#i don’t write a lot of ficlet stuff but this possessed my body

[dontcallmeeds]

PART 2 OUT NOW! PART 3 PART FOUR IS FINALLY HERE

Eddie doesn’t know when it started, making little things for Steve Harrington.

Rings and chains for both around his neck and wrist to compliment his moles. He had been making his own jewelry for years now, but he draws a blank when it comes to what he makes for Steve.

No one knew Eddie made his own pieces, not even Dustin Henderson, the nosy little shit. He kept it secret, made something up when people on the rare occasion asked where he got his stuff from. Including when Steve asked.

“I don’t know man, some little shop in Indy,” Eddie had lied. Doesn’t know why he even did, they had become good friends in recent months.

No, no, that’s a lie too. Eddie knows why he lied to Steve.

It was always in the back of his mind, and one day he finally started making them. Simple things at first. A plain band, a dainty chain. Didn’t think he’d even give them to Steve and never thought in a million years the ex-jock would wear them.

Eddie never really thought he’d even give them to him.

But he does, little boxes he leaves on the Harrington porch, on Steve’s BMW, on the Family Video counter when Steve and Robin are on one of their gossip sections in the back.

The only note he really leaves with it is that it’s for Steve and no one else, doesn’t sign it with “secret admirer” he thinks it’s too…well, he doesn’t really know. It’s not beneath him, he’s a romantic at heart. Eddie just doesn’t even know if he’s ready to admit that’s what he is.

An admirer.

It’s one day that Eddie and the party are getting pizza at the local parlor that he notices Steve is wearing one of the rings.

It’s plain silver, but hammered on the outside. Nothing fancy, nothing like he makes for himself. But Eddie was proud of it in that sense, it was outside his comfort zone and he had made it perfect.

And Steve was wearing it.

Eddie had to act like he wasn’t five seconds away from dying of how adorable it was before his heart sank, because Steve didn’t know it was from him.

Steve probably thought it was from a girl, especially because duh, a girl would make jewelry. Especially jewelry like that.

He watched as Steve twirled it on his middle finger, with a small smile on his face to himself. Eddie looked away before he got caught, tears threatening to boil over, his face on fire.

The next time Eddie sees Steve, he’s wearing the small chain that Eddie had left the other week. It’s a bit hidden by the collar of the polo he’s wearing, but Eddie catches the flash of silver out of the corner of his eye.

But again, it’s something maybe dainty, delicate hands would make. Steve does seem like the type of sweet guy who’d wear whatever thing a girl bought or made for him.

Maybe next time Eddie won’t make something so dainty.

[listlesswhistle]

So, I made a thing. As I mentioned, I’ve been having a lot of fun making up my own rain world stuff, y’know, like an entire custom region. Well, you may have noticed that the bonus pictures of my notes included information on a couple things that didn’t show up in the forest. Namely, my iterator oc, One Thousand Silent Eyes.

Well, I’ve been possessed by the need to write a short ficlet about them discovering what happened to the canon iterators through finding broadcasts as they attempt to reestablish their long range communications.

I’ve discussed Silent Eyes in more detail over on @nerdydowntherabbithole‘s blog, and I don’t won’t to go over everything about them again, so here’s the main thing you need to know before reading: Silent Eyes operates as a sort of hivemind. They have multiple different bodies, each with their own unique copy of Silent Eyes, but they think and act as a single entity when together. This does become relevant occasionally in this ficlet, most often when they switch between “themself” and “themselves,” depending on whichever is appropriate. They will also occasionally reference actions performed by different bodies happening at the same or similar time, as they see themselves as being in both of those bodies at once.

With that clarified, the story can be found below the read more. (Please be gentle, I’ve literally never written a fic before)

They let out a thoughtful chirp from their speakers as they hovered up to the antenna of the decrepit relay station; a habit they’d picked up from time spent around their citizens. On instinct, they went to store the information in their general memory banks, only to stutter in their flight as they failed to connect.

They were... still getting used to that. Silent Eyes knew that these long distance missions were necessary for reestablishing communication with the other clusters, but that didn’t make it any less uncomfortable to be cut off from so much of themselves.

At least the sensation eased up somewhat when they hunkered down in the MMSP to wait out the rain. Some of their citizens had come along for the ride, even after the extended nature of this outing was explained to them. Truthfully, they were grateful for the company. Tending to the needs of the adventurous group of slugcats served as a much appreciated distraction from the concerns that plagued them lately.

