#i've always loved winged people

[bastart13]

Doing some wing/angel studies

[zenmai--jikake--no--komoriuta]

just got home from seeing a theater production of Mary Poppins with my mum-- it was really cool!! I've never watched the movie through the whole way so I've had no idea how half of the movie goes for over two decades, now I can at least saw I know :'D but man it was really fantastic, from the choreography to the harness theatrics (the way the guy walked UP the wall and upside down across the roof was really smoothly done, as was the fly-by over the audience at the end-- I didn't realise the tracks went quite that far out past the stage!) to the set design (god I could talk about this for hours; one my favourites was a background screen painted to look like the room was tilted back at a wide angle, but the best was the main house display which was quite literally full of layers-- every number it was used in there was another way the actors could pass through it and it was cool af like "man there's ANOTHER pathway below the staircase??" or when a panel flipped on the mantlepiece to swap props out and it's like "I couldn't even see that there WAS a panel there!!"... incredibly detail-dense and I loved pondering how most of them tick)..................... like man it was all so good I can't even, it was real fun to watch and I bet it was an interesting one to perform from an actor or stagehand's perspective /////// also loved that when the bird lady finished her last solo before the end, she got a loud enthusiastic "WOOOOOOOOO" from one part of the audience which was really sweet, she probably got the biggest applause of the night aside from the lead lol

[astonmartinii]

it must be a sign | oscar piastri social media au

pairing: oscar piastri x fem deaf! red bull engineer!reader

when the two most unbothered people in the paddock combine their joint powers to be the it couple

request sent by the lovely @bibissparkles xx

author's note: heyyy so many of you won't know but i am actually deaf - i am 50% deaf in both ears and wear hearing aids so i love requests like this! (all i do most of this stuff as a deaf person, turning off your hearing aids >)

MASTERLIST | TIP JAR

yourusername

liked by maxverstappen1, oscarpiastri and 302,446 others

yourusername: you can't complain about the dutch national anthem when you can just turn your hearing aids off

view all comments

user1: the way max's engineer is as sick of that damn song as us

user2: turning off her hearing aids makes how bored she looks during podiums make sense

yourusername: it was a banger during the mercedes dominance but would it kill someone to play the australian anthem

danielricciardo: i knew you missed me

yourusername: sure, jan.

user3: her and max signing slay to each other will always be so personal to me

maxverstappen1: gonna pretend you didn't just say that

yourusername: boo hoo babe, you gotta lose something sometimes

user4: babe? are the flowers from max?

maxverstappen1: would rather choke on my own spit and fall into a pit of snakes, hope this helps ❤️

yourusername: rude! i wouldn't want flowers from you either :(

user5: i swear we get into this argument every weekend, i think people will still assume they're together until their married to other people

liamlawson30: stop using me as a messenger pigeon please and thank you

yourusername: but i thought red bull gave you wings?

liamlawson30: do not use a pr answer against me 🤨

yourusername: no comment

liamlawson30: choke.

yourusername: idk what's going on in the red bull junior academy but spit in helmut's coffee not mine

user6: y/n consistently giving all the red bull guys shit is my favourite thing ever

user7: the amount of times the sky broadcast has caught her waving them off or taking her hearing aids out lol

oscarpiastri

liked by yourusername, landonorris and 782,309 others

oscarpiastri: switched four tyres for two this weekend

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user11: you can't distract us with your slutty bike pics WHO THE FUCK IS THAT

landonorris: A WOMAN? A WOMAN? IS THAT A WOMAN OSCAR JACK PIASTRI?

oscarpiastri: yeah i'm pretty sure

landonorris: don't play smart with me buster - why was i not informed?

oscarpiastri: i don't ask to be informed of every time you get rejected in the instagram dms

landonorris: FAKE NEWS

oscarpiastri: okay buddy

user12: i be seeing the sign language book, oscar you are so real for that

user13: that's my king, i need a oscar and y/n link up in the paddock - my unbothered queens

user14: she's in the likes !!!!!!

logansargent: oh we've entered the soft launch phase i see

oscarpiastri: and what?

logansargent: someone is feeling defensive this morning, dude i won't tell i've already kept it a secret for so long

landonorris: HE KNOWS? DOES BEING YOUR TEAMMATE MEAN NOTHING?

oscarpiastri: he's my childhood best friend?

logansargent: there's levels to this game norris

landonorris: @oscarpiastri consider yourself UNDER SURVEILLANCE

oscarpiastri: okay girly

user15: oscar has the patience of a saint, the mystery gal may want to rethink it before having to deal with them all

yourusername

liked by maxverstappen1, danielricciardo and 381,044 others

yourusername: unrelaxed, unbothered, moisturised ✨

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user18: queen SHIT THAT AIN'T SHIT

user19: but this mystery man IS

maxverstappen1: yeah sorry about that... but at least boyfy has made his instagram debut?

yourusername: about time, he's too sexy to gatekeep

maxverstappen1: well i'm not going to agree out of respect for you

yourusername: so you don't think he's sexy? i might not be able to hear but HE CAN MAX BE NICE

maxverstappen1: first of all it's a text, second of all i've been way too nice to him

yourusername: he beat you in padel fair and square you're just SHIT AT IT ❤️

maxverstappen1: you know that's a sore subject WHY WOULD YOU BRING IT UP

user20: my queen was really like you wanna tell me to fuck off? oh here's my sexy boyfriend

user21: jos verstappen really didn't know who he was tangling with that gal may be chill but she doesn't take shit

user22: she's like a female version of oscar lol

user23: i knew there was a reason i liked her

this comment was liked by yourusername

danielricciardo: why am i left out of everything these days?

yourusername: snooze you lose

danielricciardo: I AM AWAKE REPLY TO MY TEXTS

danielricciardo: I JUST SAW YOU PUT YOUR PHONE ON DO NOT DISTURB

yourusername: protecting my peace

danielricciardo: i'm on to you buster

oscarpiastri

liked by maxverstappen1, yourusername and 1,209,455 others

tagged: yourusername

oscarpiastri: overjoyed to get my first (proper) win in formula one and even more overjoyed to have my amazing girlfriend (and even better engineer) up on the podium with me

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user27: so this was the special occasion?

user28: so this is why she said she wanted the australian national anthem over the dutch one?

user29: this is now my roman empire

yourusername: babe is so fucking good and i'm so fucking proud

oscarpiastri: i'm so glad to have been able to share this moment with you

yourusername: you deserve this and more, i love you

oscarpiastri: i love you too xx

user30: wait so oscar knows so much more sign language than i thought

user31: he looked so excited and even mark knows some

logansargent: he forced (we were happy to do so) me, mark and his family to learn as soon as he secured the date lol

oscarpiastri: and now we're all so cool because of it

logansargent: cool and able to chat shit without people knowing what we're saying

yourusername: best bit about it tbf (everyone please learn, it's a beautiful language)

landonorris: I KNEW IT

oscarpiastri: no you didn't

landonorris: no i didn't :( i'm hurt

oscarpiastri: if it's any consolation, we didn't tell many people, max and logan are exceptions

landonorris: WHY WAS I NOT AN EXCEPTION???

yourusername: boo hoo

landonorris: i'm not gonna say anything back to that you kinda scare me

yourusername: good ❤️

yourusername

liked by fernandoalo_oficial, oscarpiastri and 529,778 others

tagged: maxverstappen1 & oscarpiastri

yourusername: me and a racewinner (and our world champion third wheel)

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user32: fave trio in the paddock no competition

logansargent: logan erasure

yourusername: we love you logan, sunday roast at mine this weekend ❤️

logansargent: SCORE

user33: every time you post there's a new plushie

yourusername: we usually get one to commemorate a big weekend and we both got one for osc's first win

user34: that's so FUCKING CUTE

oscarpiastri: it's all fun and games until you don't fit in the bed because y/n feels too bad to put any of them on the floor

yourusername: they have FEELINGS OSCAR

oscarpiastri: she cried one time when max set off the smoke alarm cooking breakfast and the bed alarm shook so bad that all of them were thrown to the floor

yourusername: it was HARROWING but it also did wake me up so at least we know it works

maxverstappen1: actually my favourite couple to third wheel, but enjoy it while it's here osc, i won't lose again

yourusername: yeah sorry osc it's actually my job to help max win so you're gonna have to wait for him to retire if i have anything to do with it

oscarpiastri: not even for me :(

yourusername: sorry not sorry (i'm really sorry, i love you so much)

oscarpiastri: i love you too even if you won't sabotage max for my race :(

maxverstappen1: okay i know i said you guys are cute but that's enough for today

yourusername: we ARE cute thank you

oscarpiastri: the CUTEST

fin.

note: heheheheh i hope you enjoyed this, i love requests like this xx also on the comment about the bed alarm i had one in uni halls and when the alarm went off that baby SHOOK it was kinda scary

[spirits-having-flown]

“matthew, it is with heavy heart i say goodbye. the times we had together are honestly among the favorite times of my life. it was an honor to share the stage with you and to call you my friend. i will always smile when i think of you and i’ll never forget you. never. spread your wings and fly brother, you’re finally free. much love. and i guess you’re keeping the 20 bucks you owe me.” - matt leblanc

“i am so grateful for every moment i had with you matty and i miss you every day. when you work with someone as closely as i did with matthew, there are thousands of moments i wish i could share. for now here's one of my favorites. to give a little backstory, chandler and monica were supposed to have a one night fling in london. but because of the audience's reaction, it became the beginning of their love story. in this scene, before we started rolling, he whispered a funny line for me to say. he often did things like that. he was funny and he was kind. 🤍🕊️" - courteney cox

“oh boy this one has cut deep... having to say goodbye to our matty has been an insane wave of emotions that i've never experienced before. we all experience loss at some point in our lives. loss of life or loss of love. being able to really sit in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep. and we loved him deeply. he was such a part of our dna. we were always the 6 of us. this was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be. for matty, he knew he loved to make people laugh. as he said himself, if he didn't hear the 'laugh' he thought he was going to die. his life literally depended on it. and boy did he succeed in doing just that. he made all of us laugh. and laugh hard. in the last couple weeks, i've been pouring over our texts to one another. laughing and crying then laughing again. i'll keep them forever and ever. i found one text that he sent me out of nowhere one day. it says it all. matty, i love you so much and i know you are now completely at peace and out of any pain. i talk to you every day... sometimes i can almost hear you saying "could you BE any crazier?" rest little brother. you always made my day... ❤️🕊️” - jennifer aniston

“matty, thank you for ten incredible years of laughter and creativity. i will never forget your impeccable comic timing and delivery. you could take a straight line of dialogue and bend it to your will, resulting in something so entirely original and unexpectedly funny it still astonishes. and you had heart. which you were generous with, and shared with us, so we could create a family out of six strangers. this photo is from one of my favorite moments with you. now it makes me smile and grieve at the same time. i imagine you up there, somewhere, in the same white suit, hands in your pockets, looking around— "Could there BE any more clouds?” “ - david schwimmer

“shot the pilot, friends like us, got picked up then immediately, we were at the nbc upfronts. then... you suggested we play poker and made it so much fun while we initially bonded. thank you for that. thank you for making me laugh so hard at something you said, that my muscles ached, and tears poured down my face every day. thank you for your open heart in a six way relationship that required compromise. and a lot of "talking." thank you for showing up at work when you weren't well and then, being completely brilliant. thank you for the best 10 years a person gets to have. thank you for trusting me. thank you for all I learned about grace and love through knowing you. thank you for the time i got to have with you, matthew.” - lisa kudrow

friends cast remembers matthew perry 🤍🕊️

[stave-writes]

Sunday Oak x GN!Reader

Headcanons

A/N: I am SICK!!! of people making Sunday out to be an asshole who would cut you off from everything and everyone just to be selfish, especially if it makes you depressed. Sunday has more love in his heart for everyone and would let you break his heart just to see your smile, this man is sweeter than sugar. Sunday defender #1 is me fight me in my asks I'll win I've been a Zane MyStreet defender before he was popular  💯 💯 💯 💯 💯

