#twisted wonderland scenerios

[yomogi-mogi-mochi]

Ineffable Bloom

Pairings: Azul/Siren MC

Summary: Despite your status as siren, there are not many words that reach those around you anymore, voice now muted and marred from the surgeries you have endured to remove the carnations that once suffocated your throat. But you don't mind it, serving quietly as the gardener of Night Raven College, making do with a notepad and pen when necessary. You are pleased to find your childhood friend, Azul, now attends the school, who spontaneously hires you for the flower arrangements he decides to decorate in his lounge with. There's little hope you bear with the silent poetry you weave with each meticulously placed flower, only an ache which tumbles over you like the ceaseless seas. However, Azul is not deaf to this song you have sealed in your bouquets, having cherished the morsels of sweetness in your childhoods where you shared the silent language of each flower.

Notes: Sorry this took ages lmao. Been in a “creating anything is obsolete” phase my/spring allergies are starting so I am. Dying. Part of the twst myth series, here is the post with some basics. I just reached 1000 likes on tumblr which might not be much to some but wowwww thank you guys for your support!!

GN terms for MC

CW: Emotional abuse and toxic parenting when we get into MC’s backstory

AO3 Link Here.

Masterlist

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“Would you like to add a ribbon to this? I’ll add it for free since I have some extra?” You placed the last slender stalk of green hydrangea into the bouquet and move your hands in practiced shapes and swerves, forming each phrase with careful deliberation.

Jack struggles a bit in forming as keen language with his hands, but you appreciate that he has taken the time to respond in your vernacular. Writing does get a little tiring after a bit. “If you wouldn’t mind. I think Trey would appreciate that.” He pauses, looking to Ruggie, who sways around the room with his hands behind his head in boredom, dipping his gaze to the lilies standing tall in a bucket on the ground. “Right, Ruggie?”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever is fine.”

The wolf huffs a bit before crossing his arms. “You know, you should be grateful (Name) is doing this so last minute since you forgot to place the order a week ago like we all agreed on.”

“Ugh get of my back‒ Leona had me running around more than usual last week…” His eyebrows raise a bit when he brings his attention to the dandelions drying above him, a slight movement you take notice to when wrapping the bouquet in its final layer. “Besides, who cares about all the details of each flower, it’s not like whoever is receiving them is looking into all the deep meanings of each blade of grass.”

You finish tightening the bow around the bouquet, assuring with your trained hands that it is secured tightly onto the broom, before handing it off to Jack. “Just like you mentioned in the interview‒ green color scheme, with symbols of loyalty, prosperity, and patience. Here is a card that has all of the flower languages on them.” You sign, which the man responds with a smile, and a clumsy thank you with his hands.

Ruggie has drifted over to the dandelion heads soaking in a bowl of water, being prepared for the dandelion honey you sell at Sam’s shop while his junior admires the bouquet in reverence. “You like dandelions?” You write on a notepad, poking Ruggie with it. He looks over lazily, shrugs.

“I guess.”

“They symbolize ‘an oracle of love’, resilience, and even sorrowful goodbyes. The name Dandelion comes from the word dent-de-lion, meaning the ‘jaws of a lion’- fierce, is it not?” Ruggie hums in curiosity in response, glancing at the flowers again to imagine it with a growing smile on his face. “Flowers and plants all have their silent poetry. It’s good to tip your ears to them once in a while, they may have something to say to you.”

“You hear that Jack‒ ‘jaws of a lion’..." The hyena says with his hand on his hips, a bashful finger grazing his nose.

"Yeah, yeah. Let's get going, we have a lot of prep to do for Trey's celebration." Jack turns to you before he leaves "Oh, you should stop by if you have time‒ everyone was curious during my birthday who had arranged my broomquet. I'm sure the other students would be thrilled to see the face of our new‒ well, I guess not so new anymore‒ gardener."

You furiously shook your head, scurrying your hands across the air in a flurry. "I wouldn't want to intrude…my work is nothing worth fussing over…"

"Anyone with a pair of working eyes can see otherwise‒ your talent is unmatched, you nearly performed a miracle reviving my half dead cacti." Jack smiles, remembering fondly of the times he had come in, asking you for advice on his growing horticulture collection. "Besides, it's nice for the students and staff to get familiarized."

"And free cake." Ruggie adds.

You raised your eyebrows at that, quelling the swirling anxiety in your stomach. "…okay, I'll try to make it. Just have to finish a few things here and I should be good to head out."

"We'll see you then, (Name)."

——————————————————

You brush your apron, relieving the weariness of a day's work in the breath that swelled from the bottom of your stomach and escaped as an audible huff that loosened the tension of your shoulders. However when you glance at your phone, anxiety shot through you as you realize time had passed a lot quicker, and it was about half an hour past the time Jack had told you to come. In racing footsteps, you gathered your items, throwing your apron on the hook near the front door before slamming it.

By the time you arrive, everyone is singing happy birthday, gathering in a circle around who you assumed was Trey, who bore a bashful smile on his face with the broomquet in his hands. You catch the eye of Jack across the room, who lights up when you wave nervously at him. The room erupts in applause and bright laughter as Trey blows out the candles of his cake‒ a volume you take a mental note of to judge just how many people were at this celebration. Quite a lot, especially now as the students disperse, preparing plates and cutlery to cut the delicious looking strawberry shortcake.

"Hey~ what are you doing here?"

There’s a surge of anxiety when those words are pointed at you, which you respond with a pressed smile as you swerve your head to the voice. To your surprise, you recognize the face which greets you, though it is a bit unnatural seeing them without a bluish tint to their skin, or scales. You suppose it’s a surprise for them as well, seeing you out of the water for the first time in about eight years.

“I thought I recognized that face. Hello, (Name), it has been a while.”

You hands move automatically to the pen and paper stuffed inside your pocket. “Jade? Floyd? It’s been a while. What are you doing here?”

“Eh? What's with the notepad little siren?”

The anxiety returned with Floyd's words. Even with the Leech family’s connections and the chattiness of your hometown, it was hard for rumors to form with the eight years you had spent apart from your home‒ your friends. You were thankful a bit for the amnesty it brought you on rare occasions like this, but explaining the whole situation was difficult for you‒ making up a believable excuse even more so considering the one memorable thing your species was known for. Sirens‒ their voice famed to plunge sea farers into maddening passion, the talents of which even the great Sea Witch openly admired in historical record. Perhaps you had been an example of this once, training your throat to squeeze and burn itself to strike impossible notes, whirling an unmatched vibrancy when you perfected each lyric, each score, each tendon to stand straight, expand your lungs, smile, and sing. Even if you had such talents in the past, it was negated with every pinch and pull of your mother’s craft‒ that memory now clandestine, numbed from the surgery.

Or that’s what you told yourself, as your calloused fingers graze the satin ribbon around your neck, the scars marring it aching slightly as you adjusted the fabric in a slight nervous tick. They’re been healed from quite some time‒ or you believe they are from the years you had observed every winding crack slowly dull against time‒ but the mountainous fossils carved onto your flesh would grow tender like this, pushed then retraced piercingly like the jagged shores far from your homelands, leaving snowy, bursting seafoam prickling against your skin. You suppose all you could do is tighten a smile against your mute lips, maneuvering past it as best you could.

“I’ll explain later. What are you guys doing at NRC?”

“We’re students, see~?” Floyd flashes a crooked smile, turning to the side to show off his dorm uniform. “Jade here is even the vice dorm leader. Boring if you ask me.”

“What are you doing here, (Name)? I don’t think I’ve seen you in my classes.”

“My aunt just retired as the gardener here, she's back at her shop in the Shaftlands. So I've come to officially take her place."

"We'll have our quartet back in no time now‒ you should visit the Monstero Lounge sometime so we can catch up~" Floyd wraps an arm around your shoulder, hanging lazily off it while his twin smiles.

"I agree with Floyd. Azul would be more than happy to see you too." At Jade's words, you brighten, and quickly scribble onto your notepad.

"Azul here too? Is he here today?"

Jade nods. "He's our dorm leader, actually. And yes, I think he just went outside to get some fresh air" his smile widens "you know how he is."

You do. Surely he was tired of the noise and pleasantries of birthday celebration. "Azul the dorm leader huh."

"You won't believe how much he’s changed unless you see for yourself." Floyd switches his weight to his other foot, landing on his brother's shoulder while gesturing to the veranda doors. You swerve your head towards it, trying to make out a figure against the bright blue skies and roses reaching towards the mild sun. There's a slight silhouette, but you can barely make out its features with the glare of the glass.

"You should go to him. He talks about you sometimes, you know." Before you could turn around and question the twins, their backs are turned from you, melting back into the bustling crowd. Despite your initial excitement, your feet move in idle footsteps, weighed by the heaviness which emerges from your wrapped throat, plummeting to the soles of your feet sticking densely onto the ground. The notepad in your hand is gripped through your sweaty palm‒ there was only so much space in each sliver of parchment you could fill with your words, the rest of your language lost to the silence which cages your throat. Even if you could rasp through your disfigurement with a language people would lend an ear to, you were sure that your thoughts, refined through your mother's distant voice, would drive you back into forlorn silence‒ your hands clawing and reopening your wounds wide and fresh enough to assure not even a breath could be heard from it. Flowers always came to you with such ease in comparison, eyes turned away from your secret adoration for something far more beautiful in perfectly placed petals, inventing no hope that you could cling to that would turn your throat raw with desire.

Even if these givings were seen, spoken of , or heard‒ you armor yourself by repenting‒ these gifts were never a virtue, but a disguise for the womb of shame you kept awake in your heart. Forgive me, for there is fear that one day that life will ripen within it‒ something as grotesque as myself, a venerable mirror to my slumbering desires to be swaddled and held. You arrive at the handle of the door too fast for your liking, hovering your hand over it with a heavy heart and tongue before grasping it quietly, hoping a little that your soundless footsteps would turn you into a phantom.

But when you are faced with a familiar image‒ his weaving dusty mauve hair, and the arctic clarity of his blue eyes, you can't help but to pause your prayers for a moment, met with the blinding joy his face brings you. Dear, dear friend.

You're so used to his name springing from your throat that you nearly tear the fragile nerves of your lesions with a rasp threatening to boil over by the warmth in your stomach. But you clench that tension in your hand as you scribble his name in hurried, crude strokes across the entire page.

"Azul?" You turned the paper pad over with clumsy, shaking hands. He looks just as surprised as you, but he nods slowly.

"(Name)?"

You nod your head vigorously to your name, decorated sweetly with his voice. His entire body is facing you now, taking you in with the gulp of his gaze. You do the same, noticing that, actually, not quite a lot has changed. Sure, the soft little octopus had grown tall and slender during the eight years you didn’t see him‒ but still, there is that mole dotted prettily on his face you remember quite well, and the softness of his eyes when they meet yours is one of your fondest, most tender memories, unraveled whenever you saw the sea blue glow of freshly fallen snow, or the velvety reflection of the skies in gentle spring creeks. But now they were here, gazing back at you, there were no words that appeared in your mind, or which you could communicate with the likeness of flowers. It's so sweet again when you hear his voice.

"What's happening? Why are you writ‒ never mind that." He shakes the thought away. "How…How have you been? Last I heard from mother you had moved with your aunt somewhere on land."

Azul does not question how, or why you stood in front of him after eight years, but rather simply‒ how are you? The smile that blooms at that realization hurts your cheeks. Azul mirrors your sentiments silently, relieved that there were no comments on his appearance of how he's "changed so much". Dear, dear friend. He missed this. Missed you too.

"I'm well. Been working as a gardener here, I enjoy it. How have you been? I’m guessing busy, I heard you're a dorm leader from the twins."

"Ah, you've already met them I see. I just hope they haven’t said anything…unnecessary." His smile widens, you trace the movement of his mole which stretches against the curve of his lips. "I've been…alright. Land life has been a lot to adjust to, but I think I have the hang of it now."

"Haha. It was a lot for me when I first came on shore too. Pillows are so weird, aren't they?"

The dormhead chuckles as you approach him near the railing, situating yourself beside him to face the white roses dotting the garden. One meant mercy, purity, the breath of love; two‒ "I deserve you"; three‒ adoration; 99 white roses, and this would be an Eden of eternal love. But you're too enraptured by his laughter to count, caught in the waves of his lightness.

"They are. But I think it's nice now, might even be a hit at the reef if we sell them during spring break. You mentioned you're a gardener?"

"Yes. I just maintain the horticulture on campus, and I do bouquets from time to time like Trey's broomquet today." You write fast, wanting to answer Azul quickly, fill the time with as much of him as you could. He leans over, watching you as you scribble, relishing silently in the smell of fresh cut lilies and seaside rosemary tangled in a salty sweet ocean breeze.

"An impressive feat, considering the size of our campus. If you're willing‒ I may actually need your help with the twin's birthdays coming soon."

“I'd be happy to help! We would need to set an interview up like I do with most of my clients‒ just so I know their preferences more. But it'll be easier since I already know Jade and Floyd." Truthfully, you were already putting together the perfect bouquet for the twins, violet roses here, silver ragwort there, and a sprinkle of beauty berry should bring the composition together in a delicate balance. The meeting was just an excuse to assure another conversation with Azul again, a thought which churned a feeling of shame within you, rolling you smooth with its ragged tongue that sanded down the rough joy jutting out from you like an unfinished pearl. When Azul nods on confirmation, this sensation becomes slightly eased, but your muscles churn inside you like the dark, deep seas.

"I agree. Nonetheless, us four should meet at the mostero lounge soon to catch up. I could use a talent like yours to freshen up the look of the lounge a bit‒ perhaps we could work a contract of some sort out."

"I'm not that good, I'm not so sure I can hold up to your expectations, dormleader."

"Please‒ Jade's tastes aren't so bad but Floyd's sense of interior design is abysmal. His idea of interior design is a bunch of half finished snacks decorating the shelf beside his bed. Any help would be wonderful."

A silent laugh shakes your shoulders. "I'll think about it."

The patio door opens again‒ revealing Jack, who waves a hand towards you, and speaks with clumsy hands. "They're cutting the cake (Name)- Azul, you too‒ it's gonna be gone if you stay out here for too long."

"Be right there." You sign, lifting your body from the deck railing.

"Is that sign language? I've never seen it in person." Azul holds the door open for you, allowing you to scurry in with a bow of your head.

You nod. "Writing gets tiring at times. But I'm happy either way people speak to me." There’s a twitch in Azul’s eyes that you catch at your statement, regret tingling at your fingertips making your skin feel raw against your flesh. You squeeze the meat of your palm to ignore it.

"We saved you two some cake~" Floyd summons the two of you with a wave, gesturing to two neighboring seats across from them.

Jade smiles, scooping a part of his cake with a fork. "It's nice that we're back together like this. It seems forever ago that you left the reef (Name)."

"But eight years fly by, don't they? You're going to have to catch me up on all the embarrassing stories of each other."

"Only if you let us in on some blackmail about you (Name)." Floyd reveals his sharp teeth with a wide grin, licking the icing off his fork.

"I will." You write, hoping you can fill their heads enough with the happier moments at your aunt's flower shop and time so far as the NRC gardener, rather than deliberate the disease which flowered in your lungs, the sickness that came with it‒ the surgery, the scarring, the healing‒ your departure from your mother, from your home, from them. The ribbon feels tight on your throat, your smile grows tense on your lips. You try your best to quell the swelling waves of anxiety, eased a bit with the laughter of your friends that rang in your presence once more.

——————————————————

You meet them again at the VIP section of their lounge just a few days later, having planned a date to meet before you went home after the birthday celebration. Though conversation was a bit stiff at first, energy begins to swell in the room as you reminisce the events of your childhood, and the years of adolescence you missed in the 8 years of absence from your hometown. The conversation slowly progresses towards how the three would be able to see you more, shifting back to Azul's proposal to have you come to set up flower arrangements in the lounge.

"How about roses?" Floyd suggests. "Classic. Everyone likes them."

A shrug. "Hm. They're a nice touch‒ but a bit basic. I can add them in, but I wouldn't make them the focal point since there's just better flowers out there."

"What do you suggest?" Azul asks.

You think, flipping through the catalog of flowers in your mind. "Especially for the color scheme of your dorm, I think hydrangeas would be nice. Blue poppies, perhaps some rosemary in there as well. Maybe purple carnation‒” you scribble that last thought away as quickly and vigorously as it came, your throat tightening in remembrance at that thought.

“Those sound great‒ but I want something more elegant looking, the carnations you mentioned would be fitting‒ ah‒ remember those flowers from that story you always talked about? The one about the poetry being written on the petals?”

You were glad he moved from carnations. Besides, purple carnations signified grief and death in some cultures, far removed from the emblem of prayer they were in your culture. “Hyacinths?”

“Precisely. What do the white ones mean?” What about this one? What does this say? How about this, this, and this? You remember the way he pointed to each flower in your encyclopedia lent by your aunt, his small fingers fluttering across the page like a busy little cuttlefish at your riveting explanations. This is this, this and this. There was always a hurry to your words when you spoke to others‒ particularly your mother‒ rushing to seize the brief opportunity allowed for you to speak, but no matter how much you had stumbled over your words in clumsy delight, Azul listened with a smile on his face, making notes on paper for his experiments, words rushing to his hands like a school of fish.

“White ones mean a ‘quiet love’, or ‘love that is quelled’. If you want something with a happier meaning though, I would go with white wisteria, it means sweet nostalgic memories or drunken love; cornflowers‒ delicacy and elegance; or salvia‒ veneration and wisdom. Purple chrysanthemum would be splendid too‒ meaning your wish will come true."

You remember when your mother was kinder, tucking your small, innocent body into her soft arms‒ hushing your cries with a tender whisper. It was without that rattle in your throat she pointed towards you like a knife when you grew from that chaste form, sullied and filled with her disappointment. Your body was tall and flushed with it, but not quite tall enough, not quite curved and plump the way she liked‒ needed you to be to carve her desired image into you. A mirror within a mirror within a mirror‒ mother and child, mother and child. Her words lashing as the waves cracking against the jagged rocks, shaping you into a memorial of her pains, her aching hunger.

But you returned to that far-flung memory of her maternal care, remembering the legend she told you about purple chrysanthemums‒ placing one dearly to your hair, chirping her bright song with a story that was passed from the throat of her mother, to the her ears as a child, blood through blood. This was one of the only memories you remember of her singing not to an audience or a stage‒ but to you, flesh of her womb, skin and bones lovingly mirrored in babbling purity. You trace her unusually soft words with your hand, gliding across the page with the exact pitch of her voice swimming in your mind.

"There's a legend among our kind, of the purple chrysanthemum. We decorate our most treasured people with it, and wear it as a sign of someone watching over you to make a dream come true‒ whether it is a benevolent god, or another person." You pause your writing, the three looking over you to watch you write. "It symbolizes the victory of love‒ its power which pulls the best from you to achieve something as distant as a dream."

Your pen stills. "But‒ I should retract my suggestion. People of other cultures use it to commemorate death, I wouldn't want to offend someone."

Azul is brightened by the way you talk about flowers again, the fragrant morsels on his mind blooming, coloring him vividly in your dazzling artistry. This is this, this, and this. The way you forge lustrous, silent poetry with each careful placement of a blossom amazes him each time, finding your words lingering and echoing in the cove of his mind. "No." His mouth races somewhat brash, he tries again, clearing his throat. "No‒ I trust your initial judgment." He smiles. You trace that mole on his face. "I like it."

"Then it's decided."

Floyd yawns, draping his arms dramatically against the couch, and lulling his head upwards with a sigh. “Ugh. Enough with the flower talk‒ let’s talk about something more interesting.” He flashes a toothy smirk. “(Name), you wanna hear about the time Azul cried so hard he threw up?”

His twin clasps his hands with a similar expression. “Oh, that’s definitely a good one.”

Azul’s eyes blow wide open. “That is absolutely a violation of our contract‒”

“I don’t believe that includes (Name) actually.” Jade muses with a sly grin.

"Why was he crying so hard he threw up??"

The dormleader groans, dropping his hands into hands.

The twins exchange a look before Jade answers. "You, of course."

