#i was told that that's cruel if said person actually likes me but. i don't think so?

[acourtofthought]

Would you still consider it a celebration if Gwynriel’s book is next, bc it at least confirms endgame couples?

I will be very happy for Gwynriels and very relieved that it will help lessen the ship wars though I think I'll still feel disappointed.

I want Elucien to happen but I also adore Elain and Lucien as individuals so an Elucien confirmation isn't the entirety of what I want for them.

Az and Gwyn absolutely deserve a HEA and their own healing arcs but there is something to be said for the fact that right now, they are surrounded by love even without a relationship. Yes, they have their own internal struggles but they have a really strong support system, people that have their backs, that encourage them, that believe in them. Az and Gwyn both have their found families but neither Elain or Lucien do.

Elain and Lucien are regularly pushed to the side in favor of the other characters. I understand why that is, SJM has to stay on course with the narrative that they still need to find the court where they'll thrive, but in the meantime that has resulted in them being misunderstood by the others. It results in others speaking for them, the others not encouraging them or helping them find their powers. Hell, Feyre has known about Lucien's real father since ACOWAR and it's almost two years later yet she's still letting him wander around aimlessly thinking he has no place to go.

A Gwynriel book being next means we're going to have yet another book of Elain floating around the River House with no real purpose. Lucien drifting between Spring and the Human Lands while Tamlin remains depressed which means Lucien will feel the effects of that. Elain again not having the chance to have a POV on how she's feeling about the loss of her father, being made, Graysen's rejection, Az's rejection, how Nesta and Az believe she shouldn't be allowed to do anything dangerous. If a Gwynriel book takes 6-9 months, that means nearly three years will have passed from when Elain will have been forced into the Cauldron, given powers from the Cauldron that she still hasn't fully explored and hasn't been given help on training, a confirmed mating bond that remains unaccepted and unrejected, and we will have never had a single person actually ask her how she feels about any of that outside of Feyre's "you couldn't say a single word to him?"

I will be happy for Gwynriels but how can I personally be super excited when that means my two favorite characters will once again suffer for another 6-9 months without having the same support system in place that Az and Gwyn already do?

Gwyn and Az might not have romance yet but they are respected and loved by their friends and we've witnessed that on page. Meaningful moments, moments where their found family have gotten personal with them and asked them to get personal in response (though Az is kind of terrible in that area, we've seen Cassian and Rhys at least try).

Lucien has "friends" in Vassa and Jurian but we've never actually seen that connection, we're just told it's there so we have to assume it is.

And when he tried to open up to Feyre, she made fun of him.

Elain has "friends" with the wraiths but again, we're just told about it rather than witnessing moments that make us actually feel it. And yes, her sisters love her but they don't try to connect with her (Feyre only thinks of her as a pleasant companion).

And the IC, while friendly enough with Lucien, don't necessarily embrace him with any kind of true respect. There's always this underlying current of "can we trust him?", "what can he do for us?" And of course we know Az has issues with him.

The need to prove that both Elain and Lucien belong somewhere other than where they currently is starting to feel a tiny bit overdone to the point that it's a bit cruel, and while that to me would be a perfect time to end their suffering, I can only imagine what another book of that would look like.

#pro elucien #elucien #elain archeron #lucien vanserra

[mishkakagehishka]

Drinking my cherry tea, eating my medenjaci, i have done one and a half word. But i won't be the first to fail this assignment at least

#we already got one who's flunking the year (?) bc of it so. it took off a bit of stress i'll be real #bc hey . if i flunk i'll not be neither first nor the only one #i'm still gonna do my best bc as i said he's like. kinda lenient in that he gives a second chance but like. i'm not as stressed #(<- lying) #i mean realistically so what if i flunk right? we literally have repeating students in our group too #people repeat years and courses multiple times it's normal #i think my real goal is to get married actually #which is difficult considering i've never even had a proper crush but #well last time i said ''i can just be in a relationship even if i don't love-love someone if they're a good person'' #i was told that that's cruel if said person actually likes me but. i don't think so? #like i'd like them back obvi they may not be romantic feelings but i can still feel attached to someone #not to mention that i'm the way i am and i don't have to love-love someone to kiss or . 👀 #i just need trust to be present #? why did i start talking ab this. anyway i need to get married pronto

[neil-gaiman]

Hello Mr Neil,

I want to share how I feel about Sherryl the supermodel from Good Omens. You've answered a question previously when someone felt that her representation was lacking empathy (re the visual effects note in the script book, although the scene was cut), and I want to offer my thoughts to help people who felt that way about Sherryl.

The book (Good Omens, not the scripts, which I haven't read) plays with dark topics and makes them absurd and fun, aiming the jabs at the systems that (mis)guide or harm people (there are Beliefs, the People who Believe them, and the odd ways of living that make sense to them). Famine's D-Plan sums up the diet industry and a culture of starvation: of course we don't laugh /at/ Sherryl, we understand (because of everything the novel sets up) that like every other human she does her best with the frameworks she's got. It's empathetic, because that's what Good Omens is. Understanding that let me reframe the knee-jerk reaction I had on my first read of the scene in the book.

[For the TV show, though, as you've explained in the past, certain things had to be adapted to the time. I wonder sometimes - because I know that you do these things well - how you felt about approaching Sherryl nearly 30 years later.]

I think the trouble for me was that the scene in the book felt cruel at first. Now, I think 'A skeleton in a Dior dress' beautifully sums up the sacrifice of her humanity to become New York's top model. It's death dressed up - that's how such extremely-ill supermodels *should* appear to us if only we were unblinkered. One should see plainly the actual violence in an emaciated person's appearance. Maybe growing up with early 2000s aggressive body-shaming British TV shows and an overweight mother of Sherryl's generation as well as personal experience of anorexia made the 'skeleton' image feel cruel, now-overdone and recognisable to the nastiest unhealed bits in my psyche.

I think the frightened human animal in me initially recoiled from the dehumanisation. The pit of me jerked at the descriptions of Sherryl that felt like real insults, pulled straight from mainstream body-shaming media of my formative years. Of course, Good Omens predates this - thin was in, religiously, and the scene was subversive then - but that was my initial bodily feeling, not a thoughtful response. I describe it to illustrate where the challenge was, after we've gone from skinny worship in the 90s, to domestic skinny enforcement, to skinny shame, to wherever we are now in the popular orthorexic fitness culture and clean-eating minefield etc etc. Starvation dehumanises, and Sherryl was sick to the point of being inhuman - the scene under a microscope might feel complicit in dehumanisation to the sensibilities of teens and young adults today (for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can't see England), but within the book it humanises Sherryl by showing you plainly what awful thing has happened to her.

What the book did for me was let me delight in a sense of humour that makes difficult things totally absurd and therefore perfectly understandable. It told me, everyone is doing their best (to the best of their understanding), and when the fun-poking poked at my own pressure points, it said, lovingly, yes, you too. Many things about the book are like laughing with a friend or receiving a warm hug - it makes the big things so silly, and shared, and okay.

Thanks :) x <3

I am glad that is how you saw her. That is how we saw her. (I'm reminded of the only time I was ever at a high fashion event, where I found myself profoundly shocked by the incredible thinness of the models, and how sorry for them I felt, and how I wanted to feed them soup and stew and sandwiches. And of a high fashion model I knew a little, when she went out with a friend of mine, who told me that some girls she knew used heroin to stop the hunger pains, injecting themselves between their toes, and later I learned that my friend broke up with her when he learned she was a heroin addict.)

[fatesundress]

⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he���s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He���s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle x you #tom riddle x y/n #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle smut #tom riddle angst #(the trifecta) #tom marvolo riddle #voldemort #voldemort x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle oneshot #harry potter fanfiction #wizarding world #ftltutbh

[roosterforme]

Midnight Confessions | Rooster x Reader

Summary: It's getting harder and harder for Bradley to hide his feelings for you, especially when you offer to drive him home on his birthday. Before he knows it, he's drunk in your passenger seat, confessing everything he's kept to himself. He may not remember all of it in the morning, but you certainly do. 

Warnings: Fluff, drinking and swearing

Length: 4100 words

Pairing: Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x Female Reader

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"Hey, Midnight!" Phoenix called across the bar as she grinned up at Bradley. "Can you come here?" Bradley watched you turn away from Omaha and head in his direction with a smile on your face and a beer in your hand.

"What are you doing, Nat?" Bradley muttered to his friend, trying not to stare at you as you walked over to him. The last thing Bradley wanted was to get a little bit of attention from you now just to have to watch you and Omaha laughing together all night. 

"I'm giving you exactly what you want for your birthday," Nat replied with a devilish smirk. 

"Please don't," Bradley groaned, but you were already there, in his personal space. "Midnight," he said with a nod in your direction.

"Happy Birthday, Rooster," you whispered with a laugh, kissing his cheek so quickly he thought he had imagined it. "Next drink is on me." He swallowed hard, swirling the ice from his whiskey and Coke around in his glass. "Looks like I was just in time," you said, plucking the glass from his hand and heading for the bar.

"You're cruel," Bradley told Phoenix as soon as you were going. "You're evil, and I wish I never told you I have a thing for Midnight."

Nat rolled her eyes so hard Bradley was honestly afraid she wouldn't be able to see as well to fly ever again. "You think you're a locked box or something? You're transparent to me, Bradshaw. Literally an open book. As soon as Midnight showed up at Top Gun, I had your number. She's cute, she's smart, and she flies exactly like you do."

He watched you at the bar, and of course fucking Omaha was right there with you once again, his hand resting on your lower back. "I fucking hate him."

Nat snorted. "Omaha? You never used to have an issue with him before," she said, eyeing Bradley with an amused look. 

"He's annoying," Bradley said lamely. "And he's got nothing going for him except for that jawline." 

"Hmm," Nat hummed, shaking her head and scrutinizing him. "He's got pretty eyes too. And nice teeth. And his hair is actually similar to yours."

Bradley grunted and tried to ignore the scene at the bar while he picked up some darts. It was his birthday. He should be having a good time. He sighed and threw three darts in a row before Hangman joined him. And then he remembered why he never played darts when Jake hit three bullseyes in a row.

"Happy birthday," Hangman drawled with a lazy grin.

Bradley was saved from having to respond when you placed your hand on his forearm and handed him a fresh drink.

"Thanks," he told you, taking the opportunity to look at your face for a few seconds longer than he normally would. Big mistake. You got his heart rate going and made him feel speechless, and you weren't even doing anything. 

"So, what does the birthday boy have planned for the rest of the night?" you asked, staying with him even though Omaha was hanging around. 

"Oh, probably just getting blackout drunk and trying to forget that I have feelings," he replied casually, taking a sip of his drink.

"Yeah, I've tried that," you responded just as casually. "It doesn't work."

"Shit," he replied with a laugh.

"Yeah," you said, leaning in a little closer. "But I have a better idea."

Bradley shook his head and grinned. "No. Don't you remember? Penny said she'd kick us out if we played strip pool again."

You started laughing, and the sound of it this close up made him feel a little smug. Take that, Omaha.

"I swear, all it took was getting Bob to take his shirt off, and Penny looked like she was going to murder us," you said, still laughing brightly as you took him by the hand. "But we can play regular pool, if you want."

Bradley would have followed you anywhere. And then you were lacing your fingers with his, just so briefly, before letting go of him to grab two pool cues. And Bradley ended up playing with you as his partner while his friends handed him drink after drink. You were pretty good at pool, but he was better, and the two of you were unbeatable. Plus, this gave Bradley an excellent opportunity to stand very close to you and whisper in your ear. 

"Nah," he whispered as you bent down, his lips brushing the shell of your ear before he pulled back a little. He thought he heard you sigh as he said, "Go for the corner pocket with the nine ball."

"Okay," you agreed, and Bradley got to watch you beat Omaha and Hangman. And that was really all the birthday present he needed tonight. But then you jumped up and wrapped your arms around his neck.

"Smoked those losers!" you said loudly, and this time you had Bradley laughing. Then his hand settled around your waist, and as soon as he felt your denim jeans against his fingers, he had to back up a step. You just smiled and turned to re rack the balls.

Bradley didn't notice it at first, but after another two hours, he was definitely drunk. 

"Give me your keys," Nat told him around eleven o'clock as she held out her hand. 

