#in which he sheds the anxiety but in turn is nearly always in a state of mania . thanks ghosts

[star-felled]

get a load of THIS guy

aka future allister concept doodles :)

[aminiatureworld]

Melusine

Characters: Albedo, gn!reader

Word Count: 2,221

Warnings: Brief depiction of pseudo-drowning

Premise: In which the reader’s somewhat inexplicable fear of water prompts questioning

Author’s Note: This prompt reminded me of the book (and series) The Tail of Emily Windsnap, which, if you haven’t read at least the first book, you totally should read as it’s just really a wonderful read. The descriptions of the ocean are especially atmospheric. Anyways, as for the prompt, I had a lot of fun. I tried to write a mermaid story in middle school and while it didn’t go that well I have a lot of nostalgia for the mermaid genre. Though this was more about the discovery than actually being a mermaid.

Also the title is a pseudo-historical reference.

Albedo

The first time it had happened Albedo had brushed off the whole incident as completely explainable. After all, it wasn’t as if you hadn’t explained what had happened.

You two had been sitting on one of the craggy hills of the Whispering Woods, you sprawled on the grass, Albedo attempting to paint a landscape of Mondstadt, one of the more ambitious paintings in his current portfolio. Especially since he had traded his more opaque oils for the gentler tones of watercolors. At one point he must have made some sort of noise of frustration, for you lifted yourself out of the shade and made your way over to the canvas.

“That looks absolutely lovely Albedo!” Your smile had always had a calming affect on the alchemist, and this time was no different. Albedo could feel the tension slowly leeching away from his shoulders.

“Do you think so? I’m afraid that I still can’t handle all the odd shadows the buildings cast.”

“The buildings look perfect to me! Though if you feel that way, maybe you could lighten the side facing the sun a little more instead of darkening the area over here? So the shade doesn’t become too muddy.”

“You have a wonderful eye, you know,” Albedo replied, smiling at the way your mind had immediately jumped to the conclusion that he had drawn as well. Reaching for the bowl of water next to him Albedo went to water his brush a little more before trying again.

Unfortunately that’s when things appeared to have taken a turn for the wrong. Instead of reaching over the bowl Albedo’s elbow collided with the glass. Though the grass was soft and close enough to prevent any damage, that didn’t stop all the muddied water from spilling out over the brim and right over you. You let out a sort of squeak, and for a moment Albedo though it was just the initial shock, but then the expression on your face came into view and Albedo could immediately sense you were seconds away from panic.

“Is something wrong?”

“I, I don’t like water very much,” you let out a strained laugh. “I just, I don’t know. I really, really don’t like water.”

“I’m so sorry,” Albedo immediately replied.

Taking off his coat he did his best to dry you off, wiping off your arms and attempting a valiant effort with your now sopping clothes. Though you assured him that it would be alright the alchemist could sense those were only platitudes, and it wasn’t until you seemed significantly calmer that Albedo turned to pick up the bowl and refill it in Cider Lake. And though a part of his mind wished to delve deeper into what had happened he pulled himself back, figuring it wouldn’t help you if he was suddenly enquiring over something you were afraid of.

Now perhaps that should have been the long and the short of it, but the revelation had begun to make Albedo see water everywhere and, more importantly, see how much it appeared to affect you every time you appeared to come in close contact with it.

Thankfully you didn’t seem to have trouble with water in glasses, at least as long as someone was actively drinking it. If not however you would glance at the glass every so often, as if it were your mortal enemy, waiting to catch you off guard to it might tip its contents all over your clothes. Other things, like obsessively drying your wands after washing them and draping layers of towels over your shoulders when you washed your hair, also became apparent. Suddenly Albedo couldn’t stop noticing your discomfort, and the more he noticed the more he wished he could do something about it.

“Exposure therapy?”

“Yes.”

You were sitting on Albedo’s desk, leaning slightly over your partner, a slightly bemused look on your face. It had been about three weeks since the incident, and finally Albedo thought he might have found some sort of solution to your problem. Now he eagerly pressed forward, figuring you’d understand once he’d explained everything fully.

“I know that it might seem counterproductive to subject you to what gets a frightened reaction out of you, but if you subject a person to something they’re afraid of in very small doses over a long period of time, usually they begin to feel a little less afraid of the thing in question. It’s sort of like how you can sometimes make allergies less serious by slowly exposing the patient to more and more of the allergen.”

“I understand where your line of thought is coming from Albedo, but I’m really not sure if this is the best idea for me.”

“I know that it might seem daunting at first. I would not bring up the topic if you didn’t seem so miserable sometimes. I worry that you might become so unhappy by your fear that it will become debilitating eventually. That is why I decided to bring up the option.”

“I really appreciate you going out of your way to think about me Albedo. I really do. I think what you’re trying to do is very kind and noble of you. But in all honesty I don’t think that’s going to work. You see, the way my fear works, I just don’t think that exposure is going to make it go away.”

“Are you sure?” Albedo pressed on, still hoping that you might see the benefit in what he was suggesting. “It won’t start with something drastic I promise. And at the end of the day, I think that it will help a lot.”

“I understand that, I really do, but like I said my fear doesn’t work that way.” You paused, as if sensing the sinking of your partner’s heart, before smiling slightly. “If it makes you feel any better I promise to give it some more thought. Alright?”

“Thank you,” Albedo replied, though in his mind he knew that you thinking about it probably wouldn’t change anything.

Thus the cycle continued, with Albedo growing more and more uneasy. He didn’t bring it up with you again, sensing it would be walking over some invisible line, but still his mind whirled in trying to understand what you meant. If your fear wasn’t simply irrational, then surely something must have happened once. Though the alchemist didn’t pry, surely if you wanted him to know you would tell him in your own time, he had to admit that sometimes his brain went off on various daydreams, as if trying to decide for itself what might have happened.

As it turned out, Albedo didn’t have to speculate for long. Nor did the truth come out the way that he had expected.

You two were on the very small dock at Cider Lake, checking the rafts were tied down properly before the beginning of the stormy season that wreaked havoc through Mondstadt once every year. Though normally you probably would have never done such a thing the Guild was spread thin, preparing for storms, though not nearly as fierce as Dvalin’s winds, that would blow shingles off roofs and destabilize the occasional out of place rock on the wall. As of such the task of shielding the boats used to carry supplies from the City to the larger Mondstadt region had fallen to you. Albedo had tagged along, knowing how uncomfortable the experience might make you feel, and unwilling to leave you alone in a state of anxiety.

“These remaining boats are the ones we need to tie down. They’re too big to be stored in the sheds inside the City.”

“I see,” Albedo replied, already moving to nail the tarp down on one of them as you secured the roping. Already the air seemed alive with the fresh smell of impending rain.

“It’s too bad really, we can’t guarantee these boats’ safety the way we can the others. Thankfully these ones are mostly insured by the Knights. Though really maybe we should build a larger shed,” you mused to yourself, keeping up the tell-tale stream of conversation that Albedo knew you used to distract yourself.

“Perhaps you can make a query via the Guild?”

“Perhaps,” you mused. “Or I might be able to ask Amber.”

Albedo replied that would be a good idea, turning to put another temporary nail onto the top of the longboat. All seemed alright for a moment, then there was a shriek and a terrific splashing sound. Whirling around Albedo had just enough time to find your head in the water before you seemed to seize up and your head dipped below the still crystal-clear waves.

Immediately Albedo stripped himself of his coat and dove in. Though no amazing swimmer himself the alchemist was hardly the worst at staying afloat, and even if he only knew a select few amount of swim strokes that paled in comparison to the idea of you drowning. Making his way over to you he fought the panic rising up inside of him, the part of his brain that said it would be much more difficult to rescue someone terrified of water.

However almost as soon as Albedo approached you he noticed that something was distinctly off. Firstly you didn’t seem like you were drowning, in fact you appeared quite graceful in the water, swishing softly back and forth. Secondly the reason for said grace quickly became apparent to Albedo. For in the spot where your legs should have been, indeed in the spot where your legs had been mere moment ago was something long and slightly shimmery and distinctly fish-like.

Letting his mouth fall open Albedo immediately hoisted himself up above the water, choking on the gasp of breath he had found himself taking. What was that, what in all of Teyvat was that? You were half fish. How were you half fish? Did such a thing even exist, for Albedo had certainly never heard of it! Though the alchemist later admitted that in the moment such fantasy creatures as merfolk had completely fallen out of his head, there was something distinctly different than reading about something in a book and seeing it in real life.

Dragging himself onto the shores of Cider Lake, Albedo waited for you to emerge, still breathing heavily from what had just passed. His brain seemed to shut off them, for he found himself with no questions to ask. You were a mermaid, you were simply a mermaid. There was nothing more to do or say about it.

Eventually you joined him on the beach. Albedo watched in an odd sort of fascination as your legs emerged from the scaley fin which your lower body was now made up of. For a moment individual spots of iridescent seemed to remain, but soon your limbs were back to normal, ignoring the fact that you were soaking wet.

“So now you know why I said exposure therapy wouldn’t work out,” you said, letting a grim sort of laugh escape your lips.

“You… you are a… a…”

“A merfolk, yeah,” you laughed awkwardly. “Not sure why I get stuck with the weird power that is more annoying than good but, you know, oops?”

Albedo could sense your vulnerability, but try as he might he couldn’t get the words to come out of his throat. For a moment he sat there, gasping like a fish, but finally the expression of muted misery on your face wormed its way into his brain and finally Albedo felt as if he had regained some ability to talk.

“I think it’s fascinating.”

“Of course you do.”

“No, really. And not just because this is something I’ve never experienced or seen before. Though it was really surprising, it was also wonderful. As an alchemist you study all the wonders and anomalies of nature, and in doing so you see all these differences aren’t just something to be written down, but they also beautiful. And so I think you’re really beautiful.”

“Thanks,” you replied, though you still seemed uncomfortable. “I just, yeah…”

Reaching over to find your hand in his Albedo squeezed your palm softly. For a moment you did nothing, then, slowly, you leaned your head on Albedo’s shoulder. Letting you stay there Albedo found himself wishing that he could convey all the emotions he felt in that moment to you.

“I know that it can be difficult to talk about things that you’ve kept secret, especially when you feel like they make you stand out in a bad way. But I promise, there is nothing wrong with that. And I hope if I made you feel uncomfortable in any way that I can apologize.”

“Thanks Albedo,” you murmured. “You don’t have to say sorry, but thanks anyways.”

“Always.”

“I love you, you know?”

“I love you too.”

Albedo planted a soft kiss on your forehead. As the boats sat, woefully forgotten, the two of you basked in each other’s presence. For Albedo a mystery had been solved, and explanation given that, while not necessarily scientific, was certainly satisfactory. Yet at that moment he couldn’t care less about it. All he could think about was how lonely it must have been, and how, if he could help it, you would never feel isolated in your discomfort or in your secret ever again.

[foolgobi65]

varshadhara

one.

Sita has been married a year when there is news of a drought, cloudless skies that refuse to darken and dust that does not become soil. 20 villages chose a single representative to beg for aid from the Emperor himself, and Sita’s husband is drawn when he finally enters their bedroom that night.

“They are dying,” he says quietly, a confession that even later Sita is never sure he meant for her to hear. His eyes close as he begins to remove the ornaments that mark him the eldest, the favorite son, heir to all his father has conquered. Sita, seated on the bed, watches as her husband looks down at the ruby necklace whose clasp he has just undone and calculates how many meals he could buy with what lies so easily in his palms.

“Years,” she confirms, hands playing with the edge of her cotton upper cloth for want of something to do. Her voice startles them both, somehow too loud and too soft for the strange hush that has fallen on the palace so many hours after sunset. “But only because the jewelry you wear is more precious in this city for having been yours.”

He looks up, curiosity a glint in his eye and hands at the heavy earrings the Emperor insists on for court. He seems glad to see her. “Would it help?”

“Yes,” she says, ignoring the way her heart clenches to hear the hope in his voice, “for now. But what about in a year, should the drought continue?”

Her husband glances at the chest which keeps his gold, the fruit of a generation’s worth of tribute from kingdoms that span the earth.

“What a tragedy,” he drawls, fingers slowly teasing out the crown from the wonderful tangles of his hair, “to lose all these heavy jewels in pursuit of my duty as king.”

Sita startles into laughter and reaches out to take her husband’s burden, ignoring the surprise that flickers briefly across his features. He is always so surprised and then so grateful for what to Sita are the smallest morsels of tolerance. She does not think about why this might upset her. “And as my Lord’s faithful wife,” she says cheerfully in response, “I suppose it would be my duty to donate my ornaments as well.”

Both of them linger on Sita’s wrists, the ones she keeps nearly bare save the one golden bangle around each that at least proves her a wife. They smile: tragic indeed.

“My father has proclaimed that the drought stricken will not pay tribute,” Sita hears hours later, low in the moments before she finally closes her eyes, “but there must be something more we can do to help.”

She could live like this, she thinks, at the moment she slips over the edge between the worlds of life and dreams. Sita is content. This could be enough.

----

two.

By now all of Ayodhya must know that Janaki, foundling daughter of the Videhan king, was not expected to marry -- the year that she has spent in the blessed state so far has been tumultuous, to say the least. She grew up a goddess, but more than that she grew up sheltered from palace politics and finds herself embroiled in more than one controversy due to her own ineptitude.

Her sisters, each of them younger than Sita, were married to her husband’s three brothers before they became women true and so are kept as maidens in the palaces of their individual mother in laws: far from their eldest sister who lives, as is traditional, in the rooms of her husband.

What would they say, Sita wonders, if they knew their sister to be equally virginal only weeks before the first anniversary of her wedding?

Sita sets the ceremonial platter on top of a stool and kneels, gently picking up the woolen blanket covering her husband as he sleeps on the floor. The difference in temperature, they have both realized, is usually enough for him to wake and so it is today when his eyes open. Together they fold not only the blanket that covered him but the two others that make what serves as his mattress on the ground, one of her husband’s many concessions to his ungrateful, accidental wife.

“I was never supposed to be married,” she had whispered the night of their consummation, tears streaming down her face and tone as possibly close to a shriek while knowing that servants listened at the door. “I know nothing of how to manage a royal household, much less satisfy a husband!”

The black rimming her eyes must have mixed with her tears, leaving Sita a fright. The combined talents of Ayodhya’s finest ladies-in-waiting ruined by the anxieties of a girl utterly unsuited to serve as their canvas. Sita’s husband, a man who wielded enough power at 16 to force each of Sita’s baying, blood-lusting suitors -- some of them thrice her husband’s age -- to their knees in supplication, had barely walked into the room when confronted with the sight.

“I did not need the protection of a husband,” Sita had said then, back turned. “I would have died before any of those lechers disguised as failed suitors tried to touch me.” She choked back a sob. “It would have been better for us all if I had.” Years later her husband confesses that sometimes he still hears her like this in the moments before he falls asleep, even when they have spent more years than not tangled as one in bed. Sita never tells him how close it all was in the end, how tightly she was gripping the knife when someone heard that a young anchorite had not only lifted, but broken the Great God’s bow. But on her wedding night, when Sita opened her eyes it was to the sight of her husband, his own blade drawn. She flinched, but he only raised his own palm and ran the edge against skin to draw blood.

“A woman,” he said in answer to her unvoiced question, “is supposed to bleed on her first night. The washerwoman will be paid handsomely for her knowledge in the morning.”

Sita flushed, shoulders straightening of their own accord at the implication.

“And as a virgin bride myself, I will bleed as any other” she said, hands fisted at her side in brief, overwhelming rage. “My reputation does not need you to shed blood on my behalf.”

Her husband had only nodded, moving towards the side of the bed opposite to where Sita sat in order to smear his palm once, twice, thrice until he seemed satisfied with his handiwork.

A million questions ran through Sita’s mind. “I hope your sleep is restful,” was all her husband said in response, grabbing a blanket from the foot of what was to be their marital bed and arranging himself on the floor.

Nearly a year since, Sita’s knowledge as to the running of households has not increased, nor, she suspects, has her knowledge regarding the satisfaction of her husband. He keeps long hours, spending as much time away from his wife as possible. The people of Ayodhya, used to the years that might have passed between visits from their woman-drunk sovereign, are enthralled by the near constant access to their Crown Prince, and this during the years when it is acceptable, nay even appropriate to be devoted to naught but one’s own pleasure.

The women of the palace, caught between their desire to honor their collective son and their need to denigrate his strange, uncouth wife, stay silent.

----

three.

“In Mithila,” Sita’s husband begins, breaking their easy silence that has fallen over this morning meal, “what would you do in times of drought?”

Sita startles, the palm frond she was using to keep away insects as her husband ate, slipping to the ground. Though they can now speak of many things, they have never spoken of Mithila -- it is encouraged for new brides to sink themselves fully into the environs of their new, forever home. In this, at least, she is like every wife before her: the ways of her past can have no place in her present. Every day she must attempt to forget who she once was.

“I am only a girl,” Sita answers carefully, eyes lowered as she was told women do. “Such a question may be better answered by my Father, or one of the preceptors versed in these matters.”

There is a silence, but Sita, unable to lift her eyes to her husband’s face, cannot tell if he has accepted her falsehood. The Raghuvanshis, she has been told time and time again, are a line of honor. They do not lie.

“Did you think--” she hears, and then a sigh. “I know who you are, my lady. Are we not friends, at the very least?”

Sita clenches her jaw, picking up the palm fronds once more. She is no longer afraid of her husband, at least not as she was at first. But he cannot want the answers he seeks, not truly. “I am a princess of Ayodhya,” she says, as she has to herself every morning since she woke up next to her husband’s blood on the bed and his body on their floor. “I am your wife, sanctified by the Lord’s Bow and the sacrament of the Holy Fire.”

“Yes,” her husband agrees. Sita cannot help but note that his tone is gentle. “And in Videha, you are considered a Goddess too.”

He says it so easily, as if Sita does not live balanced on the sword-edge between damned and divine. For a moment, she lets herself imagine what it would be like to be known.

There is a story known in Videha, of a drought so ferocious that a King long without child was forced to seed his own lands with the merit of his good deeds. Of the four days of labor that resulted in a baby girl, delivered from the womb of the Eternal Mother Earth. A child covered in an afterbirth of soil where there had only ever been useless dirt.

And yet this too is known: children are the only dead who are buried, their bodies believed too beloved to be consecrated to the fire and burned beyond reckoning. Instead they are covered in wool and laid to rest in the lap of Mother Earth alongside a plea for Death to be gentle.

Sometimes these children are wanted. Many times, the bodies buried are the ones who are not.

This is all that is known: when the King knelt to deliver the child, what had previously been blue sky broke into the first of that year’s monsoon, nearly a decade since the last.

Foundlings left to die do not wear the garb of royalty. Goddesses do not wed.

What would you call me, Crown Prince?

“I am a princess of Ayodhya,” she says, the words suddenly heavy, like stones in her mouth. Her silence protects her sisters from the taint of Sita’s own uncertainty, and Ayodhya has no need for Gods not its own. She waves away an insect that attempts to rest atop her husband’s left ear and resigns herself to her fate: “I am your wedded wife.”

“They are dying,” he says softly, but he speaks to himself. Sita thinks of the easy way they can speak now sometimes; at nights before they retire, or over a morning meal. Her husband is right -- they are friends, if nothing else, and she owes him more than this. Viciously Sita tamps down on the guilt she feels roiling her stomach, rebelling against a stance that suddenly feels like betrayal.

----

Four.

“It is strange,” Mother Kaushalya remarks, as always, “that you were never taught the ways of Royal Women. Is this how girls are raised in Videha?”

Mother Kaushalya, who has only known the Kosala for which she is named, has latched onto the strangeness of Sita’s far-off homeland as a possible explanation for the ways in which Sita grates mountain-rough against the silk of the Imperial Palace. It is useless of course, since a slight against Videha must inherently touch Sita’s sisters, who in the last year have already developed a reputation for grace, gentility, and an overflowing well of kindness towards all blessed with their presence.

Mother Kaushalya, according to the servant-slaves Sita eavesdrops on, has been heard quarreling with Mother Sumitra, begging for “at least one of your darling girls, my Lady, for you know that it can only be selfishness to keep them both when your elder sister has none!”

Sita, tugging awkwardly at the overwrought necklaces she must wear when in Mother Kaushalya’s presence, can only agree. She, more than anyone, knows what she lacks. There have been rumors recently that all three of Dasharatha’s Chief Queens have made a petition to the Emperor to find a new princess worthy of the Crown Prince’s hand.

Sita can only hope that when the time comes, her husband will allow her access to the Imperial Library, or at least will deem it proper to have one wife devoted to the worship of the Gods: philosophy and piety are so easily confused, after all. The best life she can now demand is one where she recedes into the background of the Imperial Palace, unneeded and unknown by all. Never will Sita oversee the workings of a kingdom in the manner she was raised, nor will she sit atop an altar and listen to those petitioners who make pilgrimage to weep at her feet.

Some days, Sita does not even know if she is a woman at all, if these mothers and wives are capable of knowing and carrying the grief of a nation inside their fragile bodies. Every night she dreams of the drought ravaging the villages near the outskirts of Kosala, of how once a year Sita was carried by 50 men to the fields of Videha so that she might press her feet into the soil that made her womb and call forth the rains that heralded her birth.

But then she too dreams of this: a mother weeping, swollen with child like other mothers who have knelt in front of Sita. A mother who delivers a daughter in the ordinary way and buries her alive.

“Goddesses,” the Sage Parashurama had said the year after Sita was installed in the palace of Mithila, “are not meant for marriage. Videha is fortunate that after the reign of Janaka it will be guided by the light of the Divine.”

He paused then, as they all do. “And if the Lady were not a goddess, well --”

They never finish the sentence. The threat is implied.

Sita cannot be meant for love, not in the way of women who are meant for marriage. How can she, when she was meant to sit atop a dais as the physical embodiment of a force of nature, just as easily as inside the hearts of believers? How can she, when she lives her life in the fear that she will be caught out and banished, back into the grave she was meant to die in?

Women are meant for friendship. Women are meant for love.

“My apologies Mother Kaushalya,” Sita says, shaking her head and trying to convince herself that she does not rage against the fate that stretches fallow before her, “I was not raised to be much of a girl at all.”

The real trouble, Sita thinks later, is that despite everything she has somehow found herself liking her husband anyway.

---

five.

“My Lady,” a servant twitters three weeks after the Emperor promises debt relief to the drought-stricken. “My Lady, your Lord husband has need of you!”

Sita looks up from the flowers she is carelessly attempting to string together in a garland, perhaps to festoon a doorway, perhaps to drape around one of the many idols of Surya, the progenitor of her husband’s race. They have not spoken in the week since he asked her about Videha and she refused to answer. “He does?”

“He does,” the servant responds with some relish, ready Sita is sure to reap the rewards of being the bearer of such premium gossip the moment Sita’s back is turned. Sita’s husband has never before indicated such a preference for her company. “He asked that I bring you to him, and not in the garb of royalty.”

“And you are sure that this is my husband?” It is not altogether seemly for Sita to be expressing such doubt that her husband might be asking for her, especially when such a request -- even to appear in plainclothes -- is not unusual for those young and in love, seeking respite from the rhythms of the palace by traveling outside its gates. But really, her husband?

The servant, a girl perhaps only a few years older than Sita’s 16, only raises an eyebrow and widens her grin. “Should I call for one of your maids to help you dress?”

“No,” Sita responds absently, lost in the contemplation of what game her husband could possibly be playing. “Did he say if he had any preference as to what I wear?”

“He did not, my Lady, but if I may I think you had better choose something blue if you have it. The color sets nicely against your skin. Silver jewelry instead of gold, if you have that too. ”

Sita does, buried at the bottom of a trunk of clothes she had carried with her from home. But before that --

“Here,” Sita undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace sent to her by some princeling attempting to curry favor with the crown. There is no true harm in people knowing she has left the palace in her husband’s company, but she is off-center enough to want this a secret as long as she can buy it so. “For your silence, until we return.”

In the time it takes Sita to strip out of silk and re-knot her old lower cloth of coarse blue cotton she has thought of a hundred different potential scenarios. Had she been alone, she might have had to slouch out of her own rooms with her head down so that she might prevent recognition -- in the company of a servant, Sita is passed over as one as well and strolls quite comfortably into the sunshine, following a path she has never taken until they find her husband leaning against the wall of one of the palace’s more minor stables.

“My lady,” he says, seeming to shake himself out of some sort of stupor and leveraging himself fully upright. “Antara,” he says then, turning to face the servant he had charged with fetching Sita, “you have my gratitude.” He leans down to pick up something wrapped in cloth before walking to Antara with a winning smile while pressing the package into her arms.

Sita knows something of her husband, but not like this. She is charmed.

“I came across the mangoes your sister likes when I was making my way back from one of the border kingdoms,” her husband says to Antara. “Tell her that I look forward to hearing more about her adventures when she is feeling well enough to take visitors.”

Antara’s eyes gleam and grow misty. “Oh,” she says, lips trembling as she folds her hands around the parcel and takes her leave, “and we have only just gotten her head to shrink back to its usual size after the last time!”

Alone at last, Sita’s husband’s earlier flash of ease vanish into the ether. Sita tries not to take offense at being more a stranger to him than the woman he sent to fetch his wife. “My lady,” he says again, but cannot seem to say anything more. Sita, feeling the awkwardness of the last week’s silence and her own slight guilt besides, takes pity.

“The girl?”