"Me?" You point to yourself in disbelief.

Floyd chuckles. "He sipped a little wine at the restaurant on accident. Then he starts blubbering about how 'oh I miss them', 'oh remember when they did this', and 'oh‒"

"I think they get the point, brother."

While Floyd ignores his twin in favor of continuing the story, Azul continues to hide his slowly darkening face behind his hands, while you sit, pen hovering over the paper.

“Why?”

The twins blink with a confused expression on their face, while Floyd speaks with a baffled tone. “Ha? Why? What do you mean why?” From the corner of your eye, you see Azul lift his head from his hands to look you, with what expression, you can’t tell‒ training your eyes on the paper with hardened brows, blood tinging on you tongue from the flesh drawn between your teeth.

The pen in your hand hovers above the paper with a soft tremble. Why? Why me? When you left that reef years ago, you left any notion that your presence would be something that would be worth lingering over‒ much more grieving about‒ a thought that was confirmed by the way your mother hurriedly dumped you at your aunt’s flower shop near the somber shores, her frosty gaze and distanced followed by years of inveterated silence as incurable and everlong as the one wrapped around your throat. Like the winter storms on the beach where your aunt's shop sat upon, that silence from your mother, and everyone else for that matter, was as thrashing and unforgiving to your empty ears and throat. There was nothing left for you down there, just memories that would make that scraped dryly against your throat and make you long for something your body was not mended properly for. So the proposition that Azul had felt something towards you‒ so much so that he had shed actual tears for you‒ threatened to bring the nausea deep in your darkened stomach frothing at the surface. You pushed through it, hand gliding clumsily across the paper.

“Never mind, sorry. I should get going soon‒ I’m behind on some duties in at the Botanical Gardens.”

Azul sighs in slight relief, and stands as you gather your things. "I'll see you off." You bid goodbye to the twins, who flash a pointed smile at you while Azul holds open the lounge doors to leave.

“Come back again so we can embarrass Azul more with our stories.” You smile at Jade's words.

Before you pass through the portal, Azul taps your shoulder. He lays his hand flat against his lips, sweeping it towards you. You're taken a bit by surprise, but soon your cheeks ache from the warmth squeezed into them by your curved lips, turning the nausea reaching from your stomach to your chest into something, you think, extraordinary.

You held that feeling in your chest as much as the rupturing threaded into yourself would‒ drinking in the ease of passing clouds and the clemency of rippling seawater tickling the bottom of you feet‒ much too quick, too light, too wonderful to be bound by the chthonic gods. Your heart races with the swiftness of sprightly, sun drunken waves. There was a rising ache‒ knowing your fractured body would splinter before you could swallow this feeling in its entirety, filling you body brilliantly like a blooming chrysanthemum‒ unfurling its divine petals towards all cardinal directions in a form which flared itself every which way. Victory of love. You knew it would not triumph against your fragmentation‒ but despite it all, you smiled stupidly, weaving your florid fingers against his to show him the correct placement of the word.

"Like this." You instruct‒ on his chin, near that dotted mark, then towards you in one motion. The word is practiced twice so you can linger your hands on his own. "Thank you, thank you." You mouth.

The heat of your fingers burns this motion into him, even as you let go. He practices it again, hoping to retrieve your sensation onto his skin with the repeated motion. “Thank you.”

You take your pointed and middle finger to your eye, then glide it towards the tip of your chin with a circle made with your pointer and thumb.

“See you soon.”

——————————————————

Carnations are always a favorite among your customers. The flower of love, of adoration‒ of the gods. They have been woven into hair to commemorate new beginnings, have been rumored to sprout from a devoted mother’s tears faced with her child’s death. Their name comes from carnis, or flesh, from the myth of innocent bloodshed, a shepherd who had his eyes gouged out from a goddess of the hunt, who was displeased by his flute playing which caused the animals of her hunting grounds to be spooked. From his empty flesh, carnations grew, white petals emerging, stained with blood. White carnations typically signify the mourning of lost lives, pure love, unrequited love, loyalty, faithfulness, a mother’s love.

But most of all, it whispers, my love for you is alive. It felt that way when they flourished in your lungs, choking the song in your throat in just a few months after they sowed into your meat. Alive and red and beating so vibrantly against your flesh‒ filthy with the darkened red of your aching insides. They came as impossible heaps from your mouth, emptying quietly as you could in the corner of your room so as not to bother your sleeping mother in the room over. You remember furling your body inward, praying it to become smaller, smaller, smaller‒ quieting your agony, erasing your swaying footsteps to the medicine cabinet, slicing your body up and down into manageable pieces. It was a dance in your eyes you carried everywhere with you that classified every variation of footsteps, the slightest inflection in tone, a twitch of the lungs before it even came‒ so you could shape yourself flat against the sharpened teeth of any who bothered to bite down on your brittle, bitter form, flaying and cleaving your meat carefully to its shape. Your eyes remembered these wounds, reopened and festering against your clumsy stitches to take into account next test‒ next time, next interaction, next opportunity to prove‒ I’ll be better, I’ll prove I am worthy enough to live.

‘You’re so sensitive‒ you would be good with flowers’, your aunt says. Thank you, you gulp in the ache of your disfigurement with pride‒ a medallion passed from your mother, passed from her mother, passed from her own‒ blood through blood it was gifted, and split from your strangled throat. It felt like your body rejected it, but oh, that was the best part of it all‒ more pain, more, more, more‒ something to wear on your skin as a testament to how you’ve been such a good child, to mutilate yourself against anyone’s maws. Something to show, mother, love me for all of these marks prove it, prove that I can cut open myself deep enough to mirror the perfected version of yourself.

Carnations are a symbol of that. People give them as a trophy of love that is agony, love that is alive, love which slaughters. It is a mother's love. They're popular in those early months during the spring, where the flowers devour the corpses mulled over by autumn and winter, chewing and spitting it out with a drunken splendor. As such you had many on hand during these colder months, surrounded by consecrations of this love, thrashing, bursting inside you like sea-brine churned into frothing bubbles, the waves breaking against it swelling them over the edge of the shore. You could feel the eyes of the flowers leering towards you, tightening the ribbon around your neck.

The hand in your pocket reaches towards the heads, your fingers brush against their cold petals. They are worn, withered from the days they have slept stagnant and untouched in their watery casket. You are quick to take them from their bucket, shoving in a bag to be thrown away in the compost, back into the earth to nourish the next generation.

“(Name)?”

Was it already that time already? You had promised him you would meet with him to plan the twins' broomquet after you closed, but the day had waded through you so quickly.

His name, as always, almost makes it out of your throat. But you held the silence in your mouth like your muffled heartbeat, quietly turning to him with weary eyes. He immediately drinks their lorn gaze, before he takes out a small leather bound pocketbook from his inner pocket, flipping through a few pages, returning it to his coat when he finishes reading the contents of the page. With clumsy hands, he signs. “Do you need help?”

You look him up and down, pausing your hands shoved deep inside the bag of wilted carnations. “You know sign language?”

“I learned.” He says sheepishly. “Apologies‒ clearly I haven't gotten too far with it. I don't know some words yet.”

Your eyes widen. “Why?”

He points to his head, then towards you. For. You. I learned for you.

A smile curves on his lips, but you avert your eyes from it. You’re afraid to measure that tinted color on his cheeks, the shape of his softened eyes, the length of his smile the wrong way‒ to take something without anything worthy from yourself to give in compensation, so you take his words instead, knowing you could at least repay them with something much more beautiful, whole. Flowers. You don't look at him. “I could use some help.”

He rolls his sleeves up, takes the carnations in his hands and brings them inside the bag. “What is the meaning of carnations?”

“Love, adoration, ‘my love for you is alive’.”

“Easy to capitalize on. I see why it is so popular.” He takes one between his fingers, twirls it with a sly smile. "I like it."

You return it best you could. “They’re a bit grotesque, don’t you think? The petals are quite unfinished, like they’ve been cut jagged.”

“You don’t like them?”

You remember the day after the surgery, your lungs emptied not only from the lack of carnations taking seed inside of it, but sapped from anything you had felt for your mother. You realized, that day, oh.

It was her all along.

You had searched far and wide for what the cause of your sickness was‒ you had given too much yourself to too many people to pinpoint who you had such feelings for. Your nerves felt exposed to all, to everything all the time, pricked and pinched at any abstruse movement, washing over you like a bloody crusade everytime.

There was nothing written about in the dozens of books, articles, and lyrics you dug up that had said anything about familial love specifically, so it never struck you that it was even a possibility‒ besides‒ your mother loved you, didn't she?

But of course, the carnations‒ of course. Your love for her may have been alive, but so were these flowers, once. Before they were picked from your tendons and emptied from you as rubbish.

The absence of your piteous devotion to her plummeted your heart deep into the ocean abyss, your flesh weighted as a museum of that dance, the butchering of your body, marked up and down with lines which traced the shapes of jaws with surgical precision. If you could not be loved by the flesh which founded your own, surely, it would be a ludicrous dream to wish for any other being to love you at all, to take the weeping, patchwork meat of your body and consume it.

You want to get rid of all these carnations, give them all away at once. Take them, take them all. Yes, your mother would love these‒ yes or course they're a sign of eternal love, pure love‒ anything and everything that is alive, they would be a wonderful gift. You offer them as extras to people, suggest them instead of those beautiful roses or lilacs or lilies. These gifts were never a virtue, but a disguise for the womb of shame you kept awake in your heart. Take them, take it all. Take everything from me.

You smile, squeeze your eyes to mimic candor.

"No, I hate them."

His expression is like sand, shifting in a thousand ways. You try to inspect each grain of lustrous sand to feel how they shape around your words, but always, the waves. Wait here, you tell him, to go toss the flowers back into the decomposing earth to become the blood and body their children will sprout from. 

You set some lavender tea and dandelion honey cakes on the table‒ the bareness of the table is odious to you, sways you with abhorrence. Even with it filled, you sign. "I'm sorry, I wish I had more to offer you."

"This is plenty." He signs. You avert your eyes from that soft smile, but the warmth that bubbles in your chest knows the angle of its curve, the way his mole stretches across his chin, the world in his eyes.

"So, what exactly are you looking for in the twins’ bouquet?”

He thinks, you know he folds his arms to do this. “I trust your tastes. You were always better at reading people than I was.”

“I…” You pause. Yes, the dance‒ breathing in the world raw. But part of it is remaining silent to that ripening wound. “I guess.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“I think blue star would be great. Perhaps some ragwort, and I believe I have some dried sea lavender left from my aunt’s shop. Salvia would be great too, and some Zion, beauty berry as well.”

“What do they all mean?”

“Blue star and salvia mean trust‒ something they are bound by. Zion flowers signify that someone is thinking of you, even if they are far. And sea lavender lets someone know they are thinking of you. Beautyberry means a deep understanding. I can of course fill up the space with roses, some chrysanthemums, of course.”

Azul writes in his small pocketbook, scribbling your words across a page, then another, then another. He was always like this when you talked‒ recording the medicinal properties of plants, committing your sensitives to flowers with a fervor. If you hadn’t known any better, you’d say he was excited by your words, but you didn’t.

“Is it alright if I came and watched?”

“Watched?”

“Yes, if I came and watched you work on the twins’ bouquet.”

“It’s boring work, you would fall‒“

You feel your hands in his, your words quickly swallowed by the warmth of his palms. He speaks with softness which reaches deep within your ears, tingles the back of your neck.

“I think it’s quite brilliant, the way you work.”

You want to clasp your ears shut, squeeze your eyes until you see stars‒ knees tucked into your body, forming an embryo to protect yourself from those words. Your tongue shakes in your mouth. You want to scream at him. However to realize this rejection through your trembling fingers would be to deny him something, even if it was the mangled scraps which make your bundle of flesh. You'd keep this revolution plunged deep inside the heart of your whirling sea, a war raging at your marrow to keep the shores lush with anything he'd wish to take. Take it, take it all.

You're still for a moment. "Have it your way, then."

He smiles, but this time, you can't look away.

——————————————————

When he comes a few days later, he brings tupperwares full of food.

"What's all this? A feast?" You see various dishes from the nights your mother brought you to perform at the Ashengrotto’s restaurant‒ fragrant steamed fish that falls off the bone, crunchy seaweed salad, steaming bowls of fish-broth soup, bursting with flavor.

“My mother’s recipes. Your favorite, at least from back then.” He remembers fondly of the times you would finish performing, joining him at the seat right beside him. You’d point to the aquatic plants, bring him to the magic and wonders of their chemistry, their mythos, your sensitivities to them, the world. He's shaped his shores against the curve of your gentle waves, your words always returning to his sandy beaches to leave a million gifts from the sea. This is this, this, and this. He'd hold each sparkling grain of sand, each seashell nymph like an exquisite pearl, cupping his ears to every single one to catch the whispers of eternity bundled in each of them. No matter how you would run yourself raw against jagged beaches and the maws of dark coves‒ he would remain a mirror to your sun faced sanctuaries, hoping that in this lifetime, you would realize that it was you‒ you all along‒ that he'd chased, parodying your brilliance to finally become himself.

His words almost bring you to tears. You gulp it down with the nausea that rises on your tongue, cindering the muscle with its heat.

"Why are you‒" your hands spit out these words in a fervor. "Why are you so fucking nice to me? What is all this?"

You hate the way his expression softens, the infinite arctic blue which melts against your image, the elation in your chest upon devouring such delectable things. It’s revolting.

"Because…" He begins out loud. There’s breath that swells his shoulders, before he gathers his fingers to a shaking fist, locking it under his chin.

Precious.

You swing your head left and right mutely, wrapping a hand around your neck as if to choke any sound that could be ripped from it. Still, it comes out like dried leaves, a strangled rasp, a whimper which rattles in your tightened throat. You hate how he pulls your trembling fingers from your skin, you hate it. But you let him.

His warmth comes as a cosmic storm stirring the oceans into inescapable waves. You were a fool to even try to shelter yourself from it‒ his tenderness beat against your form so loudly it hurt. You can’t pull away, your body does not let you.

Azul sees the fear that bruises your eyes, the way your chest lurches, in heaving, shuddering, controlled breaths to mathematically contain that terror inside of you. There’s a moment where he suspects himself to be the culprit, the distaste of his form, the vile nature of his weaknesses. But you had always consumed all of him, everything‒ his unsightly body, his awful shortcomings, all of the best and worst parts of himself with what surely was heavenly grace. Everything but his adoration for you, a mirror to your givings to the world, and most of all‒ him. This was something within.

He brings you to a seat, a cup of water to your hands. He lets you take time, sipping the moment in small gulps like the drink he sets in your hands. Silence, even with the lack of words exchanged between you two, was never something which was present when you were beside him. His mind always rushed with thoughts about you‒ all the more louder in the eight years you had been absent from his side. Even then, your likeness was always carved in the back of his mind, coming and going like a haunting oceanfront.

“Do you remember the first day we met?”

You remember. “Tell me.” You sign.

“You saved me from those awful kids, remember? I still got so scared of them I got ink everywhere. You were in such wonderful garments I didn’t want you to get dirty, so I told you to back off.”

His smile makes your own. He continues. “I was such a brat back then‒ even after you fended those kids off I told you to get away from me‒ ‘don’t come crying if I spoil your garments!’” A stiff chuckle escapes your nose as you remember the expression on his face. It was much like your own‒ frightened. “But you told me‒“

“Stain them, I don’t care.” Of course you remember. The surprise on his face, the stutter of his hands as you held them.

“Yes. We spent the whole day together. You took me to the shores for the first time, facing the field of‒ what was it?”

“Memorial roses.”

“Memorial roses. You told me they meant love for the honest form." He drags his gaze from his hands, and into your eyes. "I didn't even see the sun set when you talked about flowers the way you do. All my current knowledge of horticulture comes from you, you know.”

"Surely not all of it."

He shakes his head. "No, all of it. I've inscribed every word you've said to me in my mind and I've carried you with me all those years I spent toiling away in my octopot." The hand he rests on your own warms your fingers. "I have you written all over me."

You grip the heat of your throat, hands heavy as you raise them to retaliate, again. "No. Why would you want‒ ."

"I'm not. Why do you think so?" That softness, again, his eyes. Revolting.

You threw the words from your hands in frustration. Didn't he understand? "Why would you want someone like me to‒ to poison you?"

"I could say the same for myself. Why did you defend me that day?"

You remember the look in his eyes, the way he crouched low to the ocean floor in shame. "I saw myself in you. I couldn't‒"

"You couldn't bare it." He finishes.

"Yes, but you're different. With me, I'm not‒ I wasn't‒ "

"But you aren't different." There's a growing lump in his throat, frustration, heat‒ it rises with the volume of his voice, erupting raw at the back of his tongue. "Why won't you let me show you that you're worthy of the same treatment you give to the world?"

“How could I let you?" Your legs ascend from beneath you, your hands feel hot in the air as you flare them out from yourself, hurling them for Azul to see. "Look."

"Look at me." He would see, finally.

The nail of your thumb digs on your chin as your splayed hand sharply juts from your skin. It says, "My own mother".

You slip the ribbon from your throat, unraveling yourself in front of him. Azul sucks a tense breath in‒ you revel in it, your venerable mirror‒ it breaks against your old stitches, bringing you an ineffable bloom inside your chest. You don’t know if it's pleasure or pain which tightens it, but you feel as living, as chemical, as whole as a flourishing chrysanthemum‒ blazing your florid petals every which way, splitting the bud in a thousand directions. Here is proof. You lay yourself out, to him, flay your fragmentation against his eyes. The wounds burn fresh the air. This was your wish, wasn’t it? Still, the seafoam bursting against your skin, the ache, in waves. You hold the emptiness in your hand triumphantly, or, you try to.

He looks when you tell him to, of course, but the softness in his eyes tightens your chest. He's silent for a moment, thinking. "Aright." Finally, he speaks.

"Will you make a contract with me?"

"...what?"

"A contract. Will you make one with me?"

Your knees fall from you when you lean towards the table in support, seating you in the chair across from him. You open your arms, facing your palms towards him, empty, silent.

"I don't have anything I could trade you."

He reaches towards your emptiness, filling it with his warmth. "Then give me this. If you have nothing, grant me you."

You bring his heat near your face, hoping to harbor‒ at least‒ next to it. You won't take it, you couldn't. The fear laps upon you like stormy waves, it's force tearing your fingers from his. "I don't have enough of myself to give you."

"This." He replenishes the absence in your hands again. "This is more than enough‒ it will always be enough." It's a firm grip, it quells the tremble in your body slightly.

"So, will you make a contract with me?"

Hesitantly, you nod.

He guides you towards the shop window where the flowers swill in the moonlight, violet chrysanthemums shining pearly, plump with their honeyed sap. He slips one between his fingers, holds it between the two of you. "I lied when I said I only liked these. When you tell me of promises of success, of love‒ I feel like I can crack open this world with my bare hands. I don’t just like it‒ everything that comes from from you soars my soul."

He continues, bashfully. You feel filled with his words. "You're my ocean, the waters that shape my shores. You've always been where I belong, and what comes back to me to mold me to what I am even after your physical absence." The heat of his hands feel like fire on your skin as he pulls it towards his own. "This is a contract, a promise. Will you let love victor over you?"

You trace that spot on his face as he smiles, you find the small way that it curves mirrored on your own lips. You drink in his smile, returning it with your own; you breathe his scent in, exhale with the breath in your lungs that stirs his and yours‒ you mold yourself against him like you've done so many times against gnashing teeth and jagged seaside cliffs, but this time, your rolling waves kiss warmly against his sun faced sanctuaries, melding together to refract the light in your joint tenderness. The feeling begins as a seed he implants in your chest, pressed firmly against your heart, and you feel it slowly burst open when it is showered in his gaze, his touch, all of him against all that you can muster‒ an ineffable thing, a bloom which you could never put into words, even with the language of whispering flowers and the spectacular earth. It comes in heaping waves like the tears that draw flushed lines on your face. He takes all which falls from you in his hands, staining his hands with the salty fragrance.

"Stop that. I'll get your hands all dirty."

"Stain them, I don't care."