Sunday is a gentle lover, he's always been delicate with you. Ghosting touches over the back of your hand, kisses like the brush of a feather on skin and smiles so soft it's hard to even see them when he locks eyes with you across a room. He's besotted with you, no matter what you do. The worst pain you could ever cause him is your suffering, and refusing to let him ease it for you. Hearing you cry makes his heart ache more than any of his own suffering, and he'll do anything he can to soothe you when you're struggling. Sunday sometimes finds it hard to understand what you want or need, being raised in such a way his own needs come second, so when you insist on looking after him...it's odd. He's never been his own first priority before, and it scares him a little. What if he desires too much? What if he's an issue for you? He loves you too much to risk causing you any amount of strife, so you have to beg him to be a burden. Beg him to be selfish. When Sunday is allowed to be selfish, it's cute. He'll plead with you to curl up in bed with him and sleep "Just a little longer, my love?" with those golden eyes of his shining in the early morning light. One arm will lay over you as he presses his face against your neck or back, unable to keep himself from chuckling due to just how lucky he feels having you right here in his arms. He couldn't ask for more of a blessing in love than to be able to behold you in all your glory (even if said glory is when you're drooling in your sleep or snoring so loud you could wake the dead). One of his "guilty" pleasures (damn catholic angel) is having you fussing over his piercings. He feels almost special when you toy with the little gold studs in his ear or the long dangling ornaments he likes to decorate his wings with. Sometimes he'll even ask you to pick which ones he should wear for the day and buy you something to match. If you don't wear jewellery, it'll be something like a matching set of shirt cuffs or a little keychain to match him. Anything he can do to spoil you just a bit. I'm a clipped-wing Sunday truther and so when he finally feels vulnerable enough, the priest-like coat is off and his clipped wing is shown to you, slightly mangled and clearly still sore and sensitive when you try to brush your fingers along it. You can see the twinge of shame and embarrassment run through him as you regard his incomplete self, the self left destroyed by the Dreammaster. Yet, if you tell him you still find him beautiful? He'll smile. He'll wrap you tight in his arms and cry into your shoulder, so relieved you aren't disgusted by him. That he isn't broken or unlovable, he's just...yours. Being able to read your thoughts means Sunday likes to tease you very lovingly when you're comfortable, he'll reiterate what you just thought out loud, or even listen to what you're thinking before buying you the exact thing you wanted and if you ask, he'll jokingly mention "Oh, a little birdie thought you'd like it." Before grinning and turning away, one arm settled on your waist or shoulder as he enjoyed your warmth.

[fatesundress]

⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

[lovely-peace]

Lovely?

Summary: You don't like the marauders. You don't talk and don't even look at them. But as you visit your friend in the hospital wing you encounter a certain boy with brown hair, scars and this lovely eyes.

Pairing: Remus Lupin x Gryffindor!reader

Warnings: Low self esteem, past bullying?, This is no bully! Marauders fic!!

Part 1 Part 3

"Hey, do you want to study for Transfiguration together?"

A normal day. It should have been. But ever since I was asked who I would date, I've been hearing giggles and whispers. And now James is standing in front of Amy and me. Ready to finish something. I don't know what yet, but it's going to hurt.

Because it will be a joke of theirs.

"Why should we?" I go straight on the offensive. Leave fears behind and intimidate them.

Sirius, who was standing behind James, looked to the side to stifle a laugh. That kind of upset me.

"Well, in the last lesson you had... We thought we could help each other."

Oh. My mistake. That they laughed about. Learning. Together. Actually, they just want to smile at my stupidity. SMILE.

"Amy doesn't even have Transfiguration." I hissed, looking the boy in front of me in the eye for the first time. He looked almost uncomfortable.

This boy I rode to Hogwarts with in the same wagon. And who now feels too cool to remember my name. I'm just a joke that you crack a few times and then forget.

"Which is why, unfortunately, I have to say goodbye and go upstairs. Important subjects are waiting for me!" Amy tapped my shoulder and I was about to thank her inwardly until- "That's why I'm leaving this sweetie here with you, okay?"

Peter looked up from his book for the first time. He was sitting on the couch by the fire.

In the common room of Gryffindor, it was not uncommon for people to fight over this space. Peter snatched it early enough so that Remus, who looked very ill that morning, just sat on the chair at the table next to it.

Peter was probably just as disappointed that Amy left as I was, if I interpreted his expression correctly.

"Amy," I whispered to her, "what are you doing?"

She raised her eyebrows, rolled her eyes and sighed briefly. And I understood. She wanted me to give them a chance.

I looked at her with begging eyes and screamed at her in my mind not to leave me here alone.

"So...?" James stood there like a boy waiting for his mother's permission.

And I wasn't going to give it to him.

"Sorry, Jarry, but I was planning on studying for other subjects with Amy today. So if you'll excuse us." What did I just say?

"Oo-," James looked to his friends while Sirius laughed out loud, "-okay?"

I didn't look at Amy and just stomped faree upstairs to our room.

Amy followed me, but not without letting out a sigh of disappointment.

~~

"What was that about?" My voice was a little louder than usual. "I thought we agreed that we didn't like the four of them?"

Amy groaned and threw herself on her bed. "I never said that. I meant that they can be assholes sometimes, that's all."

"But they just were assholes?"

I also sat down on my bed and looked out of the window. The Hufflepuff team was playing quidditch.

"How were they assholes in any way, please? James just asked us if we wanted to study with them in the common room."

I could hear Amy starting to get angry.

"You know what he meant. He only asked because I said something completely stupid in Transfiguration the day before yesterday and everyone had a laugh. And now he wanted to hear more of it."

Amy had gone quiet. Then she snorted loudly. "Jesus Christ."

"What?!" As I turned around, two piercing eyes looked into me.

"Can you please stop painting the devil on the wall for once? You sound worse than Cassandra!"

Now I snorted.

But Amy wasn't finished yet. "You're so afraid of being ridiculed that you're becoming an asshole yourself!"

The sun was setting. And the moon slowly rose.

"Why are you so sure that the four of them are making fun of you?"

I hated that tears were welling up in my eyes. "That's how it always is! Suddenly all these people are nice to you, who didn't even know who you were before, to lure you into safety, but in reality they're blaspheming and laughing at you. It's always like that!"

Amy shook her head.

"No, it's just always like that in your head. There's a chance that these people just want to get to know you better."

Amy took her DADA textbook and turned to the other wall. "To exclude this opportunity from the outset is not only a mistake, but also a missed opportunity to make new friends."

I looked up at the full moon. I felt as if he was out there suffering with me.

You understand me, don't you?

Probably not.

~~

The next morning, Amy was still mad at me. I couldn't blame her. What I said already sounded pathetic.

But so far it had always been the truth.

It was unusually quiet at breakfast. Amy ate almost nothing and hurried to her tray.

We had different subjects at the beginning of the day, but at lunch Amy was nowhere to be seen. There were whispers again and I wanted to scream.

And it was only in charms that I was told she had been taken to the hospital wing. 

That was not uncommon for Amy. Amy was very fragile. Amy always put on a very strong front, also to help me. But the truth was that stress really affected her and at one point she almost fell over sick.

Was it because of our argument? I don't know. But I certainly felt guilty.

~~

After class, I hurried to the hospital wing and let myself be led to her bed.

She looked almost peaceful as she slept. I carefully sat down next to her and took her hand. She was sweaty and cool at the same time.

Madam Pomfrey explained to me that Amy had been under a lot of stress lately and had eaten something bad. Then she went to the next bed and talked with the visitors there.

Visitors with... familiar voices?!

"Oh, please, you can't expect us to just leave him here alone?" Was that Sirius?

"Yes, I must. You know he needs his rest now. So shoo." Madam Pomfrey sounded a bit annoyed.

"We can stay here quietly!" That was James. Ironically loud.

"No, Mr. Potter, you cannot. So, gentlemen. Out!"

I saw out of the corner of my eye how Madam Pomfrey shooed several people outside. But who was behind the curtain of the bed? Whom were they visiting?

The curtain didn't cover the whole bed. In fact, it was only drawn on my side. Quietly, I got up and tried to get a quick look at the person. I took a cautious step to the side and—

There layed Remus. A pretty battered Remus, wrapped in bandages.

Suddenly, the curtain was pulled back and I stood there as if caught red-handed.

Remus looked at me in surprise. His look was somehow different than usual and I imagined he took a deep breath before he spoke.

"Hi." ... "Hi."

His body was even worse wrapped up than I had seen from the side. He was sitting upright and his upper body was full of bandages. His face also had scratches but his eyes were still so deep-

I stared at him. For far too long.

I quickly sat down next to Amy, who was still asleep.

Remus cleared his throat. "Is Amy very unwell?"

Somehow I wasn't prepared for a conversation with him. Not with one of the four. Not with Remus.

"According to Madam Pomfrey, it's just stress. She just needs to get some rest and then she should feel better." I was almost whispering, my voice was so quiet. Nothing compared to yesterday.

"That's good. I hope she gets better soon. Has anything bad happened?" I looked up at him. His eyes were so gentle, as if he really cared. "Something that's really stressing her out?"

When he noticed my look, he looked away. To my disappointment. "But actually, it's none of my business-"

"We had a fight." Why did I tell him that? "I worried her again."

I looked at Amy. Her face wasn't quite so pale and her hand, which I was holding, wasn't quite so sweaty.

"Oh." Remus' voice was very quiet. As if he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. As if he was worried to say the wrong thing.

"And why are you lying here? What happened to you?" It was only when I looked at him that I realized the question was a bit rude.

"If you want to tell me," I added.

He just sighed and suddenly looked so far away. "It was an accident."

I waited for him to tell me more. He didn't.

It stayed quiet between us for a long time. I could feel his gaze from the side, but somehow it didn't bother me a bit. I almost felt safe.

Suddenly he asked me: "Why did you argue?"

I looked into his eyes and almost wanted to tell him everything. I looked at Amy and borrowed her words. "I was an asshole."

He tilted his head and smiled cautiously. "Somehow I can't imagine that."

I looked at him. He looked at me.

"Why?"

"Well, you... It's not like you at all."

I continued to look at him. He continued to look at me.

"What do you mean?"

"You're usually so... Lovely."

Lovely? He saying I was lovely?

I had to laugh. He looked away.

"Me? You don't know me then." I giggled softly. "Besides, anyone can be an asshole, no matter how sweet the person still is."

He looked outside. The moon was up. He had that look again. "Yeah, I guess you're right about that."

It was quiet again after that. I heard soft footsteps outside and my anxiety wanted me to leave. So I stood up and was about to say goodbye to Remus as he-

"I want to know."

"What?"

He suddenly looked into my eyes so intensely that I felt dizzy.

"I want to know you properly."

I didn't know what to say and just looked at him as he continued.

"I want to know what goes through your mind when you see me us."

His gaze moved away from me. "I want to know why you hate us so much."

My whole world suddenly spun and I was in the middle of it. What was he saying? What did he mean, why was he even talking to me? What was going on here, why was he even here? And why did he call me lovely? What did he mean?

I wanted to say something. Something about... What actually?

Somehow I couldn't get anything out of me and was stuck in this spiral of trying to say something and figure out what to say. I opened my mouth, as-

"Remus, we're here!" James' voice tried to sound quiet but was unmistakable. Just like the footsteps of the two boys walking towards his bed.

When I saw them, so many things came back to me. Why I didn't talk to Remus.

"Are you feeling better? Remus -" Sirius faltered when he saw me. He looked between me and Remus and then grinned at me.

"Oh hello."

He turned to James now and 'whispered' to him. "Prongs, let's go and give these two some time to themselves-"

Remus cleared his throat and pointed at Amy who was lying next to me. Sirius fell silent.

"I'd better go now." I said in a very quiet voice again. James and Sirius even left me alone, but I heard their voices before I closed the door behind me.

"So, did she talk to you?" "What was going on with her?" "Is there something-"

The door slammed behind me and my head seemed to explode with questions.

[yeonzzzn]

HIIIIII I've been thinking a lot these last few days.... heeseung being an angel (could be a fallen angel or something) falling in love with a mortal, but they can't be together because angels and human beings together are completely prohibited... a totally hot and forbidden love

— 🐇💨

I am so in love with this concept. the minute this popped up in my askbox I knew I had to write it asap. I apologize for this being so long idk what happened my fingers just wouldn’t stop typing.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

fallen angel: lee heeseung

pairing: heeseung x afab!reader word count: 7.6k

Heeseung never sinned. Ever. Never once said anything bad about anyone, never once cursed, never once gossiped, kept his emotions in check, never had a single terrible thought about someone else, never committed any crimes, and always—always—had a pure heart. 

That was until you. 

Heeseung was God's most prized angel. He did anything and everything that was asked of him. Never once defying God’s wishes or commands. His pure heart is the whole reason that when he well, died, he was the first one selected to be God’s second hand. Heeseung lived his whole life dedicated to his church and doing nothing but good. 

But you? Oh, you. You were the first temptation Heeseung ever got. 

“I have a job for you, my angel,” God spoke to him. 