And ah, there was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? The thing that they’d wanted to pass off to the rest of themselves while they focused on documenting what material components they’d need to fabricate in order to get this ancient transmitter back up and running: the broadcasts. They’d been found stored on the station’s barely functional servers and the contents were... distressing.

They weren’t stupid; they’d heard the rumors. Those were all on public chatrooms, after all, so they had made it much further out than any encrypted private conversations. But Eyes had treated them with a hopeful skepticism. They hadn’t know Unparalleled Innocence very well, and the rumors were just that: rumors. They’d helped iterators handle cases of rot before, they were sure Five Pebbles could handle himself. And losing contact with Looks To The Moon doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad happened to her. Everyone’s communications were breaking down. Heck, they’d had to repair their own communication arrays before they could even talk to the iterators right next to them! Their neighboring cluster was most likely perfectly fine. They probably just needed a few new antennas, a couple fresh dishes, a good rewiring and bam! Problem solved.

Except, well... these old messages paint a slightly different picture.

It’s probably nothing! They’re probably just overthinking things, making false assumptions because they’re working with much less information than they’re used to. This will all make much more sense when they get this relay back to working order, so they can take a new look at this data with all of their processing power at their disposal. The ARU that they’re piloting wasn’t exactly built for complex thinking, after all, with its internals mostly full of sensors and data storage. That’s why ARUs are always accompanied by an MMSP; its large computing system dedicated to housing Silent Eyes picks up the slack for its smaller cousins.

They’re just maybe, slightly freaking out because even with the additional processing power of the MMSP parked right outside, the messages are still setting off all kinds of alarm bells in their brain. Contents aside, just the fact that they’re seeing these messages at all is frankly concerning.

Silent Eyes has become intimately familiar with the inner workings of an iterator’s communication arrays. They know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that incoming messages are not meant to bounce like this. The different systems for incoming and outgoing information are completely separate, only connected in that they are both part of communications. The fact that they found the messages here, in a relay station almost halfway between the two clusters, is indicative of a catastrophic malfunction on Looks To The Moon’s end. Her systems would’ve had to be physically rewired for them to broadcast a message in its entirety to a random recipient immediately upon receiving it, rather than download its contents for Moon to read. It’s honestly a miracle that the header and group name were the only things lost in the process.

It would be a different story for a public communiqué sent to a group discussion- long range broadcasts are sent along multiple relays, so that there are redundancies in case one breaks down- but these were clearly meant to be direct communications between iterators in the same cluster, with their names listed directly beneath the missing group: “No Significant Harassment, Big Sis Moon.” It should’ve been impossible, and yet here it is, scanned directly into Silent Eyes’ internal storage.

As for the messages themselves... there’s not much to be said. Two short chatlogs between users “No Significant Harassment” and “Big Sis Moon.” NSH is the only one to speak. He is unsure if his messages will reach Moon, citing an unknown amount of damage to her systems. Five Pebbles appears to be uncooperative, and NSH seems to be planning something. All in all, it sounds like a grim situation.

But, well, it’s only two messages! Maybe NSH’s plan worked, and Moon’s communication arrays stopped sending messages here! Or, maybe they can find more messages once they restore power to the upper floor! Oh, and what if-

Plink! Silent Eyes jolted at the sound of something hitting the base of their wings. Oh, the rain is coming. It seems they weren’t doing a very good job of focusing on repairs.

They spur themselves into motion, abandoning the various tasks around the station that they’d been idling at for the last half an hour. It seems they’ll have to wait until the next cycle before they can reconnect with the rest of themselves.

As they settle themselves down to charge in the vast hanger of the MMSP, and their large, armored form prepares to weather the rain, Silent Eyes takes comfort in the fact that all of their citizens appear to be fed and accounted for. They flutter their wings in amusement as the slugcats begin to bully them into the quickly forming cuddle pile on the floor, adjusting themself slightly to support the one that’s already fallen asleep on their back. They don’t appear bothered in the slightest by the rigid metal form of the ARUs, seeming perfectly content with the fact that all four of them together provide a comfortable amount of heat.