You sob, you smile harder. The tears make it impossible to neurotically measure the twinge of his muscles, the shape of his expression. But you don't think of this, filled with the knowledge of his tenderness, the precise shape of his smile, the softness of his seaborne eyes that fossilize deep within you. "You know I'll be difficult. I always am."

"And you know this about me to, don't you? But this feeling for you comes as easy as water to me."

It's true what he says, you feel like you're floating‒ weightless in the mild seas, drinking in the sunlight which trickles from the skies. Waves upon waves of this brilliance that tilts the light a thousand ways for you to admire. The chrysanthamum petals seem to widen with his warmth, the same unraveling comes bursting, flowering forward in your chest. Victory of love. It comes not as a whisper this time, but loudly as the beat of your blood. You feel it within you, that victory. At last you hold it in your hands, and it shines and lusters like a brilliant peal seeped into each of its petals, blooming forward with all of its love. You allow yourself place the flower in his hair, decorating his face with your love, your victory.

——————————————————

Notes:

All sign language is based off of American Sign Language

Part of the reason why I wanted to use hanakotoba (Japanese flower language) rather than western meanings for flowers was not only because I was more familiar with it, but because the twins I believe are Asian coded. The Octavinelle dorm is seen as the "yakuza" one (Japanese controlled crime syndicate), since they demand those Azul signs contracts with to pay the price, whether through general intimidation, or just straight up physical violence. Tweels also unfortunately sort of fit into the 'Asian twins' stereotype seen in Disney media (Siamese cats in Artisocats), but their overall design (ie eye shape and bristle-y, straight hair) fit into a pseudo Asian look. You know, as much as the fictional land of twisted wonderland will allow. But either way, I think it would be cool to see different species of seafolk have different cultures, and I think sirens in particular would have their own beliefs, systems, and traditions connected to verbal storytelling.

Not entirely sure if this is the case in the western world, but the east is very sensitive about numerology‒ so “bad” numbers are usually avoided when picking out the number of flowers to give to someone.

Chthonic gods are gods connected to the underworld

Carnations were used in coronation garlands for the Romans

Christians believed that it was the flower that sprouted from Mary's tears after the crucifixion of Jesus

Also associated with Artemis, who gouged a shepherd's eyes out because she blamed his flute playing for the lack of game that day. Therefore, they are a symbol of innocent bloodshed

Carnis, the word which is speculated the word carnation comes from, also means flesh. The genus name Dianthus comes from Zeus, connecting it to his daughter Artemis' story

Memorial Rose (ノイバラ) : In the western world, it is often a symbol of wisdom or talent, used often on literary and musical symbolism by writers such as Goethe. But in Japan, it symbolizes "love for the raw/honest form", as it is usually a wild flower that grows in the plains. Modest, but lovely. In Japan it is also called the ノイバラ or "thorn of the plains", so this modest but definitely still packs a punch. Just like Azul lol

Also often grows in the coasts

Omg I just noticed all of the fics I have written has had a toxic maternal parental figure don’t worry I’ll even it out soon lol

[ooriru]

thinking about how silver and leona are both sleepy people

so.. their interaction w each other....

masterlist

↳ leona barely escaped from ruggie for the nth time and went to find another sleeping spot

↳ stumbled upon silver, who was napping right in his favorite spot

↳ this irked the savanaclaw dorm leader and the fact that silver was malleus' bodyguard made the lion even more pissed. shishishi

"oi sleeping beauty, wake up."

this only stirred silver from his sleep.

"stupid horned bastard and his stupid minions."

leona muttered. his hands reached to intertwine with his hair locks and sighed. he was conflicted between yanking the poor bodyguard or finding a different spot to nap.

"fuck it.. it's time for that lizard to get what he deserves."

a lie, truly. leona was just petty. he harshly pulled silver up by the collar, which awakened the bodyguard and triggered a reflex. leona yelped when silver unexpectedly body slammed him to the ground. a groan can only be heard from the provoker as silver now lies on top of leona.

"leona..? what are you doing here?"

as if he didn't just backflip leona with ease.(don't worry silver, it was just self defense)

"get the fuck off me and scram."

leona growled. to this, silver quickly scurried off of leona and took a quick glance of him before leaving to find malleus. the lion was left sitting on the ground, covered in dirt when ruggie found him. (he was too tired to get up)

"shishishi what happened to you?"

"oh shut it."

© OORIRU 2022

[sinfullyrosey]

[Insert Clever Title]

There aren’t nearly enough fics focused on Yuu/MC/Reader being nonhuman and their interactions with the other human and nonhuman characters. I say that, and yet, I’ve barely written any myself. But I still wanted to contribute, so here are a few ideas I’ve come up with. Feel free to share your own or even use these as prompts. All I ask is to be informed so I can see.

 Lioness!Reader being the betrothed to Leona since they were little and having playdates. Reader loved to playfight with him and would always pin him (like Nala did to Simba). The relationship is basically just like Darek and Odette’s with the whole This is Not My Idea song up until they’re young adults. Leona is in denial of having fallen for you, but can’t help but admire how strong and beautiful you’ve become.

Mushroom Fae!Reader constantly feeling the looming presence of a certain eel follow them around, asking rather strange or invasive questions. It doesn’t help that you’re much shorter than most of the other students, so your legs can’t outrun the much taller student. Eventually, the two of you start to grow closer and the roles are reversed. Now you’re the one following him around and demanding attention due to his greenthumb towards fungi.

Rat/Cayote!Reader having a rivalry with Ruggie, as both grew up poor and had to scavenge for their meals. Reader often would swipe the last sandwich during lunch and Ruggie would pluck every edible plant before you could. However, after you fell ill and were bedridden, Ruggie, surprisingly, left you a bowl of soup, his grandma’s special recipe. After that the two of you become quite the nuisance duo.

((Warning: Gore Mention)) Sea Cucumber!Reader being squeezed by Floyd, only to accidently force them to spit up their organs and other innards, horrifying both him and every nearby student. Reader merely coughs and says they’re fine and can just grow them back, or they can just shovel the old ones back in. Floyd is super over the top gentle towards you after that.

Persian Cat!Reader being one of Vil’s favorite dormmates because of how much you love to be pampered. You’re the most well behaved and spoiled, constantly demanding Vil’s time and attention. You tend to annoy Epel and lose your temper when he picks fights with you, leading to Vil having to scold both of you.

Crow Harpy!Reader absolutely loving any and all things shiny and just swiping jewelry, silverware, and coins from anyone that’s not careful. You eventually taking a liking to Kalim, what with all this jewelry and sunshiny self. He’s more than happy to give you little trinkets and pieces of treasure, while you thank him by preening him affectionately. Eventually, you decide to show him your nest hoard and tell him he’s your greatest treasure.

Insect Fae!Reader terrorizing Jamil, because of course you would.

Orca!Reader terrorizing the Octatrio because killer whales are dicks of the sea and will literally torment their prey for the hell of it and those three need to be taught some manners. Or, alternatively, you work at the Lounge as a bouncer and terrorize everyone else. Either way, somebody is gonna end up your own personal beach ball to throw around.

Just straight up an Eldritch Horror!Reader that takes on the form of an average, unassuming human. Pretends to be normal and weak to not draw attention to yourself, but eventually it slips out here and there the more comfortable you get towards everyone. Your favorite form of affection is when you just unhinge your entire jaw and gently bite down on someone’s head like some extremely weird form of a kiss. Vil especially hates it because how dare you ruin his makeup and hair you interdimensional potato??? ADeuce are the first to learn of your true form and are used to whatever weird, new thing they witness you doing now. Malleus and Lilia are fascinated if anything, if not a bit curious to know if you could actually take either of them on. You also have full on hurled Rook across the track field at least once since he learned of your true form (he provoked you so it’s deserved).

[twistedweels]

Chocolate chip pancakes

So i was making myself some chocolate chip pancakes for dinner and got this idea, so i hammered out this disaster in an hour. set after chapter 6 but no spoilers or really any mentioning of anything. reader perspective, implied reader knows how to cook. reader isn't the air-headed PC that's in the game

A distant but sharp rapping sound alights your ears as you awake, glancing at the clock next to your bed you can barely see in the moonlight. One a.m. Grim is prodding you - what actually woke you up - and is staring at you insistently

“Hey underling, that pretty guy is at the door” he says, clearly also recently awoken.

“Which one?” you garble at him, squinting and trying not to fall back asleep

“Which one? The purple haired one” he says with a pause, clearly not remembering Vils name. How this little rascal can forget nearly everyone's name you meet - including the ones who nearly tore you to shreds - and still insist that he's the boss is beyond you. Something about the underling reminding the boss, surely.

You push yourself up and begin getting out of bed, bare feet hitting the ragged carpet under the bed. “What does he want?”

Grim looks at you in shock “how am i supposed to know that, I didn't answer the door, i just looked out the window”

You stare at the small cat-like creature for a few moments, eventually deciding to give up on asking questions you may never get a reasonable answer to and heading to the door, making sure to slide on the cheap pair of slippers as you go, no needing any splinters.

As you head down the stairs and to the front door, the Knocking continues, honestly getting a tad annoying at this point, and stops once you approach the door. as you debate just trying to ignore the impatient person at your doorstep, a voice calls from the other side. “Prefect, i know you are there, please open up” Vil says, his voice cool and collected as always.

You finally open up. “Is there something I can help you with, Vil? It's kinda late.” You sleepily say as the door finally reveals his face, the door only slightly open so he doesn't get the idea to push his way in like others are so fond of doing.

“Can you make pancakes?” he spurts out, making you pause once again, unsure you really heard what you just did coming from the mouth of The Vil Schoenheit.

“Pan… pancakes?” you sputter out in confusion, and Vil repeats himself, this time with a bit of urgency in his voice.

“Yes, pancakes, preferably with chocolate in them, though at this point i will take what i can get”

Stopping yet again - tonight is getting so weird - you think about what you have in the kitchen. Random pancake mix for breakfasts, check, it's cheap enough to keep on hand. Chocolate chips? Actually also check, since you intended to make some chocolate cookies for ADeuce and the Scarabia boys as thanks for the VDC Fiasco, but haven't gotten around to it quite yet. “Uh, yes, I could probably do that… but uh, why?” you look at him in the eyes for a moment, his eyes pleading at this point.

“Oh, please, I will do anything for you if need be, do you want some skincare products? A recommendation for a hairstylist?” he quickly says before you can get the idea to start closing the door on him. “Please, you are the only one that could help me right now” if he was any other person, his hair would be out of place right now.

You startle a bit before putting your hands up in reluctant acceptance. “Okay, okay, I’ll make some for you, just come in” you pull the door open to let him in before heading to the kitchen, wondering where grim might have gone, but thankful for the quiet. “Do you want something to drink? Water? Milk?”

“Oh, water, please, I don't need to indulge too much,” he says as he settles down at the kitchen table, frowning at the table with one leg shorter than the other, making it wobble. He looks up at you again, at this point looking a bit embarrassed. “Thank you for doing this for me, almost no one in Pomefiore can cook and I can't ask Rook to cook me something like this.”

At this point you've gotten the ingredients out of the cupboards and have wrangled a bowl from the mess of cheap dollar-store kitchen wares. “Ah, it's not too much of a problem, I'm kinda surprised Grim hasn't begged for pancakes or something in the middle of the night lately, he's been pretty tired after everything that's happened” you say as you bring him a glass of water, that he gently sips at.

Both of you go quiet for a bit as you mix up the batter and pour the first scoop into the hot pan, which like clockwork manages to somehow become a sloppy but also partially burnt mess, you scoop it onto an extra plate and look back at him apologetically. “The first one always turns out bad, I'll have a better one in a couple minutes” he cocks a single, perfectly manicured, eyebrow at you incredulously.

“That's fine, honestly I'll take it at this point” he says, a bit on edge at this point. You put the plate on the table with a fork and watch in surprise as he takes a - slightly hesitant - bite, and sighs. “You know it's bad when even this is good to me” before taking another bite of the mess, you shrug before turning back to the pan, pouring in one more scoop.

This pancake turns out just right, and so does the third, quietly stacking them on the other plate before you finally ask “so, pancakes?” bringing the plate over and settling down while the next pancake begins cooking. Vil looks much happier with the new, proper pancakes, sliding one more onto his plate and taking a quick bite, looking much happier than before.

“Yes, dear, even I get cravings sometimes, although usually I ignore them, tonight is a bit different” he sighs again, looking out the window with a distant expression, but doesn’t elaborate until you cock your head at him inquisitively

“I lost another main character role to Neige.”

“Oh… I'm uh, sorry to hear that.” you say, going back to making pancakes. Vil looks at you a little disdainfully

“You don’t get it do you?” he says, clearly a bit too tired to even have too much of an attitude

“Well,” you start, flipping over the pancake you are currently tending to. “I'm not a world famous model and actor who has been training since they were able to talk…” you flop the pancake onto the plate “I'm afraid I don’t get it”

Vil sighs at you yet again, rolling his eyes a bit. “Have you ever wanted something that you try so hard to achieve and yet there's someone in the way?”

You plate another pancake, half way now, and sit down across from him again. “As a normal person, Vil, that tends to happen, well, constantly, so we learn pretty quickly that we have to just do our best to work to our strengths.” setting your chin in your hand you look at him for a moment, him looking back with a rather sour look on his face.

“But I could achieve it, if only they would give me the chance,” he says, stabbing another piece of pancake forcefully.

Now it's your turn to sigh. “And that's what you don't get, Vil. you clearly don’t see what you already have, and what you have the ability to achieve.” He looks at you with a rather shocked expression on his face now, before quickly wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin.

“But of course I realize what i have, and what i could achieve, I’ve done all the things i have, haven’t I? But I want just this one thing more, Just a chance” sadness and frustration is creeping into his eyes. You suppress another sigh.

“And you know what? Most people will not have a fraction, not even a fraction of a fraction of the talent and resources that you have at your disposal. You are incredibly talented and lucky to have all that you have, because most of us will never be able to even imagine having it” at this point you can feel yourself becoming a bit heated, dealing with these talented but ungrateful people over and over can be quite grating.

Vil scoffs at you, rolling his eyes at you. “Well if people would just try a bit harder-”

“It's not about trying harder, Vil, it's just not. Look at me. I will never have magic, ever, there's just no way for that to happen. Some people get lucky, like Neige, and trying hard works for them, but ninety nine percent of the time, that’s just not how it works. I mean sometimes even with resources people can’t accomplish what they want, look at the majority of people in your own dorm, there are a lot of high class, rich people there, but sometimes if you can’t do something, you just can’t, and you should use what you do have.” Vil is fully in shock at this point, his eyebrows raising a bit more with each point you make.

“I mean look at you Vil, you are so good at being emotionally diverse, at acting out these hard to reach feelings, and that's such an asset. You are an incredibly good actor, and honestly putting you in a main role would do nothing but suppress the very talents that you have. Main characters are, frankly, boring, and I would personally kill me to see you in such a shallow role." By the time you finish your rant, you are breathing rather heavily, and before Vil can retort, you quickly stand up to get yourself a drink and to get Vil to think about the things you’ve said.

After a few moments at the sink, you quickly go to save the pancake that you forgot in the pan before it burns. Vil is quiet the whole time, staring deeply into the glass of water you gave him with a distant but intense expression.

“Do you really mean all of that?” he finally asks, after you set down another batch of pancakes and take a seat. Still staring into his glass of water.

You sigh and put your head in your hands “yes I meant it, I wouldn’t have said it if i didn’t mean it”

“You seemed pretty upset” he finally looks up at you again

“Just because I’m a bit upset doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking straight” you say, looking at him as well

There's a quiet moment of introspection between the both of you, before you hear the pitter patter of feet on wood and cringe as the loud voice fills the kitchen

“Underling! Why didn't you tell me you were having something to eat! I want some too!” Grim says in his usual loud voice, breaking the almost pleasant silence that had come over Vil and yourself.

“Of course, there's enough for everyone. I have a fresh plate for you right here, Grim.” you say while you roll your eyes so only Vil can see, earning you a muffled chuckle.

Vil finally stands up and begins to put on his jacket. “Thank you for humoring me prefect, the pancakes were delicious.” he heads to the doorway “no need to see me out, I know the way”

“Ah, yeah, no problem, see you later” you stumble over your words at his sudden departure.

After stuffing his face full of pancakes for a few minutes while Vil says goodbye, Grim finally pipes up with “So what did he want anyway?”

“Not much, don’t worry about it Grim” you say, shaking your head at the Cat, who just shrugs and goes back to chowing down on his pancakes.

[chenya-my-love]

Fictional Yuu

I see a lot of people basing Yuu off of characters on TV and in games. They'll have characters (usually Idia) make refrence to this fact but usually in just a throw away line. But nobody really leans into the idea of Yuu actually coming from some fictional media in Twisted Wonderland.

Like imagine some character like Cater, or maybe Vil while advertising the VDC, posting a photo with Yuu in it. Only for some random account to comment "That's an amazing cosplay, it looks so much like the character". And of course they're confused, they keep looking for who in the photo is cosplaying but nobody is there. Eventually just asking the commentor who was being cosplayed. The comment is simple.

"Right next to you. That's Yuu from (insert anime/game name here)". They don't believe it until they look up the listed media and sees the character they think Yuu is cosplaying and are shocked. They look identical to Yuu (except animated). Their name, looks, and personality are all identical to Yuu. It is Yuu.

I see two (techincally three) routes this could go. A RomCom route and an angst route.

The romcom route revolves around Yuu having a canon love interest making the boys jealous (regardless on whether they entered a relationship yet or the plot was still building it up) and trying to imulate them.

Like all the wikis say that Yuu's feelings blossomed after the love interest nursed them back to health when they were sick, so the moment Yuu gets sick the boy is just rushing to Ramshackle to take care of them. Or if Yuu caught feelings first and it was some romantic moment, the boys try to emulate that scene so Yuu will fall for them too.

But than we have the angst routes.

A scenerio where all the boys decide to watch the anime/play the game that Yuu is from. Only for Yuu to catch them, quickly learning that they're fictional.

Yuu realizing that all their memories were made up, and if their a playable character all their actions were being controlled. That all their suffering was pointless, that it was done simply to make them more interesting or to entertain a bunch of other worldly beings that Yuu didn't know existed.

Yuu having an breakdown over everything. Their life isn't even their own.

Or

While learning about Yuu's world and story, they learn Yuu dies. And not just a shock value death that could be removed from the plot without care, their death is important. Their death leads to the ending whether that be Yuu sacrificing themself for the greater good or Yuu's death motivating the protag to take down the villain.

All that matters is that Yuu dies and Yuu needs to die. The story can't progress without Yuu there.

The boys realizing that if they send Yuu back to their world, their pretty much signing Yuu's Death Certificate. And Yuu doesn't know. The boys now know that Yuu is doomed by the narrative and is destined to die in the end, but Yuu doesn't. They can't even tell Yuu cause Seven only knows how Yuu will take the news that not only are they fictional but they're also destined to die.

[z3rinn]

# #. MASTERLIST !!

# #. TWISTED WONDERLAND

gasp ! there's only one bed !?

- sharing a bed w/ the dorm leaders !! fluff, wc 1.7k !!

grocery store !!

- heartslaybul - octavinelle scenerios !! going grocery shopping w/ them is uh- wc 2k !!

grocery store pt. 2 !!

- scarabia - diasomania scenerios !! going grocery shopping w/ them is uh pt. 2- wc 2.7k !!

strawberry shortcake !!

- adeuce (separate) making a cake w/ them !! fluff, wc 950 !!

the cat ? or me ?

- you and idia get a cat... but hes jealous of it. fluff, wc 440 !!

i bid you, goodnight !!

- leona and malleus, saying gn to them !! fluff, wc 960 !!

midnight thoughts.

- deuce knows emotions can hurt, like love. angst, wc 470 !!

horror flick !!

- all scenarios !! what's it like watching a horror movie w/ them?

if you seek amy !!

- all scenerios !! would they react to the song if you seek amy ??

bathtub mermaid.

- octo trio !! the beach has been becoming a scarier place after finding a scale. wc 1.4k

first date !!

