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wolf-and-bard · 3 years

Text

Drown With Me If You Can

Prompt: White Frost/Apocalypse

Relationships: Arnaghad/Erland of Larvik (from one of the witcher-centric cards)

Rating: M

Content Warnings: swear words, grief, themes of giving up on life and hopelessness at the beginning

Summary: After the fall of Kaer Seren, all that is left for Erland to do in his gloomy cave is write his journal and let the cold take him. He doesn’t expect to be saved, especially not by his former-lover-turned-nemesis Arnaghad. In which: Erland wallows and Arnaghad calls him out on his bullshit. A lot.

Word Count: 5.6k

AO3 link

I close out this account with a warning: the knowledge I hereby hope to preserve is essential for the day the monsters return to our crypts, our battlefields, and our gardens. It is a call to battle and heroism and in that it is treacherous. If you use these pages with the intention to do good in this world, you will soon find yourself to be an outcast among humans. You will save them and they will spit at you. You will beg for fair payment and they will burn you at the stake. Be prepared for that, and take up the sword nonetheless for if you do not, no one will. Peace, brothers and sisters of the future, peace and blessings of the Gods. May you never need this journal.

Erland signs the bottom of the last page with fingers gnarled by the cold, trembling from how his muscles have hardened as a result of his lethargy. When it is done, he grips the quill hard, clings to it. It is a childish instinct that makes him do this, but this feather has been his lifeline for the past… past. A lifeline to the past. Time flakes away from Erland the same way the tattered pieces of the quill do once it breaks under his tightening fingers. The last few pages of his journal are barely legible and he can’t tell whether that is because his vision is fails him, like a pane of glass slowly devoured by a sheen of ice, or because his script has fallen prey to his tremor. As Erland waits for the ink to dry, he uses his weak hand to arrange his good one into the proper gesture for an Igni and casts it down the dark tunnel of his home.

A perfect cone of lightly crackling flames shoots outward, illuminating the glazed rock all around. The sign holds for several breaths, steady and sturdy and its heat singes Erland’s frayed cuffs, has the ceiling drip crystalline melt-off. Erland smiles grimly to himself and shuts the journal. This time can’t take from him and the ice won’t feast on, this his body will always know how to do. A perfect channelling of what Chaos he may access.

Shaking, Erland crawls over to his makeshift bedroll – a dirt-hardened pellet of furs he collected on his way up here, a long hike with Kaer Seren a steady ruin at his back and the names of his brothers and children a steady weight on his shoulders – and collapses on top of it.

It is done. His lips trace the outlines of these words, but his tongue is too heavy to lift. Erland sneezes into his pillow and draws a ratty quilt over himself. It used to be bursting with reds and oranges, a gift from an old woman for saving her granddaughter from an early death by harpy, but now it is faded and as grimy as the rest of him. Erland cannot distinguish the colours of his belongings any longer, not even in the stale light of the last sparks of the Igni that cling to the cave’s walls.

It is done.

His journal is finished, his life chronicled, his school honoured and his knowledge preserved. All that is left to the former griffin master is to wait for the sparks of his life to die out alongside those of his magic. Erland flops onto his belly and uses his weak hand to arrange the fingers of his good one into the shape of Axii. His wrist creaks when he angles the hand at his own face and he casts it with the same impeccable precision. The spell hits instantly and his body goes slack, his mind punctured through by holes. Erland sleeps and hopes a harsh wind will blow through his abode tonight.

II.

There is a long interval of darkness that is marked by bursts of hot and cold shivers that wreck his body, but Erland doesn’t truly wake and by the time he does, he isn’t sure that they were real at all. He goes through a stage of sleep paralysis in which all he can do is to stare at the coarse ceiling of the cave. It has frozen back over and if there were any light, Erland would see his own face reflected in it. Sunken cheeks, eyes reddened from burst capillaries, undercut grown out into shaggy strings of hair. The griffin tattooed on the side of his skull drowns in them, just like the griffin witchers drowned in dust and snow the day their school was buried in an avalanche.

Erland sighs. He cannot move a muscle for half an eternity. His nose itches and another sneeze finally frees him, releases him into an unsettled slumber that pushes him along the maze of corridors that is his own memory. He retraces every step he took along the Path, faces all the monsters he slaughtered and all the humans he failed to convince that he shouldn’t be slaughtered alongside them.

There is no lesson to be learned from these dreams. Only patience. Erland has long lived with his regrets, knows them as intimately as the beasts whose traits he noted down in his journal. Only patience, yes. In all his striving to be more than a mere mercenary or rat-catcher perhaps his most undervalued and least practiced virtue.

Erland can be patient.

He vaguely remembers one who never was, an old friend, a former lover who faced the world with steel first and foremost, steel accompanied by a detached pragmatism that was so at war with everything Erland believed in. That friend – now less than an enemy – would not have lain here so wallowing in the drawn-out pain of his end days. He would not have waited for his death, he would have summoned it by drawing his slowly rusting blades and cutting himself open, would have watched his hot blood hiss against the ice at the heart of this mountain and would have born a proud curl of his lip until the moment the fire in his own heart extinguished.

Erland smiles and his jaw creaks.

He takes the high-road.

He…

He sleeps.

He thrashes.

He recites every lesson the knight Gryphon ever taught him. They are the foundation of his life’s work, they are all he has left.

He is patient.

III.

Erland is caught in a sleep paralysis once more when it enters the mountains. The monsters usually haunt him when he’s somewhere in the realm of insanity, but now he is wide awake, body one rigid line under the quilt that has long since lost its ability to keep out the winter, which means the thing could be very real and out for his blood. Its steps boom and quake through the rock for hours before the giant passes into the dead end that is Erland’s makeshift dwelling. Even with no light to illuminate it, Erland can see it glittering, can see its giant head swing left and right, can hear the scrape of its fragile marble skin against the walls.

An ice elemental.

If Erland is extra lucky, this used to be its lair and he accidentally usurped it. There is no moving away, no putting up a fight and he resigns himself to a quick and violent death after all. How graceful of Destiny to show her face now, after everything else has passed her by.

But then the ice elemental shakes off the snow, hundreds of flakes that rain down to cover the floor, and Erland blinks. The outline of the monster softens from harsh crystals to wet strands of fur that hug broad shoulders. A werewolf? Erland can’t draw breath, doesn’t trust his ears when the thing opens its mouth and speaks, a deep baritone. Not nearly raspy enough to be of anything other than human origin.

"Alzur’s rotten balls, Erland is that you?"

Erland wants to laugh. Of all the demons the depths of his consciousness could have summoned to this cursed place, it had to be Arnaghad. Arnaghad with his hulking form and his smooth voice, his tattered bearskin overcoat and his terrible timing. Always terrible. He can’t laugh, of course, can’t do more than wheeze faintly.

A torch flares up, casting eerily long shadows at the feet of the apparition, more real than anything Erland has thought in a long time. At the same time, Erland catches Arnaghad’s eyes – dark ochre with narrow slits, eyes that are set deeply under bushy eyebrows which underline the blocky shape of Arnaghad’s face as though it was whittled from planks of red birch – and Arnaghad starts.

“It is you,” he says and follows that up with a curse Erland can’t discern, courtesy of Arnaghad’s Gemmeran linguistic oddities that persist to this day. With them comes a harsh edge to all his syllables and a tendency to mouth-breathe. Funny how after decades of reciprocal avoidance, Erland still remembers these details. Casting his mind down the drainage canal of history, he also remembers himself: a young fighter, just two decades of age, stuck in a body that was overflowing with emotions of visionary self-determination, of rough-and-fast passion, of compassionate anger. Erland waits for the spark of that anger to rekindle, especially as he watches Arnaghad toss his swords and pack and drop to his knees by Erland’s pellet, the torch held close. It’s heat licks across Erland’s cheeks and cradles his skull.

It remains the only heat.

His anger is but a relic of a more complicated time.

“By all the gods,” Arnaghad breathes, hand passing over Erland’s sweaty forehead. His touch too feels familiar, feels too familiar, but his scent isn’t and neither is the concern that drenches his tone. “You look like a giant lump of bird shit.”

Erland’s nostrils flare. Slowly, ever so slowly, his lips peel back in a snarl. He still can’t move, no matter how much he tries. He wants the ice elemental back, if only for the simplicity of its puny gravel brain. Arnaghad’s may only be a smidge bigger and more substantial, but with that comes so much. Arguments that have been left unburied, thoughts that have been left unspoken, memories that have been left unfinished.

Erland hisses weakly through his teeth and Arnaghad growls in reply. He doesn’t extinguish the torch, he sticks it into the ground somewhere to Erland’s right and sits back on his heels, the growl building and building. Erland drifts off again, waiting for Arnaghad to speak. He hopes that when he wakes, the phantom will be gone.

IV.

If anything, Arnaghad has solidified by the time Erland opens his eyes again. He sits by Erland’s bedside still, even cross-legged tall enough that his head grazes the ceiling of the cave if he straightens. Before him he stokes a small campfire with several crude bursts of Igni.

“That is a waste of precious firewood,” Erland says, voice croaky. He pushes himself up onto his forearms, head sluggish to lift from the scratchy pillows. Arnaghad doesn’t turn around, instead he retrieves an iron pot from his belongings and presses it against the cave’s wall, using his dagger to scrape off the ice there. Practical, first and foremost, that is exactly how Erland remembers his lover of yore. Lover being a euphemism for something Erland still cannot name.

“I’m hungry,” Arnaghad says and fires another sign. Briefly, the cave explodes with heat and Erland just about stifles a vulgar moan. When did he last have the pleasure of warmth this intense and indulgent? The fire slowly seeps into his blankets and furs and nestles against his skin. He sinks back into them and closes his eyes. “Besides,” the bear witcher continues. “You might have died of hypothermia if I hadn’t started it. It’s almost funny, Erland the righteous asshole letting himself freeze to death, where is the glory in that? Alas, I find it hard to believe that you have developed a sense of humour since last we met.”

“Neither have you.”

“Ha,” Arnaghad says and that’s it for a while. Erland listens to the water boil, to Arnaghad hacking at dried vegetables and jerky. It doesn’t even smell bad and despite his self-imposed fast, Erland’s stomach rumbles and the inside of his mouth feels coated in dirt. How long has it been since last he drank? It didn’t matter until Arnaghad stampeded into his life again, shaking him awake.

Erland sneezes.

Maybe not all of him.

“Bless you,” Arnaghad grumbles. “So, how did you end up here, little birdie? Your wings broken?”

“I’m not little and griffins aren’t birds.”

“Smartass.”

Erland snorts. He isn’t about to stoop down to Arnaghad’s level and start bickering and he has no inclination for small-talk. That’s what he tells himself anyway. A part of him is almost… glad for the company. Glad for this company in particular. Fuck that.

“I will allow you to stay the night,” Erland says, and squints to see Arnaghad raise one of his caterpillar eyebrows at him. It isn’t like either of them can tell day from night, and depending on where Arnaghad entered the tunnel system of the Dragon Mountains, the last time he saw sunlight may have been weeks ago. “Fine, I will allow you to have a rest. After, I want you gone.”

“I don’t care what you want. If it hadn’t been for me you would be a corpse right now. Take a peek.”

Erland follows the gesture of Arnaghad’s hand and glances down himself, gingerly lifts the blanket. He is swathed in thick, padded linens, an extra pair of breeches and woollen-knit socks. The bearskin that usually hugs Arnaghad’s shoulders is draped across him and what is more, his lips do not feel chapped any longer. His hair curls around his head in a long, neat braid, like a viper in slumber. Shit, how long was he out for?

“Have you considered that it might have been my explicit wish to die?”

“I have,” Arnaghad says on a low chuckle. “A ridiculous notion. You’re sick, that is all. Sick people lean towards melodrama.”

“I’m not being melodramatic,” Erland replies and, oh, there it is. Frustration breaking through the hard-packed stratum of the years like a flower through the earth in early spring. It’s fast to burst and blossom. He does try and sit up after all, but before the world can start to spin around him, Arnaghad has roughly pushed him back into the sheets.

“You are always melodramatic,” the bear witcher replies and glowers at him, face cast in darkness by his bulky outline. Erland’s eyes narrow.

“One night,” he says. “And then you’re gone.”

“We’ll see about that. The stew is going to have to cook for a bit, and you should go back to sleep. Want me to Axii you?”

“And have you make minced meat out of my brain? No thank you, I can do that myself,” Erland snaps. He’s being petulant, why is he being so petulant? It’s all these rifts tearing open in his chest, all these holes he abandoned when he left the order with his friends to found the griffin school. These holes pull him back to life and reality, pull him back through time and into a persona he thought he buried. Erland is not a child. Erland is the griffin grandmaster, Erland is a knight, Erland is a witcher. It doesn’t matter that these functions are all theory now, they make up his identity. Not Arnaghad and his quarrels. And yet…

Erland turns away, facing the wall. When he makes the gesture for the Axii, he doesn’t even have to use his hand to arrange the fingers. He didn’t want to live. Now he does. And that’s more than he can take after everything he’s lost. More than he deserves, really. Erland puts very little force behind the sign, letting it spill to the tips of his fingers then gently touching them to his own face and thankfully, the world blots out around him.

Arnaghad’s voice pulls him up again, like the detonation of a bomb.

“Wake up, stew’s ready.”

Before Erland is fully awake, a coughing fit grips his body and although it scratches at the back of his throat, it also feels freeing in a way, loosening the plaque on his bones and the dust in his chest.

“So you’re still a victim of your winter sickness,” Arnaghad laughs. “I wondered.”

“What do you know of it?” Erland’s voice is muffled as he wipes his mouth, the words come out spiteful, acidic. This time, he does have the strength to sit up on his bed, but he needs the sturdy stone wall at his back to keep him upright. It’s a cool antithesis to the slight swelter of the cave’s air, a gracious counter-force to the merrily burning fire and the bubbling stew.

“Erland, you have spent twenty odd winters in my embrace, would you not think some of that has stuck with me?”

“In the face of your betrayal, no, I would not,” Erland says, crossing his arms, though admittedly, Arnaghad is right. Erland has always been susceptible to the cold, more so than any of his fellow witchers. Perhaps that is because Skellige, in the shape of his mother, rejected him when he was young, or perhaps it is because of his father whose origin Erland still doesn’t care to investigate. Either way, when the frost’s first tendrils start to wind their way into the atmosphere, he falls ill with sneezes and shakes, fevers too. It must be winter already then.

“My betrayal, yes,” Arnaghad mutters and retrieves a wooden bowl from his pack into which he shovels some of the stew. It smells prickly and hot, thick with Ofieri spices and has Erland’s mouth water. Now that he is fully himself again, his senses have returned, an assault on his mind. As with any battle he ever fought, Erland decides to be methodical about it. First the food, then the fight. He reaches out for the bowl, but Arnaghad scoffs at his trembling hands. “Don’t think I’ll let your atrophied muscles spill any of this. It’s too damn good, here.” Arnaghad settles into a cross-legged seat before Erland and the fire paints a halo around him. He’s so big that it cowers at his back, which suits Erland fine. This way it is easier to ignore the concentrated, caring expression on the bear witcher’s face as he submerges a wooden spoon, scoops up a chunk of whatever dried meat he put into the stew and gently blows on it before holding it out.

“Why do you care?” Erland asks weakly, lips parting around the spoon. As soon as it hits his tongue – the perfect degree of scolding hot and spicy – he can’t help a small groan. Blunt though Arnaghad may be, his cooking has always been phenomenal. Erland’s stomach mewls for more.

“I always cared.”

“Funny way of showing that.” Erland gives him a pointed look and Arnaghad’s eyes dart along the scar that neatly sections Erland’s face. He has yet to receive even an attempt at apology for it. “Back then you didn’t seem too caring with me. In fact, I acutely remember your sword flaying me.”

“If I’d wanted to kill you, you would have died. But I didn’t want that then and I don’t want it now. I hold to my promises, Erland.”

Accusation is slabbed thickly onto those words and Arnaghad holds out another spoonful of stew which Erland dutifully swallows. It’s not the first time the sickness held him down so hard he had to be fed, but it feels strangely agitating for Arnaghad to be the one to do it. After he left and founded his own school, the only snippets Erland ever heard about the bear witcher were rumours of his death, especially with the vipers splitting off the bear school. Perhaps, Erland liked to believe that Arnaghad was dead because that took away the possibility of whatever was happening now. Perhaps, Erland left the one promise he spent all his life circumventing at Morgraig Castle the day he set out for Kaer Seren. Perhaps, Arnaghad didn’t change at all and neither did Erland.

“Do you even remember?” Arnaghad asks quietly, then allows himself a few gulps of soup before refilling the bowl. He doesn’t meet Erland’s eyes, but Erland can see the faint glow of anguish speckling his cheekbones. Oh, but this is bad. If Arnaghad goes berserk in here, they’ll both be buried in rock and ice and Erland is too awake and vivacious now to want that.

“Remember what?” Erland asks, feigning ignorance as long as that leaves him the proverbial high ground, the only place from which he can match Arnaghad’s sheer height. He accepts another two spoons, then shakes his head. His stomach feels brilliantly full, close to bursting, and he rubs it weakly. Arnaghad puts the bowl to his lips and drinks the rest of the stew. They’ll both want more later, especially with the firewood dwindling, but for now the next field is to be played. It all gets muddled anyway, who is he kidding. Erland sighs and that lets Arnaghad’s gaze snap upwards, latching onto Erland’s. They silently glower at each other for a handful of breaths.

“Of course, you do,” Arnaghad says eventually. “Knowing you, you remember your exact words.”

“I do,” Erland says and the ghost of his own voice flashes through his mind.

My heart lies at the end of a dream, Arnaghad. And as long as that dream remains unfulfilled, I cannot give it to you.

“You lied.”

“I didn’t lie, I never lied,” Erland protests, but Arnaghad shakes his head.

“I don’t understand. You obviously felt something for me, feel something still. Oh, don’t give me that look, I told you I care. I always paid attention to you, you know that.”

Erland does. It pains him to admit it, but he does.

“I didn’t lie,” he repeats, hands balling into fists.

“You threw me scraps of affection when it would have cost you nothing to invite me to your table,” Arnaghad says.

“Do we really have to do this now? I told you I want you gone.”

“I saved your life.”

“UNBIDDEN,” Erland screams and his arm shoots out in an arc. It is only by Arnaghad’s quick reflexes that the Aard doesn’t have him fly into the back wall. Erland heaves, watching Arnaghad’s thick Quen dissolve with a buzzing static, and he doesn’t know what’s gotten into him. After everything, he doesn’t want to hurt Arnaghad, of course he doesn’t.

“Why couldn’t you love me?” Arnaghad says, so fucking stubborn in his resolve to have this conversation. What a stupidly vulnerable question.

Back then, Erland bought in to the delusions he liked to paint for himself in blood and gore. He was destined for more, he was a noble knight, he was to rid the world of evil forevermore. Arnaghad didn’t fit in with that dream. He would try and keep Erland from it because he didn’t understand, had no ambitions for himself. And while that was, and likely still is true, it was never the reason Erland didn’t allow anything more than physical between them. But it was the reason he clung to and dangled before Arnaghad’s eyes over and over. After the night of the sundering… it didn’t matter so much anymore and Erland locked the true reason away in a dark corner of his heart, huddled together with the feelings he held hostage in the hopes they would fade to nothing.

Erland listens to his own heartbeat thump at his temples in a nagging ache and he forfeits his answer. Arnaghad doesn’t deserve forgiveness for what he did to Rhys and Erland and whomever else his sword cleaved, but he deserves the truth.

“You really want to know why?” he asks weakly, cringing inwardly at Arnaghad’s curt nod. Erland continues on a sigh, feeling fragile now that his anger evaporated with the sign he just cast. “I was afraid. I ruined my mother’s life by existing and I couldn’t spare Jagoda the experiments Alzur put us through and I never managed to make the humans see us as anything other than aberrations. I can slay monsters and teach others to do the same, but I can’t save the people I love.”

“That is horseshit, just complete and utter horseshit. Your mother was a right old cunt and nothing could have saved Jagoda. All the girls died, remember? Do you blame yourself for their deaths too?”

“My school,” Erland whispers, blinking rapidly to do away with those questions. “I loved them too and now they all lay buried under rubble. My brothers, my sons, my whole life. I loved them and I couldn’t save them. I’m a curse.”

