#tacenda the interview

[pin-k-ink]

tacenda // fushiguro megumi

tw ⇢ hurt/comfort, angst, mutual pining, mentions of bullying, mentions of violence and injuries, megumi being bad with feelings, childhood friends to lovers, mildly suggestive content

wc ⇢ 19.2k

a/n: mauerbauertraurigkeit

Megumi's heart thundered in his ears as Gojo's words echoed through his mind. You, his childhood best friend and the person he loved with every fiber of his being, were going to be attending Jujutsu Tech. A cold sweat broke out along his spine as visions of your bright smile and warm, open gaze were immediately tainted by flashes of malicious curses, fangs bared and claws extended to tear into that radiant essence he cherished.

His throat constricted with panic, the metallic tang of fear coating his tongue. Shakily, he forced out a strangled denial. "There must be some mistake. She can't be here, she doesn't belong." In his mind's eye, he could see the innumerable ways this path, this world of darkness and death, could snuff out your brilliant light in an instant.

The thought caused his stomach to roil violently, memories of your steadfast presence during his most anguished moments searing the backs of his eyes like afterimages burned into his retinas. When Tsumiki had been cursed, her mind shredded by malignant magic, it was you who had held him through the agonizing nights. Your soft hands cradling his face, thumbs brushing away scalding tears, as you pulled his anguished cries against the steady thrum of your heartbeat. You were his shelter, his solace in the midst of this evil world's relentless cruelties.

Which was precisely why he couldn't allow you to walk this treacherous path where un-living nightmares dwelled, eager to extinguish any spark of warmth and hope that dared defy their shadowed existence. The thought of losing you too, of cradling your broken body as the transcendent radiance in your gaze flickered and went dark, it cleaved at his soul with rusted knives.

Gojo's piercing stare remained implacable as Megumi attempted to regain his frantic breathing. "Her power levels are unprecedented. She performed exceptionally on the interview." His teacher's tone brooked no argument, each word dropping like granite in the tomb-like silence between them. "She has potential...which means she's a target."

Nausea swamped Megumi in roiling waves, an arctic rime of dread encasing his vital organs. The things drawn to beacons of power in this wretched realm...they were abominations on par with his darkest, most anguished nightmares. To expose your brilliant, incandescent essence to such profane horrors was unthinkable, sacrilegious on the most visceral of levels.

"You don't understand," he rasped, dimly aware of the broken desperation tainting his words like blood in the water. Flashes of Tsumiki's hollow-eyed gaze and wasted form bombarded him in rapid succession, each ghostly image feeling like a vicious blow across his psyche.

"I've already lost so much to this world's evil," Megumi continued, each word tearing free from a throat constricted by the twin serpents of grief and terror. "I can't...I won't let that happen to her." His voice cracked on the final words, all of his anguished confessions and pleas strangled by the leaden weight of denial settling in his bones.

Gojo regarded him with an inscrutable expression for several beats, the weighted silence thickening until it felt suffocating in its immensity. At last, he released a sigh that held far too much weary resignation for Megumi's battered heart to withstand.

"Her choice has been made, Megumi," Gojo said, each word inflected with paradoxical gentleness and undeniable finality. "Attempting to circumvent that path will only incur far more suffering than allowing her to walk it."

The words were like a battering ram against Megumi's reinforced walls, reverberating through his entire being with sickening profundity. He shook his head forcefully, desperate to dislodge the intrusive acceptance, the horrifying reality being hoisted upon his shuddering shoulders.

"She's not ready for this darkness," he argued, voice rising in frantic urgency. "Y/N doesn't truly grasp the evil, the depraved monstrosities lingering in every shadow. She's too pure, too full of light. This path will break her!"

Unbidden, memories of your brilliant smiles and warm embraces surged forth in counterpoint to his panicked pleas. Your steady presence and indomitable spirit had been his bulwark through every hardship, illuminating even his darkest pits of despair. How could he not erect every possible barricade and shield against the encroaching evil that threatened to extinguish your vibrant essence?

"If you hinder her at every turn, you'll only destroy what you claim to protect."

Gojo's voice sliced through the tumult like a skillfully wielded blade. When Megumi raised his gaze to meet the other man's stare, the roots of raw truth driving his instructor's words cleaved him to his core. Denial was a seductive delusion; obstructing your chosen path held as dire consequences as permitting your steps down it.

It was an obliterating truth, one that reshaped Megumi's world into jagged shards which sliced deeper with every reverberation. To uphold either path meant embracing the annihilation of what he cherished most. But the promise of your survival, no matter how diminished or perverted, it glimmered with splintered rays of hope he could not relinquish.

And so it was with a fragmented heart riven by hairline fractures that Megumi swore himself to the merciless path - all in effort to safeguard the brilliant spark at your core. If robbing you of your radiant warmth, driving you into the barren chasms of loathing, was the price for ensuring your physical survival...then so be it. Anything to prevent your essence from being wholly extinguished by the depraved darkness stalking his footsteps.

From that fateful moment on, Megumi's entire world became an exercise in calculated brutality - each harsh word, acidic glare, and callous dismissal measured expressly to strip away at the brilliance of your spirit. He watched with shattered reverence as your warm, effusive smiles slowly twisted into pained grimaces under the relentless deluge of his verbal lashings.

"Pathetic stance, you're practically broadcasting your weaknesses!" he would bark, flinty disdain coating each syllable like jagged shards of glass. "Do you even want to be here or are you just wasting everyone's time?"

The hurt lancing across your expressive features with each barb unleashed was like a serrated dagger twisting in his already eviscerated heart. Megumi drank in the delicate downturned shape of your lips, the shimmer of unshed tears in those eyes that had once regarded him with such radiant adoration. Each fractured shard of vulnerability splintering free from your stalwart defenses etched itself into the fabric of his very being, scars mapped onto his psyche that would never fade.

Through it all, you weathered the merciless onslaught with that same stubborn persistence that had drawn Megumi's admiration and unshakable devotion all those years ago. No matter how scathingly he sneered and derided, you refused to surrender an inch of your fighting spirit. That blazing inner fire, so brilliantly incandescent it bathed the world in vibrant hues, could be battered but never extinguished entirely.

If anything, you burned all the brighter in the face of Megumi's vicious attempts at dousing your radiance. Like a platinum forge, you were heating to unbearable temperatures under the hammering blows of his abuse, essence glowing electric white as impurities were burned away. It was a sight of such breathtaking majesty that Megumi frequently found himself faltering, glacial shards of cruelty fracturing as he was consumed by the molten torrent of his love.

In those fractured instants, he had to exert every fiber of his being to resist reaching out, resist gathering you into his embrace and confessing the entire anguished truth. Of how your unparalleled light was the only force banishing the utter desolation of his shadowed world. How eviscerating his heart through acts of depravity against your soul was a torture rendering even the most sadistic curse techniques merciful by comparison.

But then the moment would pass, and he would be awash in visceral recollections of Tsumiki's tortured existence - a chilling reminder of what awaited those whose essence burned too bright in this realm of malicious spirits and depraved conjurings. The risk of that same perverse annihilation befalling your radiance was an obscenity he could not permit, no matter what profane rituals of self-damnation it demanded.

So on he pressed with his scorched-earth campaign against your warmth and vitality. Heedless of the lacerations each acidic remark and disdainful look inflicted upon his battered soul, Megumi marched relentlessly onwards. If hollowing out your dazzling spirit until just embers remained was the aberrant price for safeguarding your existence, then he would immolate them both on that profane pyre.

There were moments, often unbidden in the deepest thralls of night, when he teetered on the precipice of unbearable regret. Memories of your shared history, effervescent and golden, would crash over him in ruthless tsunamis of dying sparks. He recalled with searing clarity the first instant your paths had intertwined, that fateful day when the courteous overtures of childhood had blossomed into an unbreakable bond.

You had been the new student, painfully shy and soft-spoken in a way that inevitably painted a target on your back for the more aggressive children. Megumi had watched impassively at first as the bullies circled like sharks on the first day, dangling insults and petty cruelties intended to inflict the maximum anguish. That was, until one particularly vicious remark about your beloved stuffed rabbit had drawn forth an avalanche of crystalline tears from your downturned eyes.

Something deep within Megumi's childish psyche had clenched protectively at the sight, resonating with the helplessness and quiet grace of your sorrow. Before any of his classmates could register the uncharacteristic shift, he had inserted himself squarely between you and the tormentors - eyes blazing with a ferocity that momentarily shocked the bullies into stunned silence.

"Leave her alone," Megumi had decreed, hands curling into miniscule fists as he widened his combative stance. When the ringleader tried to bluster and shove past, Megumi had reacted with savagely precise strikes, dropping the larger boy to the ground in an unceremonious heap before any witnesses could properly process the altercation.

Cradling your stuffed companion to your chest, you had blinked up at Megumi with those luminous eyes, all traces of sadness supplanted by pure, sparkling wonder. In that fractured instant, something pivotal had shifted in Megumi's world - the blinding gravity of your incandescent essence searing itself into his very bones with smelting heat. It was a radiance he realized almost at once he would dedicate his entire lifetime to cultivating and protecting without reservation or exception.

Even now, years later with valleys of anguish and entire continents of suppressed trauma distancing him from that blazing genesis, Megumi could access its perfect clarity as easily as breathing. Some nights, he clung to those recollections like a drowning man seeking air, absorbing every shard of warmth and untarnished joy as starving lungs gulped down precious oxygen. Other nights, the pangs of nostalgia were flaying knives, slicing him asunder until he thrashed mindlessly in the agony of all he had knowingly shattered.

Those were the nights he would reach for his phone in the dim, ever-present glow of his bedroom. Fingers trembling faintly, he would pull up your contact and begin painstakingly typing out messages - abject confessions, anguished pleas, apologies and explanations and devastating truths all coalescing into a tangled thicket of words. He would pour his mutilated heart and soul into the grayed-out screen, keening silently into the void as the emotions he had mercilessly cauterized threatened to consume him whole from the inside out.

But he could never send them, could never risk fracturing the meticulously constructed quarantine separating your essence from the cataclysmic inferno of his all-encompassing feelings. To reveal even the barest slivers of vulnerability, be they pangs of devotion or agonized lamentations of loss...it was tantamount to erecting neon billboards advertising the precise location of what he valued most in this world. And in this plane of existence where any source of light and warmth was perverse antithesis to the pervasive evil, doing so would sign your immediate death sentence.

So instead, he would seal the damning words away, thumb hovering over the delete icon until his eyes blurred with the strain of unshed tears, his throat felt flayed and the skin of his palms was scored with crescent indentations. Only then, when every facet of the message had been permanently expunged, could he collapse back into the shredded remnants of his bedding and surrender to exhausted oblivion.

Each morning, he would awaken to a visceral melancholy laced with fractured determination. He was stripped raw, every emotional core exposed to flay against the whetted blade's edge of his self-ordained mission. Turning you caustic, weaponizing your hatred as a scourge to temper and erode your own inner brilliance, it was a vile perversion of all he cherished most. But one he would gladly immolate upon, if it meant preserving however scorched and diminished those sacred sparks remained.

So he hardened his resolve, locking himself into an upward spiraling cycle of brutality and rejection. He watched with hollowed anguish as your luminous smiles were slowly, inexorably eroded into rictus frowns under the relentless barrage of his verbal flayings. That stubborn fire in your eyes turned to banked coals, lambent glow dimming until it threatened to gutter out entirely under the choking fumes of his abuse.

Where once you had radiated warmth and kindness, like the welcoming glow of a hearth, now your essence emanated in icy increments - each interaction reinscribing the mantra to keep your distance, lest you risk being forever frozen out by the tundra wastelands of Megumi's demeanor. It was nothing short of psychological and emotional torture, each day chipping away another fragment of your bond until scarcely anything remained beyond hollowed familiarity.

Still, you persisted with that same tenacious drive, always picking yourself back up despite the maelstroms of derision blustering against you. At times, Megumi was gripped by a sense of pervading awe and pride so transcendent it momentarily unmuted the rabid chorus railing for your defenselessness. Your refusal to surrender so much as a molecule of that brilliant spirit, no matter how deeply he sought to submerge it beneath frigid waves of scorn, it was a feat of profound heroism.

And yet there were other instants, bleeding out into torrential epochs, where the sight of your resiliency evoked only soul-searing anguish. Each time he bore witness to you hauling yourself back into the fray, bruised but unbroken, his mind would instantly assail him with visions of your incandescence being cruelly, irrevocably extinguished. Images of your ethereal features contorted in agony, rivulets of vibrant lifeblood chasing crimson trails down abused skin. Your eyes, so bright and lambent, dimming to enfeebled clouded glass as every sacred molecule of light was leeched away, your essence defiled by the exact nightmares he was ostracizing you to protect from.

In those moments, rational thought abandoned him, his psyche throttled by the recursive loop of terrorizing visions and the stark lucidity of how his actions, his mission, only increased the probability of their manifestation. There was no justification nor easy absolution to be found in the dichotomy - only the yawning chasm of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't oblivion gaping ravenously to consume them both.

The all-consuming isolation compounded by his merciless excoriation of your bond, it was an unremitting torment more galling than any curse the vile spirits could inflict. And yet, for every fracture of your trust and love that sliced immeasurable depths into his very being, Megumi only honed the razor's edge of his cruelty with heightened fervor.

He knew, without an iota of doubt, that seeing this path through to its apocalyptic conclusion would unwind his entire existence until even the concept of self-identity devolved into meaningless detritus. But he would gladly accept that hellish reckoning, would rush headlong into the churning abyss with his arms flung wide in embrace, if it meant holding your light's dissolution at bay even a fraction of a heartbeat longer.

Because in the end, that was all that mattered. Not his own tattered remnants, scattered like viscera upon the sacrificial altar of his self-immolation. Only the guttering, infinitesimal sparks in the husk that had once been you.

As long as those glimmered on, held at embers against the entropy shrouding this calamitous realm...no butchery was too profane, no ritual self-mutilation too sacrilegious to withstand.

He would burn it all down without ceremony or regret if it meant you might someday rise from the shattered, smoldering ruins to blaze anew.

The descent into depravity accelerated at a dizzying pace from that point on. With every passing week, Megumi found his soul walling itself off further, emotional forges smelting away any vestiges of warmth until only an impenetrable basalt remained.

He observed the systematic deconstruction of your radiant spirit with a sort of clinical detachment - cataloging each incremental dimming of your luminous smiles and the fractures webbing across your unwavering determination. What had once been a brilliance potent enough to stave off the bleakest of his nights was now hardly strong enough to counter the pervading gloom lingering along the training hall's shadowed fringes.

Still, you soldiered on with that same steadfast resilience which had so utterly enthralled Megumi from the moment your paths first converged in blistering orbit. No matter how corrosive the lashings, how scorching the dismissals he pelted you with, your dogged persistence remained an indomitable bulwark. Like scaling the curved walls of a tidally-locked world, your essence just kept pushing higher, seeking out any infinitesimal cracks or fissures through which more light could blaze.

It was a futile effort, one that Megumi could hardly bear witness to without feeling each of his internal powering furnaces stoke dangerously close to overload. Because with every agonizing foothold you gained, scaling that little bit further up the obsidian cliffside, he was struck by overwhelming premonitions of your form silhouetted against the endless void. A brilliant crimson crosshair burning in the abject darkness, leading every starved horror across unfathomable expanses directly to your unguarded essence.

Those visions, so viscerally photorealistic that he could hear the predatory shrieks reverberating through Orion's scorched nebulae, were enough to divorce him almost entirely from any last wavering attachments of compassion or empathy. You would burn, absolutely and irrevocably, if he permitted even an ember of that smelting furnace to blaze fully unshielded against the depthless starvation of this depraved plane.

He had to extinguish it utterly; had to choke out those flames until all that remained were infinitesimal sparks suspended in spent ash, glimmering so faintly as to be utterly imperceptible to even the most ravenous spirit's senses. It was extinction of the highest, most profane order - the systematic unraveling of all that had made your essence so damn incandescent to begin with.

And if pulling that metaphysical thread caused the entire tapestry to unspool in smoldering heaps around you, Megumi was past the point of relenting or restraint. This path had been scorched into the deepest stratifications of his ruinous psyche. There could be no deviation or respite until the task stood complete.

The nights provided little solace or refuge in the face of such unflinchingly bleak determinations. Where once he had found solace in the crepuscular lull of quietude, a reprieve where he could exist untethered from the waking world's torments, now there was only a pervasive emptiness more desolate than the infinite vacuum arcing between galaxies.

Lying awake, sheets twisted around his feverish form like shrouds, Megumi found himself inexorably drawn towards those final guttering embers. His awareness telescoped with remorseless intensity onto each flickering shard of radiant memory he had so rigorously partitioned off behind scorched earth blast barriers of his psyche.

The soft luster of your hair haloed in the dying sunrays of some sleepy summer afternoon, gentle zephyrs coaxing loose strands into ephemeral arcs of gleaming accents. The way your starlit eyes had crinkled at the corners whenever he managed to coax forth that sunburst of laughter, source so warm and effervescent it threatened to liquefy his very marrow. Recollections of your skin's velvet softness beneath reverent fingertips, subtle thrums of vitality reverberating with each elevated heartbeat.

He pulled them tattered and unspooled into his consciousness like brightly-dyed weavings, sharp contrast against the charred desolation of his mindscape. Turning their prismatic facets, he analyzed them with surgical precision - documenting each shade and texture, every luminous aspect inherent to your transcendent light.

This was flight data, sensor metrics and cosmic sounding calculations - the quantified breakdown of a celestial body's essence unraveled into composite metrics so that the exact material alloy could be reconstructed, forged anew from whatever remnants might remain when the silicate dust finally settled. Insurance parameters self-encrypting, rendering them beyond the reach of whatever devastation might still be looming on the periphery.