Heeseung knelt down on one knee with one hand over his chest, bowing his head, “Anything for you, my savior.” 

“We have a family that needs a blessing, a pure angel to take away their worries. They are struggling hard. Go down to land and help this family. I trust you with this one, Heeseung. Please.” 

Heeseung didn’t hesitate. Nodding and accepting the job God had to offer him. 

Heeseung stretched his wings, preparing for his flight down to the mortal lands. The trip didn’t take long and the minute the tips of his shoes touched solid land, his whole outfit changed and his wings were hidden. From the bright white robes and dress shoes to tanned brown boots, light blue jeans, and a black button-up dress shirt. It was one of Heeseung’s favorite outfits to wear when he came to the mortal lands. 

He looked around the city he landed in, watching as the mortals passed by him and crossed over the street. The sounds of cars honking and people yelling filled his ears along with the smells of the city. Heeseung smiled, remembering his time as a mortal and seeing how much had changed over the thousand years he’d been away. 

Pushing away the memories of the past, Heeseung starts his walk in the direction God told him this family would be. He shoved his hands in his jeans pockets, smiling brightly as he walked past the mortals, none of them paying him any mind as they went about their normal lives. 

“Fuck!” 

Heeseung chuckled at the curse, shaking his head. He wasn’t used to hearing such vulgar language. His eyes searched the sea of people around him to see where I came from, his curiosity taking over him. 

You were running down the street, hairtye in your mouth as you pulled back your long hair back into a ponytail, quickly pulling the band from your mouth and twisting it in your hair. With how you were rushing, Heeseung knew you were the one he heard the curse come from. You looked down at your watch, letting more curses escape your lips, “I am going to be so fucking late! Holy fucking shit.” 

Heeseung raised his brows at the language, “Jeez…mortals never change.” He wasn’t judging, he understood life as a mortal wasn’t the easiest and everyone had their roles to play. It wasn’t his job to judge anyway, he left that up to God. 

But you kept pushing along, pulling your phone from your pocket and dialing a number, “Pick up, please for the love of fucking God pick up!” 

You were so focused on getting to your destination that you didn’t even realize you ran into Heeseung, smacking your shoulder into his. Heeseung didn’t move an inch at your touch, but you nearly fell to your knees. Heeseung stopped to face you, making sure you were okay but seeing you catch your balance before tumbling over, looking back over your shoulder and snarling at him, “Asshole…” you mumbled under your breath as you still pushed along down the street. 

Heeseung blankly stared at you then shoved his hands back in his pockets and continued to his destination, saying a small prayer for you. 

It didn’t take much longer for Heeseung to reach the small house right outside the city. He took a deep breath and smiled wide, knocking on the door. 

A man opened the door, his eyes puffy and red from crying and now full of confusion looking at Heeseung, “Can I help you?” 

Heeseung smiled even more, “I am here to help you.” 

The man gave him an even more confused look, “Excuse me?” 

A small cough could be heard within the house and soft sobs followed after it. 

Heeseung peeked into the house, “Your child, they’re sick,” the man looked down to the ground, putting his lips into a thin line, “I can help. I was sent here to do so.” 

The man flicked his eyes back up at Heeseung, studying him, “Are you the angel we asked God to send?” 

Heeseung gently nodded. 

He was led into the home and to their child’s bedroom. The mother was hovering over her child, who looked to be about eight. His eyes were tightly closed and his breathing was uneven. He was going to die soon, Heeseung could sense it, could see it. The poor boy still had so much life left to live, and that’s why God sent Heeseung here. To heal this child. 

Heeseung placed a gentle hand on the mother, her pleading eyes staring up at him. Once she realized who he was, she reached for his hand, “Dear angel, save my baby boy.” 

Heeseung held her hand tight and nodded. With his free hand, he placed it against the boy's chest, sending a small ounce of healing power to him, reciting a prayer. The boy's mother and father joined him in the prayer, their cries slowly fading out as the heartbeat and breathing of their child became steady. 

The family thanked Heeseung more times than he could count. His face hurt from the amount of smiling he did during those hours he sat in their home. They even cooked him dinner as a thanks. Once Heeseung walked out of the home, he understood why God chose this family. The boy had much life to give, and his parents were good and pure souls. 

Heeseung walked back into the city, hands behind his back as he stared at the nightlife. Loving all the lights that lit up the city perfectly. The hustling life of mortals laughing with friends and family as they head out for dinner or to even party. 

Hopefully, God won’t mind that I take a small walk before heading back. 

Heeseung walked as far as he could, finally deciding it was time to head back to the golden gates. 

That was until he saw you. 

Heeseung stood at a crosswalk, cars flying by and the wind blowing his silver hair and clothes in all directions. You popped up to his right, your phone once again was in your hands, thumbs pressing away at the screen. 

Time seemed to slow down then. The red hand that illuminated the crosswalk to not cross flashed its light. The cars fast-paced slowed. Heeseung turned his head to look at you, watching as you continued to step from the sidewalk and into the street, not paying any attention. 

His heart raced faster, eyes widening as he looked to his left, seeing a car passing into the next lane without using a blinker and showing no signs of slowing down or even honking their horn at you to show they were there. 

Heeseung acted fast, stepping down from the curb, hands reaching out to grab your shoulders and pull you back against him. Heeseung released his wings, wrapping them around you and twirling you around and back to the sidewalk. 

Time went back to normal, and your heart nearly jumped out of your chest. How stupid could you be to walk out into the street in the middle of rush hour while on your phone? You could have died. That’s when you noticed the white wings wrapped over you along with the strong arms that held you tightly. 

You looked up, resting your head against his chest, seeing it was the man you ran into earlier, seeing him staring back down at you. His chest raised and fell quickly, his warm breath touching your face. He’s an angel. An actual, real-life angel. Ones you’ve only been told about from stories as a child. 

Heeseung pulled his wings back behind him and hid them from the human eye once again. Seeing the other mortals around didn’t take any notice. He continued to stare into your eyes, “You silly little thing.” 

The longer the two of you looked at each other, the more your heart wanted to rip from your chest. He was beautiful. Breathtaking. You felt safe in his arms and without knowing you leaned more against him, Heeseung, as if on instinct, held you tighter against him. 

“Thank you,” you finally managed to say, your cold hands touching his where they sat against your forearms, “For saving me.”

Feeling your cold touch brought Heeseung back to reality. He smiled and released his arms from you, “Try and pay better attention next time, okay?” 

You turned to fully face him. Every fiber of your being wanted to cling to him. Your heart is calling for him. 

Heeseung kept his smile, giving you a small nod, and prepared to turn away. 

“Wait!” you quickly shouted, your hands now grasping at the back of his shirt. Heeseung looked over his shoulder at you, “Let me make it up to you, for saving me. And to apologize for calling you an asshole earlier.” 

Heeseung chuckled, “Being nice to an angel won’t get you into heaven, silly mortal.” 

You bit at the skin on your lip, “I really just want to thank you.” 

Heeseung looked up to the sky and then shrugged. God can wait for a bit longer. 

He followed close behind you until you stood in front of your apartment door and with shaky hands you unlocked the door and went inside, Heeseung trialing in. 

He held his hands behind his back, looking over every inch of your studio apartment. 

“I’m sorry it’s so small…” you whispered, closing the door behind you. 

Heeseung turned to face you, his smile still on his face, “It’s not my place to judge what you do or do not have. Your space is perfect if you make it perfect.” 

Right. You forgot he’s an angel. You kicked out of your shoes, reaching your hands up to unzip your jacket, noticing how quickly he turned around to look away from you. 

You drop your hands to your sides, “Want anything to eat or drink?” you ask quickly walking to your kitchen, “I am not sure what angels eat?” 

Heeseung chuckled, slowly turning to face you, “You don’t seem to be questioning what I am.” 

You gave him a small smile as you pulled two water bottles from your fridge, “I always believed. Believed we humans had someone looking after us, whether that was a God or angels or anything else.” 

Heeseung tilted his head, “What if I was anything else? You let me into your home so willingly.” 

You swallowed, not even taking into conversation that the man in front of you could be the other type of angel. One that was meant to draw you in and kill you, “Are you going to hurt me?” 

Heeseung took a few steps towards you, “I would never.” 

You slowly nodded at him and handed him his water bottle, “I am YN, by the way.” 

Heeseung gently took the water from you, his fingers brushing over yours, “Heeseung. Second hand to God.” 

You widen your eyes, you weren’t just dealing with an angel, but you were dealing with God’s TOP angel. 

Heeseung stared at you, “Something wrong, YN?” 

You shook your head, “You’re just…beautiful.” you didn’t know where that came from or why you even spoke those words from your mouth. 

His heart picked up its pace, and his ears started to burn red. He took steps away from you and finally took sips of his water. 

Heeseung thought you were beautiful too, a little silly mortal, but beautiful nevertheless. His heart was pulling to you and he needed to leave soon and quickly. 

He cleared his throat, “You wanted to thank me, but that’s not necessary. I was simply doing my job.” 

You set your water down on the table, “You saved my life, I need to thank you somehow.” 

Heeseung looked at your water bottle, watching how the droplet fell down the plastic and touched the wood of the table. He sat his bottle down beside yours, “Tell me your thanks then, I must return soon.” 

You didn’t know what came over you or what you were even thinking. All you knew was you were now standing before Heeseung, looking up into his brown eyes.

Heeseung stared back down into your eyes, loving the way their color shined under the light of your kitchen. You stood on your tiptoes, placing your hands on his shoulders. 

“YN,” he whispered, his hands now on your biceps, pulling your feet back flat to the floor, “I can’t accept that.” 

“Just one,” you whisper back, once again standing on your tiptoes, becoming inches away from his face. 

Heeseung’s lips parted, frozen in place as he watched you move closer. You brushed your nose against him, slowly closing your eyes as your lips touched together. 

Heeseung kept still as you held your lips to his, his heart threatening to rip from his chest. But once you pulled away, he was pulling you back. 

His hands moved from your biceps to your face, keeping you in place as he kissed you back. Lips moved together as if he’d never kissed someone before. 

Heeseung had his fair share of kisses when he was mortal, but none of them felt like yours do. Tasting so sweet and addicting. You kissed him back with the same amount of passion he was giving you, roaming your hands from his shoulders to his neck, fingers tangling in the silver strands of his hair. 

You don’t know if it was you or Heeseung who deepened the kiss, all concepts of time and the world around you were out the window at his touch. At the way his hands slid from your face to your hips. At how your body was pressed so close to his and how you were now pressed against the wall of your apartment. 

It was just kissing. You two were just making out and nothing else. But you wanted more, so much more. Heeseung too, wanted more of you. He couldn’t get enough. He rocked his hips against yours, his growing hard cock rubbing you just in the right way that your lips released from his to softly moan. 

Heeseung was off you within seconds of hearing that lewd, sweet sound come from your mouth. 

He pressed his back against the door, palming the door in hopes of getting his hands to stop shaking as he pants to catch his breath. 

You wrapped your arms around yourself, “I’m sorry.” 

Heeseung glances up at you, his pupils blown out and filled with the want he has for you. You wanted to run to him, pull him back into you. But the moment his wings, his oh-so-beautiful wings, appeared from behind him, you knew your time with him was over. 

“We can’t see each other again,” Heeseung quickly says, turning and reaching for the door handle. 

“Why?!” you quickly asked, pushing yourself off the wall, “I want to see you again.” 

Heeseung flung the door open and rushed to the railing, “I can’t sin. You’re too tempting.” You stood in the doorway, watching as he climbed the railing, stretching his wings out. He glanced behind him, taking one last long look at you, feeling his heartbreaking, “Goodbye, silly mortal.” 

And then he was gone. He shot into the sky so far and fast you didn’t have time to blink, “Goodbye, Heeseung.” 

—

Heeseung kneeled at the altar, bringing his hands together, and doing his daily prayers and offerings. Pushing every thought of you out of his mind. 

It’s been days since he left you. Days since he felt the warmth of your body against his. How your lips tasted and moved against his own. How you made his body feel. The things he wanted to do to you…the thoughts that ran through his head about you. 

Heeseung squeezed his eyes, doing everything he could to shove the thought of you down and away. To forget about you and what had happened. He couldn’t have you no matter what. Angels and mortals can’t be together anyway. It was forbidden. Angels' jobs are to protect, provide guidance, to watch over, and ensure the safety of the mortals. To not intervene and only to do so when it’s necessary. Everything about you was against the rules. He couldn’t have relationships with you. 

Heeseung stood from the altar, turning to see his brothers standing behind him, “My apologies,” he said to the six of them, “I took a bit longer this morning. Please take your turn.” 

