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estapa-edwards · 1 month

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I MISS YOU, IM SORRY PT 2 - J. HUGHES

paring: Jack Hughes x fem! reader

word count: 3.7k

requested? yes -i NEED a pt 2 to i miss you, im sorry! 🤍

warnings: use of y/n.

pt. 1

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As I stared at the glowing screen of my phone, Jack's message seemed to jump out at me, stirring a flurry of conflicting emotions within. It had been a few weeks since we last spoke, and despite my efforts to move on, his presence still lingered in the corners of my mind like an echo that refused to fade.

"I miss you."

Those three simple words carried a weight that threatened to pull me back into the depths of nostalgia, where memories of our time together danced in the shadows of my thoughts. I never knew I could miss somebody this much, I reflected, feeling the ache in my chest intensify with each passing moment.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a photo on social media – Jack with his new girlfriend. She bore a striking resemblance to me, with her long dark hair and piercing blue eyes. It was as if he had found a replacement for me, someone who could fill the void I had left behind.

At first, the discovery had filled me with a strange mixture of jealousy and resentment. How could he move on so quickly, as if I had never meant anything to him? But as I scrolled through their pictures, I realized that perhaps it was for the best. He deserved to be happy, even if it meant finding happiness with someone else.

And so, I made the difficult decision to keep my distance, to refrain from responding to his message. It wasn't out of spite or malice, but out of a sense of self-preservation. I couldn't bear to reopen old wounds, to subject myself to the pain of seeing him move on with someone else.

Despite my resolve to keep my distance from Jack, there was one connection I couldn't sever – my friendship with his brother, Luke. We had formed a bond that transcended the complexities of Jack's love life, spending countless hours together sharing stories, laughter, and the occasional pint of ice cream.

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Despite living under the same roof, Jack's presence in our shared space had dwindled in recent weeks. His busy schedule and newfound relationship kept him away more often than not, leaving Luke and me to our own devices. It was during these moments of solitude that I found solace in Luke's company, grateful for his unwavering support and understanding.

As the days turned into weeks, my visits to Luke's room became a regular occurrence – a sanctuary where I could escape the chaos of my own thoughts and find solace in the familiar warmth of his company. We would spend hours talking about everything and nothing, laughing at inside jokes and sharing stories from our past.

But no matter how much I tried to bury my feelings for Jack, there were moments when his absence weighed heavily on my heart. Sometimes, in the midst of our conversations, I would catch myself drifting off, lost in a sea of memories that threatened to pull me under.

It was during one of these moments that Luke caught me staring off into the distance, a concerned expression etched upon his features.

"Hey, you okay?" he asked, his voice laced with genuine concern.

I forced a smile, pushing aside the ache in my chest as I nodded in response. "Yeah, just lost in thought."

But Luke wasn't convinced, his piercing gaze seeing through the façade I had erected around myself. He knew me better than anyone, could sense when something was weighing on my mind.

"Is it Jack?" he ventured, his words hanging in the air between us like an unspoken truth.

I hesitated, unsure of how much to reveal. But in the end, I knew I couldn't keep it bottled up inside any longer – not from Luke, my confidant and closest friend.

"Yeah," I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper. "I miss him."

There was a sadness in Luke's eyes as he reached out and squeezed my hand in silent understanding. He knew all too well the pain of unrequited love, the ache of longing for someone who was just out of reach.

"I know it's hard," he murmured, his voice filled with empathy. "But you're stronger than you think, Y/N. And no matter what happens, I'll always be here for you."

His words brought a sense of comfort, a reminder that I wasn't alone in my struggles. With Luke by my side, I felt as though I could weather any storm, no matter how fierce.

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I was just about to leave Luke's room one afternoon when I heard the sound of footsteps approaching from down the hall. Before I could react, the door swung open, revealing Jack standing in the doorway, a surprised expression on his face.

"Hey," he greeted, his voice tentative. "I didn't realize you were here."

I felt a pang of discomfort at the sight of him, memories of our past rushing back to the surface with a vengeance. It was as if time stood still in that moment, the weight of our shared history pressing down upon us like a heavy blanket.

"I was just leaving," I replied, my voice barely above a whisper.

There was an awkward tension in the air as I gathered my things and made my way towards the door, desperate to escape the suffocating atmosphere that surrounded us. But before I could make my escape, Jack spoke up, his voice filled with uncertainty.

"Y/N, wait," he called out, his words stopping me in my tracks.

I turned to face him, my heart pounding in my chest as I braced myself for whatever was to come.

As Jack's words hung in the air, a sinking feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. The anticipation that had built up inside me came crashing down like a wave, leaving behind a sense of emptiness that threatened to consume me whole.

"Actually, never mind."

With those three simple words, he shattered the fragile hope that had flickered to life within me, leaving nothing but a hollow ache in their wake. I stood there in stunned silence, unable to comprehend the sudden shift in our interaction.

Before I could gather my thoughts or muster a response, Jack turned on his heel and disappeared into his room, leaving me standing alone in the hallway, my heart heavy with disappointment and regret.

Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes as I struggled to make sense of what had just happened. Had I imagined the connection between us, the unspoken bond that had once held us together? Or had he simply grown tired of playing games, choosing to retreat behind the walls he had built around himself?

I wanted to scream, to lash out at him for the pain he had caused me with his thoughtless words. But deep down, I knew that it wouldn't change anything – that the distance between us was a chasm too wide to bridge, no matter how much I longed for things to be different.

With a heavy sigh, I turned away from his door and made my way down the hallway, each step echoing the rhythm of my broken heart. It was a painful reminder of the harsh realities of love – that sometimes, no matter how much we wish for things to work out, the universe has other plans in store for us.

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No matter how hard I tried to avoid Jack, it seemed like fate had other plans in store for us. No matter where I turned, he was there – a constant presence in my life, a reminder of the love we had shared and the pain we had endured.

It felt as though the universe was playing a cruel joke on me, taunting me with his presence at every turn. Whether it was bumping into him in the hallway, catching a glimpse of him across the crowded room, or hearing his laughter echoing through the walls of our shared home, there was no escaping the inevitable.

Each encounter served as a painful reminder of what could have been, dredging up memories of happier times and igniting the embers of longing that still smoldered within me. No matter how much time had passed, the wounds he had left behind remained raw and tender, refusing to heal in his absence.

And yet, despite the pain it caused me, there was a part of me that couldn't help but be drawn to him – to the warmth of his smile, the kindness in his eyes, the way he made me feel alive with just a simple touch.

But I knew that giving in to those feelings would only lead to more heartache in the end. I had made a promise to myself to move on, to let go of the past and embrace the possibilities of the future. And even though it was difficult, I knew that I had to stay true to myself, no matter how tempting the allure of Jack's presence may be.

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I stood in the kitchen, lost in the comforting routine of chopping vegetables and stirring simmering pots on the stove. The rhythmic clatter of knives against cutting boards filled the air, a soothing melody that helped to drown out the noise of my thoughts.

But just as I was beginning to lose myself in the familiar motions of cooking, a sharp knock on the door shattered the illusion of calm, jolting me back to reality with a start.

My heart skipped a beat as I glanced towards the entrance, a sense of apprehension knotting in the pit of my stomach. It couldn't be, I told myself, my mind racing with a million possibilities.

With cautious steps, I made my way towards the door, each footfall echoing the rapid rhythm of my heartbeat. As I reached out to grasp the doorknob, a sense of dread washed over me, the weight of uncertainty pressing down upon my shoulders like a heavy burden.

And then, with a trembling hand, I swung the door open – and there he stood, Jack, his presence filling the doorway like a looming shadow against the fading light of dusk.

For a moment, neither of us spoke, the silence stretching between us like a taut wire. His eyes searched mine, a mixture of emotions swirling within their depths – regret, longing, and something else, something I couldn't quite name.

"Hey," he greeted, his voice soft and tentative. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

I swallowed hard, the lump in my throat threatening to choke me as I struggled to find my voice. "No, not at all," I managed to reply, my words coming out in a breathless whisper.

There was a tension in the air, palpable and charged with unspoken emotion. It was as if time stood still in that moment, the world narrowing down to just the two of us, suspended in a fragile bubble of uncertainty.

And then, without a word, Jack stepped forward, closing the distance between us in a single stride. His presence enveloped me like a warm embrace, his scent familiar and intoxicating all at once.

"I've missed you," he confessed, his voice barely above a whisper. "More than you'll ever know."

His words hung in the air between us, heavy with unspoken implications. I couldn't deny the surge of conflicting emotions that washed over me at his confession. Part of me wanted to believe him, to hold onto the hope that our connection was still strong despite the obstacles that stood in our way.

But another part of me couldn't ignore the bitter reality of his words – he had a girlfriend. The thought stung like a fresh wound, reopening the scars of heartache that had barely begun to heal.

"Did you actually miss me, because you had a girlfriend?" I asked, my voice tinged with a mixture of hurt and disbelief.

There was a flicker of guilt in Jack's eyes as he met my gaze, a silent admission of the truth I already knew deep down. "I did," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. "But it wasn't the same. She's not you, Y/N."

His words cut through me like a knife, reopening old wounds and igniting a firestorm of emotions within me. How could he expect me to believe him, to trust in his feelings when he had chosen to be with someone else?

"I don't know if I can do this, Jack," I confessed, my voice trembling with emotion. "I can't be just another option, waiting for you to decide if I'm worth choosing."

Jack's words hung in the air between us, a fragile bridge spanning the chasm of uncertainty that had grown between us. His confession stirred a whirlwind of conflicting emotions within me, tearing at the walls I had built around my heart in an effort to protect myself from further pain.

"You know how much you mean to me. The whole time I was with her, I wished it was you instead."

His words echoed in the depths of my soul, resonating with a truth that I couldn't deny. Despite the hurt and betrayal I felt, there was a part of me that longed to believe him, to cling to the hope that our love was still worth fighting for.

But the wounds he had inflicted ran deep, leaving scars that would forever mar the landscape of our relationship. Could I truly trust him again, knowing that he had chosen someone else over me?

"I want to believe you, Jack," I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper. "But I don't know if I can. Trust isn't something that can be easily regained."

There was a heaviness in the air as we stood there, caught in the gravity of our shared pain and regret. For a moment, it felt as though time stood still, the world narrowing down to just the two of us, suspended in a fragile bubble of uncertainty.

And then, without a word, Jack reached out and took my hand in his, his touch gentle yet filled with a quiet determination.

"I understand," he murmured, his voice tinged with regret. "But please, just give me a chance to make things right. I'll do whatever it takes to earn back your trust."

Tears glistened in my eyes as I listened to Jack's plea, his words reaching deep into the recesses of my heart. Despite the pain and uncertainty that still lingered between us, there was a part of me that wanted to believe him – to believe that we could find a way to heal the wounds of the past and move forward together.

But as much as I yearned for reconciliation, I knew that I couldn't ignore the doubts and fears that gnawed at the edges of my resolve. Trust wasn't something that could be easily regained, and I wasn't sure if I was ready to take that leap of faith just yet.

"I appreciate your honesty, Jack," I replied, my voice steady despite the storm raging within me. "But I think we need some time apart – time to figure things out on our own."

There was a flicker of disappointment in Jack's eyes, a silent acknowledgment of the reality of our situation. He knew as well as I did that our relationship couldn't be repaired overnight, that it would take time and effort on both of our parts to rebuild what had been broken.

"I understand," he murmured, his voice tinged with regret. "But please, just know that I'll always be here for you, no matter what."

I nodded, a bittersweet smile tugging at the corners of my lips. "And I'll always be here for you too, Jack. But for now, let's just focus on being friends."

There was a sense of relief that washed over me as I spoke those words, a weight lifting from my shoulders as I embraced the possibility of a new beginning. It wouldn't be easy, and there were sure to be challenges ahead, but I knew that as long as we had each other, we could weather any storm that came our way.

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In the weeks that followed our heart-to-heart conversation, Jack and I embarked on a journey of rediscovery – one that would test the boundaries of our friendship and pave the way for a new chapter in our lives.

With each passing day, we grew closer, our bond strengthened by shared laughter, heartfelt conversations, and moments of quiet companionship. We spent hours exploring the city together, revisiting old haunts and discovering new ones, each adventure bringing us one step closer to understanding ourselves and each other.

There were moments when the pain of the past threatened to resurface, old wounds reopening with a raw intensity that left us both reeling. But instead of turning away from each other, we leaned in – offering comfort, support, and a shoulder to lean on when the weight of the world became too much to bear.

Slowly but surely, the walls we had built around ourselves began to crumble, revealing the vulnerable hearts that lay beneath. We shared our hopes and dreams, our fears and insecurities, laying bare the pieces of ourselves that we had long kept hidden from the world.

And in those moments of vulnerability, we found strength – strength in each other, in the unspoken understanding that bound us together, and in the knowledge that no matter what the future held, we would face it together, as friends.

As the days turned into weeks, I found myself grateful for the opportunity to rebuild our friendship from the ground up, to forge a connection that was deeper and more meaningful than anything we had ever shared before.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, there were moments when Jack and I found ourselves drawn together by an invisible force – moments of quiet intimacy that left us both breathless with the realization of just how deeply we had come to care for each other.

It was in the small gestures – a lingering touch, a shared glance, a smile that spoke volumes – that our bond grew stronger, weaving a tapestry of connection that defied explanation.

One evening, as we sat side by side on the couch, engrossed in a movie marathon, I felt Jack's hand brush against mine, sending a jolt of electricity coursing through my veins. It was a simple touch, yet it spoke volumes – a silent reassurance that we were in this together, no matter what.

In that moment, I found myself leaning into his touch, craving the warmth and comfort it offered. And as our fingers intertwined, a sense of peace washed over me, filling the room with a quiet serenity that spoke of the deep bond we shared.

There were other moments too – moments of shared laughter and inside jokes, of stolen glances and secret smiles – each one a testament to the depth of our connection and the growing affection we held for each other.

And as the weeks turned into months, I found myself falling for Jack in ways I never thought possible, his presence a constant source of joy and comfort in my life.

But amidst the growing closeness between us, there lingered a sense of hesitation – a fear of crossing boundaries that had long been established, of risking the fragile equilibrium of our friendship for the sake of something more.

And so, we treaded carefully, tiptoeing around the unspoken tension that simmered beneath the surface, content to bask in the warmth of each other's company while keeping our true feelings carefully guarded.

But deep down, I couldn't help but wonder – what if? What if we took a chance on love, risking everything for the possibility of something beautiful and true?

As the days passed and our friendship continued to blossom, I could sense a shift in the air – a tension that crackled with unspoken emotions, threatening to burst forth at any moment. And it was during one quiet evening, as we sat together on the balcony, that Jack finally found the courage to speak the words that had been weighing heavily on his heart.

"Y/N, there's something I need to say," he began, his voice soft yet tinged with a hint of urgency. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I realize that I owe you an apology."

I turned to face him, my curiosity piqued by the solemn tone of his voice. "What for?" I asked, my heart racing in anticipation of what was to come.

"For everything," he replied, his gaze never wavering from mine. "For hurting you, for taking you for granted, for not realizing sooner what you mean to me."

His words washed over me like a wave, stirring a whirlwind of emotions within me – surprise, disbelief, and a flicker of hope that threatened to ignite into something more.

"I'm sorry, Y/N," he continued, his voice tinged with regret. "I know I messed up, but I want you to know that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make things right."

I felt a lump form in my throat as I listened to his heartfelt confession, the weight of his words settling in the pit of my stomach like a heavy stone. Could I trust him again, after everything we had been through? Did I dare to hope for a future where we could be more than just friends?

And then, before I could form a coherent response, Jack took a deep breath and spoke the words that I had longed to hear.

"I want more, Y/N," he confessed, his voice filled with quiet determination. "I want us to be more than just friends. I want to explore what we could have together, to see if there's a chance for something real between us."

A sense of relief washed over me as I heard Jack's heartfelt confession, his words echoing the silent desires of my own heart. For so long, I had yearned for something more – something deeper and more meaningful than the platonic friendship we had shared.

"I agree," I replied, my voice barely above a whisper, the weight of his words settling over me like a warm blanket. "I want that too, Jack."

There was a flicker of hope in his eyes as he reached out and took my hand in his, his touch sending a shiver down my spine. It was a simple gesture, yet it spoke volumes – a silent promise of the journey that lay ahead, filled with uncertainty and possibility.

And as we sat there, bathed in the soft glow of the evening sky, I knew that no matter what obstacles we may face, we would face them together, united by the bond of our shared love and the hope of a future filled with endless possibilities.

#hockey #nhl x reader #new jersey devils #nj devils #jack hughes #jack hughes x reader #jack hughes x y/n #jack hughes blurb #jack hughes imagine

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hiraeth-sonder · 1 month

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Delusive Masks - Nasu

Yan! Tamamo no Mae x Reader

Old foxes aren't the best servants, they're wily and complex, and most of all, possessive

TW: Mentions of violence in the form of burning, general toxic manipulative behaviour, not really proof read

//The brainrot hit so bad that I wrote a bad fever dream. A whole bunch of liberties taken with the way being an onmyoji works and with characters as per usual. Poem is from 陽成院歌合, topic of 夏虫の恋 and is number 06 of the whole collection

あふことを, いつともしらぬ

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

To be a good person is not difficult, to be a good onmyoji perhaps less so. For many people, merely getting the skill and natural ability to qualify as one is already a kind of privilege, it taints the way they view themselves, creating grandiose splendours that they can transcend beyond the mortal principles. Yet when one becomes powerful enough to summon shikigami beyond weak spirits imbued into paper dolls, it gets to their head. They suddenly, foolishly believe themselves capable of nothing short of miracles. How fast they fall, turning themselves into cruel masters, bidding their servants to acts no better than the very yokai they seek to exorcise, kicking upon their shikigami to which they had entered that sacred contract.

You are grateful for many things in life, the first that you had good parents that supported your wishes, the second that you could become a practising onmyoji, and the third being your master’s consistent and persistent hammering of humility and altruism. No lesser or greater than any being that walks upon this world, whether human or spirit, your duty was to protect the innocent and excise the guilty. Of course, he had worded it much more eloquently than such, but the motive was still present in his orotund words.

Your shikigami are as equally deserving of respect as you are, unconditional kindness could very often make the difference between an evil spirit and a good one. You have stuck by such truths for as long as you have started, even when the only spirits under your command were Ubume and Zashiki Warashi. It became a promise of kinds, that you would always do right by them so long as they showed the same sentiment in return. Eventually, you ended up with quite a few of them, a good entourage of them you knew you could trust. Yet, it was rather difficult for people to take you seriously without certifiably powerful spirits, or perhaps it was more accurate to say that there was a certain gap between the perceived disciple of the great Abe no Seimei, and the reality that you were.

There was some part of you that did resent that expectation, partly that others should have no right to comment on your ability solely on your patronage, and partly because it felt too close to home. Of course you knew it was shameful to be so powerless when you study under one of the best practitioners, it is only natural you did.

The smell of incense fills your nose as your eyes adjust to the dim room, a talisman before you laying on the wooden floor. With a brush in hand, dipped in ink and poised for use, you calm your pounding heart. You have already summoned a few shikigami before, yet at this very moment, you could feel nothing but inexplicable foreboding. It made no sense, with your current living quarters more than protected by both your and your shikigamis’ efforts, yet you could not merely shake off the tenseness in your joints and the roiling in your stomach.

It hurts, everything still hurts. Your hands from all the preparation, your knees from kneeling on such hard floors, your head from everything that has been and shall be. It is as though your body only knows to bear suffering, pain from which is borne from being mortal, pain borne of the pure action of breathing.

Still, you close your eyes and take a deep breath. Picking up your brush in a ramrod perfect posture, the incantation so familiar to your lips spill out as ink stains the talisman. Your voice starts soft, barely a whisper in the wind and as your hand scrawls and scrawls with a fervour not quite known to human consciousness, it rises until the only sound in your ear is your very own words.

The moment your brush lifts off the paper and the ink settles within, placed within the circle, it resonates and glows, bursting with light and into flame as it burns into a brilliant blaze. It threatens to engulf the summoning room, grazing at the ceiling as even the fire from your candles are absorbed into such a violent inferno. You can feel the heat, practically licking your skin and singeing the ends of your coat, sweat beading at your brow as you shield your eyes from the bright display.