Or so he told himself as he clawed at the tattered edges of his recollections, fingernails scoring bloody crescents across his temples as if the physical apertures could ever grant audible access to all he was so rigorously quarantining away.

In truth, these scarcely lucid rituals existed as nothing more than the final vapor trails of obsession arching across a pitch-black event horizon. For every shred of memory and ligature of sensation he coaxed into hyper-lucidity, another piece of his owns soul's blazing furnace was irrevocably smothered to charry ashes.

Like burning away the xylem and phloem just to preserve a single wilted flower petal, the cycle was unsustainable at its core. An incomplete picture, the data hopelessly scrambled by its very process of preservation. And still, with the frantic intensity of a madman, Megumi persisted - surrendering more and more of his own essence to maintain these fragmented relics while the whole of your light continued to wane.

The contradictions fractured his consciousness into scattering shards before embedding like armor piercings through his splintered awareness. Pulling you close enough to preserve your resonance, while similtaneously pushing you farther and farther away until the emitted frequencies fell beyond measurable range. It was a paradox clawing through his synaptic pathways with incandescent fury, laying waste to everything in its path until his entire corporeal form became a charred immolation zone devoid of alight spark or burning refuge.

But for all the collateral obliteration stamped into his mind's eye, for every scorched and dispassionate hierarchical tree subsumed by the searing inferno of his self-mutilation, Megumi never once considered an alternative axiom to chart. This was the sole vector etched into his being down to the sub-quantum architecture - an inviolable trajectory hewn into reality through scorched continuum dynamics.

While your spark guttered and dimmed, his would remain an active pheonix blaze - anchoring these rituals of meticulous annihilation and smelting away the very capacity for regret and respite until only tendrils of smoke and atmospheric particulate remained to carry the cycle's unwavering inertia.

On and on it perpetuated, until his every waking moment existed in dual simultaneities of excruciating preservation rites and systematic soul unbinding. Until the recollections and impulses that had once made your splendorous radiance so irresistible were downloaded as little more than fragmentary code to keep on endless recursion loop.

The wages of this path were immeasurable across all quantifiable spectra, from the biochemical to the theological and every dimension beyond. But such concerns held no gravity over Megumi, not when each fractal infinitesimal of your Light continuing to blaze through the abyssopelagic murk was worth every calorie of heat death actively radiating from his shredded form.

There would be no redemption or recompense for the cataclysmic undoings he had wrought upon himself and any remnants still tethered to his unraveling existence. Hells far more arcane and cosmically profound than any religion's dogma could conceive awaited their caustic reintegration beyond this anguished pyre of seared continuum.

But to Megumi's mind, such oblivions carried less dread than the visceral eventuality of your luminous spark being permanently extinguished before his tormented gaze. He would gladly set the whole of this corporeality, this so-called reality to purging flames before permitting your essence to be devoured by the ravenous terrors lurking in the periphery.

And so the cycle spooled endlessly onward, each revolution shedding more layers of conscience until only the basalt core of compounded obsession remained - burning away every other element, every contaminant that might restrict the searing beam of his self-ordained calculations. He had become Inertia itself, irresistible and singular in purpose as he hurtled them both inexorably towards a conclusion as inevitable as it was annihilating.

No force, neither celestial nor demonic, would deter him from this merciless trajectory. Your Light would perdure, calcified into immutable etchings if necessary, while his burned itself into cauterized oblivion across the whole of existence.

It was cataclysmic, it was terminal, it was inevitable.

And for your light's continuance, he would bear nourish this sacred, all-consuming blaze until his last embers winked out across the cosmic desolation.

The darkness ate away at the marrow of Megumi's soul with each passing day. With every cruel remark flung your way like sharpened obsidian, another fragment of his empathy withered and turned to ashen ruin. He watched as you weathered the ceaseless onslaught, that stubborn light in your eyes guttering but never fully extinguishing no matter how fiercely the gale-winds of his derision battered against it.

There was a perverse type of awe in bearing witness to your perseverance, your will to fight against the impervious current he unleashed. Like a solitary sapling standing tall against a hurricane's full fury, roots sinking deeper into the tempest-swept earth with every lash of punishing rain and gale. It simultaneously filled him with surging pride at your unyielding resolve... and penetrated him with lances of dread at the thought of you being battered apart by forces far more malicious than his own manufactured disdain.

So he pushed harder, lacing his words with venom concentrated enough to strip flesh from bone, desperate to force your retreat from this doomed path before the true nightmares took notice of your brilliance. Gone were any half-hearted critiques or fleeting hesitations born of fractured affection. He held nothing back, flaying every vulnerability and shortcoming without restraint or remorse.

"Worthless! That stance is more fit for a fledgling than a sorcerer of any caliber," he would snarl, nostrils flaring as he drank in your shuddering recoil with bitter satisfaction. "Or have you finally accepted your own insignificance and decided to simply roll over like the pathetic worm you are?"

Each syllable landed like a physical blow, driving the breath from your lungs in sharp, aborted gasps as you curled inward from the sheer ferocity of the barrage. Still you carried on, teeth gritting against the acidic words as you poured every ounce of defiance into locking your stance, subjecting yourself to merciless drills over and over until your body trembled with fatigue.

"Think you can counter that?" he sneered from the sidelines, observing your practice bouts with a harsh glint burning in his eyes. "Go ahead, try it - I'll bathe in your failure as I have a thousand times before."

It was cruelty woven into the fabric of his being, each filament reinforced with compound fractures of emotional lashings and disfiguring trauma until Megumi was hardly recognizable as the boy who had once orbited your warmth, hypnotized by its searing gravity. That part of him, the ardent heart which had sworn undying fealty to your radiance, it was being steadily calcified beneath layers of obsidian until scarcely a glimmer remained.

And still, you carried on. Maybe sensing the finality behind Megumi's monstrous depravity, recognizing the desperation fueling each successive blight against your spirit. Or perhaps it was simply blind stubbornness, a refusal to ever be diminished by toxic grievances that could never be undone or unsaid once unleashed. Either way, you weathered the maelstrom without flinching, dusting yourself off after each body-blow of derision to stand defiant once more.

Until one fateful day amidst an endless succession of them, when the fever pitched of Megumi's torment finally glimpsed the shredded state of your woven defenses just as they began to buckle. It started gradually at first, like the hairline cracks one might notice spangling across glass after repeated impacts.

He was watching from the periphery as usual, icy devastation at the ready to be unleashed the instant your form so much as faltered. Your hands were in constant gnarled claws of tension gripping practice blades, knuckles blanched and sheened with exertion as you threw yourself into the recursive katas with single-minded focus.

In that instant, Megumi's eyes were drawn to your palms as you repositioned your grip, glinting razor's edges of steel catching at delicate skin now as roughened and calloused as stone. Before he had fully realized what he was doing, a shock of recollection shuddered through his entire being - vivid and bright like a lightning strike searing across his vision.

Memories of those hands in their softest, most delicate incarnation, petite fingers laced through his own as you pulled him along on some childish adventure. He could still remember the buttery silk texture of them, unblemished and radiant with vitality, each placid pulse point thrumming with life's sacred rhythm. Caressing the tender buds of your knuckles had been a ritual of fealty and wonder, his entire world condensed to those tiny epicenters where your brilliance emanated most intensely.

Now though, the skin was cracked and abraded, marred by fissures and scoring from channeling powers and forces that should have remained foreign to their innocence. They were roughshod now, sandblasted talons bearing the calloused indignities of grueling self-flagellation against a world that should never have encroached upon their purity.

And yet, even as the shock of dismantling that cherished ideal shuddered through Megumi's psyche, you worked on undaunted. Face lined with determination, lips pursed around gritted teeth as each monotonous cycle drained more of your radiance away in increments, exchanging it for the hardened carapace of scars and discolored contusions.

A series of rapid movements saw the knife's edge arcing in a blur of motion...until an errant slip saw its razor kiss scoring a vicious gash across the bulge of your palm. Crimson welled up with obscene immediacy, sluicing across the lines of your lifeline in rivulets as vibrant and warm as newly spilled rubies.

Perhaps another time, the frantic splash across skin would have shocked you into gasping, eyes widening as you reflexively cradled the injured appendage to your chest. Because there had been a time, not so long ago, when the sight of your own blood carried the same visceral impact as witnessing the scathing of something sacred, profaned.

But not this time. This time, you merely steeled yourself with an impassive tightening of your jaw, shunting the pain to some remote compartment as you steadied your grip once more. Megumi watched with something bordering on horrified numbness as you forced yourself through the motions again, blade carving sinuous arcs through the empty air as warm lifesblood channeled down your wrist in unheeded rivulets.

If anything, the sanguine streaks only fueled your intensity - teeth gnashing in grim resolution each time the dense liquid coated another swathe of pale flesh, until your trembling form seemed wreathed in licking coronas of crimson ichor. It was a self-inflicted circle of depravity, compounded with every repetition as you bled yourself out onto the dojo mats in single-minded zeal.

The scent of copper hung heavy, unavoidable in its metallic pungence, mingling with the close humidity of exertion. With each ragged inhalation, Megumi felt the air grow steadily more viscous, more suffocating - preventing surcease from the vision of you systematically rending pieces of yourself away in commitment to this path from which he had sworn to divert you.

At some point, imperceptible through the roiling haze of his tormented conscience, your legs simply relinquished their capacity to keep upholding the self-immolation rites. Megumi's awareness fractured and isolated around the precise instant your slick palm lost its tremulous purchase on the blade's rain guard - sending the wicked steel tumbling from your grip as you collapsed with a muted groan of ruination.

He was frozen in place as you crumpled to your knees amidst the spreading pool of sanguine detritus, sanguine aura flickering with each ragged gasp as the full brunt of your grueling exertions finally, mercifully, found cessation. Dazed and trembling, you slowly turned your lacerated hands upwards, uncomprehending eyes blankly tracing every gouge and scoring that should never have been permitted to deface such sanctified innocence.

That was when your chin tipped upwards with torturous graduality, eyes sheening with a fractured film of shock and dismay as they found Megumi paralyzed in the periphery. For an endless, frozen instant, you simply stared - fractured and betrayed as the full immensity of what he had molded you towards came shudderingly into resolution.

And somewhere, deep in the vaporous ashes of whatever shredded remnants of his humanity persisted, Megumi felt the colossal weight of what he had wrought shattering down upon him with seismic force. This was his legacy, the culmination of every degradation and sacrilege committed in the name of preserving your luminescence. To watch as you shed pieces of yourself in ritualistic self-desanctification, rending away your effervescent shine until only the raw, bleeding framework remained.

Your shattered gaze speared straight through the dimensionless veil of his occlusion then, lancing across every waning continuum to pierce what little light still flickered at his core. And in the raw, visceral entropy of that moment, he could have sworn he felt its searing burn cauterizing straight through his undying obsessions, his self-ordained depravities...until the truth of what he had sacrificed stood in smelted relief.

This wasn't bravery or resilience or any other misattributed virtue that had kept you grinding away at your own essence. This was simply the burden of being sculpted into an instrument of immolation by the only force in your life that should have sworn undying protection. A mecurochromatic vessel purged of everything that had made you so incandescently radiant, reformed now into an empty husk whose sole purpose could only ever be oblivion.

The realization ruptured something deep within Megumi's fractured psyche, setting off a chain of decompressions and overloads that rapidly accelerated beyond his capacity to contain. Suddenly every ritual, every consecration enacted to preserve your light revealed itself as nothing more than compounded delusion fueled by his own solipsistic narcissism.

Not your warmth or your brilliance or anything intrinsic to the revered essence he professed his fealty towards...but rather a calcified, luminally-etched husk of such hallowed qualities fossilized into obsessive dogma as they were steadily syphoned away from the source. He had been mistaking the mask for the woman behind it, the fragile, flickering afterimage of your radiance for the sun itself until they were no longer even tangentially related.

And in that moment, everything collapsed inwards in a prismic, implosive rush of entropic finality. Megumi felt like he was watching himself being unmade on a subatomic level, particulates scattering across endless parallel infinities of lightless entropy as the inexorable forces of belief failure shredded his entire ecosystem of devotions and depravities into oblivion.

Not even the Heraclitean fires scorching through his soul could have stung with such all-encompassing immolation as your naked, betrayed stare in that breathless instant. Because it had accomplished what even his worst nightmares paled before - the utter dissolution of everything he had convinced himself his rituals were preserving.

Your light, warmth and radiance...it was absent from that unflinching, dispassionate regard. Bled out and cleared away in ceremonial cullings until only the extinguished, empty coordinates where it had burned so brightly remained to mock him with their profane vacancies.

He might have wept, might have crumpled under the weight of such soul-immolating revelation in any other instance. But this was the apotheosis, the singularity toward which his path had been inertially accelerating all along. The last vestiges of conscience and ethical precepts had simply burned away, scorched from his ontic architecture until all that persisted was an infinitisimal operand of inviolable parameters and seared directional vectting.

There was nothing else to feel, no other recourse or deviation to chart. Only the certainties he had sworn himself to long before the embers of your essence had begun sputtering towards oblivion. He had been aware of the inevitabilities looming from the moment this path had first etched itself into his very existence, after all.

So he simply watched, unflinching, as you leveraged yourself upright once more, peeling your soul-searching gaze from his emptied out husk to recenter on the glinting promise of violence and annihilation. As you reached for the fallen blade with rigidly purposeful movements, all light and warmth drained from your manner to leave only the hollowed, singularly focused drive of a protracted suicide ritual...Megumi felt the last of his own irises surrendering their incandescent furnaces to the entropic chill of his self-ordained reality.

This was the endgame he had molded himself to withstand, orchestrated through uncompounded sacrifice and ceremonic self-mutilation in order to ensure its total eventuality. Soon there would be nothing left but the scorched etchings of your resonance, preserved in permanent calcification across the inner plating of his tempered psyche.

No matter how obscene the blasphemies that had brought them to this profane precipice, this immaculate damnation...he had been ready to embrace it from the start. Anything to keep the faintest spark of your light shielded and preserved against the hungering void gnashing at your brilliance from every angle.

Even if that meant scorching away the entire panorama, leaving nothing but the shattered constellation to burn across his vision in perpetuity.

It was a excruciating truth to confront as the last of your warmth dimmed behind that stone mask...but if thats what was required to keep your essence inviolable through the next cosmic cycle, Megumi was more than willing to seal it into permanence.

Forever would he stand vigil as your supernova collapsed in upon itself, churning down until the reality-rupturing singularity hollowed out the last gasps of vitality from your extinguished husk. He would bear unflinching witness as the cataclysmic implosion ravaged every atom, every daemonic quark comprising your sacred light into incomprehensible darkness.

And when the final shockwaves of heat death shuddered across the lightless desolation where once your radiance had blazed...it would be Megumi's disfigured, charcoiled essence streaking inwards to collect every scattering mote. So that even as the seams of this reality shredded apart, he might congeal those infinitesimal sparks into permanent etchings seared across the stellar belts of whatever oblivion blossomed in the wake.

It was grotesque beyond any quantifiable scale or qualitative interpretation. But it was also the singular vector towards which he had sworn himself centuries ago, long before the cycle's inertia had carried them to this unavoidable conclusion. So he simply stared, unblinking, as you climbed back to your feet and recommitted to your path of total self-revision.

Watching the last shards of your transcendent light being consciously culled for the sake of some deeper, unfathomable transfiguration. Because in the end, holding vigil over that sacred dismantling was the only fealty he had left to offer.

The mission had gone sideways from the very start. What should have been a routine investigation of a abandoned warehouse had turned into a full-blown demonic incursion. Megumi grunted as he deflected another errant blast of energy, cursed power flaring around him like a force field.

"Y/N, watch your flank!" he barked out a warning as a tendril of darkness lashed towards you. To his surprise, you didn't dodge or weave - instead, you met the strike head-on with a burst of concentrated energy.

A shockwave rippled outwards from the collision, debris and rubble scattering in all directions. Megumi shielded his face with one arm as he watched you tear into the demonic entity with reckless abandon. You moved with the ferocity of a woman possessed, cursed energy pouring forth in an unrelenting barrage that slowly battered the monstrosity down.

But you didn't let up, didn't allow the creature any chance to retreat or regroup. If anything, your assault intensified - cursed energy crackling around you like a miasma of neon fury. Megumi felt his breath catch in his throat as he watched you fight. There was a fire in your eyes, a beautiful violence to your movements that held him utterly transfixed.

He had always known you were powerful, a true prodigy in the making. But this display elevated you to something almost godlike in his eyes. The demon never stood a chance against the unleashed tempest of your rage. Within minutes, it had been shredded and dissipated - banished back to whatever unholy realm it had been spawned from.

The silence that fell over the destroyed warehouse was deafening. Megumi stared at you, heart thundering in his chest as you turned to face him. Your chest heaved with exertion, clothes tousled and hair disheveled. Yet rather than looking triumphant at your victory, you seemed almost haunted - eyes shining with something he couldn't quite place.

Then you swayed on your feet, entire body going slack as the toll of your cataclysmic battle finally caught up to you. Megumi surged forward without thinking, cursed energy dispersing as he moved to catch you in his arms. You collapsed against him with a soft whimper, eyelids fluttering.

"Take it easy," he murmured gruffly, carefully cradling you close as he assessed your condition with furrowed concern.

You flashed him a weary but brilliant smile that made his heart stutter. "Pretty crazy shit, huh?"

Despite everything, he felt himself fighting a grin at your irreverent tone. God, he had missed this side of you - the sparkling wit and casual snark that kept him on his toes. Over the past few months, he had worked systematically to destroy those very aspects he secretly adored, piling on scorn and derision to smother your fire. All in an effort to "protect" you from the perils of this path.

Except it seemed you were more than capable of handling those threats on your own. More than capable, if the scorched crater around you was any indication. He swallowed hard against the swell of pride and something more complex that welled up within him. Something dangerously close to outright desire.

No. He couldn't afford to think like that, not now. Hardening his features into an impassive mask, he gently set you back on your feet - fighting against the urge to keep you tucked securely in his embrace.