Bradley had to lean against the pool table while he dug around in his pocket to get his keyring out. He watched with unfocused eyes as she removed his Bronco key and handed him the remaining house key on the keychain that said I'M SO FLY.

"How am I gonna get home?" he asked Nat, leaning in a little closer to try to focus. "Nat, I'm too fucked up to even use a ride app."

She smiled and patted his cheek. "Midnight offered to drive you."

"No!" he groaned. "Nat. You can't do this to me."

"Happy birthday," she crooned, disappearing off into the crowd with his key, leaving him holding a pool cue as you approached him again.

"Why don't you finish your drink, and I'll drive you home?" you asked with a smile so pretty on your lips, he was just dying to kiss you.

He realized he was staring at you now, but he couldn't figure out how to control his body and turn away. Riding in your car with you right now was going to be a disaster. He just fucking knew it. And now he was still staring at you as your smile grew. He would do anything to be able to look away, but now you were giggling, and my god, Bradley just loved that sound. But he tried so hard to look away until you bit your lip and reached out to touch his forearm again, and then he knew he wasn't going to be able to look away from your face ever again no matter what.

"Fuck," he grunted, wondering who had let him drink this much.

You were rubbing your fingers along his arm, and Bradley's brain helpfully informed him that he could have a boner right now, no problem.

"Fuck," he repeated. But you were still smiling. 

"You are so drunk right now," you said softly, shaking your head. "Your cheeks are beat red. You look adorable."

"You're adorable," he whispered, and your laugh was loud and bright. 

"Okay, you just finish this, and I'll take you home whenever you want, birthday boy." You picked his drink up off the table and he took it from you before you turned away.

Oh. You had thought he was joking when he called you adorable. That was good, because he hadn't meant to say anything like that at all. Not out loud. He was going to have to hold his own damn mouth shut in your car. 

He had no idea how long he had been standing there with his glass in his hand, but he was watching you talking to Omaha. Fuck that guy, for real. But he looked annoyed right now. Bradley liked that expression on Omaha's face. He also vaguely thought nobody should ever be looking at you with annoyance, because you were perfect. 

Bradley took a few steps so he was closer to you, because he was drunk, and going home sounded like a good idea. Then he heard Omaha.

"What do you mean you're taking Rooster home? Like you're taking him to your house?"

You replied right away, and your voice sounded crisp. "He's drunk. It's his birthday. I offered to drive him home. To his house. You need to relax."

Bradley liked that tone of your voice when you were talking to Omaha. Especially when your eyes and voice softened as Bradley made his way over to you. "I'm ready to go, Midnight," he said, and you took his hand right away. Bradley shot Omaha a smug smile and saluted him like a real asshole, even though he knew nothing would ever happen with you. But the look he received from Omaha combined with his middle finger in the air had Bradley laughing. 

"Did you have a fun night?" you asked, slipping your arm around Bradley's waist to help him walk. He probably looked like an idiot right now, but he didn't care. 

"Yep," he replied. "Thanks for playing pool with me. And thanks for the drinks."

"Oh, it's no problem," you said. "I know you'll pay me back on my birthday."

Bradley draped his arm around your shoulders even though he firmly told himself not to. "I'll buy all your drinks on your birthday. All that microbrewed shit you like."

You laughed as you led him to your car and unlocked it. "Just get in, birthday boy."

"It's not my birthday anymore," he whispered. "It's midnight." And then he laughed and added, "Well, you're Midnight, actually." He groaned and ducked down into your car when you opened the passenger side door for him. "Just ignore me."

You leaned in and helped him get his seatbelt on. "Now that would be impossible, Rooster."

Your face was close to his, and you weren't moving. Why weren't you moving? You weren't drunk. You'd had one beer, hours ago. You should be moving away from him. "You okay?" you finally asked, patting his chest where the seatbelt crossed him. 

"I like your face," Bradley told you, and then he wanted to disappear into thin air more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

"Thanks," you whispered with a smile. "That's sweet. I'll take you home now, okay?"

Bradley just nodded and cradled his face in his hands as you shut the door and walked around your car. When you closed your door and started the engine, he dared to glance at you before turning to look straight ahead. He would be home soon. And he could climb in bed and this would all be over.

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

Bradley was drunk. You'd never seen his cheeks so rosy or heard his voice so raspy before. It was a cute look on him, even though he seemed pretty far gone. But teasing him a little bit was always fun, because you knew nothing would ever happen.

"I like your face, too," you told him as you backed out of the parking space. "It's a very nice one. Handsome."

Bradley groaned and gaped at you. "What the fuck, Midnight?"

"What?" you asked, glancing at him before you pulled out onto the street. "You're handsome. All you guys are."

"Fucking Omaha," Bradley muttered, and you laughed as he cross his arms. 

"You don't like Omaha?"

Bradley scoffed. "Lieutenant Jawline? He can fuck right off."

You were now howling with laughter as you tried to make a left turn. "What does that make you then? Lieutenant Mustache?"

Bradley chuckled and tilted his head back. "I guess so. But that would make you Lieutenant Sexy Laugh and Beautiful Face."

You gasped and glanced at him as your belly swooped. He was flirting with you. But he was drunk. "That's too long to fit on my name tag."

"Baby, you're so perfect, you deserve two name tags. Maybe even three," he mumbled. "Maybe even a hundred name tags. I can think of a hundred different things I like about you."

You swallowed hard as you turned onto his street. After you had driven two blocks in a daze, you asked, "What's your house number?" You couldn't remember. You were having a hard time remembering anything. Because Bradley Bradshaw could think of a hundred different things he liked about you.

"I dunno," he groaned, pushing his fingers through his hair. "I can't remember anything except that time you wore shorts when we went to the beach and your bikini top was pink, and Nat made fun of me for being too embarrassed to tell you I think you're pretty."

You laughed softly as Bradley's eyes opened wide. "You are so drunk, Rooster! I can't believe we got you this drunk."

"I'm not that drunk," he muttered, turning in his seat to look at you as the light turned green.

"You don't even remember your house number!" you said, driving slowly down the street 

"I think it has an eight in it."

You laughed and pulled over, turning to look at him. "Rooster, what am I supposed to do with you?"

His eyes were soft as he lazily searched your face. "I can think of a few things. They all involve your lips."

You were the one gaping now. His eyes were unfocused, and no matter how badly you wanted to feel his mustache against your skin, you kept yourself a few feet away from him. When he leaned in, you brushed your fingers through his hair to keep him from getting closer. "Rooster," you whispered as he melted into your touch. "Do you want me to just take you to my place?"

His eyes bugged out, and he started to stutter. "Shit, I, well... Midnight, I-I..."

You let yourself stroke your fingers through his hair for a few more seconds before you eased him back against the seat and pulled back away from the curb. "You can sleep it off at my place, and I'll take you back for your Bronco in the morning."

"Sleep? At your place? Of all the things I have imagined doing there, sleep was not one of them."

He was very clearly a mess at the moment, but you couldn't help yourself. "Oh really? What have you imagined?"

He groaned loudly, closing his eyes and rubbing his palms along his face. "Imagined kissing you after I took you out to dinner. Kissing you on your couch and in your bed. Imagined how good you must taste."

Then he was quiet. You thought he must have fallen asleep. And as you pulled up to park in front of your apartment, you couldn't believe you'd gone out on a date with Omaha and let Omaha kiss you when there might have been even the slightest possibility that Rooster wanted to do those things. 

He was breathing softly now, his head resting on the window. When you got out and opened the passenger door slowly, he jolted awake and tried to climb out with the seatbelt still on him. You tried not to laugh, but it was just too funny. 

"Sit back, Rooster," you whispered, and you leaned across his big, warm body to unbuckle him. Then you took him by the hand and laced your fingers with his. You loved the way his hands felt, so big and secure. 

"That feels so nice," he murmured, pulling your hand against him. "Where are we going?"

He was trying to lead you away from your building, and you had to keep pulling him along with you. "Come this way, Rooster."

"Okay, baby. Whatever you want."

You just shook your head as you unlocked your building with his big body looming behind you. "I'm taking you to my apartment. You'll be fine, okay?"

"Mmhmm," he hummed, and you wrapped your arm around him to get him inside. He stumbled down the hallway to your door, and once he was inside, you took his hand again. 

"Here's my bathroom," you said, turning on the light and leading him in. You dug around in one of the drawers and found an extra toothbrush. "You can use this. And the bedroom is next door."

"Thanks," he whispered, bending down to kiss you cheek softly. "Love you." You stood there stunned as Bradley turned toward your toilet and started to unzip his jeans. 

Then you quickly darted out of the bathroom and closed the door. You were stuck somewhere between laughing and dying from shock. This is not what you had signed up for when you agreed to drive him home! But maybe it was even better. Or maybe it was a lot worse, and he didn't really feel this way at all.  

When you heard the toilet flush, you headed to the kitchen and filled two glasses with water. You'd let him sleep in your bed and you'd crash on the couch. You were pretty sure he wouldn't even fit on the couch anyway. The couch he told you he had imagined kissing you on.

What was going on here? 

The bathroom door opened, and you heard him say, "Midnight? I'm getting in bed."

"Okay," you replied with a laugh as you carried the waters into your bedroom. "I think you should drink this." He was wearing nothing except his boxer shorts, and your jaw dropped open. Because he was stunning. Big and muscular and fucking hot. "Water," you muttered, handing him a glass. 

He downed the whole thing in one big gulp, and then he set the glass down, swaying on his feet. "I think I need to sleep."

You nodded at him, and he was reaching for your hand, and you had no idea what to do. "What do you want, Rooster?" you asked, but he was scooping you up into his arms.

"Sleep," he muttered. 

"With me?" you gasped.

"Yep."

And a moment later, Bradley was behind you with his big arms wrapped around you, and he was sound asleep. 

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

Before he even cracked his eyes open, Bradley knew he had a headache. So he just burrowed further into the soft, sweet smelling blanket. He knew this smell. It was familiar and comforting. When he gathered the blanket up and buried his nose in it, he realized it smelled like you.

His eyes were open then, even though his head was pounding. He had never been in the room before. But he was sure it was yours. And the spot in bed next to him was still warm. 

"Oh no. Oh no," he groaned, covering his face with his hands. "What did you do?" Suddenly it was hard to breathe. He was in his underwear. In your bed. Hungover. Yesterday was his birthday. How did he even get here? He could remember playing pool with you at the Hard Deck, and then Nat took his key away. And... oh shit, he got in your car.

He was stumbling out of bed, looking for his clothing. He found his jeans and shirt neatly folded up on your desk chair. As quickly as he could, he pulled everything on and headed down the hallway.

You were in the kitchen, wearing shorts and a tank top, brewing coffee. You were perfect. Holy shit, you were everything. And he had already fucked this up.  

"Midnight?" His voice was rough and raw, and when you turned to look at him with a gorgeous smile on your face, he thought he was going to throw up. 

"Morning, Rooster. Sleep well?" you asked with a smirk. Bradley couldn't formulate solid thoughts. You were handing him a cup of coffee. You weren't wearing a bra. He had been in your bed with you, and he couldn't remember anything that happened.

"Did we hookup?" he blurted loudly, and you froze with the coffee mug in your hand. "Oh, shit, Midnight. Please tell me we didn't sleep together."

You no longer looked happy. But you were shaking your head with your eyes locked on his. "No," you whispered. "We didn't do anything."

As relief washed over Bradley, you turned away from him with the mug and looked out your kitchen window. "Thank goodness," he sighed.

"Yeah," you said softly. "That would have been terrible."

"Absolutely," he said, still catching his breath.

But now you didn't seem to want him around at all. "I'll call Nat and see if she can meet us with your key." You kept your back to him as you reached for your phone, and then Bradley closed the distance to you. 

"Hey, Midnight?" he asked, taking your phone from your hand. You glanced at him over your shoulder with annoyance. "Thanks for driving me last night."

"No problem," you replied quietly, avoiding his eyes now. 

"But why did you bring me here?"

You rolled your eyes. "You couldn't even remember your house number, and it was so dark, I couldn't tell which one was yours. Now let me take you back to your car, please?"

But then Bradley remembered telling you he could think of a hundred different things he liked about you. He remembered holding your hand and kissing your cheek. 

You were walking across the kitchen away from him, but he chased you down, lacing his fingers with yours. You only looked slightly surprised. "Did I completely embarrass myself last night?" he asked.