He stepped aside, watching as the youngest and newest angel in their ranks took to the alter first. 

“What took you so long to return the other night, brother?” Niki, the youngest, asked as he placed his hands together and knelt, “We missed you at dinner.” 

Heeseung placed his hands behind his back, “I was sent on a job. The family I helped offered me food as a thanks.” 

Sunoo and Sunghoon knelt down beside Niki, copying the prayers. 

Jay and Jake kept their eyes on Heeseung, their eyes telling Heeseung everything he needed to know: that they knew where he was that night. 

Jungwon gave Heeseung a dimpled smile as he knelt beside the others, “It was very nice of them to return their thanks in dinner for you. Make sure to keep contact with them. It would be the right thing to do.” 

Heeseung nodded at the younger, “Of course. Already plan to.” 

He looked back at Jay and Jake, giving them a small nod and walking past them. 

“We know,” was all Jay said in a whisper only he, Jake, and Heeseung could hear. 

Heeseung stopped a few steps behind them, keeping his hands behind his back and head held high, “I know.” 

“Only Jay and I,” Jake added, his Aussie accent coming out in a hushed tone, “You know the rules.” 

“I know,” Heeseung said again, “I saved her life and she thanked me the way she felt fit.” 

“That’s not what we are worried about though,” Jay sighed, keeping his eyes locked on the younger ones in front of him, folding his wings tightly to his back. 

Heeseung knew the two of them were being nosey. That they peeked down onto the mortal lands and saw everything that happened. 

“Will you tell on me?” Heeseung asked, keeping himself held high. 

Jake chuckled, “Of course not,” he finally turned to look at Heeseung, staring at the back of his head, “You just have to promise to never see her again.” 

Heeseung closed his eyes, “I know the rules. I appreciate you two looking after me, but I am the eldest angel, the most trusted, and I wouldn’t break that trust. Not to God, or you six.” 

“We want you to promise,” Jay mumbled, “Say you promise.” 

“I promise.” 

Jay and Jake nodded, joining their brothers at the alter, leaving Heeseung standing alone. He walked out of the chapel and into the garden. He hated having to make that promise, but knowing it was necessary to make. Not just for his brother's peace of mind, but also his own. 

The day went on like normal with his normal scheduled things. It was enough to distract him away from the conversation that morning with Jay and Jake. Enough to keep his mind off and away from you. 

That was until night fell and he returned to his room with his back pressed to his shower wall, head leaned over, and letting the water slip down his head and face. 

Heeseung reached his fingers up to his lips, rubbing the pads over them, remembering the way your lips felt pressed against him. He ran his hands from the back of his neck to his shoulders, touching every inch of his upper half that your hands touched. 

Heeseung started to pant, his heart beating faster at the memories of you pressed against him. The moan that left your vulgar mouth. The pulsing pressure Heessung felt on his lower half was making him shake. He wrapped his hand around himself, slowly stroking up and back down. Biting his lips to keep any noise from coming out. 

This wasn’t like Heeseung. This wasn’t his normal behavior. And if he got found out…it would be over for him. It would have been over for him a long time ago if he was caught with you that night. Or if he continued any further. The moment Heeseung would have touched you inappropriately, or slid himself inside you…

Heeseung’s breath hitched, his thumb circling the tip. His eyes were glued to how red and angry it looked, how badly he wanted to feel your hand in place of his. 

He quickly let go of himself, turning the warm water from hot to cold, his body shivering from the new temperature and removing his thoughts about you. 

Even after his shower and now lying in bed, his thoughts trailed to you and the small time he spent with you. His heart ached, begging to hear your voice one more time. He forced himself to sleep. Forced himself to wake up that next morning and go about his normal schedule. To go back to bed and repeat over and over. 

Heeseung broke the minute he landed back in the city, sneaking out of heaven for the night and landing himself at your front door. His shaky hands banging on your door. 

You jolted awake, angrily stomping your way to the front door, “What the fuck do you want it’s almost two in the morning!” you snapped pulling the door open to see Heeseung standing before you, his wings quickly pulled tightly to his back as he pushed himself inside, his hands immediately cupping your face and lips attaching to yours. 

“Hee—Heeseung,” you said his name in between kisses, eventually pressing your hands to his chest and pushing him. Heeseung pulled back, looking at you with so much worry, “What are you doing here?” You asked. 

Heeseung slid his hands from your face to your arms, thumbs rubbing at your skin, “Do you want me to go?” 

“No!” you said a bit too hastily, fingers gripping at the fabric of his dark blue shirt, “I’ve missed you so much please don’t go.” 

It was true, you missed him more than you wanted to admit and the weeks you spent away from him were torture. You barely knew him, knew next to nothing about him actually. But something about him pulled you in. The moment you felt his arms and wings wrap around you, your heart was his for the taking. 

You did enough research after he left about why he couldn’t stay with you. Why he couldn’t be doing this with you. He’s breaking enough rules as it is to be here with you right now. 

Heeseung kissed you again, letting his wings drop to the floor, “I’ve missed you so much,” he said between each kiss, “You’re so darn tempting.” 

You giggled at his words, wrapping your arms around his neck, “I thought you couldn’t sin,” you teased him. 

Heeseung left your lips to kiss down your neck, “Kissing isn’t a sin. As long as I don’t touch you or have sex with you…” he brushed his lips back up to your jaw, “Just don’t tempt me to do anything but kiss you.” 

You did as the angel told you. Doing nothing but letting him kiss you and keeping your hands to yourself even if it was killing you to not touch him. Heeseung kept his hands on your face, thumbs gently rubbing back and forth across your jawline, slowly walking you to your bed and laying you down. Heeseung climbed in over you, gently laying his body down on top of yours, wanting to be as close as legally possible for him to be. 

He didn’t move, no matter how hard he got. He didn’t touch you anywhere but your arms and face, even if his hands were screaming to touch every inch of you. All he did was keep his lips connected to yours, kissing you so gently and softly until both of yours and his lips were swollen. 

You fell asleep in his arms but awoke to an empty apartment but a handwritten letter was on your kitchen table, Heeseung telling you he would be back when he could. 

And Heeseung kept true to his word. He always came back to you. He always held you close in his arms and kissed you gently. Heeseung fell hard in love with you. No amount of time spent with you was ever enough, not when he had to go back to Heaven before anyone noticed he was gone. Do his normal duties and schedule, wait a couple of days, then crash land back at your door. 

Each time was harder than the last. You became his every thought and wish. And Heeseung was slowly starting to lose himself when it came to you. His immortal life started to become more mortal again being with you. Mostly with how much your existence was starting to tempt him more and more. 

Heeseung was slowly starting to break the rules even more than he already was. Brushing his hands over your breasts slowly, tangling his fingers in your hair, rubbing his cock against your heat, and shoving his tongue down your throat. He would undress you, undress himself, leaving you in nothing but your bra and panties and him in his boxers, trying so hard to keep his eyes on your face and not trace every inch of your almost bare body. 

You were the devil that sat on his shoulder, breaking him away from who he really was. Never once in his life, before he died and after, was he ever faced with temptation like this. 

You made it so hard for him to behave. Not when he’d hear your sweet moans fill his ears as you buck your hips against his to feel his length and run your hands down every inch of his body. 

Heeseung nearly lost his mind when your hand wrapped around him for the first time, feeling how your fingers pumped him so slowly and oh so so good. 

“Angels don’t act like this, darling,” Heeseung whispered in your ear as your hand squeezed him, “You’re such a devil to me.”

You kissed his neck, stroking his cock a bit faster, “I’m just a devil in disguise,” you teased him, knowing full well Heeseung was loving this banter. 

“I love you,” he kissed your ear, rocking himself in your hand, “I love you so much.” 

Heeseung had you stop before things got too out of control. Redressing himself and you before giving you a final kiss goodnight and leaving. 

You always hated to watch him go. To watch as your angel flew away into the night and having to count down the days until you could see him again. 

—

Heeseung stood before the altar, his six brothers surrounding behind him along with the other angels of heaven. He kept his hands pressed behind his back, “You called for me, my savior?” 

God hummed, “We have a lot to discuss, my angel.” 

Heeseung glanced around at his brothers, taking note of their facial expressions. Then looked at the other angels, they wore the same looks, just not as hurt as his brothers. 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what this was about. Heeseung knew. His luck ran out. 

“What would you like to discuss?” Heeseung asked, giving a smile. 

“About your wrongdoings.” 

Heeseung’s smile faded, dropping his kind and happy act. He had to admit, he no longer was happy being here in heaven. Not when his heart was on mortal lands. Heaven was back on Earth. Not in these clouds. Not anymore. 

“Are you wanting me to confess my sins, my lord?” Heeseung kept his head lifted, straightening up his posture. 

“Yes,” God said with a sigh, “And why you betrayed me.” 

Heeseung pulled his wings tighter to his back, squeezing his hands together, “I am in love with her.” 

His six brothers closed their eyes tightly, tilting their heads down towards the white morale floor, hands in fists. The other angels gasped at the confession. 

“State the rest of your sins, Lee Heeseung.” 

Heeseung lifted his head up higher, “I’ve touched her. Let her touch me. Slept beside her and held her in my arms. Rubbed my body against hers until she was moaning.” 

The gasps of the other angels grew louder, their chattering voices echoing across the chapel. 

“But you never slept with her, have you?” 

Heeseung smirked, “No, I haven’t had sex with her. But I want to.”

More gasps filled the chapel. Jay now appearing at Heeseung’s side, his hand gripping his shoulder, “Stop talking man!” 

Heeseung shook his brother off him, “Go and stand back where you were, Jay.” 

“Jongseong,” God said quickly, “Please.” 

Jay slowly walked back, standing close to Jake. 

“What has she done to you? My angel? Why did you fall into her temptation when she’s a devil.” 

Heeseung tensed his face and body. Wings pulled even tighter against him to keep them from shaking out of pure anger, “She’s a human being. Nothing even close to those damned demons.” 

More gasps from the other angels. 

“You will watch your mouth when speaking to me.” 

Heeseung chuckled, looking down to the floor, “My apologies.” 

Heeseung thinned his lips in a line. He was filled with so much conflict. This place wasn’t his home, not when you were down below waiting for him. Heeseung loved his time here, loved helping mortals who needed him, and loved his six brothers and even the jobs and duties he had here. Spending time with you did change him, making him want more out of his immortal life than to just exist. He wanted to live. He wanted to love. He wanted life with you. 

Heeseung held his head high again, relaxing his body, “I confess to all my sins. My thoughts I’ve had of her, the things I want to do to and with her and I confess to betraying you and your trust, my savior.” 

God sighed, silence filling the room. Heeseung knew what was next. His punishment. 

“Jay, Jake, Sungoon, Sunoo, Jungwon, and Niki,” God called for them, “Stand by Heeseung.” 

Heeseung watched his six brothers stand closer to him, seeing the looks on their faces as God spoke to them one one-on-one in their minds, telling them exactly what they needed to do. 

Niki and Jungwon held his legs down, while Sunghoon and Sunoo stretched his arms out and held a death grip on them. 

Heeseung’s body shook, pure fear covering his face when he felt Jay’s and Jake’s hands touch his wings, “No,” Heeseung whispered, fighting as much as he could to pull his wings back, “Not my wings.” 

Jay gritted his teeth as he forced Heeseung’s left wing out, stretching it out to its full span. Jake did the same, biting down hard on his lip and breaking the skin. 

“This is your punishment, Lee Heeseung,” God said with a stern voice, “You lose your place here. And I’m taking back your wings I granted you.” 

Heeseung pushed and pulled at his brothers, doing anything he could to get them off him but their grips held hard. 

“Heeseung, please,” Sunghoon begged as he gripped his wrist harder, “Stop.” 

“Hyung please,” Sunoo begged. 

But Heeseung kept fighting to break free. 

“ENOUGH!” 

Everyone stood still as the room shook with God’s shout. Sweat rolled down Heessung’s face, his eyes piercing through everyone surrounding him.

“Take his wings. Now.”

Heeseung smirked, “To hell with all this,” he whispered. 

Jay and Jake looked at each other, their tears swelling up in their eyes as God whispered in their minds to take Heeseung’s wings. To rip them from his body. 

They pulled and Heeseung shouted. His voice echoed off the walls as Jay and Jake pulled with their full strength. Sunghoon and Sunoo kept their grips on his wrists tight and same with Jungwon and Niki at his legs, holding on for dear life. 

