i, like the devil, can fly
extras: meet my tav / accompanying playlist
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preview below the cut!
Preview:
Wyll
He barely registers the knocking at first. It blends seamlessly with the persistent drilling in his skull that started somewhere around the five digit word count of his International Relations paper, and has been marching on with fervour as the sun crawled back into the sky, having completed its lap around the underworld and is ready to go again. He stands at the kitchen window and lets it burn into his retinas, numbly clutching a mug of coffee that has long gone cold, and trying not to think about the 52 ungraded term papers for the class he’s TA-ing this semester.
It’s a gorgeous day, if anything. Wyll can appreciate that, even in his delirious caffeine-addled state. The trees are starting to sprout after an arduous battle with winter, and there’s nary a cloud in the sky. His father once taught him that every new day comes a new chance at growth, and a new chance to be a better person.
If whoever’s knocking at the door would drop dead already, that is.
“Will you fucking get that?” comes Lae’zel’s voice from her room, followed by a muffled thunk that sounds like a brick colliding with her wall. After three years of cohabitation, Wyll knows it’s the sound of the boot she keeps at arm's reach from her bed to defend against intruding attackers or vengeful exes, who are, oftentimes, one and the same. She’s just as sleep deprived as he is, pulling an all-nighter to study for her Ethics midterm, but not enough to keep from using her drill sergeant voice on him at 7 am.
Wyll grumbles something acquiescent under his breath and trundles down the hallway, not even bothering to check the peephole before flinging the door open to—
A man.
No, man isn’t right.
A man wouldn’t— shimmer like that.
The creature standing at his stoop is tall and waifish, with wavy white-blond hair and dangly silver earrings. He’s wearing a white lace top with matching gloves, and a brown leather book bag slung across his chest. His face is delicate, all high cheekbones and unblemished skin, flushed from a walk across campus presumably, and Wyll might even call the creature pretty if it wasn’t for the dark glower currently marring his features.
“Can I help you?” Wyll rasps, voice gravelly from disuse.
The creature regards him contemptuously. “I’m looking for Lae’zel. I have business with her,” he says, and his voice is softer than Wyll expects it to be. The creature glances suspiciously around him as if she might be hiding behind the potted plant in the foyer. He must be another one of Lae’zel’s conquests gone wrong. Later, he’ll rib her for going back on her ‘no more blond men’ rule after a mere month, brought on by an ill-advised hookup with Astarion, but for now, he knows this song and dance well enough.
Wyll wedges his body into the doorway. “She’s not home,” he says, ignoring the scuttling sound that is undoubtedly Lae’zel scrambling to retrieve the boot she just threw.
The creature sees right through him, looking deeply unimpressed. “I need to speak with her,” he insists, and the longer he stands there, the more he seems to vibrate with pent-up energy.
Up close, his eyelashes are long and golden, sweeping the curve of his cheek and catching the light when he blinks. He has a faint scar running across the bridge of his nose, barely a shade pinker than the rest of his skin. Something about the creature makes Wyll itch, like he doesn’t know what to do with him, like he doesn’t know whether he wants to tame the beast or provoke it. Maybe it’s the near-lethal dose of caffeine running through his veins, but he feels like being a bit of an asshole this morning. It goes against all of his well-behaved instincts, but sleep-deprived Wyll can be an uncharitable sack of shit.
”And I told you, she’s not home,” Wyll says with his nicest shit-eating smile. The scuttling in the background turns into a crash as several doors slam shut behind him. “But I can take a message,” he offers, taking a slow, obnoxious slurp from his mug.
The creature huffs and shakes out his hair, face becoming increasingly flushed with irritation. Absent-mindedly, Wyll wonders how deep that flush goes. He glares at Wyll. Wyll smiles placidly back.
“Fine,” he sniffs. The creature glances around for a second.
“Is that coffee?” he asks in a sudden detour, leaning forward to peek into Wyll’s cup. The crown of his head brushes against Wyll’s nose, and he smells vaguely of the cotton candy body mist they sell at the mall, but there’s something else there, a strangely musky undercurrent. Leather, perhaps, or something more animalistic still. Wyll is too busy sniffing the creature’s hair to notice when he plucks his mug straight out of his hands.
“Tell Lae’zel I’m a friend of Shadowheart,” he says, taking an experimental sip and wrinkling his nose at the frigid temperature. He then gives Wyll a long, meaningful once-over, mouth twisting wryly, and he suddenly feels very self-conscious of his threadbare t-shirt and sweatpants. The sun hasn’t been up for an hour, and yet this creature looks like he could attend a wedding. “…And she would like to pass along this. ”
Is he wearing… lip gloss?
The creature proceeds to upend the entire contents of Wyll’s 2007 Academic Decathlon mug onto the front of his shirt.
“Son of a bitch,” Wyll gasps.
The creature gives a satisfactory hmph, primly deposits the mug on his doorstep, and flounces away.
Wyll is left there, speechless, with rivulets of cold coffee running down his legs, a soaked doormat, and, somehow, a semi.
He collects the mug off his stoop and slowly shuts the door behind him.
His lip gloss is… cherry-flavoured.
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