kupita katashima. twenty eight years old. southeast asian origins. she / her.
callsign : SUNBIRD. an unofficial transfer from a former group of private contractors who called themselves the ❛ KIR - NHABAN ❜ — the last surviving member. resides in LONDON and currently operates within the UK SPECIAL FORCES. specializes in subterfuge. known for the fact that most details about her are UNKNOWN, and would prefer to keep it that way.
penned by KIE. keepin' it short and sweet — play nice, that's all i ask. nsfw blogs kindly dni. it's still half a year 'til i'm eighteen ( as of march ), so take that into consideration. open to romantic interactions in rp with chem, but suggestive & nsfw asks will be deleted. your warning : sunbird will not be forgiving if i wouldn't be.
main blog is @newlywedded. this is an on-the-side thing; i'm more active there.
synopsis: the inexplicable gap between you and silena seems to be bridging, slowly but surely. you're certain of it. so certain, in fact, that you have full confidence in the fact that the invitation you received to one of mactavish's house parties will absolutely not disrupt it at all.
word count: 6.8k
tags: fem!simon riley x fem!reader, sfw, simon is called 'silena' in this fic, so much seemingly one-sided yearning oh my god, misunderstandings, drinking, bad habits, more of that one-sided all-consuming crush (on si's part, and kind of on yours now too), substance use, vomiting (vaguely described).
notes: part two is finally out. i was absolutely elated to be writing this part of sieve, because i am nothing if not an absolute sucker for how accidental confessions bubble up and come into the light. i hope i can match this energy in the last two chapters as well.
i forgot to tag her in the previous chapter and for that i'm kicking myself in the ass with my so kates, but i want to give all my love to @hcneymooners for being the muse and the mantra behind it all. i couldn't have worked up the courage to post my writing here if not for her. she's such a visionary and i love her forever.
reblogs are always appreciated. please feel free to leave your feedback anywhere where i can see it. i always love to hear from you all, and especially to know i'm resonating with you somehow. i love you.
you’re about 80% sure you have no idea what it’s like to go insane—but this, you imagine, is about as close as it gets.
it’s become more and more common to see silena in the general space you take up. you run into her at the local supermarket (she doesn’t buy much outside of staples, you’ve noticed), the gym a couple blocks down the road (for some reason you always end up next to her on the treadmills), the downstairs lounge where you and mactavish spend most of your time together (something weird always curls in your chest when she reaches high to sling an arm around silena’s shoulder, and the taller woman does nothing but grunt)—you’ve even bumped into her at the local library once, eyes gravitating to meet hers before you saw the well-loved copy of the girl with the dragon tattoo in her hand. that night, you’d found a pdf of the book online and had combed through half of it before sleep had kissed your temples goodnight.
somehow, in a way you first thought improbable, silena riley has become part of your daily routine.
but your favorite times to see her are when you’re wandering back up to your flat after spending your evening elsewhere, and you turn the corner down to the hallway and see her there. strangely, she’s always there when you come back—sometimes just leaving her own place, sometimes just getting ready to go back inside, sometimes just lingering there on her phone…but she’s always there, every day, without fail.
and every day, without fail, you smile at her and greet her with ‘good evening, miss riley’. and every day, without fail, she nods at you and murmurs a low ‘evening’ before you both part ways.
it’s become something of a dance to you. when you push, she pulls, and when you reach out, she collects you in her palms; hand in hand, yet never quite close enough to touch. it’s devastating, you think, in how it keeps you rounding that corner with eyes wide enough to drink from, every day, without fail. every time you pull away, every night you gently click the door shut behind you after your breathless greetings—it always feels like being peeled apart from the ribs outward, until you’re unsure if the wound in your chest was man-made or metal-made.