Sita is rewarded with a smile of her own, small but sincere. “Bedridden, but wonderfully vivacious still. There are bouts of illness where she is worse off than usual, but she believes me nothing more than a particular playmate and I try to see her when I can. The parcel has medicine a far-off physician swore had done a similar patient some good, but Antara would never accept unless I passed it to her like this.”

Sita blinks. “But you are her sovereign!”

Her husband shrugs. “I am her sister’s friend, and I find that everyone is entitled to some amount of pride. It is difficult to accept that you cannot help the one you love best alone.”

She nods, satisfied as she has been in the past with the knowledge that at least she is not married to a stupid man, And, she supposes, not a cruel one either. “How old is the girl?”

His smile widens slightly in apparent reminiscence. “She will be seven in two months' time.”

“Does she have a doll?”

“One,” Sita’s husband says slowly, brow slightly furrowed, “but bedraggled.”

Sita may not know how to comport herself as wife nor princess, but once she was a Goddess who heard the entreaties of those who cared for their beloved ill. Still, she remains a sister. This, Sita knows how to do. “If you approve, I will make her a new one that you can take with you. I used to make dolls for my sisters out of dried grass and cloth when we were children.”

For a moment, her husband looks stunned before he manages to school his features into something like equanimity once more. Still, he slips and there is something helpless about the way he is suddenly looking at her. “You are kind,” he says, but low in a tone that makes it clear that he is not truly speaking to Sita so much as about her to himself. “I am always glad for that.”

Sita blushes, unsure about how to respond to a compliment not exactly meant for her ears. It is not something she ever expected to hear from anyone in Ayodhya, much less the husband she condemns to spend his days wandering the countryside and his nights at rest alone on his own stone floor. “Why did you call me?” she decides to ask instead.

Again, her husband shakes his head as if rising from a reverie. His usual self-confidence suddenly melts into trepidation. What could he possibly want that discomfits him so?

“At the Kosalan border,” he says slowly, eyes focused on some point behind Sita’s shoulders, “there are a few villages that, at some point in the last few years, welcomed some families from afar.”

There is something about the way he speaks that begins to knot Sita’s stomach. She has the beginnings of an inkling, but nothing so concrete that she can speak it aloud. She nods for him to continue.

“Neighbors share stories in times of plenty as well as times of scarcity. These last few months there have been stories about former droughts, experienced by foreign kingdoms.”

Ah. Of course.

“This is not Videha,” Sita says, but she speaks almost as if she is in a dream. She cannot deny her divinity, not without inviting further scrutiny of her orphanhood. But neither has she ever truly believed that it is her feet that coaxed the rains to Mithila. Her father sowed the fields with the merit of his good deeds. Her father found a babe in the trough. Coincidence does not imply correlation.

What would happen if the stories were wrong? If Sita walked the lands but the sky remained a bright, barren blue? In some faint corner of her heart, she feels resentment towards her husband for having made her think of this at all.

“Yes,” her husband agrees, “I told them so. But they insist I bring you to meet them if only to speak as their princess.” He winces slightly, eyes shifting desolate to the dirt. “Hope sometimes means the difference between death or life in these instances, and at this moment I have nothing else to offer.”

Helpless, Sita thinks again. Her husband, Crown Prince of Dasaratha’s empire that extends further and exacts more in tribute than any before, stands helpless before his wife. They are friends, he had said, and even before that, he is the one who has always been kind. She opens her mouth to say something, anything, but no words find themselves on the tip of her tongue.

Her husband, eyes still averted, nods as if he has understood. “It was foolish to ask, I know, and perhaps you even think me cruel. You do not speak of who you were in Videha, and I should not ask this of you as my wife.” His jaw sets. “I will take you back to the palace.”

What would happen if the stories were true? If, as in her dreams, Sita walked the lands here in Kosala and the skies still split?

“How will we go?” she asks quietly, unable to force her voice firm. The words leave her mouth unbidden, but she knows they are right nonetheless. “How long will it take?”

She can almost hear her husband’s neck snap as his eyes rise from their study of the ground to gaze at her with all the intensity of the vicious sun. If before he was stunned, now he can only be described as pole-axed. His face is suddenly host to so many overwrought emotions at once that it is rendered as illegible as the times when he forces it blank. She has never seen him so, but that is not unusual. She had not seen him even wearing the smile he gave Antara.

This, she wonders, if anyone anywhere has witnessed ever before. She wonders, even as in her heart she knows the truth: they haven’t. None but Sita.

“Will you really come?” His voice is almost plaintive, like a child asking something he already knows he cannot have. But what does the most powerful man in the world know of want?

“I will,” Sita says, head spinning with a thousand questions, a thousand fears, a thousand hopes. She bites her lip, suddenly overwhelmed by her own uncertainty. “I cannot promise --” again, she loses her voice before she can finish the sentence that would throw her status into such uncertainty.

“I know,” her husband says, answering her unasked question. “I always knew. It would not matter to me either way.” He too seems to break off, struggling to find the proper words. He takes a step forward, and then another, and then one more until he stands in front of Sita, close enough that if he reached out he could clutch at her wrists. “Janaki,” he says, voice dripping with an honest earnesty that suddenly reminds Sita that if she feels herself a girl in Ayodhya then her husband too is a young boy, aged artificially by the weight he is always carrying on his shoulders.

“Janaki,” her husband says again, and Sita takes a breath. He is very handsome up close this friend of hers, the man who is her husband. “You will always be safe with me.” He smiles slightly, and Sita feels the corners of her own lips curling in sympathetic response. “As you say, you are now my wedded wife. There is nothing anyone could say about you that will change that. You can be more, but from now on you will never be less.”

For years Sita was old as well. More than anything else, she was lonely. She is lonely still.

What would you call me, Crown Prince?

My wife.

“I will try,” she vows, refusing to think about what it will do to the villagers for whom the drought continues after she walks the distance of their land. For once, she knows what will happen: she will remain her husband’s wife. In many ways, this is more the moment of her marriage than the one in which he tied the sacred thread around her neck than the one in which he broke the bow of the Great God.

“I will,” she says again, and Sita is unsure if she is promising to be wife, princess, or Goddess. All three, perhaps. “For them,” she swallows and throws all caution to the wind. “For you, I promise I will at least try.”

---

+1

Sita walks for hours, hair falling out of the twist she had pulled it into after dismounting from the saddle she had shared with her husband traveling by horseback to the place that still believed there lived a goddess that could quench dry land.

She walks and walks, walks and walks and walks until her feet begin to crack and then bleed after such long exposure to the harshness of dead earth. Then, she walks some more. Thirst left her an hour ago, but now she struggles against exhaustion. Every step threatens to pull her down into the dust, and she knows, knew, that this would happen. She knew that she would prove their faith false, and leave them worse for having met her. She knew, and yet --

She had hoped, still.

There are no living goddesses who walk the land like Sita to call forth the rain. It is a ritual that has its roots in her father Janaka’s sacrifice, seeding the earth with the merit of his good deeds. Once, she had asked him what he felt when he had been plowing alone in the moments before he manifested a miracle.

“I suppose I should tell you that I prayed,” he had said thoughtfully, hand coming up to stroke absently at his beard, “but I did not. My people were suffering, and there is nothing even an intelligent man can do to mitigate the effects of a decade of drought. I was supposed to be thinking of all the good I had done, so as to imbue the ground with that goodness. But more than anything, every moment I was there I wanted it to rain -- more than anything I had ever wanted before. I felt like I would have done anything then, given anything, if only it would rain. By the end, I knew it would. It had to.”

In Videha, Sita had walked as ritual. She had lived in times of plenty.

In Kosala, there is a drought. She has seen with her own eyes the shrunken bodies of villagers who have no food. Whose voices are raspy with thirst. Together they had collected all the water they had left and had Sita sit, cross-legged before them as they washed away the dust of the road. Sita’s husband has promised that she will be his wife even if she proves a woman after all, but suddenly she knows why the rain fell. Her father too had known; in his own way, he had even tried to tell her.

In Kosala, Sita wants. She is a woman, and in this moment she wants as she never has before. She wants it to rain, more than anyone ever has wanted anything anywhere. More even than her father must have wanted because she wants not only for herself and her people but for her husband as well. Perhaps for him most of all, whom she has seen wrack his mind for weeks. Who has defied what convention or good sense would tell him and instead placed his faith in his wild wife, bringing her to the outskirts of his kingdom in hope of a miracle. Far from the palace, Sita knows herself. She knows what she wants. She knows now, with blinding certainty, what will be.

She wants to be loved, and she wants to love in turn. She wants it to rain, and so it will.

She walks until her body fails, certain in her knowledge that the rain will come. It has to. She trips, and suddenly she hears the gasps of the crowd that has kept vigil at the sides as they did in the time of her father before her. She trips, she falls, and just as she loses consciousness she hears the impossible roll of thunder on a cloudless day.

Sita hits the ground, and it begins to rain in Kosala.

---

coda. (2, 3, 4)

It is late when Sita wakes, eyes opening to the ceiling of a small hut as the raindrops patter against the roof. Outside she can hear shouts of glee, the beat of drums, the exultant songs of villagers who know that they can soothe their hoarse throats with water.

“Was it always like that?” Sita looks down to the foot of her bed where her husband kneels, hands gently rubbing ointment into her wounds before wrapping them with strips of his upper cloth. She hums in question, uncertain of what he means. “When you would walk in Videha,” her husband clarifies, eyes never leaving his self-appointed task, “was it like it was today?”

She could say yes, and imply that this is what goddesses do. Raghuvanshis do not lie. “No,” she says, and marvels at what a struggle it is to even speak. “Never.”

He nods, as if this was the only answer he expected. “Then it really was you,” he says softly, and suddenly Sita notices his hands are shaking as he winds the last of the cloth around her left foot. “You walked, and the gods answered your call.”

“Yes,” Sita says in a whisper. It is a thought too large to bear. He must have questions, she knows, and she owes her husband an explanation. She wants to tell him everything she remembers, everything she now understands, but in this moment there is nothing she can bring herself to say.

Finally, he looks away from her feet, shifting so that it is easier for Sita to look and see his red eyes.

“You cried,” Sita says inanely, stupid again but now in shock.

Her husband laughs, the sound just on the verge of being a sob. “It rained.”

He looks away.

“Before I found your pulse, I thought you had died.”

---

They leave in the morning once more on horseback, Sita clutching her husband’s waist and content to expose her aching, bandaged feet to the elements having long lost her shoes. The villagers offer breakfast, but Sita and her husband communicate wordlessly like she has seen other married couples do, and say together that they must respectfully decline. It will take another cycle for the crops to truly flourish, and there is more food than anyone can eat at home.

For a moment, Sita is jarred at the realization that Ayodhya is what she means when she thinks now of “home.” Mithila, of course, is home always -- but it is different now. Sita’s father called down the rain in Videha, but it was Sita alone who split the sky for her home last night.

After about an hour her husband brings the horse to a halt and jumps down, walking until they reach a lush orchard. Sita swings her right leg around and falls into his arms. For a moment she feels him lower her before he remembers that she cannot walk and shifts his grip, left arm grasping under her knees as Sita wraps her arms around his neck.

“You like jamun fruits, no? You keep them in our bedroom sometimes.”

Yes, Sita does. “Do you?”

Her husband shrugs. “I like these jamun fruits.”

“And where are we?”

“The crown plants orchards at places along the main roads so that travelers might find some respite.” He smiles, looking up at one of the trees. “This is the one with the best jamun fruits in Kosala. And this,” he lowers Sita to the ground underneath the tree and she lets go obligingly, “is the best tree of the orchard.”

It is a romantic claim to make, that there is a single tree that produces the best fruit in the land, but Sita’s husband does not say it as one might when repeating a fancy. Intrigued despite herself, she asks: “How do you know?”

He palms the bark, fingers searching for something that he finds in a particular divot. “A few years ago a squadron of warriors tested the fruit of every tree. This was the one they liked best.”

Sita is skeptical. “And you believe them?”

“Well,” her husband amends, that same mischief he had shown Antara in his eyes, “this is certainly the one I liked best, and the rest agreed as well. It might not be to your taste, given that you are a woman of refined taste in this sphere and I merely a man who prefers mangos.”

“We shall see,” Sita laughs, bedraggled and thirsty and tired. Still, she feels like she has never laughed like this before. In her past she has certainly felt joy and found laughter, but in her happiness now she floats. She had always felt so heavy before. “Let me have my breakfast, and I will be the judge of that.”

Her husband is graceful in victory -- it is not perfectly the season, but Sita swears she has never tasted so sweet a fruit.

---

“Her feet are bandaged,” Kaikeyi observes when the cacophony that accompanies their return to the palace dies down to a dull roar. It is an easy thing to notice when Sita is being carried in her husband’s arms. Kaikeyi was always the quickest of Dasaratha’s queens and proves herself to be the one best informed when her beautiful face twists in withering disgust. “You cannot possibly think that your wife ended the drought by walking.”

Sita cannot tell if the emphasis is on the words “your wife” or “walking.” Both, she thinks, offend the very marrow of an Ayodhyan sensibility that has spent half a year shoving gold at pandits to fund a sacrifice that will finally please Indra.

This is what Sita, married into a family that does not lie, plans to say: “We are glad to see the rain.”

This is what her husband, whose words at 18 already carry more weight in this family than those of his father, says instead: “She did. I saw it with my own eyes.”

[boxofbadaddiction]

Those Three Little Words

Fred Weasley x Reader

This story is inspired from a request of my F.R.I.E.N.D.S Themed Prompt List.

Prompts: 10 & 11

"Until I was 25, I thought the only response to 'I love you' was 'Oh, crap!'"/"Ah, Humour based on my pain. Aha-ha-ha."

Warnings: Swearing (per usual). Anxiety. Toxic Family. Emotional Trauma(?). Angsty. Post-War.

The War had been a sick wakeup call for Fred. He'd lived his life carefree and reckless, as he figured each day were a given. Mess up today it didn't matter because there was always tomorrow. He would strut through life as if he were invincible because, well, he always seemed that way. But death has a funny way of reshuffling ones priorities. A way of shedding light on what truly matters in your life.

Fred never considered himself as someone who lacked ambition. Frankly George and he never seemed to let anything hold them back. However, these days Fred could very well give Slytherins a run for their money - something George frequently teased him about. If there were something he wanted Merlin himself couldn't get in his way.

Not only in the case of work but his personal life as well. In love. And there was only one woman on Earth he loved. [Y/N].

He knew he loved her before the war. Before Umbridge drove him from Hogwarts in their final year. Before she left him.

It was only shortly prior, the boys epic departure, that [Y/N] had made the decision to call it quits. She knew their lives were destined to pull them in opposite directions and she never put much stock in long distance relationships. So, with a final kiss and a wish good luck, she walked out of his life. Albeit not completely.

After graduation she kept loosely in touch with the Twins, they had been friends after all, even visiting their shop on the off occasion when she could swing it. Although she was often far too busy to stay for long. Eventually she was relocated overseas for work, this officially terminating any of the limited contact had between the three.

The next time they would be in each others presence was the ill-fated battle.

[Y/N] had been keeping tabs on the events leading up to the fight. Even engaging in missions on behalf of the Order when necessary. She had proved quite a valuable asset. In the days before all Hell broke loose [Y/N] returned to Britian on 'urgent family matters' and of course she fought.

When Fred saw her again after so many years the rush of feelings that coursed through his body were nearly enough to knock him off balance. She was still so gorgeous. The [E/C] of her eyes reminding him just how deeply he loved her. Just how much he needed her. And he knew. Just knew she felt the same.

He saw it in the little things she did for him. Saw it in the tears of her eyes. In the way she broke down in his Hospital room when he finally woke, a fortnight, after his accident. Heard it in the tremble of her voice. In her 'I thought I lost you's. In the way she clung to him. He was so relieved she was okay and so happy to finally have her back in his life. Until suddenly...she wasn't anymore.

Recovery was Freds life now, but that wasn't hers. She was still needed elsewhere and as much as he wished she would stay he knew she couldn't. She still had a life left living. It were a miracle she managed to stay as long as she had. So...she left. And he wouldn't see her again for years. Six. To be exact.

Recovery had taken years from Fred. It was two and a half years before he could consider himself independent. After all that time wasted he wasn't about to let anything stand in his way. So when news carried to his ears that [Y/N] was back living in London, permanently, that after six years he could see her again, there was nothing holding him back.

In a second he'd apparated to her doorstep. Knocking on the withered wood door. Listening to the faint patter of approaching footsteps. Hearing the gentle click of the locks tumblers as they turned. Watching the steady swing of the door as it opened. Feeling the prick of burning tears behind his eyes as he stared back into her questioning gaze. Pulling her body into his as their lips collided. Relishing in the warmth that spread through his blood as she kissed back. Clung back. Loved him back. Everything he poured into her she gave right back. He swore right in that moment that he'd never let her go again. They'd wasted so much time already.

Over a year later the two could not have been deeper in love. She'd moved into the boys flat mere months after he appeared at her door. It's what Fred wanted, and Fred always gets what he wants.

Fred and Georges business had picked up quite quickly after the war. Fred insisted George begin work on the restorations while he recovered. Saying he wanted everything back in full swing by the time he was upright, to pick right back where he left off. George was sure he simply didn't fancy cleaning it himself and saw recovery as a pretty convenient excuse. Fred didn't deny his brothers claim.

They'd managed to open a second store in Hogsmead and were currently renovating the original store. Expanding the flat and lower levels. This saw the three residents temporarily relocating to the Burrow for a few days as the work was completed. Molly had insisted, saying the house were 'far too quiet' for her liking. Which was hard to believe as Ron and Hermione and Ginny and Harry all currently lived there. Of course Bill and Fleur, as well as Percy had all moved out ages ago, and Charlie was back living in Romania. Still, it beats paying accommodation elsewhere. And they couldn't deny that spending time back in their childhood home was enjoyable. It felt warm and safe and familiar, like the war had never happened and they were all just spending time together as a family.

As dinner approached on their third day home [Y/N] and Harry could be found helping prepare tonights meal, under the careful instruction of Mrs Weasley, while the rest sat comfortably within the sitting room fondly reminiscing their times spent together just like they were now.

The group were laughing haughtily at a certain memory George had recalled in which [Y/N] turned Rons entire bedroom hot pink with the Twins 'Everlasting Dye', after he thought it'd be funny to turn her hair a similar shade. Much like [Y/N]'s hair the dye hadn't faded for well over a fortnight as the Twins found the whole thing all too funny and refused them the instant remover.

"God, I love her." Fred smiled brightly at the memory, "I'm going to marry that woman." He stated matter-of-factly.

"Sure she likes you that much?" Ginny quipped.

"Certain, dear Sister." Ginny simply nodded a look of uncertainty on her face. "What's that look for?" "Nothing." "Ginny." "well it's just...she doesn't really say it much does she?" "'Course she does. What are you on about?" "I just don't think I've ever actually heard her say she loves you before." "It's not like you're 'round us 24/7 now is it?" Fred scoffed, shaking off his sisters comment.

George meanwhile was staring towards the ceiling, brows furrowed as he contemplated Ginnys words deeply before letting out a low "hmmp" as realisation struck.

"Oh, what now?" Fred rolled his attention toward his Twin. "Nothing it's just I can't think of a time I've heard her say it either." Ginny had a look of 'I told you so' blatantly obvious on her face while Ron and Hermione thought hard on the topic as well. Freds gaze shifted quickly between his gathered family.

"Oh, so what if you've never heard it. Point is I have. And I know she loves me so it doesn't matter. But if you all must! Here," he leant back in his chair calling into the kitchen "Hey, [Y/N/N]!" "Yeah, Freddie?" She walked toward him with a loving smile. "I love you" [Y/N]'s smile faded instantly as she raised a suspicious brow, "What'd you do?" "What!?" Fred asked shocked as the eavesdroppers giggled. "No. Nothing, really! I just wanted to tell you I love you." "Oh...well I know that" she smiled, kissing him softly. Fred gave her an expectant look as she stood back. "...what?" "you love me too, yeah?" "Of course I do." There was a determination behind her words. Almost as if she were insulted by his question, to which the answer were painstakingly obvious. She soothingly ran a hand through his hair, "I've got to get back in there and help your Mother before Harry burns everything." She joked, placing a final quick kiss to his lips. He watched her leave a giddy smile on his face before turning back to his nosey family.

"See. Told you." He laid back in his seat confidently. The group all shared tight lipped, awkward, smiles. "Oh, what?!" "It's just she didn't really say it, did she?" George spoke. "Yeah she did. I asked her and she said 'yes'. End of conversation." "But she didn't actually say the words; 'I love you'." Ginnys voice intervened. "She doesn't have to." "Shouldn't it be sort of automatic?" "Like you and Harry say it every time." He rolled his eyes. "Pretty much" Ginny nodded, earning an unconvinced scoff from her brother. "Here, watch."

Ginny mirrored Freds earlier movements, calling to the kitchen, "Hey, Harry!" "Yeah, Gin?" Harry came to his fiancès call. She smiled up at him sweetly, "I love you". Harry looked around the group a little uncomfortable and unsure but smiled nonetheless. "I love you too" he placed a quick kiss to her temple. "Right, that's all I wanted you can go now." Ginny turned back in her chair as Harry walked away very confused.

"Automatic." She gestured widely with her hands, a triumphant look on her face. "Oh piss off." Fred scowled. "Doesn't matter if she 'says the words' or not. I know she loves me. Doesn't bother me." "Good for you, Freddie." Ron spoke encouragingly. "So you're on my side?" "Absolutely!" "It wouldn't bother you if Hermione never-" "oh GOD no! She has to say the words. I need the reassurance." He looked up to his girlfriend, who in turn lovingly took his hand in hers.

"Alright. So it's a little strange. But I bet I can have her saying it before we leave." "In four days?" George questioned, sceptical. "Yep. I'll make her." "How romantic. With charm like that it's a wonder why she hasn't said it already." His Twin chuckled. "Why don't you just talk to her about it? Maybe there's a reason." Hermione piped. "Nah. My ways better." Fred shook his head, tapping his knees lightly as he thought.

And so began, what Fred would soon discover to be, the most difficult challenge he'd ever attempted.

It started out simply enough; with a few added 'I love you's here and there. Whether the moment called for it or not. Although after the war Fred had become notably more vocal in expressing his love towards family and friends, he kicked it up a notch in an attempt to coax those very words from the mouth of his partner. Quickly escalating to more grand and romantic gestures.

The first was a ridiculously large bouquet of vividly yellow roses. Moving onto a private picnic for two atop the Hill which rested behind the Burrow. At sunset he had dragged [Y/N] from the home to where he laid a blanket and candles, with soft music playing in the background, as well as having organised a platter of all their favourite foods. Ending the meal rather...intimately. During which he was sure to further praise her and whisper sweet, loving words in her ear. Telling her just how much he loved her.

His constant showering of affection had granted him plenty of appreciation in return. His words always being met with the usual "I do too"s and "Me too"s even a couple "Dittos" they always had, though he was yet to receive any "I love you"s. Which hadn't bothered him before, but now was proving to be mildly infuriating and very disheartening, really.

Failure wasn't something Fred was used to anymore. To think he was unable to get his long term partner to say those three little words was quickly making him uncomfortable.

By the fourth and final morning, since setting himself this little challenge, Fred was spent. He was sure he'd tried everything. Grand gestures. Romantic dates. Surprise kisses. Great sex. He had even seriously considered proposing, as a last resort. But these were not the circumstances in which he wanted to do so under, when he did he wanted it to be perfect. Maybe the Imperius - NO! no. Too drastic.

Why was nothing working? Suddenly Ginnys amusing quip wasn't so funny anymore and struck a vein far too close to home. Was it possible he was wrong and she simply didn't feel the same way?

All manner of sickeningly worrisome thoughts began to flood through his mind as he lay awake. He starred at the woman he loved so fiercely, so passionately, he could swear she were the only reason his heart kept bleeding.

He watched her as she slept peacefully, tucked tight against his chest, whilst he absent-mindedly stroked her hair, contemplating a reality which he much rather never come true. One in which she didn't love him.

He used to be so sure but now...now he was terrified. He'd never thought much on what form his Boggart would assume if he ever were to face one. He knew in this moment though that is exactly what shape it would take. Her.

She'd approach him slowly. An evil grin and amused brow raised upon her features. She'd tell him what a fool he was. How stupid he was to ever think a woman like her could love a boy like him. That she only stayed with him out of pity. How humiliated and desperate he seemed that day on her doorstep. How it would have been better if he had just given up, never fought to survive after the explosion. How much better it'd have been if he just died in War. She could have found real love, lived a happy life away from the embarrassing one she led with him in it.

Tears burned red in the whites of his eyes as his chest shuddered with every quickened and panicking breath he took. His heart thundering in his ears as the room began to spin. He was suffocating. Sweat streamed down his temples. He had to get out. Escape.

Sliding as quickly and carefully as he could from beneath the covers without disturbing the sleeping woman in his bed, he took for the shower. Praying the steam would unfog his mind. That the water would wash away his doubts and anxiety.

The whole time he tried to rationalise why [Y/N] wouldn't say the words. Reassuring himself that it didn't matter. Shouldn't matter. He left the bathroom long after the water had run cold feeling only moderately better than when he'd entered. At least now he had a modicum of control over his body. His emotions on the other hand...

He slowly descended the steps of his childhood home, face emotionless, to the sound of light chatter and clinking of various dishes. Everyone was already gathered around the table eating breakfast.

"Ah, there you are!" George announced as Fred entered the kitchen, "clean now are we? Thought you'd must have drowned in there." He joked. Fred offered a light chuckle and forced smile as he sat himself between his Twin and partner. "What's this the wake then?"