Even when the flames dim, what is before your eyes is merely the shaping of the firestorm into nine distinct tails, a vulpine silhouette that eventually reveals a tall figure, draped in silks and brocades. With an elaborate fox-like mask hiding the top half of his face, this spirit which presented himself as both court official and decadent noble snapped open his fan to further hide his jade white visage. Among the cool night, all you could feel was the radiating heat from his form, even if he retracted his flames, it was as if there was nothing beyond him and his fire.

The high wooden geta clacks against the wooden floorboards, elegant footfalls approaching you ever closer as he steps out of the circle. He makes no effort to lower himself to your level, fervid eyes burning behind the mask as he tips his fan beneath your chin and lifts it. The spirit takes a gander at your appearance, scrutinising your every feature with an intensity far beyond mild interest.

“This place has experienced great change since I’ve last been here,” The old fox’s lips curl into a smile, the peek of sharp canines peeking from behind. His voice is sultry, a minacious bite to his words, “Onmyoji, we finally finally meet.”

No matter this first introduction, dealing with this great spirit will be much more complicated than any you have ever met. A venerable kitsune in which vagary destruction lay right at the snap of his fingers, no matter what kind of fate he deems worthy for your mortal self, it is exactly because you are mortal that you should meet this trial.

Bowing, you raise your clasped hands in front of you and dip until you feel your back screech for mercy, “Tamamo no mae-sama, it is an honour to meet you.”

“Do take care of me, little lady,” He croons and a shiver runs through your bones, no matter how gentle his words were.

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

なつむしの, おもひはかぎり

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

“Master, I did not think you would arrive so quickly.”

Your hands are steady as you tip the lacquered teapot, fragrant tea pouring in a steady stream from its slender spout. The dark liquid a blend you rarely take out other than to entertain your master, there is a certain trepidation that comes with such an act, one you are not sure when will finally leave you. The joints of your fingers ache, throbbing even as you lay at rest.

“It is so wrong for me to worry for you?” He raises a brow, azure eyes regarding you with some placid gleam.

Despite your admittedly out of place nerves, your master has done nothing to warrant such, that in spite of his graceful and aloof poise, Seimei may likely be one of the kindest people you have ever met. You understand that a person can in no way be entirely benevolent nor evil, for that is what makes a sentient being sentient, but there is merely something about him that brings forward ease within a person.

You only shake your head, an abashed quirk tugging at your lips. Watching him take a sip from his cup, your mind drifts back to the message you had sent. A letter that was hastily scrawled and messy beyond reason, the paper carried the distinct stench of smoke and ash, it was a moment of panic now that you could look upon the incident with a much clearer head. The minute you had situated the old yokai in conditions appeasable to his own tastes, you remember sprinting back to your room, sweat clinging to your skin and staining the paper as you wrote, informing your master what had just occurred and asking for his guidance.

“Of course not, I just thought you would have taken more time to get here,” You hum, your voice lowered and sheepish. “Were you not at the capital when my letter arrived?”

Your master only nods, “Your words were so fearful, I thought you had come across a great trouble.”

He takes a moment to partake from his drink once more, a silence falling upon the sun-lit room as birds chirp in the nearby trees and the sound of your shikigami going about their lives ring from the distance. You rest your eyes upon his form, noting the seeming flawlessness of his presence. Sharper features that hinted at some otherworldly grace, just the most minute sign found in the form of the slight furrow of his brow revealed the distress that plagued him. Then, his long lashes flutter open, and your master merely seems to smile, relief all but seeping from his eyes.

“I am glad you are well.”

Averting your gaze, you thank him under your breath as heat flushes at the tips of your ears, not quite certain whether such bashfulness stems from troubling him or emotions else explained.

You can only move the conversation of topic away from that moment, putting on a facade of ease, “I thought you would have more insight about him.”

The expression on his face shifts ever so slightly, a sudden hardness in his eyes as he grips the teacup just the little tighter.

“He…has experienced a great number of losses due to both divine and human action,” He manages to breathe out, the sound almost all but serene if not for the lengthy pause between his words. Your master inhales, as though to continue his words, yet he only sighs, “I am afraid that is as much as I can disclose for now, it is not my place to tell what he does not wish to be revealed.”

Just as you think to pry just a little further, Hana’s voice echoes from beyond the closed doors, asking for your presence. There is a concern tinging her words, and judging by the pattering of rushed footsteps, this was a matter that required your immediate and utmost earnest attention.

“Master, I must apologise but…” Your eyes glance between him and the door, chest tightening ever so slightly as blood rushes through your veins.

Seimei merely shakes his head, an assuaging expression on his face as he waves you off, “Do not worry about me, go ahead.”

Nodding, you rise as quickly as possible, rushing off as you are swiftly carted off to the issue. The white haired man remains in his seated position, taking in the scent of his tea as he closes his eyes. He hears the silence of the wind, with neither bird song nor liveliness of existence. Seimei finishes the rest of his tea, herbal and heady fragrance greeting his senses for the last time before he places it down alongside your abandoned cup.

He takes a breath, not bothering to open his eyes as he speaks, “Uncle, I know you are there.”

From beyond the door and announcing his entrance through soft clicks, a masked man deigns to show his face as he lowers his fan. With his lips almost permanently lifted in mirth, the scarlet markings that painted his mask aided with the unease that your master suddenly feels creeping onto his spine. He is unfamiliar with this sensation, especially from the man before him.

“Seimei, its been a long time,” The old fox croons, insouciant tinge to his voice.

Without missing a beat, your master finds a new urgency within him, “What are your intentions with my disciple?”

“We have yet to see each other after so long and this is your first question for me?” Tamamo hums, an unexplainable expression on his jade white face. His fan taps against his jaw in a rhythmic manner, voice much more playful and recondite than Seimei would have liked, “She called out and I responded, nothing more, nothing less.”

“If you have any malintention upon her, I fear I may have to take action.”

Not quite a threat, for even he is unable to deny their relationship, but more so a warning. This tension between the two of them has an unspoken depth, one that had existed long before this clandestine reunion, and with Seimei’s admittedly almost obvious concern for your wellbeing, it only seems to sour so.

The old fox smiles, and the younger finds that he does not enjoy the way those golden eyes seem to shine with burning regard from beyond the mask. Tamamo only muses, yet despite the airy nature of his voice, behind his lilt was a zealous avariciousness, “I promise you, no harm shall befall her so long as I am by her side.”

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

なくやあるらん

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

For all that the froglets incident was worth, a situation that had been more so confusing and hysterical for the regional townspeople than any life-threatening catastrophe as you had been led to believe, it was only a mild inconvenience. A few dozen little frogs dressed to appear as great yokais were merely wandering around and acting as if they were the spirits themselves, of course they had also been imbued with some kind of ability that allowed them to recreate such acts, but it was still not some matter that would raze the whole of Heian-Kyo.

Still, that had not meant you expected to return to your abode with said froglets nipping at your heels ready to make themselves useful.

“Master…” At a loss for words, Momo could only cock her head at the image before her.

Rather than being seated at your desk pouring over documents, you were instead making yourself quite busy with some leisurely reading while the froglets dedicate themselves to stacking your books in an order only they seemed to know.

“It’s okay, they are not causing any issue,” You smile, an amused huff escaping your nose when your eyes drift to Susabi Frog balancing on top of Ichimokuren Frog as it just barely pushes a star chart into place, “I am just keeping them busy.”

Turning your attention back to Momo, you place down your book as you roll your shoulders back, the vertebrae in your spine not quite as sore. “Did you have something for me to look at?”

“Ubume asked whether you wanted to join us for lunch or have us eat with you.” Her voice is slightly hesitant, just one step away from wavering.

It feels like instinct at this point, you rest your head upon your palm and squeeze your eyes in delight. If you had to be honest, you did quite miss being able to have meals with your shikigamis, always some lively affair and certainly occuring far too sparsely for your liking.

“It has been some time since we all sat down together and ate, has it not?”

She nods her head, a hopeful expression on her face as her eyes widen in mock innocence, “Mhm! So will you?”

You laugh, shaking your head as you get up and dust your clothes. An excitement fills her as the little blooms in her hair burst open, grabbing your arm and all but dragging you out. Turning a glance to the froglets, you wave them over and they come scampering to your side at the first notice, almost all too excited to follow along. They clamour in the occasional croak or ribbit, asking about this and that. More akin to children, you wonder when that sentiment started.

By the time you arrive in your courtyard, it is all but a wonderfully teeming gathering, noise filling your ears in a manner that only served to coax your heart from its tight cage. Seeing them like this, you are happy that you get to have such a sight, living free from suffering and safe, that was the most important point, that they were safe.

“I see you all are in good spirits,” You hum, an announcement that is swiftly followed by a symphony of ‘Master’s’.

Some of the younger shikigami immediately leap from their seats to your side, to which you only greet them with on overfond smile and a pat on the head. Those busy with serving food or handing out cutlery likewise greet you, not quite able to pull themselves away from their tasks but still sending a smile or a wave. Momo is quick to join everyone else, flitting between chatting and aiding. Ootengu had busied himself with scooping soup while Hana had been floating around ensuring everyone had some kind of meal, leaving one person notably uninvolved.

“Little lady,” The old yokai calls for you, resting his head on his palm as a smile plays on his lips. Sitting beneath the plum blossom tree, he almost looks like the subject of a great painting under falling petals and soft sunlight. Just the view of such makes you almost afraid to approach him, yet still you do so. You are unable to tell exactly whether his levity is real, but you can only assume so by his leisurely tone, “Have the froglets been helping you?”

Glancing at the frogs now being babied by the rest of your shikigami, a notion you did not think they would take up so fast, you only laugh, “They are very earnest, thank you.”

Silence falls upon the two of you and for a moment, it truly does feel that all is right in the world. There is little discomfort in your body, joints no longer cracking at every minute action nor head pounding at every little stimulus that dared to exist. The smell of sweet flowers and delightful aroma of proper food fills the air, and you yearn for nothing more than these days to continue on.

Those froglets, troublesome at first though they may, had ended up being a kind of blessing. For ever since their attempted marauding, you have had little, if any issues that required your action. You spend your days reading and writing, responding to correspondence and finally able to focus on your studies.

It is while reminiscing that Tamamo’s silvery words reach your ears, pleasant and coaxing.

“These few weeks have been rather peaceful, don’t you think?” He tilts his head to the side, meeting your gaze in a single move.

You squeeze your eyes again, a soft sigh escaping you as a smile tugs at your lips, “It has, I can finally get to some marriage proposals I had apparently recieved.”

For a moment, just the slightest second late, you thought the old fox’s expression darkened. Yet just as quickly as it came, it left, and he simply continues on. His eagerness almost resembles that of those older ladies, that crooning voice asking for more and more, ready to give advice you never thought you would need, older yokais surely were no different than mortals.

“Oh? And who is the lucky fellow?” His nails, scarlet and far longer than you remember, clasp around his fan.

“Just another onmyoji, he isn’t from the big name clans that sent their pathetic excuse they call letters,” You sigh, then hold your hands up in clarification, as though to correct yourself from your perceived distate, “Which is good, less likely to be some bigoted oaf.”

Tamamo merely hums, snapping open his fan to hide the bottom of his face, yet there was an odd wry tinge to his words, “How intriguing, our little lady seems to be quite popular to attract even onmyojis from the big clans.”

“Don’t flatter me, they just want to find someone they can continue their bloodlines with.”

Rolling your eyes, an acerbic grin appears on your face as you take a drink from the teacup one of the froglets brought over. Just like those old ladies, he places a hand on your shoulder and with an assuaging tone, a sense of warm reassurance is poured into your being.

“Well, you won’t have to worry. I’m certain you will have no trouble.”

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

またまたも, みをぞすてつる

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

Kiyohara Genjirou, a practicing onmyoji that had sought you out not only for his pursuit of the craft but admiration as well. So he cited in his first correspondence, and so you would like to believe.

As he wrote to you, you found him an eloquent and diligent man. Genjirou, though not hailing from a noble family nor considered talented enough to join a major clan, wandered through the country aiding when he could. All he had were paper dolls and simple talisman, yet that was all he needed. He had heard tales from those whose qualms you have solved, and had grown curious of your being. It was natural, yet this natural curiosity had grown to longing when he caught a glimpse of you in the city.

The image he described of you had seem otherworldly when you first read it, donned in simple robes and merely another face among the crowd, his eyes had no choice but to follow along your form, entirely unable to pull away from you. As if sent down from the high heavens, even the slightest whisper of your voice had made him understand why men should turn to religion.

You thought of him less fondly, perhaps not an infatuation such as his but an interest nonetheless. He had only sent two letters, the first that had been introductory and more similar to polite courtesy, the second much more personal and akin to courting. Still, you had been touched by his words, further still when you read the last portion. He would make the journey to your estate, to meet you and to perhaps, if you would allow him the chance to, to court you.

It was by no means a demand, but rather a suggestion. Genjirou had gone so far as to write that should you not find him appealing in any manner, that should you deem him overstepping, you were in every right to have him kicked out and his hair cut short.

You remember showing Tamamo the letter, surrounded by the froglets as he read from behind your shoulder. You told him that you would like to meet such a staunch person, and perhaps at the time, you had laughed alongside him when he said that should Genjirou truly act as he feared, then it would not be humiliation that he would bear. There was nothing to worry for, all you had to do was await his arrival.

Yet, despite his staid words and his solemn promises, he never came.

Under the moonlight and through the cold night wind, you can only let out a soft sigh. Your shoulders slump beneath your robes as all of a sudden, your body feels too heavy for your feet. Leaning against the wooden pillars of the front gate, that familiar tightness in your chest returns once more. Yet rather than what feels like your ribs enclosing onto your rapidly beating heart, what occurs to you now is more akin to that sentimental organ squeezing against its cage, yearning to pry straight through to leap out and wither away. Your lungs long for air, forcing in and out and yet it is not enough, never enough.

It is cold, so, so cold. Why were you cold?

Closing your eyes, you feel a presence approach from behind you, then a hand pulls you away from your resting spot. You lay against a warm body, that even through layers and layers of silk and brocade, you do not even have to open your eyes to know who it is.

“Tamamo,” Your murmur disappears into the night, yet it is a call that he hears and responds to.

With your limp limbs that which hang uselessly, the old fox gathers you into his embrace, allowing you to bury your face into his chest. “I thought he was different…”

Methodical and rhythmic, his chest rises and lowers, coaxing your breath to follow suite. Within his hold, there is a warmth that penetrates the skin, enveloping your tendons in loving flame. Tightly held and tightly received, Tamamo lets you dig your nails into him, until your fingertips ache and your wrists cramp up. He merely returns the sentiment, as though it was entirely natural to do so.

“Will you be honest with me?”

As though ashamed to even consider such a thought an option, you can barely muster your voice to above a whisper, “Do you think I’m a disappointment to my master?”

“Of course not, my little lady is very accomplished,” He croons, his voice soft and soothing. “Do you think I would have answered your call otherwise?”

Still enveloped in his presence, you inhale the familiar smell that clings to him. When he speaks to you as such, it truly does feel like all will be right in this world. Desiring nothing more than to keep you safe, this old fox you had once shrinked from has now become your only succour. How fast you had let him in your heart, that he should treat you with the same regard and care you do the rest of your shikigami, and you would become so easily reliant on what he may give you. Ironic, yet undeniably a notion you had grown aware of since his arrival.

“Besides, he is rather foolish to give up on you,” He sighs, an undertone distantly related to triumph hidden beneath assuage and fondness.

That graceful hand cups your face, reverent as though bearing a great treasure. Your eyes flutter open, and it is then you notice that he is no longer wearing his mask, presenting that exquisite face once hidden to you. Narrow eyes of beguiling gold with long lashes, lips that more appeared as delicate petals. No matter the scarlet markings painted upon his skin, it is no wonder that men should turn to fanaticism in the face of such sublimity. You can only stare in awe, how warm your ears flush and how heat roils in your stomach upon the sonorous hum of his voice.

“You deserve much, much better than a human who only knows to lie to you.”

Lying on the beaten dirt path, Kiyohara Genjirou will be buried in an unmarked grave, neither name nor profession known to those who will find him. For all that remains of this unwitting suitor is the stench of smoke and shrivelled corpse, caught too soon in a fox’s tempestuous favour and left to burn in the same blazing rancour that once threatened to engulf the tranquil capital.

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

なつむしの, なほあきたらぬ

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

Being a good onmyoji is not difficult, it is not some arduous task to respect and love your shikigami, to treat them as one would dear friends and family. Yet, a shikigami that has only lost and lost, when given a second chance to make it all right, what then happens to that good onmyoji is very often known only to those hidden away.

Your master, when he had learned of the events that transpired had taken it with nothing more than a furrowed brow and a sharp exhale. Before he left, he had gifted you a talisman and instructed you to hang it in your room, to which you did. Yet, that very day, it had gone missing from your door. You had no unease at it, after all, he had given you hundreds of protection talismans, what difference was one going missing?

You on the other hand, had come to realise many things about your emotions with the arrival of both dismay and prolonged peace. That old fox who has done nothing but inexplicably care for you, with no explanation nor clarification. It had come out of nowhere, that quiet wistfulness and longing glances, you nearly thought yourself mad yet it was true. Torturing yourself with what could only possibly be, one could only imagine the joy that filled you when you had to do nothing but wait just a little longer, and even that foolish wish should come to be.

Cicadas sing in the distant night, your lover has long retired for the night and lays atop the bed, what you may see now is but his most true form, masks and disguises left at the door. Vulpine ears atop his head along with nine full tails, he once again scoops you into his embrace as even his tails move to cover you.

“Cold…” You only whine, squirming closer as though you could crawl into his skin.

Tamamo only huffs in amusement, no sign of actual vexation, and pulls you in closer. The increased contact brings burning touch falling upon your skin, the old fox noses along some invisible line at your neck, his lips pressing a kiss upon your pulse. He coaxes a sigh from your throat, soft and airy and almost all too practiced. Wholeheartedly embracing the fervid greed within him, you think you feel the prick of sharp canines against tender skin, yet you could care less.

In nothing more than your sleeping robes, luxurious clothes stripped off, legs entangled and limbs intertwined. To an unwitting observer, it would be difficult to discern whose form was whose, so thoroughly ensnared fox and human may as well be one body.

With neither onmyoji nor spirit to separate the two of you, and in this little delusion, not even the heavens will seize you from his side. He has ensured it, he shall see to it that the one he loves will never bear such suffering ever again.

❀⊱┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄⊰❀

こひをたのみて

#onmyoji #阴阳师 #onmyoji x reader #onmyoji tamamo no mae #tamamo no mae #tamamo no mae x reader #yandere x reader

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mabelstone · 10 days

Text

I Could Be Yours

hozier x f!reader

part one of lullabies <3

hi i have risen from the dead... new matt stone will be coming soon i promise!! i've just become infatuated with hozier recently so i had no choice but to devote a new fic to him <3

i didn't proof read because it's bedtime, i will fix tomorrow if there's any errors!! soz

cw: none really... just a shitty boyfriend and drinking. still 18+

word count: 3.5k

“That’s your man, ‘uh?” The deep voice behind me made me jump, forcing me to peel my eyes from Joe and the leggy blonde he was laughing with.

“Stop doing that!” I gasp, clutching a hand over my chest, jokingly punching Andrew in the arm. “But yes. That’s him,” I sigh, wanting to cut the conversation before it had a chance to start. Andrew was far too friendly to be talking to my walking storm cloud of a boyfriend.

“I didn’t know his sister was playing tonight,” he confessed casually, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt. “Which one is she?”

“He doesn’t have a sister,” I shake my head, quirking an eyebrow at the human tower before me. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Huh?” He played dumb, though a soft pink blush tinted his cheeks, looking like he wished he could eat his words.

“Where did you hear that?” I repeated, the room suddenly too hot for comfort, despite Joe's protests that I was dressed like a 'tart,' in his words.

“I’m sure I misheard, hearing’s a bit shot,” he lied through his teeth, and he must be a fool to believed I'd let him play it off.

“Andy," I faced him now, trying to force him to meet my eyes he was so desperately avoiding. "Who did he say that to?”

“That woman,” his voice sounded pained, as if he were almost ashamed to tell me. He was too smart, he could read me, and if anyone could read the room, it was him. I just went quiet, his warm calloused hand placed on my shoulder, feeling like it might burn a hole in my dress. “You deserve better,” he professed sincerely, pulling that horrid face at me, the type you pull when you feel really sorry for someone.