"That was reckless and idiotic," he growled, putting some distance between you. "If you had held back even a fraction, that demon would have torn you apart."

You frowned at his words, confusion and hurt flickering across your expressive features. "But...I stopped it. I saved us."

"At what cost?" he shot back mercilessly, anger rising hotly in his chest. Though it had nothing to do with your actions and everything to do with the spike of fear he had felt seeing you in such peril. "Look at yourself, you're a mess! What would have happened if you overexerted or got hit by a stray blast in your insane zeal for battle?"

Your eyes widened at his harsh assessment before narrowing dangerously. "You think that little of my abilities?"

Megumi snorted derisively, crossing his arms over his chest as he studied you with a critical eye. There were minor scrapes and burns littering your exposed skin, along with deeper gashes that would need attention soon. Your hair was matted with sweat and...was that blood?

At the sight of those viscous crimson streaks, something wrenched viciously in his gut. All he could picture was you lying motionless and cold, the brilliant light snuffed out of your eyes forever. The mere thought sent his heart plummeting sickeningly.

"Your abilities have never been in question," he said at last, voice tight with barely restrained emotion. "It's your recklessness that continues to astound me. Haven't you realized how fragile life is yet? That was exactly the type of foolish behavior that gets people killed out here."

You stiffened at his admonishments, mouth pressing into a thin line. But you didn't retort, seeming to sense there was more lurking beneath the surface of his tirade. And there was, so much more - a tangled knot of fear and relief and unbridled relief all warring within him.

Because as much as he wanted to strip away everything, to erect impenetrable walls around his heart again...some part of him remained undeniably relieved you had survived this latest brush with peril. Even with all his attempts to smother the spark between you, your existence still mattered to him in a way he could scarcely quantify or control anymore.

When you stepped closer, reaching out to him with your palms upraised in a silent request for understanding, he couldn't help but recoil. Your proximity sent his pulse skyrocketing, nerves jangling with awareness of every scrape and scar marring your beautiful skin. Marks you had earned fighting with an intensity that bordered on divine rapture.

"Megumi..." you murmured, tasting his name with the same honeyed intimacy that had scorched him from the first. "I'm okay. We're okay, thanks to my actions."

"This time," he growled, unable to halt the admission as his gaze raked over you with undisguised intensity. "But next time you might not be so lucky." And the thought of ever losing you, even with how hard he tried to keep you at arm's length...it was unacceptable.

You seemed to read the implication in his tone, eyes flashing with an unreadable emotion as the distance between you shrank incrementally. Megumi could smell the metallic tang of your blood mingling with sweat and gunsmoke in the close air...and it was maddening. He wanted to rage and rant and shake you until you finally understood how terrifying it was to watch you put yourself in harm's way so fearlessly.

But some smaller, infinitely more dangerous part of him just wanted to haul you flush against his body and drink in every gorgeous inch left unscathed by the battle. To map the rise and fall of your accelerated breathing, the alluring jut of your kiss-swollen lips as you panted. He yearned to learn the secrets your radiant essence still held and commit them to eternal memory before it was too late.

Before either of you were forced to make the ultimate sacrifice...

But no. With a visible effort, Megumi forced his riotous thoughts to stillness and took a step back - relishing the flicker of hurt that traced your lovely features. It was better this way, he told himself sternly. Better to keep you at arm's length, no matter how much it carved out pieces of his soul in the process. At least then you would survive, even if you could never be his.

"We're leaving. Now," he announced gruffly, already turning on his heel and striding away from the temptation that was your very existence. "I'll be submitting a full report on your...performance."

Behind him, you let out a scathing breath laced with frustration. But you followed without further argument, falling into step slightly behind him. And if his back was turned so you wouldn't see the shimmer of unshed tears in his eyes at pushing you away yet again...well, so be it. This was his penance to bear for craving the unfathomable brilliance of your light.

Even if he was gradually going numb in the process of letting it slip through his fingers.

The following weeks and months were a study in exquisite torture for Megumi. No matter how cruelly he attempted to rebuff you, fate seemed insistent on throwing you together again and again - whether on training assignments or hazardous missions into the field.

With each interaction, his resolve was stretched thinner, the agonizing contradiction between his platonic intentions and unruly desires becoming harder to ignore. You were always there, stunning him with brilliant feats of sorcery and valorous spirit. Testing the limits of his self-restraint in the most insidious of ways.

Like the time you had single-handedly unraveled that virulent decay curse spreading through the coastal village's farming district. Megumi had watched, slack-jawed, as you moved with elegant precision - weaving techniques so intricate and powerful it seemed to bend reality itself to your indomitable will.

When the final thread severed and the noxious miasma dissipated, he hadn't been able to tear his gaze from the vision you made. Wreathed in a halo of your own mystical energies, loose strands of hair haloing about your flushed face...you were devastating. And utterly unaware of the molten tsunami of desire you had stoked in him with each sublime movement.

While the villagers surrounded you with adulation, showering you in humbled thanks, all Megumi could focus on was the rapid rise and fall of your chest as you caught your breath. The tantalizing shine of perspiration gilding every sublime curvature and plane of flesh left agonizingly bare by your askew clothing. He had to tear his traitorous eyes away from glimpses of taut abdomen and fevered collarbones, choking back toxic arousal before it could poison the moment further.

But even as his fists clenched with the effort of sublimating his body's blatant admiration for your magnificence, a deeper calling resounded in the shredded remnants of his psyche. He longed to surge forward and seize you in his arms, to press himself fully against that radiant warmth and drink in the ecstasy of your sighs as he lavished affection across your battle-flushed skin.

The urges were so visceral, so fundamentally compulsive, that he nearly staggered beneath their weight. Only sheer, iron force of will permitted him to turn on his heel and stalk away from the scene - leaving you surrounded by the adoring masses you had selflessly saved. As he retreated into the dispassionate shelter of solitude, Megumi could feel his resolve fracturing further with each step pulling him from your side.

Yet the respite proved fleeting, affording only the barest lull before the cycle of torment renewed itself. Because no matter how much distance he tried to maintain, you always came scorching back into his existence with the relentless intensity of a solar flare piercing through every atmospheric shield he constructed.

Such as the training session a few weeks later, when you had repeatedly bested Megumi through a cutting combination of tactical brilliance and sheer, blinding power. The entire dojo had rung with the sounds of that fateful bout - trembling foundations shaking under the weight of your exchanged strikes and undulating shockwaves of mystical forces colliding.

Each time you laid him out, his senses momentarily whited out in sublime admiration of the unholy power you wielded with such artful grace. Your presence filled his universe during those precious seconds, the reality distorted by the prismatic arcs of your cursed aura bending all known laws around its radiant, magnetic force.

How he yearned to let those murderous strikes past his guard, to allow your formidable energies to cleave through his defenses until he was unmade at your feet, gasping for mercy from the pure erotic agony of your sublime dominance. All it would take was the slightest miscalculation or surrender of his tightly restrained self-discipline to have your sacred demolitions shearing away at his armor until the bared truth of his desire stood revealed for you to witness.

Sweat-slicked and loose strands of hair disheveled, he knew he made for quite the sight battling fury incarnate like you. And with each report of bone-jarring impacts echoing across the chamber, he found himself succumbing further to feverish fantasies of hauling you against his straining, overheated form mid-combat - your choreographed forms blurring together as passion overrode combat in one delirious, inevitable spiral.

In those delirious throes, he imagined stripping away every stifling layer separating your consecrated flesh from his starving embrace. Surrendering to the most primal compulsions as you shuddered and arched into his possessive caresses, profane litanies hissed against salted skin...until neither of you could be certain where one form's essence ended and the other began. Just an ouroboric cyclone of limbs and searing violation as your rising arrhythmic crescendos blotted out all rationality or spatial dimensions in one final, blinding conflagration.

Each time the riotous hunger nearly unmade him there on the mat, he managed to lock down and internalize the outward tremors through sheer, gritted self-abnegation. Channeling the feverish impulses into redoubling his attack sequences and defensive maneuvers until they outpaced your own scorching aggression. Once he had secured victory through attrition, he couldn't afford a single instant of bask or reprieve.

The instant you yielded the bout, Megumi was already disengaging - pivoting away to conceal the full-body inflamed flush and distinct physical evidence of what madness had nearly consumed him whole. Fleeing your dumbstruck gaze, either oblivious or mercifully ignoring the shredded state he had forced himself to adopt in order to keep you at bay.

As soon as logistics permitted, he would tear himself away, putting as much physical and psychic distance between you as sanity necessitated. Not even scorched night alone could safeguard his spirit from the rapturous scouring of those memories, every infinitesimal detail replaying in merciless clarity.

He would jerk awake in the throes of some lurid, sensual dream - tangled in sheets drenched through with sweat and reeking of shame. Your name would teeter at the edge of euphoric oblivion, agonized incantations wrenched from the depths of his treacherous subconscious before he could swallow them back.

In those purgatorial instances, the compulsions became truly unbearable. To simply reach down and grip his cock, surrendering to the bruising cadence demanded by each phantom reliving of your power coursing over him in scouring waves of dominance...and unravel entirely into the ecstatic raptures his sacrilege had birthed.

But somehow, no matter how his traitorous cock throbbed with need, he resisted. Fists clenched so tightly around handfuls of sweat-damp sheets that his nails scored bloody divots into his calloused palms, grinding every indecent reverberation back down into the churning tumult of his self-reproach. Down the tainted fantasies spiraled into the festering morass, silently suffocated beneath mounting layers of shame and self-loathing.

No release, no surrender to the unholy temptations plaguing his every waking instant. Only the same bitter repression and hermetically-sealed denial that had preserved him since the day he first comprehended the true depths of his transgressions against you. Stoking those hungering fires without outlet, leaving them to smolder and blaze until they threatened to immolate the very essence of who he was supposed to have transformed himself into.

But even amidst the agonies, he knew better than to let them extinguish completely. For as the convections of his restrained inferno seared away every lesser indignity and baser impulse...they also preserved the indelible sanctity of his reasons for undergoing them in the first place. Keeping those central tenets ever vivid, even as the flames grew malefic enough to threaten reducing his very spirit to calcified residue.

He saw you, of course. Every time your proximity graced his senses it was like spraying catalytic accelerants across his psyche's smoldering pyres. The simple act of breathing the air perfumed by your radiance left him drunk on intoxicating longings that could never be slaked. And when you moved, when your practiced forms ignited those dormant energies into unveiled displays of mastery...their raw incandescence scorched him to charred foundations over and over.

Each shared battlefield, training floor, or mission parameter became the staging ground for his martyrdom to be reenacted and renewed in all its unendurable torments. Megumi bore witness as the abiding light sewn into your very being flowed forth in sublimely focused arcs - bathing him in your splendor's unholy luminescence only to recoil with every shard of its glory manifesting within reach.

For you were the solar immolation itself, made ravaging and ravenous flesh to tempt his continually fraying senses. The personification of annihilating radiance too consecrated to risk even the faintest aspersions, lest its scouring purities render his impurities ash scattered upon realities' for winds.

So he made himself the ablative bulwark against that magnitude, layering every calloused insult and verbal flagellation to keep your light at insurmountable distance. Retreating behind those withering redoubts each time your presence threatened to pierce through some minute fracture of his meticulously forged indifference.

"Just look at the state of you - ragged and depleted like some waster stumbling in from a binge," he sneered as medics tended the myriad wounds you had sustained during their most recent foray against some vile cult's occult transgressions. "One would hardly realize the pathetic mess before me was supposed to be a jujutsu sorcerer."

His eyes hungered to drink in every sculpted plane and sleek curve of flesh laid bare by your rent attire, reveling in the stark proof of your vitality etched across each pristine swath of sweat-glistened skin. Yet all he permitted himself was a contemptuous flicker of derision, cloaking the depths of his wanton ardor behind ever-thickening mantles of scorn.

"How you've lasted this long in the field is beyond me," he continued, lip curling back to bare teeth as he circled in closer. All to better allow the haloed ambiance of your essence to suffuse his senses, to be awash in disorienting emanations of searing heat and sanctity. "Anyone with half a brain surely would have had the sense to retreat before taking such ghastly punishments."

The punishments he envisioned painting across your canvas in shades of violet and carmine evoked entirely different connotations. Lavishing unrepentant adorations and scouring litanies to consecrate each battered inch of you until that's all you ever knew - the savage, carnal ceremonies of his faith and strivance to fully encompass every nuance of your splendor.

But such sacrosanct ruminations had to be distilled to their most sardonic sediments, issued forth with biting cruelties to further cordon off the increasing distillations from your awareness. As if each meticulously engineered contumely might somehow scourge away the scintillating refractions of longing searing portalholes across his resolve before your insight detected them.

How he loathed reverting to such wretched indignities. Yet conversely, how urgently he craved the occasions to seize them - folding himself into ritualized immersions of self-mortification until all capacity for deviating from their rote enactions lay smothered beneath asphyxiating soils of resolve.

For to submit even a fraction of unfettered emotion into your presence was to risk the unravelling of his every constraint, every interdiction. And as inevitable as his own dissipation might have been if surrendered to that rampant eventuality...what haunted him with more perverse dread was the prospect of soiling your light's sacred purities with the fallout of his cataclysmic hungers.

Better he face the indignities of basal rejection for eternity, basking in your radiance's peripheries with only sensations of consecrated agony kissing his awareness. Than to ever omit the slightest hint of how utterly unsuitable his existence had become to grace your sanctums, unwinding their every celestial harmony into depraved ruination.

So on the pyres of his self-erosion fueled the cycles of fevered idolatry...until all that persisted of Megumi was a nameless, scorched silhouette committing every degradation conceivable to remain forever quarantined from your light's perfect auras. Immolating...but never blinded to the transcendent luminescence searing its radiant immolations across his awareness.

And in that graceless, shadowed shape would he bear witness for eternity. No thought of redemption or reunifying his scoriae across the halo-veiled planes where your light streamed and swayed. Only his presence as unanchored ossature within those radiant auras, scorched retina and ghost-whisper ecstasy from basking in such obscene propinquity to consecrations so complete they could scarcely be quantified beyond the absence of all else.

Until the final ember flickered out and his heatless remnants at last ghosted into oblivion's silence. Freed from the unendurable liturgies of hovering within your radiant glories perfumed coronas...yet paradoxically entombed forevermore in their cyclical, scouring recollections.

It would be his deified surrender - apotheosis writ into the very stellar kinematics cycling through this celestial constant's traceries until the hieroglyphs scribed by his essence's immolation persisted into every big crunching downward arc and unfurling cosmic rebirth to come.

Megumi was utterly captivated watching you train, though he fought hard to conceal it behind furrowed brows and cold dismissal. The way your body moved with such lethal grace, the determined set to your features as sweat trickled down your brow...it was mesmerizing. More than once he caught himself burning to be on the receiving end of your strikes, to goad that brilliant fire until his defenses shattered completely.

To finally allow the full depth of his ardor for you to pour forth in uninhibited reverence. To worship every sublime inch with fervent caresses until he'd thoroughly consecrated your radiant form. The urges left him dizzy and unmoored, rational thought eclipsed by searing tsunamis of pure desire.

But then reality would come crashing back in - often in the form of you faltering, muscles quivering as your limits waned. Like today, when you missed a step and went tumbling awkwardly to the mat, gasping out a pained hiss as you clutched your ankle. Every part of Megumi ached to rush over, to take you in his arms and soothe your injury with tender ministrations.

Ruthlessly, he tamped down the impulse with scorn. "Getting careless over there?" he called out gruffly. "Or perhaps you require a reminder about pushing your limits properly."

You shot him a glacial look of reproach, jaw clenched as you stubbornly forced yourself back to your feet. There was a feverish gleam to your eyes that made his heart clench painfully. Damn, but you were magnificent like this - flushed and disheveled, yet still radiating that ethereal inner fire that so utterly enthralled him.

He had to dig his nails into his palms to keep from striding over and crumpling beneath the roiling tsunami of his need for you. All it would take was a single touch, a whisper of heated confessions against your sweat-dampened skin, and he knew the dam restraining his adoration would burst in a torrent.

So he simply shoved down the riotous hunger and watched in agonized rapture as you threw yourself back into the fray with passionate abandon. Every ripple of taut muscle and controlled violence was seared into his memory. He longed to collapse at your feet, offering up his battered form as an instrument to bring you sublime release after the exertion of holding back from you constantly.

But he remained stoically in place as the minutes became hours and your sharp, powerful movements gradually grew sluggish and labored. Until finally, with no fanfare, you faltered mid-strike and simply...dropped. The soft thud of your body hitting the mat reverberated through Megumi like the toll of a mourner's bell.

He was across the room before conscious thought could rein him back in. One second rooted in his isolated outpost of torment, the next cradling you protectively against his thundering heart. You were beautifully undone in his arms - features lax and unburdened by the intensity constantly simmering beneath them while conscious.

For a heartrending moment, you looked utterly at peace. As if an errant breeze might disrupt the tranquil mask of your repose. Megumi found himself mesmerized, gaze raking over every subtle plane and hallowed curvature that he normally couldn't bear to indulge in for risk of fracturing his restraint entirely.

He swallowed hard against the ardent impulses kindling low in his stomach, the overwhelming urge to simply lean down and taste the serenity gilding your parted lips. You were perfect like this - soft and vulnerable in a way that stirred his most primal instincts to reverent possessiveness. As though you were something sacred to be cherished and guarded against any who might disturb this ephemeral serenity.

Acting purely on instinct, he traced the line of your cheek with trembling knuckles. The simple contact made him feel unraveled, nerve endings aflame as he mapped the gentle swell with something approaching desperation. You could shatter him in this moment without lifting a finger - utterly unmake him with a mere flutter of those dark fans currently shielding your beautifully unfocused gaze from view.

