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unbidden-yidden · 2 months

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This is extremely long and apparently subject to change, which is part of why I'm copy-pasting this version below. I don't agree with significant parts of it (in particular, I take umbrage with some of the delegitimizing language she uses for the Jewish/Israeli narrative and history that she doesn't use with the Palestinian narrative and history), however, I think it's a really really important read, because she addresses a lot of the real problems with the current discourse and real-world impacts that has.

I think this paragraph in particular was something I needed to read:

Arguing with the far left is a waste of time. They have no self-awareness, they are delusional, and they will never stop. They are as fanatical as any of the mob. The only way to make them stop talking is to actually sort this problem once and for all and work for the freedom and dignity of all. And when all is said and done, the ones that will keep complaining will finally be exposed for what they truly are.

She also winds up positing the A Land For All solution as the most likely to succeed, which I do agree is probably correct, for the main reason she argues, which is that it is the option that gives the most people the greatest amount of what they want, the basics of what everyone needs, and hews most closely with answering the competing narratives that exist.

There is No Magic Peace Fairy. Version 2

For anyone who might have read the previous version of this piece of writing, this is quite different from the original. Its spirit and essence are the same, but much has been added. It is very long, but it seeks to understand some extremely complicated and difficult things.

I should have realised when I first wrote it, and then sought to follow its instruction — to listen and learn from a wide spectrum of other people — that it was only ever going to be a working and evolving piece of work. This is version 2. There may yet be a version 3, 4 or 5.

Why did I even write it? Initially — truthfully, and honestly — it has been for myself. It started as catharsis, and it has become a compulsion — the way to “make it make sense.” The way to cope with horrifying scenes across the television and social media, witnessed day after day, and feeling utterly powerless to stop it.

It comes from years of witnessing, and sometimes partaking in long and sometimes very bitter family arguments. Arguments that became spectator sport for friends who would come over especially because they knew they would happen. Arguments that, in retrospect were not actually remotely funny for those of us living through that constant emotional turmoil, nor considering the subject matter. It has been the way to work through those conflicted feelings, and some things that were never really reconciled.

So, yes, it started for myself. But now I have written it, I do want people to read it. I think it may help others to work through some of the same things. And then it would have been worthwhile, especially if it may help some people to find a way to salvage lost friendships and lost relationships from the last few months, because it seems there is a giant rift forming in our communities in Britain.

This has nothing to do with ‘both sidsing’ anything, and it has everything to do with problem-solving. As far as I am concerned, in all of life, you cannot solve a problem that you do not understand. And I really want to understand it. So, I look at both narratives that the Palestinians and Israelis know as the history of their peoples, and think about the lives of individual Palestinians and Israelis, and then I wonder, how could this ever actually be fixed? Is there really any hope for the future?

It is not meant to justify or apologise for anything anyone has done.

I am sure this writing will includes things that almost everybody will take issue with, but it is my hope that by doing my very best to do justice to our collective stories that people can read without anger what it is that I have to say — and please do read to the very the end if you are intending to pass judgement on what that is.

Most of all, I think this will interest people in the diaspora with family, friends, and personal links and connections to the region — Israel or the Occupied Palestinian territories — who wish nothing more than to see their friends and family living in freedom, with dignity and security.

If you have read version 1, the stories of the 15-year-olds have only minor additions, but the narratives and the rest of the article have changed a lot. If you get to a bit that sounds very familiar, skip a bit further down — it is very long to read it twice.

~~~~~

What is the most important narrative of the Palestinian people?

(You do not have to agree with this — I am just telling it how it is told).

Something like –

“The defining event of our history is the Nakba (Catastrophe)

Before 1948, we used to live in Palestine. We loved Palestine. We lived there for centuries. We lived peacefully. We had a deep spiritual and emotional connection to the land. Our ancestors are buried there. Religious sites — Christian, Muslim, Jewish — that had great meaning to all of us were there. It was a rich tapestry of different religions and cultures containing a beautiful and sacred shared heritage.

We had wonderful villages and beloved homes that we built with our own hands. We had gardens with trees and plants that our grandparents planted. We had treasured possessions. We had friends and families and good lives. We could go and come as we pleased.

We had neighbours of all faiths, including Jewish neighbours. We lived contendly together. Some of them had been there for centuries just like us and we liked them, we lived there together happily and in peace.

In the 1900s, more and more started to come. They were fleeing persecution. We gave them refuge. We had no problem with them coming. They were being hounded in Europe and they needed somewhere else to go. Where better for them to be but here in Palestine, where the history of their people was born? And many of them were respectful and we had good relationships with them. We liked them.

But some of them wanted a country. Some of them fought with us, and some of them attacked us, and terrorised us. How could they have had a country in our land? We had been there for generations, and what would have become of us if we had agreed to it? Where would they have stopped? The problem was never them. It was them trying to make a country. And if they hadn’t tried to make a country, everything would have been okay. We could have had a country all of us together. What a beautiful country it could have been. But the country they wanted did not include us.

Some of them were clear they would have kept going until they got more and more of our land, and there is no question they would always have driven us away. Some of their leaders where unashamed and brazen in the way they looked down on us, in their statements that dehumanised us, in their disdain for us, in their colonial intent. They under-estimated us.

The Nakba (catastrophe) was a disaster for our people. In 1948, there was a war. During that war, the Israelis attacked us, killed us, stole our property and ethnically cleansed us from our land in order to create their Jewish state. We left in fear of our lives. We were not the ones that started that fighting. We wanted nothing to do with it. That is why we left.

We didn’t think we would be gone for long, surely once the fighting had subsided we would be back. But then days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into years.

Then it finally sunk in — they weren’t going to let us back. And we realised we were divided and dispossessed. That nightmare was only the beginning for us. They have never, ever allowed us back for 75 years. We lost everything. Our human rights are denied to us. More and more of our land is taken every day. We are not free. Some of us have no freedom at all and no rights.

We want to stop being ethnically cleansed. We want to go home, to go back, to see our homeland, our ancient sites, to be back where we belong, where we have always belonged. We want our dignity, and we want our freedom."

~~~~~

You do not have to agree with the way this story is told, but it has, in some form, been passed down through generations and generations of Palestinians.

~~~~~

What is life like for a 15-year-old Palestinian who lives in the West Bank?

You are told this story of your people from the day you were born. You live under a military occupation. More and more violent religious settlers move into the lands around you. They build new homes and can do whatever they want. They come and go as they please, in and out of Israel. You are not allowed to go anywhere except the West Bank. Their soldiers are always there with guns. They are in charge.

The settlers terrorise you all the time. They stop people farming their land and so you struggle to survive. A few weeks ago, a settler shot one of your friends. They never get punished and they never go to prison. But recently your best friend went to prison for throwing rocks at the soldiers. You really miss him.

Your grandparents left Palestine in 1948 with four children, and very few possessions. Your grandmother thought she would be back in a few days or weeks. Your grandmother’s sister ended up in Gaza and they never saw one another other again. She died recently. You have a cousin who is the same age as you. You know you could have been close if only you had even met.

You see no future the way things are now. There is no hope. You want a different life. You want the things your grandparents had. You don’t want to be constantly afraid of being attacked. You dream of leaving. You dream of the day you go back to Palestine where the house you should have had is, even just to see it, to be truly home, to live the life that is rightfully yours.

What do you do? You resist. In the only way that you can, with the only things that you have. You throw rocks at the soldiers. One day, you get caught, and you get put in a prison. You are tried by a military court, and you stay in prison for a really long time. In prison, people do appalling things to you. Finally, they let you out. What do you do?

~~~~~

What was life like for a 15 year old living in Gaza?

You are also told the Palestinian story from the day you were born. There are good things about your life. You go to school, have friends, and family who you love, you can go out and do things. There are hospitals, and you can get a lot of things that you need. You love Gaza. But you can’t leave Gaza. You can’t go anywhere else in the land or the world except Gaza.

Your life is still hard. Your family struggle for money and to survive, to get the things that you all need. There are a lot of things that would make your life better and easier, but you can’t get them in Gaza. You know that if you lived in Israel, you could get whatever you wanted and needed. You have family in the West Bank you have never met, but you know about their struggles. You have a cousin the same age, who is enduring unimaginable hardships.

The people in charge of Gaza are not good leaders. They can be dangerous and violent if you oppose them. A lot of people in Gaza don’t like them, although some people support them. Your own parents really can’t stand them. These people have been in charge of Gaza since before you were even born. You have learned that there was a civil war in Gaza before that and hundreds of people were killed or wounded. There has never been an election since.

You know they fire rockets into Israel because they want to dismantle it. You want a different life, but it’s never really worked or got anywhere. It seems futile. And you know that every few years, the bombs will come. Everyone you know has lost someone or something from the Israeli bombs. You don’t remember that much about the last time, but you do remember being really terrified, and you remember that your Dad cried when his brother was killed.

Then one day you hear news. News that Israel has been attacked by Gaza. Israelis have been killed, and some are even being brought into Gaza. Your heart sinks. You have a funny feeling in your stomach. You know what is coming.

~~~~~

To these two children, these cousins, Zionism can and only ever will mean catastrophic dispossession, oppression, and Jewish supremacy. The only Jews or Israelis they have encountered have either bombed them or terrorised them. Israel is a colonial entity. It never had a right to exist. Israelis are settlers. All they ever do is steal land. How could you expect them to see it any other way? There can never be any nuance, or any grey area about it. It could never have any legitimacy in their eyes. How could you expect or ask them to empathise with Israelis when you consider what they have lived and are living through?

For them, anyone who describes themselves as a Zionist in any form, even a liberal Zionist, could only ever be perceived as somebody that cannot be reasoned with, is trying to justify and support the unjustifiable, and is nothing but a settler and a tool of their oppression.

~~~~~

What is the dominant narrative of Jewish/Israeli people?

(You do not have to agree with it — I am just telling it how it is told).

It may be slightly different for secular Israelis and Diaspora Jews, but it goes something along these lines:

“We are the people of Israel. This is where our religion and our language were born, where we built temples and our ancestors are buried. We have and always have been surrounded by enemies on all sides. For millennia, we have been scattered throughout the world. We were driven from Israel and we went to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Throughout history people have always tried to kill the Jewish people. They didn’t like us being Jewish. There were always pogroms and mass killings. In some places people would hide and pray together in secret. It is our duty to keep the Jewish religion alive in their honour.

In Europe the pogroms got worse and worse. A few of us left Europe for a better life in Palestine. But most of us stayed in Europe. And most of us died in Europe. Six million of us. They did it because they said we were responsible for everything bad that had ever happened in the world.

Most of our so-called friends and neighbours said nothing as we were terrorised and led away. They carefully planned and counted how they could get rid of each and every one of us. They tried to annihilate us completely from the face of the earth. But as a people we lived on.

Jewish people had been coming to Palestine from Europe for years before 1948 fleeing the persecution. We came and we bought land fairly and built our lives there. We were happy. We wanted to all be together again, in a place that had meaning to us, where we would be safe. We knew we needed freedom and independence, so that this time it would never, ever happen again.

People say that we never needed a country, but what do they know? Jewish history has taught us things that they can never possibly understand. Jewish history has taught us that the world will always betray us, and when that day comes, our friends and neighbours will walk on by. We are a minority, so we must stick together, protect one another, keep one another safe. We knew we needed freedom and independence, so that this time we would have a safeplace where we can go and live when the world finally turns us on again, as it always does.

And In 1947, the UN agreed we could finally have a state of our own. We were so proud and overjoyed. What an achievement for us after everything we had been through.

We never wanted to fight with the people already living in Palestine. Yes, before 1948, some of us lived together peacefully. But it wasn’t a Utopia. Some of the people welcomed us and provided us with a safe place to live. We had good relationships with them.

But some of the people didn’t want us there, we were outsiders and they never liked us. Some people went to the British to get them to stop us from coming to Palestine. And even before 1948, there was a lot of fighting between us, and some of us were massacred even in Palestine.

But we could have found a way to live together peacefully, in two states, and they could have lived in our state just as we could have lived in theirs, just so long as we had a State. That is all we ever wanted. We could have divided and shared the land.

But they could never let us have it. Never. And when the British finally left, we saw our opportunity, we declared our state. We had no intention of taking anything from anyone. We just wanted a state. And then every single one of our neighbours, all the countries around us invaded us, from every corner of the land. Enemies on all sides. They surrounded us and we found we were alone, again, just as we always have been.

But this time we fought back. We fought for our freedom and independence and dignity, and our right to live and exist and not just accept to be killed, and mainly, for most of us, because we actually had nowhere else to go. It was a war, yes, we took land yes, but we didn’t start that war. It was existential, because how else exactly do you expect we could have guaranteed our security and safety surrounded by neighbours who were baying for our blood? What would you have done?

Then after 1948 the Middle East erupted. The Jews in the Middle East had always experienced persecution. But this was worse than ever. It was intolerable. They blamed those Jews for Israel. Hundreds of thousands of us were ethnically cleansed out of homes we had lived in for centuries, from Ancient communities all across the continent, and we left to build new lives in Israel. Over half of Israelis today are descended from those Middle Eastern Jews.

Now we live together in Israel. We stick togehter and we fight together. We have fought war after war after war. They have tried to kill us from all sides, time after time. But each time, we fight back harder, and we win. We have and always will be surrounded by enemies, but we will always fight back.”

~~~~~

You might not agree with a single word of this story. But this story, in some form or another has been passed down through generations and generations of millions of Jewish and Israeli people.

~~~~~

Now imagine the life of this 15-year-old born and living in Israel

You have been taught this story since the day you were born.

You live in a Kibbutz. You have friends. You like the outdoors and sports. You get good grades in school.

Your grandparents live nearby. Your Grandad came from Yemen as a refugee, as a child. He told you that his family were being attacked and threatened after the 1948 war, so they left their possessions and homes behind in Yemen, and they came to Israel instead.

Mostly you are happy. You are so excited you have a new boyfriend or girlfriend who you really like, but your parents don’t know yet.

But you really hate the rockets. You have never known any life without rockets. You know that some of the rockets get intercepted, but they still get through all the time.

There are bomb shelters everywhere. At school, in the playgrounds, in the bus-shelters, and at home. The sirens can go off at any time and then you have to run to the shelter. Even if you are busy doing your homework, or asleep, or on the toilet. The noise of the sirens never stops making you jump. You are used to it, but you still get scared and you hate it, and the sounds of the rockets make you shake.

You know in a couple of years you will be conscripted into the army. Everybody goes. You do and you don’t want to go. You want to go because you know it is your duty to protect the State from its enemies, just as everyone in your family has always done. But you are scared about it, and you don’t know what it will really be like. People don’t talk about it.

One weekend, your parents agree you can spend the night with your cousin. They live 40 minutes away. She is like a sister to you. So, you go on Friday. You have fun, watch a movie, chat for ages, and you fall asleep late.

The next thing you know your Aunt is waking you both up. It is Saturday morning. She is in a panic. Something is happening. Your parents have messaged. Something is wrong. She says there are men everywhere in the Kibbutz with guns. You turn on your phone. There are messages from your parents and your brother. They are in the bomb shelter. You try to call them. You can’t get through. You feel the panic rising in your chest. No, please, no. You ring your boyfriend or girlfriend. No answer.

~~~~~

This child has never met a Palestinian that lives in any Occupied Palestinian territory. All he/she knows about them is that they fire rockets at Israel and have done his/her whole life, and once every couple of decades they commit extremely violent and horrific terrorist attacks. That is what he/she knows because that’s what they have been taught and also what their lived experience has taught them.

Many Jewish and Israeli people believe when they talk about Zionism they are talking about, “Somewhere safe for Jews to live where they will not be attacked, where they can call home, and where they have self-determination.” How is it possible for this 15 year old child, given the stories they have been told and the life they have led, to be anything other than a Zionist, when it is defined like that? And if they are told they are a ‘settler’, or an ‘evil oppressor’ and that that is why they deserve to die, they will look at you with wide eyed wonder and assume you are a lunatic.

The reason they can conceive of the Jewish people as settlers who live outside 1967 borders and not themselves is because they do not see them as being in the, ‘Right for somewhere safe to live’ group of Zionists. They are considered to be religious extremists and supremacists, what they see as a distorted and extremist form of Zionism, and they don’t consider it the same.

~~~~~

There are many incredibly sad and depressing things about all of these stories. But the part to me that makes it seem most tragically futile — is that for a very large number of individual human beings that ended up living in either Israel or in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in the 1950s -1960s — their stories are almost the same. Most of them were running away from something, and most of the time, the people who are doing the running away are not the people doing the fighting or the massacring.

It is a story of being a refugee, of fighting for survival against all odds, of 20th century dispossession and mass displacement. A story of being blamed for things they did not do and being held to account for debts that they did not owe. The tumult of 20th century history created a shared heritage — that over a very short time hundreds upon thousands of people were displaced — Jews fleeing Europe to Palestine, Palestinians fleeing during the creation of Israel, and almost all the Jews across the Middle East then fleeing to Israel in the few years after it started.

Part of that shared heritage became about yearning to return to a Holy piece of land that carries promise and a deep spiritual connection. It really shouldn’t be that hard to explain to one another — and indeed the rest of the world, why we cannot just ‘let it go’.

I am not trying to rewrite history and say that every single person in the years leading up to and including events in 1948 was an innocent bystander. Absolutely not. I am just saying that, generally speaking, as is almost always the case — when it comes to atrocities, it is normally extremists that engage in it, that end up calling the shots for everyone, and it is them that end up dictating history.

And it is extremist ideologies that are plaguing us today. One is an ideology of Jewish supremacy. God’s chosen people, Israel is God’s gift and therefore comes with a right to take land off anyone and everyone. The other is an extreme, dangerous and corrupted version of Islam — a highly repressive ideology where human rights do not exist, and it exalts in the death of Jews.

These people — all of them — they are the mob. ‘Death to the Jew. Death to the Arab’ One or the other in their rightful place, subservient to the other, or better yet, dead in the ground.

Most people are not the mob. Most people are not sociopaths. Most people just want to live and get on with their lives, they want to have their basic needs met, their human rights, and they want their children to grow up happy and healthy with a bright future ahead.

It is important to understand though that the bonds of community and peoplehood are also part of a basic human need. The need to maintain relationships with brothers, sisters, cousins and friends who live in our communities together with us, who have a shared history with us, who support us, and to whom we are loyal — it is part of the human experience.

The stories of our own and our friend’s grandparents, the loss of livelihood and dreams for the future as they packed their bags and fled — these are the stories that make us peoples. And it is these stories that bind us together within our communities much more closely than any ancient religious text or any ancestral DNA test ever could.

And so when people say, “The Jews and Israelis are not a people. They are fakers, they are ‘Europeans’ pretending to have links to a land that has nothing to do with them.” Or people say, “The Palestinians are not a people. They are just ‘Arabs’ who could have gone anywhere, who have no real history and whose only goal in life is to terrorise Jews,” these will both only ever be seen as inherently anti-Semitic or Anti-Palestinian statements that erase and deny large parts of our collective heritage, and neither will lead to any kind of constructive dialogue. Who is anyone to make judgements about what another people is that they do not belong to?

And so we end up where we have got to today –

From the Palestinian side, what I think is difficult for somebody who is not Palestinian to understand, is that telling them that they should give up on the right to return — for many — is impossible. They can’t do it. Understanding and honouring Palestinian history, which is rich, and complicated, and is largely unknown to many people, for them it is part of their identity. Poetry, art, great thinkers, great writers — they are all there for the world to see if only they would bother to look.

And even worse for a Palestinian, to suggest that everything that has befallen them was somehow their fault because they refused to give up on their history, this could only ever be met with fury and be seen as gaslighting.

It is essential as well to remember that this land — it is not just any land. It is not so easy to walk away from it as any other place on earth. It is Holy Land. It has meaning to everyone associated with it, and everyone wishes to be able to walk free inside it.

Having an enduring determination to free themselves from a brutal occupation that does nothing but dehumanises them and steals from them — and a longing, ultimately, to return to their homeland, this is inherent to being a Palestinian. They cannot ‘Un-Palestinian’ themselves.