I huffed some pathetic excuse of a response, forcing my eyes to the ground. There seemed to be a magnetic pull, forcing my eyes back to Joe, hurting my own feelings again and again. I can’t recall a time he’d ever looked that interested in me. Not unless he was trying to bed me, which was usually after a stressful day at work or after a massive fight.

“If you were my girl, every man and their dog would know. You’re too good for him,” his voice was warm, like being pulled from a frozen over lake and straight into an oven. His Irish brogue more apparent than ever, and I cursed myself for the way my heart leapt in my chest.

He just slipped past me onto the stage for his set, unaware that he just made me feel nearly every emotion in the span of two minutes.

“That’s not even a real job,” Joe scoffed, shaking his head indignantly like he always did, as if everyone were beneath him. He’s always looked down at others for as long as I’ve known him. His Napoleon Complex makes him feel like he’s six foot eleven, when in reality, I barely have to tilt my head to kiss him.

I bit my cheek to suppress an angry concoction of insults, swallowing it down and opting for, “so my job isn’t a real job?”

“Babe,” he groaned, one soft hand slipping off the steering wheel onto my thigh. “You know that’s not what I meant. It’s just not very manly, is all. He should be doing something that’s not just for chicks.”

“He’s a carpenter, actually,” I lied, arms barricaded across my chest as I tried to focus on the London Bridge we were rolling over. “Manly enough for you?”

“Could you relax? Jesus Christ…” he pulled his hand from me quicker than he placed it there, sighing emphatically. “You gettin’ your period or something?”

“No!” It was my turn to scoff now, turning to face him. His stupid face was contorted like it always was, as if he’d smelt something rotten. “You’ve hurt my feelings, Joe.”

“Oh, everything hurts your fucking feelings,” he seethed, hooking a turn so sharp I just about fell into the driver’s side. I muttered under my breath, gripping onto the handle at the top of my door, as it was highly likely I was going to need it for the rest of the trip. That’s my Joe. Sickly sweet when you first meet him, then cold and sharp when he drops the act. “I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this shit.”

“Excuse me?” I straightened up, my stomach twisting in that familiar nauseating knot.

“You. Your shit,” he rolled his eyes for what felt like the thousandth time, turning his head to me, deadpan. “Constantly starting arguments, whining about everything. You’re exhausting me.”

Then the rest of the entourage strides in on cue. The searing pain in my throat, the tears prickling into my eyes. The shame and embarrassment that pummel me like waves in a storm. Oh, God, the embarrassment. I feel my cheeks glow red, and suddenly the chill of late Autumn is comparable to a sauna, and there’s not enough air in the passenger side to satiate my lungs.

“Don’t cry,” he groans again, refusing to look at me again. And suddenly, I’m twelve again, trying to cry silently in my father’s car. Sigmund Freud would be laughing in his grave right now. “I’m sorry," he sighs, reaching for my leg again. I jerk away. "Shouldn’t have taken it so far.”

Though his apologies are just words at this point. I’ve walked this road too many times to not know any better. The rest of the ride home is silent, my knees pressed into the passenger door, trying to focus on anything but the fact that I will probably never leave. I will board this train wreck until he beats me down to nothing.

"He just has this weird infatuation for you. A blind man could see it," he tsked, shaking his head as if it were my fault. "And you just egg him on. He's a proper knob."

"He's the knob? What'd you think of your sister's set, hm?" I seethed, silently letting the tears fall as if I were in some sappy drama.

We didn't speak for the rest of the night, Joe slamming his car door, storming inside to lock himself in our bedroom. I washed my face in the kitchen sink and fell asleep on the couch in the small hours of the morning.

Joe didn't come to my show tonight, opting for the local pub with his work mates. I can't lie and say I was upset about it. Another thing I couldn't lie about is how Andrew's words played on a loop in my head for the rest of that night and all day today. I know he was just saying it to comfort me, but is it sad that I've never been so flattered?

"Hey," I smiled, the condensation from my breath hanging between us as I walked up to Andy. “Thought you were quitting.”

He was leaning against the brick wall outside the bar, a halfway smoked cigarette to his lips. He looked nice tonight. His usual unruly curls framing his face so perfectly, two layers under his dark denim jacket. He grinned infectiously as always, never once tearing his eyes from mine as he shrugged, “I’m no quitter.”

“Shut up,” I groaned, finding my spot beside him, now pressing my back to the cold bricks.

“So, where’s Jake tonight?” Now his eyes were fixed on the busy street before us, his arm brushing mine each time he’d put the cigarette to his lips.

“It’s Joe,” I corrected with an eye roll, though there was no malice in my expression. “And he’s watching the game with his mates. We’ve barely spoken since last night.” My heart ached a bit at the reminder of what he’d said to me on the drive home. You’re exhausting me. If his wish was for me to rethink the past five years, he certainly got it.

He gave me that pathetic poor you look again. "Come on. I'll buy ya' a drink. I insist."

"Who am I to deny you?" I grinned, following close behind him as he stubbed his cigarette out under his boot, holding the bar door open for me.

He ordered himself a whiskey on the rocks, a coconut margarita for me. We slid into a small booth at the back, the walls practically vibrating from the drunken chatter and the obnoxious drum solo on the stage.

"She's busy tonight, eh?" He half shouted across to me, leaning over his drink.

"I know, right? I've never seen the place like this," I agreed, taking in just how alive the atmosphere was tonight. "Remember me when you're famous."

"You're not easy to forget. You remember me!" He grinned at me, taking a large swig of his drink. I couldn't tear my eyes from his Adam's apple bobbing with each sip, his eyes dark in the dim lighting. I felt extreme guilt, forcing my eyes anywhere but his direction.

He must've sensed it. This man could read me like a book. Thankfully, he steered the conversation smoothly, "what're you playing tonight?"

"Oh, no. I'm not singing tonight," I shook my head, polishing off my drink in a sip a little bit too big for my mouth. "Want another drink? My shout."

"Why aren't you singing?" He ignored me, pulling a face that screamed, are you mad? "If there's any night for it, it's tonight."

"Honestly, I just want to get pissed and be the observer for once." I smiled sweetly, hoping he couldn't see through the facade. "What're you singing then?"

"An original," he smiled coyly, eyes faltering.

"Oh, Andy! How exciting," I cheered, genuinely happy for him. He'd shown me some of his poetry, and with such a beautiful voice, there's no possibility he could go wrong. "You're going to blow the roof off. This calls for another drink."

"As you wish," he grinned, holding eye contact as he finished off his glass, the faintest pink tinge to his cheeks.

When I made my way back to the table, my heart sunk a bit when I saw a girl leaning against our table giggling, tucking thick red locks behind her ears. He was laughing too, body language practically begging for more. I might be exaggerating. Why did I even care? I am in a committed relationship.

Funny, he looks just as amused as Joe did last night.

I made my way to the table, sliding his drink to him.

"Hi, I'm Harper," she smiled wide, a beautiful array of pearly teeth on full display.

"Lovely to meet you. Y/N," I smiled back, unable to look at Andrew. "I'm gonna go watch the show. I'll leave you to it."

I turned my back just as he was about to protest, sipping at my drink as I kept my word, finding a seat before the stage. I couldn't really focus on the music though, my mind reeling over what Joe was up to. He hadn't even texted or calls. His location was off too. I grabbed another couple drinks, bumping into Andrew when I made my way back to the stage.

"Y/N," he reached for my arm, a sincerely apologetic tone to his voice. "I'm sorry for earlier, that was rude."

"No it wasn't," I replied a bit too quick, brushing off the apology. "You're single, you can do whatever."

"I meant having someone at our table," shit. Was that the wrong thing to say? Their margaritas are always too strong. "I was enjoying just having you and I time."

"No worries, there's always next time," I smiled sweetly, though really, I just wanted to get in the nearest cab, pack all my shit at home and move back to Bristol. "You're nearly on! I'll be front row." I turned away again, finding my way back to the nice girls I made small talk with earlier.

Sure enough, Andrew was up within the next fifteen minutes. The announcer, somewhere hidden backstage spoke, "please give your warmest welcome to our absolute favourite, Andrew Hozier-Byrne!"

He walked onto the stage, acoustic guitar hanging from his neck as he awkwardly made his way onto the stage, adjusting the microphone to his height as he did each night.

"Ehm, this song is called I Could Be Yours," he offered a tight lipped smile to the crowd, a few cheers heard here and there. "Thanks guys."

I couldn't help but grin at his shyness, the complete opposite of how he was with me.

I could be soft and sweet, I could be hard and loud.

I could be everything you'd ever need somehow.

Why don't you hear me sing out from the lost and found,

I could be yours, I could be yours, I could be yours.

He seemed to be scanning the crowd, probably for Harper, meanwhile all eyes were on him, basking in his glory. As if he were rain in a drought, not a single soul in the audience not mesmerised by his syrupy voice. Myself included, wide eyed, the epitome of awe.

Why don't you try on me? Why don't you take me home?

I'll match the colour scheme of your bedroom walls.

Oh, take a dose of me, it doesn't hurt at all.

I could be yours, I could be yours, I could be yours.

His skilled fingers danced along the strings, his eyes, when not scanning the crowd focused on his measured movements. To say I was moved was an understatement. His voice thick and sweet as honey, his eyes shining under the stage lights, the hypnotic effect he had on the crowd. Unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Then his eyes found mine. It was almost like nothing existed in the same realm as him and I. Just us.

Oh God, I'd benefit from your sweet tenderness.

Oh, thank God, it could've been, 'cause nothing comes from it.

That'd be a helpful thought if I could remember it,

but I could be yours, I could be yours, I could be yours.

"Thanks," he nodded awkwardly to the crowd, eyes leaving mine as he did the stage, the audience cheering and clapping.

I couldn't put into words the feelings I felt if you held a gun to my head. No doubt my eyes glistened back at his, tears of joy swimming at my waterline, completely estranged from last nights'.

"He was looking right at you!" One of the women I'd met shouted over the cheers, shaking me by the shoulder. I just hummed some response, smiling and beelining for the exit.

The bite of the outdoors was a stark comparison to the warmth of the bar, my nervous system seeming to reset instantaneously. I pulled out my phone and checked the time. 8:45pm. I told Joe I wouldn't be home til midnight and not to wait up for me.

It was wrong to feel this way about Andrew. He was my friend. I had Joe. Even if we had our rough patches.

My phone buzzed wildly in my hand, and when I checked the caller ID, I nearly didn't pick up.

I sighed. "Hello?"

"Hey," Andrew spoke loudly over the drunken chatter, a few good one mate, and, good on ya's here and there. "Where'd you run off to?"

"I, uh, had too much to drink," I lied through my teeth, kicking at the gravel beneath my feet. "I'm just heading home."

"Oh..."

"I'm out the front," I piped up, not wanting him to think he caused this. Or that I was running away. Because I was not. Right?

He hung up and shortly after, his tall figure emerged, his shadow reaching me before he did.

He opened his mouth to speak, but I beat him to it. "Great song, Andy. Really beautiful." I meant it.

"Oh, yeah. Thank you," he smiled, looking down at his boots. "How're you getting home?"

"I was gonna get a cab, or an Uber, or something." I shrugged, acutely aware of how breathy I sounded. Beyond tired. I wasn't lying when I said I'd had too much to drink.

"No need, I'll take you." He offered, digging his hands into his pockets and gesturing with his head for me to follow.

"It's okay, Andy, really," I countered, giving him my must sincere smile I could muster. I was too confused right now. Nobody had ever made me feel this way while I've been with Joe. "Get in there and mingle. They loved you."

"I'd rather know you're safe."

I ended up in the passenger seat of his car. He'd kindly put the heater on full blast, though no doubt, he'd be sweating under all those layers. I protested, but he kept fretting about how red my nose was from the cold.

"You alright?" He asked, my head leaned against his window.

"Yeah," I breathed, struggling to keep my eyes open, though my mind was very much awake and racing.

"You've been acting funny, did I upset you?" He glanced over at me, concern written all over his features. Had he always been this handsome?

"It's not you. I'm sorry," I lifted my head to look at him. Tequila and I are not friends. I flipped down the visor mirror to see a tiny it of smudged mascara under my eyes. I wiped it away, sighing for the hundredth time. "Joe just... things aren't going well. I slept on the couch last night. Well, barely. He's just so mean, you know?" I babbled drunkenly, a huge weight lifting after finally telling someone. "He always picks at everything I do. You complain all the time. You put too much salt in this. That isn't a real sustainable job, babe. We never shag anymore... Shag? Isn't that disgusting, Andy?"

I continued my drunken spiel, probably including more details than I should have. Andrew just kept his eyes on the road, sharing glances here and there to let me know he was listening.

The grande finale, "why can't all men just be like you? You would make a wonderful husband, you know. You wouldn't tell your girlfriend she's too lively in bed, would you?"

"No, I wouldn't," he laughed, shaking his head. He looked at me fondly. For once, it wasn't a look of sympathy. It was kind of sad, almost.

"I've said too much, haven't I?" I probably looked like a kicked puppy at the realisation, but one smile from him eased any disconcertion I had.

"Not at all," he sighed, staring at his hands on the wheel. "I have a lot to say. I just don't think I should be the one saying it."

"Well, now you have to tell me," I countered, lolling my head to the side to face him.

"He's a fuckwit," he shook his head, his grip on the wheel tightening. "He doesn't deserve you. Not even a little bit. He's going to fuck it up and won't realise what he's lost until it's too late. And you know what? Good."

He pulled onto the road before my house with perfect timing, getting out of the car to open my door for me. He took my hand in his, helping me out, and thank goodness he did, because I still nearly rolled my ankle. I laughed and let myself fall into his chest, steadying myself after a hearty, obnoxious laugh.

"Oh my God, I've made a complete fool of myself tonight," I sighed, this time it felt like a release, not a breath weighing me down. "Thank you for taking care of me, Andy."

"Anytime at all," he grinned leaning against his car. I couldn't help myself, lurching forward at him, wrapping my arms around his torso. My head barely reached his shoulder, even when standing on the curb.

"I loved your song," I murmured against his chest, pulling back to grab his face. He turned ghost white. "You are my favourite singer. Ever."

His cheeks darkened as he looked away, chuckling softly with the shake of his head.

"Drink lots of water for me tonight. That's an order as your favourite singer."

"Yes, Mr. Hozier-Byrne," I grinned, turning on my heels and heading for the door. The garage door was 1/4 open. Joe must be home early.

I fumbled through my purse for my keys, finding them after what felt like an eternity of great difficulty. I was going in with a good attitude. I was going to sit him down and hash this out. We can fix this. We've been together nearly 6 years, this is just a rough patch.

I walked up to my bedroom, sure my ears were deceiving me. When I opened my bedroom door, I saw red.

omg angst... just hear me out i have good direction for this one. i hope u enjoyed <3

#hozier #andrew hozier byrne #hozier x reader #hozier smut #andrew hozier

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comradekatara · 2 months

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What do you think of Ozai as a villain? 👀 i'm seeing people saying the live action Ozai is better and i'm like "nah". They missed the point of the character

i mean i think a lot of people misunderstand ozai because people want a compelling character (especially a compelling villain) to be “layered and complex” in a very specifically emotional sense. but i do think ozai is layered and complex, simply in a different way that people expect. azula, for example, is a great villain because she is psychologically complex, and every action and motivated is entrenched in layers of nuance. but ozai is thematically complex, functionally layered. his underlying emotional motivations, however, are beside the point.

ozai’s narrative function is primarily to be metonymically figured as the embodiment of patriarchal and imperialist violence. ozai performs this function through interconnecting the domestic (his abuse of his wife and children) with the national (his role as sovereign of an empire). zuko’s disavowal of ozai in “the day of black sun” very explicitly ties his personal abuse to the logic of imperialism, and zuko denounces both logical tracks through acknowledging their interrelation. it’s hardly an uncommon character construction either: the domestic (specifically, the patriarchal nuclear family model) as microcosmic of the societal (specifically, patriarchal societies that are otherwise organized along unjust hierarchies) is prevalent across plenty of narratives, from the house of atreus to king lear to succession.

my personal favorite example of this trope as it is employed is in palace walk by naguib mahfouz, because al-sayyid does function as sovereign of his house, but he is also grappling with the consequences of being a colonized subject, and that colonial shame and humiliation both complicates his relationship to power but also reifies his patriarchal role within his family, his very real pain and disempowerment leading him to exacerbate his domestic abuse and tighten his control over his wife and children. al-sayyid is also, notably, not strict and controlling beyond the purview of his family, but within his own house, he very deliberately positions himself as an inviolable patriarchal authority.

however, unlike al-sayyid, ozai is a sovereign in every sense of the world, and even positions himself as akin to a god. but, as we can infer from “zuko alone,” ozai is not impervious to patriarchal abuse (or he wasn’t before ascending the throne), and thus has suffered his own shame and humiliation fostering his god complex due to compensation (and through the internalization of the logic of patriarchal abuse). ozai perpetuates the cycle of abuse as he, too, once suffered it (much like logan roy, to name another excellent example of this archetype). so while ozai is no longer a victim in any sense of the term, it is important to understand the psychology underlying his belief that he is ontologically deserving of the undivided respect and submission of the entire world due to his position of power.

ozai genuinely believes that he was teaching zuko respect, because respecting his authority is one of the values ozai holds most dear. because, of course, to speak out against ozai as an individual is to speak treasonously of the fire nation, and vice versa. and he expects his children to display their unquestioning loyalty to the Father(land) above all. the second they question him or confuse that priority in any way, they have irrevocably forsaken him and thus must be discarded. that is the logic of (to quote utena) a man who has made himself “end of the world.”

moreover, the other most crucial aspect of ozai’s character is how he is framed. until book 3, we never actually see his entire face. he is always a goatee, a spaulder, a disembodied smirk, a voice echoing through the flames, a crown. ozai as metonym goes both ways. and it serves to emphasize his ominous nature, as someone who is so powerful that we cannot truly view him head on. he’s framed in an almost godlike way.

and then, in “the awakening,” we see him without reservation. he is a tall, imposing man, but he is also, fundamentally, just a man. in “the headband” we see his face through a fire nation propaganda poster, as if to imply that his face is not more sacred than any other face. his poster is immediately followed up with aang’s recreation of his portrait with noodles. before book 3, holding ozai’s gaze is impossible, as he is merely a looming spectre. but book 3 immediately and ruthlessly undermines the notion they have been building up for two seasons, and through comedy, no less. ozai may be uniquely powerful and uniquely evil, but he is still just a man, and by the time he crowns himself phoenix king, destroyer of worlds, we are well-aware that he is not innately, divinely superior in any way, and his fascistic performance simply looks ridiculous.

unlike azula’s claim that “the divine right to rule is something you’re born with,” there is nothing unique or ontological about the role of the emperor. there is nothing ontologically superior about the colonizer’s relationship to the colonized besides the material dynamics of power informing their relationship. the father as head of his family is not ontologically necessitated any more than the structure of the nuclear family is predicated on innate anthropological roles rather than being socially constructed and maintained through systemic violence. ozai is not ontologically special, and his claim that he is seems even sillier as he goes up against the avatar, who actually truly is.

when ozai faces aang in the final battle, it is a significant fight because it represents the culmination of all the ideals aang has constantly fought for and asserted within ozai’s imperialist paradigm. and by refusing to submit to ozai’s logic of domination, aang disempowers ozai wholly. not because lack of firebending makes one totally powerless, but because lack of bending makes one powerless within ozai’s logic. aang renders ozai victim to his own ideology, playing his own imperialist dogma against him. instead of killing ozai in combat, as ozai expects, aang humiliates him by asserting his cultural values and their continued relevance over ozai’s values. the culminating battle against ozai, with the spiritual light that threatens to overtake aang, is a battle of one ideology winning out over another. it is the culmination of a century of genocide and colonialism by an imperialist power. it is the undermining of ozai’s entire worldview.

ultimately, we don’t need to see a lot of ozai to understand him. we can understand ozai perfectly through zuko and azula, because he positioned them as extensions of himself and thus their respective embodiments are simply their ways of performing him (azula is obviously a better actor). his complex psychology is beside the point, because his narrative function is to represent the imperialist forces that aang must battle. and they do this by establishing him as an ominous and terrible deified man, and then undermining him as little kore than a human being with an incorrect worldview. so he is interesting, not because he’s “complicated,” but because he reflects the central tension of the show in a satisfying way, and that’s what matters.