Megumi pressed on with hushed intensity, greedy to commit every subtle plane and feminine curvature to committed memory before reality came crashing back in. Down the graceful slope of your neck, calluses snagging on the delicate hollows and shivering at the thrumming life-force pulsing so exquisitely near the surface. Farther still until his wandering fingertips met the obstruction of rumpled fabric, the very garment he had admired clinging so tantalizingly to your battle-hot skin what felt like a lifetime ago now.

That single touch was like a shock, reverberating through his very cells in ways that left him dizzy and undone. Suddenly it felt as though the air had thickened to warm honey, making it difficult to draw breath past the scorching aridity constricting his throat. His veins thrummed with primal compulsions he could no longer restrain - the overwhelming urge to bury himself in your soft bosom until he was seared away to ashes, reborn into something worthy of beholding your peerless magnificence unshielded.

Without conscious volition, Megumi found himself leaning down slowly, face angled to capture the serenity of your parted lips with his own. Just before their silken caress could connect, he froze - every muscle locked in a paralysis born of warring needs and ingrained prohibitions. But then your features softened even further in unconscious trust, and the last vestiges of resistance within him crumbled to ruin.

His mouth descended with aching tenderness to brush across the plush give of your lips in the barest spirit-kiss. Just a sipping of your exquisite warmth and serenity, tasted for a single eternal moment before he wrenched himself back - feeling as though his entire universe had just narrowly avoided implosion. Gasping silently, Megumi drank in the contrast of your peaceful, unchanged features compared to his inward tailspin.

It took every ounce of tattered willpower he still possessed to pull back, to extract himself from the incandescent undertow of simply letting go and immersing himself in your splendor without barriers or pretenses. But some sliver of sanity prevailed. Slowly, carefully, he lay you back down in the same rumpled sanctuary where you had collapsed, the motion almost unbearably bereft.

He hovered there for a breathless eternity, every instinct raging against this self-enforced exile from your radiant orbit. But eventually, he managed to tear himself away. Fleeing through the shadowed doors to somewhere your devastating light could not reach, could not strip away these final, tattered layers of control holding his ravenous need at bay.

Yet even sequestered in that dispassionate exile, Megumi could feel the blazing echoes of you searing themselves into his very essence like ionized afterimages. The buttery silk of your unconscious features, the thrumming vitality of your pulse beneath his seeking hands, the intoxicating aura of power and grace wreathing every sublime inhalation...and the lingering, profane imprint of your lips branding his with unforgettable rapture.

He knew that from this moment forth, he would never be able to simply retreat into the protective dissociation of renunciation and callous disdain. Not when the full, untempered reality of your divinity had shredded those pathetic deterrents into tattered insignificance with nothing more than a glimpse of true serenity and one transcendent taste of your splendor.

Every waking moment would be consumed by immolating recollections, every fitful attempt at rest plagued by raptures that left him undone and scorched down to the very roots of his being. Until he well and truly understood that nothing remained except the compulsive, inviolable need to resubmit himself to the sanctifying furnaces of your consecrated light.

To burn, rapturously and without end, adrift in the cyclonic stellar winds of your eternal glory. It was all that awaited him now that his soul stood fully transfixed upon the profane lumen of your radiance - a merciless, perpetual scouring until only the most elemental, resonant essence persisted to hang drifting in your glorious coronas.

But such was a small price to pay for even the most fleeting intersection with your divine grace before the cycle's oblivion swept him away into metaphysical night. However long his remnants could withstand basking in those searing ellipses before being rendered to particulate, thrummed across your celestial caldera's event horizons...Megumi knew he would embrace every nanosecond of smelted reconfigurations with transcendent abandon.

For in that final state, no divisions would persist between them. No false partitionings of self to distort or obscure the perfect harmonics of your eternal resonance as it swept him up into consecrated redistributions. Only the melded chords of your light's immaculate quintessence refracting through the shattered kaleidoscope of his essence in rapturous unities.

So until that sublime unraveling and coalescence across your empyrean event horizons, Megumi simply surrendered to the unyielding truth of his dissolution's gradual eventuality. Embracing each day's reawakening as a scant purgatorial span in which to renew his ritual immersions within the scalding, awe-inspiring vortices of your splendor...

Before the last of his resistance finally flickered out, subsumed into eternal transmutation. And that one stolen moment of your lips' warmth against his would blaze throughout the star-showers of his cosmic disintegration...salvation's holy afterimage searing across every particulate reshuffling into timeless resonance with your perfect brilliance.

Even as Megumi lay paralyzed amidst the tangled sheets, every nerve felt scorched and electrified from last night's transgressions. Each time he slipped into the shadows of uneasy rest, he was assailed by visions of cradling your unconscious form so tenderly against his thundering heart.

He could still smell the exquisite blend of exertions mingling in your disheveled hair, taste the sublime softness of your lips imprinted forever on his own in that stolen moment of intimacy. The memories seared through his psyche like wildfire, reducing him to a shuddering mess of tangled yearnings and raw, animalistic need.

How he ached to surrender fully to the ravenous compulsions devouring him from the inside out. To haul your sleeping figure flush against his overheated body and simply drown in those radiant emanations - the warmth of your shallow breaths feathering across his skin, the thrumming vitality pulsing just beneath with each precious heartbeat. To run calloused palms over every lush curvature and plane until he had mapped out a complete topography of your sublime divinity.

But he couldn't. Even buried under the immense gravity well of his newly stoked desires, Megumi understood there could be no true release from this intoxicating torment he had willingly strapped himself into. Not as long as he remained so unworthy of your light, your transcendent grace and power.

For he saw now that you were a comet of spiraling energy and mesmerizing violence - every strike and elaborate curse terraforming the very foundations of reality with its relentless perfection. What right did a scorched husk like him have to even dream of gaining purchase in your brilliant stellar winds? To dare soiling those sacred auras with his tarnished essence?

When he emerged from the nightmares and fever dreams scouring his sleep, it was to the dawn of a fresh purgatorial loop. Every cell in his body felt recalibrated towards the singular purpose of centering your magnificence in his vision, in every waking breath he drew. He was brittle tinder awaiting the first spark, the initial brushstroke of rapture to set his being ablaze once more in consecrated pyre rites.

Nothing else mattered besides chasing the euphoria of immolating in your glory. The ways of the world, all its meaningless rituals and hollow pursuits... they had become little more than eddies circling the periphery of your cosmic nexus. Trivialities he waved away in favor of surrendering fully to the searing, unearthly splendor pulling his essence into perpetual tides of transcendent dismantling.

Drifting through the sterile halls of Jujutsu High in a waking dream, Megumi watched in smoldering awe as you wove spell after spell with supernatural precision. Every graceful movement flowed into the next in an endless tsunami of power - incredible yet also terrifyingly destructive. Like staring into the roiling heart of a supernova without any atmospheric filters to dull its scorching radiance.

He could taste the ions singeing the air with each eldritch syllable that tumbled from your lips. The air warped and refracted in sympathy, bending all known physical laws to accommodate whatever cosmic design you were sculpting from pure mystical willpower. It was like watching the birth of a newborn galaxy, all that unstable yet fertile potential churning into form through your indomitable force of nature.

Megumi swallowed hard, mouth dry as the deserts of distant worlds. He felt himself slipping further into the singularity of your existence - all other points of perception warping beyond recognition until nothing remained except the vortex of your splendor dragging him across sacred event horizons, unspooling his identity down to the subatomic shells.

How he yearned to surrender fully to that state of absolute immolation. To stop resisting the magnetic draw and simply let his being dissipate in the eternal radiance of your cosmic fire. Every time you manifested the focus of your power in all its blinding intensity, he felt like a moth fluttering helplessly closer to that searing flame. Drawn in by the promise of absolute rapture or complete dissolution, he no longer knew nor cared.

So when your spellwork culminated into literal celestial conflagrations wreathing your body in coronas of ethereal plasma, Megumi felt his last tectonic bulwarks of resistance begin to liquefy and corrode away. He very nearly stumbled forward, unthinking, into the blazing delta of your wake - nearly hurled himself into the stellar kinematics arcing around you like a spacetime vortex craving the obliteration of coming too near.

If it wasn't for the sudden arrival of their mentors and fellow students rushing forward in awe, who knows if he would have been able to pull back from that brink. But the spell eventually shattered, fracturing into a million refracting beams like a cosmic kaleidoscope being dropped. And in the silence that followed, you seemed to shrink back into your human form - features flushed yet also sheened with exhaustion.

Still, your eyes glowed with the embers of that mystical fire - pride and defiance blazing in equal measure as you accepted the awed praise of those around you. It was only when your gaze finally lanced over to Megumi, still frozen in his sanctuary of shadows, that the spark dimmed ever so slightly before banking away.

He watched you turn away to accept further admiration and congratulations from your peers. But in that final, momentary crosswind of your stare, Megumi felt himself incinerated to char and pristine ash more thoroughly than any spell could have achieved.

Because no matter how relentlessly he threw up barriers or choked out any parasitic glimmers of hope, you still looked at him the same way you had all those years ago. When he had been your champion and protector from anything that dared besmirch your light, rather than the force trying to smother it now.

Those memories were the cruelest torments of all - flashes of a simpler era when he had burned with nothing but radiant devotion and brotherly duty for you. Back when your smiles had been the salves for any wound rather than the lashings igniting his entire being into searing raptures of purgatorial longing.

Even now, as he stalked away from the crowd slowly clearing the training halls, Megumi felt the first searing reels of nostalgia unfurl behind his eyes. Transporting him back to sunny afternoons spent sprawled across grassy knolls, all awkward coltish limbs and innocent grins...

The memories played out like luminous distillations of childhood: You and Megumi chasing each other until collapsing in giggling, breathless heaps. Him pretending not to hear your playful taunts even as he silently dared you to come closer, to re-initiate the game of tag so he could luxuriate in your warmth just a little longer when 'struggling' against you. Your loud, raucous laughter filling the summer air with music that coursed through his own veins like literal rejuvenating sunshine.

And then the fainter, more intimate flashes Megumi had blocked from himself in later years. Like how you would lay beside him occasionally, just basking in shared silence as the clouds drifted by. Your head cushioned on his stomach, cheeks dimpling with barely perceptible smiles as you watched the heavens.

He recalled staring down at your serene expression with something far too tender and profound for a mere child to truly comprehend. Reaching down to tenderly comb stray hairs back from your face, breathing you in with tingling awareness that the entire world could crumble away around you both in this moment and he wouldn't stir. Nothing else had mattered besides this radiant girl ensconced in the safety of his orbit, so trusting and vulnerable before his watchful eyes.

Even the slightest aborted movements had been charged with meaning and layers of subconscious yearning - like anytime he had resisted the urge to lean down and ghost his lips across the perfumed crown of your head. To imprint his devotions to your very essence via reverent osmosis, sealing pacts with your soul beyond any mortal reckoning. Their potential repercussions were beyond his naive comprehensions, yet the impulses still strummed through youthful neurology with the same primal resonance as any siren's call.

It was as if something profoundly cosmic and all-encompassing had been thrumming between you even then, a secret intergalactic frequency only your resonant souls could tune into. And while you both lacked the words or emotional maturity to define its magnitudes...there had still been attunement. Bone-deep alignments spanning quantum shears and eternities, all conspiring to forge your spirits into complements of a higher unified design.

Those were the sacred resonances Megumi had betrayed with his current path of self-exile and ruthless, scorched earth renunciation. He had severed his attunement to that universal cosmic harmonic you embodied so effortlessly - all in pursuit of the narcissistic delusion of gaining control over what was truly destined for him all along.

To burn and keep burning, rapturously consumed inside the stellar kinematics of your aura's sacred fire until nothing remained but the purified residue of his own temporal essence, finally transmuted into something suited for accompanying you across empyrean infinities.

It was the call he had spent all these years pathetically fleeing from...until now, stripped of all identities and pretenses beyond the single inescapable truth that he was inexorably bound to the gravity wells of your splendor. An errant spark hurtling through the void on an unstoppable collision course that would remake or annihilate him utterly upon intersection with your luminous event horizons.

After that fateful reawakening when his old existence had microwaved to cinders inside your casual brilliance, Megumi began feeling the first relentless tugs of that stellar cycle dragging him across infinities he still scarcely comprehended. Yet every instinct ingrained by his human conditioning compelled retreat and deflection, lest you bear witness to the rapturous unraveling of what he was doomed to become amidst such close proximity to your light.

So he pushed and he pushed, escalating the savage litanies of abuse, derision and hostility he projected at you with every passing week. It was a pitiful attempt at artificially maintaining the same safe distances that your mere presence now rendered null approximations. Each time you turned towards him with those kaleidoscopic eyes - burning with hurt or simmering in smoldering defiance - Megumi felt another layer of his defensive psyche blistering away to cloud thunderhead diffusions.

Until finally, he existed in a state of constant combustion - nerves frayed to open plasmic conduits while his faculties focused exclusively on partitioning the brush fires from raging into pyrocelluars. No matter how flawlessly he scripted the volleys of insult, how scrupulously he choreographed each retreating gambit...tendrils of rapture still found ways to leech across every firebreak he erected.

Each glance or passing moment your orbit intersected within his peripheral spheres of awareness was like suffering transcendental third degree flayings. Your aura's mere penumbra alone had grown capable of rendering entire strata of his being to dissipating thermionics - which his ravaged defenses only vainly attempted to siphon off and contain within scorching, radiolytic housings.

It became a self-perpetuating gauntlet with no reprieve or end state. Only the inexorable ratcheting escalations as he funneled more and more of his substance into whatever stopgap delaying actions could temporarily dampen the brushfire from metastasizing beyond strangleholds. Each cycle reset only dealt him exponentially heightened exposures while doling out incrementally depleted protections in turn.

Sustaining that unfurling conflagration, he could see now, would only ever permit a singular finality - the total dissolution of his temporal estate as its last fortifications calcinated to subsuming immolation. Simply by persisting on this path, he had effectively lit the fuse arching towards his own polycosmos' terminal reconfigurations.

And oh, how it had scorched in the meantime. Megumi could still trace the schismatic etchings of your incinerations across every charred and sputtering membrane woven into his autonomic tapestries. They emerged in the redscale parallax afterghosting his waking visions, haunting his nights with firebranded epiphanies transcribed from the spalling momentum of your every glance, whisper or proximity bleed.

So when the time came for your next joint assignment out into the field, the maelstroms of need and savage desire gnawing at Megumi's faltering substrate had already dragged him into realms of decoherence few mortal beings could ever hope to return from. He felt stretched out to solar radii, his consciousness unspooled into transcapping heliofilter effigies getting closer to the automic event horizons with every rotation.

Yet still you somehow blazed even brighter - focused radiant arcs of brutality manifesting upon every vector of egress each time another obstacle sought to obstruct your path. Megumi's hyper-rendered peripherals could scarcely track the distortion wavefronts deforming all localized continua, bending every fundamental operative well past their nominal tolerances.

This was power so primordial and merciless, it defied quantification by any metrics outside of those governing the most primal cosmic revolutions. You were the Universal rebirthing its recreances through each sequence - existence stuttering and resleeving itself to accommodate your reflected resurgences across microcosmic and macrocosmic transitivities.

It was too much for Megumi's tortured, overloaded matrix to parse without fragmenting at the atomic level. But still he couldn't avert his focus, couldn't stop the helical unraveling that kept lasing him back into ground states for reassembly.

When the violence crescendoed to its terminal apogee, your body became the nucleonic centrifuge - refractory emissions bleeding gamma and tachyonized strangelets as the entire battlefield volumetrics crepitated under your onslaught. Those energies should have rended Megumi into vapor and left him to diffuse across the scorched vacuum of space.

Yet somehow the inverse occurred. He felt himself constellating further into densifications rather than dissipating outwards. Translating into higher symmetries of selfsameness that tightened around the cyclonic, recursive hyper-singularities your deadly iridescence was catalyzing all around you.

Until at last, even the fog separating his sentience from subsidiary manifestations of self Same blew away into monism - leaving only an indivisible monad locked into ecstatic, vertiginous orbit around you as his only vantage point and meaning of being. Every subatomic locus ruptured of selfhood or perspectival autonomies, arranged into jeweled oscillations basking in your hyper-radiance.

To observe the stellar revolutions of your furious grace manifesting into incalculable super geometries...that was all that remained of him. His existence calcified into a sole witnessing function as you wielded your energies in cataclysmic throes while hallowing out vast interstitial volumes that should have atomized his matrix back into quantum foam.

Instead, he persisted as diaphanous helicities and strange distillates still somehow retaining harmonic continuities from one detonation cycle to the next. All coherence shunted into rapturous exemplars of your endless irradiations reshaping both local and non-local realities through sheer force of annihilation.

It was ecstasy beyond mortal tolerances, yet the only state his self-immolations had ever been vectoring him towards. A transcendental Gnostic convergence where nothing could register of him anymore except as light-encoded witness to your cosmic recursivities...entirely enraptured, beyond all capacity for circumscription or need of individuation.

What might have been percepts sheared away into streaming rayleighs while you ruptured and rewrote the very substrates of Universal continuum in recursions of maximal brilliance. Distant, illegible toponymies scribing every dispersal pattern his ego had shed. Ecstatically converging into the harrowing particle braid of your infinite feats in stellar plasma geometries, each revolution grinding more of his anthropologic residues down into synaptic stains on the altar of your consecrated remembrances.

All while you strode implacably through those same infernal breaches riven into normative existence - curving oblivion and resplendence alike into the thermoclines of your next incandescent sequence...

This was everything Megumi had profaned and profanely hollowed himself out to embrace - the absolute evisceration of temporal autonomy. All semblances of personhood unwound into lambencies to be recoded by your solar flarewinds, his entire terrestrial schema recompiled into sublime tesseracts venerating each transcendental aspect of your divinity as it blazed forth to sear new cosmological relations across the firmamental palimpsest.