“…why did you never say anything?” Arnaghad reaches out and his thick fingers brush Erland’s scraggly face. Erland stifles a dry sob. Some truths are better left unspoken and this was definitely one of them. He never dared to utter it to himself, in the quiet safety of his own mind, and now Arnaghad knows it. Arnaghad his ex-lover, used-to-be friend, nemesis for some years, phantom of his past for more, saviour of his life. Arnaghad who does, when it comes down to it, have a claim to his heart.

“Because you would have ridiculed me, as you itch to do now.”

“It is true that I was never good at understanding how other people feel,” Arnaghad says and his thumbs come to rests against Erland’s temples, smoothing out the ache there. He shuffles closer and their knees bump together which sends a jolt through Erland’s weakened frame. “But if you would have told me this, I would have found it impossible to demean you. I care, Erland, why won’t you believe that?”

Because you don’t care about anything other than your own survival.

Because it took five years for you to ever look at me twice and double the time for you to answer my frequent knocks on your door.

Because you attacked our brother and cut me and your eyes were filled with pure hatred.

Because you spent decades on your mountain, pretending like that was the only life you ever knew.

Because…

Erland grasps for more reasons, grasps for the steely indifference he felt for Arnaghad ever since the day he left Morgraig for Haern Caduch. He stops. No forgiveness, not yet. But perhaps, in the face of his grief and all that he lost, it would do well to cast his gaze into the future. Erland releases his tense muscles and lets go of something. After, his breath comes easier.

“You would have me believe that your care is rooted in love? Even after all this time?” he asks.

“Yes,” Arnaghad replies. So simple, huh?

“So maybe you love me. That doesn’t change the fact that I would have let you down.” Or Arnaghad him. Or maybe they were fated to let each other down.

“Look, birdie. I don’t know what it means to dream big, but I know this, and I know it for certain: you did what you could and because you’re a persistent shit, you did it exceptionally well. There are forces at work in this world one man alone cannot overcome. You did what you could.”

Erland doesn’t know what to say to that. Because that isn’t simple, that is insightful and attentive and not at all Arnaghad’s usual refrain. Maybe he did change and Erland is the only one who stagnated. He feels stupid, all of a sudden. Stupid for holding himself up to such high standards, stupid for being afraid in the face of his own bravery, stupid for ever calling himself honourable.

What man gives up on love because he assumes himself to be cursed? No knight. A coward.

“Could I have stopped you?” Erland asks. “If I had loved you, could I have stopped you from attacking Rhys and from waging your war on the rest of us witchers? Could I have changed the course of history?”

“You’re doing it again,” Arnaghad replies with a sly smile. He shakes his head and leans over his own legs to press a dry and warm kiss to Erland’s lips. In a way, it’s a homecoming. In a different one, it’s completely novel. Erland tilts his head for a second kiss that has his body thrum with wanting more, and Arnaghad allows it, for a bit. It’s another kind of warmth, that of their bodies re-learning one another and before long, Erland finds himself on Arnaghad’s lap, held close in a way he thought he’d never be held again. It isn’t forgiveness. It’s far from forgiveness. But it’s a start.

VI.

“Erland, there is something I have to tell you,” Arnaghad says long after they have spent the pent-up emotions of the last centuries in drawn-out kisses and frantic clashes of their body. They’re both tucked under the quilt and the bearskin, Erland’s beaten body sheltered in Arnaghad’s mountainous embrace. Erland gives a sated mumble, basking in the magic of the moment for just a heartbeat longer. Of course it couldn’t last, contentedness with Arnaghad is always the eye of the storm. “Listen to me,” Arnaghad continues and a sense of urgency replaces whatever fluttery feelings Erland just had. “I didn’t come to the Dragon Mountains to find you nor had I head of Kaer Seren’s fall. I came here for a reprieve from the storm. Have you seen it before you entered?”

“It will pass,” Erland says, unwilling to match Arnaghad’s frantic cadence. His chest is a warm rumble behind Erland, an upset sky. Damn Arnaghad and his terrible timing. “Winter is always brutal in these parts and the storms bite, but they pass.”

“It’s not winter, we are coming up on Belleteyn.”

Belleteyn… that means it’s almost May. Erland blinks stupidly before the implications sink in. Snow storms in May simply don’t happen.

“By the gods,” he breathes, and grips Arnaghad’s hand which is splayed over his own chest. His body tenses up and the cave feels stuffy now. “How long has the storm been going on for?”

“October,” Arnaghad says warily and that is so much worse than Erland expected. A harbinger of conflict Erland can deal with, an old love he can squabble over, but he is not at all equipped to handle an apocalypse. It has to be the end of the world because October is only a month after Erland entered the mountains and straight-out winter for close to eight months can only mean one thing:

“The White Frost.”

Arnaghad nods, cheek rubbing against Erland’s head. A branch in the fire bursts with a mighty crack right then, as though it is afraid too. The prophesised end of the world. Erland always assumed it was a tale to scare children and he doesn’t believe in foresight. There is no other explanation. Arnaghad’s other hand draws Erland closer and his steady mass of muscles help anchor Erland as the emotional storm resumes alongside the one that rages outside.

“I know this is a lot, but we don’t have much time. Is there anywhere we can go? You are weak still and these peaks will not protect us for long.”

“I… yes. There is a gulf that runs deeply under Kaer Seren, it carries heat out of the earth’s core and disperses some leagues out into the ocean. We have dug our cellars deep enough to tap it for the winter months… we might have food stores left too, but… I don’t know that there is a way in any longer and with a snow storm we might die trying.”

“Better to die trying than to die giving up,” Arnaghad says.

“If this truly is the White Frost, is there any chance of survival?” Erland asks closing his eyes. This is not how he wants to go out, not when he still has so much grieving and loving to do. Not when he just discovered that he can.

“I’ve never been through an apocalypse before, I couldn’t tell you. We got this far, though, so we might as well try.”

“Might as well,” Erland sighs, pulling on Arnghad’s fingers to bite the tip of one of them. The other witcher grunts indignantly. “But I’m not spending the rest of eternity stuck in a damp basement with you if you are going to keep wearing that bearskin. My nose may be clogged up with snot, but I can still smell it and it reeks. Did you piss on it?”

“I didn’t, but you might have with all the feverish thrashing and moaning you did.”

“Fuck off,” Erland snaps and they both laugh. It’s a glimpse of a relationship they barely scratched the surface of back then. If they survive now, they could learn its ins and outs yet.

And if Erland is anything, if he’s ever been anything, it is determined. He is determined to give his long life one last purpose. It’s a selfish purpose, lacking chivalry and heroism, but Arnaghad was right. He did what he could and now he can allow himself this, a shot at love in the middle of the apocalypse. Erland’s had more idealistic and futile dreams.

“What a horrible retirement Destiny has chosen for us,” he says.

“This isn’t worse than being dragged away by an ugly mage and suffering his experiments for years and years.”

“Speak for yourself, big bear, speak for yourself.”

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

@witcher-rarepair-summer-bingo , @littoraly-art

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khuns · 4 years

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who else is there to love but you; a khunbaam au

He tastes like Baam has always thought of and more, lips slotting into Baam’s the way he has slotted himself into the space between Baam’s heartbeats, and Baam isn’t sure if he ever wants Khun to pull away.

“Come on, Baam, it’s our graduation. It’s the last time any of us are gonna have time to travel before we settle into jobs and fall victim to the monotony of everyday li-“

A snort crackles through the speaker, and Hatz’s voice rings clear, “Speak for yourself, Isu. Some of us still can’t find jobs-“

A jostle over the phone, then: “-anyway, as I was saying, it’s just one last hurrah before we officially start adulting. Please just say yes, Baam, nearly everyone else has agreed-“

Baam sighs and sets down his pencil. It’s literally the week of finals; every time he rubs his eyes he sees syntax trees tattooed on the inside of his eyelids. How does Isu expect him to make big decisions when his entire brain is clouded with theta roles?

He opens his mouth, about to ask Isu to please just ask him when he gets back to their dorm room because his brain really can’t handle thinking about budgeting and accommodations, but Isu’s sly voice beats him to the punch. “Khun’s coming.”

Baam lets his head drop into his hands and groans.

Damn Shibisu.

The first time Baam meets Khun, Baam is splayed out on his stomach on Hatz’s kitchen floor, honey dripping from his hair.

The laughter on his tongue dies out; Isu stops flinging flour at where Hatz is crouched, taking cover.

Baam watches in dismay as the most beautiful man he’s ever seen in his life stands at Hatz’s doorway, mouth pressed into a thin line and eyes as hard as flint. The man’s fingers are still curled around the door handle as he surveys the mess before a clipped, “Hatz.”

He feels Hatz tensing up from where he’s knelt beside Baam, hands braced against the fine dusting of flour on the floor.

“I’ll make sure the kitchen is spotless,” Hatz bites out, tone frosty.

Baam’s eyes meet the man’s through a slow tangle of honey, and he can’t help the shiver that runs down his spine. Even backlit and haloed in the artificial hallway light, he reminds Baam of someone royal, hair pulled away from cheekbones high and regal and bangs barely covering eyes cool as glass.

An eternity stretches before the man breaks eye contact with him and makes out a curt nod, “Make sure you do.”

And then he’s gone, door locking behind him with a neat click.

Isu is the first to break the silence- “Fuck, Hatz, when you called to tell me your new roommate was an ass you didn’t say he was a beautiful one-“

“Shut the fuck up, he’s a royal pain in the ass, that’s why I called you to come over- “

“His eyes, Hatz, did you see them-“

“I hardly feel the need to look into the eyes of someone who pisses me off from day one-“

“You ask me to come over and make cookies for you, but you just neglect to mention how beautiful-“

“You saw for yourself, he’s so fucking pretentious - look, Isu, if you’ve done quite enough salivating over my arse of a roommate, do you mind helping your poor roommate up?”

Isu squeaks and slides through the flour to Baam’s side, “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Baam says. “Yeah, no, I’m alright.”

As Isu helps Baam pick himself off the floor and sends him into the bathroom to rinse out his hair, all Baam can think about is the man’s cool blue eyes and the way the image keeps sending his heart back up his throat.

It’s ten in the morning after his last final and Baam barely has time to stuff his duffel in the trunk when Rak calls shotgun.

It sets off a squabble between Hatz and Isu about who should drive and devolves into an argument over whether Rak can navigate (he cannot) and when Isu will even let anyone else drive his precious car (never).

There is a soft huff of amusement from where Khun is leaning on the side of the car, hands fiddling through what looks like a GPS, and Khun looks up at Baam, grinning. “We’ll never set off at this rate.”

“We’ll have to spend the first night back in our dorms and leave tomorrow instead,” Baam returns, biting back a smile. Khun laughs at that, his eyes sparkling through his bangs and curved into crescent moons, and Baam has to tamp down a familiar flare in his chest.

Keep it under control, he tells himself. It’s just a weeklong road trip, after which Khun will move somewhere in the big city for a job at his father’s company and Baam will move back home, despairing over what little job prospects a linguistics major brings. Useless crushes are just that, useless.

He watches as Khun pushes off from the side of the car and tosses the GPS to Isu. “Keyed in a place for lunch,” Khun grins as Isu squawks and fumbles to catch it, “Now you won’t need either of those two idiots up front.”

Hatz splutters indignantly and the rest of them just laugh, scrambling to get into the car so they can finally, finally get on their way and maybe get a decent cup of coffee.

(Rak, much to his disgruntlement, is relegated to the backseat, sandwiched between Khun and Baam.)

The second time Baam meets Khun, Baam neither is on the floor nor has any sticky substance in his hair (thankfully).

He knocks on Hatz’s door, ready to deliver Hatz’s notebook from where Hatz left it in Baam and Isu’s dorm room during an earlier study session.

(A ‘study session’, Baam has learnt, is just an excuse for Isu to bother his best friend into coming over to their room so they can talk about everything other than homework. Not that Baam minds, of course - conversations between Hatz and Isu flow like water, stories from their shared childhood spilling out as they try their best to embarrass each other in front of Baam.)

There’s a click as the door unlocks and Baam’s mouth opens, ready to remind Hatz that even though they only live just a few floors above him, it’s best not to leave his Physics notes behind ever again for Isu to doodle senselessly on, but when the door swings open, it’s Blue Eyes.

Oh.

“Looking for Hatz?” The man prompts, after a beat of silence. “He’s in the shower.”

Baam flushes and makes the conscious effort to shut his jaw. He holds Hatz’s notes out to Blue Eyes, “Hatz left this in my room earlier, could I leave this with you please?”

Blue Eyes raises an eyebrow at the dick drawn in Sharpie on Hatz’s notebook cover. He looks back up at Baam.

“It wasn’t me,” Baam blurts, suddenly anxious to inform Blue Eyes that no, he wasn’t the one childish enough to draw dicks onto other people’s notes. “My roommate and Hatz, they’re pretty close, I guess it’s their thing-“

He’s not sure why words are just tumbling out of his mouth, but Blue Eyes just snorts, corner of his mouth turning up in amusement. He takes the notebook from Baam and nods, “I’ll leave it on his desk.”

“Thank you...” Baam trails off, because for the life of him he absolutely cannot remember what Hatz has called his roommate other than ‘The Royal Ass’ and ‘That Fucking Asshole’. Neither of which, Baam is sure, Blue Eyes would like to be called.

“Thank you,” he manages, and turns to hightail it out of there before he embarrasses himself for the third time in a night.

“Hold on,” Blue Eyes says, and he waits until Baam fully turns back around to meet his gaze. “Who should I say left this for him?”

“I’m Baam.” Baam pauses, then tacks on, “From the twenty-fifth floor.”

“Alright, Baam-from-the-twenty-fifth-floor,” Blue Eyes says, and grins. “I’m Khun.”

Khun, Baam repeats all the way back up to his room, Khun. He tucks the name into the pocket of his cheek the way a child savours hard candy - Khun. Khun, Khun, Khun.

(Baam makes it all the way to the lift lobby before he realises that Khun has in fact cracked a dad joke, and when he tells Isu this Isu can’t seem to stop cackling.)

They stop for lunch at a cute diner at the edge of the city. The lights are dim and the booth seats are cracked, stuffing leaking out from where legs have over the years worn the leather down, but the food is warm and the coffee is strong and that’s all that matters.

“More coffee?” The sole waiter nudges Isu’s coffee cup with the jug.

Isu nods. Might as well, if he’s going to be driving for the rest of the day.

He takes a sip and leans back. Rak and Khun are arguing over routes, phones opened to Google Maps and fingers jabbing at the highways. Baam is listening intently to the road talk, slowly pulling the pickles out from his sandwich and setting them in a pile on the edge of his plate, ready for Khun to pick at later.

Isu smiles softly to himself as Rak leans over him to holler at Hatz. He’s glad they cobbled together this trip - it seems the perfect way to end four years of living together before they disperse and are only able to meet on weekends, or worse, every couple of months.

He’ll miss them, of course - if there’s one thing the university did right, it was their random roommate pairings freshman year. Isu’s heard horror stories of roommates going out partying and coming back to puke on rugs, but Baam clicked with him on all sorts of levels, from cleanliness to sleep schedules to taste in films, and it was only natural they applied to continue living together all four years.

And Hatz, despite his deep loathing of Khun during their first month rooming together, quickly warmed up to him too; they were both quiet and studious, were complete night owls and were quite alright with Isu coming to blabber their ears off every once in a while.

(Hatz also strenuously denies this, but after The Physics Lab Incident halfway through the first semester freshman year, Isu is pretty sure Hatz would follow Khun to the ends of the earth and back. And Hatz’s loyalty is hard-earned; he would know.)

Rak was a lucky happenstance in their second year, a constantly sexiled sophomore from across the hallway who more often than not ended up sleeping on their couch. When Isu found out Rak could make a mean beef stew, well? Isu adopted him into their little family straight away.

“What do you guys think?” Khun turns to his left, spearing a pickle off of Baam’s plate. Baam hums his approval and Isu shrugs. He hasn’t really been listening, but he trusts that Khun’s come up with a good route. If anything was weird, Rak and Baam would have pointed it out anyway.

“Doesn’t matter to me where we go,” Hatz says around a full mouth of fries, “As long as we make it to the hotel tonight.”

“Alright then,” Isu says, brushing crumbs off his shirt, “Where has the Great Rak and Khun planned to bring us next?”

“The Museum of Turtles.”

Rak is grinning so broadly Isu can’t help himself - he laughs.

The third time Baam meets Khun, it’s for dinner with Hatz and Isu.

They’re crowded around a table heavy with pizza Hatz must have grabbed on the way back from class. It’s somewhat towards the middle of their first semester - Khun and Hatz must be getting pretty close if Hatz has invited him to eat with them. So much for Hatz’s obstinate declaration that he’d never be friends with someone “that stuck-up”.

“-completely winded because as I said, I fell on my fucking back, and the crazy girl goes, “Oh my god, you’re looking up my skirt!” Like, I’m the one you knocked over literally half a second ago and you’re accusing me of looking at your ugly ass?! How fucking ridiculous is that?” Hatz waves his slice of pizza in the air, pepperoni somehow clinging to the cheese by sheer force of will.

Baam winces in sympathy. He’s not sure what he would have done in Hatz’s place. Maybe die.

“Then Khun - bless Khun - leans over from his bench and says- oh man, I think you better tell this part-“

Khun huffs and wipes his mouth. He sets his half-eaten slice back down, eyes sparkling with mirth, and continues, “So I’m quietly working on this stupid Physics lab sheet when I hear this idiot fall flat on his ass behind me and when I turn around to laugh at him-“

There’s something that resembles a protest from Hatz but it’s covered by Isu’s guffaw.

“-his lab partner looks like she’s about to scream bloody murder to the whole class so I lean over and - see, ordinarily I’d just laugh at Hatz and turn back but this was the girl who looks down on Hatz because she saw that his textbook was second-hand, and more importantly, she insulted my earrings once-“

“Your earrings! How dare she!” Isu is cackling even louder.

“Right?” Khun smirks, and Baam thinks his heart skips a beat, “Anyway, I lean over and I go, “Oh, sweetheart, you’ve fallen again,” and Hatz is on the floor looking at me like I’m some kind of fool instead of his damn roommate trying to get him out of trouble, so I have to tack on, “Sorry, my boyfriend is such a klutz, he’s always bumping into things. And don’t worry about him looking anywhere at you, he’s not interested.” The look on both their faces, priceless-“

“Boyfriend!” Isu howls, pounding the table, “Straight-as-an-arrow Hatz! Boyfriend!”

Hatz grins, “Whatever, you idiot, you missed the best part - then Khun says to her, “Not that there’s much to see anyway!” Oh man, her face must have been some seven shades of purple-” This sets all of them off and as their laughter dies down Baam is pretty sure if he laughs anymore his cheeks might just split in half.

But through his bangs he sees Khun looking, looking at him, and he instantly flushes. He reaches for another slice of pizza, just for his hands to have something to do, but he brushes against something cool and sees Khun retracting his own hand. Khun gestures for him to go ahead, eyes fixed on him.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, then as an afterthought, “Thanks.”

Khun’s smile is absolutely blinding.

Baam hums happily, flicking through photos from the museum exhibit. They were nearly kicked out for being completely obnoxious, yes, but he got the absolute best photos and he knows Isu has more.

“We’re nearly there,” Rak says from where he’s finally wrangled shotgun. Sure enough, Isu turns into the gravel driveway of a small hotel.

Hatz is the first to tumble out of the car, stretching and nearly knocking Baam in the face. It’s been quite a ride from the museum to the hotel, including a boisterous karaoke session, and Baam can’t wait to check in and dump their stuff so they can grab dinner.

“Bad news, y’all,” Isu says, not even ten minutes later. “They have two rooms, but they’re all big beds instead of those individual ones. Hatz and I can take one - we shared beds during sleepovers - but two of y’all have to take a bed and someone has to take the cot.”

Rak, of course, lays claim on the cot instantly. “I kick in my sleep,” he points out, and everyone groans. He does.

Baam nods, but realises with a sinking feeling-

“That leaves Baam with Khun, then,” Isu says, satisfied. He shoots Baam a barely-veiled triumphant look as he hands him a key card and Baam can’t help but flush. This is a terrible, terrible idea, and Isu is a terrible, terrible friend.

He nearly groans in despair when they finally head to the rooms - even with the bed taking up most of the space, it looks barely big enough for two.

Khun clears his throat.

“I can take the floor,” Baam blurts. He doesn’t want to make Khun uncomfortable. With his luck, there’d be some sort of accident in the night and... he’d rather just take the floor and nap in the car tomorrow.

Khun glances sharply at him. “Don’t be silly, you’re going to ache all over tomorrow. We’ll just, you know, set boundaries.”