Surrounded on all sides by warm bodies, with the sounds of purring echoing off the walls of their hanger, Eyes feels their fans start to slow as the worry that had been eating at them finally begins to abate.

The messages are concerning, and Eyes is still concerned at the apparent state of their fellow iterators, but they will not let their fear dismantle them. With a clearer mind and a new objective, One Thousand Silent Eyes finds themselves wishing they could tell NSH the same thing he tried to tell Looks To The Moon: “Hang in there. I’m coming to help.”

[officialsporkintheroad]

Oooh Gin n Tonic for the soulmate ficlet!

(Author’s Note: OKAY so this one got away from me--it’s almost 3k words. It’s a little darker/sadder than I thought it would be--I started off with Power Couple vibes, and then it became canon compliant, so obvi that didn’t quite happen. Ginny’s still a bad bitch tho. Thanks for the prompt and I hope you like <3)

SEND ME A HARRY POTTER RARE-PAIR FOR SOULMATE AU FICLET

TW: brief & mild self-harm, depression, off-screen attempted murder, minor character death

**********

Here’s the thing.

By the time Ginevra Weasley is born, there are six other Weasley children already. It’s hard enough to distinguish yourself when you’re poor, when your family name is synonymous with Blood Traitors in some circles and Pity in others, when everything you own is second-hand and handed-down and usedbrokendirty. It’s even harder knowing half her siblings will make a name for themselves before she’s even out of nappies.

Bill is the most talented. Charlie, the most fearless. Percy is the smartest. The twins are funny and inventive to a degree that’s nearly unbeatable. Even Ron is the best at chess, the best at strategy.

What’s left for me, she wonders.

But when she’s old enough to understand soulmarks, old enough to read them, she realizes that magic herself has marked her as different. Nobody in her family two sets of words the way she does.

 ********** 

Here’s the thing.

Tom Riddle is born to nothing but the name falling from his dying mother’s lips, but even in a sea of orphans, he is extraordinary. First, because he is a pretty child. Then because is so very bright. And later—though not much later, because as noted, he is extraordinary—because of his magic.

And because, unlike the other children at Wool’s, there is a string of words winding around his wrist in narrow script that read, “I wish someone would see me instead of my family.”

Soulmarks. That’s what Professor Dumbledore calls them when he visits, when he explains magic and Hogwarts and the words his soulmate will one day say to him.

“Someone made just for me,” Tom mutters under his breath, enchanted by the idea. Someone who will understand him wholly and completely, who will be his entirely—

“Well,” Dumbledore says, and he has a strange, cold look in his steely eyes. “Not all soulmates work out.”

Tom gets the impression Dumbledore might not like him very much, and that’s before the man sets his wardrobe on fire.

Still, before Dumbledore leaves, Tom asks one more question.

“Sir. Do people only have one soulmate?”

Dumbledore pauses, assesses Tom. “Almost always.”

Tom nods quietly and lets the old man leave.

(There’s a second set of words in a more elegant script above Tom’s left hip that read, “It’s always you, isn’t it?” Another sign that he’s more than the wizards around him—two soulmarks instead of the usual one—but Tom doesn’t tell anyone about them. Not yet.)

 ********** 

When Ginny meets Harry Potter—for only a split second just outside platform 9 ¾ —she hopes it will be him. Probably lots of people hope Harry Potter will speak their words; he’s a hero and he has the prettiest green eyes and the nicest smile. He doesn’t speak to her then, and she’s too shy to say anything, and that means there’s still a chance.

Still a chance when Harry Potter comes to visit the next summer.

But of course, then he waves and says a cheery, “Hello!”

Ginny freezes, turns and all but runs back up the stairs. Neither of her marks is a simple, “Hello.”

For the next few days, weeks, she wallows a bit in her disappointment. Harry Potter is not her soulmate.

The excitement of Hogwarts dulls the hurt of her doomed crush, though, right up until she puts on the sorting hat and it says, “Another Weasley.”

And in the Gryffindor girls’ dorms late that night, having unpacked and found a strange, blank diary that she doesn’t remember buying, Ginny writes down the thought that’s been plaguing her practically from the moment she was born.

“I wish someone would see me instead of my family.”

She doesn’t expect the book to write back.

“I see you.”

She stares at the words, the pretty, delicate script, for only a moment, and then she’s running to the bathroom, wrenching her nightgown down off her shoulder because even though she’s looked every day since she learned to read, she has to be sure.