(you look at silena from across the pasta aisle while considering this one day, watching how fluorescent grocery store lighting hits the almost lethargic wheat of her close-cropped hair and paints it in streaks of sterile bone-blonde, and wonder if there’s a difference when it comes to her.
then you wonder if it would matter.)
one thing you’ve noticed all too quickly is that she doesn’t quite seem keen to talk with you outside of your usual evening greetings. you’ve tried to spark conversation, grasping at the flint of your usually effortless social skills to stoke the flames, but she’s exceptional at dodging all of your attempts with that same quiet ease she probably doesn’t even realize she carries herself with.
you asked her about the wild geraniums you’d gotten her, and she’d shrugged, unable to meet your eyes. “died last week.”
you offered to walk with her from the gym back to the apartment, citing wanting to get to know her better, and she had let a beat of silence clot the air between you two before she’d replied, “not headin’ ‘ome yet.”
you tried to offer her an extra drink you’d gotten from the vending machine one night, lemonade with some kind of vaguely berry flavor, and she’d told you in as little words as possible that she wasn’t a fan of sweets.
naturally, you bring this up to your girl. mactavish, helpful as she is, laughs it off with that breezy charm she wears like a tattoo, looping her arm through yours as she leads you both out of the cafe she’d dragged you to on a whim.
“‘ow many times dae ah gotta sae it?” she mumbles lightheartedly from around a bite of scone with perhaps a bit too much jam to be wholly comfortable. “ye gots tae give ‘er time, lass.”
“i know,” you sigh, dragging out the syllable. “but how much time can i give a person before i give up? and i don’t like to give up on people, tav, but—”
“yer better than me, bon, tha’s fer sure,” mactavish snorts in response. “proper dick, she can be, but ah promise ye she’s well good once ye get tae ken ‘er. ye jus’ make ‘er a lil’…how do ah say…”
you watch as her eyes glaze over, candy-bright, as if trying to pick out the words from thin air with nothing but the sheer force of her intense staring into the abyss. there’s a kind of consideration in her gaze that makes you wonder if she knows something you don’t.
“…ye leave ‘er outta ‘er wits, ah’ll say that much,” mactavish finishes. naturally, you try to ask what you did or why silena’s seemingly unnerved by her, but that seems to be all your friend is willing to divulge today.
conversationalist that she is, mactavish manages to steer your mind briefly from it. there’s a party she’s putting together, she tells you, a little shindig in about a week just to let loose for a night. it’s something she does on occasion with her friends, you’ve heard, but she’d never formally invited you to one until now. you feel an irrational spike of embarrassment at the idea that you’d been waiting on her to extend her grace to you, the bruise to your pride something you shrug off like water down your back—like you always do.
before she drops you off at your apartment, you ask her what the dress code is. she asks you what you think it is, and you respond honestly that with her, you think it could very well be anything at all.
and she grins at you, foxy in a way that makes your ribs curl like ivy. “well, whatever ye’re thinkin’? ‘s that, but less.”
maybe it’s because silena’s crept to the forefront of your mind, but you take a page out of her book and promptly shut the door in mactavish’s face. even as you shuffle to your bedroom and start rooting around at the bottom of your dresser, you swear you can still hear her laughing.
two days before mactavish’s little…get-together, you run into silena again.
you’re not sure what it is about today. maybe the way you’d lined your eyes sharp enough to cut glass had emboldened you somehow. maybe the scent of wine-soaked peaches you’d smelled on miss price’s collar when she’d scooped you in a one-armed hug this morning had permeated something in your head. maybe the grocery store light is catching her hair differently this time.
whatever it is, something in you tugs—incessant, persistent, urgent in how it refuses to let you let her slip away from you again.
the moment she turns to look at you, you’re smiling up at her sweetly enough to give her rows of rot in her teeth. the string of silver beads you’ve strung around your neck feels like it’s coaxing the words out of you, and you don’t miss how her eyes snag the light bouncing off of it. “miss riley, it’s so good to see you! are you going to mactavish’s party on friday?”
you watch as silena’s eyes widen a margin, flicking away and to the side as if she’s looking for any other ‘miss riley’ you could have been talking to. there’s something startled in her eyes, skittish and almost a little stunned, that sends a curl of satisfaction plinging like bullet casings through your stomach.
she regains her bearings easily enough, expression shuttering back into quiet reticence. for some reason, you feel an absurd temptation to try and get her to spook like that again—if only for the novelty of it. you hadn’t known silena riley could spook at all.
“would hardly call that nonsense a party,” she mumbles, “but yeah, i’m there.”
you feign a brief lapse of confusion before your smile blooms back to life, twice as sharp. “sorry, let me rephrase.”
you toe forward by half an inch, just enough to where your flats click delicately on the floor, and she doesn’t stumble but you watch the hand she has on a poor loaf of whole wheat bread tighten until her knuckles pale.