So the Palestinians will say, “What world would you have us do? You the world have done nothing to help us. You who have been silent and you care nothing for our oppression. You have abandoned us to unthinkable injustice and suffering for decades. You who sit comfortably in your homes have no right to moralise at us or criticise us and tell us what we should or shouldn’t do. We have no means whatsoever to fight for our freedom. No one is on our side. We are alone. We will do whatever must be done to fight for ourselves, our human rights, our land.”

The Palestinians are living in an impossible nightmare. There seems to be nothing they can do to free themselves that doesn’t make their situation worse. What exactly are they supposed to do when they live under an occupation, have no civil rights, no means to fight for themselves, and the people with power that could do something are not standing up for them? And when all means of civil and non-violent resistance are completely denied or futile, support for more violent resistance will become inevitable.

And it was indeed inevitable that 7th October would come. Warning after warning has been given about the Occupied Palestinian territories and the blockade. Warnings about human rights abuses have gone unheeded. Warnings that if Palestinians are not given their freedom what would happen. Warnings that it was totally unjust, immoral and illegal for Palestinians in the West Bank to be under military occupation. Time and again it has been said it is a danger to the security of Israel, and it was ignored.

But the problem for the Palestinians is that terror was never ever going to work — because the people in Israel believe it was established and is needed as security because of the risk of terror against them. So the idea that they could be terrorised into giving it back, or into leaving — this is an absurdity. People talk of ‘Hasbara’, but terror is and feeds Hasbara. October 7th has done nothing but make people believe in Zionism even more (a safe place to live in their eyes). Zionism burns greater than ever with the fuel of the fires from the Hamas rockets. All terror has and can ever achieve is further encroachment onto Palestinian territory — the literal opposite of a free Palestine.

What happened in 1948 is horrendous. But what of it, to that 15 year old Israeli child? Whose own grandparents had nothing to do with it, and were themselves dispossessed, as is the case now for so many people living in Israel. That child who has only ever known Israel as their home.

So Israelis will say, “World, what would you have us do after October 7th? People outside Israel, you can say whatever the hell you want, but we are here alone. We have and always have been surrounded by people on every side who wish to murder each and every one of us until we are annihilated, and in the most painful and brutal possible way, as has just been demonstrated plainly for all the world to see. You, who do not have any understanding whatsoever of what that is like, do not get to tell us what to do. We will do whatever we think is necessary to strengthen our position to ensure this cannot happen again.”

What people are missing is that this conflict is unique to any other case of the ‘coloniser and colonised’ in history, because the people doing the ‘colonising’ are half the people of the land, people who have a genuine existential fear of everybody around them that does not come from nowhere, and is deeply ingrained into most people’ psyche. Most do not have anywhere else to go, because most of their grandparents came to Israel as refugees, and so they cannot perceive themselves as a ‘colonial settler’ in any way. So they will never stop fighting back at terrorism for their right to live without fear of attack.

This links to the Jewish people in the diaspora who support Israel and is extremely difficult for non-Jewish people to understand.

For many Jewish people, memorialising the repeated attempts to eradicate Jews throughout history, most notably the Holocaust, and remembering and honouring ancestors who have died to keep the Jewish religion alive is considered essential.

Every festival, every prayer book, every cultural activity and a very large number of conversations includes this on some level. It is integral and inherent to most people’s identity. So if people feel that their Jewish counterparts, and very often family in Israel are in existential danger, they can and only ever will see it as a moral imperative that they must be supported.

Asking Jewish people to somehow disavow themselves of this notion is impossible. To tell most Jewish people they need to ‘get over it’ because, “they are a coloniser and their needs do not matter,” is completely meaningless to them.

It is not grounded in reality, and something that can and will only ever be perceived as an attempt to ‘UnJewish them’. I.e. to eradicate significant parts of Jewish history and day-to-day life and community, and thus could only ever be perceived as deeply antisemitic in its very nature. The more these things are denied as relevant, the more people will fight back against what they see as gaslighting.

But for those people in the diaspora who have blindly, unquestioningly, dutifully and uncritically supported Israel, while its government drifts ever further into the grip of right-wing extremism and corruption, must surely now see that was a mistake. If you had a friend or a loved one on a destructive path of self-sabotage, would you just let them carry on?

It is great tragedy of Jewish history for both Jews and Palestinians alike that self-determination and independence for the Jewish people, at a time when they needed and wanted it so badly would come at someone else’s expense. Something that is so freely and unquestioningly given to so many other peoples, but not the Jewish people. Yes, it is unfair. But it did come at their expense. I think that most Palestinians only opposed it, not because they oppose Jewish people — it is the bit about it being at their expense.

We can argue forever and eternity about, “Oh, but it never needed to be this way. If only you could have shared with us. If only in 1947 this or that. And if only in this peace agreement this year or that year,” or whatever.

But what of it to those 15 year olds living in Gaza and the West Bank? It is an irrelevance what was ever intended. What was intended bears no resemblance whatsoever to their lived reality. The Jewish dream of Zionism became their nightmare. I know this is an extremely painful and bitter pill for people to swallow, but Zionism since its inception has resulted in nothing other than subjugation for them. And it is not normal for a country to not have any proper borders, and for one people to control another in some parts of it.

And while it continues to happen, Zionism will continue to be seen as Jewish people being allowed to have control over other people. This was never ever how Zionism was originally intended for a lot of people, and it is not what they think it means. Far from it. But this is where it has come to, and intentions do not matter, because it is our actions that count. Once you understand this, it is really not difficult to see how this is fuelling dark and extremely dangerous conspiracy theories about Zionism, which are dragging us back to a place in history that we most definitely do not want to go, and it endangers us all.

We need to open our eyes to reality. As the bombs reign down in Gaza, destroying thousands of lives, after well over 100 days, there are people dying from starvation. This must end, immediately. It is abominable. The rockets are still coming. And even if you stop them today, while there is occupation in any part of the land, they will just come back tomorrow or the next day or the week or the year or the decade after that. And surely from the Israeli side, negotiating whatever terms to get as many of those hostages out alive, going through what must be unthinkable terror, at any cost, must be prioritised above all else.

And I am very sorry, because I know people will not like this. But this ‘war’ — it is not about destroying Hamas. It is becoming increasingly clear by the day that not only is destroying Hamas impossible, but Israel’s government are violent ethnonationalists. The far right threaten to collapse it at every mention of a ceasefire — the only thing that will get most of those hostages back alive — and so it carries on. And extreme ideology is much more widespread within the government than just the furthest right that are propping it up. The very leader of Israel himself is at the heart of it.

When you hear what they are saying, it is very clear that they have far more sinister intentions, and we must take them at their word. Allowing people to starve, making plans to drive them off their land into other places, destroying heritage sites, and yes, mass killing — that is ethnic cleansing. It is the definition of ethnic cleansing. It is illegal under international law, and it must stop.

People say, “Oh, but Hamas are stealing the aid.” Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t care because it is an irrelevance at this moment in time to that woman looking into the eyes of her hungry child as they wither away and die. It is enough.

Could it ever be solved?

There are those of us that would be willing to give up on the dreams of our respective peoples, and not because we wish to throw them under the bus. But simply because we would just accept any solution, in whatever form, that would bring the suffering of all people to an end, and as quickly as possible. Because we believe that none of any of this is worth the blood of anyone’s children.

Because we look at those dreams of security through self-determination, rights to return, and we look at where we are today, and we see that none of any of it has delivered on its promise. We see that the world is a very different place to what it was in 1948. We recognise that there are people on the ‘other side’ that we would much rather share a country with than the ‘mob’ on our own side.

Because we know that our histories are worthless if they demand that we ‘unhuman’ ourselves.

Because we recognise that we have inherited the most Unholy mess.

But we are few in number, because the majority of most peoples cannot let go of their respective narratives, either in whole or in part. And so the solution that must be found is one that could satisfy the majority of the narrative of both peoples.

Israel already has half of what it wants — it has the state. But it does not have security, and any pretence of it has been an illusion, one that was violently shattered on October 7th.

The Palestinians meanwhile — they have nothing of what they want.

A one state solution — this does not satisfy the Israeli narrative, because it requires the undoing of Israel. It gives many Israelis nothing of what they think they want and everything they are afraid of. If you were that panicking aunt of that 15 year old Israeli child just now, would you be agreeing to open that border?

But I do not think the two-state solution really satisfies the Palestinian narrative. Because in that narrative, things were better before Israel, before Zionism, where everybody just lived together. And mainly because people want to able to walk free across the land — the right of return. The two-state solution may bring freedom and dignity, but I am not sure if it would give enough people what they really want.

Ultimately it comes down to one of the reasons this has been so intractable for so long. The Jewish State and the desire to control and ensure the continued right of Jewish immigration to Israel, and the presumed need to maintain a Jewish majority to enable that, vs the Right to Return of the Palestinians. ‘The War of Return’ as it has been called. The thing that neither side seems to be able to give up, that seem to be in direct conflict.

So what do we do? Throw our hands up, put it down to a bad job and just give up. (What the world has done). Keep blaming each side’s ‘propaganda’, each side’s education system, each side’s unwillingness to budge. But it won’t work, because it is asking people to let things go of things that they cannot let go of, things that are integral to the history of their peoples.

Human beings have been solving problems since we existed and there is no reason why we cannot solve this one.

There are many possible ways to solve it. The confederate two-state-solution is one example of a way to square the circle: https://www.alandforall.org/.

I suggest it not because I am wedded to it but because it seems to me that it would satisfy enough of both narratives to work. There may be multiple other ways to do it.

How do we get to it? As a possible example. We start with two states. Real states. Not a bit of a state or half a state with the other bit not connected to it and some people still being occupied that could never be acceptable, and was always going to be fought against. A real Palestinian state, whose borders are secured through international peacekeeping. But with that state must also come the promise and the goal that over a reasonably short period of time, everybody who wishes to cross that border gets to cross that border, until eventually, one day, ideally, there isn’t a border. People live wherever they want, but retain citizenship in their own state. And with regards specific land and homes that cannot be returned, real reparations are made. This is just one example of how it could be done.

As we keep hearing — 7 million Israelis, 7 million Palestinians. No one is going anywhere. But at some point, it is my opinion that, probably, for this to ever end, everyone must be able to go everywhere.

Two peoples living side by side. All free to live and move freely across this ancient and Holy land that is so special and meaningful to all and must be shared. Finally able to mix and become humanised in each other’s eyes. Christian, Jew, and Muslim, free to access their ancient and Holy sites. All of us united together in the spirit of mutual respect and tolerance.

Cooperating together to fight the only war that there should ever have been — the only war worth fighting.

Everybody vs the mob.

Not a religious war, not a war of the us or them, not a war over rights to the land and houses. But a war of the moderate and the just against the extremists that have desecrated our respective religions and turned them into something ugly. The lunatics marginalised, silenced and rejected. As opposed to what we have now — the sociopaths leading the charge and everyone else marching dutifully along behind.

People will say this is idealistic nonsense, a pipe dream. But what is the other option? Another twenty or thirty years of failed peace agreements and more of the same all over again? And with every round of violence, the violence gets more violent, the mob gets stronger and more popular on both sides as their ideas are seeded. And the mob is hard to fight, because the mob involves fanatic religion that cannot be reasoned with.

If we keep allowing them to get stronger and stronger, I think they will eventually set each other, themselves, and quite possibly the entire world, alight. Literal World War 3 with Jerusalem at the centre.

“How can you ask us to negotiate with them?” I hear you say. “Them, who are ethnically cleansing us,” or, “Them who wish to annihilate us,” depending on which side you are on. But here is the rub — you cannot terrorise people into leaving and you cannot bomb people into submission. Neither has ever worked. We cannot ethnically cleanse or genocide our way out of this for either people, one way or the other. Any other solution other than a diplomatic solution will lead us nowhere but the abyss.

Israelis and Palestinians are not all inherently genocidal oppressors or inherently genocidal terrorists. (As unfortunately lots of people are saying) Of course they are not. Maybe right now in Gaza most Palestinians do support Hamas in what they see as armed resistance, and most Israelis do support the actions of their government in what they see as a war. But both things have become intertwined with both mobs, and so they are not what each respective side thinks they are. The ‘armed resistance’ — a pogrom style massacre by the ‘death to the Jew’ mob, and the ‘war’ a flagrant breach of international law and an obvious attempt at ethnic cleansing by the ‘God gave us Israel, death to the Arab’ mob.

I am not very sure that most of any of them either know or believe exactly what has or hasn’t happened. The information they are receiving is very different to ours. And in times of heightened escalation of violence, people retract into the respective narratives of their people as they become reinforced. “If it’s a choice between us or them, I choose us. And for me to be able to look myself in the mirror, I must choose to believe what I choose to believe.”

Both believe so deeply within their heart and soul that they are on the side of righteous justice. For one it is ‘the right to just exist’, For the other, it is ‘the right to life, dignity, freedom from cruel and violent oppressors’. So they are both engaging in the collective delusion that because theirs is the side of the right and good, their soldiers/fighters must also be right and good.

Their people can’t possibly be the ones committing the crimes against humanity, and they cannot believe the worst things that are being said about their own side, only the other. But this is not the reality of wars and fighting, and definitely not in a conflict that has gone on for this long where this amount of hatred has become so entrenched, and most of all not ones which involve religion. To me it seems very likely that most of the worst things that are being said about both sides, are in fact, the true things.

As it turns out, many of them were always, are becoming, or have become, the mob.

I think almost everyone, whatever they say, would in fact be appalled if they were actually to see the violence that has happened, and is happening with their very own eyes. But they do not want to open their eyes to see it for what it really is, because they are on the side of the right and the good.

I know there are people of every colour and creed who no doubt I could become friends with, get along with, and love dearly. But also there are people of every colour and creed that I could not stand to be in the same room as. I know this because I am not a racist. Human beings are human beings, that is all we need to know. And if we find ourselves making any collective statements about all of a people, we are probably becoming the very thing we so vociferously claim to the world we are not.

I think that racism may well have become entrenched on ‘both sides’ but I am not sure that it is exactly racism — perhaps a better way to put it would be ‘othering’. “They did this, they did that. They support this, they support that.” And the only way to stop doing it is not to tell each other that we need to unlearn or erase our respective histories and ‘un-brain’ wash ourselves. It is the opposite.

We have to first human ourselves. And then we might have to temporarily UnJewish and UnPalestinian ourselves for short amounts of time. Then we learn each other’s history. Then we will be able to find solutions together.

How can we work together to solve this?

This part of this piece of writing — specifically — it is for us in the diaspora. Hardly anyone in the Middle East is in a place to hear any of this this right now, and too many of them are much too busy trying not to die or get killed.

We in the diaspora, we are trying very hard to do what we can to stop this, and to help. But how is it possible, that all of us who seemingly so desperately want the same thing — freedom and dignity for everyone, and yet still don’t seem to be able to get anywhere without offending and upsetting one another? How can we expect people in the Middle East to co-exist, if we cannot even have a conversation?

I believe we are talking to each other in languages we do not understand, and until we realise this, we will only ever talk past each other. Almost every conversation will have the opposite of its intended consequence, and make the other person believe they are even more right.

We will only ever find it inconceivable that people or friends or colleagues that we thought were ‘nice’ could have views that seem totally barbaric in our eyes. But if we could talk in languages each other could understand, it would get easier. Or at least if we can’t, if we tried to hear what the other is really saying.

We are not listening to, or being respectful of one another and as a collective we are so much weaker and so much less powerful for it. Because the discourse has become so toxic that we cannot work together to find solutions.

I know I myself have been done these things, but even as we try to so hard to understand and explain, it is so easy to offend. I think the reason we are offending each other is because the words in the mind of the speaker sound very different to the ears of the listener.

If the conversations are had respectfully in the spirit of achieving genuine mutual understanding, that is great. But if it is an argument to convince the other person that you are right, forget it.

Take the debate about whether shouting ‘Intifada’ is Anti-Semitic.

If you tell some Palestinians that shouting, what to them means ‘resistance’ against a state which is and has been exercising immense and disproportionate power against them and has done for three quarters of a century, is anti-Semitic, they will inevitably wonder what planet you are living on. How exactly it is that you expect they can possibly fight for their freedom? And why do you continue to engage in this collective delusion that just condemns them to suffer and die?

But if you try to tell most Jewish people, that what they perceive as the indiscriminate killing of Jews in terrorist attacks is not antisemitic, it is inevitable that they will not believe you. In fact, they will see you as yet another of the seemingly innumerable people in the ‘Death to the Jew’ mob.

Every conversation is having the opposition of its intended consequence. Convincing the other person they were more right than they were before.

Think about the way that we frequently use each other’s non-mainstream diaspora voices as a stick to beat each other with. (And this is not necessarily a criticism of those voices — some of them are very important — it’s just explaining how they are seen).

People say to Palestinians:-

“Look, this Palestinian is good, they think Zionism is okay, and you should just accept it. If only you could stop being so silly like them it would have all been over a long time ago. They agree that you haven’t exactly helped yourselves.”

How could a Palestinian ever consider this as a legitimate argument? Views that surely could only be perceived as incredibly anti-Palestinian. Surely they must think something along the lines of…

“You are privileged not to be in Gaza grieving incommensurate losses. You are one of the lucky ones whose entire family is not now dead. You who are not hungry and ill and exhausted and cold and terrified of being killed. All of your hopes and dreams do not lie in ruin before your eyes. You are enabling and emboldening our enemies. You are throwing us under the wheels of the bus of occupation all the while benefitting from living in the countries that side with our oppressors. You do not, and you will not ever, speak for us.”

Equally Jewish people are constantly bombarded with -

“Look at this Jewish person or that one. They are reasonable. They believe Israel is a colonial entity and should be entirely dismantled. They agree you are weaponising the Holocaust and playing the victim. Why are you not a good Jew, like them?”

This is not in any way a mainstream Jewish view because it is mostly perceived as -

“Lucky you, not to be one of almost half the Jews of the world that ended up living in Israel, to not have been born there, to not have a friend or family member that has been killed or taken or mutilated.

Lucky you, who can align yourself with the baying mob, and in so doing throw your Jewish Brothers and Sisters in Israel under the wheels of the bus of annihilation by the people that have demonstrated time and again that they hate them, because it is not your problem. You are not and never have been part of the community, and you do not speak for us.”

If we constantly tell both groups that we don’t hate them, just so long as they agree with something that is a total anathema to them, it will never wash. I am sure it is incredibly offensive to everyone.

“From the River to the Sea.” What do you mean? Genocide the Jews? Genocide the Palestinians? Arab Nationalism? Jewish Nationalism? Or simply freedom and equality for all?

And when it comes to ‘Zionism’. Forget about different languages. We are on completely different planets.

For everyone and anyone else watching the nightmare unfold, who can’t make sense of any of it, they must be thinking, “Surely none of any of this can be okay in the name of human decency?” But they do not know what to do. Because to ‘both sides’ it is to offend everyone and convince no one. ‘Both sidsing’ it has been declared not allowed. You will always be seen as a sell-out or a bus-thrower-under, one way or the other. So they are silenced, their voices not heard, reduced into a despondent, hand-wringing depression.

Yes, in the Middle East, one group has all the power. But in the diaspora, we are more equal. We have equal rights, we mostly live in countries where we are free to speak our minds.

Both sides are busy trying to expose each other’s mob. Both sides have “traitors” who are busy helping. The traitors have totally denounced their own side as either misogynistic, or racist, or both, and have joined the other team. And most of everybody else is on the scale of moderate, somewhere in between the views of the ‘mob’ from their own side, and ‘traitor’ for the other side. None of us even agree with each other on our ‘own side’, and very often, the people on our own side annoy us even more than the people on the other, and amazingly, sometimes the people we find the most annoying are the people we agree with the most.

In the first version of this I wrote, “We are mirror images of one another, yet it seems we mainly hold the mirror up at each other, not at the self.” So we never get to see what it is that we might have been missing.

Maybe is the other way around — we only hold the mirror up at the self and not the other. Something like that.

This is a long and, yes, very complicated story affecting and involving millions of different people across the world, across time and space, with millions of different stories to tell. For there to be any genuine hope of mutual understanding or respect, every single person is going to have to concede that most things about this story they can never truly understand because they have not lived them.