#lilith-91 #asks #analysis #ozai #synthesis #azula&ozai #ozai&zuko #azula #zuko #putting this under a readmore even tho it’s only 10 paragraphs….. for shame #im on mobile rn but if u go thru my ozai tag you’ll also find a lot of other posts and more in depth analyses of the things i cover here #im sick of linking to other posts tho #at this point everyone should just be wholly familiar with my oeuvre #(im lazy)

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yeyinde · 4 months

Text

fever in a shockwave

pt., iii | stagnant on my betterment

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

WARNINGS: angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; poor/unhealthy coping methods; codependency; reference to drug use (but it's just weed); reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series

WORD COUNT: 14,7k

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an update; this isn't the final part lmao dangerous words coming from someone like me oops. there's probably going to be three more parts after this.

There is no sense of closure when you watch the jagged pieces of a broken man fall to the floor by your feet. The splintered edges offer no succour, no victory, when they come to rest along the scattered ruins of a delusional love affair: alcohol bottles—Kraken, Captain Morgan—and grease-stained boxes of takeaway, most unfinished in favour of satiating yourselves on flesh, sex.

(Booze, more often than not.)

Seeing him struggle to find meaning in what you say—watching that ethanol-soaked resignation filter through hazy, electric blue—brings a fresh pain instead, taking space in the hollow gaps where you expected vindication and self-worth to bleed through.

You're doing the right thing, after all. Aren't you?

Aren't you? (please, someone, anyone, say yes—)

Uncertainty is an uneasy, nauseating feeling inside your guts. Much like a broken bone, it emanates a visceral sense of perturbation through your body. Every synapse fires in protest; every nerve screaming out. They bellow one thing in unison: something is wrong and not quite right.

You feel their cries deep in your being. Each muscle twitch and frayed thought that passes carries the echo of it.

This pain, it seems, is cracking your ribs apart and exposing the rotting marrow to the open air. Slurping from the putrefying sludge, satiating itself on the sickness eroding you from within.

It's all wrong. It feels wrong.

Bear swallows. You watch the way his throat works around the bitterness that lashes across the cut of his brow; gyres darkening in his eyes. Storms on the horizon.

(You think you'd welcome the squall. Might embrace anything to get out of this place—)

“That's what you want?” He rasps, thick and gritty, and you think about the last time he sounded like that—all torn up, and broken. Words mangled in his throat. Husked out when he told you about Rip, about the boy, his daughter, and—

No. No.

None of this is what you want, and it pains you that he can't see that.

(Such a selfish, broken man.)

Inside the festering slurry of your marrow, an urge wells up. Bubbles in the putrid pools until it's frothing, raging against the walls keeping it trapped until it seeps through the cracks, leaking into your muscles, your tissue, your bloodstream.

This silly little body of yours carries it up to your heart where it sinks talons into your pericardium, subsumes the serous in this terrible essence, this idea, this whim—

(“what?” the scoff he lets out trails on the coattails of what might have been a laugh in another life. if he was another man, maybe. you, more honest with yourself. but you are just two broken people in a run-down bar. humour exists somewhere in the muzzle of a loaded pistol. “got a saviour complex or something?”

or something. or something—)

Because the thing is: you do.

You spend most weekends wandering around antique stores because you're convinced that everything deserves a home. A place of its own. You find the unwanted, the unsellable, and you let it take space in your lonely, cramped apartment.

And why not? No one else will buy it. You're, technically, helping the environment. It's a win-win.

(and more lies you tell yourself.)

These false promises are always made that one day, one of these days, you'll find something to do with it all—maybe you could learn how to make something out of it; stitch all the unuseable parts, the unwanted pieces, and create something that everyone will want—but so far, none of your rescues has ever been finished. Saved. They sit in a corner taking up space. Untouched. Unused. Collecting dust.

That insidious whim curls inside of your heart, and whispers:

it's never too late to try again. maybe this time, it'll work out for you—

It's the same one that lures you in, making you purchase a complete set of ugly-looking dolls because some ladies were recoiling at the sight of their lumpy, antediluvian faces, and you felt bad thinking that they were doomed to end up sitting on the shelf until they were unceremoniously tossed into the bin with all the other things that won't sell.

And the one, now, that stares at the terse set to Bear's shoulders, the lines rucked across his broad, the helplessness etched into ashlar, and considers that maybe all he needs is someone. A friend, maybe.

(And maybe, maybe, that it could be you—)

“Bear—” it would be so easy to swallow the words back down until you choke on them.

You breathe in. Taste nicotine in your throat; the phantom burn of a memory from long ago: one once buried under the rubble of your crumbling foundations, now rearing into this yawning abyss as you waver on the precipice. This vacuum that syphons you dry. Leaves you empty, gaping.

It’s your mum leaning over the railing of a mezzanine as she smokes a cigarette—the eighth in the last three hours, pack near gone—and tries (and fails; always, always, always) to find some temporal kinship with a higher power as you sit on the porch swing and drink in the scraps she tosses your way.

(Today, it’s the way the smoke curls in the periwinkle sky like a naked gospel; grand televangelist to a crowd of one.)

She scrambles within the ruins of her own making to seek answers to compensate for the lack of worth that slips from the cracks. Left behind again. Again, but it’s not her fault. It’s never her fault.

(You should know best, she tells you—you suckled from the shattered parts of herself before you broke away from the cradle of her arms. Genetics leaves you wrecked for company, for permanence.

It’s just not made for us, baby. We’re unloveable only because we love too much—)

An epiphany comes in the middle of her eighth cigarette, and she divines enough wisdom to come to the succinct conclusion that those broken pieces are not the cause of her misery.

(How could they be when they’re a part of her and she’s a part of everything?)

Can't fix a broken man, she murmurs into the midmorning fog, blood-red mouth splitting into a sneer. There was beauty, you thought, to be found in the pale yellow of her teeth against the pastel dusting of dawn. Rapturous, almost. You couldn't look away even as the words snaked through the underdeveloped fibres of your mind. They're like someone who's drowning, you know? They'll grab on to anyone that gets too close and try to pull them under, too. Maybe because they want to save themselves, or maybe because they don't want to die alone. Better to leave them behind.

Can't fix a broken man, (but maybe—)

Your dad tried to fix me, she adds, and it comes in the same cadence of an afterthought, blase; but the thinness in her voice, the reedy pitch of barely veiled urgency, all feigned indifference to the topic, all give her away. She's been waiting for this, you know. Gearing up in steady increments so that the blow lands harder when it's thrown.

Isn't that stupid? And he couldn't even bother to stick around. What a joke… But I guess some people are like that, huh? Couldn't be me, she scoffed, jabbing her finger in your direction. You could see the yellow of her nails beneath the pock marks in her chopped, blue nail polish. And don't let it be you, either. The best thing you could ever do for yourself and someone else is leave. Don't cheat. Don't be the other woman. Just fucking—

The bubble bursts, and in that breaking, a truth is revealed to you in some strange, hangover-induced epiphany brought on by dehydration, malnutrition, and the terrific idea of going home with a man who has never once talked to you while being completely sober. It screams—first and foremost—you are an idiot, but beyond that, you really are your father's child, aren't you?

Lost amid your memory, the emergence of a forgotten fallow, it’s Bear who shakes you awake when he reaches for you after the silence sat for too long. Fingers touching, too tender and too rough at the same time, and the juxtaposition makes you quiver as it ploughs disquiet into your being.

Tears pebble in your lash line, threatening to spill over. You haven't cried in a long time and yet, yet—

His hand folds over your wrist, tight and unrelenting. Shackles against your bones. Grinding them into soft, fine powder.

“C’mon,” he slurs, pleads; tugging you closer as if distance is what makes you say these things to him and not the heavy, overwhelming scent of alcohol wafting off of his numb tongue. “You don't know what you're saying right now—”

His fingers tighten. The midnight scabs on his knuckles tear from the strain, the stretch. Blood wells under the slit that lifts from his broken, battered skin. Pebbles like a tear-drop on the wrinkle of his bruised knuckle, and then sheds itself free. Running down the yellow mess of moulted flesh until it meets the cliff edge of where his palm rests against yours.

“You don’t mean it. You can’t mean that. Stay with me, stay—”

The alcohol makes him sway where he sits, eyes upturned but focused inward, lost to thoughts and feelings and places unreachable to you. Ephemeral lines in jaded, blue sands. It slips, too, from between his fingers. Uncatchable to anyone but the flush under his skin, the slur in his words.

Can’t fix a broken man.

The motion dislodges the droplet and it waterfalls over his palm until his blood kisses the clean, unmarred skin of your hand.

He doesn’t notice the way he bleeds on you (through you, in you; drowns you in it, in him—): outside of a thready determination built on drunk devotion, he doesn’t seem to see much at all. Clouded. Overcast. Those hazy eyes regard you with a thin, untouchable distance. Filmed over and too far gone for you to pull him back—

(and you can’t help but wonder if he even notices you or if, in those unending crevasses, an icy, broken bergschrunds, the misshapen silhouette of you strikes a different chord to him; if these slurred hymnals are just a hollow orison for someone else in your stead.)

—so you stop trying. Let it sit, let it rot. Smell the infection in the air as the wound splits apart. Gangrenous and beyond palliative help.

Something must flicker across your face sharp enough to cut through the fog he drowns himself inside because his eyes widen slightly, and his hand tenses around your wrist. Tight. Unyielding.

As his fingers dig in over your pisiform, deep enough to bruise—to mark you once more with his stain, his touch—you’re struck by the sudden thought of brittleness. It’s not something you’d ever considered yourself as—delicate, fragile—but with the way he holds you now, not at all dissimilar to the way he held on last night, fingers loosely wrapped around your wrist as he used your joints as a stress ball to calm himself down, you feel vulnerable. Swallowed whole, caught.

What once felt like a comfort, a sense of security as you moulded yourself into an anchor point, a lighthouse on the sandy, dark shore, for him to find, to swim for amid the roaring waves dragging him down, now feels like dead weight.

For the first time since you've met him, you taste chlorine in the back of your throat. Feel the pull of the currents dragging you down.

You know all too well what it feels like to drown.

You pull away. He clings tighter.

“Bear, please—”

Please, you think. Please, please, please—

(If you keep stripping yourself bare, you'll be nothing but bones—)

He doesn't even notice. Nothing, it seems, will pull his fixed attention from every minuscule expression that flickers across your face as if the mere notion of weakness, of hesitancy, will give him reason to hold on just that much harder.

“Can't just give up on this—” the words are tangled in his throat, caught on the end of a snarl, and vicious. He tugs on you, pulling you closer. “On us.”

“There's no us, Bear.”

And it isn't a lie. Of course, it isn't.

There's an empty chasm between you both, void of any tangible substance. Whatever he thinks this is, it can't work. Won't. Not in the real world. Not outside of the bottom of a bottle.

You won't be his crutch. His bad habit. His midlife crisis amid a downward spiral.

You can't be.

Won't be.

(you will not be the other woman. you will not be your father's child.)

And it isn't remotely the same, you know. Bear's wife is—

Dead. Gone.

—and yet, this whole situation still makes you feel like a homewrecker even though the home you demand he returns to is empty.

Selfish, you think, but you can't even begin to know who you're referring to in this beautifully devastating moment. Bear, for chasing ghosts, drowning them in alcohol and bad choices and vices that end with bringing strange women back to his lonely hotel room just to feel more than the vicious bite of grief in his chest.

Or you, for pulling away from this drowning man because you're not strong enough to save him and yourself at the same time.

(or—something sneers—you just hate the idea of being like either of your parents, but what can you do when you've stolen all of their bad parts for your own?)

You think of the man in the bar. One hundred dollars to send him back home. Where he belongs.

(...he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend.

send him home, alright?)

“Go home,” you say, harsh and severe. All the things that your mother wished she said to him. Regurgitated words spat out by his feet because borrowed doctrines are you've ever known.

A fissure crackles across his expression, cutting through the fog. It's anger, bitterness, pain—some strange, fantastical amalgamation of the three—and it coalesces into broken defiance where it sits, clinging to the glossy grease around his brow, his nose.

It makes your fingers itch with the urge to soothe—to unfurl the wrinkles in his brow, to tuck this grown man close to your chest until the tension in the thick set of his shoulders liquifies in your hands, and he melts into malleable putty.

(Another trinket to collect dust on your mantle.)

You swallow it down—the salt and blood, and the pathetic pulse of your heart, and all. Hurt him, you think. Hurt him deeply. Deeper, still. Push him away and run. Run. Keep running until your legs give out, until your lungs collapse because if you don’t, if you don’t, you know you’ll stay with him until he throws you to wayside, until he wakes up one morning and decides that you are not enough compared to the big, wide world just outside his door; that your walls and your roof are not big enough for him—

“Please. Go home. Go home, Bear—”

Your words land like you knew they would, and he reels back for a moment, as if struck, but the anger, the twisted pain etched in the lines of his unkempt beard, his greasy brow, make stand firm. Unmoving.

You catch the acrid scent of gasoline on his skin when he leans forward, forcing himself back into your space with his chin dipped low, eyes blazing with a defiant inferno. His scarred, battle-battered hands drop to his splayed knees, gripping tight. Holding firm.

(Or holding himself back—)

His voice is a matchstick when he speaks. Smouldering embers sparking to life. Renewed with a sense of purpose you can't make sense of. What set him off? What made him flip—

(You're not worth it. You're not worth it—)

“M’not giving up on this.”

His jaw is slack. Laxed. The words slip out slow, languid. Curling with a touch of humid derision, mordant humour, at the idea that after all of this, everything (nothing, you think—nothing, nothing, nothing), you could just walk away unscathed.

If I burn, the crackle in his throat says, promises: then you're burning with me.

“Bear—”

“I'm not giving up on us.”

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him.

(You sever a part of yourself and leave it in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

The aftermath goes like this:

A tsunami of regret and indecision dredges up terrible, awful things—phantom memories and stains in the shape of fingerprints that pollute the inside of your psyche—ones that should have been left to rot at the bottom of your buried trenches. It makes leaving harder than it should have been considering the abrupt nature of this—whatever it is.

(Untitled. Unnameable. Unknowable.)

There's betting on losing dogs, and then there's this:

Pacing all your cards, all your coins, on one that wasn't even in the race.

One foot in, one foot out doesn't apply when Bear has never even stepped over the threshold. That notion roots itself in the scorched fibres of your chest, knotweed in your alveoli, as you scent liquor on his breath when he speaks. A cavernous distance grows between want and reality.

You thought you knew him. Learned and memorised all his hard lines, his soft valleys, the thick thatches of hair that dust his body like the dark depths of a riverbed; a nebula of loosely connected scar tissue—Orion's belt made of fine, silvery lines—and pock marks from blemishes and bumps born from the rich, enigmatic tapestry of his life beyond the mere sliver of you. Crows' feet in the corner of his eyes, but only when they're crested in pleasure, twisted in that tender sort of humour only comfort brings.

It takes you a weekend to map out the burly topography of a man, and only seconds to realise you know nothing about him outside of this rapacious intimacy.

And even though you want to feel like this was the right choice—because it is, it was—you can't seem to stem the sheer brutality in which regret tears through you as you stand alone in a desolate parking lot under the waning sun. A whimpering ending to a desolate beginning.

Was it loneliness that brought you here, or just the mundanity of fearing failure? It's these unanswerable questions, these skewed thoughts, that tumble over themselves, struggling to stay buoyant in the molasses of your sicky grey matter.

(Let them sink. Let them drown.)

These distant sentiments barely echo in the gaping vacuum of that is your mind. Untethered, whispering by as you stare, transfixed, at the broad strokes of pretty pastels in periwinkle, tangerine, and bluebonnet are rapidly consumed by the darkening sky that opens like a chasm above your head. The sight of it a little too close to the colours that danced in the aether when you both broke, finally, meeting somewhere in the middle, tangled webs. Broken people coming together in a cataclysm that was always, always, headed down a single path to devastation.

(The perfect conclusion to a story without a beginning.)

It's something you shouldn't think about. Let them sink. Let them drown—

This looping, knotted thread is a dangerous one to follow—the agony of watching Bear storm off (even after asking, demanding, that you let him drive you home; an offer you quickly refused) is still raw and gaping; a pulsating wound in the back of your throat—but you're brittle enough to want it to hurt, maybe. Chasing that unequivocal high only self-flagellation brings.

Masochism in failure. In heartbreak by your own design.

And it should hurt, right? This lonely climax (not with a bang, but a fizzle) should devastate you. Cut you to the core. Leave false starts on your bones. Scars on your ribcage. A meteor shower in milky white. Something tangible. Permanent.

But instead, it feels unfinished. More of a sudden paroxysm than a defining choice you've made. Concretely. Absolutely. It's a hollow win for your bruised ego. Your battered pride. It slinks, somewhere, in the depths of this renewed pain, and licks at the tender wound made when you pierced your chest and ripped your heart cleanout.

Threw it at the floor by his feet.

Quid pro quo, maybe. Or a desperate bid to rid yourself of the Bear-shaped hole now taking residence inside.

(It's fine, though. That pesky thing, all wrapped up tight in thick layers of duct tape, has never really felt like it belonged to you, anyway—)

It's all such a beautifully horrific panoply, you find. Paradoxical. Oxymoronic. Smothering and somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Being burnt alive and dying from hypothermia.

The cudgel of pain to your chest is white-hot and vicious, but there's a seismic polynya in the lavascape of sadness that drapes through the topography of your being like a sluice, and in that little island of ice sits the unrelenting sense of flat resignation.

You left Bear of your own free will, but in the jaded fibres of your being, you know it was all—

Inevitable.

And fuck—

(fuck, fuck, fuck—)

Was it? Was it all inexorable or are you just making up flimsy excuses for yourself?

Yes, you think. And then: no. Maybe. Maybe.

(you are your father's child—

and your mother's broken daughter.)

You want to cry, and scream, and break the pain against something willing to fight back, to cut you just as deeply as you hack at it, but all you have are fragmented memories swarming you in this vacant parking lot on the wrong side of Virginia Beach, and—

(don't let it in, don't—)

—you chase it, lure it all in as you compare the blue in the sleepy gloam to the colour of his eyes, and then—

Your back against a brick wall, his knuckles sticky with blood closing around the nape of your neck, pulling you closer. Closer. The wide expanse of his palm swallowing your wrist as he led you to his truck; then, heavy on your thigh the entire—ill-advised—drive to the Motel 6 down the road where you stand now, fragile, raw, and all alone.

When this all started, when you finally had the cobbled remains of Bear’s lucidity in your arms, the flat press of his attention against your jugular, you considered it to be a victory—

(a victory in amber)

—but hindsight is a cruel, mocking laugh in the back of your head. Twisting the knife deeper, severing the fraying threads that anchor you to yourself. With a sadistic glee it tells you that while you might have won the battle over the bottle, you lost the war (—abysmally, and without even the haze of a fever in your veins to numb the hollowness of your loss).

You just can’t fix a broken man, and you certainly can’t keep him afloat all on your own when you’re too busy trying not to drown yourself.

It's just that the weight of your shared brokenness was incompatible and insurmountable to the grief in Bear’s heart, but really. You just wonder if it was inevitable that everything you offered would be passed over in favour of numbed indifference at the bottom of a bottle. For someone, something, else. And while you might have been the one to leave first, but somewhere in the misplaced hurt inside of your chest threatening to collapse in on itself, folding into a black hole that devours all of your messy, ugly parts, you know that Bear was never really there, anyway.

That thought stings more than it should because you know, you know—

It’s just not made for us, baby.

—and maybe it’s all your fault for forgetting that inevitability in the first place.

(shame on me—)

The thread you warned yourself not to chase gets tangled around your throat, choking you with the very same line you should have stayed far away from. It feels like hollow cyclicity—a gluttonous ouroboros gorging on itself—when it all, eventually, leads back to the beginning.

Your fault, again, for trusting broken guidelines in the dark. For betting on losing dogs. For picking up another stray who already had a home. Another trinket to gawk at that ended up being chock full of arsenic, killing you with every touch.

But He's gone, now, despite the fire that raged in his eyes, he still left you here to burn on your own.

(inevitable—)

You should learn when to let go, you suppose, and fight the urge to bite your nails down to the wick just to taste blood in your mouth that isn't his.

For the most part, though, you’re fine.