It was killing Jay to have to do this, to watch his own hands pull his older brother's wing right out of his body. He could only imagine the pain Heeseung was feeling. And Jake? He was in tears. He could feel inch by inch of Heeseung’s right wing stripping from his back. He could already see the blood spilling onto his white robes and onto the floor. Seeing Heeseung fling his head back and forth in a rage as his voice bounced off the walls and echoed throughout the whole chapel. The pained faces his other six brothers had at having to witness this. 

Jake wished he could turn back time, wished he could have stopped Heeseung from sneaking out. Stopped the angel who caught Heeseung dropping down to the mortal lands and kept him from getting nosey and running his mouth to God. But it was all too late. Heeseung would get his wings stripped from him and pushed down to the Earth to fall. All Jake could do now was pray he survived long enough to make it to you. 

Heeseung clenched his jaw as the last bit of his wings was stripped from his body, his back spilling blood and muscles aching from the loss of where his wings once were. His beautiful white feathered wings lost all their life and slumped in Jay’s and Jake’s hands, blood dripping down them. 

His brothers stepped away from him, watching as Heeseung fell to the floor, too dizzy from the blood loss. 

“You will now fall,” God sighed, “You will be stripped of your immortality and fall to Earth. You will crawl to your lover and show her where her sins got you.” 

Heeseung weakly smirked, eyes closing, “Gladly.” 

Heeseung didn’t know who picked him up by his arms and dragged him out of the chapel, he just knew it wasn’t any of his brothers. The grip the other two angles had on him was proof enough that it wasn’t any of the ones he loved. 

The six of them stood in the chapel still, eyes locked on Heeseung's wingless back, watching the blood pool from the wounds and stain his white robes and the marble floor. 

They watched helplessly as Heeseung was pushed off the edge. 

—

You heard a faint knocking on your door. At first, you thought you might have gone crazy and heard things. But once the knocking kept happening and then you heard something fall, you quickly rushed to the door, opening it to find Heeseung still in his white-stained robes. His back was pressed against the railing and his skin was pale. 

“Heeseung, oh my god!” you dropped down to his side, cupping your hands to his face, “What happened?!” 

Heeseung was barely able to hold his eyes open, “My wings…they stripped my wings from me.” 

You bit at the skin on your cheek, quickly standing back to your feet and pulling him up with all the strength you had, pulling his arm over your shoulders and gripping your arm around his waist, pulling him inside your apartment. 

Heeseung barely made it a couple of steps in before falling to his knees, you losing your grip on him and your eyes finally landing on the holes in his robes and the blood that still continued to push out. 

“Heeseung,” you fell back to his side, “You need to get to a hospital.” 

“And tell them what?” he breathed out, fingers gripping the carpet as he pants, “That I am a fallen angel who got their wings forcefully torn from his body?” 

Heeseung wasn’t trying to be snappy or rude, truly. The pain was just so immense he couldn’t control anything. 

You sat back on your heels, watching the love of your life suffer. This was your fault. It was all your fault. You’re the one who asked him to come home with you that fateful day. You’re the one who kissed him. Who tempted him. You pulled him in and touched him. You did this to him. 

Heeseung could practically hear your brain turning over and over. He pushed himself to his side, reaching his hand up to grip your chin, forcing you to look at him, “This is not your fault, you hear me? Not even close.” 

The tears swelled in your eyes now, falling into his touch as he cupped his hand to your cheek, “Heeseung…” 

“Baby,” he whispered, “I need you to do as I say, okay? My immortality hasn’t been taken from me yet, I will heal a bit fast but I need my wounds covered and taken care of, can you do that for me?” 

You nodded, placing a kiss on his palm. Heeseung told you exactly what you needed to do. Starting with tearing his robes off his body and ripping it into a big enough strand to be wrapped around him. Then using any medical alcohol you had in the apartment and pour it onto his wounds and hold a towel to them. It killed you having to press the towels to his wounds, feeling the massive hole where his beautiful wings once were…the pain Heeseung must be feeling…

But you took care of him. Doctoring his wounds to the best of your ability and doing as he instructed you. You wrapped the pieces of what was left of his robe around his chest and back, tying it as tightly as you could. 

You helped him to your bed, steadying him up as he sat down. Heeseung wasn’t as pale as earlier, but you could still see the pained expression. 

“Hey,” He whispered, cupping your face, “Stop thinking whatever it is.” 

You looked away from him, “I caused this. I tempted you.” 

Heeseung shook his head, “Baby, look at me,” you looked up at him, “I did this of my own free will,” he slid his hands from your face and down to your waist, “I knew the consequences, and did it anyway,” he squeezed your waist, “I love you. I gave up heaven for you.” 

You wanted to fight him, to yell in his face about giving up eternity for you. But you also couldn’t help but feel so loved at this moment. That this angel found love with you and was willing to give up everything for you. 

Heeseung kissed you, pulling you between his legs, and deepening the kiss. 

“Heeseung,” you said, pulling away from him, “You’re injured, you need to rest.” 

“No,” he shook his head, pulling you down into the bed and towering over you, “I’ve waited,” he said, his eyes growing lustful and his fingers tearing into your shirt and ripping it in half, pulling it off your body, “so damn long,” sliding his hands down to your shorts, looping his fingers in and pulling them down, taking your panties down with, “to have you like this.” 

Heeseung kicked your legs apart with his knees, leaning up straight to unbutton and unzip his black slacks, wiggling them off his body, leaving him in his boxers. You pulled yourself up on your elbows, opening your mouth to protest that this could wait. But Heeseung wasn’t having any of it. He connected his lips back to yours, his hands cupping your breasts and loving the way you moaned into his mouth. 

“Oh hell baby,” he said between kisses, “I love how these feel between my fingers.” 

You kept your lips attached to his as if your life depended on it, bucking your hips up onto his. 

Heeseung trailed his lips down to your neck, squeezing your breasts then sliding them behind to unhook your bra, sending the fabric off somewhere in the apartment. 

Heeseung lifted himself back up, tearing down at your bare body. So perfect. So beautiful. So his. 

“You’re so perfect,” he whispered, connecting his forehead to yours, tracing his fingertips down your body and stopping at your cunt, slowly pushing his fingers in, “So wet,” he groaned, rubbing his hard cock against your thigh, “Hmm I can’t wait to feel your cunt wrapped around me.” 

You giggled at him, “Angels don’t say such dirty things,” you teased. 

“Yeah?” he smirked, plunging his fingers in and out faster, “Angels don’t finger this good, do they?” 

You squirm underneath him, rolling your hips in sync with his fingers. Pushing your head back into your pillows and aches your back. 

You gasped out at the loss of his fingers, watching as he pulled the remainder of his clothing off him. His hard cock was red and angry. Precum dripping from his tip.

Heeseung gripped both your thighs, pushing them to your chest, “Angels don’t do what I am fixing to do to you,” he smirked, lining his cock up to your entrance. With a deep breath, he pushed himself inside you. Heeseung’s moans fill the apartment along with your own. 

His grip on your thighs tightened, his nails digging into the skin. He pulled his hips back and pushed forward. Picking up his pace and pounding into you like a madman. His pupils were blown out and his breaths were unsteady. This. This was what he gave up heaven for. To feel your cunt wrapped around his cock. This was the real heaven. 

“See, darling,” he groans, throwing his head back, “Angels don’t fuc-fuck this good,” he looked back down at you, loving your fucked out expression and how your hands gripped your bedsheets. Mouth slack as sweet moans spill from your lips. It turned you on so bad hearing Heeseung talk this way. To feel him so balls deep in your pussy, “Thank god I am not an angel, huh?” 

Heeseung was the definition of looks like an angel but fucks like a demon. With the way he pistoned into you, the grip on your thighs, the dirty words leaving his mouth that you’ve never heard him say before tonight…Heeseung was never meant to stay an angel. 

You continued to moan out with each of his hard thrusts, your core growing tight and threatening to snap at any moment, “Fuck you feel so good,” he breathes, “Moan my name baby,” he snaked his fingers to your clit, rubbing it aggressively, “Cum around my cock, I know you want to.” 

You bit your lip, arching your back more at his touch, jaw going slack as you chanted his name. Chanting his name as if he were god and you were his follower. Your core snapping, your orgasm releasing around him and onto your bedsheets, “Fuck yes, baby,” he smiles, pumping himself even faster inside you, “Can’t believe I’ve waited this long to fuck you. Should have done it the night we met. Should have fucked this cunt, should have ruined you. Claimed you as mine from the beginning. Oh fuck—“

Heeseung’s body shuddered, cock twitching, “I’m fixing to cum baby,” he bit his lip, looking down and watching how his cock slides in and out, in and out, “Oh dear god, I’m cumming. Oh fuck I’m cumming.” 

He kept his eyes locked on your pussy as he came, watching how his seed leaked from your hole as he continued to pump inside of you, milking his cock between your walls. 

Heeseung fell on top of your body, his head resting on your chest as he steadied himself and caught his breath, wrapping his arms underneath you. 

Heeseung spent his whole life being good and doing good. Never once being selfish or doing any selfish acts. Until you. You pulled this high-ranking angel down to his knees. Making him for once, want to be selfish. To do something for himself. To live freely and be free. To love and fuck you with every ounce of his being. 

He was so in love with you and you were so worth getting his wings taken away from him. It's so worth his immortality being stripped. 

Heeseung looked up at you, “Want to know a secret?” You tilted your head at him, waiting for him to continue, “I knew it would happen eventually. I wasn’t truly happy up there. My brothers and God knew it too. It was a matter of time before I fucked up and got caught,” he leaned himself up on his elbows, “I wanted it to happen. Because I wanted to be with you so bad. I knew they’d strip my wings. Take my immortality. Yeah, I enjoyed my wings and being immortal, but I wanted you so much more than that.” 

You cupped his face, “My fallen angel,” 

He placed a kiss on your lips, “I love you, YN.” Heeseung wrapped your legs around his waist, slowly moving again, “And I so love fucking this pussy.” 

You giggled, bracing your hands onto his biceps, “I love you too, even if you gave everything up for me.” 

Heeseung rested his forehead on yours, slowly fucking into you, “And I’d do it over and over again, all for you.”

—perm taglist: @alvojake @ikeuverse @woniebae @shawnyle @kangnina @jwnghyuns @in-somnias-world @zyvlxqht @aaa-sia @wonniethepoo @addictedtohobi @eneiyri @sparklovespink @skzenhalove @fakeuwus @cherry-park @vousty @ladyartemesia @criminalyun @cmoundiamante @enhaverse713586 @wondipity @lhsvibez @belowbun @jaeyunq @rikizm @kaykay11sworld @pockettwinzz @vixialuvs @seunghancore @enha-cafe @ohdeerhee @sunpov @zeeloveshee @hxxsxxng @moonrisearies @brownsugarbaybee

[imonanotherlebel]

Passion - Jacaerys Velaryon

Jacaerys Velaryon x Fem Reader

Not proof - read.

------------------------------

Genre : Romance, Smut

Warnings: Smut, Minors DNI, kissing, penetrative sex

------------------------------

The sky was painted with hues of amber and rose as the sun dipped below the horizon, casting a warm, golden light over Dragonstone. The sea breeze carried the scent of salt and brine, mingling with the distant roars of dragons as they flew overhead. You stood at the edge of the castle's courtyard, your gaze fixed on the horizon, where Vermax's silhouette was visible against the fading light.

Vermax had grown considerably over the years, his once-sleek form now imposing and powerful. His scales shimmered like molten bronze in the fading light, and his wingspan cast a wide shadow over the courtyard. Once only able to carry a single rider, he was now more than large enough to comfortably saddle two, a testament to the bond he shared with his rider and the strength he had gained over time.

"Are you ready, my love?" Jacaerys's voice broke the tranquility, and you turned to see him approaching, a soft smile playing on his lips. He was already dressed in his riding leathers, the Targaryen crest emblazoned on his chest. His dark curls framed his handsome face, and the sight of him made your heart swell with affection.

"Always," you replied, smiling as you took his outstretched hand. He helped you up onto Vermax's saddle, settling you in front of him so that you were nestled against his chest. The dragon's scales were warm beneath you, and you could feel the rumble of Vermax's breathing as Jacaerys climbed up behind you.

"Soves, Vermax!" with Jace's command, Vermax spread his massive wings, lifting off from the ground with a powerful beat that sent a rush of exhilaration through you. You leaned back against Jacaerys, feeling the solid strength of his body as he wrapped his arms around you, holding you close as Vermax soared into the sky.

The wind whipped through your hair, the thrill of flight filling your veins as you looked out over the vast expanse of the sea. The world seemed to stretch out infinitely below you, and for a moment, it felt as though you and Jacaerys were the only two people in existence, free and untethered.