We cannot know, if we have not lived it, what it means to be born and live in a country that has only ever been at war. We cannot know, if we have not lived it, what it means to be born and live your whole life in a territory that is brutally occupied, or is under a blockade, by another people. Nor can we know, if we have not lived it, what it is like to have friends and family caught up on any side of this, whose safety and wellbeing you are desperately worried about.

We in the diaspora, so desperately worried for people in the Middle East, we are all working so hard, but we are not doing the right work. We are digging the hole deeper than ever. The magic peace fairy is not coming. They will not simply just descend from the sky, sprinkle us with magic fairy peace dust and make it all better.

When was the last time we tried to have a meaningful conversation with someone who is saying things that seem incredibly offensive to us? When was the last time we took the trouble to ask them why they think what they do? Or to ask why it is that we have offended them? To ask them about their lives, what happened to their grandparents, and their families and friends, and their parents and the stories that they were told growing up. About their hopes and dreams and aspirations. About their fears for the future.

Whenever the violence escalates, the historians cash in. Suddenly people have more motivation to understand, so we start reading and re-reading the history books. But mostly history will not give us the answers that we are looking for. It is people’s stories that will do it. And reading books that reinforce things that we already agree with will not give us the understanding that we need. It is the great writers from the other side that might.

Social media has many ills. But one huge positive is that it allows us to connect with all sorts of people whose thoughts and ideas we would never have been exposed to. We can observe fascinating conversations between other people we would never have been party to before. We can gain understanding, share ideas and solutions. It is definitely happenning. None of this was there in any previous attempts to fix this. It might just be the gamechanger that we need. We must make the most of it.

We cling to our positions like shells to a rock, not budging at all, so sure that we and we alone can see this for what it really is. I know I was. We could have been working together to stop this, but we never make any progress, and as a result, inadvertently, each and every one of us is complicit in the most unforgivable human suffering.

People say that there is no point talking about peaceful co-existence because it has never worked — but neither has violence. Ultimately there are only two choices — wait for the magic peace fairy, and die together. Or we can do the work to make the ‘peace’ that we all want, and maybe we can live together.

Addendum

And now I speak “as a British Jew,” to anyone in our community who is willing to listen.

I can tell the story of the Jewish story because I know that story. I have grown up listening to it. I was taught it in the Synagogue, in Sunday school and by family and friends. I have also tried, as best as I can, having not lived it, but by listening to the voices of Palestinians and with the help and feedback of allies, to do justice to their story. I hope that I have. It may not meet the mark, after all, this is only version 2. And anyway, neither ‘side’ is a monolith, we would all tell our histories a bit differently, so I definitely cannot satisfy all.

It is important to say that there is one thing yet unmentioned about these two stories. It may be the most important thing. I think it belies the biggest lack of understanding between us.

I have talked much of the similarities in our stories. But there is one very big difference.

The Israeli and Jewish story is about running away. It is about running away from terrible persecution, and of moving forward. It is about moving on and building a new life. The idea of wanting to go back in time, wanting to turn back the clock — it is unconscionable. There was never anything worth going back to. So, for example, when some of us are suddenly being offered citizenship in European countries because our grandparents lived there before the Holocaust, this is not something that we could ever comprehend wanting.

So many Israelis feel, “Why couldn’t they have just moved on like we did? Why did they spend all of their efforts ruining things for us when they could have just moved forward, let it go, made the best of a bad lot, and made new lives like we did?”

Apart from the multitude of reasons I have already explained as to why it was never that simple and why their material circumstances and the occupation has made that impossible for most people — what we need to realise is that their story is the other way around. Our story starts from a place of misery, and moves onto something better. Theirs starts from a place where they were happy enough, and moves onto something horrific. It starts from being at least content for hundreds of years, running away — something they thought was temporary — and never being allowed to go back.

And I say this part as gently as I possibly can. There is a very deep and particular sorrow that many Jewish people will know. It comes with realising that we do not want to look back, because looking back is much too painful. Knowing that for some of us there is no point going on ‘ancestry.com’ because there is no ancestry left to trace. And is it that sorrow that was felt so keenly after the atrocity that was October the 7th. People do not understand that something cannot be weaponised when it is so genuinely heartfelt — there is no intent behind it.

But for the Palestinians — seeing that people from other countries can go and visit, go on holiday, and walk around in a land where their grandparents built their homes, left with whatever they could carry only for them and their families to encounter ever more worsening horrors on their onward journey right up until this very day — and yet they can never set foot in that land — I think what they experience when they see that — it is a very similar sorrow. And I am sure that they have been feeling that sorrow most keenly with each and every passing day, and most particularly in these last months.

I do not believe, as I have argued, that is the case that Israel must cease to exist with all the people in it, to allow the Palestinians what they clearly want, need, and, I believe, are indeed entitled to. The idea that our millenia-old right of return is still in date but their 75-year-old right of return has somehow expired is completely logically incoherent.

And I am coming to understand that suggesting that it has somehow been indulged is a bit like telling us we are weaponising the Holocaust. I think that nothing could be more insulting.

The problem with our version of the story that we were taught — The story of the Jewish people, our losses, our sacrifices, our spilled blood — it is only half a story. It is history through only one lens.

And that story is not the only thing that is taught in our homes and in our Synagogues and in our Sunday schools. We are taught values. We are taught values of respect, justice, and ‘do unto others’. We are taught the words of the Talmud ‘Whoever saves a life, saves the world entire,” (words that can also be found in the Quran).

Most importantly of all, we are taught, “Do not stand idly by while the blood of your neighbour is shed.”

And because we are taught those values — there is a cognitive dissonance that so many people in our community feel — but don’t quite understand — that parts of this story don’t really make any sense, that what happened, and is happening, is definitely not okay. That dissonance — it will not hold forever. It will tear our families and our community apart. It already is.

Yes, there is a death to the Jew mob. Yes, they are a massive problem. But I think we have no right to make mention of that mob unless in the same breath and multiple times over we are making mention of our own mob. Because our own, ‘Death to the Arab’ mob — they have been running around the Occupied Territories unchecked for decades. And it is both mobs that need to be brought under control before there can ever be any hope of resolving this. The Death to the Jew mob will come back stronger than ever while the Death to the Arab mob roam free. And who are we to lecture Palestinians for not getting their house in order, when it is our side that has all the power and all the resources, and yet we have allowed it to carry on? We who demand that they condemn the “resistance” whilst refusing to condemn the “war”.

And we must understand this — If Gaza is allowed to be resettled — it is over. Ever more untold and unimaginable horror for the Palestinians, and in our silence we will have handed Israel on a plate to those ethnonationalists, to the people that should have had nothing to do with what Israel could have been — and in fact people that have nothing to do with us and our values.

People keep talking about the two-state solution like it is some kind of utopia that, like the magic peace fairy, it will just fall from the sky. It is not that easy. Trying to dismantle settlements in the West Bank to make that possible — it is probably almost undoable as it is. Some of them have been there so long now and the Palestinians have very little faith that it could or would ever be done. In fact a confederate version of the two state solution may in some ways be easier to implement because it does not necessarily require the dismantlement of all settlements, something that looks like it is getting harder to do.

And If we think antisemitism is bad now, it will be nothing compared to what is in store in years to come if the resettlement and reoccupation of Gaza were to happen. Israel, hated among nations like never before, until eventually the world will finally not tolerate it. It is dangerous and it leads I know not where, undoing it, I know not how. An epic holy war ahead of us, and in the process we will see what we are already seeing in Israel — free speech and dissent a thing of the past — and Israel’s democracy — burned to the ground.

We are doing our cousins and our friends no favours by parroting off the same old arguments, and ignoring the occupation that has been allowed to become normalised within Israel. It is high time for a different conversation. It was a long ago, and it is now or never.

We need to speak up, loud and clear. When it comes to armed Jewish settlers running around the West bank and terrorising Palestinians, we are anti — it, and we always have been. But how can we expect other people to know this if we do not have these conversations in the open? If we do not call a spade a spade. Our refusal to use particular words and talk about things in a particular way in front of other people even if we do it behind closed doors has led to a lack of education within our community — and I am sure that there will be some people when I talk about these things, that have literally no idea what I am even saying. This is a very big problem. I hope some of those people are reading this now.

And what exactly is it that we are so afraid will happen if we put our heads above the parapet? It is evidently clear that Israel has not been abandoned by its allies. Put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary Gazan just now. Heartbreakingly, it seems to me, that being abandoned by the world — that that has become their destiny.

And, “What of the far left?” people will say? How are we to do deal with their antisemitism?

Yes, the far left think they are supporting armed resistance but have in fact aligned themselves with the ‘death to the Jew’ mob. They bleat on about ‘Hasbara’ — something they clearly have no understanding of whatsoever because if they did they would realise that they are it. Or at least that they are feeding it. Literally they are walking, talking Hasbara.

But of the multiple problems with the far left — and there are many — to me the worst is that there are those of them who have no connection whatsoever to the lives of anyone in the region — no ordinary Israelis or ordinary Palestinians, and yet they cheer for ever more death and destruction. They cheer on “armed resistance” from their comfortable homes in their comfortable lives, and it is not them who will have to face the consequences.

And maybe this round of violence will be the last round, the round that ends it once and for all — I hope so. But it has come at the most appalling and unacceptable cost.

Who are they to think they have a right to declare that somebody else’s family, somebody else’s child — Israeli or Palestinian — even one — let alone thousands and counting — is an acceptable sacrifice?

Maybe it is because they did not understand that October 7th could only ever have been a suicide mission. Because as a consequence of the rigidness of far-left ideology that does not allow for self-critical thinking, they refuse to understand this problem in more than one way. That you cannot fight evil with evil. That yes, it is more complicated than just ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’, more complicated than their warped version of reality where even children are fair game.

Probably there are some of them that knew what would happen after October 7th, and just decided it was probably worth it if it would eventually ‘free Palestine.’ Either way it is unforgivable because it was not their decision to make. And all that has happened as far as I can see, all October 7th has achieved is all it would ever achieve — to enable an extremely racist, harmful, problematic and untrue stereotype that ‘Palestinians are genocidal terrorists’ to be reinforced in the eyes of Israelis and the rest of the world. Around 3,000 people crossed that border on October 7th, of a population of over 2 million. But undoing that sterotype will be extremely difficult, taking us further away from where we need to be.

You cannot help but wonder where we might be right now if only all those people had used all that effort to lobby for a real diplomatic solution. But we can’t turn back the clock.

That there are outspoken people within our community that think that the correct response to these people is for us to align ourselves with far right Islamophobes — we who have traditionally been proud of being anti-fascist — this could not be more ludicrous. It will lead us into that abyss. “I think the Jewish Chronicle is the Daily Mail for Jews.” Yes Dad, we all finally agree.

So where do we go from here? We need to start doing that right work. It is incumbent upon us more than anyone. Because it is only us who can help our friends and family in Israel, because it us who share history with them, who love and care about them. It is us who can help them see this through another lens.

We need to change the conversation, and we need to do it fast. Because the Palestinians do not have the luxury of time, and as far as I am concerned, neither do we.

There are people in our communities — both Israeli and Jewish — that have already been doing that right work for a really long time. It is time to listen to them, and elevate their voices. We need to start to be willing to be offended and to listen to other points of view. And unfortunately some of the right work does sometimes involve wading through what feels like a massive steaming pile of anti-Semitic shit, in order to get to the heart of some of the problems. But we also have an opportunity to meet some incredible people, and hear some amazing and wonderful voices that we would never have had a chance to hear. We have to get this done, to fix this once and for all.

We cannot hand this legacy to our children. We have to fight (non-violently) for a different future. This is the chance to do it. The world’s eyes are on Israel, and the time is now.

#i/p #המצב #jumblr #a word of warning:#when I say it's extremely long #I mean that this will likely take you an hour to read properly #I'm not getting an easy word count on it #but it's Long

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cafeinthemoon · 1 year

Text

King - Chapter V

Chapter 5/?

Title The Particle of the Sun

Fandom Shuumatsu no Valkyrie / Record of Ragnarok

Previous chapters

1 . 2 . 3 . 4

Symbols ⭕ . ➕ . 🖤

Warnings: A not so subtle (and very problematic) threat from Poseidon involving pregnancy

Tagging @cloveradora @the-dumber-scaramouche @mikkies @sl33py-zer0 @nooneknows8976 (If you want to be tagged in any of my stories, just leave a comment on this chapter or send an ask or a message)

N. A.: Finally a new chapter!! Yay! I wanted this chapter to be as long as the previous ones, but I thought I've already reunited enough information in these less than 3k words (hope you don't mind). About the story of the Particle: a curious fact about Poseidon that I discovered recently was that he was deity responsible for the Delphic Oracle alongside Gaia before Apollo was even born. I couldn't find many details about this, but my headcanon is that Poseidon still has the gift of clairvoyance, or extended vision, as said by himself here, and this will show in crucial moments of this story. I also found a way to explain the existence of days and nights under the sea and I'm very proud of my work in this :)

When you opened your eyes, you noticed a slight change in the shade of the curtains: the abyssal black was replaced by a softer form of blue, the same blue of the sea’s surface on a sunny day. There was absolute silence in the canopy’s interior, which only changed when you decided to sit on the bed.

It was strange that you were left to sleep there: you thought you would be sent back to the lodge after the wedding’s consummation, but you were kept in your husband’s chambers for that entire night. You were debating the reason for this when you noticed a tall shadow approaching the canopy’s entry, and a hand showed up between the fabric to open it.

When the curtains were separated, the morning light shone into the space, exposing the messed sheets and the tiny human cradled among them to the eyes of the Lord of the Seas, who kept observing you with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval, as if finding hard to believe that you needed such a long period of sleep.

Well, you had no idea of how long you’ve been there, but you found that absurd.

Does this man know nothing about the human nature? If he wanted me to wake up earlier, he could’ve just called me.

It was when you noticed he was dressed in a formal, bluish attire... and realized it was the first time you saw him properly dressed. That made you look at yourself and pull the sheets up to cover your torso.

Poseidon frowned at this attitude.

– Why are you doing this? There is no need for you to cover up now. I have already seen everything I had to see.

Your reply came in an impulse.

– I’m cold.

He stared at you for a moment, then pointed at the empty space beside him.

– Here.

You tried to leave the bed using the sheets to cover yourself but, once you were under his reach, he pulled them away, throwing them back on the bed and closing the curtains. You crossed your arms before your chest: staying undressed and disheveled in front of a god under the daylight and when he himself was wearing full clothes provoked a new, incomparable embarrassment in you.

– Come with me – he spoke it like an order and, before you could do anything, he took you in his arms.

Unlike you told him, you weren’t really cold, but the absence of the sheets caused you shivers that only ceased when you were on his lap, and for a moment you allowed yourself to relax, leaning your head on his chest. It was curious that, despite the sensation of complete unfamiliarity that surrounded every aspect of your relationship with that man, you were still able to find good things in them, such as this sort of safeness in his grip and the pleasure you experienced in his touch. If this was thanks to some spell or if you were just susceptible, you were yet to find out.

That time, you were carried to a dressing area: your husband stopped with you in the middle of a room with an infinity of clothes, shoes and other female accessories, ready to be worn; on a corner, there was a screen with hand painted illustrations of coral reefs and other marine concepts, similar to the one you had on your lodge and, beside it, an open door that led to a bathroom.

Poseidon put you down and turned to a rack at his left, taking a dress with him and giving it to you.

– Put it on and go wash your face – he instructed – I will be waiting here.

What you heard instead of this was Do not let me waiting.

You did as he said, entering behind the screen to put the dress despite what he said when you cover yourself up with the sheets, then cleaned your face and fixed your hair. When you went back to him, he held your shoulders and made you turn around; you didn’t need to ask what he was doing, for soon you noticed his fingers brushing your hair. After this, he took a shawl and wrapped it around you, then took your hair out of it. You didn’t think he believed when you said you were cold, but the message behind the gesture was clear: as much as he expected you to take his words seriously, he was able to do the same for his wives, so that you had all the reasons to pay attention to the things you said to him.

Poseidon brought his hands to your shoulders again, making you turn back to him.

– Still cold?

You made a negative sign with your head.

– No, my Lord.

– Good.

You thought he was going to take you out of that room, and maybe that was his intention, but he gave up on it when he touched your ears, making you flinch.

– They are a bit swollen. What happened?

– It’s probably because I slept upon them, my Lord...

You were going to say that they would stop aching soon, but he went to a vanity and brought a tiny pot of salve with him before you could open your mouth. Stopping in front of you, he took a bit of the product and spread it between his fingers, passing them on your ears, massaging around the earrings.

– It will soothe the ache – your husband went to put the salve back on its previous place.

You nodded.

– Thank you, Poseidon-sama.

His response was a sigh.

– You are so delicate it is impressive that nothing more than this happened.

That time, the impatience you felt bubbling inside you was too much, and you couldn’t keep your mouth shut.

– My fragility seems to be an issue for you, my Lord. I’d like to understand the reason I was brought here, if possible.

For a moment, you congratulated yourself for finally speaking out, but as soon as Poseidon laid his eyes on you, you sensed your courage diminishing in an impressive speed: you looked away, your fingers griping on the shawl’s fabric with nervousness; you felt his hand surrounding your jawline, his thumb caressing the corner of your mouth.

– It is just something I had to do, dragonet. For my own sake. It is nothing you should be concerned about.

***

You had your breakfast with your husband on a small table placed at the chambers’ balcony, as large as a common, human house, with a privileged view of the white beaches through which you’ve passed to enter the castle and the furious waters that surrounded them, now showing deep, mutable shades of green under the light.

It was something that has been intriguing you since you arrived, but you haven’t had the chance to bring it out in your conversations with Alyssa: when Poseidon brought you to the balcony – in his arms – and you were exposed to that light, the intensity and the warmth of it on your skin were enough to make you think that, if you didn’t know you were under the sea, you could be easily convinced that it was the true sun.

You were sitting on a white chair while your husband took the place before you, having a beautiful breakfast prepared for two, with fruits, tea and bread, everything with excellent aspect just like the food that was offered to you at the lodge. You weren’t sure if you should start eating now or wait for him to do it, but Poseidon didn’t seem inclined in this sense. At the same time, your hesitation was noticed and questioned by him.

– I’m not hungry, my Lord.

– At least take some tea – he replied – It will help you to stay warm.

You obeyed, filling a tiny cup with the liquid in silence. A conversation then took place.

– Are you still cold?

– No, my Lord.

– You don’t seem tired now. Did you sleep well?

– Yes, my Lord. Thank you for asking.

He nodded in approval, then suddenly changed the subject.

– You seem curious about the illumination system of this kingdom. Do you think it resembles the sunlight?

Your eyes widened at this.

Such sharp eyes, those ones.

– Yes, Poseidon-sama. It’s something I’ve been observing since I arrived.

– It is because you are indeed seeing the sunlight – he continued, answering the mystery – This is a story I do not mind telling you. Long time ago, I was the responsible for the Delphic Oracle before Apollo. All my houses were placed upon the waters by that time, but I was planning to bring all of them into one, on the seabed. I offered my connection with the Oracle to him and demanded a particle of the Sun in return, just enough to make life possible for non sea creatures in the depths of the ocean. Apollo accepted the deal and ordered the Particle to behave as if it was still in the skies, and this kingdom have been experiencing days and nights since then.

Poseidon told that story while observing the surroundings, as if talking to himself; he spoke as if all of that happened yesterday, and you were hearing in stunned silence. As someone who wasn’t raised to praise the gods, you knew nothing beyond their names, and cared little about them and their acts; that was entirely new for you. But if there was something you were quick to realize when you met them, specially the one who married you, was that they never did anything without a reason, or without expecting something in return, so that the story of the Oracle made total sense to you. You weren’t sure why Poseidon was telling you something that probably happened in a time when none of your ancestors existed, but it was intriguing that a proud being like him would give up on such an important treasure as an Oracle in favor of another deity, no matter what he would receive in exchange for it.

Since he didn’t oppose to it, you questioned him about it.

– Forgive my ignorance in these subjects, my Lord, but is hard to believe that such exchange really happened.