Baam thinks about the photo Isu once took of him starfishing all over his own bed and clinging to his pillow like a lifeline. Boundaries. “Um,” he says. “Um.”

“Fantastic.” Khun says, already dropping his duffel on one side of the bed.

Fantastic.

Khun eventually loses track of the number of times he meets Baam. It seems like he’s always there whenever Isu comes downstairs to go bother Hatz, or whenever Hatz pulls them all outside for dinner.

(Not that Khun minds, of course - Baam is... interesting. Khun refuses to explore why.)

He ends up seeing Baam outside of the dorm too, sometimes waving to each other across the street between classes. It’s not until Hatz pulls all their schedules together to find a time to go cake-shopping for Isu’s birthday that Khun realises they share a lunch time most days.

Baam volunteers to get the cake the day before Isu’s birthday, since Hatz has classes until late. Which doesn’t quite make sense to Khun, since they agreed on hiding the cake from Isu in Hatz’s and Khun’s room anyway, so he makes an executive decision to join him.

He leans against the wall, picking at his nails, until he hears shuffling from inside the classroom. A few minutes later, Baam emerges from his Phonology class, scarf tucked messily around his neck.

He raises his hand in a half-wave, and waits for Baam to make his way over.

“Heard from Hatz you’re going to pick Isu’s cake out and thought I’d come with,” Khun says in lieu of greeting, and Baam beams at him.

“Great! We can put it in your fridge right after.”

“Exactly why I came,” Khun returns easily, but it seems like the wrong thing to say - the light in Baam’s eyes shutters a little, but before Khun can think about what he said, Baam’s hitched his backpack a little higher and takes the lead out of the linguistics building, waving goodbye at the security guard.

Huh.

He scrambles to catch up, long legs bringing him back up to speed with Baam easily. “I’m thinking chocolate?”

“Isu only ever eats chocolate cake,” Baam informs him, and flashes him a smile. “The only time I ever get to eat a full slice is when I get strawberry or some other fruit flavour.”

“Strawberry? Good taste,” Khun offers, and Baam’s beam returns.

If Khun waits by the exit of Baam’s phonology class the next week just to see that beam again, well, that’s nobody’s business but his own.

Time melts into months, and Khun and Baam’s weekly lunches melt into nearly daily lunches.

Sometimes Khun stops by the linguistics building to wait for Baam to end class; sometimes Baam finds himself waiting outside their agreed-upon dining hall before Khun shows up, waving goodbye to one friend or another.

Khun’s relatively popular, Baam thinks, until Khun corrects him one day with a, “No, it’s just that business majors have to network a lot. I expect we’ll either end up being employed by each other or buying up each other’s businesses ten years down the road.” He laughs at the mildly terrified look on Baam’s face.

Baam tells Khun about the calculus class he’s been forced to take for his math requirement, and Khun gripes about having to take a Physics class to fulfill his science requirements even though he’s a business major. Conversation flows easier than Baam expects, and the more he talks to Khun the smoother it flows.

He learns about how Khun is a business major because he’s expected to take over the family business. He learns about how Khun is interested in a Computer Science minor because he’s convinced the future of the world lies in tech, and Khun learns how Baam might be taking a Psychology minor because he just wants to learn more about the people around him.

Baam learns how Khun talks with his hands, long fingers swirling and jabbing as he maunders around his point. He learns how Khun’s laughs runs from derisive chuckles to laughter as bright as moonlight on icicles. He learns how Khun would rather carry around a hair tie than have to go to the barber’s every two months, and Khun learns, after an incident where his hair tie snaps and he can’t lean forward without getting hair in his soup, that Baam has taken to carrying a spare one around for him.

Baam learns how Khun takes his iced coffee with milk but no sugar, and Khun learns about how Baam’s favourite boba order is lychee green tea. Baam learns about the way Khun doesn’t really believe in dating for fun, not since he watched his sister run away from home with a boy and come back, badly bruised and begging to be loved again as though her family would have ever given up on her the same way that boy did. And Khun learns Baam is a hopeless romantic, and laughs at the way Baam flushes while admitting he believes in love at first sight.

They talk and talk, and as November melts away and Khun introduces Baam to someone as his best friend, Baam grins and feels as though he’s known Khun all his life.

(“It seems as though,” Isu remarks to Hatz one day, “instead of Khun-and-Hatz and Isu-and-Baam, we’ve become Isu-and-Hatz and Khun-and-Baam.”

Hatz throws a pen at his head. “We’ve always been Hatz-and-Isu, you fool. Ever since I saved you on the playground-“

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you swapped the order of our names, you bitch!“)

They’re settling in for the night, Hatz and Isu on the bed and Rak on the fold-out cot.

Rak is tapping away on his phone, setting his multitude of alarms for the next morning, but Hatz doesn’t bother. He’s sure Isu will shake him awake somehow.

He wrestles a good amount of blanket away from Isu’s octopus grasp, and gets ready to close his eyes when Isu suddenly says, “We really need an intervention.”

Hatz frowns. Did he take too much blanket?

“About Khun and Baam.”

Oh. Isu kicks all the covers off in his sleep anyway.

“Khun prides himself on how perceptive he is,” Isu is saying, “But it’s really stupid how he hasn’t cottoned on about Baam.”

Rak bursts out laughing. “We’ve has this conversation before, yes.”

“It’s so slow burn it feels like one of those frog-in-hot-water kind of stories, you know? One of them makes a move, but the other thinks it’s just bros being bros, one of them slips up but the other blames it on fucking Mercury in retrograde or whatever-“

Hatz snorts, “Pretty sure neither of them believe in astrology-“

“Point is, they practically orbit around each other and everyone, everyone, sees that but them. I mean, have you seen the way Baam picks food he doesn’t like off of his meals and Khun just straight up swipes it off of his plate, no questions? Who does that? Every time I swipe food from Rak he threatens to kill me-“

“It’s because you swipe the food I like, you stupid turtle-“

“Anyway, I pointed it out to Baam once and you know what he said? You know what he said?” Isu rubs his hand across his face. “He blinked and said he didn’t even notice! He doesn’t even remember when they started doing it! Khun does the exact same thing and you know how he hates people touching his food! I tried picking carrots off of Khun’s plate last month because I know he always sets his carrots aside and he fucking hit me so hard with his fork I bruised!”

Hatz hears the slight whine in Isu’s voice and finds himself suddenly unable to hold bubbles of laughter in. It’s ridiculous, it really is, four years of Khun being the absolute softest for Baam and Baam not noticing, and he hears Rak’s low rumble of laughter from Isu’s other side.

“The worst thing,” Isu says over their laughter, “is that you know Khun’s the type of person to not do anything if it might put his friendships in danger. Bet you he thinks Baam doesn’t like him like that.” That sobers them up pretty quickly.

“And you know what the absolute kicker is?” Isu’s voice is quieter now, as Hatz’s and Rak’s laughter die down. “Baam won’t do anything about it because - and I know this for a fact - the fool thinks the same.”

Rak groans and rolls over. “We really need to do something before everyone moves home, huh.”

“Damn right we do.”

(They don’t manage to figure out any sort of concrete plan before Rak drops asleep, but Hatz and Isu agree in the vaguest sort of way that Something Must Be Done, Even If We Don’t Know What.)

When their very first set of finals are over, Isu insists on dragging everyone out for drinks.

They find themselves in a small, dimly-lit pub a short walk away from their dorm, teeming with college students temporarily freed from the shackles and chains of higher education. It’s loud and it feels like there are too many people than there should be on a snowy weekday night, but Isu snags them a table and leaves them there to guard it while he goes to grab their first round.

Khun leans across the table, “How were your finals?”

“Glad they’re over,” Hatz says, unwinding his scarf. “I never want to see a physics formula again. How were yours?”

Khun shrugs. “Same about that physics requirement, I suppose. But we’re taking statistics together next semester, right?”

Baam looks up. “Which professor? I’m taking statistics too.” He’d like to take a class with friends, he thinks, and a small flame blooms in his chest at the thought. Friends.

Cheesy as it is, he’s glad he’s come out of his freshman semester with a group of friends to call his own.

“-Yoo, I think,” Hatz is saying, “The Monday and Wednesday morning one.”

“Neat,” Baam grins. “The three of us can study together then?”

“I leave to get drinks and you’re already plotting to take a class without me?” Isu plops a tray down on their table, sounding more amused than affronted.

“You’re the engineering major,” Hatz points out, but Isu waves him away.

“Enough school talk,” Isu says, and raises an eyebrow. “Let’s talk about more fun things.”

Isu’s idea of fun things, apparently, includes a list of get-to-know-you questions, and he grills each and every one of them as if he’s about to have a final on the details of his friends’ lives.

“-past relationships in three words, go.”

Hatz winces, “She… wanted… fencer?“ Isu groans at Hatz’s poor summary, then gestures for Baam.

“Um,” Baam says. “She… wanted better.” Not technically true, he thinks, but that’s as clean as he can get to describing Rachel without prying open a can of worms he had trouble closing in the first place.

Isu pats his hand in sympathy, “One of those, huh? One of my exes dumped me because he had his sights on something higher too. I’ll go for the other one then… his gay experiment.”

Hatz hisses at that, and drains the rest of his beer. “Deserved every last punch I gave him.”

Isu laughs, light and hollow and carefully wiped of emotion, and the sound, emptier than the thud of Hatz’s glass on the table, rings in Baam’s ears. He’s glad Hatz was there to dole out the hits all those years ago, because tipsy on three whole glasses of beers, he’s ready to go out and start a new fight himself.

Isu gestures for Khun’s turn, but Khun’s eyes are on Baam. His gaze has a sort of scrutinising air, as though he’s trying to figure something out, and Baam feels his scowl disappear and a tremble run under his skin.

“I don’t believe in dating,” Khun says, after a measure of silence, and Baam’s heart gives a soft thud from where it has sunk somewhere near the floor.

He isn’t sure why he’s disappointed; he’s known about it ever since Khun told him about his sister, of course, and he’s not even sure what he’s hoping for - they’re great friends and it’s already more than Baam could ask for. Khun is kind and smart and pays attention to the people around him and he has a sort of determined dedication that Baam has never quite figured out how to instil in himself. And even if Khun was up for dating, Baam thinks, he’d be too many leagues above Baam; just in the time they’ve been sat down, there have been countless looks thrown at their table, soft giggles about the boy with the messy blue ponytail and eyes like sapphires, quiet and not-so-quiet whispers daring each other to go up and talk to him.

None of them have, though. It’s just something about the way Khun’s eyes have never wandered from their table that has kept everyone away.

“-couldn’t press charges against him,” Khun is saying. The napkin between his fingers has been torn to shreds, and Baam wants nothing more than to be able to curl his hand around Khun’s in comfort without the tug in his heart begging for more.

He keeps his hands to himself.

“Well, I thought I was the most miserable story, but fuck,” Isu says, and stands up. “I’m going to get another round.”

He comes back with a tray full of soju bottles, and they end up drinking all the way through Isu’s list of silly questions.

They learn that Hatz would name his hypothetical bunny General McHoppers, and that Khun would rather fight a duck-sized horse than a horse-sized duck. Baam can’t remember if they decided on hot dogs being tacos or sandwiches on their way out of the pub, but somewhere along the way his gloves have been fumbled onto his hands and his beanie jammed onto his head.

Isu has his arm around Hatz, talking a mile a minute about how the flat earth theory could theoretically be true while Hatz is struggling to support his weight. Baam could laugh at the way Isu’s stumbling, but come to think of it, he isn’t so sure about the structural integrity of his own legs.

He feels an arm slide around his waist and a laugh, low and breathy in his ear. He shivers at the sound and the way it feels so achingly close he could just turn and- he decides to blame it on the wind chill.

“You’re a lightweight,” Khun accuses. There’s a ribbon of a laugh in his voice and Baam mutters out a stubborn, “I’m not,” that goes unheeded.

“So when are you coming back?” Khun asks, voice light and conversational. “We can probably do something together before winter break is over and the next semester starts.”

Baam squints at him, as though it will make Khun’s voice amplify through the cotton wool of his brain. “Mm not leaving for break,” he says carefully. “Staying here.”

Maybe taking phonology was a good idea, Baam thinks. Makes his enunciation clearer and all that. Maybe Khun will stop thinking he’s drunk and unhand him.

Khun just snorts, and if anything, his hold on Baam gets tighter. His voice is tinged with amusement as he leans closer, lips brushing Baam’s ear. “You are drunk,” Khun informs him, “and you’re saying all your thoughts out loud.”

Baam flushes and immediately clams up. That’s enough thinking and thoughts for tonight, he decides, and is rewarded with a silver peal of Khun’s laughter.

Khun tosses and turns.

There’s no reason why he can’t sleep - the curtains are drawn and Baam’s breathing is even and quiet. He can only imagine the storm coming from Rak just next door.

Khun groans quietly. This is the worst time for his insomnia to act up - they’re planning to go to an amusement park tomorrow and damn if he’s going to be tired through all the fun.

He gropes blindly about until he finds his phone. Isu and Baam sent photos from the museum earlier; he might as well use this time to go through them and save them.

He thumbs through them quickly. Most of them are shots of Rak staring open-mouthed at the exhibits, but there are some silly shots of them looking absolutely ridiculous.

There’s a mirror shot with all of them crouching in front of four huge turtle shells, with Rak standing in the middle, cackling his head off about them finally being “turtles”. Isu’s holding the phone and yelling at them to stop squirming and to please align themselves so they all show up at the correct angle in the mirror or god so help me, my arms are gonna fucking fall off. The photo is slightly blurry with his efforts and Khun can almost hear Hatz’s helpless giggles ringing through the photo.

His thumb stills.

Picture-Baam’s arm is half-raised, fingers coming up to brush away his bangs, and picture-Khun’s arm is slung over his shoulders. PIcture-Baam’s eyes are crinkled up, mid-laugh, smile bright and golden as sunflowers and not quite as radiant as Khun knows it is in real life, but radiant all the same.

And picture-Khun is looking at him, smile soft and head slightly bowed, eyes brimming an emotion Khun does not yet know how to describe.

His thumb swipes to save the photo before he realises it, and there is a flash of an idea about setting it as his wallpaper before he is distracted by a sleepy snuffle. By the light of his phone he sees Baam spread out on his side of the bed, face-down on his pillow.

Khun frowns. There’s no way that’s good for respiration.

He reaches over and gently tugs on the pillow, enough so that Baam has to shifts his head to accommodate for the change but not enough that it wakes him up. He waits until Baam resettles, head tilted and eyelashes brushing his cheek. His mouth is slightly open, lips soft and parted, and Khun is dimly aware of the urge to brush Baam’s hair away from where it is falling across his face.

Beautiful.

The word springs, unbidden, to his mind and he freezes.

Baam. Baam, with the biggest heart of anyone he knows. Baam, with his thoughtful smile and easy laugh and the quiet way in which he lights up the room.

Baam, with the way he finishes Khun’s sentences and laughs at all of Khun’s stupid puns, with the way he understands Khun without either of them having to exchange a word, with the way his loyalty to his friends is fierce and burns with the heat of a thousand suns. Baam, with the way he fits, just right, into Khun’s side, like two hands made to hold.

Baam, with all his kindness and his constancy and his optimism and all of his warmth.

Baam, his best friend.

Khun breathes out shakily, puts his phone down, knots his fingers together, and wills himself to go to sleep.

Baam yanks his chair out from his desk. He’s sopping wet and his bangs keep dripping in his eyes and his goddamn bag is soaked and he feels that awful discomfort of clothes sticking to his skin and really, all he wants to do is take a warm shower and curl into his bed and forget this day ever happened.

“Your mood,” Isu remarks from his bed, “seems to be absolutely foul.”

“You think?” Baam snarls.

Isu blinks, then shuts his laptop. “Wanna talk about it?”

Got caught in the rain, he wants to say. Got called out in class to answer a question about the reading I didn’t do. Got leered at by some creep on the street. But everything is stuck on the top of his tongue, dwarfed by a bigger truth threatening to slip out.

Got stood up for lunch by Khun again.

“Whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here to listen,” Isu says, voice soft and gaze even softer.

Just like that, Baam feels the angry knot in his chest loosen, gently unwound by the unquestioning kindness in Isu’s voice. He lets his backpack tumble to his chair, then sinks, wet clothes and all, onto the floor.

He opens his mouth, intending to apologise for snapping at Isu, but all that slips out is a sob.

Immediately Isu is on his knees, hugging him tight and cradling Baam’s head. Baam tries to bat him off, tries to say through a nose full of snot, I’m getting your clothes drenched with rainwater, but Isu just swipes Baam’s bangs away from his forehead and hugs him again.

“Go take a warm shower,” Isu says, “I’ll make tea, and you can tell me what happened.”

Baam nods, and Isu herds him off the floor and into their bathroom.

He tries to get his shit together in the shower, and emerges ten minutes later, red-eyed and sniffly-nosed, to Isu’s promised cup of tea. It takes five minutes for him to gloss through the shit-show that was class, then another five for him to meander around the topic of Khun.

Isu leans back, finally. “You were meant to meet Khun for lunch, but he stood you up and you’re upset because it’s the second time this week he’s done it without warning.”

“I mean... yes, but now that you put it like that, it sounds like such a stupid reason to be upset, I sound so stupidly clingy-“ Baam falters.

“Do you know why he didn’t show up?”

Baam looks down at the chip in his mug. It fits the shape of his fingernail exactly, almost as if he could have, at one point, dug his fingernails in so deep he chipped the mug himself.

“Yeah,” Baam says at last, “He was meeting his partner for their marketing project.”

“The marketing genius? The one he’s been nattering on about for the past two weeks?”

Baam swallows the bitter taste in his mouth that really has no reason to be there. There’s an uncomfortable knot in his throat, and he sighs. “The first time, I waited twenty minutes before I called and he picked up and apologised for losing track of time because he was talking to her. Which is fine, you know, we all do it.”

“And this time?”

“Called a couple times but he didn’t even pick up the phone. And it was raining, so I thought he might have been trying to wait out the rain and lost battery or something, or maybe something important popped up, so I ran through the rain to the business building to look for him, but he was just standing in the lobby of the building talking to his project partner and laughing with her and-“ Suddenly there’s a lump in his throat that he can’t speak around, and he falls silent.

It’s so stupid, he thinks. He’s acting like a spoilt child, crying because he doesn’t have someone’s undivided attention. It’s so, so stupid that he thought he had a monopoly on Khun’s time, that he thought he was so important that-

“It sounds,” Isu says carefully, “like you’re upset that he didn’t respect your time, and that he temporarily held time with his project partner in higher regard than time with you. Combined with the rest of your day, it’s understandable that it’d be a last straw.” He’s squinting at Baam, as though he doesn’t expect to be right, as though he expects there to be something more but can’t quite put his finger on what it is.

Baam nods at him anyway, but there’s an unsavoury, wiggling feeling at the bottom of his stomach that laughs at that.

If it wasn’t Khun, you wouldn’t have minded as much, it taunts him. If it was Hatz, you’d have just brushed it off as his scatterbrain and just waited out the rain. But it was something about seeing Khun with that girl that made you so upset you had to run home in the rain, wasn’t it? I think you’re-

“You’re jealous,” Isu says, slight incredulity colouring his tone as he arrives as the same conclusion. He rocks back in his chair slightly, and repeats, “My god, you’re jealous.”

Baam chokes. He briefly considers denying Isu’s scarily accurate mind-reading, but his head is so, so heavy, and there’s a tiny bloom of relief now that the nasty knot in his throat has finally been given a name.

He lets his head hit the table, and his question comes out more like a smothered whine. “How do I make it stop?”

He feels Isu’s fingers tap along the table as he works out the answer to Baam’s question.

“You’re acting like you’ve just got your heart broken,” Isu says, after a while. “I think that should tell you something.”

“I’m not in love with him,” Baam says, protest dulled and muffled. “I’m not.”

Isu remains silent.

“I’m not,” Baam insists. “He’s my best friend.”

He waits for the familiar bloom of pride he gets whenever Khun introduces him to someone as his best friend, but the words ‘best friend’ no longer taste like they used to.

“He’s my best friend,” he says again. As the words leave his mouth, Baam no longer quite knows who it is that he’s insisting to.

(Khun knocks on his door that night to apologise. Baam takes a deep breath and they both ignore his red eyes and pretend nothing ever happened.)

Baam shifts. It’s warm under the blanket and really, if someone could turn that fucking alarm off and let him sleep a couple more minutes, it’d be great.