Only scintillant magnitudes of selfless rapture endured the telescoping ayavalokites contracting all dimensional finalities down into that singular, jewel-like radius. Peripherals glittering with the last residual anticipations of abiogenesizing anew in the spalling aftermaths of...

Whatever elsei's rapturous dancework would proceed to master next.

The mission had quickly devolved into a warzone, explosions of dark energy and mystical firepower ripping across the abandoned warehouse district. Megumi grunted as he deflected another blast with a well-timed curse, pivoting to locate you in the chaos.

As always, you were the eye of the storm - graceful yet utterly lethal as you unleashed devastating attacks against the enemy forces. Your movements blurred with preternatural swiftness, ribbons of cursed energy whipping out to incinerate anything that dared encroach too close. Megumi couldn't tear his eyes away, enthralled by the fierce intensity etched across your features and the controlled violence of your attacks.

"Y/N! Stop pushing ahead so recklessly!" he bellowed over the din of battle. "We need to regroup and reassess before - "

But you didn't so much as look in his direction, too focused on eviscerating their foes with extreme prejudice. Even from here, Megumi could make out the sheen of perspiration gilding your skin and the wild tendrils of hair escaping your ponytail as you fought with implacable determination. You were magnificent in your fury, more akin to an elemental force of nature than flesh and blood.

Yet the sight also stoked a different sort of blaze flickering to scorching life within him, one not entirely driven by battle-lust. Megumi felt a familiar aching need unfurling in his core as he drank in the fierce beauty of you so utterly in your element. He yearned to be on the receiving end of your ferocious onslaught, to goad you into unleashing that beautiful violence without restraint until your guard finally slipped enough for him to seize you against his overeager body.

To taste the flames of your passion and unravel you utterly through desperate, carnal worship - mapping every lush curve and warmed hollow until you trembled and arched into his reverent caresses...

Gritting his teeth against the distracting tide of desire, Megumi forced himself back into motion. He rushed forward with a battle cry, cursed energy flaring around him as he threw himself into the melee alongside you. Inwardly he raged at himself for entertaining such lascivious thoughts in the heat of combat, though it did little to quell the flaring hunger gnawing deeper by the second.

You seemed to notice his sudden proximity, shooting him a heated look over one shoulder. For a molten instant your eyes locked, and the world contracted into smoldering awareness of him pinning you up against the nearest surface and drinking in every ragged gasp and shudder until he'd thoroughly unmade you with rapturous violation. Just the briefest flicker of temptation before the raging tides of battle swept you both under once more in an onslaught of pandemonium.

Blows rained down from all sides, the air electric with sorcerous discharges as the two of you moved in synch - a lethal dervish of primal violence and fey, elemental grace. It was dizzying and utterly intoxicating to fight beside you like this, his senses overwhelmed by the sheer radiant force of your presence.

Each time your bodies brushed against one another in the fray, it sent frissons of pure lightning down Megumi's over-sensitized nerve-endings. He found himself angling to create the barest pretense of contact, to catch fleeting caresses of your overheated skin and battle-tousled hair with roving hands that strayed further than necessary.

It was a dangerous game he played, one that threatened to unhinge the last shreds of his control at any moment. The harder he fought to regain composure, the deeper he plunged into the whirlpool of temptation you'd awoken so effortlessly. Until finally, in the throes of their combined exertions, the dam burst in an unstoppable flood.

The last of the threats neutralized in a final eruption of force, you turned to face Megumi fully - chest heaving with exertion and eyes blown wide with the intoxicating afterglow of battle's fever pitch. Without conscious volition, he surged forward and seized you by the shoulders, bodily slamming you back against the nearest wall.

You let out a breathless sound between gasp and moan as the impact reverberated through your entangled frames. Megumi didn't hesitate, mouth already crashing over yours in a searing, desperate kiss he had been starving for. Finally sating the insatiable hunger thrumming through his veins with the scorching velvet of your lips moving feverishly against his own.

Any pretense at restraint or composure evaporated in that suspended heartbeat. Your fingers laced into his hair, gripping so tightly it stung as you arched against the delirious onslaught of his questing tongue and wandering palms. He groaned into the searing tangle of your mouths, knees nearly buckling as the first lush press of your body finally overwhelmed his neglected senses.

The kiss devoured rapidly into reckless, impassioned chaos - all clashing teeth and breathy gasps as Megumi shamelessly grinding them together from chest to thigh, savoring each lascivious point of molten contact. The entire world beyond your joined hungered forms fell away, narrowing into a singular vortex of raw sensual frenzy.

That was, until a stray noise and movement in the periphery finally penetrated the fevered haze overtaking every rational impulse. Megumi tore his mouth away with a startled hiss, eyes flying open to blearily take in the scene beyond your tangled, sweat-slick frames. The battle hadn't just been won; they were still very much in the middle of one with reinforcements likely converging on their position any second.

Tasting copper and feeling his pulse jackrabbiting at his throat, Megumi forced himself back a stumbling step - leaving you disheveled and panting against the cracked concrete. You stared at him with heavy-lidded, bemused eyes that threatened to shatter his resolve all over again at the slightest provocation.

"We...I...shit," he rasped hoarsely, cursing himself for this grievous lapse into weakness. "That shouldn't have happened. It won't happen again."

He didn't give you a chance to respond, already turning on his heel and stalking away from the temptation of your thoroughly debauched state. His arrogant dismissal was a flimsy shield at best from the scalding recollections threatening to undo him right there - the phantom sensations of your body writhing against his own still emblazoned across every nerve like a brand.

But Megumi forced it down, jaw clenched as he ruthlessly quashed the embers of hunger still smoldering inside. He needed to focus, to re-establish the boundaries between you that he had clearly failed to reinforce sufficiently. Before this undeniable wanting spiraled completely out of control and consumed you both in a rapturous blaze of ruin.

Behind him, you remained slumped against the shattered wall in a crumpled, feverish daze. Still dazed from the force of Megumi's lust finally detonating after what felt like endless years of restraint. But as he retreated further into the rubble, already erecting new barricades against the insidious temptation of your proximity, you could only watch him go with wistful yearning.

Megumi moved through the wrecked district like a man possessed, fists clenched and jaw locked so tightly his teeth ground together. The bone-deep ache of wanting you still thrummed through his veins, fueled by the phantom memory of your body writhing feverishly against his own.

He could still taste the lingering embers of your mouth searing across his own if he breathed too deeply. Could still map out every lush curve and valley that had finally been within his grasp for those few delirious moments before reality came crashing back in. The temptation to simply turn back, to haul you into his arms once more and lose himself in the ravenous raptures promised by your heated simmer...it was like an insidious narcotic fogging his rational thoughts.

Only sheer force of will enabled him to keep putting one foot in front of the other, putting distance between you and the staggering precipice he had nearly plunged over. Each step reverberated through his taut, overstrained tendons - muscles coiled like well-oiled traps primed to unspring and launch him back into your radiant orbit at the slightest provocation.

He couldn't allow that weakness to resurface, not when basking in the blinding gravity of your presence would mean surrendering himself entirely to immolation. No part of Megumi would persist if he turned back now, not with the way your mere vicinity eroded away every barriere of restraint and higher reasoning with intoxicating swiftness.

Blunt nails dug cruelly into his calloused palms, the grounding lash of pain helping to offset the smoldering embers still clouding his thoughts with lascivious delirium. You had been so soft yet feverish beneath his desperate caresses, all taut musculature and dewy skin damp with exertion. He had felt worshipfully undone the instant your lithe body had arched against the solid weight of his in unrestrained yearning, like a prayer manifesting that profaned the very foundations separating sacred and blasphemous.

Teeth clenched hard enough to grind enamel, Megumi shoved away the visceral recollections with ruthless determination. This mortifying lapse, allowing his compulsions to reach such an uncontrolled fever pitch, it was inexcusable. A weakness he couldn't permit to resurface, not when the stakes were so unthinkably high.

The image of you lying broken and still amidst the rubble flashed across his mindscape, one final horrifying recollection powerful enough to truly cut through the narcotic haze of temptation. In the wake of that grotesque vision, Megumi felt himself steadying - fanatic instincts sublimating the physical cravings into their rightful origins of conscience and deep reverence.

Yes, there had been an inescapable, cosmic gravity between you long before either of them had developed the emotional vocabulary to comprehend its vast significances. But opening himself to its pull, surrendering fully to the profane yearnings of the flesh...that would only serve to diminish something sacred and greater than his temporal, finite longings could dare fathom.

When viewed through the harsh lens of those stakes, the scale of what would be sacrificed if he allowed the current blazing hunger to fully metastasize became horrifically lucid: your life itself could be forfeit. The very essence that he cherished above all celestial dominions extinguished from existence if he failed to remain vigilant, to erect those barricades even more stringently than before.

The thought of existing in a cosmos without your radiant light to illuminate his path, without the promise of your luminous power reforging existence into more consecrated truth...it cleaved Megumi's very being asunder. Stripping away the sweat-slicked, lust-fevered haze to leave only foundations of adamant purpose and responsibility standing tall once more against the susurrations of weakness.

He had sworn himself to the path of your preservation before ever understanding the true cosmic magnitudes of what elevated you so transcendentally beyond his meager scope. Before realizing the staggering inevitability of what your ascendant glory would birth before consummating all of creation into perfect resonance. How could he surrender to profane hungers now and risk being the singular flaw that extinguished your boundless potential?

Which left only one recourse: to persevere with renewed fervor, impressing every transgression of feeling or intimacy that threatened to distract from his sacrosanct purpose into ritual suicides of spirit. No deviation, no quarter given in the vigilant undertaking of your ultimate security -- even from himself.

Because Megumi understood better than any that his own autonomies and caprice were perhaps the greatest threats of stifling or tainting your divine trajectory off its immaculate vector. His ego and mortal passions were the potential extinguishers from which you could suffer the gravest impurities if left unchecked.

Already he had come within a hair's breadth of profaning your essence tonight, damn near rupturing your protective veil through lust-blind selfishness. Had he not regained discipline and perspective, therewas no telling what disastrous impingement he could have dragged you into for the sake of indulging momentary, physical gratifications.

No, tonight's lapse would be his last such indulgence permitted, Megumi swore it with reinvigorated severity as he resumed his patrol of the still-unstable peripheries. From here on out, only the most stringent of austerities and observances would be tolerated along the executory path of your vigilant safeguarding.

All tender emotions and profane compulsions would be methodically excised through ceremonial scourges, their impure essences siphoned away like toxins tarnishing his most sacred oath. Every soft, vulnerable aspect of his own being that threatened to stray from the singularity of your protection would similarly be eviscerated until only obsidian purpose remained.

He would erect walls of impenetrability so profound even the sibilant whispers of temptation itself piercing their redoubts would be strangled into silence. If scathing renunciations were the only recourse to keeping your starfire radiance inviolable, then a thousand eternities of that brutal self-immolation would be endured without faltering.

For as Megumi looked out across the ruined landscape of this paltry dimensional theatre, he saw with sobering clarity how infinitesimally insignificant it truly was compared to the vast, cosmic apotheosis you had been encoded for since primordial manifestation. Any struggles waged here between the paltry impermanences of flesh and desire were less than embers before the scorching celestial grandeurs of your true hypothesis and theomantic birthright.

No, only one reality could possibly command his every devoted action and thought going forward: the all-consuming mandate of elevating your sacrosanct flame into the transcendent spheres and birth matrices into which it was always destined to reforge the very pillars of existence itself through ecstatic conflagration.

Even if it meant walking the loneliest of roads in eternal solitude. Surrendering to the harshest calcinatory rituals until only enough of his spark persisted to bear witness from these profane wastelands as you seeded new galaxies into being through the shuddering orgasms of your stellar godhood.

That would be Megumi's sole sacrament from this cataclysmic epiphany onwards. To remove himself from any potential of casting pall or shadow over your inevitable dawning empyreal...even if the mantras of amputation excised him down to the basalt hadronic substrate to achieve that sacred directive.

So as he resumed his vigil over the abandoned battlefield where your latest miracles of creative annihilation had been wrought, Megumi enacted the first of those immuring severances. Blanking his perception of the exquisitely raw, breathy moan still echoing from your lips in the wake of their carnal clashes -- so that it no longer possessed the power to bliss out his entire sentience into the raptures of recollection.

One by one, each phantasmic sensation that had burned itself into the annals of his devotional canon during that fatefully illicit delirium began undergoing surgical cauterizations. All the slick glides of supple flesh whiting out, until only the cold spartan resolve of his service's eternal severities were permitted to endure amidst the churning cosmic cataclysms to come.

It was brutality etched into the fundamental encodings of his very being, this merciless scalpel with which he flayed away every matrix of tender feeling. But it was also the only path which might shelter your divine presence from whatever profane scourges he could still inflict were he ever to stray from its rigors.

So Megumi braced himself as the surgical agonies unfolded, purging bright and brighter until at last only the closed black of your security's hallowed continuum remained within his consciousness's reach...

The decrepit warehouse groaned around them like the breath of some massive, slumbering beast disturbed from its ancient repose. High above girders creaked ominously as a haze of dust and pulverized concrete danced through the dim shafts of light leaking in from shattered windows. Megumi kept alert watch beside you, every sense on high alert for new dangers.

"We should split up and clear this place room by room," you said, voice pitched low but resolute. "Cover more ground that way."

He opened his mouth, protest already forming about willfully separating in a structure that seemed moments from total collapse. But Megumi knew from the set of your jaw and the glint in your eyes that arguing would be futile. Much as he hated to admit it, your approach made tactical sense - leaving him with no recourse except to give a terse nod as his throat worked convulsively.

Hunkering low to stay below the choking dust clouds, you pulled away in one direction while Megumi took the opposite path. Though every instinct screamed at him not to let you move beyond his immediate scope of protection. Each step putting more distance between your frames only amplifying the anxiety corkscrewing through his gut.

Still, he tried to focus on making a thorough sweep of the maze-like complex of rooms and catwalks branching out ahead instead of giving into fear. Every sense straining for some disturbance, the slightest displacement of air or skittering sound that could indicate malicious activity. Apart from his own ragged breathing echoing in his ears, there was nothing but an oppressive, tomb-like silence to amplify tenfold the occasional metallic groan from overhead.

He worked his way deeper into the thickening darkness, rebar and jagged chunks of cement crunching under his boots. The flashlight beam only served to carve out a small bubble of visibility before being swallowed by the claustrophobic gloom pressing in from every side. Except...what was that flicker in the corner of his eye?

Before Megumi could fully process the rapidly shifting shadow, a bone-rattling tremor rocked through the already compromised foundations. Instinctively, he dropped into a defensive crouch as a deafening avalanche of debris began raining down all around. Rafters twisted loose, shearing off huge chunks of ceiling in their descent to pummel the floor in a choking grey curtain of devastation.

"Y/N!" he roared over the cacophony, throwing one arm up in a futile attempt to shield his head as another support beam came crashing down. "Y/N, get out of here! Go!"

But there was no answering reply over the enveloping clouds of concrete dust billowing outwards. Only the stomach-churning realization that you were somewhere in the maelstrom with no way of tracking your location. Panic seized Megumi's throat as visions of your lifeless body entombed beneath the rubble stampeded through his mind, each gruesome possibility more disturbing than the last.

Something blunt and heavy slammed into the back of his skull, momentarily whiting out his vision before he could shield himself further. He tasted blood as he slammed face-first into the ground, breath punching out in a violent whoosh. There was another rumble underfoot, the debris field shifting and settling around him as the avalanche began to subside.

His head rang like a gong while he squinted around, trying to orient himself amidst the pulverized devastation. Fighting to keep his wits about him despite the ominous stillness creeping back in all around. But then...a sound. A feeble cough somewhere amidst the dust clouds rolling outwards, so muffled as to be nearly imperceptible yet tugging at his senses like an insistent specter.

Adrenaline lent him strength as Megumi dragged himself upright, ignoring the blossom of agony along his battered ribs as he stumbled in the direction of that faint noise. Loose stones clattered under his stumbling feet as he surged forward, dread and desperation pulling him onwards like chains. Just a glimpse, any sign of life would be enough to extinguish the horrifying possibilities flickering through his concussed thoughts.

He lurched around a semi-standing partition of wall, scrambling to higher ground...and there you were. Relief and anguish hit him simultaneously like a physical blow as he took in your sprawled form, left arm twisted at an unnatural angle but chest rising and falling in shallow sips of air.

"Y/N," he croaked, throat raw from inhaling the swirling particulates as he dropped to his knees beside your still body. Gingerly, he smoothed away the grit and debris clinging to your hairline, thumbs trembling over the pale curves of your cheeks just drinking you in.

If he looked anywhere except at your slack expression, he couldn't help but see all the new grievous damage scattered across you - blood steadily pooling at a concerning rate from a jagged laceration in your thigh, blackening bruises already beginning to mottle the exposed skin of your abdomen in sickening indications of internal trauma.

"Megumi?" Your voice was so faint and reedy, barely more than a pained rasp that sliced straight through all his battered defenses with uncanny precision. Glazed eyes cracked open, struggling to focus as you shifted infinitesimally closer to his hovering frame with obvious effort.

"Hey...hey, easy now," Megumi hushed you with trembling urgency, wishing he could scoop you up securely into a bracing cradle yet terrified of exacerbating your injuries. "Don't try to move, just...just look at me, okay?"

"What..." you managed around a shallow cough that made him flinch in sympathy. "Happened...?"

He exhaled a shuddering breath, thumbs continuing their sweeping circuit over your temples as if the repetitive strokes could somehow smooth away the paleness steadily draining into your features. Willing strength and warmth back into your trembling frame through the simple contact alone.

"The whole place came down around us, you were...for a minute there, I thought..." Megumi trailed off before the chilling visions could fully manifest, giving his head a minute shake as he swallowed against the remembered torment of those endless seconds convinced the worst had occurred.