Contrary to what you expected, your doubts didn’t provoke the slightest sign of irritation in your husband: instead, he held a smirk on his lips, observing you with a sort of pity for the said ignorance.

– You really know nothing about gods, don’t you, dragonet? – and, without waiting for a response, – When I passed the Oracle’s management to Apollo, I was not sacrificing a belonging. Instead, I was delegating a responsibility to a younger god, in a way that his work would increase and mine would diminish. I no longer own the Oracle, but I still have the ability of extending my vision; besides, Proteus, who is a prophet himself, still works for me. On the other hand, Apollo has gained experience over the ages, and with experience came power. The Particle of the Sun that he gave to me will be forever a sign of his gratitude, since I was the one who made him the offer.

Gratitude? Was he trying to teach you a lesson about this? But why?

You chose your words carefully.

– I understand you have a reason to tell me all of this, my Lord. But I fail at perceiving it.

Poseidon opened a genuine smile of contentment, and that was the most unsettling moment you had with him since the wedding: though you were now dressed, you were still feeling exposed, too close to him to try and escape, whether with your words or your feet. You observed his expression and realized it was the first time you were seeing the natural light touching your husband’s figure, a vision that enchanted and scared you at the same time: the rosy shade on his cheeks and lips, the golden shine of his hair, the blue of his eyes glowing between those long, white lashes, all of this on an impossibly proud, young face, that has been like this since the oldest past and would stay the same in the furthest of futures. To you, it was inconceivable that someone could be so beautiful yet so menacing.

But not only this was possible through his looks, but also through his words, given what he said to you next.

– Good girl, always saying the right things. But I would like to know if you are just as grateful. So, tell me: have you already thought of how you are going to thank me for granting you my favor last night?

Since you took too long to understand what he was talking about, Poseidon didn’t mind explaining.

– I did you the favor of not making you bear a child right in your first night as my wife, though I still think it is a strange thing to ask, not to say foolish. This is what I want to know: what will you do for me in return?

You swallowed. In fact, your husband’s agreement with such an uncommon request came too quickly even for you, who didn’t know him so well. Of course such generosity wouldn’t come for free.

You opened your mouth in an impulse, but held your tongue just in time, granting yourself a moment to think of a wise answer.

– I... What do you need me to do, my Lord?

Poseidon still had the same content smile on his lips, to which you felt some relief.

He’s still having fun with this. And, as long as he stays like this, I’ll be safe.

– That you are very clever, I already know, and your talent with words might keep me entertained for quite some time. It would be a waste if you would just stay with the common duties of a secondary wife, so I have a task for you: since you will not use your time to bear and raise any child until the next year, you will have entire days to go to my children’s training area and observe each of them. You will figure out each one’s most efficient technique and find weaknesses in them. Once you do it, you will develop a solution for that. Given you are a smart girl, I believe it is something up to you.

You had your hands on your lap, holding each other with all the strength they had to avoid trembling, but you had no guarantee that the same nervousness didn’t raise to your face. Yes, you wouldn’t become a mother, but that didn’t mean you wouldn’t have any contact with your husband’s children – that was the trap he has been preparing for you. And, by asking him what he needed you to do for him instead of thinking of something to offer, you easily fell into it.

I tried to examine the territory before making my offer, just like my father told me. But I should have known that what usually works with humans would be just useless while negotiating with a god. How stupid of me.

– What you will do to accomplish this is also up to you – he continued – Though I must warn you about the deadline: you will be given one year for this, nothing more. The counting will start tomorrow, by the morning, and will end in the next year, by a morning as well. By the end of this period, you will have to show me the results of your work. I will evaluate it and, if it is satisfying, your current condition, that is, of not bearing any children, will remain. However, if you show to be unable to fulfill this task…

Your heart ached, as if held tight by cold fingers, fearing what would follow those words. The table’s size was such that it allowed you to reach each other by touch, and that was precisely what your husband did: he stretched his arm over it to touch your face, making you startle despite the warmth of his skin. He brushed your hair behind your ear and you breathed deep, not daring move away.

– I still have to think of how things will be for you, dragonet – his voice was now a whisper; you looked at him and noticed an increase in his cheeks’ blush – But I cannot help thinking that you would look pretty with a rounded, swollen belly under your dress.

There was no need for explanations this time.

This offer, that sounded more like a threat, was absurd – not to say terrifying. But it was not the end for you: it was the beginning of a year full of work and discoveries, just like the ones that preceded it. And if you’ve already gone so far – entering that domain and staying alive, making a human friend where you thought you’d never see another human beyond yourself and managing to have your offer accepted by the Tyrant of the Seas – thinking of giving up didn’t make sense now.

I’m already in the bottom of the sea… What should I fear now?

You did your best to stand Poseidon’s gaze. He still had his hand close to you: you put your own upon it and turned your lips to his palm, giving it a soft, docile kiss.

– I will not disappoint you, Poseidon-sama.

And I will not disappoint myself either.

#snv x reader #ror x reader #snv poseidon #ror poseidon #snv poseidon x reader #ror poseidon x reader #poseidon x reader #shuumatsu no valkyrie x reader #record of ragnarok x reader #shuumatsu no valkyrie poseidon #record of ragnarok poseidon

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xoxomoonlightxoxo · 3 months

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Somewhere Between Hello and Goodbye | Ch. 2: It Was All a Dream, I Promise

a/n: Writing that has been italicized + highlighted blue represents past memories or dreams, while writing that is italicized + bolded is a letter.

Months have passed since I last saw Jungkook. From the day he was discharged till now, no one has heard from him or his family. No texts, no calls. Nothing. Even his academic advisor raised concern regarding his absence, and still, there was radio silence on the other side of the line. It’s as if he never existed in the first place. He left with the cold winter and never came back to see the blooming of the spring cherry blossoms.

Naturally, the last three months have been nothing short of torture. Day after day, night after night, I prayed to God, prayed that he would bring Koo back to me. Every morning, I would call his number just to hear his voicemail greeting, the one we crafted together during our late-night run to 7/11.

“Hello, you've reached Jungkook’s voicemail. Please don't leave a message unless you're Mira,” Jungkook says confidently, scrunching his nose at the way my eyes widened from disbelief.

“Koo!? You have to take this seriously. What if an employer calls you?” I exclaim, gaze softened at the sight of his bunny teeth on full display.

“I'm sure they'll be able to tell if they're you or not,” he grins, taking a sip of his strawberry milk before pulling my chair closer to him, placing a soft kiss on my forehead.

My eyes swell with tears reminiscing our memories. It pains me to think of the possibility that he might not even remember me. I'm not sure how long, if at all, I'd be able to last in a universe where Jungkook sees me as a stranger again. After all we've been through, man, that would hurt immensely. Nonetheless, I hold on to the hope that he is not alone. Surrounded by his loved ones, I hope Koo is resting in peace, at ease. This wish, however, has yet to overcome the aching feeling in my chest, my desire to hold him in my embrace. To be close to him once again. To tell him how much I love him.

“Mira? Miraya, honey, can you hear me?” my mom shouts through the phone. After all this time, she has yet to learn how to properly use Facetime.

“Mommy, I'm looking at your ear. You have to turn the camera towards you, remember?” I giggle, eyes tearing up from the mere sound of her voice. I've missed her. I've missed my family. I wasn't able to go back home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, so it's been ages since I last saw them. Nonetheless, after trial and error, mostly error, I could finally see my mother’s beautiful face which was trying its hardest to hold back the built-up sadness.

“My love,” she whispers, worried gaze searching my scattering eyes.

“Miraya, what's wrong?”

“Nothing, I just missed you guys so much,” I say softly, pulling my knees to my chest as my body sits crouched on the cold kitchen floor.

“Just one more week, honey. Your dad is so excited, you don't even know. He has packed the fridge with your favorite food, and is holding it hostage till your arrival,” she chuckles, shaking her head at my dad's behaviour.

“One more week,” I repeat, looking up at the picture of Koo and me on the fridge. The photo booth snapshots we took at the dumpling restaurant near the Oceana beach. I wonder if he kept his word.

“Jungkook, what the heck?” I yelp, hitting his forearm. “I can’t show these to anyone now,” I point to the last photo, in which his face remained inches away from mine as my body froze behind his Iron Man hat. Compared to the previous three takes, this one clearly did not fit the friendly theme.

“Why not? Nothing happened,” he grins, leaning his head back.

“Nothing happened my ass, it's obviously suggestive,” I roll my eyes.

“Let their imagination run wild then. I'm putting mine in my wallet, you can put yours on your bulletin board, I heard manifesting is a popular practice these days,” he chuckles teasingly, giving me a sly wink.

“Oh, by the way, I sent you some clothes for when you arrive. It’s been raining here nonstop and I wasn’t sure if you packed good rain boots,” my mom’s voice brings me out of my daydream, as I nod my head accordingly.

“Thank you, mommy. I’ll let you know when I receive them,”

“No, they should have already been delivered. I got the notification today,”

“Oh, okay, then I’ll check the mailbox right after our call,” I say with a soft smile.

“Well, I’m not gonna take up any more of your time, I’m sure you’re busy with finals. Please, just confirm that you got the package,” my mom says, sending me a flying kiss as I wave her goodbye.

“I love you, mommy,”

“Love you more, Mira,”

Putting my hair in a messy bun, I grab my keys and ID before heading out the door. I did in fact pack some rainboots upon my arrival to Korea, but didn’t have the heart to tell my mom that on the phone. Her smile was too contagious for that news. Anyways, who would pass on free clothes? So, I make my way down to the mail room before scanning the area for my number, 1289.

“Okay, oop, jeez, how big were these boots?” I huff and puff from all the heavy lifting, before stumbling back on my tippy toes. Managing to finally open the box, my eyes widen from the amount of snacks my mom packed. You know, sometimes, I think my parents think that my university doesn’t provide food. As if I beg my neighbors for a cup of sugar each night. I can’t complain though, I really do appreciate the way they show their love and care. So, yes, I will be indulging in all of these before I leave. Locking my mailbox I get a better grip of the box before heading out, that is, until one of the front desk employees stops me.

“Miss! You dropped something,” he points to the white envelope on the ground.

“Oh, thank you,” I say with a soft smile before opening what seems like a letter.

To Miss Jean,

Hello Mira, this is Mrs. Jeon. I apologize for not reaching out to you sooner, I’m sure you’ve been worried sick. But, I hope you can understand that we as a family needed to take some time to help Jungkook heal. He is doing well. Although, his memory, at least of last year has been completely wiped. It’s been a tough journey, but the fact that he regained his consciousness is truly a miracle on its own. We really thought we lost him. You have no idea how much I cried that day. For a mother, losing her child is worse than death itself. So, I thank God every day for his protection.

With that being said, the reason I’m writing to you is regarding your relationship with Jungkook. Please don’t take this too personally, but I need you to cut all ties with him. When I received the phone call from the paramedics on site, they reported that he was found unconscious on the side of the road, holding onto a bloodstained picture of you guys. Now, I tried to remain as reasonable as possible, but he is my son and I would do anything to protect him. Even if that means coming in between you two. I’m not sure if you guys were dating or tied by any romantic relationship, but from the way he talked about you, the dots were relatively easy to connect.

He doesn’t remember anything, Mira. He doesn’t remember you. In hindsight, maybe it's for the best. I truly hope that you will be able to understand and respect my decision. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t interact. Jungkook will be returning back to Seoul for the Fall semester, and I trust that you will follow the plan. If he initiates contact first, try your best to avoid it at all costs. Just please, don’t make me worry about him again.

Feeling my throat tighten, my chest heaves up from the sudden flow of emotions. What is going on? What did I just read? Cut all ties? He doesn’t remember me? Did I just receive an ultimatum from Jungkook’s mom before ever meeting her? My eyes swelled with tears as I looked around, scanning the room for any sign of life that would confirm if this was real or just a bad, bad dream.

“Miss, are you okay?” the man at the front desk asks gently, his smile slowly fading as my body drops to the floor.

“I don’t know,” I whisper, before looking up at his worried expression. Feeling my eyes dissociate into the distance, there’s a trail of teardrops marking the wooden floor as the denial settles in. Don’t call … Don’t write … Don’t interact.

- -

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Toronto. It is currently 8 pm exactly and pouring cats and dogs outside. So, I hope you dressed appropriately. On behalf of the cabin crew, I would like to thank you for flying with Air Canada. Enjoy the rest of your day!” the pilot's voice mumbles through the speakers as the sound of safety belts being unbuckled fills the tight space.

Mom was right, Mother Nature seems to not be too happy about something, because why is it thunderstorming? To be fair though, I love it when it rains. Something about its aftermath, specifically, the smell of wet cement the next morning just tickles my brain.

Mira: Just landed! Will be out shortly ❤️

Mommy: Thank goodness, we can't wait to see you, my love!

Daddy: Miraya, honey, I'll be standing right by the doors to help with the luggage.

Mino: I hope you packed lightly -_-

Milo: Mira, did you get us anything? ;)

Having younger brothers is definitely an experience, but I can’t lie, I managed to miss them as well. And, as I rolled my suitcase down the exit, I could feel my heartbeat increase, palms getting sweaty from the nerves. Overwhelmed by the emotions, it takes only a glimpse of my father’s face for me to break down. With tears rolling down my flushed face, we pulled each other into a long embrace, as my mother’s hands caressed my dishevelled curls. Pressing a soft kiss on my forehead, she cups my face in her warm palms before searching my teary eyes.

“My sweet, sweet girl,” she says softly, wiping my tears with her pink handkerchief, as my dad navigates us out of the airport to our car.

The drive back home was rather sentimental. With every turn I caught myself reminiscing my childhood memories. The time I broke my wrist falling off the monkey bars in my elementary park, or the time my friends and I tried to sneak into a frat party dressed like those edgy college girls … you can imagine the outcome, I don’t even have to explain.

“Peaches!”

A faint voice brings me out of my dissociation as I snap my head towards my younger brother whose smile visibly fades from the intensity of my stare.

“What?” Milo asks slowly, eyebrows furrowed from confusion.

“What did you just say?” I scoff, a bit more harshly than initially intended.

“Mommy asked what fruit she should use for her pie …” his words trail off into the car's ambience, as my eyes swell with tears. God, I miss Jungkook so much that I’m now hearing things. Surely, this isn’t healthy.

“Sorry, I must have misheard you,” I try to subside the suspense with a soft smile before looking out the rainy window again. Feeling my throat slowly tighten, I try to shake away the thought that somewhere across the ocean, rests a soul whose heart no longer beats for me.

“He doesn’t remember you, Mira,” Mrs. Jeon’s voice keeps replaying in my head as I bury my face deeper into the duvet, attempting to block the thoughts with my pillow. Unfortunately though, It’s not working as the haunting realization of our future, or rather, the lack of it, has already consumed my conscious mind. It’s not fair. I’ve lost him once and can’t bear to lose him again. Which, I guess … is exactly what Mrs. Jeon is feeling right now.

“Ugh, Mira, shhhh. Please, just let me sleep,” I snap at my racing thoughts, turning aimlessly inside the soft sheets before feeling my body slowly give in to the fatigue as my vision goes pitch black.

“Koo!” I call out his name as we run towards each other with open arms across a field of orange tiger lilies.

“My sweet, sweet girl,” he says softly, lifting me in the air before we melt into each other’s embrace. Tucking a few strands of hair behind my ear, he caresses my cheek with the back of his palm before searching my teary eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asks hushly, leaning closer as our lips rest inches apart.

“Koo, please tell me that you remember me, that you remember us,” I cry out, placing my hands on his warm chest.

“Of course, I do Peaches. What are you saying?” Jungkook’s voice is soft but full of worry as he moves my hand to his heart.

“You lost your memory. Your mom said you don’t remember anything. Nothing,”

“Mira, baby, please don’t cry. It was all a dream, I promise,” he says with a gentle smile, before wiping the tears off my face, resting his forehead on mine.

“It’s you and me, till my heart stops beating,”

His words fade into the distance before I’m awakened by the feeling of sheer distress. Chest heaving up, there’s sweat dripping down my face as I reach for my journal on the nightstand. With shaky hands, I jot down the sudden overflow of my emotions in the form of a letter.

Dear Koo,

I saw you today and … it felt so real. Your embrace was warm, familiar and full of love. We were finally happy again. Except … it wasn't real, none of it was real. You promised it was all just a dream, but you lied. This … this is a nightmare.

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stargirlaveblog · 3 months

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7Seals

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Chapter 1

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• Previous Chapter: Prologue Next Chapter: Chapter 2

•Chapter List

•Content: Levi Ackerman x OC Fem! Canon Verse! Slow Burn!

• Word Count: 1.2k

"Now I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals; and I heard one of the four living creatures saying with a voice like thunder, 'Come and see.' And I looked, and behold, a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer."

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In the regiment's relentless rhythm, my days blurred together over six unchanging years. The routine was our relentless master – wake, eat, train, meetings, eat again, and sleep. The mundane melody was occasionally disrupted by Shadis' whims, granting us a fleeting taste of the world beyond the towering Walls.

Our morning table, a sanctuary for the seasoned veterans, bore witness to comrades dropping like autumn leaves. The unspoken question lingered: when would our turn come? While many saw luck in our continued survival, I saw a darker twist. Fate, I believed, lurked patiently, biding its time until we felt secure, ready to shatter the false reality we'd constructed in this hellish existence.

Today, the cruel hand of fate played its cards, mocking our comfort.

"The boys aren't here yet?" Petra's radiant smile broke the morning's routine as she settled across from me.

"Nah," I replied, absentmindedly tearing at my morning bread. "Just Hange and I, probably still asleep."

Petra's grin widened, cheeks tinted with a hint of mischief. "Thank the Wall."

Hange, always perceptive, caught the unspoken secret in Petra's expression.

"I know that look," they squealed with infectious excitement. "Spill."

"Have you guys seen the new recruit?" Petra's playful voice danced through the room.

"Have I?!" Hange's response, a lively squeal, prompted a shared effort between Petra and me to hush them. Yet, if anything, their voice only seemed to gain volume.

"He's a menace! Have you guys seen him in action? He's truly set to revolutionize the Scouts."

One person expected to revolutionize the regiment was a wild accusation, not only wild but big shoes to fill.

"I thought all the recruits died."

"He's the sole survivor. Goes by Levi," Petra disclosed in a hushed tone leaning towards me. "Word has it his entire wing was taken out on the last expedition. Rumor even suggests he took down five titans single-handedly."

"Five?" My surprise echoed throughout the mess hall, louder than Hange had earlier.

"Who is this guy?"

A recruit taking out more than one Titan on their first journey outside the Walls was unheard of. The recruit surviving a Titan encounter was impressive enough, but taking down five was a whole other game.

Petra gestured subtly towards the corner, where Levi sat alone. "A short fella," Hange added with a playful smile.

"But undeniably handsome," Petra remarked.

My curiosity ignited and my intrusive thoughts won as I nudged Petra.

"Go talk to him."

"I'd only fool myself," she sighed. "He keeps to himself, speaks only with section leaders and the commander."

"I don't buy it," I chuckled, glancing in Levi's direction. There he was, absorbed in the morning paper, sipping tea in that peculiar way of his—hand over the rim, neglecting the perfectly good handle on the side of the cup.

"Go see for yourself," Petra challenged with a smug grin.

"I will," I declared, sticking my tongue out playfully before confidently striding towards Levi's table.

He was a recluse no doubt about it. From the moment Petra pointed him out to me, not once has he looked up from his morning paper. I know that nothing that interesting happened in these three walls to keep his attention that long.

Undeterred by Levi's icy reception, I took a seat without awaiting permission. The mess hall seemed to hold its breath, the world stopped moving around me as I gathered the courage to speak.

"What's your name?" I probed, met only with the continued rustle of his morning paper and the measured sip of his tea.

"Not a big talker, huh?" I teased, maintaining a resilient grin. "Well, I'm Iris, been with the scouts for six years now. Sorry for the tardy introduction—"

"Are you a section leader?" he interrupted.

"Oh, no, I'm just—" Again, his interruption cut me off.

"Until you become a captain or commander, don't talk to me unless ordered to," he snapped, his eyes still glued to the paper.