“are you going to mactavish’s party on friday,” you repeat, slow and almost sumptuous if not for how entirely innocent your intentions are, “with anyone?”
and oh, there it is—the disconcerted flutter of her lashes, quick as a hummingbird, as she processes what you’ve said. you think, for a moment, that if you reached up and pressed two fingers to her pulse, you’d feel it jump and simmer like a stag through untrodden snow beneath your hand. somehow, the thought only stirs within you the terrible urge to actually test your theory.
silena’s still staring down at you, looking at you as if your third eye’s split your forehead clean in two. you raise a brow, slow and even, and she looks away and puts the loaf of bread back on the shelf with more force than you think is strictly necessary.
“i don’t—” she starts, voice as rough as the burn of sandpaper on skin. she won’t meet your eyes, but you’re used to that by now. “i mean…yunno, ‘s not really that kind of—”
“oh. i’m sorry,” you interrupt, smile wide enough to make your cheeks hurt. you’re aware you don’t look very apologetic nor very keen to actually smile, but it’s the only socially acceptable distraction in this moment to keep you from focusing on that traitorous, mortified prickle behind your eyes. “forget i asked. have a good day, miss riley.”
you turn as carefully on your heel as you can, never one to be frantic even when the most infuriatingly elusive woman you’ve met has just turned you down without actually turning you down, and make to walk away with as deliberate of a stride as you can manage. there’s a horrible wedge in your throat like someone’s digging the heel of their boot into your vocal cords and you feel like you might be sick all over your brand new lily-purple sweater, but the self-checkout is only a couple paces away; you can pay for your things and be home, wailing your humiliation into your throw pillows until your throat is raw and you’re left unsure of what you’re going to do about your preciously guarded evening routine.
except you never actually make it to the self-checkout, because in the two seconds it takes for you to envision your night, silena’s grabbed the edge of your basket and nearly sends the produce you’d scrupulously picked out flying.
“no, wait,” she rushes out, a tumble of words that makes your heart pulse with an acute piercing of…something. you’re not sure what it is, but it sits restless in you as she talks. “wait, that wasn’t— that didn’t come out right. let me…”
she still won’t look at you, but she carefully extracts your basket from her grasp and draws into herself. somehow, it makes her look smaller, and you find a coil of unease drawing itself tight at the top of your stomach.
“...please,” she says, one exhale, in lieu of a proper ending to her sentence. she raises her hands in a half-helpless gesture, and it’s only when you don’t say anything in response that she looks up and meets your eyes.
you learn in the next half-second to bemoan the fact that you so deeply cherish the moments when she actually looks at you that you can never bring yourself to look away when she does, because now that she’s not only looking at you but seeing you, you realize that you recognize the look in her eyes—the kind of look you’ve given yourself on the bad nights. the dumb, wide-eyed gape you’ve pinned to the glass, when all you could do was stare at yourself in the mirror because you thought that if you looked away, whoever you pretended to be would disappear, and you’d be left with whatever was somehow still true. it rattles you, violently, in a way it shouldn’t.
still, you don’t say anything. but you don’t move either, and so she continues—hurried, as if she’s under the impression that her time with you is limited. as if you’re not trying to drag this out as long as you can, to potentially have the first real conversation you’ve ever had with her within a month of living four doors down from her.
“tav, she doesn’t…doesn’t usually do th’ whole bring a date thing f’ her get-t’gethers. says it’s too much pressure on her guests, or wot’ever,” silena says, and you’re unsure of how she’s expecting you to understand when you’re still baffled at the fact that this is the most she’s spoken to you at once in the entirety of the time you’ve known her.
“but i don’t—” she continues, running her tongue over her lips. a bit stupidly, you watch the movement. “i wouldn’t…tha’s to say, i—“
you know. you’re not dumb. but you want to hear her say it, so you remain patiently silent and never take your eyes from hers. is that devious of you? you find that looking into her eyes like you’re trying to pull them into you with your mind is a wonderful distraction from having to answer that question.