Despite your best efforts, you were smiling at him again. "I thought you were pretty damn endearing, actually." You tried to pull your hand out of his grasp, but he held you tight. 

"I can think of more than just a hundred things I like about you. So many more than that." He pulled you a little closer still. "You let me sleep in your bed with you?"

You sighed. "Don't worry, Rooster. We didn't hook up. We didn't even kiss. You just spooned me and passed out immediately."

Bradley groaned and tipped his head back. "I spooned you? I got to cuddle with you, and I don't even remember it? That's not fair!"

Another smile was dancing along your lips as you nodded. "You're really great at cuddling. Very warm." But then you bit your lip and looked at the floor. "Would it really have been so bad if we did more?"

"Yes!" he nearly shouted, and your startled eyes snapped up to his. "Baby, I want to remember that stuff in vivid detail!" 

You laughed and now Bradley was smiling. And then you kissed him softly, and he thought his heart was going to pound out of his chest. "You said some crazy stuff last night while you were drunk," you whispered, but he kept you close to him.

"I am pretty sure it was all true," he promised you. "But I'd be more than happy to fact check with you."

"You said you like my face."

"That's a fact," he said, nodding. 

"You said you wanted to do things with my lips."

"Oh, yeah. That's definitely a fact."

"You said you imagined taking me out to dinner and kissing me."

"Many times."

"Why didn't you ever say anything?" you asked, sounding annoyed.  

He kissed you again. "Fucking Omaha, baby. What's that all about?"

"Oh," you said softly. "That is something that is basically nothing. At least on my end of things. And I could happily put a stop to that."

"Like today?" he asked, running his lips along your neck. 

"Like five minutes ago, Rooster."

Then you had your arms around his neck, and Bradley's hands were all over you. Your soft sigh as he kissed your lips had him scooping you up into his arms. "Can I have a do-over? Can we get back in your bed and cuddle?"

"Yes," you whispered as your mouth brushed his neck while your fingers went to his hair. 

This time Bradley kept his clothes on, and when he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you against his chest, he laced his fingers with yours. "I like this. We should do this all the time."

"We will," you promised, and his lips and mustache found your neck as he buried his nose in your hair. "I hope you had a fun birthday."

He needed to remember to thank Nat for being a pain in his ass when he saw her later. "I did. But today is even better."

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

Midnight, you're so lucky, babe! Upgrading from Lieutenant Jawline to Lieutenant Mustache! Thanks @mak-32 and @beyondthesefourwalls for putting up with me.

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@lilyevanswhore

@o-the-o-grim-o-reaper-o

@hecate-steps-on-me

@xoxabs88xox

#bradley rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster fanfic #rooster x you #rooster x reader #rooster x female reader #bradley bradshaw imagine #bradley bradshaw x female reader #bradley bradshaw x you #bradley bradshaw fanfiction #bradley bradshaw fic #bradley rooster x reader #bradley rooster bradshaw #rooster bradshaw x reader #top gun imagine #top gun maverick imagine #top gun fanfiction #top gun maverick fanfiction #bradley bradshaw x reader #midnight confessions #roosterforme

[avatar-anna]

Assistant! Reader x Harry Styles Masterlist

2013

"Mr. Styles? Mr. Styles, you need to get up. You have a radio interview in an hour."

There was no response, but Y/n expected that. Her boss had a tendency of sleeping like the dead, a side effect of partying too long the night before.

Sighing, Y/n stepped further into the lavish hotel suite. Her first instinct was to check the tour bus, but she should've known better. LA always meant a hotel suite. When she finally made it to her boss's room, she only had to follow the trail of clothes leading to the huge bed and there he was. She also noted a separate head of hair tucked beneath the covers. A headache, seeing as that meant a trip to the legal department and an awkward conversation with said headache. But that was the job. And Y/n was nothing if not exceptional at being Harry Styles's personal assistant.

Walking over to Harry's side of the bed, Y/n shook his shoulder. His skin was warm beneath her hand, but she didn't focus on that or the corded muscle that hadn't been there a few months ago. Those boxing lessons really were paying off.

"Mr. Styles, please don't make me get the bucket," Y/n said, shaking his shoulder one last time. When he didn't move, she stepped away to grab the champagne bucket she knew was in the fridge. Harry always had one in his room, but at Y/n's request, not his. 

Before she could grab it though, a voice sounded from the mountain of pillows and blankets. "Please don't. I hate the bucket."

Shaking her head, Y/n told the voice, "If you woke up when you were supposed to, I wouldn't have to use it."

"Your hands are soft but cruel, Y/n," he said, his voice deeper than it normally was.

"You've got thirty minutes to wash last night off and get dressed," was all she said in reply, but there was a small grin on her face.

As far as bosses went, Harry Styles wasn't the worst. He was sweet and not a total diva, which made Y/n's life a lot easier. He was a young guy with a lot of money and fame, though, and that meant waking him up from deep, hangover-induced sleep was the norm, and getting him to arrive on time anywhere was pretty much impossible. But he didn't make her life miserable, and for that she was thankful.

When she made sure Harry was actually out of bed and getting ready, Y/n went about her usual routine—making sure a car was ready to drive them to the radio station, ordering room service, setting out a bottle of water, three Advil, and a bullet coffee from Harry's favorite coffee house when he was in LA on the dining table in the main room of the suite. Room service arrived as she heard the shower shut off, and after checking her watch, Y/n deigned to believe they might not be that late today. A win in her book.

Ten minutes later, Harry was out of the master bedroom in a pair of black skinny jeans and a Stones t-shirt. His hair was damp and unstyled—an easy fix in the car—and his face was surprisingly fresh looking despite his late night. His eyes landed on the water and Advil first, quickly swiping those off the dining table, then saw the plates of food Y/n was helping herself to.

"Leave some for me?" he asked, throwing the pills back and downing them in one gulp.

Y/n shrugged. "Got you something better."

"What's better than Belgian waffles and bacon?"

"I might've popped over to the Beachwood Cafe this morning," she said, grinning when her words dawned on Harry.

"Breakfast burrito?"

"Mmhm."

"And the toast with the special jam?"

"What do you take me for?"

"You're the best, Y/n," Harry gushed, coming around the table to squeeze her. 

For a moment, Y/n’s senses could only process Harry's cologne, a scent that wasn't too overwhelming but definitely there. And when her nose pressed against his neck, she had to make a conscious effort to not breathe in deep. Instead, she shifted in his embrace and plucked a slice of bacon off her plate to hand to him.

As difficult as he could be sometimes, Harry Styles really was a sweetheart. Since she'd started working for him a year ago, he'd been nothing but gracious to her. He always went out of his way to talk to her when he didn't have to, he never raised his voice when things that were out of her control went wrong, he hung out with her in his dressing room when she worked on his schedule or answered emails before his shows, and the Christmas bonus he'd given her this year was unlike anything she'd received before. Y/n had been unsure of what to expect when she took this job, but after nearly a year, she and Harry operated like a well-oiled machine, and she liked to believe that even though he was her boss, they were at the very least acquaintances.

"Is the car ready?" Harry asked around a bite of bacon.

"Yeah, head down there. I'll handle…" Y/n's voice trailed off as she nodded in the direction of the master bedroom, where Harry's guest had yet to hear.

"Right, um…"

Y/n pinned him with a stare. "This is a new low, Mr. Styles."

"I know. I swear I know it, it's the alcohol fog," he insisted, but they both knew that didn't make it any better. "And for the last time, it's Harry."

Shaking her head, Y/n motioned to the door. "Go, or you're gonna be late."

He didn't put up much of a fight after that. He grabbed his coffee and breakfast and headed for the door, but not before squeezing Y/n's shoulder affectionately. "You really are the best, Y/n. I'm gonna give you a raise."

"That's my third raise this year!" Y/n said, calling after him as he walked out.

"You deserve it! Just say thank you!" he said with a wave, then he was gone.

Y/n sat in silence for a moment, her cheeks flushing involuntarily. She swore it was that he was uncharacteristically kind for a celebrity. Harry was just charming and endearing, that was why she was blushing.

"Harry?"

A voice coming from the bedroom brought Y/n back to earth. Harry might have gone to his interview, but her job was far from done. Sighing, she pulled out a folder where she kept all her legal documents out of her bag, rifling through the color-coded tabs until she landed on the purple one. She slipped a piece of paper out, then snagged a pen from a smaller pocket in her purse.

Readying herself for what would be a less-than-pleasant conversation, Y/n clutched the NDA in her hand and went to greet the woman who would no doubt be disappointed to see her instead of the man she thought she seduced the night before.

#harry styles #harry styles blurb #harry styles x reader #harry styles fanfic #harry styles oneshot #harry styles imagine #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles x you #harry styles fluff #harry styles writing

[shesalewa]

Idk bro.

I remember a post about Shen Jiu wanting someone to be there for him when he needed it most, and that it would've changed the way he is if he had said person.

And its not wrong, Shen jiu really needed someone to be there for him

So in every Shen twin au, it would mean that Shen Jiu wouldn't be the cruel person he was. He would just be sassy. And because they share trauma, Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu would both be over protective of each other.

Imagine they become peak lords and decide to be silly and have the same peak lord name and have the same disciples. Imagine the confusion the disciples must have when on their first day the teacher is strict and cold. Then the next day he's overflowing with love and is suddenly so kind.

The disciples just came to the conclusion that their shizun has D.I.D until they find themselves having to go on a mission with the both of them because one doesn't like to go out and has to keep count of affairs that doesn't involve crowds and the other has to keep count of affairs that involve crowds.

And then they realize "oh. They're twins. But why would they both be Named SQQ?" That wasn't answered. They both answered vaguely.

And the fact that Shen Yuan is now a Native in the world he probably told Sj about the system. That or Sj found out about the system, and he became a glitch.

So when Lbh finally arrives, Sj keeps a close watch, and Sy immediately shows favoritism.

Which eventually shocks the other disciples because the twins hardly ever play favorites. Though the disciples know that Sj's favorite person to be around would be Sy, but Sy??? Having favorites??? Shocking.

Though Sy still tries to live under the radar of the system, Sj takes the place of protecting Lbh for him.

However due to Sj's having a villainous appearance being the supposed villain, scares poor white lotus.

Sy being over filled with joy just seeing lbh, gets hit with a big bang of, OOC. because Sj is a glitch. He cannot count as Sqq, therefore Sy, has to take over has Sqq.

What's more, Lbh gets confused on who is who from time to time. One he hardly ever interacts with (Sy) who is actually very kind but he's not close enough to let his guard down. The other, strict and scary, and has no plans of getting to know him or close to him.

Eventually, Sy gets rid of Ooc, and gets to be close with Lbh, and Lbh gradually latches onto this kindness.

Soon enough the Demon attack thingy arc happened, and since the Shen twins were known to hardly ever fight, nobody knew what type of fighting style they had. They think just like how common stereotypes work.

But to their surprise, Sj is more on defense and Healing, Sy is more on offense. Despite their appearance, they tend to act more differently from what they look at certain times.

Ofc the poisoning thingy happens, and Sj scolds Sy for saving someone who won't be affected.

Ofc this leads to Sy telling Sj about Pidw, and etc etc, and about the Abyss.

So blah blah blah. Non of this matters.

What matters is that Shen Jiu is happy, and not cruel. Just Sassy and happy.

Sy: wanna talk sh/t about other peak lords?

Sj: how unbecoming of you. Yes, I will. why ask?

Etc etc.

Lqg: fight me.

Sj: ... Oh me? No thank you, I don't wanna fight children.

Lqg: but I'm not-

Sy: he says you're childish. Now leave.

So yeah basically.

Shen jiu is not cruel if he just had someone be there for him. Baby boy just wanted to have someone by his side.

Oh and. Sy has trauma too. Oh and Sj is on good terms with YQY.

#svsss au #mxtx svsss #svsss #mxtx #shen jiu #shen yuan #original shen qingqiu #shen twins #shen qingqiu #yue qingyuan #liu qingge #lou binghe #scumbag villain #scumbag self saving system #scumbag system #scum villian self saving system #scum villain

[singingcicadas]

More thoughts on Cyclonus.

Nova's evaluation of him in this panel is brutally accurate. That last sentence. Ouch.

