#happy bday rafayel!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

revasserium · 2 months

Note

Ma’am your writhing is immaculate!!! If possible can we have a rafayel falling backwards?

falling backwards

rafayel; 1,670 words; fluff, fem!reader, no "y/n", slight!suggestiveness, fade to black, the slightest spoilers for raf's bday card, existential cuteness?

summary: the sky forgets, but the sea remembers

a/n: this is rly short and sweet, with a sprINKLE of spice in there for the bday boi!! happy belated my fav mermaid oi

lost and found.

He has waited for you for a thousand years.

And like, this he thinks he could wait for you a thousand more.

“Do you remember?” he asks, his thumb running along the thick rim of his coffee mug, the morning sun pouring thick and lemon-sweet through the endless windows of his vast studio.

“A little,” you say, your eyes fixed on your own coffee, steam still rising in faint, ghostly tendrils above the milky surface.

“Only a little?” Rafayel sighs, leaning back in his chair, his white shirt buttoned carelessly to the middle of his chest, revealing a strip of smooth, unmarred skin beneath. You lick your lips and take a sip of your steaming coffee, cheeks warming as you try to look anywhere else.

“I was just a kid…” you say, a little rueful of his disappointment, but Rafayel only laughs, leaning forward to dip a finger into the chantilly cream dollopped on top of the bowl of fruit sitting in the middle of the table. He reaches out and swipes a bit onto the tip of your nose, making you jerk back, going slightly cross-eyed as you frown.

“Hey!”

“There she is —” he nods, apparently satisfied as he sucks the remaining cream from the tip of his finger, eyes flickering up to meet yours, “There’s that laugh I love so much…”

You somehow find it in yourself to blush and look away, the abashedness of all your previous and younger years welling up inside you, only to crest up your neck and into your cheeks like the morning tide, staining your skin in the color of sunrise. Rafayel watches you with a pleased glint in his eyes, his tongue flickering out to wet his lips.

“You promised you’d come back for me,” he says, pushing his mouth up into a childish pout. You fight the urge to roll your eyes.

“That I don’t remember,” you say, petulant, as you wipe the bit of cream from your nose, scrunching your face to make sure there’s no more. But it’s a lie — though not entirely. You do remember, but only in the way the most important memories always fade with time, tucking themselves into the forgotten corners of your mind until they’re needed. And then up they come, floating to the top of your mind’s eye in flickers and goldfish flashes, like brightly colored fins caught in the morning light, just beneath the water’s shimmering surface.

“Liar,” Rafayel says, and you don’t refute him. He takes a long sip of his coffee and casts his eyes towards the distant horizon beyond his huge, studio windows. The air smells of burgeoning spring, of melting snow and drying paint. Of empty canvases and seafoam and the dewdrops lingering on the leaves of freshly budding flowers.

You press your palms to the warmth of the thick ceramic mug cupped between your hands.

“But… you found me again, didn’t you?”

a whole new world.

The entire world is 70% water. So you know this. So Rafayel tells you.

“The other 30% though, I had no way of seeing, of knowing —” his eyes are faraway as you sit, shoulders pressed against each other, a thick blanket wrapped around you both as the morning chill threatens to seep right into the marrow of your bones.

“I wanted to see the world — the whole world — not just the parts that were sunken under water.”

He says the words sunken like a curse, but you lower your eyes to your hands, clasped in your lap, and you wonder if things enveloped by the soft embrace of water might have it better than the bits of the world doomed to be above it.

“Y’know… I wanted to be a pilot when I was a kid,” you say, leaning back and casting your eyes far up towards the endless sky, the horizons brightening in silken steams of pinks and yellows. Still, the sky directly above you with color of a healing bruise, and a thick, unrelenting darkness simmers along the opposite skyline like a crouched cat, waiting for the sun to turn her head before leaping back up again.

“You did? I thought… well, honestly, I thought all Hunters would’ve wanted to become Hunters from when they were kids.”

You shrug, laughing, “You’re not wrong, but… I thought — how cool must it be to fly the planes that Hunters rode in for their bigger missions? How cool would it be to pilot something into Deepspace? I mean… there’s so much out there that we don’t know…”

Rafayel turns toward you. You flash him a soft, indulgent smile.