Jacaerys's breath was warm against your ear as he leaned in, his voice soft and intimate. "I've always loved seeing the world from up here, but it's even more beautiful with you snuggled close to my chest."

You smiled, tilting your head back to meet his gaze. "I feel the same way, Jace. There's nowhere I'd rather be than here, with you."

He pressed a kiss to your temple, his lips lingering against your skin as Vermax banked gently to the left, beginning the descent back to Dragonstone. The island's familiar silhouette came into view, and soon enough, Vermax landed gracefully in the courtyard, the thrill of the ride still buzzing in your veins.

As you dismounted, your two young children of five and three came running out from the castle, their excited giggles filling the air. "Mama! Papa!" they called, their small feet pattering against the stone as they rushed to greet you.

Jacaerys scooped them both up into his arms, laughing as they clung to him with wide grins. "Did you enjoy watching us ride, my little dragons?" he asked, his tone teasing.

"Yes! Did Vermax fly really high?" Your son, who was the oldest, asked, his eyes wide with wonder.

"He did," you replied, ruffling his dark curls. "One day, you'll be riding him with us."

Your daughter of three clung to your leg, looking up at you with wide eyes. "Can I fly with Vermax too, Mama?"

"Of course, sweetling," you said, crouching down to press a kiss to her forehead. "But not until you're a little older. Then you can ride your own dragon, too."

"Mine own dragon is small. I want to ride Vermax!", the little boy exclaimed, his eyes twinkling. Your daughter giggled, copying her brother's enthusiasm towards your husband's dragon.

Jacaerys set the children down, watching as they scampered off to play, their laughter echoing through the courtyard. He turned to you, his expression softening as he took your hand in his. "Looks like they've got a lot to do. Shall we retire for the evening as well, my princess?" he asked, his voice low and suggestive.

Your heart skipped a beat at the look in his eyes, and you nodded, your own desire mirroring his. "Lead the way, my prince."

He took your hand, leading you through the castle's corridors to your chambers. The moment the door closed behind you, the air between you shifted, crackling with a familiar intensity that had only grown stronger over the years. Jacaerys wasted no time, pulling you into a searing kiss that left you breathless, his hands roaming over your body with a possessive urgency.

You moaned into his mouth, your fingers threading through his hair as you tugged him closer, the heat between you building with every touch, every kiss. His hands found the ties of your riding leathers, and with practiced ease, he began to undress you, his movements quick but deliberate, as though he couldn't bear to be apart from you for a moment longer.

Once your clothes were discarded, Jacaerys guided you to the bed, laying you down gently before stripping off his own leathers. His eyes raked over your naked form, a dark hunger burning in their depths as he crawled over you, his body pressing down against yours with a delicious weight.

His lips found your neck, trailing hot, open-mouthed kisses down to your collarbone, his hands mapping out every curve of your body as though he were committing you to memory all over again. The familiarity of his touch, the way he knew exactly how to make you gasp and moan, only heightened your arousal, and you arched into him, your body begging for more.

"Jace," you breathed, your voice trembling with need as you felt him pressing against your thigh, hot and hard. "Please..."

His response was a low growl against your skin as he positioned himself between your thighs, his lips capturing yours in a heated kiss as he slowly pushed into you. The sensation of him filling you was both familiar and exhilarating, the perfect blend of pleasure and connection that came from years of loving each other so intimately.

You moaned into his mouth, your hands clutching at his shoulders as he began to move, his thrusts deep and slow, each one drawing out a wave of pleasure that left you trembling beneath him. The way he filled you, the way your bodies fit together so perfectly, was nothing short of bliss, and you could feel the tension coiling tighter and tighter in your core with every thrust.

Jacaerys's pace quickened, his breathing growing more ragged as he drove into you with increasing intensity, his hands gripping your hips to hold you in place as he took you higher and higher. The room was filled with the sounds of your shared pleasure, the slapping of skin against skin, the breathless moans and gasps that escaped your lips as you chased the peak of ecstasy.

It wasn't long before you felt yourself on the edge, your body trembling with the force of your impending release. Jacaerys could feel it too, his thrusts growing more erratic as he neared his own climax, his lips pressing wet kisses to your neck, your collarbone, anywhere he could reach.

With one final, deep thrust, you were both sent over the edge, your body convulsing around him as waves of pleasure crashed over you, your release washing over you in a flood of sensation. Jacaerys followed you over the edge, his body tensing as he spilled his seed into you, his hands clutching at your hips as he rode out the last shudders of his release.

For a moment, the world seemed to still, the only sound in the room the ragged breaths of Jacaerys and yours. Jacaerys slowly lowered himself down beside you, pulling you into his arms as he pressed a tender kiss to your forehead, his hands stroking gently over your hair as you both caught your breath.

......................

The light started to dim through the windows as you lay entwined in Jacaerys's arms, the warmth of his body a comforting presence beside you. The evening had been one of passion and love, a reminder of the deep bond you shared as husband and wife.

Jacaerys pulled your face closer once more, fingers entangled in your hair. He started to kiss you softly, his neediness growing once more.

A soft knock on the door pulled you from your passionate moment, and Jacaerys groaned, burying his face in your neck as if to shield himself from the inevitable intrusion.

"Go away, Luke," Jacaerys called out, his voice muffled against your skin.

The door creaked open, and Lucerys peeked in, a mischievous grin on his face. "Mother says dinner is ready, and she sent me to fetch you. Or should I tell her you're otherwise occupied?"

You laughed, swatting at Jacaerys's shoulder playfully as he groaned again. "We'll be down in a moment, Luke," you said, trying to suppress your own amusement.

"Take your time," Lucerys replied with a wink before closing the door behind him, leaving you and Jacaerys alone once more.

Just as you were about to settle back into Jacaerys's embrace, the door flew open again, this time with Rhaena and Joffrey barging in, both grinning like fools. "Are you two planning to stay in bed?" Rhaena teased, crossing her arms with an exaggerated sigh.

"Seems like it," Joffrey added with a wink, making you and Jacaerys exchange amused glances.

Jacaerys sighed, rolling onto his back as he gazed up at the ceiling, a satisfied smile tugging at the corners of his lips. "I suppose we should join the others before they send the whole castle to drag us out."

You chuckled, leaning down to press a kiss to his chest before reluctantly sliding out of bed. As you began to dress, you couldn't help but steal glances at your husband, admiring the way his muscles flexed as he stretched, the marks of your passion still visible on his skin. The sight sent a thrill through you, a reminder of the love and desire you shared.

Jacaerys finally rose from the bed, pulling on his own clothes with a lazy ease that only made him more irresistible. He caught your eye and smirked, clearly aware of the effect he had on you. "Don't look at me like that, or we might never leave this room," he teased, his tone light and playful.

You rolled your eyes, but couldn't suppress a smile as you finished dressing. "As tempting as that sounds, we do have responsibilities, my love."

He sighed dramatically, but the twinkle in his eye gave him away. "Very well, let's face them together."

Hand in hand, you made your way to the dining hall, where the rest of the family was already gathered. The children were seated at the table, eagerly digging into their dinner, while Rhaenyra and Daemon conversed quietly at the head of the table. Lucerys, Rhaena, Baela, and Joffrey were seated nearby, their faces lighting up as they spotted you and Jacaerys entering the room.

"There they are!" Lucerys exclaimed, a teasing grin on his face. "We were starting to think you'd decided to skip dinner altogether."

Jacaerys chuckled, squeezing your hand as you both took your seats. "Not today, Luke. We wouldn't want to miss out on Mother's famous lemon cakes."

Rhaenyra glanced over at you both, a knowing smile tugging at her lips. "I trust you two had a good restful evening?"

The slight arch of her brow made you blush, but you managed to maintain your composure. "Very restful, Your Grace," you replied, trying to keep your tone light.

Daemon smirked, clearly enjoying the exchange. "Good to see the young ones are still keeping the fire alive."

Rhaenyra shot him a look, but there was amusement in her eyes as well. "Let them be, Daemon. They're allowed their moments of happiness."

As dinner continued, the atmosphere remained light and filled with laughter, the warmth of family, and the bonds that had been forged through love and loyalty. Your children chattered excitedly about their plans for the next day, while Jacaerys stole occasional glances at you, his eyes filled with an affection that made your heart swell.

After dinner, the family began to disperse, each member heading off to their chambers. As you stood to leave, Joffrey approached with a sly grin on his face. "If you two ever need a babysitter for the little ones, I'm sure Lucerys and I could be persuaded," he offered, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

You laughed, swatting his arm playfully. "I'll keep that in mind, Joffrey. But don't think I didn't notice how you conveniently avoided the last time we asked."

Lucerys joined in on the teasing. "I'm sure Vermax could help keep them entertained. He's always up for a game of 'Chase the Dragon, isn't he?"

Jacaerys rolled his eyes, but the fond smile on his lips betrayed his amusement. "Just remember, you're the one who has to explain it to Mother if anything goes wrong."

The banter continued as you made your way out of the dining hall. The day had been beautiful. Your heart swelled with happiness and appreciation for your family.

But as you and Jacaerys walked hand in hand through the corridors of Dragonstone, the warmth of his touch and the memory of the evening lingered between you, a silent promise of the passion and love that would continue to burn bright, no matter what the future held. You just knew the passion was not over for the night. The chambers tonight will be....... eventful.

.....................

[pomefioredove]

Hiya! Do you think you could write something romantic and fluffy with Vil? I love him!

hi anon of course! I am so unwell about this man

summary: being friends with vil schoenheit has its perks type of post: fic characters: vil additional info: romantic, reader is gender neutral, reader is not specified to be yuu, FLUFFY, mentions of food, friends to lovers huhuhu, maybe a tiny bit suggestive but also not really? lap-sitting and kissing

Someone should write a guide on how to be friends with Vil Schoenheit.

It did not come as naturally to you as you would have hoped. There were times when he felt like a star in your presence, not the actor kind, but the heavenly body.

Bright, and burning, and millions of miles away. Even as he sat directly across from you.

"You're not eating," he remarks. The comment is not degrading, though it is tinged with curiosity. "Is it bad?"

You haven't even sampled the meal yet- something fancy and expensive that you likely couldn't pronounce. He'd ordered it for you.

"It's okay," you lie.

He either buys your excuse, or ignores it. Either way, he reaches across the gossamer table cloth and switches your plates without asking.

Vil Schoenheit Friendship Survival Manual, rule number one: always assume his judgment is correct, until proven otherwise.

You look down at the plate- some kind of vegetable dish. He urges you on with a nod, lilac eyes fixed firmly on your pleasantly surprised reaction when you take a bite.

Rule number two: his judgment is always correct.

"Better?" he asks, not bothering to finish your food. He'll likely get something else later. "You really shouldn't skip meals. If you were feeling unwell, you should have said so. I would've ordered something lighter for you."

"Sorry. Didn't think of it," you say, taking another bite of his meal, if only to appease him.

You're hesitant to mention that the heavy feeling in your chest wasn't from illness, and so you say nothing more.

"No need to apologize. Here,"

Vil delicately reaches across the table and dabs at the corner of your mouth with his napkin. You hate how light-headed such a simple action makes you feel.

"Better. And don't worry about smudging anything, I have a few new products I'd like to try out on you later,"

Rule number three: always accept his gifts.

"Thanks," you murmur.

You were starting to feel as if you really were ill, the way your entire body warmed in his presence. Vil brought out a feverish sort of stupidity in you that made outings like this a minefield to navigate.

How painfully cliché, you thought. Hopelessly in love with someone far out of your league, with infinite options, none of which you could even hope to catch up to...

It made these evenings together pure torture.

You felt guilty for wishing he wasn't such an amazing friend. Must he insist on showering you in gifts and holding your hand every time you cross the street?

But being in his bedroom is another, dirtier realm of guilt. Vil saw you as a friend. Platonic. Someone he confided in, who he took under his wing. You were allowed to see parts of him no one else had, and yet, you can hardly pay attention to what he's saying because you can't stop thinking about the way his lips look when he speaks.

"Did you understand any of that?" he asks, bending down to your level as you sit on his bed. On his bed. And you had the mind to be thinking about doing romantic things...

Rule number four: speak when spoken to.

"No, sorry, I've just had a lot on my mind lately,"

Vil clicks his tongue and holds a hand to your forehead, feeling for temperature. "And you're sure you're not ill?"

"I'm fine! Just distracted,"

He chuckles, walking across the room to peruse his vanity. "Hm... and what sort of thoughts have got you scatterbrained today?"