- heartslaybul - octavinelle scenerios !! where do they take you out on your first date ? wc 4.3k

doing their makeup !!

- nrc first years !! doing their makeup during a monthly ramshackle sleepover !! wc. 1.3k

# #. LINKED UNIVERSE

- cots and cuddles !!

- sharing a bed w/ hyrules heroes !! fluff, wc 1.5k !!

- I want you more.

- link finds out the librarian he's pining after has a lover. yandere, wc 2.7k !!

©z3rinn

[xkotaro16w]

Hellooo, I would like to request short scenerio/reaction ehe~

Imagine during night time, Leona having a hard time to sleep as usual, so he decided to go to botanical garden. At there, he meet S/o who is also having hard time to sleep too. What will his reaction be?

Thank you for writing amazing fanfics as always!!^^

—𝙻𝚎𝚘𝚗𝚊 𝙺𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚊𝚛 𝚒𝚜 𝚂𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙼𝚎𝚎𝚝 𝙶𝙽!𝚂/𝙾 𝚆𝚑𝚘'𝚜 𝚂𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝙱𝚘𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝙶𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚎𝚗—

Summary: Scenario/short scenario where Leona is sleepless and decides to go to the Botanical Garden. He meets his GN!S/O there who’s sleepless as well.

Pairing: Leona Kingscholar x GN!S/O.

CW: Fluff/comfort, grammatical error, OOC.

A/N: OMG- This’s just me rn, SLEEPLES, I HAVE 2 MANY ENERGY HELP AJHWEVAWFMNHVAMWHFAVBFMH (˶‾᷄ ⁻̫ ‾᷅˵) How 2 sleep 101 EHE ( ｡ •̀ ᴖ •́ ｡) Anyway THX A LOT 4 UR WORDS SAMBFHBAFB Im still improving my writing cz i changed my style after i made this blog ༼;´༎ຶ ۝ ༎ຶ༽ I HOPE U LIKE THIS-

Leona loves to nap. It’s a general information about him. The whole NRC knows about this. He spends his time napping every time he has the opportunity. It’s hard to get him to go to his classes. Even Ruggies gives up easily.

It’s rare to see an unmotivated lion becomes sleepless. Only he knows the reason. He never wanted to tell anyone about this. If he feels not good, not feeling well as in having a bad mood, overthinking, negative thinking, or perhaps something else, he feels irritated and sometimes sleepless.

If a nap makes him feel better, sometimes it doesn’t. He keeps his feelings to himself and there are times when those feelings overflow turns into anger, insecurity, fear, etc.

Leona’s not good with expressing his feelings in words, but his actions tell otherwise. But the good thing is that he feels comfortable to reveal it to you. Not always and it takes time.

Tonight, is one of his sleepless days. He moves to face the window and tries to sleep. It doesn’t work at all. This bothered him a lot. Why tonight of all nights? As he sighs, he gets up and remembered there’s only one place where he usually takes a nap.

The Botanical Garden.

The lion goes out from his bedroom and walks to the garden. A yawn escapes from his mouth. Perhaps he could sleep there. However, he didn’t expect to see a certain herbivore to be there as well, yes, you.

“Leona?” You see him open the door and walk inside the garden.

“What are ya doing here, herbivore?” His face looks sleepy yet he couldn’t sleep.

You explain him that you’re feeling sleepless. Oh, so you too, huh. He’s not surprised to his S/O feels sleepless, but he’s worried. The beastman lets out a sigh and sits beside you. He leans on you and position himself to hold you. Well, it’s rare to see him here this late and so you ask him.

Gosh, the Leona Kingscholar feels sleepless? Now, he worries you. A growl of a lion reaches your ear when you ask him what’s wrong. Even the lion beastman can feel sleepless. It must be hard for him.

There’s no such as a perfect king. Even the king of the beast has their own hard times. The king needs your presence right now. Your presence is a comfort to him. You don’t have to say a word for now. save it for the morning.

A soft palm gently pats his head. It drives him to the world of dreams more and more. The Botanical Garden is very serene and quiet. His steady breathes and his sleep face next to you make you sleepy as well.

Sleeping with him is always comfortable. Your eyelids start to close. Its touch lulls you to sleep as well. It’s not that bad to sleep in here just for tonight. In the morning, be prepared to feel the embarrassed, because a teacher finds the two of you sleeping in the garden together overnight.

I DO NOT OWN TWISTED WONDERLAND & DO NOT REPOST MY WORKS.

[loreilane]

❛❛ 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐬, 𝐈 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐲 𝐨𝐰𝐧,❜❜

═══════════𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪════════════

𝗜𝗡𝗧𝗥𝗢,,

Welcome to my blog! Where stories of WLW and NbLW will be the main focus. There will be genderbends and even slightly suggestive works! I hope you enjoy!

═══════════𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪════════════

𝗡𝗔𝗩𝗜𝗚𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡,,

tags; #enter; nonnie , #enter; name , #enter; writing , #enter; rambles , #enter; important

masterlist; nothing here to look at, it seems...

anon list; nothing here to look at, it seems...

═══════════𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪════════════

𝗙𝗔𝗡𝗗𝗢𝗠𝗦,,

ever after high , monster high ,

fairy tail , jujutsu kaisen , demon slayer ,

records of ragnarok , my hero academia ,

twisted wonderland , hetalia

south park

═══════════𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪════════════

𝗪𝗥𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚,,

feminine characters , female readers ,

gender neutral readers , scenarios ,

headcannons , poly scenerios ,

lgbtq themes , au's ,

poc friendly reader inserts , ocs'

monster! character , genderbends

═══════════𓆩ꨄ︎𓆪════════════

𝗗𝗡𝗜 𝗖𝗥𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗔,,

Transphobes, homophobes, any sort of terfs! I do not allow any sort of hate on my blogs, so please do keep from it.

©️ this account belongs to @/loreilane please do not copy any works or creations of this creator

[jadeeababee]

!!Bad b1tch sh1t right here!!

||"Never had a b1tch like me in you're life"||

About the host

⊹Jade⊹18⊹capricorn⊹fanfic writer⊹I will mostly write for POC⊹We here to vibe tf outtt⊹she/her

✩rules for writing✩

No r@pe

No incist

Nothing underaged

Stay positive

https://www.tumblr.com/new/ask/jad

✩what I write✩

Black butler

jujustsu kaisen

twisted wonderland

Helluvaboss

Haikyuu

my hero academia

https://www.tumblr.com/new/ask/jadeeababee

Please feel free to request. At this moment I have an idea of who and what I want to right about, but it would be helpful to have scenerios. This will be the first time im officially starting an account for writing. I'm doing this mostly for fun, so I'll try to be online as much as I can. But anyways remember Jadee luvs you <3

-jadeeababee

[mariondeux]

RULES!

• Please be specific in your request! I may have a hard time thinking of something for them if it’s vague. Especially if it’s just “(character name) + (genre)”

If I can’t think of anything for your request I’ll eventually delete it.

You can use this template for example! ;

(Character name) + (written out scenerio) + (genre/elements) + (whether you want a headcanon or drabble)

Please do this!! This will take me faster to write your requests, right now I am having this problem of struggling to think of a scenerio for some of your requests that I really want to write!

• I will only write x reader! I will not write ships.

• I have the right to refuse a request. If it doesn’t pique my interest or I just don’t want to write it it will be deleted.

• I will only write male, transmale, and gender neutral readers

• PLEASE specify the gender of the reader in your request. If you do not the reader will automatically be male. Also, I am not comfortable writing fem-aligned readers so if you do request that I will delete your request.

• Unfortunately, at the moment I do not write for Dominant and top readers, I’m not interested in that field nor am I experienced in it.

• The character limit is 3! I will also accept an entire unit and dorm. I will also age up 16+ characters.

• I can write SFW, NSFW, Dark Content, Suggestive, Angst, headcanons, gore and light gore, drabbles/scenerios, and alternative universes.

• I will NOT write platonic, inc*st, self-h*rm, s**cide, eating disorder, mental illness, disorders, heavy gore, scat, piss kink, vomit, nacrophilia, p*d*philia, ageplay, age regressing, raceplay, stuff like that.

• Examples of NSFW and dark content I can write are Stepcest/Pseudo-incest, Somnophilia, Teacher x Student(legal), corruption/manipulation, virginity loss, aphrodisiac, A/B/O dynamics, drunk/high sex, Breeding, Size difference, spit kink, dub-con/non-con, sex tapes, yandere, mindbreak, predator/prey, sex pollen, knife play, blackmailing, cheating, and the list goes on.

FANDOMS I WRITE FOR ;

Ensemble Stars!

Twisted Wonderland

THE ONLY CHARACTERS I WILL NOT WRITE FOR IS TORI HIMEMIYA, ARASHI NARUKAMI, AND ORTHO SHROUD

I write at my own pace and when I get the motivation to, so please be patient with me!

[yuufujimaru]

Snippet from Mirror, Mirror on the Wall-Within a Future Chapter

“You know I really, really, REALLY am trying to figure out if you are serious or you’re just good at throwing everyone off right now.’ 

“Huh? Whatever do you mean? I am just trying to be friends with Vil-San! He’s been my hero-” 

“Wow, you really are an arrogant ass. You must have done a lot of research to be able to seamlessly pick apart Vil you know? And make it seem like you’re naive is a bonus too, really know how to rile him up.” 

“I want to be his friends! He needs good friends in his life-”

“Stay away from Vil. I mean it. I don’t want this ‘I can be a good friend bull’ that you’re trying to pull over both me and him but he’s fine the way he is. Keep promoting your stupid half baked song though. I’m sure you just hoping to edge out over Vil.” 

“...you don’t know anything about me.” 

“I know your type though. So back off, you just being you is painful enough to Vil.” 

“Tch...Don’t know why my agency offered you a spot.” 

“And I don’t know why they cant see past that stupid facade of yours, but I digress. And don’t worry, I rejected the offer. Vil’s company offered me a MUCH better deal and I can have a solo campaign as well; instead of being forced to work with you all the time. Better for when I strike out on my own eventually.” 

“Your so arrogant!” 

“I could say the same!” 

“Potato! Come here now! Neige! Please, don’t hinder my Potato! We have things to do for VDC.” 

“Coming Vil.” 

“V..Vil..San...” 

[yomogi-mogi-mochi]

Merciful Crusade

Pairings: Jamil x Shikigami MC

Summary: The life of a shikigami, or a ceremonial servant spirit was a threadbare one. The small world you scarcely lived consisted of hard, earth‒packed walls framed tightly against a small cedar cell, illuminated only by the lonely starlight during your sleepless nights. Despite your human body, you’re almost certain you’ve never felt the blood move and warm your body in such a way that would indicate that there had ever been a human heart‒ having spent too much time gilded with a hardened iron face to even feel it if it had been there. Jamil‒ who untethers you from the spell that binds you to your onmiyoji master‒ becomes a peculiar mirror in your new life that reflects your choked breaths and measured footsteps. It never bothered you when your own body smothered what was left of your vitality‒ but when you watch Jamil from a distance, knowing the way he classifies each movement, the strangle of his muscles‒ something inside you aches. You don’t know why.

Tw: Mentions of Child abuse/abuse, references to slavery, references to dissociation, references to dissociative amnesia/amnesia, references to anxiety

GN terms for MC

AO3 Link Here.

Masterlist.

——————————————————

"Do not fail me."

You bow forward, on your knees, palms to the gravel, neck cooled from the moonlight. Practiced, perfectly paced breaths, mathematically measured strain of your muscles. It must all be still, perfect as your master always instructs with every narrowed twitch of his eyes, the tightening grip on his staff prepared to unleash his flurry of magic. You had felt it before, the fire of his skillful hand on your skin, bubbling the flesh, and every fiber of your muscles parting with his lashing hands. So you've burned these precise movements, each counted breath, to your body tightly wound to still any mistake, any fear that may escape it. Servant spirits do not speak, tremble, or bleed without the permission of their Onmiyoji masters, however‒ your body once human‒ would shake if you didn't hold the tightness in your shoulders at the center of your stomach, the lurching muscles of your spine. 

  "Leave." He dismisses with a whirl of his hand which cuts through the air. 

  You do as you are commanded, leaping onto your feet and back to the hall of mirrors to head to the Scarabia dorm. The halls are hollow and whistle somberly with the breeze that runs through, and you glide with that sound to reach the boy's room with muted footsteps. Somber indeed, if the word poured from the mouths of wives and neighbors and kings and queens of the lives you had taken were true to its meaning. Another night, another prince's blood is spilt. However practiced, every movement and decision must be performed with quick execution and precise resolution before you disappear like the stars washed from the bleeding morning light. 

  The knife in your hand molds against your grip as you creep into the room‒ the boy sleeping peacefully in his plush pillows and rich fabrics, sunken deeply into slumber. His soft breaths tickle your hand like a fluttering bird as you hold the cloth just above his lips, before you hands work quickly to press it firmly into his airways, filling his lungs with the chemical of your master's making. He takes a brief second of conscious struggle, widening his eyes with panic, but he soon succumbs as they always do‒ eyes rolling back with an idle slump before all the muscles of the body grew limp. You take the blade to his throat, promising a quick death with the angle of which is pressed into his bulging vein. A deep breath in to draw the sharpness quickly in one sweeping motion. 

  But you are stopped by a stony grip and a cold voice which coils around your spine, sending a cold shiver down which you swallow through your taut muscles the best you can. 

  “Stop right there.” 

  In an instant, you leap backwards, body lowered to the ground prepared to take down your obstacle. 

  “Look into my eyes.” 

  They're all the same‒ woven with greed, with false hope, fear‒ all of the rotten fruit which bears heavy on humanity before you bleed every lustrous thing out of them. You always look at their eyes with great indifference as you do with most things, knowing no matter how much they thrash their body and rip terror and mercy through their throat‒ a single motion of your hand would empty them out of such things, as swift as dark wings that claws rotten flesh clean from breaking bones. 

  But you are met with all the silvery glitter of ebbing stars. 

  It is of course not his magic he casts which stills your hand a moment in the air‒ your current status as spirit assured that‒ but the world within the delicacy which projects this spell. Like the thousand colors of heavenly bodies and roaring comets, you think. The allure which trickles between the thick cedar bars of your cell every night‒ the only beauty you know of. And now its greatness was closer than ever, you didn’t know how quite to react other than to stare back dumbly. 

  "Put the knife down and step away‒" 

  You fling yourself towards him in that instant, scraping the skin where the largest vein lies beneath with a lightfast motion, and knocking the wand in his hand. He is quick on his feet, shifting backwards with fluid movement, before he jumps back towards you like a striking serpent‒ pinning one arm down and using his other hand to bring your knife down towards your shoulder. You catch his wrist with the thrust of your elbow, the knife inches away from your palm. 

  "That should have worked on you…"

  This would have to be dealt with quickly. 

  "Your abilities only work on humans, am I correct?"

  He is startled by the rasp of your voice. "Yes. But…"

  In the midst of his confusion, you rammed your hand through the tip of the blade, grabbing his hand with the same hand that tore to pieces with blood and sinew. You flipped him to the ground, pinning his hands to the ground in the same way he had with you. You felt a swift kick to the stomach before you could properly pin his legs down with your own‒ flying towards the wall with his knife still lodged in your hand. Yanking it out with a bloody tug, you resumed a low stance to charge him once more. 

  "You are insane." He says, disgust in his eyes. 

  You leaped at his throat again, while he dodged your tactical violence with a strained breath. Good, he was beginning to waver, you thought. But just as that thought passed, you felt him snake around your form, behind your neck with a prepared fist. Feeling it prickle the hair on your neck, you jumped back, at the ledge of the window to regain your composure. But before you could even grip the handle of your knife properly, you felt your body tipping backwards towards the sky‒ a gust of wind pulling at your spine. 

  As you fell, you tried to think of something, anything, you could measure your life with. But there was nothing, only threadbare blankets of meaning and will. You’ve heard the sputtering nonsense of men you had failed to kill swiftly, recounting their husbands, their wives, their mistresses, their friends, and their children as they choked out their last breath‒ but nothing of that sort came to your mind, just the disappointment adorning your master’s face‒ and ‒ the unyielding excellence of the night sky. You'd never have to face that fury anymore if you succumbed to it‒ so you let your head dip into the dazzling starlight weaving their path like turbulent waves through the darkened sky, prickling in their evanescent virtuosity. You were glad at least to recognize such beauty by the end of your life, and see it at last beyond your cedar cage. Scorching those prickling lights into the flesh of your eyelids, you let the fall embrace your body, diving down. 

  But you soon realized the darkness you had laced into the eyes of many dead did not come. You looked up, the man grasping your hands, plump veins threading his strained arm. The knife in your hand was nimble, quick to stab through your own and into his, knowing the likelihood of his arm giving before he could pull you up. But he whacked the knife out his skin and from your hand, cupping it over yours to begin pulling you up and inside. 

  "You are fucking crazy. Do you want to die or something?" 

  You didn't want anything, but you especially didn't want to anger your master. And it would anger him very much if you left evidence, and especially if you failed this task and came back alive. But you suppose it wouldn’t make much of a difference if he ended your barren life. 

  You laid limp in his hands, until he dragged you over the ledge of the window, toppling your body onto the floor with a thud next to his. With no weapon, you could resort to your bare hands, so you prepared both of your bloodied limbs, cracking your fingers in the air as your knife sharp nails gleamed with red even in the cool blue of the moonlight. 

  However, you felt the man's feet sweep under yours, knocking you off your center and smashing your face into the ground. Quickly, you raised your stance, ignoring the blood that dribbled from your forehead and nose before returning the favor to his own feet, dragging your battered body towards the boy’s sleeping one. All you would need is a single hand‒ if your other limbs and face came as an expense, so be it. You felt a tug at your pants. 

  The man let out a groan. "Just. Stay. Down already!" 

  Your eyes slanted towards his body, as he began to rise off the floor, and away from the carpet. Something tugged inside you, but you let him, heaving your body towards the prince. But the fabric moved from under your feet, catching you in its constructing embrace. You looked down, finding your body completely restricted by a rough fabric that seemed to be wriggling against your rebellious arms. 

  The man tipped his head back in relief, slumping his shoulders down. "Thank the great sevens for this carpet. Kamil is so going to be hearing about this tomorrow morning. As for you…" You stared with a wicked violence in your eyes, daring him to lay a hand on you again, You’d tear out from this fabric and rip everything in your sight to shreds. "Ugh you have such unsettling eyes. It would be better if I just brought you to Crowley. I don't get paid enough for this." He retrieved his wand off the ground, waving it in front of your eyes. You barely fought the phasing darkness that eclipsed your vision, before you fell completely into it. 

——————————————————

   Shikigami don't sleep, so you don’t dream, usually. Today you won’t either. 

  But some nights in your cedar bared cell, you would press your ear to the earth, feel when it would rumble in its arcane voice that rippled like a heartbeat in the hard, earth-packed floor. You’d imagine the heart of the earth, writhing with molten rock, and the way it would hiss feverishly when it met the polluted air above ground‒ beating especially fast during the moments you’d feel it growl against your flattened cheek. The song, and blood of the earth, raw. The dried roots hanging from the ground would be traced by your fingers, as you’d imagine surpassing the curtain of flesh and bone to dive deeper into that beating earth‒ feeling that heart closer, trailing the way the movement would hammer throughout your body. Beyond all that tightness, the pain you would trickle from, back into the heart of the earth. 

  You’d never felt a beat closer than the one beyond your reach, deep under the ground. But when you felt like you needed to hear the sound of your own heartbeat you’ve never heard‒ you would imagine yourself feathering into the earth to feel it.

  “Hey. Wake up.” 

  You wince slightly from the bright daylight entering what appeared to be an office room, blinking to adjust your vision unaccustomed to seeing the rays of the sun. The halls at your master’s abode had always been shrouded in darkness‒ either through the veil of night, or the washi paper dyed dark that showed itself only slightly against the solid shoji frames. Nonetheless, you do everything in your draining power to flatten your expression solid, chilled, against peering eyes. It seems that is all you can do against the three which stand before you, your body and hands bound tightly against the chair you were sat on. 