On the surface level Cyclonus appears to be portrayed as this stiff proud warrior with an austere, diehard take on his own internal code of honour and patriotism, but the more I think about it his actual character is pretty much the opposite? He doesn't have any hardfast values or stances of his own aside from shallow romanticism for the preachings of others.

His whole life is comprised of hanging onto other people. First it's Nova and his group, despite Nova and Jhiaxius looking down on him and insulting him to his face and being very forthright about the actual purpose of their mission, which Cyclonus apparently had different ideals about. Theoretically. But he didn't say anything after Nova corrected him.

Then it's Galvatron, after Galvatron backstabbed Nova. Even when Galvatron became increasingly unhinged and violent toward him and also started insulting him to his face, he still continued to follow Galvatron around because Galvatron's powerful, hope he stays on our side.

Then after he broke off from Galvatron post-Chaos Theory he joined the Lost Light, an Autobot ship, despite not liking Autobots, because it had something that he wanted: the chance to start again.

His defense for murdering all those people in Kimia is literally "he made me do it." That's all he can come up with. He even knows it's a bad excuse.

And he always corrects people when they assume he's a Decepticon. Here he directly says that he doesn't want to be a Decepticon. Why not, if he clearly admires their ideology?

One possible reason is maybe he doesn't like their ideology that much. Enough to romanticize it from a safe distance but not enough to commit to it himself (since doing that would force him to do actual introspection about his own role in what made the Decepticon ideology so appealing in the first place). Second reason's simpler: Decepticons have to wear inhibitor chips. No thanks. They're the losing side.

Once on board the Lost Light he followed Rodimus' command fine despite Rodimus accusing him of murdering Red Alert without any proof. Then after he developed a relationship with Tailgate, he put Tailgate up on a pedestal and made Tailgate the center of his universe.

But then there's also this 🔽 after he thought Tailgate dumped him:

I don't even know what he's trying to do there😂

His lack of true conviction is evident in the little things too: he thinks it's unethical for Rodimus to perform mnemosurgery on Tailgate while he's unconscious and unable to give consent but drops the subject after Rodimus distracted him with fireworks. He thinks that mutiliating an enemy's corpse is appalling but doesn't say anything when Rodimus said they were going to use Skip's corpse as a shuttle to get off Necroworld. It's Nautica who raised ethical objections, not him. He's supposed to be really religious but when the guiding hand did their big reveal at the end of Lost Light, he got nearly zero lines because of compressed screentime except to argue with Epistemus over sending Tailgate into danger.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Cyclonus is essentially a go-with-the-flow sort of person. Nothing he holds is uncompromisable. Not his ideals, not his values, not his pride, not his faith. To an extent, not even his love for Tailgate, at least not completely, because he left when Tailgate told him to leave even when he suspected that Tailgate was lying about not loving him without making more of an effort to understand why. It all depends on the person he's hanging on to at the moment. And his choice of which leader to follow is ultimately based on self-serving reasons. This pattern is first broken when he turns on Galvatron, then fully subverted after he learns to love Tailgate as a sign of character growth.

He's not an intrinsically cruel or callous person. The way he learns to love Tailgate, befriend Whirl, and being kind and supportive to everyone when Rodimus left him in charge on the Necroworld are all attestments of his better nature. Water takes the shape of the container in which it's kept; surround him with people like Galvatron and Nova and he'll be their murder machine. Put him in the company of people who's mostly decent like the Lost Light crew and he'll grow into a compassionate person and a reliable friend.

#transformers #idw transformers #maccadam #mtmte #Cyclonus

[make-me-imagine]

Something Better

Plot: When you return to an island you used to call home, you run into an old flame. Zoro takes matters into his own hands to get some long-awaited retribution for you.

Requested By: Anonymous

Pairing: Roronoa Zoro x Gn!Reader

Warnings: Allusions to cheating and toxic relationships. Mentions of violence (past-tense). Brief description of injuries.

Words: 2,375

As the once familiar shore grew closer, you felt a pit in your stomach deepening. The island approaching had been a home for you for some years, but by the time you left, you had been certain you would never want to return. All of those fond memories of a new adventure on a once unknown island, were tainted by the same person who had brought you there in the first place.

Feeling eyes on you from the crew you let out a soft sigh.

"I thought you used to live here, why do you look so miserable? I thought you would be glad to be back."

You glanced at Nami as she spoke before you shook your head softly, "I left for a reason."

"What reason?"

You looked over at Zoro as he spoke, your heart palpitating. How would he react if you told the story? Would he care at all?

He studied your eyes and you remained silent, as you debated if you should tell the story now, later, or never.

"Did you get in trouble?" Sanji asked with curiosity.

"Did you get kicked out?" Usopp asked with a mouth full of popcorn.

Before you could answer Luffy stood up and smelled the air, "Do you smell that?"

You finally looked away from the others before you nodded, "Seafood gumbo, the islands most famous dish."

Stepping away from the railing you left the previous asked questions unanswered as you prepared to dock the ship. You reminded yourself you were only stopping for supplies, you'd only be here for a day or two. You might not even see the reason you left the island in the first place.

Or so you hoped. Surely fate wouldn't be so cruel, right?

The familiar sights and smells engulfed you as you walked through the market with Zoro. The others had wandered off looking for various supplies. Why Zoro stuck by your side, you weren't sure, not that you were complaining. You and the broody swordsman had grown close recently.

A few people even recognized you as you passed stalls. It felt good in a weird way, if it weren't for the lingering pit in your stomach.

"Well, you aren't hiding, and people aren't exactly trying to chase you off or arrest you. So I would assume you didn't leave the island because you did something bad."

"Good observation skills." You said with a hint of sarcasm, earning a soft smile from Zoro.

You knew he was asking what happened, without actually asking what happened. You let out a soft breath.

"I moved here with someone. We were young and wanted an adventure. I thought he was my future, but to him, I was just one option of many. He cheated on me, lied to me, used me and embarrassed me, so I left. "

Zoro's hand softly twisted around the hilt of his sword. "Sounds like a catch."

You scoffed before stopping at a stall with the islands local fruit. You gently held one in your palm, reminiscing of the flavor you once loved. Zoro watched you closely, wondering if the pain you felt here still lingered, or if it was strictly resentment.

Hearing your name called from nearby, you and Zoro turned to see a tall man headed towards you, surprise in his eyes and a smirk on his lips. Zoro eyed him as your stomach twisted.

"Speak of the Devil." You muttered, just loud enough for Zoro to hear, causing his grip to tighten around his sword.

"Well, well, well, look who came back." The man grinned as he stopped just in front of you. His eyes raked over you and Zoro felt his jaw clench in anger.

"Well, well, well, look who never left." You countered, in a similar condescending tone.

He continued to smile, but you saw a small twinge of the eye you knew as a familiar sign of annoyance.

"To what do we owe the honor of your return?"

"You don't need to know." Zoro broke in, causing your ex to finally look over at the swordsman.

He looked Zoro up and down with a soft smirk. "Oh I'm sorry, I didn't notice your bodyguard here."

Zoro took a small step closer, his eyes piercing. "Well now you do."

You saw your ex swallow hard, as he tried to keep his composure, not used to anyone not backing down from him. You couldn't help the smile that graced your face as you saw Zoro's actions.

Reaching out, you gently grabbed Zoro's arm before giving your ex a hard look.

"Like he said, you don't need to know why I'm here."

Leaving the fruit stall behind, you walked away, Zoro kept an eye on your ex before moving to follow you.

After a few moments you side-eyed Zoro, "So, you're my bodyguard now?"

Zoro's lip curled slightly, "I guess I am."

Zoro sighed with contentment as he set down his half empty glass. The people in the bar chattered and laughed around him.

His mind kept wandering to you and the story you felt you couldn't share. The thought of how your ex had treated you caused his gut to twist. He couldn't help but wish he had known you before, he could have saved you the pain of being with someone like your ex. And instead, been with someone like him. Whisked you off on a better adventure and all that. He couldn't help but wonder if you would have gone with him.

Hearing an obnoxious laugh come from across the bar, he did a double take as he spotted your ex.

"Speak of the devil." He muttered, repeating your words from earlier.

As if your ex felt Zoro's eyes burning into him, he noticed Zoro and smirked. Zoro smiled softly to himself as he tapped his fingers on the table, watching your ex saunter across the bar towards him, clearly having had more than one drink beforehand.

"Well, well, well, if it isn't Y/n's body guard."

Zoro rolled his eyes as your ex sat down across from him. "So where are they?"

"Where's who?" Zoro asked, voice low, as if daring him to say your name.

He smirked, taking the challenge. "Y/n. I'd love to see them again. We have a lot we could reminisce about. Hell, maybe we'd even strike up that old flame again."

Zoro clenched his jaw as he leaned forward, palm wrapping around his sword, "Not gonna happen."

As Zoro stood up, your ex scoffed, "What, not even over your dead body?"

Zoro quickly finished off his drink and slammed the glass down before he looked at him, dead-panned, "No. But maybe over yours."

As your ex froze for a moment, Zoro began to walk away, but his chest burned with the need for more gratification. But how would you react?

"Sure you don't want to know all of Y/n's dirty little secrets?" Your ex said with a sing song voice as he stood up as well.

Zoro stopped in his tracks before turning back to your ex and smirking softly.

The cold sea breeze blew over you as you sat on the edge of the ship, staring out at the island. A weird sense of nostalgia sat over you as you both wished to stay longer, and to leave immedietely.

Hearing footsteps, you glanced back to see Zoro boarding the ship. His eyes were already on you and your heart fluttered momentarily. You looked back out at the city, hearing Zoro approach you before climbing over the bannister and sitting beside you.

"The bar still as lively as ever?"

He nodded, "Seemed like half the island was there."

You nodded with a soft smile your eyes moving to Zoro's hand as he held out something in front of you. Your heart jolted as you saw the familiar fruit you had been looking at earlier in the day.

You took it from him and smiled.

"It seemed like you wanted to get one earlier." He said softly.

You looked over at him but he avoided your eyes, staring straight off to the city. You smiled as you began peeling the fruit, before your eyes caught on fresh scrapes on the back of Zoro's hands.

"...Did you...steal this from someone?"

"What?"

You motioned towards his hand and he scoffed, "Would that make you feel better or worse about the fruit?"

You eyed him closely before shrugging as you continued to peel the fruit. "I'm grateful either way"

He smiled at this, but took in a deep breath, knowing you would press for more.

"So, what really happened?"

He looked down at his knuckles with a smile before clearing his throat. "There was a situation, but I handled it."

"Hmm. You tend to find yourself in a lot of situations."

He chuckled, "It's kind of my thing."

You nodded, "Can't find the trail of breadcrumbs you left behind, but you can always find a fight."

"What does that even mean?"

"It means you have a terrible sense of direction"

"I do not."

You pursed your lips with a soft glare and he sighed, before shaking his head, fighting a smile.

After a moment of silence, you hand him a piece of the fruit. He took it slowly before eating it, enjoying the sweet yet fresh taste. He nodded, showing that he enjoyed it and you smiled.

"This is one of the only things I missed about this island."

"One of?"

You hummed, "I admit, I had some good memories here."

"How many of them were with him?"

You could sense the hint of venom in his tone and you repressed a smile. "None that come to mind." You said softly, noticing the way Zoro's jaw seemed to relax, yet his hands clenched.

"Zoro?"

He slowly looked over at you and almost froze at the soft look on your face.

"Yeah?"

"What happened to your hand?"

He swallowed, "I hit it on something."

"On what?"

"Your exes face."

There was a moment of still silence before you pressed your lips together, biting them, as you clearly repressed a laugh.

Zoro felt relief and amusement wash over him as you let out the soft giggle that you could no longer repress.

"Your not mad then?"

You thought for a moment before you shrugged, "I am mad but not because you hit him."

He frowned, "Then why?"

You looked over at him with a straight face. "I'm mad because you didn't hit him while I was there to see it."

Zoro stared at you for a second before both of you broke into grins. He chuckled as you giggled before letting out a sigh.

Zoro shrugged his head. "I mean...I could go pick him up off the bar floor and bring him over here if you want. "

You laughed again and Zoro grinned, relishing in the sounds as they made his heart pound proudly.

Handing him a slice of the fruit you grinned, "Tempting."