“Those are my words,” she whispers to herself, vaguely aware she’s nearly hyperventilating. She all but runs back to the book—her soulmate is a book?—and writes more.

“I’m Ginevra Weasley, though I go by Ginny. Who are you?”

 ********** 

When Tom Riddle is 16 and overconfident and proud and desperate to prove himself, he opens the Chamber of Secrets and inadvertently kills Myrtle Warren.

Waste not, want not, he thinks. The girl’s death might have been a bit of an accident—he’d planned to kill someone, if not her specifically, and perhaps not right now—but that won’t matter for the ritual he has planned.

When he makes his first horcrux, he feels as though he’s being split apart. The agony is blinding, burning. But eventually it fades and he hauls himself up, dusts himself off, and sneaks back into the Slytherin dormitories.

It’s only the next morning that he realizes the soulmark on his wrist is gone. Not burned off. Not faded to gray the way they do when your soulmate has died. It’s as if it never existed.

(The one on his hip remains unchanged.)

Ultimately, he decides, it’s of little consequence. Soulmates are a childish fancy that had appealed to him when he was an orphan nobody. Now, Lord Voldemort is on the horizon—a grander image for himself that will elevate him beyond the paltry frivolities of mortal men.

He doesn’t linger on this loss, or what it might mean for his soul.

********** 

Ginny wakes up on the floor of the Chamber of Secrets, soaked to the bone in filthy water, Harry Potter bleeding profusely beside her. The diary—Tom—is on the floor, a huge hole gaping on the front cover.

He tried to kill me, Ginny realizes, a sick feeling in her stomach. Tom had possessed her for months, had made her kill chickens and set the basilisk on muggleborns, had dragged her down to the Chamber so he could suck the life out of her. And now he’s dead.

At first, there’s nothing but the relief of surviving, tinged with bitterness and a vile, betrayed feeling in her gut. The idea of telling anyone that her soulmate was Tom—was Voldemort, as it turns out—makes her throw up. And then, of course, it occurs to her that no one has to know.

It would be better if no one knew.

She keeps that tidbit to herself, even with the anger and the grief. Everyone attributes her moods to the fact that she nearly died, but eventually they stop worrying so much. Eventually they leave her alone.

The mark on her shoulder—“I see you.”—once black, now has faded to a pale gray. So light it’s nearly invisible to anyone else.

The other mark is fine.

********** 

Ginny throws herself into her life with the energy of a person who knows what it means to die. Where she was quiet and shy before—always overwhelmed and overshadowed by her siblings—she’s now loud and bright and fearless. If Tom has taught her anything, it’s that nobody else is going to come along and make her great. That’s something she’s going to have to do for herself.

So she tries. She makes friends with Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom. She studies hard, makes sure she answers questions in class. She goes to the tri-wizard ball her third year with a nice boy named Michael Corner who is not her soulmate. She dances and she has fun and he doesn’t try to kill her, so it’s a win.

She thinks she might finally be getting the hang of things.

Of course, that’s when Voldemort resurrects himself.

Harry lands in the stadium, sobbing and clinging to Cedric Diggory’s body, and suddenly the sick feeling from the Chamber is back.

 **********

Cedric Diggory was Harry Potter’s soulmate.

Ginny learns this late at night at Grimmauld Place because dreams of the Chamber and Tom are keeping her awake and when she goes to make a cup of tea, she finds Harry at the table, staring blankly in the dark.

The clock reads 2 a.m.

“I barely got to know him, and he’s gone,” Harry says, voice ragged from crying. “And it’s my fault—”

“It’s Tom’s fault,” Ginny snaps. Not her Tom, really, but they’re the same enough. Both murderers and jackasses as far as she’s concerned.

Harry looks up at her, wide green eyes, and she realizes that no one else has told him he’s not to blame. Not for Voldemort coming back, or for Cedric dying. She wonders if anyone else even knows that they were soulmates.

Maybe that’s what prompts her to tell him.

“Tom was mine.” The words taste like ash, scrape up her throat and leave her feeling raw. “The diary. He was my soulmate.”

She shows him the grayed-out words on her shoulder.

“Fuck,” Harry chokes out eventually. “That’s…”

There really aren’t words for this.

“It’s all fucked,” she agrees.

