekend, and that’s great, but… I know you’ve stopped putting yourself out there. And we did that. We fucked it all up for you. I just…” he ran his hands through his hair and sent it into wild disarray. “I just wonder if you could really have been happy with him after all.”

Alec pulled his brother close and hugged him. “I’m not going to lie,” he murmured into his brother’s dark hair. “I’m furious with father for keeping everything from me, and for making you and mum and Ellie lie to me and Angie about it as well, but… if I hadn’t seen Sebastien’s eyes go red — yeah, I thought it was just a reflection or something — and if I hadn’t seen the way he sleeps literally like the dead… I’m not sure I would have believed you anyway. I don’t forgive him for it either, but…” he sighed deeply. “I forgive you, Theo. And Ellie.”

“And mum?”

“I’m still working on that.”

Theo went slack beneath him and snaked his arms around his brother’s waist for a moment. “Thanks,” he mumbled into Alec’s shirt.

“You’re still coming to the exhibition?” Alec asked as he pulled back and went back to the stove, giving Theo a moment of privacy to pull himself together.

In truth, Alec was a little shaken too. Their relationship had been slowly patched over the intervening months, but it still wasn’t particularly close, and the matter of Sebastien had been a permanent, proverbial elephant in the room. That Theo was questioning their father’s teaching came as an immense relief to Alec though. He poured them each a glass of wine, and the two spent the rest of the evening in a quieter kind of closeness than they’d yet shared.

When the evening of the exhibition drew round, Alec was quite frankly, a bit of a mess.

“C’mon,” Theo grinned, patting the lapels of his jacket down for him and grinning up at him. “Where’s that Twayblade hunter courage, huh?”

“Must have skipped me and all gone to you,” he quipped back. “Fuck. I’m so nervous. Why am I so nervous?”

“No fucking clue,” Theo chuckled. “You’re awesome and they’re gonna fucking love you.”

“Language,” Alec said instinctively and Theo’s laughter redoubled.

“You’re a big fucking hypocrite, you know that?” Theo laughed just as Kay sidled up with three glasses of champagne awkwardly held between her hands.

“Help a girl out here, would you, boys?” she asked, proffering the glasses to them.

Alec resisted the urge to down it in one — he’d probably only choke on the bubbles anyway — and filled his lungs instead with a big gulp of air. He tried to send all his nerves into the air and then blow it out of his body in one heaving sigh to leave him calmer, but it just gave him a head rush, so he sipped the wine and turned to look around the gallery from the corner where he’d been lurking.

“What if no one shows up?” he blurted, earning him a scowl from Theo and a pout-and-eyebrow-raise combo from Kay.

He needn't have worried in the end. The marketing team had done their work, and within an hour the place was heaving and all but three of his pieces had been reserved. Scratch that. Two.

The fact that almost all of his students had turned up as well to cheer him on and trade high fives, and scrounge free alcohol and food from the canape trays, warmed him in ways he didn’t know were possible.

Overwhelmed and a little bit tearful, he stepped out of the town hall’s main exhibition space and into the small corridor that led to a fire exit and a grotty back car park beyond, letting the flush die down from his cheeks. This was what he’d really wanted right from the moment he’d graduated all those years ago; to be an artist in his own right, with people buying his work at exhibitions… It almost made him giddy to think that he had a chance to do this full time now. It seemed that Sebastien had been right when he’d said he could really make something of himself.

Ah, there was the crash in his mood that he’d been waiting for. Nothing good lasts forever, right?

Would Sebastien have been proud of him if he knew about this? Would he have been there that night, by his side? Would they even have lasted that long anyway, even without his family’s interference?

The noise in the room was gradually dying down when he gathered enough courage to step back into the echoing hall. The pale wooden floors gleamed in the low light, the white of the temporary exhibition walls almost glowing, in stark contrast to the black and grey of his charcoals. He’d chosen mostly charcoals for the show, with a few acrylic abstracts for flavour, and apparently people loved them. Every single one had a red ‘sold’ dot beneath the label now, he noted as he cast his eyes around the room.

Then his gaze snagged on someone standing with their back to him, hands clasped loosely behind them, a long, silver-blond ponytail hanging down their back. And Alec’ vision slipped sideways.

Sebastien.

It had to be him.

No one else stood with posture like that. No one else was so tall and lean and elegant and god-damned graceful, even when just standing still. And no one else stood quite as still as that.

He let out a ragged breath and swayed slightly, glancing around. There was no sign of Theo or Kay just then, and only one or two couples meandered admiringly around the room. And there, fixated by one piece in particular, stood Sebastien.

Inhaling for courage, Alec approached and came to an unsteady halt a few feet away from him. He didn’t look real, somehow. His beauty had always been striking, but now in the low light he seemed like a mirage, with his warm olive skin and contrastingly pale hair, that cut-glass jawline and —

— He turned and met Alec’s gaze with dark brown eyes alight and glassy.

“You’re here,” Alec breathed, at a loss for anything else.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Sebastien said, and the sound of his voice sent a wild tingling through Alec’s whole nervous system. The man — vampire — looked uncharacteristically shy, uncertain, as he half turned to face him.

“Gotta say,” Alec said, scratching the back of his head, “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“Should I leave?”

He chewed his lower lip for a second and Sebastien’s eyes tracked the movement before he blinked and looked back at the charcoal in front of him. It was of the Lady Chapel of the cathedral; one of the most tranquil places Alec had ever been. A shaft of light lanced down from a Gothic window high on the right, scattering fractured shards of light onto the stone floor, and behind it, just barely visible as a grey, misty outline, sat the small altar.

“You’re religious?” Alec asked.

“Mm,” Sebastien nodded. “Surprising, I know, given my ‘condition’, but there you have it.”

All the smalltalk then suddenly boiled up into thick irritation inside Alec and he scowled. “Where have you been? And why now? Why come back now? What do you want?”

He must have raised his voice fractionally because the couple admiring the seascape to their left shot them slightly scandalised looks, as if he’d started swearing in a sanctuary, and he bit back the wave of anger, halting it in its tracks.

“Shall we step outside for a moment?” Sebastien asked and Alec nodded tersely.

Passing Kay and Theo who were sitting in the chairs near the drinks table, Alec cast his eyes at them and watched Theo tense visibly. Kay laid her hand on his thigh and shook her head, at which Theo nodded and sat back, eyes hard, mouth set, but at least he didn’t appear to be on the point of leaping out and staking Sebastien on the spot.

Alec mouthed a silent ‘thank you’ at them both, and followed Sebastien out on to the street.

“You’ve patched things up with your family then?” Sebastien began, standing perfectly still beside the brick wall of the Victorian building while Alec paced.

“Mostly just with Theo, but yeah. Why are you here?” he asked again.

“Honestly? I missed you. Couldn't get you out of my head. I went all over Europe, and even to Asia briefly, and nothing I did distracted me from you, from leaving you. I had to come back.”

“You could have called,” he said, instantly regretting the way it came out like a petulant teenager’s sulking.

“And what would that have achieved?” Sebastien asked evenly. “I was hundreds of miles away.”

“You could have come back sooner? Talked to me in person?”

Sebastien sighed. “I was afraid that your family would come after me. I needed to disappear.”

“Theo convinced father to let you go. As you said yourself, your name was on the treaty, and you didn’t hurt me or hypnotise me, or whatever… did you?”

“No,” he said, pale brows pinching with evident distaste.

“Could you have?”

Sebastien levelled him with a dark look. “Yes, but… that’s not something I enjoy doing. It’s a survival mechanism — to make people forget what they’ve seen — it’s not something to be used lightly.”

“Ok, but you could have, and you didn’t, so that was another reason to let you go,” he said. God he wanted to kiss him. The realisation hit him like a gut punch and he turned away. Alec ached inside and out for those lips, those hands, those eyes… “Fuck,” he whispered, barely audible. “Are you staying?”

“Do you want me to stay?”

Alec rounded on him, frustration pouring out of him again. “Don’t answer my question with one of your own. Are you staying or not?”

Sebastien remained eerily calm, but a heartbeat later Alec saw that it wasn’t serenity in his eyes but sadness. “If you want me to, I’ll stay. I want to try again, Alec. I want… I want to be with you. I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”

“Feel? As in… present tense?”

“Yes. It hasn’t faded. Not with all the days and distance between us.”

“God, you sound like a shitty romance novel hero…” he scoffed. “I almost believe it.”

Sebastien spread his hands and said, “I am who — and what — I am. You know me, Alec, in a way that no one else ever has. I was utterly myself with you, except for the fact that I kept my nature from you. I hope you can at least understand why, if not forgive me. Everything else was genuine. I have never done that — been that open, that vulnerable — with anyone.”

“Even knowing what my family are?”

“Even then.”

Alec looked up at him and saw his own reflection in those dark, rich brown eyes. “Show me.”

Sebastien’s angelic face soured into a confused frown. “Show you what?”

“Your eyes. Your fangs. Show me what you are.”

“Now?”

He looked around. The street was empty on either side, with the only people around gathered outside a bar further up the street.

When he turned back to say yes to Sebastien, he found blood red eyes glowing in the man’s face. “Holy fuck,” he hissed. Every already-chiselled line on Sebastien’s face had sharpened somehow, his cheeks hollowing a little, perhaps to account for the additional hardware he now sported in his mouth, and his eyes seemed a touch more sunken. And they glowed as if lit from within.

Heartbeat thrumming out a wild tattoo, he stepped closer and Sebastien went utterly still. His chest ceased to rise and fall, and he didn’t even blink as Alec raised his fingers to his left cheek. “Show me.”

Sebastien swallowed and parted his lips. Angling his jaw a little to one side, he showed Alec the elongated canines, three quarters of an inch long. “Careful,” he murmured as Alec made to touch them. “Vampire venom is potent, even in small doses.”

“Does it really do what the hunters say it does?”

Sebastien’s red eyes glittered almost playfully. “I don’t know,” he smiled, seeming to relax a fraction. “What do they say it does?”

“Drives your victims wild, acts like a date rape drug, makes humans lose their will and their inhibitions…”

At that, a hardness returned to his features and his lip twitched in a lopsided snarl, like a wolf backed into a corner. “That’s certainly one take on it,” he said. “It creates a rush of euphoria. It’s supposed to make feeding a pleasant experience for all concerned. Endorphins in the blood make the taste sweeter, and the human feels no pain or fear.”

“Right. Gotta say I like that one better,” Alec said with a shaky smile. “But I’m not gonna risk it right here… And fuck me, your eyes are incredible.”

“They’re still red, hmm?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Closing his eyes and tilting his face upwards a little more towards the cloudy night sky, he inhaled deeply. His features softened again, and Alec watched, fascinated, as the slight bumps behind his closed upper lip slid away into nothing, presumably as his canines retracted into his gums. When he opened his eyes, they were their usual, endlessly dark brown once more.

“Better?” Sebastien asked, oddly self-conscious.

“No,” he said. “Just different.”

Something prickled on the back of his neck and he turned to find a woman silhouetted against the light of street lamp halfway up the road. “Friend of yours?” he asked, tense.

“Felicity. She came with me.”

“Why? Surely you don’t need a wingman… or, you know, woman.”

With a tiny smile, Sebastien said, “You make me more vulnerable than you realise, in more ways than one. And we weren’t sure if your family would be here.”

“Or whether they’d want to flambé you…”

“Precisely.” He inclined his head and the woman did the same, turning and vanishing even as Alec blinked.

“Can you do that too?” he asked, still gawping after her.

When he turned back, he found that Sebastien had stepped in close to him - close enough that his faint, woody cologne wafted gently around them and he felt his knees wobble slightly. He’d missed this. Oh god, he’d missed this. “Mmhmm,” Sebastien hummed. “I can.”

“Kiss me,” Alec whispered. “Please…”

Sebastien didn’t need telling twice. He took Alec’s face in both his hands and crushed a passionate kiss to his lips so hard that Alec’s mind went perfectly blank for a few beautiful seconds. When he came to, he grabbed Sebastien’s narrow hips and tugged him close, making the vampire grunt as their bodies connected.

This time, he took Sebastien’s ponytail in one hand and began to pull on it gently. Sebastien yielded at the pressure and tipped his face back, exposing the entire column of his throat to Alec without resistance. The gesture left Alec stunned and breathless. In his research with Theo over the past months, he had learned that for a vampire to expose their throat to another implied absolute trust. Overwhelmed, he pressed his lips to the bare skin and felt Sebastien gasp, grabbing at his shoulders suddenly to keep himself upright.

Over and over, the vampire shuddered tangibly beneath his touch and gasped sharply again, panting. As he shifted his hips against him, Alec felt Sebastien’s growing hardness, and at the same time, Sebastien drew back, eyes screwed shut. “Stop,” he laughed. “Not here.”

“I want you,” Alec moaned, one hand on Sebastien’s chest. “Fuck, I’ve missed you so much.”

“I want you too,” Sebastien smiled, opening his eyes. They glowed scarlet again. “And because of that, this —” he said, gesturing to his red eyes, “— isn’t going to go away quickly this time.”

“This too?” Alec said, boldly cupping the obvious bulge in Sebastien’s smart black trousers gently with his hand and making the vampire groan.

“Yeah, that too.”

“Your place or mine?” Alec asked with a dizzy grin.

“You decide. I’m booked into a hotel one street over for the next two days,” he said. “If that affects your decision in any way.”

“Yours,” he said. “I… I’ll just…” he looked over his shoulder and caught sight of the exhibition banner dangling by the door. “I should…”

Sebastien nodded slowly. “I’ll be here.”

“You’d better be,” he snarled as he adjusted himself and prayed no one would notice. He took a few steadying breaths on the threshold of the town hall and then disappeared inside.

Kay raised her eyebrows at him when he reappeared.

“Not a word,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Your hair’s a mess,” she said conversationally. “Is it windy outside?”

“Fuck off,” he grimaced and she laughed. “Where’s Theo?”

“He left out the back way,” she said. “But he told me to tell you to enjoy yourself tonight, and that he’ll stand by whatever makes you happy.”

Unexpected tears prickled his eyes and he tugged her into a hug that was probably meant for his brother.

“You can thank us later,” she said, shoving him off her. “Go be with your Prince of Darkness…”

“I’m not sure how much he’d like you calling him that,” he said as he stepped back. “I’ll have to wrap things up here first…”

It seemed to take forever, but he finally found the events coordinator and after an interminable conversation full of congratulations, agreed to stop by the next day to take down the exhibition and sort the sales out. His heart was thudding when he stepped back outside, but he let out a huge sigh when he saw Sebastien leaning against the brick building, face tilted towards the moon that was just peeking out from behind a bank of cloud.

“It’s like one of your charcoals,” Sebastien said without tearing his eyes from the sky.

Alec crossed to him and smiled when Sebastien met his gaze, red meeting blue. Alec slid his fingers into Sebastien’s where his hand hung quietly by his side.

“Ready?” the vampire asked.

Alec nodded, and let Sebastien lead him back to his hotel.

They barely made it into the lift before Alec was kissing him, backing him into the mirrored sides of the lift with a thud before the doors had even closed. He stopped suddenly, drew back and laughed, and Sebastien — who looked like he’d just got whiplash — asked, “What?”

“Vampires do have reflections after all…”

Sebastien rolled his eyes and gave an indecorous snort-laugh. The sound was rich and warm and it filled Alec’s whole consciousness for a moment. “It’s only the antique ones with genuine silver backing that don’t show our reflections. Technology has evolved, thank goodness. Now, if you don’t mind, you were kissing me senseless…”

“Sorry,” he laughed, grabbing Sebastien’s white shirt collar and tugging him down again. They nearly didn’t get out of the lift at Sebastien’s floor, but as the doors began to close again, Sebastien slid his foot into the path of the doors and dragged Alec out.

Clothes landed in a steady line on the carpet between the door of his hotel room and Sebastien’s bed, ending with them both in only their boxer-briefs on the pristine white surface of the bed. Alec was tipped back onto the duvet and lay there staring up at Sebastien who was now no longer hiding his nature from him at all. Red eyes blazed in his face and as he opened his mouth to breath heavily, the tips of his fangs were just visible. There was no denying that he was a vampire.

“Was it like this before?” Alec asked hoarsely. “I mean… did I just not see it?”

“I had to work very hard to rein all this in,” he said, kneeling on the bed and crawling a little way up it. His own boxer briefs strained at the crotch where his erection tented the fabric, and Alec’s own black ones were stained with a little spot of wetness where his cock twitched with eager interest. “I only let it slip once or twice, but you were distracted at the time.”

Alec smirked and then moaned as Sebastien’s palm skimmed up over his groin and over his stomach. He’d always been a bit self-conscious about the softer parts of him, but Sebastien worshipped him like he was some kind of immortal god, lavishing attention on him over and over until he was shaking and gasping and sweating. “Please!” he begged after what felt like hours. “Oh god, please…”

Sebastien slid off the bed and deftly removed his own underwear before encouraging Alec to lift his hips for him and drawing his boxer-briefs down too. Before Alec could think or process what was happening, Sebastien was between his legs again and had swallowed the entire length of his cock to the back of his throat in one.

“Oh fuck,” he hissed, mind whiting out.

Sparks of pleasure shot up his spine as Sebastien worked him alternately with his mouth and his hand.

He teased him, licking the slit at the tip where pre-come beaded profusely now, teasing the delicate folds of skin until Alec thought he was going to shatter apart with want. Just before it got too much to bear, Sebastien would take him back into the wet heat of his mouth and work the underside of his cock with his tongue, swallowing occasionally and making Alec’s head spin all over again.

His balls tightened and he spread his legs wider, instinctively opening himself to Sebastien.

The vampire moaned against his cock and Alec whimpered. Pulling off him, an obscenely inviting thread of saliva and pre-come connecting them briefly, Sebastien sat up and reached for the top drawer of the bedside table. “Vampires neither catch nor transmit diseases,” he said, “But if you still wish to use protection —”

“— I haven’t been with anyone since you,” he rasped. “And I’m clean anyway…”

“As you wish,” Sebastien smiled, withdrawing an almost-new bottle of lube and sitting back down between his legs. Alec eyed it and Sebastien laughed shyly. “I opened it last night…” he admitted and Alec grinned.

That smirk shattered into an open-mouthed groan as Sebastien’s finger slid inside him and he began to prepare him. There was nothing perfunctory about it either. Sebastien took his time to work him open, his fingers fucking into him slowly, almost reverently, until he crooked them and Alec yelled as white-hot pleasure shot through him.

“Still so sensitive,” Sebastien crooned and Alec just shivered in response. His thighs were quivering too now from the effort of not bucking upwards into the empty air, his cock drooling freely over his slightly soft stomach with each futile twitch. He knew he was a wanton mess, and he couldn’t quite find it within himself to care. It seem to drive Sebastien wild anyway.

When Sebastien added a third finger, still stroking up and down his thigh with his other hand, Alec broke.

“Please, please, please,” he whimpered, out of breath and desperate. He cracked his eyes open and looked down at Sebastien to find that his red eyes had been almost eclipsed by his blown pupils. He gave a weak buck of his hips to try and encourage Sebastien to get on with it, but the vampire seemed utterly transfixed by him. He worked his fingers over Alec’s prostate gently but with absolute precision, and it was going to make Alec lose his mind altogether.

“Pleasepleaseplease, I need you, please…” he wailed as Sebastien’s mercifully short and blunt fingernail caught him just so and sent another jolt through him.

Finally the vampire moved, but as he withdrew completely, the loss almost shattered him. “Shh,” he smiled, stroking a soothing circle at Alec’s hipbone. “I’m still here…”

Alec whimpered like a wounded animal but his foggy brain accepted that the loss was only temporary, and he watched as Sebastien took his own flushed cock in his hands and slicked lube up the length of it in a couple of efficient strokes, head bowing under the attention it was receiving at last. He’d focused solely, completely, on Alec’s pleasure for all that time, and the realisation sent a fresh wave of lust rolling through Alec’s entire body.

He spread his legs, but Sebastien caught Alec under his left thigh and raised his leg easily, exposing Alec completely. Before Alec could process anything, his tip was nudging at Alec’s entrance, and then he had sunk all the way in to the hilt.

Sebastien froze then, bowed forwards over Alec like a supplicant, canines openly bared, eyes screwed shut, not even breathing.

“Sebastien… please…” Alec grunted. He’d never felt as full and whole as he had with Sebastien inside him, and yet this wasn’t enough. He’d ached for this. For months, he’d ached for it, and still it wasn’t enough. “Bast, please…”

Finally, the vampire opened his searing red eyes and began to move.

Slowly at first, he picked up his pace until Alec’s back was arching and his fingers clawed great furrows in the sheet beneath him. With each thrust, Alec saw stars at let out little fractured, broken gasps. Sebastien was quiet, almost silent, while Alec himself was unable to stop the sounds from tumbling out of him. He moaned and whimpered, gasped and cursed and begged until Sebastien yanked him further down the bed and lifted his hips a little way off the mattress entirely.

From this new angle, it was so blindingly good that Alec went alternately taut and limp with ecstasy. “I’m close,” he gasped over the slap of Sebastien’s hips meeting his skin.

The vampire snarled then; an inhuman sound that sent the hairs prickling all down Alec’s body.

“Come for me,” Alec begged in a whisper, opening his eyes and watching as Sebastien chased his release with a ferocity he’d never shown before. He wasn’t careless with his strength, but he was certainly forceful. Had Alec wanted to grunt ‘stop’, he knew the vampire would halt, but that was the furthest thing from his mind as he watched the flawless perfection of this man above him. “God you’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “Come for me, Bast…”

And at the sound of his name, uttered in little more than an abbreviated wheeze, Sebastien went still, hips spasming as his spine arched back like a bow at full draw, mouth open, head thrown back, fangs bared, eyes rammed shut, a sheen of sweat covering his perfect, bronze chest, his silver hair falling around him like a veil.

The sight of him like that wrenched Alec’s orgasm from him with such sudden force that he almost blacked out, and he clenched around Sebastien’s still-twitching cock as he spilled all over himself. Vaguely, he felt Sebastien trying to withdraw, but he grunted, “Don't… not yet… please… I… unngghh…” Unable to finish the sentence as the last shock waves fluttered through him, Alec went limp against the bed, breathing hard, his blood roaring in his ears.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Sebastien did finally move, but eventually he slid his softening cock out of him and Alec grunted at the cool slide of the vampire’s release down his thigh. He was too spent and exhausted to care about the mess though, and as Sebastien collapsed onto the bed beside him, he cracked one eye open.

Sebastien lay on his left side with his cheek pillowed on his bicep, facing Alec with his eyes closed, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. Tentatively, clumsily in the daze of his recent, mind-blowing orgasm, Alec reached out and touched the delicate skin on the inside of his arm. Sebastien jolted like he’d received an electric shock, and opened his eyes. They still burned bright red, but the rest of his face seemed a little softer somehow.

“You alright?” Alec asked.

Sebastien nodded.

“Been a while too, huh?” Alec grinned, flopping back down to stare at the ceiling where little points of light still sparkled across his vision every now and again.

“Not since that last night with you,” he said, words slurred with exhaustion. “Unless you count my rather pathetic climax alone last night, which I certainly don’t.”

“Not at all?”

He shook his head but didn’t speak again. The vampire lay perfectly still — perfectly undead — and perfectly vulnerable beside him without even a sheet to cover him. His cock now lay soft across the top of his right thigh, still drooling a little and making a mess on his olive skin. Not half as much mess as Alec was currently sporting over his torso, he mused with another smile.

With Sebastien showing no sign of stirring, Alec rolled carefully off the bed and headed on shaky legs to the shower. When he returned, Sebastien hadn’t moved, and he slid in beside him, drawing the sheets up around them and lying there to stare at him in the dimness of the unlit room, processing everything. Sebastien was back, and apparently wanted to stay. He could hardly believe how well that day had gone.

Waking the next morning with a cool, lean body pressed against him, Alec sighed, relieved that it hadn’t all been some kind of fever dream brought on by the stress of the exhibition.

The fact that the man next to him was an undead vampire who didn’t breathe in his sleep was a bit unnerving, and the way he had his cheek now resting on Alec’s collarbone and his nose pressed against his neck should also probably have been a bit of a warning, but Alec couldn’t bring himself to move, except to place a soft kiss on his forehead.

Suddenly, as if surfacing from boundless depths, Sebastien’s body heaved and he drew in a great, sucking, rasping inhale through his mouth. His lips brushed against Alec’s pulse and Sebastien began breathing heavily there for a moment.

“That will never not be weird,” Alec murmured.

“Apologies,” Sebastien muttered, trying to roll away. He paused, freezing, and then whispered, “I fell asleep…” as if that was something miraculous.

“Yeah, you passed out almost as soon as we both finished,” he snickered.

Sebastien turned his big, dark, doe eyes on Alec and said, “No, you don’t understand. Vampires don’t just shut down like that the way humans do. We only sleep somewhere we know is secure and safe…”

“Oh,” Alec said significantly as the realisation plunged through him. He tucked his arm under Sebastien’s head and tugged him closer so that their bodies were once again flush with one another. “I’m glad you felt safe…”

Sebastien sighed, trailing his fingertips across Alec’s chest in absent circles. His cock twitched too, and Alec shot him a look.

With a bashful smile, Sebastien said, “I can’t help that I find you attractive, Alec…”

“Wasn't complaining,” he grinned.

It was a long time before they rolled off each other that morning, with the sun well up and the sheets damp with sweat and tangled around their ankles. Vampires, it seemed, had a longer refractory period than humans, but Sebastien also came so big when he did that Alec wasn’t surprised. He gave everything to Alec when he came that Alec could quite happily lie there all day just staring at him as he came down afterwards.

The room was chilly, however, and when Sebastien seemed to have dozed off again around ten o’clock, he headed to clean up. Again.

As the steam billowed around him, he tipped his head back into the stream of searing water and nearly yelped as the shower door opened and let in a rush of cold air as Sebastien stepped into the stall as well. Cool hands found his waist and then strong fingers kneaded his arse appreciatively before Sebastien kissed and nibbled up his shoulder and traps to his neck. Instinctively, Alec tilted his head to one side and Sebastien moaned, pressing open-mouthed kisses there over and over as the hot water coursed around his lips.

The sensation must have been too much for him because he pulled back sharply with a hiss and Alec turned to face him, water still streaming down around them. Sebastien stood frozen, eyes red, staring at Alec’s neck. “I shouldn’t…” he began. “That was stupid of me… I…”

“What happens to the treaty if the human is willing?” Alec found himself asking. He’d thought about it a lot before drifting off the previous night. If Sebastien had wanted to drink from him, to feed on him, what would happen to the tenuous peace between hunters and vampires like him.

“Don’t,” Sebastien said through gritted teeth. His canines were elongated, Alec noted.

“What happens?”

“The only way it’s permitted is if the human agrees by written contract to become the vampire’s source.”

“‘Source’?” he asked. “That sounds like an official title.”

“It is,” Sebastien said, relaxing a fraction and putting his hands back on Alec’s hips. His cock stirred with interest and Sebastien smiled. He leaned back in, as if proving to both of them that he could do this, and kissed down Alec’s neck again from the junction of his jaw all the way to his collarbones. He ground his hips against Alec and they both began to harden again.

Alec’s hand went to Sebastien’s cock and he started to stroke him gently, knowing he was still sensitive from their last round. Sebastien let out a ragged exhale, the cool breath making Alec shiver slightly in the heat of the water.

“So…” Alec pressed gently, thumbing across the top of Sebastien’s flushed cock.

“Hmm?” he asked, a little stunned.

“What is a source?”

“A human becoming a vampire’s source means that the vampire drinks only from that human. It’s… an ancient - ah - custom,” he said, gripping Alec’s shoulders as Alec upped the speed and adjusted his grip to tighten just a little around his now fully hard cock. “Rarely used today, but still… nngh…”

“Mmm?” Alec grinned, loving that the vampire’s thoughts were unravelling under his touch. “Go on.”

“You’re a menace,” he laughed breathily, nipping playfully at his neck and then kissing him hard. Alec’s back suddenly hit the icy tiles behind him and he yelped, rearing into Sebastien who wasn’t all that much warmer, though the heat of the water was raising his body temperature from the ambient temperature of the room.

“So if…” Alec began, somewhat distracted as Sebastien’s kisses continued and the vampire raked his fingers through Alec’s wet hair, scraping luxuriantly across his scalp hard enough to make him break off and groan. “If… if I wanted to become your…”

“Don’t,” Sebastien whispered. “Not yet. Not so soon after… all this time.”

The subtext was clear. Let’s see if this is going to last before I risk my life with the hunters guild and your family, shall we?

“Fair enough. Nothing to say I can’t suck you off now though, right?”

“Nothing at all,” he whispered and then immediately cursed as Alec sank to his knees and did just that.

It was only as he was handing in his own letter of resignation that the truth really sank in for Alec. He’d gone from post-grad assistant in the department to a full lecturer, where he’d stayed for six years, and now he was moving a little way out of the city, and moving in with his boyfriend of a year. A vampire, nonetheless. His life had gone from miserable to wonderful in that relatively short time.

Sebastien met him at the edge of campus after he’d handed the letter personally to the head of department. Standing under the verdant cherry trees, Sebastien looked like a vision. He wore tight, dark jeans and a loose shirt, half untucked, with his long hair tied back in a loose plait, fly-aways wisping around his head like mist. Alec walked straight up to him as the vampire opened his arms, flung his own arms around Sebastien’s neck, and hugged him.

“All done?” Sebastien asked without pulling back.

He nodded and popped back down from his toes. They were both tall men, but Sebastien had a few inches on him still. With a slightly doe-eyed expression, Sebastien smiled and kissed him gently. “I love you,” he said softly between kisses.

“Come on, you big sap,” Alec said. “I’ve got to be out of my apartment at four.”

“Such a romantic,” Sebastien sighed melodramatically.

With Sebastien’s supernatural strength, loading up the little van they’d hired for his stuff didn’t take long, and after giving his keys back to the landlord and signing the final bits and bobs, they were on the road.

The old farmhouse had been a find of Sebastien’s, and it needed some work. “Well, what else am I going to do on long, impossibly sunny summer days while you’re running your own business from the little art studio at the bottom of the garden?” Sebastien had laughed when they’d first viewed it, the back of his hand pressed to his forehead in a terribly ‘put upon’ gesture. “I might as well spruce the place up.”

“It needs more than a light ‘sprucing up’,” Alec had said, brows raised at the rotten wooden beam and the tired 1950’s kitchen. “And don’t tell me you made your wealth flipping houses back in the day.”

“Would you rather I told you I robbed the Bank of England and they still haven’t noticed?” he replied archly before planting a kiss squarely on Alec’s scratchy, stubble-darkened cheek.

With a scowl, Alec had shot him a look. “I honestly don’t know whether that’s a lie or not…”

“It’s a lie,” Sebastien snorted. “I can’t believe you think I’m a criminal.”

“You’re a vampire,” he’d retorted. “You could probably have just walked in there and demanded a small fortune in gold ingots and they wouldn’t have objected…”

“Please. I do have some scruples. And besides, I only use my charms on poor, miserable artists to get into their pants…”

“And their hearts too, apparently,” he’d scoffed as they’d left the dilapidated house with Sebastien’s hand in Alec’s back pocket, fingers firmly cupped around his arse.

It took another six months for the work to be completed, and even with Sebastien’s not inconsiderable talents in the DIY and home improvement departments, they still had to call in a team of builders to fix the pointing in one wall and to sort out a few other structural issues. But by the end of the work, the farmhouse was quite frankly the most stunning place Alec could ever have dreamed of living. Exposed oak beams and a fireplace big enough to park a tractor in were only half of the best features of the place.

One clear, frosty evening in late October, the pair sat outside on the recently finished patio, a small cast iron fire-pit crackling away and sending sparks and heat twisting up into the night sky, a glass of wine each in one hand and their free hand clasped around the other’s.

“Bastien…?” Alec said, not taking his eyes from the mother-of-pearl points of light in the sky above.

“Mmm?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about… about becoming your source.” He didn’t miss the sharp inhale from his partner, nor the way Sebastien went completely still in the wooden chair beside him. He also didn’t say anything. “I’d… I’d like to ask how often you’d need to feed from me, and… what the repercussions would be for me as the human…”

Still Sebastien didn’t speak for a long time, and Alec worried he’d spoilt the serenity of their evening with the sensitive question. Finally, the vampire cleared his throat and Alec realised with a jolt that he was near tears.

“Bast?”

At the sound of the pet-name, Sebastien blinked rapidly and two mirroring tears tracked down his cheeks in perfect synchrony. “I thought you’d forgotten all about it,” he said in a hoarse croak. “I didn’t want to bring it up again.”

“You should have done, silly,” Alec groused, and he was met with a watery smile that didn’t meet his eyes at all.

“Well, to answer your questions,” he said, trying to sound unaffected even if he clearly was. “Every three months is safe enough, so long as you take an iron supplement. If you don’t, you might feel a little more tired right afterwards. We generally take slightly less than a person would give at a blood donation, if that helps put it into context.”

Alec turned and frowned at him.

“What?”

“You’ve gone all clinical,” he said, shuffling a little and setting his wine glass down on the edge of the stone fire pit. “Do you not want this anymore?”

Sebastien swallowed thickly and looked away. In the ochre and copper flicker of the flames before them, his suddenly red eyes seemed to glow like coals. “More than you know…” he rasped.

“Then what’s the problem?”

He chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before turning back to face Alec with glassy eyes. “I’m frightened.”

Alec’s scowl deepened and he rose from his chair to straddle and sink down into Sebastien’s lap. Settled in his new position, he kissed Bast’s lips and stroked his loose, white-blond hair out of his eyes. “Of what?”

“Losing control. It’s been… decades since… If I hurt you, Alec… it would break me.”

“How about we start small? Just a taste?”

Sebastien looked so young then in the firelight. He suddenly looked like the twenty year old man he had been when he’d been conscripted into the army and sent out to battle to die, only to be turned at the eleventh hour by a nurse in a field hospital who’d seen something special in him. Thank god she had, Alec mused.

Alec leaned back a little and brought his index finger slowly to Sebastien’s lips. The vampire swallowed, red gaze drifting down to watch its approach before looking back at Alec’s face, searching, questioning, doubting.

Alec nodded and slid his fingertip a few millimetres into Sebastien’s mouth. The vampire inhaled, closed his eyes, and then opened his mouth properly. Alec brought the pad of his fingertip to the underside of his right canine, and pressed.

After a moment, the pressure gave way and a prick of pain like a needle pierced his skin. A bead of blood welled there instantly and he withdrew to let it swell. Sebastien clearly smelled the blood because his pupils dilated and he sucked in a sharp breath.

“Easy,” Alec said. “It’s only a drop.” And with that, he turned his finger over and held it above the tip of Sebastien’s tongue.

Paralysed in a heartbeat of terror, Sebastien sat rigid, frozen, wide eyed, but Alec lowered his finger to meet the slight roughness of his tongue, and Sebastien’s eyes rolled. He moaned and let his tongue play across the tiny pinprick wound, fingers digging into Alec’s hips. The tiny wound had already stopped bleeding, but he sucked gently, drawing a little taste more. Then he released Alec and stared at him, a look of stunned awe on his beautiful face.

“How was that?” Alec asked, briefly thumbing a fond arc across Sebastien’s cheekbone before dropping his hand.

“Manageable,” Sebastien murmured.

“Ok, I have to ask, do I taste good?”

The tense spell that encapsulated both of them broke and Sebastien cracked a smile, fangs and all. “Yes,” he rasped.

“So… I can become your source?”

“If you wish it, yes. You can withdraw the honour at any time. I won’t hold you to it.”

“Good to know,” he said, only half laughing. A moment later, he said, “When… When do you want to start… you know… properly. Formally?”

Sebastien’s eyes had drifted to the rabbiting pulse in his neck.

“Now?” he asked. “It’s only been a few weeks since you went to the blood bank though…”

“That’s…” he said, hands finding Alec’s waist and holding him gently. “That probably works in my favour this time. Are you sure you want this?”

“To be ‘yours’ on your terms as well as mine? Of course,” he smiled, and watched as another tear rolled down his perfect olive cheek. He tilted his head to one side, feeling a little sheepish, and said in barely a whisper, “Whenever you like.”

“Really? Now?” Sebastien hissed, chest suddenly heaving. “Just like that?”

Alec laughed quietly. “It’s not as if we’ve just met. I know you, Bast. I trust you. I wouldn’t offer this to just any old vampire, you know?”

Unable to stop the smile from twisting his lips, Sebastien finally relented with a nod. “Alright. But not here. You’re going to want to be more comfortable.”

“But I’m already comfortable here,” he whined playfully, wiggling his hips in Sebastien’s lap, eliciting a deep, rumbling groan.

With a roll of his red eyes, Sebastien sighed. “Stubborn arse,” he grumbled without sting.

“You love my arse.”

“Yes, you’re right. I do,” he said.

Tenderly he ran his thumb down the line of Alec’s carotid and inhaled deeply. “I love you,” he whispered. And then he leaned close. He took his time kissing Alec’s neck until he was gasping and rocking his hips against Sebastien.

“Please…”

“Last chance,” Sebastien said against the skin of his throat.

Alec shook his head. “I want this. I’m yours.”

So the vampire sank his fangs into the artery. After the initial surprise and sting, Alec’s whole body lit up as the venom hit his bloodstream, and he bucked into Sebastien who held him still with what should have been frightening ease. There was no fear behind the gesture, only longing and love and sweet, aching, rolling, unending pleasure.

“Oh fuck,” Alec moaned, going limp in his arms as Sebastien began to feed, withdrawing his fangs to draw more deeply on him while he held him easily in his arms. The vampire moaned, lips locked against his skin so as not to spill anything. The motion of his throat suddenly fascinated Alec as he swallowed down his own life-force, but before he could raise his hand to touch fingertips to his Adam’s apple, pleasure exploded in his mind and he forgot everything.

When he came back to himself, he was inside, lying on their bed, with a small, soft dressing over his neck, and Sebastien sitting quietly on the bed beside him, staring down at him and holding his hand. As he blinked his eyes, he frowned. “What…?”

“It’s intense the first time,” Sebastien murmured fondly. “I did say you’d want to be somewhere more comfortable.”

“ S’perfect,” he slurred. “Fuck me…” he added, more curse than command.

“Maybe later, hmm?” Sebastien smiled. There was a flush to his cheeks that Alec had never seen before, and a brightness to his eyes.

“C’mere,” Alec said, patting the bed beside him. With Sebastien lying silently next to him, Alec rolled over and hooked one leg over Bast’s thigh. “Love you,” he mumbled, sinking into a deep and exhausted sleep, even as Sebastien’s hand came up to cradle his head.

The vampire smiled, kissing his forehead. “I love you too.”

___

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[100hearteyes]

Clexaweek 2021: Day 3 - Reunited (a summary)

Several months after Praimfaya, Clarke is roaming the now deserted Earth without a destination. All her friends on the spaceship actually died (ship exploded after take-off); there’s no Madi either. So she’s roaming the desert when a portal opens and out comes.... her doppelganger.

After a less than warm introduction, because it’s Clarke (and there’s two of them now), Clarke 2 tells Clarke that they don’t just look alike — she’s her but from another world and her name is Ruby. And she makes her an offer (mind you, Clarke is desperate and 100% she is going to die sooner or later): trade places with her. Ruby will stay in the desert, where she actually has the tools to survive, and Clarke can take her place in her own world.

Clarke’s like 🤔 a chance to actually live a life 🤔 know what could’ve been in a different world 🤔 well what the hell, I’ll take it. So Ruby hands Clarke an object that allows her to travel ONCE to another world and they part ways — Ruby stays in our Earth, whereas our Clarke goes to that other world.