You can feel your skin burning again. He could tell, couldn't he? All these weeks of coming undone every time he so much as looks your way couldn't have gone over his head... could they?

Or perhaps he was just used to people staring at him, stumbling over their words every time he spoke. Perhaps you were just another foolish fan who'd gotten to know him before falling in love.

You couldn't help but wish that there was someone or something that would just tell you what to do.

Rule number five: do not fall in love with him.

Vil sits beside you, a small, wooden box in hand.

"I'm supposed to promote these next weekend, but I'm not sure about them, yet," he says, opening the lid to reveal a plethora of lipsticks that likely cost more than your existence. "I'll need your opinion, of course."

"Right," you murmur.

"And I'd like to try them on you, as well,"

"Of course,"

"And you're alright with that?"

You nod. Ever the gentleman, always asking for permission. He's been quite generous with his products lately, giving them away to you like candy. You're almost certain he has a full list of your allergens somewhere.

Vil returns to the vanity, delicately prepping, and then applying the first shade. It's a marvelous, metallic pink, with dark red undertones that make it a regal color. It suits him, and you say as much.

"Oh, you think so? I suppose it does compliment my eyes, although I'd definitely need to pair it with something darker, else it become too overpowering..."

He clicks his tongue, and then turns to look over his shoulder at you.

"Your turn. Come sit,"

There isn't another chair at the vanity, and you take that as your cue to awkwardly stand in front of him until he tells you what to do. He chuckles, amused by some thought of his that he doesn't share aloud.

"What are you standing there for? Sit,"

You awkwardly look around the space, eyes searching for a mysteriously hidden stool, something that should have been obvious...

He smiles. "Oh, don't be shy. We've known each other long enough by now, haven't we?"

You can't think of the right thing to ask, although your thoughts are quickly cut off by the sight of him gently patting his lap.

Sevens. If there were any time to wake up, this was it.

Rule number five: do not fall in love with him.

He's not joking, of course. Vil hardly jokes. And so, you awkwardly straddle his lap, facing towards him, and allow him to get a good look at your visage.

He holds your chin firmly, studying your features as if he hasn't already seen them a thousand times before.

"Stay still,"

He's going to give you a heart attack, and there's a little quirk in his smile that tells you he knows it, too.

You wonder what your tag at the morgue will say. Death by Vil Schoenheit?

He starts with your skin, commenting on how soft it's gotten since he met you, then your eyes...

...Once he's satisfied, as he always is with his work, he turns your head so you can admire the makeup look in the mirror behind you.

"Stunning," he comments. "But you're missing something."

You look back, eyes wide. Surely, he hadn't forgotten something...? That's simply not in his nature.

He smiles at your confusion. "Remember? You promised to test these for me?"

Right. The lipstick. You nod. "Yes, but, I thought you'd already..."

"Oh, I do like the color. I'm just worried about this brand," Vil says. He looks away for a moment, almost as if to summon his courage... what a strange expression on him.

"What's wrong with the brand?"

He turns back with a small smirk. "They have a nasty reputation for smudging easily. I wouldn't want to make a fool of myself next weekend, hm?"

His cups your chin again, bringing you closer.

Rule number five: do not fall in love with him!

He tilts his head to the side. "You don't mind, do you?"

You couldn't have shaken your head any faster, even with his grip on your chin.

"Good. Now, stay still. I think this will be a good color on you, anyway,"

He pulls you in with ease, letting his lips rest on yours for a second or two, before pulling back. Short but sweet, enough to make you feel like your entire body has gone numb.

He inspects your face, humming to himself...

"Good so far," he says, bringing you closer again. "But that was too safe. I won't hold back next time. Are you ready?"

You nod. Barely anything had happened, and you're already breathless. "Ready,"

Another smile crosses his perfect face, though he doesn't give you any time to admire it before he's kissing you again, one hand still cupping your face, the other holding the back of your neck and pressing you closer.

Definitely not a very platonic kiss.

It takes him longer to pull away this time, though when he does, it gives you a perfect view of his still-pristine makeup.

"Hmm... still nothing. I'm quite impressed with this line," he says, reaching behind you and returning with the wooden box. "How do you feel?"

Dizzy. Light-headed. Warm.

"Good," you say.

Rule number five: do not fall in love with him.

Or do.

"Not too much, I hope?"

A delightful realization was beginning to come over you, one that made all you had thought about him null and void:

No one else could possibly give you a guide on Vil Schoenheit, because he writes the rules himself.

"No. That was perfect,"

"Excellent," he smiles, and flips the box open again. "Because we still have six more colors to test."

[choochooboss]

Sketch dump! Vol. 3 August 2022

Literally dumping all the presentable works here as promised, whether I’m proud of them or not!

The first image was inspired by a color palette of a random YT playlist thumbnail! I really loved it and wanted to turn it into a cosy travel & rain scene with colorful city lights smeared like dripping wet watercolors. The second one is a KH3 reference! Do you recognise this scene? I don't know how he would possibly end up there in the first place, but he sure is determined to find his dear brother by breaking through the edge of the world!

How to make Ingo smile, step 1: Make him spell "Emmet"! And a goofy cartoon collision moment ahah!

They are very satisfied after a challenging match, win or lose, and they want you to come back for another ride! I love the twins as they appear in Pokémas the most and try to capture the personalities their English VAs give in my art. They are adorable, excitable, cool and very much admirable!

Emmet always wants to look cool, and Ingo surely gives the most heartfelt handshakes! This piece was to celebrate 1K followers on Twitter! The first three months were wild as so many people found my works!! I fondly reminisce that time, not only I was doing well with my first fanart account, I also felt very happy in general! I was so in the zone with art, being super creative free of worries. It's awesome to see most of the people who commented this back then are still posting/in contact with me!! Thank you so much for sticking with me and my little shenanigans!

I still really like these sketches here, love to see this trio having a blast together! The clips are from a movie classic "Singing in the Rain", and below is the final piece:

Doodles~

Early Breakmas AU sketch (Team Break Submas); going full speed after trainers to collect their pokémon... What would you do if these two giant traffic cones approached you at high velocities?

Excadrill & Archeops, the soft & fluffy guys! Some of my first sketches of the submas mons. Excadrill has become my no. 1 submas mon, I adore that tough little missile knight! Archeops is definitely one of the most appealing ones! I love how he kinda has 4 wings he glides with. However I cannot unsee the snake in a parrot suit ahahah, pardon me! Also I pity the poor guy's in-battle idle animation where he has to flap SO HARD just to stay afloat!

Also Durant & Galvantula! I never was a fan of Durant but I've found ways to have fun drawing this little mischievous creature. They're after your ankles nyehehehe~ Galvantula also wasn't appealing to me until submas fever hit but now I think it's a pretty cute beast! I really like how I drew that fur, which is funny because it was that bristly blue fur that didn't strike my fancy back then!

Still enjoying this sketch! Took me some time to read the lines though ahah, the sketch so loose. He's leading a complete opposite life now...

Surprise!!! I held an art raffle on my Twitter account once but I never finished the piece for no good explanation other than getting stuck with the depot agent designs. I wanted to finish this so badly but just couldn't get over that mental block. It still bothers me I couldn't do it!

More KH inspired attempts, this time the stained glass!

Some expressions! Those snouts I draw for them are so silly ahah

Oh yikes, mood shift! The situation is looking dire, is his brother okay?? I like how the pose & water turned out!

'How's it hanging bro?' Who hung him up there anyway?

Another intense situation, what could this Team Break guy possibly want from him..?! Man, this piece feels so old now but I still like the movie like vibe! That's all just from August!! I was extremely productive back then ahah, it's cool to see how creative and varied stuff I could do!

More and more sketches & WIPs are waiting in the queue! Hope you had fun checking these out!

UPDATE: I had accidentally uploaded some sketches I had already shared in the July 2022 sketchdump so I replaced them with other sketches I had actually forgot I made in August!

Sketch dump Vol. 1: April-June 2022 Sketch dump Vol. 2: July 2022

[riki-dazed]

Best friends can kiss, right? -- PART 2

go to part 1 · fluff, kissing · wc: 1205

Your eyes search Riki's for any hint of jest or sincerity, a knot forms within your stomach as you try to make sense of the sudden shift in atmosphere.

Did I hear that correctly?

He must be joking. Right?

The question continues to hang in the air as you stay cuddled into his side, mere inches away from his face. The warmth in which you felt radiate off his hoodie moments prior has now doubled in temperature.

You wait patiently for Riki to crack a smile, expecting him to mention that he's joking around, as his unserious self always does. But instead, your heart nearly leaps out of your chest as you watch his seated figure begin to lean closer into you, your eyes instinctively close shut as you brace yourself for whatever is about to unfold.

It's finally happening..

Your mouth emits a barely audible gasp as Riki's pillowy lips come into contact with your forehead, his hand finding its way to the back of your head, gently keeping you in place for him. His lips linger on you for what feels like an eternity, the warmth of his breath against your skin causes a sense of calmness to flush over your stiff body. Nerves in which had settled upon you moments prior were nowhere to be found anymore.

You open your eyes to find him pulling away from your face, and you can't help but almost feel a tinge of disappointment; a sense of longing for his lips to be moving against other places, and not just your forehead.

Your cheeks flush at the racing thoughts within your mind as one of your hands finds its way up his torso, clinging onto the fabric of his hoodie that covers his chest. Your touch leaves Riki slightly surprised, prompting him to conceal his emotions behind a composed facade.

You pout, your gaze set on his, "Nishimura Riki, is that all you've got..?"

Just tell me how we can make this work

Your best friend returns a small smile, the both of you listening to the quiet melody in the background fade into a comfortable silence. Riki's heart rate picks up with every passing second as you continue to search his eyes, he wonders if you can tell just how much your puppy-eyed gaze is taking an effect upon him.

"Y/n," He reluctantly begins, his voice even more hushed now that there's nothing playing through his speakers. His tall body shifts to find a comfier position on the small sofa, his hand simultaneously pulls you back into his side, "...I don't want to rush you."

You furrow your eyebrows at the sweet boy, giving him a look that screams playful annoyance. A shy smile creeps onto your lips also, your heart warming at how considerate he always is with you.

"I've waited for this since the day we first met, Riki,"

His gaze burns into yours as he tries to process the words he's just heard you say. A part of him knew this, though, he's always loved you too much to put your friendship at risk. In this moment, and with the help of your confession, Riki realizes that some people are just worth taking these sort of risks for.

His eyes shy away, "Me too,"

Riki's calm reply leaves you feeling each and every butterfly within your body flutter its wings, without restraint. Finding a sudden boost of confidence within yourself, you take the opportunity to shift your position. Both of your hands are now situated atop Riki's chest as your knees rest on either side of his hips, the pace of his breathing quickening beneath your touch is dangerously noticeable to you.

This is so unlike him

The realization that you're straddling him feels surreal to Riki, like a scenario he could have only ever dreamed of actually happening. He's looking up at you with an expression akin to a lost puppy, his arms resting on either side of him. He's uncertain of what to do with his hands.

"Then don't make me wait any longer," Your voice is laced with anticipation and longing, your gaze falling to his mouth in which hangs slightly open.

And just like that, the look in Riki's eyes changes entirely, like your words had just flipped a switch within him; you realize that you've just added fuel to a long running fire.

Riki doesn't dare to make you wait another second longer. He lifts his back off the sofa, closing the distance between your bodies. The boundaries set between your friendship begin to blur as Riki's lips finally start to move against yours fervently, causing you to melt against him into a tender reciprocation. You'd be lying if you were to say that you've never kissed him in your past daydreams, though, you never expected it to be this good in real life.

The silent world around you fades into insignificance as you tug at Riki's hoodie, his hands finally settling on the small of your back, pulling you even closer to him; as if he's afraid to let you go.

The kiss you share with him is needy, both of you hungry to taste one another for the first time. Sounds of want and desperation wash throughout the small studio, creating an intimate symphony in which completely envelopes the both of you. Your mind is completely blank, the only thing being present within it being the thought of how good Riki's lips feel against yours currently. The biting, the sucking.. You start to wonder where he learnt to kiss like this.

Your hands trail up Riki's chest, they rest on his shoulders as you gently push his back against the plush sofa. The both of you take a moment to catch your breaths when your lips detach from one another's, your chests rising and falling in synchrony. You struggle to make sense of what has just happened.

"Is that all you've got?" The almost panting boy mockingly teases, refering to your previous question from minutes ago.

A menacing smile washes over his face as he pulls his bottom lip between his teeth, his hands settling on your hips. You scoff in reply, leaning back into him to leave one final, wet kiss against his now slightly swollen, and pink lips.