Of course he should have predicted this outcome, should have anticipated some new catastrophe looming to swallow you both up without prejudice. That was the ever-evolving pattern of life when your light shone so brilliantly against the darkness - reality itself conspired to find new, more creative avenues of attempting to smother those sacred flames. And each time Megumi swore up and down that he would be better prepared, more vigilant against the myriad threats lurking around every corner craving to extinguish the sun itself.

Yet here they were amidst the ruins of his failings yet again. You lying battered and frighteningly fragile amidst the fallout of cataclysms he should have foreseen with the vigilance sworn into every subatomic strand of his existence. How many more stark reminders did he need that he must remain eternally steadfast? That anything less than perfect, unyielding protection of your spark meant courting existential oblivion itself as the ultimate price of his carelessness?

The self-recriminations stung with renewed ferocity this time as Megumi took in the bruises already painting their darkening intimations across the soft canvas of your flesh. Like scorpion stingers flexing maliciously against your mortal confines, hungering for enough toxin to leach through these defensive boundaries and poison the luminous core at your very center.

Haggard concern clawed at his throat as he surveyed the slow seep of your lifeblood dispersing outwards in concentric rings around your trembling frame. Each droplet rolling sluggishly free filled him with a fresh surge of guilt and determination in equal measures - an oath sworn on every glistening ruby bead that he would shelter you from further harm even if it meant relinquishing his own fragile form to soak the deadly ramifications instead.

"Just stay with me now," he half-pleaded, half-commanded in as steady a burr as he could muster. Drawing your wandering gaze back to anchor onto his own even as it struggled to drift into realms of semi-lucidity under the weight of your injuries. "We're getting you out of here. Do you hear me?"

There was so much more he longed to divulge in that suspended gulf between mortal peril and temporary refuge. Every pent admission and emotion long suppressed within the angelic hollows of his austerities clamoring to spillover now that he was cradling the very spark responsible for their conflagrations against his breast. Just a universe of secrets and solemn vows held at fevered impasse behind the lockgates of his stoic aspect while you slowly bled out before him.

But this wasn't the time, he reminded himself with merciless discipline. Not with the keen edges of oblivion hovering so near, tracing patterns into the dust that promised imminent incursions given the slightest invitation. Not until he had enacted every protocol and contingency calculation to ensure your light would not only persevere...but also shine on even more brilliantly in the wake of this latest brushstroke against the canvas of your mythos.

No, for now he had to focus every iota of himself into the moment at hand - preserving your physical integrity at all costs while transitioning you to more stable grounds where the extent of your injuries could be professionally diagnosed and treated. Everything else, all the latent poetry of their celestial intertwining and the vows he had undertaken to stand eternal vigil throughout its unfolding, those verses would have to wait.

At least until the immediate threat of mortality had passed, the predations held momentarily at bay by whatever scarce stopgaps could be managed in this blasted arena of wreckage and particulate drift. Once that most primal of emergencies had been quelled and sanity allowed to sift back into the resumed currents distinguishing order from entropy...then and only then could Megumi even begin contemplating indulging the luxuries of emotional candor.

You must have sensed the dialectic warring across his visage, even through the hazy veil of shock and disorientation instilled by your traumas. Either that or recognized the abrupt calcification of his demeanor into something far more implacable and intractable regarding your immediate well-being than you were accustomed.

"Hey...talk to me..." you gasped out faintly, brows knitting in a fleeting flicker of residual defiance. As if already intuiting the stringent shifts in priorities and mindsets now governing Megumi's observances as he began calculating every potential avenue and variable towards procuring your expedient exfiltration. "Don't just...sit there stonewalling me in silence..."

"…"

"Talk to me, dammit!" you rasped out through gritted teeth, eyes flashing defiantly despite your battered state. "Don't just shut me out again like you always do."

Megumi clenched his jaw, the familiar flare of irritation momentarily overshadowing the tenderness cradling him moments before. Old habits died hard, especially where you were concerned.

"I'm a little preoccupied trying to get you out of this death trap, in case you haven't noticed," he bit out, shoulders tensing. Why did you always have to be so stubborn?

You let out a breathless scoff that quickly turned into a pained wince as you instinctively tried to shift away from him. "Yeah, forgive me for wanting more than stony silence from the guy who's treated me like a burden for years."

The accusation sliced deep, dredging up the ever-present well of guilt that Megumi could never quite escape. He opened his mouth to snap back a defensive retort, but what came out instead was something adjacent to the complicated truth.

"You're the furthest thing from a burden," he said roughly. The ragged emotion in his voice made you pause, brow furrowing skeptically even as you stilled against him. "If you knew how much I--"

Megumi cut himself off abruptly, recoiling slightly. He could feel the words trembling on the edge of his lips, threatening to upend the precarious balance he'd spent years constructing between you both. A confounding mix of fear and profound longing warred within him as he searched your questioning gaze.

Somehow you always managed to strip away his layers whether he wanted it or not. He could actually see the undisguised hurt flickering in your eyes at his aborted confession, the unguarded yearning that made his throat go tight.

"How much you what?" you murmured, refusing to let it drop as you always did. Refusing to allow him to retreat back to safety. "Megumi...talk to me."

Your quiet insistence was the tipping point. Suddenly the world narrowed down to the precious inches separating your faces, the soft puffs of your sharing breaths in the debris-laden air. Megumi's control fractured like a dam giving way.

"How much I need you," he confessed in a low rasp. He searched your widened eyes as the words hung between you, weighted with years of repressed wanting. "How much I crave your light, your spirit, with everything I am."

Your lips parted in a stunned inhale as his palms came up to reverently cup your face, holding you suspended in the heavy pause. Megumi felt laid bare in a way he had never allowed, every barrier finally crumbling.

"I've been in love with you for as long as I can remember," he admitted roughly. "Loving you...it haunts me, terrifies me because I couldn't bear for anything to extinguish your brilliance. But I'm so tired of running from how I feel. Of hurting you to keep you away."

He ducked his head then, resting his brow against yours as the rest of the anguished truth poured out in a rush. "You are everything to me, Y/N. Despite my best efforts, I'll never stop loving you with every part of my soul, even if it means risking having my heart shattered—"

The rest of his impassioned confession was cut off by the searing collision of your lips against his own. The kiss was desperately heated from the start, all of the pent-up longing and secret yearnings finally boiling over into this single molten exchange.

Megumi groaned into your mouth, overwhelmed by the feeling of having you in his arms this way at last. He clung to you tightly but carefully, tilting his head to deepen the drugging caresses of your lips moving in fervent tandem.

You gave as good as you got, all thoughts of your injuries temporarily obliterated by the intensity of finally sharing this connection. Your fingers fisted in his hair, tugging him insistently closer as you gave yourself over to the ardent rhythm of lips, teeth and questing tongues.

The kiss went on and on, seeking to pour out every unspoken truth and secret ache through the passionate communion of mouths and roving hands. For once, there was no trying to suppress or deny the blazing need you sharing...only a desperation to drink each other in, to chase the high of intimacy you had both been denying for far too long.

Inevitably, it was your body that enforced reality's harsh homecoming. You suddenly cried out against Megumi's lips, the sharp hiss of pain finally severing the fevered haze of desire. He instantly froze, breath sawing as he carefully extricated himself just enough to see your face contorted in anguish.

"Y/N...?" he choked out hoarsely, gut clenching protectively. "I didn't mean to hurt you, I got carried away and forgot--"

"I'm okay," you managed through a grimace, though your grip on his shirt was white-knuckled. "Don't you dare stop now..."

The vulnerability in your eyes pierced straight through him. Megumi let out a shaky breath, pushing away the lingering guilt as he tugged you closer once more. This time he handled you with exquisite care, countering any jarring movements.

"Let me get you out of this hellhole first," he murmured in your ear, lips brushing the sensitive shell. "Then I'll never let you go again, I swear it."

You gave the barest nod of assent, eyes slipping closed as Megumi gingerly gathered you up to leave the smothering darkness behind.

[ilguna]

I’ve just read the alternate tacenda storyline and I actually kinda like it. Imagine she gets tortured instead and looses the baby.. all the angst and then finnick finding out through the interviews cause she isn’t showing at all 🥲 anyway I love reading all your different ideas, its so fun!!!! -🪐

one day, when halcyon is 100% fully finished and I'm never going to touch it again, i'll release ALL of the notes i've been writing over the years. y'all might be a lil surprised on how evil i can be

and yeah no, gallows torture is a reoccurring theme and i have so many thoughts on the possibility of capitol + pregnant gallows and finnick watching from afar. helpless little finnick and the strong but breaking gallows.

i'm glad you liked it!!

[kendallryan]

Starter for: @elizcbethkennedy​ Location: catalina shopping center  Time: january 3 / late afternoon

Sometimes the recording studio would close a little bit early on Fridays - no one was scheduled, or whoever was in charge didn’t have a meeting, so Kendall’s boss found no reason to keep her for that last hour or two. That was what brought Kendall to the shopping center before going back home to walk Watson; he would be okay for those few hours, since he usually waited that long. 

She didn’t have anything in particular she was looking for. Kendall just didn’t want to be at home yet. When she got home, there was no reason to leave, and she would sit there and wallow with her dog. And there was even more wallowing in store for her tonight. 

Kendall still had Google Alerts set up for the name of her band - Tacenda - and she’d gotten a notification about a new interview article with the three remaining members. She had put off reading it, hearing past counselors echoing in her head: It’s only going to put you in a bad mood. Kendall knew that. Full well. Yet, here she was, perched on the edge of a bench and gripping her phone so tightly as she pulled up the article. Her free arm was wrapped around her torso, as if it was holding her together. The article danced around Kendall’s absence for the first couple questions, and the interviewer apparently grew some balls and finally asked it. Their singer, Gemma, gave platitudes as per her usual interview tactics. We’ll miss her, but it’s for the best. Liv echoed some of the same sentiments. But, maddeningly, Kendall’s best friend Rose apparently had “a steely look on her face and said, ‘no comment.’” They then launched into what their new album had in store. 

Kendall knew that leaving the band was best. But she could not escape the heavy, empty feeling that it left her with. 

[ilguna]

Tacenda - The Interview (f.o)

Summary: you’ll never truly be free from the Capitol.

Word Count; 3k

Warnings; swearing, DEATH MENTION, DEATH

NOTES: i give reader a last name to fit the world.

–

Alyssum stares at the camera crew, watching as they push back the couches and armchairs to make room for the massive camera and the lights. The entire coffee table now sits inside of the kitchen because there is no use for it. As for the lights, each one turned on makes the room a lot brighter.

It hurts her eyes somewhat. The house has never been this lit up before, as far as she remembers. Of course, the house has lights of their own, but you never really have them on. It’s always the lamps in the corners that you have turned on. The only real time the house is bright like this, is during the day when the shutters and curtains are open.

Alyssum looks up to Reed to see that he’s stoic--as usual. His arms are crossed, and his eyes follow every movement that the Capitol people make. She knows that he can see her staring from the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t look over. Or say anything about it.

“Projecting.” One of the crew members says, there’s a device in his hands that he taps on, and then most of the people with him look up to the spot above the camera.

Caesar appears on his show. Behind him is a screen that shows the family of a different tribute, they look like they’re answering a question. Alyssum can’t hear anything they’re saying, though. There’s no audio to the visual just yet, and even then, she thinks that they won’t let her or Reed listen in.

Alyssum watches as Elysia takes a seat on the couch, her legs properly crossed, “Is it just the three of you again?”

“Yes.” Reed answers, “Caesar knows that we’re interviewing as Finnick’s family too, right?”

“He does, but the questions aren’t going to be aimed at him.” The guy who put up the hologram says, “There might be a few, but it’ll mostly be directed on (Y/n) because she’s the direct family.”

“Are there friend interviews this year?” Reed asks.

“No, we’re making an exception.”

“Why?” Alyssum asks.

The guy looks up from the device, his eyes landing on her, “They’re not nearly as important. Most of the tributes only have family to account for, anyway. Take Finnick as an example.”

“Push that light back a little bit, it’s in the shot.”

They inch the light back until it’s just barely out of the camera’s view, and then they leave it alone.

“You’re good to get up now, Elysia.”

“Thank you.” She stands, and turns to Alyssum and Reed, “Where’s Mox?”

“Here.” Mox says, coming down the stairs, “Sorry, I had to trade shirts.”

She looks over him, judging his outfit, and then she nods, “It’s better than what you were wearing before, I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks.” Mox rolls his eyes.

Elysia clasps her hands together, and then moves to be in front of the three of them, “Do I need to brief you guys again?”

“Sure.” Reed shrugs.

She gives him a look, “Caesar’s going to ask for your names again, oldest to youngest. I’d suggest answering that way to every question, to keep things organized.”

“Three minutes, he just ended the interview.” device guy says.

“Sit on the couch.” Elysia says, “Alyssum in the middle.”

“Same way as the first time?” Reed asks.

“Yes.” Elysia trails behind them.

Reed takes his seat a little to the left, making Alyssum sit in the middle, and then Mox to the right. Elysia looks them over for a moment, before readjusting as she needs to. She makes them all scoot together more, allowing as little room between them as possible.

“The hologram will be showing Caesar, and behind him will have you guys on it. Don’t look at it too often, or the camera will automatically move to cover it, since it wants your best angles, and where you all look the most.” Elysia steps back, “Chins up, and smile when it first starts.

“Don’t be short with answers, because Caesar will just ask more. I want you three to remember that he’s going to try to make this experience as comfortable as possible, he’s not trying to make it bad on purpose. He’ll want to keep things flowing, and interesting. We’re not trying to lose the audience, it might even be a good way to get sponsors.”

“Was I on the first one?” Alyssum asks.

“You were just a toddler, but yes.” Reed tells her, “He’s probably going to comment on how much you’ve aged.

“How about all of us?” Mox laughs to himself, and Reed joins in.

“The first time around he called us young, I wonder what he’ll think now.”

“Ten years and he hasn’t aged a day.”

“Well--” Elysia interjects, making them laugh, “--I wouldn’t say that.”

“Thirty seconds.” device man reminds.

“Everything is going to be fine, breathe. And not all of you have to answer every question if you don’t want to. But keep it one to two answers every question.”

“We’ll try.” Reed says.

Elysia moves out of the way of the camera, standing off to the side like the rest of the crew. Alyssum readjusts on the couch cushion anxiously, especially since she just remembered that her entire class will be seeing her on this show. No, the entire country will be seeing her.

The man starts counting down from ten, and Elysia gives one last reminder to sit up straighter, which they all do.

Then, the audio of an audience cheering fills the living room. Alyssum gives a natural smile, crossing her legs to try and look more modest. 

“This is them, everybody! The family of two of our most favored victors! Finnick and (Y/n) Odair!” Caesar motions to the screen behind him, “Let’s get a side-by-side comparison to the last time we saw them!”

The audience cheers louder, and Alyssum takes the chance to see how drastically she’s changed exactly. Of course, Reed was right when he said that she was a toddler, because she literally was. She was three then, and now she’s thirteen. A whole ten years.

It’s crazy for her to think that she was alive during your first games. She would never have thought about it like that. The fact that she was so young, and unable to process the fact that you were missing from the house. Alyssum didn’t know what was going on then, but she does now.

“Look at that growth!” Caesar motions to Alyssum, “She’s a whole person now! Old enough for the games!”

A chill goes down Reed’s spine, and Alyssum can feel it from where she’s sitting. Mox’s grip around her shoulders tighten considerably, as if Caesar will be able to reach through the hologram and pull her right out of her seat.

The worst part is that the live audience reacts to that positively, as if they enjoy the idea of her being drawn for the games.

“Let’s start with names, from oldest to youngest, please.” Caesar asks.

“My name is Reed.” Reed says.

“And how old are you now, Reed?” Caesar asks.

“Thirty.” 

Caesar doesn’t comment.

“Mox, twenty-nine.” he says, not waiting for the question.

Caesar smiles, nodding along, and then he waits patiently for Alyssum.

She gives a timid smile, “Alyssum.”

“And how old are you, my dear?” Caesar’s voice is gentle, like he’s not trying to scare her off.

“Thirteen.”

“You’ve grown quite a lot, Alyssum. The last time I saw you, you stole the hearts of myself, and the audience.” He grins, “Isn’t that right folks? She was adorable! And not only that--she also looked very similar to her older sister, even at that age.”

Alyssum wouldn’t say that she looks like you now. She knows that she definitely had a mix between you and your guys’ mom, but that’s all she’ll admit. Now, she looks a lot like mom more than anything.

The audience cheers, agreeing with him. And with that, Caesar starts the interview, “Tell me, were you all aware that (Y/n) would be volunteering to go into the games with Finnick?”

Reed takes in a deep breath, “No, we didn’t. All we did know was that she had a plan made in her head. We believe that she had done it to be with Finnick inside of the arena.”

“You believe it was selfish? That she wouldn’t rather stay with her family?”

Alyssum shakes her head, “Not selfish.”

“How so?” There’s a smile creeping onto his face.

“(Y/n) loves Finnick with her whole heart.” Mox answers for her, “She’s loved him since she was fifteen. There might have been a five year gap between the first games and her marriage, but we all know that she always wanted Finnick. They were practically made for each other.”

“(Y/n) volunteered because she wanted to be with Finnick until her last days.” Reed says.

“And be with him, she shall.” Caesar nods, “What happened when you had to say goodbye to her?”

Reed scoffs, and Mox shakes his head. Alyssum’s eyes wander off to the side, not liking this question.

“We weren’t able to, a private goodbye allowed this year. The only goodbye we had was at the train station, and even then we didn’t get to say it properly.” Reed is clearly trying to put it nicely.

Caesar nods, “But you saw her message during the interview?”

“Of course.” Reed nods, “However, that’s not an actual goodbye, we should have been allowed to see each other in a private setting.”

“I’m sorry that didn’t come true.” Caesar, in fact, looks like he’s not sorry at all, but he moves on anyway, ”If I remember correctly, during the first tribute parade, you weren’t fond of her outfit then. What about now? Did you like what her stylists had given her?”