"Until you become captain or commander, don't tell me what to do," I retorted, my smile unwavering. "Until then, I'll talk your ear off as much as I want to."

Finally, he set aside his papers and looked up. His midwinter eyes jabbed at me as they locked onto my own.

"If you're trying to make a friend, save your breath and look elsewhere," he groaned, his gaze cold. "Tell your friends it's rude to stare."

I rose from the table, maintaining my cheerful facade. "Congrats on the five Titans. Until next time, Mr. Grumps."

"Tch," escaped Levi's lips as I walked away, his grumbling fading into the background as I navigated back to my comrades.

Miche Oluo and Alexander awaited my return at the breakfast table. All eyes were on me, especially Alexander's, his light brown gaze burning into mine. There was an unspoken tension, a silent exchange between us that spoke of disapproval and lingering questions.

As I settled beside Alexander, his disapproving gaze burned into my being. "What were you doing with that little freak?" he sneered.

"Hey, don't call him that," I retorted, nudging him playfully.

"What? Freak?" He laughed with a harsh edge. "He's just another underground sewage rat. Nothing but a freak." The disdain lingered on his tongue.

"Kid has a death wish," Miche chimed in.

"I think that kid is older than all of us," Hange interjected.

"There's no way that puny little thing is older than me," Alexander scoffed, dismissing Levi as if he were insignificant. "Just look at him. Nothing but bones under that uniform."

"Now now, Alexander," Hange teased. "I'd think you're jealous of him passing you up."

"Me jealous of that freak? Never," Alexander laughed, a defensive edge in his voice.

"Really? Because he's already at five Titans for his first expedition. I recall you earning three on our first mission," Hange pointed out with a mischievous giggle.

"Listen here, you little shit" Alexander's frustration surged, and he aimed his words at Hange. "I earned my way into the Scouts. That guy is only here to kill Erwin. He's nothing but a thug."

"Alexander, calm down," I attempted to defuse the tension, but his anger was worked up. Hange's teasing had struck a nerve, a fact known to everyone at the table.

"What?" Alexander groaned at me. "Don't tell me you have a soft spot for the freak already."

"Calm down. Hange is just teasing, and we all know it," I laughed lightly, attempting to ease the situation.

The table fell into an uneasy silence as Levi strolled by, his steel-grey eyes fixed ahead with unwavering confidence.

"Freak," Alexander muttered under his breath as Levi passed.

Alexander's sharp words lingered in the air as a bitter aftertaste, and a knot of worry tightened in my stomach. The casual disdain he threw toward Levi struck a nerve, leaving me both surprised and uneasy.

The recruit's gaze met Alexander's, offering an unfazed look. However, Levi's eyes then locked onto mine. I felt a shiver down my spine as his gaze traveled, time seemingly slowing down at that moment.

At that moment, I couldn't shake the feeling that fate itself had chuckled at us, reveling in the disruption Levi brought to our routine. The mess hall buzzed with the usual noise, but an undercurrent of change hummed beneath it all. It was as if Levi's mere presence had punctured the veil of our ordinary existence, inviting uncertainty and curiosity. It was a curiosity I wanted to explore, boundaries I wanted to see be pushed.

If only then I knew how much he would change our little world inside these three walls.

━━━━━━ ◦ ❖ ◦ ━━━━━━

#levi ackerman #levi x reader #levi aot #captain levi #levi attack on titan #snk levi #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #aot x reader #levi angst

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lancermylove · 5 months

Text

Chapter 5 (N.SFW)

➣ Pairing: Demon brothers, Royals, Solomon with fem!Reader. ➣ Warning: N.SFW ➣ Word Count: 2,361 ➣ Chapters [SFW]: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] ➣ Chapters [N.SFW]: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

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It was one of those rare occasions where you woke up with an energetic smile and took a deep breath of the fresh morning air as the sun kissed your skin. Was the spirit of the holiday, or maybe the previous day you spent with Levi? You weren't sure, but you giddily opened your bedroom door and skipped into the hallway. Sadly, not everyone was having a great morning, especially not Lucifer.

Lucifer's eyes darkened in the dimly lit hallway like two pools of pitch-black ink when his gaze met yours. His stern and prideful expression was now painted with weariness, his movements slow and sluggish, as if he was struggling to stay awake and function. He was a shadow of his former self, a hollowed-out shell of himself. He barely seemed to acknowledge you, as if he was too tired to do anything but simply exist in that moment.

"Lucifer, you don't look so hot," you whispered, bewildered. His eyebrow slightly raised at your choice of words, but he didn't tease or reprimand you.

"I should have suspected Satan's intention when he offered me a cup of coffee. Yet, I foolishly accepted," he explained in a dull tone but revealed none of his underlying emotions. "I believe he wished to temporarily cease our discord. Alas, he proved me incorrect. The coffee contained half a bottle of caffeine pills."

"Half a bottle...!?" You gasped. If Lucifer had been a human, he would have been in the hospital fighting between life and death. A lingering sense of guilt gnawed at the back of your mind. While you wanted to apologize to him and take partial responsibility for the prank, you feared incurring his wrath. So, you gave him an empathetic smile, "Why don't you return to your room and rest. I can bring your breakfast there."

"Thank you, (y/n). I would appreciate that," Lucifer chuckled, his dull gaze softening for a split second. But he didn't allow you the pleasure to see his tender gaze for long and walked back into his bedroom.

As you entered the kitchen, you noticed Solomon on one of the bar stools, staring absentmindedly out the glass patio doors. Was the sorcerer also having a bad morning? He didn't allow you to ponder that question for long and turned his attention in your direction with a warm smile. "Good morning, (y/n). Did you rest well?"

"I slept like a baby," you giggled and placed a marble tray with gold handles on the kitchen island. Solomon's azure orbs followed your movements as you arranged breakfast on the tray, ensuring every item was symmetrically aligned. The sorcerer raised his eyebrows at your precision and couldn't help but wonder if you were a perfectionist.

"(Y/n), does everything have to be perfect?" He questioned, his voice holding undertones of amusement.

"If this breakfast was for me, then no. But it's for Lucifer, so yes, everything has to be perfect," you chortled.

"Lucifer?" He muttered under his breath and sighed. "(Y/n), while I understand you care about the brothers, you need to think about yourself."

"Think about myself? Solomon, I am not going to war for Lucifer; I am only bringing him breakfast." His words were an overreaction to you, so you quickly brushed them off. Although, somewhere deep down, you knew the sorcerer disliked you spending copious amounts of time with the brothers, but you weren't sure for what reason.

"I am not talking about you serving him breakfast, (y/n). I am well aware something is going on behind the scenes," he said firmly, but his words were not harsh or angry. "Your behavior around Lucifer and Barbatos, Diavolo's discomfort around Lucifer, Barbatos and Lucifer's stare-offs - I have noticed them all."

You felt like walls were closing in around you, like your secrets were precariously perched and on the verge of being exposed. Against your will, your heart rate increased while your palms grew clammy. Noticing this, Solomon smiled slightly, "I have no intention of prying into your decisions. I am bringing this up only because I am worried about you. The brothers are adults who can handle their own matters, so you don't need to stress yourself every time for their sake."

Since when had the sorcerer developed this side? Was it always there, and you never noticed it until now, or had something changed in him? Regardless, Solomon's reassuring and surprisingly kind words soothed your tension instantly. With a firm nod, you flashed a sweet smile, "I will be at home today, so I will get some rest."

"Is that so?" Solomon chuckled, tussling your hair slightly. "Well, in that case, I will devise a plan to take everyone out of the house so you can rest without interruptions."

Though Solomon asked you to rest, you were bored out of your mind and went downstairs to find it surprisingly quiet. The stillness of the moment was almost picturesque, creating an atmosphere akin to a painting on the walls. The only sound filling your ears was the melody of your own thoughts. Had Solomon actually managed to convince everyone to go out together? How? The sound of distant rustling from Beel and Belphie's room snapped you out of your thoughts.

"Hey, Belphie. Where is everyone?" You asked, startling him.

"You stayed back?" Belphie asked, surprised. "Solomon invited everyone to go to some winter wonderland or something like that. I thought you went with them."

"Wait, he managed to convince Lucifer to go? How?" You were intrigued by the sorcerer's ability to change the Avatar of Pride's mind. But you knew he either used manipulation or verbal trickery.

"Solomon said if Lucifer stays back, he will accompany him. Then they can have a nice, long chat about why Lucifer won't make a pact with him," Belphie chuckled.

Verbal trickery, it was, but you were thankful to the sorcerer for keeping his word. As you pondered this matter, your gaze fell on the youngest brother's bed to find ornaments, string lights, ribbons, and garlands laid out. "Are you planning to decorate the tree, Belphie?"

He nodded, "I want to get it over with so I can sleep. That's the only reason I got to stay behind."

Much to his joy, you offered to assist and carefully carried some decorations to the living room. The tall and stately pine tree stood a safe distance from the fireplace, its crisp needles glistening in the sunlight pouring in from the ceiling-height windows. Though you said you would help him, you wanted to see how Belphie would decorate the tree and silently stayed behind him.

Belphegor stood before the pine tree, carefully choosing from a wide selection of ornaments to add to the tree's greenery. He perused each option with deliberation, studying the colors, shapes, and sizes to find something that matched his taste and would receive your approval. But when he turned to grab a few more ornaments, you discretely snatched a handful of the decorations from the tree and slipped them into a nearby bag.

Initially, Belphie was confused at the disappearance of the baubles but brushed it off, assuming that he was simply tired due to the lack of sleep. Unable to resist the temptation, you continued your prank and hid a few more ornaments. The Avatar of Sloth caught on to your antics the second time but decided to stay quiet as he wanted to catch you red-handed. When you repeated your prank thrice, Belphagor swiftly grabbed your wrist and chortled, "No stealing, (y/n)."

Though you complied with him for the time being, you had a few other tricks up your sleeves. As he wrapped the ornament-covered tree with Christmas lights, you stepped in front of the tree. However, Belphagor continued his task, stringing you against the tree in a light-hearted act of mischief. You purposely waited for him to finish before dramatically touching the back of your hand to your forehead and speaking in an exaggerated and theatrical tone.

"Alas! I am trapped in a tangle of lights, my movements restricted as if by a restraining order! All that I can do is gaze upon the decorations, but I cannot fully enjoy them as I am caught up in this Christmas snare! Oh, cruel fate! Why must I suffer such a harsh and unjust punishment at the hands of a demon?"

He laughed and applauded, "That was the worst performance I have ever seen."

You huffed loudly but played along with his joke, "How dare thee utter such nonsense. Mine performance - it doth warrant an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony, and thou knowest it well! I am the best actress among the past hundred of years, and none shall ever compare to my skill and innate talent!" With those words, you crossed your arms and pretended to sulk.

"Are you upset?" Belphie chuckled and freed you from the binds of the festive string lights. "I am sorry."

When you didn't give him attention, he poked your shoulder, followed by your right cheek and left cheek. Then, he brought his fingers up and curled them slightly before suddenly digging them into the curves of your waist.

"Belphie!" You squealed and squirmed under his tickles. Breaking free from him, you dashed away, but the Avatar of Sloth had no plans of letting you walk away. For a while, you played the game of cat and mouse as laughter echoed through the empty cabin.

In a swift maneuver, Belphie spun you around into his arms and pinned your back against a wooden wall. He captured your lips in a playful kiss that only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to feel butterflies in your stomach. There was a moment of silence as the two of you locked eyes, your lips curled into small smiles. He noted your warm and sweet breath caressing his lips and dove in for another kiss. This time, your lips slid and met in a heated manner.

Amidst the lip-locking, Belpahgor raised the knee of his right leg, which was between your legs to prevent you from escaping his grasp, and pressed it against your womanhood. The gentle touch awakened your senses as a loud gasp escaped your lips. Though you tried to maintain your composure, heat rose to your face, and you couldn't hide the enjoyment of the sensation.

"Do you like this, (y/n)?" He whispered in a low voice in your ears, erecting a moan from you in response. The Avatar of Sloth found pleasure in your reaction and rubbed his knee harder between your legs, causing your breath to become shallow and your heart to race faster.

"B-Belphie, you need to...finish d-decorating the tree...before they come b-back." You had to fight the urge to moan as you got your spoke to him. With a sigh, he released you, but the lack of presence of his touch left you disappointed.

Belphagor instantly returned to his original task while you assisted him, still a bit shaky from the heated event. The two of you took a step back to examine the fruits of your labor. Various silver and gold baubles and decorations hung from the branches, surrounded by colorful lights, giving the living room a festive yet inviting glow. The garlands were draped over the branches and complimented the other decorations without overwhelming the observers. The red bows around the tree trunk tied the look together. There was only one item left to place on the Christmas tree - the star.

"Satan told me the tradition of placing the star is important," Belphie softly said, holding out the star for you. "So, I want you to place it on top."

His words tickled your heart, and you gladly accepted the task. While he gripped the ladder to stead it, you carefully climbed the rungs until you could reach the top.

Having completed your mission, you descended the ladder but failed to notice a spark of mischief gleaming in Belphie's amethyst orbs. When you were close enough, he reached his fingers up and lightly grazed them between your legs, earning a yelp from you.

"B-Belphie!"

Your protest fell on deaf ears and caused him to rub them harder in a circular motion. Your breath caught in your throat, and your body trembled from the stimulating touch. While the feel of his touch was thrilling, the slight shaking of the ladder terrified you, forcing you to cling to the sides with all your might. As if he sensed your fear of falling off, Belphie withdrew his fingers and watched you shakily climb down. He wordlessly clasped your wrists and pulled you to his bedroom.

Clothes lay scattered throughout the room, some tossed carelessly on the floor and others draped over furniture. There was an overwhelming smell of musk in the air, the scent of passion and arousal hanging in the space. The sound of skin sliding against fabric mingled with the rustling of sheets and covers, and the moaning became more audible as the scene grew more heated. Your eyes were closed while your face flushed with the intensity of the moment. You could feel Belphie's ardent gaze on your bouncing breasts as his fingertips dug into your hips, guiding them on his erect length.

As you reached your peak, your breath caught in your throat, and your body shuddered in pleasure. Belphie's face tightened, but he continued to thrust upwards inside you, getting closer to his climax. Soon, he pulled out of you with his eyes squeezed shut and released the tension on your chest and stomach, filling your nostrils with his slightly bitter scent.

Before you could fully catch your breath and snuggle with him, the Avatar of Sloth gave you an impish smile. "Beel messaged me a while ago. Everyone will come home soon, so you better get cleaned; otherwise, they might find out what we did."

Your eyes grew the size of discs as a squeal escaped your lips. Without caring about your ragged breath or shaky legs, you hopped off the bed, scooped your clothes, and ran out of his bedroom. In the background, you heard Belphagor's hearty and playful laughter.

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➣ Obey Me Masterlist: [1][2][3] ➣ Main Masterlist

➣ Buy me a Ko-fi?

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astro-royale · 3 months

Text

Four Basic Steps for Effective Creative Visualisation 🌀🌀🌀

From Creative Visualisation by Shakti Gawain📚

Four Basic Steps for Effective

Creative Visualization

1. Set Your Goal

Decide on something you would like to have, work toward, realize, or create. It can be on any level — a job, a house, a relationship, a change in yourself, increased prosperity, a happier state of mind, improved health, beauty, or better physical condition, or whatever.

At first, choose goals that are fairly easy for you to believe in, that you feel are possible to realize in the fairly near future. That way you won't have to deal with too much negative resistance in yourself, and you can maximize your feelings of success as you are learning creative visualization. Later, when you have more prac-tice, you can take on more difficult or challenging prob-lems.

Creative Visualization

2. Create a Clear Idea or Picture

Create an idea or mental picture of the object or situation exactly as you want it. You should think of it in the present tense as already existing the way you want it to be. Picture yourself with the situation as you desire it now. Include as many details as you can.

You may wish to make an actual physical picture of it as well, by making a treasure map described in detail later). This is an optional step, not at all necessary, but often helpful (and fun!).

3. Focus on it Often

Bring your idea or mental picture to mind often, both in quiet meditation periods, and also casually throughout the day when you happen to think of it. In this way it becomes an integrated part of your life, it becomes more of a reality for you, and you project it more successfully.

Focus on it clearly, yet in a light, gentle way. It's important not to feel like you are striving too hard for it or putting an excessive amount of energy into it — that would tend to hinder rather than help.

4. Give it Positive Energy

As you focus on your goal, think about it in a posi-tive, encouraging way. Make strong positive statements to yourself: that it exists, that it has come or is now coming to you. See yourself receiving or achieving it.

These positive statements are called "affirmations." While you are using affirmations, try to temporarily suspend any doubts or disbelief you may have, at least for the moment, and practice getting the feeling that that which you desire is very real and possible.

Basics of Creative Visualization

Continue to work with this process until you achieve your goal, or no longer have the desire to do so. Remember that goals often change before they are realized, which is a perfectly natural part of the human process of change and growth. So don't try to prolong it any longer than you have energy for it — if you lose interest it may mean that it's time for a new look at what you want.

If you find that a goal has changed for you, be sure to acknowledge that to yourself. Get clear in your mind about the fact that you are no longer focusing on your previous goal. End cycle on the old, and begin cycle on the new. This helps you avoid getting confused, or feeling like you've "failed" when you have simply changed.

When you achieve a goal, be sure to acknowledge consciously to yourself that it has been completed. Often we achieve things which we have been desiring and visualizing, and we forget to even notice that we have succeeded! So give yourself some appreciation and a pat on the back, and be sure to thank the universe for fulfilling your requests.

#law of attraction #law of manifestation #manifesting #self healing #healing #metaphysical #feminine energy #manifestation tips #visualization #spritualgrowth #spiritual knowledge #spiritualgrowth #spiritual disciplines #spiritual awakening #spirituality #void success #void state #void

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pauking5 · 6 months

Text

Addicting Taste Chapter 4

Synopsis: Enishi Yukishiro was on a mission to execute his piece de la resistance. A plan to avenge his beloved sister. Until you showed up. Will you be a part of his downfall or will you try to save him?

Pairing: Enishi Yukishiro x reader

Genre: strangers to lovers, sunshine and sunshine protector, comedic relief, slow burn, a lot of fluff, occasional smut (soon), angst

Word count: 8.9k+

A/N: This chapter is full of angst I would say. Enishi's true nature comes out a lot and he vents his frustrations on Miyu. Please don't hate me :') This is only the calm before the storm.

Powered by Mackenyu’s outstanding portrayal of Enishi’s character in Rurouni Kenshin: The Final, I hereby present you a story ripped from the figments of my mind. I hope you’ll love their story as much as I do. Enjoy lovelies, Paula.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Previous Next Bonus Chapter 6

Enishi's brain was playing a rerun of today's events as he walked the hallway to his office. The smile that stamped his lips seemed to not want to leave at all after the moment in your room. The way you cuddled up to him made that cold heart of his thaw over. You looked like the smallest creature on earth seeking comfort in the presence of your biggest predator. That’s when it hit him that you weren't afraid of him. And it confused him.

People were always throwing him disapproving looks, calling him heartless and all kinds of insults in just one breath. But they could barely muster the courage to look his way without a chill running down their spine. They were afraid of him and he used that to his advantage every time he needed to. But you were different. He was taken aback by your compassion and warmth. It was something he hasn’t felt since his sister. Tomoe.

He stopped in his tracks in the dark hallway as the thought of her crossed his mind, your favourite painting sitting stark before him. He recalled the day he made it, a heavy weight tightening around his heart at the memory. He painted it after one of his hardest days, when his mind couldn't give him the respite he needed.

He was sitting in his office, plans scattered across the desk, stressed out of his mind. He felt suffocated in this big and empty house, so he furiously left the mansion in search of a way to breathe. Taking to the wooden trail up the hills, he climbed until his feet felt sore and his lungs were gasping for air. The earlier rainfall tore apart at the forest, the same way his mind was destroying everything in its wake.

Reaching the opening in the trees overlooking the village he settled on the ground, dirt sticking to his clothes. He tried to fight his thoughts away, gripping his chest in a plea to push some air inside. He kicked and punched his emotions until he couldn't fight them anymore, letting himself be consumed. Everything suddenly became too much. Feeling, seeing, tasting turned into the hardest tasks.