[Y/N] leant into his side, placing a kiss to his cheek as her hand traced circles on his lower back. "Morning, Hun" she murmured tenderly, chin resting against his shoulder as she peered up at him. He didn't look at her, simply humming in response. His hand briefly came to squeeze her thigh before quickly retracting. This did little to evoke a sense of ease within his significant other.

Over the eighteen months they'd shared together [Y/N] had long since become accustomed to his dramatic morning greetings. Usually, as they'd wake up together, it'd involve him peppering her face and neck in countless kisses before joining George for breakfast. On days when they'd wake to find themselves alone under the covers, the other having obviously awoke long ago, he'd surprise her. Lifting her off her feet and spinning her through the air then, placing her back down, kissing her deeply.

The only times she'd seen him like this were nights when his dreams had been plagued with flashbacks from the Battle. She assumed he'd slept peacefully. He hadn't had any nightmares in months and would usually, unintentionally, wake her during them. "You okay, Freddie?" "Yeah."

Totally convincing.

The rest of the day Fred was cold. To everyone but [Y/N] especially. He was having difficulty even looking at her. She'd tried talking with him but he insisted there was nothing the matter. Didn't keep her from worrying.

After dinner everyone moved into the lounge, engaging in various bits of conversation. Everyone aside from Fred. No one was sure when he'd disappeared but his absence was noted nonetheless. [Y/N] was the one to search for him. Found standing within the garden over looking the sunset.

She could see the discontent held in his body, the way he stood so rigid. The hollow expression on his features, completely devoid of any emotion. It hurt her seeing him this way.

"Hey, You." She spoke hesitantly. Fred turned at the sound of her voice. Watching her standing tentatively before him as if unsure whether or not her presence was welcome. "Hey, You" he smiled sadly back, his frame visibly relaxing at the sight of her. "We're all missing you in there. What are you doing out here all by your lonesome?" [Y/N] said softly as she approached him, arms snaking around his waist. His hands fell to her lower back and pulled her into his body ever more so. "Just needed a bit of quiet to think" "'Think', huh?" He hummed in response. "That's never good" she grinned making him laugh lightly. "No, it isn't." He placed a slow kiss to her lips.

Breaking it shortly after as he teased, "So, you missed me?" "Every second you're not by my side I do." He rested his forehead against hers, their eyes falling shut contently. Fred exhaled comfortably,"I love you" "I do too" [Y/N] replied. "What love you?" Fred straightened himself with a cheeky expression on his face which was mirrored on that of his partners. "Stop it." "I'm serious." "You know what I mean" "Do I?".

[Y/N] had another quip ready on the tip of her tongue until noticing that cheery look he held had vanished and they were no longer standing in one anothers embrace. Her face dropped at the sight if a completely serious Fred Weasley stood in front of her. Awaiting the answer to a question she didn't fully understand. "Whats gotten into you?" She took a step toward him, to which, he took one back. "Do you love me?" "Of course I do!" "Then why don't you say it?" "I don't know what you're -" "you never say it." "I just did." "No, you agreed to a question I asked." "It's the same thing." "It's not."

The two were practically talking on top of one another. "Just...say it." He took a step towards her, to which, she took one back. "If I say it now it'll be forced and it may as well not mean anything." "Why can't you just say it!?" He snapped, more asking himself the question than her. But he needed to ask. He wasn't yelling at her but a part of [Y/N] wished he would. "I know you love me. Or at least I thought I did. I just...I need to hear you say it because sometimes I can't help but wonder - please just. Say it." Staring into her eye's pleadingly, hers stared right back in apology. "Fred..." "Forget it." He turned from her. "Fred, baby" her hand reached for his shoulder as his own ran through his hair in frustration whilst his jaw clenched. "I can't. I can't be near you right now." He shook his head, storming off towards the Hill. Ignoring her frantic, begging calls.

[Y/N] stood rooted to the spot from shock. This was one of the first fights the pair had had, and she wasn't even sure what brought it on. There'd been minor squabbles between them out of stress from work or other things but never something like this. They had such an open relationship it never got to this point, any concerns either held was always voiced and discussed. Why was this time different?

As she watched his figure slowly disappear amongst the dark as night was soon to fall, she made her decision. This time wasn't going to be different. They were going to talk about it whether he cared to or not. Even if that meant her admitting somethings she'd very much hoped never have to. So, she set off after him.

Fred stood with his back against the trunk of an old tree which grew tall on top the Hill. One hand in his pocket as the other ran his fingers over the markings carved into it's wood by the Weasley family. One engraving in particular. A relatively fresh one where he had carved [Y/N]s name next to his own last Christmas to "officially" mark her as apart of the family.

He recalled the moment vividly. How she questioned his actions, wondering if he'll still love her the same 'down the road', not to regret this decision. "Nah, you're right. I won't love you the same. I'll love you more." He'd said. "But the real question is; will you love me, or are you just going to break my heart?" To be honest. He truly hadn't expected the latter.

He was drawn from his thoughts by the approaching sound of footsteps. Turning his head he rolled his eyes upon realising it was her. "Not now." He growled. "Yes now." She shot back at him standing firm in place.

She'd planned a whole monologue on the walk to him but now that she was here, eyes meeting his, she hadn't a damn clue what to say.

"Until I was 25, I thought the only response to 'I love you' was 'oh, crap!'" She blurted out. Fred looked at her quizzically as the words settled in the air. [Y/N]'s eyes shut for a moment, kicking herself. That wasn't how she intended for the conversation to go. "I'm-I can't say the words" she began again to which Fred scoffed. "Yeah. I gathered that much." "Fred, just shut the fuck up, and listen to me!" Her stare shot daggers into the boy and he found his attention unwavering from her words.

"I didn't have a normal upbringing. I didn't get what you have. I came from a family where love was a weapon. A tool for manipulation. Something that was withheld until you were useful. Something used to excuse shitty behaviour. I didn't get the warm Christmases and intimacy you got. Before you I wasn't sure I knew what love was. My whole life had been cold. Then when you showed up at my door that day it was like hot blood began pumping through my body for the first time. You felt like life when my whole existence has been death. That's when I knew I couldn't live without you. When I knew that I...I can't say it. The words. But not just to you, I can't say them to anyone. It feels unnatural like there's a rope tied around my throat and it suffocates me. And it kills me a little bit. To look into your eyes and know that I - that I still can't - may never ... fuck. I-" [Y/N]s hand came to cover her eyes as tears fell and heartbroken sobs escaped her body.

Fred reacted on instinct, by her side in a second, pulling her into his chest. A hand gripped her back as the other fisted into her hair. "I'm sorry" she cried as he soothed her.

Fred was fighting sobs of his own, feeling as her body shudder against his and she clung to him for support. Because if she didn't her knees would buckle and she'd fall.

"You have nothing to be sorry for. I-I had no idea this was...look at me." He held her shoulders taking half a step back to look at her. "I don't care if you never say the words." "But then why-" "I listened to the opinions of four prats who had no business sticking their noses in our relationship." [Y/N] chuckled sadly, wiping tears from her cheeks. "Before they said anything I honestly hadn't noticed because I knew, I know you love me. You don't have to tell me because you show me. It's in your kiss. In your eyes. Your laugh. Your nostrils as they flare when you yell at me after successfully pissing you off. Never be sorry. I shouldn't have gotten so worked up over nothing. Okay?" [Y/N] nodded in response, unable to form a sentence. Smiling sweetly his hand came to caress below her jaw."I love you." "Now you're just rubbing it in." Fred laughed, leaning down and pressing a kiss to her lips.

He's pulling away before [Y/N]s pulling him back by the collar of his shirt for a deep and passionate one. Soon breaking in dire need for air.

Her chest is heaving as she catches her breath. His eyes fall shut, pressing his head against hers gently. [Y/N]s eyes are searching his face. Why can't she just tell him? The words, those three stupid little words, are right there tearing at her throat. Wanting to be said. This is real. He is not her parents, not her toxic 'family'. He's Fred. Sweet, caring Fred. Her one and only. He's different.

She swallows hard, mouth going dry, as that familiar tightening takes hold. Trying desperately to rid herself of that strangling sensation that plagues her a trillion times a day. She's staring at him, panic coursing through her bloodstream. Her eyes clench shut as she tries to muster as much strength as she can. "I-" the words are right there. Her voice barely a whisper as she fights that rope. "I love you." [Y/N] gasps for air as a knot in the rope snaps. Eyes widening as her chest shudders before she's smiling. Fresh tears falling in relief and joy.

Fred's eyes spring open, gawking. Did she just...is he-did he imagine that? No. There's no way. "You...you-" "I love you." Her voice louder this time, more assured as a second knot snaps. He doesn't know how to react. Body and mind still processing.

Soon though he's grinning like a madman, spinning her in his arms, feeling happier than he thought possible. Placing her back on the ground both hands cup her face as his lips crash into hers.

They stay like that for a while, in one anothers arms. [Y/N]s kissing him tenderly as she pulls back to whisper the words once more, "I love you." He smiles cockily down at her before his expression shifts to one of mock surprise. "Oh, crap!" he laughs as [Y/N] rolls her eyes. "Ah, Humour based on my pain. Aha-ha-ha. You're such a bastard." She turns to walk off but he grabs her arm. Spinning her back against his chest as his other hand comes to the nape of her neck.

"Not so fast, Princess." He licks his lips smirking, voice low "say it again." She bites her lip suppressing a wide smile. "I love you." He places one final kiss before a wicked grin spreads over his face and he's quickly throwing her over his shoulder.

"Come on, love!" He starts running for the Burrow. "FRED!" [Y/N] squeals. "No time to waste! I told them I'd have to saying it before we leave." "You...oh my god, FRED! Did you place a bet on me!? You absolute GIT!"

"Love you too, sweetheart."

[prismatales]

Oh my goodness, finally the request thing is showing! It wasn’t for the longest time. First, I’d like to thank you for being such an amazing human being. Here’s an idea: Mirio and maybe the other two (separately) with an s/o who’s Sir Nighteye’s daughter. She’s with them at the raid and is there when Nighteye gets hurt and later dies. I crave angst and hurt/comfort. Of course you don’t have to! Thanks either way, you rock!

I hope you don't mind if it's only Mirio, but I tried to make it long enough, hope you enjoy it! 💖

Warning: Death, Slight mentions of gore, Angst and Fluff.

Reassurance

Everyone could feel the misery coming out in massive waves, filling the surroundings with a sorrowful feeling to such an extent everyone could feel that same pain as their own.

Nobody has the courage to approach the young girl whose bloodshot eyes can no longer shed a single tear looked like the physical embodiment of despair as she stands in front of her father's memorial.

She was there when everyone gave it their all for the sake of the mission, to capture the Shie Hassaikai and rescue Eri-chan, that little girl who had to suffer endlessly at the hands of that sociopath father of hers, the one person their group called their leader and the same man who didn't hesitate to use a small child, all for the sake of his horrendous goals.

She was there when her father, Mirai Sasaki, also known as the hero Sir Nighteye did everything in his power to protect the little girl, and his intern Lemilllion, just to be defeated and fatally wounded by the monster known as Overhaul.

She was there when her father fought for his life, even with a gaping hole in his chest together with the knowledge there was nothing else that could be done but wait for everything to be over, and in spite of being fully aware that his time in this world was not far from coming to an end, he never stopped smiling.

Caressing his little girl's face with a sense of pride, knowing that just like everyone else, she gave her everything to accomplish their mission. The last thing he asked of her was to keep smiling, before his eyes eventually closed for the last time.

A gut-wretching cry nearly shook the whole building, loud enough for everyone nearby to jump out of their skin, nobody had the courage to touch the grieving girl as her body gave up, fearful that the lightest of touches would end up breaking her apart, all they could do was watch as she cried, and cried and kept crying until her throat became raw from the ache, making even the slightest of whispers feel like hellfire itself on her vocal chores.

The day of her father's funeral was not different, the tears wouldn't stop falling down, everyone who had the honor of working with her father gave their condolences as well as offering to help out in any possible way, while aware it wouldn't do much to help, they could only hoped it would make a difference to soothe her grieving soul.

One person in particular knew exactly how much she's really hurting, and he'd made sure to do everything in his power to take care of her, that was a promise he made to his mentor, a promise he swore on his life that would never be broken.

Sir Nighteye was like a second father to Mirio, someone who believed in him from the very beginning, if he was in pain he knew it was probably small compared to what you were currently going through.

After all Sir was your father, the man who saw you growing up, who's wallet was full with pictures of his little girl, from a wiggling little newborn to a young teenager's first day at UA. The same man who couldn't stop crying of joy when your stubborn baby self refused to take her first steps for anyone but him....And the man who approved of their relationship in the blink of an eye, and asked Mirio for one thing only, to take good care of his daughter and make her happy.

If Mirio's good at something else than being a hero is at keeping promises, that was proven as he made way towards (Y/N)'s room, where said girl had been isolating herself after coming back from the mission. When their classmates told him she wouldn't come out, anxiety started eating him from the inside, but all he did was shake off the uneasy feeling before rushing towards her room.

You refused to move from the position under the soft blankets, the spot in the mattress right under your face was damp with ever flowing tears, motivation and energy abandoning you ever since that cursed monitor went flat, alerting everyone of the end of a journey. A stuffed giraffe squeezed firmly against your chest, it's the very first stuffed animal he bought for you as a baby, one eye was missing and one of its plushy ears long gone, but it was still a memento of your Dad which could never be discarded.

Someone knocked on the door softly, the vibrations could be felt throughout the utterly silent bedroom, where not a single noise could be hear aside from your soft breathing going off in a steady rhythm.

"(Y/N), It's me...Can I come in?"

Everyone who knows about your relationship with Mirio knows that if he's asking IF he can come in, it means the matter at hand is a serious one, the amount of trust between you was at such level he could just waltz into the room without asking. But this time he knew better than just burst in. The door slowly creaked open, Mirio's head peeking around the edge at the same time his blue eyes began looking around, however when he caught sight of your limp self it made his heart feel heavy by the sight of his girlfriend's non-responsive state.

The edge of the mattress dipping down by his additional weight was not minded, neither that or anything else in particular as you just keep on staring at the wall with dead looking eyes, fingers tracing a small pattern on the soft material of the stuffed animal comforting you during this moment in time filled with ever lasting pain.

"...I miss him so much" Mirio barely manages to catch the monotonous murmur coming from your side, gone was that sweet tone of your voice that he loved so much, the person laying in bed next to his sitting form was someone completely broken.

Right now you were not living, you were only...existing.

"...I miss him too" His hands reached forward to caressing your shoulders in a comforting manner, his touch was something that always brought a sense of comfort no matter the situation. That time when you had an argument with your best friend? he was there to cheer you up. The first time you failed the provisional licence exam? Mirio was there to cuddle your sadness away.

The ruffling of the sheets indicated Mirio moving around the mattress, the heat of his body enveloping you from the back, chin resting against the top of your head while his arms sneak around your waist to bring both bodies together for comfort.

Was it selfish of you not to see how much he was hurting as well? Mirio's someone who shines as bright as the sun, someone with a comforting warmth capable of help during the hardest moments in life, and yet in this moment, even with that bright smile on his face, he too was mourning on the inside.

"...Can you turn around?" He asks softly, in a way comparable to someone would ask a small child, the last thing he wants right now is to leave your hurting and alone, he can't help but smiling weakly when your body carefully turns over so your face is buried into his collarbone, the stuffed toy resting in between of your bodies, he can't help the sad smile that comes out knowing how much the little guy means to you.

"I heard you didn't come out all day, not even to eat something?" It takes a while for Mirio to get an answer, the silence no longer being so suffocating the moment your body started to relax thanks to his warm hold.

"...I'm not hungry, I'm just tired" In that exact moment the one thing that should have stayed quiet decided to betray you as your stomach began to grumble furiously at the comment on food. Mirio can't help the oncoming laughter as you start blushing despite the sadness. But at least the tears have stopped flowing for now, that's a good start.

"...Listen...I know how much you're hurting, I'm hurting too..." One of his hands start caressing your cheek, his touch bring so much comfort that you can't help but lean towards it with eyes closed, craving for more of his warmth like a moth attracted to the bodies of light.

"But we made a promise to him, remember?"

...A promise, the last thing your father asked before he left...

"Smile"

"...Easy for you to say...you're like the human equivalent of the sun itself" You couldn't fight back the tired smile that came out, and Mirio noticed that, relieved his actions were having at least a tiny but effective reaction on your mood.

"Look...I know you're in pain, but I promised your dad to take care of you, remember? And I can't stand to see you suffering like this" He slowly lifts himself up, dragging you along into a sitting position. "So I'm going take good care of my cupcake until she's back to her sweet ol' self, alright?"

Mirio pulls away from his cuddles session before getting up, taking you by the wrist to lift your still in pajamas body out of bed.

"Now, let's take you to the bathroom to take a nice warm bath, once you're done with that we're getting you something to eat and if you want we can go for a walk or something? What do you say?"

Your only response was to latch onto him once more, his eyes darting down to take in the sight of his girlfriend taking in as much of his warmth once again, nuzzling against his chest affectionately.

"Think we can go back to cuddling instead after we're done eating?"

His arms wrap around your shoulders as he gives you a small peck on the lips, it's his way to accept your proposal.

"Cuddling sounds good too"

He knows it would take time, but Lord help him if Mirio doesn't give his everything for the sake of being able to see that beautiful smile he adores so much.

MASTERLIST

@t-amajiki @undead0relived @shoobirino @bnha-ra @godtieruwu @mysticalite

[deathonyourtongue]

Welcome Home

Summary: Everything would be perfect, if he could just get home. Pairing: Henry Cavill x Reader Word Count: 2K Warnings: Miscarriage, HEAVY angst. Please don’t read if these things trigger you in any way. A/N: This is what happens when personal boy issues, wine, and crying Henry gifs collide. I apologize in advance. The song for this one is Lovely - Billie Eilish, Khalid

“And then literally Desmond says, ‘just give him the bloody axe, he’ll do it himself!’”

You laugh at the culmination of Henry’s story, an anecdote involving a very large tree, a very nervous crew member, and a director who put more stock in his lead actor than any of the men hired to actually remove the tree from the shooting location. 

“How’s our little one?” Henry asks after a moment, his voice tender and sweet, already a doting father even though you’re only six months along. 

“She’s having a little dance party, but I think that’s due to the chocolate chip cookie I ate an hour ago,” you laugh, rubbing the belly that sprang up overnight; It seemed like only last week you still had a flat tummy.

“Well, you tell her daddy can’t wait to come home and give her and mummy so many kisses she’ll lose count.” You can hear the smile in his voice and it warms your heart, cementing Henry as the man you want to grow old with and have many more babies with. 

“Mummy misses daddy a lot. When are you coming home, babe?” You ask softly, knowing production had been plagued with delays ranging from weather to a stomach bug that had laid out half the crew and nearly all of the cast. Henry sighs thoughtfully, the sound making it clear that he too is frustrated by the schedule. 

“If all goes according to plan from here on out, I should be home next month.” It’s not ideal, especially as your pregnancy draws to a close, but it’s better than nothing. 

“I’ll be at Heathrow with bells on, and maybe your mother in tow,” you chuckle, trying to bring levity to a situation you knew was hard on both of you. An affectionate person by nature, you know it’s hard for Henry to be away from those he loves. You miss him more than words can describe and you know that him coming home will be the balm for all the aches, nausea, and trouble sleeping you’ve had since first getting the news. 

“I can’t wait to see you, love. Miss you so much. Sleep now, and I’ll text you in the morning. Love you to the moon and back, darling.” Henry’s words bring tears to your eyes, as they always do when you’re apart for an extended duration, but you manage to keep your voice even as you respond in kind, saying your own ‘I love you’s in the nick of time, hearing Henry’s name being called by production just as you finish. 

It’ll be a long month, but you know that soon enough, the man who keeps your heart will be back and you’ll be nestled in his arms, where you belong. 

            ______________________________________

You wake from a decent sleep when, after rolling over, you feel wetness coat your outer thigh. Thinking you must have been dreaming of the ocean a little too much, you feel around for the bedside light switch and turn it on, rubbing your eyes to ease the switch from the darkness. You’re really not in the mood to deal with having to change the sheets, but what meets your eyes is beyond changing. Bright crimson instantly sets off alarms, and you look down to find that the source is exactly what you were hoping it wouldn’t be. 

There’s little time to react as a bolt of pain ricochets through your entire torso, emanating from your womb and immediately making you want to vomit. You manage to reach for the phone and call for an ambulance, but make it clear they may have to break down the door to get to you. For once, you’re grateful that Henry takes Kal with him whenever he goes to shoot, as the dog would hinder more than help as you pull together all your strength to try and stand. 

The room spins violently and you manage to grab onto the doorframe before your knees turn to jello. Taking several deep breaths, you wait for the wave of nausea to pass before dragging yourself to the staircase. Crumpling at the top of the stairs, you breathe slowly before moving down like a child pretending to be on a slide. You’re out of breath from pain by the time you get to the bottom and it takes the last of your energy to reach up and unlock the front door. Cell phone gripped tightly in hand, you do your best to stay awake, hearing the sirens in the distance. 

Though you have no memory of arriving at the hospital, one directive repeats in your head like a marching order, and you make sure to tell every doctor or nurse that comes into your triage room that under no circumstances do you want anyone to be contacted, especially the father of your baby or his family. The staff at the Royal find the request odd, but because you’re awake and alert, they have no choice but to heed your wishes. With your own family an ocean away, your request leaves you no choice but to go through the ordeal alone. All the better, you think, guilt already forming as the doctor breaks the bad news.

Your world is overturned in a matter of hours. They put you on Oxytocin, and pain the likes of which you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy is your sole companion for the next several hours as you’re induced for a birth you’ll never be able to celebrate. When all is said and done, the nurses ask if you want to hold your baby, and against your better judgment, you say yes.

Seeing her perfect, peaceful face breaks you. 

          ______________________________________

A month and a half to the date of the phone call, Henry arrives at Heathrow to find, much to his confusion, only his mother waiting for him. He greets her warmly, but his eyes scan the arrival area, hoping that you’d maybe just run off to use the restroom. When he finds no indication of your presence, his attention turns back to his mother. 

“Where is she, mum?” He asks, unable to piece together why you aren’t there, in his arms, where you promised you would be. Henry’s mother looks anywhere but at her son, unable to find a way to explain that everything he knew and was expecting had irrevocably changed. 

“She couldn’t make it on account of the...I’ll take you to her, son.” 

Henry tries not to let his imagination run wild as his mother drives north, past the home he shares with you. When the car crosses into Mayfair, Henry begins to panic. “Mum…” His tone is low, distrusting, frightened. His mother’s hand is clammy as it finds his, squeezing in a way that’s meant to be supportive, but only fuels his anxiety. 

He begins to visibly tremble when the engine cuts off in front of Nightingale Hospital. “Please tell me what’s going on. Why are we here? What happened? Mum, please.” His whispered appeal breaks his mother’s heart and she cups his face, willing herself not to shed tears yet again, for her son’s sake. 

“I’m sorry, Henry, love. I’m so sorry, my darling.” The explanation sticks in her throat, allowing only platitudes to escape and leaving Henry with no choice but to fly from the car and into the private hospital. 

The receptionist looks shocked when she recognizes him and forgets her job for a moment when he asks for your room number. “The last name is Cavill. Please, hurry. I need to see her.” When it’s explained that patients aren’t generally allowed visitors, Henry nearly begins foaming at the mouth, feeling as though he’s losing his own mind. He asks to speak to the doctor in charge, and before long is ushered into an office and poured a cup of tea, the banal formality only serving to anger him more. 

“Why is my wife in this godforsaken place?” He barks at the doctor the moment the door is closed, wanting answers and wanting them immediately. The doctor takes a seat, his expression sympathetic. 

“Mr. Cavill, I apologize that we weren’t able to reach you, but your wife, before taking a turn for the worse, made it explicitly clear that we were not to contact you. At this time, given that she can no longer make those sorts of decisions, her instructions fall back to you as her power of attorney.” The doctor takes a deep breath, knowing that what he’s about to say will break the man in front of him. 

“Your wife had a late-term miscarriage about a month and a half ago. It was exceedingly traumatic for her, especially as the common procedure for dealing with these sorts of things is to induce and force labor. Your wife went through all of that trauma alone, by her own choice, as she was repeatedly asked if you were to be contacted. It took several hours for her to deliver your child, and holding the baby afterward put her in a severe downward spiral in terms of her mental health. She’s been residing with us since her delivery and I’m sorry to say, but as of late, she’s been in a catatonic state, giving us minimal responses. At this stage, we’re simply providing palliative care to your wife. Unfortunately, many in her condition never recover, so we do our best to keep her comfortable, healthy, and calm.” 

Henry keeps his mouth pressed firmly closed in order not to scream. Blowing air through his nose, he forces himself to bite his tongue until it bleeds, chest heaving as he fights for control. If he can’t keep it together, he can’t see you and that’s all that matters to him at this point. 

“May I see my wife? I’ve been overseas for the last six months, shooting a film. I w-was expecting her at the airport.” His voice sounds wrong to him, pinched and tinny. He knows he has tears in his eyes as the doctor is blurry, but he refuses to let them fall, his need to be strong for you taking over any allowance for grieving. 

“I’ve been told she’s not having a good day today, so if she refuses to look at you, to let you touch her, to make any form of response, please do not think it your doing. It’s the nature of her condition,” the doctor warns as he approaches your room. 