You’ve always been a good liar (“terrible, actually,” Bear snorts, and it’s the closest you’ve ever come to seeing him roll his eyes. “Jesus, never play poker if I'm not around—”), and especially to yourself, so after a moment of self-reflection in the form of a scalding bath and a purging cry in your car as you shoddily cut the Joe Graves-shaped cancer from your aching heart before it can metastasise and infect you further, you come out of it all standing, somehow.

It might be the pastiche of indifference you slip into; a facsimile of the one, jaded and so bone achingly tired, that fell over you when you stumbled out of the bathroom, ready for something more only to find a man half-gone already to a bottle in the span of a few moments alone with his thoughts.

Regardless of what it is, it works (—in shades, and only as long as you cling so tightly to anger that your fingers bleed and your joints ache—), and you let the familiarity of your unpractised trot to some gnarled finish line lead you forward.

A clean break, you think (—hope: plead, bargain; wishing so hard on every eyelash that falls, every eleven you come across so that something, someone, listening might cradle the delicate splinters in their arms and nurse this whim, this want, into fruition), and you'll be fine. Fine.

You have to be.

But the thing is this:

Despite your best efforts to put some sense of distance between you and the heartache that must be, at least a little bit, on par with being gutted, a clean break is never clean, is it?

Case in point—

Thinking about him makes you bleed, and you think about him constantly.

(Regret, then, is a wellspring in which the pain drinks and you didn't know a body could thirst this much.)

And it's made even worse when you realise just how bullish a man like Joe Graves can be.

Maybe it's the thought of everything that had built up between you shattering into pieces that awakens this sense of urgency within him. Clinging, perhaps, to the only form of comfort he knows. The only one who toughed it out—in part, due to your employment obligation; the rest? an unresolved saviour complex when it comes to the people even a contrarian wouldn't place a bet on. Maybe.

(Probably. Undoubtedly.

You stopped trying to find the reason why you kept picking up the strays who always bite you in the end.)

Whatever the reason, Bear is persistent. Relentless.

He makes it Wednesday (you'd left him behind Sunday evening—day of the Sabbath, you learn; how fucking ironic) before his campaign starts.

It's forty-six missed calls, half a dozen texts (because he doesn't like texting—he likes talking. Face to face. No fallacies, no bullshit), and thirty voicemails (twenty-seven of which are drunken ramblings you don't even bother to listen to, and the rest—

Pick up. We need to talk.

Listen, I—

I fucked up. I fucked everything up—

Delete. Delete. Delete.

What are you supposed to do with any of that, anyway?)

The crux of the issue that Bear seems to miss swims in ethanol and leaves behind a five-minute voicemail filled with slurred I miss you's amid a background chorus of a rowdy bar. Then, a woman's voice—a woman who isn’t you—urging him back for more shots.

You can imagine how the rest of that night unfolded.

(You wonder if the word meant for you—I miss you—was still on his tongue when he followed her back.)

It's your fault (again; always) in the end because while you don't answer him—neither text, nor call; all voicemails deleted—you can't bring yourself to block him, either.

You let it sit somewhere in the murky middle. Untouched but looked at. Longed for.

It would be so easy to just give in. To let Bear back into your life—properly this time, maybe—and to take him up on those slurred promises made at two in the morning about coffee shops on the boardwalk, and breakfast at the Gulfstream, and movies and dinner, and talking until three in the morning, fucking in the back seat of his pick-up truck—

But that's the thing about yearning, isn't it?

Everything seems sweeter when you want it bad enough.

So, you drown yourself in him. Stand as close to the fire as you can without burning alive.

Dousing yourself in the scent of ethanol cleaner. Clinging to broken pinky promises. Thinking about peanut butter and bacon staining your fingers. Prying information from rotting timber, and keeping the saprophyte that falls off the wood in your pocket for safekeeping. Filling space on a drumroll because you talk too much, anyone ever tell you that?

(ad infinitum.)

Taping the ugliest bible verses to the back of your eyelids just to get closer, to feel closer, only to come to the realisation that you have no stake in religion to care about the deeper meaning behind it all. Metaphors and imagery are hollow when they mean nothing at all.

There's no comfort, no succour, to be found in the thin pages.

(You roll them up and smoke them instead. Easier to digest that way, you find.

Bear would probably hate it, and that alone balms the hurt some. Marginally, infinitesimally, because nothing can cauterise this gaping hole in your chest so you might as well fill it up with paper mache instead. Origami cranes with how much you hate him miss him need him want him written on the inside.)

You ache. Moulder. But you let it all rot inside of you until it's a congealed mess of putrefying memories and the moulted remains of the yearning you kept locked in shackles; the one that keeps biting, gnawing at the limbs of its cage to free.

It's easier to let it all decay together in a controlled space so that you can bisect the necrosed mass in a single go. Sever the limb to save the body. It's a mantra you repeat as you call in sick to work over and over again.

The flu, you say, and if the sniffle you give is from crying, and the cough from the weed you've been smoking all morning (blue dream, the shaggy-haired kid tells you with a nod; adds: the good shit), well. No one—especially your shitty boss and his shitty work ethic—has to know. You balm the hurt in a way that makes you feel good, smoothing it all over with trashy reality television (though, the Japanese dating show you end up dozing off to is pretty good, admittedly), and junk food.

Moving on—even some sad, pathetic facsimile of it—helps. Routines forged in wilful avoidance take the edge off of the livewires inside of your body, nerves overstimulated and burning up with a fever much too hot, too vicious, for you to palliate with home remedies.

And so, you throw yourself into it. Become a human battering ram against the ghosts in your head.

Things quickly become more of a coping mechanism than a potential, but that's fine. It's all fine. It'll work in the long run until the bruises that line your flesh fade along with the want and the hope, and the terrible memories, too.

(Terrible, in the way only a desperate, all-consuming one-sided love can be.)

All of it up in flames, in smoke.

You burn through an ounce in retaliation while watching his name flicker across your screen, and then spend an hour googling whether or not weed is really addictive (it isn't, but the routine, the habit, can be), before deciding that this whole affair is stupid, anyway.

It's a carousel of self-pity, spite, and masochism that feels like it might never end. Your efforts to palliate the sickness amount to a week of paid sick time spent watching a slew of old romantic dramas on repeat, and ignoring the string of texts that pour through (talk to me, let me fix this, let me—). All voicemails are immediately deleted before you can even hear the hitch in his voice.

It's duct tape over a gaping wound. Drifting aimlessly along Lethe, careless and indifferent, but all the while, desperately reaching down and cupping water into your palm for a sip that never seems to quench the thirst in the back of your throat.

You think you could drink until you're just standing in a dry riverbed and still feel parched. Effloresced by your own hand.

(as usual. as always—)

But this wound is still raw, still tender, even beneath the tape.

Ignore it. Ignore it—

(—before the edges begin to tear. Cloved down the middle.)

Another buffer is born when you get a text message from your boss—u comin in tmrrw?—and realise you can't avoid it, work, forever.

The prospect of going back on Friday evening—tomorrow, you suppose (the days have been slipping like molasses through your spread fingers)—makes you nervous.

You're not ready to see Bear.

But more than that (deeper than it, too), you’re not ready to see Bear unaffected by all of this. Sitting in his usual spot, in their chair he barely fits in, ordering the same drink over and over and over again.

Moving on, too—in his own way. Meeting someone else.

(His horoscope holds no punches when it tells you a past relationship may re-enter your life, which may open your eyes to a world of new experiences—)

It isn't as if he usually pairs celibacy with his whisky, and with the plethora of ignored messages (read receipt turned off), unanswered phone calls, and deleted voicemails, you know it's inevitable for him to give up. To get the hint—whatever that might be. Move on, maybe?

(get your shit together and chase this properly, Bear, jesus christ—)

You consider calling in again, but without any paid sick days left at your disposal, you know you can't afford to. So, you swallow it.

(And if it takes a little longer than usual to get ready for work, then so be it.)

Even with all of the false bravado you can scrape together come Friday, your nerves are frayed. Raw. The anxiety rolls off of you in waves, noticeable enough that even the regulars loitering outside (the ones who usually try and bum smokes off of any passersby, yourself included) offer you a cigarette.

(Politely turned down, but fuck—fuck—you wish you took it.)

The first hour into your shift is spent trying to pretend you're not aware of the way your roaming eyes skirt to the door in thirty-second intervals. Traitors. Or the involuntary flinch each time the door opens.

It would be easier to get lost in the familiarity of this desolate dive bar on the fringes of town, and so, you do.

(Try to, anyway.)

Immersing yourself in the routine of it all—the motions of pouring drinks, sizing the newcomers up (profiling their personage down to a drink and a random idiosyncrasy); the astringent scent of alcohol, the mild barley and hops; the noise of hushed conversations lulling between the static rumble of the television (sports, per usual).

The clock ticks down the seconds, the minutes, hours. You pour drinks. Clock the local gossip. Listen to the patter of condensation dripping into the tin bucket beneath the hole in the roof. In between the threadbare stirrings of routine, you find yourself waiting with dread gnawing at your insides until they're shredded and raw, pulsing ligaments burning with the fever of infection.

But it's moot. All of it.

He doesn't come back to the bar.

Where you expect to see his broad shoulders slouched over the counter, head hanging low over his steady accumulation of shot glasses (a drinking challenge with only one participant; his demons the spectators), the seat he usually occupies remains empty.

And maybe you're idealistic and stupid and wet behind the ears, but a part of you expected him to. To wander up to the counter with roses and chocolate and sobriety etched into the Neptune blue glow of his eyes, and to pick you, to choose you, but—

A fairytale.

The box on the counter—complaints—$5—is picked up by some wayward frat boy, and the mocking laughter that follows makes you think of cobalt blue, and peanut butter and bacon burgers in the empty parking lot near the beach, watching the endless midnight black ocean rock against the sandy shore. Talking. Talking. Talking.

Everything. Nothing. All the things in between.

You told him about college—failed the first semester, and then my dad… well. Anyway, had to drop out for a bit. But. I went back. Stupid, I know, and it doesn't matter but—

His hand falls on your arm, fingers a little greasy from the sweet potato fries, the ones he kept sneaking from your pile when he thinks you aren't looking, and he says:

It matters to you.

And it did, but only because it was something your dad mentioned a long time ago—I'd be proud if you followed in my footsteps—and despite everything he'd ever done, his attention, his affection, was all you'd ever wanted.

Yeah, you'd said, and stared out at the vat of blue until your eyes burned. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, he had peanut butter staining the corner of his mouth when you blinked the sting from your eyes, and turned to him. What do you wanna do?

Nothing. Everything.

Your dad once picked you up from practice, hands tight around the steering wheel. He filled you in about his day (stupid fuckin' guy from upstate came down and bought all the houses we were fixing to sell), complained about your mother (god, you know, that woman didn't even tell me what school to pick you up from? Said I should know where my daughter goes to school, as if I'm not working all damn day to keep you fed, and—), and gave you the biggest piece of advice you'd ever get:

"Look, no job is better than real estate. All that crap you think you want to do? Not important. All you need is four walls and a roof, and that's it. The rest is secondary."

(If that was true, why weren't you enough for him? Why weren't your four walls and roof enough to keep him?)

A shrug. I don't know. I've never been good at anything. You think of bruised knees. Scraped skin. Chasing a car, a dream, that never once slowed down. Can't even run right, it seems.

I can teach you. He clears his throat when you look at him, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand twice but somehow misses the dollop of peanut butter tangled in his beard. M’used to training men, I'm sure I can whip you into shape. Teach you how to run. Put you through the wringer until you come out sprinting on the other side.

"Teach me how to swim instead."

The bark of laughter he let out was cut off when you held your pinky up.

His brows bounced, incredulous. "Really?"

"A Taurus always keeps their promise."

"Christ's sake," he shakes his head, and you count the lines on his forehead when he turns, and rubs his fingers against his temple so hard, you wonder if he's trying to chisel through his skull to get at where it hurts the most. "I might not even be a Taurus."

"When were you born?"

His tongue pokes out from between his teeth, chin dropping to his chest when he huffs. You watch the way his shoulders shake, the flesh softening around his neck when he dips it low, and wonder if this is what it was like to yearn.

His eyes spark, Neptune blue, when he looks up. He says nothing, but holds his pinky up to yours, the digit swallowing yours whole.

It's a promise. He squeezes your hand in three pulses. One. Two. Three. You think you might get lost in the canyons that keep dividing inside of his eyes.

"Bet you were born in April."

"Not even close." He grins, all teeth, and drops your hand. Motions to the fries spilling over your console with his chin. "Finish up."

"Oh, did you even leave any for me? Thought you ate them all."

"Watch it."

Your stomach churns at thoughts, the memories. Plagued by him, it seems. So tantalisingly out of reach, and yet—your phone vibrates in your pocket; another voicemail left for you to listen to in your car and pretend that this whole thing is fine—so close.

He's everywhere, it seems. The scent of this place makes you think of him, and the stench of sickness—

Every square inch brings back some reminder of him.

When he got too trashed the first few visits and stumbled into the washroom. His bulk falls into the cheap door frame, and sends the ugly photo of what might have been the boardwalk crashing the floor. His call of: take it outta my tab when it shattered into pieces.

(You didn't. You hated that picture, anyway.)

When he knocked over his shot of tequila when you told him you thought he'd look really handsome in a beanie—a touch too bold, high off of the ethanol that leaked from his pores—and the rubescent smear over the bridge of his nose that followed. The ruddy stain on the counter—nail polish, you think, from that time a group of bridesmaids stumbled in after a wedding on the beach, and used the washroom to freshen up—matches the shade of his blush.

You spend an hour before closing scrubbing the counter down until your fingers are cracked and dry and burning from the chemicals you douse on the cheap, aged wood. It doesn't come out. Nothing you do will ever make the table unsticky. It's too far gone.

Like him. Like—

"Whisky," a man barks, slapping a dollar bill down on the stain. "Two shots."

Four walls and a roof, right? Right. Right. Right.

The walls here bleed condensation from the humidity outside, and the roof leaks when it rains. Always. It's patched up with duct tape and pipe dreams.

(Like you—)

The box on the counter catches his attention, rheumy eyes skimming the words. He scoffs. "Funny. Make me a drink worth a tip, and maybe I'll—"

"You know what?" You snap, throwing the wet cloth down with a splat that sends droplets pelting across his abdomen. There's a vindictiveness in seeing the splatter on his smooth, unwrinkled shirt.

Your eyes sting from the bleach, the lemon cleaner. Pebbled tears in your lash line threaten to spill over, but you swallow it all down. You won't cry. Not now. Not anymore.

Your hands twitch, an aborted motion to scour the wetness from your lashes, but you stop it in time. Curl your fingers into fists instead.

(And stupidly, nonsensically, you have the sudden, passing regret over washing your hands of the blood he'd spilled on your skin.)

"I don't work here."

"Since when?"

"Now. Get your own whisky, and take your shitty tip, and shove it up your ass—"

Quitting your only source of income certainly isn't the wisest decision you've ever made—but you've never been wont to make good ones, anyway, and so, you think it's all perfectly fine, considering.

Considering.

If anything, it's better than waiting around for the inevitable collapse of this shaky, patchwork foundation of paper-mache you cobbled together (reinforced with pipe dreams) to come crumbling down around you when Bear wandered in.

(If he ever would—

Fuck. You hope he does. Hope he doesn't.

Get better. Come back—)

You sit in your car at the end of your shift—the very last one after several odd years of growing roots down into the worn floorboards, and keeping more secrets about the occupants in this town than you care to admit—and just—

Breathe.

Sort of.

It's twisted in a way that makes you entirely too aware of what everyone would think if they knew about it. So, you cup this little secret between the palms of your hands, and cradle it to your chest, only exposing it to the outside world when things become too much. It's easier to say you count to ten—in, out, in, out—than to admit that your methods of self-soothing, of quelling the visceral sense of anxiety from pinballing around inside your guts like a marble, is to lean back, close your eyes, and pretend that you're back in the deep end of the swimming at the local chapter of a YMCA.

Drowning, of course.

Or some fictive version of it.

It comes to life in smeared yellow against hazy blue. A cacophony of muted sounds in the background—exultant shrieks of children, splashes in the distance, the low chatter of garbled conversation—is all you can hear in your underwater sanctuary, but only just. Noise is distorted and strange. A warbled mimicry of noise.

Your world is pressed into a cerulean marble, untouchable and inescapable. You linger in the centre, floating aimlessly in stagnation.

Down here, nothing matters. Everything is dissolved in the heavy chlorine that saturates the cold waters, and whatever resilient pieces remain sink low to the pool floor, scattered around the yellow goggles just within arm's reach.

You sink with them. Your thoughts become liquid; mercury slinking around your head. Intangible. Nonsensical. And above all else—silent.

Or they're supposed to be.

But even down here where nothing can touch you, where no one noticed you haven't surfaced in ages, your thoughts are carried by the lulling currents. Saved from your murky grey matter, from the sap that traps them in the mouth of a pitcher plant, they buoy to the surface, unmoored now. Free to scream at you in whispers.

You think of Bear.

Or rather, you think about not thinking about Bear.

About other things. And nothing—forced white noise. Static. What you're going to do now that you don't have a job. The scabs on his bloodied knuckles. No. Work, maybe. Finishing up that degree you promised yourself you'd get, if only to fill some absent void in your chest—or a futile obligation to a man who forgot your birthdays. Who spelled your name wrong on holiday cards—on the rare occasions he ever bothered to send them.

Other things. Other things—your faucet is leaking. You'll need to call the property manager to fix it. You need to get gas, too. Groceries.

Faintly, you catch the musk of his cologne still clinging to your passenger seat when you breathe in. Hold it, count to ten. It makes you remember the warmth of his humid breath on your cheek when he leaned in close, tapping your console as he pointed out your CHECK ENGINE light was on. Had been, you confessed sheepishly, for a few weeks up to that point.

Stupid pothole, you grumbled around the electricity running down your spine when his arm brushed yours as he leaned back with a derisive snort.

You caught the headiness of white oak, musk, when he turned his face to you, decidedly unamused by your answer, and flatly told you that you were driving around in a death trap.

Things not even on its last leg—it's in the damn grave.

Whatever, you shrugged. I'll just hit another pothole on the way home and it'll turn off.

Jesus Christ—

He didn't smell terrible. Faded cologne from a few days ago. Something woodsy. Cedar, maybe. Leather, smoke, pine. Sweat from the unrelenting humidity. Loam clinging to his skin. Spiced rum around his collar when he spilled his drink down his chin (you, eagerly, hungrily watching the amber droplet roll down the length of his neck—). He always seems to smell like he had been working in a thick, taiga forest in the dead of winter. Cindersap. Evergreen. Sweat-soaked leather. Chopped wood.

It congeals in your senses. Glueing to soft tissue, embedding itself in your skin. Permanent, unshakeable.

Unwashed sheets shouldn't be appealing. Motel shampoo. Cheap soap. The muted smell of old, stale cigarettes.

And yet, in this marbleised world, you think of it.

Of his skin, and the way it feels against yours. The slight sheen of grease along his nose when it nudges the soft slope of your neck. The rough drag of his beard over your pulse. Wry curls that end up on your tongue after he'd kiss you.

Any plans on shaving?

He dragged his cheek over your collarbones, eyes lidded, heavy. None at all. That a deal breaker?

You hold your breath until your lungs start to quiver, to ache; until you're dangling precariously on the verge of hypoxia with ink blots splashing across your vision in a garish Rorschach (they're all butterflies. with knives. what does that say about me, doc?). Phosphenes scatter in a nebula of colour. Your throat constricts around nothing, empty. Empty. The urge to swallow follows on the coattails of a pitifully fleeting euphoria. Temporal and untouchable, but you still reach out, grabbing and grasping with straining fingers because you'll hate yourself forever if you don't try. Scrambling, desperately, to catch cosmic dust on the tips of your fingers. To imbue your disjointed cracks with the chemical makeup of a Magellanic cloud until your broken parts burn incandescent. Kintsugi in cuts, scraps, of Andromeda.

But for as much as you want to shatter your lungs into infinitesimal pieces, and scatter them across the universe, your body has a failsafe against stupidity.

It forces you to gasp, gulping down thin, crisp air until you feel the burn in your chest from overexertion.

You open your eyes, and wish the world around you was still draped in teal and hazy yellow. That you could taste chlorine in the back of your throat. It's a brutal awakening to find a gossamer of silken midnight draped over the parking lot in the back of the dive bar. Empty, barren, save for yourself and the chef. A man you guess you'll never see again.