Her tea is scalding and soothing and not nearly enough. But she’s been here for months; she knows where Sirius has been hiding the good stuff from her mom. She reaches into the false bottom of the china cabinet, pulls out a bottle of Ogdens, and pours a shot into her tea.

Harry raises a brow, but she just shrugs.

“I think we’ve earned it, don’t you?”

He takes the shot she pours for him, and there’s a silent promise that they won’t talk about this. Not with anyone else.

**********

She shouldn’t have come here.

That’s what she thinks, standing in the Department of Mysteries, in the Hall of Prophecies. One moment, they’re looking for Sirius, and then Lucius fucking Malfoy is there, and Bellatrix Lestrange, and a handful of other Death Eaters, and Ginny knows they’ve stumbled into a trap they’re not getting out of unscathed.

Harry was holding the prophecy, but sometime between him taunting Malfoy and when they all send out a simultaneous stupefy, she feels him slide it into her pocket. It takes less than a second for her to understand. They’ll think Harry has it, and even when it inevitably comes out that he doesn’t, Ron and Hermione will be the next obvious choices. Ginny is unexpected; Ginny can keep it safe.

They scatter, each one of them running in a different direction. Ginny’s dodging spells left and right, tossing hexes over her shoulder. She’s always had a fair amount of power, but the DA has honed her skills in a way they never were before. She lands more hits than she expects, hears the belligerent cursing of the man behind her when a well-placed diffindo makes him stumble. She can’t look back and see the damage herself—that would be stupid and she can’t afford to give up her meager lead—but she tosses a reducto and listens as the walls collapse.

She has three seconds to be proud of herself before it all goes to shit.

Somehow they all end up back in the same room—a strange one with a pale, shimmering archway standing in the middle—and then they’re surrounded: Death Eaters on all sides.

Voldemort himself strides forward from the darkness. He’s tall and pale and snake-like, but those movements, that grace, are all Tom.

The room is too cool and dark and for a moment, she’s back in the Chamber, she’s fading, she’s dying, she’s staring up at Tom’s face, twisted into a mocking, cruel smile that she’ll never forget as long as she lives.

“Harry Potter,” Voldemort says, breaking her out of her memory. “And I see you’ve brought your useless friends.”

There’s a split second of nothing, and then Harry’s clutching at his scar, screaming. Ginny is distantly aware of Ron helping to catch him, but she won’t be distracted now. She keeps her wand level, steady, and aimed at Voldemort.

That’s why she sees when his gaze shifts to her: red and piercing and horrid.

“Don’t be stupid, girl. Give it here,” he says, words half-hissed, and he holds out his hand for the prophecy.

She stares at him. Stares, and then laughs. It’s something manic and bitter and this is not the time, but she can’t help it. Fuck.

Because those are her other words, the ones etched across her ribcage.

(When she was younger—before the Chamber incident—she’d never liked these words as well as the other set. Her soulmate was calling her stupid, for one thing, and seemed demanding to boot. After Tom and the basilisk and nearly dying, she’d looked at these words with the last shred of hope she had left. She’d hoped, first impressions aside, that maybe this person would be the one to love her. Maybe this person she’d be allowed to keep.)

What a fucking joke.

“It’s always you, isn’t it?” she spits and has the joy of watching Lord Voldemort freeze on the spot.

She has managed to strike him speechless. It’s almost enough of an advantage.

But in the end—Ginny is starting to think some things are inevitable—Voldemort and his Death Eaters rally, the Order of the Phoenix shows up to save the day, the prophecy shatters, Sirius dies.

********** 

Back in the safety of Hogwarts, of the Hospital Wing, Ginny puts her fist through a mirror.

Then she takes one of the shards to the words on her ribcage, tries to scrape them off.

Madam Pomfrey has to stop her, has to restrain her to the bed while she heals the bleeding wound.

The mark stays. It’s magic, her soulmark; it goes deeper than the skin.

*********** 

Voldemort sits in his study in Malfoy Manor.

The prophecy is destroyed. Harry Potter has escaped. The Minister, idiot that he is, won’t be able to deny Voldemort’s presence now that he’s seen him firsthand.

It has been a shite evening, in short.

Then there is the matter of his soulmate. Ginevra Weasley.

“It’s always you, isn’t it?”