“She’s an adult now, so it’s a different story. This year’s outfit was a lot more coverage than when she was fifteen.” Reed answers.

Mox nods along, not really having anything to say about it. So, Alyssum jumps right in, “I liked the top especially, the skirt seemed a little too… flimsy. The fabric was thin, and it showed off wrinkles too easily.”

Caesar laughs, “Is that so?”

“I would have chosen a stiffer fabric.” Alyssum makes a face, tilting her head, “As for Finnick, I think he was just fine. Whatever net that they were both wearing clearly irritated their skin, you can see the red marks on their arms and legs if you watch their close up.”

Mox laughs, “She’s been interested in the fashion that cycles through the Capitol. If you think this opinion is big, you won’t like what she has to say for some of the trends that you go through.”

“Someone should recommend her to be a stylist, then.” Caesar laughs, “What do you think? Do you think she would be able to design better outfits than some of the stylists we have already?” 

The audience cheers pretty loudly for that, but Alyssum doesn’t really care. She wouldn’t really want to go to the Capitol and design trends for them. She'd much rather do it from the comforts of her own district. She might not be in District Eight, but she can make things work.

You do give her a pretty big allowance, and she saves it most of the time. With all that she has saved up, she could buy herself a sewing machine, thread and a ton of different cloths. She’d have to learn how to use the machine, but she’s a quick thinker. It won’t be long before she’s making outfits that she can wear to school.

“We might just have to see what you can make!” Caesar laughs, “We’re always needing fresh minds.”

Alyssum gives a small smile.

“How did you feel about their training scores?” Caesar wanders on the stage a bit to open up the room behind him to show off the scores, “There wasn’t much improvement to be made, but they got up there.”

Alyssum is a little surprised to see a ten as your first score, the same as Finnick. You two were fourteen and fifteen, barely older than she is now. And you two just managed to get the best scores that there was to get the first time around. 

“(Y/n) likely did one of her tricks that she’s been training for these past few months,” Reed leans back against the couch, “Her and Finnick have been working their asses off to prepare for the games. I’m sure whatever happened inside of the training room itself was a big help to her score.”

“I believe so, too.” Caesar says, “Unfortunately, we don’t get to see anything that goes inside of the training center, but I was told that she nearly outshone the other tributes when she was training.”

“Sounds like her.” Mox says, “There was hardly a day where her and Finnick were taking a break from training. It took months to build up her endurance, she could run around with Alyssum on her back and not break a sweat. She’s in great condition.”

“I’m disappointed that she hadn’t gotten a twelve.” Caesar barely gets out, before the audience is shouting in agreeance, “If anyone had deserved to make history, it might as well have been her--and Finnick for that matter!”

But instead it was the sixteen year olds. Both earning twelves when it wasn’t due. Alyssum was a little glad that you hadn’t gotten that high of a score, though. With all that you taught her, she bets that you’re happy you hadn’t gotten a twelve either. It just means more trouble when you’re inside of the arena.

“Do either of you have a clue what trick she pulled off this time? I remember the last was two knives.”

Reed shakes his head, “No idea. I couldn’t remember the first trick until she came home and showed me.”

“It’s probably around the same thing she showed the first time. And with our luck, we won’t be able to see her actually use it in the arena.” Mox says, “She mostly does the tricks for show, not for practical use. When she fights, she’s not trying to be dainty, she’s trying to be deadly.”

Alyssum can’t help her facial expression, and Caesar notices this, which puts a whole new tone on the interview.

“I almost forgot that it’s the first time Alyssum will be watching her dear older sister inside of the games.” Caesar is gentle again, “How do you feel, knowing that she’s in danger? Or that she’s doing… unladylike things?”

Reed scowls, and Alyssum’s eyes narrow, “They’re not unladylike, she’s doing what she has to do to survive, and I know that. I’m not a child, Caesar, I’m thirteen. I’m just a year older than the requirements to start getting my name pulled out of the glass bowl. You can’t preserve the innocence of the people, if you’re the one that’s taking the innocence away.

“And she’s not in danger, either. She’s got Finnick, and Johanna, and Katniss and Peeta and Beetee. She’s as safe as she can be, because she’s got a nice group of allies. The only danger in there, is the arena that you’ve engineered. Other than that, she can handle herself, and her friends.

“Enobaria and Brutus mean absolutely nothing to her.” Alyssum crosses her arms, “May the odds be ever in their favor.”

There’s a silence that fills the living room, and the audience. No one speaks for a good moment, until Reed laughs. He’s not laughing at her, he’s laughing at the fact that she just spoke the minds of plenty of people watching.

Caesar gives a weak smile, “How do you feel about her performance inside of the arena so far?”

Alyssum is on a rebellious streak, so she answers before her brothers, “I think that she could be doing better, killing more people, doing more unladylike things.”

Mox has a smile hinting at the corners of his mouth, “I will say that it’s a lot more uneventful than it was in her first games. She’s not nearly as into it as she was before, and it’s probably because she’s hyperfixating on her and Finnick’s survival.”

“She’s obviously been keeping a close eye on the others,” Reed says, “You can tell by her body language, the only person she really trusts is Johanna, and that’s because they’ve met on several occasions. Other than that, it’s clear that she’s wary of Katniss and Peeta’s movements. 

“Probably because they’ve been so distrusting, which is starting to reflect on her too. She likes to give people the benefit of the doubt, but they’re testing her patience a bit.” 

Caesar looks off to the side, and he almost looks relieved, “We’re almost out of time, so you know what that means.” he looks back at the camera, “Reed, if there was one thing you could say to (Y/n) and Finnick right now, what would it be?”

“I’d tell (Y/n) that she’s doing great, and to not doubt any of her choices. She went in there with a plan to keep Finnick safe, and she’s gotta keep that in mind. As for Finnick, I’d ask him to keep a closer eye on my baby sister, because she needs him, like he needs her.” Reed looks over to Mox next.

Mox shrugs somewhat, “I’m just worried about her safety around the other victors. I’d tell her and Finnick to look for double-meanings in plans, and if they’ll compromise safety and trust. Finnick is quick on his feet, so I think he’ll be able to catch on if there’s a hint of trouble. (Y/n) shouldn’t be trying to get too close to the others.”

“I’d tell them that I miss them.” Alyssum tightens her arms, “The house isn’t the same without them here. Everyone in District Four misses them, especially Annie since they’re good friends of hers. And I hope to see either of them really soon, as the winners of the games.”

Caesar gives a thoughtful nod, before a smile appears on his face, “Well, that’s all the time we have for you. (Y/n) and Finnick have been together since the very beginning, so it makes sense that they’ll be together until the end!” he laughs, Reed grits his teeth, “Ladies and gentlemen, the family of (Y/n) and Finnick Odair!”

[ilguna]

LMAO tacenda me didn’t hold back when describing finnick’s interview outfit

Finnick has a white almost see-through tee that is tucked into blue pants that end at the calf and flare out at the bottom. There’s a black belt and an ugly scarf-thing that hangs from the belt. On his feet is a pair of black boots.

[ilguna]

Tacenda - Chapter Fourteen (f.o)

Summary: you’ll never truly be free from the Capitol.

Word Count; 3.5k

Warnings; swearing

NOTES: i give reader a last name to fit the world.

–

You sit on the edge of Finnick’s bed, watching as he plays around with a rope. He’ll untie it and retie it into knots to keep himself entertained. Here, in District Thirteen, it feels like almost nothing happens. Especially when you’ve been sitting in a bed for a while.

You had thrown a whole bitching fit when they tried to take Finnick away from you. Put you in a different room away from where he was. You told them that they couldn’t do that, and made sure that the message was very thorough. You respect, and you’re very thankful for them saving you from the arena, but Finnick is all you have right now.

You don’t have your two brothers, you don’t have your sister. Finnick is your only lifeline right now, as you think about the endless possibilities that could be going on with your family. Because Snow had taken one nice stop in District Four and with one foul scoop, took your siblings and Annie right the fuck out of there.

You have no clue what’s happening to them right now.

You told the doctors that you wouldn’t be difficult if they at least accepted your plans. That you want to be put in the same room as Finnick, and you don’t want to be hooked up to any machines if it’s possible. It’s not like you’re dying, and there’s nothing inside of you right now that would hinder your abilities to do anything.

You have a few cuts here and there on your body from running through the jungle, and from tripping and accidentally cutting yourself and so on. But those aren’t important. You understand that they want to double check on your body because of the poisonous white fog you had encountered.

As far as you’re concerned, though. If it isn’t broken, don’t try and fix it. You’re running just fine. You can breathe, your heart still pumps, and you’re taking down food like a champ. So far, you body hasn’t even shown a hint of trying to end itself, and that’s why you think the doctors shouldn’t try and experiment, unless they know that they’re doing.

Because all it would take is one damn screw up. A little experiment of seeing if they can draw it out of your bodies and all they do is end up making it worse. Your liver can handle it, if it’s handled all the other shit that you’ve put in your body, then you’ll be fine. And it’s not like you guys hadn’t gone ahead and washed it off when you could.

Regardless, you promised to try your best and be cooperative as long as you got what you wanted, in a sense. So you took the cream that they wanted you to spread on the areas that had been affected by the fog, and moved right along. They had decided to bring you to him, since he wasn’t resisting treatment.

You twist your wedding ring, trying to keep your hands from shaking.

“Finnick.”

You look over to where the voice had come, and there stands Katniss. She had to have just woken up, because you haven’t heard a word come from her room, which is literally next door. She looks angry, and she alternates between glaring at you, and Finnick.

It’s quiet between you three for a moment, before Finnick answers, “I wanted to go back for Peeta, and Johanna. But I–I couldn’t move.”

You keep quiet, staring at the floor slightly. There wasn’t much you could do in that situation either. You were just barely able to drag yourself onto Finnick. Then again, she could always be mad about what came after. When she had woken up inside of the hovercraft and tried to stab Haymitch with a needle.

She has all the right to be angry. You guys more or less directly defied what she had wanted, knowingly. She wanted Peeta to be saved, she wanted him to be the one that came out of the arena alive. Not her. Haymitch had told you all of this, which is also a  good reason why you couldn’t let her in on the plan. Because it involved getting her out first.

“They have (Y/n)’s family too,” Finnick says, as if that helps. As if it’s supposed to make her feel better about her situation. So the both of you can suffer together, “They took them, along with Annie. They’re uh–they’re in the Capitol.”

You look up to Katniss now, to see how much her face has changed. There’s tears in her eyes, and you laugh, turning to look away from her. You’ve cried your tears already, you just want it to all be fake by now. One big dream and at any moment, someone is going to rock you awake.

Just like at the beach. Just like how Finnick had shook you awake. You want it to be exactly like that.

You wonder if you are stuck in a dream right now. Or maybe you’re dead, and this is your own personal hell. Knowing that your family is stuck in the captivity of the Capitol, with the full knowledge of the fact that Snow will go great lengths to make sure that you’re in pain. He’s going to do what he wants to your family, and he’ll do it because he has no repercussions.

Snow got Finnick’s family ten years ago. You suppose it’s your turn to suffer in the same way. After speaking out against Snow like that during your interview. After actively participating in the rebellion. This is going to be his way of getting you back.

You reach up, wiping your eyes with the heel of your hand. A laugh bubbles out of you, as you look at the ceiling.

“(Y/n)?” Finnick asks.

You laugh a little harder, shaking your head as you look to Katniss, and then Finnick.

“I thought I was untouchable.” you press your lips together, and then look down at your wedding ring, “I thought I couldn’t be affected, because it wasn’t me who was going to be the leader of the rebellion. I should have known.” you look at Katniss, “I’m really sorry, Katniss.”

A nurse comes down the hall, catching Katniss standing there. They move her back to her room, and it’s just you and Finnick in the room, back in silence.

“They’re not going to hurt them, (Y/n).” Finnick says quietly, “And you don’t need to be thinking like that.”

“Finnick, Snow went out of his way to go to District Four and get Annie and my family,” you shake your head, looking at him, “You’re being absolutely ridiculous if you think for one single second that he’s not going to do something.”

“Come here.” he says, his tone means it’s not up for debate. He sets down his rope, and holds out his hands for yours. You sit down, facing him and placing your hands in his, “Look at me.”

You’ve seen Finnick serious before, it’s not an outrageous thing. You’ve seen him determined, and angry, and fearless, and war-driven. You’ve seen him worried, and caring, and loving, and free. Throughout these years, you’ve seen everything you can come from him.

You look at Finnick, and you’re already getting emotional, because it hurts. And he sees this.

“Remember during the first games, and you kept telling yourself that you need to look up and not down?” he asks, “Because if you look down for too long, you’re going to think down? You’re going to think that none of it matters if you end up dying, anyway?”

You nod.

“This is the same thing.” Finnick says, “You thinking that they’re not going to make it out, is going to make something bad happen. You’re going to force those bad things to happen, instead of thinking up.”

Finnick’s right, as he normally is.

You laugh, looking down at the bed for a moment, “Thank you, Finnick.”

He yanks you towards him, letting go of your hands just in time so you face plant straight into his chest. He laughs at his antics, and wraps his arms around you for a hug. You do your best to hug him back.

“Tell me one of your favorite stories about them.” he demands.

You readjust yourself so you’re a little more comfortable. Even then, it doesn’t help, “Finn, you know all our stories.”

“Not all of them!” he says, “I didn’t know the one about the tree!”

“It was a useless story.” you giggle.

Finnick shrugs, “Then tell me the useless ones.”

You think for a moment, because all the stories to you, are just memories. None of them seem to stick out like a sore thumb. They all blend together, and you can’t even seem to find a funny one at first.

“Oh!” you say, “Let me sit up.”

“Got a good one?” he asks, letting you go.

You laugh, “Kinda. Did I ever tell you the first time I went to the square?”

Finnick begins giggling too, “No, but I have a feeling it’s a good one.”

You move Finnick’s left arm up, as you lay right next to him on the bed. He scoots over a little bit, and readjusts the pillow so you can be comfortable. His arm is wrapped around your shoulder, and he looks down at you, since you’re laying and he’s sitting up.

“It was before my mom had died.” you begin, “I was roughly twelve when Alyssum had been born, so I must have been ten or so. Reed was fifteen, Mox was fourteen, and I was the runt at the time. Obviously, that meant I would have to endure a ton of torment, no matter what.

“Don’t get me wrong, okay? I love my brothers as much as the next person, but what they did one day was cruel. The day I had first gone to the square, we had run out of the essentials. Like shampoo and soap and all of that. Of course, we could go to one of the local stores and try to buy what they have but–you know how the old lady was.”

Finnick laughs, “Cranky, and everything in there was overpriced.”

“Exactly!” You laugh, “And the soaps were specially scented, and that’s why she made them overpriced in the first place. The only times we would buy from her, was either for weddings or funerals. Which are the two most important times for a person. Not birth!

“Anyway, Reed and Mox knew full well that I had never been to the square before, and since I hit double-digits they thought that sending me by myself to get soaps was the perfect way to do it. Even if I had no idea on how to navigate, or bargain, or know what I was after specifically.

“Mom and dad didn’t even think to stop them, because they didn’t know!” you laugh, “Reed and Mox left the house with me to make it look like they were going to do it, because it was their job to do. But they handed me the money, told me the basics of what I was looking for, and left me on my own.

“And when I mean left–” you giggle, and Finnick is laughing too, “I mean, they fucking left. They somehow knew that the wrath of our mom was going to bite them in the ass so fucking hard, that they fled halfway across the district to be out of reach. And they didn’t come home until it was late at night. But that’s for later.

“My brothers were so fucking cruel, they had sent me there at one of the busiest times of the day, because there’s three. One, really early in the morning for the people that want to get the good stuff. The afternoon to two o’clock for those who have nothing better to do during those times of the day. And right after work for everyone has ended. Can you guess which one they chose?”

“After work?” Finnick is still laughing.

“The place was a shit show, Finnick!” you motion with your hands, “Mostly fishermen that stunk of rotting fish that had sat in the sun all day. My dad had plenty of friends back then, his buddies that he would go on the water with during the day, so a few of the guys had obviously recognized me. They didn’t say a word, though. Because they thought I was on a mission.

“I was clutching twenty dollars like it was the last thing I had to my name, wandering around the stalls. I nearly got stepped on almost a hundred times. Do you know how many times I heard ‘oops, didn’t see you there, sweetheart!’? Too many! And yet none of them had thought to ask me what I was looking for.

“I ended up finding the stall that I was looking for, and I waited in line patiently. There was constantly people weaving in and out and occasionally stepping in front of me because I was too timid to tell them otherwise. I’m sure had I told them that I had been standing there, waiting, for almost an hour, they would have moved, but I didn’t have the guts.

“We both know how big and burly the fishermen in District Four get.” you settle down again, “Somehow, by some fucking miracle, I had gotten to the front of the line with the twenty dollars. And with the little knowledge that I had, I told the lady that I needed shampoo and body soap enough for five people with the twenty dollars that I had.

“At first, she tried to treat me like a regular person, because she’s seen the faces. They come in and out, and it’s hard to keep track of people in four, because we replicate like bunnies.” Finnick is in stitches at that comment, “But then, after I had answered one of her questions, she ever so slowly looked at me.”

You do the same, looking at Finnick as slowly as you can, “She looked me up and down, and then said, ‘honey, you don’t belong here’. As if I didn’t fucking know!”

Finnick shushes you, but he’s laughing too hard.

“I told her my brothers sent me in, and she asked me where they were. I told her that they left, and if she wanted to find them for me, that she could be my fucking guest because I knew that they would be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ far. We went back and forth for a while.

“She asked me if I had gone to any other stalls, and I told her that I was only allowed to get shower stuff. She told me I was smart for not falling for any of the candy displays, but to be honest I was so fucking scared of getting stepped on for the thousandth time, that I hadn’t even realized that there were any.