Soft, crushed ochre smears a hazy ring in the east. The dawning sun of a new day.

Leaning against the old leather of your car, your eyes cut to the console briefly. The CHECK ENGINE light is off. You made Bear groan, out loud, when you hit a pothole on the freeway and it flicked off, like you knew it was. Problem solved. More duct tape over what is probably something wrong with your engine (probably dented the filter in your catalytic converter, Bear grumbled, and you nodded along, pretending like you knew what that meant).

A light catches your eye. Your phone buzzes on the dashboard, screen illuminated in the reflective surface of your window.

You could pretend you were getting a call from RAEB if you tried hard enough. Answered it, maybe, and feigned ignorance while you chatted away to him like nothing happened. Like you sometimes don't try to drown yourself on land.

You reach for it, fingers tingling at the last vibrations before the screen cuts out, and bring it close.

It takes a second, but the voicemail icon pops up in the notification bar beside a text from your friend sent hours earlier begging you to come out next weekend (haven't seen you in forever okay?? come out w us!!).

You don't know why he keeps trying. Why he's so persistent over something that is, quite decidedly, nothing.

The icon taunts you. You hate seeing it—always have. It can't be swiped away. Can't be hidden. It irks you somewhat, seeing this little symbol.

Make it go away—

You shouldn't. Not when your insides are this raw, this fractured. Broken. But you turn your phone over in your hands for a moment, mood mulish and itching for something. A fight, maybe. Something to be angry about, justifiably. To vent your frustrations.

You tap it before you really think things through, watching as it dials VOICEMAIL and the automated message pops up after a ring.

Please enter your password—

You have one new message. To play your messages, press one—

It starts shaky—like he's moving. You can hear the shuffle of his body, the rasp of his shirt. A door slams. He huffs.

Look, uh. I'm not… I'm not good at this kind of thing. I was hoping—hoping we could talk… but. I guess I, uh. Anyway—

It goes quiet. You reach up to hit SEVEN on the keypad, delete the message like all the others, but a noise stops you. The screen hums under your finger.

I've been thinking lately. About a lot of things. The team, myself. You. I made—some bad calls. Got some good men…uh, into some trouble. The kind of trouble you… don't walk away from.

It made me think about Rip. I told you about him, right? In the—the motel. Rip is—Rip was… important to me. To us. Saved my life. In Iraq. Mosul. Bullet nearly hit me but somehow, he pulled me back just in time, took the bullet instead. Right in his stomach. And you know, he, uh—he huffs. It sounds like a laugh, but one he's choking on. He got right back up and took the bastard out. Just—wasted him. I owe him my life. Always have. It's muffled, as if he has his hand pressed to his mouth, keeping the words in. Should have saved him, but I couldn't. Couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I let him get that bad and I knew. I fucking—I knew. I saw it. Watched him spiral. And now—shit. Now I'm—uh, talking to your voicemail at four in the morning—

You think you catch what am I doing before the line cuts out.

Fog settles in the midmorning dawn. You lean against the headrest, clutching your phone, and try not to think at all.

(wash, rinse, repeat)

The hole in your chest, filled in with clay and papier-mache, crumbles under the seaspray.

What am I doing. It stays with you.

These flimsy excuses become a house of cards.

It doesn't surprise you much at all when they wobble, falling on top of you.

It's his name flashing across your screen—just Bear—as you lay in bed days later, pretending not to think about him that starts it all.

(again, again, again)

This is all a cruel sort of timing, you think, and feel the harsh thud of your heart so strongly against your rib cage that you wonder if the silly thing might break through them yet.

You shouldn't answer. Know, without any hint of uncertainty, that Bear has the potential to pull you back in—fish to a pretty, glimmering lure—and that the moment you acquiesce to one thing, others will immediately follow in rapid succession, much too quick for you to keep up with.

There will be no stopping the deluge once it breaks.

And yet—

What did you expect?

The words thrown back into your face echo in the small of your flat as the walls around you wobble, teetering on the edge of collapse.

Like most things when it comes to him.

After the second buzz, one that sends a thrill through your spine that you refuse to give attention to, you hesitantly press your finger against the green answer key and slowly bring the phone up to your face, inches away from your nose, before stopping. Abruptly.

You can handle Bear at a distance, you think, and so, deciding better than to have him murmur directly into your ear, you quickly tap the speaker button, and stammer out a muzzy greeting.

“...Bear?”

There's a sharp inhale that threads through the speaker, and you know, all at once, that he hadn't expected you to pick up. Was, instead, ready to meet and reluctantly embrace the cool, blithe distance of your voicemail.

“You answered,” he hedges, and you wonder if the wariness in his tone means anything deeper. “I didn't think you would.”

Despite his honesty, there are shades of derision tainting the gruff timbre.

“I wasn't going to,” you volley back, matching the fickleness of his misplaced scorn with your own.

“Then why did you?”

“You know why,” you admit quietly.

No one is around to see your boundaries crumble. To watch as the cards you kept so close to your chest dip once, quick enough for him to glimpse them, to see what is tucked in the palm of your hand.

In that loneliness, you find a sense of freedom that you had been missing. One tinged in the bitter coat of nostalgia.

It feels too much like those nights spent arguing about the meaning behind the perfect pour (and why yours would always be trash), and showing him abysmal creations on Instagram in a thinly veiled attempt to make him see that you weren't, objectively, the worst at it.

Back when you held the patchwork remains of your bruised, duct tape heart out over the countertop that never seemed to ever be clean as an offering to a man who bluntly looked down into the nozzle of his bottle instead.

He huffs a little, then. Put-off, maybe, by the distance you pitch when giving in is always just within reach. “I don't see the problem.”

“Well, yeah…” you mutter, shuffling in bed to get comfortable. You drag your knee to your chest, as the other stretches out in the sheets, and lazily wrap your arm around your shin, fingers digging into your flesh. Bruising, biting. It centres you, this fleeting pain. “You wouldn't, but I'll have you know—”

It's comfortable. The thought is a battering ram, one that hits hard, vicious, and dredges up the realisation of just how much you missed this. And just how easy this all is with him, even know when your heart is in tatters and you can hear the slur in his words (though, that might be his usual mumble—the man is hard to understand on a sober day, what with his penchant to grit words out between his teeth, as if he needs to tear them to shreds, to chew on them, before forcing them out), the normalcy in all of this, or as normal as this abnormal situation can get, is a bludgeon to your resolve.

“...what, huh? What'll you have me know?”

You'll get suckered back in again, but this time, all the way to the event horizon. Inescapable.

“You know, Bear.”

It's flimsy when he huffs, and sounds too much like relief when he growls: “Then why fight it?”

“I don't want to talk about this right now.”

The line goes still, but you catch the hitch in his throat all the same. “We should. I can fix this. We can fix this. You can't just decide—”

You can, you think, and drop your forehead to your knee, letting the phone slide down the valley of thigh and stomach where it comes to rest on the clothed crease of your hip bone. A prison. Your body is the cage.

Not being able to see him gives you some sense of power back, and you reach for it. Needing to wield something decisive and distant before the rough timbre of his voice, his desperation, scoured your resolve into thin powder.

“ Just give up, Bear. It's over. There's nothing to fix because there was nothing there to begin with.”

“Nothing there, huh? Is that what you think?”

Overtaking the bitter resignation is anger. A bone-deep fury that simmers to the surface, dredged up from the bottom of the bottle you thought you lost him to. You can hear it in the sharp breath he takes, the little growl he lets out.

“Fuck that,” his viciousness stabs into your defences like a battering ram. Unrelenting, dizzying. You make to step back, but he fights you on it. Keeping you close. Blazing anger so hot, it nearly burns you. “You waltz into my life, chasin’ after me and then, what? You just decide it's too much for you? I warned you. I fucking warned you, didn't I ?”

“I—I know. I just—”

What, you wonder. What? Because was it ever as simple as wanting a hurting man to be a little less lonely in an empty pub?

It's moments like this that make you contend with your self-sabotage, the unmaking of yourself (morality, compassion, kindness) by your own hands. Your complicity in all of this is staggering, and suddenly the idea of a clean break feels vile.

How could you drop a man you spent months pursuing, expecting him to change overnight?

Your faults, and flaws, soften the part of you that wants to run, fleeting into the dark to avoid the consequences of your actions.

It takes two to tango, and the idiom bludgeons through the headache like a battering ram.

“I guess I just wanted to help, at first. To be your friend. You seemed so—” lonely. Sad. One bad day away from slipping too deep into the bottle that he couldn't climb out again.

His laugh is ugly, biting. “What? Pathetic? A sorry fucking drunk—”

“Alone.”

It quiets him, this soft confession.

“Can't save everyone,” is what he says after an agonising beat, and you think of the priest he tore into viciously for uttering the same sentiment. Bruising with his words, his tone, instead of his fists. Creating walls from the craters it left behind.

“Doesn't mean you can't try.”

“Wasted your time, don't you think?”

“No.” The word is immediate. Forceful. “With you? For you? No. But Bear. The thing you don't get, what you don't understand, is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. And maybe it's selfish, and honestly, I know it is, but you always risk your own life whenever you try to save someone from drowning, and I know I'm not enough to help you.”

He's quiet. “Reading up on being a lifeguard?”

“In my spare time.”

A huff. It's barely a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hope it all works out for you.”

You can imagine the grim twist of mouth as he says it. The downward pitch to his chin, dipping in his misery.

“I hope the same for you.” You whisper, and it feels like finality.

Moments ago, the thought might have brought a sense of bitter relief to you, but now it just feels sickeningly like loss all over again.

“Shit,” Bear grouses suddenly, and then draws a sharp breath once more. “I miss you,” he rasps on the exhale.

You don't know why he would, but you understand, maybe, because you do, too.

(So much, so much, so much—)

“I miss you, too, Bear.”

The tentative words seem to shake him, and all at once, he's commandeering again. Authoritative, in that way only he can be.

“I'm getting better,” he rumbles. “I gotta. For the—for the team—”

It's the wrong thing to say, though, and he seems to realise it midway through. A quick course correction comes with a rushed, and for me, too, that reminds you too much of all the times you heard this same thing from behind the counter as you topped up their third, fourth, fifth glass.

You know better than to believe in this hollow gospel, this midnight epiphany, and for the most part, you don't. It's all empty words. False promises from a prophet, spoken as a defence mechanism against the ugly reality of what happens when people catch on to their bad habits.

But it's Bear.

Out of everyone who murmured the same phrase in that exact tone, you believe in him just a little bit more than the rest.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

It's his intense tenacity. That gritty determination seems ingrained within his very being. Inseparable.

You wonder when you started divining truths from its scripture.

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

“Bear—” It's late, and your thoughts are just running themselves aground. Turning into a tangled, indecipherable mess. “I need to get some sleep. Can we—can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Will you answer?”

It's deserved, of course, but you know that particular knife twist hurts him just as much as it does yourself, and whatever little vindication he finds from it is swallowed, quickly, by regret.

“I just…want to talk to you.”

You imagine that somewhere between the lines, the things unsaid, sits the glaring truth of his sudden devotion, his obsession:

there's no one else.

(never anyone's first choice—)

“Sure. Okay, yeah, we can. We can talk. You're—” you need distance. You need space. A minute, maybe, to sort through the ugly thoughts making webs in the back of your head. “You're my friend, Joe. We're… we can be friends, again.”

“Friends?”

It's not what he wants. That much is clear by the threadiness in his tone, but at two in the morning and with your thoughts liquifying into syrup, it's all you can offer him, all you're willing to give.

Friends. It makes you remember the limbo you sat in before, the murk and heartache of watching him ply himself with overpriced liquor and then stumble out the door, sometimes with company but most often, all alone and with just ten minutes to spare before closing. The yearning. The pining. The want that made you feel sick to your stomach with guilt for some unseen, unknown woman back home.

(“Dead. She's dead—”)

It sickens you even more to think about that. The ring he kept, the sadness that draped over his shoulders in a swath of agony. The one he didn't take off, not even for you. The warning signs were there.

You just ignored them all.

Friends, you murmur again, and wonder where, in all this, you went wrong. The beginning, maybe, when you looked at him and couldn't bring yourself to look away. Friends. We can be friends, Bear.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Best friends,” you echo back, hollow and thin. “With matching bracelets and everything—”

“Thought it was a tattoo?”

“That, too.”

“Okay,” he acquiesces quietly, but you can hear the threads of obstinacy in his voice when he says it. The combativeness, the steadfast refusal to fully submit, rears in the things he doesn't say, pitching bivouacs in his tone. This isn't over, it says. You're not over. “Friends.”

It's scornful, and you hate the way it blisters under your skin. Burning hot, the same feverish delirium that turned you incandescent with just his touch.

Everything about Bear tells you to relent. Submit.

It would be so easy to just give in.

And the thing is:

You want to. Desperately, achingly.

His certainty, his acuity in all of this, has a way of dismantling your sense of reason. Or, at the very least, your rationale for why you're keeping him at a distance. It's not just being diametrically opposed, though; this is the unerring knowledge that your complicity needs to be curbed. That you are, in small parts, responsible for this barren husk of a man. For aiding and abetting in his spiral, sure, but mostly for expecting him to greet you with sobriety when he woke up, as if spending an entire weekend between your thighs was enough to negate all the demons clawing at the walls of his skull. Scarring bone. Chiselling into marrow.

Simply put: you're not enough. You knew this, and yet—

Pursued, persisted. Laughably, even echoed the same words you repeat now to a man on the verge of going nuclear under the pressure of his rage, his grief.

It's impossible to make a levee out of skin and bones, and no matter how much Bear might want to try—maybe has tried with his late wife, with a bottle, with vice, with bloodied, bruised knuckles and a chip on his shoulder deeper than a canyon—it's just not feasible.

Too bad, you think, that this bone-weary epiphany didn't come sooner. That you didn't kick him out when you realised those beautiful valleys in his eyes were really just trenches.

Hindsight, of course.

(How were you supposed to know that the rough growl in his timber wasn't a security blanket against the world but just the aftereffects of inhaling too much artillery fire?)

You should have, though. Your mum was a how-to manual on the things to avoid. She could channel wisdom directly from a man's marrow, and you—made in her spitting (vitriolic) image—seem to have learned nothing at all about divination.

And you—forgotten ilk—can barely tell the difference between a portend and good fortune when you sift through clumps of barley tea at the bottom of your cup.

For all of her stolen wisdom, you make a promise to yourself that you won't tear yourself into pieces just to make a safety net for him out of your flesh. Or set yourself on fire to keep him warm.

(Not anymore, anyway—)

But then, cruelly, viciously, you wonder if you ever really helped him at all, or if this is just a manifestation to assuage your own guilt. Doubtless, you find. What have you done for him that wasn't, in some part, mutually beneficial? All this time, you've been gambling equivalence with a broken man, and then ran the moment those jagged pieces cut you.

And maybe a little bit of this hesitancy is rooted in fear as well. A fickle thing you try to ignore in favour of something that makes you seem more altruistic than you really are, but still lurks in the shadows, in the words you, too, won't say.

Things like:

He's never met you sober. Not completely. And certainly not in a way that counts.

Each interaction is marred with some form of a buffer between you both. Distance shaped in sips of his (fourth, fifth) beer; a shot of whisky.

What if he doesn't like what he finds sober?

You heard enough jokes at the bar about falling in love drunk and then waking up sober. If this is that, you don't know how you'd regain any sense of ground back.

The precipice you clawed your way up to is endlessly steep, treacherous, and yet: you still let yourself fall. Still took the risk in opening your hand just to show him your still-beating heart.

Return to the sender, you think a touch hysterically, deliriously.

In the suffocating silence, his voice rings out. Quiet, rough, as if his vocal cords were made of charred wood, smouldering embers, and not warm, wet tissue. It's just your name, but the sound of it seems to drag you down to yourself, if only in increments.

“You good?” He asks when you hum noncommittally in response.

With your forehead braced against the slope of your knee, it feels like bowing your head in a confessional when you whisper, paper soft, “I'm tired, Bear.”

It sounds like he is chewing on glass when he sighs. Throat torn, raw. The ghost of it whispers across your chin; fingerprints tapping over a tender bruise.

“Haven’t been sleeping much these last few days. Been thinkin’ of us. Of you. And the team. All the people I let down—”

“Bear…”

“And I—I want to see you soon. When you're ready. I'm not going to rush things this time. Not gonna mess it up again—”

He speaks like this is settled. Over. As if you've already climbed into the palm of his hand, and all he has to do is just close you up tight in his fist. A little flower he can carry around in his pocket. Kept safe. Kept close.

It's—

A lot. Overwhelming. He sounds sober enough, and you know that he's not wholly dependent on drinking—it’s palliative; a coping mechanism to numb himself from the reality of everything else that happened to him—but there's a real crutch there that can't be erased by determination alone. But thinking about that—the future—makes your chest feel like it's going to cave in on itself; collapse and become another black hole in the Milky Way, swallowing everything down.

You need to breathe. You need to think—

“You should get some sleep, Bear. And—”

Don't drink. Stop. Get help. Talk to someone.

But the words are empty. Hollow vessels to placate your sense of responsibility. Your own guilt.

Coward. You've always been so good at running—

“Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” he rasps. The hushed timbre makes you tremble. “You too. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning.”

And so, this delicate dance made of putting duct tape over fractured promises and palliating the sickness in patchwork hope begins again, working in pieces.

There's a distance that lingers between the folds of you both, unspoken hurt and distrust—a lingering symptom of letting yourself get swept away by the idea of a man rather than the flesh and bone cut of one—but despite it all, each misgiving that passes your mind when you see Bear’s name flash across the cracked screen of your phone, it works.

Somehow, somehow.

It isn't as deep as missing puzzle pieces, because as much as you and Bear seem to connect on a level beyond sex, and booze, and fleeting highs to numb a phantom ache in the pit of your chest, the idea of soulmates seems to be frangible for your fractured selves; with all of your jagged, sharp edges, something so soft would break into pieces, shatter apart. But it is something.

And that might just be enough. So, you let it root. Let it grow limbs, and leaves, and curl around you like gentle, strangling wisteria until it reaches up to your chest.

This delicate, fragile thing makes a home, again, inside the empty landscape of your heart.

(shame on me, you think, but still pick up his call as this tender, soft thing you're nurturing snakes across your jugular where it's the warmest, leeching heat from the fever that thrums under your skin.)

Despite his bold declaration, though, he seems to waver on a full pursuit. Content, almost, to maintain this idea of closeness without shattering the bubble you've reconstructed.

It's odd, though.

Bear is a man who seeks logic out but always ends up relying on his hunches. Emotional in the sense that he places all confidence in himself beyond the scope of what he might be able to deliver. If his determination can't bring him across the finish line—well, then it was unwinnable from the start.

For a man so tenacious, so driven, his hesitation in all of this surprises you.

But something has to give eventually.

It always does.

Bear isn't terrible at texting, but he prefers phone calls. Something he admits has less to do with his occupation (no, I won't have to kill you for telling you this, you need to stop believing what you see on tv), and is more just a way of gleaning nuances he can't with written word.

Though, not always.

There's a softness when he speaks tonight, a quality you're unfamiliar with, as he confesses on a hushed memory, half musing aloud when the world is dead asleep and the sun is a distant idea in the back of your head, that he used to write letters to his wife whenever they weren't on the phone talking. Or Skyping each other.

“Deployment with a group of guys doesn't leave much room for privacy,” he says, as if he hasn't just unravelled this hidden part of himself at three fifteen on what was meant to be a rather mundane ending to your Thursday. “They're not really, uh, sensitive to that. We're on top of each other for most of it, anyway. Asking a whole room to clear out just so I can talk isn't happening. So, uh, we—uh, me and Lena, we wrote letters.”

There's a stutter in his voice when he relays this to you, and you're struck numb by it all. Lena, you think, putting a name to a concept.

“Oh,” you say, and you're not sure what to think about it. So, you don't. You tuck it aside, where all the other things you've learned about Bear go. The ones revealed to you in shambles. “That sounds— romantic. ”

It makes him scoff, and it's this terrible, broken thing. “Romantic, huh? Is that what you think?”

You hum, taking it in. The grand reveal of his ex-wife (she… we, he corrects and clears his throat like it burns: we decided to separate. See, uh… see other people), and his marital problems, you connect the dots lingering in the foreground.