Even his new body, freshly formed out of the cauldron, had borne those words. The ones that, no matter how many horcruxes he’d made, had stayed firmly printed above his hip. Years ago, he’d thought they would disappear when he made the ring, then the cup, the locket. He’d wondered why he lost those first words but not the second set.

Now, of course, it all makes sense.

Well. He’s still not quite sure why magic has deemed some scrawny, red-haired chit deserving of Lord Voldemort.

Draco Malfoy is a well of information. Largely useless information, granted, but information all the same.

She’s a quidditch player, apparently, and—according to Draco—nearly as good a seeker as Potter. She’s got a mean bat-bogey hex and a short temper, but on the whole, she’s a year below Malfoy, so he doesn’t know much.

“Oh, but—” and here the boy pauses, pales, and swallows nervously “—she was…uh…the one who nearly died. In…in the Chamber of Secrets.”

Draco looks like he’s worried Voldemort will curse him for that, but really he’d gotten all—okay, most—of his frustration over that spectacular disaster over with when he’d first heard Lucius had given away his fucking diary.

But he didn’t know Ginevra was the one his horcrux had almost killed.

My horcrux that took my first soulmark, he thinks, and something in the back of his brain clicks.

“It’s always you, isn’t it?” she had said. Always. Because they’d met before.

She was both his marks.

********** 

“I had—have—a second mark,” she tells Harry, because he obviously knows something is up. They’re sitting together up at the astronomy tower. It’s one of those nights where the dreams creep in and she wishes she had the memory of Gryffindor’s sword in her hands. She wishes she’d been the one to kill Tom all those years ago. Wishes she could kill Voldemort now.

But that, apparently, is Harry’s job.

Despite the fact that she’s pretty sure he’s already guessed the truth, and despite the fact that she knows he won’t judge her for it—he didn’t judge her for Tom, he won’t judge her now—she can’t stand to say it aloud.

She shows him the words on her side instead.

Don’t be stupid, girl. Give it here.

“I…I tried to get rid of them,” she whispers into the night when the silence stretches too long. “Why is it him?”

Harry wraps her in a hug that’s just shy of smothering.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry, Ginny. I’m so fucking sorry.”

**********

Dumbledore is dead. It’s only a matter of time before the ministry falls. Lord Voldemort is more powerful now than he’s ever been.

He can’t stop looking at his soulmark.

It is ridiculous, he tries to tell himself. Lord Voldemort has no use for a soulmate, no want for one either. And certainly not one that’s a mudblood-loving bint fighting for the enemy.

He should kill her and be done with it. It’s not as though he can just leave her be.

But.

But for all that Voldemort has remade himself into something near-godly, there is still an orphan boy somewhere inside of him that used to steal the things he coveted, that used to collect what little treasures could be found in Wool’s and keep them close.

Once, he saw his soulmarks and thought, There is someone made to be mine.

And that?

That’s a temptation he cannot quite pass up.

[pelle-lavellan-a]

Pelle x Aela Ficlet

Timeline: Pre-Quisition

Ship : Pelle Sibil x Aela Lavellan

POV: Aela Lavellan

2269 Words

If this was some kind of cruel joke, I was really hoping for a punchline that would make me forgive him. Even if I could get my hopes up for something like that, if he was lying about this...about any of this.

I would never speak to him again.

Six months ago, if I told myself I would be laying next to the Keeper’s First, Pelledir bloody fucking Sibil, with our fingers intertwined listening to the peaceful sounds of nature in the dead of night basking in the moonlight that cut through the trees.

I’d have laughed right in my silly face.

Now I know what you’re thinking...Pelle and I have been friends since i found him healing a fox whose leg had been caught on of the hunter’s traps. He was three years old...I was six. Even then I thought he was beautiful--I don’t know if that’s possible but something about him has always left me wanting more.

I mean that in the most non sexual way possible. Whenever I look at him I wonder--if the embodiment of our souls was a person..would it look like him? Everything he did, every word he spoke...even his terrible jokes--it was all expressed with such gentle passion..and sometimes I wished that just once in my life I want to be like him.