Clarke lands in a 16th century style palace bedroom. She barely has time to collect her bearings when the door opens and---

---in full 16th century noble garb, looking heartbroken, when she suddenly sees Clarke and... she nearly faints.

Sixteenth century Lexa goes totally neurotic because her Clarke just died so who is this imposter??? And she knocks Clarke down and is about to kill her (as if she could bring herself to do it) when the door slams open and---

Yes. Another one 👀 two Lexas. Clarke’s lil bi heart can’t take this.

This one is dressed completely different, a lot more sci-fi, almost like a modern deity. And she just comes in and MIB’s the first Lexa and Clarke is like WTF IS GOING ON HERE??? But also-- LEXA????

This Lexa, we’ll just call her Lexa for the sake of both our collective sanity and the story because Lexa is you-know-what, helps Clarke up and asks her to come with her, to which Clarke is like lol no, explain first. But Lexa’s all like annoyed eye roll and look we don’t have time, I promise I’ll explain everything if you come with me. She also assures Clarke that 16th century Lexa will be fine, she just won’t remember what happened.

Anyway, Clarke goes with her and they enter a sort of palace/tower in the middle of space or like in a rift between worlds. There’s a big room there with an oval/round table, which is basically a database for every single Clarke and Lexa in existence. The building is called The Observatory.

Lexa explains that there is a multitude of universes and timelines where the two of them exist. A lot of their iterations have different names, but sometimes they’re called Clarke and Lexa. Those are like their “purest” versions.

So, yes. They’re soulmates. Obviously.

And there is always a Clarke-Clarke or a Lexa-Lexa watching over all of them, making sure everything runs smoothly. Which is what Lexa does. When an Observer dies (time passes normally for them) another takes her place.

Basically, in this AU, every Clexa fic that’s ever been or ever will be written is canon.

Anyway, Lexa tells her tat the Lexa-Lexa or Clarke-Clarke that becomes the Observer is one who has passed away too soon. And Clarke is like 👀👀👀 so are you MY- but Lexa shuts that idea down very quickly.

So what happened to this rogue Clarke? A Clarke aka Ruby has been killing other Clarkes for a while but Lexa has no idea why and she also doesn’t know WHICH version of Clarke she is. There’s millions, billions of their iterations.

She killed 16th century Clarke (whose name wasn’t Clarke), too.

And why can’t Lexa just go after her in Clarke’s world? Because while you can detect anomalies (like a live Clarke in a dead Clarke’s world) you can only locate Clarkes or Lexas if you know WHO they are. Also, the Observer can’t stay in any world for longer than two weeks.

Clarke asks Lexa why she didn’t just go back to her world after being sort of brought back to life. Lexa explains she’s only allowed a short total amount of time in her original world and she already used some of it a long time ago when she went back to help her soulmate when no one else would. Clarke, remembering how her Lexa showed up in the City of Light to help her, says it must have killed Lexa’s Clarke to lose her a second time. Lexa says it was just as painful for her.

And she can’t stay on HER original world for longer than a day — otherwise she dies/disintegrates (and another Observer will take her place.

Clarkes and Lexas are supposed to live out their lives without outside interference. In some worlds they know about soulmates, in others they don’t, bu they need to live in their own worlds and timelines. The Observer observes — everything else is considered tampering with how things are supposed to be. So the time limit rule is meant to keep her from influencing other Clarkes and Lexas and from going back to her own world.

So Lexa can’t just jump into Clarke’s world going after Ruby because it might take too long to find her.

Still, they have a name now, thanks to Clarke — Ruby. So they look it up... Only to find out there’s like a thousand Rubys. Obviously they can’t find a ruby needle in a haystack so they try to understand why Ruby would go on a soulmate killing spree. Clarke and Lexa start visiting every world and BONDING and shit.

There’s also some soul searching on Clarke’s behalf because she’s struggling between being sad about Lexa but also mad because once again she was left behind. And Observer Lexa helps her sort through all those feelings, and our Clarke starts maybe developing some feely feels for this Lexa but also feels GUILTY.

And this one time there’s something Lexa says that makes the lightbulb go off in Clarke’s head.

What if Ruby never had a soulmate?

What if there was never someone meant for her in the first place?

Lexa counters with the fact that several iterations of them never even get together, that being someone’s soulmate isn’t binding — there’s still a choice. But, Clarke says — how heartbreaking would it be to never have a choice at all?

You can never make the wrong choice or the right choice. You can never change your mind. And it’s heartbreaking to have that choice ripped away from you.

That’s Ruby. She never had a choice. And, as they find out eventually, she comes from a world where soulmates are a pretty big deal. Upon finding out by accident that there are billions of Clarkes in millions of other worlds who have a Lexa, while she — sue to some crazy glitch of the universes — had that choice taken away from her, her excruciating pain turned into something ugly. And she decided to start killing Clarkes, so Lexas all around other worlds would feel HER pain.

And that’s how Clarke and Lexa realize what was missing: the numbers didn’t add up. The sum of Rubys with living and dead soulmates didn’t match the total number of Rubys — because there was one whose soulmate was neither dead or alive. She never existed in the first place.

So they manage to filter out all the other Rubys and find the right one. Lexa’s intention is to stun and arrest her, but Clarke is a little more practical and just takes a gun.

Before they go, though, Clarke and Lexa have a heart to heart.

At this point, their feelings for each other are too strong to ignore. So before they go, Lexa asks larke to stay with her in the Observatory even after they catch Ruby. Clarke wants to, but she also feels guilty because she’s falling in love with THIS Lexa and it feels like a betrayal of HER Lexa. And she feels like she owes it to HER Lexa to make an effort to survive and build something in their world. So she tells Observer Lexa she can’t, because she can’t run away again like she did when Ruby came to her. She HAS to build humanity back up in her world. She HAS to survive.

And that’s when Lexa — nervous, tentative Lexa — asks:

“Maybe life should be about more than just surviving. Don’t we deserve better than that?”

So, yes. It’s Lexa 😌

(If you think about it - I didn’t mention it but - she knew which Clarke Clarke is right away. She didn’t ask, the Obervatory didn’t tell her. She just knew who Clarke was. Because Clarke has that scar on her forehead from when Emerson attacked her. And the moment she saw it — she KNEW.)

Lexa didn’t say it before because she knew Clarke would want to stay with her but she didn’t know if there would be any consequences. And if there were and it turned out to be impossible for Clarke to stay, then the heartbreak would have been all the greater, because they’d be losing each other a fourth time.

Anyway, Clexa reconnect and everything is beautiful but they still have a murderous soulmate to catch.

They teleport themselves to a spot close to Ruby. Some fighting ensues, Clarke loses her gun, which ends up in Lexa’s hands, and Ruby ends up pointing her own at Clarke’s pretty head. And Lexa has a double reason not to dire that gun: one, she’s still a grounder and grounders don’t touch Mountain Men weapons; two, she’d be shooting a Clarke for all intents and purposes.

Ruby taunts Lexa about not being able to shoot her, pokes the bear a few times about how she’ll have so much fun killing Clarke — You wouldn’t mind, would you? After all, it’s just another one in a billion —, yada yada.

And then Lexa actually shoots.

And Ruby dies and Clarke runs to Lexa’s arms and Lexa is like, I thought I was over the violence, and Clarke pulls her to meet her eyes: We are now.

Clarke and Lexa go back to the Observatory and Clarke asks if it’s actually safe being there, if she or Lexa won’t be harmed for it. And Lexa tells her she’d been thinking about how everything happens for a reason and maybe, just maybe — maybe this WAS always meant to be their second chance.

(Or third. Or fourth.)

So they stay there and live out their days together traveling between worlds and making a home for themselves in the Observatory. Their maybe someday has arrived at last; they owe nothing more to their people.

[kylo-renakin]

Death in Star Wars, and How Ben Solo Was Shafted: A Mini Meta

Something has been bothering me about Ben’s death in The Rise of Skywalker. While I’m upset that he died, I echo the sentiments of other fans that just as offensive was the way that he died and how his death was treated in the context of the film. It bothered me because death has always been a part of Star Wars, but usually handled much better.

And so this meta was born.

I will be doing a brief analysis of significant character deaths from the Star Wars movies. I don’t want to touch on all of them because there are simply too many, so I’ll focus on the ones that were either major characters (i.e. trio billing or main villain) or narratively important (i.e. Shmi Skywalker).

This list will be approached chronologically within the Star Wars universe, beginning with:

Qui-Gon Jinn; portrayed by Liam Neeson

Personal feelings: I cried like a baby. Qui-gon holds a special place in my heart. His death was both epic and sombre. It hurt to watch other main cast celebrating their victory after defeating their respective challenges and then cut to Obi-wan cradling his master’s head in his lap, crying.

Mode of death: Killed by Darth Maul at the end of The Phantom Menace. His actual death takes a few minutes of screen time, an outburst/scream from another main character (Obi-wan). He has last words to say to the person he has the closest on screen relationship with.

Aftermath: Held by a visibly devastated Obi-wan while he died. Sombre funeral pyre. Death discussed on screen by the council and Obi-wan.

Narrative purpose: To enable Anakin’s training under Obi-wan, which is pivotal to the overall arc of this trilogy. To provide a tangible loss and character growth for Obi-wan, who failed to save his master from a Sith--later mirrored by Obi-wan’s inability to save Anakin from becoming a Sith in Episode III, thereby providing a narrative ‘tail-end’ to Obi-wan’s journey in the trilogy. To cement the master/apprentice relationship as loving, emotional, familial, which then adds narrative depth to the bond between Obi-wan and Anakin. To introduce a cohesive theme of death, failure, and loss at the hands of the dark side that would pervade this trilogy.

Overall response: This death is both emotional and narratively important. It’s given the weight and time it deserves to have an impact on the characters. 

Shmi Skywalker; portrayed by Pernilla August

Personal feelings: Rough acting aside, watching a person die in their family member’s arms is always sad. It’s an extremely dark moment in a film that otherwise leans heavily into romance, action, and detective-mystery storytelling.

Mode of death: Tortured by Tusken Raiders. Died from her injuries. Again, her actual death takes a couple of minutes of screen time. She is able to say some last words to her son, the most important character relationship for this character.

Aftermath: Dies in the arms of her visibly devastated son. Anakin murders the Tuskens for revenge. On screen funeral where she is mourned and memorialized by her family/loved ones.

Narrative purpose: To drive Anakin further to the dark side by taking advantage of his love and compassion and turning this into anger and hate (revenge against the Tuskens). To plant the seeds of Anakin’s inability to save the ones he love. To emphasize his failure to keep his promise to return to his mother and free her. (Despite being freed off screen, she essentially died in captivity anyway, and Anakin was not the one to free her.) To further the cohesive themes of the trilogy: death, failure, loss, the power of the dark side.

Overall response: While not as moving for me personally as Qui-gon’s death, it has a very relevant thematic purpose and furthers the story. Shmi’s death is given adequate time on screen and we are able to observe the responses and aftermath of that loss.

Padme Amidala; portrayed by Natalie Portman

Personal feelings: We make jokes about how she lost the will to live, but her funeral was beautiful and Natalie’s delivery of the line “you’re going down a path I can’t follow” feels extremely important in this story.

Mode of death: Up for debate. She has lost the will to live after giving birth to Luke and Leia in the wake of Anakin’s fall to the dark side. Some have theorized that her life force was taken (or given?) to keep Anakin alive, but this is not made explicit in the movies. She dies beside Obi-wan Kenobi, and has the time to say last words--words of hope for Anakin’s eventual redemption. Her death itself takes several minutes and is followed up with screen time for a funeral where characters acknowledge her death.

Aftermath: The gorgeous and enormous funeral, mourned as a queen and a senator and a good woman. Anakin (as Darth Vader) mourns with a devastated and poorly acted “nooooo”.

Narrative purpose: To fulfill the themes of death, loss, and failure (Anakin’s failure to keep her alive) at the hands of the dark side. To provide a character loss that mimics the loss of democracy, freedom, and goodness that has fallen to Palpatine’s control. To provide a visual and narrative parallel between the death of Anakin (through the death of his love) and the birth of Darth Vader.

Overall response: While this death was definitely poorly handled it did have narrative significance and it was arguably necessitated by having to have this trilogy line up with the original trilogy. Her short funeral was one of my favorites in the series.

Obi-wan Kenobi; portrayed by Sir Alec Guinness/Ewan McGregor

Personal feelings: I feel weird having an opinion about this one because this movie was made well before I was born, and so I didn’t feel a real connection to/nostalgia from these characters the way I did with the prequels and sequels. Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan was a huge part of my childhood, so watching A New Hope in retrospect makes this death sad for me.

Mode of death: Killed by Darth Vader/becomes one with the Force. Essentially sacrifices himself so that Luke doesn’t try to come after him.

Aftermath: Luke shouts “no!”. In a later scene, Luke further acknowledges his death--”I only wish Ben were here”. Ben is later seen as a Force ghost in Episodes V and VI, continuing to acknowledge his character’s death and ongoing influence on, importance to, and relationship with Luke.

Narrative purpose: To provide growth for Luke’s character as he grapples with losing a mentor and surrogate father figure who was also the last person (he believed) who was a link to Luke’s (supposedly) dead hero father that Luke looked up to--and setting us up for this narrative complication in VI. To demonstrate that the Jedi/good guys of the film win through self-sacrifice and not through anger, hate, or fear, which is very thematically resonant in this trilogy.

Overall response: Narratively meaningful, and the character’s death is immediately recognized. We get to see the response of the characters who he has the closest relationships with.

Yoda; portrayed by Frank Oz

(I just love The Last Jedi, okay??)

Personal feelings: It was kind of sad, in the way any person dying of old age is. It did feel more overtly spiritual than Obi-wan’s death.

Mode of death: Dies of old age, in his own home, in his own bed, with Luke beside him. His death scene lasts a few minutes and he has some last words.

Aftermath: We see Yoda again as a force ghost, which we are expecting as an audience since his body fades like Obi-wan’s did. There is sufficient closure. Luke is present for Yoda’s death and, at this point in the films, is the only character relationship Yoda has left alive--therefore this is the most significant his death can be to someone. Luke doesn’t look overly upset but this is not painted to be a sad death, as death by old age is usually more a fact of life and a nice reprieve from untimely losses.

Narrative purpose: Honestly, it’s been a long time since I watched the original trilogy so I’m kind of stretching here. I’m going to borrow from The Last Jedi and say that Yoda’s death allows Luke to grow beyond his master and stand on his own two feet as a fully autonomous agent of goodness. He no longer has the crutch of wise older men to lean on and must make his decisions on his own. Yoda’s death frees Luke to be the master of his own destiny, now knowing the truth of his parentage and no longer being guided by others to do what they think is best (kill Vader).

Overall response: One of the less impactful deaths in the series, but I do appreciate how it adds to Luke’s growth as a character and transition into Jedi Master.

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader; portrayed by James Earl Jones, Hayden Christensen, and Jake Lloyd

Personal feelings: This is the big one™ of the trilogy, and it shows. Watching Luke trying to literally drag his father to safety is raw and heartbreaking. Seeing him unmasked for his son is chilling. The funeral pyre is beautiful. This definitely made me feel the feelings.

Mode of death: Sacrificed himself to kill Palpatine. Death lasts several minutes. Dies in Luke’s arms and Luke cries as he dies.

Aftermath: Funeral pyre. Force ghost Anakin bringing peace to Luke and cementing his redemption.

Narrative purpose: Too much to list! Reinforcing that good guys sacrifice themselves to protect the people they love. Bringing balance to the Force by killing the Emperor (thanks JJ for messing that up by the way). Finding peace with Obi-wan as a force ghost. Showing that the belief that people can be saved from themselves is validated. I’m sure there’s plenty more besides but this one is so narratively rich that it would take forever to mine.

Overall response: Extreme narrative importance. Basically ties together six movies. Emotional, beautiful, resonant.

Han Solo; portrayed by Harrison Ford

Personal feelings: Ouch, ouch, ouch! This was... this was angsty. I love angsty. I cannot possibly find adequate words to describe how well done this scene and this death was. One of my top three moments of The Force Awakens.

Mode of death: Struck through the chest with a lightsaber by his son, Ben Solo (under the alias of Kylo Ren), after an attempt to save him from the dark side and bring him home. His body falls into the pit on Starkiller Base.

Aftermath: So. Much. Rey screams “no!” Finn is visibly upset, too. Chewie roars in agony and shoots Kylo Ren with his bowcaster. Leia can be seen feeling Han’s death and cannot find the strength to keep standing. Kylo/Ben looks immediately shaken by what he has done. Rey and Leia share a sad hug at the end of the film. In The Last Jedi, reactions continue. Luke is shaken by the revelation of Han’s death and spends a quiet moment in the Falcon mourning him. Kylo/Ben’s reaction continues to spiral. Snoke, in one of my favorite lines in the film, announces that “the deed split [his] spirit to the bone”. Rey grieves Han and accuses Ben of hating him. Luke warns Kylo that he will always be with him, “just like [his] father”. Han’s shadow is felt all over The Last Jedi without him being present. Even without the further reactions in The Rise of Skywalker (Rey saying Ben is haunted by him, the literal memory scene on the Death Star), the impacts of Han Solo’s death are the most significant in the entire franchise.

Narrative purpose: To advance both internal and external character conflicts. Kylo killing Han provides an external conflict between him and the heroes--particularly between him and Rey as Rey yearns for parents who love her and Ben (seemingly) rejects/kills his that do. It also provides a meaty internal conflict for Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, who is the most nuanced villain I have ever seen in film. While Han’s death doesn’t seem to serve a main theme in The Force Awakens (it is my perspective that JJ does not have cohesive overarching themes in his two entries in the saga), it does blend in pretty well with The Last Jedi’s preoccupation with killing the past. The thematic takeaway from The Last Jedi is that you can’t and shouldn’t kill the past, you should learn from it and move on--and Kylo killing Han neatly fits into this theme by showing that Kylo tried to kill his past by killing his father, and yet he was unable to move on because of it.

Overall response: Poignant. Purposeful. Well-crafted. The effects are long lasting and felt throughout the trilogy. This is not a meaningless death. Of the entire saga, this is the death that is given the most acknowledgement.

Supreme Leader Snoke; portrayed by Andy Serkis

Personal feelings: I was on the edge of my fucking seat. This is not emotionally resonant because we don’t care about Snoke but it was huge and shocking and had these enormous narrative implications moving forward.

Mode of death: Cut in half by Kylo Ren while he narrates his own death.

Aftermath: The Praetorian guards spring into action to avenge their master. In a later scene, we see Snoke’s severed legs topple to the floor. Hux is visibly shaken and angry. Kylo Ren acknowledges the death (by blaming it on Rey) and takes Snoke’s position as Supreme Leader (”the Supreme Leader is dead”, “long live the Supreme Leader”). I’m... going to ignore how The Rise of Skywalker handled Snoke. It was unnecessary to have Snoke clones from a storytelling perspective. It added nothing to the narrative, just used as a clumsy way to justify that Palpatine was really pulling the strings all along.

Narrative purpose: To deepen the perceived conflict within Kylo Ren and showing his unwillingness to kill Rey. This further complicates their relationship moving forward as we’ve established that the new head honcho powerful villain has no real desire to hurt the hero. The narrative implications of this moving forward were so rich. Pity JJ ignored them. Additionally: To show Kylo Ren symbolically surpassing Darth Vader. In Episode III Anakin claims he will overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy with Padme. He never achieves this. But Kylo Ren does (minus the Empress by his side). To deepen the theme of Kylo Ren trying to kill/bury the past in order to become stronger (and ultimately failing). To add Snoke to the list of characters in the movie who embody the theme of failure. To shake up an expected narrative trajectory and provide new pathways for future storytelling. (Again, JJ, looking at you.)

Overall response: Loved it. Loved it. Not as resonant as some of the other deaths but by far to me the most shocking.

Luke Skywalker; portrayed by Mark Hamill

Personal feelings: Okay, this is a big one. Here’s the thing. I did not grow up with the original trilogy. I never really cared for Luke (didn’t dislike him either, just ‘meh’). But this movie. This movie. I went on a journey with Luke. I saw him as fallible. As human. Making mistakes. Failing. Falling into depression. And overcoming it. I cried when Luke Skywalker died. I did not think that would happen. I did not think I would ever love Luke so much.

Mode of death: Force projects himself across the galaxy to face his nephew and save the Resistance; the effort kills him. Luke’s death takes a couple of minutes of screentime, and it is gorgeous. Hamill acts his ass off. The music, the visuals, everything combines to make this the most emotional death in Star Wars--a fitting end for its first hero.

Aftermath: Leia and Rey feel his death in the Force. They speak to each other quietly about it. They know it was peaceful. Luke, knowing he was going to die, came and saw his sister first and gave them beautiful closure and a message of hope. Just before Luke dies, he warns Kylo/Ben that he’ll always be with him. Just like his father. Luke fades into the Force and we know we will see him again as a force ghost (which we do, but JJ managed to trash even that). The boy on Canto Bight and his friends are inspired by the legend of Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. He ignites hope throughout the galaxy once more.

Narrative purpose: Multiple. As above, inspiring hope throughout the galaxy once more. To serve the theme of self-sacrifice. Achieving victory without violence (pacifistic). Preventing Kylo Ren from killing more people he cares about (Rey, Leia, Luke) and thereby protecting him, at least a little, from himself. Also serves a similar purpose to Yoda’s death--with both Luke and Snoke dying, Rey and Kylo Ren are without masters, the arbiters of their own destiny (thanks again JJ for fucking that up too).

Overall response: I can’t decide if this or Han Solo’s death is more emotionally impactful to me. They are both so, so moving, and so essential to the narrative.

Leia Organa; portrayed by Carrie Fisher

Personal feelings: This is hard. I don’t think her scenes in The Rise of Skywalker worked. They were cut from The Force Awakens for a reason--and then cobbled together like some kind of Frankenstein’s Monster for this movie. As much as I love Leia and Carrie, I couldn’t feel emotion for her death because it was so wooden and artificial.

Mode of death: Uses the last of her energy to reach her son (it is unclear exactly how she is reaching him. Force projection? Did she create the Han memory? Who knows.) Even with so little to work with, they still managed to focus on her death with her lying down, her hand falling to the side--trying to give this some weight.

Aftermath: Chewie mourns. Ben and Rey both feel her death and are clearly devastated. The Resistance gather around her body in mourning. Her body fades at the same time as Ben’s (wtf, JJ) and then we see her as a force ghost with Luke (but not Ben because fuck him apparently). 

Narrative purpose: To bring her son back to the light, something that has been a central struggle of this trilogy. Sacrificing yourself to save that which you love.

Overall response: It has a purpose, but I can’t help but think it wouldn’t have gone this way if Carrie hadn’t died. It doesn’t seem as organic as the deaths of Han and Luke.

NB: I’m skipping Palpatine because his death was literally nothing else than “defeat the big bad”. It wasn’t even fulfilling a prophecy, it had no significant narrative weight for Rey, it was a nothing burger.

Ben Solo/Kylo Ren; portrayed by Adam Driver

Personal feelings: Twofold. In the cinema, I felt nothing. Nothing. I actually laughed in surprise. Like, “what was that”? The next day, at home, I cried. I don’t think I cried because he died. I was open to that possibility. I cried because I was so, so angry at how poorly his arc and death was handled. Like he was a footnote in his own fucking story. I think him living was a much more interesting story, narratively and thematically, but I wasn’t necessarily opposed to his death if it was done well. And it wasn’t.

Mode of death: Uses the last of his life energy to resurrect Rey. Falls over. (Plop, there he goes.) Fades into the force.

Aftermath: Like, none? Rey looks kind of surprised and blinks for a couple of seconds. No words are exchanged. He just tips over and dies. Cool.

Narrative purpose (or failure thereof): I am fucking reaching here because all of the previously established trajectories and themes are dashed by this ending. We could argue that this is a self-sacrifice to save what you love theme point. Which is fine, but like, no one mourns. He doesn’t become a Force Ghost. No one acknowledges his death. Ben fading into the Force is a metaphor for him fading from people’s minds. It’s like he doesn’t even exist in the context of the story anymore. Which is insanely baffling because all three of the original trilogy heroes sacrificed their lives, at least in part, to save Ben Solo. So that he could in turn save Rey? So he’s just another cog in the machine? This was always about Rey and never about the love Han and Leia had for their son, or that Luke had for his nephew? If you think about it, the only other ‘main’ characters to die during the course of their trilogy were Qui-gon and Padme. And both of those characters had funerals, and people mourning, and huge narrative implications. The death of Ben Solo reads like the death of a minor character. It serves one very narrow and already over-represented theme. The death of all of the rest of the Skywalkers had huge emotional ramifications for the other characters in the films. With Ben Solo, the Skywalker legacy fades as well, as if JJ is telling us that this saga was not about this family at all, but their whole story existed only for the point of saving Palpatine’s granddaughter. How fucked up is that?

Overall response: Narratively, this just doesn’t make sense. It’s lazy and not impactful. When a character dies in films, you want the audience to feel something, so you show other characters reacting to it. Are they sad? Then we should feel sad too! Are they elated? We should be celebrating! No one reacts to Ben’s death, so we’re not sure how we’re supposed to feel, either. The people who are devastated by this death are the ones who love the character itself and are upset that he got treated this way--the death itself was hollow and emotionless.

So, there you have it. Ben Solo was shafted. Death is extremely prevalent in these movies, and yet, being the only new Skywalker of the sequels and half the protagonist (thank you Rian), Ben Solo has arguably the least emotional or narratively impactful death in the franchise.

Rian Johnson would never do this to Ben Solo.

[elyvorg]

Maki Harukawa: What She Wants Matters

As much as I love Maki and her character arc, I didn’t use to think there was any need for me to do a big analytical ramble about her like the one I did for Kaito. After all, Maki’s arc is very clear and in-the-open thanks to Kaito encouraging her to talk about things. Look at her opening up and making friends and learning to trust people and be trusted herself! It’s lovely to behold.

But I realised as I thought more about Maki that there is a part of her arc that’s a lot subtler and likely gets noticed and talked about a lot less, which is a shame when it’s possibly the most interesting aspect of her issues and development. I’m referring to how difficult it is for her to believe that her own feelings and desires are important in any way, and the series of events that pushes her into finally acknowledging this and beginning to embrace what she wants for herself.

So let’s talk about this. Because just like everything that goes on inside Maki’s head, it matters, and it deserves to be talked about.

Her feelings don’t matter

Throughout chapters 3 and 4, Maki gradually makes a lot of progress in opening up to Kaito and Shuichi about herself: the people she’s killed, the horribly gruelling training she’s been through, and eventually even her happy days back at the orphanage before her life became hell. But one aspect lags noticeably behind compared to her just talking about these things, and that’s her ability to acknowledge how she feels about any of this.

Maki repeatedly calls her stories about her horrible past “boring”. Really, they couldn’t be further from that – it’s heartbreaking learning how much suffering she’s been through – but she genuinely doesn’t expect Kaito and Shuichi to be having any kind of emotional response to hearing it all. She has so thoroughly convinced herself that her suffering doesn’t matter that it doesn’t occur to her for a second that anybody else might think it does – not even the people she’s just about beginning to accept are seeing her as a friend. There’s also the way she has a habit of calling Shuichi’s expression “gross”, specifically whenever he shows signs of caring about her feelings and seeing her as a person. She’s trying to write off his concern for her, because no, that’s not a thing he’s supposed to be doing. Her feelings don’t matter. Nobody else – not even someone who might be her friend – is supposed to care.

You’d think, when people found out her talent and became afraid of her, the most obvious way for Maki to defend herself would have been to explain that she never chose her profession and was basically forced into it against her will. Yet it never even crosses her mind to say that. It’s only more than a chapter later, in the chapter 4 training session where she talks about her past at length, that Maki finally fully admits for the first time that she never had a choice in becoming an assassin. But even then, she says it offhandedly, like that fact doesn’t ultimately matter or change anything.

There’s also a comment Maki makes in early chapter 5 about how killing for a living makes her no better than the evil sadist that they’re assuming Kokichi is. She genuinely doesn’t think the fact that she didn’t choose this and doesn’t enjoy murdering people counts for anything in terms of judging how good of a person she is in light of all her murders. That’s so heartbreaking? Of course that makes her a significantly less terrible person than a hypothetical sadist who kills just for fun!

There’s no way out

This whole problem is illustrated even more clearly in Maki’s final free time event. It might seem like a positive sign of progress that the event ends on Maki saying that maybe she’ll be able to quit being an assassin one day, but the way she approaches this possibility is so painfully telling about how messed-up she still is. And this FTE takes place as late in the story as chapter 5’s Daily Life, because Maki still isn’t going to get anywhere with this part of her issues until the fifth trial.

In the FTE, Shuichi offers to use his detective skills to investigate and maybe take down her assassin cult so she won’t have to kill people any more, and Maki instantly tells him that’s impossible. She explains that assassins are currently a necessary evil in this world and suggests instead that Shuichi should try to change the world enough such that nobody ever resorts to murder any more. Only then, Maki concedes, she might be able to stop being an assassin.

Which is a monumentally worse way to approach getting her out of her profession than what Shuichi was suggesting, and completely missing the point. Some assassins exist who actually willingly chose that job for whatever reason, and they should be the only people who “need” to do it. Even if assassins might be necessary, child slave assassins who never had a choice in the matter are very decidedly not. Taking down Maki’s one single child-slave-assassin-training cult is absolutely the simplest and most achievable way to help her.

But Maki doesn’t see it that way, because the fact that she personally never wanted this has never crossed her mind as relevant at all. If Shuichi asks her “but are you okay with this?”, Maki tells him that question is unreasonable and cannot answer it. It’s really a very simple question – the answer is no, obviously! – but Maki has trained herself to block out her own feelings about her situation and write them off as unimportant and irrelevant, so thoroughly that her mind just short-circuits and returns an error message when she’s asked about them.

The reason Maki’s like this, the reason that this is the hardest thing for her to change, is that this is the coping mechanism she’s had no choice but to develop. Trapped in her awful situation with absolutely no possible way out of it as far as she could see (she was ten years old), all of her thoughts and feelings about how badly she didn’t want this would have been just too painful for her to deal with. The only way she could cope was by locking those desires and feelings away and convincing herself that they don’t matter. She’s just had to resign herself to this. When there’s genuinely no escape, nobody could bear to keep fighting against it forever. It’s so much easier to just stop trying, and to forget that you ever wanted to try in the first place.

Maki has grown up telling herself that the impossible is just impossible, so she should accept it and get used to things the way they are. Trying to make it possible is futile and will only lead to more pain.

This is precisely one of the many reasons why Kaito is such a good influence for her and exactly the kind of person she needs to help her out of this!

She killed Kaito, and she definitely doesn’t care

…Or, at least, he might have been, perhaps – if she hadn’t gone and killed him.

After what I imagine was a huge emotional breakdown over the events in the hangar, Maki pulled herself together and suppressed that pain as hard as she could. She’s so well-practiced at doing so that the next morning – the morning after she killed her closest friend – she appears to be just about the same as ever. Even as they find Kaito’s body even more horrifically dead than she was expecting to see it, Maki firmly insists that his death doesn’t bother her.

It’s that same coping mechanism she always uses, for exactly the same reasons. This reality can’t be changed, and thinking about how she wanted things to be different only causes pointless unnecessary pain, so she doesn’t. She can’t. She just accepts things the way they are and convinces herself she’s fine with it.

Maki refuses to investigate with Shuichi not only because she doesn’t want him to figure out she’s the culprit, but also because Shuichi keeps infuriatingly talking as if Kaito might be alive – and as if she should want Kaito to be alive. She just can’t bear to be brought anywhere near those kinds of thoughts about what she might want when she knows that it’s already impossible.

Later in the trial, while fervently arguing that having broken into the hangar doesn’t mean she’s the one who killed Kaito, at no point does Maki ever try to defend herself on the basis that she would never want to kill him. Nobody has brought up the possibility that Kaito’s death could have been accidental at this point, so it would be a sensible argument to make. Granted, arguments about someone’s character and motives aren’t the most concrete ones to make in a class trial, but Maki has to know that it would be likely to give Shuichi pause, because there’s no way he’d want to think that Maki would do that either.

But no. Of course that’s an irrelevant argument to make. What Maki wants never matters, especially when it comes to her having killed someone. She’s just a murderer, and Shuichi should accept that she could just as easily have murdered anybody at all, even if it’s Kaito, no matter how she might hypothetically feel about it.

Even as Maki is confessing to the truth of what happened in the hangar and it becomes clear that her shooting Kaito with the poison arrow was an accident, she never actually directly mentions that she didn’t mean to kill him. She talks only very indirectly about the panic she felt while rushing to get the antidote, without properly expressing why she was so desperate. It’s only “I knew I had to do something about the poison,” and not, “I couldn’t let Kaito die.”

It just hurts too much for her to think of it that way when Kaito still died anyway because of her, and nothing will change that truth.

…Kaito’s alive!?

Until, out of nowhere, maybe something can.

If Shuichi still thinks it could be possible for Kaito to be alive, then maybe it actually is. The fact that Maki listens to him as soon as he expresses this is a subtle but huge testament to how much she believes in her friend’s detective skills. She only ignored Shuichi’s optimism earlier because she knew a lot more than he did about what happened in the hangar, and she didn’t see any possible way out for Kaito from where she was standing. But now that he knows that same information, Shuichi can still see a way out after all.

Maki puts her faith in his judgement and latches onto that tiny possibility that Kaito might be alive with everything she has. She refuses to let it go, despite Exisal Kokichi – aka Kaito himself – continuing to insist it’s totally impossible. I bet Kaito made a point of claiming it was impossible in a deliberate attempt to spur Maki to argue otherwise, and he must have been bursting with pride in her when she went and did exactly that. The impossible is possible! Maki Roll is finally believing that for herself! She’s finally trying to claw and fight her way into a better reality instead of just accepting the awful one she’s stuck in!

An equally important and absolutely lovely part of this is Maki finally expressing the fact that she didn’t want to kill Kaito, that she hates the thought that she did that. Based on her wording and her hesitant tone, it’s still difficult for her to admit it, but she’s finally doing so. It’s not quite so unbearably painful to think about when it might not be the truth after all. And it’s so wonderfully appropriate that this is the first moment we ever see Maki cry – she’s finally letting herself acknowledge and express her painful emotions and feel like they matter.

She also openly admits for the first time that she likes the nickname Maki Roll, not just begrudgingly accepting it, but actively asking Himiko to call her that! She’s desperate for anything that’ll remind her of Kaito and help her hold onto what she felt like back when he was alive, so that she can keep believing that maybe he still is. Maki is finally beginning to embrace how much she cares about Kaito and treat that fact like it’s important and deserves to be acknowledged, and it’s adorable.

Half a lifetime’s worth of forcing herself to just accept her lot as an assassin and ignore how desperately she wants to be a normal kid was always going to be nigh-impossible to break through on its own. But caring about Kaito and not wanting to lose him are new feelings that Maki hasn’t spent half her life suppressing. She only had a single night to shut away her pain over Kaito’s death and accept that he’s definitely gone – it’s far easier for that to be undone. The moment a tiny glimmer of a possibility opens up again thanks to her belief in Shuichi, Maki couldn’t ignore it if she tried.

Maki’s arguments for Kaito’s survival aren’t even all that logical. Her statements in the Nonstop Debate about the video are too caught up in what if it wasn’t Kaito? to make any meaningful suggestions like everyone else is; she insists the weird video angle “proves” a trick was used when really it only opens up the possibility; she’s the first one to hastily summarise everyone’s discussion about the video trick and just get to the point that this means Kaito’s still alive, right? Maki’s usually one of the best at taking the rational approach in trials and focusing on all the logistical details, but right now she doesn’t even care about any of that stuff, not when Kaito being alive is what she wants to be true, more than anything else in the world.

It would hurt so much for this to all be for nothing and for Kaito to turn out to be dead after all. Holding onto this hope is such a huge risk, and it’s terrifying – but it’s worth it. Even the tiniest chance of Kaito being alive is infinitely better than the alternative, no matter how terrifying it is. Whether she likes it or not, or even realises it at all, this experience is teaching Maki that fighting for that tiny possibility of something better, no matter how much it hurts, is always worth the pain.

Maki’s desperate defence of Kaito leading into her Argument Armament, though she doesn’t admit it and keeps trying to insist her argument is logical, is also her acting on her emotions. Her only real reason for it is simply that she doesn’t want to believe Kaito could have killed anyone.

And the only way for her to run away from that is to insist that she really did kill Kaito after all – which incidentally forces her to express a narrative of “this happened even though I didn’t want it to,” and not brush that latter part off like it’s irrelevant. This time it’s just a lie, but this is nonetheless a very important kind of narrative that Maki needs to learn to understand and accept. Sometimes things happen that she wishes never had, but that doesn’t mean that the fact she didn’t want it never mattered!

Losing Kaito after all

Maki is forced to learn this even more harshly at the end of the trial. Kaito’s alive, she didn’t kill him, he’s right here – but he’s dying anyway and there’s not a thing she or anybody else can do about it.

The Maki from before all this happened would have just given up, accepted it, and immediately begun insisting to herself that she doesn’t care in order to cope. Kaito is clearly a dead man walking on two separate levels – his illness and the execution – and changing his fate at this point really is completely and truly impossible. Maki is a smart and pragmatic person; she knows this perfectly well.

But the Maki who’s here now refuses to let that stop her from trying. She’s furiously determined to fight the Exisals to protect Kaito, despite knowing that even her assassin skills aren’t enough for that, despite knowing that Kaito is sick and dying anyway no matter what she does. She doesn’t want this, so she’s going to claw and scream and fight against it with everything she has, no matter how futile her efforts will be in the end. I love her line, “I don’t want this to end… I just… don’t…” – the only reason why she’s doing this is that she doesn’t want Kaito to die, and that’s the only reason she should ever need.

Amongst all this, Maki desperately admits to her romantic feelings for Kaito, because even if this can’t do anything to change his fate, her feeling this way about him still matters and she’s still feeling it and it deserves to be said. She’s not even really saying it for Kaito’s benefit like she expects a response from him about it; she’s just saying it for her own sake, because she wants to make it real.

Usually I’m the first person to roll my eyes and lose interest when romance rears its head. Yet I can actually appreciate the fact that Maki’s feelings for Kaito have a romantic aspect to them, because it makes this moment work for Maki’s arc in ways that it wouldn’t if her feelings were purely platonic.

Kaito was obviously always trying to get Maki to consider him a friend, so her having done that is still essentially her just doing what someone else wanted of her, like always, albeit at least someone who has her best interests at heart for once. But Kaito never asked or expected Maki to fall in love with him. Maki’s romantic feelings came from nowhere but herself. And while that in itself can’t quite be called her “choice” because that’s not how romantic attraction works, Maki accepting and embracing those feelings to make them a part of her and let them drive her actions is entirely her own choice. It’s a choice nobody else, not even Kaito, encouraged her to make. That’s such a huge, huge deal coming from her.

Maki caring about Kaito as a friend is something that was already pretty apparent from her actions and never really needed to be said. But her caring about him romantically was something that nobody would have known (Tsumugi’s incidentally-right-for-all-the-wrong-reasons amatonormative bullshit aside) if Maki hadn’t decided that it mattered enough to want to express it.

Maybe she manages to admit to all this now because she hated having to suppress all her feelings about Kaito like they didn’t even matter the last time he “died” on her, helping her realise just how important these feelings are to her and that she can’t bear to just ignore that any more. Kaito has been so, so good for her; of course she wouldn’t want to lose that, nor brush it off like it’s nothing.