It’s all Henry can do not to break down right there and then, the heels of his palms pressing hard into his eyes, teeth clenched as he tries to remember how to breathe. The woman in the bed, staring passively through him isn’t the woman he loves, the one he would die for. That woman is gone, replaced with a cheap, emotionless facsimile that breaks him even more. Resting his hands on his knees, he tries to catch his breath, wishing he’d come home sooner.

            ______________________________________

By the time he’s back in his mother’s car, Henry’s numb to everything but the pain searing through his chest, “Take me home, mum. Please,” he murmurs, Henry’s head lolling onto the window for the duration of the drive back to your former home. He refuses to allow his mother in the house, pleading with her to go home and wait for his call.  She takes Kal with her, knowing her son well enough to understand that he needs to grieve in his own way. 

Henry’s not ready for the blood, having assumed that someone would have cleaned it up by now, but the Hansel and Gretel trail is hard to miss and with leaden steps, he moves upstairs.

Left in the exact condition it was last used in, the room you two shared leaves no question of what happened and what you went through, alone. His knees give out as he takes in the sheer quantity of blood on the bed, Henry guilt-ridden that he wasn’t there for you when you needed him most. 

Finally freed of any need to save face or be strong for others, Henry screams from the depths of his shattered soul, the sound unbroken until anguish consumes his voice and tears flood his face. Finding his feet, Henry staggers to the bed and curls up around the remnants of his previous life, wailing over the permanent reminder of what almost was.

[kingreywrites]

Where My Skin Begins

Fandom: Tangled

Word Count: 1903

Summary: Even now, as the moon was shining through a tiny interstice in the ceiling, his skin was still tingling uncomfortably where Stalyan had touched him. On his shoulder, on his chest, on his cheek, her hands were everywhere, and if he hadn't been able to hold Rapunzel right now and here, he knew he wouldn't have slept at all.

Note: I don’t know what to say but if you don’t know it, you should definitely check out the song Pluto by Sleeping at Last, it was a big inspiration for this and I feel like it’s a Eugene song through and through!

Read on ao3

The night of his almost marriage to Stalyan - second almost marriage to Stalyan even - Eugene slept with Rapunzel alone in one side of the caravan, the others giving them a wide berth after today's events. He was grateful for that, and she was too, because they… They had needed this. Even now, as the moon was shining through a tiny interstice in the ceiling, his skin was still tingling uncomfortably where Stalyan had touched him. On his shoulder, on his chest, on his cheek, her hands were everywhere, and if he hadn't been able to hold Rapunzel right now and here, he knew he wouldn't have slept at all.

Not that he was sleeping right now. Rapunzel wasn't either. He was spooning her tightly against his chest, and she was gently stroking the pulse point on his wrist, trying to calm him down with the gesture. Eugene hoped she couldn't feel him tremble behind her, but it was probably a lost cause. She kept on touching him and he kept on breathing, until everything seemed a little more normal again. He wouldn’t say he was relaxed but he was… Significantly better than earlier. His hands had been so shaky that Rapunzel kept holding them on the entire way to the caravan. He loved her.

Softly, Eugene shifted and kissed the nap of her neck, drawing a shiver out of her.

"I love you," he whispered. "Thank you for rescuing me, again."

It was said in a light tone, intended as a joke, but Rapunzel immediately wiggled out of his embrace to face him, still lying down. Her eyes were shining despite the darkness - she didn't look tired at all. She probably had too much on her mind, just like him.

"You don't have to thank me for that," she murmured fervently, pressing closer to him, and for a moment, he wished he could forget about everything but her.

He still couldn't get Stalyan's voice out of his head, couldn't forget that sinking feeling in his heart when he had been sure that Rapunzel thought he had left her. Anxiety was still coursing through his veins, because for a moment, he thought he had lost everything that ever mattered to him - and all of that because of his past. He had never hated himself more than at this moment.

"I'll always come for you," Rapunzel insisted, her hand going to touch his cheek lightly as she interrupted his musings. "I promise."

His eyes watered before he could stop it. He had a second to freak out, but no matter how hard he tried to bite them back, his body refused to listen - he could already feel his face twist in that ugly way of his as the tears built up.

Eugene sat up quickly, leaving Rapunzel's arms to put his palms over his eyes and his elbows on his raised knees. Eugene Fitzherbert didn't cry. He had an ugly crying face and nothing to cry about anyway and why were his eyes burning-

"Eugene?"

He sucked a breath through his teeth when he heard her call his name, but didn't move. If anything, he curled up on himself even more. He didn't cry. He hadn't cried since he left the orphanage, at least, and never planned to do it again. He didn't even cry when he died, though he had been close - why would he now?

I'll always come for you.

He knew that. He knew that. Rapunzel loved him, that wasn't a new information, his eyes had no reason shed tears about it of all things… Except that, today, Eugene saw Stalyan. Today, he remembered exactly what it felt like to be Flynn Rider - and to not have Rapunzel in his life. Less than two hours ago, Eugene had been sure that he would have to marry the woman that still gave him nightmares, all of that to save his best friend's life - and to say he felt uneasy about the entire situation was sugarcoating it.

Stalyan thought that they belonged together, and he couldn’t help but fear that she was right. Couldn't help but fear that he didn't deserve better, didn't deserve to be loved as Eugene after everything he did as Flynn. Stalyan knew him, she knew the worst parts of him like he knew the worst parts of her, and who better than her to see that he would never be worthy of Rapunzel?

"Eugene," Rapunzel said, her voice even in an obvious attempt to sooth him. "Eugene, can you stop biting your lips?"

"Oh," he exhaled, the sound wobbly - he hadn't even noticed, but he had drawn blood in his attempt to muffle himself. "Sorry- Sorry I-"

He cut himself, because he knew she would hear just how awful he was feeling if he kept on talking. Something told him she already knew. His face was hot under his palm, his tears escaping him despite his best efforts, and wow, Eugene hadn't expected himself to be this pathetic-

"Can I touch you?" Rapunzel asked, interrupting his thoughts once again.

He vaguely nodded beneath his hands and she scooted over, putting her head on his shoulder gently as her arm went around his back. A soft sob escaped him and he nearly bit his lips again, before remembering her previous words. The position had to be uncomfortable for her, all because he couldn't get ahold of himself.

"You don't have to… You don't have to stop yourself from crying," Rapunzel said tentatively, her hand making slow circles on his back.

"I- I have an ugly crying face," Eugene chuckled, the excuse familiar enough that he nearly sounded normal again. Because he was fine - he had no reason not to be. Stalyan was a thing of the past and yes, maybe today had been a close call but nothing had happened and he wasn't a young and stupid teenager dreaming to find his place in the world anymore; he knew where he stood with Rapunzel, he… He…

"It's okay to be scared, Eugene," Rapunzel murmured, and that sentence broke through every of his defences.

For a moment, he curled even further on himself, before abandoning all pretenses and turning towards her. Rapunzel instinctively knew what he wanted, and he wouldn't be able to tell who moved first, but suddenly he was in her arms, head pressed tightly against her shoulder as burning tears escaped his eyes. His fingers gripped her dress as he tried to anchor himself through the silent sobs shaking his body, his face contorting once again because of his crying. At least, where he was, she still couldn't see him.

His chest was heaving, and he didn't know why he was crying so hard, he didn't know why what happened affected him so much - or maybe he did, but refused to accept it. He had never revisited the "Stalyan events" after leaving her at the altar. The memories that had rushed to the forefront of his mind today, after years of being casted away, hurt just as much as he remembered it and- He couldn't tell Rapunzel. The simple idea of explaining to her exactly what had happened between him and Stalyan worsened his state, because his worst fear was that she- she would see the same things Stalyan did, and she would hate him, and… And that was unfair to Rapunzel to think like that but he couldn't stop himself.

He still remembered the person he was with Stalyan, and he hated it. Hated her for bringing out the worst in him because that was what she wanted her boyfriend to be; hated himself for doing everything to please her and more; hated himself, again, for being just as despicable as Stalyan was without prompting.

We belong together Flynn, her voice echoed again inside his mind, and a more violent sob shook through him. He hugged Rapunzel tighter -or maybe she did- and tried to drown it out with her scent and her warmth and her love.

He was probably ruining Rapunzel's dress with his stupid tears. Her fingers were gently massaging his scalp, and that was nice. He could feel her hair tickling his neck, could sense her chest moving with her respiration, could count the circles her hand was doing on his back. Little nothings which meant everything to him, and as always, Rapunzel was his light in the night. Slowly, Eugene felt like he could breathe again.

"I will always come for you, Eugene," Rapunzel said again, louder this time, "I don't want you to ever doubt that."

"Ah, I... So-"

"Don't say sorry."

"-oookay," Eugene snorted, quite ungracefully. "I- I love you."

She put her hands on his chest to push him back gently, and his first reaction was to try and hug her tighter, before sighing. He wouldn't be able to hide from her forever. His face was a mess, he knew it, and yet Rapunzel cupped his cheeks tenderly, eyes shining in the darkness and looking so beautiful that Eugene couldn't help being even more flustered. He wanted to quip about his crying face again, because he knew it was hideous, but he didn't think she would appreciate it. She never did like it when he was demeaning himself, even in a joking manner.

Her thumb lightly brushed out the wetness under his eyes, blessedly cool against his warm skin.

"I love you," Rapunzel whispered fervently. "I love you so much, Eugene, and I never want you to think that you have to hide your tears from me."

Of course, that only managed to make his eyes tear up again. His right hand went over hers on his cheek, engulfing hers really, and his heart seemed to be fluttering with emotion as he exhaled shakily. Rapunzel was the one to hug him this time, her arms going around his neck as his hands settled on her back and, somehow, they were fitting perfectly together.

Eugene had never believed in fate, soulmates, or whatever set-in-stone paths people loved to think about. He always hated these ideas, because if fate was a thing, then it was his to be a lonely and good for nothing orphan - and if soulmates truly existed, then him and Stalyan were a perfect match.

Now, he wasn't so sure. Perhaps being a lonely orphan was his fate, because it led him to meeting Rapunzel. Perhaps meeting her was his fate. But what they did next, their acts and their friendship and their love - all of that, they made it themselves. And so, maybe Flynn could have belonged with Stalyan, but Eugene chose to love Rapunzel everyday of his life, and he knew she did the same. Maybe that was what it meant, to be soulmates. Or maybe the universe simply didn't have as much meaning as people wanted it to.

For now, Eugene and Rapunzel were lying down on the bed, still in each other's arms, though Rapunzel was clearly spooning him now. He always felt safe when she did that. His eyes were swollen from crying, and his face felt too hot against Rapunzel's skin, but she was softly breathing against him and he knew everything would be fine.

Rapunzel would probably have questions about his relationship with Stalyan - questions that he was, frankly, not eager to answer - but it was all a problem for tomorrow. That night, they slept deeply, exhausted, but relieved to be together.

[maskthesimp]

Cold Blooded, Warm Hearted - Malia Tate x Self-Insert

Warnings: mentions of child abuse, general violence and gore, crude language, monsters

If you wish to follow this fanfic more closely (as it will be a full on book hopefully) check my Wattpad in the Pinned post! It just makes everything easier~ XOXO

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Chapter 1: Paths Crossed

"Bring him," a voice rings out, fire crackles as chains gently rattle against parallel stone pillars. Echoes of footsteps ring through the halls, coming to a whisper as they enter an open space, the ground lined with sand, crunching under the small boots of he who entered the ceremony room.

"You, child of Connor, Lord of the West Territories; Here you shall evolve. Shed your skin, accept your heritage and become one of us! Take your first kill, and burn away the weakness that plagues you," the voice continues to boom through the vast space, voices whispering and muttering as the small figure makes it's way closer to the rattling chains, "Are you ready, my child?" The voice booms as a man groans, his chains shake and knock together, the heat of the fire laying ontop of his skin like a blanket waiting leap and turn him to ash, "...I am!".

Two cloaked men, jam their spears to the ground next to the younger figure, and take their place next to the chained man, "It's time for you to evolve," says the left man, "Shed your humanity." Says the man on the right. A chant erupts in the observing crowd, 'kill, shed, evolve...kill, shed, evolve...'

The young, small figure slowly walks towards the rattling chains, and the bare man constricted by them. He looks at his hands as ash red claws crawl their way out of his formerly human finger tips, wine red scales peel back up his arm, waist, chest, neck, and face, amber rings brand his once ivy green orbs. "Kill, shed, evolve," the two men echo, gripping the edges of two stone bowls on either side of the chained man, filled to the brim with molten rock, glowing with the licks of flames. The ash red claws glint in the light of the flames, and swing down, sending flicks of blood to the ground, as they melt into the already red scales of the young figure's hands.

The chant continues, over and over again, 'kill, shed, evolve, kill, shed, evolve..', the first stage having been complete. The child winces in fear and nearly stumbles back, but holds himself steady, as the two men release the heated rocks onto the scaled child. A piercing scream erupts into a roar as flames slither their way across the child's body, when he opens his eyes in agony, the burning Amber rings are replaced by a now cold, blue glow.

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[Beacon Hills High-school, Last Period]

"Hey do you guys wanna study after hours?" Stiles asks, standing up from his seat. "I need to, I have a maths test coming up soon," Malia responds, a slight pout growing on her face as she reminds herself of her least favourite class. "Cool, I'll help you out!" A tall, dark boy stands from his seat aswell, Scott, he follows his girlfriend, Malia, and his best friend, Stiles, out of the classroom. They make their way up the stairs, running into their resident Banshee, and Stiles' girlfriend, Lydia, eventually reaching the doors of the library.

They settle down at one of the central desks, each opening their books and beginning to study for their respective classes. "Ya know, we haven't had anything supernatural happen in the past few months, it gives me bad tingles in my feet, like something is gonna happen soon," Stiles squirms in his seat with his his chin resting in his palm, Lydia agrees with Stiles, "Yeh you're right, it does seem weird doesn't it? Maybe The Beast was the last big bad in Beacon Hills. Seems fitting that our last one would be the first Werewolf killed by an Argent." Scott turns to his friend, somewhat rolling his eyes, "C'mon Stiles, you're being paranoid! Not everything is supernatural in this town, we can go one year without finding a body, or having kidnappings, or giant phantom werewolves tearing people apart!" Stiles looks down at his open book, a concentrated frown on his face, "Yeh I guess you're right.."

The conversation moves on, everyone but Stiles focusing on other things. A few minutes pass, before Stiles pipes up about a new face who's entered the library,with long brown and blonde hair, light denim jeans, and a black jacket. "Who's that? I don't recognise them from the new Freshmen, are they a transfer student?" The person wanders over to the Anthropology section, also known as where the stories on Mythological creatures are, "I think so, I've seen them at the Jujitsu hall, I think they were signing up," Malia answers Stiles' characteristically unrelated and random question. She gazes off at the new figure, watching them wander around, their raw fingertips glazing over the spines of each book they pass, until eventually they stop and open one, setting themselves down at a desk behind theirs. Scott turns to his girlfriend, a confused expression stapled to his face, "Why were you near the jujitsu Hall? None of us have a single class near there." Malia directs her attention back to Scott and her friends, her focus on the new teen broken, "Hm? I find it entertaining, why else?" She says as if it's blatantly obvious, which to her friends; it is, almost confused as to why Scott would even bother asking. "They seem like they're around our age, I'm just surprised anyone is even bothering coming to Beacon Hills High anymore, let alone what appears to be a transfer student." Lydia looks up from her notes, also oddly transfixed by the person, who is now deeply involved in their own selected book, "You sure they're our age, Lydia? They're kinda short, maybe puberty is stuck in traffic for them," a chuckle comes from the group's friends Liam, Corey and Mason as they sit down next to the main four, with Scott's Beta, Liam glancing at them each one at a time as a silent greeting. "No, they likely have some form of Dwarfism, a condition that essentially puts a limiter on how tall someone can grow, although there's hundreds of different types so I can't for sure say which one they may have.." Lydia responds almost distantly, still keeping a keen yet seemingly misty eye on the new kid, everyone taking a glance at her, not at all surprised by her scientific knowledge anymore, before they all go back to silently watching the figure.

After a while Stiles stands up, and begins making his way towards the new kid's desk, but not before Scott questions what he's doing, "I'm gonna go talk to them! Every time a mysterious new student shows up something happens, what if we have another Liam? Another time bomb?" Stiles points out, accidentally taking a small dig at their friend with I.E.D, "Hey! That was Scott's fault, I didn't come here as a wolf!" Liam retorts, glaring at Stiles with a frustrated gesture, "Well technically you got yourself tossed off the side of a building, so it was sorta your fault," Mason pipes up, "That was the wendigo's fault! Not mine!" The Beta reminiscences over the time he got bitten by Scott, when he fell off the hospital roof after he was hunted by a hungry Wendigo. "Alright enough! I'm going to talk to this kid and see what their deal is, okay?" Stiles eventually interrupts the debate, settling to try and conversate with this strange new face, "Who's to say they're anything at all? You don't need to be suspicious of every new person ya know," Malia points out to Stiles, shrugging her shoulders, "listen I always trust my gut, they transferred to Beacon Hills High even after everything that's happened here, and oh look! They're reading a book on supernatural creatures! That's not suspicious at all!" The skeptic says sarcastically, before stumbling over to the desk the young figure is sitting at.

He sets himself down clumsily, glancing between the person and their book, "So..a fantasy lover?" Stiles awkwardly asks the stranger sitting before him, he looks up from his reading in an almost panicked state, suddenly closing his book most of the way, "Oh um--..Hi, yeh, just studying for History," They let out a small, awkward chuckle before introducing themselves, "Cael by the way!" They reach out, shaking Stiles' hand as he too introduces himself, "So, you a fan of Mythology too, huh?" Cael attempts to break the Ice a little, worried that his social anxiety was showing, "Yeh," Stiles stares at the back of Cael's chosen book, somewhat zoning out while reading the title; 'The Extensive History and Physiology of Dragons throughout History'. "So, you're a dragon lover aswell then?" Stiles questions the kid's taste in History so Cael explains their history project, "Pff no, I have quite the distaste for them in fact, the history project is to study a part of any culture that we fear, whether it be real, religious, or historical events that took place in a Country's past," he awkwardly shifts in his seat, explained away by his discomfort with the Winged creatures depicted in his selected book, "So, what makes you dislike them so much, just scary? Or a separate reason..?" Stiles lightly stares at the androgynous figure sitting across from him with suspicion he hopes isn't noticeable, "Because they're the most scientifically realistic, in most cases," he responds with a deadpan and almost cold stare. Stiles' mind starts running wild with theories on every word Cael spoke, the way he said them, and other meanings of what he could've meant, his gut giving him more feeling than ever that Cael wasn't who they said they were.

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[Scott's House]

"Scott I'm telling you! This kid is shifty as hell! I checked with some of the people in his class, and they don't have a history homework even close to what he described!" Stiles points out his evidence for Cael's lying, showing his continued distrust for the young lad, "Maybe he just wanted to learn about Dragons, people have interests, Stiles!" Scott argues with his friend, while he watches him rummage through his desk, clearly searching for something, "Why would he lie about something like that? What's the point of lying about an interest in something such as dragons? Why not tell the truth, unless the truth is something you wish to keep hidden?" Stiles finally appears to find what he's looking for, he holds up a hard drive that Scott recognises, the Bestiary that used to belong to the Argents.

Stiles plugs in the Bestiary to his computer, and loads up the index. He scrolls down to the Dragons section and look through it for a while, reading some useful parts out loud; "Much like other shape shifters, dragons appear as human...Dragons have various species among their communities...they have a similar hierarchy system to ancient Kings and Queens of the English Empire..." Scott looks over Stiles' shoulder, silently reading along with him, "Stiles you should head to bed, it's late and we can talk more tomorrow. Listen if something is up with this kid, then we'll eventually find out, but other than a natural interest in fire breathing lizards, he hasn't acted suspicious in the slightest." Stiles turns his spinning chair around to face Scott, "Scott, he said he hates dragons and has a fear of them," Scott's face sinks with confusion, he asks what the skeptic is talking about and Stiles responds, "Whenever I was talking to him, he said that he had a really bad fear of Dragons, when I asked why all they said was because they're the most likely supernatural creature to be exist, is that not in the least bit suspicious?" The Werewolf stands up properly, thinking in silence for a few seconds, "Scott you didn't trust me with Theo, or when I realised I was the one who wrote Kira's name on the chalk board, I just need you to trust my gut this one time!" Stiles begs his friend to go along with his hunch, but Scott seems to be somewhat distant, until he snaps his head up "He could be a hunter! Maybe he's not a supernatural but a hunter!" Stiles claps his hands and points a praising finger towards his best friend, "Yes! Now you're following along! That explains why he was researching dragons, he wasn't studying them for himself, he was trying to figure out ways to defend himself or--"

"Kill them.." Scott quickly interrupts, his gaze sinking to the floor, "That's it, tomorrow we inform the rest of the Pack, and we find him. We'll question him, if my hunch is right and he's a hunter, then he poses a risk to all of us. Including any humans who are involved with protecting the supernatural, aka me! I only have a metal bat to protect myself so it'd be nice to have a heads up on this guy!" Stiles retorts with a snarky undertone, Scott nods his head, agreeing and saying goodnight to his partner in crime before heading home, the last thing he needs is his girlfriend climbing through the window to find his room Scott-less.

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[pitiless-achilles-wept]

2020 Can Take My Hair, But Not My Hope

My hair started falling out on election night.

I thought at first it might be the anxiety, that I was literally pulling my hair out with worry over numbers I already knew were not going to be definitive before the night wore into morning but which I stayed up until 3:30am watching anyway. I tweeted rapidly, reassuring my jittery timeline that not only had we all known that the night would bring no results but that we had even expected Trump to lead in key states because of the greater number of mail-in ballots from urban areas that would largely count for Biden. We knew. We all knew. But we were all terrified, flashing back to 2016 and already dreading another four years of living life on high alert, in constant survival mode.

I posted a selfie with a tweet that read, "Could be the last presidential election I vote in (blah blah stage 4 cancer blah blah) and I wish it were better and clearer than this but it's a crucial privilege to have voted. Remember, whatever the outcome, the last thing they can take from you is your hope."

To me that last sentence has been a mantra for these years and for my treatment. I have consistently refused, despite overwhelmingly terrible odds, to lose hope. The story of Pandora's Box tells us that the very last thing left inside was Hope--that even once all the demons were out in the world there was that tiny, feathered creature left to hang on to. It hasn't been easy, but I am one of the most stubborn people you will ever meet (and if you doubt this just ask anyone who's ever fought me on anything!) and it has turned out to be a saving grace rather than an irritating personality trait. Feeling like the world was trying to take my hope away made me angry. And when I get angry I will fight back.

I know I'm not alone in feeling like we entered some kind of alternate nightmare timeline on election night 2016. To that point, despite periods of immense personal difficulty, nothing truly terrible had happened to me. Then, in short order, my marriage ended and I was diagnosed with and began being treated for a terminal illness, all against the backdrop of a regime so deliberately hateful that it was truly incomprehensible to me. Then, a global pandemic and national crisis swept away the small consolations I'd found in my new life with cancer. The temptation to feel hopeless was strong and I struggled with it, particularly in the isolation of quarantine. I'm struggling with it now, facing a winter of further lockdowns, social isolation, continued chemo, and the added indignity (and chilliness!) of not having any hair. But somehow the coincidence of my hair loss with election night seemed like a good omen for the future, if a sad thing for the present.

I heard the news that they had called Pennsylvania for Biden at a peaceful Airbnb in the Catskills after stepping out of a shower where lost hair in handfuls. It felt oddly like a sacrifice I had made personally. I joked about this with friends on the text chains that lit up and that (despite my promise to myself and my writing partner that we'd "go off the grid") I responded to immediately. Instant replies, with emojis and GIFs, participated in the fiction: "Thank you for your service!!!"; "We ALL appreciate your sacrifice!"; "Who among us would NOT give up their hair for no more Trump?". The feeling was real for me, though. It was as though the good news demanded some kind of karmic offering. You never get something for nothing, I thought, and really it was a small price to pay.

The rest of the weekend passed too quickly, with absorption in the novel I plan (madly, given that I also work full-time) to work on for "National Novel Writing Month" (NaNoWriMo), walks in the unseasonably warm woods, and nighttime drinks on the back deck under the stars, watching my hair blow off in fine strands and drift through the sodium porch light. My friend and I read tarot and both our layouts contained The Tower, the card for new beginnings from total annihilation, the moment of destruction in which (as the novel's title says) everything is illuminated. "This might sound dumb," he said, "but maybe yours is about your hair." It did not sound dumb.

[shaved heads, the 2020 election, and a couple pics under the cut]

There is probably no more iconic visual shorthand for cancer than hair loss. It happens because chemo agents target fast-proliferating cells, which tend to inhabit things that grow rapidly by nature (hair, fingernails), or that we need to replenish often (cells in the gut), as well as out-of-control cancer cells. But not all cancer treatments, not even all chemotherapies, cause hair loss. In my 20 months of being treated for cancer and my three previous treatments (four, if you count the surgery I had) nothing had yet affected my hair beyond a bit of thinning. This despite the fact that my first-ever treatment (Taxol) was widely known to cause hair loss for "everyone." I had been fortunate with this particular side effect in a narrow way that I have absolutely not been on a broader scale. "Maybe," I had let myself think, "I can have this one thing." The odds were in my favor too; only 38% of people in clinical trials being treated with Saci lost their hair. I liked the odds of being in the 62% who didn't. But--as we all felt deep in our gut while they counted votes in battleground states--odds aren't everything.