He smiled softly as he ate it, "You know it doesn't matter what you left behind here right?"

You tilted your head slightly in question. "Why not?"

He cleared his throat briefly, "Because what you have now is more important. It's better."

Your eyes locked and you could feel the tension growing.

You smiled softly as you nodded. "Yeah, it is."

He gazed at you softly, his mind running wild with a thousand things he wanted to say. His thoughts were silenced when Sanji came sauntering from the kitchen to announce that dinner was ready.

Looking back to see the others quickly heading in, you began to rise. But before you did you quickly pressed a kiss to Zoro's cheek, causing him to freeze.

"Thank you."

Your whispered voice echoed in his mind as his cheeks burned from the brief kiss. His heart was pounding as he looked behind him seeing your back disappear into the ship.

Getting a hold of himself, he rose and headed inside. Not so subtly kicking Usopp out of his seat beside you. Sharing a brief yet knowing look with you as he did.

As Zoro and Sanji loaded on a few more boxes of supplies you took one more look at the island in front of you. You were glad you were leaving, but at the same time, you wondered when you would be back next.

Your eyes caught onto a figure walking towards you and you let out a sigh, just loud enough for Zoro to glance over at you. He spotted the same thing and rose with a huff of air.

As Zoro appeared beside you, his arm pressing against yours, you felt your tense shoulders relax as your ex sneered at the two of you.

His lip was busted, and he had to matching bruises under each eye.

"New look? It suits you."

"I was thinking the same thing." Zoro mused.

Your ex looked between you and Zoro before his eyes paused on you. You shook your head softly.

"Nothing you could say is a good idea, trust me."

He hesitated a few times before giving in with a huff of air and a roll of his eyes as he turned and sauntered back down the dock.

"Who was that guy?" Usopp asked.

"No one important." You said softly.

Feeling Zoro's eyes on you, you glanced over at him. "Still regret coming here?"

You hummed softly as you looked back at the village seeing your exes head disappear into the crowd.

"No, not really. Besides, I got a good memory to leave with."

"Just one?"

You smiled softy as your eyes locked, "A couple."

He smirked as he scanned your face, "We'll make a lot more."

"We?" You mused your heart fluttering.

"Yeah. We."

Feeling someone sling their arms over your shoulders, you looked back to see Luffy's grinning face. "Yes we will!"

You paused for a second as you locked eyes with Zoro before letting out a laugh, and Zoro chuckled before shaking his head.

As Luffy began talking animatedly about the next stop, you felt Zoro's hand brush yours at your side, before he gently squeezed it.

No matter where you came from or left some heartbreak behind. Your next adventure would make it all worth it.

xx End xx

General Taglist: @criminaly-supernatural, @imaginesfire, @rexit-mo, @onuen, @witchygagirl, @alexxavicry

OPLA Taglist: @fangirlextraordinaire

-Taglist Form-

#roronoa zoro x reader #roronoa zoro/reader #one piece live action x reader #one piece live action/reader #zoro x reader #zoro/reader #opla x reader #opla/reader #opla zoro fic #opla zoro imagine #roronoa zoro imagine #one piece live action imagine #opla imagine #zoro oneshot #zoro one shot #zoro fic #roronoa zoro fic

[creedslove]

KEEPING YOUR PICTURE 💋

Javier Peña x f!reader

Summary: Javi sees you going a little crazy over your ex and he tries to make you feel better

Warnings: angst, fluff, mentions of bad relationships, mentions of cheating, javier peña (because he is a trigger warning himself)

A/N: besties, this is just a short silly drabble that came to me because I actually dreamed of that, lol!

0.8k words

"I hope you know I can have you arrested for that, cariño" Javi's voice startled you as he took a step closer and lit up a cigarette.

He was the last person you expected to see at that hour, but there he was, having a smoke and wondering what the hell you were doing.

You couldn't sleep that night, not after the news you got, and you tried several times to get rid of the annoying pang that grew in your chest, however, the more you tried not thinking of it, the more you thought of it and that was bothering you to no end so you thought of the most illogical idea that could possibly cross someone's mind: you went out in the street in the middle of the night, grabbed one of the trash cans outside, dragged it to the patio of your apartment complex, started a small fire inside the can and threw it into the flames all of the painful memories that troubled your sleep and disturbed your heart.

And of course that working with Javier wasn't enough, you had to be his neighbor too, door to door, and not only that, he had to be up in the middle of the night to watch your mentally unstable horror show.

He could've made fun of it, he could've made a cheeky comment, but instead, he just stood there, curiously watching what you were doing as he took some puffs of his cigarette.

"You can try to arrest me, I may not be an agent but I have my DEA privileges" you winked at him with a sad smile and watched as Javi took a step closer and finally watched what was in your hands. He saw the photographs you held and looked at you

"That's the bastard who broke your heart?" You nodded and he hummed, taking the pictures into his own hands and watched them carefully "I'm guessing you are burning them down? Lorraine did the same when I left her at the altar" he smiled sadly and earned a chuckle from you

"Well, maybe you and my ex could have a drink together and exchange life experiences…"

Javi gave you a stinky eye and shook his head "I was a dick, but I was also immature as fuck, barely had left highschool and thought I was adult enough to get married. Your ex, on the other hand, was just a dick, because he couldn't see how lucky he was to have a wonderful woman like yourself and decided to change you for some whore" he shrugged and a blush spread through your cheeks. Javier Peña considered you a wonderful woman? You hadn't really thought that was possible, well, Javier had flirted with you and hinted at taking you back to his apartment, but he did this to every woman he saw, so you figured it wasn't a big deal.

"Cariño, you told me what he did, he cheated and deceived and he got the other girl pregnant, didn't he?" His thumb stroked your cheek gently as you nodded, looking into his eyes

"And after he said he would never marry me because he just didn't do marriages, he married his bitch" you groaned "and that's not it, guess where they're coming on their honeymoon?"

"Colombia?" He raised his eyebrow and you nodded

"Let me guess… they aren't going to Cartagena or any other beautiful place, they're coming here?" You nodded again and Javi licked his lips

"That's cruel" he said "tell you what, you let me know when they're coming and they will get a cop visit" he suggested it and made you scoff "would you really harass innocent civilians in order to protect me?"

Javi took another step closer, this time placing his hand on your waist and pulling you closer

"For you, I would yeah… now, instead of burning these pics, why don't you give me them? I will cut out your shitty ex boyfriend from them and keep the rest to myself…"

"The rest as in… my pictures? Why would you keep them?"

"Because you are too pretty to just burn it down, I'd take better care of the pics, cariño, just like I would take better care of you" he winked and you laughed again, Javi was a true womanizer, he just had whoever he wanted, and yet, it never seemed to work on you.

"Why didn't you accept when I asked you out, cariño? Were you afraid I'd play with your feelings?"

"You didn't ask me out, Javi, you invited me over for drinks and cigarettes which translates into sex…"

"That doesn't mean I wouldn't take good care of you, hermosa…"

Your hands rested over Javi's and you smiled big "yeah? Prove it"

And Javi pulled you for a kiss, a deep, intense one, where your lips wouldn't leave his even if someone forced you to.

Your whole body shook and it just felt right to be in his arms, it was a warm, soothing and intoxicating embrace. In his arms nothing else matter but you and him and you moaned disappointed the moment he broke the kiss, his fingers gently placing a strand of hair behind your ear, as he smirked

"See? Told you I could take care of you, cariño"

____

A/N: Besties, I know it wasn't great, but I had a dream about that lol, and I thought I should put it into paper. Also, I'm working on the epilogue of Deserve It, it's just going slower than I thought... 🌹❤️

#pedro pascal #pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal x you #pedro pascal x y/n #pedro pascal fanfic #pedro pascal fanfictions #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal imagine #javier peña #javier peña x reader #javier peña x y/n #javier peña x you #javier peña fanfic #javier peña fanfiction #javier peña imagine #javier pena #javier pena x reader #javier pena x y/n #javier pena x you #javier pena fanfiction #javier pena fanfic #javier pena imagine

[honestlyimstilllivinginthe90s]

"Enemies" to lovers with Matt | Aching |

thank you so much @fl3wers for the request!! sorry it took so long my love, college was on my ass 😭

warnings: all lowercase, angsty with a dash of fluff, slow-burn/pining

word count: 1.2k

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he was just annoying. not necessarily mean or cruel. and you didn't hate him but he was so gorgeous and so unavailable that you didn't know whether to jump his bones or smack him. not that you'd do either of course. he's nicks brother.

you knew that matt was an anxious person, quiet at times too. maybe you freaked him out with how you talked nonstop whenever you got passionate about things, and maybe the way you always forgot where you put things made him impatient, and maybe the fact that you still talked to him even though you drove him crazy just pushed him into hating you more.

“why are you still here, don't you have a home to go back to?” matt asked, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, his hands gripping the door frame above his head as he tilted his head like an inquisitive puppy.

“why? you sick of me already sunshine?” you teased, poking his ribs as you rolled your eyes, brushing past him to grab your keys.

“hey! where are you going?” he asked immediately, his arm instinctively wrapping around your waist to pull you back to him. you immediately pulled his arm away from you, ignoring your heart pounding from his simple touch.

“you just asked me to leave dipshit.” you teased, looking at him with a dead stare, your arms crossed. he rolled his eyes at you but you cut him off before he could protest.

“I'm going home” you replied matter-of-factly, his eyes bore into yours before they moved to scan your face. you could've sworn they lingered on your lips for a moment but why would they? omfg focus.

“its past two am.” he stated.

“well done, you can tell the time bernard.”

he rolled his eyes at you, his jaw clenching. fuck why did have to look like that. you turned away from him, moving to grab your jacket but matt stepped in front of you, your head crashing into him. you shove him gently, his hands wrapping around your wrists in annoyance.

“I'm not letting you go home this late, it's too dangerous” he shook his head, a light blush dusting his cheeks, “nick would never forgive me if anything happened to you” he muttered, “stop being stubborn and accept me actually being nice to you for once”

you blushed, looking down at your feet. you hated that he was right, and you hated that he was being nice and you hated his beautiful face.

“fine” you spit out, like the word was on fire in your mouth.

“you can stay in my bed.” he said like it was obvious, letting your wrists go before swiping your keys from the counter and walking away, leaving you standing in the kitchen.

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you ignored his instruction, walking to nicks room instead to ask if you could stay with him. you opened the door, sighing as you see chris's head above the covers with nick snoring beside him. fuck chris and never sleeping in his own bed.

you sighed, closing the door and preparing your stuff to sleep on the sofa but to your surprise, you find matt laying on the sofa, his head resting on his arm as he scrolled through his phone.

“go to your bed matt” you sighed, hitting him on the head with a spare pillow. he laughed at your attack, throwing a cushion back at you.

“see this is why I'm not nice to you, you're never grateful” he smirked, “I told you to take my bed, I'm okay here.”

“you can't tell me what to do bernard” his jaw clenched at the nickname, his eyes closing in frustration.

“fine.” he groaned.

he got up, moving his stuff from the sofa. you hopped on the sofa the second he got off and started making yourself comfortable when you noticed matt do the same on the floor beside you.

“matt what the fuck, go to bed” you laughed. he ignored you, placing down his pillow (and stuffed animal) and getting comfortable.

“you're not the only one who can be stubborn” he smirked, looking up at you smugly as he pulled his blanket around his shoulders.

“youre ridiculous” you rolled your eyes but your cheeks gave you away. you laid back down so he could no longer see your blushing cheeks. you longed to see his face as he continued his teasing but didn’t trust yourself to not kiss him to shut him up.

“youre the one who passed up my gracious offer.” he teased.

“and you're the one who'd rather sleep on the floor than his own bed just to spite me” you teased back, biting your lip to stop yourself from laughing. there were a couple beats of silence before matt spoke again.

“it's not to spite you”

“what's it for then?” you asked shyly, turning on your side so you were facing towards him, despite still not being able to see his face, just the tips of his hair.

“I don't want to be alone” he whispered.

you quietened, looking down at him shyly.