There’s a slight shift behind him, and a small whine comes from the crook of his neck.

Baam freezes, suddenly more awake. There’s a heavy, warm sort of weight around his waist and a cool press against his calves. He doesn’t dare open his eyes to see what they might be.

This can’t be happening, he tells himself, then nearly laughs aloud. Of course it’s a dream, Baam thinks. His unconscious must have lifted something out of all the things he’s never allowed himself to consider, much less daydream about, and stuffed them all into a dream-

Lips brush the back of his neck and Baam’s mind stops working.

He’s sure his heart is thumping loud enough to wake Khun up, but Khun just mumbles against his neck again, whispers of a breath making Baam’s hair stand on end. “The alarm-“

He feels Khun still. Stars burn and burst and civilisations rise and fall in the spaces between Baam’s heartbeats. He can almost hear the cogs in Khun’s brain turning, and he’s so busy trying to keep his heart still and his breathing even that he thinks he imagines the barest press of lips on the back of his neck before Khun pulls away.

He nearly whimpers at the loss of contact, but Khun has already shut off the infernal alarm and is shaking him awake, hand warm against his shoulder.

Khun’s voice is rough with sleep and something else as he tells Baam to get up and get dressed for breakfast. Baam tries not to think about it.

Isu is convinced Baam just needs to go out more and meet people that don’t live with him and are not Khun.

Baam disagrees.

He doesn’t understand why Isu is squeezed onto his bed next to him, flicking through Tinder and showing him faces that frankly, look nothing close to Khun’s. “I’m not interested in dating anyone,” Baam mutters for the fourth time.

“You’re not interested in dating anyone that isn’t Khun,” Isu corrects. He swipes left a couple times, then frowns. “How about this one?”

Baam groans, and shoves him lightly. “Get off my bed, Isu, your bed is literally three feet away.”

“You can’t see faces on this screen from three feet away-“

“I don’t want to-“

“Listen, Baam, you want to get over Khun? Go on some dates. Seven billion people on this earth and you think that blue shrimp is The One?”

“I don’t think he’s anything, he’s just my best friend-“ Baam falters under Isu’s withering look. He has to admit that even to himself, his repeated denials have sounded particularly pathetic as of late.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” Isu says finally, setting his phone down. “I’ve seen the way you look at him, and frankly? It reminds me of the way I used to look at Hatz.”

Baam’s eyes widen. “Hatz?! But-“

Isu waves him away. “Briefly thought I fancied him way back in ninth grade. Had a whole dramatic little crisis about pining after my straight best friend too, it was a nightmare for my mum.”

“And then what happened?” Baam’s voice is smaller than he intends.

Isu snorts, tipping his head back and letting it hit the wall, “Then I went on a date with someone else and realised that I was an absolute fool and Hatz wasn’t all that great, that’s what happened. My mum’s theory is that since there wasn’t anyone else in the picture, my brain went for the only one who would show me affection. Which was really stupid, because something in me already knew that even if Hatz and I were soulmates, we’re in no way relationship material, you know? It just took me a little nudge to better figure out what I wanted in a relationship and realise that Hatz wasn’t it.” He chances a look at Baam, and exhales a shaky laugh, looking back up at the ceiling. “Don’t tell him, though, don’t want to get his ego to get more inflated than it already is.”

Baam looks up at him. He sees how Isu’s biting his lip and avoiding his gaze, and he sees how Isu’s sharing a part of himself that he’s never told anyone, how Isu’s just really and sincerely trying to help. “I’d never.”

And so he agrees. He agrees to let Isu set him up on dates and he agrees to sit down and figure out what it is he wants. Because it can’t be - and it shouldn’t be - Khun. It can’t be Khun and his smart quips and his messy bangs and the way he smiles at Baam like Baam’s the only thing in his world and the way that makes Baam’s heart skip a beat every time.

(Khun catches him, one day, stumbling out the dorm, running late to a date with some girl named Endorsi? Androssi? “Where you headed? Wanna get dinner?”

“Maybe later,” Baam mumbles, distracted and looking at everywhere else but Khun, “I’m late to a… to a date.”

Then he slips away, like sand between Khun’s fingers, and Khun tells himself for the rest of the day that the hollow feeling in his chest is because his professor only gave him an A- on that marketing project that he and Yuri slaved away over.)

“If I have to go on another rollercoaster, I’m going to throw up,” Isu warns the group. He’s bent over heaving, hands on his knees, and his glare just makes Hatz laugh even harder.

Khun chuckles and takes pity on him. “You all go on ahead, I’ll take this one and get us snacks. We’ll meet you at the exit of the next coaster.”

It takes all of two seconds for Hatz and Rak to cheer and haul Baam off to the next one.

“You didn’t want to get on another one too, huh?” Isu whispers conspiratorially, bumping his shoulder against Khun’s.

Khun snorts, “I can handle a couple more-“

“Liar!” Isu sings, and winds his arm around Khun’s shoulders. Khun bats him off, laughing, and they head over to the nearest concession stand.

Isu orders them hotdogs, but the churros in the display case catches Khun’s eye. A vague memory of Baam mentioning churros flashes in Khun’s mind and he makes a quick decision.

“And a churro,” Khun tacks on, then fishes out his wallet.

Isu eyes him. “Hungry?”

Khun shakes his head. “Baam likes churros, he hasn’t had them in a while.”

Isu just looks at him strangely, then turns to collect their orders from the operator.

Khun frowns. Should he have gotten all of them churros? Hatz doesn’t like sugary things, though-

As they walk back, foil-wrapped hotdogs and churro in hand, he hears Isu whistle quietly. He bumps his hip against Khun’s, and nods over to their right. “Look at that guy.”

Khun glances up, trying to keep the mini hotdog-churro mountain in his hand from toppling. The guy in question has short silver hair barely covered by a backwards cap and eyes red as a snake’s. The flimsy white tank top he has on leaves little to the imagination, and from the way he looks positively sculpted, Khun can see why Isu singled him out.

“Right Baam’s type, isn’t he?” Isu says, and Khun nearly drops the churro.

“Baam-“ he splutters, trying to salvage the churro from where it’s clamped in the turn of his wrist. “Baam’s type?”

“Yeah. You think he’s Baam’s type?”

“I don’t know, he’s only ever dated girls-“

“You’re his best friend and you never once asked? Also, he’s only had one girlfriend, but I set him up with all genders-“

“You set him up?!”

“For the whole of freshman spring, you fool, did you never catch on?”

“He’s never mentioned it-“

“That’s because he wasn’t interested in any of them, and I tried my best, mind you-“

“And that’s Baam’s type?” Khun twists slightly to look back at the man.

Isu bites his lip, grinning, and Khun has a strange feeling Isu’s just making it up in his head.

“He isn’t, is he?” Khun says, and ignores the way his heart lifts slightly.

“You’ll just have to ask,” Isu sings, and Khun groans.

Before he can think too much about why he even wants to find out in the first place, they see a brown blur barrelling towards them, and Khun has to take a step back to avoid being ran over by Rak.

Hatz and Baam are slower to head towards them, still talking about the animatronics in their last ride. Isu hands Hatz his hotdog, and Khun is about to tell Baam that hey, the concession stand was selling churros and I remember you mentioned a while ago-

“The animatronics were really cool, Khun, you should have seen it. You would have liked them.” Baam’s eyes are shining, soft muted gold, and Khun finds himself smiling softly back.

“I’ll go with you next time,” Khun promises, and is rewarded with Baam’s breathless beam.

(“Gross,” Hatz mutters, mouth full of mustard. Isu isn’t sure if he’s talking about the way Khun and Baam can’t stop looking at each other or if it’s the obscene amount of mustard he slathered onto Hatz’s hotdog as a joke.)

As it turns out, Baam gets along with all the people Isu sets him up with like a house on fire.

Not in the way Isu expects, of course. Baam finds out that Wangnan was forced to do it by his friends too, and they spend an hour commiserating over meddling friends with good intentions before realising they share their sociolinguistics class and move on to commiserating over that too. Ehwa is slightly clumsy with her words, but is completely endearing, and when she admits to Baam that she’s not really looking for a relationship because she’s still hung up over an ex, Baam finds himself equal parts relieved and sympathetic. Urek confesses that his main motive for downloading the app is to convince people to join his school’s flailing LGBTQ club, but it backfires when they realise they attend different colleges. Baam laughs and agrees to attend some of Urek’s club events anyway.

He ends up great friends with all of them, and with the flow and ebb of the semester, ends up spending less time in his dorm than usual.

“Getting popular, huh,” Khun says one day, as Baam taps out a reply to Ehwa that absolutely yes, he‘d love to hear about the new boy she’s been seeing. Baam hums distractedly in response, and sets his phone down when Khun sighs.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time out of the dorm,” Khun tries again.

Baam blinks. “Some of my friends living in different residence halls.”

“You’ve been spending less time with us,” Khun clarifies. Baam wishes he could see Khun’s eyes to figure out what he’s thinking, but Khun’s frowning down at his nails.

“You jealous?” The words slip out of his mouth before he can help it, and he nearly laughs at their irony.

Khun glances sharply at him, full force of a blue stare wiping away Baam’s smile. He’s looking straight at Baam with a seriousness that they’ve never shared in their nearly-two semesters of friendship, and there follows a moment of silence so loud that it echoes in Baam’s ears and with each beat of his heart Baam knows that Isu is wrong, Isu is wrong, Isu is wrong and that there will never be anyone for him but Khun.

Suddenly Khun blinks and he’s pouting, lower lip jutting out in petulance. “So what if I am?”

(When Hatz walks in, he says Baam laughed so loudly he could hear him all the way from the lift.)

Rak eyes Baam’s hotdog. He’s long since finished his, but Baam’s been stuck, starry-eyed, on the churro Khun bought for him, and Rak grumbles to himself that if Baam doesn’t get started on that hotdog soon he’ll rip it out of Baam’s hands and inhale it himself.

“Baam? Is that you?”

An unfamiliar man is standing behind them, head cocked to the side and unzipped hoodie barely clinging onto his biceps. Rak winces as Isu grabs his shoulder and whispers, “It’s him!”

Before Rak can ask Isu what he’s talking about, Baam has burst into a smile - “Urek!”

“Baam, baby, I knew it was you!”

Rak blinks. Baby?

He wants to ask Isu about this strange man with silver hair, but everyone’s mouth hangs open as Urek envelopes Baam in a bone-crushing hug and lifts him off the ground.

“Thought I wasn’t going to see you again, not with my club leaving for our trip two days before your finals ended, but I’m so glad to see you, babe-“

Isu issues a faint squeak as Urek plants a loud smack on Baam’s forehead, and clutches Rak’s shoulder even tighter.

Rak turns to Isu. “Explain,” he demands, under his breath.

“I thought he looked familiar when I saw him just now, fuck- I set up him with Baam ages ago, back in freshman spring, I thought nothing came of it since Baam talks about him like he’s just a friend but-“

“But babe?” Rak hisses. Khun isn’t going to like this, he thinks. He’s going to go into one of his infamous sulks and Baam’s going to be the only one who can pull him out of it, and good fucking luck to whoever gets the job of explaining to Baam why Khun was sulking in the first place.

“So you gonna introduce me to your friends, Baam?” The man says, slinging his arm around Baam and smiling genially at everyone. Baam’s smile is so wide it nearly cracks his face in half, and Rak wonders faintly how Khun is faring.

“Everyone, this is Urek, he goes to the college uptown. Urek, these are my best friends Hatz, Isu, Rak and... where’s Khun?”

Rak pauses as everyone turns to look around. He swears Khun was right beside Hatz half a second ago, but there’s absolutely no trace of him now. Half of Rak is relieved that he’s not on the other end of one of Khun’s patented glares, but the other half of him knows Khun well enough that he can smell the Brood building just right round the corner.

He sighs, and gently disentangles Isu’s arm from his. “He mentioned something about needing to run to the washroom, I’ll go see if he’s there.”

Rak waves a friendly goodbye at Urek, and as he walks away to search for a flash of blue hair, he hears a sly, “Oh, Khun? Your Khun?” and Baam’s flustered spluttering.

Ah.

He spots a messy blue flash a little ways down from them, and hurries over before Khun can see him.

“So,” Rak says by way of greeting. He clamps a hand on Khun’s shoulder as Khun turns, blue eyes flashing in surprise, “Our mighty Khun has run away.”

“I’m not running from anything,” Khun mutters, turning away again, “I just... saw this really interesting... thing and came over to look at it.”

“Terribly fascinating, these... uh,” Rak follows Khu’s gaze, “these trash cans.”

“They... they might talk.”

“Talking trash cans.” Rak is unimpressed, and he makes sure to let it into his tone.

He crosses his arms and lets Khun avoid his gaze for a few more seconds. Khun’ll start talking soon, Rak knows - he hates awkwardness, especially when they’re centred around him.

“He’s… he does seem close to Baam, isn’t he?” Khun says, eventually. He still hasn’t taken his eyes off the trash cans, and Rak briefly considers tossing Khun into one.

“I don’t know, you tell me. You’re his best best friend.”

There’s a flash of a wince before Khun’s cool mask is back. “He hasn’t told me anything about that guy.”

Rak waits.

“He’d… he’d tell me if they were dating, wouldn’t he?” Khun’s eyebrows are furrowed. “Why hasn’t he said anything about being someone’s… someone’s babe?”

Khun spits out the last word with so much disgust that Rak nearly laughs. “You’re an idiot,” Rak chooses to say instead.

He waits for Khun to look up before continuing, “You’re an idiot and lest you forget, you're his best friend-“

“Just his best friend-“

“-and what that means is that if he hasn’t told you anything about this guy giving him pet names, it probably isn’t significant enough to him and he hasn’t feel the need to mention it. To you or to any of us. Whoever Urek is, he doesn’t mean anything to Baam other than a friend, and you, of all people, shouldn’t worry that Baam is keeping anything from us. He’s your best friend, Khun. Trust him.”

Khun lowers his head, worrying a fingernail between his teeth. They remain silent for a moment, until Rak finally processes what Khun has said.

“Just his best friend?” Rak tries not to smile too widely. “You looking to be something more, then?”

Khun freezes slightly, then lets out a laugh that is far too cheery. “Course not.”

Rak isn’t as smart or perceptive as Isu is, he knows, but he likes to think that after more than two years of friendship, he can read Khun pretty well too. He kicks lightly at the trash cans, and offers quietly, “I know his friendship is valuable to you - I know all of our friendships are - but I don’t know if you see the way Baam looks at you sometimes. There’s… there’s something different there. There’s something there that Hatz doesn’t have with Isu. And I know you’re afraid of losing him, and you’re afraid taking the chance that one day he might leave you behind but… for what my opinion is worth, I think Baam might be a chance worth taking.”

He watches Khun take one breath, two, three. Khun’s hands are balled up into fists and Rak can see the cogs turning as Khun processes and reprocesses what Rak is presenting to him.

When Khun speaks, his voice is small. “The way Baam looks at me?”

“You’ve been walking around him with your eyes closed, haven’t you - he looks at you the same way you look at him.”

Khun’s mouth opens, as if in denial, and Rak huffs. “He looks at you like if you were to hypothetically be more than best friends with him… he looks at you as if he might like that.”

Khun shuts his mouth. He stays lost in thought for a while, and Rak feels an itch on the back of his neck like someone is watching him. He suddenly remembers the way they have left Baam and Hatz and Isu standing, waiting for them, and curses. “Come on, they’re looking for you. Should I tell them you were jealous that someone called Baam baby or should I tell them you were entranced by talking trash cans?”

Khun flushes and turns to walk away from said trash cans, tossing Rak two fingers.

Rak just cackles.

The first snow of sophomore year falls on a Tuesday.

Baam wakes up to a flurry of white outside his window, and as he trudges through the ankle-high slush and the snowflakes that threaten to glue his eyelashes together, he realises he forgot to bring gloves.

Ah, well. He’ll just suffer, then.

His phone buzzes with non-stop texts from Hatz and Isu all throughout his second lecture of the day, and he fumbles to set it on Do Not Disturb when his TA starts glancing over at him.

Best Roommate Ever: snowing!!!! Fencing Champion: snowball fight in the park, 2pm Best Roommate Ever: bring it on bro I’m not scared of you Fencing Champion: yeah, not scared of me keeping my winning streak alive Alligator Overlord: get ready to get SMUSHED, cowards, the Great Rak is coming Khun: good lord, y’all couldn’t wait until classes were over?

Baam bites back a grin, heart oddly warm, and he finds himself unable to sit still for the remainder of the lecture. He ends up counting down the minutes to the end of class, and as soon as it hits 1.45pm he tosses his notes into his bag and his scarf around his neck.

He is the first one out of the building, and nearly blows by the person leaning by the entrance. The person reaches forward and tugs on his backpack, and Baam turns around, startled, only to come face to face with Khun.

“Woah there,” Khun laughs, arms reaching out to steady him. “In a rush?”

Baam grins in response. “Left my gloves at the dorm, thought I’d go grab them before meeting everyone for the snowball fight. Wanna come with?”

Khun raises an eyebrow, and produces Baam’s gloves from his own pocket and holds them up to Baam.

“Absolute hero,” Baam beams, and he tries to tamp down the wonderful sort of warmth curling out from his heart all the way down to his toes. “How’d you know?”

Khun shrugs. “You always forget your gloves. Thought I’d just let myself in and check if you did.”

He hands Baam his gloves, and wait for him to put them on before they begin the cold and slippery trek to the park.

Isu and Hatz are already there, wrapped in beanies and scarves and long winter coats.

“Get ready to get wrecked, losers!” Isu calls out, waving to them.

“Where’s Rak?”

“Rak’s here,” comes Rak’s voice, somewhere near Baam’s feet. He’s lying on his back, limbs spread out and tongue sticking out. “Mm trying to catch snowflakes.”

Baam just laughs, and helps him up. There are already multiple groups spread across the grass, flinging snowballs at each other with peals of laughter carrying in the wind.

“We’re thinking a three versus two game,” Isu offers, now that Rak is back on his feet. “How do we want to split?”

They decide on rock, paper, scissors, and by some feat of magic (“Manipulation,” Hatz insists), Khun emerges on top.

“You get first pick,” Hatz tells him, “but the other side gets the third person.”

Khun twists to look at Baam. “How’s your aim?”

“Terrible,” Baam answers honestly, and Khun grins with far too much delight.

“Great. I want Baam.”

“No cheating,” Hatz warns. “Just the both of you.”

Khun bumps his shoulder against Baam’s and grins at him, eyes sparkling with mischief, “Always been us, hasn’t it?”

And when Baam laughs, full and delighted, Khun swings, hidden snowball hitting Hatz right between the eyes.

(Baam dreams about us sometimes. He dreams of an us, a universe in which Khun is ice and he is fire, and they burn together in an endless firework instead of melting into a tepid puddle.

He dreams of a Khun that hurtles through space and time, and of a Baam that will rip rifts into the fabric of the universe if it means he can follow wherever Khun goes.

He dreams of a Baam that spins illusions out of thin air in a circus for those without a home, and a Khun that tells the future and flips cards and is the flip side of his card, the way people are in the best sort of love stories.

He dreams of a Khun that wraps his hand around Baam’s and tips their foreheads together in soft moonlight, and of a Baam that is brave enough to rest his head against Khun’s heart, finally brave enough to dance with him to the quiet song that is three o’clock.

He dreams of a Baam that charges into battle, cloaked in red, sword drawn and burning with the rage of a thousand souls, and of a Khun that grits his teeth and charges in right behind him.

He tells Isu about the latest of his strange dreams one day, and Isu just laughs.

“Of course he would,” Isu says, picking up his book again. “Khun looks at you as if he’d follow you around anywhere.”)

“Come on, eat faster, we’re gonna miss good spots for the fireworks!”

“What good spots?” Khun snorts. “In case you forget, fireworks are in the sky. Anywhere’s a good spot.”

Rak levels Khun a glare, and brandishes a fry in his face. “Not if the only place left is under an awning and all our views are blocked. Remember junior year?”

Everyone groans at the memory and starts eating slightly faster - they waited for the fireworks to signal the end of the pride parade, but when the fireworks started and they finally clambered outside of the coffee shop they were waiting in, all they could see was the red underbelly of an awning that desperately needed a clean.

“So,” Baam says, “Urek asks if we want to meet his club for lunch tomorrow.”

There is instant reaction around the table - Rak drops a fry on the ground and squawks, and Isu chokes on his soda. Hatz has to thump him hard on the back before Isu inhales, red-faced. He flashes a grin at Baam, “Why don’t you ask Khun?”