  “They don’t look threatening at all Jamil!”

  The boy you had been sent out for is still alive, as carefree and sprightly as he was the weeks and months you had observed him. Your eyes swim throughout the room and to the three who stand before you, your mind racing to look for a weapon, a human error, a crack in their facade you could thrust into and to break their bodies‒ to at least finish the bare minimum of your master’s bidding. 

  A man in a mask stands between the two younger men with a file in his hands. “Hm. I’m looking through their files and they seem like they’ve been enrolled normally, a late enrollment, but nothing too suspicious in their file…” 

  “Still‒ this matter should be investigated properly. I will send a message to the Al-Asim family for any resources you need to do so.” The man you fought yesterday rubs his injured hand as he glances at the file, before he flickers his eyes to your form, stilling your wandering eyes in an instant. 

  “Don’t bother looking for an escape. Even you won’t be able to escape those bounds.” 

  You feel the knot of your hands, and you know it well‒ the one the guards use in your cell during nights they particularly felt they needed to release some pent up stress. 

  “Will you dispose of me?”

  “We’re not gonna kill you if that’s what you're asking.” The ivory haired boy answers. His companion sighs a bit at his words. 

  “Kalim, ignore them.” His words fall sharply against your steely gaze. “Who sent you?” 

  You still yourself to silence, returning his question only with unblinking, vacant eyes. This was the best choice, you think, having never had to make this decision before‒ you’d be dead soon after if you had failed to protect your Master’s confidentiality. Perfection or failure‒ that thought had already fettered in your mind, tingling at the back of your neck as if to recall its previous sanctions. Though, you suppose the silence that slated your mouth shut at this moment would be able to prolong that inevitability of suffering. Jaws clamped, shoulders snared, eyes clenched so tightly you saw bursting stars. Those raging bodies could fashion something from that petrified tensity, purifying it to gild yourself in an impenetrable alloy. Still, a hammer is a hammer‒ it could still shape and scar the metal, however impervious.

  You breathe, in, out‒ expelling some of the tightness in your aching back. It always came, always. Reliving those things in this moment would be carving this tomb of a body into more of a museum of yourself. It would soon come, but you’d be steely, cold, by then‒ you had plenty of time. It would come, but not now, you reminded yourself. There was time to strip yourself raw of any feeling. 

  The masked man sighs. “Clearly this isn’t going anywhere. So I’m going to put you in charge of this…” He looks you up and down. “…fellow. Until I get someone to investigate this matter more deeply.” 

  “Of course.” 

——————————————————

   Your master visits that night.

  You've exhausted yourself thoroughly by the time the moon slits itself brightly against the night sky. You don't know whether your fatigue comes from your attempts in unbinding your limbs, or from your still racing mind‒ either way, your body had readied itself for all of your damnation tonight, slumped and sapped of sensation and feeling. But even between your phasing consciousness, you could feel the dreadful drag of his robes, the vivid power swelling with each step he takes towards you‒ a high tide of terror suspended over you before it all came crashing down with a grip to your scalp. 

  Your vision is burnished from a flame coiled around his hands‒ a herald for the burns to come. It eats away at your clothes, and then rages against your skin, splitting it open like seeds, sowing the ache of tomorrow. But right now, you focus on unfeeling all of that‒ jaws clamped, shoulders snared, eyes clenched so tightly you see bursting stars. Unfeel it. Unfeel. A prayer, if you knew the word. 

  “You have disappointed me one last time.” 

  Your master never taught you how to shape decadent words with your mouth. Your tongue was cut and hammered for concise, sparse‒ cold, metallic language‒ please, thank you, yes, forgive me, Master, my apologies. 

  Mercy. 

  That was not one you had learned from him, but had heard so countless times before you had taken the lives of many‒ the word embossed in your mind so deeply it had finally carved itself out to take shape on its own. You thought yourself ready for all of this, but something climbs from your throat. Mercy, mercy, master, mercy‒ the word ran forward on your tongue like an undammed flood, the sound of your voice so frail and winded having been gnawed every waking moment you stood hardened at your master’s feet. You barely recognize it against the thundering of your blood. When he reaches to your throat, palms adorned with the inferno of his abhorrence‒ you rip that word from your cords towards anything you may have the capacity to believe in ‒ a god, a martyr, some mythical beast‒ something that had never shown itself in your life that may present itself in this very moment. 

  Mercy is not of the servant words. He spits, "Failure". Your kind were to take punishment of the sacrilege that was your very existence with thanks, not some wailing perversion of humanity. Still, you break through to cry that word. For hope, or some dwindling attachment to life you do not know. You were reborn without will, no fire, no warmth, and you know the stars do not answer to those who have no heart. But still, you cry. You cry. 

  “Trespassers aren’t welcome here.”

  The roaring scald at your skin stops for a moment, leaving only the aching blister hissing against the air. You cast a fading look to Jamil, who stands behind your master with a wand in hand. 

  “Look into my eyes.” 

  You call to mercy, and it comes in his words. 

  “The person reflected on your eyes is your master. Answer if you are asked, obey if you are ordered."

  The magic takes its time to coil within your master, ever a stubborn mind. But when it does, you feel a lightness within you, and for a second you think it's the trick of the torrid ache that bleeds you dry of life, or the released pressure from your throat that is the cause. That is until you hear the words that follow.

  "Free them. They are yours no longer."

  No, that lightness was very real. It bleeds within your chest, for once, the weight in your lungs as you breathe in, out dwindles. You listen again to his words which echo in your mind, then you realize. He had released you from your master's contract. 

  You let the darkness welcome you as it always has, untethering all the stiffness that binds you. It slips between your cracks like smoke, and you feel as wild and boundless as the roaring starlights. You hold onto the feeling as tightly and as long as you can before it slips, and ciders, as all things do. 

   Shikigami are bound to their master for life, but you're a unique case, you've heard. It was through those cedar bars tipped to the night skies where you hear whispers and hushed words during night patrol‒ the gossip of the many hands and blades which were under your master's rule. Usually, they are about trivial human affairs‒ what to eat that night, who to bed, who to rage against. But you’ve heard, once.

  That one is strange, once human. Once like us. Now…

  You're instructed by your master to keep your head down, bowed to the gravel and tethered low to the earth. It is where you belong. He snarls, driving it further towards the filth. You know to do this for all who work in the great mansion‒ but there was once, when you were younger, a time you had flashed the vacancy of your eyes towards a general. You didn't think much of the tremble of his chest, the disgust twisted in his face and the weak sting of his hand when a fist knocked you to the wall. It’s just how it is.

  You don't know, but you think your master has done worse. You had never measured the strength of fist against your flesh against each other‒ it was useless to dwell on it‒ much easier to swallow all of it the same way, deep into your dark belly. But when word soon found its way to him, you found this to be untrue. Humans are capable of so much more. There was pain beyond comparison.

  That night turned out to be only the rehearsal for many more to come, a harbinger to the trick you embedded in every movement, every bow, every breath. A trick of petrification‒ knowing the taste of blood through teeth, tongue, and flesh, how to swallow it in silence. When the flaying began that night you’d learn how to snare every muscle in your body inwards, drive that agony deep within that fossilized density, shove your face deep in the corner‒ take the pain and hide the face of it. Soon, that face began to fade all together, you’d soon forget how to shape your features in a way that wasn’t thickset iron, that bent and molded against every crucible that scorched and tempered, remaining the same insipid gray no matter how many times it would be hammered and fluxed into any shape. If you’d concentrate enough, you may taste the fragrant blood from your body‒ but you’d swallow it as soon as it came before its flavor could meet your mind. 

  Once like us. Not any more. 

  Men slept so soundly at night once you had shown you'd drag yourself through the halls beating after beating like a rotten corpse‒ heaving behind thrashed skin and filthy blood even with it all nearly being drained from you.

  Like us, but no longer.

  They'd often take turns with their own fists, their own blades, chattering with laughter at your limp form, their inhuman brutality spilling endlessly out from them like buzzing plagues. The next day you'd smell the stink of their lily white faces in the morning incense they burn at their shrines wishing for good fortune, riches, for my wife, this; for my son, that. Though you had sipped the ambrosia of their boundless violence‒ you never thought your eyes divine during those ceaseless nights‒ it was just the way things are. Perhaps that knowledge morphed you into a caricature of the celestial bodies‒ after all, you’d once been made in their image. But the stars never answered your calls. It was all the same for shikigami, you were just a unique case‒ therefore, you must be punished for such heresy that was to defy human order.

  You thought for sure your master would have concocted some acid to smear between the cracks of his skin, brewed death to his hands before he took your throat into it‒ ensuring your destruction. But that would be a kindness for empty spirits such as yourself, so he'd meant to do the same as all other men‒ to satiate their hunger, to ravage and tear apart such living things that could not raise a finger to their might. What better than something that looked like an image of the gods‒ a human? Like us, but no longer. He meant to enjoy every fleeting breath of your lungs, every drop of blood spilt with his permission. So, you supposed you shouldn't be too surprised that you've woken up in the same world again after you had felt the unraveling of your contract. You gnaw on yourself. 

  "Oh. You're awake." 

  No binds, no chair. Only having known the cold, earth-packed floors of your cell, even during your investigations at the school‒ the plush that surrounds you dips awkwardly against your wobbling body, trying to balance itself on the soft surface. You find your center, and you touch the softest, most whole fabric you’ve feat your fingers to. You rake your nails through it to test the delicacy. 

  "You shouldn't move so much, or that's what Jamil told me. Your scars will reopen, I think." It's the ivory haired boy again. You look for his companion either sweeping eyes, but find no one else in the room but him. 

  "It's okay. You're safe now‒ Jamil told me about your situation."

  Your voice comes willowy, dry and crushed like the autumn floor. "Situation?"

  He looks a bit in confusion. “Yeah, your Master. He treats you poorly, doesn’t he?”

  “Poorly?”

  “Yeah, poorly. Like he… abuses you?” 

  You think. You know blood, you know how it spills and beads off your flesh as it is feathered open like a festering, spewing fruit. But you’ve moved so straight-backed all these years, muscles calcified to contain all your writhing heart at once in the great brimming bowl of your hands. You didn’t think of the pain too often or soften your body enough to feel it‒ only of the next breath, the next twitch in your muscles that would spill a drop of that dark liquid, and become reason to prolong the flaying. Maybe that was pain too, the tightness. But such knowledge would be useless in your hands, you decide, so you say your words with conviction‒ flesh fossilized to gilded iron so vigorous it would brace any feeling under its pressurized solidity. 

  “Abuse is a strong word.”

  Kalim blinks. “Still‒ a master’s duty is to protect their servants and right hand, not hurt them. So you can stay with us, here.” He smiles brightly, hands behind his head and tossed back. 

  Your head spun with questions‒ but so many of them falling from your lips began to feel foreign on the tongue. So you declare, “It's just how things are. And…” You look you the boy's hands. Would they reach to you in their cruelty like all others have? Groveling at your master's feet did work at times to feed his ego, his hunger, perhaps you should do the same for him. "Thank you, prince. For this you can use me however you wish." You bow your head, stretching thin your scars. 

  He’s silent, something you measure to be surprise or confusion‒ but before you can completely catch it, Jamil walks through the door, steaming plates in hand. “Kalim, don’t tip your chair like that.” 

  “You’re finally awake.” He hands you a plate of something hot. It’s nothing like you’ve ever smelled before‒ fragrant spices, the warmth of each bursting smell tingling your nostrils and to the back of your throat. Despite its rather plain brown color, the dish glistens and gleams with each slurred movement of the steaming stew, poured over the white heaps you had seen other servants carrying to your master’s quarters, every morning, lunch, dinner. 

  “Eat. It will help you heal.” 

  “Heal?” 

  Again, surprise, you gather, though expressions seem to be faint on Jamil. It stills to his usual expression soon after while he chooses his words carefully. “For your wounds. The…trauma you’ve sustained on your body.” 

  You echo the words you’re unfamiliar with, shaping your clumsy tongue to shape such indulgent words. “Trauma?” 

  “Your back, your body. It’s sustained prolonged exposure to…damage. It’s going to take a long time to heal. Even longer with you malnourished.” He answers quickly, a flicker of his eyes like the tongue of an apse to measure your expression without notice. But you know the movement, having carved it in peripheral gauges low to the ground. You don’t answer to it however, still caught by his foreign words. Even from the most brutal floggings, scars were healed quickly and with force‒ through acid salves and infused tinctures that bubbled away your body’s ailments. You were never given food after your beatings‒ that would be rewarding bad behavior after all‒ you weren’t familiar with this process. 

  “Oh.” 

  “Aren’t your parents worried?” Jamil shoots a look at Kalim when he asks it, but the ivory haired boy does not take notice with his undeviating gaze. 

  “I don’t think I have them.” 

  “You don’t think?” Jamil quirks a suspicious eyebrow. 

  Kalim leans forward, inspecting your face. “Are you even human? We can't find anything else on you besides your school records."

  “I am human. Or…” You look at your reflection in the window, peering into your gaze to find the same life that was held in theirs, or even passing birds and young buds sprouting from the ground. Pain, humiliation, some sliver of the folly of men you'd witnessed. But nothing. Only a shaded hue which atrophied in all directions. “I was.” 

  Jamil gathers his eyebrows to the center of his forehead. "Explain. We're still investigating further into your matter, and we've virtually nothing on your file. We can’t help if we know nothing." 

  You slosh around the food with the spoon, eventually placing it on the table beside you, bringing that plush blanket to your hands. "I know as much as you do‒ I was once human, and now I'm a servant spirit. I don't know or remember anything beyond that."

  "Does the name (Name) mean anything to you?" 

  "It was just something randomly picked by my master. Fake, I think."

  "That's not possible. The dark mirror summons its students by their true name."

  You sift through your memories, searching if there was never any recollection of anyone calling a name to you. It was always "you" and sharpened fingers‒ a passing phrase to rush against their lips, a nuisance to waste breath on when in turn, they could tug at your chains or pull you by the root of your hair. But never (Name). Your head scraped against itself with that sound, as if to kindle some memory that had been lost in the air. 

  "It…sounds familiar, maybe. Perhaps it was my old name. I do not remember anything of my past life, if any, truely."

  Jamil hums. "Well, if you remember anything, report it to me so I can pass it on to the investigation." 

  "Certainly."

  "Are you not going to eat that?" Kalim points to the still steaming plate of food on the bedside table. 

  "Spirits do not require food, prince."

  He waves his hand, dismissing the title which falls naturally from your mouth. "Ah, no need for formalities, Kalim is okay. But you should try‒ Jamil's curry is the best!"

  You weigh their expression as Kalim thrusts the plate into your hands again, taking in that inviting aroma once more. Scraping the foreign utensil against the ceramic, you shovel a heaping spoonful clumsily into your mouth. Spices, the heat, mouthwatering oils, and ‒ no doubt‒ a harvest rooted in the clouds of heaven and paradise.

  You had felt the pyre at your master's hands, blistering and breaking your skin like rotting fruit, the earth baked raw with the sun against the soles of your feet. You'd felt snow that scalded you like fire upon your fingers, tonics and brews summoned by your master splitting your skin like wildfire eating away through cedar forests‒ fresh, still beating blood spilt on your face, your own and many others’. But it was not until that moment that you’d felt warmth. 

  When you brought those steaming white pearls to your lips, glazed with that fragrant sauce, you were flushed with that mildness‒ a heaving gravity that beat like a heart. Living‒ or whatever that could mean to you. 

  "Did you…" You dig through the plate with the metal, searching for a sprig of an herb, the trace remains of a tincture, magics and spells which could be hidden in ground willow bark and the sticky sap of flowers that could not be fully dissolved enough into the fat of the dish that would stray from your untrained eye. “…what did you do to this dish?” 

  “If you’re accusing me of poisoning you‒”

  “You couldn’t have, I’m immune. But…” You feel a pressure at the back of your throat‒ perhaps that heart was fighting its way out of you, you think. In fact, all of your organs felt like they were being rushed to the edge of your flesh, to the skin meeting the air to make space for this writhing feeling inside, swelling, reaching its arms to the very core of your chest, unfurling its prickling fingers to your stomach. Yet, it felt inextricably tender, moth soft. “What is this called?” 

  Kalim answers. “Curry?” 

  The words come clumsy‒ you try to swallow that lump which disables you of clarity in your words with a gulp ‒ but that golden feeling comes back in waves, stuffing you of all of its thundering presence. “What about inside?” You scrape another bite into your mouth, it blooms with another burst of warmth inside your entire body. “This warmth. What is that ingredient called?”

  The ivory haired boy shakes in laughter, taking an elbow to his companion' side. "I think they’re talking about love, Jamil. You made it with looooove~." He sings. 

  Love. 

  You’d heard that word sparingly in the twisted corners of your cell, sipping sparse droplets of it and swallowing the power infused in that word. You’d never know the true taste of that word, but whispers and pleas here and there: he loves me, she loves me not, I love, I love, I love. It was rarely a word that was used in its full capacity in the human tongue, or at least how you’ve seen it‒ instead, its unfurling force threaded into dying confessions and outstretched hands that was fleeting with the beat of life. I love you, I love you, I love you. Their final words to their wives, children‒ the likes. You had added it to the list of unknown words, but held a special place for all of its vigor it seemed to have upon human lips, a sacrosanct sound kept deep in their blood until it was bleeding from their bodies. You felt that robustness in you, living. You thought you did, anyway. You were still too straight backed‒ solid steel to feel the full shape of it. 

  Jamil rolls his eyes, averting his gaze. "You're just getting used to proper food. It's just curry over rice, nothing special." He digs back into the dish, scooping it into his mouth with a bored expression. But even with his lolled gaze, you feel his eyes on you‒ telegraphing.

  Something is wrong with me. You think. It is of course a permanent thought in your mind, pressed upon you with the sharp disgust in others' eyes and depth of their hatred as they lash against you‒ but it wakes and rises on your flesh like a seal burned upon your skin, stinging and bitter against the air. You feel raw with it, for once, perhaps this was pain. What you remember of it at least. 

  Another, and another, and another spoonful into your mouth, teeth clacking against the metal in the speed of which you bring it to your lips. But that thing is alive as ever, taking its great wings to jostle the beat of your own heart inside you. You don't notice the last bite being shoveled into your mouth‒ but when you do, it grows cold, tasteless, sandy on your tongue. The absence of that warmth leaves you frigid as ever. 

  "Could I‒" You bite back at your heart slipping through your lips. Asking for anymore, just mere days after you had attempted to take the life of the boy standing in front of you would be met with lashing words, if you were to flatter yourself with some ability of self preservation and cleverness to escape a more realistic punishment worthy of your master's name. "Apologies‒ I spoke out of line. Let me clean your plates." You swallow the last bits of rice stuck between your gums, savoring each bursting pearl before it slides cold down your throat. 

  "It's fine. I'll go get more for you, do you want the same amount?" Jamil stops you from even rising from the bed, taking your plate in his hands. 

  Your palms feel empty without instruction, the consequences that come if you do not anticipate it. So you stumble over your words. "I…please. If that's okay, yes please. I’ll do anything."

  "You don’t have to do anything, we have plenty. From now on, you can always ask for more."

  From now on. You traced that word in your mind with a buzzing feeling inside you, imagine pressing against the ground to feel that heartbeat underground. You find its shape somewhere within you, you think. From now on. the feeling bubbles and erupts from your chest. From now on. You replace the beat of your blood with it, sounding each word as a pulsing force throughout your body.

  All you can do is nod meekly, bringing the soft blankets back to your hands, feel your sharpness claw against it. 

——————————————————

   "So you’ve really never had food before?"

  You look at the tiers of boxed lunch lain in front of you, taking hungry spoonfuls into your mouth with quick speed. Its inviting aroma and warmth narrowed your vision at once, focused on the vibrant sauces, heaps of rice steamed with fragrant herbs, grilled meats that would leave your mouth watering, grape leaves stuffed plump with grains. "What do I have to do to earn it?" You asked Jamil this morning, body still heavy with its sunken weight in the softness of your covers, linens, mattresses, pillows, is what he called them. "You don't have to earn food." His voice is flat, but there's still a softness to his eyes when he hands you the boxed lunch. It had been some weeks since he had started packing them for you, seeing that the cafeteria lunches weren’t enough for your stomach, nor for the healing of what he called, your trauma. All of what he made was sprawled out in front of you now‒ half of it’s heaping amount finished, much to the amazement of your classmates. They crowd around you‒ counting the empty containers, gawking at the speed in which you fed yourself. 