You're not completely ignorant of his intentions.

It's the first move on a fresh chessboard: a show of his commitment to this—whatever it might be—and how serious he's taking it all. Where you'd been the only one to dare pry open the rusted nails keeping your secrets at bay before, he's taking the initiative to do so now, to meet you somewhere in the middle where the olive branch still grows. Placing his bets before the race. Offering himself, and his secrets, up as collateral in this strange game you found yourself in.

But does he know that you can still hear the slight slur in his voice when he speaks, or notice the way he seems to skirt around the conversation of his drinking habits on the days when it must be hitting him harder? Surely, he must.

And yet, he still calls. Still decides to gamble with your devotion in maintaining a strange facsimile of friendship with whisky on his breath, slurring his words, and gives out the pretence of playing for keeps under the table.

Maybe he knows you'll still give him the chance to keep playing no matter how many times his luck runs dry. It makes sense, considering.

You'd always had a weakness for men like him.

(Stupid—)

Outside of the tipsy phone calls, you've yet to hear him completely gone. A testament to his dedication, maybe, but you know the first week is always the easiest. When the high of the epiphany roars through their bloodstream, and the weight of the world doesn't feel as crushing as it once had, it's easy to make deals you don't have the means of keeping up with. But the debt is insurmountable to those who aren't fully invested, and the collectors are vicious.

Still. Still.

This is as close to sobriety as he's ever been, and you soak up his unbridled attention like you're starving for it.

And in all honesty, you are.

Bear is a strange, complex web of a man. Full of grit, anger. Misery curls in the corners of his eyes, hidden there amongst the powder keg of obsessive devotion just waiting to go off. You scented kerosene on his skin—napalm drenching his pores—when he'd lifted two fingers up and nearly snarled his order from across stained cedar wood.

Having the brunt of his fire listing your way is a character study in restraint, in penance. It taps against the delicate binds holding everything back, and loosens the ties with every piece of him you're given.

It's hard, you think, to stay so far away from someone when you're wobbling on the brink of devotion. Love, in shades of obsession. The taste of which settles in the back of your throat like a sickness, aching each time you swallow.

You're not sure what it is about Bear, about this particular brand of miserable, angry man, but his very existence feels like it was constructed, handspun, to make you hunger for a taste.

And then, you know. It's just that, isn't it? Miserable, angry man.

(saviour complex, maybe. maybe, maybe, maybe—)

It feels deeper than that, though. It might have been the cause for this unravelling, this unmaking between you both, but the rest—the helplessness and the anger and the worry; answering his call even when you swore you wouldn't, leaving him in the motel room like a bad dream smeared across your pillow only to pick him up again, another bad habit in a sea of others—is than just a simple desire to fix problems that are not your own.

(especially when they aren't your own.)

“Never really been the romance type,” he rumbles, shattering this strange, introspective reverie you've fallen into.

“You seem to be doing okay for yourself, though,” you volley back, a touch too cautious compared to how it all was before. When you'd read him his horoscope, and pester him about trying your audacious food combinations he'd complain about, but eat, anyway.

“Is that what you think?”

“It's what I know.”

You expect him to pick up your jab, turning it on you instead. Something caustic, something severe. Something equally mean and mordant in the way only Bear could be. But he doesn't. He lets it fall to the wayside instead, humming under his breath in something that might be acquiescence, or maybe avoidance of the topic entirely, and shifts back into neutral territory.

How was your day? He asks, as if that wasn't one of the first things he'd said to you when you answered the call.

“Fine,” you hedge, breezing the word out between your teeth. “It was okay. Bear—”

“I, uh, have a meeting tomorrow,” he steamrolls through your concern like it's made of paper instead of the broken remnants of your heartache. “Another eval., to see if I'm fit to return to training. Make my way back to being an Officer.”

More secrets are revealed to you in the slow dawn of his unfurling fist. Held out like a beacon, a piece of candy. Good job, it says when you reach for it like the good, obedient dog you are.

Pavlov's finest.

“That sounds…” You're not really sure what it means, in all honesty. Words coming together to form a sentence. The meaning is absent from between the lines. You could infer, but you've never been good at guessing. So, you stagnate. “Good. Um, really good, Bear.”

He huffs, and you take it as a laugh—or as close to one you'll get from him. “Gotta pass the eval first.”

“Should be easy for you.”

“Should be,” he mumbles, and you catch the faint end of a muffled groan. “But I've been slacking. Put on extra weight. Need to burn it all off before I can really get into the old routine. Gonna fall behind worse than a newbie.”

Newbie being growled out in his flat intonation makes you snort.

“You find something funny? ”

“Ha, no—” his words turn over in your head—put on extra weight—and, damningly, you remember what all that extra weight felt like, stretched out beneath you; arched over your body, heavy and suffocating, and—

Fuck.

Bear catches the hitch in your breath, and makes a questioning noise in response. You can't let him ask. Can't let him know that you keep painting a picture of his hairy belly brushing against yours in the forefront of your mind. His biceps. Burly is what you'd thought of him before. Thick. Husky. A heavy man, in more ways than one.

The softness around his waist belied the hard muscles below. You could feel it pressing firm against your palm when he rolled under you, bracing your hands over his chest as he let you ride him.

That's it, sweetheart. Just like that—

“No,” you swallow around the desire welling up inside of your throat. “Nothing.”

He hums, and it's tainted in disbelief. Like he knows, somehow, what you were thinking of. What you keep thinking of—especially after these phone calls, his voicemails, when you're lying in bed with your fingers whispering between your thighs—and you almost expect him to call you out on it. To demand an answer.

Instead, he offers a tender truth that nudges against the soft pulse in your throat.

“...Not drinking as much helps.”

You almost want to call him out on the as much he tacts on to the end of his confession, to question the logistics behind those two words. To quantify it in a number, in tangible data. Something concrete you can plinth your hope on. But the answer scares you.

Too much and you'll fall all over again. Too little and you'll have no choice but to run.

So, you retreat in the face of his truth. A coward.

“That's—It's good. That's good, Bear—” and it is. Of course, it is. Great, even. He isn't even yours and this silly notion of pride staples itself to the front of your chest for the world to see. “I'm, um. I'm proud of you.”

It sounds hollow, pyrrhic, coming from you—repentant enabler—but the airiness in his voice strikes something deep inside. Pulses against a dormant place that comes alive, fecund with the bittersweet stirrings of hope germinating in the fibres.

Skingraft over the wound.

“Proud, huh?”

And the sound of his voice cuts that thread as soon as it forms.

His voice is pitched low, throaty. He draws the syllables out as he says, at length, “I, uh, keep thinking about you.”

You should warn him away. Tap the impish fingers sneaking to the cookie jar—a thorough chastisement to keep wandering hands in check. Bad dog, is the passing thought, and you try to swallow down the hysterical giggle that bubbles in the back of your throat.

You should.

But you don't.

It comes out breathier than you intended when you say his name, and it sounds much too malleable in the face of this tactile man.

“Been thinkin’ about you a lot.”

“Yeah,” you whisper. Too much. Too much. “Same. Uh, me too.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going out with some friends. Probably going to get dinner. Watch that new movie that just came out. And, um, have a few drinks after.”

“How're you getting home?”

“Taxi, most likely.”

He hums low, throaty. The sound seems to reverberate through the phone and tremble deliciously down the length of your spine. “That so?”

“I'm not going to be drinking much.” You weigh the ethics of discussing your intentions to drink, to get completely wasted, and maybe go home with someone who isn't Bear, who doesn't even so much as look like him, before waving the thought away before it can take shape. “It's just—social. Getting caught up. Haven't seen them in a while because of school and stuff.”

And because you've invested so much of your free time spinning in circles around a man who didn't even really seem to look at you (who insisted on calling you kid to force distance and indifference between you) until a few months ago, letting your social life dawdle on the wayside.

Not that there was ever much one. It's easier, sometimes, to push people away than to explain the inner workings of your borrowed scar tissue.

He hums again—and he really needs to fucking stop doing that before you do something stupid, something reckless, like remember the way he sounded when he lifted his head up after coming deep inside of you, panting in your ear from exertion, and groaned just like that when he shifted forward, inching his softening cock further you, seemingly content to stay like that as you melted into the mattress that reeked of stale sweat and sex.

“I'll drive you.”

Your breath catches. “You don't have to.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, but it's decidedly noncommittal and comes completely undone when you catch the crackle of iron in his mulish tone as he adds: “but I want to.”

And he will, is the underlying promise that brims to the surface, wrapped up neatly in a way that brokers no real room for a counterargument. Not that he'll give you the chance to make one.

Still. You try, if only to snatch at some modicum of control that slips, gossamer thin, between your fingers.

“It's fine. Making you go out all that way is kinda…”

“Don't worry about it. Beats paying for a cab, anyway.”

“Bear…”

It's firm when he says: “let me drive you home. Make sure you get there safely.” Final. But to soften the blow, he adds, voice tender like a bruise: “Just let me do this for you.”

And how are you supposed to stay no to that?

“Okay, Bear.”

(Answer: you don't.)

#joe graves x reader #joe graves x you #bear graves x reader #joe bear graves x reader #joe bear graves #barry sloane #joe graves #six (2017)#seal team six #history six #bear x reader #bear graves x you

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sweet1delusi0ns · 5 days

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Nicknames Naruto boys call you—☆*:・ﾟ

Characters: Naruto🦊,sasuke🗡️,kiba🐺, shikamaru🀄️,shino🪲,neji🎋,Lee🥋, choji🍥,gaara⏳, kankuro🪆

Naruto🦊-*

He always calls you complimenting nicknames such as beautiful, gorgeous and pretty ect. He doesn’t care about your looks honestly you could be the ugliest person alive and he’s still love you. He just needs you to know your attractive no matter what! But also calls you the classics like babe n sweetheart!

“Good morning gorgeous!!” “I look like a fucking raccoon babe.” “Your still attractive no matter what y/nnnn” side note he loves giving morning kisses~

Sasuke🗡️-*

Darling. Without a doubt he calls you darling or love. He’s not sure what he would call you at first other than your name but it soon came to him. He is soooo soft for You idc what anyone says I can just imagine his soft voice “oh love” “anything else darling?” “I have a surprise for you my love” (I’m crying)

He will genuinely start crying if you called him sweet nicknames like that. (I’m writing abt that later😋)

Kiba🐺-*

Hes so Basic yet so complex honestly he will call you the most basic nicknames like babe or sweetie but then go on for hours how your the only one for him and how your were like a missing piece in his heart that he has finally found, yet he can’t come up with any better nicknames😭

“Babe have I ever told you how I feel like I’m missing apart of myself every time your away. Honestly just going to bed without you pains me so much. I’m so happy I found the one for me~” “not even baby just babe?” “I’m trying to be sincere and sensitive y/n!”

Shikamaru🀄️-*

He mainly called you dear like a old couple (LOL). Other than the sweet compliments he gives you about how hot you are n such he’s similar to kiba, basic nicknames but a lot of meaning

“Dear, I have put together a small picnic for us. I finally have time to treat you right so I figured I’d take you on a date” “Aw your the sweetest old man ever~” “anything for you dear!….HEY.”

Shino🪲-*

Call me stereotypical but he totally calls you love bug, cuddle bug or flower, cuz your his little love bug yk just full of happiness (mostly). He isn’t one to just use nicknames every sentence, he thinks nicknames should be special not matter how many times he uses them!

“Shino! I’m so happy your back home ugh I’ve missed that face! Cmon give me a hug~” “of course, I’ve missed you too love bug, or should I say cuddle bug” “either one is fine Shino~”

Neji🎋-*

Destiny (ha get it) I’m jus joking. Similar to shikamaru he talks you like you guys are an old couple but still romantic, so names like sweetheart, love and gorgeous. He uses them frequently thought so throughout the day you get to hear his pretty voice

“Sweetheart how was your day?” “Love do you want to tag along with me to the store? Or just for a walk” “you look gorgeous as always” AGH

Lee🥋-*

Ez he calls you precious. He finds it complex enough to show the love he truly feels for you without the nickname being overwhelming. “You are my precious! I will spent my whole life protecting and serving you! You deserve the best!!” I love him.

“So pretty! You are so special y/n! You are the most precious person to me!” “My precious I have a surprise!” “Precious, do you care for some tea, I’m making it fresh!”

Choji🍥-*

Also ez he calls you either honey, sweetie, or pretty. Honey and sweetie for obvious reasons, he finds you as sweet as candy and as yummy as honey, but he also finds you VERY attractive.

“Honey! I’m making dinner I hope your hungry pretty~” “your so nice to me y/n, like sweets! Ooooo that’s a good name, sweetie!”

Gaara⏳-*

He just calls you by your name, he doesn’t know what he’s doing LOL. You’ll have to coerce him into calling you cute nicknames by either promising him a reward or explaining how it’s normal to call loved ones names other than their name.

“You can call me anything you want gaara!!” “Can I Call You raccoon?” “No.” “Oh.. then what can I call you?” “Oml I’ll give you cuddles if you start calling me darling~” “sure thing y/n…uh darling..?” “Your so cute when you get flustered!”

Kankuro🪆-*

Flirt. So names along the lines of hotty, sexy, doll. Pretty self explanatory he thinks your fine asf so he’s gotta make it known. “Oo whos that hotty? Oh my gosh that my lover~” he teasing you, well atleast tried you but you just end up giggling at his attempts!

“Doll do you want to come help me in my work shop?” “Danm your so sexy~ honestly I’d let you do anything to me” “what’s your problem weirdo!” “Your hot thats my problem”

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secondratefiction · 5 months

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Keep You Safe - Commander Cody x Medic!Reader

Life Day Fic Exchange 2023 @cloneficgiftexchange

Written for @loving-the-cambridges

“Alright… unfortunately it does look like it’s broken…” You sighed, setting the trooper’s arm back down gently, “I’ll brace it and give you something for the pain and swelling until we get you back to the ship. 1 to 10, how bad is it hurting?”

“It’s feeling much better now that you’re taking care of me, mesh’la.” The trooper smiled up at you loopily and you had to resist the urge to roll your eyes.

“Careful Shiny…” The voice behind you made you smirk and you turned to smile at Boil as he stared the trooper you were working on down.

“He’s fine.” You said, motioning the older trooper to come help hold the other’s arm while you splinted and wrapped it up, “It’s probably the shock and adrenaline talking anyway.”

“Even so…” Boil rolled his eyes but was still as gentle as possible holding his brother’s limb while you worked, looking pointedly back at him, “You show the medics more respect. Especially the nat-borns.”

“Careful Boil,” You laughed softly as you finished up the wrapping, helping the trooper put his arm in a sling before giving him an injection, “You’re starting to sound like your commander.”

You could see Boil’s lip twitch as he tried to maintain a professionally neutral expression, “Thank you ma’am.”

Declaring the newer trooper done for the time being, you quickly shooed him off with instructions to find one of the transports back to the starcruiser, once he was out of your tent set up, you turned back to Boil expectantly, “Alright, so what can I do for you?”

“The Commander is back ma’am, he asked for you.”

“Maker karking damn it…” You spun around quickly to grab your bag, “Maybe lead with that next time.”

You had literally watched the man bust his knuckles open, dislocate a wrist, and just keep throwing punches. If Cody was requesting a medic there was no way this was going to go well.

-*-*-*-

Your relationship with Cody was complex to say the least. Honestly, he’d barely paid you any mind in the very beginning… another nat-born medic that had been brought in because there was too much work for the clone medics to keep up with. But after a few weeks of you seeming to always be there every time he turned around, the Marshal Commander couldn’t help but notice the way you treated his brothers. Like actual people and that they were deserving of your real effort, care, and attention.

And there was also the fact that you had to be the single most persistent nat-born he’d ever had to work with… Usually, Cody avoided the medics when and wherever he could, leaving the time and supplies open for other troopers he considered more in need than himself.

You however were stubbornly opposed to his inexplicable need to ‘just walk it off’, going so far as to literally chase him down once when Waxer had ‘accidentally’ mentioned to you that he’d taken a rather hard kick to the ribs during the previous skirmish.

Granted, his ribs had been bruised, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.

You weren’t hearing any of it though, and Cody had had to sit there petulantly while you’d tended to him.

That had been where the ice had started to crack, and eventually after much persistence and pursuit on your part, Cody had started coming to you, and exclusively you, whenever he was more than just a little bumped and bruised. And, you at least liked to think that, a sort of friendship had sparked up between the two of you….

What little free time he had, he was more than content to spend with you if the situation allowed, you’d sat in on more than a few meal time meetings with him, and you were always his first consult when it came to the best solutions for setting up the field medical stations.

The only other person you’d seen him be that casual and informal with was the General in their down time, so you’d like to think that meant you were in some kind of favor.

Which is what leads you here now, busting into the command tent with a barely contained panic, “I’m here! What happened?”

Cody was leaning against the large table in the middle with different maps and other planning materials strewn across it. One arm was hanging limply at his side, the other one holding it close against him to seemingly keep it from moving or getting jostled around.

“I can’t-” Cody grunted, trying to roll his shoulder again, “I can’t get it back in…”

“All right, stop - Stop moving it,” You shook your head crossing to him and quickly putting your hand on the uninjured arm, “Let me look.”

You started gently removing his armor to get a better look at the damage underneath. The hiss through your teeth was involuntary as soon as you got the spaulding off, just from the jut of his shoulder you could tell the joint was fully dislocated.

“Ok… good news is we can fix it…” You said looking up at him.

“The bad news is, it’s gonna hurt like hell.” He finished and you nodded sheepishly, “Alright… Let’s get it over with…”

The process wasn’t complicated, making Cody lay back across the table with his shoulder at the edge and hold your bag while you pushed the arm back out straight to get the bone to drop back into the joint. The loud crack made you wince, and completely justified the long, low string of curses Cody let out as he reflexively dropped your bag.

“Easy… Easy,” You helped him set up, making sure he moved somewhat gingerly until you could get a look at the rest of him, “Just relax a minute.”

“I’m alright,” Cody shook his head, trying to wave you off as he got back on his feet, “I need to get back out there.”

“Cody!” You snapped, grabbing him by the elbow of his good arm.

Whatever scolding you were about to give the commander was cut off by a loud explosion that rocked the ground beneath your feet. Cody moved quickly to grab you by the forearm, half dragging you out of the tent to see what was going on.

The second explosion went off far too close to the right of you and Cody barely had time to pull you into him before the two of you were sent flying through a cloud of dust and debris.

You registered something sharp hitting you in the back before everything faded away…

-*-*-*-

“C’mon cyare, you have to wake up for me…”

You groan lowly, trying to turn your head away from the incessant tapping on your cheek, blinking slowly as things around you came back into focus. The first thing to register was the ringing in your ears, followed quickly by the pain in your head and back.

“There you go kar’ta, easy.” Cody helped you sit up as gently as he could, shifting around behind you so you could sit propped up against him, “I tried to cover you, but you still took a hard hit to the head. Don’t try to move too fast just yet.”

You gave a weak laugh and leaned your head back against his shoulder, “Well, it’s nice to know you’ve been paying attention, even if you don’t actually listen to anything I tell you.”

You could feel the chuckle vibrate through his chest even if the trooper behind you was trying to hide it, “I always listen to you, mesh’la.”

To say you were a little stunned by his free use of endearments would be an understatement; other troopers, especially the new and shiny ones, through them around like water - a sweet, if a little awkward attempt to flirt with one of the first if not only females they’d had close contact with in their lives - but not Cody. He almost exclusively addressed you as ‘ma’am’ or your surname.

Either way it was still your turn to chuckle, turning your head to look up at him over your shoulder, “Yeah? You got a funny way of showing it, Kote.”

Another odd occurrence: Cody smiled, again laughing under his breath, as he looked away from you. If you didn’t know any better, and there was more light wherever the two of you were temporarily hidden, you would have sworn he was blushing.

“Just because I don’t always have the luxury of following your orders, doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention.”

Another explosion and the sound of blaster fire cut through whatever clandestine moment the two of you were having, Cody’s head immediately snapping back to the small cave entrance you assumed you’d fallen through, “We need to move.”

You nodded, pushing yourself back up to your feet, still a little unsteady, but there was no spinning feeling or nausea, so you could power through it.

“You stay right beside me, cyar’ika,” Cody said drawing his own blaster as he chanced peeking out of the cave, “Right on my hip, I’ll get you back behind the line.”