It felt like death was upon him, knocking on his door with a sick grin. But he couldn't go just yet. He couldn't go in peace until he avenged her. He didn't believe in god but he raised all the prayers he could for anyone to hear him and help. Help him find the way back to the light that left his world.

Just when he thought all resolve was gone to shit, he got a response. Warm rays of sun hit his cold skin, willing him to regain some of his energy. Opening his eyes he sat up from his curled position on the ground and looked ahead. A sunset rose on the horizon, drenching the hills into a vivid green, the valley below dressed in a warm orange. The cold hills appeared to warm up as the sun turned golden in the sky.

As far away as the sun felt, it managed to comfort him. It let him know he was not alone, drying the salty tears falling down his face. That's when he found solace in this place. A place where he could let himself be even just for a while without prying eyes or battle plans clouding his mind. Just breathing, existing and feeling.

He didn't even know how long he was sitting there until the slow fall of night darkened the crests of the hills in a dark shade of blue. The valley was still basking in the warmth of the sun's last rays for the day. The hills looked willing to let the cold and darkness surround them just to see the valley this bright and warm. They would sit and face the chaos of the world just to see the valley full of light. It was like a secret promise of protection until time would end.

He wanted to protect someone like that too, even after failing to do that for his sister. He had all this power with nothing real to use it for and he wanted to give it a shot. He would face the world with all his might if it meant he could feel warmth like this again.

When he got back to the mansion, he scrambled for an empty canvas and pulled up the colours stacked in the desk drawers. He painted the scenery the best he could, pouring out everything he felt onto the canvas before him. He took extra care in capturing the light the right way, desperately flicking the brush to make it as warm as possible. A smile sat on his lips as he hung it in the hallway, making a wish for light to come his way.

You surprised him. It was almost every evening since you came here that he caught you in front of the painting, studying it like a student trying to understand its teacher. He felt exposed every time you traced the lines with your eyes, hoping you wouldn't be able to notice the intense emotions dangling off the canvas. He thought you would scrutinise him like everyone else, calling him a fool for trying to put his heart into something. But you didn't. You liked looking at the painting almost as much as he did making it and that connected you.

That was why he decided to take you up on the trail, trying to open up to you in the only way he could. You were like an open book, letting him fly through your pages anytime he wanted to know more, so naturally he felt compelled to give back a piece of him. Even if it felt small compared to everything you gave him in the short time you've been together.

Sitting there with you looking at the same sunset that brought hope back in his being when the sky came down on him at full force, he felt comforted by entirely something else. Your presence. It felt stronger than the sun's warmth. He couldn't settle the weird nerves crawling up his spine as he looked at you, shining in the sun like some divine being. His mind was going a hundred miles an hour, swarming with all kinds of thoughts. Until one hit him like a train at full speed.

Was the one he was supposed to protect now... you?

This question was enough to mess with his head as he made his way to his office. Sitting down in the chair he let his eyes wander over the maps and plans laying on the desk in a chaotic mess. He wasted precious time getting caught up in feelings that probably weren't even real.

What if you were going to mess up his plans even more than you already have? He did take you in on a weak moment, he had to admit that. It was merely a favor he returned because he was a man of his word. But you were at most a distraction, a fleeting moment meant to catch him off guard, as his mind convinced him.

He wasn't stupid to kick away all his hard work for some strange feeling he had that might have been fabricated by the little conscience he had left. He wanted warmth. He needed it. But what if the warmth you gave him was not genuine? Was it just empty sympathy?

His fist collided with the desk to snap him out of spiraling. What he truly needed was to get his head back in the game and continue with the plan. He was far from ready to take on the man that took away his world.

He was going to train you harder to minimise the time lost on sweet gazes and chaste touches. If you were going to get to the level of everyone else you needed to show him you wanted it. Even if that meant pushing you away and making you hate him.

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Warm rays of sun tickled your face urging you to wake up. The comfort of the blanket draped over you covered the sweaty smell coming off your clothes. Rolling around in the cozy space of the bed you sighed and stretched your arms above your head. A yawn brought yesterday’s events rushing in leaving you a little confused.

Enishi showed you a side of himself you didn't think could exist under that cold attitude he carried around. He took you on that hike for good reason and you were grateful for it. He seemed so at peace up there on the hill, like the world stopped spinning for a while, letting him feel it through every bone in his body. His cold facade was melting away with the sunset and he looked beautiful. The kind of beautiful you thought was reserved for angels in heaven.

Your mind took you back to the descent down the hill when he held your hand to help you down some of the steep rocks. He was so gentle with you and it made your insides become mush. He could be so soft despite the harsh way he was training you...

"Training! Oh god, I'm so late," you screeched as you jumped out of bed. You washed up at lightning speed and put on fresh training clothes on autopilot.

"I'm in deep shit. He's going to kill me."

You ran around the hallways the fastest your feet could take you. Passing by the kitchen you quickly downed a glass of water and a banana to give you some energy for at least a few hours. Dashing outside the doors to the terrace, you saw him leaning against a tree. His arms were secured over his broad chest, jaw slightly twitching as he caught sight of you slowly approaching.

He pushed off the tree not sparring one look at you, shoulders rolled back in a defensive manner. Was something wrong?

Coming closer he leaned down and threw something at you. Catching the foreign item you noticed it was a bo staff. A long red oak stick sitting heavy on your hands as you balanced it around to get a feel for it. You knew its agility was an advantage in a fight, easily becoming an extension of its owner's energy if used correctly.

"We're sparring today," he said as he got his own staff off the ground.

"Sparring? I don't even know how to use this-" you were cut off as a hit came your way, catching you unprepared, shielding yourself just before it could smash into your side.

Okay... Did someone pee in his tea today?

Sparring was difficult considering you were defending against a martial arts connoisseur. Every time you defended a hit on your left, your right side was left uncovered, earning you a smack from his staff. You had no idea what you were doing but kept going, thrusting your staff around with no actual direction of where you wanted your swings to go. You got excited whenever you managed to send a strong hit down on him only to get caught off guard when he would catch it, shoving you back double the force.

"You can't defend yourself," he huffed pointing out the obvious.

"No shit, Sherlock."

He continued the attack, every blow coming in faster and stronger than the last. He even started combining aerial moves with the swings of the staff for extra force. If you couldn't defend the hits before you definitely couldn't keep up now.

He almost got your head off your shoulders in a horizontal swipe of his staff, but you managed to slide down to the ground before it could happen. You jumped back a few meters away from him to catch your breath. He was being too aggressive in his training today. Did I do something to upset him?

"Is this about me being late?" you said, trying to will some air back into your lungs. Getting no response from him you looked over to where he was standing.

There was something weird about his energy today. He had that storm catching speed behind his irises again, knuckles turning white from the iron grip he had on the bo. He looked ready to plunge that stick through you if you weren't threading carefully around him.

As dangerous and wild as he appeared you saw straight through him. He was being this rough on purpose, trying to push you to your limit in hopes your instincts would kick in.

Before you knew it he charged at you again and your weapons collided with a loud crack. The force with which he came at you pushed you backwards, making it difficult to keep the hold on your staff. Willing the wobbling muscles in your arms to keep going you tried to match his pace, fighting his raw strength the more he forced his staff down on yours. You tried so hard to find a way out of his attack that you didn't even realise your back hit the tree trunk behind you.

This wasn't training anymore. He looked like he actually wanted to kill you. The more he pressed down on his staff the more yours cracked down the middle, sending little ripples down the upper and lower parts. One last push of his bulky arms made your staff cave in and break in half, leaving you defenseless. Enishi's staff continued to press down on your neck as you tried to push it away with the little energy you had left.

"Stop!" you yelled, but he didn't seem to hear you. He was far too lost inside his mind to come back to the real world, eyes roaring as they bore into yours. You were nothing but prey to him.

"Enishi, snap out of it!"

At the sound of your broken voice he froze. His pupils decreased back to a normal size and his breathing evened, the hold on his staff going limp. Shaking his head he looked at you, lowering the weapon away from your throat. You bent over to catch your breath, leaning your trembling hands on your knees to support you. By the time you straightened back up he was already gone, his staff discarded by the broken remains of yours.

What the fuck just happened?

—————————————————————————

He acted even weirder the next few days, leaving you to train by yourself most of the time. You took the time to get a better form on your bo staff, practicing your hits on wooden dummies you found laying around. Practicing by yourself gave you a chance to enhance your skills, making your hits gain power and improving your balance.

You tried to focus but your mind was elsewhere, a certain mophead occupying it. You could tell he was stressed by something from the way his personality did a 360 spin towards asshole land out of nowhere. You hated the way he shut you out.

The door to his office was locked tight every time you passed by. You wanted to ask him what was going on, see what you could do to help, but every time your hand lifted to knock on it you froze and laid your palm flat on the door. With a heavy sigh you would trudge back to your room and sit awake, hoping he would come out sooner or later.

He finally showed up for training one morning, glasses sitting idly on the bridge of his nose trying to cover the dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he hasn't slept in days. His eyes were looking at a spot next to you, darting everywhere but into yours.

A few sets of knives were set out on a table a few feet away from what looked like a bullseye target. Walking towards the table you recognised the weapon: the kunai. A sleek 30 cm blade with a round handle, easy to hide and deadly in close combat. He probably assumed mastering the kunai should be easily at the same level with your shooting abilities, which was debatable.

He stood over on the side and watched as you analysed the weapons. Weighing one of the double sets in your hand you noticed they were the same as your twin pistols, just a little on the lighter side. You didn't wait for his directions as you positioned one in your hand. Visualising where you wanted it to hit the target like a bullet, you swung your arm backwards, angled it and threw it towards the target.

Anticipation built up in you as you watched it twist for its destination. Maybe you found something else you were good at. Your optimism was quickly destroyed as the knife fell three circles away from the center of the target, jaw dropping in confusion. My aim couldn't be this bad, right?

Picking up another one from the pile on the table, you went for a different arm technique. Swinging the knife from the other side of your body with a lot more force from your torso than your previous throw, you watched as it barely got stuck in the outer layer of the bullseye.

What is this fuckery? Has my aim gotten this shitty?

You took more of the kunai and tried again, desperately trying to hit the red spot in the middle. Each time you threw a knife it barreled through the air rapidly only to avoid getting stuck anywhere in the damn target. You were seeing red, frustration gripping you the more you tried. There was no way you couldn't control any other weapon besides your guns. You had to get the hang of at least one but it felt impossible.

An idea popped into Enishi's head and he made his way to the target. He positioned himself in front of it arms wrapped securely around his torso. You tilted your head at him, confusion swimming in your brain. What was he doing?

"Throw the knives."

His tone sounded so casual as if he asked you to make him tea, not to decorate him like a Christmas tree with combat knives.

"What? You mean throw them at you?"

He nodded showing you he was hellbent on this incredibly stupid idea. You shook your head in refusal, but he wasn't going to budge from that spot until you did what he instructed.

"What if I stab you or something by accident? This is stupid."

"Just throw the knives," he said, sharp glare piercing you, making chills run down your spine.

You took one of the few available kunai left on the table and turned towards him. Taking a few deep breaths to calm your nerves you considered the few possible outcomes. If you were successful you would live to tell the tale. If you weren't cautious you could injure or worse, stab him somewhere vital by mistake. All these scenarios clouded your mind, making your hands shake slightly.

I can't do this. I can’t have blood on my hands again.

"We don't have all day."

That was enough to push your buttons, rage slowly flooding your veins. He was acting like a dick to you while you were working your hardest. He didn't show up to your training for countless days and he was the one throwing a tantrum.

Getting into a throwing stance, you lifted up the knife and pushed it forwards with as much force as you could muster. Watching as it left the safety of your palm and headed straight for Enishi, all your reason fell apart. The earlier anger was replaced by horror as you watched it closing in on him. You were praying he would get out of the way before it was too late. But he didn't move an inch.

Closing your eyes to avoid witnessing a possible crime of your own doing, you listened for the impact. When no sound came from the other side you opened your eyes to see Enishi holding the kunai with his bare hand, a hairsbreadth off his face. Releasing the breath you were holding you struggled to contain your rage. What if he didn’t catch it in time? What if his face was now a bloody mess? He could have gotten seriously injured and all I could do was sit and watch.

His face sported that sick grin of his and you couldn't hold back your tongue anymore.

"Are you out of your fucking mind?" you gritted out, trying to get your shaky hands under control.

"What?"

"What?! I could have injured or worse, killed you!"

"But you didn't," he chuckled. "And frankly, I don't think you would be able to do that."

"Excuse me?"

"I thought giving you a real target would help with your limitations. But as it turns out, you can't even aim properly at anything. How did you even learn how to shoot with an aim this shitty?"

"Why are you suddenly being a dick?"

"I'm just telling you the truth. You can't keep hiding behind Barairo just because you're scared," he spat out as he walked closer to you. "It makes you look like a coward."

"I'm not listening to this shit,” you say turning away from him to make your way inside. You couldn’t be in the same space as him right now without strangling him. Before you could get far his hand latched onto yours spinning you around to face him.

“Running away already?” he taunted, adding to your irritation.

“No. I’m done listening to your bullshit,” you say shoving his arm off of you roughly, his eyes widening at your outburst.

“You think I haven’t tried? I’ve been trying my hardest ever since you agreed to train me. I’ve done everything in my power to become better at shit I’ve never done before. Because you told me I could make the worst parts of me become the best," you said, voice slightly breaking.

"The least you could do is show me some respect as your student, the same way I show it to you as my teacher instead of treating me like I'm nothing,” you spat and turned around, leaving him in the middle of the garden.

Tears threatened to spill on your cheeks and you couldn’t let him see you like that. He didn’t deserve your tears. You ran inside your room and locked the door, angrily throwing your shoes around the room. Sitting down on the floor in front of your bed you brought your knees up to your chest. Your mind started spiraling out of control again.

What if he’s right? What if I’m hiding behind who I used to be like a coward? What if I really can’t get better at anything?

You couldn’t stop the tears cascading down your cheeks in currents. You were angry with yourself and the aching in your muscles from the endless training made it all too much. Violent sobs wracked you as you let out the built up frustration from the last few days.

You hated him. He took your trust and stepped on it like it was a bug crawling on the floor. He crossed you once again, just like the night he left you to fend for yourself and you felt like a fool for thinking he wanted to help you. You were nothing but a pawn in whatever scheme he was playing, easily discarded whenever he wanted to.

You wished you were back home with your parents, laughing at the trouble you would get yourself into with the maids. To have your mom patch you up as your dad gave you an earful. To feel cared for again.

Mom, dad, I need you. Please come back to me.

—————————————————————————

Enishi was back in his office, barricading himself away from the world. On the way back from the garden he passed by your room and heard your frantic sobs. He wanted to knock on the door and comfort you, begging for you to forgive him. But his pride got the best of him.

I hurt her. She was trying her best and all I did was push her away. I'm a monster.

He got up from his chair and pushed everything on top of his desk to the floor. Leaning his hands on the empty wood he huffed a few breaths trying to steady his racing heart.

I wanted to protect her. To help her come out of hiding and show her that she can become the best . But I broke her trust again.

He threw his chair across the room knocking down a few swords onto the floor. He was losing control again and there was no coming back from it this time.

I hurt her the way I let people hurt me. I promised her I would help and I failed. The same way I failed Tomoe.

—————————————————————————

You cried your eyes out until there was nothing left to cry. The darkness surrounding your room told you it was the late hours of the night. Rain started pouring outside a few hours ago, accompanying the sadness you were feeling.

Cold and quiet. That was how your heart felt right now. It seemed like the mansion mirrored your sorrow, no sound of humanity present in its hallways. The same hollowness walked the walls of your heart.

It felt like the world stopped the minute you let your walls down. You felt numb, sitting in the same position you were in when you locked yourself in the room. You didn’t move an inch, afraid it would do more damage than good.

Your stomach grumbled and you whined in protest. All you wanted was to stay in here, avoiding everything and everyone until the pain would go away. Avoiding him. But your stomach insisted you grab something to eat something before it would shut your system down.

With a huff you pushed yourself off the floor and stood upright. Stretching your body to get rid of the ache in your joints you walked over to the door. Unlocking it, you were surprised to see no one around. There were usually guards around walking the grounds on patrol but it seemed they were dismissed for the night.

You walked to the kitchen and looked in the cupboards for the leftover potato salad you made yesterday. You made a little extra in case he would want to eat some if he would come out of his office. It turned out he didn't even touch it, judging by the foil still wrapped around the pot to conceal its warmth. Sitting on a chair at the kitchen island you unwrapped the pot and dug into it, eating in silence. You watched as the rain fell down the kitchen window in rapid waves and sighed to yourself.

After you were done with the food you went over to the sink to wash it before you headed back to your room. You reached to turn on the on the tap freezing as your eyes focused on the window above the sink. The view of the garden made you panic as you saw a person sprawled on the ground. Your heart was stuck in your throat.

Grabbing the broomstick leaning by the door, you slowly pushed the doors to the terrace open. Your shoes were splashing against the puddles turning the green patio to mushy mud. The crisp air pierced your skin as you advanced towards the figure laying still on the grass.

Looking to your right your heart immediately softened. A drenched Enishi was laying on the ground in a star shape, rain ruthlessly hitting his face. You put the broom away and took slow steps in his direction until you stopped just beside his head.

His hair was sticking to his forehead in a wet mess. His eyebrows were scrunched up and his jaw was tense, looking like he was crying. He’s been laying here for quite a while considering that his clothes looked soaked beyond just a few raindrops. His eyes seemed lost so far away, gazing at the dark sky in search of something.

Crouching down you shook his shoulder, getting no reaction. Your clothes were getting soaked as well uncomfortably sticking to your body. The rain falling through your locks cascaded down on his face. Your warm hand met his icy cheek caressing it gently, action that got him to finally look at you.

“Hey,” you said softly.

He just looked at you. The way he was acting scared you. He looked absolutely broken and you had no idea what could have caused it. You rubbed soothing circles into his cheek and he faintly leaned into your touch.

“Enishi, talk to me.”

He just blinked and turned his head away from you, continuing to stare at the raindrops falling from the sky. You didn’t know why he was acting like this but it looked like it wasn’t the first time it happened.

“I want to help you,” you say hoping he would say something. But he only stayed still as a rock letting mother nature drop her sorrows on him.

Trying to think of what else you could do you did the only thing you could think of. Laying down on the ground in the same position he was in you turned your head to him. Your hand searched for his, locking your fingers between his cold ones once you found it. He turned to you and the look on his face made your grip on his hand tighten. His eyes were glazed over with unshed tears, reddish lines telling you he already shed enough before the rain covered his cheeks.

As mad as you were at him you weren’t going to leave him like this. You knew how bad it felt when you had no one to lean on whenever the world came crashing down. No one deserved to suffer alone.

His hand gripped yours like an anchor keeping him tethered to the real world, helping him find control again. He needed comfort and you were willing to give it to him for the time being.

So you both laid there, letting the rain wash away your hurt, your hands intertwined in a promise. A vow to never let each other hurt in silence like this ever again.

—————————————————————————

The rain clouds broke apart a while ago and you were still in the same position on the muddy ground of the garden. He made no move to get up so you did it first, eyes shooting up to you as you were sitting up. He looked at your hands afraid you would let go and he would fall back in the deep relentless ocean in his head. But you didn’t let go.

You moved to get him to sit up with you and he obliged with your actions. Getting to your feet your hand was pulled back by his. He was sitting on the ground his eyes sparkling and a pout on his lips. You thought he looked like a puppy. You pulled on his hand to make him get up but he didn’t budge. Sighing you crouched back down to his height and stroked his hair away from his face.

“Let’s go back inside,” you said softly.

He nodded and slowly got up with you. He waited for you to lead him inside so you did. You took small steps to the kitchen holding the door for him. Walking the long hallway you stopped in front of his room. He shook his head and you were confused. Wasn’t he going to change in his room?

“Where else do you want to go?”

He took the lead and lightly pulled you to your room. Pushing one of the double doors, he returned your earlier gesture and held it open for you.

“I’ll get us some towels,” you said as you made your way to the bathroom only to be stopped by the hand that was still holding yours.