  “No, I haven’t. But I’ve bitten someone’s ear off before, does that count?” 

  The ginger who asked you the question smiles, but there is slight unease rolling through his expression, and he lowers the device he had in your face moments ago. “O-oh. Good one.” 

  You’re tempted to ask what is?- but the nerves wobbling through his eyes, and those around him, quickly turns to something distant‒ revolt, you think. It stifles your voice, and your hands. The area clears almost completely, leaving you only with Jamil and Kalim. 

  “What was good?” you ask.

  Jamil gives you a look you’re not sure what to do with. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk so much about your old life. People get unnerved, even if it’s normal for you.” 

  “Oh. Okay.” You accept his words with ease, but the food you begin to scoop back into your mouth turns heavy and tasteless. It forces cold and damp through your throat, and you almost gag, prompting you to excuse yourself for the water fountain. 

  “Trey, you have to see the new kid.” 

  The red head, you think, raising your head above the fountain. 

  "They're a tad unnerving. However, we should prevent our first impressions from welcoming a new student."

  "Yeah, yeah. But you know what they said when I asked them if they've ever had food before?"

  You hear the other student sigh, then ask. "What?"

  "They said 'no, but I've bitten off a ear before, does that count?' And their gaze gives me the creeps! Ugh‒ Trey this school just keeps on attracting more weirdos."

  Their voice reaches closer, until you're standing face to face with them, you settle your eyes on them, take in their nausea as part of their own. 

  “O-Oh! You scared us, (Name).” 

  “Sorry.” You say, gaze cast to the floor. 

  It is where you belong. 

  If spirits existed, ghosts certainly could‒ with the solidity of your master’s voice ringing through your ears, you were almost certain you could feel his thin fingers threaded through your hair, pushing it down towards the earthly filth. Even with your downturned gaze, you know how to read the unease fluttering sharply within the cavity of their chest, the unyielding distance between you, and them. You gild yourself in that iron again, head down, back straight. It was a shape you knew how to forge yourself into, at least, rather than some crude caricature of humanity. It’s just how it is. 

  “You didn’t hear us did- oof.” The student next to him jabs him in the stomach. 

  “We’re sorry. We don’t mean any harm, we swear.”

  You were already turning from their faces, measured breaths, jaw clamped, shoulders snared. Before this, you’d carefully temper your flesh and ask‒ was this the shape of a human‒ how they moved, how they felt, how they lived? But the softened iron of your palms had turned to something else, some smoothed, petrified alloy that could not be identified, found, or belong anywhere. All those years‒ hammered and fluxed by the crucible of human hands, and now suddenly that heat had died, and you would only be met with the frost of the water which treated you solid into an alien thing. 

  “It’s fine. Just how it is, don’t worry about it.” 

  You gnaw on yourself, swallow the blood but do not taste it. 

——————————————————

   You take your lunch outside the day after, but have no appetite to touch it. Since when have you had such a thing‒ an appetite? Spirits don't require food, you think. But there's a slight ache that rolls through your stomach, eating its way through the prickle of your skin. 

  "Kalim was looking for you." 

  You jump to your feet at that sudden voice‒ heart pounding, gripping the hand that reached towards you with unforgiving force. The soft spots, the places where blood would come fastest when it was cut‒ those shapes were found easily in your hands. But you let them go as soon as they came, noticing Jamil's pained expression. You snap your hand back. 

  Words rush to your mouth. "I'm sorry‒ I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to‒"

  "It's fine. I shouldn't have done that. I startled you, I apologize." He shakes out his hand, and seats himself next to you. "Why are you sitting out here?" 

  You gather yourself, knees to your chest, words clotted to the air that suffocates you. "I unnerve people, like you said. It's better this way.” The isolation in your cells comes to mind. “I’m used to it.” 

  He begins to lay out some of the containers in front of the two of you, takes a bite from the steamed lamb rice. "You're still recovering. You shouldn't expect change so quickly. Besides, no one from this school is normal by any means, trust me." There's a smirk on his face when he says this, you see more of himself leaking through his facade. You feel yourself soften. 

  A moment of silence. You think. 

  "Can't you make me normal? With your magic?" 

   You fill the emptiness of your hands with his, face him with your shrewd, all-seeing gaze‒ measuring, telegraphing. "You can make me your machine‒ won't you?" You would have called him Master, then. But the fear set deep within his gaze silenced that sound from you. 

  His eyes widen, all of his contempt scrunched to the center of his face. It takes a lot for him to relax it, knowing you would take all of that blackness into you soundlessly without any reaction to the way it should burn and tear all the way down to your stomach where you held too much or those things. When he does, he feels it rolling to rage inside him, glad that he at least knew one of the faces which had made you this way to stir it in that disgust.

  Still, that wasn't enough. 

  Jamil had never been one for justice, or righteousness‒ from the moment he opened his eyes, that notion would meet him at every turn‒ but, what tools that had shaped and twisted for this question from you, all the flecks of firelight that had been ripped from you when you were hammered into your current shape, for such a thing to fall from your mouth so normally. He often felt contempt for the world‒ if I had been born this way, if things were different, or if the world had worked in my favor instead of his‒ but rarely did that grow so sharply into what he was feeling now. For all the world’s violation, whatever divine plan that had planted every hand to shape you this way‒ he found himself coveting an ugliness, piercing like a blade through his chest when he met against it. 

  He was a servant too‒ he had also been stripped of his choices, his potential through his life. But it had never been unsheathed entirely from him. He'd spent all his life searching for the softness somewhere tucked in people's eyes, somewhere he could coil into to plant his own desires. But you stared back with all that emptiness‒ he wanted instead to take your hands, and tell you to fill them yourself. 

  He feels muddled, curdled in all that coalescence. He takes your hands. 

  "...I can't do that." 

  "Why? It would be better, for everyone else, wouldn't it?" You ask. 

  "You‒" He takes a deep breath in, lowers his voice. "...you shouldn't want that. To be controlled. It's not right."

  "It's not?"

  "No. It's not. Besides," he looks at his bandaged hand. You wince a bit. “It didn’t work last time.” 

  "Then…" The words cinder on your tongue. Then why? Why had I been taught so? If Jamil had the answers, you think he would have told you already. You spin it into something else. "Then what should I do?" 

  "That's not for me to decide. You should decide what you want to do, what you want to eat, what you want to like or dislike. Don't rush it‒ healing takes time."

  Jamil's words chokes you with warmth, prickling against your fingers, flushed and florid of all that heat he seems to open you to. "What is there to do‒ to eat, to like, then? I've never…" You could never truly recall what it was like, coming into being. It was like being pulled from the darkness into another, like vague, passing shadows‒ there was little between those lapses of confined shade where you could trail any light back to its voice in the trilling birds, the rustle of cedar forests, the lush silvergrass. 

  In your cell, life had always trickled through your cage in distant whispers, morning songs, dying flora‒ and with humans it had always been the same. You'd feel the blood draining from their veins, but never that warmth inside of them‒ flesh to flesh, heart to heart. The food always tasted cold, and so did flesh when you touched upon it. It was just how it is, no like or dislike to it‒ just some cold, inscrutable stone pillar that stood at the eye of your life. "I've never had a will, before. I don't know if I can." 

  Jamil presses together his lips, hesitant of his next words. “When you called to me. That night. What was that, then?” Mercy. He had heard it, and answered to it with something of his own will. 

  You jumble through the thoughts in your mind. “I don’t know. Why did you save me?"

  You hear the leaves and earth sing. But Jamil's heartbeat is still as loud as ever. He opens more of the containers in front of you. 

  "I don't know." He parrots back. There's a tick in his breath that catches your eye for a moment, but he continues. 

  "We can start with food, then. It'll get cold if you leave it in the container too long. Better to enjoy it warm." 

  He was right‒ the food had cooled while you had left it out. But the warmth when you put his handcraft into your mouth never chilled like those temporal things. He smiles warmly when you bring heaping spoonfuls to your mouth, and it fills you with that beat again. It rings louder this time, thundering in your ears vividly. Perhaps you were growing softer, learning to shape new curves and faces. You look to Jamil, memorizing the sculpt of his lips to know the composition of warmth. 

——————————————————

   "Why are you holding back?" 

  "Huh?" Jamil is wiping the sweat on his forehead with a towel then, water bottle in the other hand prepared to take a sip. But you trip him with your words, and he freezes on the spot, the perspiration that had felt so overwhelmingly warm and sticky seconds ago turning into icy streaks down his back. His silence urges you to continue. 

  "You were holding back. The beat of your footsteps, your reaction time, your breath. It's not the same as always." The words you say are sharp as ever, unsheathed from your tongue like a blade. "The position you were in when you passed the ball to Kalim‒ it was far better than where he was standing. The purpose of the game is to score points by getting the ball in the hoop, is it not?" 

  This part of your unexpected school career had been your best‒ moving your body with speed and purpose, surveying the field and each moving pawn, anticipating their motions through honed eyes and riding the rhythm of blood in other's bodies to intercept it. You had thought Jamil the same‒ but even with his refined gaze and nimble reception to it, his muscles stretched to pull back each movement, choking back all his vigor. You thought of your brimming bowl, the strangle of your body when you held it. The shapes you had known to forge yourself into were felt when you observed him closer. He had been a servant all his life too‒ but Kalim was always kind with him, and unlike you, he had warmth and fire within him. Desire, the word was. 

  "I guess. But Kalim wanted to make the shot."

  He shoots a look over to Kalim, crowded by the rest of the class who nudge and jostle him around with their bright laugher. But you continue to look at Jamil, noticing his strained breath was still there.

  “Didn’t you? I saw. The moment of hesitation before you passed the ball to Kalim.” 

  He stiffs under your piercing gaze. It’s unwinding, like a claw which catches a thread sticking by a single hair from its weave to unravel it, stitch by stitch. “I don’t want to stand out is all.” 

  "Why? You're amazing." You state flatly, as if you point out the blueness of the sky. 

  Jamil's heart bobs in his throat, it's weight silencing him. 

  "Did I…use that word incorrectly? I thought‒"

  "No. It isn't that." 

  You thought you'd ask him what it was, then‒ but he had already joined back in the game, quieting his breath, measuring each step with the beat of those around him, slowing it. Your fray at the thought. 

——————————————————

   “Bad dog!” You flinched slightly from Crewel’s pointer whipping against the hardwood table, but you smoothed your expression as usual despite the growing frost mangling your lungs, your collapsing chest, your fingers. “Wrong measurements again! Read the directions before you even attempt to touch the materials this time.” 

  Nodding mutely, you still your eyes on the book again, staring at the foreign letters and scribbles printed on the page. This whole situation was beyond you‒ you never expected to have to actually participate in classes after you had succeeded in your job‒ such a life outside your cell would be witless to even imagine‒ yet here you were. Still, you continued to dart your eyes around the page, looking for answers to perfect this task at hand. It must be perfect, always. Perfection or nothing. Perfection of failure. And what follows failure was stretched thickly over your body, carved into your face as its first feature. You knew its gravity, held it in your body like it's very lifeblood. 

  Your vision began to shift far from where your eyes were looking‒ your body feeling but so unfeeling. That unfeeling had worked before so well to harden yourself, to be able to be beaten and hammered thick and thin against any anvil, to be purified over and over, cast into knotted molds. But this distance was sharpened and gnashing‒ a mouth and its slashing teeth that ate away at whatever was left of you. 

  Your racing thoughts were interrupted with a hand lightly grazing the hairs of your arm. It reminded you of the sharp frostiness of your master's grip, gray skin glinting like a knife, elongated nails digging into your arm as if to herald the hours of punishment that was to follow with a simple touch. You flinch away, and see your lab partner snap his hands back with defensive palms. But when he jerks his body in such a way, he tips the bubbling cauldron towards himself, the scorching liquid lurching towards his skin. 

  You don't remember putting down your book, or pushing the student off to the side. First, it melts the cotton of your blazer, through the thick fabric and instantly through your blouse. But that's all you feel, until you follow the gaze of your classmates to your hands, and you see the steam rising from the acid raging through your flesh, reducing it to its gorey sinew and muscles you'd seen so many times before. 

  You offer him your free hand to pick the student back up. But he backs away, his eyes wild with horror. 

  "Let go of that now! Don't you know what you've done?!" Crewel marches towards you, thick rubber gloves on his hand to yank the still hot pot from your hands. 

  "But I caught it. It's not broken. And everyone is okay." 

   "That's not‒ just." A pitch at the bridge of his nose. He waves his hand high in the air and you imagine for a moment that it cuts across your cheek. But you stifle that flinch, the rising fear in your body. "Just go to the infirmary."

  You take his dismissal as a mercy, nod obediently. The rest of the students murmur, their gaze and conjurations in their minds prickling at your skin. It closes in, pressing hard on your veins like a grip on the neck‒ it's hard to breathe, hard to move, hard to feel and unfeel. Despite its enclosing suffocation, the permanent distance between whatever you were, and they were still stands unwavering and salient like a gilded column. You look to your hand, see the concoction eating a layer of your skin in angry red bubbles. But its sensation is little compared to the sharpness in which you feel yourself corroding, that alien metal rusting away at your insides like a gathering wildfire. The flesh, the sinew, the gore of your hands seem so distant, so unreal to you‒ so far from your body, and you do everything to raise a perversion of pain, of humanity. But nothing comes. Just that whetted withering inside. 

  The school nurse dresses the wound, some spells to take the pain away, despite the sharp smell of her unease when she notices you don't wince or shrill at it. She tells you to rest, recover. But you don't know what it means, so you sit soundlessly, eyes open on the cot. 

  "Hey." 

  You're so deep within the blur of your gaze that you don't see Jamil enter. But you hear the rhythm of his footsteps, his breath, his heartbeat. 

  "I heard something happened in alchemy." He sits himself in the chair beside you. "You alright?"

  You hum dully in response. 

  He chews on the inside of his cheek, it's a bad habit of his that he thinks no one notices. But you do. 

  "The investigation." He starts. "They found something." The hesitance in each of his words, the heaviness of his breath. Something wrong, again, you think.

  He retrieves a sliver of paper from the file in his hands, setting it on your lap. The edges of the thin newsprint paper are browned, rolled in their age, the words of the flaky paper sparse and rubbed off. You can barely make out a grainy picture of a barrel, tipped over from the bushes and vines it is thrown into. "I can't read." You simply state.

  Jamil takes it back from your hands, swallowing a breath to sound the words slowly, in measured care. You read the words from his expression. 'Body of child found stuffed in a cask, suspected (Name) Tarutani, child of sakagura owner. Father imprisoned, life sentence.' Grief. 

  "Oh." That sound comes echoed in your throat, hollowed out of any feeling.

  What were you supposed to do with that? 

  You'd grieve if you could, run up and down the hills and cry out to the stars. But you already knew of their blinding silence, their unwavering trek through the skies. There were glimpses, now that you thought about it. The smell of alcohol wafting in the stink of the guards' breaths that made you wince, closed spaces that would quicken your breath. But you held those things in that brimming bowl, not knowing what to do with them‒ should you bleed it dry, cradle them like some clandestine shrine, singe it to smoke? Either way, you'd keep it from surging‒ back straight, head down, muscles choked. "I didn't know."

  "I'm..." Jamil hesitates to give you his reassurance. “…sorry that happened to you.” 

  But you don't know what to do with his words, his kindness, his comfort‒ you didn't even know if he was talking to the person in front of him, or some ghost that had been lost to the air. You look at the print, see if you could see any glimpse of what came before‒ any scrap of fabric, wind tossed hair, green youth‒ anything distinctly human. Were you a happy child‒ if one at all? 

  The stars don’t answer to you. 

  You measure the distance between the tragedies of your life. There is none.

  Just one unfinished memorial of your pain, built flimsy atop another. The way extravagant palaces were burned to the ground, before a new one sprouted, already neck deep in its corrupt blood. You wish you would visit the monuments of your mind like those fracturing buildings, stalking through its outstretched limbs before you'd find a crack and crumble you could slip your hand through to set ablaze its heart‒ bleeding it's inhabitants over and over again like pulling brambles from the red earth. But commanding all of that destruction inside you‒ you'd be every break and burn of it all‒ the blazing memorial, the fire, the witness, the ash. Then the stars would cut through your flesh‒ wounds for the sun that burns through the morning mist, unfolding into another immature skeleton, for another memorial, another house, another place where shaded blood moves. 

  Perhaps it was better if you just watched, now, the construction of your blight. But your hands itched, forged and brazed for slaughter. 

  You gnaw on yourself. 

  “You alright?” Jamil tests the far off expression sculpted into your downwards face. 

  "Fine." You answer, taut, measuring with his expression an appropriate response, instead of some desolate look. 

  "Just…processing. I remember, now." You didn't, merely slivers of darkness, damp and choking, before you were pulled from it to your master's feet as a ceremonial spirit. But it seemed good as a lie as any, what good would a tragedy be without the curse of remembrance? But perhaps the fog and distance of it all was its own pain, own memorial, own blood, spilt. You didn't know. 

  You weren't sure how to mold yourself in a way that could meet it, know its shape to cast its features onto yourself to know that pain inside and out. Your face‒ what did it look like again? The fingers you bring up to it are as foreign and cold as a stranger's. That face, that body, that world‒ you could never belong to it, but only, be. The fire, the witness, the memorial pyre, the ash‒ you'd be all of that fracturing degeneration, but it could never belong to you. 

  And what was that even‒ being? You had never been allowed that either. 

  Jamil keeps on drinking in your expression like flooding water‒ catching the light in a thousand ways, changing direction into itself with every pebble lain, every breath of wind cast. It seems he has learned the trick of your stillness, the gilded iron of your face when he says, "...let me show you something.", and takes your hand. 

  He brings you to his room, it's just like yours, but filled. You're slightly embarrassed at the thought, feeling bare all of a sudden. As Jamil sits you down on the floor, you don't let him see your expression. 

  The glass vial he slips into his hands is tipped to his palm, and he rubs the oils which is poured from it into his hands. An ugly thought passes, then another. Poison, some sort of sleeping potion, another weapon, another blade? 

  But he turns to you, you see his face. And it puts you at ease. 

  "Is it alright if you touch your hair?"

  You nod. 

  He takes the tangle of your hair, dips his fingers through it and massages your scalp. The fragrance of the oil is soothing, calming both the skin on your head and your senses. It smells a little like him, you imagine some honey-sapped crimson flower and the aroma of spices he surrounds himself in when he works in the kitchen. 

  "My mother used to oil my hair for me back home. Especially when I was upset over something."

  "Is there something wrong with my hair?"

  "No‒ although it is a little bit damaged. But it's just to relax, to feel more grounded."

  You think to the way you would listen to the earth’s song and blood. There’s a similar pulse moving softly within Jamil’s fingers that work through your scalp. You lean into it. 

  "I like it."

  "That's good. I'm not too used to this. I've only done it to my sister a couple of times."

  "Sister?"

  "Yeah. She's younger than me, a brat. But, she's family."

  Family. You tried to imagine that word as faces, but nothing came to mind. 

  "What is it like having a sister?"

  Jamil laughs through his nose. "Mine is very demanding, gets on my nerves at times. But she's smart, clever, quick on her feet. She scolds me a lot for my attitude, but I think a lot of times she takes after me in some ways."

  "And mothers?"

  "They're all different, you know that right?" 

  "Sure, but I don't know any."

  "Well. My mother is beautiful, and hardworking. I've learned all my cooking from her‒ but she still makes all the best tasting food. Curry, dolma, knafeh‒ the flakiest, most mouth watering pastries you could ever imagine."

  "It’s even better than yours?"

  "By at least a hundred times, at least."