“you must be pretty lonely if you'd rather have me for company than be alone”

“shut up” he laughed, throwing a pillow at you as you keel over, holding your tummy in laughter.

you both continued your conversation into the night, laughing and joking like you were childhood best friends. it almost felt like a sin, a secret crime committed by your forbidden friendship. you left behind your roles as rivals and simply existed in dumb jokes and embarrassing stories and fond memories.

the night made him softer and it made it harder for you to pretend to hate him. you wished that you were next to him, that you were in his bed with him and that you could hold his hand and play with his hair. you hated how he made you feel like a dumb child with a crush, craving domesticity.

you listened to him tell you about a hockey game where he ended up being sent off (again), his voice lulling you to sleep. everything in you ached for him, you craved closeness and sleepily you reached down for him.

matt noticed your outstretched arm hanging off the sofa. he reached to hold your hand, his heart aching for you close to him but stopped himself, blush rising on his cheeks.

you couldn't have possibly been reaching for him because this wasn't a movie where the boy ends up with his brothers best friend. he turned over, silently cursing himself for starting a dumb rivalry with you instead of kissing you when he got the chance. and so he fell asleep wishing that you had taken his bed so he could've laid with you instead of regretting his choices.

when you woke up, his stuff was gone and you realised he went back to his bed at some point during the night. you sighed, thinking that maybe you two were finally going to drop the facade. that maybe you were what he wanted and not the dumb fights. and so you stared up at the ceiling and wondered if your late night talk was all in your dreams when you should have been waking up with him instead.

THANK YOU FOR READING FEEL FREE TO REBLOG AND COMMENT YEAH THANK YOUUU

#matthew sturniolo x reader #matt sturniolo #matt sturniolo imagine #matt sturniolo x reader #nick sturniolo #sturniolo triplets #sturniolo triplets imagine #chris sturniolo #matt sturniolo x you #matthew sturniolo #matthew sturniolo x you #matthew sturniolo imagine

[sexydoffyman]

Hi! I am a very quiet person, and I never get angry (even somethimes a little but i don't scream and shout). Some years ago happened that a bully (a guy that i kwen since i was 7 yo and literally stalked me in very rude way: from the food, the clothes, the movies, the nail polish, manga, anime, my drawings and lot of other things and every time he tells me cruel words and rude things and every time I replied him to go to hell) managed to makes me angry... very angry. Like, I never scream when i am angry but in that case I started to scream against him. He just stare at the floor the entire time. Can I ask you a reaction for the Red Hair pirates to a girl that is usually quiet and for a reason like mine she starts to scream for angry?

Thank you, I like your blog very much❤️

ANGERED

genre: angst fluff

word count: 737

A/N: It was actually hard to make it at least a little fluff at the end.🐝 I feel weak in the legs.

"Common girlie, it's nothing serious." You heard from the man you spent months on a ship with. "Shanks it is serious." "Maybe not for you, but I'm scared."

To put you in perspective on why you were angry. You had a room in the lower places of a ship. This meant that lots of deep sea creatures would bump into these places on the ship. That wouldn't be a problem alone. The Red Force was a well-built ship, so it wouldn't take any damage. The problem was that these sounds scared you. They scare you a lot.

Shanks ignored the fact. I mean, he was going to move you. But before that, he wanted to tease you.

"Common Shanks, please don't be a dick." Shanks was looking at you with a shit-eating grin. You wanted to punch him in the face so bad. "Oh, common scared of little noise?" "What are you, a coward?" "Cowards aren't accepted on my ship." He said all that like it was nothing. That made you even more angry.

He knew that you wouldn't fight back. Whenever he teased you like that. Being the only girl in the crew didn't help at all. The men with monkey-like brains were making sexist comments and assumptions. You just ignored them. But now they were all chuckling. They took advantage of you for being too nice. And you couldn't do anything about it.

Now you were sick of all of it. Them taking advantage of your kindness. And them ignoring your problem. "Shanks, I'm serious!" you tried desperately once again. "Are you sure that it isn't the time of the month again?" He said teasingly.

*SLAP*

Shanks fell out of his bar stool and looked at you like, you just defeated him. A red mark in the shape of a palm appeared on his left cheek. "YOU NEED TO STOP BECAUSE WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS MAKING ME WANT TO LEAVE!" You yelled at him. The look on his face said that he knew that he fucked up.

Him hearing you say that, you feel like you want to leave his crew because of him. That might just be the worst thing he heard in his life. Now he was worried. He would never forgive himself if you ever left just because he was stupid.

"YOU MIGHT NOT REALIZE IT, BUT I LOSE INTEREST IN BEING HERE WITH EVERY "You really think you can open that? Common, you're a girl." AND IT HURTS!" You yelled your heart at them. You told them every single thing that weighed your shoulders.

Shanks tried to speak and make an excuse, but you cut him off every single time. When you ended yelling at them, you gave them one last glance and started to walk away to that room you hated so much.

You slammed the door behind you and sat down on your bed. You put your back against the wall and cried. You felt like you couldn't win even if you did everything you possibly could.

*knock knock*

You couldn't even tell him to fuck off when Shanks burst into your room. "Shanks, leave now!" You said with tears rolling down your face. Shanks ignored your request and hugged you while he sat you on his lap. You were so frustrated. You punched his side with all your might. But how could you defeat the grip of an emperor.

"Punch all you need, I deserve it." You hesitated to punch him another time. "But I won't let you go because you deserve to be treated well" You cried into the fabric of his coat and started yelling again "I HATE WHEN YOU TELL ME THAT YOU WON'T DO IT AGAIN, BUT LEAVE ME CRYING MY SLEF TO SLEEP THE NEXT DAY!"

Hearing you say stuff like that broke his heart again. He didn't realize he was making you cry every night. He never wanted to make you sad or worse, cry. He just looked at you with eyes that had regret written all over them.

You looked at him. It will gonna be hard, but you will forgive him. And he will do anything in his power to make you not angry at him. You knew that. You knew because of how tight he hugged you. And because of the tears that rolled down his cheeks.

"You can sleep in my room if you want-" "Shut up."

#one piece #one piece requests #one piece x reader #one piece x you #requests are open #one piece x y/n #requests open #one piece x female reader #one piece smut #one piece x gn reader #one piece x gender neutral reader #shanks x you #shanks x reader #shanks fluff #red haired shanks #shanks #shanks x y/n #shanks x female reader #one piece #shanks angst #shanks angst to comfort #shanks angst with comfort

[epickiya722]

As much as I would have loved for Kenjaku and Yuji to have more interactions, another part of me now actually liked the little interaction they had.

It's just as tragic, if not more tragic. But also it goes with the idea that Yuji doesn't know his parents or more of his family.

The most he knows now probably is that Choso and the Death Paintings are his (half) siblings and Kenjaku had something to do with it (Choso probably told him so).

Yuji learning about Choso being his brother is a good thing for him. The time he did act unsatisfied with the idea was back in Shibuya. After that, we seen their relationship got better. He had Choso at his side since then.

Now what good would it do if Yuji learned the truth about how he's related Kenjaku and Sukuna? In fact, would he even care?

Remember when Wasuke tried to tell him about his parents? Didn't care to hear that.

When Junpei asked about his parents? Didn't remember little to nothing about his dad and nothing at all about his mom. But he didn't seem entirely brokenhearted. He seemed... like he accepted it, moved past that.

The thing with Yuji is... if Sukuna decides to throw it in their face that they're related, I doubt Yuji would break down in tears and give up fighting.

That's not Yuji.

Two reactions I feel like Yuji would give.

Either he will be furious or he'll brush it off as he normally does with Sukuna's antics.

With him being furious, it will just give him more reason to hate Sukuna and kill him. Family be damned. We seen Yuji angry. Look, Sukuna already got hit with back to back Black Flashes. I don't think he wants Yuji angry. Nuh uh. Sukuna don't do that.

Honestly though... I also feel like Sukuna doesn't give a damn about telling Yuji.

Anyways!

Same with Kenjaku. I don't think Yuji would actually care to know Kenjaku is his mother (by host). Again, what good would it do for him?

I also feel like he may have figured it out by now. Yuji ain't all that dumb now. I said it before but I do think he may have caught on by now or at least will later. And I don't think he would be fazed.

Would he think it would be cruel that Kenjaku have done such things? Yes! Would he not like the fact he was created by Kenjaku to be Sukuna's vessel and be related to those two? Also, yes. He'd hate that idea.

But Yuji just doesn't come off as someone who dwells on the past like that, let alone would be like "oh, woe is me, my family is so messed up" and cry waterfalls.

He's just more of a "What's done is done and I'll do what I can to make the best of it" person to me. He accepts, he learns and does what he can to make the most of out a bad situation.

Him knowing he's related to Kenjaku and Sukuna in some way will not change the fact that they're both evil and done terrible things or Yuji's feelings.

Sometimes I feel like the reason we don't know much about Yuji or Sukuna or others for the Heian Era is for the purpose of not needing to.

Yes, knowing about the past can help. But sometimes knowing, it doesn't have a purpose other than having extra information.

Maybe not knowing much about Sukuna is a way of saying "let's leave the past in the past and move on". Sukuna was not meant to be in the present times. When he's finally put to rest, that should be it for him.

It's why some of the characters like the Higher-Ups and the Zenin clan sucks and came to a downfall. Part of their awful behavior was they were more traditional and didn't care to adapt to the new changes.

That's going to be the case for Sukuna. Yuji is the present and future. Sukuna is the past. Yuji is going to be that new age that rises and push Sukuna right into the dirt where he belong.

Again, them being related and Yuji knowing ain't going to change the fact that Yuji wants Sukuna dead and he's going to kill him. So what would be the point of knowing?

#but that's just me #while i want him to know i also don't want him to knkw because i think it's for the best for him and nothing will change coming out of it #just went on a tangent there i did not mean for this to get long 😆 #just kiya's thoughts #jujutsu kaisen #jjk #jjk 257 #jjk manga spoilers #jjk spoilers #itadori yuji #yuji itadori #itadori yuuji #yuuji itadori #sukuna #ryomen sukuna #sukuna ryomen #kenjaku #kenjaku jjk

[crusty-chronicles]

As requested, I present to you ✨

Hiei Bringing His Airheaded S/O To Demon World

Absolute chaos

The entire time he regrets bringing you there.

He only did so because he was tired of you crying everytime he left. Even though he always came back to you no matter what, idiot.

Truthfully, he prefers you staying in the living world because there's less things that could kill you.

No bloodthirsty demons salivating at the scent of you. No carnivorous plants waiting for you to aimlessly stumble into. And no threats of kidnapping and being used for ransom.

It's not like you can't take care of yourself, but the chances of a someone or something taking advantage of your naivety are high

Which is why he specifically tells you to stay close to him.

“If you get lost here, I won't try to find you.” It was a small warning that he'd never really follow through with. But he needed you to take this seriously.

“But you found me when I got lost on my way home that one time.”

“I mean it this time.”

He has to keep a constant eye on you at all times.

Even going as far as holding your hand to keep you in place.

Which is very humiliating for him. The three eyed demon not used to openly showing his affections.

His first stop is Mukuro's base. To which you responded ‘Why is it moving??? I think I'm gonna get motion sickness.’

Because of his constant supervision, he isn't really able to do his job.

And so it begins.

He needs his Jagan, so it's either you or the other poor humans who stumbled past the makai barrier.

Guess who he chooses most of the time.

The few times he does leave you, he makes sure you're occupied with something.

“Go spar with those new recruits over there while I'm gone.”

“Okay!”

Bless those poor demons. They never stood a chance.

Hiei warned Mukuro beforehand about you.

How you're decently strong but don't have a single thought in your head.

She didn't believe him at first. At least, not until she met you in person.

How you managed to bust a hole in the wall by tripping, she'd never know. She saw it happen, but she still doesn't understand how it's possible.

Hiei introduces you to her and immediately regrets it.

“You’re a liar! You said you didn't have any friends.” You pointed out, causing the three eyed demon to tense up.

“I don't. Mukuro's an ally.”

“We both know it's the same for you.”

He's actually mad you're smart enough to figure that out but not why you shouldn't eat glass.

He's pretty embarrassed about your relationship. Not because he's ashamed of you. Couldn't be any further than the truth. He relishes in the fact you're so strong, paired along with your heart that has more kindness than he's able to fathom.

No, Hiei is embarrassed because here he's respected. His reputation is infamous and he's regarded highly. Known to be cruel yet reasonable.

But here he is telling you not to wonder off like some worried parent.

Here he is inspecting the smallest of cuts on your finger and healing it.