I had come to treat the "strength" of my hair as a kind of relative consolation (though as with everything cancer "strength," "weakness," and the rhetoric of battle have nothing to do with outcomes). I treasured still having it, not just out of vanity (though I have always loved my hair whatever length, style, or color it has been) but because it allowed me to pass among regular people as one of them. I had no visible markers of the illness that is killing me, concealed as first the tumor and then the scars were by my clothing. "You look wonderful," people would tell me, even when I suffered from stress fractures from nothing more than running or sneezing; muscle spasms in my shoulder and nerve death in my fingertips; nausea that I swallowed with swigs from my water bottle that just made me look all the more like a hydration-conscious athlete; and profound, constant, and debilitating fatigue. Invisible illness had its own perils but I would take them--take all of them at once if necessary!--if only I could keep my hair and look normal.

It was not to be. A part of me had known this, since a lifetime with metastatic cancer means a lifetime of treatments a solid proportion of which result in hair loss. But I had hoped. And I had liked the odds.

The hardest thing for me is having to give up this particular consolation before knowing whether or not my new treatment is also working on my cancer. Unfortunately, there really isn't a correlation between side effects like hair loss and effectiveness of treatment. If it is working then I will feel that--like the election to which I felt I had karmically contributed--it was all completely worth it. Yet, even in this best case scenario, there's a new reality for me which is that while I am on this treatment I will stay bald. When you are a chronic patient you hope for a treatment that will work well with manageable side effects. And if this treatment works--and if the other side effects are as ok-ish as they are now--then I will remain on it.

It's that future that I am furious about more than anything else. I want to continue to live my life, of course, but I don't want to have to do it bald! In part that is because I don't want to register to people constantly as an archetypal "cancer patient" when I know that I am so much more. It is also in part because I don't want to think of myself as being ill, and living every day having to disguise my absent hair will make that all the tougher. I have already noticed that I feel, physically, as though I am sicker because of my constantly shedding hair. How could I not, in some ways, when every move I make and every glance at myself (including in endless Zoom windows) shows me this highly visible change?

For that reason, I'm shaving my remaining hair tomorrow (Wednesday). It's a way to feel less disempowered--less like hair loss is happening to me--and wrest control of the situation back. I will try to find agreeable things about it: wigs, scarves, cozy caps, bright lipstick, statement earrings, and a general punk/Mad Max vibe that is appropriate to 2020. But I don't want anyone to think for a second that I find this agreeable, or even acceptable, or that I don't mind. I mind a whole hell of a lot. My hair was my consolation prize, my camouflage, my vanity, my folly, and my battle cry.

I dyed it purple when I was first diagnosed because I knew (or thought I knew) that I would be losing it soon. I didn't, and I came to cherish it as a symbol of my boldness in the face of circumstances trying to oppress me, to make me shrink, to tempt me to become invisible. I refused and used it to "shout" all the louder in response. Because of what it came to mean to me, I'm nearly as sad about losing the purple as I am about losing the hair itself. It both symbolized the weight I was carrying and also that I would not let that weight grind me down. It was my act of resistance and my sign resilience all at once.

I sent a text to my friends, explaining this and offering, as an idea, that I could "pass the purple" to them in some way, small or large. It would feel more like handing off a torch or a weight (or the One Ring) than anyone shaving their head in solidarity. (After all, if they did that it would just remind me as I watched theirs grow back that, in fact, our positions were very different.) You're welcome to do it if you'd like too, internet friends, with temporary or permanent dye or a wig or a headband or one of those terrible 90s hairwraps or whatever. But I don't require that anyone do it because I feel support from you all in myriad ways, all the time. (But if you do, please send me pictures!)

It's November 2020. The election is over and Joe Biden has won. I still have cancer and I'll be bald tomorrow. I hope it's a turning point, both personal and global, because it feels like one. We've given up a lot in the last four years and I cannot say that I feel in any way peaceful or accepting about having to give up yet one more thing. But in losing my hair I absolutely refuse to also give up my hope.

(On our walk we did also seem to find a version of The Tower, all that was left of an abandoned house)

[thorinthehottotty]

It Will Come Back (Part 2) - Dwalin

A/N: Requested by @saviorsong so here you go! I hope you like it.

Part 1

Warnings: little angst, lots of smut.

You promised yourself you wouldnt go to his chambers. But you couldn't help it. Not when your every waking thought was him. Even though your nights were suddenly achingly empty.

Two weeks was a torture of being unable to sleep and trying to get him out of your mind. You tried desperately to stay angry at him for ignoring you now, but every time you saw him your mind went fuzzy and hazed you into day dreaming of his wicked tongue.

You brought him an entire cake yesterday and he walked away from you! It hurt. Truly.

He'd left you an ultimatum. Court him or leave him be. It was very clear to you even if it wasn't outright spoken. You had enjoyed where you'd been with him before. The flirting was fun and no commit necessary.

You enjoyed his company and tried to be furious about the ill treatment of your body after you left, namely his lack of allowing you to finish. To be perfectly honest, you're glad he hadn't made you. If you'd orgasmed, it would have been right when his trainees had come in and that would have been even more mortifying than just the way he left you.

But a fire still burned in you. You still ached something terrible, no matter the relief you gave yourself, you always worked back to that unsatisfied state he left you in like it was some sort of magic. All you could think of was the debauchery that he preformed on you, how his mouth felt against you, what his hands would feel like in you.

How did you get here? You wonder as you find yourself suddenly in front of his door. Tears of frustration were prickling in your eyes. You hesitate, fist raised. You were stubborn! You were a dam! He was supposed to be chasing you!

But you were all too aware of the ache in your chest, the rising anxiety you felt with ever cold brush off he gave you. Now, you were overwhelmingly alone.

You missed him. You missed how his hooded eyes lit up when he saw you, how completely his hands enveloped yours. You just wanted to be pressed against his chest and be held by him.

You want so badly to knock and to leave but you stood frozen in the corridor in the middle of the night. The cold creeping up your legs. Your slip the only thing protecting you from the cold and it was doing a poor job.

Being in a bed warmed by a dwarf was more appealing than this. If you just set aside your pride-

No! He was crazy one! How dare he-

"Y/N!" Came a loud and sudden voice, making you whirl in terror. Dwalin strode toward you quickly, a bewildered look on his face as he sees your tears. "What are ya doing here?" He demands, grasping your shoulders. Even if his tone was loud and brash, it was like music to your ears.

He glanced over your nearly naked form and froze, hands tightening. "Did someone hurt ya?" He rumbled dangerously.

Sniffling, you shook your head, feeling yourself tremble under his hot hands. "I missed you," you respond and all at once the anger fades into annoyance.

"So ya show up here in nearly nothing in the middle of the night?" He grumbles, turning to unlock his door. He grumbles under his breath and you feel uncertain if you should flee. This wasn't how it was supposed to go.

He holds the door open and gestures you inside. Wrapping your arms about yourself, you slip into his suite. You'd been here a few times to deliver food to him and always marvelled at the beauty of it.

As he closes the door you start to reach for him, but he slips past you with a glower at the fireplace. Hurt lashes through you. You should leave. He obviously was no longer interested in you.

"Mahal, Y/N, don't even think about it. Get over by this damn fire." You jump at his voice and hesitantly pad over to one of the couches, shivering on your way. He grabs the matches haphazardly tossed on the mantel and strikes them, grumbling quietly in Khudzul.

"I shouldn't have shown up here," you murmur quietly.

"Not in just yer night dress, no. Not all dwarves are honorable," he trails off bitterly. Was he referring to himself? Striking the match he holds it to the dry kindling and it quickly begins to catch. He simply tosses the match into the small flames and stands, leaning against the mantel for a moment.

Then he glances over at you, a confliction settling on his face. "I going to leave," you mutter, taking in his ruffled appearance, more tears prickle your eyes as you lift up from the couch. Bitterness rising in you.

"Sit! Down!" He roars. You glare up at him.

"No! I overstepped! Don't worry, I'll stop trying to talk to you." You start to twist away when he catches you by the arms again.

"Since when do ya care about overstepping?" He snaps.

"Since you're coming back from whatever dam's room!"

"Dam's room!? Yer definitely mad!"

"Then why are you just now getting home? Why do you look like you've been tangling with someone?"

"I was on watch, ya jealous lamb! Stop butting with yer button horns and sit!"

"Oh." You deflate, sinking back onto the couch in embarrassment. Dwalin gives a great sigh and peels at his coat. And you bury your face in your hands as he drapes the coat over you. He settles down on the couch beside you. Hesitantly, you glance up into his eyes and see nothing but frustration.

Maybe you'd die of mortification. But first you wanted to do one thing. He stiffened as you moved toward him. "What?"

"I'm sorry," you murmur, and pull yourself into his lap. He closes his eyes as you lean against him, absorbing his heat he's radiating.

Heaving a frustrated sigh, he pinches the bridge of his nose. "Y/N, stop. Just stop. I don't want to play yer games." You grasp at his tunic, staring up at him. Even as he says this, his thumbs are lifting to stroke at your cheeks.

"I miss you," you repeat. "I didn't want a relationship. I didn't want to marry, but I miss you. I've never slept next to you but I miss it. I want to wake up next to you. I miss bringing you treats and lunch. I miss how you used to look at me," you stop when your voice cracks and the frustration melts from his face, instead into something softer.

He wipes at the fresh tears and you sniffle again.

"I shouldn't have taken advantage of ya like that. We're not even married and I-"

"Marry me." Maybe it was your hormones, maybe it was you being perched in his lap. His lips part in shock. "Please?" You add.

"Marry ya? Were not even courting!" You pull yourself up, pressing a pleading kiss to his lips.

"Marry me." You whisper. He groans against your mouth, one arm wrapping about you, the other falling to you thighs.

"I should court ya first," he breaths into your mouth. The fire was starting at his hot hands on your thighs. He gives a heady groan as your legs spread for him. Kissing him just felt so right. "We shouldn't."

Your eyes flash open to stare at him in horror. "Why not? You've already devoured me." Your choice of words makes him grin proudly.

"And a feast ya were. I want to do right by ya."

"Ugggghhh! You choose now to do right by me? That's not even fair!" He chuckles, stroking your knee with his thumb.

It wasn't! Now he was being the tease. Biting your lip, you grip the base of your slip and drag it up. His hand snatches your wrist. "I have little self control. Don't." His eyes are pleading.

"I can't do it myself," you admit quietly. His eyes grow large. "I've tried but you've ruined me. Please, I'll do anything." Dwalin tilts his head back and groans. "You told me to come find you. It's not a game, I promise. Please. Warm me up, Dwalin."

"I must be dreaming," he rumbles and releases your hand. He looks, watching as you draw it back. The whole room shifts. You do it slowly, putting on a bit of a show. His hand follows yours, drawing up the soft flesh of your thighs.

Sighing, you let your self fall into his touch, legs spreading open. Your touch starved self shivers at the heat of his hand smoothing higher and higher. You moan softly as he drags his fingers up and between your folds.

"Mahal, yer drenched," he murmurs and you give him a desperate look. And suddenly he's lifting you and settling you back on the sofa. He smiles when you reach for him. Instead of following you he shifts down and around your leg so he has a better view and is settled between you knees, kneeling on the floor.

"Where are you going?"

"To finish my feast," your eyes light up eagerly and he jerks your hips to the edge of the cushion. He wastes no time, there is no teasing this time. He's just as ravenous as last time. And his tongue is plunging into you, making you gasp and arch off the back of the couch. You grapple for the hard edge above you.

All of the touches he was offering you were deep and satisfying. The build was much quicker this time, leaving you moaning and crying beneath his mouth, especially when he began using his fingers on you.

You were quick to cum and it was fast, hard and satisfying as you practically mounted him.

"Let me court ya," he murmurs and you glance down to watch him kiss your thighs as you pantingly come down.

"Marry me," you argue. He chuckles.

"Let me court you and I'll fuck ya until ya can't walk tomorrow." You give him a groan.

"Fine," you sigh, too tingly to argue. He scoops you back up again, moving away from the fireplace which makes you whine. "Your room is going to be cold."

"Don't worry. I'll warm ya up." He chuckles as your head rolls to his shoulder. Your sex was buzzing from his attention. When he laid you down on his bed the furs were cold. You pass him a grumpy look as you hiss away from the coolness. Dwalin just chuckles at your ornery face and leans down to kiss you its gentle and sweet, you can taste yourself.

He only leans off you to shuffle out of his gear for the day. "What made ya finally decide to come to me?" He murmurs in the dark.

"I already told you. I missed you. You were supposed to chase me." He gives you a playful eyeroll as he sheds his tunic for you, making you gulp hard at his firmed body exposing itself to you for the first time.

"I did lass. For months."

When his body descended to yours you shiver at the heat of him, running your hands down his fuzzy chest. It was like heaven to be pressed to him like this. Suddenly, you can't remember why you were arguing and choose to stay quiet, leaning up to kiss him tenderly. He gives a throaty groan at the fierce kiss you give him.

And all at once you feel him targeting his cock with in you. The sudden intrusion should hurt but it stretches you with the utmost delight and your gasping and arching. When had he even pushed down his trousers. "Does it hurt?" He offers you, as you grasp at his enormous shoulders.

"No, mahal, please continue!" Dwalin grins and begins to rock his hips into yours at a shallow, slow pace. It's a delicious start.

"I never believed I'd ever have ya under me like this," he whispers with strain. There's nothing like the heat of his breath fanning your shoulder as he presses loving kisses into your skin. Nothing like his gentle words. "I dreamed of ya so many nights. Just wanted to hold ya. Love ya." His big hands glide up around your shoulders as his hot skin burns you compared to the coolness of the room.

You listen to him ramble on, something that seemed so out of character for him as he begins to rock deeper into you, letting his head fall against your neck. You were losing all sense being in his arms like this. It felt like stars exploding through your body, making you tremble and quake as the rumbles sweet nothings and caresses you with a delicacy you never imagined he could possess.

You didn't feel cold anymore, couldn't hear the moaning you gave. Every whimper you gave he praised you as you lost yourself in him. It was disorienting as he whispered his love for your repeatedly. Toward the end, when his hips became wild, bringing you to orgasm around him, he wrenched back, covering you in a way you were surprised about.

Pools of white slowly seeped through your night dress and rolled down your belly. You'd forgotten that you were even still wearing it as you panted. His eyes grew dark at the sight of you trembling. Honestly, him cumming in you hadn't been a thought that had made its way through you mind. It was probably for the best he wasn't spilling inside you like that. Especially when he was refusing to marry you just yet.

"Let's get ya out of that," he groans and pulls you to sit up so he can drag the fabric over your head. He crumples it in his hands and swipes over your belly to clean the rest of his mess haphazardly. "I'm going to start the fire, then we're going again." He promises. It makes your eyes widen. There was already a deep ache in your hips.

Perhaps you really wouldn't be able to walk tomorrow the idea thrilled you as Dwalin hikes up his trousers enough to move over to the fire. This was a sight you could get used to, you decide, dragging his tunic on in place of your night dress. "Don't take too long or I'll catch my death."

"Whose fault is that?" he scoffs and passes you a glance but double takes when he sees his tunic falling off one of your shoulders. A dark grin fills his face.

"You and your mouth."

"Oh, its my mouth, is it?"

"Yes."

"I'm starting to believe yer doin' this so I prove ya wrong."

Taglist: @tomisbaeholland @fizzyxcustard @queenofmankind @dumbassunderthemountain @dabisburntnut

[mirkwoodshewolf]

Guardian of creatures; AU! Queen x oc female x reader Chap. 7.1

*Author’s note*

Hey guys well do I have an update for you now this chapter is PRETTY LONG so I apologize in advance, which is why this chapter has been broken up into 2 parts. Now I would like to thank some users who have helped me with the face cast decision in each of the family members and I think it’s safe to say for certain characters some of you will already get (hehehe). Now like I said this is a lot because it contains background info on our two main leads John and Serafina and now for the warnings.

WARNINGS: Fluff, angst, child abuse (WHICH I THINK IS VILE which is why I’ve put a trigger warning in my taglist below so anyone with that blocked from their suggestions may not be able to read this chapter).

Taglist:

@plethora-of-things​

@waddles03​

@psychosupernatural​

@ixchel-9275​

@simonedk​

@jd-johndeacon-or-jackdaniels​

@queensdivas​

@queen-paladin​

@dancingcoolcat​

@geek-and-proud​

@queendeakyy​

@kinole009x​

@wormzteef​

___________________________________________________________

Chapter 7

The truth of Serafina Black and John Deacon

*May 28th. Nighttime 3rd Person POV*

It was a full moon tonight; the spring wind softly blew against the trees outside and across the grand lake which rippled in the wind’s direction.  Inside the manor however was a different story.

At around 1:30am, the walls began to tremble, almost as if it were crying.  The moving pictures soon became fearful as they felt their portrait homes shaking with the walls.  The wooden snake décor along the stairs was now hiding itself down on the ground trembling in fear.  The lights soon came on one by one down a certain hallway and a long snake like tail slowly slithered down the hallway.

Freddie had come up from the basement, sensing and knowing just exactly what was behind the house acting like this, especially since this wasn’t the first time to happen.  He slowly continued down the hallway and faint whispers from the pictures began to echo out.

“Back to bed. All of you. Stop gawking and back to bed. Come on now back to bed.” He told the pictures as he slithered past them till he saw Brian standing at the last door.  When the Naga now stood beside the Elf lord, Brian opened the door and inside they saw the culprit behind the house’s anxiety.

Lying in her bed was Serafina, tossing and turning as her whole body was caked in sweat. Whimpering frightenedly like a lost puppy.

“This is the worst I’ve seen her.” Brian whispered softly.

“It’s another big milestone this year Brian. Those are always the hardest for her.” Freddie merely replied. “As always do not let John come into this room, and also keep our Knight away from this wing. They don’t need to see her like this.” Freddie soon slithered into the master bedroom of John and Serafina.

When the tip of his tail entered the room, Brian closed the door and stood guard of it.

Inside the dark bedroom, Freddie slowly slithered towards Serafina, all the while looking at the walls as they began to burn and boil up like sores.  

He then stared at the young witch who was still tossing and turning, trapped in her own mind like a caged animal.  His forked tongue tasting the air as he could literally taste the heat in the room as well as Serafina’s fear and anxiety rising higher than he ever saw before.

When he got right up to her bed, his hand slowly reached out for her and as he touched her wrist, he was suddenly hit with a vision.  All around him he saw nothing but fire.  A blazing hot fire surrounding a cozy little home.  

He also heard various levels of screaming.  Ranging from ages of either a full grown men, women, young adult men and even small children.  They were filled with nothing but pain and sorrow.  

Flashes of green lights also shot up at him and Freddie knew all to well just what that green light meant.

As Serafina kept whimpering and panting away, Freddie tried to call out to her trying to get her to snap out of her nightmare.  Then with one final call, he managed to get Serafina to wake up and the both of them were now gasping for air.  Freddie lying across Serafina’s legs exhausted from the vision he had seen while she looked up and saw Freddie lying before her.

“I—I s-saw it. I could…..feel their pain…….hear their screaming.” She choked out frightenedly.  Freddie composed himself and stood beside her.

“It was only a dream.”

“No. It was a memory. Like your visions I—could see everything. Feel. Everything.”

“Visions like mine have dire consequences. Now you are indeed the most powerful witch I have ever known, your powers of the mind alone can convince anyone—”

“No Freddie it’s not my powers, I know what it is. Just like last year these memories continue to burn into my brain. And they’re getting worse!” she pleaded to the Naga.  “I thought the Hydra test cured me of this.”

“It did. Instead of degrading yourself with your guilt every day you’ve only resorted to doing it once a year. And you know it wasn’t you’re……”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be the last of your family by murder! To know that you were forced to stay alive while your own family dies!”

“Actually, I do.” Freddie told her in a low, serious but velvet-like voice.  The young witch looked at the Naga as he continued, “For the very same bloodline that took your family away from you, took mine as well. One man, slaughtered my entire race. And I was forced to live with that.”

Serafina’s eyes filled with tears as she lay back down, her back facing Freddie and her hand clenching her pillow.

“I should never have let John take me away from home.” She whimpered out as tears dripped down her face.  There was a moment of silence in the room, except for the faint sobs that came out of Serafina’s lips.  She soon felt coils beginning to wrap around her.  She was taken out from her blanket and soon found herself wrapped up in Freddie’s coil.

Instead of squeezing her nearly to death like he’s done to millions of others in the past, he kept a comforting embrace around her as he now wrapped his arms around her.  Holding her like a parent holds a crying child.  Looking down at her, he could see that she had now mentally reverted to the frightened child she once was when she first had to deal with this.

“Being the last of your family is a lonely, dark path.” He gently cupped the side of her face while the tip of his tail tucked the strands of hair that stuck to her face out of her eyes. “You will learn why it was you that survived. And when you do……you will know peacccce.”

She looked up at Freddie and saw as his eyes began to shift in a hypnotic pattern.

“You can mourn in the morning. For now, ssssshhhut your eyes. Ssssslip into sssilent ssslumber.” her eyes slowly began drooping tiredly as she couldn’t look away from Freddie’s gaze.  Finally her eyes shut and the house was now at ease.

Freddie kept her in his coils for the rest of the night and stood guard over his young red witch.  He looked out of the balcony up to the stars and for the first time in what felt like eons, a single tear slipped down Freddie’s face as he stared at a specific constellation in the sky.

*2nd Person POV. The next morning*

After you wake up and make up the bed, you walk down the stairs to see that for the first time since you moved in, breakfast hadn’t been made. In fact no one was in the kitchen.

“Serafina? John?” you walk through the house but in each room you could see that no one was there. “Hello?” you then go out into the backyard.  Thinking that maybe they could be in the gardens, after all it was a beautiful day today for gardening.

“(Y/n)?” you turn around and there stood Brian.  His face looked shocked to see you out here in the garden.

“Brian there you are. Where’s everyone else? Was there another problem at the club?” you ask him.

“N-no. No. I—I thought you had your internship today?”

“I only work Monday through Friday. Today’s Saturday Brian.”

“Bollocks.” He muttered.

“Is—everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine. No need to worry your head dear one.” He tried his best to assure you.

“Great cause I was hoping Serafina could teach me how to do some transfiguration. John told me she was always the best at it and even taught him. I’ve always wanted to change into my favorite animal. Where is she?”

“Umm (Y/n). I don’t think today’s a good day for a magic lesson. Let alone the rest of the week for that matter.” He muttered the last part.

“Why?” you question with a tilt of your head.  Brian looked towards the gardens and sighed heavily.

“We didn’t want you to see this but…..there’s no use in hiding it.”

“Hiding what? Brian you’re starting to scare me here.”

“There’s no need to be frightened mellon. But just promise me that when we find Serafina you won’t speak a word to her. In fact don’t even let your presences be known to her.” His tone that always filled you with warmth and comfort now gave you anxiety.

He places a hand to your shoulder and guides you deep into the garden.  Further than you ever went before until your eye caught the sight of Serafina and Roger standing close together under a large willow tree.

Play video

Roger had an arm wrapped around Serafina but this didn’t seem like Roger trying to make a pass at her.  It was almost like he was trying to comfort her or something.  Brian presses his finger to his lips as he gestures for you both to move closer.  You both crouch down behind the shrubs and through the green curtains of the willow you could see Serafina in a state you had never seen her before.  Normally she always appeared motherly, welcoming, and caring to those around her.  Like she was the kind of woman who would never betray your trust or break you down.

But all that stood before you now was a shell of the woman she was.  Her red eyes were now red with shedded as well as unshed tears.  Her mind seemed to be elsewhere as she just stood there frozen in time in that broken state of hers.

Roger tried his best whether nuzzling her or even giving her a comforting kiss to get her to snap out of it.  But she was long gone.  Lost in her mind.

You turn to Brian confused and sad wanting to ask why Serafina was this upset but he once again pressed his finger to his lips before pointing back towards them.  It was then John soon arrived at the Willow tree.  His expression solemn and eyes full of regret as he stared at his wife.

Roger turned to John and glared at him but before he could do anything, that’s when Serafina turned to John.  Her expression never changing as she stared at him with solemn, broken eyes.  Roger backed off as John slowly walked towards her.

The couple stood silently before each other.  Not one of them saying a word.  It was then John fell to his knees, his head bowing in shame before Serafina.  He stayed in that position and you watched as Serafina just looked down at him.

She then raised her hand up and a red beam of light started to form from her palm as she looked like she was about to strike John down. Your heart began to race with anxiety, was she really gonna strike him when he was unarmed? Not even wanting to fight? And why did John seem to want this to happen?

But when you saw Serafina’s hand tremble and shake you knew then she wouldn’t do it.  And it was only confirmed when she closed her hand into a fist before turning away from John as more tears seeped down her face.  Her biting her tongue to keep from sobbing.

That’s when Roger came back, this time in his horse form. Serafina wrapped her arms around Roger’s powerful stallion neck and he lowered his head onto her shoulder.

You and Brian were now back at the mansion in the living room. A cup of tea was in your hand as Brian prepared himself his usual cup of wine.

“I’ve never knew Serafina could be so broken like that.” You muttered solemnly.

“She tries to keep her optimistic and motherly nature. But on this day, she can’t help herself. Be thankful she’s only managed to keep it for this day. When I first met her, she was like that almost every day.” Brian said before taking a sip of his wine.

“What happened to her that made her so broken?”