  You curve your lips into what you think is a smile‒ its rounded movement novel, finding shapes it never forged itself in. Servitude required sharpness, taught, straight lines and jagged sounds. This softness was new. Had you been a happy child before all of this, to feel the stinging crackle of your lips when they moved so little from their straightness? You shake off that feeling, eclipse it with that buzz inside your chest‒ bright as a forge’s heart. From now on, you could take that silvery radiance bursting forth from that furnace nestled inside you, and shape that curve, that softness against the beat in Jamil’s hands. 

  You find Jamil doing the same.

  “I..” A moment with the smile, before it fades. "I was lying before. When I said I remembered." You admit. "I don't remember anything about my human life. My mother, my father, siblings if I had any." Come to think of it‒ did you even remember your Master's face? All you could recall is his hands, the grind of his teeth. "I don't have anyone, or anything. And I guess I never have."

  Jamil continues to massage the oil into your scalp. "That's not true. You have us now, you have…" Me. The two of us. We'll be... He bites his tongue, swallows the blood with ease. You hear a deep breath sipped between his lips, as if the words would continue to tumble out. He lets it go. "You have the people here at NRC. You'll make friends in no time."

  "But I already have you." You loll your head upwards, look at him with weary eyes. "And Kalim. Isn't that enough?"

  His heart at his throat, again. That unforgiving weight. Fast learner, his mother always praised. He's learned now to speak through the gulping waves, but he still can't look at you. So he moves your neck back, continues to work his hands through your hair. "You'll learn how to make connections with more people. You can start a new life. You're safe now." 

  "I know I'm safe." You lean into his touch, he's here. "I know."

  "Then you'll be making friends in no time."

——————————————————

   You didn't think you'd find yourself in a situation like this again, but you know human cruelty could cross all borders, all worlds. 

  "You're such a fucking creep, you know that?"

  There’s no movement from you as they grab you from behind, binding you with their arms. 

  “Hey, say something, freak.” 

  You swallow their gaze with your own‒ a step back, fear in their eyes. “What would you like me to say?”

  A scoff. Two steps forward. “Is that all you do? Do as you’re told? Are you even human, or just some fucked up emotionless puppet?”

  “I was.” 

  There’s a sensation in your gut, you find his knee embedded in the skin against your ribs. A breath out, you don’t let out a sound. 

  "You're no fun."

  “I bet you don’t even bleed the same color as us.” The knife glints behind his back. 

  People always did that‒ they seldom took you head on with their blades and tools‒ their flesh. They always binded you, knocked you cold on the ground before they revealed their gnashing teeth between their crumbling facade. “Show us then, here.” He signals to the other two to let go of your arms. You land on your hands and knees, center to the knife he tosses to the ground. 

  “Go ahead, show us.” Ah, there it is. That smile that is cut and carved in that estrangement.

  Like us, but no longer. 

  They're right. You're not. 

  You've always had to move head on with your weapons, your flesh. Contact had always been a way to reap people of their life so you’d never been afforded such delicacies as lily white hands and hidden blades. All the pain in your life had been faced as a straight swinging hammer. And you were already priming yourself for this one, sanding down sensation and feeling that had heightened with every day you spent here. With him. 

  The flesh is as cold as the blade. You hug the silver against the vein emerging violet against your skin. Would it be red, like the stain of your hands? Or some darkened thing, sunken of all its color and rotten from your vice? Truth is, you were curious too. 

  You draw. 

  "You…!" One of them gasps between the teeth that spread wide on the red of his cheeks. "This freak really did it!"

  It's too dark to see the color of the smooth liquid, but you bring it up to the light to inspect it. The three who stand illuminated against it back away gasping in disgust. 

  It's red, after all.

  "Let's get the hell out of here before anyone finds us with that thing." They snicker, shove each other and scramble away. 

  You lay awake, dying. 

  You're used to seeing the weight of blood draining out of bodies, but to feel it pouring from your own makes you feel more alive and crimson than ever. This soaring must be the reason to the confessions of love, you think. But for you it's always been an immutable distance between other flesh‒ like us, but no longer. And you were no longer, if you had ever belonged. There is no one you could weave those sentiments into if you wanted to. No matter how flushed you felt with that writhing red substance, you knew your face had never been softened with it enough to reach towards others‒ to say, here I am too. Always, it had been straight backed, stone faced strokes you faced life's hearth with, and now it was all twisted into ash now, too.

  You dragged yourself upwards, feel the blood rushing down your body to the earth. There’s barely anyone in the halls‒ you think of that night where you fought Jamil, where he had saved you once before you had even asked for it. 

  You want to see the stars. 

  The door creaks open as you stumble into it. There’s very little in your room‒ the things they had provided you with‒ covers, linens, mattresses, pillows, all that softness had been enough. You think yourself greedy‒ hungry as you look to the metal lunch boxes that sit clean on your bedside table. It was a ritual every morning to bring it to Jamil and help him prepare everything‒ let him slowly work the old habits from you as he told you everytime, “do you want more?” And of course you’d accept every time‒ how could you not? Everything tasted amazing and warm, you’d be a fool not to run straight towards all of that when you could, all of that “from now on”. But, it’s all over now. It was all the world’s delight when it lasted. There’s still an ache, in your chest, and all over like keyholes pricking through your body to see something you could not. 

  You see the stars. 

  The window you press your cheek against is cold as you devour the scene outside the window. The breath that comes dried from your throat is choppy, thickset with iron, but you’re used to the taste‒ savor it even, as your tongue had longed for such a taste of your own, thrashing life. 

  Tomorrow, you’d be a cold, fallen thing that will be burned of all of your hardened flesh to your brittle bones‒ and those who witness the pyre will claim to have not seen a heart within it that had moved you in any meaningful way. 

  But tonight‒ tonight is a perfect night. You hear your own heartbeat, and the warm breeze that combs through that sound carries the sand lapping against the starlight, brushing them into the skies as their own dazzling things‒‒ and the stars‒ oh the stars. It’s as beautiful as you remember when you had nearly plummeted into them the night you had met Jamil‒ and all the blissful moments with him you had to gaze upon it, drinking in each constellation, each speck of starlight with a hunger you had never had before him. You feel alive, tonight, and hungrier than usual. But there are twice as many stars out tonight, so you ravage all that splendor.

  You’re tired, you want to close your eyes, but you tell yourself‒ one more second. Another. Another. 

  The thought rolls in your mind at least a thousand, thousand times before there’s a knock at the door. 

  "It's open."

  “I figured you couldn’t sleep either.” He carries two cups, hands you one. You take it with a smile with your clean hand. “It’s tamarind juice from my home. I think you’ll like it.”  

  You take a sip, delight in how the sweet sour taste rubs raw on your tongue. “I do. Thanks. Why couldn’t you sleep?”

  “Just…” he looks down at his hands. “...thinking. About some things. Someone.”

  You hum. “Yeah. Me too. The stars are beautiful tonight, don’t you think Jamil?” 

  His breath catches in his throat when shape his name with your voice. “They are. What’s this all of a sudden? Feeling wistful?” The amusement in his voice climbs to his cheeks. 

  You let out a breathy laugh, before it fades to something heavy in your throat. “I’m really going to miss you, Jamil.” Your eyes begin to weigh down, you slump your head against the wall, and do everything in your draining power to tilt it towards him. 

  He laughs for a second. “What are you…?” The deep inhale he takes comes out as a sharp shudder when he sees the red staining the entirety of your forearm. “Are you…!” He rushes to clutch your forearm, putting pressure above the cut. But it still spurts forth‒ you knew it would. You counted the seconds it would take before it would be too late. “You’re bleeding! What happened? We have to‒” 

  You smile, and when you put your hand over his you feel his pulse hammering against his skin. The flood of his words cease to a dried breath. 

  "It's funny, Jamil. I think I’ve said goodbye to so many things, you’d think I’d know what to say now. But I still don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

  The reflection of the stars in his eyes are far more alluring than any of the lights traveling hundreds and hundreds of years to reach this sky. It softens you. 

  You feel your body lifting‒ from the pull of death, or Jamil you don’t know. But you lean into it, reaching.

  I am here. 

  You feel it answer, but you find yourself dismembering, fraying to nothing.

——————————————————

   I should have said thank you. You think. Or‒ at least‒ I'm sorry a dozen more times. 

  Thank you Jamil. 

  You think it’s a fading thought, but the light bleeds red through your eyes, and you find yourself waking again. This time, there is a face which awaits you, and a warmth which meets your hand, your touch. 

  “(Name)!” Jamil stands from his chair, pulled immediately to your side. 

  “Jamil.” You rise to your elbows, you want to see him better. “Where am I?” 

  “The infirmary. You‒ ” He casts his gaze down, holding his breath deep in his lungs as he squeezes your hand. You’re here. You let his fist hit your shoulder lightly. “You asshole. You scared me. You idiot.” 

  "I'm sorry." You let him hit against you again, squeeze back. I’m here.

  "You're going to learn how to live‒ weren't you? Why then‒" He takes a gulp of air. "Why?" 

  "I'm sorry."

  He lifts his head. "That wasn't an answer to my question." 

  "I…" You hesitate to let the words unravel from you in the air. "I would say I was just doing as I was told. But I think I wanted to see for myself too."

  “Who‒” The center of his face creases further. "See what?"

  "If I was really human. If I would bleed red like everyone else. If I had a heart that pumped blood instead of an empty tomb of a body." The blood flushes against your skin as you press your hand deeper into his. 

  You continue. "But I think. I think this is proof enough." He’s silent when you lift your hand, already intertwined with his, heartbeats singing. "I can feel the warmth in my hand when I touch yours. That's human‒ right?" You feel the pulse breathing under his palm, and the twitch of his fingers laced through your own that closes it ever so slight around your knuckles. 

  I am here. 

  There's a slight tremble. He's scared‒ you're terrified. You’d thought you knew hunger, after realizing those years of ignorant starvation. Desire is such an ugly thing. To witness. To want. To be unbearably bare‒ nerves flayed and butterflied while you hold your hands in his, that bowl now flooding crimson into your hands. 

  But you feel his heartbeat, the song memorized and echoed with the second one growing in your stomach. Flesh to flesh, heart to heart. 

  There's surprise in his eyes, delight blooming on his cheeks. It pleased you to see him like this, cracking his stillness as he had your own. 

  "Jamil‒ I think‒" You breathe his scent in. "I don't know what I want, yet. But I want to move forward. And live." 

  You hold tighter. I'm here, I'm here. He answers back, closer to his beat. 

  "And, I think‒" You collapse the nerves festering in your mind. "- I know I want to do that with you. If you'll have me." 

  You feel yourself kindling under his touch, you take that fire in like hot coals, smoldering slowly‒ higher‒ higher, you rise. 

  "Will you?" 

  There’s panic that rolls through him, one which nearly chokes his entire body. But you press further and further into him‒ find his shapes in the air. But for once, he doesn’t let himself stifling his ardor, instead, he lets it feather throughout his body, melting that sweetness into his blood and bones. He’d always been a fast learner, but this one he would have to swallow piece by piece.The moments he spent under your unyielding gaze come to him at once, that straight shooting thing like a resplendent comet comes to mind. It is etched into his memories‒ your face which swallows and shows him his own pains, his own desires pressed into him in your hand. Perhaps you were that‒ desire, will. That very thing itself. You’d be with him, help consume every piece of him hand in hand, heart to heart. 

  In that moment, the two of you stand closer than the constellations in the sky‒ such godly things that have been thrust into the cosmos in all of their dazzling, eternal radiance which tethers and claws at the ether. And it feels like forever, with the two of you. A soft thing like the thousand thousand stars reaching their crumbling hands towards each other. 

  You’d never thought of himself a martyr for anything soft. Something of flesh and blood. But that reaching hand was more than enough. A dead thing like the stars you were, but whatever light Jamil had pulled from you was whirling towards him‒ a straight shooting comet. 

  “Of course."

  You curve his desire onto your lips. He does too. 

  You shake. But the two of you grasp your hands tightly to quell it, hand in hand, heart to heart. I am here. What a merciful thing. 

  Together, you take the brimming bowl in your hands, soften your body‒ and drink.

——————————————————

Notes:

Washi is one of the many papers shoji doors can be made out of. There's tesuki kouzo (handmade, made of kouzo/mulberry, usually very expensive and laborious), and more modern materials like rayon or plastic. Washi is a bit of a rarer material, but adds the benefit that it can be dyed, and produced cheaper than kouzo (in most instances), I imagine the mansion as dark‒ black lacquer, darkly dyed washi, embellished with spots of decadent gold.

Sakagura is where sake is brewed and stored, similar to shuzou, a place where sake is made and sometimes also brewed.

Tarutani is a surname that means "cask valley" (cask being the barrels used for alcohol storage)- surnames were often used to indicate status, occupation, even location during older times, much like how family crests (kamon) did

Rice was actually a delicacy up until really the Nobunaga era where agricultural advancements happened, even then until the Taisho era, Rice was not readily available to lower class since the Tokugawa Shogunate (feudal military government) had very strict rules about class mobility and what certain classes could eat, do, speak of, and even wear. I wanted to base the house that MC was serving on Daimyo (feudal lords under Shogun) because they're very grimy and scheming, especially as the military class and samurai began to grow stronger with the Shogunate's influence against the more "democratic" Imperial family‒ and they grew in their corruption before the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and instead replaced with a more democratic government with the Imperial family as head during the Meiji restoration ("knock knock, it's America" and Perry's boat lol). Their slimy nature would also kind of fit with MC's master and his motive to take down the Al-Asim family down as assassinations were very frequent during the Sengoku era where Daimyo were killing each other left and right because of their paranoia and greed lmao.

Hair oiling is practiced in a lot of different cultures‒ predominantly in Indian, Egyptian, and Black African cultures. However, in the modern day, it has spread to many different cultures as both a health and therapeutic measure, so I think it would make sense that Jamil would know about it, what with his long luscious locks and all lmao. According to my research Ghergir leaves and oil, as well as Blackseed are commonly used in Arab cultures? Please correct me if I’m wrong lol it’s kind of hard to find historical records and research on this because academia likes to center on the western world and treat non-western cultures as a monolith unfortunately

Tried to incorporate mostly Arabic cuisine but I am not an expert by any means I just know that entire region does magical things with spices the food tastes so good

Weirdly enough a lot of blacksmithing research for this. Idk why I kept reaching for that metaphor but it kinda slays

Tamarind juice or Tamar Hindi is a type of drink meant to be consumed during Ramadan to quench thirst and hunger, something something metaphor

[ooriru]

thinking about how; once idia opens up to you (it's a long process, but if you're patient enough...) he would purposely sit crisscross while playing games so you could sit on his lap.

he’s not going to say it directly, of course.

masterlist

his eyes shifted from the screen to you in a matter of seconds when you entered his room. though his hands were busy with the controller and his goal to win the game busied his mind, idia’s touch starved self wanted you close to him. he sighed and slightly pouted, bamboozled on how to signal you to come closer when he was oh, so busy.. ah, yes! his legs shifted and the ruckus brought your attention.

his legs were now in a crisscross apple sauce position (as ortho once mentioned), seemingly inviting you to sit on his lap. you chuckle in amusement and waddle yourself over to him. he hums in delight and rests his chin on top of your head.

I would lean back afterwards, and just snuggle against his chest.

just grabbing the tips of his hair and playing with it (pretend you're fireproof or smth)

the warmth and comfort

it’s just a safe space at this point

© OORIRU 2022

[yandere-wishes]

A Story Told In Maybes  {Part #1}

🗡️Yandere! Enma Yuuken x reader

🗡️Summary: Enma Yuuken lives on the fine line between "Hero" and "Villain" but his story will never end in a "happily ever after" or a "tragically ever after" it will only end in Maybe...

🗡 Edited by the amazing @tealyjade-libran

🗡️ Alternative title: How many times can Genie use "Damn" in a story...

Maybe in some other world, they could have been lovers

Imagine that...

picture it as vividly as a fresh stab wound to your heart. Sketch the vision of a red waterfall carrying away your life. 

Now picture two people. A young man and woman, sitting on a park bench, holding hands and laughing, inching closer and closer. 

Imagine love, happiness, tranquility...

But those things only exist in fairy tales. And his life was most certainly not a fairy tale. 

They were foreigners, outsiders, aliens. Banished into a strange land were twisted fairy tales, roamed the earth. Where magic and mischief came as naturally to the inhabitants as breathing. Where nothing mattered, because nothing was. Everything is and thus it isn't. Nothing made sense, and sometimes, in some rare moments of stolen repose, Enma Yuuken was scared that nothing would ever make sense again. 

All of it, every microscopic thing about this 'new world' was wrong, abnormal, twisted. 

Everything except his traveling companion. Another lost soul as disjointed and out of place as he was. Another ghost trying to survive in this matrix of a so-called reality. 

There was no shock initially, no surprise in not being the only normal creature to be transported to this bizarre world. Enma knew full well that he wasn't special in any way. Another foreigner being here was one of the few things that actually made sense. 

But as the old expression goes, everything comes at a price. 

Someone else just like him being here, being stuck in this nightmare, made sense. Yet the price of logic was a thread of hysteria that had woven itself deep within his battered heart. A maddening sense that gripped his lungs, robbing them of breath. That picked off pieces from his tattered mind, replacing them with clear cutout thoughts of her. It was always only her.

His companion in this broken world just had to be you. A frail, naïve little girl with no sense about her. Some pretty-girl protagonist straight out of the pages of Shojo Beats. The kind of girl who finds her happily ever after no matter where the hell she is. 

Yet he did not have that luxury, his life was dictated by a series of maybes and could bes. He was a secondary character at best, a background shadow at worst. With no purpose other than smiling and waving. And listening to the protagonist weep about their love-driven woes.

Some days, when the dreary bell chimed for the last time, when the students marched back to the solitude of their dorms, Enma would wander around the halls, squirming in his own misery. Pondering why, oh why of all the people, in all the towns, in all the worlds, did you have to be the one to wind up in this grim land along with him. 

Why fate always had to be so cruel, so domineering, thinking it knew better than the people whose miserable lives it toyed with. He wanted to be your lover, your prince, yours. But what would a guy, who doesn’t even belong in this backward world, have to offer some heroine-type sweetheart? 

🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

The Ramshackle’s flickering porch light glows in the distance. Like a dying star beckoning him to a destroyed paradise. He knows what's waiting for him behind the worn door. He knows you'll be there standing by the cracked dinner table, laying out days-old sandwiches for dinner, while Grimm rangles with an expired can of tuna. He knows you'll smile with tears in your doe-like eyes as you retell the fables of your endeavors. Telling him in great detail how the so-called king of beasts overpowered you in the school garden. How the King of poisons stole yet another kiss. The tales go on and on. Never-ending, never stopping, never giving him the chance to scavenge the fragments of his shattered heart.

You play your role so damn well. You know how to be the damsel in distress, the poor thing in need of saving. It's repulsive, disgusting...but only because he doesn't know how to be the hero that you need. 

If he was being honest -something he rarely did nowadays- Those "prefects" were the root of all his problems. They were the evil that made this dark world an endless horror. They'd been the ones to drive him into the "caring older brother" role. They had twisted his hand, leading him to the role of the "side-hero" like a lamb to the slaughter. Made him into a prince charming in a world that ate princes alive and spat them out once more. 

They had sealed his fate with a few insults and loaded threats. With just a few longing stares overflowing with lust and envy. They were villains, in a world that celebrated sinners. A world that cheered when the dragon steals the princess and rejoices when the evil king sits upon his skeleton throne. They were villains in every dreadful sense of the damn word. 

It's hard to be in love when all odds are against you. 

When your fate binds you into one role with no way out.

Like a rabbit hole made of quicksand. It dragged him deeper and deeper into intimate madness.

Maybe in some fair world, those leeching villains could keep their greedy blood-drenched hands off of you.

Maybe in a world where the sun never dies, you could bring yourself to love him.

Maybe he could have been the love interest, maybe, maybe, maybe.

It's always only MAYBE!

🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️🗡️

"Welcome home Nii-san," 

It's a sweet greeting that ties his guts into ribbons. His hands grow damp as his heavy eyes stare into yours. His lips curl into a painted smile, shielding you from the pain that's clawing in his stomach.