You nodded, as he slipped his helmet back on, “Right behind you Commander.”

Reaching back for your hand, Cody pulled you up beside him as close as he could get you, and just as you thought he was about to step out into the fray he stopped and turned back to you. Squeezing your hand, you could just tell Cody was staring down at you intently behind his helmet

“Stay with me, ner kar’ta,” Your eyes fell shut on their own accord as Cody leaned in to press the forehead of his helmet against yours, “I will keep you safe.”

In that moment, you had never believed anything more.

#star wars #clone wars #commander cody #commander cody x reader #commander cody x medic!reader #reader insert #LDE23 #clone fic gift exchange

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one-of-tankhuns-neurons · 26 days

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I cannot let this show go without writing my goodbyes... Deep Night Final EP

Deep night was everything and more. It was a show that was made with insane love, thought and care and it fucking shows. That loves shines through the screen and it is GUARANTEED to warm your cold dead heart. Cheewin has always made his shows a bit more grounded, a bit more queer, a bit more real. Since YYY you can just tell there's someone in the crew that understands queer experience and this was it again. The good parts, the sad parts, the struggle without exploting it for pity. It showcased confusion and acceptance and love and love and love. So many different kinds of love.

Wela and Khemtid

These two developed so beautifully, from people who misunderstood eachother, to people who felt attracted to each other but still didn't get it, to people who listened, apologized, leaned on, supported, loved, cared for eachother. Khemtid's enchantment with wela blossomed after they fought about Wela's job, he realized that acceptance was the better route to take and he just worked hard to get it right, to make up for it, to help. Wela at the same time tried so hard as well to understand Khem's feelings, making it easier for them to reach the middle ground. He worked so hard with Khem to keep the club afloat, he was never mean to his coworkers, he carried the whole world on his back and still stood proud. They went from strangers to these two adorable dorks who hold hands and smile while kissing. I'm sorry but Khemtid smiling like he just won the world while giving his injured bboyfriend a handjob at the back of the club made my heart burn. That's complicity and partnership and mischief and intimacy. They stand on equal ground and that's so meaningful to me.

Then we have these three dorks

The true rivals to lovers. I talked about this in my previous Deep Night post but it was brilliant. Their storyline developed so subtly and naturally I cried last week. The way Japan and Ken's love bloomed out of love for Seiji... like it's not that they're just dating Seiji, they're dating eachother and that comes from a trust that developed from and understanding, that grew from care into desire. Last week's episode showing Japan as the center of his fantasy showed that, Japan is also attracted to Ken, and Ken's heart has melted for Japan as well, unknowingly. The talk they had was so necessary, so respectful and rooted on concern and an actual attempt to build something that left no one out. Seriously the way they're sitting in the end, with Ken brushing Japans hand, the way Japan held Ken's hand and brought him into the hug to welcome him, to shelter him. I love that it wasn't fetishized. (Because we've tackeled threesomes before in other shows but not romantic love) I love them, they love each other, this is healing.

Freya and Meiji

They are EVERYTHING. Honestly the role of women, specifically queer women in queer spaces has been overlooked for way too long. They take on the role of caring, protecting and supporting the whole club, the boys themselves and themselves. The fact that Freya's character was divorced and was constantly under attack from her ex-husbands family now existing with a same-sex partner was so complex yet beautifuly handled. Meiji was not just some random chic they threw in to gay it up, she was important to Freya, she helped at the club, she wasn't much around but when she was on screen she was Freya's rock. The talk on age... bro that shook me to the bone. Media is so focused on youth their questioning was so valid and so painful to watch... but it healed. Fuck I'm crying watching this. Everyone deserves to be loved by THEMSELVES.

Khem and Freya

gET TF OUT I WANT TO BE ALONE this mother-son relationship was amazing. Both characters grew so much out of love for each other I want to swallow a shotgun. The was it was alway Freya trying to gain Khemtids approval was so heartbreaking, and watching Khemtid LEARN to accept and love his mom, accept and love the club, accept and love the role they play... fuck. FUCK FUCK FUCK

Also we cannot forget Dai

I don't even have words to explain how great this character was. Outfits on point, personality strong and unmoving, loud and authentic and accepted and part of everything and capable and necessary and just EVERYTHING. And the fact that Dai was perceived as a potential love interest for Freya without it being a joke or mockery was gold. Apart from that, all of these characters and storylines are interwoven in a net of complexity, social norms, real struggles but also real coping mechanisms. I also want to LOUDLY RECOGNIZE the work put into it, as they all worked hard to actually get on stage and perform acrobatics like their characters. There was just so much attention to detail and to making things right I want to cry just thinking about it. Please please please if you havent... Watch it. It may not be revolutionary but it's perfect to me. Deep night is a very queer show that decided to open a lot of wounds just to let them heal properly. THANK YOU DEEP NIGHT. I expected nothing from you and you're now part of me.

#deep night final ep #deep night the series #nah but i cried like 18 times writing this #and theres so much stuff I didn't mention #the whole discourse on recognizing this line of work #i love them #khemwela #kenseijipan #bl drama #deep night bl #thai bl #im crying again #wela and his moooooom #freyameiji #ql #thai ql #queer

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moonstruck-poet · 6 months

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Rewrite The Stars

Pairing - Kaz Brekker x reader

Summary - The story of how you two manage to unravel the complexities that concern a relationship based on the song 'Rewrite The Stars'

Hope you'll enjoy it!!!

You know I want you, it's not a secret I try to hide. You know you want me, so don't keep saying our hands are tied.

Kaz Brekker, you muttered under your breath and kicked a small stone with as much strength as you could muster, ignoring the sharp pain that followed.

He really was impossible that one. Tested your patience to such a level that you were almost considering giving up.

Almost.

But you weren't known as the never giving up person for nothing. You would try to make him see sense.

You halted in your path towards the Crow Club to analyse your thoughts which were a hundred percent occupied by that young boy whom everyone called Dirtyhands.

He had you completely charmed, as could be observed since he was the one running rent free through your mind at all times when you weren't risking your life for the same man.

So taking a deep breath and resting your hand on your holster, you entered your home with a poker face and scanned everything to see that all was going on smoothly.

"All good here?" You questioned Rotty and downed a shot of whiskey, scrunching your nose at the bitter after taste.

"Everything under control ma'am, got a lotta good pigeons," he grinned and your lips twitched sideways.

"What's up, Jes?" You asked the gunslinger who was sitting on one of the stools near the bar, twirling his pistol in his hand.

"Nothing, I'm bored. Need some action," he groaned and stretched upwards.

"Of course you do," you laughed softly. "Where are the others?"

"Off doing saints know what".

"Kaz still ain't budging?" He asked suddenly, his tone a little gentler.

"No," you said shortly and clenched your jaw. Suddenly not wanting to thing about him.

Jesper sighed loudly, "He is one of the most idiotic person I know. He doesn't even seem to realise he's missing out on the best thing that's happened to him".

You smiled at that, it was a small one but nevertheless a smile after all.

"If I wasn't so unbelievably enamoured by messy haired guys who are quite a shot at chemistry, I would've gone for you honestly".

"I'm flattered, Fahey".

"But seriously tho, love. What's his reason for denying you, huh?"

"Kaz thinks we're not good together," you answered abruptly.

"Not good together my ass," he rolled his eyes in utter annoyance. "You deserve so much better than him. I don't understand how you even managed to fall for him".

"Falling for him wasn't falling at all, Jes. It was like walking into a house and just knowing that you're home," you whispered.

And there he was, the hindrance to your concentration, the object of your continuous staring, Kaz Brekker.

He took off his hat, revealing his rather well defined featured that seemed to be sculpted with a help of a knife.

Your eyes took his figure in. Those all black clothes with that unmistakable cane was his entire persona that he had built for himself.

Your gaze softened at the sight of his messed up hair, the few strands that had fallen on his pale forehead making your heart skip a tiny beat.

"You really love him don't you?" You snapped from your staring at Jesper's question."I guess I do," you answered, eyes following him as he walked towards you with what you assumed to be another one of those tasks that he always gave you, just because of the amount of trust he had.

===============================

You claim it's not in the cards and fate is pulling you miles away and out of a reach from me. But you're hearing my heart so who can stop me if I decide, it's on my destiny?

"Fucking hell this idiot of a man," you groaned and ran frantically towards the mount of wounded people.

You had indeed raided one of the most well protected safe of the most dangerous person and there were bound to be major consequences.

Your heart dropped after seeing Wylan lying near a building wreckage and you sprinted despite the throbbing pain in your calf and ignoring the blood flowing down one side of your head and torso.

"Hey," you whispered, getting down to your knees and shaking the boy. "Wylan, come on. I need you, come on wake up," phrases fell from your lips absently.

And he did wake up and you felt as though your feet were back again on solid ground. He woke up, immediately clutching his head and looked around, eyes squinting. "Where are the others?" he said hoarsely.

"Everybody is fine, everyone except for Kaz and we're all looking for him," you murmured, the relief fading away for panic to seize control of your weak heart again.

He immediately noticed your tensed posture and really looked at you, succeeding in reading your internal turmoil.

"Up you get," he suddenly said in an authoritative voice. "We're gonna go and find Kaz right now," he got up and held out his arm for you to grasp.

You simply stared before shaking yourself off and following his lead, glad to have someone to listen to instead of following your stupid thoughts all alone.

The fear in both you and Wylan seemed to increase tenfold after witnessing gruesome scenes all around you. But you both swallowed it harshly and kept a determined spirit, him more than you actually.

Because naturally your heart always seemed to lose its stone cold interior upon the mention of a specific someone.

"Saints," Wylan suddenly came to an abrupt halt and his eyes widened as he pointed to the shed of a shop that was almost on the verge on collapsing entirely. And underneath all of that rubble was Kaz.

"Oh god," was all that escaped your lips and you didn't think before running towards him, not even noticing a large chunk of the ceiling falling om your shoulder.

"Kaz," you said, leaning down in front of him. Your throat burned at his terrible state. His hair completely dishevelled, numerous cuts and blood stains littering his body, eyes half closed as he gazed ahead endlessly.

"Kaz!" You said again and Wylan softly patted his shoulder, accidentally touching his bare skin where the shirt was torn and in the process jolting awake the unconscious boy.

"Good gracious," you prayed and stepped back after seeing the anxiety on his face. "Kaz you have to let me, or you're going to die you bastard," you frowned but waited and turned towards Wylan, "Will you go and tell the others that we've found him? They'll be there at our decided headquarters, just inform them quickly please and get Nina as soon as you can," you instructed and he set off instantly.

"I'm sorry," you whispered and clenched your jaw hard before moving closer and putting one hand behind his shoulders, your heart shattering a little at his sharp intake of breath. "I'm so sorry but I have to do this," you said with a rather broken voice and picked him up.

Halfway through the route he let out a loud groan and you almost dropped him but then steadied yourself and halted.

"What's wrong, Kaz?"

His eyes were scrunched up in pain and it was then that you noticed the bullet which was wedged on the side of his chest and you froze at the sight.

"No no no," your muscles seemed rooted to the spot and the only thought runnung through your mind was that he was going to die. Kaz Brekker was going to die.

"Shit," you muttered and hastened your pace, struggling slightly under the weight of his rather heavy body but you did manage to reach the secret meeting place just in time.

"NINA!" You yelled and placed him on the nearest couch. "NINA!"

She was out in a second, all others following close behind and breathing in sharply at the sight of their leader beaten up so badly.

"Th- There's a bullet through his s- side," you said, panting as suddenly there was a lack of oxygen in the air. "There's a bullet Nina! Quick come on you gotta get it out. You have t- to get it out, quick!"

"Wylan," Nina gestured with her eyes and he understood, gently taking you by the shoulders and pulling you away.

"No! What're you doing?! Wylan stop it!"

"He's going to be okay, let me clean up your wounds too".

"I'm fine! But he's not! He needs me okay? I- I can't leave him lying there like that! I can't- I can't-" you broke off and gulped. Your eyes tearing up as you let yourself be pulled away from him.

But tell me, how is one supposed to survive when their lifeline itself is im danger?

You were sitting in one of the rooms all alone, looking out of the window absentmindedly. Wylan had graciously cleaned and bandaged all your injuries amd you didn't even have the heart to say a simple thanks to him.

Inej had dropped by a few minutes ago with a small plate of food and you hadn't bothered to appreciate her with a small nod.

All that rang through your mind was Nina's conversation with Matthias that you had accidentally overheard.

"There were not one but two bullets, Matthias. And they were the poisonous kind, the ones that work on paralysing and slowly killing the body of the victim. He's taken quite a hit that one".

He's taken quite a hit that one...

A lump welled up in your throat as you mulled over every incident when you were on the brink of losing him forever.

Once when you two were fourteen, once when you were sixteen and now at the very tender age of seventeen, Kaz was slipping through your grasp again.

Fate was constantly pulling you apart, making you go as far as possible from each other but it had been enough now, you simply couldn't handle it.

You swallowed down the burning sensation and went quietly towards the room where Kaz was fighting for his life. Your breath got caught upon seeing his rather peaceful face. No furrowed eyebrows, not a crease on his forehead, he seemed very much at ease.

You took a seat next to him, tears on the verge of falling but you blinked then away stubbornly. You weren't one to cry that easily, but control seemed to jump out of the window whenever he was involved.

"Kaz," you whispered as though he would open his eyes that very second and you would be met with dark brown irises that you so loved.

"Here we are again huh," you murmured and heaved a deep sigh. "Its been what 3 times now that we were in this same scenario?"

You kept on making small talks, it beimg useless towards him but actually helping you to get over your emotions.

"You don't understand the way my heart breaks when you get hurt this badly, Brekker," you said softly. "I've tried to tell you so many times but you're one stubborn asshole aren't you?"

You exhaled and your eyes gazed at his beautiful features, from his sharp eyebrows, to long eyelashes and then to his perfect lips.

"You have to wake up, Kaz. You will," you said firmly. "I don't think I can function properly without you," you looked down at your hands.

"Get well soon, love," you whispered the words and despite being unconscious, rhey ringed in Kaz's ears. Love, you had called him. He felt something brush against his forehead, pushing away strands of hair and tickling him a little.

But then the warm feeling was gone and once again he was alone, cold, and empty.

===============================

What if we rewrite the stars? Say you were made to be mine. Nothing could keep us apart, you'll be the one I was meant to find. It's up to you, and it's up to me, no one could say what we get to be. So why don't we rewrite the stars? And maybe the world could be ours, tonight.

"Saints this is all so ridiculous," Jesper muttered and frowned deeply at the comedic costume that he was supposed to wear. "Couldn't you have gotten something better?"

"You either have the choice to wear it or run around naked, I don't care. All I want is a proper distraction. The choice is yours," Kaz said easily and went back to scrutinising the map placed on the table.

Jesper rolled his eyes but wore the clothes anyways and you snorted making him give you a sharp glare.

"I'll shoot you, I swear," he threatened weakly when you fully cackled. "It's not fair that you get to dress up like a literal princess when I'm here looking equivalent to a clown!"

"I'm afraid you won't make a very pretty princess Jes," Inej smiled as she sharpened her knives with without even looking at them.

"Oh I don't, Inej. He might make a wonderful, lovely girl," Nina piped in and you laughed.

"Enough chatting please," Kaz interrupted your lighthearted teasing making the Heartrender scowl.

"You always have to interrupt the best moments between us don't you?" She glared but the man didn't as much give a shit.

"Wylan you're ready with your explosives? Confident they'll go off exactly when we want them to?" He asked and received a confirming nod.

"We'll leave in about five minutes exactly," he checked his watch and scanned all of the faces staring at his intently. "Off you go then. I want absolutely no detours from anyone, I'm talking especially to you, Jesper," he narrowed his stare to the Zemeni who merely shrugged and grinned.

"Goodluck everybody," he said and they all left for their respective work. "Let's go," he said to you and you got up, instantly feeling uncomfortable in the rather beautiful dress and the heels.

This was new and uncharted territory, something you had never even worn before in your entire life. But you liked it. It didn't match your usual attire at all, but a change at times was welcomed on your part.

You two were invited, or rather you had invited yourselves to the ball that was supposed to take place. It was the perfect opportunity to infiltrate and steal.

"Remember all we have to do is stay for the entire program, we cannot afford any mishaps to happen. No tiny slipups at all or the entire plan goes down the drains," Kaz said as you slowly walked to the venue.

"I know Kaz," you sighed at his nagging. "You can trust me, you know?"

"I know," he said lowly and looked straight up, refusing to make eye contact.

Your eyes flitted to look at his side profile. It was sharp, the streetlights highlighting his carved features and your heart started running at an unbelievable speed.

He had for once ditched his long coat and had instead worn an all black suit with a black tie. And saints did he look amazing. Kaz Brekker seemed to have no idea at just how unsettled and in love you were.

Just as you were about to enter the grand hall, he stopped you and offered his arm. He was also not wearing his gloves, wanting to stay off suspicion as much as possible.

"You sure? We don't have to do this," you said softly but he insisted and you hesitatingly wrapped your fingers around his elbow.

Kaz didn't as such flinch from your touch, which just proved that he did trust you a lot.

"Ah there you are! Mr and Mrs Helvar am I right?" An elderly man beamed at you two and Kaz instantly transformed into a complete stranger in mere seconds.

"Absolutely!" He smiled widely, his lips stretching in an unfamiliar way and you almost cringed at how fake it looked, but that was only because you knew him.

"Alright alright that's enough," you whispered after the host went away to greet someone else. "Please bring back the Kaz I know".

He rolled his eyes and returned to his cool demeanour. You were lounging near the bar, sipping drinks to pass time while also maintaining a strict checking of the area.

"How much longer do we have to stay?" You asked after about an hour.

"The party's only just began. It'll take time I think," he answered and looked around.

"These heels are killing me," you groaned. "I need my shoes back".

He didn't say anything but his jaw had clenched, as it always did when he felt a little helpless and unsure. He glanced at your feet before returning his gaze back to the ballroom.

"Saints he's here again," you said suddenly and he turned to see the same man walking towards you two once again.

"You've been sitting for quite a time now! Come on then let's get you on your feet. Don't keep such a beautiful lady waiting, Mr Helvar," he grinned cheekily, eyes clearly trailing down your body.

"I'll make sure," Kaz answered rather tightly, stepping in between his line of sight and blocking you from his filthy eyes. He looked at you and held out his hand, you stopped for a tiny second before placing your bare palm into his cold one.

He inhaled sharply but at the same time gently pulled you towards the dancefloor, keeping his eyes on the host who seemed to be watching your every move.

"He's just wrote himself a death wish," your fake husband grumbled in annoyance which soon turned into a forced smile after waving at someone.

"Loosen up now, we have to dance," you said and were surprised immensely when his fingers intertwined with yours and his other palm was slowly making its way to be placed on your waist.

He glanced in your eyes and all you offered was a gorgeous smile. That seemed to be all that was required and the tips of his fingers brushed your waist before halting there.

Your free hand was on his shoulder and you two swayed, your bodies closer than ever before. And you thought to youself, you could definitely get used to this.

Not the elegant gown or the grand party, not at all. But these small but significant moments of intimacy with him.

"This is nice," your small whisper broke the silence as you danced, engaged in your own little rhythm. Too occupied with each other to even pay the slightest attention elsewhere.

"It is," he nodded and this time made eye contact without hesitation. The force was so strong and powerful that you couldn't feel anything except for the rapid thumping of your heart.

Everybody else seemed to fade as you two danced the moment away, completely taken by each other as you swayed. And you thought, it wasn't so bad was it.

And Kaz gave you a look which seemed to answer your question, it was as if he had clearly read your mind.

It's not so bad, his eyes reflected and you couldn't stop the small smile which soon fell off after another question had plagued your mind.

'Then why? Why can't we give this a shot? Give us a shot?'

"It's always up to us you know," you murmured suddenly, not bothering to elaborate because you knew he understood it well enough.

"Nobody has a damn say in what the hell we do with our lives. It's always up to you and me," you repeated and smiled tightly.

While he just stared at your face, taking notice of the way your heart was literally shattering in front of him. And all he wanted was to tell you that he loved you too, had been loving you since ages.

But you already knew that, you weren't oblivious for saint's sake. You knew he had fallen as hard for you as you had for him. His problem was that he refused to accept it, for god knows what reason.

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Ahem ahem... do we need a part 2?

Preferably from Mr Brekker's pov? 👀

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