There was something magical about the forest that Pelle loved to listen to so much. It was ironic really. Pelle hated silence more than anything, even more than violence. Despite this, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier than when he lays still on the forest floor with his eyes closed in serene silence. He just looked so peaceful, he was so happy when he could just be himself. No worrying about me and my demon predicament, no Talwinne pressing him for answers regarding that particular predicament, no blatant denial of his modest and beautiful pacifism, no blood, no murder, no fighting between us, no me slowly breaking his heart with every waking minute. It was just...well once I would have considered it silence.

But to him I swear he believed he was in a symphony.

I used to think he was crazy, but nowadays I could hear it. It was amazing the things his ears picked up for someone who spent most of his life reading and being intensely tutored in both magic and natural lore. I was a hunter, one of the best in the clan and even still I came to learn that I had been trained just like him. Except I had trained myself to only hear what I wanted to hear. Pelle wasn’t allowed to hunt because of his poor health, my grandmother had labelled him too frail both in body and in heart to wander out with the hunters and take the life of animals for survival. Once I would have agreed with her.

But she was wrong. And so was I.

I tilted my body to the right just slightly so I could see him. He made no effort opening his eyes or questioning my reason for loosening the knot created by my brown and his freckled fingers. A loving smile tugged at the corners of my lips, I couldn’t help it. Even if I spent so much yelling at him, fighting him about the choices I was making, and my inevitable vice of being unable to control the magic neither of us had any business knowing even a whisper of, I couldn’t help but feel so lucky to have him. Most people would have told me to fuck off by now, but he didn’t.

I knew deep down he would be happier if I would have never made a deal with a demon on his behalf in the first place If I were to, be a normal girl with normal problems who didn’t battle with demon possession every day of her life. He probably would have loved to have the confidence that the girl he’d given his heart to wasn’t someone who may or may not be an abomination tomorrow.

I tried not to think about it.

Because despite the rather obvious things, if he really didn’t love me he’d be long gone by now. He’d have run away when I told him about the desire demon. He’d have been creeped out that my desire to protect him from the bullshit trickling out of a city that seemed too far away to touch us was so strong that I would sell my soul for him.

In retrospect he wouldn’t be laying beside me sharing something as personal as his peace with me.

I watched him carefully and quietly, I didn’t want to miss a single breath that rose and fell from his slender frame. The moonlight cast upon us highlighted his freckles like a projection of the stars on his cheeks. His complexion was still a little red from the fresh vallaslin on he’d received only a few hours ago. I had to keep myself from tracing my fingers along the charcoal colored lines that marked him as an adult amongst our people.

To be honest it wasn’t just his face that I wanted to touch. I wanted to touch every inch of him so badly. I wanted to count every freckle that dusted his pale rosy skin, I wanted to trace all the shapes of his beautiful face, I wanted to taste the lips I’d mustered the courage to kiss years ago in our childhood in a way I hadn’t experienced them before. I wanted to love him the same way he loved the woods, with such an unspeakable passion that only his gentle and awe inspiring spirit could conceive.

Pelle must have felt my eyes upon him because he bared his hanting amber eyes towards me. His gaze lingered for what felt like years before he sat up with a quizzical expression on his face.

“You alright?” He asked me softly.

I grinned like a sap, which of course caused him to look even more confused. “Yeah..” I nodded. “I’m just...so happy right now.”

Pelle’s head cocked like a puzzled bird but seemed incapable of suppressing the sweet smile that snuck up on him. “Oh? What for?”

I felt like an idiot, a giggly idiot. But I meant it, really I did. I shrugged. “That’s what the weird part, I don’t think even I know.” I replied before shyly tucking a tuft of my raven hair behind my short and frankly very human ear.

Pelle chuckled softly. “Something in the air I guess.” He suggested.

Oh it was something in the air alright. Something sitting right in front of me breathing in said air and smiling at me in a way I never would have considered myself worthy of. “I guess so…” I murmured before turning my body forwards again and stared onwards into the twilight trees in front of us.

Pelle’s eyes eventually averted from me and he looked ahead as well. “Thanks for coming out here with me..”

“What? No way Pelle! Thank you for bringing me out here.” I replied almost instantly. “Honestly, I never knew what someone who hated silence so much could see in the idle woods...but I think I get it now.”

Now Pelle was the one grinning like an idiot. He didn’t say anything in response but the dorky way he smiled from ear to ear was answer enough for me. He was so cute, I don’t think he even tried to be, but he was a real master at it. I took a small risk and scooted close enough to him that our legs touched.