“So… in that sense, we’re not so different — we both wanted to see part of the world that we hadn’t before. Parts of the world that we didn’t have access to but… I was thinking about it and… isn’t that a kind of running away too?”

Rafayel stills, his breath going shallow as he turns back to watch the far horizon, where the dawn is rising like a great phoenix, feathers burning, her throat full of bright orange light, and suddenly, all the stories and legends make sense.

“The sea remembers everything the sky forgets…” Rafayel says, never taking his eyes off the rising sun, “That’s what my teacher used to tell me. Artists — we try to remember the things that the world tries to forget too — we paint moments and feelings, try to capture a second in time, even though we’re doomed to fail, over and over again.”

You turn to glance at him, and you catch him staring. Your eyes meet and it’s not so unlike the colliding of lost stars. He reaches out to trace a finger along the edge of your cheek and you feel your breath burning like sunrise in your chest, and suddenly, there’s an entire world caught in your belly, a rising dawn feathering its way out of your throat —

Kiss me, you want to say. Instead, you say, “Happy birthday.”

Thanks, it looks like he might say.

He leans in to kiss you instead.

calculations.

Later, when the sun has risen and set once more, when the tides have come and gone again, when the moon hangs high and envious in the late winter sky and he has his lips pressed to yours, the taste of your pleas slick and sweet on his tongue, he wonders if a lifetime under water has just been preparation for this.

He traces the seashell shapes of his fingers along the white sand beaches of your skin, dropping kisses into the moonlit pools caught in the dip of your collarbones.

“R-Raf —”

He savors in the way your breath catches and cuts, the way he can sever them with silver scissors as he laves his tongue across the midnight bruises blooming along your shoulder, your chest, your hips, the soft, plush insides of your thighs.

“Don’t you think you owe me at least this much?” he asks, his own voice a soft rasp as he pulls back, panting, “After leaving me alone all those years ago… making me wait for so long?”

You keen, head pressing back into the soft feather-down pillows of the mountain-top chalet, lips kissed pink, your cheeks flushed dark with color.

“I — please — more —”

“Mm…” Rafayel grins as he cocks his head, drinking in the sight of you spread out beneath him, “Since you asked so nicely…”

He figures that the human body is also made 70% water. Of salt and gravity. Of the mind forgetting while the body remembers.

Of oxygen and the stuff of lost and wandering stars.

“Tell me one more time,” he says, bending down to graze his lips along your earlobe. He savors in the way your body shakes with shivers, the slick of sweat, the soft break in your voice as moan his name.

“Raf - a - yel — please. I want — I want you.”

hiraeth.

“Do you… ever miss home?”

You try to think about how it might feel to miss a home you can no longer go back to, to come from a place that everyone around you has written off as legend — about the doubt and uncertainty, but about the freedom too.

It’s the morning after, except this time, you’re tucked into the bend of his arm, your ankles locked beneath the twisted sheets, his hair a tangled mess, haloed around his face against the soft white of the pillows.

“Home… doesn’t always have to be a place, y’know.”

“Yeah… I know that.”

“Oh? You do?”

Rafayel smiles, a thing of tenderness and salt, even as he tucks you close. Like this, you wonder if he knows that there’s an entire ocean locked beneath the dark of his gaze.

“Sure I do. Ever since that day — on the beach, my home hasn’t really been Lemuria.”

You swallow passed the dryness collecting in your throat like so much soft, white sand.

“Then…”

Rafayel lets out a puff of laughter, turning his eyes towards the ceiling.

“C’mon, I thought you had to be smart to pass the Hunter exams.”

You crinkle your nose and inch in closer.

“Maybe… maybe I just want to hear you say it.”

You don’t miss the way his ears go red as he makes a show of sighing, glancing back towards you with a helpless smile.

“Fine, fine — ahem… here it goes,” he says, clearing his throat with perhaps too much pomp and circumstance.

“Ever since that day on the beach… my home hasn’t really been Lemuria…” his voice trails off as his eyes soften and he turns to face you properly, the teasing lilt seeping from his voice until the only thing left is warmth and honesty and you can’t help but hold your breath.

“Since then… my home’s always been… you.”

368 notes · View notes