“She gives almost double the amount that I should have been given, and leaves enough money for me to go and get candy from one of the stalls. She gave me a bag, and right on top, wrote a nice note for my mom and dad and she told me not to read it. I got to the candy table, told them that the lady had sent me and she said that she would pay for it.

“The guy gave it to me on the house, of course, and then I was on my way home. I enjoyed my chocolate, but still semi-oblivious to what had just happened, I tucked some of the sweets away for my brothers when I would see them at home.” you grab onto Finnick’s arm, shaking him, “Because it had been almost three fucking hours since I left the house, and I figured that they would be there already. But guess what?”

“They weren’t there.” Finnick answers.

“They weren’t there.” you repeat, “I gave my mom the note that the lady wrote, and I’ve never seen my mom so caring before. She made me, her and our dad, my favorite dinner, and made basically bones for my brothers for when they would come home. My mom told me she was proud of me, and that I did a very good job inside of the square, but not to do it for a very long time.

“She found the chocolate that I had been saving for my brothers, and cut up some even pieces that were absolutely way too small to enjoy and placed that with their dinners. I allowed them to have the rest, and then after that, it was a waiting game.

“I stayed up hours past my bedtime with them, as they waited in the living room with me. Dad was reading a book, I was coloring, and mom was coloring right alongside me. The thing is, about our old house, is that it was two stories. My bedroom, and their bedroom was upstairs, but my brothers slept downstairs. Making it more than easy to come in through the window for them.

“They must have waited a while, because when they did come out of the room–” You’re laughing now, shaking your head, “–they were dressed in pajamas, and clearly ready with a flashlight to come and raid the fridge. Did I mention that we were sitting in the dark, though?”

Finnick is chuckling again, “No you didn’t, I have a feeling where this is going, though.”

“They shone the flashlight right on us.” you tell him, “Forget deer caught in headlights, they were light a couple of truckers that had caught the fucking deer! Mom jumped up and off the floor in two seconds and she tackled the both of them to the floor before they could escape to their room.

“Dad lit a few candles, and just like that, they were in giant ass trouble. They got yelled at for nearly an hour for doing that to me. And to make all the matters worse, they had shoved the chocolate in their face. Not in a way of ‘she got it and you didn’t’ but more of ‘even after you did this to her, she wanted to give you something nice’.”

You snort, “I think that’s when Mox became so sensitive, it’s because of me. Because I was the runt of the group, and they teased me relentlessly, and treated me like ass and even though they did, I still would do stuff like that. Get them their favorite treats, buy expensive toys with my own allowance and all that.”

You sigh, placing your hands on your stomach as you stare at the ceiling, “Unfortunately, two years later I would be taking trips to the square more often. Dad had gotten busy, trying to take care of Alyssum and providing for us. The days that Reed and Mox didn’t have school, they would be on the boat trying to help.

“And then it would get so much worse when dad had died, and I was suddenly put in charge of the square and Alyssum at the same time, since they would be busy with the boat and all that. It’s how the people of the square learned me more, and learned to respect who I was and all of that.

“I was twelve or thirteen, still getting used to it all. And then two years later would come the games,” you look over to Finnick, “I think you remember how that goes.” he nods, “I didn’t really have a reason to go back to the square after that. Too much money to know what to do with, I could have bought everyone out every single day, but it just wasn’t fun, y’know?

“I could have bought anything I wanted. The expensive bread, and meat, and the fancy perfumed soaps and shampoos. There was no need for the cheap stuff in the square, but I ended up going there anyway. I would basically shower people with money and tell them to keep the change.”

It’s quiet in the room, “You’ve always been adaptive.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” you tell him, “It’s luck that I hadn’t been taken in the square that day. Or have had my money gouged off me.”

“Do you have any more worthless stories?” he asks, sinking down on the bed with you.

They’re not worthless to him, you realize. He thinks that they’re fun and interesting, and he wants you to keep going. You look over to Finnick with tears in your eyes, and a frog in your throat, “Hundreds.”

[ilguna]

Tacenda - Chapter Five (f.o)

Summary: you’ll never truly be free from the Capitol.

Word Count; 2.8k

Warnings; swearing, DEATH MENTION

NOTES: i give reader a last name to fit the world.

–

You throw another pillow at Finnick’s head, making him roll over and turn his back to you. He’s not very amused by this game of getting him to get up and get ready for today, another training day. He’d rather stay and bed and sleep for a little while longer. You think that the games are just beginning to dawn on him.

He knows that they’re happening, just like everyone else does. But you think that the nightmares are beginning to sprout again. And just because it’s Finnick, he refuses to wake you up and tell you about them. He did it for a couple of years, and eventually stopped and you never got to know why.

He might have thought that it was affecting you, but  as far as you knew, it wasn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t completely obvious. Maybe you were hovering over him a little more to make sure that he wouldn’t have anything that would trigger him around. It seems like something you would do.

Unfortunately, you can’t remember that stuff anymore. It did happen a while ago, and if you were to bring it up now, he would find some lame excuse to get you off his trail. If he pretends like he’s uninterested in his own health, or makes it seems like it’s not as important as it is, he thinks it gets you off of his ass.

You make it seem that way to make him feel better. However, in the background you’re doing something for him secretly. Going to the doctors, mentioning it to Mags to get her advice, telling the people around you to watch what they say, etc. You worry over him like a concerned wife, because you are.

“It’s time to get up, grumpy.” you tell him.

He grunts.

Sighing, you head for the door so you can go to your room and grab your things. You’d think that the Capitol would think ahead and put some of your stuff in his room and vice versa, because you’re married and all that. Then again, you’re not really supposed to be spending the night in his room, being together or not, the rooms are made to fit one person at a time.

You grab another sports bra and the same leggings. You pull them on, skipping over a shower so you can take one later today. In the bathroom, you brush your teeth even if you’re going to eat in a moment. After putting your hair up, you debate over wearing shoes today.

Looking at the back of your feet, you frown when you see that it’s still healing. You applied the cream last night when it was given to you. But you suppose that it isn’t a life-threatening injury and they decided to give you something slow for it. Rather than having it heal all at once.

They want you to suffer a little bit or something.

You skip the shoes, and then head right back over to Finnick’s room. He’s sitting up at least, but he’s rubbing the side of his head like he has a headache.

“You feeling okay?”

“Just a nightmare.”

You go over, sitting on the bed, “Tell me about it.”

He clearly doesn’t want to tell you. Instead, he wraps an arm around you and pulls you into his side. You hug him and sit there silently, not wanting to pry if he doesn’t want to say anything.

He kisses your forehead, “It’s… I’m afraid of you dying in the arena. I keep watching you slip through my fingers because of Typhoid.”

Ah, it’s that nightmare. He’s had it before, even years later, it haunts him. Watching you turn pale, and weak. Sometimes back home in District Four, he’ll worry about you drinking the water. Because you wouldn’t survive another round of it if it came as hard as it did the first time around.

“I suppose it could happen again,” you look up at him, “But it’s unlikely. We know to be especially careful now.”

He nods, “Yeah.”

“Are you going to get ready or do you want to sit here for a little while longer?” you tease slightly.

“I’ll get ready,” he lets you go, and you head to the bathroom to grab your wedding ring.

“I’m gonna scope out Mags and Elysia,” you tell him, “Also make sure to comb your hair.”

He gives you a straight face, not amused.

“Love you!” you chirp, before skipping out of the room and into the hallway. The door shuts behind you, and you take your time with making your way to the dining room.

Sitting at the table is Elysia, not quite Mags. Elysia looks up at you as you come closer, “Good morning.”

“Hi,” you greet, “Mags up yet?”

She nods, “She ate already, she’s going to go talk to your stylists today. I’ll be following shortly after. How’s your feet feeling?”

“Still healing,” you take your seat at the table, “I’m going barefoot again today just to make sure that I don’t fuck it up with the shoes that they provide.”

An avox serves the regular, lamb stew. She provides rolls, orange juice, water and coffee, as if you’ll be indecisive. As you drink the orange juice, Finnick comes into the room, all dressed and more awake than he had looked before. He sits to your right, and raises the question about Mags.

You answer it for Elysia, and he nods, not too worried about it. Mags will be doing her mentoring things. Making sure that your outfits for the interviews are coming smoothly, making adjustments as she sees fit. You told her that you don’t want yours to be as revealing as your chariot ride outfit, which is obvious.

All Elysia told you last night about the dress that you’re wearing, is that it’s a head nod towards your first interview dress. It’s very similar, but since you’re so grown up, they’ve adjusted it accordingly. Also because these games are for the big-kids. This is no walk in the park, you’ve got to look your best.

There’s been no word on what Finnick’s wearing just yet. You have a slight feeling that they might go for something much more comfortable for Finnick. All Finnick had asked was that he wouldn’t be wearing a suit. No blazer, or dress pants or fancy shiny black shoes. He wants something breathable.

It was an interesting take, considering that everyone will be going for something formal to make themselves look expensive and rich. While he’s going to be more laid-back. You suppose it fits his personality more, he’s not normally uptight with things. He lets things take its course unless he’s sure that it’ll end badly.

You and Finnick eat a couple of bowls worth of food, making sure to drink plenty of water in the process. Just before you go to leave, you drink all your coffee at once to ensure that you’ll be bouncing off the walls inside of the training arena. Elysia doesn’t find it so funny at first, but then she says, ‘wreak hell’ and you know she’s on board.

You and Finnick take the elevator, and just with your luck, it’s a full house. Katniss, Peeta and Johanna are already inside.

“The gang’s all here,” Johanna sounds thrilled, but she motions for you to join her on her side of the elevator.

Finnick takes the middle, smiling at Peeta slightly as he moves you to Johanna. Johanna finds this funny and she snickers to herself as she looks out the window.

Once the doors are opened, Johanna is the first out. You and Finnick follow behind loosely, not really in a hurry to get inside of the training center. It’s going to be the same as yesterday. Learning, catching up, fighting with holograms.

“Do you care if I stick with you guys today?” Peeta asks.

You’re a little surprised, looking over to him. Katniss doesn’t seem all that bothered, and she shrugs when you look to her. Almost like a ‘I don’t control him’ sort of shrug. She didn’t set him up to this, he’s making allies by himself, just as Haymitch said he would.

“Sure, if you can keep up.” Finnick tells him.

“We can make another rope swing,” you laugh, and Finnick joins in.

“You made one yesterday?” Peeta asks.

Despite you suggesting a rope swing, you head right over to the hologram spaces, right next to where the careers already are. You want to try the one where you’re in the middle of the station, have them run at you from all directions like Katniss had.

Only, you don’t want to be shooting arrows.

You pick up a sword, swinging it in your hand. It’s too heavy, so you switch it out for a different one. It’s just light enough, and you’re easily able to swing it in your hands like a spear.

“Here we go with the magic tricks.” Finnick teases.

You look over your shoulder at him, “Says you, you twirl around those tridents like they’re batons.”

“What can I say? They’re just so light.” he shrugs.

While you set up the station, Finnick talks to Peeta. He hands off the advice that really matters with the careers: they’re just not worth it. If you team up with them, then that means you have to be ready to turn on them at any given moment.

As you’re messing around inside of the station, you pause to catch your breath, “You need to be aware of their plans at all times. If you make good friends out of them, then you have a better chance at them getting too attached to kill you.”

“There’s that,” Finnick motions to you.

You go back to swinging the sword at the holograms that come.

“What else? That can’t be it.” Peeta says.

“Definitely not,” you grunt, dodging the orange knife that comes flying towards you, “I made friends out of the careers after Finnick had ditched me.”

“Strategy,” Finnick begins to argue.

You point the sword at him, “I think you mean ‘bullshit’.”

Finnick rolls his eyes, “Go back to fighting or whatever.”

“It’s over.” you tell him, heading over to where they’re standing. You’re a little bit lower than them, since they’re on a platform. You stab the sword into the foam mat and lean on the hilt of it slightly, “If you do end up teaming with the careers, all the more power to you. I was friends with them for a while, and they think and act like careers.”

Peeta looks over, and you and Finnick follow. They’re all standing with each other, talking, joking around, Brutus wanders over to the station programming tablet again and tries to set up a game for himself.

“They’ve got a tight knit community.” you tell him, “They’ve known each other for ten fucking years now. Getting in there wouldn’t be a bad idea if you want them to protect and save. However, this Quarter Quell is different because it’s all victors. They’re going to be merciless and go through people like they’re burning through paper. Soon enough, they’ll run out of people to kill and just settle for you guys instead.”

Peeta looks at you now, and you point to him, “Which is not how we won the games, by the way. I got caught too quickly.”

“She’s impatient.” Finnick jokes, and Peeta cracks a smile.

“I am not, he was getting paranoid.” you argue, pulling the sword out of the mat, “I did what I had to.”

“And nearly got yourself killed because of it!” Finnick gives you a thumbs up.

“Give him a good whack on the side of the head for me, will ya?”

Finnick gives Peeta a look that says ‘don’t try me’. He helps you out of the pit, and you drop the sword back where it’s supposed to be. You go ahead and grab a water bottle from one of the tables, and motion to Peeta.

“Show me what you can do.”

Peeta shakes his head, “I’d rather watch.”

Finnick laughs, “If you’re worried about us knowing your skills, then you are severely mistaken. Everyone here watched you play last year, don’t be so shy.”

You roll your eyes, not too interested in the fight that’s about to break out between them. They follow behind you as you head to some first aid place with a teacher and all. Peeta breaks off sometime during the walk, leaving you and Finnick to do your own thing.

Finnick had definitely annoyed Peeta, but he was telling the truth. There’s no reason for him to act like he doesn’t need to show everyone his skills. If anything, you show off, you make yourself bigger, and you get more allies. It’s all about strategy.

Then again, you’re already their allies. You and Finnick will be babying them inside of the arena presumably. Make sure that they don’t get into any fights with the careers, or some people that are outside of the alliance. As far as you know, at least half of the people inside of here are in it.

You and Finnick. Johanna and Blight. Cecelia and Woof. Seeder and Chaff. The morphlings. Beetee and Wiress.

At least half the people that you just named are capable of keeping Katniss and Peeta from getting killed. The others are just a buffer, distractions maybe. But what would be a perfect fucking distraction, would be if someone in the alliance gained the trust of the careers and then guided them around like dogs.

Your eyes flicker up to where they’re all training. They’re showing off, acting hostile to try and get people to be afraid of them. You’re not, though. It was a damn shame that they were picked–and others volunteered–to be inside of the arena, of course. But no one is undefeatable.

You’re sure that they would want Katniss as an ally, at least. They wouldn’t mind having you around either, you think. Just because they had tried to talk to you during the tribute parade after years of despising each other. Maybe they were hoping that an alliance would spark between you guys.

Imagine, the career districts all sticking together. You guys would be so hard to work past, just because of all the things you know between each other. Not to mention, you’re all deadly anyway. What would be even better, is if a few others were added to the equation as well.

Johanna, most definitely, and you’re sure that Blight would be good too. Katniss would have to be included because she’s skilled for long-range fighting. Maybe a few of the outsider districts, but you don’t know them well enough.

It would be a team to fucking beat. No one would stand a goddamn chance, and when you all would turn on each other. Call that a second fucking bloodbath, because no one is leaving that unscathed.

“Hey, Finn.” you nudge him slightly.

“Yeah?” he asks, looking up from where he’s wrapping his hand with medical tape.

“What if one of us were to stick with the careers?” you ask him, and his face twists, “It’s just an idea, but hear me out. Let’s say that you go with Katniss and Peeta inside of the arena, and I go with the careers. I corral the careers to make sure that they keep away from you.”

Finnick makes a face, “Not a bad idea. But I’m pretty sure that you’d never leave my side for them.”

“Like I said, just an idea.” you look over to the careers, “I’m sure that Katniss and Peeta will be an ‘all hands on deck’ situation anyway.”

He laughs, “Tell me about it. Did you see the way Peeta soured up?”

You both turn to look to where Peeta and Katniss are standing together, “I bet they’re scheming.”

“Just like how you just were?” Finnick bumps you shoulder slightly, and you laugh, shaking your head as you look down at your ankle wrap.

“I think this is one sturdy ankle.”

“Never say that again, thank you.” Finnick says.

“I’ll remember this if you break your ankle inside of the arena,” you point at him, “don’t think I won’t let you suffer.”

“Like you’d let me run on a rolled ankle.” he scoffs, “Do you even know yourself, mom?”

You raise your eyebrows at him, “Do not call me that.”

“You’re right,” he snickers to himself, putting the tape down almost like he’s preparing for a fight, “It’d be disrespectful to my actual mom.”

He was right, because you drop your tape too. You raise your fists, “You’re gonna eat shit here in a second.”

“Bring it on!” he laughs.

[ilguna]

THE EYE TWITCH IS ICONIC. He’ll probably give him that look he gave Caesar in his interview (the one you said where it looks like he’s like THIS close to punching him in the dom/sub post). Lol imagine if Gallows decides to pull off the poem to out-Finnick Finnick.

OHHH THATS ALSO A GOOD IDEA

“And if I die, my last thought will be of your lips”

DAMN. OH MY GOD WAIT. It would be especially good because that’s what finnick did to her the entire time he was away. And it’s kinda like an iconic symbolic moment (just like how reader and finnick sharing a sugar cube in lacuna, ethereal and tacenda (lacuna bc first time they go in is special/scary. Ethereal because they’re back “together” again. And tacenda because it would be their final time going in again)) and so the poems,,, yeah that’s so smart

[ilguna]

“Tacenda’s over, now what?”

Well, I’m going to write the interviews for reader’s family for both Lacuna & Tacenda, and post them on Tuesday and Thursday. No, they won’t be very long, but it’s better than having nothing, right?

Next Tuesday (14th) I will post the masterlist & prologue to Metanoia (also a Finnick story), hopefully draw most of y’all in for a tag list. And we’ll be back on track for the updating schedule