Seeing him about to die for real this time with no way out, Maki’s probably also driven by some desperate irrational sense that if she just explodes with all of the exact reasons why she doesn’t want this to happen, maybe it somehow just… won’t? This is the very opposite of the lock-it-all-away coping mechanism she’s been employing for a lifetime, and even as it’s heartwrenching, it’s also so lovely to see her doing this.

Maki partly tries to cover up these emotions of hers at first with her fierce assassin mask. She’s still instinctively using her usual defences to try and block out some of the pain, but it’s not enough to stop her expressing things, nor to stop her from crying as she does so. As Kaito responds to it all by showing his usual painfully selfless pride in how far she’s come and can keep going from here, making it all about her and not himself, Maki finally seems to fully accept that there really is nothing she can do to save him, and she drops the assassin mask and just breaks down completely.

Kaito is inescapably about to die, even though she doesn’t want this, and both of those facts are allowed to co-exist. She lets it hurt; she lets herself cry over his death, because no matter how painful it is, it’s worth it. It’s so much better than pretending she never cared about Kaito and all the things he did for her. Maki tried doing that once, and she’s never going there again.

In their Kaito memorial training session after the trial, it’s such a big deal that Maki is the one to nudge Shuichi into talking about how he’s feeling and how much it hurts. She’s finally realising and learning for herself that opening up about her painful feelings can help, and by sharing that with Shuichi, she’s helping him deal with his grief, too. She resolves to honour Kaito’s memory by showing how grateful she is for everything he did for her, not even because that’s what Kaito would have wanted her to do, but just because she wants to for herself.

It’s all “fake”

But losing Kaito isn’t quite the end of Maki’s arc regarding all this. There’s still a little further for her to be pushed in trial 6.

When Shuichi reveals in the trial that Kokichi wasn’t actually a Remnant of Despair, Maki is subtly the most shocked out of anybody to hear this. She never explains why, but knowing what we know about her issues with never having her own desires and always being used as a puppet by somebody else, it’s clear that that’s what this is about.

Maki thought that her decision to kill Kokichi was her own. She even still basically kept thinking of it that way even after learning he wasn’t the mastermind, and even after realising that the Flashback Light was a motive designed to make her target Kokichi. After all, she’d have chosen on her own to kill a Remnant of Despair anyway; the Flashback Light just happened to let her know Kokichi was one, right? But upon realising that none of that was true, that there was no genuine, non-fabricated reason for her to kill Kokichi at all, it shakes Maki to her core.

It wasn’t really her decision, on any level. She was finally beginning to feel, after Kaito’s trial, that her desires were her own and they meant something – but here’s a sudden revelation proving that this action of hers that she thought was entirely of her own volition was never that at all. It was nothing but her being manipulated and used as a puppet to kill by someone with far more power than her, just like she always has been.

(Maki also overlooks the implications of Kokichi’s motive video during the investigation, even though she’s in the room when Shuichi watches it, meaning she should have seen it and been able to figure out what it meant by herself. The sad truth is that because of her background of suppressing her own desires and ideas, Maki is very susceptible to manipulation. She was quite happy to believe that Kokichi was a Remnant of Despair, because it justified her decision to kill him and made the whole situation easier to deal with. There was no way she was going to question that assumption on her own.)

Similarly, when Tsumugi boasts that the Flashback Lights were being used to control everyone’s emotions and motivations, Maki again sounds more distressed by this idea than anybody else. She thought her determination to “defeat despair” was her own desire, but really, none of it was. In this instance, that’s basically true, but hearing as such is especially painful for Maki. It hits her right in her issues and the progress she was beginning to make about feeling like her own person, making her wonder if she really even is at all.

This gets even more painful for her a little later, as Tsumugi goes right for where it hurts and insists that Maki’s romantic feelings for Kaito were just artificially implanted by a Flashback Light, never truly “real”. Tsumugi probably did this because she thinks that ~romance~ is so much more important than friendship and obviously Maki must be soooo sad to lose that – but that’s not the reason why Maki’s distressed by it at all. It’s because, as I went over before, Maki’s romantic feelings for Kaito were supposed to be hers and something nobody else wanted of her and that she chose to embrace and make a part of her, all by herself. Hearing that actually they just came from some evil asshole manipulating her and using her as a puppet yet again – it tears right into all of the progress that these feelings themselves had been helping her begin to make. Maki’s emotions and desires matter after all? No, they don’t. They were never even hers in the first place. They were never even real.

Someone more self-assured than Maki (such as Kaito) would have been able to stand up for their own feelings here and call Tsumugi’s claim out as the bullshit it obviously is. Even if her feelings were implanted, they would still matter just as much because she’d still be feeling them now – but also, there’s a mountain of evidence for the fact that Maki’s romantic feelings for Kaito were in fact completely real and organically arose throughout her interactions with him. She made it very clear as she confessed to them at the end of trial 5 that this is all about the kind of person Kaito is and the things he’s done for her. That’s where her romantic feelings arose from, and all of that was entirely real and happened after everyone was created from fake memories. Maki is the only one who was inside her own head when she began to feel that way about Kaito, so she of all people should know better than anyone else just how very not-fake her feelings are!

But she can’t realise that on her own. Despite the progress she’d been making thanks to Kaito’s trial, Maki had still spent a lifetime (a fake lifetime, but those fake memories clearly still wired her brain to think this way) suppressing her emotions as thoroughly irrelevant and feeling like she was nothing but a puppet for other people’s whims. She began the killing game with absolutely no self-assurance in who she is or how she feels; of course it would be heartbreakingly easy for her to lose faith in herself and revert back to thinking that way again when given the slightest reason to.

So Maki just buys Tsumugi’s claim completely, without even questioning it. Her feelings for Kaito were fake, as was her desire to defeat the mastermind, as was everything else about who she is. Nothing about her matters, and it never did. She doesn’t even get to be a person at all.

Believing in herself at last

We don’t see Maki reacting much as Shuichi begins his impassioned argument that the pain and emotions and desires everyone felt in this killing game were still thoroughly real. But it must have helped her begin to overcome this. If you feel something, that feeling is real and important, and that’s all that matters. She believes in Shuichi’s judgement; she must have been listening to him.

Perhaps even more helpful for her is how, as Shuichi encourages Maki to stand with him on this, he urges her to believe in herself. It might sound generic at first glance, but really, that’s exactly what Maki’s arc and her struggle with these issues always needed to come down to in the end: her believing that she has worth as a person. Not only in terms of not hating herself and accepting that she deserves to have friends, but in terms of embracing the fact that her feelings are real and important and hers, and they always have been.

It’s so hard for Maki to do this. It goes against everything that’s been ingrained into her throughout her whole life (a “fake” life, but what does that matter when it’s having a real effect on her?), and everything that Tsumugi’s been spouting for half the trial. But she can do it now. Thanks to everything Kaito’s done for her, and the things she felt as she lost him twice, and Shuichi’s continued support, Maki finally makes a conscious effort to believe in everything she’s feeling. She chooses for herself to make her existence as Maki Harukawa matter.

It’s such a wonderful culmination to her character arc, right at the end of chapter 6. She’s finally reached a point where she can fully accept and embrace that she wants to believe in herself like this. Kaito would be so, so proud of her – like he once said, “The only thing that matters is what you want to believe!”, and now Maki Roll is embodying that perfectly! But as much as Kaito would have loved to see this, the best part is that she’s not even doing this to make him proud. She needed her friends’ help and kindness to be able to reach this point, but now she’s not doing this for anyone else’s sake. Maki’s doing it purely for herself.

[letgraysonsheart]

The green is shimmering in front of him, almost mesmerizing. There's a dripping sound, from somewhere in the dark cave, steadily drip, drip, dripping with the same tact as the beat of his heart.

There’s no sound from the man lying beneath him. Dick’s head lolls limp as Tim drags him closer towards the pit. The league has to know they're there, there is no way they don’t. He has no idea why they haven’t showed up yet.

Maybe Talia wants to see how it plays out. Maybe Raas wants to see if he has the guts to do it- if he’s willing to follow through on this hail mary.

Bruce is probably on his way across the world as they speak, even if Tim’s sure he’s covered all his tracks. The Bat always figures it out. Tim hopes Bruce hasn’t brought Jason with him, and the can of worms that that situation would bring up. Damian shouldn’t come either, considering his weird and unexplainable close relationship to Dick, and surprising devotion to keeping Dick's wish about staying dead.

Tim’s the only one willing to do this.

There’s been enough death. It’s never finite for the bats anyway, he tells himself, it’s almost a law of nature by now. A bat never dies, not permanently. Tim’s prepared to follow through on that, even if he has to do it by own hands.

He doesn’t want to lose more family this way.

They’re by the shore now, he finds himself standing on weird black sand disappearing into the green waters. There’s no rise and fall of Dick’s chest, but he hasn’t started to decompose yet - thank god. He still looks like Dick, like he’s just in a deep sleep, face relaxed and free of worry.

Footsteps echos through the cave, coming up behind him. The swish of a cape, familiar but also not.

“Are you now sure of this, Detective?” Raas asks from behind him. Tim doesn’t turn around and tries to keep calm as he stares over the murky waters. He can’t see anyone else, can’t hear anyone else, but maybe they’re just hiding in the shadows.

Maybe he isn’t as alone in the cave as he first thought.

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” he replies, turning around to face Raas. The man looks older than usual, due for a bath himself soon perhaps. His eyes are still vibrant green though, just like the last time Tim met him, under very different circumstances.

“How is my grandson?” The old man asks, leaning against his staff, almost casually. It’s a funny picture and a strange change in the conversation topic.

“Distant,” Tim answers truthfully, “and angry. Sworn on revenge.”

“A lot like his father, isn’t he?” Raas quirks an eyebrow up at him.

Tim just nods; he doesn’t know what to say.

Batman can arrive any second, and he might have said rage-filled Robin with him. That won’t be pretty.  

“So,” Raas steps closer, and Tim moves to stand in front of Dick, blocking him from view. Raas' face turns into a weird funny smile like there is something overly interesting about all of this. Perhaps it is. Tim can't see what.

“Are you going to throw him in?”

Tim freezes, for a second, and lets himself imagine what will happen if he does. Flashes of rage and heartbreak, tears and bruises. He quickly shakes it off, opening and closing his palms in a self-soothing manner and taking a breath to calm himself,

“Is it safe for me to wade in with him?” he questions Raas. Their knowledge about the Pit in surprisingly scarce, there are few of the green waters left and Jason has never been particularly happy talking about what he knows.  The League has always kept their cards close to their chests too, no matter how much Bruce has tried to find their papers on the stuff.

Raas looks at him, and for a second Tim thinks the older man isn’t going to answer.

“Father, please stop with this ridiculous game,” a new voice joins in. Talia. The woman is walking, her heels clicking against the stone floor of the cave and he knows it’s only because she wants them too. She's heading straight towards them.

“Now, now, I’m only humoring our uninvited guest,” Raas says, rumbling voice filling the cave. Tim bites his lip as Raas looks at him, an eyebrow quirked. Uninvited, yes, he had blown a hole in a wall just to get in.

“Truly, I have problems seeing why you are allowing this. Nightwing has been a thorn in our side for a long time,” Talia says as she comes to a stop, standing by her father’s side. She is a lot taller than the old man plus imposing and scary in a whole different way.

Tim wonders if her animosity towards Nightwing has anything to do with his older brother’s close relationship with Robin, leftover from Dick’s run as Batman.

“Why shouldn’t we let the boy resurrect his brother? I’m sure Damian would appreciate it too,” Raas argues, which Talia scoffs at. She probably has a better idea of what Damian thinks about all of this than the boy's grandfather, who never seems to care about anything besides his own agenda. Tim knows Damian’s thoughts too and has to refrain from visibly cringing at the thought.

Damian is for sure steaming somewhere, cursing Tim in every language he knows. It's surprisingly many.

“Are you sure Mr. Grayson would?” Talia asks, and Tim isn’t sure if the question is directed at him or at Raas.

Her eyes meet Tim’s, hers a fiery glow so different from Raas’ green, before she adds, “And what about Bruce?”

Her use of their civilian names is eerie, sending goosebumps up Tim’s spine even if he tries his best to hide it. It sounds wrong and unnatural, when they’re the villains that they are and Tim is in full suit-up, he’d even forced a Nightwing-suit and domino mask on Dick before he left Gotham with the body.

“I’m sure the Bat would be glad to see his son again and as of Mr. Grayson - well, he’s dead. I’m sure he has no opinion as of right now,” Raas contemplates, and looks towards his daughter, for the first time showing a hint of irritation. “Who are you really trying to argue with here? Me, or the junior bat?” he questions her with a voice more sharp when neither Tim nor Talia answers to his first words.

Talia quickly back’s up, taking a step further away from her father, having heard the same underlying threat as Tim apparently.

“Whoever it works on,” she says, nonchalant, “Even if he’s dead now, I’m quite sure the famous first Robin would have quite a lot to say about being resurrected.”

Talia’s a good actor, Tim notes, not showing any sign of being scared of her father as she continues arguing, besides the little first reaction.

And she’s right. Dick will have a lot of words, most of them probably negative, about being woken from the dead.

Tim doesn’t care.

He wants his big brother back.

Raas opens his mouth as if he is about to say something but then stills for a second.  Something changes over his face as he looks over at Tim again.

“Well, young detective, it seems we are becoming short of time. The Batman seems to have infiltrated the first level, so I suggest you make a decision quickly.”

Bruce is here already. Crap. How Raas even knows is a mystery to Tim, he’s never been able to see a comm-unit on neither the Demon’s head nor his daughter.

“I can inform you that the water is safe, just don’t inhale too much,” Raas continues, voice rushed, stepping closer to him. To Dick.

Talia stares, mouth pulled tight, waiting for the end game. For Tim’s decision.

Is he ready to face the consequences of the choice he is taking right now? The reactions he will be met with?

There hasn’t been a funeral, there is no gravestone and not everyone even knows. It’s not completely real, not yet.

He takes a deep breath. Yes, he knows what he’s going to do.

Smoothly he turns, feeling his cape fluttering behind him, as he bends down. He hefts Dick up, arms holding under his brother's shoulders. He has to remind himself that Dick can’t feel anything as the limp body scrapes against the rough black sand and stones mixed up in it.

He can’t help but hold his breath as he steps backwards into the waters, feeling the water around his boot clad feet.

Nothing happens.

He drags Dick further out, the water quickly deepening. Soon he’s standing to his middle in it, everything around him glowing green. He can barely see Raas and Talia still standing at the shore, they don’t seem to have moved.

“It’s now or never,” Raas says, his voice somehow reaching Tim without yelling. There’s the sound of fighting, closing in, the tell-tale explosion sound of the specially made batarangs.

Okay.

He’s doing it. It’s happening.

Tim pushes Dick’s limp and broken body under, something in him screaming about how Dick will drown - how wrong it is to hold someone he loves underwater. But Dick’s dead, this won't kill him more. You can’t drown if you’re not breathing, the logical part of his brain says.

He stands there, completely still, only using his muscles to stand and to keep Dick’s body under.

For a breath, nothing happens. Tim feels the panic start to take hold. What, why - This was supposed to -

Something moves in the water.

Twitching.

A pale veiny hand grabs around Tim’s wrist.

It’s done.

[smolbeandrabbles]

Control - Ralph Anderson x Shifter!Reader 2 (The Outsider)

Sequel to Halfway Home

@mandy23b​ @wltz-bby​ @happyskywhale​ #mendotagsquad

Author’s Note: This song, this damn song, oh my god. I confess I hadn’t listened to any Halsey at all (besides a couple of collabs with other artists I like) until I was music swapping with @mandy23b​...  But I honestly don’t think I’ve loved an album this much lyrically in a very long time! Anyway, a second part was always in the works. This song for sure inspired the finish of it.

Thank you @mendelskrull​ and @crawlingmist​ I really REALLY hope the sequel was worth the wait 🙈🙈🙈🙈

Control - Halsey

Disclaimer: gif not mine / lyrics not mine / The Outsider & all associated characters not my property!

I wrote this before I read ‘If It Bleeds’ but I see the immediate eerie similarities in my Shifter species. I think I might cover it off in the finale...

Premise: After a particularly erratic encounter with Ralph Anderson, you wait on your fate... can you trust the Detective to make the right choice? Can he trust you, at all?

Words: 5737

Warnings: Swearing  

⚠ Major Angst/Hurt Caution Warning (Again) ⚠

_____

They send me away to find them a fortune A chest filled with diamonds and gold The house was awake, the shadows and monsters The hallways, they echoed and groaned

I sat alone, in bed till the morning I'm crying, "They're coming for me" And I tried to hold these secrets inside me My mind's like a deadly disease

I paced around for hours on empty I jumped at the slightest of sounds And I couldn't stand the person inside me I turned all the mirrors around

I'm bigger than my body I'm colder than this home I'm meaner than my demons I'm bigger than these bones

And all the kids cried out, "Please stop, you're scaring me" I can't help this awful energy God damn right, you should be scared of me Who is in control?

---

Your first visitor the following morning surprised you. You thought Ralph might just have blanket banned the entire city from seeing you, but apparently some just wanted to break the rules. DA Kenneth Hayes stood hesitantly in the doorway watching you, clutching papers close to his chest – and you were inquisitive enough to wonder if he was about to serve you, or, you were going to be dragged into a questioning room. You sat yourself straight against the wall and folded your arms; “What will it be Hayes?” He jumped, and for a moment you thought you’d get a good laugh out of the papers scattering – no such luck though. “Detective Anderson has already appeared to have considered the full 48 hours. I just hoped as the DA you’d be able to shed a little light on the subject.” He was staring at you like he couldn’t believe you were talking, like an animal had suddenly found a human voice. You weren’t in the mood; “Look if you can’t tell me anything-” “Ralph told us to stay away from you.” “Then why are you here?” You realised how exasperated you sounded, but you hardly cared. “Are you… are you really…?” It was obvious that Hayes couldn’t bear to even voice it. “Yes. I am what he says I am. No, I didn’t have a hand in anything that happened here…” You tilted your head, “I don’t see why it has much consequence to you. They didn’t even tell you.” “But I know now.” You sighed; “Hayes just put me out of my misery, what’s the big plan!? I know I’m behind bars but I’m not an animal in a zoo.” Your eyes flashed, and it caused him to step back, truth was you were no longer trying to hide it, and they could all blame Ralph for that. “Least you could do is stop gawking at me like I’m about to spring into some kind of murderous, child-killing rampage, or change form.” He swallowed, “Ralph has it all planned out and I trust him.” “You know he put a gun to my head yesterday, right?” “I’m aware.” “Sounds like intent to me.” You scoffed, “I suppose to you I wouldn’t come under the remit of human rights, huh?” The way your eyes were burning an odd iridescent silver, and emitting light the way they were, made Hayes even more uneasy than just the thought of you really being a Shapeshifter, and he backed away – heart racing, “Good day, Y/N.” You shook your head after him with a roll of your eyes – Humans had always been so typical. Part of you wished for the days of old, when your kind was fascinating, mystifying and worshiped – and you could all coexist. Before humans, as they did, got ideas beyond their station. Now you were still revered, but not for being so unusual – for the thought alone that you could threaten their existence.  People like Kenneth Hayes would brush this off as a bad dream and would never allow it to be mentioned or lingered on again, even if it was witnessed. Ralph would never forget – and it would scar him deep; that was without the added heartbreak of you. You were the final nail in the coffin for your beloved detective. You were sitting against the bars with your eyes closed the next time someone joined you. And you were immediately suspicious by the level of calm they issued – for one, you weren’t even in the mood to have visitors now. Ralph hadn’t come by, and by now you were thinking of refusing an apology if he even offered one. “Go away.” You groaned softly, “I don’t need you all staring at me like I’m some form of entertainment.” There was a tap against the bars and you cracked your eye open, greeted by a disposable coffee cup; “I’d rather make sure you were okay.” You took the cup from Detective Sablo, “Why? You were in Tennessee too. Your best friend know you’re doing this?” Yune sighed as he crossed the room to sit on the bench opposite your cell; “He’s not my best friend.” “Yeah he is…” You took a sip, and hummed in gratitude; he’d remembered your coffee order. Yune smiled gently; “I’m not afraid of you.” “You should be. He is.” “He loves you.” “Loved. I think you’ll find.” And you’d not forget that soon enough, your heart still greeted you with a sharp pain in remembrance. “Ralph’ll come around.” You indicated to the cell that you were stuck in, and it made him grimace, “Okay, I know. It’ll be a long time…” He ran his hands through his hair, “But I believe in the two of you – Look, Y/N, I want all of us to get out of this… I’ll talk to him; we’ll get you out of here. I promise.” “I’m not sure he wants to see me.” You took a few gulps of coffee, “At least not alive.” “Ralph’s not like that, you know he’s not like that.” You finished the cup and placed it outside of the cell for him to collect. “Yune, answer me one question.” He nodded, ready for it, and you breathed, “Who killed the Shifter in Tennessee?” “…I think it was a joint effort.” “Answer the question.” “I wasn’t there-” “Yune!” He had to realise that skipping around it was just as bad as what you knew the answer was. He swallowed hard, and couldn’t meet your eyes, “Ralph did.” You gave him a pointed look; which made his statement all but useless, “RALPH did.” ***  Surprisingly Ralph Anderson did make his way down to you. You thought he might leave it the full two days and deal with you when he had to let you go, or when Hayes had figured out something that would lead to you spending a lot of time in prison. Maybe they’d even work out a way to pin the death penalty on you. You wondered if it’d work – but you weren’t sure you wanted to be the test subject. Or maybe he’d found a lab somewhere that was going to take you in – despite the fact that he’d spent the later part of his threats yesterday telling you that he’d rather no one knew you existed. You were back to lying on your bed and studying yourself with a depth of self-hatred – that this was something you’d chosen for yourself. That if Ralph Anderson came face to face with the real you, he probably wouldn’t have hesitated with pulling that trigger. That the blood flowing through your veins looked like the ink Ralph would make notes with in every interview he’d ever conducted, otherworldly, ethereal… dark and cold – rather than the rich red that could be associated with such emotions as anger, love and passion. The kind of emotions that were easy to feed on – your preference was love. Love was strong, and it only got stronger, and even when it wasn’t some kind of all raging passion when two people were all over each other, it was still there. And if you could surround yourself with couples (particularly those that had been in love a long time) you were at your happiest; and also your strongest. You supposed your Cherokee City counterpart had the same edge, but for fear, anger and total chaos. You could eat like a human, but you could sustain yourself on emotion alone. If he’d chosen a better path, he would have been able to as well – but he had to cause the pain he fed on. Which is why he had to move so frequently. After all, you couldn’t keep those close that you made angry or fearful of you – let alone if they died. But if someone loved you, if someone really loved you, you could live the rest of your life on them alone. You’d spent the best four years of your life living on his. But that was not the emotion that overtook Ralph Anderson’s body as he entered the room. It never would be again. You turned your head to him, and were met with that icy steel blue; calmer than last night, which you were glad of – you didn’t want to have to face that erratic anger again. But it hurt you; because your heart stirred just to see his face, and you had to push all of that back once more. He kept track of your every movement, but said nothing. When Ralph was satisfied, he opened the door; “Out.” You raised yourself, “What, they didn’t give you the full 48?” His eyes narrowed slightly; “I said out.” You stood and he unlatched the handcuffs from his belt “Hands front.” You raised an eyebrow in questioning but did as he asked. This was even more painful for Ralph – half of him felt terrible for going so out of control yesterday; half of him knew he was face to face with a monster, a woman who had lied to him for four years and broken his heart. He wasn’t about to apologise – and didn’t think you were either. He still kept his eyes on you as he picked up the bag, hating the fact that you were wearing one of his favourite shirts – he should never have given you that. But Ralph didn’t want any of your things in the house. He pulled himself upright to full height – you took half a step back, still not sure of exactly what he would do to you. You didn’t think Ralph knew himself. “Lets go.” He pulled you out of the cell and down the corridor – Ralph wasn’t about to tell you where of course, and it left you wondering if you were about to be met by a lawyer and a judge, and the same kind of water tight evidence that Terry Maitland had been. You supposed to the humans here your race deserved nothing less. And perhaps they were right. Humanity had never scared you; even when it had driven your race to hiding – you’d grown up around them, and you’d blended well. But humans had become the kind of scary stories told to children that ‘monsters’ were to them. Ralph’s reaction was simply proving every one of those stories true. When he pulled you back to the elevators you wondered if this was about to be Terry and the courthouse part II. Crowds of hundreds wanting a glimpse of a terrifying creature, and a few well aimed shots… “Stop it.” He growled, although he refused to look at you – talking to him was only going to make it worse, but upon flicking your eyes to the elevator doors you realised that all the thoughts in your head were causing your eyes to burn silver again. You blinked a couple of times and they returned to their ‘natural’ colour. Ralph gripped you tighter as he pushed you in, and as you found yourself in the parking lot, you were surprised to see there wasn’t a soul in sight. That only made you turn to him; “Where are we going?” He ignored you, pulling him along to his car and opening the back door – your stare was defiant and this time you demanded it, “WHERE are we going!?” “Get. In. The. Car.” Ralph’s voice shook with every syllable and you knew he was dangerously close to losing it with you again. He also probably didn’t like that you weren’t about to just let him order you around here, you’d always had a little bit of push about you – it was an aspect of your personality he really liked, especially when you were snarking someone he didn’t. Right now, Ralph didn’t need or want it – he just wanted you to get in the car so that he could do what he must. You only conceded because you weren’t sure you wanted that stalemate to end with getting shot – a little too aware of the pistol on his utility belt. He slammed the door on you and took a deep breath; it wouldn’t take much – he’d done it before. If he could keep a clear head, he could do it again – Ralph could finish this easily. All he had to do was get through this. *** You realised very quickly that you were heading for the city limits and sat up, twisting around in your seat. No court case? No going back home? You knew where the jail was and he certainly wasn’t heading that way. What was he doing? You bit your lip, knowing it couldn’t be good. Wondering if Ralph was numb to it all, or was simply that good at controlling his emotional output. It scared you that you weren’t sure of the answer. And suddenly you wished you didn’t know the answer to the question you’d asked Yune; one tear leaked and you rubbed your cheek on your shoulder to hide it, heck, now you wished you’d never asked that question in the first place. When Ralph finally stopped the car you weren’t sure ‘middle of nowhere’ covered it. You weren’t even sure what you were supposed to feel – and he’d been off-roading for so long he might well have been lost. Maybe Ralph Anderson wanted to get lost. It occurred to you that he might not want to be found out here; maybe he’d take that pistol and kill you before turning it on himself. Ralph didn’t seem like the type, but you felt perhaps now you’d seen him at his worst (what else would you call the previous evening), maybe he was… maybe he could do something that devastating. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a long time before he decisively shut the engine off – gathering his radio, cell phone, and gun, Ralph hopped from the car and pocketed all items before opening the back and dragging you out. Ralph marched you a little way from the vehicle and stood you roughly in the grassland before growling at you to stay still, and walking back towards the car. He stopped, maybe 10 paces from you and turned back. You blinked, but no emotions crossed your face. That only made him angrier, but Ralph wasn’t sure what he wanted to see out of you – blind rage and anger that would prove to him you really were the monster underneath your guise? Tears streaming down your face and begging him for mercy – as you rightly should be, after everything that had gone down in the past few months, after what you’d done to him for years. Maybe even controlled acceptance of your situation, that it had to end this way and you were alright with that. But there was nothing; not even that shiver inducing silver in your eyes. The silence eschewed and you found yourself looking around, fields and farmland to one side rolling for miles into hills, and a forest in the distance on the other – too far to think that even with your decent sprinting you could get into cover before he put a bullet in your body. Maybe if you weren’t human, but you weren’t about to give Ralph Anderson the satisfaction of seeing your true form. You looked back to him and took a step; “Look, whatever you’re gonna do… Will you just do it already.” The pistol was drawn immediately; “NOT another step.” “You’re really gonna use it this time-!?” You couldn’t help your cold laugh; “I swear to God Ralph Anderson, if you have it in you, it better be a good fucking shot.” If he wasn’t about to keep the venom out of his voice then neither would you. Ralph just shook his head. Paying more attention to his gun than you, he checked everything was in working order; “How could you do this-!? Do you not even think about what you’re doing to the person you’re with-!? How utterly selfish it is to play someone like that?” You flinched, pulling back a few paces – the metal of your restraints cutting into your wrists. What right did he have to ask you something like that? “Look at me, Ralph Anderson.” He didn’t. And this time you weren’t sure if you were crying from anger or because it was hurting you so much and you were just letting it; “RALPH! LOOK AT ME!” You yelled it, “Look me in the eye and tell me that even without the Frankie Peterson case, if I’d have told you what I was then you wouldn’t have reacted in exactly the same way-!” He raised his blue eyes to you, and he didn’t have to answer, the guilt was already there. “Tell me the second I said shapeshifter you wouldn’t have thought me insane – that the second I’d have shifted into someone else to show you, you wouldn’t have cast me out as a freak and wanted to use your damn pistol on me anyway.” “You could have HELPED the case!” “It’s NOT the case-! Stop pretending it’s the case! If you knew what I really was Ralph, you’d run 1000 fucking miles and not look back and you know it. The case!?” You looked around you again and now he could clearly see the tears running, “The case has put me in a field in handcuffs waiting for the man I love to kill me.” “NO. Don’t!” He held his hand up, “Don’t tell me you love me. You gave up that right.” “Then for Godsake Ralph,” you presented your body to him, “Just get it over with because I can’t take this.” your eyes narrowed, flickering again, “But don’t you dare presume to tell me that I can’t love you.” That was decisive enough and he swept his pistol up to aim for your head; yet Ralph knew he was thinking too much. He just wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was – wasn’t killing you just as bad as murdering someone? Sure, he’d killed one of you in Tennessee – but you weren’t an evil murdering entity (as far as he knew). You were you. And what Ralph would have to accept was that even if you were a monster, he couldn’t end your life without killing a part of himself. You watched all of this cross his face, even though his look maintained the utter hatred and disgust for what you really were, and you were soon yelling at him again; “Oh, why don’t you just aim for my heart—!!!!” He gritted his teeth; “Because that won’t work!” Hadn’t your counterpart taken a shot gun and a knife to the chest before he’d crushed its head with a rock? How many bullets would you take? Could he count on it being a one and done? You gave a shrug, wondering if there was just enough love in Ralph left for you to somehow talk him out of it, “For him maybe-! For me who knows-!” You focused acutely on his body, you knew that DNA so well by now; you could feel Ralph Anderson coursing through your veins even when he wasn’t a part of you. His breath was small, but still significant – the safety gave a click, and you realised this was the time to be anything that you could be but scared. Even if your fear was driving you to this. You didn’t really want to die, after all. You hadn’t come all this way in so many lifetimes for a Cherokee City detective to end your life in the middle of nowhere. “If shooting me is so easy for you, do it Ralph. But I should show you what you’ll do to yourself-!” Ralph would have asked you what the hell you meant. Ralph would have asked a million questions that he never got the chance too; because real fear finally flickered across his face, and his body became rooted to the spot, eyes wide. One second he’d been staring at you, defiant even in the face of your own death by his hand – until your eyes illuminated once more; but instead of it just stopping there, your whole body seemed to shimmer out of focus and pixelate. It clearly didn’t take you months to shapeshift into someone else – because now Ralph Anderson was standing face to face with himself. And if it wasn’t for the fact that your eyes were still a gentle silver colour (always the last thing to accurately render), it would have been just like looking in a mirror. Instead Ralph got chills; he’d seen a lot, he would admit to that much, but he’d never seen anything as unnerving as this. He had no choice than to immediately look away from you, hand over his mouth, for fear of throwing up over all this once again. Your eyes narrowed and you tipped your head to follow his movement – he better not think he was getting away with that. Unfortunately, your straining on the cuffs still didn’t cause them to break, and you could already feel the likelihood of leaving Ralph’s DNA in the middle of the field as pretty high, considering how raw your wrists now looked. “Look at me.” Oh, that was much worse. The shudder that coursed through Ralph’s body must have been visible – his voice coming from you; well him, but- It wasn’t him. He shook his head continuously. This was too much. This was way too much and Ralph was suddenly aware of how in over his head he was. He should have brought back-up. He should have listened to his friends. Ralph Anderson suddenly realised just how alone he was out here; and finally comprehended just what was in front of him. “LOOK AT ME!” This time you screamed it, repeatedly, admitting to yourself that there was a certain power that came with being in someone else’s body whilst also facing said person. And it’d never felt so good as this moment. Eventually Ralph Anderson did – but you could feel him when you were like this – and if anything, he was only looking at you because he wanted it to stop. He straightened; the pistol was still very much in play but lowered and hesitant, still you didn’t trust him not to take out your knee at the way he was holding it, and that finger was still hovering on the trigger. “What is wrong with you?” You continued, wondering if he might even listen to himself, “I can tell you what I think is wrong with you, Ralph Anderson, and you can hate me for it all you want – but I think it’s about time someone told you the truth.” You took a step and the pistol raised a little higher; “You have survivors guilt for whatever the hell happened in Tennessee, you feel guilty about everything that happened to Terry; from the way you arrested him to the way he died, guilt that you’ve left the Maitland family in the state it’s in and two girls without a father, guilt for the Peterson family because they’re all gone now – not forgetting the fact you shot Ollie. You think you’ve got off lightly with therapy sessions. For the record, I think he’s a God awful therapist and I get the feeling you don’t hold him in regard much higher than I.” You took a breath, “You feel guilty about everything that happened on this case, and every other fucking person that suffered at the hands of that shapeshifter and everything it ever touched.” You pointed to yourself… or… himself. “But I am NOT it, Ralph!! I didn’t do ANY of that. And you’re still here! You’re still alive and you’re still breathing! And you have friends and people who LOVE you!!!” You shook your head, suddenly a picture-perfect image of the man who’d been on the other side of your cell yesterday; “Face yourself—!! Face the person YOU are-!! How hard can it be!?” You couldn’t place your fingers exactly on the look on has face, it was such a distinct form of fear. No-one in the world should have to face themselves in such a way as this; and you could see it, Ralph Anderson was terrified of you. And you acknowledged that with a twisted smile; “Yeah. You’re damn right! You should be scared of me.” But it wasn’t just you, was it, that’s what you were getting at; “Scared of ME and yourself – at the man you can become!”

By this time Ralph was shaking, his hands were trembling and all he needed was one shot. Perhaps that was the point – was that what you were saying? By ending you, he might finally have peace? Or were you saying that’s what he thought he could have and it wouldn’t be that way? That he should face everything he’d done… that he thought he might have done, even when he hadn’t, and feel better. You didn’t want to die, but if he was going to do it the only thing you wanted right now was Ralph Anderson to be free from everything that haunted him. Even when you’re pointing a gun at my head I still fucking love you… But the shakes became sobs, and even Ralph knew he couldn’t hold that gun steady enough to take a clean shot. His vision blurred as tears ran; “God dammit-!” The pistol left his hands, settling in the grass – and Ralph’s hands went back to his face, trying to wipe those tears away as if you hadn’t been staring at him long enough to see them. Knowing it was over, you shimmered back to yourself, and although you wanted nothing more than to run over to him and hold him close to reassure him – the situation still had you standing calmly in the spot that he had placed you – waiting for Ralph to free you himself. Your detective crossed the grass to you, tears still staining his face, and again you found yourself wanted nothing more than to reach out and hold him close. You weren’t sure you’d like the result of that one – he had pointed a gun to your head and been seconds from pulling the trigger. Twice. In two days. Even though his hands were still trembling as he pulled yours towards him, he managed to unlock the cuffs with ease. “R-Ralph-” “Go. GO-!” He wiped his eyes again, nudging you away from him; resolve completely done. And you had a terrible feeling that Ralph Anderson was more broken than he’d ever been before. You shook your head, closing the gap again and trying to get him to look at you; “You don’t mean that…” You whispered gently, glad that he didn’t put away when you placed your hand delicately on his arm, “…You don’t.” “I do.” If there was ever a time to let him know that no matter your race you were still you, it was now. Maybe he expected the monster to run for its life. The woman who loved him would stay. “Tell me, Ralph Anderson. Tell me you want me to go. Right now. Say those words. That full sentence.” He was still determined not to let his eyes meet your face; “I want… I want….” But his body was still shaking; and his lip quivered. Ralph didn’t finish his sentence before he was sobbing again. “You can ask me to stay. Ralph. We can go back. I know this is going to take time, maybe a lot of time… but we ca-” “No. We can’t.” He shook his head, “I won’t.” Your face fell as he held out his car keys, “Take it. Take the car and go - I don’t care where, anywhere - just not Cherokee City. Not back to me.” “Ralph…” Your disbelief was more than evident, after all, you hadn’t done anything wrong and yet realised you were the one begging for his forgiveness now; “…Why? What about you?!” “Yune can pick me up. Look TAKE them!” He closed your hands around the keys and stepped away from you again, “Leave-! I’m letting you go, God dammit just GO!” “NO!” You shook your head again, “Why won’t you let us fix this? We can make this work! You know we can!” “BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO BE WITH YOU ANYMORE!” You were forced into a stunned silence, and your eyes couldn’t help but burn again. If you expected anything from him, it wasn’t that.  You opened your mouth, but suddenly found it hard to form words. “I DON’T EVER WANT TO EVEN SEE YOU AGAIN-!!! BUT I CAN’T EVEN KILL YOU – I LOVED YOU TOO MUCH TO KILL YOU, AND WHAT DOES THAT MAKE ME!?” Ralph ran his hands through his hair, and suddenly that strange crazy energy he’d given off the evening before was back – but a hell of a lot more erratic. “R…Ra…Ralph.” You weren’t sure it was something you could reason with; and he snapped, just to prove you right; “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! FUCKING GO!” His advance on you made you stagger back, and this time the fear that ran across your face was something he’d never seen before. It unnerved him but he couldn’t stop now; “LEAVE! NO ONE IN CHEROKEE CITY WANTS YOU AROUND ANYWAY!” That was just a little too much, there was a knife already through your heart, he didn’t have to twist it. You were staring at a man you’d loved for four years, and you didn’t recognise him at all. ‘Oh my god, who… who is this man?’ The pain was unbearable, and you didn’t want to cry – you couldn’t show him he was upsetting you; but Ralph Anderson probably already knew exactly what he was doing. You shook your head, continuing to walk backwards towards the car – staring at him hard, even if you couldn’t hate him you could still let him know how angry you were. And you’d show him your anger before you let him upset you. ‘Human beings, all the same… I should just have listened…’ Throughout history when weren’t you told to never get involved with one? Lifespan was the least of the worries at the top of any other shapeshifters list; but you’d always been fascinated – and their biggest advocates. They were afraid and they had to drive you to this point, that always made sense – but they were fragile, and emotional, and they could love in ways so unconditional that you’d never seen another species replicate. Yet here you were, and the one you’d wanted to spend the rest of his life with was doing this. And Ralph Anderson was one of the good ones. “You have it wrong, Ralph Anderson. So fucking wrong. You think you don’t know me... but really, it’s me that doesn’t know YOU.”  You didn’t turn as you kept backing towards his car, “How can you – YOU – prove my race so fucking right!?” You opened the door, still glaring at him, you wanted to say it, you wanted to tell him that you couldn’t believe you’d ever loved him. But you couldn’t. You couldn’t even bring yourself to pretend you felt that. Because even now when he was breaking your heart – you’d never loved a person as much as you had him. And you knew you didn’t know where you’d go from here – but you knew you’d carry that feeling with you for the rest of your life. There would never be another Ralph Anderson. You stopped looking at him, slamming the door shut, belting yourself in and starting the engine, throwing it into gear. You paused with a deep breath and allowed yourself one last glance at him. Standing there in the middle of a field alone watching you leave. Take a good hard look, Y/N, because you will never see this man again… You peeled your eyes away with an exhale, and closed them, counting to 10 before you pushed your foot to the pedal and the car began moving. But now you were stuck with eerie silence, and the echoes of his voice in your head – the remnants of his DNA in your veins. You knew Ralph would never let you go, but right now you couldn’t handle that. And suddenly realising how alone in the world you were, you had to pull over to the side. Tears were running before you’d even slowed to a stop, you buried your face in your arms against the steering wheel and all you could do was let out huge, shaking sobs. God damn you, Ralph Anderson… Why?! *** 9 Months Later…

You’d watched him for a little while, sitting in that little corner coffee shop. You would call him new in town; only you’d seen him a few times whilst running around. He drew you in in a similar way to the detective whose face you wore a little more often than you’d care to admit. Ralph’s body made you feel safe when you were alone, especially at night – he was familiar, his voice was familiar. Comfortable. Yet, with Ralph you could torture yourself for everything you’d ever done – and you were no longer content with looking at your own form. This man was gone because of you. Still, there was something about the one you were watching that you couldn’t quite put your fingers on… You tapped your stirrer against the top of your cup and bit your lip gently – never a fan of making the same mistake twice. But you knew that aura well, and he wasn’t human. Which was why you were sitting here and you looked like you again. Even though you couldn’t let him go; it was still Ralph’s shirt you were wearing, it was still his car you were driving, it was still him that you cried over every night. That didn’t mean that the man now turning from the counter with his coffee didn’t intrigue you enough to try it; had you found one just like you? His eyes met yours, and that silver flashed. And this time you couldn’t help but smile, using exactly the same tell on him. He wasn’t expecting it, and immediately froze, despite the tiny smile making its way to his lips.