Khun looks up from where he is staring daggers at the table, and frowns. Why me? He wants to ask, but Baam has already turned to him, eyes hopeful and fingers poised over his keyboard.

He swallows hard. As much as he doesn’t like Urek (Which doesn’t make sense, by the way, a small voice in his head tells him primly. Urek’s been nothing but friendly to you.) he doesn’t want to be the one to deny Baam anything. “If you want to, sure.”

Hatz huffs in annoyance, and Khun shoots him a look. What’s with all his friends today, he wants to demand. First with Isu joking about Baam’s type, then Rak being uncharacteristically insightful about things Khun doesn’t want to think about, and now Hatz? But he sees an opening to get answers, and he goes in for the kill.

He turns to Baam, and slaps on a smirk. “So he’s your type, huh?”

Baam’s mouth hangs open, a faint blush painting his cheeks. “He’s- what- he-” Baam flaps his hands in Khun’s direction. “What made you think that?”

Khun affects a casual shrug. “Looked like you were pretty pleased to see him.”

“He’s a friend from uptown,” Baam says. “Nothing like my type.”

“And what would that be?” Khun says, then makes the mistake of looking into Baam’s eyes. Like honey, he thinks, dazed, the kind that is sweet and sticky and impossible to ever escape once you’ve fallen in.

He nearly misses Baam’s nonchalant answer, delivered as if he’d rehearsed in his mind a thousand times before. “You know, kind, smart, resourceful. Takes the time to get to know me. Same sense of humour. Always knows what to say. Remembers the small details about me, stuff like that.”

There’s a snort from the other end of the table that sounds suspiciously like sounds a lot like Khun, but the tips of Baam’s ears are red as he breaks eye contact with Khun and he’s pouting so fiercely at Isu that Khun’s mind nearly goes blank at how… how cute it is.

But Rak is growling at them about how if they don’t finish eating in five minutes he’s going to head out to see the fireworks without them, and so Khun’s mind shuts up pretty quickly.

(They manage to find a good spot, of course. Not many awnings in amusement parks.)

The first firework to go up is red, and the crowd oohs and aahs as their video cameras capture the peony bursting into a thousand tiny stars. The next one is a yellow brocade, and as the golden stars fade away, Khun can’t help but think that it doesn’t quite match the golden of Baam’s eyes.

Baam.

He turns to his side, shoulder brushing Baam’s, and is stunned to see Baam already looking at him.

Baam blinks rapidly at having been caught, and Khun can see a small flush making its way up his face in the dim light. Khun’s eyes unconsciously trail down, a small part of his mind wondering, wandering-

Khun finds himself leaning in, and his eyes dart back up to Baam’s, suddenly closer than they’ve ever been. They are full of… hesitance, Khun thinks. Hesitance and a quiet sort of yearning and something that resembles hopefulness that makes Khun’s heart flip in a peculiar sort of way.

He opens his mouth, but under the bursts of the fireworks and the thunder of his own heartbeat, he finds that for the first time in his life he cannot think of anything to say to his best friend.

He doesn’t know how long they stay like this, encased in all the things Khun doesn’t know how to put into words, a frozen bubble of their own, but all too soon the lights are flickering back on in the park and everyone is cheering for the fireworks display. There is a resigned sort of smile on Baam’s face as he raises his hands to join the applause, and Khun notices too late that Baam never pulled away.

“They were beautiful, weren’t they, Khun!” Hatz is saying, and Khun snaps away, shoulders jolting away from Baam’s and mouth fumbling through a yes, of course, of course.

When Khun is five, his sister tells him about her first boyfriend. What kind of person do you want to date in ten years, Khun? Khun thinks about it, and tells her, with all the gravity a five-year-old can muster, someone who eats all my carrots so I don’t have to. His sister bursts out laughing, then hauls him onto her lap. My boyfriend is tall and smart and handsome, she says, tickling his sides. Will you be tall and smart and handsome too? But he’s wriggling around too much to answer, answering shrieks of laughter echoing down the hallway.

When Khun is eight, he comes back from school with a backpack full of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, and when his mother laughs and asks him who he got them all from, he shrugs. Here and there, he tells her, and he hands her the stack of letters he gets along with them for her perusal. You didn’t open any of them, she says, but he has already wandered off. He ends up stuffing some chocolate into his sister’s jacket pocket, and when she disappears that night he wonders if she ever finds them.

When Khun is ten, his sister comes back home, bruised and empty. She sometimes forgets the motions she needs to go through to love herself again, Khun’s mother tells him, so he needs to love her extra until she remembers. He hears - he can still hear - the quiet, trembling way she tries to rebuild herself and when he climbs into her bed to hug her and pepper her forehead with kisses the same way their mum does, he tells her it’s okay to cry, and he tells himself that he will never let someone consume him the way that monster has consumed her, because even at the age of ten Khun has come to learn that sometimes the wounds that hurt the most are the ones that don’t show scars.

When Khun is fourteen, Novick gets a crush for the first time. He tells Khun all about her after school one day, and Khun nods politely in all the right places while trying to solve a rubix cube. How do you know? Khun asks, hands fiddling with his cube. How do you know you like her? Novick flops over onto his bed and sighs. Can’t get her out of my mind, Novick says. I can’t stop wanting to make her smile.

When Khun is seventeen, Dan applies to the same college his partner does. You’ll regret it, Khun and Novick tell him. Think about what college is best for your education, not who’s going to go there, but Dan just laughs. It’s a reach school anyway, he says. He might not make it in. But he’s test-savvy, and he does, and when it comes down to the decision between Khun’s school and theirs, Dan chooses them. Don’t sacrifice your future for someone you might not even remember down the road, it doesn’t make sense, Novick tells him, and tosses a pen at his head. Love isn’t supposed to make sense anyway, Dan grins, and that’s that.

When Khun is eighteen, he comes back to Dan and Novick for the summer with one name on his tongue. He tells them all about Baam and the way Baam’s eyes sparkle when he’s excited and the way he hates pickles and the way he laughs at all the bad jokes everyone else groans at. He talks about Baam until Novick swipes him on the head and laughs. You talk about him so much it’s insane. You in love, bro? And Khun remembers the flames that burned his sister, the way love ate and ate and ate away at her until she had to build herself again, and he bites his tongue and shakes his head, insistent. I’m not.

When Khun is twenty two, alone in a hotel room crowded with his own thoughts at two am while his best friend lingers outside, he calls Dan and Novick. They hear the worry of fingernail between his teeth, and they ask him what’s wrong, Khun, what’s wrong, and joke about how they’ll help him hide the body. He takes a deep breath, and whispers, I think I’m in love with him.

And just like that, the dam breaks.

He tells them about the way he cannot stop thinking about Baam - the way he has never stopped thinking about Baam since the day they met - and the way he’d do anything to make Baam smile. He tells them about the way Baam’s eyes shine a soft, subdued gold when he’s thoughtful and a fierce, flashing gold when he gets worked up, and the way Khun has tried his best but has never quite figured out if it’s the gold of dusk or dawn. He tells them about the way something inside him aches when Baam looks away, the way Khun’s hands itch to hold his every time they touch.

He tells them about the way Baam eats his carrots (Novick laughs) and the way Baam has a stupid sweet tooth that can only be satisfied with copious amounts of chocolate and the way he walked forty blocks once just to find the sort of chocolate Baam likes because he knew that Baam’s beam at the end of it would be worth it. He tells them about the way Baam looked, under the dim light of the fireworks, the way Baam looked at him, hopeful and yearning and sad all at once, and the way Khun wanted nothing more than to kiss him in that moment. He tells them about what Rak said, about the way Baam looks at him, and the way he looks at Baam and how the past few years suddenly clicked and made sense.

He tells them about the way he’s discovered that Baam has dismantled him, piece by piece, and has diffused through him so thoroughly that everywhere he looks, it just echoes Baam, Baam, Baam, and as a tear rolls down his cheek he tells them about the way it doesn’t make sense, because he’s told himself that nobody is supposed to cut through him like this.

Love isn’t supposed to make sense, Dan says. Now go, go and tell him.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Baam looks up. He watches as Khun emerges from the shadows, hair almost pearlescent in the sharp moonlight. His hands are stuffed in his pockets, and he looks almost nervous waiting for Baam to allow him to sit.

Baam shifts, and he settles down next to where Baam is sitting on the curb, hugging his legs and chin on his knees. The curb is narrow, and Khun is nearly totally pressed up against Baam by the time he’s fully sat down, adopting the same pose Baam is.

Baam swallows. He feels the warmth of Khun’s leg through his own jeans, and the dangerous brush of Khun’s hand on his.

“Nice night.” Khun comments.

Baam hums in response. It is - the stars have all come out in this dark distance between them and the city, and the only things Baam can hear is the song of the cicadas and the low buzz from the neon sign outside the hotel.

“What brings you outside at 3am?”

Everything, Baam thinks. You. Me. What I want us to be but daren’t ask for.

The way I keep replaying that moment under the fireworks in my head. The way that when I close my eyes, I keep seeing the way you looked at me, keep feeling the brush of your shoulder against mine, but knowing it doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to me. The way that even if it did, you’d never act on it, and oh, the way I wish you would.

“Too stuffy,” Baam says instead.

“Me too,” Khun says, and his voice is so close, so close to Baam’s ear that he’s sure if he just turns his head a fraction Khun’s lips will be there. “Too many thoughts for one small room, you know?”

Baam swallows again, and stays still.

“Baam,” Khun murmurs. His voice sounds slightly strangled and all sorts of breathless, and it takes everything in Baam not to shiver in response.

“Baam, look at me, please.”

And so Baam does, because he never can resist when it is Khun asking. He turns, and he sees the way the moonlight dances between Khun’s eyelashes, the way it brushes Khun’s cheeks and makes him glow, makes him look so ethereal that it makes Baam’s chest hurt.

He sees the way Khun’s eyes are soft and open and willing Baam to understand, but fierce and determined and brilliant all at once. They shine, and Baam’s breath stutters.

He wants to look away, wants to pry himself away from the trainwreck of a memory he knows he’s going to form, the memory he knows will replay in his mind’s eye over and over again when he lays down to sleep at night.

But Khun is beautiful, and Baam cannot take his eyes off of him.

Beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

And suddenly Khun is leaning over, hand warm on Baam’s jaw, eyes questioning, pleading, and Baam feels himself melt into Khun, carried by the ache of want he has hauling around by himself the past four years.

Khun tastes like iced coffee, like sunlight glinting off of fresh snow. He tastes like the crackle of lightning, like a multitude of city lights, like the sound of snowballs skimming across a frozen pond. He tastes like Baam has always thought of and more, lips slotting into Baam’s the way he has slotted himself into the space between Baam’s heartbeats, and Baam isn’t sure if he ever wants Khun to pull away.

And when they do break apart, it is with the feeling that everything in the world has snapped into place, brighter, clearer, right.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me this long,” Khun murmurs. “But I’m here now, and I don’t think I ever want to leave.”

====

anyway i just graduated and now i miss my friends and i don’t know what to do with my life what’s up with y’all

#tower of god #tog #khunbaam #khunbam #vivi writes #what's up folks i haven't written a full fic in close to two years #anyway i'm not posting this on ao3 firstly bc . i don't have an ao3 acc #if anyone could help that would be very helpful #used the morpheme help twice! i'm never going to write 15k words ever again #chopped some too bc i was so scared this wasnt gonna fit in the tumblr character count #catch my old fandom references LOL #but also if you know where the title is from high five ayeeeee jj lin ballad king #除了爱你还能爱谁 is a masterpiece and none of you can tell me otherwise

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tenmillionwhumperflies · 3 years

Text

Cloudwalker Series: Mouse the Dragon

Alright, so here is Mouse’s little origin story... thing, because Mouse is precious and deserves all the loves. Oh, and you can meet Azeera, another sorcerer boi.

Drawing of Mouse Here

Warnings for mentions of death, grief, mentions of slavery, ‘animal’ cruelty (contained in a very small space).

Word Count: 1700

Tag List: @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi

Orrien hated busy places, he hated the noise, the stall owners drawing attention to their produce, the chatter of so many people, the chopping, the grinding, the sound of animals. He hated the mix of smells that didn’t go together at all, fish and cinnamon, fruit and dung.

He hated the heat, the buzz, the way he had to bustle past so many people that just didn’t even notice he was there. He kept his cloak pulled up high, hoping to keep his tattoos hidden. No one could know he was a sorcerer. It was dangerous. They’d assume the worst, that he’d escaped or was going to start an attack on behalf of a kingdom. Sorcerers were not simply free, certainly not in his land anyway.

He kept his head down, buying what he needed to get by until he could travel to the next kingdom. Always searching, desperately looking for a new purpose now that he had lost his only son, and the man who had loved his son had turned to darkness and death. Orrien needed time before he went back to the Red Hills, back to the land he’d been born and raised on.

“Mama, look over there!” a child cried. Orrien turned quickly, thinking perhaps they were looking at him. He heaved out a breath of relief, seeing she was pointing at a small market stall. The mother ushered the child away from whatever it is they had seen. Orrien couldn’t help but approach the emptier area of the city. Something drew him towards it and didn't fight the urge to follow. He saw the owner of the stall was a cloaked man. Orrien couldn’t see his face, but he knew enough about him already. He had light magic, Orrien could feel it, but that didn't necessarily make him a friend.

Orrien pondered speaking to him, to find out who he was, but he was distracted by a strange tink noise. He turned his head to see a very small jar on the table, and at first Orrien thought it was a small lizard. He stepped closer, seeing that its grey skin was actually metal. He picked up the jar with care. The cloaked figure grunted, but that was all.

Orrien inspected the jar with more care, seeing that the small dragon inside looked incredibly scared. They were so small, only the size of his middle finger. They clawed at the metal with one foot, but the jar was so small they could barely move. They stared at Orrien with wide eyes. He felt so drawn to them. He couldn��t leave them trapped like this. It was cruel. It could kill them. Besides, a small companion like this would likely do him some good. He turned the little paper tag attached to the jar. Enchanted dragon, 100 pieces.

"A trinket has caught your eye, sir?" The man asked. Orrien recognised the voice somewhat, but he couldn't put a name to it. "Some 'trinket' for one hundred… You can’t put a price on a life, enchanted or otherwise. You know no one will ever buy such a small charm for so much. Distress them for too long and they will lose their magic. Why push for so much money?” “The enchantment on this dragon is... immense. They were made with incredible power- from love and care. They are practically alive with their own personality... My greatest work. They deserve a loving home, but are you worthy?"

"Money and power does not equate to kindness," he hissed. My greatest work. Orrien hoped he’d put the voice to the right face, and the fact that the dragon was enchanted. Reluctantly, he eased his hood back a fraction to show his face, his tattoos. "You of all people should know that. You say they deserve a loving home, but you treat them so harshly," he grunted before putting his hood back. "Trapping them like this. You should be ashamed… Azeera." The man carefully moved his hood away, showing bright green tattoos on either cheek, a sharp contrast on his dark skin. Orrien had been right after all, and his relief must have showed. He belonged to the Sorcerer's Circle, one of the eight. His enchantment magic was impressive.

“Correct, though it seemed to take you a while, Orrien of the Red Hills, high sorcerer of the Kingdom of Everblade." He remarked. “Former,” Orrien corrected glumly. There was no kingdom left to serve, not that he’d ever enjoyed serving that wretched man. “Indeed. Word spreads fast. But here you are, in front of me, as I’d waited and hoped. Fate always finds a way, doesn’t it? In truth, I thought you were dead."

“Why would you think that?” Orrien frowned. “Well, the last I heard of Everblade, it was being called Everblood and had fallen. I wasn’t sure if your apprentice had turned on you also.” Orrien sighed. “That castle was so low it could not have fallen any further… Avizon has chosen a darker path, but he would never turn on me.” “Then… tell me, where is your son? Are the rumours true...” his voice faded off. Orrien looked away and kept his eyes on the dragon that was now headbutting the glass with a repetitive tinking noise. “He is… he’s gone. Avizon told me the king killed him while he rested from wounds gained by protecting the castle. That is why Avizon rebelled and attacked. I was a coward and left him. I wasn't going to stop him after what Halve had done, but nor could I stand by him…"

Azeera sighed and bowed his head. “That is indeed a terrible thing to hear, but this was Avizon’s path to walk, his destiny. Fate always finds a way, even if you had stayed behind. I don’t know how Ignium will feel about the whole affair, but I shan't be the one to tell him.” “Perhaps, but what does my son have to do with buying a dragon?” Orrien asked. "And if I may ask, why are you here? Are you not still serving Queen Daphne?”

Azeera shook his head. “Not all of us were kept on as short a chain as you, you know? I was allowed to leave the grounds, but alas, no. After… Everblade, the queen decided against magic defences, despite my years of unwavering loyalty. Royals are realising we are powerful, dangerous, and most importantly, unhappy. Her focus is on the army, on a group that won’t risk so much if one loses control. She did not care for the reasons why young Avizon turned on the castle. She reflected and I believe she feared his actions would influence me. She released me peacefully, no quarrels, and gave me a home to try to keep me from turning bitter. I consider it early retirement, and really you can’t consider freedom to be a punishment. So here I am, selling trinkets to pass the time."

"I see. For what it is worth, I am sorry for Avizon’s actions. I should have been able to do more to stop this.”

Azeera shrugged. “It is a difficult situation, but when I saw Avizon after you saved him… I didn’t expect him to turn to violence, but I cannot say I’m shocked. What Halve did to him was beyond human.” Orrien shuddered, he needed a change of topic. “So what is this fate you speak of?"

"Ah, yes, that. Orrien, I don't think he told you, that it was a surprise but your son saved my life only days before the attack. I offered him a favour in return.” Orrien looked back down at the dragon and stared. Was he leading to what he thought?

Orrien continued to stare. When he stared in the dragon's eyes, he could see their pleading. They dug at the glass desperately, but it was so cramped it barely equated to anything. It bit at his own tail, but it didn’t seem to damage itself at least. Did he imagine it, or was there a familiarity? All he knew was that he couldn’t leave them. His heart told him that he needed this little one. He gritted his teeth. Orrien pulled the cork out of the jar, ignoring Azeera’s grunt of a protest. The little dragon scrambled out and hid in Orrien’s palm. He opened his hand just enough to stroke their head. They seemed so much more relaxed now they had access to magic, that they could move.

“The only way to contain them was to take away their mobility. They’re quite the trouble maker and an escape artist. They had started with a very comfortable abode,” Azeera explained with a soft grumble. Orrien put his hand up to his shoulder, letting the dragon climb onto him. They hid behind Orrien’s ear, chewing nervously on it. Orrien couldn't help but brace to have to argue or fight, to have to run away and get to the horse, out of habit more than anything.

“You're tired and on edge, old friend. I can recommend you an inn or offer space in my home to rest? That little dragon is meant to be yours. They were the favour Ro asked of me. They were to be a gift… for you. He poured his heart and soul into helping me make it… After seeing what happened to the castle I left before I could give it to him. I assumed they would be forgotten about, that you were dead, and so I put them up for sale for a good home. Fate had other plans. Your son’s love drew you here.”

Orrien bit back tears. He had not expected anything like this. For Ro to have left him something so... pure. The dragon began to slide down the front of Orrien’s cloak, so he put his hand out as a platform. “My debt is paid, the offer of rest is still there? The inn is the Crooked Key. It is welcoming of our kind and my home is just around the corner."

Orrien nodded. "Thank you, for everything you have done for me."

Orrien bowed his head and left, cradling the little dragon in his hand. “You’re so quiet… so small, like a little mouse.” He stopped and smiled. “Yes, that will be your name. I think it would have annoyed Ro just as he’d have wanted,” he smiled softly. He scratched their back, enjoying watching the dragon weave through his fingers and arch their back like a cat might.

“To get a favour from a sorcerer as powerful as Azeera and ask only for a trinket for your father… Oh, Ro, my poor boy… This world was not made for one as pure as you.” He forced himself to take deep breaths, to calm before he let the dragon back onto his shoulder and disappeared into the choking crowds.