“I’ll be right back,” you reassured him and he hesitantly let go of your hand.

You went over to the bathroom and grabbed every towel you could find. Coming back you found him sitting at the end of your bed, lost in thought again. You placed the pile of towels beside him and picked one up to dry his hair. Placing it on his head you started making your way through his gray locks, untangling them. You worked from the top of his head to the ends on his neck, drying up as much as you could. Before you could swipe the towel over his forehead his hands came up to rest on your wrists. It was only then you realised how close you were standing. He looked at you tilting his head in confusion.

“What’s wrong?” you asked, searching his eyes for anything that could hint at even more distress.

“Why are you helping me?” he croaked out, voice smaller than the wind blowing outside.

“Because I know how it feels like," you sighed, "to be alone with the world ripped from under your feet.”

His thumbs moved in circles on your wrist, a silent response to your confession. You took that as a sign to continue drying him up. When you were done with his hair you moved to the rest of his body. His blouse was sticking to him like a wet rag. He noticed your hesitation so he took off his blouse by himself, leaving only his navy tank top on.

“I can go get you some clothes—“

“Just stay here,” he said. His hands got hold of a new towel and his hand guided you to sit down on the bed next to him.

He started drying your hair this time, taking extra care to smoothen out the knots in your hair. He was gently drying it on all sides coming back to your face. He placed a few stray hairs behind your ear before patting down the droplets still running down your face. He pat your forehead stopping when he came up to your eyes. He noticed they were red and puffy just like his and he knew he was the reason for it. He hated himself for hurting you. He never wanted to do that. Setting the towel in his lap he looked down at his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, a tone you haven’t heard from him before. He looked genuinely apologetic as he fidgeted with his fingers in his lap.

You placed a hand on top of his and rubbed your thumb in soothing circles to warm his cold hands. His eyes snapped up at you to see a soft smile forming on your lips.

How you could still smile after everything was beyond him. This must have been your secret power, comforting others when you yourself needed comforting. He realised your compassion and warmth were real and he admired you even more now than he already did.

“It’s okay," you replied. “I’m gonna go change. You sure you don’t want me to bring you some clothes?” He nodded and you made your way to the bathroom.

After you changed, you came out and he was in the same position you left him. You put the rest of the towels away on the vanity and moved to get under the covers. Exhaustion was knocking on your door after the day you had, feeling consumed and drained completely. Setting your head on your pillow and getting comfortable you looked at Enishi. He was still sitting at the end of your bed, clueless as to what to do with himself.

“You can… uhm… come up here. I don’t bite.” He turned his head to see you tucked in bed already. He didn’t mean to bother you any more than he did.

“Are you sure?”

You nodded and patted the place next to you. He got up and crawled his way up to the headboard laying down on his back. You turned on your side to look at him finding him gazing up at the ceiling mind pestering him again.

“You can talk to me. I’m here to listen.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to settle his nerves. He debated on whether he should tell you what was on his mind or not. What did he have to lose if he told you? The most you could do was push him away and call him a monster like everyone else. Taking a few more deep breaths, he spoke words no one else has heard before.

“Tomoe. That was my sister’s name.” He paused to gather his thoughts and you reached up to hold his hand, letting him know he could take his time. You weren't going to push him away and that made him relax.

“She was killed 13 years ago and I saw it happen. I couldn’t do anything to protect her.”

“I’m so sorry, Enishi,” you said rubbing his knuckles to try and soothe his pain a little. He squeezed your hand in appreciation.

“It’s okay. I’m planning to avenge her and make the one who took her away from me suffer,” he gritted through his teeth as his hand tensed in your hold. You wanted to know more about what happened to her but you knew it would be too much to ask of him right now.

“I left Japan and came here to build my resources and train until I became the best I could be. I dealt and fought until the Shanghai mafia became mine so I could lay the plans in my favour.”

At least now you knew why he was doing all this in the first place and why it meant so much to him. Losing the only family you had is like losing the only thing that made you mean something in this world. It scars you so deep that you can’t move forward without someone else supporting you on the way.

If avenging her was his wish, the last thing to get him moving on, you had to help him. You still didn’t know all the details but you knew enough to want to help him see this through.

“I’ll help you,” you said making him turn his head to you. A yawn made its way out of your mouth and you tried stifling it but failed. He thiught you looked like a lion cub.

“Let’s avenge your sister and find you some peace,” you said sleepily as exhaustion took over you. Your eyes closed and you gave in to the darkness of dreamland. You were going to help him no matter what.

Enishi turned on his side to get a better look at you and saw you were fast asleep. Your hand was still holding his hand and he felt a small smile come to his lips for the first time in a while. He pushed some stray hairs away from your face. He was so grateful to you. You came through just when he needed it the most. Like a miracle he's been waiting on for ao long.

Maybe his wish came true, but only time would be able to tell. What he did know was that he wasn't going to let his mind push you away anymore. He was going to protect you properly from now on.

Lifting up the duvet over the both of you he closed his eyes and let sleep take him, his hand securely holding yours between you.

—————————————————————————

You woke up the next day in the late afternoon, the warmth enveloping your hand still ghosting around your fingertips. Creeping your eyes open you shut them closed, a mild headache forming. Your stomach was growling you awake after it digested the last of the food you ate the day prior. You wanted to sleep some more but it just didn't want to let you.

Sitting up in bed you took notice of the smell of something cooking. Sniffing more of the essence floating through the air you realised it smelled like pancakes. You were either hallucinating from hunger or someone was actually making pancakes.

Slipping on shoes and tying a robe around you, you made haste for the kitchen. The aroma got more divine the closer you got and you could already taste the sweetness of the pancakes. Pushing open the doors you saw broad shoulders working busily on the stove, flipping the plump dough in the pan, pressing down with a spatula to get it baked evenly on all sides.

"Good morning," he said, sensing you behind him. He could easily recognise your light steps after the few weeks you've spent together.

"Good morning," you replied walking over to his spot near the stove. Peeking over his shoulder you noticed a plate stacked high with pancakes, red bean paste smoothly spread in the center.

"Are those dorayaki pancakes?" you asked, drool pooling at the side of your lips at the sight of the traditional confectionery. You haven't had those since you left Japan.

"Mhm," he nodded a smirk on his face at your reaction.

"Can I have one?" you asked, eyes twinkling in anticipation.

"No," he said seriousness taking over his face.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN NO?" you yelled ready to throttle him until he started laughing.

"I'm joking," he chuckled. "You should've seen your face."

"Very funny. So, can I have one?"

"Of course you can. I made them for you after all."

Your heart melted. Dorayaki pancakes required an immense amount of focus in getting the dough right and if you didn't know the recipe properly you could mess it up and they could turn all mushy. He put time and effort into them considering how soft they were. And he made them for you.

He flipped another one on the pan and turned to see why you got so quiet. You had a pout on your face and your eyes were sparkling in the afternoon sun shining through the kitchen window. You looked nothing short of adorable and he had to physically restrain himself from pinching your cheeks. Your stomach growled loudly ruining the moment and he chuckled.

He grabbed the plate full of pancakes and put it on the kitchen island pulling out a chair for you. You sat down and thanked him, grabbing a fork to dig in. The soft dough melted in your mouth and the red bean paste tasted exactly like the street vendors in Japan made it. It was a taste of home away from home.

Enishi waited for your reaction, releasing a breath he didn't know he was holding as you sighed happily chewing on a pancake. You looked like you enjoyed the small dessert and that made him happy. He wanted to do something for you to thank you for yesterday and to apologize.

"Is it good?"

"It's ahmazhing," you said with your mouth full making him shake his head.

"Come eat with me," you prodded pulling on the chair next to you. You pushed the plate closer as he sat down so you could share the pancakes. You ate in silence, silently gazing at each other when the other wasn't looking. You both wanted to say something and you both rushed in, accidentally speaking over each other.

"About yesterday," you started.

"I'm sorry about yesterday," he said at the same time.

You both chuckled and went on to argue about who should go first. Finally giving in you let him go first.

"I'm sorry about yesterday. I was a total jerk to you these past few days. I left you to train alone and I pushed you away instead of helping you learn things the right way."

"You forgot the part where you almost decapitated me with a wooden stick and almost killed me. With the same stick," you say trying to rub salt in the wound.

"Yeah, I'm sorry for that too. I got too carried away and I shouldn't have lashed out on you like that."

"What about the part where you made me throw knives at you?"

"Technically that was all you-"

"Don't push it mophead." At the sound of the nickname he let a small smile walk his lips. He didn't know why you kept calling him that but he kind of digs it. He wasn't going to tell you that though.

"Point is, I am sorry and I promise to not do that ever again."

"What you said out there was so way out of line," you say slowing down on the pancake you were chewing. You still felt the punch of his words drifting around your heart.

"I know. I shouldn't have said those things to you. I gave you my word that I'll help you become the best and I intend to do just that."

A comfortable silence sat in the air. His face was covered in regret as the sun's rays tried to reach him. He was trying to make it up to you which was probably way out of his character. Tension was wafting through the air in thick waves, so you decided to make the mood a little lighter.

"Sooooo... are these apologetic pancakes?"

"Only if you want them to be."

"You softie."

"Oh, shut up."

Things felt better between you now. You still needed to talk some things out but for the time being you were back on track. Whatever tried to sway you these past few days was long gone now.

Finishing up the dorayaki, you took the plate to the sink and got started on the dishes. Enishi joined you on the other side, wiping dry the utensils as you put them on the drying rack. Team work made the dream work and you were done cleaning up fairly quickly, the earlier sunset turning to nightfall.

Wiping his hands dry on the cloth his hand attached to your wrist to grab your attention.

“Come with me for a bit,” he said motioning you towards the door. He was leading the way again just like last night, hand gently resting on your wrist.

The office came into view and he pulled you inside. You haven’t been in there for a few days and the place looked pretty beaten up. Enishi left you standing in the middle as he went to pick up maps and papers off the floor next to his desk. You looked around and spotted a few swords laying on the ground, their scabbards on the walls empty.

Kneeling next to them you picked one of them up. The robust wooden hilt was decorated with metal motives ranging from animal details to florals. The blade was heavy on your hand, tilting it on the side to see the light reflect its sharpness. Something about this sword called out to you. A red tassel hung from its end, delicately floating around the sword. Enishi watched you inspect the sword, surprised to see you so keen on learning more about it as you moved it around.

“That’s called a jian. It’s more of a practice sword but it can still be used in combat.”

“What’s with the red tassel?”

“It’s meant to give you a reference point during a fight,” he said taking hold of your hand and placing it on the hilt with his on top. He manoeuvred your body into an attack position, his other palm resting on your hip to direct you.

“The tassel moves with the sword,” he moved your hands together to create a wave with the sword. “It gives you balance as your moves get more pronounced.”

He made a show of a relaxed horizontal line, lifting your hand up to then drag it down vertically. He was supporting most of the weight of the sword as he waved it around, letting you feel the strong pressure of his wrist against the weapon. His other hand guided your hips to move in sync with the swings.

“It can make your moves faster,” he exhaled as he went for a quick diagonal slash causing your bodies to get impossibly closer. You looked up at him to find him already starring down at you. Your hips were pressed firmly to his, both of your breaths quickening the more you stared at each other.

His adam’s apple bobbed down, the trunk of his neck now in your direct view. You didn't realise it was so defined until you stood this close to it. His red robe sat on his nape, covering the extension of his collar bone under it to your disappointment. Taking a nervous gulp you lifted your eyes back to his only to find his looking at you with hunger. The hand on top of the sword went to hold yours lowering the weapon towards the ground. The palm on your hip moved to the small of your back bringing you even closer.

Want suddenly ignited in you as you waited for what could follow, your heart racing. You didn’t care what would happen as long as he would close the distance between you. He seemed to notice the change in mood, the flush painting your cheeks being a dead giveaway of your current thoughts. His signature smirk raised to his lips and he let out a chuckle, earning him a smack on the chest from you. Fucking flirt.

You stepped away from him trying to bring your heartbeat back to normal. The sword was left secure in your hold as you left to look for its sheath. Scanning the scabbards on the wall you couldn’t pinpoint the location of the jian’s casing. Enishi came from behind you and took the sword from you, fingers lightly grazing yours in the process. It was enough to make your stomach flutter again. Why did he have this much of an effect on me?

Spinning around you went to pick up the rest of the swords looking for their sheaths. You found most of them without his help, successfully cleaning up around the office.

Once you were done you went and sat on the couch stretching your arms above your head. You didn’t really want to leave to your room just yet. Enishi took to arranging the maps on his desk folding them around to make some space. You got up and went over to help him sort them out. Putting all the paper away you wiped the desk clean with a cloth and put every gimmick back to its previous spot.

You then took to walking the office rounding up every sword and weapon on the wall. Curiosity got the best of you wondering which one was his. He was definitely a swordsman considering the trained grip he had on the jian a few moments ago.

“Which one is yours?”

Your question caught him a little off guard as he was sorting through his drawers. He walked over to the wall besides his desk and took down a sword. Its blade was longer than a meter, hilt covered in leather strips criss-crossing each other, matching the copper colour of the tassel attached to the end. It had a mix of both Chinese and Japanese elements.

“This is a wato. It’s similar to a katana in its power and to a tachi in terms of agility,” he said giving it a spin with his wrist. He held the handle to you urging you to give it a try.

You took the sword feeling its heavy hilt be entirely balanced by the length of the blade. Despite needing a lot of force to move it around the blade followed the hilt accordingly creating fluid movement.

“You have to combine it with some kind of martial arts to make it work in battle.”

You were taken back to your bo staff lesson a few days ago. The way he was easily moving with the staff whilst blending in aerial moves to push more force into the blows was due to the way he wielded the wato. You thought his fighting style was an art of its own.

“Will you teach me?”

“Sword fighting?” You nodded eagerly as you waited for his response. He seemed deep in thought about it. You were far from ready to use a sword. However, he's seen you train by yourself with the bo staff and you surely got better at it. Your grip seemed to be stronger on it the more you practiced on the dummies. He saw how bad you wanted this and he wanted to give you a chance. But not without making it a challenge.

“I will teach you," he said getting your hopes up. "If you manage to take me down in hand to hand combat at least once,” he continued making your jaw drop.

“Are you crazy? How on earth am I supposed to do that when you’re a literal martial arts god?”

“You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for. You’ll find a way," he encouraged you as he took the wato from your hold to place it back in its sheath on the wall.

You sat on it for a while. Would you actually be able to take him? You got better at one weapon but you still lacked the combat skills, but you weren't one to back down from a challenge.

“So, deal?” he extended a hand to you.

Well you know what they say, hope dies last.

“Deal,” you said confidently as you shook his hand.

You didn’t know what you got yourself into but it should be fun. Sword fighting has always been something you wanted to try and this was a better time to learn it than ever. All you had to do was devise a plan to take down the crime lord of Shanghai in a fight. Should be easy right?

—————————————————————————

Thank you for reading! As always, comments, notes and reblogs are always welcome!

#Addicting Taste #enishi yukishiro #enishi yukishiro x reader #enishi yukishiro x you #rurouni kenshin #enishi yukishiro fanfiction #This is only the calm before the storm

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tavyliasin · 12 days

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The Scent of Cinnamon 4 - The Morning, The Tailor, and The Fit of the Glove

Raphael wakes up to the consequences of the deal he made the night before, and realises Haarlep has no clothes to wear save for his own which are somehow a poor fit on his copied body. A trip to Waterdeep sparks more conflict as the two fiends begin to find their places with each other, pushing each others boundaries. Haarlep also has to reckon with the consequences of their end of the bargain, with shadows of their past biting at their heels. 5,139 Words - AO3 Link Click Here

--- Summary: The pair head out to Waterdeep to a tailor who can make something for Haarlep to wear other than Raphael's old clothes that feel like a poor fit on the incubus' borrowed body. Pairing: Raphael/Haarlep SPICE Rating: 0.5/5 Content Warnings: Mild Power Play, Mild Angst,

Spoilers Vague House of Hope and Act 3, but most of this series is focused on what came before. Canon Compliance The mention of a certain mad mage should match up roughly to the time he was actively in Waterdeep. But even the official lore is inconsistent on that one so we're running Rule of Cool. Also, the perfume is the exact canon scent according to 2 pieces of in game lore (Yurgir saying Raphael smells of cherry, and a letter of Raphael's that carries the scent of Palmarosa and Black Pepper in his perfume) Other Notes This is really to explore the dynamics between the two as they get to know each other outside the boudoir...don't worry, they'll be back there soon enough.

Song Pairing Everything You Hate by Project Vela "Looks like the time has come to pull the plug on the weak Your independence gone, control is not what it seems It's time to rise up and take it into the streets The life support is cut, the transformation complete

My actions don't seem so clean You're out there pulling the strings Anything any cage that couldn't hold Has escaped and it's out of your control Everything you ever hoped that you could be Only exists in a fake reality

You and I are one and the same One reflection bound by different names Recognised that you have become everything you hate Everything you hate"

--- FULL CHAPTER BELOW THE CUT --- ---

The Morning, The Tailor, and The Fit of the Glove

Raphael stirred in his sleep, suddenly aware of an unfamiliar weight resting on his leg. It felt like his tail was draped over something too, yet there was nothing beneath when he tested moving it. The awareness of his own body began to spread through his consciousness, piece by piece. There were ghosts where aches might have been, even if pain had healed his muscles still felt the echoes of whatever it was he had-

Whoever it was. And that who was snoring quietly on the pillow beside him, their tail draped over his leg, their hand resting lightly on his waist.

The previous day came rushing back as the last vestiges of a far more peaceful dream were banished from the cambion’s reeling mind. His eyes blinked open to see exactly what he was dreading: the imperfect mirror of his own face, a slight smile tugging at the corners of copied lips, but a different scent drifting on their warm breath.

Cinnamon.

Ah. That was it. The incubus and their deal, the contract signed in ink and in lust, his body the very page that they had inscribed their presence upon.

Raphael almost expected their eyelids to reveal the vivid emerald as they began to slowly open, but instead there was only the infernal fire burning around their pupils as they met his gaze.

“Mmm~ I could get used to this~” They purred, stretching their wings lazily behind them before pulling the sheets closer around them.

The cambion already felt his ire rising. He might have invited this…this…Harlot to his bed, but that did not give them the right to treat it like a luxury resort. He kicked his leg free of their tail and threw the covers off the pair of them as he forced his exhausted body out of the comfort and warmth of the night.

“Five more hours~” Haarlep pulled the sheets back over them, covering their face, but not before he caught the hint of a grin spreading across it.

“Petulant creature.” Raphael waved his hands in a swift motion, a few brief words tugging the threads of the Weave into ripping the covers from the incubus’ grip, tossing them out of reach on the floor.

“Spoilsport.” They groaned, brows furrowing and the fire in their eyes flashing dangerously as they scowled at him. “I am the one with the power in this room, by your own contract’s terms.”

“And do you wish to spend your days in here completely nude?” Raphael was already pulling on the fresh clothes that had been set aside for him. A modest outfit, but one that nonetheless showed his figure. “Or will you concede that you need at least one outfit you feel comfortable in? My clothes will fit you, but I suspect they are not to your taste.”

“Clothing is hardly a necessity for my line of work~ Do you not like what you see, Archduke?” It seemed the incubus had no intention of ceasing their insulting nickname, a completely transparent attempt to rile him up. “Made to your very own specifications, no less! Aren’t you curious what it might feel like to-”

“No.” He snapped, turning away as he continued to fuss over the fastenings of his shirt, frustrated by his fingers refusing to obey him. He wasn’t ready to accept that the incubus was flustering him, even the shadow of that thought entering his mind was more infuriating than the sound of their voice. His voice. Not his voice… They were like an echo, distorted by the landscape it ricocheted from. Within every word, he could still hear-

—

“Let me help you, then.” Haarlep had grown tired of trying to cling to the comforts of silk sheets for now. Their lips just brushed the pointed tip of Raphael’s ear as they wound their arms around his waist to fix the fastenings he was having such trouble with. “There. Not that difficult, was it?~” The cambion shivered at their touch, stepping quickly away from where their naked body had pressed against his back, but their tail wound around his wrist to turn him back to face them. “Could you not-”

“Wait.” They cut him off again, firm yet soft. His collar was crooked… The incubus carefully straightened the piece, pulling the ruffles into place and ensuring they were even. “The master of the house has appearances to keep up, does he not?”