And for the first time since you’d left Ralph Anderson in a middle of nowhere field, you didn’t feel quite so alone…

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I really appreciate your support for this series 💕 Thank you for your readership! I’m sorry!

[jasiper]

golden

fine line series 1/12

you’re so golden

i’m out of my head

i know that you’re scared

because hearts get broken

A golden state of mind. That’s the California dream, isn’t it? The place where dreams come true, where fleeting thoughts can transform into a tangible reality. The place where the sun never seems to set. The place where nobody is sad—and if someone is sad, there are the means to not feel sad anymore.

Piper’s life seemed to begin—and end—in the golden state. Her dad was living the golden life, making money and walking the red carpets and flashing his pearly whites on the big screen. When she went to the store, his face was plastered on every other magazine cover. He was what the famous people called a California dream. He made something out of nothing. His daughter? Well, she was trying.

But even trying is a generous word for her. California is the place where her dad found his career but lost Piper in the frenzy of the media. This was the place she felt the most alone. This is the place she found herself in the backseat of a police cruiser. This is the place she appeared in court. This is the place where her dad told her she shouldn’t be. She found herself forced across state lines and as she stared over the desert, she saw that Nevada had golden sunsets. Just like California. Only there was no water to reflect the light—only miles and miles of dry land and broken dreams and white walls where bad kids like her resided. But Piper wasn’t a bad kid. She just couldn’t find a place in the golden state.

Dreams came true in California. Only her dream didn’t.

Most people found heartbreak later on in life. Piper felt her first heartbreak as a kid. She should have been tucked into bed by her dad after a bedtime story with a kiss on the forehead. She fell asleep alone, clutching a teddy bear to her chest because her dad was off shooting another movie. Dance recitals meant that she looked out at the audience without a familiar face in sight. She never attended a daddy/daughter dance. Her first heartbreak was due to her own father’s negligence. She promised herself that no one would ever hurt her the way her dad did.

As Piper expected, she didn’t experience a golden state of mind in California. She felt that anticipated bliss in the middle of the winter in New York.

After a whirlwind December, everything Piper thought she knew turned out to be false. Her entire world flipped upside down. It took her the whole month of January to learn the ropes of being half-god. Turns out, there are a lot of things to be taught when your mother is the Greek goddess of love, including how to fight with a dagger, how to detect monsters, and how to come to terms with the fact that an evil earth entity is waking up. Maybe Piper would never achieve the California dream her dad was living; how could she? Everything she ever knew was a lie. Even if she had believed in God or whatever before all of this, she isn’t sure she’d be able to handle the real truth well.

If not for Leo, Piper probably wouldn’t survive this. Not with her life in jeopardy. Not with the knowledge of being a charmspeaker. And certainly not with the fact that her boyfriend wasn’t really her boyfriend at all.

It seems shallow, even to Piper. Her dad almost died and she almost died and the world almost ended but the Mist incident was—and still is—the lowest blow in this entire mess. The closest thing to a golden state of mind was just a hallucination, an illusion, a dream. So ironic since her mom is Aphrodite; shouldn’t her one success be in the romance department?

It took two months for them to kiss (for real this time). It happened so fast, it felt like a dream. Piper was being her usual nervous self, fiddling with her own fingers and she was babbling away and suddenly Jason leaned in to kiss her. The warm feeling in her stomach didn’t go away for a whole week after the kiss. She was smiling like an idiot even while training. Leo gave her shit for her grin and Annabeth rolled her eyes, but she didn’t care. The boy she liked kissed her after everything she endured—Jason didn’t have to like her after the Mist gave her fake memories.

But Piper stopped smiling when reality sank in. Sure, she and Jason were now exclusive, but when did things ever go right for demigods? She heard of the tragedy of her late older sister, Silena, and her boyfriend Beckendorf. Things ended horribly for them. She looked to her new friend, Annabeth, and her tired grey eyes, defeated from dead ends in the search to find her missing boyfriend. There were picture frames lining the walls of the Big House. Half of the faces were strangers to her even though the picture was recent, and although Chiron would never say it, she knew they were dead. How many people really achieved a happy ending here? Camp Half-Blood was the self-proclaimed safe place for Greek demigods, but she felt like she was walking on a gravesite.

And even if Piper somehow were to beat the odds and live through this war, love was never kind. Anyone could see that, not just a daughter of Aphrodite. She grew up in Hollywood’s backyard—she saw the headlines reporting that celebrity couples were divorcing. Love, as powerful as it is, is cruel. It’s ruthless and even has gods at its mercy. Her mother is feared for a reason.

If her own father had the ability to break her heart, what was stopping Jason from doing the same thing?

The walls go up. Piper feels like a child again, staring at her darkened bedroom wall, wishing more than anything that she could live her life without fear.

Unlike her past, someone recognizes that her walls are up.

It must have been hours upon hours of sparring. A sidestep, a parry, a kick to the dummy’s chest. When the dummy fell, Piper would wipe her sweaty forehead, take a breath, pick up the dummy, and start again. A mindless, tedious routine. Anything to get the image of her bedroom wall out of her mind. Anything to chase away the irrational fear dormant in her chest. 

By the time she kicks down the dummy again, she looks up mid-forehead wipe and sees Jason. He stands about five feet away, frustratingly dashing in his black tank top with the sleeves cut off. His sword hangs from the sheath on his hip and by the look of his own sweaty brow, Piper can only guess he had been training as well. When he runs his fingers through his hair—which is glistening in the sun, may she add—she can see his tattoo, forever a reminder of the Mist.

“You’ve been out here for a while,” Jason finally says after several moments of silence.

Piper sheaths her knife. When she finally allows her body to relax, she notices how her arms feel like jello. She’s more exhausted than she thought. “Not too long. I’m still a little shaky on my technique,” she answers, voice hoarse.

Jason bends down and grabs her water bottle. He extends an arm and she gratefully takes it, taking a swig. As she’s drinking, he says gently, “Pipes, you’ve been out here for hours. Annabeth was ready to drag you away from the dummy herself, but I didn’t think you’d appreciate that when you’re so, uh, on edge.”

On edge? Am I on edge? Piper wants to ask, but she can see Jason’s concern even though he tries to hide it. There’s that crease between his eyebrows that develops when he’s worried. She saw it when she broke her ankle and got hypothermia. She doesn’t like how he’s worried. He shouldn’t be worried, right?

“I’m fine,” Piper replies, though she doesn’t sound so sure.

The crease only deepens between his eyes. “Really? Fine?”

Piper’s knuckles are white around her water bottle. Jason’s looking at her with a concerned, almost bewildered expression. This should comfort her; someone with the intention of breaking her heart shouldn’t be this worried about her, right?

But Jason is a good person. Break him down to his soul and that’s what he is: a good person. He’s the kind of guy who offers up half of his sandwich if someone forgot to pack lunch. He’s the kind of guy who holds the door open for a crowd of people even if they’re ten feet away. He’s also the kind of guy who jumps into the Grand Canyon for a complete stranger.

What’s stopping a good person from realizing he made a mistake and leaving and unintentionally breaking Piper’s heart anyway?

“Pipes?” Jason’s voice snaps her out of her reverie. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to be sick.”

“I’m fine,” is her instant reply. Her voice wobbles and she winces because she does not sound fine. Jason’s look of concern grows more apparent and she clears her throat to try speaking again. “Really. Just… Wow, I am so tired. You’re right, I’ve been out here for a while and I’m tired and probably dehydrated—”

“Piper—”

Piper sidesteps away as Jason moves forward. She turns so she’s walking backward, careful not to turn her back on him to assure him she’s alright. “I really need to shower and probably lay down. I’m fine, really, I am, I just—”

Her ankle snags on something on the ground as she backpedals. She tries to balance her weight a moment too late, her body too exhausted to keep herself upright. She braces herself for impact as she trips ungracefully—pun not intended— over the mysterious object on the ground.

Before she can hit the ground, a hand wraps around her wrist and tugs her forward. The momentum of the pull sends her flying and she crashes into a warm, firm body. It takes her a few seconds to realize she’s in Jason’s arms, his hands gripping her biceps. She turns her head to see that she dripped over the dummy she had been sparring with a few minutes ago.

“Piper,” Jason begins slowly, worry laced in his words, “what is going on?”

The worry in his voice isn’t enough to free Piper from her fear. She looks into his eyes and irrationally sees the end to a very recent relationship and it’s all too much to handle. It’s dumb, it’s irrational, it’s flat-out stupid to think about nonexistent relationship problems with her perfectly kind boyfriend when she’s probably destined to die from Mother Nature herself but here she is, in Jason’s arms, and it’s all too much.

Piper pushes her perfectly good boyfriend away and tries to ignore the hurt flashing to his eyes. “I’m sorry, I have to—I can’t—”

A crowd has formed. The volleyball game between some Apollo and Athena kids has come to a complete standstill. Annabeth is in her usual spot for this time of the afternoon, perched in front of her cabin, a book in her hands, and even from several yards away Piper can see those disappointed grey eyes. The only thing making this situation less embarrassing is the fact that Leo isn’t there; he’s busy with his siblings working on the Argo II. If Leo had to see Piper like this…

“Pipes?” Jason makes one last attempt. “What’s going on? Talk to me. Please.”

“I can’t, Jason,” Piper manages, voice shaky, and the edges of her vision blur together as tears prick her eyes. “I can’t.”

It takes all of her willpower not to sprint back to her cabin. She lowers her head and tries to ignore the sinking feeling in her chest—the same sinking feeling she felt when she boarded a plane to Nevada—as she walks away.

***

“You’re going to have to talk to him, you know.”

“I know I do. I just… can’t right now.”

“You already missed dinner last night. And breakfast this morning. Are you really going to let your embarrassment keep you from eating and talking to Jason?”

Piper risks a look at Annabeth from under the pillow she has covering her face. Although Annabeth’s voice is a bit condescending, there’s no hiding the worry on her friend’s face.

“I just don’t understand, Piper,” Annabeth continues. “You chased after him for two months, hoping he’d like you back and within two weeks you’re, what, pushing him away?”

“It’s not that simple,” Piper protests, burying her face deeper into her pillow and rolling on her side to face away from Annabeth. “I’m not trying to do this.”

“You’re not trying to stop it from happening,” Annabeth says softly. “You’ve had every chance to go talk to him since yesterday and you’ve locked yourself in your cabin. You won’t even talk to Leo.”

“Leo won’t understand this.”

Annabeth’s hand, calloused from hours of training, rests on Piper’s arm. It moves down to rub her back. Annabeth isn’t one for physical comfort but she must sense Piper needs it. “Why won’t Leo understand? He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“Leo’s never been in a relationship,” Piper mumbles, her voice mumbled by her pillowcase. “I’m sure if I tell Leo how I feel, he’ll look at me like I’m crazy.”

“You’re pushing away the guy of your dreams. You are a little crazy,” Annabeth weakly teases.

Piper lowers her pillow and stares at the cabin wall. She stares at the picture of her and her dad in front of her face and her chest tightens. “Maybe he’s not the guy of my dreams.”

“You literally called him that after he kissed you for the first time.”

“Yeah, well, I was stupid and I wasn’t thinking straight,” Piper retorts. “I’m fifteen. What do I know about love?”

Annabeth sighs. “You’re the daughter of Aphrodite. I feel out of my element here. I’m not one for relationship advice.”

Piper chews on her bottom lip. She wonders if Annabeth would understand her crazy, irrational fear of Jason breaking her heart. If her dad, the person who raised her, could break her heart, what was stopping Jason from doing the same? Good guy or not, he has a history he still doesn’t remember, a family of Roman soldiers across the country who might change his mind. The uncertainty of her relationship—and her life—had been eating away at her sanity for weeks.

Before Piper could come up with a response to Annabeth’s comment, a knock sounds from the door. Annabeth calls out, “Who is it?”

“Uh.” Piper sits up because she recognizes that voice. “It’s me, uh, Jason.”

Annabeth looks over at Piper, eyebrows raised. Piper shrugs so Annabeth asks, “What do you need?”

“I know Piper’s in there,” Jason says through the door. “I need to talk to her. Piper? Can I please talk to you? Alone?”

“We’re not allowed to be alone in a cabin together,” is Piper’s pathetic reply.

Jason sighs. “Okay, then we don’t have to—”

Annabeth stands and quickly crosses the room despite Piper’s noise of protest. She opens the door, revealing a crestfallen Jason, and says, “I’ll keep watch. You guys need to work out whatever’s up, I don’t really know what’s up, but if we’re going to go on a quest in a few weeks, we can’t have miscommunication. Got it?”

“Understood,” Jason replies obediently.

“Piper?” Annabeth’s grey eyes flash.

“Yes,” Piper mumbles, still clutching her pillow to her chest.

“Perfect. I’ll be right outside. Yell if you need me.” Annabeth sends Piper one last stop being a baby look and shuts the door behind her.

A long silence follows the door closing behind Annabeth. Jason stands just inside the cabin, staring down at his feet, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Piper’s heart races inside her chest and she grips the pillow like a lifeline.

I just don’t understand, Piper, Annabeth’s voice echoes in Piper’s head. You chased after him for two months, hoping he’d like you back and within two weeks you’re, what, pushing him away?

“You can sit down, if you want,” Piper offers softly. Jason lifts his head and she pats the bed mattress beneath her. “I promise I won’t bite. Or yell. Or push you off.”

Jason cracks a smile and he chuckles. “Promise?”

“I promise. Come here.”

Jason finally walks over and sits on the edge of her bed. He turns his body to face her and for a moment, he studies her face. Her heart races and she wonders what he’s thinking. Although she’s getting better at reading his face, sometimes it’s impossible to know what he could be thinking.

“What… happened yesterday?” Jason asks quietly. “I noticed something was wrong a few days ago, but I didn’t… I just thought you were a little down, which is totally understandable. But yesterday you really worried me. Did I do something wrong?”

It takes Piper a few seconds to realize Jason blames himself. She blinks and rapidly shakes her head. “What? No, no, of course not. You haven’t done anything wrong. I mean it. If you did, I would tell you.”

“Are you sure?” Suddenly Jason isn’t the son of Jupiter, or Zeus, or whatever. He’s not the guy who fought the king of the giants with a piece of scrap wood. He’s not the guy who jumped into the Grand Canyon to save her. He’s a scared, insecure fifteen-year-old boy who looks worried about messing up.

If only he knew the only one messing up was her.

“Jason.” Piper pushes away the pillow and scoots closer to him. She takes his hands into his, threading her fingers through hers. She looks up to meet his eyes and she sees the fear. She has to swallow her embarrassment from yesterday’s blowup as she says, “You are… perfect. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I feel like I have,” Jason whispers. “You’ve been so distant. So quiet. I thought you were overwhelmed with the upcoming quest and the fear and everything because I’m scared, too. But yesterday it seemed like you were distant from me and me only.”

Her stomach twists into knots. The hurt in his voice is so evident and it’s her fault. Her irrational fears have forced a perfectly good guy, a guy who likes her, to doubt himself. Some girlfriend she is.

“I’m… scared,” Piper breathes. Jason leans in closer, staring at her with such an intense gaze that she forces herself to look away. “I didn’t realize how scared I was until we got together.”

“Scared?” Jason asks. “Scared of… me?”

“No,” Piper assures him. She squeezes his fingers and he brings their intertwined hands up to kiss her knuckles as he sighs out a breath of relief. “Scared of… this.”

“This?” Jason keeps her knuckles against his lips. “Our relationship?”

As Piper hears it out loud, she realizes how stupid she’s being. She nods miserably, staring at her knees. “Scared of trusting someone this much.”

“Is it me? Or just in general?” Jason asks. His voice is so kind and understanding that it makes Piper want to cry.

“In general… and a little bit of you,” Piper admits. “I know that Hera’s meddling wasn’t your fault, but the Mist really messed me up.”

Jason kisses her fingertips this time. “Gods, I know. It would mess anyone up. I am still so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. The Mist and my dad and the whole demigod thing… It was a lot to swallow at once, you know? That and all of my baggage.”

“Baggage?” Jason sounds confused.

“You know. The relationship with my dad. Not having a mom.”

“Oh.” Jason tightens his grip on her hand. “Yeah. Not having a mom… sucks.”

Piper realizes how insensitive she sounds—she has a mom. Sure, Aphrodite is a goddess, but she’s still alive. She’s there in her own weird, annoying, immortal way. But Jason… His mom was abusive and she gave him away when he was a toddler and now she’s dead. At least Piper had her dad, which is more than what Jason could say; Jason has never met Zeus and judging by the tallies tattooed on his arm, his dad has had more than enough time to pop in and say hi. If Piper has it bad, Jason has it worse.

“It’s… so stupid and it’s unfair of me to be taking it out on you,” Piper continues. “But I thought I knew you and then it was all the trick of the Mist. I’m still getting to know you. And trust me, I like what I know. I really, really do. But my own dad broke my heart, Jason. He neglected me for years, thinking he was providing for us. He was gone for days and weeks at a time. He missed every dance recital, every parent-teacher conference. He didn’t see me graduate from middle school. He didn’t come to my first soccer game. My dad missed everything. I know it sounds so unfair because I had a dad, I had a pretty normal life and you didn’t, but my dad… I was a kid and he broke my heart. My own dad did that. If the person who raised me could do that much damage, what’s stopping any other person from doing the same thing? Is something wrong with me? Are you going to wake up one day and realize I’m not the person you want and leave?”

Jason is quiet for a long time after she finishes speaking. Her heart hammers uncomfortably in her throat and she’s afraid that she just drove him away. He probably sees the fifty shades of crazy she is and doesn’t want a part of that—who would want this? A BMW stealing girl who got sent to court for wanting attention? Someone who is pushing away a perfectly good person just because her dad wasn’t around? If he wants to run for the hills, she wouldn’t be able to blame him.

“My mom’s name was Beryl,” Jason says softly. “She was an actress. Hollywood’s starlet. Attracted Zeus himself not once, but twice. And when he left, she lost it. Drowned herself in every bottle she could get her hands on. I don’t remember this, but Thalia says she raised me. She was a kid and making my bottles and changing my diapers. I wouldn’t want anyone to be raised the way I was, but then to make matters worse, my mom abandoned me in the forest? She left a two-year-old in the forest with a wolf goddess to fend for himself. I didn’t even know any of this until a few weeks ago. I… I didn’t even know my mom broke my heart until recently, and I’m so angry about it.”

Piper’s chest tightens. “Jason, I’m so sorry.”

“No. I’m sorry. I’m so upset and I don’t even remember this woman. You know your dad. Your dad has recently hurt you, Pipes. You have a right to be upset. You have a right to be afraid of me. I don’t think I get that right because I hardly even know who I am.”

“I don’t accept that,” Piper argues. “You can be upset over something you don’t remember. Your mom changed your whole life. She forced you away from your sister. I’d be angry, too. I’d be furious. You’re allowed to be furious and you’re allowed to be afraid of me, too.”

Jason’s eyes are frustratingly soft when he whispers, “But I’m not afraid.”

“How?” Piper murmurs. She leans in even closer and when she does so, Jason raises one hand to cup her cheek. “How are you not terrified that I’m going to break your heart like your mom broke yours?”

“Pipes, even if you did break my heart, I’m sure I’d deserve it,” Jason says. “I was a baby then. My mom was a drunk. What she did… It wasn’t okay. That was neglect. I look at you and I’m not scared. I trust you with every cell in my body. You… you trusted me when I was just an illusion. You kept trusting me when you found out I was a Roman. You keep trusting me. You trust that I’m going to lead us to defeat Gaea and keep us alive. How could someone like you be someone I’m scared of?”

Piper’s heart skips a beat and she stares at him, a lump forming in her throat. “We might die.”

“You’re right, we might.”

“Gaea… she’s capable of killing us.”

“Yep. She is.”

“Aren’t you terrified?”

Without skipping a beat, Jason nods. “I am. But I look at you and it doesn’t seem so scary.”

It’s like falling all over again. She stares into his deep blue eyes and it’s a slow tug, a warm feeling pooling in her stomach, and she’s back at the Grand Canyon; he saved her from a death fall. He’s holding her upright, keeping her from hitting the ground. This boy in front of her is not her father. Even if he wanted to, she’s convinced he couldn’t break her heart. He could try and he’d never intentionally hurt her.

When Piper leans in, Jason meets her halfway. She kisses him softly, his warm hand cupping her cheek and his fingers burying themselves in her hair. His lips taste like strawberries and he smells of Old Spice. She melts against his lips and pulls him closer. He complies, both of his hands on her cheeks, soft and warm and comforting.

By the time they pull away, Jason’s cheeks are red and Piper’s breathless. He presses her forehead to hers and for a moment, they just look at each other.

“Next time you feel this way, can you please tell me?” Jason murmurs. “I’m pretty dumb and I can’t read your mind, even though I wish I could. I know years of abandonment aren’t going to be healed by a talk with me, but I want to help. I want you to know I’m here and I’m not going to leave you, Pipes.”

Piper feels her lips curl up in a tiny smile. “Thank you. You handled my crazy and that’s something I never asked you to do.”

“You’re not crazy, but you’re welcome.” Jason kisses her forehead. “Waking up on that bus… I felt so alone. I didn’t know who I was, and I’m still learning. But you… took control of my fears and you made me less afraid. You make me feel like me if who I am is the person I was before I woke up.”

“I don’t know who that person is either, but if you’re anything like who you used to be, I know I trust you,” Piper whispers. She pulls him in for another soft kiss. “I know you’re probably busy, but I haven’t eaten all day so I am starving. Can we head to lunch before going to Bunker Nine?”

Jason smiles and nods. “Anything for you.” He stands up and offers her his hand, which she takes. “Maybe we can take some strawberries before lunch. Sound like a plan?”

Beaming, Piper presses herself against his side. “You read my mind. Let’s go.”

And as they step out into the daylight, Piper can’t help but admire how the sun makes everything golden.

[softsichenghours]

metanoia {m.l}

summary: after a painful breakup, you set out on a journey to live your life, never thinking the boy at the gas station would bring the most meaning into it. 

word count: 11.2k (i went a little overboard) 

category: fluff, a little bit of angst, soulmates au

warnings: mentions of alcohol, swearing, mentions of religion, a tad bit suggestive, death

a/n: yukhei, johnny, and donghyuck are side characters, the song mentioned is slow it down by the lumineers, props to you if you can find the quote from the end of the f****** world, heavily inspired by the world is ending and i’m with you by @jaeminlore​ so pls check that out too

you and your soulmate have matching tattoos that become clear once you meet.

metanoia: the journey of changing one’s mind, heart, self, or way of life. 

you had a secret. a secret you could tell nobody. not your friends, not your family, not your boyfriend. well, you couldn't tell him because it was about him. well, your relationship with him. that sounds terrible. the secret about your relationship that you kept hidden away from your boyfriend wasn't a bad secret. yes it was. it wasn't a secret like you were cheating on him or you knew something bad that he didn't, but you knew it could hurt you both in many ways. 

your boyfriend yukhei was wonderful. he was the light of your life, always creating sunshine wherever he went. he could help you out of your bad moods in an instant and he dealt with your nihilistic views on the world, despite his opposite beliefs. he was a smooth talking flirt, which was what first pulled you in to him a year ago. 

the concept of soulmates was something so cherished in your society. when you met your soulmate, your matching tattoos appeared on your body. for years you watched as your friends in middle school and high school got their tattoos with their high school sweethearts. you were convinced you were never going to get yours, although you were still very young.

it was a cold winter's day when you met yukhei. you and your friend were walking into a café, as yukhei and his friend were walking out. had either of you been delayed by even ten seconds, you wouldn’t have met. yukhei called it fate, you called it coincidence (you were never one to indulge in such foolish concepts such as fate, magic, destiny, etc.) you wore your brand new cream coloured knit turtleneck and yukhei spilled his hot coffee all over it while running into you. he must've apologized ten times over but you shrugged it off, more annoyed that the coffee was basically scalding your skin. you offered to buy him another, but he denied. instead, yukhei bought you and your friend your drinks and even tried to compensate you for the price of your sweater (which you wouldn't take. it was just a shirt). 

once the two boys had left the café, your friend started babbling about how she thought one of them was her soulmate. she said she felt a tingling on her skin, never mentioning where, but saying that her older sister told her that's what the tattoo felt like when it appeared. she said she had a suspicion that it was yukhei’s friend.

within ten minutes, the boys were back in the café. you watched them discuss something on the snowy sidewalk before entering the tiny shop again, the christmas chimes clattering. your friend held her breath when they made their way back over. 

“uh, hey again.” yukhei smiled sheepishly, snowflakes dusting his hair and shoulders. “it seems that i've lost my number.”

“huh?” you chuckled in response, sipping your hot cocoa.

“i lost my number. can i have yours?” 

that's how smooth wong yukhei was. that's how you ended up falling in love with him. 

but you had a secret. yukhei was not your soulmate. 

yukhei got his tattoo. a little sun right on the inside of his wrist. you were falling for him and although you knew it was wrong and useless to be in a relationship with him if you weren't soulmates, you didn't want to let him go. 

so you lied. you said that your sun tattoo had shown up on a part of your body that was too personal to show him. but a year into your relationship and it was still too personal to show when he asked. because you didn't have it.

you cursed the gods or whatever had created soulmates. you knew of people who hated their soulmate when they first met. you knew of people who's soulmates had died and then they were alone forever. but you cursed them because you loved yukhei and he wasn't yours.

your secret was about to be revealed.

you and yukhei had been fighting a lot recently. over stupid things that every couple fought over. you wanted to get a new apartment away from the noisy city, he didn't. he wanted to get a pet, you didn't. neither of you did the dishes and now they were piling up in the sink. every couple fought about these things, but soulmates were able to resolve them easily. you hated to admit it, but your feelings for yukhei were fading. it was because he wasn't your soulmate. 

you tossed and turned in your shared bed, not being able to sleep because of the noise outside your window. your apartment with yukhei was right in the middle of the city, where it was loud day and night. 

after hearing a particularly loud and aggressive honk from a car horn, you sat up in bed, rubbing your temples and praying for yukhei to change his mind about moving. 

“why are you awake?” he mumbled, turning to face you, his eyes still half shut with sleep. 

“how are you asleep?” you sighed, wondering how he could sleep with all the noise. 

“just ignore it.” he suggested, like it was a world changing idea. you rolled your eyes and got out of bed, hoping the couch would provide more comfort to your ears. 

“i can't “just ignore” it.” you mocked his voice as you trailed out of the room. 

“seriously?” yukhei groaned, getting up to follow you. you didn't want to argue right then, in the middle of the night. 

you walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water first. yukhei followed and leaned against the counter, watching you intently, like a detective interrogating a criminal in a movie.

“what is it, xuxi?” you asked, clearly agitated, using his mandarin name. 

“why do we always have to fight? soulmates don't fight like this.” soulmates. your secret had become heavier and heavier to bare lately. 

“i don't know.” you said bluntly. “maybe we just want different things, yukhei. i want to have a good nights sleep for once, but you don't want to move so that can happen.” you snapped. this was so stupid, and you both knew it was. you put your cup in the sink after taking only two sips, and tried to walk away from him. 

“but soulmates don't want different things–”

“we’re not even soulmates, xuxi.” you let your biggest secret slip out of your mouth. just like that. the cat was out of the bag. 

yukhei was silent for a moment. “w-what?” he asked, even lightly chuckling as if he thought you were joking. when you turned around to look at him, you knew he was connecting the dots. 

“that’s why you never wanted to show me your tattoo. because–because…” he couldn't finish his sentence. 

“because i don't have it.” you finished for him. an uncomfortable silence settled over the dark room, both of you truly realizing that you weren't soulmates. 

“i'm sorry, yuk–”

“you knew all this time and you didn't tell me? then who's my soulmate?!” he exasperated in disbelief, throwing his hands in the air. 

“it must be someone else you met that day…” you said in a quiet voice. it was silent again. 

“you lied to me for a year?” he spoke into the dark silence, tears collecting in his usually sparkling eyes. you didn't mean to make him cry. you didn't want him to cry. his watery eyes caused yours to fill up. 

“i didn't lie, i just–” you didn't know what to say. “i love you, yukhei.” you stepped closer to him, your fingers wrapping around his slender wrist. but you knew it was too late. he pulled away from you and turned his head to look at the floor as his tears fell. you shouldn't have said anything.  

“i thought only soulmates could truly love each other.” he scoffed, wiping at his eyes ashamedly. you realized something. 

“so you only loved me because you thought i was your soulmate?” you questioned, your eyebrows furrowing and your eyes burning into the man standing in front of you. your tears started to fall. “i loved you even though i knew you weren't mine.” 

yukhei took one fleeting look at you, and from the expression written all over his face, you knew it was over.

if there was one thing your parents taught you, it was that you had to live your life the way you wanted to. you couldn't let other people boss you around or tell you what to do. your life was your story, and you had to write it word for word.

that's how you ended up in your van that must've been over ten years old, aimlessly driving down the highway. you knew you had to get away from your life. your break up with yukhei was your reality hit. everything was meaningless anyway, so why not? you wanted to see as much of the world as you could and what could be a better time than during heartbreak? 

so you took your savings, shoved a mattress onto a wood palette in the back of your van, and hit the road. you didn't know where you were going, but you had been driving for a few hours now. you kept going, despite the tears blurring your vision that you tried to desperately blink away, despite the sun setting and darkness setting in, despite the rain furiously slapping against your windshield. wait, when had it started raining? you were so consumed in your own thoughts that you hadn't even realized the change it the weather. maybe it was time to take a break.

you stopped at a gas station in the nearest small town. the roads seemed too quiet, but maybe it was because it was after dark. you stepped out into the pouring rain, getting drenched almost as soon as your foot hit the ground. you ran inside, not noticing a pair of eyes watching you from inside the store. 

“is that everything…?” the boy behind the counter asked hesitantly, his fingers tapping the edge of the surface out of habit. you both glanced down at your array of foods you had dropped from your arms; chips, those rotated hotdogs that definitely weren't real meat, beef jerky, a box of tissues, and three cans of redbull. 

“yes.” you replied dryly, a slight chuckle escaping your lips. 

“roadtrip?” he questioned as he scanned the items. 

“you could say that.” 

it was silent for another moment. all you could hear was the low hum of the electric open sign, the deep buzz of the freezers, and the crinkle of the plastic bag he was putting your food into.

you finally looked up, grabbing your wallet from your pocket, letting your eyes examine the boy in front of you. he looked young, your age or younger. you couldn't deny that he was cute—high, sculpted cheekbones, smooth, fair skin, wide doe eyes. 

his eyes were what attracted you to him the most. when they finally met yours, you noticed that they sparkled, almost. you couldn't look away from them. you felt an itching sensation on your chest near your shoulder, almost like a tingle that you couldn't describe. 

you paid for your stuff and exited the store, stepping back into the rain. but you stopped in your tracks, something coming to your mind. something that had been described to you before. you turned your head in either direction to make sure no one was watching you before pulling the front of your shirt out and glancing down at your chest. and there it was, right above your heart. a single music note tattoo. you were sure that hadn't been there before. 

you were on this journey to find yourself and find happiness in this dreary world, and that's how you found yourself going back into the gas station. the boy watched as you marched up to the front counter. you noticed how he rubbed his left hand against the edge of the surface, almost as if he was relieving an itch. 

“hi again.” you breathed out, not believing you were doing this.

“hi…?” he said hesitantly, rocking on the heels of his feet lightly.  

“i know this is going to sound insane–” you eyed his name tag, “mark, but i think you're my soulmate.” 

he was silent. you were silent. the whole damn store was silent. maybe the world was silent. 

you released your breath when he didn't say anything after what seemed like an eternity. he just stood there, wide eyed, his mouth pursed in an “O” shape. 

“okay then, never trying that again.” you mumbled, taking a step back from the counter, turning on your heel to leave. maybe this whole soulmate thing was rigged and your tattoo was bullshit. 

“w-wait!” he called nervously. you looked at him again, waiting for him to say more. “i think you're right.” he laughed. 

“i'm right?” you repeated, like you weren't sure what he had said. but you heard him correctly. he lifted up his hand, displaying the music note tattoo in the middle of his palm, identical to yours. 

“can i see yours?” he asked quietly, his sparkling eyes even wider than before. “i mean, if it's–y'know.”

you nodded and pulled down the edge of your shirt ever so slightly, just enough to reveal your tattoo. 

“woah…” he muttered, his eyes darting from your tattoo to his, back to yours. he reached out as to place his palm on your chest, but you jolted back, letting your shirt go back into place. 

“sorry.” mark stuttered out, drawing back his arm. it was quiet again, both of you just looking at each other. how weird was it that you had found your soulmate so fast? and where did you go from there? 

for the first time in a long time, you found your heart speaking instead of your mind. 

“come with me, mark.” you didn't just say that.

mark laughed, looking down and shaking his head subtly. “i don't even know your name.”

“i’m y/n. now you do.” you blurted out, not being able to take your eyes off him. 

“how do i know you're not going to kill me?”

“i mean, you don't. but we’re soulmates, i think you should take my word for it when i say i won't murder you.” 

he hesitated again. “i'm off in,” he checked his watch. “ten minutes. but i have responsibilities.”

mark lee’s (you learned his full name on the drive to his apartment. he talked a lot) apartment was just like him from what you observed; somewhat tidy, somewhat all over the place. he had clothes on chairs in the kitchen, but there were no dishes in the sink. there was a half eaten apple on the counter, but he had instructed you to take your shoes off before you came in. you were surprised he was even going with you. 

“so, what are those responsibilities you were talking about?” you asked, looking around his place. 

“well, i have to pack a bag, make sure the tv and lights are off…” he trailed off as he walked down the hallway, presumably to his room. “oh and–” he stopped and crouched down, tapping his fingertips on the floor. “jellybean!” 

what the hell was he doing? you opened your mouth to ask if he was okay in the head, but then you saw it. a tiny ball of orange fluff running out of his room. 

“mark, what is that?”

he scooped the kitten into his arms. “this is jellybean.” he looked at you and smiled, his eyes sparkling once again. you merely blinked at him. 

“don't tell me you're allergic?” he whined, his face dropping. 

“i'm not allergic, but where will we keep it? where will it piss?” you questioned, crossing your arms over your chest. 

“i don't know, but– jelly is all i have,” he said quietly, petting the creature in his arms. “it's me and her, or neither of us.” 

“mark, get your feet off my dash.” you sighed, glancing over at the boy who was now in your passenger seat. 

“why?” he questioned, just to be defiant. 

“because it’s distracting.”

“more distracting than the cat trying to jump into your lap every two minutes?” he giggled, grabbing jellybean before she could prance over the middle console again. you merely nodded and smiled, keeping your eyes on the dark road. you were trying to find a spot to pull over and park for the night, without getting killed in your sleep. it was getting late, and you were getting drowsy.

finally, you found a clearing on the empty highway and pulled over, parking the van and looking over at mark. his eyes were closed and his chest rose and fell gently. you couldn't deny that he was breathtaking while he slept. if he was going to sleep right there, keeping that pest of a cat away from you, you weren't going to fight it. 

it was dark enough that you could barely see anything in the back of the van. the only light provided was from the moon and the stars coming through your tinted windows. you felt around for your bag, quiet as to not wake mark. you picked out a sweater and shorts from your bag, and figuring it was dark enough, changed right there. 

and mark would've gotten away with watching you, if jellybean hadn’t meowed into the silence, making you jump. you quickly pulled the sweater over your head, before turning to face mark, whose face was red as a fire truck. 

“i-i wasn't looking, i swear!” he stuttered. he wasn't meaning to look in a sexual way, but the way the shadows cast by the moon fell over your bare shoulders and back entranced him to you. 

“don't do it again.” you huffed, pulling your hair back into a ponytail. it was awkwardly silent until mark glanced out the window and thought of something. 

“let's look at the stars.” he suggested, placing his cat in the back with you and opening the passenger seat door, stepping out into the brisk night air. you were too tired to protest it, so you opened the back doors of the van and stepped out, now right next to him. he was already craning his neck up towards the night sky. you thought he was crazy when he stepped onto the floor of the van and hoisted himself onto the roof. 

“what are you doing?” you questioned, looking up at the boy. 

“view’s better up here. come on up.” he smiled, reaching his hand out to help you up. you had nothing else to lose. 

“well, lying on the roof of my van with a stranger hasn't been the weirdest thing that has happened today.” you chuckled, turning your head to look at mark. 

“hey, i'm not a stranger,” he defended himself with a smile. “you know my name, you've been in my apartment, and you've pet my cat. i think we’re well acquainted by now.” 

“i think you're crazy.” you shook your head jokingly and looked back at the sky full of stars. 

“well i think you're crazy.” he fired back. 

“i am crazy, mark lee.” you said, nudging his shoulder with yours. 

“i can't believe you're my soulmate.” he sighed contently, wriggling closer to you. 

“why? were you expecting someone else?” you questioned. 

“no, it's just– i've worked the night shift at that gas station for a year. no one interesting has ever come in there before while i was working. and then the first person who looks like she's got a good story comes along, and she's my soulmate.” he explained. 

“i look like i have a good story?” you glanced over at him again. he looked like he was deep in thought, silent again for a moment.

“what are you running away from? nobody gets up and leaves like that for no reason.” he turned his head so that his eyes met yours, sending a chill down your spine. 

“it's silly.” you shrugged it off, not sure if you could talk about yukhei without bursting into tears.

“it's not silly.” he reassured in a quiet voice.

“would you believe me if i said i was running away from a relationship?” 

“really? but…” 

“yeah, i know,” you sighed. “i know you're my soulmate and all but…he believed that i was his soulmate, but it must have been someone else he met that day. i guess just couldn't keep the secret anymore.” 

“you knew you weren't soulmates but you didn't tell him?” mark questioned, propping himself up on one elbow to look down at you. 