#Cloudwalker series #tw: death mention #tw: slavery mention #Mouse #Orrien #Azeera #you will meet more sorcerers soon #once I'm actually able to write 26 #so yeah Mouse is super precious and I will protect them with my life #I don't even want to hurt them I just love them so much #a good baby

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daraanna · 4 years

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“Arranged Love”- Part six „Guest”

She woke up with a terrible pain in her neck. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was a scroll on her lap. She and her husband spent most of the night searching the library for documents about the land of the moon and the Otsutsuki clan. Unfortunately, their search did not bring them much new information. Despite this, she had to admit that she was impressed with the knowledge Boruto possessed. During the days she spent in the imperial palace, she never saw him take any particular interest in politics. However, yesterday he was very helpful. She looked at the blonde who was sleeping next to her, he also spent all night on the couch in a position even less natural to sleep than hers. Trying not to wake him up, she slowly got up and placed his head on the pillow, slightly correcting his posture and covered him with a blanket. Then she went to their bedroom to change her clothes. Ready, she go to find Shizune. The woman was dispensing a potion in hers cabinet. After the greeting, their conversation quickly turned to the mystery patient.

“His condition is stable, but he has a high fever, most likely pneumonia caused by choking on water, also he has polyuria ...

Sarada blinked twice. Her medical abilities were far from perfect, but the last symptom did not match the patient's clinical picture.

"You wrote down too much nettle and elderberry in the medicine that was given to him yesterday," explained the doctor, seeing her confusion. Young Uchiha immediately blushed ashamed. “It's not that bad, it's good that you corrected the prescription, the first thing you wrote could kill him ...”

Somehow it didn't cheer her up.

“But when it comes to resuscitation, you did a great job, the boy probably owes you his life.”

The last words made her heart warm. Until she remembered what they had discovered about the boy's identity the night before. Thanking Shizune for everything and saying goodbye to her, she ran to his room. The black-haired boy laid on the ground motionless. His chest rose and fell slowly. His face was flushed, by a fever that was consuming his body. Getting closer, she dipped a cloth in water and placed it on his forehead. Up close, you could see that his hair was not entirely black, there was a shorter-cut blonde hair at his temples. Apart from this, he had the number IX tattooed on his cheek. It wasn't the only tattoo, there was a black square on his left hand, it was quite strange. Suddenly she felt a sharp tug. Before she had time to react the boy's hands were on her neck, pressing her body to the floor.

“Who are you!?” She heard his hoarse voice. However, she was unable to make any sound. She tried to remove his hands, but the boy was much stronger than her. She started losing consciousness when someone pushed the boy away from her. Her body reacted immediately she take a deep breath and cough. She sat up to see Boruto slap her attacker in the face and then press him to the ground.

“S-stop it" she stammered as loudly as she could. The blond halted and looked at her.

The stranger moved away from him and looked at them in shock.

“Who are you!? What is this place!?” He shouted without letting go of his guard.

“Bastard! You don't even know with who you...

“We are the owners of this clinic” the black-haired girl replied interrupting her husband, who looked at her in surprise “ Inhabitants of Naka found you unconscious on the river bank, they brought you here ...”

The boy flinched slightly, but still remained wary.

“It means where?”

“In the Konoha Prefecture” she replied, but seeing that the boy still does not understand, she added ”In the land of fire.”

The stranger immediately relaxed, making an undefined sound, he bowed and uttered a silent sorry.

"I thought ... I took you for someone else ... My behavior was unforgivable" he added.

“Exactly” said Boruto slowly lowering his guard “And who are you !?”

“My name is Kawaki. I am ... Nobody ... Wanderer? This is probably the best word to use…”

There was silence for a moment, broken again by the stranger.

"Thank you for your hospitality, unfortunately I have nothing to repay it ... It would be best for me to go," he replied, heading for the door when he start coughing heavily.

"No way!" Sarada replied, walking him back to the bed. "In such a state you cannot leave the infirmary!"

As soon as Kawaki laid down, Boruto led her out of the room, and then ordered the guards who came with him from the castle to observe the boy.

Going through the corridor leading to the residential part, he embraced her around the waist, a little more too hard than she would have liked. At the same time being so close she could feel how tensed his body was. Her husband was angry with her. She understood that she was acting irresponsibly. Still, her pride did not allow her to admit it.

When they reached her room, the heir to the throne finally spoke.

"What were you thinking?!" He asked, releasing her.

"I went to examine the sick man," she replied, trying to remain calm.

“Without me?! Without a guard or at least an accompanying person?! Are you crazy?!” He growled, walking around the room.

“I can take care of myself!”

“Yeah, you showed it already!”

“He surprised me!!!”

“You will never go there again !!!” the blond screamed and then both of them fell silent. They looked at each other for a moment. They had never argued before. The situation was new, yet none of them wanted to lost.

"What is this, an order?", She asked, nervous about the answer she might get. She knew that if the answer was yes, she would not only get more angry, but also hurt. Probably more than she would like. The boy flinched at her words and thought about the answer for a long time. He ran his hand through his hair before, a bit calmer, replied, "No ... but understand, he could have killed you”

She felt a strange pang in her heart. She didn't think the boy could just be worried about her. It embarrassed her, and at the same time she was strangely happy about it. He cares about her as a person.

"I'm sorry," she replied, coming up to him. "It was irresponsible. I won't get close to him again ... Alone ...”

The blonde was clearly not pleased with the last word she added, but he did not protest. He just gently touched her shoulder.

“And maybe you need training?” he added with smirk.

She looked at him in shock.

"I don't understand," she replied, looking into his eyes.

"You wouldn’t like to practice sword fighting with me, maybe you are a bit rusty?" She stood for a moment opening and closing her mouth trying to say something. It is not possible that he meant it.

"I'm a woman, I don't know much about combat," she replied, trying to sound sincere.

“From what you showed you know more than me, but even I know that such knowledge cannot be drawn from observation ...” resigned, she hung her head. She knew perfectly well how the majority of the world reacted to a woman using a sword. But once again her husband surprised her with his behavior “ So maybe this time you will teach me something?” he asked, smiling warmly, this time without a teasing tone.

.....................................

Standing with her own katana in front of Boruto, she didn't know what to expect. Observing his previous training, she was able to draw conclusions about his fighting style, or rather the lack of it. This time, however, she could not count on the element of surprise. Not to mention what could happen if someone caught them sparring. After all, there were now a lot of people from Konoha in Naka.

Their second fight didn't last much longer than the first one. Although the blonde surprised her with the strength with which he attacked, a few tactical movements were enough for the heir to the imperial throne to find himself on the ground with the blade just above his head.

Uzumaki looked at her in disbelief, to smile widely shortly after.

“Soooo? Who was teaching you? “He asked and sit cross-legged as she pushed the weapon away from him.

"My father," she replied sighing, "Master Kakashi also helped a little ..."

“Oi, Uncle Kakashi also trained you too? It's not fair, why am I so lame?”

“Maybe it's because you didn't listen to him? You completely lack the basics, even the best-trained body will do you nothing if you lose your balance “ she replied, giving him a hand. The boy grabbed her and stood up.

"Then we will continue training?", He asked, not letting go of her hand. For a moment she was too focused on how close they were, so it takes her some time to understand the meaning of his words, she snorted.

“You want me to train you?”

The boy nodded.

"Do you realize it is illegal?" He looked at her in consternation.

"What? " All she could do was roll her eyes. Did he really not realize that what they were doing was not at all socially acceptable? It doesn’t bother him?

"You're annoying," she answered, moving back home in hurry to hide blush on her cheeks.

...........................................................................................

To say that I’m not satisfied with how this chapter is look like is like to say nothing... But after hours of rewriting, translating and then rewriting this again I came to conclusion that I can’t write this any better. I will do everything to write next chapter better, but I have no idea how long it will take, unfortunately I really struggle to find any good inspiration lately :(

<<first part next part>

#borusara #boruto uzumaki #uchiha sarada #kawaki #arranged marriage #arranged love

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lady-therion · 5 years

Text

Lost With You: Part 4 [Nessian]

Summary: Cassian and Nesta struggle to fix all the broken pieces between them.

(Post ACOFAS. Spoilers. Slight NSFW).)

A/N: At long last, we’ve reached the end. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

It’s easy to break things. Putting them back together? That’s harder.

Cassian knows this better than anyone. It is one of the first lessons of combat. The second is that war is only the beginning. Treatises may signed. Accords may be struck. But to rebuild a new world in the wake of the old…

Has anyone ever done such a thing without bloodshed, without tears, without loss?

His thoughts lead him to Nesta—always Nesta. The most impossible mortal he has ever met. If anyone can alight the universe, it would be her. He knows it deep in his bones.

He just wishes she did too.

***

Nesta wakes first.

Through her half-dead haze, she watches Cassian sleep beside her. His breaths are steady and his heartbeat is strong. She can feel it through his tunic, just as she can feel the simmering heat of his body.

He cradles her in the circle of his arms, his wings an even warmer shroud, and it fills her with both reassurance and unease. There is a feeling that she’s right where she’s meant to be. But there is also a feeling that whatever happens after is out of her control.

Perhaps she doesn’t need control anymore. Perhaps she just needs to let go, as she did in the park when they held one another.

She blinks and memories return in pieces. She remembers the storm and the crack of the earth, like bones splitting. She remembers the silver-white fire and a red bolt of power, rending apart the seams of the sky. She remembers Cassian most of all. The way he called for her. Desperate. Beyond desperate. It was almost mad—the way he chased after her in the dark.

He is always chasing after her…

She drinks in his face. Asleep, he looks boyish. Almost sweet. His lashes are thick and his lips, when not curled back in arrogance or swagger, look soft and plump. She imagines him pouting all the time as a child and the image almost makes her grin. This is what he would be, she thinks, if he was not raised in the killing fields.

Eventually, he stirs. “Nesta? Are you—?”

“You terrify me,” she says.

This is how Nesta is. She cuts to the heart of things, swift and without warning. Her sisters often compare her to a blade freshly forged or a pillar of steel, daunting and unmovable. Perhaps there is something to that. Still, the thought sparks a pang in her chest. All she excels at is wounding. But she knows nothing else, except to move forward and strike.

Cassian raises a brow. The scarred one. The urge to press her lips to it is unbearable and she hopes he cannot sense it. Or if he does, she hopes he will not embarrass her over it.

“I terrify you?” he says, finally.

Relief sets into her shoulders. Unlike most people she meets, Cassian is used to counterattacks. He does them well. Years of training and discipline have made him formidable. There are enemies who quake at the sound of his name. But she will never quake when he draws near. At least, never in that way.

“You terrify me more than anything,” she says.

He thinks on this. Then reaches for a strand of her hair, a curl that wound itself around her ear. He does it slowly, so that she has time to say no. When she doesn’t, he rubs it gently in between his fingers—fingers that have spilled blood.

“You aren’t the first to lay siege to the walls I’ve built,” she says. “I’ve built them carefully, brick by brick. Iron, ice, steel. But somehow, you found a way. A hole. A chink. A weakness. I keep trying to think about when it first happened. If I had to go back to the beginning, it would be that night.”

The night at her father’s house. He stills. “I’m not proud of what I did. How I acted.”

“Likewise.” She draws a breath. “I used to feel things all the time. Every passion, a death sentence. Then one day, I didn’t feel anything at all. That is until…”

She doesn’t need to say any more than that.

He shifts and places her head beneath his chin. Her nose is pressed against his collarbone and she can see the whorls of his tattoos. She is very thankful he cannot see her.

“I’ve never known you to be afraid of anything,” he says.

“I am,” she says. “All the time. I just don’t cower.”

He laughs and it warms her better than the hearth. “That is very Illyrian of you.”

“Is that a compliment?”

She coughs before he can answer, seawater still churning in her lungs. There are other nuisances. Her head spins if she moves too quickly and all her muscles ache as if she has been squeezed through a sieve. Cassian touches her forehead, his eyes drawn with sharp concern. There is a deep furrow there, between his brows, that she hasn’t really noticed before. She does not have a fever, or at least she doesn’t think so. But he isn’t pleased by whatever he sees. So he fusses, rising from the pallet to fetch her draughts and medicines. Even his wings are twitching in agitation. It’s both awful and endearing.

“I know you don’t like it,” he says as he watches her drain her tea. “Being taken care of.”

“It’s...tolerable when you do it.”

“Just tolerable?”

“It’s far better than when I had to do it myself.” She sets the cup aside. “Did you know I couldn’t bathe in a tub for months after the Cauldron? I had to use buckets. Lighting fires are hard for me too. It’s the sound…” The sound of necks snapping. Her father’s dead eyes staring at her.

Shocked silence. “What?”

His exclamation surprises her. Didn’t Feyre tell him? Or Morrigan?

“Surely,” she began, “You had some idea? The Inner Circle…they did not say anything?”

He flinches. Confusion clouds his thunderous expression. “I…they...”

Ah. Well. Nesta waits to feel smug or righteous. Her old self would have relished it, twisted the knife deeper. It seems the pedestal you set them on is not so golden after all. There is a temptation to say it; she cannot deny that. To fling those cruel words at him and watch him recoil. But it fades as it soon it crosses her mind, like a shadow of a cloud passing over a winter field. What good would it do to hurt him so? What good would it do to shatter this fragile peace between them?

Cassian looks like he might be ill himself. He keeps opening his mouth, struggling to form words. But there are none. Perhaps there never could be. His loyalty to his family is deeply rooted and immutable. No matter what he feels for her, he will never turn his back on his family. She envies him a little for that. Had she ever pledged her life to anything with such devotion? Even her ties to her own sisters have their limits.

Then she remembers lying over his body at the end of all things.

Together…

She surprises herself when she takes his calloused hand in hers. “I heard you. In the sea. I could...feel you.” She rubs her thumb across his palm, feeling the ridge of a scar there, as though he had fended off another sword by holding it. It’s likely he had. She snorts. “You went after me again. The ever gallant brute.” There’s no sting in what she says. It’s a jest, but it’s also a truth. “You really can’t stay away, can you?

“No,” he says, and he closes his palm over hers. “I really can’t. Even if you terrify me too.”

“Oh?”

“I’m Illyrian,” he says. “So I don’t cower, either.”

They sat, facing one another, saying nothing.

They are waiting. As always, Nesta strikes first.

She kisses him, hard and fierce. It’s without finesse; raw and eager. There is a pause in which Cassian is too stunned to react. “Wait,” he tries to say. “Wait. Should you...should we even…?”

“Yes,” she says, though it comes out like a gasp. “Yes, we should.”

He does not look convinced, but also does not resist when she rolls him beneath her. She grips his wrists to steady herself. There is less pain and dizziness than before and she is still recovering and there is so, so much more to be said between them. An ocean of atonement and explanations.

But then, there is also this. And though they could both live on for centuries, moments like this seem to be far and few between. “I would like to be with you,” she said, leaning forward, mouth coaxing his open. “Without the threat of dying for once.”

A flush appears on Cassian’s cheeks. He is hot and shivering all over. To have such power over him is heady and makes her feel brave, daring. Like she can do anything. But there is also a reluctance in him, as palpable as a chain. He is keeping himself back.

“What is it?”

He turns his face away, making a sound like choking. Then, she realizes. “You’re not like the others I’ve...,” she says. “I would not discard you. Or regret you. I would not leave you behind. Ever.”

She says this with fire, with conviction, as though she is swearing an oath. She watches him intently as the doubt clears from his eyes. But still, he lies prone beneath her. Unsure of what to do next. Could she ever have imagined such a thing? The General Commander of the Night Court Armies...unsettled, hesitant? And yes, she sees it now: shy.

So she does something on instinct, and bares her throat to him.

His pupils grow wide and dark. She is giving her permission. But she is also rectifying a mistake—the last time he had kissed her throat at her father’s house, the gesture did not end well. This time, she thinks, it can be different.

Cassian seems to agree. Something unleashes in him and he mouths at her there, sucking and kissing and marking. She feels the points of his teeth. Gentle and insistent and oh so very delicious. She feels his hands—their hands—running over each other as they pull apart their clothes. There is a driving need to get closer, to feel skin on skin.

“Why there?” she asks, her breath hitching. “Why always that?”

He nips at the crook of her neck, then soothes it with his tongue. “This,” he says, his voice heavy. “This is where I would claim you if…”

“If?”

He does not look at her. Instead he stops, then buries his head against her shoulder. “If,” is all he answers. It’s all she needs to know.

Then, suddenly, a tug. A thread from her rib to his, pulling taut. It did not snap, but it made itself undeniable. They say each other’s names, over and over and over again as they explore each other half-dressed and sweating. They are senseless in one another now. She is fascinated by his hardness, by the way he croons and cries and shakes when she puts her lips around him. She does the same when he puts his lips...there, drinking her down as if she were the finest of wines. Nesta has taken her share of pleasures before. But this is something different. This is a revelation. A dawning.

“We should eat,” he says, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He kisses her and it is all she can do to not take him inside. To feel his fullness rock within her.

“I would feast on you instead,” she said.

“I have no doubt,” he says. Despite their arousal, they are tired and coiled around each other. Bedclothes strewn everywhere. “But when I take you...and when you take me...I hope to honor you by bringing you some place nicer than this. Where there’s a featherbed and silk sheets and no one else to bother us about some armageddon.”

“Hm. That would be nice.”

He hums into her hair, now wild and tangled and unbound. “We’ll take it slow.”

“Slow is nice too,” she says.

A pause, and then a whisper: “Come with me. Come with me to the Illyrian mountains.”

She knows what he is really asking and is almost too overwhelmed to speak. She can feel that ever-present tug, growing stronger and more absolute with every shared moment. If she jumps from this precipice, she can never go back.

But what, really, does she have to go back to?

“I would like to spend more time with you,” says Cassian, “Knowing you in this life, finding you in this life, and losing myself in you in this life.”

Tears fall. Both hers and his. She holds his knuckles to her lips and kisses them. Something in her catches, then releases.

“When do we leave?”

***

Thank you for reading, my loves.

Tagging these baes: @missing-merlin, @rosehallshadowsinger, @queen-archeron , @mariamuses, @jemma-nessian-and-elriel, @illyrianbeauty, @queenofillea1, @sunsummoner, @stardustsroses, @urbisie, @hikari274, @dreaming-of-bohemian-nights, @ashlightgrayson, @my-fan-side, @ame233, @vicisbookishblog, @thebitchupstairs, @sannelovesreading, @wearestarseternal, @moonbeammadness, @wolffrising, @a-trifling-matter , @writer-reader-traveller, @tntwme , @fucking-winchester-trash, @voiceoftheroses, @verifiefangirl, @photofeesh, @maddieimhot, @awesomethreedragons, @fantasy-faes, @mydarlingwhitethorn, @thenameisjaida-blog, @alexisnm95, @leulivy, @managingmischief007, @goldbooksblack, @hashtolanashoba, @wewhohavefailed, @highladyjel, @nerdperson524, @sarcasticsashimi, @tswaney17, @acourtofrosesandbooks, @beelezebub, @rowanismybae, @starlightheir, @city-of-fae, @arwenbk3, @aelins-fire-queen, @azriels-forgotten-shadow, @abillionlittlepieces, @rairrai, @aclass-trash, @cf-mist-and-fury, @maastrash @gabi422, @trmblinghnds, @tea-drinker25, @court-of-fandoms-and-art, @soitsgorgeous, @fireheart-queen-of-ships, @xinyourdreamsx, @feyaelin-rowsand, @heleneisthehottest-torch, @dreamerforever-5, @mightymorphingayagenda, @theogvodkaaunt, @sjmsstuff, @illyrian-bookworm, @empress-ofbloodshed, @lordof-bloodshed, @faequeenaelin, @secret-lil-rendez-vous, @catwomancabello

If you’d like to be tagged, untagged, or if I forgot to add you because I’m silly, drop me an ask!

Other chapters be found in the Masterlist in my Bio / I am Lady_Therion on AO3

#nessian #nesta x cassian #acotar #acomaf #acowar #acofas #lost with you

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vagrantblvrd · 5 years

Text

I don’t remember where I heard/saw this? But Geoff knowing how to sew/making his own clothes = Geoff the tailor AU. (With a side of Battle Buddies.)

Because reasons.

Also because reasons, Ramwood.

But like.

Ryan coming into Geoff’s shop for a fitting because his BFF Jeremy is getting married.

Jeremy’s deliriously, sickeningly happy with his husband to be. Ryan’s all jokingly grumpy mcgrump about it because could they please, please, please not talk about how ~perfect your man is and how his eyes are like jewels, or sparkling orbs or whatever nonsense you’re spewing today?

We’re meant to be killing a Very Bad Man, Jeremy. Please focus.

But really, he’s just as happy for Jeremy and has totally ~secretly vetted Jeremy’s husband to be even though they work with him and he’s got top security clearance and it’s really Ryan being an overprotective dork. (I don’t know who Jeremy’s husband to be is in this - Gavin? Michael? Some other lucky/unlucky bastard. Possibly both, who knows.)