"Hi..(Y/n)"

His voice cracks and croaks like a dying frog. His lips feel abnormally dry and his eyes sting as if they've been pierced by diamond daggers. His steps are heavy as he plops down in his seat. The weight of his worries pulled him down harder than gravity ever could. He watches you through tried, restless orbs. Watches as you waltz over to your seat and sit down with the half grace of some future queen to be. It's bitter, dreadful, leaving a sickly toxin-like taste in his mouth. The mere thought that someday one of those, sinners, will take your hand and drag you to some kingdom far far away makes Enma want to claw his brain out with his bare nails. 

Enma's focus shifts over from his traveling companion to the silver-coated fireball licking his paws. Grimm's teal eyes scan him nervously before he offers a nervous smile, a rarity for the narcissistic cat. He's usually so talkative, so boasting, there was never a moment of tranquility with that cat around...

It takes a moment. A steel coated moment before the gears in Enma's head begin to turn. Before he can place his finger on the heavy abnormality weighing down the atmosphere. His nerves jolt to life, leaving a freezing sweat behind their trail. The room is spinning like a ballroom floor. Something's off, something big and obvious and hidden and...

Maybe...

"So..."

It's your sweet voice that breaks the tension creeping into the air. Melodic and luscious just like the sensation of a blissful dream. The room freezes in its tracks. The heavy atmosphere melts away like a cube of ice. Normality has one foot through the door. Behind it, hope and tranquility peek their heads through the tiny gap.

 Maybe just maybe everything is alright. Maybe it's just him, his stress and anxiety are starting to play cruel jokes on his wonder mind. Maybe he's just going mad. Yeah, that's the sanest conclusion to draw from all this. 

Enma cranes his neck to the side to get a better view of your face. Distress is scribbled all over your skin, like pristine razor cuts. You shift around in your seat, clawing at your uniform skirt as if the midnight black fabric is cutting off your circulation. Your fingers nudge the entrance to your pocket fiddling with something he can't quite make out. 

His voice is low, shaky, as he replies. The unusualness of the situation has him on edge. Nervous to the bitter bone. Maybe he was wrong, maybe his nerves were right to be wary of whatever this was. This uncertainty permeated the air-tight room. 

"What is it?" 

Slowly you drag out a white envelope flooded seven times over from your pocket. You stretch out your hand placing it in between his fingers. Enma throws a passive look at the note, his nose wrinkled up at the familiar scent that pervaded from the paper. 

"What's this?" 

It was rhetorical, asked out of dull, morbid courtesy. This time he didn't bother looking at you, in fear of seeing you look -lord forbids- gleeful. 

"A love letter, Grimm found it in our locker after class." 

There was a pause, lengthy, nerve-wracking, heart wrenching. Yuuken could hear the way your breath hitched in your throat, he could almost feel the excitement radiate off your body. 

"Can you believe it Nii-san? Someone actually left me a love letter!"

It hurt it really did, this time his heart didn't shatter. It simply broke, in two or three or maybe four. Who knows, who cares.  They had escalated from simple harassment and unsightly displays of public affection to leaving you love letters. How ungodly, how absurd, how brave...

He laments, eyes tracing over the fog of his breath as it wafts through the musty room. He wants to rip that damned piece of paper, shred it into millions so the words become ineligible, so you'll never read those horrible words again. So you'll forget that some damn fool other than him can actually love you. But he doesn't, he has too much self restraint and too much respect for his dear "little sister" to actually do it. 

His arm stretches over the table, skin illuminated by the dying candle on the center. He places the letter back safely in between your fingers. His eyes meet yours for only the second time that night. He takes in your face, Committing every piece of it to his miserable memory. The heartily glow in your crystal eyes, the faint schoolgirl smile dancing across your lips, the rose blush kissing your cheeks, the way the candle illuminates your skin, wrapping in a sparkling glow like the princess from those tales of old. You're mesmerizing in every way, it would be reasonable for other men to notice your elegance. No wonder those "prefects" were drawn to you so naturally like moths to a golden flame. 

"Who sent it?" 

His voice comes out like a block of ice, shielding away any and all his stray emotions. He doesn't want to know how doleful he is, he just can't have you taking pity on him. 

Your smile fades ever so slightly, your brows draw closer. Confusion is etched on your face. You haven't got a clue. 

"Well...I'm not sure, but they did say to meet them at the school gates when the clock chimes twelve."

Oh, joy, another fairy tale reference. It's comedic how fairy tales have begun to dictate his life. Everywhere he turns there's a grim tale awaiting him. Yuuken spares a quick glance at the crooked clock hanging by a loose thread. It’s a minute to midnight. 

"I should come with you" 

It's not a request but you take it as so. 

"No need to bother, I'll take Grimm, he could use the walk. He's starting to bulk up a bit"

"HEY! The great Grimm-Sama doesn't "Bulk up" He only gets more powerful!" 

Before the older male can protest, you're already halfway out the door. Grimm scurrying to follow you on all fours like a pesky rat. The door slams on your way out, leaving Yuuken alone with his morbid screeching thoughts. 

There goes the only good thing in his life. Into the arms of another. 

For a second he contemplates leaving you to fate, after all, who's he to disobey fate, go against whoever orchestrates this universe. But it's only a second, short lived and quickly died. 

Maybe he's a hero.

Maybe he's a Prince Charming.

Maybe he's a villain.

Maybe he's just some honorary older brother looking out for his kid sister.

Maybe, just maybe, he's your future lover;

and he'll be damned if he lets you slip out of hands. 

Enma's quick to grab his old practice blade from the overstuffed closet. It's not much, but it's all he has from the normal world, from his world. 

The door grates for the last time that night as he steps out into the cold midnight air. The stars blink in some sort of secret tongue, either warning him or encouraging him, he doesn't know. Nor does he truly care, for Enma Yuuken is done letting life and fate and villains decree his meaningless life. Here and now that's where he'll make his stand, he'll save you. Kiss you. Love you. Marry you. You, You, YOU

But there's still one nagging thought that screams inside his head as he dashes for the school gates. This world worships villains, prays at their feet, and hands them death and destruction on golden plates. And he's no villains, he's some sort of upside-down, in-between. Rotting alone in the border between Hero and Villain. By law of society, he's a reject, a useless foreigner, an alien, an outsider. 

and MAYBE he's already too late...

Who wrote the love letter? Was it the head of the savanaclaw dorm or maybe the head of the heartslabyul dorm ? Maybe it’s the ever mysterious  Tsunotarou... 

[glamorousruins]

𝔉𝔬𝔩𝔩𝔬𝔴𝔢𝔡 ℌ𝔬𝔪𝔢 - 𝔙𝔦𝔩 𝔖𝔠𝔥𝔬𝔢𝔫𝔥𝔢𝔦𝔱

Summary: During a panel at one of his meet n' greets, Vil is left a bit unnerved at one of the questions asked. These feelings soon strengthen into paranoia as he realizes someone has followed him home.

Vil Schoenheit | Scenario | Part 1 (Reading) | Part 2 (coming soon!)

TW: feelings of paranoia, anxiety, and nervousness. Themes of a break-in and being followed are portrayed. Read at your own risk. Notes: Didn't check for grammar so I'm sorry for any mistakes!

Word Count: 1,330

"What's your plan for...?"

"What is your opinion on...!"

"Are you going to appear in...!!"

He smiles, graceful and poised as the onslaught of questions attack him from all angles. His hair is pulled back flawlessly in a bun as just the right amount of stray bangs cascaded over his features.

He's beautiful.

He's elegant.

And he's the epitome of perfection.

It's no wonder that one would dedicate their every waking moment to groveling before him. Spending all their seconds showing their adoration to a gift sent from the heavens. Yet, how much love does it take for such a simple and innocent thing to transform into something much more...sinister?

He wonders that very question right now...

It had been going smoothly, questions were answered with the perfect amount of honesty and vagueness; leaving them satisfied yet still yearning for more. He'd smile, laugh, and entertain the interviewers for just a moment longer as his mind counted down the minutes in his head. He'd turn his captivating eyes to them, locking gazes as his eyes silently ushered them to speak their minds. 'Go on...', his eyes would beckon, 'Speak forth your truth... I'm listening.' No one could resist his gaze for long; not many wished to anyways.

Though he enjoyed entertaining his fans and the press, he was tired and ready to rest. It had been a long day, after all. He had figured a few more questions wouldn't hurt, he owed it to his fans in the end. He enjoyed spending even the slightest bit of one on one time with them; even if they were kept apart by the flashing lights and endless shutters of camera lenses.

"How fast can you run?"

Pardon? Vil blinked as the faintest trace of surprise flashed within his eyes before dissipating quickly. He quickly covered his fumble by lightly fixing his position in his chair as he leaned forward to his mic. Such an odd question, it had certainly caught him off guard. He allowed a small, teasing smile to adorn his face. "Ara ara, wish to challenge me to a race?"

Teasing his way out of yet another situation, a habit he had picked up well over the years.

"No, not exactly." "I'm more interested if you can outrun, me."

Vil fought the urge to furrow his brows, lest he wants wrinkles of course. He hadn't been able to ask for clarification as one of the workers took back the microphone and expressed how Vil's meet n' greet was coming to a close and that a few announcements needed to be made. Vil's alluring eyes glanced to the director of the film this panel was for as he glanced back to the crowd.

The person who asked was gone.

The slightest bit of discomfort grew within him. He'd glance around the room slowly and see how no one else seemed uncomfortable by the response. They all brushed it off and watched the director with wide, attentive eyes. Easily swayed and distracted they were, Vil thought. Perhaps the question and response were as innocent as they seemed. It must've been the tiredness finally getting to him. He had been awake since early this morning after all.

It was just an innocent question; nothing more, nothing less.

He told himself this after he bid farewell to his adoring fans.

He repeated this to himself as he gathered his belongings and slipped into his car, away from prying eyes and paparazzi.

He chanted this silently to himself as he drove home, constantly glancing to all the mirrors to make sure he wasn't being followed.

He whispered this quietly to himself as he pulled into his secluded home, far, far away from all the chaos that was the city.

He... fell silent as he stood before his front door. The keys were firmly nestled in his hand, waiting to be inserted into the keyhole. And yet, he couldn't bring himself to move. He felt as though someone was staring holes into the back of his head.

He was being unreasonable, he concluded. He was a powerful mage who could have his security guards here in an instant. He was safe in his house which he had ensured had the latest tech of home security. He could protect himself against anything, there was nothing to fear.

And yet his hands still trembled. He swore he could hear breathing behind him.

He stepped inside and looked to the quiet, dark inside that was his home. The light outside was dimming; it would be night soon. He wasted no time locking the door and making sure the security systems for his house were online.

They were turned off when he checked up on the systems, a detail he did not miss.

Long legs made haste to reach his bedroom, passing by the living room as the soft sound of his heels echoed within the silent dwelling. He passed by multitudes of doors, his mind solely focused on reaching the safety of his personal room.

He passed 6 doors. Each luxury room serves its own purpose; whether excessive or necessary. He made no comment yet he noticed door number 4 was open. He had closed all the doors before he left.

Vil eventually reached his room and felt a strange sense of fear flow over him as his silky smooth hand rested upon the door handle. Though he wanted nothing more than to rush inside and lock himself in, he couldn't bring himself to do so.

Not yet.

The door handle was smooth and glistened up at him like always. And yet, despite its usual appearance, he found himself doubting its sincerity. Was... was the handle... warm? Was he imagining it?

His free hand lifted up so that he could examine it, a noticeable tremor taking over his long, slender fingers. For a second he believed that his hands could've been clammy and hot, making the handle feel warmer than it actually was.

But he didn't see anything of the sort.

Vil dropped his hand and turned the door handle to enter his room. He was imagining all of this, he reasoned. He was just paranoid. Of what? He couldn't tell you. He was simply tired from the day of work. He needed to take a nice, warm shower and begin his nighttime routine.

Then, and only then, could he really shake off the pressures of today.

The door was shut behind him as he walked inside, setting down his bag and standing in silence.

He looked wordlessly at his room, eyes looking- searching- for anything out of the blue.

What had changed since he was gone this morning?

What was missing?

Where were they--

. . .

Vil let out a small strained breath, a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Everything was as he left it. Nothing had changed. No one was in here.

He let out a shaky sigh, bringing his hands to his face to rub away the anxieties that were clinging to him. Now he was certainly convinced it was time to head to the shower. He could nearly laugh at his own nervousness, it was pitiful.

Vil kicked his shoes off to the side before sauntering over to the bathroom as his hands busied themselves with undoing his hair. He busied himself with preparing his shower- which soon became a bath as he decided a nice warm soak would do him good. He hummed a simple tune as he took out the various cleansers and bottles needed for his nighttime routine.

He distracted himself enough to the point that he nearly forgot about how nervous he was moments before.

He distracted himself enough to the point that he could not hear the faint creak emitting from under his bed.

He was far too distracted to hear the sound of something coming out from beneath the bed.

He was too distracted to hear the sound of approaching footsteps nearing the bathroom door...

To be continued. . .

[magicpumpkin3]

Hello! I see that requests are open. So can I request a scenario with Ace bringing his s/o with him to his home on summer break. But he totally forgot to tell his family about her(fem reader or gender neutral if you want). So imagine the shock in their faces. The rest is up to you. Love your writing btw 💖

Note: I apologize it took so long. I'm bad at describing Ace's character and I know so little about his family. So I gave all of his family members appearance from my imagination. Hope It's okay!

Note№2: Sorry if it's bad, I tried my best. And thank yous for the compliment!

Ace x fem!reader

"Are you sure, you didn't forget anything?" Looking at Ace suspiciously, you hand him one of your bags. "I did not forget anything! How many times do I need to tell you this?" You look at him with one eyebrow raised. "Why are you looking at me like that?!" You sigh, turning away from him to shake your head.

Currently you and your boyfriend were waiting for your turn to face the mirror teleporter. It's been a long time since you were out of school. Last time was probably on one of your dates. Sighing to yourself, you can't help but feel worry. There's something you both forgot to do you most likely forgot to tell Ace what he forgot to do.

"Hey, I know you're worried about meeting my family but it's going to be fine, they'll love you." Ace say's with a small nudge on your shoulder. He continues with a wide grin "You'll bond and become really close to them. They'll probably even try to invite you to most family dinners. There's nothing to be worried about! We'll be fine!" Chuckling to yourself, you look at him with a small smile on your face "Whenever you say that, there is something to worry about." Ace looks at you, like you have just offended his whole family tree "HEY!"

Laughing at one another like that, you don't notice how time seems to pass by. It was your turn already to teleport when you were ready to hit Ace with one of your bags he dared to say that you don't actually help with overbolts. You reach out your hand to Ace. Grinning like an idiot, he takes your hand in his. Into the unknown you go, as they say it.

Time skip brought to you by me not knowing enough about Ace's family-

And here you were standing in front of a door. It's an absolutely regular door of a regular house but to you it looked like gates of hell themselves. Nervously smiling you look at Ace. "Are you sure they're going to like me?" He gave out an annoyed whine. "Yes, they will like! Now for the Great Seven, can we please come inside already? Or are you still scared?" Last part of his speech followed by a smug grin. Pouting, you turn away from him and ring the doorbell.

A few seconds of silence were followed by a some shouting on the inside and a few loud bangs. Gulping, you look at Ace, who looked at you back. Right at that moment,the door swings open. "Who the fu-! Oh...eh...hello." Standing before you was Ace's brother? There's no other explanation to their similarity. The only difference is a hair style and lack of a heart under his eye. "Who's there?!" Females voice rang trough the hall. "It's Ace and his... Friend!" The taller version of your boyfriend replied. This was getting awkward really fast.

"Actually that's my girlfriend!" Ace announces proudly, pulling your l by your waist closer to him. The face of his brother was priceless. Eyes wide, mouth agape, he was looking at you and back at him. Then he let out a whizz. "Yeah and I'm the Queen of hearts! Okay that's a good joke but oh my-" he starts to laugh uncomfortably. "Quit it dumbass, I'm dead serious! She is my girlfriend. I told you about her!" Tightening his grip on you, Ace continues arguing with his brother, which causes older Trappola to hold on too a doorframe and laugh even harder.

"Oi! What are you all barking about here?" Before you appeared a woman, probably Ace's mother, Mrs Trappola. She looks like she could take out a wild bear in a fight. A bit plumped, with short curly brown hair, chocolate like eyes, wooden spoon in her hand, she stands in front of you with her hands crossed over her chest. "Can you believe it? Our baby boy Ace trys to tell me this girl is his girlfriend!" While oldest of Trappola brothers continues to laugh his brains out, woman turns her head your direction and gazes at you with a look that could surely incinerate you, if she wanted. "Is that truth young lady?" She asks with a raised eyebrow. You nod with your head aggressively, holding onto Ace's arm. This woman is so intimidating and you just met her!

Bright smile appears on her face. "Welcome to the Trappola family my dear!" And your enveloped in a warm hug. Blinking a few times you hug Mrs Trappola back. Ace's brother immediately stoped laughing. "Wait, you weren't joking?! Holy Seven- Dad!!!" A loud thud is heard from the inside of a house. Next thing you know, there's a man standing before you in a fighting pose, like there's some kind of a danger. Looking around confused, Mr Trappola straights up, fixing his clothes a bit, he pretends like nothing happened. "What's all this yelling about?" Mr. Trappola is a tall, linky man, with a short bright red hair, crimson eyes and a big mustache. He looks like he haven't slept in a while.

"Our son brought a girl home!" Finally letting go of you, Mrs Trappola turns to her husband with a bright smile and sparkles in her eyes. Immediately father of the family throws his hands up in air and yells a loud 'YOOHOO'. They high five each other. Ace's older brother starts laughing again. "Everyone stop!!!" Your boyfriend, as red as Riddle's hair, trys to stop this mockery by pushing his parents apart. "Why? Our son finally has a significant other that he thinks is worthy to be shown to us!" Before Ace could object that statement, he was sucked into a big family hug.

"Don't just stand there! You're in for a hug too!" Mrs Trappola says, while her husband stretches his arm out, welcoming you in. And you're in for another hug, sandwiched between Trappola brothers. After what gelt like eternity, you were finally free. "Oh! Now, why are you standing outside like some homeless cats? Let's go inside!" With that, you and Ace's brother follow Mrs Trappola inside, while her husband and and your boyfriend are getting your bags.

Time skip brought you by my lack of knowledge about Ace's character-

"…And that's Ace on his first day of school! Isn't he adorable?" Mrs Trappola is showing yet another picture of little Ace. Little boy was standing with a giant backpack on his back and banquet of flowers in his hands, tired but still bright smile shinning on his face. "He is! I can't believe he was so cute, whom am I kidding he still is!" You and your boyfriend's mother are getting along very well. Sitting on their couch, you look at Trappola's family album. "MUM!!! Stop!" Ace is hopeless trys to steel album from his mother. "Young man, as your mother, it is my duty to show whole you, past and present, to your significant other and embarrass the living hell out of you. So, no." Pushing Ace away, with her free hand, she continues. "And this is him with his new classmates!"

Trappola family are such a nice people. They took you in, like you were and old friend of theirs. Even though they were mocking each other, you could see with how much love they did it. Ace's older brother, telling you about Ace's 1 girlfriend and how he cried when she broke up with him. Mrs Trappola telling you some really embarrassing stories about both brothers. Mr Trappola sharing some inside family jokes. You had dinner with them. Ace's mother's cooking skills are beyond limits. Fried chicken tastes so good, especially with the 'family-secret' sauce and salad. And don't get me started on the pies she made, my lord-

At the end, you and Ace got to his old room to sleep. Particularly facepalming onto his bed, your boyfriend let's out a loud groan. "Tired?" You sit near him on his bed. Nodding , Ace turns on his back to look at you. "You know, I finally realized what you forgot to do." Quirking and eyebrow he sits up a bit. "And what is it, that great me forgot to do?" A small smug smile appears on his face.

"You forgot to tell your family, you have a girlfriend."