“I don’t know how I didn’t understand it before. It isn’t nearly as quiet as I thought it was with the trees rustling, the owls gossiping and what not.”

Pelle snorted with laughter and I swear I think I stopped breathing for a second. “You think they’re talking about us?” He asked.

“As if!” I said. “What would they even have to talk about?” I asked. Then for some godforsaken reason I started imitating owls in this very unnecessary voice. “Look at those weird kids down there napping in the dirt! Why you’d almost think they thought they were in some terrible romance novel!” I joked.

Thank the Creators Pelle thought I was a lot funnier than I was. It meant he got to laugh and my ears got to be blessed by the sound of it.

“But really though.” I kept talking, because I always did. “I bet shem--humans..” Elvhen or not Pelle didn’t like the word shemlins, so I always tried to remember not to use it in front of him. “I bet humans think that nights like this are things that only happen in their terrible books.”

“I didn’t realize you were such an expert.” He teased.

I couldn’t read, he knew that...somehow that made his comment twice as effective. But I was going to pretend I was the greatest reader in all of Thedas, it added to the effect of it all.

“Oh but I am!” I declared. “I’ve studied all their writing patterns and their tropes, their quite fascinating really you should take a crack at them someday. In fact, I can think of one very specific trope that the humans have tried so so hard to create and you know now that I think about it--it’s exactly like what we’re doing save for one thing.”

“Oh really?” said Pelle. He knew I was completely shitting him but he humoured me anyway. I loved that about him. “And what is this one thing?” He asked.

And now there was a pit in my stomach. Maker I thought this was going to be a lot easier if I did some pretty godly grandstanding beforehand, but it just made me more nervous. Because now I had his full undivided attention, and while he was probably expecting me to do something outrageous was this actually too bold of me?

“Well you see.” I coughed. Wow, I really was a loser wasn’t I? “Usually in books exactly like nights like these, everything is always perfect because things are about to get a lot less perfect afterwards but someone...usually person A wants person B to know that even though life has a very high potential of getting real shitty that they want person B to look back on that night and remember that sometimes stuff is okay, sometimes life is perfect you know?”

Where was I even going with this? I was making a real mess of things. Was there a way to talk myself out of this? If there was I was going to find it, so I opened my mouth and took one more profoundly stupid breath with full preparation to spout some more incredible nonsense.

But Pelle stopped me. “Aela…” He spoke my name softly and immediately my throat went dry. I held my tongue and stared at him my mouth still open but no words came out.

“It’s okay.” He whispered before turning to face me.. “And..if you ever need a reminder of that for any reason at all you need only ask.” He told me.

I let out a physical frustrated groan. “No no! This isn’t about me Pelle it’s about..” He could feel my voice start to shake again, it was only a matter of time before I was rendered speechless again.

So I quit.

In one swift and frankly clumsy movement I a ran my fingers into Pelle’s strawberry blond curls and pulled his face towards mine. Our noses bumped at first but I refused to let my embarrassment of nearly head butting Pelle stop me from getting this out. It only took a small tilt of my head for me to catch his lips against mine and seal the last little detail of the trope I had completely made up just a few minutes ago.

I felt Pelle’s cheeks heat up against mine and I knew that his face was now flushed for a reason quite different than a fresh tattoo. I could tell that this must have been his first real kiss, his hands seemed a tad confused about what they were supposed to be doing. I giggled against his lips before releasing him and letting my eyes flutter open. There was a small twinge of panic on his face, in the back on my mind I wondered had I gone too far.

Still he got even more adorable after I kissed him. His ears stuck straight up and his face was a furiously vibrant shade of crimson, perhaps if his face wasn’t already red it would have been more tame but for now it was quite an extreme color for him. His amber eyes stared holes into my heart, it never occurred to what a wide eyed boy he seemed despite having seen so many terrible things.

I smiled warmly at him, from the looks of it he was still trying to process the fact that we’d kissed at all. “Relax..” I whispered cupping his face before leaning in and capturing him in another kiss.

The second time he was more prepared, probably felt a lot less like he had just been pounced on. He returned the soft gesture and let his left hand wander gingerly up to my cheeks. Our free hand...somehow they wound up laced back together just as they’d been before.

And for just a fleeting moment. My utter bullshit was absolutely right for once.

Everything was perfect