Someone gives Jeremy the card to Geoff’s little shop, tells him he’ll get a great discount for Jeremy and his groomsmen if they say the card giver sent them.

Jeremy was originally mean to go along wit Ryan to his fitting, but there was a last minute schedule change.

Which, fine, okay.

Plans change.

Ryan can do this!

He’s a highly skilled special ops/sekrit agent man!

Being fitted for a tux has got to be way easier than sneaking into another country to quietly (well, the mission briefing said quietly, reality turned out to far different) assassinate a druglord-turned-dictator, right?

...Maybe.

But then, okay.

Then he goes in and the shop is nothing like he was expecting.

Something along the lines of what you’d see in movies and on television, right? All classy decor and fancy as hell. Understated everything and the kind of place rich people love to go because Classy. (Kind of place his parents dragged him to as a kid for all kind of things and he wanted Jeremy along for moral support because ugh, memories.)

This place?

Nice decor, sure.

It’s just.

It’s not stuffy. (Not stuffy or pretentious like the places his parents dragged him to as a kid and it’s just an overall pleasant surprise.)

There’s music playing quietly, some band he’s never head of which isn’t a surprise, really. But! He gets the feeling even Jeremy would be hard-pressed to name them.

Potted plants and the lighting is just right to set him at ease. Not glaringly bright like a box store or too dark like certain stores in the mall. Framed posters on the wall - they seem classy enough at first glance, right? Tasteful frames and lovely artwork and all that.

But as he hits the little silver bell on the counter to alert the shop owner he’s there, he gets curious. Takes a closer look and laughs in surprise because the one behind the counter is a goddamned movie poster.

One of those vintage style ones for some classic movie, and the others around the shop are for other movies and bands and the like.

Little splashes of color and personality are dotted around the shop too, have him wondering what the hell kind of place this is, and then the shop owner walks out of the back.

Kind of looks like a crazy you’d run into the street, except for the nice suit and shoes and so on. (Maybe the hair is just some fancy hairstyle Ryan’s not cool enough to get. That whole deliberately messy look some people go wild over.)

The guy looks mildly annoyed not to see someone - Ryan’s wandered away from the counter, half-hidden by display mannequins as he examines the framed art hanging up. (And it is art, no matter what people like his parents would have to say about the subject matter.)

“Uh, hi?” Ryan says, sheepish about getting distracted as he goes over to where the shop owner is standing. “I had an appointment for a fitting today at two?”

The guy cocks his head as he gives Ryan this slow once-over.

“Haywood?” he asks, deep in thought.

Ryan nods, they do the whole handshake bit.

“For the Dooley wedding, yes.” A pause, as Ryan gets his brain into proper working order because the shop owner has the most vivid blue eyes. “Jack recommended your shop?”

At the mention of Jack’s name the shop owner’s lips twitch into this smirk.

“HE did, did he?” he asks, and something about it comes off as ominous.

“...Yes?” Ryan answers, not really sure what he’s in for here, and also wishing Jeremy was there.

As backup.

Against a tailor.

There’s a long pause, the shop owner regarding Ryan like he’s sizing him up, and then he laughs. Goes from suspicious to friendly and welcoming in the blink of an eye, smile on his face that looks like it could spell trouble if Ryan’s not careful. (Jeremy’s always saying he isn’t, so…)

“Well, any friend of Jack’s is a friend of mine,” the shop owner says.

That’s...okay. Good to know???

The guy introduces himself as Geoff, and leads Ryan to the back to the fitting area and they go about things as you do in a tailor’s shop. (I don’t know what goes on in one personally, but I imagine dark magics must be involved somehow???)

Anyway.

There’s idle chitchat that relaxes Ryan, has him not so uptight at being at a tailor’s on his own.

But that’s kind of worse in a way, because he’s noticing how the wild jumble of Geoff’s hair works for him, not to mention the beard.

Also, okay.

The tattoos are interesting, and Ryan keeps finding his attention drawn to the ones on Geoff’s hands.

Just.

Literally cannot stop himself from looking, feels himself blushing when Geoff catches him at it. This wry twist to his lips as he spins some story about ~youthful indiscretions and rebellion and whatever else about how he got them.

This pause, tension to his shoulders, set of his jaw that wasn’t there before.

“What about you? Have any tattoos?”

Ryan blinks, not sure what’s caused the guarded tone in Geoff’s voice.

“Uh, one,” he admits, a bit sheepishly.

He’s never really been someone who wanted tattoos of his own, but then he got partnered with Jeremy, and Ryan’s kind of an idiot.

(The two of them celebrating the fact that they somehow (miraculously!!1!) survived a particularly dangerous mission and Jeremy more than a little drunk when he came up with the idea of matching tattoos.

Sketched out a design for the “Battle Buddies” on a bar napkin and shoved it at Ryan who was impressed in spite of himself. A little messy because Jeremy and drunk and bar napkin?

But the basic design was something he could maybe live with as a tattoo.

Told Jeremy to wait until he wasn’t halfway to blackout drunk to pith the idea again, and thought that would be the last of it, you know. Idea lost to murky fog of alcohol and whatnot, but then Jeremy comes to him a week later, presents one of his sketchbooks with a proper drawing this time. Clean lines and bold design and Jeremy wheedling, so you know.

Tattoo.)

Geoff looks surprised at that admission, so Ryan tells him the whole story and Geoff’s laughing by the end of it because actually getting the damn thing was An Ordeal.

“Hey, c’mon,” Ryan says, something light in his chest at Geoff’s laugh – goddamn sunshine - and oh, oh, he’s headed for trouble here. “It’s not that awful, okay.”

But it kind of is, because assholes looking for revenge on the Battle Buddies from a previous mission and a good portion of the city in chaos and having to find a new tattoo artist. (Jeremy’s favorite guy being apologetic about it, but seriously Jeremy. There’s only so many times his insurance will cover the cost for repairs when it suddenly explodes, think of his premiums.)

Geoff loses that tight, pinched look to his face and this time when he catches Ryan staring at his hands he just waggles his eyebrows and makes terrible joke and it’s okay.

(Geoff also totally laughs when he catches a glimpse of Ryan’s tattoo at some point, and Ryan is like “Hey, now,” with this dumb little smile.)

And like.

Of course Ryan has to go back a few more time for additional fittings and Geoff is always delighted to see him.

Worries a bit when Ryan comes in looking like shit after a mission – all bruised and battered, even if he’s cleaned up. (“You should have seen the other guy, Geoff.”)

(Jeremy finally freeing up time to offer to go along with Ryan for one of them and Ryan telling him it’s not necessary and Jeremy being confused until he spots the tell-tale signs of Ryan with a big ol’ crush,and then it’s gentle teasing because it’s freaking adorable is what it is.)

And then!

Some situation in which baddies track the Battle Buddies down to their personal lives and Ryan terrified for Geoff, right? (They’re not a Thing, but the baddies know he’s been going to Geoff’s shop a lot – look, fittings, okay. Rough business. Or something, Whatever.)

Rushes to get there after fighting off some baddies who got to him at his place, and find -

“Uh...”

Geoff, standing over a body with a gun and this hard-eyed look to him.

Not the sassy, snarky motherfucker Ryan’s totally head over heels for who makes dumb jokes and gives Ryan this look until he laughs at him. This guy who listens to punk rock music and mocks Ryan for being a complete dork. Someone with an amazing laugh and just makes Ryan indescribably happy being around.

“Hey, give me a hand, there’s another one in the back.”

Ryan just ??? as he follows Geoff – glances down to look at the very dead baddie and is even more ??? - because what is going on???

Finds Geoff trying to move another very dead baddie because apparently there’s a hidden trap door or whatever that leads down to what looks like a bunker of some sort? Weapons locker and body armor and what the fuck is going on???

Geoff catching the dumbfounded look on Ryan’s face and sighing.

“Didn’t Jack tell you? We used to work together.”

Jack, as in the guy who basically runs the agency he and Jeremy work for. Quiet and competent and all these rumors about his old partner before the guy retired. Some bullshit about getting into a fight with Burnie over something and quitting over it.

(Rumors say there was more to it, conspiracies and Jack’s old partner working behind the scenes with Burnie and his people to expose it and deciding he'd had enough of the life when it as all over and done with even though Burnie offered to reinstate him and so on.

Just...didn’t like the lies and shit that went with it, and started up some little business of his own somewhere.

Kept in contact with Jack and Burnie, sent them tacky postcards when he went on vacation or Christmas Ryan would see in their offices every so often. Had a barbecue every one in a while for the old guard, that kind of thing.)

Ryan staring at Geoff as he gears up, clearly knows what he’s about as he does. Quick and efficient and Ryan finds himself staring at the tattoos on Geoff’s hands again, right.

Only this time there are guns and ammunition and knives in them instead of the tape measure or pins or the battered little notebook and pen he likes to use to mark down measurements.

(Ryan is a little embarrassed at how hot he finds it all, okay.)

Geoff catches him looking – of course he does – and the smirk he gives Ryan is all sharp and knowing and oh, fucking hell, has Ryan really been that obvious?

“Hey, you want to, I don’t know. Grab a fucking coffee or something when this is over?” Geoff asks, this slight edge of nervousness to his words that jolts Ryan out of mindlessly staring at him.

“I...uh,” Ryan is totally not panicking, no. “Yeah, sure?”

Winces at the way Geoff’s smile fades because Ryan is a disaster, but then there’s a crashing noise upstairs and more baddies to deal with.

Geoff scowling and muttering about just getting the place remodeled as he storms up the ladder, Ryan hurrying after him and oh what the fuck has he gotten himself into now???

Shenanigans as they fight off the baddies and meet up with Jeremy to figure things out and awkward flirting.

And then!

When everything’s over and done with, and Ryan and Geoff are in medical waiting to have their flesh wounds and the like treated -

“I - “ Ryan clears his throat when Geoff look up at him, ache in his chest at the slump to Geoff’s shoulders.

Because awkward flirting, sure, but also Ryan processing Things.

“There’s this place downtown that has great coffee,” he offers, sure Geoff’s going to turn him down. “If you want to go there sometime. With me. On a date.”

(Just to be clear, you know. Ryan would absolutely die if there was a misunderstanding now.)

Geoff blinks at him, and it’s got this sad panda effect with the soot smudges on his face and bits of dried mud and blood.

“What?”

(Okay, yes, there were a few explosions here and there and they may have been a wee bit too close to them. Temporary deafness and the like.)

Ryan laughs and tries again. Rips off a bit of the paper on the examining table-thing and writes it down before balling it up and throwing it to Geoff. (His knee’s a little messed up, makes it hard to walk. Because reasons.)

Geoff sputter and shooting him a glare before he opens the crumples paper ball up and then he just...stares at it for a long, long moment.

Nothing giving away what he’s thinking and Ryan dying inside because his knee, okay. Makes it real fucking hard for him to run away to find a corner to die of embarrassment in if he got things wrong? (Really, unbelievably wrong?)

And then Geoff looks up, crooked little grin/smirk on his face.

“You’re lucky you’re pretty,” he says, and then because he has to know Ryan has no idea what that even means in relation to anything. “Yes, you idiot. I’d love to get coffee. With you. As a date.”

Ryan blushing like a moron as Geoff laughs at him, and that’s about the time the doctor gets there and yells at Ryan for being an idiot and Geoff, Geoff, you should fucking know better you asshole.

Jack laughs at Ryan for forever about falling in love with Geoff, because oh, Ryan, you poor bastard. (But also Shovel Talks him, so there’s that.)

Jeremy laughs himself sick when he realizes why Ryan insisted he could handle his fitting appointments on his own, but thanks, buddy! (There are, of course, dirty jokes about it always.)

Geoff is just amazed at how dumb Ryan is, because oh my God, man. Seriously? (Look. Ryan’s smart, but also real dumb.)

Also, they do get that coffee and Geoff is Ryan’s date to Jeremy’s wedding.

...And then a few years down the road when Ryan and Geoff decide they might as well fuckin’ get married they go on a Quest to find a suitable tailor. (Geoff insists he shouldn’t have to do it because it’s his own fucking wedding, what the hell are you on about, Ryan?)

#ramwood #ragehappy #battle buddies #tailor au #idek #¯\_(ツ)_/¯#technically not a fic #vagrant fic

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biblichor-lisztomaniac-blog · 6 years

Text

Souls Unfractured

"For fractured souls are like magnets. Drawn to collide into an impossible bliss…" Labeled a ‘Cursed’ woman of Eve from birth, Maddie has endured nothing but pain and repression at the hands of The Order’s most abusive elder, Moses. Now living with her sister in The Hangmen’s secluded compound, finally, Maddie, is free. Free from the suffocating faith she no longer believes in. Free from endless years of physical and mental torment. Just… free… At age twenty-one, the timid and shy Maddie is content to live within the confines of her new home—safe from the outside world, safe from harm and, strangely, protected by the Hangmen’s most volatile member; the heavily pierced and tattooed, Flame. Flame. The man who ceaselessly watches over her with his midnight dark and searing eyes. The man who protects her with a breath-taking intensity. And the man who stirs something deep within her numbed heart. But when circumstances conspire for Flame to need HER help, Maddie bravely risks it all for the broken man who has captivated her fragile soul. The Hangmen’s most infamous member, Flame, is ruled by one thing—anger. Plagued by haunting demons from his past, an all-consuming rage, and isolated by an abhorrent hatred of being touched, Flame's days are filled with suffocating darkness, pierced only by a single ray of light—Maddie. The shy, beautiful woman he cannot purge from his thoughts. The woman he has an overwhelming need to possess… ... the only person who has ever been able to touch him. Flame’s mission in life is to protect Maddie, to keep her safe. Until a trigger from his troubled past sends him spiraling into madness, trapping him in the deepest recesses of his disturbed mind. His Hangmen brothers fear that Flame is beyond saving. His only hope of salvation: Maddie and her healing light.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW

this book was just as good as the others, but in a wildly different manner.

It delved deep in to abuse and the dark pasts of both Maddie and Flame and is certainly not for the faint of heart, it is incredibly tragic, brutal and striking.

However despite all of this, this book was wonderful. Though the sense of sex and danger still remained this book did not display it nearly as much as the previous two.

It was mostly about the recovery and journey to find themselves that Maddie and Flame shared. Less Maddie than Flame and was interesting to see that the ones who need help are not always the ones perceived as weak that we all need help at times and denying it will never help us.

The journey for Flame to recover showed that sometimes the things that help us recover are not the things we might want to face or do, but in the end finding yourself is never without a fight. It showed the vulnerability behind a facade.

The most interesting part was watching Flame tackle his self-mutilation and inability to touch, but also attacking the beliefs so engraved in his mind about the evil within him. It was inspiring and touching to watch him journey to fight back against his demons and defeat the memories.

I think within this story the most significant part for Maddie were her drawings. She was abused and perceived as vulnerbale, but despite her pain she found solace in her sketches and it was truly the best part. That the vulnerable have strength, that we all have strength and there is no shame in needing help.

This story to me was less fiction about gangs and cults and more a symbol of defeating darkness.

Much love

- R

#book review #bookworm #bookaholic #biblichor-lisztomaniac

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theliterateape · 3 years

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How Free is Our Speech and Who Decides?

by Don Hall

"Donald! If you say one more word, I'm sending you to the Principal's Office! Just. SHUT. UP!"

Third grade. Mrs. McWilliams. As the resident 'new kid' I was isolated to begin with but I had ridden this roller coaster before. Two boys in class decided that I was their enemy (or rather the object of their boredom) and they had taken to stealing any toys or books or games I'd grab during in-classroom recess. This was the third time and McWilliams had had enough of my gift for non-stop verbiage.

There it was. They had ripped the CandyLand game out of my hands and aside from just marching across the room and beating them to death I had no options but to sit there and take it. McWilliams had completely cut me off at the legs. If I say one more word, I’m screwed.

Except…

I grab some construction paper and a crayon. I draw what looks like two parentheses with a line through:

( | )

Sort of like an early emoji before there even was such a thing. In my brain, it was a butt. Then I drew the same butt with lines coming out of the crack and another with several circles coming out. This was my best guess at drawing the litany of profanity I wanted to yell. My nine-year old imagination couldn’t come up with anything quick for ‘cocksucker’ or ‘motherfucker’ which, all things considered, was probably a good thing.

I walked over to the boys and flash card style, held each one up to them making a stern and angry face.

The boys ratted me out. McWilliams fished the paper out of the trash and LOST. HER. MIND.

Two hours later I’m underneath my mother’s dining room table waiting for her to come home and belt me. McWilliams was apoplectic; the Principal was horrified. They sent me home early and called my mom at work to tell her what a perverse and awful monster I was. I had drawn pornographic pictures in class!

In hindsight I get it. I was an obnoxious kid. I was smarter than most, was full of more energy than five teachers could handle, and I thought nothing of breaking the rules for the sake of breaking them.

It seems that we are at an impasse when it comes to our personal rights to free speech. Laws against hate speech are already a violation of the First Amendment (which sets out that the government cannot create and enforce laws abridging speech) but we get around it by using the old chestnut of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The idea that by uttering racial slurs is somehow in the same ballgame is tenuous but still sticks.

The other side of the debate is accountability for words spoken or written. Call it whatever you choose—cancel-culture, public shaming, mob justice—it amounts to groups of people with no individual authority but the power of populist organization to effectively shame companies into firing offending employees. It also, on a far smaller but more destructive level, harbors a revenge justification against those who err in public for any reason (Amy Cooper is a solid example).

When the religious decide you can’t do or say something, well, Holy Shit.

The Critical Race Theorists who advocate curtailment of speech offensive to minorities insist that individual instances of hate speech are never the isolated, unpopular speech of a dissident few. Rather, they are manifestations of a deeply ingrained cultural belief system, an American way of life.

Hate speech is so dangerous because it plays melodies that are so deeply rooted in the culture as to be structural parts of everyday life for large numbers of Americans—perhaps even a majority.

“Your motherfucking son spray painted my house, bitch!”

The woman was a good six inches taller than my mom and outweighed her by at least seventy pounds. Earlier that day she had decided that I and my other eleven-year old friends were too loud just outside her window.

She screamed at us through her window. We cussed her and then ran off. I had come back with some red spray paint and had tagged the side of her house with a defiant “FUCK YOU!”

“What makes you think you can accuse my son of vandalizing your fucking house?” Mom was tiny but the Irish made her think she was much bigger.

“The little dumbass signed his name.”

She was right on both counts: I had signed my name because I was a little dumbass.

When a homophobe uses an anti-gay insult, he's signing his name to it. When a misogynist says something obviously anti-feminist, he's a dumbass. Things get stickier when the racists aren't dumbasses and refuse to provide an incriminating signature.

The question that some would prefer we check off in the “Answered” box is likewise a tangly mess. Is the n-word (a word so thoroughly aggrandized that, like He Who Shall Not Be Named in the JK Rowling books, the utterance has increasing and horrifying power) “hate speech” or just hateful speech? Is it racist or merely racial? Queer used to be a slur but when GenZ kids regularly describe themselves as such, no one calls the language police.

The lack of any clarity along these lines is resulting in a quandary for everyone involved in words or merely dealing with other people and being in a position to have to communicate with them.

In the film Dangerous Liaisons The Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) plots revenge against her ex-lover by ruining his young fiancée. There’s a lot of betrayal and a duel that ends in the death of a dude who duels and all. In the end, she is boo’d a bunch and she is disgraced. Now imagine if her big sin was to call someone something on the hate speech spectrum or espouse an ideology deemed wholly immoral. Sure, booing her then seems appropriate but for her to be completely eviscerated for it? To have the booing crowd pressure her work into firing her? Putting her behavior on social media so that she can never be hired again? Seems like an overreaction.

Seems like the permanent record one receives from going to a religious school.

Seems a bit religious.

When the religious decide you can’t do or say something, well, Holy Shit. You don’t have to go all Goody Proctor and the witches beings drowned to see if they could float to see a more recent example. Operation Rescue was the anti-abortion group in Wichita, KS when I happened to be going to high school in…Kansas. Randall Terry had a unique approach. If he disagreed with you (and if you were anything but fully anti-abortion in every possible scenario, he disagreed with you) he would yell over you instead of have some sort of heated discussion.

The local broadcasters stopped putting him on television because he’d just get on there and scream people down. As if, by drowning out their ability to communicate with anyone, he was likewise obliterating the message entirely.