“don't get me wrong, i really loved him. i didn't just do it to play with his emotions, i’m not that much of a bitch.” you laughed, making mark smile at your word choice. “i mean, i don't know if romantic love can truly exist with someone who isn't your soulmate, but whatever i felt for him, it was real.” you looked away from the boy, not even noticing the tears in your eyes. but he did.

“oh shit…i'm sorry, y/n.” 

you sat up, still looking away from him. even though he was who you were supposed to spend the rest of your life with, you didn't want him to see you cry. not when you’d only known him for a few hours. 

“hey, are you okay?” he asked quietly, moving closer to you, rubbing his hand soothingly up and down your back. it felt like your body jolted with electricity at his touch. 

“yeah, i'm fine, i just–it's hard to get over him when we were dating for a year and i know i broke his heart and as soon as i leave him i find my soulmate and—” you stopped yourself, not wanting to break down in sobs.

“well, we don't have to be soulmates like that yet.” he offered. “we can be…best friends.”  

you couldn’t help but laugh at how pure he was. he brought his other hand up to your face, wiping the tears off your cheeks gently. 

“okay, okay, we can be best friends.” you agreed, looking into his eyes, your stomach plunging to your feet. he was so breathtaking. god, you’d only known him for four hours.

 waking up next to mark lee definitely startled you at first. the mattress in the back of your van was barely big enough for two people, but thankfully you both managed to keep your hands to yourselves throughout the night. 

you woke up before him, and quietly exited the van to get a breath of fresh air. you huddled down into your sweater, the chilly morning air making your teeth chatter. you thought it was funny how you still reached for something that wasn’t there, a dirty habit that you had quit months ago. 

you nearly jumped out of your skin when you felt something furry rub against your bare ankles. 

“jesus…” you muttered, glancing down at the cat that must’ve escaped the van when you did. you noticed how jellybean had slept peacefully in mark’s arms the entire night. now she sat at your feet and looked up at you, meowing for attention. 

“i’m not picking you up. i don’t like cats.” you said, like it would hurt her feelings. why were you even talking to a cat? you were sure you had lost your mind. jellybean pranced around your feet in circles, her meows sounding more like a baby crying. 

“okay, okay,” you gave in, scooping her into your arms just so she’d shut up. she immediately nuzzled into your chest, purring with delight. you felt yourself smile. “maybe you’re not so bad…”

 how mark lee had convinced you to go to the beach, you didn’t know, but there you were, lying on a towel on the sand, watching your soulmate try to build a sandcastle. 

“you’re such a child.” you joked, taking your sunglasses off to see him more clearly. his sandcastle wouldn’t stick together because there was no water. you didn’t know if he knew this or not.

“i am not!” he laughed. “you’re just jealous of my sandcastle.” as he said that, the sand crumbled in his hands again. “shit.”

“you need water for it to stick.” you mentioned. 

“oh. yeah. but i don’t have anything to transport the water in.” he said as he looked around for something. he finally eyed your water bottle, which you let him use. finally, he seemed content building his sandcastle. 

you put your sunglasses back on and lid on your back, trying to relax and absorb the sun. it lasted for around two minutes before the sun was blocked out by a shadow. you opened one eye, looking up at mark’s form hovering over you. 

“yes?”

“come swimming with me.”

“don’t want to.”

“please?”

“no.”

“okay…” he pouted and moved out of the way. 

it wasn’t even a minute later and mark tugged on your arm.

“pleaseee?” he whined, his hand latched onto yours. you sighed and sat up, hoping that if you got in the water with him, he’d leave you alone to rest. 

“the water is too cold.” you complained with a giggle, watching mark splash around delightfully. 

“i know, but you’re supposed to swim at the beach, not sleep.” he teased.

“i was not sleeping!” you protested, laughing at how silly your arguments were already. you would only get in the water up to your thighs, your skin already numb from the frigid water. you wondered how mark could submerge himself completely. oh yeah, he had mentioned that he was from canada, it was always cold there, right?

you dragged mark out of the water a few minutes later, not wanting either of you to die from hypothermia. as you sat on your towel again, you watched as mark’s teeth chattered, water dripping from his hair onto his face. you wanted to tell him i told you so, but you actually felt bad for him.

“hey, uh, i forgot my towel back in the van...i’m gonna run back and get it.” he said. you noticed the goosebumps covering his arms and the slight shiver in his body, and the van took a few minutes to walk to. 

“here, have mine.” you offered, standing up and shaking out your towel before handing it to him. 

“you sure?”

“yeah, i’m fine.” you smiled, pushing it into his chest. “take it, mark.”

he grasped it hesitantly, a small grin forming on his lips. “well, here, take my sweater so you don’t get cold.” it was his turn to push the blue garment into your hands. you didn't protest, feeling the chilly wind picking up. instead you pulled the sweater over your head, suddenly engulfed in mark’s scent. 

you didn't want to admit it, but you were growing a liking for mark lee.

you felt nervous as you drove down the small town road, your mind swarming with thoughts. you had known mark lee for a week and he wanted you to meet his friends. he had told you that his friends opinions of you mattered more than his parents, which made your stomach churn. would mark’s friends like you? yeah, sure, you were his soulmate, but what if he was easily influenced by his friends? but they wanted to meet you, too. you could only hope for the best. 

you parked the van on the street beside the lonely bar, taking a deep breath and pulling down the visor. you could feel mark’s excitement radiating off of him from the passenger seat. you brushed through your hair with your fingers and applied lip gloss in the tiny mirror. you could feel his eyes on you. 

“you look pretty, you know.” he spoke up. you were almost startled by his compliment. you weren’t used to receiving them. 

“thank you…” you glanced at him and back at yourself in the mirror. he could tell you were nervous.

“they’ll like you, don’t worry.” he said, grabbing your hand. you were sure that startled you more. he rubbed his thumb across the back of your hand comfortingly, smiling softly. “they’re really chill.”

“or are they weird like you?” you joked, focusing your attention on him. his eyes seemed to sparkle even more that night. 

“yeah, they are.” his smile only grew.

you didn’t intend on drinking but once mark’s friend johnny announced that he would be the designated driver back to his place (where you and mark were going to crash for the night), you decided a few drinks wouldn’t hurt. you learned that mark was a total lightweight. after a few beers he was drunk, and then you learned another thing about him. he was clingy when he was drunk. mark lee was clingy and giggly and touchy. 

so when he put his arm around you and laid his head on your shoulder for the fifth time that night, his friends started to question your relationship. he had explained to them that you were just friends. well, as friends as soulmates could get. they were all so happy for mark, and you were happy he had a group of people who could really understand him. 

mark lee was sneaky. every time he clung to you in his drunken state, he added something else to make your heart race. it started off as just his arm around your shoulder or your waist, then he would lean his head on your shoulder, then he got really bold and intertwined his fingers with yours under the table. maybe it was your drunken state, but you felt flustered and your heart jumped to your throat. you hoped the other boys wouldn’t notice just how red you were. 

johnny proposed that you called it a night when the clock struck midnight and mark was asleep, his body limp against your side. you agreed and attempted to wake the boy. 

“mark, we’re leaving.” you whispered, poking his cheek. he hushed you and didn’t move. 

“come on, marky.” you giggled, trying to push him off you. he finally sat straight, a quiet laugh escaping his lips. 

you got your bags (and jellybean) from the van and sat in the back of johnny’s car, where mark had managed to sober up enough to not fall asleep on the ride to johnny’s place. you laughed and sang along drunkenly to the radio the entire ride, johnny glancing at you through his mirror, rolling his eyes jokingly. you had never felt more alive than you did in that moment. 

mark collapsed on the bed in johnny’s guest bedroom, his tiredness (and drunkenness) taking over. you dropped your bags on the floor and set jellybean down before making your way over to him. 

“at least put on pyjamas, silly.” you said, grabbing his arm and attempting to make him sit up. he merely muttered nonsense to you, his eyes remaining closed. 

“mark…” you dragged out his name and laughed, your mind still cloudy. you let your grip on his arm go loose and before you knew it, he pulled you down on top of him, making you laugh out loud. 

“come on, seriously?” 

“why are you so pretty, y/n?” he questioned, his eyes now open and peering at you. 

“why are you so cheesy?” you fired back, ignoring your heart about to beat out of your chest. he didn’t answer, instead he tucked your hair behind your ear and let his hand linger on the side of your face. a few seconds felt like a million years with him. you moved one hand up his chest and booped his nose before standing up like nothing happened. 

“hey!”

“change, smelly.” you joked, grabbing a pair of his pyjama pants and a clean t shirt and throwing it at him. 

“but i don’t want to go to the bathroom to change. i’m tired.” he whined. 

“you don’t have to. i won’t look. i have to change, too.” you replied, lifting your shirt over your head. you knew mark’s eyes were on you, but you didn’t mind it. he was going to see it sooner or later, right? 

“o-okay…” he muttered. you changed quicker than him, because of his sleepy, slow movements, and you were quick to jump into bed and huddle down into the blankets. 

you watched mark hop into his plaid flannel pyjama pants and sit back down on the edge of the bed. 

“do you mind if i sleep shirtless?” he chuckled, balling up his dirty t shirt and throwing it so it landed on his bag. 

“i don’t mind.” you said, watching as he lid down beside you. maybe it was your hazy state of mind, but you thought he was so handsome in the dim light. you couldn’t stop yourself from gazing at his lips. you wondered if mark lee had ever kissed a girl. you wondered if mark lee ever thought about kissing you, like you thought about kissing him. 

“kiss me, mark.” you whispered as he filled the gap between your bodies. it felt like your whole being was on fire as mark’s lips landed on yours. maybe it was because of him being your soulmate, but kissing him felt more right than anything else. 

that night you fell asleep in mark’s arms, your mind dancing with visions of him.

mark always slept later than you, so it was no surprise that he was just waking up as you came into the room after your shower the next morning. 

“morning.” he murmured, his voice raspy from just waking up. 

“good morning.” you smiled, the memories of the night before being stuck in your mind since your eyes had opened earlier. you wondered if he remembered the kiss you had shared in your drunken state. you decided you wouldn’t mention it. 

“hey, um, quick question…” he spoke up, running a hand through his messy, jet black hair. 

“yeah?” you glanced over at him. 

“about last night…” you felt yourself blush, “did we, um–y’know?” he rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. you hesitated, shifting your weight from one foot to the other.

“uh, yeah. we did.” 

his silence reminded you of the night you met him, how awkwardly silent it was when you told him you were soulmates. 

“did we at least, how do i word this…use protection…?” 

your eyes widened. “no, we didn't have sex!” you laughed. 

“o-oh! good. yeah, good.” he chuckled, embarrassment staining his cheeks.

“we just kissed, that’s all. just once.”

“okay, i can live with that.” he let out a short laugh, turning his attention to the sudden knock that came at the door. johnny poked his head in the doorway, a smirk on his face. 

“good morning lovebirds.” he teased, raising his eyebrows. “how did you sleep? or was there any sleeping going on?” 

“go away, johnny!” mark whined, like a child would to his older brother. you just laughed at their banter. 

“okay, my bad. are you joining me for breakfast?” he asked, looking from mark to you. 

“yeah, i'll help, actually.” you smiled, glancing at mark. “you, get a shower first.”

 mark insisted on hitting the road again, so within a few hours, you were taking a specific route to the mountains. you were feeling good, you had heard johnny mutter “she’s a keeper” after you helped him make breakfast and clean up. 

mark had offered to drive, and apparently he knew of a camping spot where you would be able to see the mountains, where he used to go with his family. you sat in the passenger seat and held jellybean in your lap, petting the creature lovingly. 

“and to think you didn’t like cats just a week ago.” mark said, smiling at the way you and jellybean had grown a liking for each other. the most important girls in his life, he thought. 

“to think it’s only been a week,” you looked at him. “it feels like it’s been an eternity with your annoying ass.” 

“hey!” he exclaimed, “you’re lucky i’m putting up with you.” 

“we both know that if you didn’t come with me, you’d probably work at that gas station and be single forever.” you said. 

“okay, okay, kind of hurtful, but you’re right.” he shook his head with a grin plastered on his face. “i’m happy we found each other.” 

you felt your heart swell at his words. 

when you finally got to your rented camping spot, you sat on the edge of the van with the back door open, admiring the view out over the mountains. it was breaktaking, a once in a lifetime view. 

while you were admiring nature’s beauty, mark was having a very difficult time starting a fire. you watched as he crouched next to the makeshift fire pit that was left by the last campers, trying his hardest to start it with just a lighter and a few pieces of wood. 

“need some help?” you called out. looking over your shoulder at him.

“no, i got it!” 

you hopped down from the van and made your way over, observing his attempts. “you need paper. and some dry wood.”

“well i don’t have paper or dry wood.” he muttered with a sigh in a defensive tone. you could tell he wanted to impress you with his skills, and was frustrated that he couldn’t get it. you opened the drivers side door of the van and leaned over to the glove box, pulling out a handful of old newspapers. paper was always good to have on hand, and for this reason. you walked back over to the boy and passed them to him over his shoulder. he mumbled a thank you and went back to trying to light a fire. 

you crouched down and put your arms around his slumped shoulders, placing a gentle kiss to his cheek. “you’re cute, you know?” 

mark gulped and you noticed how he got red, but kept his eyes focused on what he was doing. he wouldn’t admit it this early, but mark lee was starting to catch feelings for you. and he knew he was in too deep already. 

that night after you ate leftover pizza from lunch and talked around the fire, you settled in the van for the night. you kept the back door open, watching how the sky painted itself numerous shades of oranges and yellows as the sun set. mark hummed a soft tune and you were reminded of your matching soulmate tattoos. a music note because you were both music lovers. well, you were, you weren’t sure if mark was. 

“hey,” you spoke into the comfortable silence, turning your head to look at him lying next to you. “do you play any instruments?” 

“i play the guitar.” he replied in an instant. 

“really?” you smiled, your eyes widening. “me too.” 

“i guess god made us soulmates for that reason.” he laughed, putting down his phone to focus his attention on you. 

“god?” you raised an eyebrow. you were never really a believer of anything like that. 

“yeah. i don’t know, i believe in god and that he made everyone for a certain reason…” he chuckled, almost like he was embarrassed in his beliefs. “makes life feel important i guess…”

“don’t be embarrassed. i respect it.” you assured. “maybe it’s just because i’m a nihilist and i grew up thinking like it, but i think everything is meaningless.” 

“you’re kidding. you don’t think everything and everyone has a purpose?”

“not really. why would it be important if we’re all just going to die anyway?”

he fell silent. had you scared him or made him think you were a total weirdo? 

“then i have a new goal.” he smiled smugly. “to make you believe that life is meaningful.”

you laughed. “good luck, marky.” you shook your head and sat up, remembering what sparked the conversation. you quickly hopped out of the van and grabbed the case that was underneath the palette your mattress was set on. you sat next to him again, placing the case in his hands. 

“play for me.”

“oh.” he opened the clasps and gently took out the old acoustic, strumming the strings a few times. “i don’t know…what should i play?”

“think of me and play something based on your thoughts.” you challenged, leaning forward, resting your head on your fist, watching him intently. 

“oh gosh,” he laughed, plucking a soft tune. “do you know the song slow it down?”

you didn’t, but you were curious to see what made him think of you. 

he started singing, and even though he was a little rusty at first, his voice was beautiful. it was ragged and raspy, all while being delicate. to you, his voice sounded like hope. hope for a new beginning. hope for a better future. hope for all your days to be spent with him.

was this what it felt like to fall in love the right way?

you didn't even know what you were yelling for anymore. the conversation had started in a civil way, talking about what the future held for you and mark. if you were being honest, you were terrified. you didn't know what you were doing or where you were going, and money was becoming an issue. money was at the base of your fight with mark.

“you're not even listening to me!” you huffed, your eyes trying to stay focused on the dark road ahead, your windshield wipers slapping furiously against the harsh rain. 

“it's hard to listen to you when everything you're saying is bullshit!” mark fired back, throwing his hands up in frustration. 

“what do you mean?” you whipped your head over, glaring through him.

“we can't just keep driving around in your van, like the world doesn't exist! we need money, we need jobs and a place to live! you have your fucking head in the clouds, y/n!” he raised his voice. you knew you needed to pull over soon, as you wouldn't be able to see the road through your rage. 

“you’re an asshole.” you mumbled. 

“what did you say?”

“i said you’re a fucking asshole!” you shook your head and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station, coming to an abrupt stop. 

“well you're a bitch.” mark clenched his jaw and quickly got out, slamming the door so hard that the van shook. 

you were never one to apologize first, and all you could see was red. you were sure you hated him in that moment. maybe you should've just stayed with yukhei and kept living a lie.

when he didn't get back in the van, you opened your door and got out, looking at him with the vehicle between you. 

“what?” he spit, his eyes like daggers. 

“are you going to apologize?”

“for what? i didn't do anything wrong, y/n.” he leaned an arm on the roof and avoided your gaze. 

“for starting this fucking argument?!”

“god must've made a mistake when he made us soulmates. i don't think i could ever get along with you well enough to actually love you.” 

unlovable. it wasn't the first time that term had been used to describe you. you tried to keep up your facade of being angry and careless, but his comment had stabbed you right in the heart. 

“maybe i should just leave you here, huh?” you challenged, hoping he'd come to his senses.

“fine!” he shrugged, stepping away from the van. he swung back the side door and grabbed his bag and jellybean, before slamming it and proceeding to walk away. 

he was actually leaving. well, you could too.

you tried not to glance back at him in your mirror as you drove out of the parking lot and back onto the highway. your anger was all that you could think about, you weren't being rational. 

you drove and drove, tears streaming down your face, tears you didn't even realize had collected in your eyes. sometimes, mark felt like a boy you could love. then, other times, he felt like a total fucking stranger. it felt like the night you left yukhei all over again. even though it was only a little over two weeks before, it felt like an eternity with mark.

mark. what was he doing right now? was he already calling someone to pick him up? was he cursing your name and wishing you crashed? was he regretting what he said? because you were. 

you finally had to pull over on the side of the highway, leaning your arms and head on the steering wheel, breaking down in sobs. mark was your soulmate, the only person in the world you were meant to be with, and you had ruined it. your stupid pride had ruined it. was it too late to go back? 

you drove and drove, back to the gas station. you weren't letting him go that easily. your shoulders shuddered with another sob when you saw him leaned against the brick wall outside, soaked with rain, trying to keep jellybean warm in his jacket. your heart ached. you were the shittiest person alive, you were sure. 

mark watched with wide eyes as your van arrived in front of him. you got out quickly, before going right up to him. he was confused. he thought he had screwed everything up and that you were gone forever. 

it took all your courage and pride to walk up to him, but once you were there, your hands shaking, you felt like breaking down all over again. you hugged him tightly, burying your face in the crook of his neck, your warm tears heating up his skin. 

“i’m sorry.” you mumbled, your voice cracking with emotion. mark wrapped his arms around you, and you could tell by his sniffles that he had been crying too.

“me too.” he whispered, tightening his grip on you, like you'd disappear soon. 

“i like you so much, mark, and i don't want to ruin this.” you sighed, your voice weak and muffled.

“i shouldn't have said anything that i said. i was really afraid for a moment.” 

you stayed silent, not wanting to cry even more. mark swayed you gently in his arms, so thankful you came back for him. he couldn't lose you. not now, not after everything. 

 when you pulled your face away from him, you looked away subconsciously, not wanting him to see you in such an unruly state. but he put a finger under your chin, tilting your face up to meet his. you became insecure, wondering what you looked like in the eyes of your soulmate. you were brought back to his eyes, the first feature of his that you fell in love with. 

he kissed you with reckless abandon, his hands cupping each side of your face, his warmth spreading through your whole body. you couldn't get enough of him. 

“i love you.” he muttered in between kisses. the whole world went silent. 

“i love you too.” there went your heart again, speaking for you. from the beginning, you knew it would be impossible to be just friends with mark lee. you couldn't help but crack a smile when your eyes fluttered open and met his. 

“you do?” he grinned.

“of course i do.” you said, your voice almost disappearing with the rain. 

“i love you.” he repeated, kissing you again. “i love you, i love you, i love you.” 

“say it too much and it loses meaning.” you teased, noticing the rain dripping onto his forehead. 

“you believe that?” he chuckled.

“i believe–” 

“stop loitering on my property, you damn kids!” a voice called out from the doorway. 

“oh shit.” you giggled, grabbing mark’s arm and running towards the van. when you came to a stop, he caged your body between his and the side of the van, dipping down to kiss you again. 

“i love you.” 

“i love you, mark lee.”

you couldn't sleep. you were grateful to be sleeping on a couch for the night instead of in the van, but as you stared at the ceiling of mark’s bestfriends basement, sleep just wouldn't hit you. mark was sleeping on the couch in the living room upstairs, as donghyuck still lived with his parents. you didn't mind the couch though, it was quite comfy. 

you liked donghyuck, and you were pretty sure he liked you too. he seemed like a sarcastic asshole at first, but once him and mark got to talking, you saw how kind and cute he could be. the way mark lit up like a christmas tree when he saw donghyuck proved how close they were as friends. he said they had been bestfriend’s since they were twelve, and it showed in the way they bickered with each other in a heartfelt way. 

you couldn't remember when you entered dreamland, but you woke up in the middle of the night to your arm falling off the couch and your fingers messily tangled with someone else’s. you thought your tired eyes were playing tricks on you when you peered over the edge and saw mark lying on the floor next to the couch, his eyes closed, his chest moving up and down slowly, and his fingers holding onto yours. 

you didn't even think to question why he was there at first, as you were too drawn into the way he looked so peaceful while sleeping. his eyelashes lightly brushed against his skin while his eyes were closed, and his lips were parted ever so slightly. his skin seemed to glow even in the dark. 

“mark, what are you doing?” you questioned in a quiet voice, once it hit you that he was sleeping on the floor, after all. his eyes fluttered open, him being the ever so light sleeper. he smiled softly almost immediately. 

“just couldn't sleep…i guess i'm used to you being next to me now.” he chuckled sleepily, his voice raspy and rough. he glanced at your hands and back up at you. “i needed to be next to you.” 

you were thankful it was dark, because you felt yourself blush with his words. knowing you both couldn't fit on the couch, you came up with a quick plan. 

“here,” you said, getting off the couch and grabbing a few cushions.

“what are you doing?” mark questioned, propping himself up on his elbows. 

“shhh,” you hushed him, laying down the couch cushions on the floor and motioning for him to move onto them. he complied, and you took a blanket donghyuck had supplied you with, and draped it over his body. then, you took the other one and lay down next to him on the cushions, covering yourself as well with the warm blanket. 

“there.” you sighed with an air of contentedness as you faced him. it was a tight squeeze, and not the most comfortable of arrangements, but it was perfect in the moment. 

“this is perfect.” mark uttered, his thoughts matching yours. “well, not perfect, but you get what i mean.” 

you inched closer to him until mark put his arm around you and closed the gap between your bodies. 

“okay, let’s get some sleep now.” he murmured, closing his eyes. “i love you.” ever since the night he first confessed it, mark couldn't stop telling you that he loved you. the first night he told you, you had said it back, but you weren't sure if you meant it. you were full of emotions from your fight and it just felt like the right thing to say to him, maybe to comfort him. 

but as you lay in the dark on the small, uncomfortable, makeshift bed, with his protective arms around you and his heartbeat beating in your ears, you were sure you loved him. and you were sure that love was the only thing you ever wanted to feel.

the dim lights in the bar made mark look even more handsome, a gentle shadow cascading down his nose and smile as he sat across from you. 

“ten bucks says you can’t get someone to buy you a drink.” he smirked, challenging you.

“alright. ten bucks is ten bucks.” you laughed, leaning forward.

“seriously?”

“you know what you can get with ten bucks? lots of things, mark.” you were about to get out of your seat, taking him up on his offer. he grabbed your hand and urged you to stay.

“okay, okay. the thing is, i know you can get any of these guys to buy you a drink,” he chuckled, a hint of jealousy in his voice. he clasped his hand over yours on the table and smiled at you. “i’d rather buy my girl a drink than any of these pervs.”

you felt your cheeks heat up at what he had called you. you opened your mouth to hush him jokingly, but then your eyes caught something in the distance. not something, someone. what was he doing there? you tried your best to keep your head down without mark noticing that you were making yourself smaller, but then his eyes locked with yours. you felt your stomach plummet to the soles of your feet. and then he was walking over. you couldn’t just up and flee, not with him that close and not without telling mark. please, pass by the table, you prayed. but you weren’t so lucky. 

“hey, how are you?” he smiled, a hint of passive aggressiveness in his voice as he set his hands on the table and leaned down. his eyes wandered to mark, who’s eyes were stuck on you with a look that said ‘who is this?’ 

you cleared your throat, not realizing how dry your mouth had become, before gathering sudden courage to speak to him. “i’m- i’m great, how’re you?” 

“good, good…” he muttered, glancing at mark again before looking back at you. 

“oh! mark, this is yukhei,” you smiled forcibly, hoping he remembered the name. his eyebrows raised in realization. “yukhei, this is mark...my soulmate.” you inhaled sharply. you noticed mark’s grip tighten on your hand. he was definitely getting protective, and you didn’t know how this scene would play out.

“nice to meet you, man.” mark nodded, offering his other hand to yukhei. he shook it hesitantly, but didn’t say anything back. you could read him like a book too, and you knew by the look in his eyes that he was jealous. please stay civil, you thought.

“i’m glad you met your real soulmate. must feel nice, right?” he retorted, casting his gaze down at you. 

“what are you even doing here?” you sighed, trying to keep the peace. 

“just doing the same as you are. trying to find my soulmate, but it’s kind of hard considering i’ve already met her and now she could be anywhere–”

“don’t do this here, yuk.” you warned, your voice low and your cheeks now darkening in embarrassment. 

“no, i think he deserves to know what you did to me. how you led me on and lied to me for a whole year. was it all some sort of game to you?” he spit out.

“you’re causing a scene.” you whispered, looking around at the glances and glares you were getting because of yukhei’s temper. you could tell that mark wanted to speak up and say something, but you weren’t letting that happen. that would be like adding fuel to the fire. 

“you broke my heart, y/n!” he declared. with that, mark stood up and your eyes widened. 

“come on, we’re going.” he muttered, his gentle eyes meeting yours. even in the situation you were in, you found comfort in his eyes. you got up, trying to ignore yukhei. mark was quick to ease your jacket over your shoulders and put his hand on the small of your back to lead you out of the bar, glaring daggers at yukhei the whole time. 

once you were in the passenger seat of the van, you felt like breaking down all over again. you felt terrible for what you did to yukhei. but you loved him. you really, truly loved him. but that was the past. 

“hey,” mark spoke softly, placing a gentle hand on your thigh. you snapped out of your thoughts and looked over, the moonlight casting shadows on his face. “you okay?”

“i’m okay.” you sighed, looking down again. your eyes fixating on his thumb rubbing tiny patterns into your jeans in an attempt to comfort you. 

“y/n. talk to me, please.” 

“i’m not a bad person, mark.” you said in a timid voice.

“i know you’re not.”

“but i feel bad.” you admitted. “i feel like the shittiest person alive. i broke his heart. i didn’t deserve him.” 

you were both silent for a moment as you collected your thoughts. 

“and i definitely don’t deserve you.” you uttered out, leaning your head back on the seat and staring at the ceiling of the van. 

“don’t say that.” mark said. “you have been so amazing to me. i didn’t even know this feeling existed,” he stopped to chuckle, “we found each other when we needed each other the most, y/n. we deserve each other.”

 you cast your eyes on him once again, a feeling of contentment settling over your heart. now that you thought about it, what you felt for your past lover was nothing compared to what you felt for mark. soulmate love was a different kind of love. it was an everything and anything kind of love, a sacrifice kind of love, a commitment kind of love. you could see it in the way mark always offered you the last of his french fries, the way he talked to you in a calm voice when you wanted to curl up and die, the way he offered to drive when he knew you were tired, the way he always gave you more of the blankets, the way he left his whole life for you and dove into your relationship with no cares in the world. you knew he was the only one who would ever love you like that. and you were damned if you ever let him go. 

an hour later as mark drove down the highway humming a soft tune, he was thinking all the same things. he smiled when he glanced over at you asleep against his arm, your hands wrapped around his. he was sad that he could only admire your peaceful face for seconds at a time before turning his attention back to the road, but his thoughts stayed on you. he loved you more than he had ever loved anything else before, he was sure of it. and he’d be damned if he ever let you go.

you rolled up your map and shoved it in the glove box before sitting back down on the mattress. you were more relaxed now that you and mark had done a little bit of planning for what lay ahead. you had picked a quiet, cozy town to settle down in, and mark had already looked into an apartment. it was a small, one-bedroom apartment, but it was away from any noise and had mostly elderly neighbours. you both were looking at jobs to get you back on your feet and to earn a little more money than your combined savings, which were running out. you were ecstatic to start your new life with mark, and you could tell he felt the same.

“wanna hit the hay?” mark questioned, closing the back door and putting jellybean on the bed.

“yeah, i’m a bit tired.” you nodded, pulling his sweater over your head to provide a little warmth, although you knew he would be soon enough. you smoothed down your messy hair and took jellybean into your arms. you hated mark’s cat at first, but you got used to her in no time. 

“you’re so pretty, y/n.” mark uttered, his eyes stuck on you, his lips slightly apart. you understood his bluntness when he was drunk, but it was weird for him to be this straightforward. 

“you’re prettier.” you smiled, continuing to pet the ball of fur in your arms that was meowing at you. mark just laughed and moved next to you, his gaze focused like a child. he lay down and brought his hand up to your shoulder, nudging you to join him. 

once you were comfortably situated in bed, you found it hard to stay awake. you watched as mark cooed at jellybean, and felt your eyelids get heavy. you let your eyes flutter closed, but opened them suddenly when mark’s hand touched your cheek. 

“hmm?” you hummed, raising your eyebrows and soaking in his warmth. 

“stay awake for a little while longer. i wanna talk.” he said softly, like you were a delicate thing in front of him. 

“about what?” you questioned, nestling closer to him. 

“that night that we fought, what did you feel?”

“huh?”

“what went through your head? what were your emotions?” he pressed.

“...i don’t know. a lot, i guess? i was angry at you. but i was mostly just sad.”

“why?”

“are you just being cocky, mark lee?” you chuckled.

“no, just–why were you sad?”

you sighed. “because you mean a lot to me and i didn’t want to lose you?”

he smiled, like he was satisfied with your answer. “i mean something to you?”

you shoved his shoulder in a playful manner while rolling your eyes. “of course you do, you know this.”

“i know, i know, but the word. mean, meaning. meaningful. at least one thing in your life means something to you.”

“okay?” you laughed, leaning on your hand and shaking your head. 

“and–and when we first met, you never wore your seatbelt.” he stated like it was a fact.

“and…?”

“and now you always wear it.”

“because you nagged me so much to wear it.” you chuckled, remembering how he used to say ‘seatbelt!’ before allowing you to drive.

“that just shows that you don’t want to die if we get into an accident. you care more about your life and safety now.” 

“that shows nothing.”

“and that one night when we were tipsy in the back of johnny’s car and singing at the top of our lungs, you looked so happy.”

“because i was.” you said, your insides warming up while remembering how alive you felt in that moment.

“you know what all of this means, y/n?”

“what does it mean, mark?” you replied, going along with it. 

“it means you’re starting to believe in meaning. you’re starting to believe that life is meaningful.” he smiled, running his hand through your hair gently. 

despite how much you’d argue against it, he was right. mark had opened your eyes to how precious life was.

“hey, can i try something?” mark spoke into the darkness a few nights later. you were still awake, worries filling your head as usual, but you thought mark had fallen asleep. you could tell there was a lot on his mind that night, too. 

you looked at him and raised your eyebrows. “what is it?” 

“um, you need to take off your shirt–or, uh–” he was a mess when he was embarrassed, “i just need to see your tattoo.” 

“oh,” you replied to his odd request. you hadn't given your matching tattoos much thought, also they were what made you soulmates in the first place. “sure.” 

you sat up a bit straighter and leaned against your pillow before pulling your sweater over your head, leaving you in only a thin tank top. you didn't feel insecure around mark. you glanced down at the eighth note magically inked into your skin. 

you watched mark look at his tattoo in his left palm and then at yours again. ever so gently, like you were glass that would break under his touch, he pressed his palm to your chest. you remembered that he tried to do it the night you met, but you had retracted from his touch. 

your body felt like it was full of electricity, his fingertips grazing the skin that had been barely touched by anyone else, the warmth of his palm seeping into you. his sparkling doe eyes met yours, and your stomach leapt with a feeling you couldn't describe. 

“i wanted to do that since i met you. i don't know, guess it was just a temptation.” he shrugged, pulling his hand back to his body, his eyes staying glued to yours. slowly, you wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him down to you, placing a soft kiss to his lips. then another, and another. until all you could feel was the shape of mark’s lips on yours. until that's all you ever wanted to feel. and then his lips on your cheek and jaw and neck and collarbone and chest. everywhere all at once. your body and mind on fire. when you closed your eyes, all you could see was mark. all you could feel was mark. you were his, and he was yours.

you watched as the sun lit up the sky a million hues of pink and orange in the morning. your heart soared with excitement as today was the day you'd move into your new apartment with mark. you had gotten up at the crack of dawn to get on the road, and the sunrise was a major bonus. you were unfamiliar with your surroundings, especially the road, but your gps had your back surely. 

mark turned the radio to a station playing rock music, the upbeat tune matching his mood. when he was sure you weren't looking, he felt around in his pocket. the tiny, felt box was still there. phew. he had snuck into a jewelry store when you were shopping a few days before, and bought the ring. he was sure of this. he didn't know when he would propose, but he knew he wanted to. the sooner you were his forever, the better. 

it was a silent drive, both of you thinking about your journey together and now, your future together. your mind couldn't help but wander while you were driving. mark meant so much to you. a mere month and a half before, mark had just been the boy at the gas station who seemed to understand your broken heart. 

now, he had made you believe in what you hadn't believed in in a very long time. life. happiness. love. meaning. mark had brought the most meaning into your shitty life. he was your happy pill. your sunshine. the love of your life. you glanced over at him, taking in everything about him. you were so happy to finally be at peace with yourself, with the help of mark. you wanted to thank him for being so good to you, for making everything shine with meaning. 

maybe you should've studied the maps more, kept your eyes on the road. because you didn't see the transport truck going over the speed limit that had skipped a stop sign. you didn't even feel it. you didn't feel anything.

[jq37]

The Report Card – Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 6

The Fall of Fabian Seacaster

OK, let’s do this.

We pick back up with Kristen and Riz who are still outside Garthy’s room. Kristen’s Detect Good and Evil from last week pings Garthy as well as the general aura of the Golden Gardens which is protected in the way a sanctum sanctorum would be but with celestial energy. Riz and Kristen improvise a not super cogent plan that involves ribbon dancing and knocking over barrels before Riz just decides to cut to the chase and ask Garthy’s guards to send for Sandra-Lynn. Once she comes out (still looked sexed up and pretty annoyed) they’re not quite sure what to ask her and Riz wants to bail but Kristen (who has cast Zone of Truth, tried to muscle into Garthy’s house, and gotten smacked down physically by Sandra-Lynn) says that she’s worried about Sandra-Lynn because she’s “not poly but [she’s] acting poly.” Being directly called out is enough to snap Sandra-Lynn out of it (and to think about Fig’s reaction) so she agrees to get her stuff and come back to the gang’s suite.

Meanwhile, Fabian is hanging out with Bill’s cult of 20-ish warlocks. They’re all super glad to see Fabian--who they assume has been sent by Bill to help them--and they want him to regale them with the tale of how he slew his father in battle. Fabian tells them the story which, as you all know, isn’t a story about besting his father in a hard-fought battle so much as it is about a story about bittersweet mercy killing. They are less than impressed, especially considering they want Fabian to defeat Captain James Wicklaw who has promised to kill all of Bill’s followers. Ego stung, Fabian says that he may not have bested his father but he did (help) kill a dragon and, more importantly, he’s gonna lead them into an ambush against Captain Wicklaw (who he sees, presumably looking for him, with 30 men).

Oh boy.

Fabian telepathically alerts the Hangman that he’s about to get into a big fight before slamming down a door and full-out attacking Captain Wicklaw. He’s able to get a good couple of attacks in and Wicklaw misses his first couple of attacks but then Fabian fails an intelligence save with a Nat 1 and gets stunned while Wicklaw tries to open his skull and eat his brain.

Meanwhile with the rest of the Bad Kids, the Hangvan alerts Gorgug that the Hangman has sped off and everyone assumes Fabian is in trouble. They all do their best to get to him as quickly as possible and, even though these scenes are intercut with Fabian’s I’m going to summarize them all at once:

Fig (w/ Gorgug in tow) Dimension Doors as close to the Hangman as she can. Then, Gorgug has the idea to try the classic pirate move of grabbing a rope, cutting the weight, and instantly flying to where on the ship you want to go. They try that and begin flying towards Fabian at terminal velocity, both dislocating their arms. Fig passably disguises herself as Jemina Joy (even with quadruple disadvantage) and tries to get a wizard to teleport her to where Fabian is but they’re going way too fast for anyone to hear her. Gorgug (also with quad disadvantage) tries to throw a hand axe and, on a nat 1, almost cuts the rope they’re swinging on.

Gilear is fully passed after a back-slap from Fig.

Adaine casts fly on Riz (because his rogue speed means he can make the most use of it) so he can go get Garthy to see if they have any teleport spells. Then, she gets on Baxter with Kristen and Sandra-Lynn (plus Tracker who follows in spectral wolf form). Kristen tries to bring up Sandra-Lynn’s relationship stuff again and Adaine casts Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on her. Adaine tries to pull from the jacket to get something to help her get to Fabian faster and she gets a Razor scooter.  

Ragh drives the Hangvan towards Fabian’s.

Riz finds Garthy who takes him to a room, pops out neon angel wings, and does some kind of teleport spell that almost seems like it moves the space closer to them rather than the reverse.

But, none of this really matters because Brennan says none of them will be able to make it to Fabian before 22 rounds of combat. Woof.

Still in the first round of combat, 2 of the warlocks manage to hit Wicklaw and break Fabian out of his grapple (right after Wicklaw says that he’s eaten many of Fabian’s siblings but let’s put a pin in that because we have so much to get through here). Fabian declares that all spells are on him for the remainder of the fight (which is maybe the last funny thing he says all night). Then, 6 of the 20 warlocks on Fabian’s side die to gunshots from Wicklaw’s men. Fabian sends his men forward then falls back and attacks with his crossbow. Wicklaw mocks him for abandoning his crew so viciously that I feel like he should have spontaneously taken a level in bard. Brennan rolls for the ten still living pirates who never got names and only one survives. Then he rolls for the named pirates (Alistair and the three I haven’t mentioned yet because this episode is A Lot--Chungle-Down Bim, Old-Young Benjamin, and Creaky McBarrel) and only Creaky dies. In two rounds, Bill’s cult is down to four (plus one guy who peaced out after Fabian said he didn’t actually brutally murder his dad).

Fabian’s tactical retreat shakes the confidence of everyone but Alistair who stays loyal (even as he gets wrecked on his next attack on Wicklaw). Chungle-Down Bim is so disgusted by Fabian’s cowardice and performance that he tries to Eldritch Blast him and misses. He says, “Yeh ain’t no pirate and Bill would spit in yer eye.” Fabian has to hold back tears. He, with a heartbreaking mix of trepidation, reluctance, and resolve, asks if there are any ropes he can use to escape. Roll a perception check. He does.

Natural 1.