“Today is the 900th anniversary of the day she and I had something in common.” Freddie’s voice spoke up.  You quickly turn and surprisingly for the first time since you’ve been here, Freddie had come out from the cave of the basement and was now slithering towards you all.

“And what is that?” you ask the Naga.

“To tell you that would take forever. But if you wish to truly know, follow me and you will see what I’ve seen.” He slithered away.  You turn to Brian completely confused.

“Does he always speak like that?”

“Nagas always love to speak in riddle-like manner. It’s just their nature. But you should go with him. He can tell you more than even I ever could.”

“You really think I should go with him?” he nodded. You let out a whine as you stand up and you muttered. “I don’t want to though! He nearly killed me last time I was alone with him.”

“But he didn’t. Trust me if Freddie really wanted to kill you, he’d never let you know.” Brian said sternly before trailing off in a darker tone.

Swallowing the last bit of your tea you set the cup down and walk in the general direction that Freddie had slithered off to.  You heard his voice in your head telling him to come up to the attic.

When you got there, all around there were additional shelves filled with even more ancient trinkets, spell books, weapons, and even some wizard photographs (apparently when wizards take pictures with a camera, the pictures move about in that moment in time).

You then see Freddie standing right before a beautiful fountain.  The bottom of it was pure stone and trailing up towards the top was an intwining pattern that resembled tree branches twisting and turning over each other.  A silver bowl encompassed the top part of the fountain, shining as bright as a star in the sky.

“A gift of the Eldar. Brian’s grandmother’s mirror. This shows you things that were, things that are, and some things…..that have not yet come to pass.”

“Is this how you see the future?”

“I’ve been seeing the fates of all creatures long before this fountain was created. But when Brian was able to bring this along, with a little bit of my magical knowledge, I helped improve on just what this fountain can do.” He pulled out a tall silver pitcher and poured the water that was inside it into the fountain, while with his tail, it reached over to one of the shelves and took out a small vile with barely a quarter of what looked like water.

“What’s in there?” you ask him.  He put the pitcher down and took the vile from his tail and responded.

“The key to you seeing what all has been in the lives of your teachers. This my darling, are the tears of Serafina Rhea Black and John Richard Deacon.” He then opened the vile and tilted it over the fountain and soon the two teardrops fell into the fountain.

He turned to you and gestures towards the fountain.  Slowly you walk towards the fountain and look at Freddie.  He gives you a soft nod telling you to look into the fountain.  You look down at the water to see ripples forming and expanding throughout the entire fountain.  Smoke began to form from within the water and all of a sudden it felt like you were being pulled in.

It was so fast and so quick you almost didn’t even know what was happening.  Until finally you landed before a large forest.  The sun was shining high above the sky, birds were chirping and flying about through the forest trees.  Suddenly you heard the sound of a child’s giggle.

Coming out from the trees was a young girl around 5-6 years old.  She had very long black hair, right about to her mid-back and she was chasing a butterfly. Her bright brown eyes gleaming with child-like innocence as she chased after the butterfly.

“Hey wait! Come back! I just wanna play!” she called out to the butterfly before chasing after it once more.  For some reason this child looked familiar to you but you couldn’t place your finger on it.

“She looks different. Especially to how you know her now but it is her.” Freddie’s voice said beside you.  You look to him before turning back to the little girl.  Your eyes widening in realization!

“Wait that’s….that’s Serafina!?”

“Indeed it is.”

“But her hair’s not red, nor are her eyes.”

“All will be explained further on. Keep watching. This was the day that changed both their lives forever.” You both continue to watch as little Serafina run after the butterfly before crouching down in the tall grass as it now landed on a boulder before her.

“The mighty huntress……has cornered her prey.” Serafina whispered lowly.  You watch as gets into pouncing position and she leaps over the grass but over shoots her mark and soon knocks into someone.

A boy around a year or 2 older than her.  He had short brown hair but there was no mistaking from those eyes of his.  That mix of blueish grey, this was John Deacon as a little boy.  The two of them rolled around till Serafina ended up on top of him and the two of them groaned in pain.

“Sorry. I—get a little enthusiastic when I chase after butterflies.” Serafina apologized.  You saw as little John Deacon just stared up at little Serafina in pure awe.

Like she was the prettiest thing he had ever seen.

A light blush blossoming across his chubby face.

“What’s wrong? Can’t you talk?” little John’s stunned face continued to grow redder. “Hey, I don’t bite.” Serafina told him assuringly before getting off of him. “My name’s Serafina. What’s your name kid?”

“Pretty.” You hear him whisper.

“Pretty? What kind of a weird name is that?” Serafina asked with a tilt of her head.

“Wha? No. No I mean……my-my name is-it’s I meant to say. John. My name is John Deacon.”

“You’re part of the Deacon family!? My daddy says I need to be careful around you.” she said stunned before trailing off lowly.  You watched as John’s expression grew sad and he lowered his head in shame.  And you thought you saw tears in his eyes but that’s when Serafina suddenly exclaimed. “I like you!”

“What? But didn’t you hear my last name?”

“Yeah I did. My cousins Fred and George Weasley say that they’re stuck up trolls that don’t know how to have fun. But you seem like you do.” She then poked him in the chest before jumping back from him. “Tag you’re it!”

She jumped in circles around John who just looked at her confused.

“What are you doing?”

“Wizard tag. I tagged you now you gotta come tag me!” Serafina giggled happily as she continued to hop around him. “C’mon don’t you know how to play?” when John looked down once again, Serafina stopped hopping and stood in front of him. “Ohh.” She said solemnly.

“Mother and Father don’t allow fun.” Serafina then began to ponder for a moment before she exclaimed.

“I got it!” she took his hand and dragged him out of the forest.

“Wh-where are we going?”

“To the masters of fun. They’ll show you how to have fun!” they soon disappeared from sight.

You and Freddie stood there and you say to him.

“She was pretty resilient as a child wasn’t she?”

“Serafina always did want to get her way. And being the only child from her mother and father she did get that. But it was a good thing she persisted in wanting to being friends with John. His family is……to put it lightly. Not a great bunch of characters.” The scene then faded away into smoke and now you stood before a large mansion of some kind.

Unlike the mansion you currently lived at, this one was dark and gloomy.  Hardly any light came in through the windows (even though they stood as high as the ceiling).  A large fireplace was to your right and up above you a large diamond crystal chandelier.

Suddenly coming around the corner was John who looked much older this time (roughly around 11 or 12 years old) but you watched in horror as a woman dragged him by his ear before tossing him down to the ground and she hissed out.

She seemed to be around her 40’s maybe 50’s and wore a long black raggedy dress with a black corset around it.  Her hair was dark brown like John’s, and it reminded you of Brian’s to a degree but her hair was almost unkept and madded around her face like a rat’s nest.  What really frightened you the most were her eyes.

Her dark brown eyes that almost appeared black were just wide with insanity.  Even the most insane person that had ever been convicted and had those same crazed eyes couldn’t compare to the eyes of the woman before you.

“You’ve been with that filthy half-blood again weren’t you?”

“No I—”

“DON’T LIE TO ME!!!” she screamed at him.  Hearing her voice was like hearing nails running down a chalkboard.  It almost made your ears bleed and send fear up your spine. “You know it’s never good to lie to mummy Johnny boy.” Whoa wait what? This crazed psychotic woman was John’s mother?!

You turn to Freddie, your eyes filled with shock and he nodded once to you.

“So why don’t you tell me again, were you with that filthy half-blood?” she hissed at her son’s face all the while holding a knife!? A freaking knife at her own child!

“What is with all the shouting now Bellatrix?” a deep baritone voice echoed through the walls.  Soon a very tall and lean man soon came into the picture.  His posture showed that he held great status and power with his hands behind his back as he slowly walked towards the woman known as Bellatrix and John. He had long platinum blonde hair that went down to his back and piercing blue eyes.

“Ask your son Ronan. I caught him gallivanting with that insult of a witch Serafina Black!” Ronan soon turned to his son.  John fearfully turned to his father who only looked down at him like he was an insect.

“And what were you doing together?” he asked John.  When John refused to answer his father all he got was a hard slap across the face sending him to the ground.

Alright that’s it! You race towards John’s father to tackle him to the ground when Freddie’s tail wrapped around your waist.

“Let go of me I’ve got to help him! They can’t do this to him this is child abuse Freddie!”

“These are the shadows of things that have been. The past cannot be altered nor changed not even erased. No matter how much we try to bury it.” You slump down and watch helplessly as John tries to pick himself back up.

“They were skipping along holding hands making lovey-dovey eyes at each other. And I even saw John give Serafina a thistle.” Soon a young teenager that almost resembled his father to a T said as he came strutting in the manor. “Honestly it made me feel sick to my stomach.”

“Well done Draco.” Bellatrix whispered to the teenager’s ear almost seductively.  You made a disgusted face as you turn to Freddie, questions buzzing through your mind like a swarm of bees.

“His older brother Draco. And Bellatrix is incapably of showing real motherly love as you can see. She’s unquenched by her bloodlust and any love she may try to show comes out as lust. Like for her eldest son whom she molded into the perfect killing machine.”

“How could John have remained the type of person he is today with a family like that? If that had been me I would’ve been locked away in some asylum or thrown in prison for the crimes I would’ve committed.”

“I think you already know the answer to that.” Freddie told you.  You pondered and pondered till it finally came to you.

“Serafina.” He nodded and the world around you vanished once again into smoke and a new picture was formed.

This time however it was a large field in front of you. Nothing but green as far as the eye could see.  A little farm was just to the corner and you could hear the sounds of horses, cows, chickens, ducks and pigs.  When you turned around you saw what looked like a stack of houses on top of one another.

Wooden and all with many doors, windows and finally the stereotypical triangle-shaped roof with a little chimney on top.  The sun was high above the sky on this beautiful sunny day but there wasn’t any people around or showing up yet.

“Where are we?”

“Welcome to the Burrow. The home of Serafina and her entire family.”

“Just how big is her family to live in a house like that?”

“Remember darling they’re wizards. Not everything is as it seems.” Suddenly something landed behind the two of you and drove right through you both.  You at first were startled as you tried to make sure you were still there but then you remembered what Freddie said.  That this was in the past and nothing could see or hear us, so it would make sense that nothing could really touch you.

“There they are right on time.” Freddie said. “This happened the next morning after what you just witnessed.” The carriage soon came to a stop and coming out of it was Serafina and John along with two teenage boys.

Identical twins with the brightest red hair you had ever seen on anyone else.  It came down just short of their shoulders and they grabbed John’s stuff from the carriage while Serafina checked John over before taking his hand and leading him towards the Burrow.  The four young wizards walked quietly towards the house when you turned to Freddie.

“Go see.” You follow behind them and when you entered inside, it was like visiting a cozy cottage.  Antiques of pottery stacked along the shelves, a cute little table was set up with a plate of biscuits at the center.  And of course like Freddie said the house did seem to be bigger on the inside.

Not as big as John’s manor home but it was homey enough. Like being wrapped up in warm hugs homey with enough space to walk about.

“Do you think it’d be alright if we had some of these?” Serafina whispered.

“Yeah mum will never know.” whispered one of the twins. The three of them take the biscuits but Serafina grabs two and hands one to John.

“I—know it’s not much. But it’s home.”

“I’ve been here before Serafina. And I love it every time I come here. Thanks for getting me out of there.” He reached out and took the biscuit from her hand but allowed his fingers to linger on her hand a bit longer which made Serafina blush.

Oh my god how can these two kids be sooo cute together!? It was then you heard the sound of frantic footsteps and soon coming out from the corner of the stairs was a stout woman with long ginger hair.  Her eyes slightly narrowed as she spoke with a shrill in her voice.

“Where have you been!?” immediately Serafina and the twins hid their helpings of biscuits behind their backs as they stared like a deer in headlights at the woman before them.  When her eyes turned to John, they softened up and she came around as she spoke in a real motherly voice. “Oh John. How wonderful to have you back dear.” She then turned her attention back to Serafina and the boys, her hands at her hips as she lectured them. “Beds empty! No note! Carriage gone! You could’ve died! You could’ve been seen! Of course I don’t blame you John dear.” She spoke softly to John.

Her face then turned immediately concerned as she saw the bruising around John’s face.

“Oh, dear what happened to your face?” she walked up to John and cupped the side of his face, gently stroking the bruise which made him softly hiss in pain.

“He hit him again Aunt Molly. And they put bars on his window.” The twins nodded in agreement.  Molly continued to look John over and sighed.

“Alright, I’ll overlook this just this once. But be thankful I’m not your father cause otherwise you’ll have bars up your window Serafina Black.” The twins stared down at Serafina wide-eyed. “Come now John. Little bit of healing and then time for a spot of breakfast.” Serafina’s aunt guided John to another part of the room when her voice suddenly called back. “And you three put those biscuits back on the plate less you get the swaddle!”

Immediately you saw Serafina and the twins put their biscuits back on the plate and race back up the stairs.

As the scene went on you watched as Serafina’s aunt pampered John at the table telling him to tuck in as a large breakfast was now being set down along the table.

Another set of footsteps came walking down the stairs and soon a beautiful young woman with the same ginger hair color and honey brown colored eyes came down and she said.

“Molly have you seen my wand?” she asked in a warm, soft voice.

“Yes sister it was on the cat.” Molly told the young woman. When she saw John sitting beside Serafina at the table, her eyes slowly widened in fear.

“Hello Mrs. Black.” John greeted her with a smile.  Wait so was this…….Serafina’s mom? No wonder where she got her beautiful looks from, this woman was beautiful.  Ethereal almost like an angel.

“Young lord Deacon. What-what-what a surprise to see you here.” She then immediately raced off out of the kitchen.

“Did I do something wrong?” John asked confused.

“Don’t worry about my mum. She’s always been freaked out a lot lately. In fact I think it was around the time we met. But I wouldn’t worry about that. She can sometimes act a little crazy at times. This one time Fred and George slipped this garden snake into her pillow and she refused to sleep in her bed for a month. My dad was not pleased about that.”

“Now, now Serafina don’t go insulting your mother like that. She loves you and you know it.” Her aunt Molly lectured her.

“Morning everyone!” a man’s voice called out. Soon coming through you was a stout man wearing the a green cloak and the traditional pointy wizard hat on top of his head.  It was the same color of dark green as his cloak but was worn down after probably years of being worn.

“Morning dad! Uncle Arthur! Arthur!” you heard everyone in the room chorus out.

“What a night! Nine raids. Nine!” the man known as Arthur said excitedly as he crossed across the kitchen to set his stuff down and take off his cloak and hat.

“Raids?” John questioned to Serafina.  She swallowed her food and said.

“You remember John, my uncle works with the Ministry of magic. In the Muggle artifacts office.”

“He loves muggles.” Said one of the twins that was with Serafina earlier.

“Thinks they’re fascinating.” The other twin joined in. Arthur went up to his wife and kissed her cheek before taking his seat at the head of the table.

“Well now,” Arthur said as he took his seat.  When he took notice of John sitting next to him he said, “Oh well John Deacon welcome back lad.”

“Morning Mr. Weasley. Hope I didn’t come at a bad time.”

“Nonsense. Besides I was wondering when your next visit would be, when did he get here?” Arthur waved off nonchalantly before digging into his breakfast.

“This morning.” Molly answered as she turned around from the oven. “Your sons and niece flew that enchanted carriage of yours to Leicester and back last night.”

“Did you really?” Arthur said in awe.  He then turned to his twin boys and asked enthusiastically, “How’d it go? Was it…..” as the twins began to talk over about how it worked out well, their mother stepped into the conversation.

“Arthur!” Molly scolded him as she slapped his arm and giving him a lecturing look.

“I mean……that was very wrong of you children! Very wrong indeed!” Arthur said in his best lecturing voice.

You saw as John and Serafina look at each other before smiling secretly at each other holding in their laughter.  Now that you’ve got more questions you stepped outside the house to see Freddie right by the pigpen.

“No wonder where she got her motherly side from. She’s almost exactly like her aunt. Serafina’s got a great family.” You heard Freddie softly laugh before it grew and he was now laughing hysterically.

“Great? Great is a loose term when describing families.”

“Well at least they treated John like one of their own. They were way better nurturers than his poor excuse of parents!” you exclaim at the Naga.

“That is true but Serafina’s parents weren’t any better than John’s were. I assume you’ve met her mother in there correct?” your anger faded as you say outloud.

“She did seem pretty freaked out about John. And Serafina said that it happened right after they met when they were little. So what is this really a Romeo and Juliet situation?”

“To a degree. It’s not so much as rivalry families. When one of John’s many great grandfather’s became the Sorcerer supreme, he sought out a hierarchy based line. In which Pureblood were respected and revered almost like Gods, while everyone else of either Half-blood or hybrid blood, in their case anyone born with a muggle parent, were deemed less worthy. But if you had a certain skill set then you were seen with a slight more advantage than the other families. But only by much.”

[mollymauk-teafleak]

don’t go where I can’t follow

I don’t know guys, I’m sad so I wrote some sad podcast twins

Please leave a comment on Ao3!

Trigger Warnings: Underage Drinking 

----

Juno hated waking up more than any other part of his day. And, this morning, he hated it even more.

Dry mouth and cracking headache that had made its home, all nice and cozy like, right behind his eyes. The tacky, sour taste on his tongue that told him he’d thrown up last night and probably would again before the morning was through. A disconnected feeling in all his limbs, lying there in pieces, a dismantled puppet in too many parts. His head rocking like his bed was bobbing in the middle of the ocean.

And, already, before he’d even twisted his face into an expression of disgust, flashes of last night. A best bits clip show of all the ways he’d made a complete ass of himself in the previous twenty four hours, shoving him over the edge of these fresh ones with the heavy realisation that he’d probably fuck them up just as badly.

Juno finally got out his groan, turning his face to the pillow, taking a bleak assessment of all the smells on his breath. Gin. Beer. Vodka. What the fuck was that, was that vermooth? Where the hell had he gotten that from? Had he gone back in time to the 1920s? And overlaying it all the thicker smell of what it had all come back up. Hopefully not on someone else, hopefully not in the middle of his classmate’s living room. But Juno knew better than to hold out any hope.

He was grateful, for once, for the miserable drabness of his and Ben’s bedroom. No bright colours to make his eyes ache worse, no sunlight making it through the smog of Oldtown to sneak in through the broken blinds. Just the plain brown walls and the plain brown carpet, the dull stains on everything. He was glad Ben’s attempts to liven it up had died around the time they were six.

Ben. That thought snagged on something and he lifted his head to peer into the identical bed across from his own. He felt anxiety pinch for a second before he remembered it was Sunday and Sunday meant dance classes. Ben had three paper rounds to fund those classes and the bus to get him from Oldtown back up into Halcyon, he wasn’t going to miss them even if he was as wretchedly hungover as Juno. Which Juno doubted, Ben always had the good sense to drink water and all that crap before bed.

And, yeah, there it was. A glass left on Juno’s side table, gathering some dust now like anything left unattended in their house for more than five minutes. Ben’s way of tugging him towards some kind of functionality, even when he’d been too belligerently drunk to listen.

Juno sighed and drained the glass, of course it was exactly what he needed. He wiped off the thin trail that ran out the side of his mouth and sat up, the movement dragging a whine of pain through his teeth as his body protested. One glass of water wasn’t going to be enough to bring him back from the dead.

He was still wearing his party clothes under the duvet, the sequinned drop sleeve shirt and billowy skirt, his only nice clothes now rumpled and sweat stained. He couldn’t see but he had no doubt his make up was a state too. He brought a hand up and confirmed there was mascara congealing in clumps on his eyelashes, glitter shedding from his eyelids and…

Why was their lipstick halfway to his cheekbones? Had he tossed and turned enough to ruin it that much? But there was none staining the pillow as there should be if some nightmare had been throwing him this way and that, sending him cowering against the bed enough to rub off his lipstick. Juno winced. The only explanation left was that he kissed someone last night, kissed them hard enough and sloppily enough that he made this ruin of his face. As if this morning couldn’t get any worse.

He didn’t really want to know, there was no one at his school he’d be willing to admit he’d made out with, but Juno couldn’t help but run through the candidates anyway. Carlos, maybe, he was cute enough but he’d hated Juno’s guts since he wrecked their science experiment back when they were partners in freshman year and he’d cost them a final. Appoline could be a possibility, she’d been staring at him all night but he’d thought she looked more likely to punch him in the nose than kiss him. Maybe Dev but they’d been even drunker than he was, they hadn’t looked fit to stand, let alone make out with someone. Oh god, please don’t let it have been Sasha…

Juno froze, stomach clenching sudden and hard and he’d been positive for a horrible second that he would vomit all over his bed. Memories crashed down on him like an ice cold wave. Throbbing lights, music that barely qualified for the title, stolen champagne drying stickily on his fingers. Something making sense in the way things only did when the world was coloured by liquor. And a very, very bad decision.

The muffled sound of the front door slamming into the wall of the hallway made Juno jump. Not because that was an uncommon sound, that was how ma always came in whether she’d had a good day or a bad one. Juno jumped because he knew that wouldn’t be ma, not with the way his luck was going.

Angry, heavy footsteps in the hall, ones their owner was deliberately making audible for effect. And then, the bedroom door flew open.

“Juno, you asshole!” Benzaiten screeched.

The worst thing about an angry Ben was the tears. They came tumbling down his cheeks in an endless tide, making his skin a blotchy and furious red. That was the worst part by far, knowing you were the cause of those tears.

“Ben, listen…” Juno croaked, cringing back against the headboard.

“There were loads of people you could have kissed at that party!’ Ben threw the door back into its frame, nearly cracking the wood, “Loads of people! And the one you picked was my fucking boyfriend?”

Juno wanted to curl up in a ball so tight he would just disappear. He hadn’t kissed Sasha or any of his classmates. He’d kissed Mick. Mick Mercury. The tall, perpetually grinning idiot they’d been friends with since they’d moved to Oldtown. And his brother’s boyfriend.

“Ben, I’m sorry,” Juno closed his eyes tight against the headache and the tears that were building up. He didn’t have a right to cry right now, he knew that, “Listen, it wasn’t Mick’s fault…”

“Yeah, I know that!” Ben raged. He was still in his dance gear, curls kept back by a headband.

He usually looked so calm after class, the happiest he’d be all week, like there had been something building up inside him he’d only managed to shake off during those two hours. He’d walk on the balls of his feet like he didn’t see their shitty house and their shitty town and their shitty life, like sun shone out of his skin.

And Juno had taken it away from him with one stupid, drunken decision.

“He called me and told me everything, he told me you came up to him when he’d been drinking and wouldn’t be able to tell us apart and you didn’t speak so he wouldn’t know and you kissed him,” it all came rushing out of Ben like a burst pipe, the tears still dripping from his chin onto Juno’s blanket, “And I believed him because he isn’t a fucking asshole, like you. I can’t believe you’d do that to me, Juno!”

“I didn’t think like that, I wasn’t trying to hurt you!” Juno’s heart wrenched, “I just…”

What had he been thinking? Why had he done it?

“I don’t want to hear it,” Ben snapped, hand reaching for the first thing he could grab. It ended up being a pillow, thankfully, because he pitched it right at his brother’s head. His headache didn’t take kindly to that, pain exploding at the base of his skull.

“I don’t want to hear excuses, I don’t want to hear apologies because guess what, it isn’t going to be enough this time!” Ben scowled, reaching again, “He’s my boyfriend, Juno, after everything I told you about how much he means to me? You’d go and try and take him?”

“I wasn’t!” Juno managed to lurch away from the book that came flying at him next, “I...I just…”

“Shut up!” Ben yelled, sitting down on his own bed, head in his hands, “Shut up and let me be pissed at you!”

Juno bit his lip, guilt hot and prickling under his skin. The only thing he’d ever been good at, the only thing he’d ever strived for, was to be as decent a big brother as he could be. It was written on every one of his cells, right down in his DNA. He was the eldest so he had to do everything he could to protect Ben, to put his happiness above his own. It was all he could do to keep going sometimes.

And he’d hurt him worse than anything ever had. Worse than Ma, worse than the bullies at school, worse than the bad luck that clung to them like oil that never washed off.

Juno knew he’d been told to shut up and that for once he should listen but he couldn’t help it, “Benzaiten, you should be angry at me, I’m never going to tell you you shouldn’t. I fucked up so badly.”

“Yeah,” Ben mumbled tearfully, shoulders shuddering, still not looking at him, “You did.”

“But I didn’t do it to hurt you. I’d never hurt you, Ben. I mean, I know I did and I know I’ve done it before and I said sorry and it meant less than dirt…” God, he was crying, sobs building up in his chest, making himself even angrier at himself.

He could feel Ben’s gaze on him, not angry but wounded. Wanting answers, in spite of what he’d said.

“I didn’t do it because I want to take away what you and Mick have,” Juno tried to say things he only knew were true but it was hard to pick them out of the roiling mess in his head, “He’s good for you, he knows I’d break his jaw if he wasn’t.”

“Then what were you trying to do?” Ben sniffed, rubbing at his eyes like he was six rather than sixteen.

Juno forced himself back into those memories, even as he wanted to recoil away from what he’d done. He remembered the flute of champagne he’d stolen from some senior girl who was busy sucking the face of the girl hosting the party. He remembered going out into the front yard, where Mick was sitting, watching the cars go by as he liked to do when he got tipsy and moony eyed. He’d turned when he’d heard heels on the wooden porch and his whole face had lit up with such pure and uncomplicated joy, the way he’d always looked at Benzaiten…

Juno took a deep, shuddering breath, “I...when he saw me and thought it was you, he looked at me so...well, like a guy in love. And it was so nice and soft and...and it hit me that no one is ever going to look at me the way he looks at you. No one is going to love me like that. And...and I just wanted to keep hold of it for a few moments because I’m stupid and selfish and awful. Okay?”