He tastes so good.

"Mm, this is nice. I like this," Riki sighs contently as his long arms wrap around you, squishing your figure against his. A chuckle escapes you as you proceed to lay your head against his chest. "We should do this more often."

"So, is this where I ask what are we..?" You tease with a smile as you gaze up into his face.

Riki's eyes shut as he chuckles away, hugging you tighter in the process. The feeling of his chest moving against your body with his laughter causes your eyes to ever so slightly tear up, out of pure love, and adoration. His happiness radiates a different kind of warmth throughout your body.

This is where I belong.

Three AM soon turns into the early hours of the morning as you continue to sleep peacefully, your limbs intertwined, the both of you embracing one another closely on the cramped studio sofa.

...

Copyright © 2024 riki-dazed. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED | Do NOT edit, copy, translate or repost any of my work without permission.

[vendetta-ari]

Please, write an x reader about the Vs with an angel reader who they want to win over and who happens to be completely oblivious about their intentions because she is very naïve. Oh, and I would appreciate some fluff! If it's okay, I'd like Vox and Val to have romantic intentions while Velvette has platonic ones (ie: wanting to hang out with reader and show off her work). Of course, this last bit about Velvette is completely up to you! Thank you for reading! <3

my first ask back from hiatus, enjoy my dear anon! I'll be honest, I dont know how to write Valentino in a not smutty or angsty way, so I tried my best, velvette's has implications of her liking you but not dating so???

[SUGGESTIVE AND ITS VALENTINO SO IT DESERVES ITS OWN WARNING THERE]

THE VEE'S X ANGEL READER

Vox

☆ Vox found you during extermination day, you weren't an exterminator- just wanted to visit the bright red place they call hell. 

☆ took an interest in you, more specifically your naivete. he put on his business smile and led you to the vee's tower wanting to “tour hell” with you

☆ Instead he just ended up falling for you harder than he thought

☆ his original plan was to get you to sign your soul off and he'd use you as branding, something like “even angels live voxtek products!!”

☆ but he ended up liking you more than he should've, he thinks your naive and kinda ditzy, he loves it and think its adorable

☆ however, he doesn't let you leave hell, so I suppose you're a fallen angel now.

☆ no matter,  you're with Vox now. you can have everything you ever need and want

☆ And he totally didn't brainwash your brain into thinking that. 

☆ “Just don't ask questions, okay angel?”

Valentino 

~Valentino saw you wandering hell during extermination, you were not killing anyone though.. what the fuck?

~But you, you looked different then the other angles he'd seen.

~He just had to have you,  I mean how could he possibly even resist! it's your fault for looking all dumb and naive like that after all. 

~He grabbed your wrist and threw you into his studio, all the explicit content and nudity made your poor virgin eyes look away and blush.

~ “Aren't you a lovely specimen my dear angel? your so much different then the others I've seen, amorcito~” His voice was tinged with lies but you were just too stupid to notice, weren't you?

~You fell hook, line, and sinker for him. you quickly signed a contract with him, he had you right where he wanted you. while him? well you were..just another worker is all. but soon you started getting popular, in videos like Ditzy angel has their first time!~

~It was all acting anyway, what was the harm in making a few videos?

~You quickly became Val's favorite. He didn't treat you badly, you'd sit on his lap while he'd direct his other workers. He'd treat them so badly though! you couldn't help but feel bad so you often calmed val down by snuggling up to him and wrapping your pretty angelic wings around him.

~Upon your touch he usually shuts up, and wraps his own wings around you too. and he would always be gentle with you. 

Velvette

-Velvette just found you waltzing around hell like it was no big deal, she was confused as hell but intrigued, you were different 

-actually, you were perfect. so she snatched the opportunity while she could.

-She ran up to you, turning up her charm and asking you if you wanted to model for her company

-She showered you with compliments, and it was more like an order and demand rather than her actually asking you.

-no matter, you excitedly agreed. you've always wanted to be a model!

-Your her top model actually,  you got a lot of popularity being an angel after all

-She dresses you up in white and blue, not usually her style but she must admit, it looks great on you!

-You never leave her side, she's very protective of you. I mean there are dangerous people out in hell and “I just wanna keep you safe my angelic dolly!~”

-Any of her advances fly right by you, not even noticing she's flirting with you, she does get pissed about it sometimes but she usually just ends up saying “You're a klutz, my dear angel. and your cute and ditzy and clearly not getting that I'm flirting with you so your clearly my type.”

-you look away from the new dress she bought you “Huh? sorry what'd you say Vel? I got distracted..”

-xoxo, Ari

[banmitbandit]

Pots 'N' Picks Week 2024: Day 7: Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Snacks/Dessert/Family/Goodbye

[Dungeon Meshi spoilers (with a big amount of canon divergence) and a long, long caption beneath the Keep Reading]

November 20th, 1484 Dear Senshi, It's been a little over eighty two years since you've been gone. In that time, Merrywinn, the newborn baby you held in your arms days before you passed, became a great-great-grandmother, and her funeral last week was as rancorous as every other half-foot funeral we attended. Soon, it will be my one thousandth birthday, and I can only hope that, like you and Marcille, that's when this curse will finally be lifted, and I can see you again. If that's true, then that means I'm the beginning of an end. Instead of twenty one years, Laios will only have to wait three until he dies after me, and Falin will only have to wait three after that. In twelve years from now, Izutsumi will pass on too, and the six of us will get to share a meal together once again. I've missed your cooking, sure, but most importantly, I've missed you. Do you remember when we first shared that bottle of wine in my new house in Kahka Brud, over nine hundred years ago, before we had the slightest idea that something was wrong? I told you that I didn't want to make you feel the way I felt when Fayfinn left me. You said you didn't care, that it was worth whatever small amount of time you had me. Obviously, it turned out that fate had different plans for us, that the Winged Lion had cursed Marcille too, that we'd each live as long as she would. It's been hard, but since then, you've been there for me every step of the way. When Fayfinn passed, when my girls passed, when their children passed, and theirs too. You've been there for everything, and I'm thankful for it, from the bottom of my heart. I knew I wouldn't be prepared to lose you, and I wasn't. But no matter how much I hurt, Izutsumi was worse, even if she'd never admit it, and I had to be strong for her, too. She's strong and independent, just like she's always been, since the day we met her, but you were the closest thing to a father she ever had. She loved you, Senshi. She said so herself at your funeral. I just hope she doesn't miss me enough to cry at mine. I don't care what dwarves or tallmen or elves think, you and I both know funerals are supposed to be celebrations. Fun is in the name, isn't it? I haven't been okay in a long time, but these days, I feel somewhat peaceful. I have lived my life to the fullest, like any good half-foot should. My birthday gets nearer and nearer with each passing day. Tomorrow, Lochlee, Merrywinn's great-grandson, is helping me collect my things so that I can return to Merini for Laios and Falin's birthday in a few days, and I plan to stay there at the castle until my time is up. I've packed the cheesecake recipe you perfected, and I'm going to sneak it to the cooks whilst Laios isn't looking. I'm sure he'll end up eating yours and Marcille's portions too, but I know you won't mind. After that, it's Marcille's birthday. Then Izutsumi's. Then mine. I'm looking forward to it; like funerals, birthdays are for celebrating. Even elves know that. I can't wait to see you again, Senshi. Yours, -Chilchuck Tims

An AU I proposed back in the Chilshi Nation server a while ago seemed to be a good way to break my heart when rounding off Chilshi week. A lot of people bring up the tragedy of Chilchuck and Senshi's lifespans being so different, and it makes me wonder what it would be like if Marcille's misguided wish had long term consequences.

This wasn't intended to be seven pages long with the lyrics to A Thousand Years by Christina Perri shoved in, but that's what it ended up being. The song seemed a little too perfect not to include.

All of my Chilshi posts were drawn up on the day, and I used them mostly as an excuse to experiment, whether it be posing, body types, shading, comic layouts... My later entries got to be a little more ambitious with what I wanted to do with them, so they're maybe not as polished as I would like them to be, but I hope you can enjoy them anyways.

Whilst I'm here, I'd like to extend a special thankyou to @dumblilracoon for dealing with my awful brainstorming and struggling all week. Couldn't have done this without you. And of course, the Chilshi Nation discord server for being so lovely! :)

If you reblogged or liked or commented on even one of my Chilshi week posts, thankyou so much! Chilshi week has been a blast and working on it and seeing all the lovely art and writing that's come up from it has been a treat.

Happy Chilshi Week, everybody!

[wilwheaton]

I don’t know what the fuck people are on, but you don’t deserve this. You seem to be one of the most self-aware and conscientious straight white boy allies that I’ve ever come across, and besides that you’re a good human being. I hope you’re okay, and please know that those of us who understand trauma are behind you and are sending you so much love 💜

You're so kind. Thank you.

The main shitstorm has passed, and the people who are so awful have moved on to whomever or whatever their next target is.

I hope that the thing I was hoping to make clear -- that an act of non-consensual violence on live television -- isn't okay, and should carry consequences for the man who did it. It's unsurprising, but no less disappointing, that the perpetrator gets a pass, as they always do, while someone like me (a survivor) is somehow twisted into the actual Bad Guy in the story.

Something I've noticed since ... maybe Tuesday? Is a lot of real people (as opposed to right wing CHUDs and other clout-chasing dorks) sharing my feelings and also wondering why I seem to be the only person with any kind of public voice who said anything about it.

It's weird, but also very nice, to stumble across people talking about me behind my back, but they're actually being kind.

I'm sorry you know the secret handshake. I see you.

[bamfkeeper]

Anger.

RQ: 'Heard that ur taking requests ! Love your work and the writing is great ! I was wondering if you could do reader x Kurt where reader is opposite of Kurt. Anger issues less understanding etc and has a mutation where they have two sets of wings and eyes ? So like really arch angel type of stuff but a real sinner. Being the other half then Kurt <3 have a great day and remember to drink water !' - @toxic-chainsaw-666

Pairing: Kurt Wagner x GN!reader // Warnings: None

A/N: I was actually really happy to write this rq because I tend to have some anger problems irl. I've always imagined how he'd be with someone who's less understanding and more hostile than him, so this was really fun! Written as a collection of hcs.

Kurt is known as being the sweetheart of the group of X-Men, his heart of gold and aversion to violence, (unless absolutely necessary), makes him well liked by everyone. There isn't a single mutant who doesn't like to strike up conversation with him, he makes everyone feel welcome.

That's why when he began dating you...it rose a few eyebrows.

Your reputation was quite the opposite. Hot-headed, short tempered, aggressive...to name a few.

You were not very approachable, sometimes vulgar, and you had a habit of snapping at people before you spoke civilly.

Kurt tried his approach, your first instinct was to yell, but he just seemed so...sweet, so you found yourself holding back. His presence felt better than everyone else's, no judgement in his eyes.

He'd have a knack of calming you down too, or helping you cool off better than other people might. His presence helps your nerves a lot.

When you get angry, your appearance shows your extra features, which often makes others wary and scared. Kurt is never really bothered, he just does what he can to help soothe you.

He doesn't want you to be ashamed of yourself, he never makes you feel bad for being the way you are, he knows you can't help it. But he does try to guide you into reacting to things a bit better, just so you don't get yourself into trouble.

He would never try to change who you are though, he respects you enough to know that.

You both had very different ways of reacting to situations, your personalities were black and white, but somehow mixed together okay. You balanced one another out.

Sometimes you worry about religious differences too, since you feel like a sinner a lot, because you are, and Kurt's Catholicism is very important to him. He comforts you though, he offers support and guidance for you.

If someone is bad to him, he will forgive and forget. You will not. You will make sure that person apologizes, even if you have to hold them up by their collar and force them to.

Your first instinct is to fight or choose a physical way to solve a problem, Kurt tends to try to talk things out instead. You two vary that way, but it's a funny combination to see.

"Liebling, no need for such violence, they bumped into me by accident," Kurt says gently after you threaten to hurt someone quite graphically.

You scowl back and cross your arms, while Kurt worries about your impulsivity, he does find your passion quite endearing, even if he doesn't agree with your methods.

You're the one to ask a food worker for no pickles on Kurt's order while he stays behind you shyly.

He's the one who often apologizes for your attitude, but also uses you as a back up, he gains confidence because of you. He knows you always have his back no matter what. You are his 'scary dog privilege.'

You both love one another despite the obvious differences you have. You both bring out the best in one another, and you support the other's weakness.

Opposites certainly attract.

Thanks for reading.

*BAMF*

Dividers by @/adornedwithlight