It's just so embarrassing for him to be soft in front of others who aren't you.

“So this is the one that has you returning to the human world.” Mukuro teased.

But Hiei wouldn't take the bait.

“I don't know what you're talking about.

Only for you to come up to him with a small gem. Presenting it proudly to him.

“Hiei! Look what I found! Isn't it pretty?”

It's a ruby. Something you'd told him reminds you of his eyes. It makes a tinge of red appear on his face.

But Hiei's a stubborn demon.

“And what do you expect me to do with it?” A tone that would sound cruel to anyone but you.

“Maybe I could turn it into a necklace like the one you gave me.”

“That's a ridiculous idea.”

It was inevitable something would happen to you on this trip. A lot of demons were still bitter about the outcome of the tournament. And with Hiei's involvement with the reform, you were only a huge target.

He ends up wearing it for the rest of the trip. Guarding it with his life. Much to the amusement of the Mukuro and her henchmen.

He came back to the base expecting to see you waiting, but you weren't there.

He didn't waste a second using his Jagan to find you.

He fully prepared to end the life of whatever demon decided to mess with his mate, but when he found you, you'd already taken care of it.

Save for a few scratches on your arm, you were completely fine.

It led to Hiei scolding you for walking off with someone you didn't know. Promising this would be the last time you ever came here for acting so reckless, and that you weren't to leave his side for the rest of the time you were here.

It proved that he was right with you staying in the living world. It was safer for you. And he had Kurama to take care of you if anything happened. You were completely alone here.

“How come you didn't want me to come here?” You asked while he went over your injuries once more.

His answer came immediately.

“Because I knew you wouldn't be able to stay out of trouble.”

“Hey, it's not my fault that guy wanted to fight. How was I supposed to know he wasn't a part of Mukuro’s army?”

He glared up at you.

“You're an idiot.” Then his gaze softened. A look reserved only for you.

“…But you're my idiot, therefore my responsibility. I can't have you getting hurt on my watch.”

What kind of mate would he be if he couldn't even take care of you in his element?

You sat in silence for a while, and he briefly wondered if he went too far. You usually never took his harsh words to heart. He was relieved when he heard you speak again.

“You seem to really like it here. I wouldn't blame you if you decided to stayed after all one of these days.”

You still thought he would just abandon you? Truly your naivety infuriated him.

“In case I haven't made my intentions clear before, I come back for you and you only. Yet you still doubt my devotion. If you expect me to stay in the living world forever with you, you shouldn't.” But I'll always come back for you. Words he'd said over and over again.

An idea struck you then.

“We could stay here if you want. Get all old together. Maybe start a family.”

He couldn't stop the heat crawling onto his face. The way the red seemed to glow from his flustered state. He had to look away from you and move back.

“As if. I have no intentions to keep you here, nor procreate with someone who can't even tie their shoe.”

He heard you laugh and the red only worsened from there.

He didn't like the effect your words had on him.

Tempting him with something so sweet. Something that would inevitably give him even more of a weak spot.

But you weren't meant for this world. Your home was on the other side of this barrier. And his was with you.

For now this arrangement of being with you periodically would work.

#hiei yu yu hakusho #yu yu hakusho #hiei jaganshi #hiei x reader #yyh hiei #yyh x reader #airhead s/o #stronk s/o #x reader

[soraviie]

they told you to go and you did.txt

━ type: bts x gn! reader ━ navigation

━ about: heavy angst ━ pictures taken from Pinterest

━ c/w: mention of mental illness, implied emotional cheating, falling out of love, smoking

━ previously posted on soraviii

NAMJOON: If you'd still talk, you'd ask him if "disappointment" is the right word. It's not pain. It's actually hard to describe what is this familiar pang, the stab that almost feels like a bruise made yesterday. It's not pain. It's the sad realization in your heart of hearts that this would happen eventually. It's a disappointment because once, just this once you allowed yourself to believe it'd be different. And you were wrong. Or rather you were right all along. He's just like that and you're you and the rest is a story that writes itself.

Picking yourself up is hard work, hence perhaps why they call it falling for someone. Falling is not a threat, people fall all day long but a fall from the last step of stairs no matter how scary is not lethal but falling in love, unlike a blunder through the dark, is getting up into a skyscraper and then placing all the trust that the other person will provide a mat big enough to cushion the fall. But he had pulled your safety net away. You'll rebuild yourself, from scratch if needed but some part of your trust in all people will forever be cracked. If a forever person becomes temporary...it's a bizarre, ungainly feeling that unevens your footing and makes for many, many quiet afternoons spend in the company of your lonesome, staring out through the windows and thinking was it always meant to end like this.

"You were supposed to be there," you breathed out, shaking. Out of anger, out of cold, who knows.

"And I said I'm sorry," he growls back, shoving the laying laundry into the washing machine.

"Sorry? "Sorry" is not going to cut it! For weeks - weeks! - I've asked you, I begged you to be there! It was one of the most important events in my life!"

"What do you want me to do here?" Namjoon asks, exasperated and the wrinkle between his eyebrows mars his features into someone...unrecognizable. A stranger almost. Since when have you had to beg to be heard?

"I don't know," you reply truthfully but slowly something in your gut begins to work. Why are you feeling like the villain? You shouldn't be.

You shouldn't be is the chief thought.

"Do you even care about me?"

"What?"

The look in his eyes...you know, you just know, he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand this profound feeling of being tired. Being proven right that, in the end, you will always have this - begging to be heard and understood and it's tiring. It's draining the soul right in front of his eyes, ones which do not see the obvious.

"Do you even care about me?"

He scoffs.

"Take a walk so you clear your head and don't ask stupid questions."

In hindsight, a very small part of you is grateful. The comment was cruel and cut like the end of a sharpened knife but it gave you a leeway. It gave you the thought that if you had to go, you didn't have to come back.

And it's like a bit of fresh air after that. Dizzying, confusing, the feeling of being lost in a way never leaving but you're finding your legs so to speak. You didn't owe him anything, there is no legal law that would force you to explain. You walked right out. A walk to never return, a walk to self re-discovery. You eat what you like, you go where you like and when you feel like dying because there your lover is not on the other side of the bed, you turn around and pretend he was never there.

He was after all rarely there, to begin with.

Right or wrong, who cares, you could just leave and while you're alone, at least you don't have to beg. At least, you understand even if it's yourself.

YOONGI: Lillies, as Yoongi finds out, are not long-lived flowers. They fall most often in clumps of petals. Not elegant and refined like those in drawings but dropping almost half of themselves in one swift move. In one second, losing nearly all they had, remaining then barren and partly lifeless. He didn't know enough about flowers to know when exactly are they pronounced dead. But he'll be here. He'll be here because he's done nothing else but watch them shed, clump by clump.

"I told you," he'd said with a smile of all things. A cold, mirthless smile but still. "I told you it'd be hard, that you wouldn't be able to handle it."

"That's...that's not it all," you deny and maybe you hadn't been lying. All he knows is that the fear had gripped him so hard he couldn't even breathe then.

"No, it is what it is," he'd cut back sharply, decisive, leaving no room to argue because if you'd argue you'd do the same magic you'd done when he first fell in love, he'd listen and do everything exactly how you want it. He didn't want to listen at that moment, he'd just wanted to be angry.

"Then go, just go. Go back 'cause I know you want to."

Tears rose on your waterline and suddenly he felt like a bad guy which in turn, of course, made him more vicious.

"You're being cruel," you breathed faintly. "You're just being cruel."

He scoffed harshly.

"I'm just being honest. Face it, you can't handle being with me," a pause. Critical hit. Cruelty for cruelty's sake. "You can't handle much at all."

And if he had even a little bit of a brain left he'd see the change. The exact moment where you fell out of love with him and it happened just then.

You took a step back, breathed in exactly once, calmly, sombre even.

"Okay," is all you said and unbeknownst to him, that would end up as the last thing you'd say to him. "Okay" is what could kill love - a supposedly unkillable thing.

The flowers are what he brought to ask for forgiveness which would not be granted. There was no next time, no do over, no apology. You'd been long gone when he wisened up to his own words and now he has a vase of old Lillies, wilting on his desk. He reaches to straighten one of the last petals but in its frailty, it just falls. It falls down, down, down and lands on his desk. He puts his hand away. The clock ticks away.

"Okay," he mutters to himself and then sinks into silence.

JIN: "They're my parents," he says for the thousandth time, driving half-blind through the dark.

"So what?!" you exclaimed. "They don't get to say all those things about my family. About me!"

"And I already told you, I warned you that they...they would be like that! They're old! Different."

"That's not being different! That's being a dick."

His eyes glinted and you flinched. You'd never fought with Jin before. Not like this certainly. But whenever you thought of forgiving him, it all came back even clearer. How he just stood there, silent, staring at his plate like a small boy would when they called you a gold digger, your family nothing but mud-trodden scammers. The spoilt rotten apple of the bad seeds. And your lover, your boyfriend, your one true fairytale prince had bowed his head in compliance.

"Careful," he growls, hands tightening around the wheel. "Mind your tongue."

He could slap you and it'd be less bitter.

"Did your mother mind your tongue?" you asked sharply, suddenly yanked harshly forth as he drove a foot through the brakes.

"I'll give you this one last opportunity," he spits and it awakens a heinous part of yourself. Or rather it extends. It extends from the scenery of not even an hour into the past, when you'd sat by the dining table listening to one hurled insult after the next. His father had been "the others", his mother and now he himself. It's him vs you. And that's...

...that's just not someone you could ever touch without shuddering in hate.

"One last chance to stop throwing a fuss. To stop disrespecting my family and myself."

"I can't disrespect it," you open your mouth, weirdly proud. It's cathartic to hate at times. "It would imply I've held any this evening."

His jaw makes an audible sound when it clamps shut. You'd hurt deep, you'd cut it where it hurts. Good, so had he.

"Get out," he hisses, clearly fighting hard to reign in his temper. "Get out of my car now!"

You do and afterwards, he speeds off, tires screeching against the cement road, fumes, in time, evaporating into the atmosphere. You touch the necklace, his gift, on your neck. Feels more like a chain now. You take it away, frown and allow yourself to think.

Gold diggers, scammers, evildoers and nothing but lowlier of the low they had said into your face. You remember your own mother's face, proud and happy, then tired after working long hours just to put food on the table. She'd be heartbroken about this, she'd cry.

And no one could ever make your mother cry. Guided by a sudden impulse you throw the necklace away and it glistens once under the streetlights.

Jin's car disappears over the horizon and despite lingering, you see no point in going after it. You could go home.

The thought fills you with comfort.

You could just go home.

Your mother picks up after one ring.

"Hey, I'm just letting you know, I'll sleep over, is that okay?"

Your mother's voice comes frazzled but she attempts to make it soothing. No, she should never meet those people. Those people who would hate her without a reason, who raised a son you fell in love with. Past tense.

"Of, course, it's okay," then, softly, cautious. "Did it go awry? What about your boyfriend?"

You glimpse over your shoulder. JIn is long gone. There's nothing but the dark so you turn and walk the opposite way.

"There's no boyfriend anymore," you reply, cooly but even so few, traitor tears rush into your eyes and it gets hard to breathe. "But I still got you."

"The porch lights will be on," after a moment she explains kindly and you nod. "I'll be waiting."

HOSEOK: "I just think...this will be the best of us."

That's really all you remember. At the time, the words fell distant like coming from another room. His damn present, a simple present you'd saved over the course of the summer was burning against your leg, distracting you, maybe saving you in a way. If you'd heard a flaw he had named as to why would you deserve to suddenly be broken up with, you didn't remember it. He'd been doing so well, being so good, practising and making history and you loved him so much you just wanted to make him smile. He'd been so stressed. So empty and removed. And when you heard his call, his tentative invitation to a restaurant you thought must be destiny, he must be thinking it too, you needed to be closer together. Reality... the reality was as always much different than you imagined in your head.

You'd sat politely, being really good, not quite listening due to the bracelet sitting in your pocket like a carcass, but you hadn't made a fuss. Should you have? Or did you do the right thing?

Whatever should or should not have happened will take place in the multiverse, in the infinitude of other more pleasant realities, this one was yours.

"You should cry," your friend suggests, with a frown of worry. But you can't hear her also. Flinging the pillows left and right, you try to find the damn thing. The receipt is nowhere. You couldn't have just flung it into the trash, right?