Ben didn’t say anything, looking at his brother through tear beaded eyelashes.

“We kissed but he realised it wasn’t you,” Juno continued thickly, “And as soon as he did, he pulled away and he was apologising and crying and he ran away. He really didn’t mean it, Ben. He really cares about you.”

“I know that,” Ben murmured, shoulders slumping as some of the tension left him, “And someone will care about you too, Juno. But it won’t happen until you stop thinking it won’t, y’know? You treat yourself like crap and it makes you do stuff like this...and yeah, then people are going to think you’re a dick if you act like one.”

Juno rubbed at his eyes, mascara coating the heel of his hand, “Maybe I am just a dick, has anyone ever considered that?”

“No because it isn’t true,” Ben aimed a kick at him that wasn’t really a kick at all, just a nudge with his foot, “You’re not a dick. Just apologise to Mick and maybe don’t drink too much and kiss other people’s boyfriends?”

Juno sighed, plucking at his blanket, “I mean, I’ll do my best. I sure as hell won’t kiss yours anymore.”

Ben rolled his eyes, red rimmed now but the tears had stopped. He threw another kick in his brother’s direction, one that meant a little more business, “Don’t do it to anyone! Maybe you’re done with parties for a little while.”

“Yeah,” Juno admitted, running a hand through his hair, “I feel like shit.”

“You look like it too.”

“Shut up…”

Ben managed a rough laugh, leaning back against the wall. Juno sank back onto his side, wincing again, wrapping his arms around his pillow and trying to find a position where his head wouldn’t throb so badly.

After a while, he mumbled, his voice barely more than a whisper, “Ben?”

“Yeah, Super Steel?”

“Just...promise that when we’re grown up and you and Mick are married and you’re off being the solar system’s most famous dancer somewhere on another planet...just promise you’ll still call me?”

He couldn’t see Ben’s smile but he heard it, “What makes you think I’m not gonna bring you with us? I’m not going anywhere without my brother.”

Juno smiled crookedly into his pillow, hoping he wouldn’t see the relief on his face.

“I’m gonna hold you to that, Benzaiten.”

[eternalstrigoii]

Conall writing prompt: Flower crown?

*gently whips more Unfettered universe at you guys*

                                                        Your father did not know how to address your utter and absolute lack of craftsmanship.

When you were a child, it was faintly amusing. Your distress was understandable, and you could be consoled; your mother had learned to weave, to paint, to steady her hands so well that the healers called for her when they needed her peculiar even-temperateness. Though you were, by no means, held to that standard, they had both presumed you would improve with time and practice.

You did not.

If it was possible, you might’ve gotten worse.

There was nothing wrong with you, regardless; even if you had possessed some misplaced instinct, some physical inability to complete the task (be it in your fingers or your gifts or your eyesight), your people were not human – they would not allow you to go without simply because you could not fashion your necessities for yourself. Everyone had different skills (or so he told you several dozen times throughout the course of your life); if yours just so happened to be something else (you often let him get through the reassurance without pointing out that it was supposed to be an instinct, as intrinsic as breath and flight) then you would discover it, in time.

Your people were not human; no one pushed for a reason as to why, when you tried to repair a basket (with a patch, no less; you didn’t even try to take the whole thing apart like your mother would’ve), the whole shape of it changed. They did not whisper to your father to make sure it was not your eyesight, or your talons, or – Phoenix forbid – your gifts. Even if it had been, those were all things one could live without. Even if there was some definite reason as to why you could not  make anything but a mullein candle, nothing would ever be withheld from you; your life would not be lacking or lesser for it.

The moment he landed, the floral massacre you’d made of the nest became painfully apparent.

Conall knew you’d heard him. He knew you would be expecting him to join you in less time than his pause took, but he had to prepare himself for your valiant persistence in the face of terrible odds.

Stars above, Noren, our daughter would’ve made a fierce warrior.

It was a floral massacre. In every sense of the word.

He had thought the sight of the petals scattered across the down-laden floor would’ve been indication of your state enough, but it was not. He did not know if you had asked anyone (or who you had asked, for that matter, if you had) for guidance on whatever it was you were supposed to be doing, but he imagined that you had either been intentionally mislead or accidentally misheard. Or, hopefully, you had not asked at all. Hopefully, it was a whim gone wrong. Hopefully, you would not be offended if he did not laugh at the sad state of whatever in skies it was supposed to be, or the sorry little pile of stems that looked like they had been hacked off once, then hacked down again, and perhaps a third time only to end up too short.

By the ancestors, there were flower petals everywhere.

For a heartbeat and a half, he considered not even acknowledging it. He knew you; you were quick to embarrass, sensitive and so very well-intentioned – he could’ve waited until you went to bed to pick the petals out of everything and leave them in a heap outside.

But he had seen them, and he knew you knew he’d seen them, and so you sat there in your nook with a pile of mutilated flowers tied together at the stems so thickly that he could see the knots from where he stood, and you stared at him with the most forlorn eyes he’d ever seen on an un-wounded creature. And he, in turn, stared at you.

“I was trying to make a flower crown,” you said. There was a quiver in your voice.

Oh, Cas.

He stepped over the ledge of woven branches, so well-aged that they crinkled underfoot. Some of the petals were not bruised enough that he could tell what they were – you’d taken whatever you could find, apparently, as long as it flowered.

Had you only tried to make just the one?

He wrapped you in his arm and his wing at the same time. The usual reassurance was on the tip of his tongue, but he let it go. “You put too much pressure on yourself.”

You held up a limp-worn section of stems six flowers thick. The flowers themselves were no longer whole and the stems were not viable for support, but the braiding was nice. The knots could’ve even been decorative.

He took it from your hands and laid it out flat across your folded legs. “Tell me what you see.”

“A mess.” Which was true. It was, without question, a mess – you had made a grand mess.

“Did you enjoy making it?”

“No,” you admitted. Not even a little. You’d had fun gathering the flowers, though you’d spent the whole time biting back the anxiety that, perhaps, if you were lucky, this time would be different.

“Then why did you do it?” He stroked back your braids.

You shrugged. Even your wings shrugged in time with your shoulders. “I wanted to be able to.”

“To prove your opinion of yourself wrong,” he clarified.

You let your wings slump; gave him a look that could’ve withered the flowers on your lap, had you not already done that by hand.

“Cassia,” he touched your chin, “do you think I would tolerate anyone speaking of you the way you regard yourself?”

“No.” You knew he wouldn’t. Even if he was not a warrior any longer, he would always be your father. “But they would be right.”

He gathered the ends of several of your braids to show them to you. “I did not do these.” Though he used to, when you were younger and far too impatient to take the time to do it yourself.

You rolled your eyes. Anyone could braid hair, though your curls were a special exception – not everyone could navigate them as well as you did.

“I did not forage for nettle for Clove’s tea, or scent a candle with honey for Maple. You accomplish far more with success than you believe you do – and,” he did not let you brush honesty aside, “this was your first attempt, was it not?”

“I made one as a child,” you muttered. “It was terrible then, also.”

He gave you the same dramatic show you’d given him, sighing and rolling his eyes. “Yes, it was terrible, and I’ve spoiled you on worldly pleasures. How vain I am, how blind, to know my daughter cannot weave because I’ve spoiled her rotten.”

The laugh that bubbled out of you was entirely involuntary, according to you.

“My daughter cannot weave, but she can braid. Though she is certain, quick-witted, compassionate, beautiful, and kind; though she is loved by all and skilled at many other things, she cannot weave, and, for that...perhaps I ought to throw her into exile.”

“I am not a child!” you exclaimed, though his broad wing still came up to cover your face like he was blotting out the sun – “trapping” you away somewhere. When you were a child, it was different – he could cover the whole of your body with his dense, broad wings, and you laughed and play-screamed with mock fear at the nonexistent threat of “exile” like you didn’t brush your hands over his feathers with the knowledge that you were always safe.

“Ah, but that is where you’re wrong – you are my child, and you always will be.” The thumb-claw at the apex of his wing brushed over your cheek, and tapped the tip of your nose before withdrawing. You put your hand over it – to stifle your smile, not because you always did. “You are my daughter, my heart, and I love you. Just as you are.”

You shifted, unfolding from yourself to press into his side. He tucked your head between his shoulder and his jaw like you were still small, and you wrapped your wings around him in return. His lips pressed to your forehead, and his hand settled, steadying,  just below the joints of your wings.

“Quick witted?” you muttered. There was only one way to salvage your abomination, and it felt like cheating. “Do shortcuts count?”

“Shortcuts support nests,” he replied, as though that wouldn’t give you pause. You’d never considered it, but that made sense – even if one built a nest from what had already fallen, wove together the tree-parts already shed, there was nothing to stop a swift rain from washing it away but its weight – to shield it from the weather, though you had always presumed there was an element of mud-seal, like a robin’s.

Your abomination grew a bit in length when you touched it, though since it was tied together it could not grow far. Some of its bruised leaves rekindled, and the flowers you’d beaten half to death returned to life – new petals and all. It was just barely long enough to wrap around your head, so you took yet another shortcut and slipped the knotted joints at either side over your horns. “Is it pretty, at least?”

It was. Quite pretty, for no two of the same flowers grew upon it. Your father didn’t tell you that, though; he folded you close within his wing and pressed you tightly against his side. “It’s yours. That is what makes it beautiful.”

“By the Phoenix,” you muttered, reaching up to pull it off.

He didn’t let you. It was unconventional, perhaps – not what you’d intended to make, but beautiful all the same. It was yours, so unique that he could imagine no other existed like it. “If you will not wear it, I will.”

The look of horror that crossed your face was ample motivation for him to sweep it off your horns and drape it over his. You reached for it, even sitting up on your knees to try to grab it out of his hands, but he would not be dissuaded.

“Papa--” you nearly begged.

“It is beautiful, Cassia,” he repeated, making sure it settled nicely on top of his head with the petal-laden side facing the sky. “I will wear it to council in the morning.”

“No!” You’d die of embarrassment. It didn’t even matter that you saw it with different eyes, now that it wasn’t yours – it was not a gift you’d freely given, but all parents saved terrible creations, didn’t they? Though it was strange, and didn’t necessarily sit right, you’d chosen colorful flowers, and your gifts breathed life back into them. Even if some of the flowers didn’t look right the second time around. “If you love me, that thing will never leave this room.”

“You are my heart,” he repeated, taking your face in his hands as though it was necessary to cup your cheeks when he kissed between your horns. “Trust yourself not to falter. You will do what you are meant to.”

Arguing was fruitless. You sighed from the very depths of your chest and practically crawled back into his wings. “I’m sorry about the…” you gestured faintly to the mess you’d made.

“It can be picked up.” His concern did not lie in the easily remedied. “Will you promise me something?”

You quirked your head. Perhaps, depending upon what it was.

“Forgive yourself when you make mistakes. I am not concerned with what you could be, I love you as you are.”

You could stop trying to make things. That would solve the problem. You could stop trying to fix what you had no business touching, but it would still be easier to promise than to do.

“I can try,” you murmured.

“That is all I can ask for.” He gave you yet another gentle squeeze, and you tucked your head into his shoulder. You could smell the different perfumes descending from his hair, and you linked your fingers through one of the shell-plated straps of his not-armor.

“Please do not wear that to council tomorrow. I am actively begging.”

“I will leave it here only if you promise to let it stay.”

“I promise,” you muttered, if only because you were not totally disgusted with it now that it had flowers. Now that it was no longer yours.

Your father had no idea how to address your utter and absolute lack of craftsmanship because he did not feel that way; you did not lack skill, only confidence. That, as with all things, would come in time.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Happy Together : 7

Perfect Illusion

Character(s): (deceptively) dark!Steve

Warnings: this is a dark!fic, it contains non/dubious-consent elements. It goes without (and with) saying that this is 18+. [some touching]

Series Synopsis: The reader is stood up while awaiting a blind date, instead finding herself keeping company with the restaurant’s famous owner; Steve Rogers. After that night, she tries to forget her humiliation but she just can’t shake one thing about that night: him.

Masterlist

Chapter Summary: The reader makes a dire mistake.

Notes: So in this chapter, it ramps up just a little bit. We get some intense Steve and some very foolish reader. But let’s get going on this rollercoaster from hell.

Thanks to everyone who reads and as always, I looked forward to hearing from you in the replies/reblogs/tags/asks. <3

You washed your mouth out shakily as you held back the rest of the bile that threatened to rise. You brushed your teeth, trying to rid the acidic tang on your tongue. As you leaned over the sink, you noticed that there was vomit spattered across your dress. Never before had your fear become so visceral. You huffed as you closed your eyes, recalling the impatient fury which has hardened Steve's features. You had been lucky; saved by the very panic he had instilled in you.

You stripped away the soiled dress, creeping into the bedroom in your shift. You scurried into the closet and dropped the dress in the hamper, pulling a sleeping gown from a hanger. You shed the shift, discarding it into the tall basket, the nightie draped over the side waiting for you. As you reached back to unclasp your bra, the door of the closet shifted and a shadow appeared over you.

“There you--” Steve’s voice caught as you looked up at him, frozen in place as you kept your bra from slipping away from your chest. His eyes roved your body and his jaw squared. His gaze darkened and he exhaled loudly, visibly shuddering. “S-sorry.” 

The wood of the closet door groused as his grip tightened and he slowly backed out of the closet. You could see the battle against some unseen force in his staggered movements, the door closing in a single motion as he barricaded himself from you.

You were stuck in a tableau as you gaped at the door. You slowly looked down at yourself; had he been a few minutes later he would have caught you in a worse state. Your garters, and thigh highs would have swiftly followed your half-undone bra, which was barely held in place over your chest. You were about to spill forth and suspected he had seen more than you could from your vantage.

His shadow retreated from the other side of the door and you let your bra fall down your arms, setting it on the small chest of drawers for the next day. Your garters and thigh highs were added to the rest of the laundry and you changed into a fresh set of panties before pulling on the knee length nightie. The fabric was as thin as all the others, barely concealing what was underneath. You shivered as you contemplated leaving the small refuge. You couldn't hide there forever.

You shifted the door open and stepped out, keeping your attention on closing it behind you. When you looked up, the room was empty. The bathroom was open just a crack, steam seeping out as the shower pattered distantly. You were relieved to find him otherwise occupied. You approached the vanity but a noise kept you from sitting. Your palm was flat on table as the groans grew louder. Just audible past the stream of water. You dared to tiptoe past the bed, drawn by Steve's low growls. And then you heard it. A slap against the tile followed by a long moan, the syllables of your name floating through the mist.

You began to back pedal, nearly falling as you collided with the footboard of the bed. You caught yourself with the post and carried on past it, sitting at the vanity with wide eyes. You stared at your reflection as your cheeks burned. It wasn't hard to guess at the reason for such sounds. The faucet cranked and the shower head died. You quickly pulled open the drawer and pretended to be distracted by its contents.

You heard Steve enter, glancing at him behind you in the mirror. A towel was knotted low around his waist and his muscles rippled with each move. You looked away guiltily, finding your mind straying to what you could not see. He neared, his hands on your shoulders as he pressed himself to your back. His fingers played with the ends of your hair, “You should lay down, dear. You need your rest.”

His hand settled just above your chest, fingers twitching as if longing to venture lower. You nodded, a high-pitched “okay” as you carefully pulled away and stood, afraid to provoke the urges he was fighting. He smiled at you as you came around the stool, his arm grazing yours as he watched you climb up onto the bed dutifully. The weight of his gaze followed you as you slid your legs under the covers, hoping they could shield you.

“I'll be with you shortly, dear,” He turned to the closet, unhooking his towel and baring his ass as he opened the door. You looked away shocked and he disappeared inside. You doubted that was unintentional. You rolled over, blankets drawn up to your chin.

You heard him return, the bed dipping as he pulled back his side of the covers and got up beside you. He sat against the headboard, tugging the blankets away from you and his hand fell onto your arm, squeezing just slightly.

“Tell me how you broke the glass,” It wasn't a question. You were glad he couldn't see your face. He must have sensed as much as he nudged you towards him and you rolled flat on your back.

“I knocked it over while I was cleaning,” You said meekly, “I'm sorry.”

“I'm not mad. Did you cut yourself?” His fingers were in your hair again, feeling the ends as he spoke. You shook your head. “You must tell me if you hurt yourself or if you’re unwell...you scared me today.”

“Okay,” You complied, wanting him to just leave you be. He blinked at you, waiting. “Sweetheart.” He relaxed and you hid the bubble of anxiety as it slowly faded.

He moved to lay beside you, pulling the chain of the lamp before slinging his arm across you. He was as close as the night before and you steeled yourself against his touch. He kissed your cheek, your temple, your jawline. “You're so precious to me. You know that, dear?” 

His hand cradled your other cheek. You nodded and his lips continued to dapple your skin. He was flush against you and you felt his excitement prodding you through his thin pajamas. You tried to shimmy away but he had you trapped.

“I'm trying to be patient,” His voice was low, his breath hot, “But you make it so hard.” 

His hand closed on your chin and he turned your head. His mouth pushed against yours, begging for entrance, demanding it and you let his tongue past. He released your chin, his hand on your neck, squeezing once before trailing further. He cupped your breast through your nightie and hummed. He pulled away suddenly. 

“No.” He fell onto his back. “We must wait.” He reproached himself more than you. You saw his hand wander beneath the blanket, settling on the bulge hidden there. “Wait.” He groaned through clenched teeth. A shaky breath escaped him. He cleared his throat, reaching over to take your hand and sling your arm across his torso. “Goodnight, dear.” He kissed the top of your head as you were forced to rest it on his shoulder, cradled by his thick arm.

“Goodnight, sweetheart,” You returned, your voice thin. 

This man could barely fend off himself, how on earth were you to contend with him?

—

You quickly fell into the routine of your prison. Steve’s alarm woke you, he kissed your cheek and said good morning and you rose at the same time. He went to ready himself for a day outside and you set off to make him his breakfast as you stewed in self-pity. Then he would leave and you’d clean the dishes and the mess left from cooking. When you had finished that, you washed up yourself, opting to do so when he was away. 

Ever since he had walked in on you in the closet, he had become more fixated on your body. His hands would stray to thigh or breast before quickly recoiling and reproaching himself. It was terrifying. Much of your day was spent reading the outdated magazines and doing little chores before you started the evening meal. Without Steve to remind you, you didn’t often have much of an appetite.

He had allowed you another inch on your leash; the laundry room. Unlike the decor, the appliances were from this century. You were thankful as you weren’t sure you could manage ancient technology. Today, the hamper was full and you were determined to get it done. You dragged it through the kitchen and dining room until you reached the small room meant for washing. You dumped it into the machine and added soap, sitting in the cushioned chair as you opened the booklet titled “A Woman’s Day” and turned to the back page where the daily roster remained blank.

Well, apart from the crooked branches you had started drawing with the pen. As they stretched higher they became more twisted and rotten. Like you. Your core was there but with each day in this time capsule, you felt yourself changing. You were almost complacent, catching yourself enjoying the simple chores, the quiet. And other times you loathed the very same. And Steve. When he left you were relieved but with no other company, you found yourself longing for his return. And that frightened you more than him. Your own mind was holding you captive, lulled into a false sense of security. You didn’t belong here, even if it felt like it.

You were suddenly restless. You closed the book and set it atop the whirling washer. You stood and paced around the small room. What were you doing here? Why hadn’t you tried to fight back? Well, that was simple enough. You had that first day and he had swiftly crushed any hopes of resistance. He reminded you of your weakness every night when he held you to him. His arms were the bars of your cell. So then why hadn’t you tried to escape? He left you for hours a day and you all you did was play house. You could get a head start, run and find the police before Steve found you.

You stopped short, your hands clasped together before your chest as you thought. Christ, there were windows in almost every room. Break one and get out! You shook your head as if a veil had been lifted from you and marched into the kitchen, grabbing the broom from against the wall where you had left it. You looked to the window and a small smile curved your lips. He’d have no inkling of your intentions, especially after a whole week of you acting like his little pet. He’d be shocked; angry.

You gripped the wooden handle and sped towards the wed, jabbing out the end into the glass. But instead of a shatter, it was crack. The window didn’t dissemble into shards, instead the image cracked, the point of impact formed a spider web of discolored pixels. A ragged circle, half-black and the rest a mosaic spectrum, right in the middle of the illusion of rustling trees and playful squirrels. It was all fake! It wasn’t even a window.

The lump rose in your throat and you began to shake. Oh fuck! Steve would get home and realize you had tried to escape...and you hadn’t. Oh no, oh no, oh no. You slowly sunk down to your knees, sitting back as you let the broom fall beside you. You covered your face, letting out a few tears before sniffing back the rest. You had fought so hard to keep from a breakdown. You looked up at the smashed screen and whimpered. All of this was his twisted fantasy. Every window was a screen with some pre-programmed deception. You had been sitting here watching bullshit, dreaming of being free. There was no freedom.

You gulped and stood. You neared the window, pulling shut the curtains as you hoped you could distract Steve for a while before he noticed. Maybe even appease him enough that he’d believe whatever excuse you managed to you come up with. You replaced the broom in its place and returned to the laundry room, sitting with booklet in hand as you waited to switch over the laundry. You felt entirely deflated. You had been waiting for nothing. There would be no chance to flee, no window to climb through. Only Steve.

—

When the clothes were dry, you hung them in the closet and set the hamper back in its place. You had enough time to change before your keeper returned. You shed the long-sleeved dress in lieu of one with thick straps instead. You had opted most days for coverage but seeing as you had fucked up royally, you hoped that you could endear yourself to Steve. At least enough that he wouldn’t kill you. The thought gave you goosebumps. This man you had been living with for a week was a stranger. You didn’t know what he was capable of. Physically, you knew he could break you in half, but mentally...you still weren’t sure.

The top of your cleavage was just visible below the square neckline, your hairs was set neatly, directing all attention to the tight bodice and cinched waist. You wore heels high enough that they emphasized the movement of your hips. Even so, you felt entirely unprepared for his return. He was late that night which only stoked your dread. You sat at your vanity, bedroom door open as you listened for him and doodled along the borders of the booklet, framing the recipes with flowers and vines.

Heavy hands rested on your bare shoulders and you yelped. For all your expectation, you still hadn’t heard Steve enter. You looked up into the mirror as he leaned down to gaze back at your reflection. His head was next to yours and he kissed your cheek with a purr. “You look nice,” He said as he loomed over you, his hand wandering to the top of your chest, lingering on the bare skin. “Very nice, dear.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” You made to snap shut the booklet but he quickly lowered his hand and caught it before the pages could meet.

“What’s this?” He grabbed the booklet and easily dislodged it from your grasp. He stood straight as he flipped through the pages and and turned on the stool to watch him with round eyes. He stopped at the back page where the tree grew to ash. “Hmm,” He sighed, “Now, Y/N,” He lowered himself to kneel before you, closing the book as he set it on your lap. He pulled your hands around the thin booklet, squeezing them between his large ones. “This isn’t a sketchbook. This is to help you manage your time.”

“I--I’m sorry,” Your voice was brittle, “I…” You couldn’t think of an excuse that wouldn’t anger him. Bored, lonely, sad… all of them would be an insult against him.

“If you wanted something to draw with, you could’ve asked,” He said gently, “Anything you need, you can ask me, dear. You know that, right?”

You looked away guiltily and forced yourself to nod. It wasn’t true. What you needed was to be rid of him but he’d never give you that. He grabbed your chin and forced you to look at him, pulling you to lean closer as he kissed your lips. His other hand was on your thigh, it slid down until it met the hem of your skirt and began to push it up your leg. His palm grazed along your thigh, fingers tugging at your garter as if tempted to rip it off.

“Mmm,” He pulled away, tugging your skirt back down. He stood and breathed deeply as if warding off some dark force. “So,” He offered his hand and you took it, standing up warily. “What’s for dinner? It smells amazing.”

+

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[hlupdate]

Harry Styles isn’t exactly dressed down for lunch. He’s got a white floppy hat that Diana Ross might have won from Elton in a poker game at Cher’s mansion circa 1974, plus Gucci shades, a cashmere sweater, and blue denim bell-bottoms. His nail polish is pink and mint green. He’s also carrying his purse — no other word for it — a yellow patent-canvas bag with the logo “Chateau Marmont.” The tough old ladies who work at this Beverly Hills deli know him well. Gloria and Raisa dote on him, calling him “my love” and bringing him his usual tuna salad and iced coffee. He turns heads, to put it mildly, but nobody comes near because the waitresses hover around the booth protectively.

He was just a small-town English lad of 16 when he became his generation’s pop idol with One Direction. When the group went on hiatus, he struck out on his own with his brash 2017 solo debut, whose lead single was the magnificently over-the-top six-minute piano ballad “Sign of the Times.” Even people who missed out on One Direction were shocked to learn the truth: This pinup boy was a rock star at heart.

A quick highlight reel of Harry’s 2019 so far: He hosted the Met Gala with Lady Gaga, Serena Williams, Alessandro Michele, and Anna Wintour serving an eyebrow-raising black lace red-carpet look. He is the official face of a designer genderless fragrance, Gucci’s Mémoire d’une Odeur. When James Corden had an all-star dodgeball match on The Late Late Show, Harry got spiked by a hard serve from Michelle Obama, making him perhaps the first Englishman ever hit in the nads on TV by a First Lady.