“Quite so.” Raphael clawed back his dignity with the reply, reaching forward to fix Haarlep’s hair, even though they both well knew that not a strand was out of place. “You will have to wear something for now. Wait here.”

Haarlep watched as he strode confidently to an old armoire, searching through a variety of finery that was neatly pressed and stored within. It seemed most of the options were objectionable, until he pulled out a simple outfit in a near-black tone. It would have looked absurdly severe on the cambion himself, a poor match for the line of his jaw or the hint of apprehension in the expression above it. “It will do, for now.”

“Beggars, Harlot, make for poor choosers.” He held it out at arm’s length, clearly trying to avoid the ire in the incubus’ gaze.

“The day I beg you for anything, all of Avernus will be colder than Cania.” Haarlep snatched the outfit from the cambion’s claws, quick to remind him in every moment of his place in this room, loathe to leave the one space they retained control.

“Perhaps if you play your role well, you will have no need to do anything more than ask.” Raphael turned away, as if to give them privacy to put on their clothes. An absurd notion at this point, but nevertheless they began to dress as he continued. “We have our deal, there is no reason for us to be adversaries, you know.”

“Hmmm maybe so,” Haarlep wound their arms around his waist again, half dressed but their shirt still open, claws teasing at his hips as they held him close. “But it’s so much more fun to feel you squirm like this~”

“Degenerate.” Raphael’s tail swung around and whipped their thigh - hard enough to be felt, but not to hurt. He gasped. “Mmmm harder~” Haarlep moaned in his ear, relishing at the shiver they felt beneath their fingertips, drifting lower already. “You won’t even feel the pain, just the pleasure.”

—

The cambion shuddered. They were right, he felt a brief but clear rush of heat… “Absurd.” He lied.

“There’s the trick, Archduke,” Haarlep purred, the bitch dropping to an even more seductive tone. The imitation of his voice barely sounded familiar, the tone of their previous voice snaking through his senses far stronger while he couldn’t see them behind him. “It’s only arousing because your body likes it. The pleasure I feel is yours, in more ways than one. Don’t you want to try it out? Find the limits of your own debauchery-”

“We are going to be late if you don’t stop this nonsense.” Another lie, though this one was more believable than the last. The tailor would wait as long as necessary, he had enough of a hold on them that they would not consider turning him away even if he marched them out of bed to sew a ballgown in the middle of the night. “Fine~ Have it your way.” Their touch left him immediately, his body suddenly colder for the lack of their warmth pressing against him. It took conscious effort to stop his tail from reaching out to find them. “Then tell me, if we are to rush to this appointment of yours… Will this suffice?”

Raphael turned around to take a look at the incubus dressed in an outfit he had not considered wearing in decades. It was a little tight on them, and the shirt had been left half open to expose part of their chest in a way that had no right to be so tempting. Their tail was twitching impatiently, yet their wings spread behind them as they struck a swift pose and flashed him a grin. He turned away again, reluctant to look any longer in case their eyes alone drew him closer. Outside the room he would be in control again…at least on the surface. “Come.”

“Hah! I’m not that easy-”

“You know precisely what I meant.” He stepped beyond the door and into the hallway, subconsciously standing a little taller and straighter as he wore the power of his title like a monarch’s cloak. “Hurry up.”

—

Haarlep followed Raphael through the House until they arrived at a room with a shimmering portal, several short steps leading up to it.

“An easier method of transportation, no point in wasting energy on magic when permanent spells can be cast.” The cambion waved dismissively towards the huge arch and the warped reality within it.

“And where, precisely, does it lead?” Haarlep eyed it suspiciously, unwilling to play a game of ‘follow-the-leader’ without at least some idea of whether they would be treading the ice fields of Cania or the muddy streets of a Halfling village. “Waterdeep.” Raphael replied simply, stepping forwards and stopping just short to beckon them to hurry. “I did not take you for one so hesitant.” “And I did not take you for someone to rely on mortals for your tailoring.” They didn’t bother to keep the disdain from their voice, although they did step obediently forwards all the same.

“One more thing,” the cambion turned to face them, a swift casting of a spell rendering them completely invisible. “You are not permitted to speak until we arrive.”

Haarlep pursed their lips, hands forming some swift and unsavoury gestures to spell out their displeasure without any verbal component.

“I can see invisibility, Haarlep. Know your place.” Without further warning, Raphael transformed his body to his human guise - clothes shifting to fit the smaller frame - and walked through the portal.

—

The room was dusty and poorly kept, despite Raphael’s strict instructions - he made a note in the back of his mind to have stronger words with the diabolist maintaining his portal in what should have been the upper floors of a well kept mansion. Boxes were piled to the sides, half open and half labelled in scrawled handwriting.

“That looks like the writing of a madman.” Haarlep’s shimmering form stood beside him, peering at one of the boxes. “Not entirely inaccurate,” Raphael ceded the point, but not without irritation. “You were, however, told explicitly to be silent.”

“First, we have ‘arrived’, so you should be more specific if you mean another destination.” The whisper of their smirk was more audible through their tone than it was visible on their face as he felt a dull ache nagging at the back of his skull. “But that aside, this place is clearly uninhabited. There’s no risk of being discovered.”

“Must I train you in both manners and obedience?” He turned to face the warped space that concealed Haarlep’s insolent form from most onlookers.

“Hardly necessary. Besides,” they stepped close, strong hands taking a grip of his jaw and moving his mouth with their words. “If you move those lips just right it will seem as if you’re the one talking, given how you have burdened me with your own voice.”

Raphael swatted their hands away, fixing his hair and collar quickly as he tried to keep his emotions in check. “If I must remind you to behave once more, you will live in that outfit for your first decade. Or perhaps you would rather never leave that room, if you are so hellbent on retaining your control? I do not have to cross the threshold, nor do I have to send anyone in to sate your needs unless I choose to.”

—

Haarlep bristled. They knew that he had power and control, that both of their deals now bound them to him with all the fine print that came with it, but they had not considered that the young and overconfident fiend would…would…

—

Raphael faltered. He could feel the tension, the change in their demeanour in an instant. They still stood behind him wearing his body, but it now seemed like a poorer fit on them than the clothing that groaned at the seams. Even their stature seemed to shrink back in that moment, the unseen shadow of their presence retreating.

An unusual sense scratched the back of his mind. Guilt? Unthinkable. And yet…

“I am no tyrant, incubus. Stick to your word and I shall be true to mine. But no more words for now, not until I dispel the invisibility shrouding your form.” He began to lead the way, loathe to waste any more time. Halaster could be reprimanded later for leaving the portal in such a state.

—

It took half an hour before they reached their destination. The sun was far too bright, the incubus cursing that invisible wings could do nothing to stop the wretched beams from searing their eyes. Haarlep kept quiet for the remainder of the journey, following carefully in step behind Raphael, wings and tail tucked in so they would not catch a passer-by unawares.

For his part, the cambion acted much as a human noble might. He strolled down the streets as if he owned them and all who walked through them. Every now and then, he stopped to greet someone, to slip a note into a hand, or to show his disdain or appreciation for the quality of goods on market stalls.

But for their own part, Haarlep was an invisible shadow. They stalked behind him with heavy steps as if their own feet fit as poorly as the boots upon them. Every now and then, they stopped with him to adjust their shirt, to rub at their head from the weight of the horns above, or to swallow back the worry that he might decide to leave them locked up to starve after all.

The bell of the shop rang with a disgustingly joyful tinkling, crinkling their nose into a grimace. Luckily, they were able to fix their expression into something more neutral as Raphael removed the invisibility spell that kept them hidden.

“So,” the tiefling shopkeeper peered over her glasses, “this is what all the fuss is about?”

“Uphold your bargain and you will find your competitor out of business by the end of the tenday.” Raphael replied, before gesturing towards the incubus. “They require proper clothing. Should you supply something that meets their needs, you will have my repeat business.”

“Surely someone in one of the hells would be a more appropriate choice to dress a devil such as yourself.” She shrugged, stepping around the counter nonetheless. Her outfit, Haarlep noted, was plain but well fitted. A measuring tape was draped around her shoulders, and numerous pins were strategically held in the apron of her dress along with a couple of pouches holding scissors and threads.

“They are not me. Which is information that will not be leaving this room, unless you particularly relish the idea of centuries in the hells as a pathetic lemure.” His voice left no room for argument, a confidence that seemed a strong contrast to the whimpering and begging mess he had been at the end of the previous night. Haarlep watched closely. They had a role as a spy to uphold, after all.

“They look exactly like you.” The tailor walked around Haarlep now, assessing them in a way that felt far too much like their first meeting with Raphael the day before. Their tail flicked behind them, still unused to the smooth tip in place of the arrowhead shape of their own body. Their body…which now seemed more like an outfit that had been zipped up into a neat little bag and stored away in a locked closet out of their reach. But he had the key. That’s all that mattered.

“You need new glasses, they look nothing like me.” Raphael’s absurd response snapped Haarlep back out of their thoughts. He transformed swiftly into his fiendish appearance, and gestured to the incubus as the tiefling looked back and forth between the two. “See? The ruse would only fool someone who lacks insight.”

The tiefling seemed to agree to appease him as she began to take notes on the fittings in a small book from her pocket. Haarlep, on the other hand, was stuck on his words. They were a near perfect copy, they knew that. The deal they made was important, and they had made sure to memorise his body as carefully as he had theirs…though perhaps… His eyes met theirs for a moment, a light hint of a blush behind already crimson cambion cheeks.

—

“You should undress.” The tailor stepped back and gestured to a partitioned area of the store, as Raphael pulled his gaze from the incubus’ blazing eyes.

He was perplexed. How did she not see the obvious differences? This wasn’t a mirror before him - not quite. He swore he could see the green in the depths of their eyes, the curve of their jaw and shape of their ears a little sharper of an angle than his own. The way they moved was certainly no copy, either… That would need some work later, he decided. The sway of their hips was decidedly too seductive-

“You didn’t tell me what you want me to make for them.” The tiefling was eyeing him over the rim of her glasses. “There was all the rush to be available immediately, but as you are unsatisfied with them wearing your own clothes I assume it is to be something different. Something bespoke.”

“What do you think?” Raphael looked down at her, for a moment forgetting to choose his words more carefully to keep the power balance strongly in his favour.

“Clothes have a purpose, Raphael. They must not only fit the wearer, but be appropriate for the role they must fill. One who is your copy, yet is not supposed to fill your usual role? I need more information than that.” She tapped her pen on her notebook, not bothering to turn around as Haarlep stepped out from behind the screen in only the loose silken underwear he’d given them. Even those seemed like a terrible match…

“Start from the undergarments. My outer clothes will suffice for any other needs for a time.” He gestured over to the incubus standing proudly, and almost entirely naked, in the middle of the shop.

—

“Arms out.” The tiefling was clearly unperturbed by Haarlep’s almost naked form as they followed her instruction, mildly amused at the little stepladder she had to use to reach their shoulder. Raphael had taken a seat over to one side, watching closely but mostly leaving the woman to her work.

“If he told you to work from undergarments, why do you need the measure of my arms?” They couldn’t help but feel perplexed by her choice.

“It would be a shame to cover you up, what with all these muscles,” she cast a tentative glance at Raphael for a moment though he seemed not to care in the slightest, “but clothing doesn’t just cover. The right garments can enhance what you have instead.”

Haarlep laughed, the first genuine moment of amusement all day breaking the tension that had been eating at the back of their mind. “I assure you, I do not need any of my anatomy to be enhanced.” They licked their lips seductively and glanced down. “I can prove it, if you like~”

“Not here, Harlot.” Raphael snapped, earning their impudent tongue-out expression as a response. “Just…work with her. Find something you would be comfortable in.”

Their expression changed just as quickly again, switching to one of quiet contemplation. Comfort? He hadn’t been concerned with their comfort before now. Even in his sleep, it had been a fight to keep enough of the sheets to cover themselves. The contract had been business, the deal itself pleasure, and all they shared since was…confusing was about the only way they could describe it.

“What would you like? Are there any materials or styles you prefer? Or is there a particular look you wish to emulate?” The tiefling had largely ignored their quips and offer, measuring their chest and waist easily, now wrapping the tape around their hips.

“Leather has its appeal…” Haarlep considered the options, the purpose they would have in Raphael’s deals. “Something close fitting - cover as little as you can - and it must project power.” Their eyes flashed across to their Master, as he would call his role, who remained nonplussed…aside from the momentary flick of his tail betraying a hint of the thoughts behind his calm expression.

“Is that agreeable?” The tailor turned to Raphael herself now, looking for his approval as the one purchasing the garments.

“Whatever they want. I will reserve my judgement for when I see the look complete.” Even his voice was measured and calm. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes, yes. That will do.” She finished measuring their inner leg with a quick and practised motion, avoiding any intimate contact much to Haarlep’s disappointment. They were wondering if the cambion might squirm in his seat if they let themselves get a little excited by the simple touch-

“Go and get dressed again. There is more to do.” Raphael distracted them from their amused thoughts. It was hard not to roll their eyes at his tone, but they held their reaction in check for now.

Until they could be certain, until they had proof of what he was really going to be like… They didn’t want to test their luck. Though they were sated now - the deal had been more than an adequate feast - their body still remembered hunger. Their nerves recalled too easily how they could ache if left untouched, unfed. Their heart was far too familiar with the hurt of trying to get by with nothing but their name and a bare shred of hope that they were still pretty enough to secure a meal...

And now they didn’t even have that name, nor the body they cared for so carefully to ensure they wouldn’t starve.

The clothes they pulled on behind the screen once more felt as ill-fitting as their skin, laced with those same clashing scents that Raphael wore to cover the hint of the infernal that lingered around any who travelled in and out of the hells.

At least that was something they might be able to change.

—

Raphael paid the tailor an advance for the materials, tracking in his mind exactly which pawns he would need to move to ensure the rest of that deal was upheld. Behind him, the incubus seemed just as uncomfortable as they had been in front of the portal, when he had snapped at them.

He sighed and rubbed at the wrinkle forming at the bridge of his nose. He would need to be more careful with how he treated the spy. It didn’t matter much what Mephisto found out from them, but if he were to be so foolish as to allow himself to spend the night naked and vulnerable with them again… A shudder crept uninvited down his spine as he cast the invisibility upon them once more. That was dangerous. Foolish. If he were to die here in the streets of Faerun it would be little more than a painful inconvenience. He would simply reappear in Avernus.

But if he were to be slain in the hells?

He pushed the thought from his mind, resolving himself to be more careful. Haarlep must know their place, but should not be backed into a corner. They were strong, cunning, and they were likely to learn more of his own weaknesses by living in his body.

“Before we go,” they almost startled him, unseen hand on his shoulder and voice quiet near his ear, “I should like to stop at a perfumery.”

“And why would that be?” Raphael hissed back, pausing with his hand on the door.

“Your fragrance… It isn’t quite right. There are too many scents in there battling for dominance. You should have something complex, but not overwhelming.” Haarlep didn’t sound insulting, despite the implications of their words.

It took barely a moment to cast Sending, projecting his voice to their mind and allowing the reply to come back to him silently from their thoughts. Perhaps conversing might be acceptable like this, especially on his own terms as he would have to initiate each part.

—

It took a while to find a place that Haarlep approved of. Raphael even seemed willing to indulge them in a little more casual conversation as they walked, the sendings passing back and forth. In truth, the first shop might have been truly atrocious but the second was more than acceptable. Yet here they were, at the door to the fifth.

“Please tell me this one is good enough for you. I have contracts to write and precious little time to waste on further frivolous ventures.” Somehow Raphael always seemed to use up every one of the 25 words the spell allowed, his voice echoing in their head.

For a moment, Haarlep wondered if their reply would sound like they did now, the echo of Raphael’s own deep tones filtering into his mind like his own thoughts betraying him, or perhaps… “It seems like it will suffice. As long as nobody tries to spray you as soon as you walk through the door. Again.”

They slipped through the door behind him as he entered the shop, careful not to allow the door to remain open for a suspicious amount of time. They kept their steps light and took a good look around the place. It might not have been as substantial as the third establishment, but they were fast running out of options.

“As you are so insistent that I require something different, I suggest you tell me what the ingredients might be, Harlot. Make it quick, though.”

“Pick up the bottles I point at and hold them so I can sniff them.” Haarlep replied quickly, already pointing to a few.

“Can I help you?” The elderly shopkeeper was watching Raphael closely, and seemed anxious in his silence.

“If I bring you several of your scents, can you make something based on those?” Raphael gestured to the shelves as he asked, earning a smile from the man behind the desk as he continued. “I will, of course, pay you handsomely should your perfume meet my exacting standards.” The flicker of his eyes towards the incubus was for them alone this time, but the perfumier seemed to already be counting his profits.

“Yes, yes! Go ahead, I have many years of experience, I’m sure I can mix just the thing for you!”

Without the sending to reply to, Haarlep could only gesture invisibly as needed. Several bottles were pulled from shelves and opened with dramatically wide gestures to waft the scent closer to where they stood.

It was difficult to decide, but there had to be a balance. The cherries suited him, and something strong would have to disguise the hints of the hells that carried on his clothes and skin after travelling between planes. Something spicy too, and the blend needed an allure that could draw in a wide range of potential clients.

And, naturally, it mustn’t clash with cinnamon.

All of this was relayed to the perfumier who made notes with impressive speed for a man of his years, selecting and rejecting several of the bottles himself. Eventually he seemed ready to mix a selection of oils into a glass flask, balancing it out with the base and blending the scents carefully.

“Palmarosa, black pepper, cherry…”

“The contents matter less than the result. May I?” Raphael took the bottle that was handed over, waving it dramatically through the air once more. “Ahh, interesting.” He looked over to Haarlep, finally allowing a Sending. It was not lost on them how he controlled even their private communication for now… “Well? I have no objections to this one. Quite to the contrary, it seems very fitting. I may concede that you both have adequate taste.”

“Finally,” they began, unable to hide their frustration at being left to mime for so long. “It’s close, but it needs one more thing. Not much, but it needs some cinnamon. If I am to play your role, that is…”

“Agreed. There must be as few loose ends as possible. Our scents should match as closely as our appearance, voice…” This time he didn’t use the limit of the spell’s words. He seemed momentarily torn and distracted before he stopped pretending to sniff the bottle and handed it back to the man waiting expectantly at the counter. “A little cinnamon, and that will suffice.”

“Of course!” The perfumier seemed delighted by the suggestion. “Warmth and spice, to balance out the bitter and cold edge, an unusual blend but it should work quite nicely, quite nicely indeed!”

—

Several very long minutes later, the pair were back out on the street with a small bag in hand and an order left with the Perfumier to prepare a much larger batch along with some infused soaps and candles.

The journey back to the portal was somewhat swifter and than before, but at least the time of day meant the sun was now more of a pleasant warmth than a blinding presence above. Raphael kept a swift pace, though with his human guise his stride was somewhat shorter than the incubus’ who had a far more relaxed stroll behind him.

The mansion holding the portal was just as empty as it had been before, and Raphael made a mental note to contact Blackcloak soon. The mage might have been driven mad in the past, but he was still powerful, useful, if he remembered to hold up his end of certain contracts. The cambion shuddered… Halaster had once come far too close to binding him into service. That would not stand. Neither would he allow-

Haarlep tapped his shoulder. A quick gesture and mime a reminder that they were following his instruction not to speak out loud.

Raphael dismissed the invisibility and turned to face the incubus. They were quiet a moment longer, expression unreadable as they awaited his instruction. “The day appears to have passed us by far faster than intended.” He broke the silence first, the insignificant statement preferable to the uncomfortable stagnation of the air hanging heavily around them as if still carrying the echoes of earlier words spoken in haste. “Well, time does fly, so they say.” Haarlep shrugged, a hint of mischief tugging at their lips once more. “I always favoured the night, anyway.”

--- --- ENDING NOTES --- --- A little more angst and plot for our dear incubus, but the night is theirs and that's where the next chapter will lead.

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