He and his crew were out of control. They had determined that anyone associated with abortion in any way whatsoever was EVIL. In fact, I remember a group of them screaming at passers-by in downtown Wichita on Douglas Avenue for not joining them. They had extra placards with pictures of butchered fetus parts on them and were foisting them on people. If the person demurred (you know, maybe they had an appointment or needed to go impregnate someone so they could have a reason to slaughter the baby) the group would scream at them until they basically ran away.

At the time, I was anti-abortion but a prolonged summer of being around these religious screaming whack jobs changed my mind. Truly. My ideological change from pro-life to pro-choice had more to do with disgust over these idiots than any righteous belief in the autonomy of women.

This is not to say that I didn’t come around with a more progressive view. It took some time but a woman’s right to choose which surgical procedures she employs on her body is pretty much her business. If someone can elect to tattoo 75% of her skin, decide to stick Botox in her face, and fill her tits with silicone it isn’t much of a stretch that she should without obstacle relieve herself of a tumor that will become a human tethered to her hip for life.

The idea that human life is valued in the world is perhaps a goal but certainly not a reality. An ideal to uphold but not a realistic approach. Some lives matter. Lots of lives don’t so much.

Ideals are exactly that: goals. “I disagree with what he says but would die to ensure his right to say it” is a goal but would I really die so that someone unbalanced or religious is able to say “God Hates Fags” or “All White Americans are Racists”? Probably not.

Would I expect you to die for my right to say whatever I want? Not unless I'm a sociopath or a moron.

So no one is really going to die so that someone else can insult another person or espouse an ideology that differs from his own. Established fact. Where does that leave us as we navigate the increased opportunity to show our ass's in public more frequently (considering that social media and the whole of the digital highway is now quite public)?

Self censorship is completely legit so the folks complaining about people being afraid to speak “their truth” because of repercussions are simply pussies.

Around 2010, I was working for the public radio station in Chicago. I also had a blog from before I was hired. It was entitled (with an intentional wink at the rightwing NASCAR crowd) "An Angry White Guy in Chicago". Being fairly progressive in politic, the fun in the name was that people on the stereotypical raging caucasian dudes would jump on expecting me to parrot their ideology only to have themselves smacked in the face with articles against George W., in favor of the queer nation, and railing against the tendencies of unregulated capitalism. Also, as my mom used to point out, a lot of profanity.

The meeting was called because there were concerns about employees of an NPR station with social media and blogs. The concern was that these platforms might paint the station in a bad light if a lack of objectivity presented itself. The management had come up with a policy limiting our ability to utilize these methods of communicating and asking that they be able to censor us when necessary.

I listened.

My boss came over after the meeting.

“So, Don, what are you gonna do about your blog now?”

“Wrong question, boss.”

“Wrong question? What’s the right question?”

“What are you gonna do about my blog?”

He paused. “Probably nothing.”

“Good answer.”

I had come to the conclusion that any business that decided to censor me wasn’t worth my time working for and that has held true to this day. I suppose the fact that I’m not a racist or a sexist or a religious-type saves me from being relegated to the heap of dumbasses who sign their names to their intolerance. Being far more tolerant but more discriminating (or skeptical, I guess) has likely made me less odious.

At some point I did change the name of the blog mostly because, with Donald Trump suddenly in office, the joke wasn’t as funny as it was before. Self censorship is completely legit so the folks complaining about people being afraid to speak “their truth” because of repercussions are simply pussies. If you believe it, you can prove it, you should say it but don’t blame the mob if they don’t like it. This includes college professors, linguists, journalists, activists, and those dumb shits who think they can post memes on Twitter but shouldn’t lose their jobs if it’s anti-Semitic.

On the other hand if the best you can do in the face of language you can’t abide is scream down your opposition, you’re no better than the anti-abortionists of the eighties and you should look closely at your maturity level and how cultish your beliefs are. Chances are, if you’re so impassioned by your beliefs and refusal to hear anything that may contradict them, you’re a religious nut of one stripe or another.

“You’re a racist, man!”

The guy was in the casino I was managing, trolling around, trying to bum smokes and vouchers from paying guests. When I told him he couldn’t do that, he decided to play what is commonly referred to as “the race card.” This card has now become the rosary beads to flash around as a sort of secular religious icon.

“You’re racist, man!”

“OK. You still can’t solicit cigarettes or cash on the casino floor.”

“It’s because I’m black!”

“No. It’s because it’s against the rules. It’s a colorblind rule.”

“RACIST! RACIST!” He started screaming at me in order to what? Shut me up? Scare me away? He got loud and animated. I just stood there and watched him lose his shit like the girl who lost her shit on the white professor whose wife had written that college Halloween costumes are not the height of racist demonstration. You remember the video. I was mostly surprised at how calm the professor was in the face of such unrepentant childishness.

His accusation didn’t rile me up because I had no reason to be defensive. I know who I am and he doesn’t. He might as well have accused me of being a vampire or a Scottish lord.

“You finished?”

“You gonna kick me out, racist?”

“I’m going to ask you to leave unless you put some money in a machine.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’m gonna kick you out.”

“Because I’m black?”

“No. Because you’re an asshole and assholes can be any color under the sun.”

To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?

— Christopher Hitchens

It seems like an awful lot of this battle for freedom of speech is a struggle for who gets to say what without living-threatening consequence and who gets to dole out those consequences when they decide it goes beyond a predetermined boundary. The idea that those who can wield the iconography of secular religious thought are somehow the disenfranchised is a fantasy in the exact same way that the idea Christians (or Muslims) are in some way marginalized by those who do not believe.

These days political thought is indistinguishable from religious rhetoric. So many looking to assert the moral ground upon which we all must stand or be banished. The mistake made is to embrace the idea that the digital space is real life or even matters that much. As someone who dumped Faceborg a while ago and whose dick didn’t fall off and life didn’t end, social media is not the sum total of free speech.

A friend who works for Netflix recently made an off media comment that the company is noticing that the social justice crowd is fighting online for more inclusive and political content but that no one is watching it. This indicates that either they’re all just a bit full of shit or there simply aren’t as many out there as the noise of deplatforming and calling out signals.

The best form of “deplatforming” is to ignore the people who can’t understand that all speech is free but if you scream in the wrong person’s face, you’re gonna get popped in the jaw.

Or at least kicked out of the casino.

#Freedom of Speech

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feynites · 6 years

Text

*sneaks some more Reverse Reincarnation AU onto @selenelavellan’s reading pile*

Warnings for gross violence enacted upon an abuser.

Dirthamen dreams of Selene for weeks.

He learns a great deal about her in that time. That her name is the same. That her voice sounds the same. That she is Dalish, still, and that she is somewhere in the Free Marches. That there was a fire, where she lived. That she has since moved away from it. She is careful not to tell him her exact location, or to offer up the names of people in her personal life. She hardly seems to talk about her life at all, and Dirthamen is not certain if she avoids the subject only because she distrusts him, or because she dislikes speaking of it and would not wish to bother even if she trusted him completely.

That could just be his own projections, however.

Des is fascinated with the development as well, of course, but their contract has long since settled, and it makes it difficult for him to exert himself in the dreams he has allocated to Dirthamen. And they are reluctant to change the pattern of the dreams, lest it somehow prevent Selene from returning again. They do not know how she found them, and so they do not dare risk moving, or changing their schedule, or altering the fundamentals of Dirthamen’s dreaming space beyond the usual cosmetic details.

But it has an impact, of course. Dirthamen finds himself… engaged. Almost as if he is waking up, even though he is technically still asleep. And it carries over, too. More mornings, he wakes up feeling more presence within his body. Engaging more with Des, and retaining better memories of what they do throughout the day.

Which, in between Des’ pursuits, usually involves searching all of the databases on Dalish fire refugees in the Free Marches. Records are difficult to access, however, and Dirthamen finds himself calling upon favours he has not bothered with in a long time.

He phones Uthvir.

“You are dreaming about Selene,” they say, in a tone of voice that implies that this not surprising or noteworthy information in any sense.

“It is not a dream construction or a memory of her,” Dirthamen clarifies. “It is another incarnation of her. She has found me again.”

There is a long pause, and then low sound, like a breath being let out.

“I see,” Uthvir replies. “In that case, I should probably come and see you. Where are you?”

Peculiar. Uthvir is generally reluctant to leave their manor. But, then again, this is a highly unexpected situation.

“I do not require a meeting between us, as yet,” Dirthamen nevertheless explains. “I only need assistance in locating her in the real world. I believe she may require some assistance. That seems a plausible reason for her to have sought me out, on some level.” And it is an impression he has not been able to shake in his interactions with her. Something is wrong.

“So you want me to help you find Selene’s reincarnation, whom you have met in a dream?” Uthvir clarifies. “The dreams you regularly have about Selene, which are constructed by Des to be especially lifelike and believable?”

Dirthamen considers.

“Yes,” he confirms.

There is another long pause, and then another long breath.

“I suppose it would not hurt anything to look,” Uthvir decides. “Just so long as you do not take any drastic actions without consulting with me first, if you please.”

Dirthamen agrees, and even Des does not protest. Though, his partner has grudgingly grown to accept Uthvir’s counsel more readily over the years. Des is not particularly good at subtlety, and there have been a few times when he has been in command of situations that have subsequently deteriorated, and required outside aid to escape. Despite their own extreme preference for safety, Uthvir has never failed to help.

They do not disappoint in this situation, either.

It takes several more weeks, and many more dreams, before Uthvir finds a record of an elven merchant attending a Dalish conference on the wildfire incidents. According to the elf’s records, he has a wife, named Selene. Uthvir sends this information with many reminders that it is possibly only a coincidence. They do not recognize the name of the man on their list; Dirthamen cannot blame them. The incident where they might have crossed paths was many years ago, in college, and few had cared to recollect the name of the elf Dirthamen threw out of a window even during their lifetimes.

Dirthamen did not forget, however.

Haleir.

Reincarnation has not made an exception for Selene, it would seem. And this time she is married to her attacker.

Perhaps he is not a bad person in this life, Dirthamen hopes. And he is surprised to find Des echoing the desire. But in the grand scheme of things, he would rather Selene be happy with someone else, than be married to someone who would harm her.

He does not think this is a wish the universe has accommodated, however. The Selene he has been meeting in dreams has changed – but not very much.

Des gets them from their apartment in Denerim and onto a plane to Starkhaven. The records with Uthvir had found for them show that Haleir is a member of Clan Lavellan, which has mostly sought refuge among various shelters around Ostwick. When they land, they find their search somewhat stymied by the chaos and flood of inquiries which are barraging the Free Marches. Politics between the cities remains difficult to navigate, and records of various refugees are being divided between Starkhaven, the chantry, and various regional emergency services. A further call to Uthvir, and some more digging, and they board a second flight to Ostwick.

The plane has already taken off by the time Dirthamen looks towards the seats several rows up, and sees a familiar head of ginger hair.

He stills.

It could be a coincidence, of course. He cannot see the man’s face. But he is very tall, and has visibly elven ears.

Dirthamen stares at the back of his head, and waits to see if the man will move. It is not a long flight, however, and even when Des decides to get up and ‘use the restroom’ so that they can pass him, several other people opt to do the same. So they remain seated. Dirthamen stares and Des attempts to glean some of the man’s desires, instead, to pull a clue from there. But differentiating him from the other people on the flight is impossible. They did not know Haleir well enough the first time they met him to tell, and the plane is filled with a general ambiance of anticipation anyway. A desire to land and be reunited with people and to rest.

They keep an eye on him as they disembark. Confirmation comes later, when they are in the airport again, and they see the man waiting at the baggage claim.

It is him.

Des takes over, as Dirthamen pulls back. Drawn more into contemplation and consideration of their next move. Des purchases a book from the small airport library which is still within view of Haleir’s position. They did not bring anything apart from their carry-on. Dirthamen’s most valuable possessions are in safe storage, and Des enjoys buying new things when they travel, and neither of them knows how long they might be here for. Hours. Weeks. Years.

He finds a chair, and Des pretends to read, and in the meanwhile plucks at the threads of Desire that he can perceive in Haleir. The man is frustrated, so his desires are somewhat conflicting. He wants to go home, and he would have preferred to stay in Ferelden. He wants an opportunity. Nice things. Importance. He is satisfied that the disaster in his clan has put him in even higher standing, but he wants more.

He is looking forward to retrieving his wife and taking her to a hotel room. Of venting his frustrations on her.

Dirthamen considers killing Haleir on the spot. He wants to. Viscerally. The sight of his face again provokes a hatred that he did not know what still inside of him. But, there are many witnesses, and besides which – his presence may have at least simplified part of their search. Haleir is planning to retrieve Selene, which means he will go to her.

He will lead Dirthamen straight to her.

Of course, that would also mean that he will see Selene again. That would not be a permissible outcome, and if possible, should be prevented.

Mind made up, Dirthamen waits until Haleir leaves the airport. Des is much better at navigating the situation outside, and they draw close, nearly colliding with the man in the rush to hail a cab amidst other potential passengers.

“Where are you heading?” Des asks. “Maybe we could split the fare.”

Haleir sizes him up.

“I’m going a long ways out of the city,” he admits. “To one of the villages. Steriton.”

Des beams.

“A lucky coincidence,” he says. “I’m heading that way, too. You… are you Dalish? You must be. The tattoos, and the location – I’m a legal advocate from Arlathan, Des’din Adannaris. Just flew in to volunteer my services at facilitating discussions with some members of your clan who are interested in seeking asylum from Arlathan.”

Haleir blinks. His narrow, just for half a second, before he smiles affably.

“Well that is lucky!” he agrees. “Splitting the fare will certainly help the clan coffers, too.”

“A good cause,” Des cheerfully notes.

They share the backseat of the same cab.

Haleir asks them a few questions, which Des fields easily. He gets the man talking about himself, then, and that seems to be a topic which Haleir is fond of. He is a businessman, he explains. He organizes his clan’s finances and trade, and helps get them good deals on various pieces of craftwork they sell, and comes from a prestigious lineage within his clan. He has married recently, he explains.

“Not that it’s slowed me down much,” he explains, with a chuckle. “But my wife has a good bloodline. You know how it is. Good for making proper elven babies, passing on the traditions and all.”

Des’ returned smile comes back tight. Dirthamen does not like Haleir’s desires.

“Do you have a photo?” he asks, anyway. Just to see. He is not certain if he wants it to be his Selene or not, now. It seems so likely that it is. But perhaps it is not – perhaps she has escaped this. Except, then he would be at a loss as to how to find her again. That is better than the alternative, he thinks, just the same.

Ultimately, however, the universe and his desires are not often in concert. Reality is what it is. That is why it is not a dream.

Haleir shows him a photograph of himself and Selene on his phone. They are dressed in formal Dalish attire. Elrogathe, and a woman Dirthamen thinks must be Selene’s mother – going off of the resemblance – are in the photo as well.

“She is beautiful,” he notes.

“Eyes off,” Haleir says, jovially, but with just a hint of an edge. “She was promised to me since we were children. I’m glad she grew up as nicely as she did – you should see some of the dogs in our clan.”

Dirthamen frowns, until Des’ understanding of his meaning comes through. Ah. He is referring to unattractive women as dogs, not attempting to divert the conversation towards animal husbandry.

It is a long cab ride to Steriton. Dirthamen grows quiet after a time. Haleir even falls asleep for part of it, and the driver makes very little small talk. Her presence is the largest deterrent towards the idea of ending Haleir. That, and the fact that doing so would likely result in an aborted trip, and he still has not learned where precisely Selene is. Haleir gave their destination has a hotel, but no village hotels are serving as emergency shelters.

Still, Dirthamen thinks, he could always visit each of the prospective shelters himself. But killing Haleir is liable to cause disruption. It may upset Selene, even despite his mistreatment of her. And once it is done, it cannot be undone.

They reach the hotel, and split the fare. Haleir heads to the desk first, to receive the key for his reserved room. Des asks after a room for them, in turn, while Haleir moves towards the elevator and pulls out his phone. He dials a few times, frowning, as the concierge explains that they have no vacancies, but recommends an inn on the other side of the village. Dirthamen then pretends to consult his own phone, as he listens to Haleir finally get an answer to his call.

“Alaris!” he exclaims. “Good news, I’m back from the arlathvhen. Where’s Selene? I’ve been trying to reach her but my calls aren’t getting through-“

The conversation moves beyond Dirthamen’s ability to eavesdrop as Haleir gets into the hotel elevator.

However, before Dirthamen leaves the hotel lobby, the elevator comes back down to the ground floor again. Haleir hurries out.

“Is that cab still here?” he demands.

Dirthamen looks, and shakes his head.

“No,” Des says. “Why? Is something the matter?”

Haleir’s expression twists into something more like a grimace than worry.

“My wife’s gone missing,” he says. “I need to get to that chantry, figure out where she’s run… ah, what might have happened. She might have gotten overwhelmed by all of this. She has a fragile state of mind, and sometimes she gets confused, especially when her routines are disrupted.”

Des raises an eyebrow, and Dirthamen goes cold and sharp. Angry in way that is oddly satisfied with his anger, and worried in a way that makes his stomach drop.

“You don’t know where she is?” Des confirms.

Haleir gives him an odd look.

“No. That’s the whole problem,” he replies. “I need to call a cab-”

“I’ll do it,” Des offers. “I saw the number on the driver who just dropped us off. Where’s the chantry?”

Haleir gives him the address, and he calls the cab, and asks if the driver could take a passenger to the chantry on 232 Wheatley Street. The woman doesn’t seem eager, but she also accepts. Haleir doesn’t seem to think twice about it when they follow him out into the parking lot – but then, Dirthamen was already on his way out. It’s a natural flow of movement, to exit the hotel. Haleir still has his luggage with him.

Good.

There will probably be more information inside of it.

“Haleir, look,” Des says, gesturing towards a side street. “Is that your wife down there?”

Haleir spins, and frowns.

“Where?” he demands.

“I thought I saw her, just heading down the back street,” Des replies. “It was a tall blonde, at least. Leggy, with a similar face to the photo…”

Haleir is already moving. Dirthamen follows him until they’re halfway down the side of the building. The brick of the building next to it makes the space small enough for a simple illusion spell. Cover, to make the street seem empty. It’s fairly easy to get Haleir to stop before they reach the street behind the hotel. Dirthamen just settles a hand onto his shoulder.

“Where did…?”

“Haleir,” Dirthamen says.

Haleir looks back towards him, and balks. He opens his mouth, but Des is already moving. Satisfying the desire that has been in him since he first read Uthvir’s message. It stretches Des further away from their body than he has been in some time, but for this, he can manage it. Dark desires have gotten harder for him to follow over the years. Yet Dirthamen’s own desires are dark right now, so the bridge is neatly made.

Oh, Haleir. Tsk, tsk. What did you do? Did you hurt our Selene? You did. You hurt our Selene. You wanted to hurt her. I thought I made my point a lifetime ago, but we will have to try again, it seems. Perhaps death will make the lesson stick better this time. Perhaps more pain will leave a better impression.

It will have to be quick.

More’s the pity.

Haleir’s open mouth becomes a silent scream, as Des’ magic sinks into him, and sets him aflame.

Purple fires arc up Haleir’s body. It takes slightly longer than anticipated. Possibly because there is no smoke, so asphyxiation does not ensue. Dirthamen maintains the necessary illusions as Haleir drops to the ground and writhes, trying to put out fires there are immolating him from inside his own flesh. His skin cracks and bubbles, and it is an effort to disguise the scent, as his flesh cooks and his bowels evacuate, and his corneas turn white and then burst. They flames are very hot. Dirthamen has to take several steps back before they manage to reduce Haleir to ashen bones.

To dust.

It has barely been done, before Dirthamen hears the sound of a cab pulling into the hotel parking lot.

With some effort, he shifts his shape. Turning his hair ginger and changing his clothes to match Haleir’s suit. Des picks up the man’s bag, and runs a hand over their shifted locks; and he drops the illusions, as the wind kicks a strange new ash cloud out into the street. Then he walks back towards the front of the hotel, and waves in acknowledgement just as the cab driver is opening the door.

“Thank you so much,” he says.

The driver looks at him for a moment, and then shrugs.

“Sure,” she replies. “Other guy’s not coming?”

“Oh, no,” Des replies. “He was a big help, but I don’t know where he’s gone to now.”

#dirthalene #reverse reincarnation au #I AM KEEPING THAT ART U DID OF SELENE #FOR THE FOLLOW-UP TO THIS BECAUSE IT IS PERFECT #dun dun DUN #hope u like it #and also that life gives u a break because this month has been crap to everyone

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