Closer to his heart, he brought down the house at this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony with his tribute to his friend and idol Stevie Nicks. “She’s always there for you,” Harry said in his speech. “She knows what you need: advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl.” He added, “She’s responsible for more running mascara — including my own — than all the bad dates in history.” (Backstage, Nicks accidentally referred to Harry’s former band as “’NSync.” Hey, a goddess can get away with that sort of thing.)

Harry has been the world’s It boy for nearly a decade now. The weirdest thing about him? He loves being this guy. In a style of fast-lane celebrity that takes a ruthless toll on the artist’s personality, creativity, sanity, Harry is almost freakishly at ease. He has managed to grow up in public with all his boyish enthusiasm intact, not to mention his manners. He’s dated a string of high-profile women — but he never gets caught uttering any of their names in public, much less shading any of them. Instead of going the usual superstar-pop route — en vogue producers, celebrity duets, glitzy club beats — he’s gone his own way, and gotten more popular than ever. He’s putting the finishing touches on his new album, full of the toughest, most soulful songs he’s written yet. As he explains, “It’s all about having sex and feeling sad.”

The Harry Charm is a force of nature, and it can be almost frightening to witness in action. The most startling example might be a backstage photo from February taken with one of his heroes, Van Morrison. You have never seen a Van picture like this one. He’s been posing for photos for 50 years, and he’s been refusing to crack a smile in nearly all of them. Until he met Harry — for some reason, Van beams like a giddy schoolgirl. What did Harry do to him? “I was tickling him behind his back,” Harry confides. “Somebody sent me that photo — I think his tour manager took it. When I saw it, I felt like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction opening the case with the gold light shining. I was like, ‘Fuck, maybe I shouldn’t show this to anyone.’”

In interviews, Harry has always tended to coast on that charm, simply because he can. In his teens, he was in public every minute and became adept at guarding every scrap of his privacy. But these days, he’s finding out he has things he wants to say. He’s more confident about thinking out loud and seeing what happens. “Looser” is how he puts it. “More open. I’m discovering how much better it makes me feel to be open with friends. Feeling that vulnerability, rather than holding everything in.”

Like a lot of people his age, he’s asking questions about culture, gender, identity, new ideas about masculinity and sexuality. “I feel pretty lucky to have a group of friends who are guys who would talk about their emotions and be really open,” he says. “My friend’s dad said to me, ‘You guys are so much better at it than we are. I never had friends I could really talk to. It’s good that you guys have each other because you talk about real shit. We just didn’t.’”

It’s changed how he approaches his songs. “For me, it doesn’t mean I’ll sit down and be like, ‘This is what I have for dinner, and this is where I eat every day, and this is what I do before I go to bed,’” he says. “But I will tell you that I can be really pathetic when I’m jealous. Feeling happier than I’ve ever been, sadder than I’ve ever been, feeling sorry for myself, being mad at myself, being petty and pitiful — it feels really different to share that.”

At times, Harry sounds like an ordinary 25-year-old figuring his shit out, which, of course, he is. (Harry and I got to know each other last year, when he got in touch after reading one of my books, though I’d already been writing about his music for years.) It’s strange to hear him talk about shedding his anxieties and doubts, since he’s always come across as one of the planet’s most confident people. “While I was in the band,” he says, “I was constantly scared I might sing a wrong note. I felt so much weight in terms of not getting things wrong. I remember when I signed my record deal and I asked my manager, ‘What happens if I get arrested? Does it mean the contract is null and void?’ Now, I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes.”

We slip out the back and spend a Saturday afternoon cruising L.A. in his 1972 silver Jaguar E-type. The radio doesn’t work, so we just sing “Old Town Road.” He marvels, “‘Bull riding and boobies’ — that is potentially the greatest lyric in any song ever.” Harry used to be pop’s mystery boy, so diplomatic and tight-lipped. But as he opens up over time, telling his story, he reaches the point where he’s pitching possible headlines for this profile. His best: “Soup, Sex, and Sun Salutations.”

How did he get to this new place? As it turns out, the journey involves some heartbreak. Some guidance from David Bowie. Some Transcendental Meditation. And more than a handful of magic mushrooms. But mostly, it comes down to a curious kid who can’t decide whether to be the world’s most ardently adored pop star, or a freaky artiste. So he decides to be both.

Two things about English rock stars never change: They love Southern California, and they love cars. A few days after Harry proclaimed the genius of “Old Town Road,” we’re in a different ride — a Tesla — cruising the Pacific Coast Highway while Harry sings along to the radio. “Californiaaaaaa!” he yells from behind the wheel as we whip past Zuma Beach. “It sucks!” There’s a surprising number of couples along the beach who seem to be arguing. We speculate on which ones are breaking up and which are merely having the talk. “Ah, yes, the talk,” Harry says dreamily. “Ye olde chat.”

Harry is feeling the smooth Seventies yacht-rock grooves today, blasting Gerry Rafferty, Pablo Cruise, Hall and Oates. When I mention that Nina Simone once did a version of “Rich Girl,” he needs to hear it right away. He counters by blowing my mind with Donny Hathaway’s version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.”

Harry raves about a quintessential SoCal trip he just tried: a “cold sauna,” a process that involves getting locked in an ice chamber. His eyelashes froze. We stop for a smoothie (“It’s basically ice cream”) and his favorite pepper-intensive wheatgrass shot. It goes down like a dose of battery acid. “That’ll add years to your life,” he assures me.

We’re on our way to Shangri-La studios in Malibu, founded by the Band back in the 1970s, now owned by Rick Rubin. It’s where Harry made some of the upcoming album, and as we walk in, he grins at the memory. “Ah, yes,” he says. “Did a lot of mushrooms in here.”

Psychedelics have started to play a key role in his creative process. “We’d do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram in the sunshine,” he says. “We’d just turn the speakers into the yard.” The chocolate edibles were kept in the studio fridge, right next to the blender. “You’d hear the blender going, and think, ‘So we’re all having frozen margaritas at 10 a.m. this morning.’” He points to a corner: “This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place.”

It’s not mere rock-star debauchery — it’s emblematic of his new state of mind. You get the feeling this is why he enjoys studios so much. After so many years making One Direction albums while touring, always on the run, he finally gets to take his time and embrace the insanity of it all. “We were here for six weeks in Malibu, without going into the city,” he says. “People would bring their dogs and kids. We’d take a break to play cornhole tournaments. Family values!” But it’s also the place where he has proudly bled for his art. “Mushrooms and Blood. Now there’s an album title.”

Some of the engineers come over to catch up on gossip. Harry gestures out the window to the Pacific waves, where the occasional nude revelry might have happened, and where the occasional pair of pants got lost. “There was one night where we’d been partying a bit and ended up going down to the beach and I lost all my stuff, basically,” he says. “I lost all my clothes. I lost my wallet. Maybe a month later, somebody found my wallet and mailed it back, anonymously. I guess it just popped out of the sand. But what’s sad is, I lost my favorite mustard corduroy flares.” A moment of silence is held for the corduroy flares.

Recording in the studio today is Brockhampton, the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest boy band.” Harry says hi to all the Brockhampton guys, which takes a while since there seem to be a few dozen of them. “We’re together all the time,” one tells Harry out in the yard. “We see each other all day, every day.” He pauses. “You know how it is.”

Harry breaks into a dry grin. “Yes, I know how it is.”

One Direction made three of this century’s biggest and best pop albums in a rush — Midnight Memories, Four and Made in the A.M. Yet they cut those records on tour, ducking into the nearest studio when they had a day off. 1D were a unique mix of five different musical personalities: Harry, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, and Liam Payne. But the pace took its toll. Malik quit in the middle of a tour, immediately after a show in Hong Kong. The band announced its hiatus in August 2015.

It’s traditional for boy-band singers, as they go solo and grow up, to renounce their pop past. Everybody remembers George Michael setting his leather jacket on fire, or Sting quitting the Police to make jazz records. This isn’t really Harry Styles’ mentality. “I know it’s the thing that always happens. When somebody gets out of a band, they go, ‘That wasn’t me. I was held back.’ But it was me. And I don’t feel like I was held back at all. It was so much fun. If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s not like I was tied to a radiator.”

Whenever Harry mentions One Direction — never by name, always “the band” or “the band I was in” — he uses the past tense. It is my unpleasant duty to ask: Does he see 1D as over? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t think I’d ever say I’d never do it again, because I don’t feel that way. If there’s a time when we all really want to do it, that’s the only time for us to do it, because I don’t think it should be about anything else other than the fact that we’re all like, ‘Hey, this was really fun. We should do this again.’ But until that time, I feel like I’m really enjoying making music and experimenting. I enjoy making music this way too much to see myself doing a full switch, to go back and do that again. Because I also think if we went back to doing things the same way, it wouldn’t be the same, anyway.”

When the band stopped, did he take those friendships with him? “Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Definitely. Because above all else, we’re the people who went through that. We’re always going to have that, even if we’re not the closest. And the fact is, just because you’re in a band with someone doesn’t mean you have to be best friends. That’s not always how it works. Just because Fleetwood Mac fight, that doesn’t mean they’re not amazing. I think even in the disagreements, there’s always a mutual respect for each other — we did this really cool thing together, and we’ll always have that. It’s too important to me to ever be like, ‘Oh, that’s done.’ But if it happens, it will happen for the right reasons.”

If the intensity of the Harry fandom ever seems mysterious to you, there’s a live clip you might want to investigate, from the summer of 2018. Just search the phrase “Tina, she’s gay.” In San Jose, on one of the final nights of his tour, Harry spots a fan with a homemade sign: “I’m Gonna Come Out to My Parents Because of You!” He asks the fan her name (she says it’s Grace) and her mother’s name (Tina). He asks the audience for silence because he has an important announcement to make: “Tina! She’s gaaaaay!” Then he has the entire crowd say it together. Thousands of strangers start yelling “Tina, she’s gay,” and every one of them clearly means it — it’s a heavy moment, definitely not a sound you forget after you hear it. Then Harry sings “What Makes You Beautiful.” (Of course, the way things work now, the clip went viral within minutes. So did Grace’s photo of Tina giving a loving thumbs-up to her now-out teenage daughter. Grace and Tina attended Harry’s next show together.)

Harry likes to cultivate an aura of sexual ambiguity, as overt as the pink polish on his nails. He’s dated women throughout his life as a public figure, yet he has consistently refused to put any kind of label on his sexuality. On his first solo tour, he frequently waved the pride, bi, and trans flags, along with the Black Lives Matter flag. In Philly, he waved a rainbow flag he borrowed from a fan up front: “Make America Gay Again.” One of the live fan favorites: “Medicine,” a guitar jam that sounds a bit like the Grateful Dead circa Europe ’72, but with a flamboyantly pansexual hook: “The boys and girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it.”

He’s always had a flair for flourishes like this, since the 1D days. An iconic clip from November 2014: Harry and Liam are on a U.K. chat show. The host asks the oldest boy-band fan-bait question in the book: What do they look for in a date? “Female,” Liam quips. “That’s a good trait.” Harry shrugs. “Not that important.” Liam is taken aback. The host is in shock. On tour in the U.S. that year, he wore a Michael Sam football jersey, in support of the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team. He’s blown up previously unknown queer artists like King Princess and Muna.

What do those flags onstage mean to him? “I want to make people feel comfortable being whatever they want to be,” he says. “Maybe at a show you can have a moment of knowing that you’re not alone. I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows. I can’t claim that I know what it’s like, because I don’t. So I’m not trying to say, ‘I understand what it’s like.’ I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”

On tour, he had an End Gun Violence sticker on his guitar; he added a Black Lives Matter sticker, as well as the flag. “It’s not about me trying to champion the cause, because I’m not the person to do that,” he says. “It’s just about not ignoring it, I guess. I was a little nervous to do that because the last thing I wanted was for it to feel like I was saying, ‘Look at me! I’m the good guy!’ I didn’t want anyone who was really involved in the movement to think, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ But then when I did it, I realized people got it. Everyone in that room is on the same page and everyone knows what I stand for. I’m not saying I understand how it feels. I’m just trying to say, ‘I see you.’”

At one of his earliest solo shows, in Stockholm, he announced, “If you are black, if you are white, if you are gay, if you are straight, if you are transgender — whoever you are, whoever you want to be, I support you. I love every single one of you.” “It’s a room full of accepting people.… If you’re someone who feels like an outsider, you’re not always in a big crowd like that,” he says. “It’s not about, ‘Oh, I get what it’s like,’ because I don’t. For example, I go walking at night before bed most of the time. I was talking about that with a female friend and she said, ‘Do you feel safe doing that?’ And I do. But when I walk, I’m more aware that I feel OK to walk at night, and some of my friends wouldn’t. I’m not saying I know what it feels like to go through that. It’s just being aware.”

‘Man cannot live by coffee alone,” Harry says. “But he will give it a damn good try.” He sips his iced Americano — not his first today, or his last. He’s back behind the wheel, on a mission to yet another studio — but this time for actual work. Today it’s string overdubs. Harry is dressed in Gucci from head to toe, except for one item of clothing: a ratty Seventies rock T-shirt he proudly scavenged from a vintage shop. It says “Commander Quaalude.”

On the drive over, he puts on the jazz pianist Bill Evans — “Peace Piece,” from 1959, which is the wake-up tone on his phone. He just got into jazz during a long sojourn in Japan. He likes to find places to hide out and be anonymous: For his first album, he decamped to Jamaica. Over the past year, he spent months roaming Japan.

In February, he spent his 25th birthday sitting by himself in a Tokyo cafe, reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. “I love Murakami,” he says. “He’s one of my favorites. Reading didn’t really used to be my thing. I had such a short attention span. But I was dating someone who gave me some books; I felt like I had to read them because she’d think I was a dummy if I didn’t read them.”

A friend gave him Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. “It was the first book, maybe ever, where all I wanted to do all day was read this,” he says. “I had a very Murakami birthday because I ended up staying in Tokyo on my own. I had grilled fish and miso soup for breakfast, then I went to this cafe. I sat and drank tea and read for five hours.”

In the studio, he’s overseeing the string quartet. He has the engineers play T. Rex’s “Cosmic Dancer” for them, to illustrate the vibe he’s going for. You can see he enjoys being on this side of the glass, sitting at the Neve board, giving his instructions to the musicians. After a few run-throughs, he presses the intercom button to say, “Yeah, it’s pretty T. Rex. Best damn strings I ever heard.” He buzzes again to add, “And you’re all wonderful people.”

He’s curated his own weird enclave of kindred spirits to collaborate with, like producers Jeff Bhasker and Tyler Johnson. His guitarist Mitch Rowland was working at an L.A. pizza shop when Harry met him. They started writing songs for the debut; Rowland didn’t quit his job until two weeks into the sessions. One of his closest collaborators is also one of his best friends: Tom Hull, a.k.a. Kid Harpoon, a longtime cohort of Florence and the Machine. Hull is an effusive Brit with a heart-on-sleeve personality. Harry calls him “my emotional rock.” Hull calls him “Gary.”

Hull was the one who talked him into taking a course on Transcendental Meditation at David Lynch’s institute — beginning each day with 20 minutes of silence, which doesn’t always come naturally to either of them. “He’s got this wise-beyond-his-years timelessness about him,” Hull says. “That’s why he went on a whole emotional exploration with these songs.” He’s 12 years older, with a wife and kids in Scotland, and talks about Harry like an irreverent but doting big brother.

Last year, Harry was in the gossip columns dating the French model Camille Rowe; they split up last summer after a year together. “He went through this breakup that had a big impact on him,” Hull says. “I turned up on Day One in the studio, and I had these really nice slippers on. His ex-girlfriend that he was really cut up about, she gave them to me as a present — she bought slippers for my whole family. We’re still close friends with her. I thought, ‘I like these slippers. Can I wear them — is that weird?’

“So I turn up at Shangri-La the first day and literally within the first half-hour, he looks at me and says, ‘Where’d you get those slippers? They’re nice.’ I had to say, ‘Oh, um, your ex-girlfriend got them for me.’ He said, ‘Whaaaat? How could you wear those?’ He had a whole emotional journey about her, this whole relationship. But I kept saying, ‘The best way of dealing with it is to put it in these songs you’re writing.’”

True to his code of gallant discretion, Harry doesn’t say her name at any point. But he admits the songs are coming from personal heartbreak. “It’s not like I’ve ever sat and done an interview and said, ‘So I was in a relationship, and this is what happened,’” he says. “Because, for me, music is where I let that cross over. It’s the only place, strangely, where it feels right to let that cross over.”

The new songs are certainly charged with pain. “The stars didn’t align for them to be a forever thing,” Hull says. “But I told him that famous Iggy Pop quote where he says, ‘I only ever date women who are going to fuck me up, because that’s where the songs are.’ I said, ‘You’re 24, 25 years old, you’re in the eligible-bachelor category. Just date amazing women, or men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up, and explore and have an adventure and let it affect you and write songs about it.’”

His band is full of indie rockers who’ve gotten swept up in Hurricane Harry. Before becoming his iconic drum goddess, Sarah Jones played in New Young Pony Club, a London band fondly remembered by a few dozen of us. Rowland and Jones barely knew anything about One Direction before they met Harry — the first time they heard “Story of My Life” was when he asked them to play it. Their conversation is full of references to Big Star or Guided by Voices or the Nils Lofgren guitar solo in Neil Young’s “Speakin’ Out.” This is a band full of shameless rock geeks, untainted by industry professionalism.

In the studio, while making the album, Harry kept watching a vintage Bowie clip on his phone — a late-Nineties TV interview I’d never seen. As he plays it for me, he recites along — he’s got the rap memorized. “Never play to the gallery,” Bowie advises. “Never work for other people in what you do.” For Harry, this was an inspiring pep talk — a reminder not to play it safe. As Bowie says, “If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

He got so obsessive about Joni Mitchell and her 1971 classic Blue, he went on a quest. “I was in a big Joni hole,” he says. “I kept hearing the dulcimer all over Blue. So I tracked down the lady who built Joni’s dulcimers in the Sixties.” He found her living in Culver City. “She said, ‘Come and see me,’” Hull says. “We turn up at her house and he said, ‘How do you even play a dulcimer?’ She gave us a lesson. Then she got a bongo and we were all jamming with these big Cheshire Cat grins.” She built the dulcimer Harry plays on the new album. “Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, those are my two favorites,” he says. “Blue and Astral Weeks are just the ultimate in terms of songwriting. Melody-wise, they’re in their own lane.”

He’s always been the type to go overboard with his fanboy enthusiasms, ever since he was a kid and got his mind blown by Pulp Fiction. “I watched it when I was probably too young,” he admits. “But when I was 13, I saved up money from my paper route to buy a ‘Bad Motherfucker’ wallet. Just a stupid white kid in the English countryside with that wallet.” While in Japan, he got obsessively into Paul McCartney and Wings, especially London Town and Back to the Egg. “In Tokyo I used to go to a vinyl bar, but the bartender didn’t have Wings records. So I brought him Back to the Egg. ‘Arrow Through Me,’ that was the song I had to hear every day when I was in Japan.”

He credits meditation for helping to loosen him up. “I was such a skeptic going in,” he says. “But I think meditation has helped with worrying about the future less, and the past less. I feel like I take a lot more in—things that used to pass by me because I was always rushing around. It’s part of being more open and talking with friends. It’s not always the easiest to go in a room and say, ‘I made a mistake and it made me feel like this, and then I cried a bunch.’ But that moment where you really let yourself be in that zone of being vulnerable, you reach this feeling of openness. That’s when you feel like, ‘Oh, I’m fucking living, man.’”

After quite a few hours of recording the string quartet, a bottle of Casamigos tequila is opened. Commander Quaalude pours the drinks, then decides what the song needs now is a gaggle of nonsingers bellowing the chorus. “Muppet vocals” is how he describes it. He drags everyone in sight to crowd around the mics. Between takes, he wanders over to the piano to play Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.” One of the choir members, creative director Molly Hawkins, is the friend who gave him the Murakami novel. “I think every man should read Norwegian Wood,” she says. “Harry’s the only man I’ve given it to who actually read it.”

It’s been a hard day’s night in the studio, but after hours, everyone heads to a dive bar on the other side of town to see Rowland play a gig. He’s sitting in with a local bar band, playing bass. Harry drives around looking for the place, taking in the sights of downtown L.A. (“Only a city as narcissistic as L.A. would have a street called Los Angeles Street,” he says.) He strolls in and leans against the bar in the back of the room. It’s an older crowd, and nobody here has any clue who he is. He’s entirely comfortable lurking incognito in a dim gin joint. After the gig, as the band toasts with PBRs, an old guy in a ball cap strolls over and gives Rowland a proud bear hug. It’s his boss from the pizza shop.

In the wee hours, Harry drives down a deserted Sunset Boulevard, his favorite time of night to explore the city streets, arguing over which is the best Steely Dan album. He insists that Can’t Buy a Thrill is better than Countdown to Ecstasy (wrongly), and seals his case by turning it up and belting “Midnight Cruiser” with truly appalling gusto. Tonight Hollywood is full of bright lights, glitzy clubs, red carpets, but the prettiest pop star in town is behind the wheel, singing along with every note of the sax solo from “Dirty Work.”

A few days later, on the other side of the world: Harry’s pad in London is lavish, yet very much a young single dude’s lair. Over here: a wall-size framed Sex Pistols album cover. Over there: a vinyl copy of Stevie Nicks’ The Other Side of the Mirror, casually resting on the floor. He’s having a cup of tea with his mum, Anne, the spitting image of her son, all grace and poise. “We’re off to the pub,” he tells her. “We’re going to talk some shop.” She smiles sweetly. “Talk some shit, probably,” says Anne.

We head off to his local, sloshing through the rain. He’s wearing a Spice World hoodie and savoring the soggy London-osity of the day. “Ah, Londres!” he says grandly. “I missed this place.” He wants to sit at a table outside, even though it’s pouring, and we chat away the afternoon over a pot of mint tea and a massive plate of fish and chips. When I ask for toast, the waitress brings out a loaf of bread roughly the size of a wheelbarrow. “Welcome to England,” Harry says.

He’s always had a fervent female fandom, and, admirably, he’s never felt a need to pretend he doesn’t love it that way. “They’re the most honest — especially if you’re talking about teenage girls, but older as well,” he says. “They have that bullshit detector. You want honest people as your audience. We’re so past that dumb outdated narrative of ‘Oh, these people are girls, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ They’re the ones who know what they’re talking about. They’re the people who listen obsessively. They fucking own this shit. They’re running it.”

He doesn’t have the uptightness some people have about sexual politics, or about identifying as a feminist. “I think ultimately feminism is thinking that men and women should be equal, right? People think that if you say ‘I’m a feminist,’ it means you think men should burn in hell and women should trample on their necks. No, you think women should be equal. That doesn’t feel like a crazy thing to me. I grew up with my mum and my sister — when you grow up around women, your female influence is just bigger. Of course men and women should be equal. I don’t want a lot of credit for being a feminist. It’s pretty simple. I think the ideals of feminism are pretty straightforward.”

His audience has a reputation for ferocity, and the reputation is totally justified. At last summer’s show at Madison Square Garden, the floor was wobbling during “Kiwi” — I’ve been seeing shows there since the 1980s, but I’d never seen that happen before. (The only other time? His second night.) His bandmates admit they feared for their lives, but Harry relished it. “To me, the greatest thing about the tour was that the room became the show,” he says. “It’s not just me.” He sips his tea. “I’m just a boy, standing in front of a room, asking them to bear with him.”

That evening, Fleetwood Mac take the stage in London — a sold-out homecoming gig at Wembley Stadium, the last U.K. show of their tour. Needless to say, their most devoted fan is in the house. Harry has brought a date: his mother, her first Fleetwood Mac show. He’s also with his big sister Gemma, bandmates Rowland and Jones, a couple of friends.

He’s in hyperactive-host mode, buzzing around his cozy VIP box, making sure everyone’s champagne glass is topped off at all times. As soon as the show begins, Harry’s up on his feet, singing along (“Tell me, tell me liiiiies!”) and cracking jokes. You can tell he feels free — as if his radar is telling him there aren’t snoopers or paparazzi watching. (He’s correct. This is a rare public appearance where nobody spots him and no photos leak online.) It’s family night. His friend Mick Fleetwood wilds out on the drum solo. “Imagine being that cool,” Gemma says.

Midway through the show, Harry’s demeanor suddenly changes. He gets uncharacteristically solemn and quiet, sitting down by himself and focusing intently on the stage. It’s the first time all night he’s taken a seat. He’s in a different zone than he was in a few minutes ago. But he’s seen many Fleetwood Mac shows, and he knows where they are in the set. It’s time for “Landslide.” He sits with his chin in hand, his eyes zeroing in on Stevie Nicks. As usual, she introduces her most famous song with the story of how she wrote it when she was just a lass of 27.

But Stevie has something else she wants to share. She tells the stadium crowd, “I’d like to dedicate this to my little muse, Harry Styles, who brought his mother tonight. Her name is Anne. And I think you did a really good job raising Harry, Anne. Because he’s really a gentleman, sweet and talented, and, boy, that appeals to me. So all of you, this is for you.”

As Stevie starts to sing “Landslide” — “I’ve been afraid of changing, because I built my life around youuuu” — Anne walks over to where Harry sits. She crouches down behind him, reaches her arms around him tightly. Neither of them says a word. They listen together and hold each other close to the very end of the song. Everybody in Wembley is singing along with Stevie, but these two are in a world of their own.