Sure, Brennan says. There’s a rope that looks like it will 100% guaranteed hold Fabian’s weight. Fabian goes for it--leaving behind a stunned and crushed Alistair--and finds that it’s actually a clothesline. He goes plummeting down a quarter-mile towards the ground but, before he actually hits, he hits a bunch of other ropes and, on his last possible chance, is able to save from splatting and taking max fall damage. Lou opts to take some damage anyway because he’d feel like he was cheating otherwise.

The rest of the group shows up through their various means and all immediately assume that Fabian got jumped. Fabian is meek in a way we’ve never seen before. I’m talking Adaine with Jawbone in Prompocolypse meek. He doesn’t tell them what happened and he answers all the questions with short yesses or no’s as much as possible. The healers heal him (plus Fig and Gorgug) up and take him back to the suite. The Hangman asks if he’s alright. “No Hangman,” he says. “It’s all bad.” Cathilda brings him kippers but he feels like he doesn’t deserve them.

Garthy has a little tete-a-tete with Fig about their tryst with Sandra-Lynn. Garthy is all about getting down but not if that person is in a monogamous relationship (even though they’re against them on principle). Fig (who has been avoiding her mom since the top of the ep) says she’s only mad at Sandra-Lynn (she says Sandra-Lynn, not Mom--oof) since Garthy didn’t know better. It just sucks that this happened to Jawbone. Jawbone as in Jawbone O'Shaughnessy? asks Garthy. Turns out he’s visited (many times) and they’ve boned (super hard) which, honestly, totally tracks.  

Because she didn’t get a full night of sleep, Tracker can’t keep the Moon Haven spell up all night which isn’t great. Kristen can also gather than she’s too tired to remember anything that happened earlier in the night (ie: things about Sandra-Lynn and Jawbone). Fig, concerned that she might get mind controlled again without the Moon Haven up asks Adaine to tie her up (this actually happens before the above conversation with Garthy).

Sleeping arrangements are Fabian, the Hangman, and Riz as a bodyguard in one room and everyone else in another. Adaine trances a little early so she can regain her spells and be awake in case anything happens. Brennan makes everyone do wisdom saves. Kristen and Adaine roll high and Adaine gives her TWO (2) NAT 20 portent rolls to Fig and Gorgug. That leaves Riz and Fabian, but we’ll get to them in a minute.

Adaine wakes up from her trance and she sees Ragh get up early as well. He says he’s going to get some food. Adaine, vigilant as ever asks Ragh who his first kiss was. Ragh acts confused for a second, and then screeches and attacks her, waking everyone up. He’s been dominated. Adaine goes for a Tasha’s Hideous Laughter and subdues him. Also Fig is able to escape Adaine’s magical ropes so maybe she’s not the best person to do that next time.

Meanwhile, Fabian is having a nightmare. He dreams of Wicklaw trying to eat his brain and Chungle-Down spitting in his face and his betrayal of Alistair. He sees the ghosts of the warlock  cultists entering hell and his disappointed father. And then, he’s approached by a man. A man with a familiar, non-threatening sounding, yogurt-offering voice. Fabian, like Adaine before, feels very strongly that if he looks at this man’s face, something terrible will happen but he does take the offered yogurt and agrees to go with him without looking at him. He’s taken to a lovely, sunny, kind of museum area dedicated to Bill Seacaster. Fabian thinks it’s very nice but he starts to notice that though there are many pictures of Bill and Hilariel, there are none of him. He asks why. The man says that Fabian needs to look at him. Fabian is hesitant. The man says that Fabian really needs to look at him. The yogurt in Fabian’s stomach curdles, weakening him (and me because yogurt grosses me out on the best of days and this is not the best of days). The man turns Fabian’s face to look at him and Fabian finds himself looking at a doughy, middle-aged Fabian Seacaster. He laughs hysterically and Fabian wakes up, plunged into the sea.

Elsewhere, Riz wakes up in his room. Fabian is gone, he’s paralyzed, the Hangman has been stabbed through by Fabian’s sword and is leaking oil, and Kalina is sitting on his bed. She was able to get in with the Moon Haven spell down. She speaks to him unsettlingly casually. She sounds almost friendly as she demands Riz and his friends stop looking for the Nightmare King’s crown on the pain of their lives. Riz, a grizzled old knight to his core like all of Murph’s characters, can’t wrap his head around why she would be doing this. It’s simple. Power. She psychologically toys with him, saying that Riz throws himself into his cases (which she seems to know quite a bit about) to distract himself from how sad he is about his dead dad. Then, she says that Fabian is in massive danger and if Riz doesn’t play ball (pun not intentional but it’s staying in), he’ll die. Riz assumes she knows where the Nightmare King’s crown is and she asks why he’s sure she knows which makes him think she actually doesn’t know. Riz, who sleeps with his sword because he’s rightfully paranoid, uses it to Misty Step outside but he’s still paralyzed so he just hits the ground and breaks his arm.

Kalina meets him outside, tells him Fabian is long gone, and tries to bargain with him: information about his dad for information about what he knows. Riz counter-offers that he’ll tell her about where the Nightmare King’s crown is if she guarantees his friends’ safety. She doesn’t care about the crown. She wants to know what Riz knows about her. Riz agrees (to save Fabian) and tells her everything he knows except that he withholds the information about Adaine’s mom being involved and tries to withhold the information he got from Ragh but he accidentally gives himself away without saying Ragh’s name. That’s enough for her to put two and two together though and she leaves to kill Ragh’s mom.

Back in the sea, Fabian has to make three Constitution checks. He rolls two nat 20s in a row for the first two and is rescued two flying imp monsters (presumably sent by Kalina) who drop him off at the edge of town. Fabian, absolutely destroyed, rips off his eyepatch and takes off his Owlbear jacket as he makes his way back. He rolls one last Constitution check. Nat 1. He’s got pneumonia. Cathilda shows up in the Hangvan to pick up Fabian.

The rest of the group is still shaken up by Ragh’s attack. They snap him out of it and someone gets Garthy. Post Riz’s encounter with Kalina, Ragh bursts in, devastated and says that someone from home called and said that his mom died. The whole group is immediately suspicious because--post Gorgug/Zelda debacle--they know they shouldn’t have signal. Ragh tries to call another number and all he hears is laughing on the other end. When Riz (healed up by Garthy) looks, he sees that his phone shows 5 bars for a second. Riz, Tracker, and Sandra-Lynn also see the flicker. Possibly illusion magic. Tracker and Garthy can also now suddenly see the Shadowcat in the picture (but it doesn’t seem like the rest of the Bad Kids can). Riz thinks Ragh’s mom is in serious danger but not dead yet.

Garthy has the idea to send the group to the Leviathan Library so maybe Adaine can learn a Sending Spell to communicate with their various parents and allies in Solace. They give Adaine a note that says to let the group safely use the library addressed to one Aida Aguefort.

Fig checks in with Sandra-Lynn to see if maybe she was under the influence of something more malevolent than alcohol when she cheated. Sandra-Lynn cries, and admits that she just F’d up but that they should deal with the problem at hand for now and that’s where we end, with the bulk of the group en route to the library.  

Detention

Fabian for Everything

Oh Fabian.

Fabian, Fabian, Fabian.

I don’t think I have ever seen a series of events so driven by a single character’s careless actions.

Truly, almost every single bad thing that happened in this episode can be traced directly to Fabian losing his entire chill at the worst possible time.

All those warlocks, dead (And Alistair either dead, seriously hurt, or set on the path to show back up with a vendetta later on down the road).

Because Tracker didn’t get her 8 hours, she couldn’t do the Moon Haven properly which is why Ragh got mind-controlled, the Hangman got stabbed, and he got brain-jacked and dumped into the ocean.

It’s why Kalina got to Riz. It’s why Lydia’s in danger.

And it wasn’t just that what he did was dumb, it was also completely unnecessary. There was no plot reason for what he did and he wasn’t forced into it. It was a completely character driven decision and it was bad, y’all. It was pretty much an absolute fail parade.  

Honor Roll

Brennan and Lou for Absolutely Stellar Roleplay

Everyone had their moments this episode.

Siobhan and Zac made some clever choices. Ally brought some needed levity. Emily subtly continued her emotional threads about Fig’s relationship with her mom and her distress over her actions while mind controlled. And Murph had that absolutely stellar scene in the back half of the back half of the ep with Kalina.

But Brennan and Lou 100% carried this episode.

Brennan is such a good DM that I feel like it’s almost easy to take for granted. Like, if you visit a town, you’re gonna talk about how how cool the shops, and food, and events were. Not about how well the roads are paved. But if the roads are all janky and potholed and stuff then it’s a big issue.

This episode clearly took a major turn from whatever was supposed to happen but Brennan deftly kept pace with all of Fabian’s wild choices and made sure the roads were paved before he got there.

So much of this episode was just Brennan talking to one other person (Fabian and then Riz during the Kalina scene) and he nailed all of it. The disgust from Chungle-Down. The betrayal from Alistair. The concern from Cathilda. The quiet but sinister lilt of Nightmare Fabian. And the affable, dispassionate, Just Business evil from Kalina.

And Lou. Everything Fabian did this episode was an extremely bad idea but it is exactly what Fabian would do in the situation. Lou played him completely consistently, even when it clearly pained him to do so. 

When Lou rolled a nat 1 on his perception check for an escape rope, Brennan essentially handed him a fully loaded gun and said shoot yourself, and Lou grit his teeth and he did it.

Mad respect to both of them for keeping the tension and gravity going for a full three hours basically. That was lightning in a bottle. D&D is an amazing game.

Random Thoughts

I know there’s a significant chunk of the fandom that ships Riz and Fabian and, can I just say, RIP to y’all.

It really was narratively cool that we started out with the Sandra-Lynn plot in this crazy, over the top, comic scene and then ended with the quiet conversation between Fig and her mom on the same topic. It really was a through line throughout the episode without over-shadowing the main drama. This episode had a clear A and B plot just like a scripted show.

Also if Garthy is a powerful as Brennan is making them seem, wild that the NK and Kalina were able to bust through what is supposed to be super sanctified ground, especially since Tracker--a jr. cleric--has been keeping them at bay by herself.

Zac: This is a real Axford move.

Also Zac: I don’t understand what’s gonna happen if this goes well.

Riz and Murph Equally: We’re so stupid.

I think it’s funny how players in D&D tend to treat Zone of Truth like it forces them to spontaneously say things that are true rather than just preventing them from actively lying.

The kinda wild thing about how this whole mess started is that Fabian’s character development is part of why it happened. When he told the warlocks about the dragon and his dad, he gave everyone else their due credit, didn’t hog the spotlight, and didn’t lie/embellish the truth to make himself sound cooler. That in turn disappointed them which made him relapse into S1 Fabian who attacked Gorgug on the first day of school for absolutely no reason. I was actually going to give him major credit for that before he, you know. Made some other choices. He absolutely gushed about how cool his friends were and then invited exactly none of them to his terrible plan.

Lol at Lou being like, “I rolled to get Alistair to make a better speech?”

Bill’s cult of about 20 guys has collectively sent him like 350k gold. That’s insane! They’re all so poor!

Lou playing Fabian very confidently making an absolutely suicidal decision, and then surfacing to laugh hysterically for a full thirty seconds out of character about how he’s for sure gonna die, was such a mood. It was like Lou was being held at gunpoint by Fabian for the entire first half of the session.

Big props to Zac for trying to get everyone in on the action by suggesting the Hangvan would see that the Hangman was gone and let the group know.

OK, so now let’s talk about that line about Wicklaw having eaten many of Fabian’s siblings. Hoo boy. You know this episode was wild because that line was said and never followed up on. What might have been a headline in a different episode was a footnote in this one. No big surprise that Bill would have fathered a ton of kids. That pretty much tracks, as Adaine said last ep. I feel like this was something that was going to come up regardless, Fabian just forced it to be right then and there. This dude hates Bill so going after his kids seems like an obvious move (unless he’s bluffing I guess, but I doubt it). But, like, did Bill know about these kids? Was he fully ignorant? Willfully ignorant? Did they know they were Bill’s kids? Are there any left? Can Fabian please have a little pirate sister because I would love that so much you don’t even know.

You think Lou expected to say (loosely quoting), “I try not to cry in front of Chungle-Down Bim,” when he woke up that morning? Idk but I can tell you that I didn’t expect to hear it and feel strong emotions about it.

Chungle-Down Bim, which is short for Bimothy.

Lol, Brennan makes Emily rolls with Quadruple disadvantage and she still gets a 15 because she has a plus 11 to persuasion. No wonder she’s so quick to slam the disguise self button if there’s even a sliver of a chance it’ll work.

Adaine getting a useless Razor scooter on the way to try and help Fabian and then being like, “Well, I’m still gonna keep it,” was such a funny beat during the tenseness of that fight scene.

I need you guys to know that this is a mindflayer ability: Extract (Ex): An Illithid that begins its turn with all four tentacles attached and successfully maintains its hold automatically extracts the opponent’s brain, instantly killing that creature. Truly what was he thinking? You’re gonna eat his brain? Go ahead because he clearly isn’t using it!

You know the part of Princess Bride when Wesley is giving the “To the Pain” speech to Humperdinck? I feel like that’s what Brennan did to Fabian this episode. “Oh you think I’m going to kill you? No, that would be too easy. This fight is to the pain. You will watch your allies get slaughtered until you are forced to betray them or die. You will escape but in the most clownish fashion possible after breaking your most loyal ally’s heart. You will be beset by your concerned friends and forced to either own up to your horrible life choices or stew with them and lie by omission. You will be the reason your ultimate enemy is able to break in and attack your friends and you will be forced with your worst nightmare before being unceremoniously dumped into the sea. You won’t die. You’ll just wish you had.” Absolutely brutal.

Anyone else feeling a possible villain turn from Allistair? Dude’s a warlock so he’s already prone to dabbling in questionable power sources. And Fabian really did him dirty. I was hoping he’d at least get Kristen or Tracker to try to see if he was around anywhere for a heal but he just went into shellshock shutdown mode and they bounced. We didn’t see him die on screen so I feel pretty strongly that we’ll be seeing him again in some form.

Also, maybe I’m way off, but did you guys feel like Fabian missed a clear opportunity? I thought he was gonna ask his dad for help. Or, at least try and talk to him before the fight. Clearly it’s possible because the warlocks are doing it. Just pray for some infernal intervention or guidance or powers or something? Worth a shot when you’re in such a bad situation anyway.

Fabian never did tell the party what was going on. They all still think he was ambushed and forced into a fight somehow. I really can’t wait for the truth to come out. I wonder how long he’ll sit on that info. He better tell them before they fight Wicklaw again and they find out that way.

Every single player playing up their concern for Fabian and making a point to presume he was in the right and that it had been a wrong place/time situation to make him feel even more like garbage was *chefs kiss*.

The Hangman basically acting like a big metal dog and pressing itself up against Fabian to comfort him is weirdly adorable.

“Anyway, I’m gonna go get tied up.”/“What?”

Also I love Adaine’s reaction to being asked to do it. She’s like, “What? I mean, I’ll do it but, what?” Sidenote, Fig said she was gonna ask Riz as her first choice but that’s also a terrible choice! He has like a minus 2 strength modifier I think. Ask Gorgug!

Truly, the entire episode can be encapsulated in the fact that Siobhan was sitting there with two nat 20 portent rolls but sidelined and useless because Fabian decided to go completely rogue.

I have to give Adaine big credit for checking to see if Ragh was mind controlled because whenever I’m watching a show where a bad guy can shapeshift or possess people, I always think, “Why don’t they just have a codeword or something?” This is one of the few times I’ve seen it properly executed. Genre savviness saves lives people.

Fabian’s rolls really matched his decisions this week. It was like the dice were punishing him with all those nat 1s on crucial checks.

Also, Brennan being like, “You get pneumonia” was lowkey hilarious. Just like, insult to injury. What’s next? He’s gonna die on dysentery on the Oregon Trail?

I wonder if Fabian is considering chronomancy-ing this away? The thought for sure crossed my mind. Also, everyone was joking about everything being all a dream, but that’s something that could happen in this campaign without it being cheap because it’s been set-up that that’s the kind of bad guy they’re up against so I’m staying vigilant.

Ragh coming into the room and, voice cracking, announcing that his mom was dead cut me up so bad. And I thought it would be not as bad on my rewatch. Nope, still awful. I can’t believe I like him so much now. This is like a Steve from Stranger Things level turnaround for me. Also, the chat was absolutely blowing up when Murph was like, “I tell her everything,” without excepting Ragh’s info at first. Brennan is a nice DM for reminding him about that (despite the absolute ravaging of Riz and Fabian otherwise this ep).

Also gotta give a shout out to Murph this ep for playing Riz so well during the confrontation with Kalina. His steadfast, simple, “We can’t stop. It would be wrong. Fullstop,” mentality is so pure. Riz is such an interesting character. When he tried to withhold info, Murph said, “I have low deception.” That’s who Riz is. He’s a rogue with low deception. He’s sneaky but only in pursuit of justice. No guile at all. Kalina, who is as casual as he is wound up and amoral and he is knightly is such an interesting foil for him. I’m very intrigued to see how this develops.  

Like I said in the recap, Garthy and Tracker can now see Kalina in the picture, even though neither of them saw her when she broke in (that they know of) so the plot thickens there. I’d go into it more but I really don’t have any new theories off the top of my head and this was honestly the least of my worries re: this ep.

Also, she says that all of her abilities come from serving the NK, and she had the abilities since she was working with Pok so this doesn’t seem to be a new development. I will say though, based on the info the group got, I really thought she was gonna be a more ancient being, you know? Maybe it’s just a title and she’s just the latest tabaxi to serve him and get it? I dunno.

Truly the mood for this episode was dawning horror. Things just got progressively worse in new and interesting ways every single scene.

Speaking of, let’s talk about Fabian’s vision. First of all, Brennan did a great job real-time DJ-ing that scene. The switch to that creepy music was very unsettling. Second of all, the chat exploding when Brennan started doing That voice and everyone for a brief moment thought that maybe, Maybe, Gilear was the Nightmare King, was delicious. But, on to the important stuff: When this happened to Adaine, my guess was that if she had looked at figure, it would have been a representation of her anxiety which I think was like 65% correct based on what happened to Fabian. Her worst possible future for herself is probably herself ruled by anxiety to the point of uselessness so she would have seen that version of herself. Fabian’s worst possible future self is essentially Gilear. Which, on behalf of Gilear, ouch. But, yeah, I see why it would be. And, honestly, NK-Fabian was worse than Gilear. Gilear is pathetic, sure, but he’s pathetic in pursuit of his own goals. To be stuck in his dad’s shadow, devoid of any other purpose is the antithesis of Fabian’s whole making a name for himself thing and a sick twisting of his very real pride in his dad. It’s a real raw nerve to hit, especially right after his colossal failure that left him feeling unworthy of even his favorite snack.

I’m really glad Fabian looked at the face of his nightmare. Brennan pushed him a little (in that fantastically unnerving, cajoling yet demanding voice) but I think he would have done it anyway. Like, it’s good information for the team to have and, if anyone was gonna get hit, it made most sense for it to happen right then, when Fabian was already at basically his lowest point. Both Adaine and Fabian felt like something horrible would happen if they looked at their nightmare and I’m wondering if there’s a mechanical effect to that or if it’s just psychological. I feel like there might be some not yet revealed mechanical effect going on but, when your players are as devoted to the RP as Lou (who, again, asked to take damage from his fall even after Brennan was gonna let him off with just the shame) you can get away with just giving the character trauma and having the player hinder their own actions based on it.

Titles for this recap that I rejected include Actions and Consequences and Keyfish 2: Pirate Boogaloo (because the first part of this episode truly felt like the CritRole Keyfish incident but spread out over an hour and a half).

Yet another thing that would have been a headline item in another recap but is just a footnote here: Aida Aguefort. That’s gotta be a sibling, ex, or parent (in my order of probability). What is an Aguefort doing running a pirate library? Are they as chaotic as the other Aguefort? I think it would be very funny if Arthur is this dude in a high position in a “normal” town who is just feral and Aida is living on this insane pirate island but, like, a completely normal librarian.

Oh, speaking of Aguefort, Kalina called him out on his child soldier factory and, listen, I know she was just trying to hurt Riz but she doesn’t not have a point.

Kristen was able to discern that Tracker probably won’t remember what happened with Sandra-Lynn but I hope she keeps track of that info because if Tracker rolls high perception and finds out that she semi-willfully kept that information from her, she might be miffed.

Are all of Bill’s dead warlocks gonna work on his hell ship now? Didn’t they become warlocks specifically because they were bad at being pirates?

I notice the group didn’t wait for Fabian even after Riz presumably told them what happened. I also notice that Cathilda was able to find Fabian right away which is interesting.

Adaine solemnly Razor scooting at the front of the party towards the library is low key hysterical.

Fig better hope it doesn’t get back to Jemina that she was being impersonated.

Also, that plan was crazy but super not the craziest thing Emily has ever done and Brennan backed her up on that. He was like, “This is good. This isn’t Hilda Hilda,” which is where the bar is because Emily is crazy.

Fig: We’re gonna fail./Gorgug: We’re gonna die./Adaine: And, more importantly, we’re gonna fail school.

Riz’s “How about no dead friends,” one-liner was so good. Unfortunately, it didn’t do anything to stop his paralysis. Ouch.

I’m assuming Kalina was asking what he knew to see if there was anyone she needed to kill because they knew too much about her? Because, otherwise, it seems like unimportant info for her. I was thinking when it was happening that she needed him to give her that information so they could take it from him and he wouldn’t have it anymore, like in a weird Fae way, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s probably just the simple thing.

Garthy doesn’t leave the Golden Gardens which is probably good for game balance. You don’t want to give the players a super powerful ally who has no reason not to help them at any given time. That’s rife for PC abuse.

I have to say, after last week, I was hoping we’d be done with the pirate stuff halfway through the ep and en route to Falinel but this was such a turn. I was saying to someone last week, it’s very tempting to try and predict where a D&D game is going by using typical narrative structure as a guide but that only halfway works because you really can’t account for the improvisational nature of it. I absolutely could not have guessed that this is what this episode would be and I’m glad.

Goes without saying, this ep totally snatched the crown for Most Heart Attacks Given To Me By BLM from Family in Flames.

“The game isn’t about what you plan; it’s about what happens,” sounds like a line from an inspirational Ted Talk, and not from a man who, minutes later, said that a pirate named Chungle-Down Bim wanted to use a teenager’s mouth as a toilet.

“I feel drunk from anxiety.” Same Ally.

You wanna know how many pages of handwritten notes I have for this episode? If you guessed 16, you’re right. And I was so into the ep, I forgot to keep track of crits, which is why I had to watch it a second time.

Emily proposing “felettes” as the feminine version of fellas.

“How many HP you at?”/”I’m not telling you.”

Just, the idea of this warlock drawing on Bill’s power to try and attack his son is so raw.

Brennan, being asked by Zac if he can help with Emily’s crazy plan: You absolutely may not and, in fact, take five points of damage.”

Siobhan: What do you have to lose?/Gorgug: *Rolls a nat 1 and almost severs the rope he and Fig are holding on to*

Garthy plays the harpsichord (I have in my notes harpsichord and not harp so I’m going with that) post-coital which is definitely a choice.

The shot of levity that Brennan injected between the big fight and the NK invasion by having Garthy know Jawbone was great. I knew it was coming as soon as Fig said his name, but the comic timing was still perfect. Apparently, Jawbone’s stories are crazy even by Garthy’s standards, which is wild.

Also funny, Fig being tied up as combat started. It didn’t end up making a difference but, at a certain point, when enough bad things have happened, piling more bad stuff on top just becomes funny like, yeah. Of course. That tracks.

Ally: Sleep when you’re dead, which might be this episode.

Riz and Gorgug (and Allistair) each roll one nat 1. Kristen rolls a nat 20. Adaine has 20s for both of her portent rolls (which she gives to Fig and Gorgug). And Fabian rolled an amazing 2 Nat 20s (in a row) and FIVE nat 1s.  

Edit: Oh, forgot to say! Next week there won’t be a game because Thanksgiving is happening in the States. Early Happy Thanksgiving for y’all in the U.S. who are celebrating. I’m thankful for a week off to recover after the ordeal that was this episode. 

[Footnote: This ended up cracking 6000 words, in case you’re wondering about the ways I choose to spend my time. Shoutout to y’all for reading these and justifying the dissertation length brain dumps my dumb, former English major brain compels me to produce for absolutely no good reason.]

[vaguely-concerned]

Mass Effect: Annihilation thoughts

TL;DR I fucking LOVED IT, a balm to my heart after struggling through Nexus Uprising! Also canonical lesbians! The sweetest quarian & his badass grandma! Elcor Hamlet except this time it’ll make you cry!!! 

- Aaaaaah the audiobook reader is Tom Taylorson (so male Ryder)!! Fryda Wolf (female Ryder) read the two others and did a nice job, but man I’m soft for his voice in a way only rivaled by (...outside-of-Overwatch!)Jennifer Hale and Nicholas Boulton haha. He also has a much better handle on the pronunciations and voices for the different alien species -- delightful, I’m still cackling over his pitch perfect elcor impersonation. (Bioware please give him more Scott Ryder to voice I miss my son)

- I’m only about half an hour in and this is already SO much better than Nexus Uprising, it really does feel like a brave new galaxy haha. Very funny, very warm and smart and engaging in how it does its characterization and Valente clearly has affection for the setting and the universe, she and Jemisin both do incredible jobs with these. 

- I’m fucking crying laughing at this cross-species near-brawl over a flower arrangement, god I love Mass Effect SO MUCH (what a neat idea though. something blooming quietly even when no one can see it. impractical as hell and hilariously including a high-nutrition celery now, but still neat)

Taylorson continues to wonderful things with the voices, that volus suit sound is so good. (he’s just generally really good at comedy) also a volus bellowing insults ‘moments before punching an anti-bouquet batarian in the groin’ sdafhjklsahfsjadkhfklajshdfkjlsadhf

- a high as a kite elcor... what a time to be alive, to get to read this book

I have already reached the ‘I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR’ stage with these characters, hard boiled drell detective lady and sweet sweet quarian first officer and manically enthusiastic elcor doctor TOT I would die for any one of you!!!

- The quarian/multispecies ark was built for long-term habitation, potentially over multiple generations. So what you’re telling me is that the quarians are the only ones who fucking thought this through and the rest of the Initiative probably should have listened to the people who’ve essentially been living on arks for ages. Who’d’ve thunk huh lol. (I guess the in-universe explanation is that people like the mysterious benefactor just wanted those arks yeeted to Andromeda ASAP, no time to get fancy in case the Reapers changed up their schedule. Fair enough)

- ;n; petition to let senna have a SAM pls (also uh. how happy do you think the stringently anti-AI quarian pathfinder will be when he finds out about everyone else’s SAMs lol lol lol he’s going to PASS OUT FROM RAGE upon meeting ryder. well he sounds like an asshole, I hope he dies so senna gets a chance)  

- I can’t BELIEVE yorrik is an anti-stratfordianist, i am betRAYED! disgraceful, how can I still love you knowing this (and yet I do he is extremely funny and sweet)!!! (at least his theory is that this so-called ‘shakespeare’ was actually an elcor, which makes it better somehow lol. anything so long as he’s not an oxfordian tbh)

senna and yorrik’s friendship is so good and wholesome 

- I really love the consistent alien POVs in this book, mass effect should indulge in this more -- everyone loves this universe so much, bioware, stop making us squint through a human lense to look at it!!  

- oh of course quarian ‘pirates’ exist, the people who’re thrown out of the fleet must be doing something huh. 

- haven’t written that many notes in a while just because I’m enjoying myself so much, I keep forgetting 

- lfsdkhfsajkldhfskadjhfsjakdfhsdkjfh communist volus!!!! this is not a drill, communist volus! I am completely and utterly charmed by this entire book

- the quarian ancestor VI is so interesting and weirdly touching. senna is adorable (and relatably neurotic lol)

grandma AI smoking T___________T I love everything about this, she’s so cool. the worldbuilding being done around pre-geth revolution rannoch here... exquisite 

- way to make me cry about batarians cat valente ;_______;

- the voice acting is SO FUCKING GOOD! I keep forgetting it’s one dude reading all these characters haha, I caught myself wanting to look up who voiced this dying batarian. (special shoutout that he does so many wonderfully distinct and specific female voices!) 

- haHA I KNEW the quarian VI was a full AI (or near enough that it makes little difference tbh)!!! this fabulous grandma was self aware the entire time b i t c h e s !!!!

- the running joke of borbala’s ‘you need ______? I can make _______ happen’ is SO satisfying hahaha

ooooooh serious femslash vibes!!!! initially I thought batarian ex-crime matriarch was too old for drell PI, but this is undeniable. (I don’t think we actually ever get to know how old annex is, anyway, come to think of it) I guess if asari get to be five times older than everyone else and still fuck freely this isn’t really that weird lol

- “don’t look! it’s not so bad if you don’t look!” ofhsdalfhskldlsfjas oh senna baby boy 

hey qetsi? qetsi both senna and I love grandma liat more than you. stand the fuck down 

- NOOOO GRANDMA LIAT ;______________________________________;

- do you think SAM could meet liat (either ship!liat or just grandma!liat).... and have... a friend ;_________; (a cool laidback friend who isn’t a murderous angaran ai who might very well go the murder suicide sort of friendship route lol) 

anyway I miss SAM a lot and love him??

- yorrik noooooooooooo this is awful everything is bad and terrible I love all of them so much why must senna be sad and watch everything he loves fade away 😭😭😭

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?” He realized he’d forgotten to preface the words with an emotion. Now they wouldn’t understand what he meant.

Oh. Oh what a way to drive home the sadness and loneliness of this moment f u c k  (and again the emotion taylorson brings to it jesus cHRIST) 

I’m destroyed over how much senna and yorrik love each other, cross species found family out here wrecking my heart in true mass effect style 

- yorrik is such a great character though. he’d be so easy to make a one-note joke character (like most elcor have been in canon lbr), but there’s nuance and depth and just enough satsifyingly believable alienness there. (I love the staunch elcor ‘you can’t call anything love that hasn’t lasted at least two centuries’ perspective haha) his memories of his childhood and disappointment with his profession and everything... goodnight sweet prince indeed :(

- they went and made elcor hamlet heartbreaking how dare they 

(to be real for a second I think some of the human culture references are a little bit clunky, but the elcor hamlet stuff is perfect. contextualizing a throwaway joke from the original trilogy and giving it emotional depth, helping us see it from the elcor perspective and how frustrating and lonely it is to be so fundamentally not emotionally understood or seen on a level most of the other races are, despite their other differences, even though you have all these feelings and want to communicate... its very good.)   

fun additional fact: both mordin and yorrik have played/wanted to play polonius in a production of hamlet! though I guess mordin is the slightly problematic fave in that duo and yorrik is a sweet melancholic angel who has never done anything wrong in his life, I would say protect him but I guess it’s too late for that D:  

- qetsi giving off some real ophelia vibes here, I wish yorrik was here to see it, he’s the only one who’d properly appreciate it despite it all

- I. am. SO FUCKING HUNGRY for more mass effect after this (well even more so than usual) I’m so hyped!! I love this universe so much! I want a new andromeda game with senna as quarian pathfinder and grandma liat as the ship’s AI and see how they interact with ryder and SAM! (honestly though I feel like senna might be the one who’d translate the most cleanly into a game, I think there’s a lot of potential in him that’s barely being realized towards the end there with his deep righteous rage cutting through his uncertainty. also I just want nice things for him. is that so much to ask. he is a good boy, yorrik was so right.)

- aaaah not just femslash vibes, canonical lesbians, this is not a drill! I can’t wait until they propose... ‘we get shit done together, want to be in good cop/bad cop with me until the day we die y/n?’  

- the ME universe doesn’t feel quite itself without all these ‘background’ species hanging around, I suddenly realize. I dream of an Andromeda sequel with all of them on the board and in play again Y-------Y 

- potential Liat and SAM dynamics are so fucking interesting though! if she becomes/is confirmed as a full AI (all I hope and dream of), you’ll have two artificial intelligences with such different starting points but not that dissimilar goals? Liat was an organic person once who’s looking out for her family even now, and SAM is completely artificial but also intimately tied to and protecting His People. (and pulling a whole lot of symbolic weight re: the strength of familial/interpersonal relationships to boot; he’s the best way alec ryder managed to connect with his children. even though he was dead. because as established alec ryder was a disaster of a person)  

- I enjoyed the loose murder mystery structure of this quite a lot, but that might also be because nexus uprising is so shapeless and meandering by comparison that I’d be relieved by anything else (sorry I’ll stop ragging on NU soon it just. took some hours of my life I can’t get back)  

- jemisin did great stuff for characters already in andromeda (cora, SAM, alec ryder) and valente made me remember just why I love this universe so much and desperately want these aspects brought to andromeda too... and now I’ve exhausted all the fresh mass effect content I had available to me and will sit here consumed with lust for the rest of the time it takes for a new game to be announced thank you and goodbye  

[heyyyharry]

In Another Life Series: Chapter 11 - The End

Series description: Y/N and Harry are soulmates and destined to meet in every lifetime, but no matter how many times they reincarnate and find each other again, they never seem to get it right.

AU: reincarnation, soulmate!harry, prince!harry, assistant!y/n, witch!y/n.

Chapter 10 - The Sidekicks: The protagonists aren’t always the only heroes.

wattpad link ❤︎  Before you read the chapter, I have "a few" words to say *clear throat and open my Oscar winning speech* (or you can just start reading and skip this altogether, it's fine).

When I was reaching the end of Flatmate with no intention of writing the sequel, I wanted to write something new that would be just as good. My mind was empty, and I came up with many bullshit ideas and almost settled down with some of them (glad i DIDN'T!). Then as I was listening to 1000 Times by Sarah Bareilles, from the lyrics, I pictured two strangers meeting each other for the first time, feeling like they've known each other forever, but having no clue that they used to be lovers in a different lifetime. It's just so romantic in my head and I knew I could do this idea justice. So thank you Sarah Bareilles, if you read this fic lemme know lmao. The painting idea was originally from Marc Levy's novel with the same name (Idk what it's title in French, but in my translated language it's) In Another Life, so just to be clear I didn't really come up with that, credit to the genius who did. Thank you "The Tudors" for all this knowledge I have about the English dynasties in the 16th century, and I'm genuinely sorry if I offend anyone with all the historical inaccuracies, please forgive me. Thank you everyone who's read and waited and commented on every chapter to help me make this as good as possible. I know it's only fiction but to read about how my writing makes some of you happy and feel better really does make me happy and feel better and motivated to write more.

I've had a couple alternative endings to this series, and I think this one is the best (among the others), but if you want to know what the other endings are, feel free to drop me an ask! Or simply tell me what you expected from this chapter before knowing the actual ending here!

Okay, bye, thank you for putting up with my extra ass! Kissy, Allie.❤︎

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Harry ended up spending the rest of his afternoon chatting with his assigned nurse. He'd told the old woman about what had been going on in his life, how he'd met Y/N, the dreams he'd had ever since his trip to the museum, the faces in those dreams that looked just like her. And even though it did feel nice to finally get all this burden off his chest, he still found it strange that she barely opened up about herself. All he knew about her was that her name was Margaret, or Maggie as she preferred to be called, and she lived alone, no husband, no children, and had been working as a nurse for as long as she could remember.

"I have a feeling that we've met before," he told her at last because it had been bothering him since they first met. 

But the woman just looked at him in surprise as she said she didn't think so. "Although, you do remind me of someone I used to know." She studied the look on his face, pondering for a little while.

"Oh, who is it?" He asked.

"I had a niece, she fell madly in love with a young man whom you remind me of."

"Had?"

"She...passed away years ago, unfortunately."

Harry could see the clear change in her facial expression when she said those words, so he didn't want to dig too deep into that hurtful memory of hers, even though he was curious to know about the man who resembled him. However, it was Maggie who continued with this topic he thought she wanted to avoid.

"That young man was very passionate about my dear Annalise as you are for the girl you love."

"Her name was Annalise?"

"Yes, it means Grace of God. I helped her mother pick that name."

"Very beautiful, ma'am." Harry pressed his lips into a smile when he saw how hers was beaming as she talked about her beloved niece. "I'm sure Annalise and her man were very happy together?"

"No. They never got together." Maggie shook her head slowly. "His family didn't want him to be with her and he didn't have a choice."

"So after she...uhm..."

"Passed away?"

"Yes, after she passed away, what happened to him?"

There was a long pause as the old lady's eyes shifted to her feet, and Harry felt like he never should've asked that question. He took a wild guess that the young man must've had the same tragic ending as the girl, if that was true, then this was definitely the most heartbreaking story he'd heard in a long time.

"He moved on, married the girl his family wanted him to marry, but he never stopped loving her. He died of a heart attack, and his last word was her name."

Harry felt a lump in his throat and he had no idea why. He was really hurting over a story of two strangers whom he knew nothing about. His faith in true love had always been faint, after hearing this he had completely lost hope.

"Had the timing been different, they could've ended up together," he said, breaking the melancholy silence that had taken over the atmosphere surrounding them.

Maggie released a long heavyhearted sigh as she crossed her legs and leaned back against the chair. She stopped to think for a moment, then she told him, "but I like to think they'll meet each other and start again in another life. Because true love never dies. Do you agree?"

No. Harry didn't.

He thought people had had enough chances in one lifetime already and God wouldn't be so merciful to offer endless trials for them to try and fix their mistakes again and again, lifetime after lifetime. Despite so, he still told Maggie he agreed with her and added, "I'll have my fingers crossed for the two of them."

As he was about to move on to another, more cheerful topic to discuss, the old lady spoke up again, "she wrote him a letter every single day they'd spent together."

"Oh, did he get a chance to read them?"

"He did. I gave them to him myself. He was very emotional, he burst into tears."

"Wow..."

"Before he passed away he gave them back to me." Maggie rose from the chair by his hospital bed and went to grab her purse, which sat on the table by the window. "I have them with me here, do you want to read them?"

"You bring them with you to work?"

The perplexity on his face made her smile as she pulled out a pile of papers which seemed pretty old, they'd turned to a yellowish brown and were all a bit torn at the edges. "I was moving to a new home today so I brought them with me, I don't want to put them with the rest of the other stuff in my flat, they're very fragile."

"I don't think I should read them, they're very personal, ma'am." Harry shook his head when she gave the letters to him.

"You're an artist, aren't you? Maybe these love letters will inspire you in your songwriting. And I know my darling Ann would love to share them with people who have the same heart as the man she loved."

Did she just say Ann? That was the name Harry had heard many times in his dreams about Y/N. But he could be wrong.

"I'm gonna leave them here for you to read. You have nothing fun to do around here anyway," Maggie chuckled then walked away from his bed, not expecting a reply from her confused patient.

.

.

Madam Maggie told Edward she'd come to him because of Ann. She's asked her to. Before the fire incident, Ann had a bad feeling, which she just assumed had something to do with Edward marrying someone else. Little did she know, that bad feeling she'd thought was insignificant ended up costing her her own life.

In her despair, the poor girl had snuck outside of the castle to see Madam Maggie and asked for two little favors. Thanked to Ann's favors, Madam Maggie showed up just in time to find an unconscious Edward lying on the floor of his chamber.

"Her powers allowed her to detect sickness, she knew you had a weak heart, which was also why you fainted earlier. She didn't have the heart to tell you, so she came to see me."

"Ann asked you to cure me?" Edward inquired, placing a hand on the left side of his chest, only to get disappointed by the answer he received from this woman.