"Honestly, fuck this guy."

Right, fuck Hoseok. But when you remember him, you don't suddenly learn how to hate him. That was...that went against everything you knew.

"Just please go," he pleaded, you'd open your mouth to at least give him the bracelet. It was after all a present. Why had you been so hyper-focused about it? You can't remember that also.

"Just go. Don't make this any harder than it has to be."

But what it did have to be? What did you do? Or not do? What was so wrong with you that he kicked you away?

"He left you for his career," your friend scoffed. Her pride was your pride and vice versa but at the moment you couldn't even appreciate her indignance. The receipt was gone. You did not have it. And as such the bracelet, his bracelet, the one you worked so had to buy for your own money, could not be ridden of.

"Plain and simple. You were distracting him, whatever that means. What a prick."

You had not thought the same then and you didn't think it now. Coming to a stand you wonder how long will it take to unlearn someone. Hoseok must have learned it quite quickly. He'd not even spared you a glimpse as you stood there, with the bracelet in hand, suddenly turned into a parting gift not one of gratitude. If he saw it, he hadn't cared. And so you went, as he asked, clutching the bracelet in your palm. Hoseok must be a quick learner, you reckoned, leaving the bracelet to lay on your nightstand table.

JIMIN: "Already back?" a neighbour, a smarmy twenty-something who thinks he's just the thing because he has a couple of tattoos on his arm, asks. You light up the cigarette already put between your lips and scoff in his direction.

"Yeah. Now quit hanging around in the stairway, you look like a predator," with that you enter your apartment. It's disgusting to smoke indoors, that you admit, but right now it was time to think and smoking for some reason made your head clearer. Navigating through the dark, you stumbled out into the balcony, breathing out a sigh of relief. Flicking the ash into the makeshift ashtray you thought and thought and thought.

"When?! When will you be ready?!" he'd practically screamed. You hated when people raised their voice and he knew that but he still did it. A fact you wouldn't forgive anyone but this was...Jimin and he'd been the exception for a long time. Longer than he should have.

"I don't know! When we got together, I told you I'd be difficult! I'm...ill!" recalling how your lip had wobbled, you sneered to yourself. One cigarette down but you bought a new pack so there was plenty.

"Stop using that as an excuse!" he'd snarled, fists curling out of anger. You had thought then that if he truly wanted to marry you, he'd stay true to his word to be understanding. Of understanding that your mind did not always work the same way most people were used to, it did things, often ones you couldn't grasp full control of, like fear, fearing everything and most of all being yelled at for this very same fear.

"It's not an excuse!" you shrieked. "It's the answer! When someone has a cold, do you reprimand them for coughing? Why is this illness any different?!"

You were objectively hard to love if mental illness was easy it wouldn't be an illness. You required work, work done by yourself and by your partner and you had told him that, you'd told him fair and square, come clean with all that you were and Jimin had promised to love you all the same. He was, it seems, a beautiful kind of liar.

"You won't ever be ready," he'd continued, a hard scowl warping his features. "You know why? Because you hate yourself so much you can't even wrap your head around the idea of not self-sabotaging yourself for once."

And it was the truth. Objectively speaking. But you didn't mind the truth. It could be harsh and unapologetic but you could swallow it down, just not cruelty. Anything but cruelty. Coming from the one man on earth you thought could not be cruel. See what you meant by beautiful? Beautiful, convincing, angel of a liar.

"And I can't handle it anymore. I can't handle your..." he raised his hands out of frustration, letting the fists rise to his own chest and shake there before it happened.

"You're just too much. So just go away because you're just too much for me."

Pushing the bud of the cigarette against the glass jar, you put out the last light on the balcony. It's dark now and you sit, arms crossed, still thinking. You know what to do, you'd done it plenty of times before but...you just thought, you assumed, had the delusion that..he'd be the one, you know. That he'd be...different. But the nature of liars is to lie, you suppose.

TAEHYUNG: It is sad and horrifying to realize that you're becoming one of those couples. Those couples that do not talk, that sit on the bed silently and sullenly, waiting for it to be over, couples who did not touch each other, who forgot each other's bodies, voices and minds. Those couples who you always looked on with pity, wondering to yourself why didn't they just break it off. What was the point?

But the point was that, of course, once upon a time you loved Taehyung and you think he loved you too. You almost saw him, the younger him, the one that charmed you with the promise of timeless romance only to let the very same time deteriorate it away. As you walked up to the cafe, you saw him there, laughing with a friend you did not know he had. They're both laughing in fact, clearly enjoying their time and you can't help but feel like a creep, like an onlooker peeking into the lives of a happy couple even if it's your boyfriend sitting there. He'd brought them flowers. You don't remember when was the last time he'd given your flowers. The promise was every Wednesday, the reality was sometimes after the first six months, anniversaries after two years, never after five.

He pulls the chair closer to the friend. You saw the other person's blush in the candlelight and then with even more horrifying realization, you grasp that you're the other person. The one brushed to the side when they're of no other use.

"Those are pretty flowers," you reckoned, mostly just to start a conversation. An ice breaker for a lover, strange isn't it?

"I guess," he offers a non-committal grunt.

"Should I meet you after work? We could go somewhere?" you almost sounded hopeful then. How naive.

"Don't bother," he says, not quite even looking at you, more so focused on the mirror to fix the tie the other other person was twirling between their fingers. "I'll be busy and late tonight. Just go home."

Standing on the street and passively watching your love slip away, you figure you'll do just that. You won't be one of those people, you thought, standing straighter and leaving the window side, you won't cry yourself to sleep, you won't find someone else's scent on his shirt, you won't have your heart any more broken. You'll just go home.

And Taehyung was not home anymore.

But it's okay, you tell yourself, stumbling unsteadily through the neon-lit streets, you'll find a new one. You'll be okay.

JUNGKOOK: You used to love his jokes, his confidence, his assuredness that you were meant to be. But after some time, you don't quite know when, it stopped being funny the way he brushed off your worries, always so assured that in the end, it'll work out. That no matter what you'll forgive him anything.

You stopped loving his jokes.

And you stopped loving his confidence.

And you stopped loving him.

You just wanted for him to listen but he was so smug, so assured that you wouldn't leave. You just wanted for him to listen just once.

But he never did.

"If I'm so horrible, then just leave," he tossed over his shoulder, tugging harshly on Bam's leash. "Just leave!"

But he did it first, slamming the door behind and dragging Bam with him.

Maybe it's selfish, really childish, quite unhealthy but in a way also victorious. You drag your clumsily arranged suitcase, stubborn. You miss him. But a him that's not even here. Can a person die while still living?

But even if it's selfish, childish and unhealthy, it becomes easier with the next step. You're just leaving, just going. You still miss him, you miss Bam and others, and all the funny toys on his shelves, and his kitchen towels and the laughter on Fridays and movies on Mondays but even more you miss yourself. The street is long and you wonder where you'll end up next, once upon a time, it brought you to Jungkook and now it'll take you away from him. You can find plenty of sadness about it but not enough regret to turn around. Whoever's fault it was, even if it truly was a fault, it doesn't matter now. It's over, it was good for a while and now it's over. You're free to go where you want and so is Jungkook and when enough time passes you know you'll wish him nothing but the best.

© soraviii/soraviie 2022-2023

#bts reactions #bts scenarios #bts x reader #bts x you #namjoon x reader #namjoon x you #yoongi x reader #yoongi x you #jin x reader #jin x you #hoseok x reader #hoseok x you #jimin x reader #jimin x you #taehyung x reader #taehyung x you #jungkook x you #jungkook x reader #bts reaction #bts angst

[kimberellaroo]

I have a theory on why Crowley might not have told Aziraphale what he experienced in heaven, both during the hellfire execution I S1 and the files he saw about Gabriel and the second coming in S2.

Crowley is protective of Aziraphale, we know that he keeps coming to the rescue and bailing him out of trouble. We also know he's said that Aziraphale is just enough of a bastard to be likeable and we've seen him all gleeful when Aziraphale does something a little bit bad. But I'm pretty certain that his protective streak also extends to protecting Aziraphale's innocence a little from just how bad Heaven is.

Aziraphale has had a long run of either getting off scot-free, getting away with lying to God, and at worst receiving a "sternly worded note", basically just a reprimand. He knows Crowley goes through a lot worse in Hell, but that is hell of course. They're the bad guys. His attempts to protect Crowley are protecting Crowley from hell. Crowley also is very aware that hell are cruel so we can leave that aside for now.

The situation with heaven is more like this:

Imagine you have a group of friends that you trust, you've been close forever, maybe since childhood, practically family. They can be a bit bitchy to outsiders, but you're part of the group. As far as you know, they love you. Then one day while you're not there, your partner hears what these friends actually say about you behind your back and it's horrifically cruel. Things your partner knows will hurt you pretty bad. Your partner has to try to work out how to let you know that these aren't good friends, that you should cut ties with them, without wanting to repeat the hurtful things that could devastate you. Also if you believe your friends more than your partner, if you decided your partner was just trying to drive a wedge between you and your friends or isolate you, there's a risk you fight with your partner and break up about it.

Crowley is this partner. I think that he's trying to say "trust me, heaven is toxic" hoping that Aziraphale trusts him enough to believe it without having to go into detail. Meanwhile Aziraphale doesn't have the context to properly believe how bad it is, and Crowley isn't giving it to him. It's not the best way to go about it, even though Crowley means well.

I also think that as the demon, as the person who has gone through torture and abuse, part of Crowley is determined to carry the burden of this knowledge alone to protect Aziraphale from any of that. He's had practice after all, that means he's tougher right? He may think he's better able to handle it.

Because of all this, while Aziraphale obviously knows heaven punished "him" (body swapped Crowley) after the failed Armageddon, he may believe that heaven treated it like an unpleasant duty that they had to do, because he never saw and wasn't told about how much smug pleasure Gabriel took in doing it, and how he would have encouraged others to humiliate him (Eric the demon in the deleted scene). Did Crowley even tell him that it was meant to be an execution and not a lecture? There was nothing said about it on the park bench afterwards. Aziraphale knows execution was what Hell had planned for Crowley, but as we've already established, Hell is cruel. He may believe that Heaven only smites demons and sometimes humans (because angels don't seem to really understand humans), never their own angels. As far as we've seen, Crowley and Aziraphale have never had a serious talk about how and why Crowley was cast from Heaven, how that took place, who was involved in the casting out. It could be that Crowley has protected him from that info too. It could be that Aziraphale forgets a little that demons were once angels too, or again, thinks it was done as an unpleasant duty.

Of course Crowley's determination not to share the hurtful information backfires spectacularly in a number of ways:

Aziraphale does not have the information and context needed to see the real danger towards himself and treats Crowley like he's overreacting. Crowley hasn't shared the tools that allow Aziraphale to protect himself.

Not knowing all this means that Aziraphale forces Crowley into contact with an abuser, even if it's one with a personality change. That puts a lot more pressure on an already burdened Crowley.

I think that Crowley trying to bear the burden himself starts to weigh on him. His efforts to protect Aziraphale from heaven are unappreciated by Aziraphale because Aziraphale is clueless that he's even doing it. When he finds Aziraphale has been sheltering Gabriel I think part of his reaction is to how ungrateful Aziraphale seems to be, as well as the feeling taken for granted and that Aziraphale doesn't trust him enough that he's gone back to that metaphorical cruel friend. He explodes, and then is exhausted by it all. Aziraphale demanding an apology dance from him and being smug about it makes it worse, but I think he does it to keep the peace because he doesn't want to leave Aziraphale to deal with the threat of Gabriel and Heaven alone.

I know all this kind of makes Aziraphale sound like a bit of jerk while Crowley is all self-sacrificing, but if Aziraphale's jerkier actions are from genuine ignorance and Crowley's self-sacrificing is misguided thinking he knows what's best for Aziraphale, it kind of evens out. Neither of them are seeing what they have as an equal partnership at this point. Both of them are trying to protect the other from the other's ex-employers and think they are right. We've already established that crappy communication skills form the basis for a lot of their problems. It's not healthy at all and there's definitely ways they could deal with it better, but they are both messy flawed people acting according to feelings.

#good omens theories #good omens #aziraphale #crowley #Shitty communication