"I can make you feel less pain, but I don't think I can cure you completely. Witches can fix broken bones and mend wounds, but we cannot magic away something so permanent like the heart disease you've carried since the day you were born."

Edward nodded understandingly. He seemed so unbothered for someone who had just found out his heart had been unwell since his birth. That was when you know he was, in entirety, wrecked. Ann's death had caused him such pain that nothing else, not even a stab in the gut by the sharpest blade would be able to hurt him that much.

"On the night we met, she fixed the wound on my leg," he said with a fractured grin and tears in his emerald eyes. "And I was supposed to be afraid of her, that was the first time in my life I'd ever seen witchcraft." He chuckled but there was no humor in the sound of it, just utter desolation. "But the look in her eyes made me feel safe...and suddenly I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew she was a good person."

"She said the same thing about you. She really loved you."

"And I let her down...Maybe...Maybe this sickness should just kill me so I can finally be with her." He took a long pause and shifted his eyes to the window by his bed, sucking in a long breath while contemplating whether or not he should say this out loud. He thought he should. "Before you got here, I nearly jumped out of that window."

"Why didn't you?" Madam Maggie calmly asked as if she'd already known, both what he'd tried to do, and the reason he'd chosen not to do it.

"I made a promise to Ann that I would be a good King. I have to live to fulfill that promise."

"It's good that you're still thinking straight." The woman flashed a smile, reaching out to hold his hand which laid lifelessly by his unresponsive body. "I haven't told you the real reason I'm here. Ann also asked me another favor."

"What is it?" He asked.

Madam Maggie thought that this was the most alive he'd looked since she first saw him. She confided, "did you know she'd been writing you letters?"

"N-No..."

"She had. Everyday, from the first day she set foot in this castle, to the night before they locked her away. She felt something bad was gonna happen so she brought them to me and asked me to keep them for a while. She told me she'd come back for them, hopefully with you by her side. She was very sure that you two would end up running away together." When she finished that sentence, Madam Maggie couldn't control her emotions anymore. Tears started to shed from her eyes, running down the crinkles at the corners of her chapped lips to land onto her worn out dress. Edward squeezed her hand a bit tighter, as he could deeply sympathize with her loss.

"Before she left she gave me a kiss on the cheek...Like she always did whenever we said goodbye...I didn't think—" That sentence was never finished for the old woman couldn't speak anymore. She began sobbing into the palm of her other hand. And Edward did as well. It was the first time he'd really cried ever since he last saw her, and he thought the agony he was feeling then would be his life sentence.

.

.

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Harry woke up, gasping for air, again.

He was back in his hospital room, the only sound other than his own ragged breathing and riotous heartbeats was the beeping of one of the machines placed beside his bed. This time, he had a dream about Y/N stuck in a burning house, he risked his own life to run inside to save her but she couldn't come with him. So he held her close and let the flame swallow them whole. The dreams he'd been having had become more real recently, and he guessed his mild fear of the hospital had something to do with it. Fortunately, Harry wouldn't have to stay there much longer. The doctors had said, for some reasons they could not explain, his heart's condition had been slowly going back to normal, as if it'd healed on its own. By this time tomorrow, he could finally be home.

Harry propped himself up on his elbows then reached out to grab the glass of water his nurse had left on the bedside table. That was when he saw the pile of letters she'd put right under it. He slowly sat up, finishing his water, putting the empty glass back on the table, then with a little bit of hesitation, he took the letters and brought them to his lap.

When Harry scanned his eyes through the first line, which was the date, he almost thought his eyes were mistaken. The year was 1509, which was 510 years ago! Was this supposed to be a joke? Or was it just a thing this girl Annalise always did with her lover? Maybe it was a secret message only they knew. Now, Harry couldn't put the letters down without finishing every single one of them.

So Harry began to read, every single word. It took him only halfway through the first letter to realize this wasn't from just 'a few years ago' like Maggie had said. This was a letter from a peasant girl named Ann written to a Prince, Edward Rammour, no other than the man in the portrait, in the museum where the series of strange events and bizarre dreams of Harry's started.

The girl, Ann, wrote about their first met, about their little moments together, about the look in his eyes when he looked at her, about the things he said that he didn't pay attention to but she remembered every single word. And Harry knew every single detail in here, he'd seen them countless of times in his dreams, in which the girl who was supposed to be Ann, looked like Y/N. But the last few letters were all from her point of view so he didn't know what was gonna happen. She talked about not being able to see him as much, about doubting his love for her, about believing in his love for her again when he snuck out to visit her one night, about the things people in the castle said about her even in her presence, about a princess named Emilié who was betrothed to the Prince and hated her deeply, about receiving his letter one night asking her to meet him in the library. And in the last paragraph of the very last letter, she wrote about how happy she was because she believed they were gonna run away together. Harry's heart wrenched in anguish for he knew that wasn't what had happened.

In a millisecond, all the lost memories flooded back to him. Harry now remembered. Everything.

He remembered her screaming and shouting and begging him to save her and not let them take her away, and he didn't save her, he watched them take her away. He remembered saying goodbye to her one last time. He remembered the look on her face before the door shut between them, He remembered telling her he loved her, forever, and so he did. He loved her forever.

He remembered everything.

And on the hospital bed, he burst into tears, and those tears fell down and blurred out the handwriting of the girl who'd been dead for hundreds of years, yet kept alive inside his heart.

"Little Annalise had always preferred to be called Ann."

He lifted his head quickly and saw Maggie at the door. He didn't ask her to explain, he already knew what was going on. "Is Y/N...is she..."

"Yes, she is." The woman gave him a nod. "Did you feel strange when you looked into her eyes?" He did. "The eyes are the windows to a person's soul. That was why when you looked into hers, as well as...your own...in that painting in the museum, you felt a sense of familiarity that you couldn't explain. Same souls, trapped in two different bodies"

"How is this even possible?" Harry grimaced, trying to put two and two together on his own, but it wasn't that simple. "Why are there only two of us? Do the other...Does this happen to them too? How are you still alive?!"

"I'm the head witch, I'm immortal. Not even fire could kill me," she said, smiling as she approached his bed and sat down on the chair where she'd sat earlier.

Taking in a deep breath, she began, “when a person dies, his or her soul breaks into tiny pieces, each creates a new life. They start again as different people with no memories of the lives they used to have. But Ann already casted a spell on you, on both of you actually. That spell keeps your souls from unraveling and also connected to each other. So you’ve met in every single lifetime, and had many chances to start over. But this is the closest you’ve ever got to the ending she wanted for you two.”

"Why did it take me until today, this lifetime, to remember?"

"Because it took me that many centuries to have found you." Maggie sighed. "I usually found Ann first, but as there are more and more people on the Earth nowadays, it's really difficult to track her down. Every time I arrived in the past, it was already too late. But this time, I guess God does show some mercy after all. He brought me to you instead."

"So you working here is all a coincidence."

"A magical coincidence. I almost didn't believe it when I saw you here." She showed him a smile. And even though Harry had calmed down by now, he was still in shock. "Edward asked me to give you these letters, he thought only them would help you remember."

"W-Why should I remember if...if every time we got together one of us died?"

"Because only when you remember, would this story be over."

.

.

.

"Are you sure you want me to have them?"

Edward nodded, pushing the letters into Madam Maggie's hand as he insisted, "you're the only hope for me to find her."

She really was. Madam Maggie said once Ann had reincarnated into a new body, she would be able to feel her, and even if it might take a lot of effort to find her and convince her to believe she was Ann, it was possible.

Honestly, Edward didn't really believe in life after death. But he hadn't believed in witches until he met Ann, and she was real. Sometimes he still wished she hadn't been real. Maybe if she'd been a dream, a beautiful dream, then he would just sleep forever and never wake up.

"But how did you know it was the only way to break the spell?" He asked Madam Maggie, eyes on the letters. She could sense the sound of fear and doubt in his trembling voice.

"I just knew when you first told me, dear." She put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. "She said it herself, only when you've found her in another life, could you two finally be together."

Edward exhaled though his mouth as recalled his lover's last words. She did say so, after she'd kissed him. The kiss. He realized it now! That kiss was when she put a spell on them both!

"Destiny is a funny thing, it's like a chess game, if you can't win, you lose." Madam Maggie took a deep breath and slowly let it all out. "Destiny wants to keep you two apart, so it will make sure you two are forever kept apart no matter what. Ann tried to break the rules, so by finding her she meant, you, finding Ann, not whoever she'd be in the next lifetime, or many after that. If you fail to recognize her but still try to break the rules by being with her, then destiny does what it has to, history repeats itself. One of you will pay the price."

Edward opened his mouth to ask another question, yet Madam Maggie shushed him right before he could release a single sound. "You should get some rest, your coronation is tomorrow."

Then she walked away, disappeared into the darkness of the long corridor. And that was also the last time he ever saw her.

"Edward! Wait, darling!" The voice caught Edward's attention, and he turned around, wishing he hadn't. His mother ran up to him, sounding so desperate as she pleaded, "darling, we need to talk!"

"No, we don't," he said coldly and started walking away. But she chased after him and managed to grab him by the arm.

"I understand that you don't want to speak to your wife but I am—"

"She's not my wife!" He shouted, but the frightened look on her face made him weak again. "It's only a title. Tomorrow she might be the Queen of England, but she will never be my wife."

"You cannot say that! You have to give her a chance! You need a son to rule after you!"

"I don't want a son so he would grow up with a mother like that. I don't want him to suffer the same way I am." Edward hoped those words did hurt the Queen, he hoped the pain shown on her face was genuine. However, he didn't know anymore, he didn't believe in it. Was there anything, or anyone in this castle, 'genuine'? "Emilié had told me everything, mother. You sent Ann in there...knowing father could hurt her. You were willing to destroy a young girl's life just to make sure I'd stay for the throne. Now I am King, are you happy now?"

"I did it because I love you!"

"You, same as Emilié, same as father, love no one but yourself!" Each and every one of those word was a knife pierced right through his chest. "The only one who's ever loved me for me, and not who I am, or going to be, was Ann, and now she's dead."

"I am still your mother..."

"You are not." He shook his head slowly, trying not to cry because she wasn't worth anymore of his tears. He'd suffered enough. "I loved you, I really loved you."

Loved. The sound of it crushed the Queen's dark heart into dust, and she thought she might collapse onto the floor had she been able to feel any of her muscle. She was frozen right where she stood, eyes wide, jaw dropped, heartbroken, staring at the son she'd let down. They could've just continued to stand there until sunrise, had the conversation been interrupted by the arrival of the Chief Minister.

"There you are, Your Highness!" Exclaimed the man, who sounded so thrilled since he didn't know what was happening here. "I already had everything you asked prepared for the coronation tomorrow morning. Also Piersilvio, the famous Italian painter, he wanted to paint your portrait as a gift. He would arrive at court soon after the ceremony."

"Good." Edward nodded as he exhaled sharply. "Anything else?"

"No, Your Highness."

"It's 'Your Majesty' to you now."

"Yes...My apologies...Your Majesty..." The Chief Minister hung his head to show respect to the new young King as he was startled by the change in Edward's attitude. He was afraid he might been in trouble for addressing the monarch in the wrong way, but Edward didn't pay much attention to it.

"Have a good evening, His Excellency. Could you please escort the Queen Mother back to her bed chamber?"

"Yes, Your Majesty."

When Edward absented himself, he heard his mother desperately screaming out his name, begging him to forgive her. However, he turned a deaf ear to all the things she said. He was no different from a dead man walking.

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There were indeed plenty of museums in London, more than 170 of them. Countless of visitors came and went every single day. What were the chances of two person returning to the same museum, every single day, to sit in front of the same painting? Surely very little.

For the first few days the pair were there, nobody really noticed. For almost two weeks, they began to. Everyday before the museum was closed, a young man and a young woman would arrive and stare at the portrait of Edward Rammour, and then they left when everyone else did. Some people thought they were lovers who shared the same passion with art, some said they were sad, depressed, and lonely, some said they were crazy. However, nobody actually came and asked them what their story was. Maybe if someone had, they would've told them.

"How long are you gonna keep tormenting yourself?" Asked Jason as he sat down by his best friend's side on the bench in front of the painting and handed her a donut, which she refused.

"Until I get my memories back..."

"That's impossible."

"Why?" She snorted. "I think I just need a bit more time with this painting, and it'll all come back to me. She wanted me to remember. That was why she cursed me as well."

"We don't really know what she wanted." Jason heaved a sigh. "Maybe she wanted the King to pay for his mistake by cursing him, but she didn't think about how it would also affect her in her new lives."

That theory seemed justifying, but Y/N knew it wasn't the truth. People wouldn't want themselves to be bound together for eternity with someone they loathed. She knew the woman she used to be still loved the King despite it all. If only she could remember what had really happened.

"He's back in London you know," Jason broke the silence between the two of them, hand reaching out to hold hers. He thought she might pull away like many times before, but this time she didn't. She stayed still where she was, emotionless, unbothered. "Have you listened to his new song? It's about you."

"I have. I love it. I wish I could tell him."

"You should reach out to him...if you want to."

"I can't, you know I can't." The lump in her throat when she thought about him made it hard for her to breathe. "Not until I know how to break the curse. If we tried to be together, there would be consequences."

"So you're gonna spend your entire life, sitting in front of this painting, trying to remember a life you had...five centuries ago?"

A simple "yes" was her answer. And Jason knew nothing else to say. He wanted what was best for her, and he thought separating her from Harry would fix everything. But everything became worse. She'd been losing sleep, her nightmares got more real and hard to wake up from. Still her memories of her past life were still dust in a desert.

Jason asked her if she was thirsty, she said no, but he said he would go buy her something to drink anyway. He then laid a kiss on her cheek and stood up to go. She was once again left alone. Actually, she wasn't alone.

She could feel him near. She didn't even need to turn around to know he was there. She just did. And she was afraid to look because her feelings could be wrong, and if he wasn't standing right behind her she would be so disappointed. That was when his voice rang right through her ear. The first thing he said wasn't 'hi' or 'hello' or 'how have you been?' Or even her name.

It was, "I've found you."

Y/N rose from the bench to turn around, facing Harry at last. He was wearing an expensive trench coat, hands in its pockets, his grey flat cap made sure half of his face was covered, but there was no way she could mistaken him with anyone else. Time seemed to stop when they locked eyes, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, she felt something she'd never felt before. She parted her lips, wanting to speak, yet no word escaped for she had no idea what to say. He said he'd found her, but she knew he didn't mean finding her, here, in this museum, it was something else, almost like—

"Of course you don't remember...I...uhm—" he mumbled, as if he was talking to himself. Then a dimpled smile crept up on his face only to vanish as soon as Jason returned with a bottle of water for Y/N.

She didn't know what was going on in Harry's mind at that point, and Harry didn't say a word either. He turned his heels just as Jason recognized him, and quickly made tracks to the nearest exit.

Her eyes quickly followed his familiar figure to that door over there, then all the sounds around her became muted at once. She didn't even hear Jason asking her what had just happened, instead she heard Harry's footsteps echoing inside the walls of her brain as they were fading away. He spun his head and sent her one last look before the door was closed between the two of them. Time stopped. It wasn't Harry that she saw.

She saw Edward.

She saw him being dragged away from her by the men in amours. She heard her own deafening screams as well as his. She saw the flames on the torches on the brick walls mirroring in his green eyes. She saw him mouthing the words 'I love you' to her. The door shut between them two, and she snapped back to reality. Everything vanished. The room, the guards, the flames, the torches, him.

She remembered it now, everything.

"Y/N! Y/N! Where are you going?!" Jason shouted after her as she started running fast, pushing her way through a crowd of tourists, who screamed at her for being so rude. Then she burst through that door and she screamed out his name, causing many heads to turn around. There was only one face among them that mattered.

When she saw him she didn't hesitate. Hell, she'd been waiting for this moment for too long, 500 years! Now, she could finally fall into his embrace. Her head against his chest, and she was finally home.

Shocked as he was, Harry didn't resist the hug. He chose to ignore all the judging stares they were receiving and clung onto her, eyes squeezed shut, lips pressed to her forehead.

"Why did you walk away?" She pulled back to look up at him with a pucker between her brows, all out of breath, yet laughing uncontrollably.

"You were...with someone else..." He sounded hurt and confused, it only made her laugh harder.

"That's my best friend Jason, you've met him before, remember?" she cried out, voice trembling because she'd never been so happy that she choked on her own words. "I was waiting for you. I've been waiting for you for so long."

"Wait, so you..."

"I remember." She nodded fast, arms tightened around his waist. "I remember exactly what was going through my head in that tower. I remember feeling so scared when I was on the stake. I remember the last image in my head was you. I remember...telling you to find me in another life so we could finally be together...And you did, Harry you found me."

When she touched his face, Harry felt as if there was magic on her fingertips. He dug his nose into her palm, sniffing away his own tears as he wiped away the ones that were rolling down her cheeks. He heard the sound of the camera shutter somewhere behind her, behind him, on his left, and his right, knowing their reunion could've already made the news already, yet he couldn't care less.

"How did you know I was here?" She asked, still cupping his cheeks with no intention of letting him go.

"I came to your house and Lisa told me." He paused. "I'm sorry it took me so long. I needed over a week to think of what to say to you before coming here so I wouldn't sound insane...I even brought your letters—"

"How do you have the letters?" Her eyes grew wide, mouth slightly opened. "Wait, have you...have you met her?" Y/N felt like her heart could burst from joy when he nodded his head, telling her yes. "Where is she?! Is she here?!"

"No, but I'll take you to her, love. She really misses you," he told her while looking around and spotting a couple sneaky paparazzi. So he locked his fingers around her wrist and urged her to come with him and get out of here so they could finally tell each other everything that had happened.

"Harry, wait!" Y/N tugged on his arm when he was about to pull her with him. "I...I need you to kiss me now so I can be sure neither of us is gonna die."

Her pretentious fear made Harry burst into laughter. With no hesitation, he cupped her cheeks with both hands, bringing his face down to hers so the tips of their noses brushed against each other, then with their lips only one breath apart, he whispered to her, "queen of my heart."

He kissed her exactly how she wanted to be kissed, like it was their first, last, everything they had left to lose. This passionate and timeless moment put an official end to the series of misery that had lasted for five centuries long. And people who walked past King Edward's portrait that day could swear when they told the story, of how they saw the man in the painting, smile.

[monstersandmaw]

Male vampire x male character - Part Four (final) (nsfw)

Wow. This part is 10,904 words, people. And in total this story now reaches 23,704 words in length!!

I hope you enjoy this part! Obviously, mlm exo(ish in this case) stories always flop on here no matter what, but some folks at least seemed to like it once it got going, and my Patrons seemed to enjoy it too. I really enjoyed getting to know these two boys, and their personalities, so at the end of the day I guess that’s what matters.

Last time, Alec learned that a few members of his immediate family are in fact vampire hunters, and he found out the truth about Sebastien too.

Heads up in this part for continued, but easing, tense familial relations, some angst/heartache (not heartbreak though), and some (consensual) blood drinking.

Thanks to those of you who have engaged with this story! And for being so supportive in general. You've been an absolute pleasure to write for.

Tumblr links to previous parts: Part One (sfw), Part Two (nsfw), Part Three (nsfw)

Alec let out a shaky breath and crossed to the sofa, sinking down onto it as his legs finally gave out. “Vampires,” he said, hardly daring to believe the word he was uttering.

“Yes.”

“And you’re one?”

“… Yes.”

“And my family…?”

Sebastien’s voice was tight on the other end of the line as he said, “Hunts my kind. Well, those of us who aren’t registered with the ‘Guild of Hunters’ —” his tone turned acrid as he spat the words out, though he kept his voice low and quiet.

“What does that even mean? I don’t know what any of this means… And did you know about my family? I mean, before? When you started dating me?”

Sebastien took another deep breath. “Yes. I knew. And it was a long time before I fully convinced myself that you did not.”

If Sebastien had thought it was some kind of trap, that would explain his reticence at the beginning for sure.

“And were you planning on telling me any of this?” Alec snarled. God, his chest hurt so much. The deception was like Jeremy cheating on him all over again, only this time the betrayal was coming from two fronts at once: from his love life and from his family. Not that he’d had all that solid a relationship with the latter to start with. Perhaps this explained why.

“I hadn’t planned on becoming your boyfriend at all,” Sebastien snapped.

“So, what, I was just a quick diversion? A casual fuck you kept coming back for because I’m such a fucking chump? Is that it?”

“No,” Sebastien sighed. “Not at all. I fell for you. Like the horrid cliche I am, the vampire fell for the hunter, and by then I had no idea how to tell you. I’ve not been with a human before, so this is all very new to me.”

Alec ran his fingers through his dark hair to buy himself a moment. “You… You haven’t?”

“No.”

“How… How old are you?”

“Do you really want the answer to that?”

“Yes!” His phone was slippery in his fingers now from the sweat on his palm but he couldn’t bring it away from his ear long enough to put it on speaker. He needed answers.

With another cavernous sigh, Sebastien said hurriedly, “Very well. I was born in 1897 and turned on the battlefields of the Great War — World War I, that is. I was dying, and a vampire named Felicity who had been working as a field nurse turned me. My first run-in with your family was not long after I moved from France to America. They were working with the American Hunters’ Guild on a case which had nothing to do with me.” He let out a shaky breath and said, “I got in the way and I nearly died. Those were the days before the treaty, of course, and before I moved to England.”

Despite his still-spinning mind, Alec managed to croak, “What treaty?”

“Those of us who get our blood from sanctioned blood banks and do not live-feed are exempt from being hunted like animals.” He spoke like he was quoting from a law code; cold and clinical; detached.

God, the way he said it made Alec’s skin crawl. It was as if he were being permitted to exist on the grounds of good behaviour and, he supposed, that was exactly the case. Even so, Alec couldn’t help the next words that just fell out of his mouth. “So you weren’t planning on feeding from me?”

“Of course not,” Sebastien retorted but then appeared to rein himself in with yet another steadying inhale. “No. It’s been decades since I’ve fed from a human directly. I didn’t plan on starting with you.”

Alec slumped back into the sofa cushions and stared up at the ceiling of his tiny apartment. “Fuck.”

After a long silence, Sebastien’s gentle tenor sounded in his ear. “Are you alright?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve never been close to my family - my dad was always an arsehole, but… I can’t believe Theo’s involved in all this. He was such a sweet kid, and we were really close until…” he swallowed thickly around the rising lump in his throat.

“Until?” Sebastien prompted when he stalled again.

“I can’t believe this is all real,” he muttered. “Until he turned sixteen and started to ‘work out’ with dad. I was at uni by then, getting my fine art degree, but whenever I came home he was just… different. Harder. Sharper. More focused. Guess it makes sense now… Well, as much as… you know…” he gestured vaguely to the empty apartment with his hands, “… as much as all this can make sense. Fucking… vampires…”

After a heartbeat, Sebastien added softly, “Quite literally.”

Despite himself, Alec snorted. “So… where does this leave us?”

Now it was Sebastien’s turn to feel clearly uncomfortable. Eventually he said, “Alec, I don’t think it’s wise for me to see you currently. Not with your family being what they are.”

His heart twisted, even though he’d been half expecting it. “You still think they’d… what, stake you, or whatever it is that vampire hunters actually do to you lot?”

“There are many ways to kill a vampire,” he said flatly. “And your family knows all of them, probably more. You need to work this out with them first as well. Talk to your brother. He seems the more reasonable…”

“I can’t believe Ellie’s in on it as well. And my mother? Fuck…”

“Talk to them.”

“Will I still see you at work at least?”

The awkward silence told him all he needed to know, even before Sebastien said, “I just sent in my letter of resignation.”

“That was quick,” he hissed, stomach dropping. “You only just left.”

“Supernatural speed,” he replied bitterly. “Comes in useful for typing papers and getting out of awkward situations…”

That sparked another question in him. “Supernatural powers, huh? Can you turn into a bat too?”

“No.”

Then he thought of Sebastien’s Halloween outfit. “Wolf?”

He thought he detected a faint smirk in Sebastien’s response. “No, sadly. No shape-shifting for me. Felicity is not of any extraordinary bloodline, and thus, neither am I.”

“Right,” he grunted. “Of course. Is she… is she still around?”

“Felicity? Yes. We meet every now and again. She and her wife spend most of their time in Venice these days.”

“Her wife? She a vampire too?”

Sebastien swallowed audibly. “Yes.”

“Did Felicity turn her too? Would that make her wife your sister?”

“No.”

He frowned. “Did she know her as a human though?”

“Yes.”

After a moment of spinning thoughts, Alec asked, “Did… you turn her?”

“One doesn’t tend to turn one’s own intended. Between a sire and their turned, there can grow… tension. Not always, but it can be enough to ruin a relationship that was seemingly solid before. Something about exchanging blood changes the soul… or so we think, anyway. It was an honour to be asked to sire her.”

“Right.” Alec felt slightly sick. “Will I at least see you before you leave?”

“I think it best if we don’t. Not while your family is still… ‘investigating’ me.”

“Are you really in danger from them?”

“Quite possibly. My name is on the treaty, but…”

Something twanged painfully again in his chest, swiftly followed by the fizzle of fear through his veins. “But what?”

“But vampires and hunters are not supposed to sleep together, Alec…”

“Don’t bang the enemy? How very Romeo and Juliet,” he snorted. “Fuck. Why does every good relationship I have turn to shit?” he asked, not of Sebastien but of the universe itself. “What did I do?”

“Alec —”

“—Don’t. Don’t make it worse by apologising or something. It’s fine. We were only together a month. I’ll get over it. You’ll move on. Heck, you’ll fucking live forever, right? What’s a month to you anyway? Nothing, right?”

The bitterness in his own voice nearly choked him, and without thinking, or even saying goodbye, he just hung up and let his phone lie in his limp fingers on the sofa cushions. It lit up and rang a moment later, but he didn’t answer it. Six more times Sebastien tried before finally giving up.

Kay was an absolute blessing in the next few days.

He didn’t tell her immediately about the whole vampire thing, but after he’d calmed down enough to be able to look at Theo without immediately busting a vein in his forehead, he hashed the basics out with him, and then told her everything. Alec told her about his newly-discovered, secret family occupation which, apparently, stretched back centuries. He told her about the fact that his eldest sister and younger brother were monster hunters in their spare time, and he told her the real reason Sebastien why had vanished overnight without a trace — yes, Alec had gone to his apartment building, only to be politely informed by the doorman that Dr. Dulac was no longer in residence and did not leave so much as a forwarding address.

That, above almost everything else, shattered Alec’s hopes of seeing him again. Like thistledown in the wind, Sebastien had simply flitted away somewhere else.

She took it about as well as he had to start with, but when she saw the seriousness in his eyes, and when, three weekends later, she came to his apartment for a definitely-not-awkward dinner with Theo, she saw video footage that Theo and his father had captured from various hunts of supernatural creatures beyond only beautiful vampires. Then she believed him. Ghouls, ghosts, reanimated corpses, demons… you name it and Theo could tell you about it.

Alec spent Christmas with Kay’s family, and Theo met him for New Year drinks in the city, joined by Ellie. It wasn’t anything like the family dynamic he’d always longed for, but the new degree of openness between them went some way to mending his still bruised heart. Slowly. Gradually. Piece by tentative, honest piece. He never joined in, but Theo started to tell him a bit about what they did. It still sounded barbaric to him, but at least it was true.

He had no word from Sebastien, and the number he had saved in his phone had been disconnected.

With the arrival of spring, Alec found himself more than usually dissatisfied with his job. He was a good teacher, and he enjoyed seeing his students’ talents evolve and grow, but the ever-increasing admin ground him down, and the politics of the faculty and the university as a whole wore on him.

“Have you seen this?” Kay asked one afternoon as they shared a takeaway coffee beneath the drifting cherry blossoms. Petals spiralled down like pastel pink and white wedding confetti, and he watched with an absent smile as a terrier snapped and sprung around on his hind legs trying to catch them while his owner stood and talked with her friend nearby. “Oi!” Kay asked, digging him in the ribs.

“Hmm?”

“Have you seen this?” she asked, shoving her phone under his nose.

He blinked, refocusing his eyes, and read the article’s headline aloud. “Council offers artists the chance to win a sponsored exhibition in the town hall with this unique competition.” He blinked. “So?”

“So?” she gawped. “You can’t be serious?”

“Send me the link. I’ll forward it to my students. They might like that.” That earned him a smack upside the head, and he scowled. “What was that for?”

“Alec, you might be the dumbest smart guy I know,” she said. “I showed it to you so that you could enter it, you giant idiot.”

He blinked. “Me?”

“I saw those charcoals you did the other week of the cathedral! They were amazing!! And the abstracts too… I still want one, by the way.”

“It’s already wrapped up for your birthday,” he groused. “You really think I should do it?”

She rolled her eyes and drained the last of her coffee without gracing him with an answer. Of course she thought he should.

“When’s the deadline?”

“Next Thursday,” she said without looking at him.

Alec licked his lips and swallowed. “Will you help me pick some images to submit?”

Her answering grin was feral.

In all honesty, Alec forgot about having even entered the competition until the letter dropped through his door six weeks later announcing that, to his utter astonishment, he had been selected as the winner. Tears blurred his eyes and he sat down heavily at the tiny kitchen table. He’d never entered any of his own art into anything like this in his whole life, and the first time he does, he gets a whole fucking public exhibition out of it?

“Maybe this year won’t be so bad after all,” he murmured. “New year, new start…” His chest still ached when he thought about Sebastien, and he hoped he was doing alright, wherever he was.

Theo had been searching for him, probably by way of apology for lying to his big brother for all these years, but he’d turned up very little. Sebastien had gone to Venice first, it seemed, presumably to spend time with Felicity and her wife, but had disappeared completely after that, with only rumours flickering here and there that he was in Paris, St. Petersburg, Prague, and then potentially Florence. Maybe.

“Venice seems like a pretty sunny place for a pair of vampires to live,” Alec commented, but Theo shrugged.

“They don’t burn up immediately in sunlight, or your professor would never have been able to take a day-job at the university. They’re sensitive to it, some more than others, but it takes a full day of constant sunlight beating down for them to burn properly.” The callousness of his brother’s response shook him, even after all these months, and Theo must have seen it on his face because he sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then added, “You really loved him, didn’t you?”

Alec shrugged. Yes, he wanted to say. I thought so. “I only knew him for a month or so,” was what he said carefully instead. “And even then… turned out I didn’t know him anyway.”

Theo, who had been lounging on Alec’s sofa with his legs spread and his head tipped back into the cushions while Alec made supper, asked quietly, “Did he seem… normal to you?”

“Normal?” Alec asked, not sure he’d heard his brother correctly.

“Yeah… like… did you ever suspect he wasn’t… you know…?”

“Human?”

Theo grunted and nodded his head. “Yeah. I guess.”

“No. Obviously not. Never crossed my mind. Why would it have?”

Theo scowled and turned his eyes to regard him. Alec knew that Theo looked like a younger version of himself, if maybe in better shape, and he wondered if he’d have the same steely look in his eyes if he’d been deemed ‘man enough’ to become a hunter, or whatever bullshit criteria their arsehole father had used to select which members of his family were to become soldiers and which would live normal lives.

“What?” Alec demanded.

“But you slept with him, right?”

“I’m not talking about that with you,” he said, briefly brandishing the wooden spoon at him.

Theo pulled a face. “I’m not asking about your sex life. Gross. No, I mean…”

In that moment, Alec spotted a flash of something in his brother’s blue eyes that softened him to the kid. He turned off the gas and went over to where Theo was now sitting hunched over with his elbows on his knees, running his hands through his hair. When he looked up at Alec’s approach, his face showed open vulnerability in a way he’d not seen since they were young children and Theo had got himself into trouble at school.

“What’s going on?” Alec asked, seating himself next to his little brother.

Theo bobbed his knee like a deprived caffeine addict and bit his lip. With glassy eyes, he croaked, “I keep asking myself if we did the right thing…”

“What do you mean?”

The bravado of Theo’s early twenties melted away to become a worried, frightened, guilty little boy again and he said, “I mean… if what we do is right…”

“You mean… hunting?”

“Yeah,” he croaked.

“What set this off?”

His brother quirked him a humourless smirk and said, “You always did know when something was bothering me.”

Alec remained quiet, just watching him.

“We teamed up with some hunters from Edinburgh for a ‘vamp gone rogue’ case and we finally found her yesterday. She… She’d been turning people; trying to amass some kind of small army to take over from another vampire further up north. She was insane… like, completely, sociopathically insane, but… the people she turned… they were just…” he blinked, and Alec saw with a jolt that his eyes were full of unshed tears. “They were still just people.”

He feared he already knew where this was going. Still, he asked, “What happened?”

“Father wanted to put them down. They were terrified, chained up… still on the point of lashing out…”

Bile rose in his throat. “Oh god…”

“One of the hunters said she knew of a vampire who could help rehabilitate them; help them adjust to their new lives. One of them didn’t want to live as a vampire though, so father just…”

Theo didn’t need to finish that for Alec to know that father had ended the newly-turned vampire’s life in a heartbeat. “And the rest?”

“The other three went with the hunter. I don’t know what happened, but… I trust her. It’s just… father taught me and Ellie that vampires are mindless killers when they feed… that you can’t get close to them, that all they want at the end of the day is blood no matter what they tell you…  but…” he looked up at Alec. “You’ve been fucking miserable since the whole Sebastien shit-fest. I know you’ve been trying to hide it, and you’ve got the exhibition coming up next weekend, and that’s great, but… I know you’ve stopped putting yourself out there. And we did that. We fucked it all up for you. I just…” he ran his hands through his hair and sent it into wild disarray. “I just wonder if you could really have been happy with him after all.”

Alec pulled his brother close and hugged him. “I’m not going to lie,” he murmured into his brother’s dark hair. “I’m furious with father for keeping everything from me, and for making you and mum and Ellie lie to me and Angie about it as well, but… if I hadn’t seen Sebastien’s eyes go red — yeah, I thought it was just a reflection or something — and if I hadn’t seen the way he sleeps literally like the dead… I’m not sure I would have believed you anyway. I don’t forgive him for it either, but…” he sighed deeply. “I forgive you, Theo. And Ellie.”

“And mum?”

“I’m still working on that.”

Theo went slack beneath him and snaked his arms around his brother’s waist for a moment. “Thanks,” he mumbled into Alec’s shirt.

“You’re still coming to the exhibition?” Alec asked as he pulled back and went back to the stove, giving Theo a moment of privacy to pull himself together.

In truth, Alec was a little shaken too. Their relationship had been slowly patched over the intervening months, but it still wasn’t particularly close, and the matter of Sebastien had been a permanent, proverbial elephant in the room. That Theo was questioning their father’s teaching came as an immense relief to Alec though. He poured them each a glass of wine, and the two spent the rest of the evening in a quieter kind of closeness than they’d yet shared.

When the evening of the exhibition drew round, Alec was quite frankly, a bit of a mess.

“C’mon,” Theo grinned, patting the lapels of his jacket down for him and grinning up at him. “Where’s that Twayblade hunter courage, huh?”

“Must have skipped me and all gone to you,” he quipped back. “Fuck. I’m so nervous. Why am I so nervous?”

“No fucking clue,” Theo chuckled. “You’re awesome and they’re gonna fucking love you.”

“Language,” Alec said instinctively and Theo’s laughter redoubled.

“You’re a big fucking hypocrite, you know that?” Theo laughed just as Kay sidled up with three glasses of champagne awkwardly held between her hands.

“Help a girl out here, would you, boys?” she asked, proffering the glasses to them.

Alec resisted the urge to down it in one — he’d probably only choke on the bubbles anyway — and filled his lungs instead with a big gulp of air. He tried to send all his nerves into the air and then blow it out of his body in one heaving sigh to leave him calmer, but it just gave him a head rush, so he sipped the wine and turned to look around the gallery from the corner where he’d been lurking.

“What if no one shows up?” he blurted, earning him a scowl from Theo and a pout-and-eyebrow-raise combo from Kay.

He needn't have worried in the end. The marketing team had done their work, and within an hour the place was heaving and all but three of his pieces had been reserved. Scratch that. Two.

The fact that almost all of his students had turned up as well to cheer him on and trade high fives, and scrounge free alcohol and food from the canape trays, warmed him in ways he didn’t know were possible.

Overwhelmed and a little bit tearful, he stepped out of the town hall’s main exhibition space and into the small corridor that led to a fire exit and a grotty back car park beyond, letting the flush die down from his cheeks. This was what he’d really wanted right from the moment he’d graduated all those years ago; to be an artist in his own right, with people buying his work at exhibitions… It almost made him giddy to think that he had a chance to do this full time now. It seemed that Sebastien had been right when he’d said he could really make something of himself.

Ah, there was the crash in his mood that he’d been waiting for. Nothing good lasts forever, right?

Would Sebastien have been proud of him if he knew about this? Would he have been there that night, by his side? Would they even have lasted that long anyway, even without his family’s interference?

The noise in the room was gradually dying down when he gathered enough courage to step back into the echoing hall. The pale wooden floors gleamed in the low light, the white of the temporary exhibition walls almost glowing, in stark contrast to the black and grey of his charcoals. He’d chosen mostly charcoals for the show, with a few acrylic abstracts for flavour, and apparently people loved them. Every single one had a red ‘sold’ dot beneath the label now, he noted as he cast his eyes around the room.

Then his gaze snagged on someone standing with their back to him, hands clasped loosely behind them, a long, silver-blond ponytail hanging down their back. And Alec’ vision slipped sideways.

Sebastien.

It had to be him.

No one else stood with posture like that. No one else was so tall and lean and elegant and god-damned graceful, even when just standing still. And no one else stood quite as still as that.

He let out a ragged breath and swayed slightly, glancing around. There was no sign of Theo or Kay just then, and only one or two couples meandered admiringly around the room. And there, fixated by one piece in particular, stood Sebastien.

Inhaling for courage, Alec approached and came to an unsteady halt a few feet away from him. He didn’t look real, somehow. His beauty had always been striking, but now in the low light he seemed like a mirage, with his warm olive skin and contrastingly pale hair, that cut-glass jawline and —

— He turned and met Alec’s gaze with dark brown eyes alight and glassy.

“You’re here,” Alec breathed, at a loss for anything else.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Sebastien said, and the sound of his voice sent a wild tingling through Alec’s whole nervous system. The man — vampire — looked uncharacteristically shy, uncertain, as he half turned to face him.

“Gotta say,” Alec said, scratching the back of his head, “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“Should I leave?”

He chewed his lower lip for a second and Sebastien’s eyes tracked the movement before he blinked and looked back at the charcoal in front of him. It was of the Lady Chapel of the cathedral; one of the most tranquil places Alec had ever been. A shaft of light lanced down from a Gothic window high on the right, scattering fractured shards of light onto the stone floor, and behind it, just barely visible as a grey, misty outline, sat the small altar.

“You’re religious?” Alec asked.

“Mm,” Sebastien nodded. “Surprising, I know, given my ‘condition’, but there you have it.”

All the smalltalk then suddenly boiled up into thick irritation inside Alec and he scowled. “Where have you been? And why now? Why come back now? What do you want?”

He must have raised his voice fractionally because the couple admiring the seascape to their left shot them slightly scandalised looks, as if he’d started swearing in a sanctuary, and he bit back the wave of anger, halting it in its tracks.

“Shall we step outside for a moment?” Sebastien asked and Alec nodded tersely.

Passing Kay and Theo who were sitting in the chairs near the drinks table, Alec cast his eyes at them and watched Theo tense visibly. Kay laid her hand on his thigh and shook her head, at which Theo nodded and sat back, eyes hard, mouth set, but at least he didn’t appear to be on the point of leaping out and staking Sebastien on the spot.

Alec mouthed a silent ‘thank you’ at them both, and followed Sebastien out on to the street.

“You’ve patched things up with your family then?” Sebastien began, standing perfectly still beside the brick wall of the Victorian building while Alec paced.

“Mostly just with Theo, but yeah. Why are you here?” he asked again.

“Honestly? I missed you. Couldn't get you out of my head. I went all over Europe, and even to Asia briefly, and nothing I did distracted me from you, from leaving you. I had to come back.”

“You could have called,” he said, instantly regretting the way it came out like a petulant teenager’s sulking.

“And what would that have achieved?” Sebastien asked evenly. “I was hundreds of miles away.”

“You could have come back sooner? Talked to me in person?”

Sebastien sighed. “I was afraid that your family would come after me. I needed to disappear.”

“Theo convinced father to let you go. As you said yourself, your name was on the treaty, and you didn’t hurt me or hypnotise me, or whatever… did you?”

“No,” he said, pale brows pinching with evident distaste.

“Could you have?”

Sebastien levelled him with a dark look. “Yes, but… that’s not something I enjoy doing. It’s a survival mechanism — to make people forget what they’ve seen — it’s not something to be used lightly.”

“Ok, but you could have, and you didn’t, so that was another reason to let you go,” he said. God he wanted to kiss him. The realisation hit him like a gut punch and he turned away. Alec ached inside and out for those lips, those hands, those eyes… “Fuck,” he whispered, barely audible. “Are you staying?”

“Do you want me to stay?”

Alec rounded on him, frustration pouring out of him again. “Don’t answer my question with one of your own. Are you staying or not?”

Sebastien remained eerily calm, but a heartbeat later Alec saw that it wasn’t serenity in his eyes but sadness. “If you want me to, I’ll stay. I want to try again, Alec. I want… I want to be with you. I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”

“Feel? As in… present tense?”

“Yes. It hasn’t faded. Not with all the days and distance between us.”

“God, you sound like a shitty romance novel hero…” he scoffed. “I almost believe it.”

Sebastien spread his hands and said, “I am who — and what — I am. You know me, Alec, in a way that no one else ever has. I was utterly myself with you, except for the fact that I kept my nature from you. I hope you can at least understand why, if not forgive me. Everything else was genuine. I have never done that — been that open, that vulnerable — with anyone.”

“Even knowing what my family are?”

“Even then.”

Alec looked up at him and saw his own reflection in those dark, rich brown eyes. “Show me.”

Sebastien’s angelic face soured into a confused frown. “Show you what?”

“Your eyes. Your fangs. Show me what you are.”

“Now?”

He looked around. The street was empty on either side, with the only people around gathered outside a bar further up the street.

When he turned back to say yes to Sebastien, he found blood red eyes glowing in the man’s face. “Holy fuck,” he hissed. Every already-chiselled line on Sebastien’s face had sharpened somehow, his cheeks hollowing a little, perhaps to account for the additional hardware he now sported in his mouth, and his eyes seemed a touch more sunken. And they glowed as if lit from within.

Heartbeat thrumming out a wild tattoo, he stepped closer and Sebastien went utterly still. His chest ceased to rise and fall, and he didn’t even blink as Alec raised his fingers to his left cheek. “Show me.”

Sebastien swallowed and parted his lips. Angling his jaw a little to one side, he showed Alec the elongated canines, three quarters of an inch long. “Careful,” he murmured as Alec made to touch them. “Vampire venom is potent, even in small doses.”

“Does it really do what the hunters say it does?”

Sebastien’s red eyes glittered almost playfully. “I don’t know,” he smiled, seeming to relax a fraction. “What do they say it does?”

“Drives your victims wild, acts like a date rape drug, makes humans lose their will and their inhibitions…”

At that, a hardness returned to his features and his lip twitched in a lopsided snarl, like a wolf backed into a corner. “That’s certainly one take on it,” he said. “It creates a rush of euphoria. It’s supposed to make feeding a pleasant experience for all concerned. Endorphins in the blood make the taste sweeter, and the human feels no pain or fear.”

“Right. Gotta say I like that one better,” Alec said with a shaky smile. “But I’m not gonna risk it right here… And fuck me, your eyes are incredible.”

“They’re still red, hmm?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Closing his eyes and tilting his face upwards a little more towards the cloudy night sky, he inhaled deeply. His features softened again, and Alec watched, fascinated, as the slight bumps behind his closed upper lip slid away into nothing, presumably as his canines retracted into his gums. When he opened his eyes, they were their usual, endlessly dark brown once more.

“Better?” Sebastien asked, oddly self-conscious.

“No,” he said. “Just different.”

Something prickled on the back of his neck and he turned to find a woman silhouetted against the light of street lamp halfway up the road. “Friend of yours?” he asked, tense.

“Felicity. She came with me.”

“Why? Surely you don’t need a wingman… or, you know, woman.”

With a tiny smile, Sebastien said, “You make me more vulnerable than you realise, in more ways than one. And we weren’t sure if your family would be here.”

“Or whether they’d want to flambé you…”

“Precisely.” He inclined his head and the woman did the same, turning and vanishing even as Alec blinked.

“Can you do that too?” he asked, still gawping after her.

When he turned back, he found that Sebastien had stepped in close to him - close enough that his faint, woody cologne wafted gently around them and he felt his knees wobble slightly. He’d missed this. Oh god, he’d missed this. “Mmhmm,” Sebastien hummed. “I can.”

“Kiss me,” Alec whispered. “Please…”

Sebastien didn’t need telling twice. He took Alec’s face in both his hands and crushed a passionate kiss to his lips so hard that Alec’s mind went perfectly blank for a few beautiful seconds. When he came to, he grabbed Sebastien’s narrow hips and tugged him close, making the vampire grunt as their bodies connected.

This time, he took Sebastien’s ponytail in one hand and began to pull on it gently. Sebastien yielded at the pressure and tipped his face back, exposing the entire column of his throat to Alec without resistance. The gesture left Alec stunned and breathless. In his research with Theo over the past months, he had learned that for a vampire to expose their throat to another implied absolute trust. Overwhelmed, he pressed his lips to the bare skin and felt Sebastien gasp, grabbing at his shoulders suddenly to keep himself upright.

Over and over, the vampire shuddered tangibly beneath his touch and gasped sharply again, panting. As he shifted his hips against him, Alec felt Sebastien’s growing hardness, and at the same time, Sebastien drew back, eyes screwed shut. “Stop,” he laughed. “Not here.”

“I want you,” Alec moaned, one hand on Sebastien’s chest. “Fuck, I’ve missed you so much.”

“I want you too,” Sebastien smiled, opening his eyes. They glowed scarlet again. “And because of that, this —” he said, gesturing to his red eyes, “— isn’t going to go away quickly this time.”

“This too?” Alec said, boldly cupping the obvious bulge in Sebastien’s smart black trousers gently with his hand and making the vampire groan.

“Yeah, that too.”

“Your place or mine?” Alec asked with a dizzy grin.

“You decide. I’m booked into a hotel one street over for the next two days,” he said. “If that affects your decision in any way.”

“Yours,” he said. “I… I’ll just…” he looked over his shoulder and caught sight of the exhibition banner dangling by the door. “I should…”

Sebastien nodded slowly. “I’ll be here.”

“You’d better be,” he snarled as he adjusted himself and prayed no one would notice. He took a few steadying breaths on the threshold of the town hall and then disappeared inside.

Kay raised her eyebrows at him when he reappeared.

“Not a word,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Your hair’s a mess,” she said conversationally. “Is it windy outside?”

“Fuck off,” he grimaced and she laughed. “Where’s Theo?”

“He left out the back way,” she said. “But he told me to tell you to enjoy yourself tonight, and that he’ll stand by whatever makes you happy.”

Unexpected tears prickled his eyes and he tugged her into a hug that was probably meant for his brother.

“You can thank us later,” she said, shoving him off her. “Go be with your Prince of Darkness…”

“I’m not sure how much he’d like you calling him that,” he said as he stepped back. “I’ll have to wrap things up here first…”

It seemed to take forever, but he finally found the events coordinator and after an interminable conversation full of congratulations, agreed to stop by the next day to take down the exhibition and sort the sales out. His heart was thudding when he stepped back outside, but he let out a huge sigh when he saw Sebastien leaning against the brick building, face tilted towards the moon that was just peeking out from behind a bank of cloud.

“It’s like one of your charcoals,” Sebastien said without tearing his eyes from the sky.

Alec crossed to him and smiled when Sebastien met his gaze, red meeting blue. Alec slid his fingers into Sebastien’s where his hand hung quietly by his side.

“Ready?” the vampire asked.

Alec nodded, and let Sebastien lead him back to his hotel.

They barely made it into the lift before Alec was kissing him, backing him into the mirrored sides of the lift with a thud before the doors had even closed. He stopped suddenly, drew back and laughed, and Sebastien — who looked like he’d just got whiplash — asked, “What?”

“Vampires do have reflections after all…”

Sebastien rolled his eyes and gave an indecorous snort-laugh. The sound was rich and warm and it filled Alec’s whole consciousness for a moment. “It’s only the antique ones with genuine silver backing that don’t show our reflections. Technology has evolved, thank goodness. Now, if you don’t mind, you were kissing me senseless…”

“Sorry,” he laughed, grabbing Sebastien’s white shirt collar and tugging him down again. They nearly didn’t get out of the lift at Sebastien’s floor, but as the doors began to close again, Sebastien slid his foot into the path of the doors and dragged Alec out.

Clothes landed in a steady line on the carpet between the door of his hotel room and Sebastien’s bed, ending with them both in only their boxer-briefs on the pristine white surface of the bed. Alec was tipped back onto the duvet and lay there staring up at Sebastien who was now no longer hiding his nature from him at all. Red eyes blazed in his face and as he opened his mouth to breath heavily, the tips of his fangs were just visible. There was no denying that he was a vampire.

“Was it like this before?” Alec asked hoarsely. “I mean… did I just not see it?”

“I had to work very hard to rein all this in,” he said, kneeling on the bed and crawling a little way up it. His own boxer briefs strained at the crotch where his erection tented the fabric, and Alec’s own black ones were stained with a little spot of wetness where his cock twitched with eager interest. “I only let it slip once or twice, but you were distracted at the time.”

Alec smirked and then moaned as Sebastien’s palm skimmed up over his groin and over his stomach. He’d always been a bit self-conscious about the softer parts of him, but Sebastien worshipped him like he was some kind of immortal god, lavishing attention on him over and over until he was shaking and gasping and sweating. “Please!” he begged after what felt like hours. “Oh god, please…”

Sebastien slid off the bed and deftly removed his own underwear before encouraging Alec to lift his hips for him and drawing his boxer-briefs down too. Before Alec could think or process what was happening, Sebastien was between his legs again and had swallowed the entire length of his cock to the back of his throat in one.

“Oh fuck,” he hissed, mind whiting out.

Sparks of pleasure shot up his spine as Sebastien worked him alternately with his mouth and his hand.

He teased him, licking the slit at the tip where pre-come beaded profusely now, teasing the delicate folds of skin until Alec thought he was going to shatter apart with want. Just before it got too much to bear, Sebastien would take him back into the wet heat of his mouth and work the underside of his cock with his tongue, swallowing occasionally and making Alec’s head spin all over again.

His balls tightened and he spread his legs wider, instinctively opening himself to Sebastien.

The vampire moaned against his cock and Alec whimpered. Pulling off him, an obscenely inviting thread of saliva and pre-come connecting them briefly, Sebastien sat up and reached for the top drawer of the bedside table. “Vampires neither catch nor transmit diseases,” he said, “But if you still wish to use protection —”

“— I haven’t been with anyone since you,” he rasped. “And I’m clean anyway…”

“As you wish,” Sebastien smiled, withdrawing an almost-new bottle of lube and sitting back down between his legs. Alec eyed it and Sebastien laughed shyly. “I opened it last night…” he admitted and Alec grinned.

That smirk shattered into an open-mouthed groan as Sebastien’s finger slid inside him and he began to prepare him. There was nothing perfunctory about it either. Sebastien took his time to work him open, his fingers fucking into him slowly, almost reverently, until he crooked them and Alec yelled as white-hot pleasure shot through him.

“Still so sensitive,” Sebastien crooned and Alec just shivered in response. His thighs were quivering too now from the effort of not bucking upwards into the empty air, his cock drooling freely over his slightly soft stomach with each futile twitch. He knew he was a wanton mess, and he couldn’t quite find it within himself to care. It seem to drive Sebastien wild anyway.

When Sebastien added a third finger, still stroking up and down his thigh with his other hand, Alec broke.

“Please, please, please,” he whimpered, out of breath and desperate. He cracked his eyes open and looked down at Sebastien to find that his red eyes had been almost eclipsed by his blown pupils. He gave a weak buck of his hips to try and encourage Sebastien to get on with it, but the vampire seemed utterly transfixed by him. He worked his fingers over Alec’s prostate gently but with absolute precision, and it was going to make Alec lose his mind altogether.

“Pleasepleaseplease, I need you, please…” he wailed as Sebastien’s mercifully short and blunt fingernail caught him just so and sent another jolt through him.

Finally the vampire moved, but as he withdrew completely, the loss almost shattered him. “Shh,” he smiled, stroking a soothing circle at Alec’s hipbone. “I’m still here…”

Alec whimpered like a wounded animal but his foggy brain accepted that the loss was only temporary, and he watched as Sebastien took his own flushed cock in his hands and slicked lube up the length of it in a couple of efficient strokes, head bowing under the attention it was receiving at last. He’d focused solely, completely, on Alec’s pleasure for all that time, and the realisation sent a fresh wave of lust rolling through Alec’s entire body.

He spread his legs, but Sebastien caught Alec under his left thigh and raised his leg easily, exposing Alec completely. Before Alec could process anything, his tip was nudging at Alec’s entrance, and then he had sunk all the way in to the hilt.

Sebastien froze then, bowed forwards over Alec like a supplicant, canines openly bared, eyes screwed shut, not even breathing.

“Sebastien… please…” Alec grunted. He’d never felt as full and whole as he had with Sebastien inside him, and yet this wasn’t enough. He’d ached for this. For months, he’d ached for it, and still it wasn’t enough. “Bast, please…”

Finally, the vampire opened his searing red eyes and began to move.

Slowly at first, he picked up his pace until Alec’s back was arching and his fingers clawed great furrows in the sheet beneath him. With each thrust, Alec saw stars at let out little fractured, broken gasps. Sebastien was quiet, almost silent, while Alec himself was unable to stop the sounds from tumbling out of him. He moaned and whimpered, gasped and cursed and begged until Sebastien yanked him further down the bed and lifted his hips a little way off the mattress entirely.

From this new angle, it was so blindingly good that Alec went alternately taut and limp with ecstasy. “I’m close,” he gasped over the slap of Sebastien’s hips meeting his skin.

The vampire snarled then; an inhuman sound that sent the hairs prickling all down Alec’s body.

“Come for me,” Alec begged in a whisper, opening his eyes and watching as Sebastien chased his release with a ferocity he’d never shown before. He wasn’t careless with his strength, but he was certainly forceful. Had Alec wanted to grunt ‘stop’, he knew the vampire would halt, but that was the furthest thing from his mind as he watched the flawless perfection of this man above him. “God you’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “Come for me, Bast…”

And at the sound of his name, uttered in little more than an abbreviated wheeze, Sebastien went still, hips spasming as his spine arched back like a bow at full draw, mouth open, head thrown back, fangs bared, eyes rammed shut, a sheen of sweat covering his perfect, bronze chest, his silver hair falling around him like a veil.

The sight of him like that wrenched Alec’s orgasm from him with such sudden force that he almost blacked out, and he clenched around Sebastien’s still-twitching cock as he spilled all over himself. Vaguely, he felt Sebastien trying to withdraw, but he grunted, “Don't… not yet… please… I… unngghh…” Unable to finish the sentence as the last shock waves fluttered through him, Alec went limp against the bed, breathing hard, his blood roaring in his ears.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Sebastien did finally move, but eventually he slid his softening cock out of him and Alec grunted at the cool slide of the vampire’s release down his thigh. He was too spent and exhausted to care about the mess though, and as Sebastien collapsed onto the bed beside him, he cracked one eye open.

Sebastien lay on his left side with his cheek pillowed on his bicep, facing Alec with his eyes closed, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. Tentatively, clumsily in the daze of his recent, mind-blowing orgasm, Alec reached out and touched the delicate skin on the inside of his arm. Sebastien jolted like he’d received an electric shock, and opened his eyes. They still burned bright red, but the rest of his face seemed a little softer somehow.

“You alright?” Alec asked.

Sebastien nodded.

“Been a while too, huh?” Alec grinned, flopping back down to stare at the ceiling where little points of light still sparkled across his vision every now and again.

“Not since that last night with you,” he said, words slurred with exhaustion. “Unless you count my rather pathetic climax alone last night, which I certainly don’t.”

“Not at all?”

He shook his head but didn’t speak again. The vampire lay perfectly still — perfectly undead — and perfectly vulnerable beside him without even a sheet to cover him. His cock now lay soft across the top of his right thigh, still drooling a little and making a mess on his olive skin. Not half as much mess as Alec was currently sporting over his torso, he mused with another smile.

With Sebastien showing no sign of stirring, Alec rolled carefully off the bed and headed on shaky legs to the shower. When he returned, Sebastien hadn’t moved, and he slid in beside him, drawing the sheets up around them and lying there to stare at him in the dimness of the unlit room, processing everything. Sebastien was back, and apparently wanted to stay. He could hardly believe how well that day had gone.

Waking the next morning with a cool, lean body pressed against him, Alec sighed, relieved that it hadn’t all been some kind of fever dream brought on by the stress of the exhibition.

The fact that the man next to him was an undead vampire who didn’t breathe in his sleep was a bit unnerving, and the way he had his cheek now resting on Alec’s collarbone and his nose pressed against his neck should also probably have been a bit of a warning, but Alec couldn’t bring himself to move, except to place a soft kiss on his forehead.

Suddenly, as if surfacing from boundless depths, Sebastien’s body heaved and he drew in a great, sucking, rasping inhale through his mouth. His lips brushed against Alec’s pulse and Sebastien began breathing heavily there for a moment.

“That will never not be weird,” Alec murmured.

“Apologies,” Sebastien muttered, trying to roll away. He paused, freezing, and then whispered, “I fell asleep…” as if that was something miraculous.

“Yeah, you passed out almost as soon as we both finished,” he snickered.

Sebastien turned his big, dark, doe eyes on Alec and said, “No, you don’t understand. Vampires don’t just shut down like that the way humans do. We only sleep somewhere we know is secure and safe…”

“Oh,” Alec said significantly as the realisation plunged through him. He tucked his arm under Sebastien’s head and tugged him closer so that their bodies were once again flush with one another. “I’m glad you felt safe…”

Sebastien sighed, trailing his fingertips across Alec’s chest in absent circles. His cock twitched too, and Alec shot him a look.

With a bashful smile, Sebastien said, “I can’t help that I find you attractive, Alec…”

“Wasn't complaining,” he grinned.

It was a long time before they rolled off each other that morning, with the sun well up and the sheets damp with sweat and tangled around their ankles. Vampires, it seemed, had a longer refractory period than humans, but Sebastien also came so big when he did that Alec wasn’t surprised. He gave everything to Alec when he came that Alec could quite happily lie there all day just staring at him as he came down afterwards.

The room was chilly, however, and when Sebastien seemed to have dozed off again around ten o’clock, he headed to clean up. Again.

As the steam billowed around him, he tipped his head back into the stream of searing water and nearly yelped as the shower door opened and let in a rush of cold air as Sebastien stepped into the stall as well. Cool hands found his waist and then strong fingers kneaded his arse appreciatively before Sebastien kissed and nibbled up his shoulder and traps to his neck. Instinctively, Alec tilted his head to one side and Sebastien moaned, pressing open-mouthed kisses there over and over as the hot water coursed around his lips.

The sensation must have been too much for him because he pulled back sharply with a hiss and Alec turned to face him, water still streaming down around them. Sebastien stood frozen, eyes red, staring at Alec’s neck. “I shouldn’t…” he began. “That was stupid of me… I…”

“What happens to the treaty if the human is willing?” Alec found himself asking. He’d thought about it a lot before drifting off the previous night. If Sebastien had wanted to drink from him, to feed on him, what would happen to the tenuous peace between hunters and vampires like him.

“Don’t,” Sebastien said through gritted teeth. His canines were elongated, Alec noted.

“What happens?”

“The only way it’s permitted is if the human agrees by written contract to become the vampire’s source.”

“‘Source’?” he asked. “That sounds like an official title.”

“It is,” Sebastien said, relaxing a fraction and putting his hands back on Alec’s hips. His cock stirred with interest and Sebastien smiled. He leaned back in, as if proving to both of them that he could do this, and kissed down Alec’s neck again from the junction of his jaw all the way to his collarbones. He ground his hips against Alec and they both began to harden again.

Alec’s hand went to Sebastien’s cock and he started to stroke him gently, knowing he was still sensitive from their last round. Sebastien let out a ragged exhale, the cool breath making Alec shiver slightly in the heat of the water.

“So…” Alec pressed gently, thumbing across the top of Sebastien’s flushed cock.

“Hmm?” he asked, a little stunned.

“What is a source?”

“A human becoming a vampire’s source means that the vampire drinks only from that human. It’s… an ancient - ah - custom,” he said, gripping Alec’s shoulders as Alec upped the speed and adjusted his grip to tighten just a little around his now fully hard cock. “Rarely used today, but still… nngh…”

“Mmm?” Alec grinned, loving that the vampire’s thoughts were unravelling under his touch. “Go on.”

“You’re a menace,” he laughed breathily, nipping playfully at his neck and then kissing him hard. Alec’s back suddenly hit the icy tiles behind him and he yelped, rearing into Sebastien who wasn’t all that much warmer, though the heat of the water was raising his body temperature from the ambient temperature of the room.

“So if…” Alec began, somewhat distracted as Sebastien’s kisses continued and the vampire raked his fingers through Alec’s wet hair, scraping luxuriantly across his scalp hard enough to make him break off and groan. “If… if I wanted to become your…”

“Don’t,” Sebastien whispered. “Not yet. Not so soon after… all this time.”

The subtext was clear. Let’s see if this is going to last before I risk my life with the hunters guild and your family, shall we?

“Fair enough. Nothing to say I can’t suck you off now though, right?”

“Nothing at all,” he whispered and then immediately cursed as Alec sank to his knees and did just that.

It was only as he was handing in his own letter of resignation that the truth really sank in for Alec. He’d gone from post-grad assistant in the department to a full lecturer, where he’d stayed for six years, and now he was moving a little way out of the city, and moving in with his boyfriend of a year. A vampire, nonetheless. His life had gone from miserable to wonderful in that relatively short time.

Sebastien met him at the edge of campus after he’d handed the letter personally to the head of department. Standing under the verdant cherry trees, Sebastien looked like a vision. He wore tight, dark jeans and a loose shirt, half untucked, with his long hair tied back in a loose plait, fly-aways wisping around his head like mist. Alec walked straight up to him as the vampire opened his arms, flung his own arms around Sebastien’s neck, and hugged him.

“All done?” Sebastien asked without pulling back.

He nodded and popped back down from his toes. They were both tall men, but Sebastien had a few inches on him still. With a slightly doe-eyed expression, Sebastien smiled and kissed him gently. “I love you,” he said softly between kisses.

“Come on, you big sap,” Alec said. “I’ve got to be out of my apartment at four.”

“Such a romantic,” Sebastien sighed melodramatically.

With Sebastien’s supernatural strength, loading up the little van they’d hired for his stuff didn’t take long, and after giving his keys back to the landlord and signing the final bits and bobs, they were on the road.

The old farmhouse had been a find of Sebastien’s, and it needed some work. “Well, what else am I going to do on long, impossibly sunny summer days while you’re running your own business from the little art studio at the bottom of the garden?” Sebastien had laughed when they’d first viewed it, the back of his hand pressed to his forehead in a terribly ‘put upon’ gesture. “I might as well spruce the place up.”

“It needs more than a light ‘sprucing up’,” Alec had said, brows raised at the rotten wooden beam and the tired 1950’s kitchen. “And don’t tell me you made your wealth flipping houses back in the day.”

“Would you rather I told you I robbed the Bank of England and they still haven’t noticed?” he replied archly before planting a kiss squarely on Alec’s scratchy, stubble-darkened cheek.

With a scowl, Alec had shot him a look. “I honestly don’t know whether that’s a lie or not…”

“It’s a lie,” Sebastien snorted. “I can’t believe you think I’m a criminal.”

“You’re a vampire,” he’d retorted. “You could probably have just walked in there and demanded a small fortune in gold ingots and they wouldn’t have objected…”

“Please. I do have some scruples. And besides, I only use my charms on poor, miserable artists to get into their pants…”

“And their hearts too, apparently,” he’d scoffed as they’d left the dilapidated house with Sebastien’s hand in Alec’s back pocket, fingers firmly cupped around his arse.

It took another six months for the work to be completed, and even with Sebastien’s not inconsiderable talents in the DIY and home improvement departments, they still had to call in a team of builders to fix the pointing in one wall and to sort out a few other structural issues. But by the end of the work, the farmhouse was quite frankly the most stunning place Alec could ever have dreamed of living. Exposed oak beams and a fireplace big enough to park a tractor in were only half of the best features of the place.

One clear, frosty evening in late October, the pair sat outside on the recently finished patio, a small cast iron fire-pit crackling away and sending sparks and heat twisting up into the night sky, a glass of wine each in one hand and their free hand clasped around the other’s.

“Bastien…?” Alec said, not taking his eyes from the mother-of-pearl points of light in the sky above.

“Mmm?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about… about becoming your source.” He didn’t miss the sharp inhale from his partner, nor the way Sebastien went completely still in the wooden chair beside him. He also didn’t say anything. “I’d… I’d like to ask how often you’d need to feed from me, and… what the repercussions would be for me as the human…”

Still Sebastien didn’t speak for a long time, and Alec worried he’d spoilt the serenity of their evening with the sensitive question. Finally, the vampire cleared his throat and Alec realised with a jolt that he was near tears.

“Bast?”

At the sound of the pet-name, Sebastien blinked rapidly and two mirroring tears tracked down his cheeks in perfect synchrony. “I thought you’d forgotten all about it,” he said in a hoarse croak. “I didn’t want to bring it up again.”

“You should have done, silly,” Alec groused, and he was met with a watery smile that didn’t meet his eyes at all.

“Well, to answer your questions,” he said, trying to sound unaffected even if he clearly was. “Every three months is safe enough, so long as you take an iron supplement. If you don’t, you might feel a little more tired right afterwards. We generally take slightly less than a person would give at a blood donation, if that helps put it into context.”

Alec turned and frowned at him.

“What?”

“You’ve gone all clinical,” he said, shuffling a little and setting his wine glass down on the edge of the stone fire pit. “Do you not want this anymore?”

Sebastien swallowed thickly and looked away. In the ochre and copper flicker of the flames before them, his suddenly red eyes seemed to glow like coals. “More than you know…” he rasped.

“Then what’s the problem?”

He chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before turning back to face Alec with glassy eyes. “I’m frightened.”

Alec’s scowl deepened and he rose from his chair to straddle and sink down into Sebastien’s lap. Settled in his new position, he kissed Bast’s lips and stroked his loose, white-blond hair out of his eyes. “Of what?”

“Losing control. It’s been… decades since… If I hurt you, Alec… it would break me.”

“How about we start small? Just a taste?”

Sebastien looked so young then in the firelight. He suddenly looked like the twenty year old man he had been when he’d been conscripted into the army and sent out to battle to die, only to be turned at the eleventh hour by a nurse in a field hospital who’d seen something special in him. Thank god she had, Alec mused.

Alec leaned back a little and brought his index finger slowly to Sebastien’s lips. The vampire swallowed, red gaze drifting down to watch its approach before looking back at Alec’s face, searching, questioning, doubting.

Alec nodded and slid his fingertip a few millimetres into Sebastien’s mouth. The vampire inhaled, closed his eyes, and then opened his mouth properly. Alec brought the pad of his fingertip to the underside of his right canine, and pressed.

After a moment, the pressure gave way and a prick of pain like a needle pierced his skin. A bead of blood welled there instantly and he withdrew to let it swell. Sebastien clearly smelled the blood because his pupils dilated and he sucked in a sharp breath.

“Easy,” Alec said. “It’s only a drop.” And with that, he turned his finger over and held it above the tip of Sebastien’s tongue.

Paralysed in a heartbeat of terror, Sebastien sat rigid, frozen, wide eyed, but Alec lowered his finger to meet the slight roughness of his tongue, and Sebastien’s eyes rolled. He moaned and let his tongue play across the tiny pinprick wound, fingers digging into Alec’s hips. The tiny wound had already stopped bleeding, but he sucked gently, drawing a little taste more. Then he released Alec and stared at him, a look of stunned awe on his beautiful face.

“How was that?” Alec asked, briefly thumbing a fond arc across Sebastien’s cheekbone before dropping his hand.

“Manageable,” Sebastien murmured.

“Ok, I have to ask, do I taste good?”

The tense spell that encapsulated both of them broke and Sebastien cracked a smile, fangs and all. “Yes,” he rasped.

“So… I can become your source?”

“If you wish it, yes. You can withdraw the honour at any time. I won’t hold you to it.”

“Good to know,” he said, only half laughing. A moment later, he said, “When… When do you want to start… you know… properly. Formally?”

Sebastien’s eyes had drifted to the rabbiting pulse in his neck.

“Now?” he asked. “It’s only been a few weeks since you went to the blood bank though…”

“That’s…” he said, hands finding Alec’s waist and holding him gently. “That probably works in my favour this time. Are you sure you want this?”

“To be ‘yours’ on your terms as well as mine? Of course,” he smiled, and watched as another tear rolled down his perfect olive cheek. He tilted his head to one side, feeling a little sheepish, and said in barely a whisper, “Whenever you like.”

“Really? Now?” Sebastien hissed, chest suddenly heaving. “Just like that?”

Alec laughed quietly. “It’s not as if we’ve just met. I know you, Bast. I trust you. I wouldn’t offer this to just any old vampire, you know?”

Unable to stop the smile from twisting his lips, Sebastien finally relented with a nod. “Alright. But not here. You’re going to want to be more comfortable.”

“But I’m already comfortable here,” he whined playfully, wiggling his hips in Sebastien’s lap, eliciting a deep, rumbling groan.

With a roll of his red eyes, Sebastien sighed. “Stubborn arse,” he grumbled without sting.

“You love my arse.”

“Yes, you’re right. I do,” he said.

Tenderly he ran his thumb down the line of Alec’s carotid and inhaled deeply. “I love you,” he whispered. And then he leaned close. He took his time kissing Alec’s neck until he was gasping and rocking his hips against Sebastien.

“Please…”

“Last chance,” Sebastien said against the skin of his throat.

Alec shook his head. “I want this. I’m yours.”

So the vampire sank his fangs into the artery. After the initial surprise and sting, Alec’s whole body lit up as the venom hit his bloodstream, and he bucked into Sebastien who held him still with what should have been frightening ease. There was no fear behind the gesture, only longing and love and sweet, aching, rolling, unending pleasure.

“Oh fuck,” Alec moaned, going limp in his arms as Sebastien began to feed, withdrawing his fangs to draw more deeply on him while he held him easily in his arms. The vampire moaned, lips locked against his skin so as not to spill anything. The motion of his throat suddenly fascinated Alec as he swallowed down his own life-force, but before he could raise his hand to touch fingertips to his Adam’s apple, pleasure exploded in his mind and he forgot everything.

When he came back to himself, he was inside, lying on their bed, with a small, soft dressing over his neck, and Sebastien sitting quietly on the bed beside him, staring down at him and holding his hand. As he blinked his eyes, he frowned. “What…?”

“It’s intense the first time,” Sebastien murmured fondly. “I did say you’d want to be somewhere more comfortable.”

“ S’perfect,” he slurred. “Fuck me…” he added, more curse than command.

“Maybe later, hmm?” Sebastien smiled. There was a flush to his cheeks that Alec had never seen before, and a brightness to his eyes.

“C’mere,” Alec said, patting the bed beside him. With Sebastien lying silently next to him, Alec rolled over and hooked one leg over Bast’s thigh. “Love you,” he mumbled, sinking into a deep and exhausted sleep, even as Sebastien’s hand came up to cradle his head.

The vampire smiled, kissing his forehead. “I love you too.”

___

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[theshadowedqueen82]

Thoughts on Trollhunters S3

 Watched the first five episodes and oh boy. OH BOY.

MY CLEVER CHILDREN making magical election signs!

but what are they going to do when the election is over? Huh?

Maybe they could magic something else, like street cleaning signs or something else you can’t legally remove

AND THEY TRIED TO GIVE ONE TO HER OPPONENT HAHAHA

I literally gasped aloud when I saw Strickler was training Jim, this was all I ever hoped for

Okay but is the changeling!Jim thing canon? Because uh “his humanity is too weak” sure sounds like it’s canon

and his dad’s never around... and that would explain why the amulet chose him...

Look I really hope it’s canon but I’m not through the entire season yet so NOBODY TELL ME

But really “darkness within you” if it’s not changeling or half troll idk what it is because Jim is a cinnamon roll whose only dark side could be genetic

The kid cooks for his mother like, absolutely zero darkness detected

Things are so much darker this season already! No Troll Market is the most heartbreaking thing ever

I’m so proud of Blinky leading the trolls, he’s trying his best and if anybody criticises him I’ll attack them

Claire in the sewers episode talking about how she’s really sick “well you could go home” “what no! I’m fine” honestly so relatable

Claire ignoring all the warning signs (signs? Get it?)

I was yelling at the television “JUST TELL THEM OKAY”

They could have avoided her living room being destroyed if she’d just told them “hey, those signs keep appearing under my bed”

It still might have taken them a while to figure out but you know Toby would have immediately gone “holy Chamber of Secrets you’re being possessed!”

Speaking of Toby he and Darci are the cutest thing ever oh my gosh

“the perfect place for a first kiss! Darkness, adrenaline, lasers.” Toby my precious child

Also I am delighted to see that Darci’s dad is a cop and ARRESTS HIM

this is going to be a fantastic story to tell at their wedding reception

Toby’s short lived life as a fugitive is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on screen absolute gold

“You mean the burglaries were done by actual burglars?” I was rolling on the ground dying

Toby literally is given an ultimatum between dating Darci and possibly going to jail and he goes for the jail option askjlhdskjfslk

look Toby might have not stolen the mopeds but he sure did steal my heart

Now if we want to talk about ships I don’t like then who is this blue haired joker? Hm?

Get between my Jlaire and I will destroy you

Miraculous Ladybug did such a better job introducing a blue haired punk kid as an alternate love interest

He might be allowed to date Mary as long as he gets away from Claire

Look nobody can convince me that it wasn’t just Morgana who has a crush on him, okay? Because Claire is LOYAL to JIM AND ONLY JIM

In other news CLAIRE HAS A BAND I WANT ALL OF THEIR ALBUMS

CLAIRE PLAYS ELECTRIC GUITAR TOO

Look I get that it’s scary she fainted and all but I literally gasped in that scene out of fear for the guitar

I hope it’s okay it looked like a really nice electric +  if anything happened to her guitar Claire would probably be Not Okay

Barbara painting Blinky oh my goodness

Also she’s actually a really talented artist I would buy one of her painings

“I made this HATE PAINTING of my ex, who I HATE” then why’d you use your largest canvas hmmm?

speaking of ships THE STRICKLAKE OKAY

I’M LYING NONE OF IT IS OKAY

Before I mainly shipped Stricklake because of fanfic but now the canon is making it impossible to not ship

And um, it might... hypothetically stand a chance... of being my favourite ship in this show

*hides under a table* I’M SORRY OKAY BUT THEY HAVE SO MANY MOMENTS

STRICKLER HIDING FROM BARBARA AT THE CAFE, STRICKLER BRINGING HER THE WINE, “I came back to protect her!” “you want to protect my mom, Barbara, remember how she makes you feel”, “he came back” aaaaaaaAAAAAA

“I can make her love you despite the monster you are” JUST RIP OUT MY HEART OKAY

Side note: Blinky and Strickler semi bonding was A+++ nothing brings you together like your surrogate son’s possessed girlfriend

“WHAT DID YOU BARGAIN?” “I SAID NO!”

“Wait were you going to stab me with that?” “No!” “Yes!”

The one who died in that scene was ME, of laughter

The shadow realm is super creepy actually

But why haven’t we seen it’s illusion creating ability before? Is it because Morgana is now more powerful and was responsible for this hmmm?

I thought it wasn’t possible to love Claire even more, but guess what? MAGIC CLAIRE

In that scene she was possessed, magic, a ghost who believed she was somewhere else, and female, which makes her a maniac pixie dream girl

Hey do you ever think that the reason why Strickler had such a hard time making the portal was because he spends so much time repressing his emotions

ANYWAYS let’s talk about the grave dust! Which links back to my changeling!Jim hopes because maybe Strickler and Nomura are trying to get him to shift?

Also WHY WOULDN’T YOU CHECK THE COFFEE CONTAINER

I think Jim could have just gone up to the teachers and gone “excuse me, my coffee fell out of my backpack and rolled in here, would you mind passing it to me?” but “surprise teacher dance party” Toby also has benefits

The true plot twist would have been if Jim grabbed actual coffee from his house and Barbara was the one who had the grave dust, and then proceeded to hunt down Strickler from his scent to tear out his throat

Oh dang I might fic that

But I was also very happy with the Steve and coach bonding, and seeing Creepslayerz work with Jim and Toby!

Does Jim explain about Strickler, how does that go? “Our social teacher/ principal dated my mom but is also a changeling who tried to kill me a few times but it’s all cool because he’s stopping the end of the world with us!”

O yeah, there was also plot wasn’t there, I guess Morgana was pretty scary and Angor Rot’s back now, so that’s not good

Does he have his soul back? Because it sounded like she gave him his soul back so I’m going to be majorly disappointed if he doesn’t defect since that’s all that kept him in Morgana’s service the last time we saw him

SOMEBODY SAVE DRAAL HE NEEDS TO BE OKAY

AND AAAARRGH! ALSO NEEDS TO BE OKAY I CAN’T LOSE HIM AGAIN

Blinky’s not going to be happy at all to learn that Aaaargh! sacrificed himself for Dictacious

Wait Blinkous is shortened to Blinky does that mean Dictacious

Well no wonder he turned evil

Look it’s hard for me to focus on the doom because there was so much SHIPPING

THE DOUBLE DATE OKAY

“She’s flirting with you! She’s giving you the flirty eyes!” They were more like STABBY EYES

Them walking home like “I can’t wait to kill you” “wait WHAT” “KISS you, I said kiss” “oh okay”

Afterwards Toby would be all “how’d the date go?” and Jim would be “you might have seen the scary movie but I LIVED it”

Speaking of which the “look behind you!” moment was GENIUS

“What are you doing?” she just tried to CUT OFF YOUR HEAD JIM, what do you think she’s doing

And then! He proceeds to pillow fight his possessed girlfriend!

Look Claire you’d better keep him he cares a lot about you

“Claire you’re seeing this right? I’m not the one who messed up your living room this time!” ohmygosh this child

Hang on did Jim salvage some of his reputation in Claire’s parents’ eyes by setting up all those campaign signs? these are the questions I need answered

Final thought: Toby was kissing the basketball and Coach said “what did I tell you? No making out with the equipment!” which means this is not the first time, Toby has done this before enough times to warrant the coach telling him off for it, that is all