“...i’d be alright with—” silena finishes, waving her hand vaguely. you realize, a bit belatedly, that you’ve never seen her without her gloves. “yunno. going wit’ you. making it a whole…thing.”
you’re quiet for a moment, just long enough for her to get squeamish. you’re no sadist and so you tell yourself you take no enjoyment in the way she shifts in place like she’s nervous—as if—but you’re also no saint, and so you find it incredibly easy to lie to yourself like that.
the inclination to repeat her words back to her in a teasing lilt is maddening, truly, but you refrain. again, you’re no sadist—you won’t torture her, even if that’s the only adequate word for this song-and-dance she’d roped you into since the two of you had met.
instead, you smile slowly and watch as her shoulders stiffen in a hard line. she’s unsure, you realize with a start. you ease in a breath and say carefully, “i thought you didn’t like me.”
and you’ve never been more grateful for the god-given gift of sight, because you’re not sure how you would have gone on if you had gone your entire life missing the way silena’s face contorts in shock and horror and a little offense, the shift so dramatic in comparison to her usual glower that you find yourself fighting valiantly not to let out a tiny sound of surprise.
but then her face crumples for a split second, barely a heartbeat, and something in her eyes is so undeniably guilty that all thoughts in your head are promptly drained down your spine like blood in a bathtub.
her hand curls into a fist, nails undoubtedly biting into her palm through the thick fabric. when she speaks, the scrape of her voice is raw against your nerve endings, so earnest it makes your stomach drop.
“no. no. never that.”
you stare at her. she’s biting the inside of her cheek. something comes alive in you then, something flayed to flesh and left to sear against the back of your ribcage, and you fight to keep it contained there. you’re not sure what your face looks like right now, but you imagine you must look a little ridiculous because for some reason, your neighbor of a month confirming that she doesn’t hate you is making you feel like you’ve been kissed on the mouth by god.
you’re once again reminded that you hardly know this woman. maybe the way she pulls herself taut like a bow when you look at her is a product of your own delusion. maybe the way she’s looking at you now, severe in her intensity, the way it only makes you feel more naked than if she’d reached out and stripped you down with the gloved hands that had crushed a loaf in the middle of aisle 7—maybe it really is all in your head. you’ve always prided yourself on being more keen to people’s tells and intents, but maybe you’re losing your touch.
overhead, frank ocean croons through crackling speakers. the light hits silena’s hair again, and you realize with a start that part of you had mistaken it for a halo. you tell yourself that that’s the reason you feel this strange compulsion, this need to get her to look at you—to see you. maybe it all comes down to the idea that you want the beautiful infestation in your head to agonize over you in return, because that’s as close as you’ll get to feeling wanted. surely, you reason, that must be why.
(lying to yourself is even easier this time around.)
you bring your eyes up to meet hers, ignoring the way your heart drops three inches. “so…you’re not going with anyone?”
silena swallows, and your eyes track the dip and roll of her throat. you wonder if she’d ever been asked to prom in high school. you think you would have asked her.
“no.”
you mimic the smile you’d shown her the first time you’d met her—curved up like the last syllable of ‘honey’, your lipstick the color of ripe plums. “do you want to?”
she follows suit and mimics the way she’d looked at you before that first ‘evening’—demanding, eerily still, like she’d been trying to needle her way into tearing you apart with her gaze. she tilts her head once, a scarce nod, and you instinctively brace for that fervid shiver that ripples down your shoulder blades when she greets you in the evenings.
but it’s 3:17 in the afternoon and she doesn’t say a thing—so you do instead.
“i’ll be holding you to that, miss riley.”
you watch her jaw tick, something swelling in your lungs at the sight. she’s quiet for a long moment before saying, “m’ name’s silena.”
her eyes never leave you, which makes the smile that unfurls to life on your face just a little sheepish. “i know.”
“then why don’t y’ use it?”
“i couldn’t,” you admit. “not when i was so sure you’d only dislike me more.”
something in her hardens—the set of her eyes, the stillness of her gait—and for a moment you worry you’ve said something wrong. but she shakes her head vehemently, and her face is unreadable but you somehow notice how she comes loose for you. it sends a sudden burst of something like sentimentality through you, clear and bright.
“never.”
something curls in your chest, as if she’d said she loved you.
silena is twenty seven seconds late to showing up at your door.
honestly, she thinks, you’re the one to blame for it. she’s not that old, and so she figures her knees should be in working order—and yet there she’d stood, feeling them go weak and threatening to send her crumbling to the floor when you’d looked away after hearing her stumble over herself and end up driving a temporary, too-quick wedge between her and you. your brows had knitted in a downward slope that had given your face such inexplicable sorrow that she’d had to look away before your face in the sting of rejection could cement itself in her mind as something beautiful, something to pry and prod for until she could see it again.
then, once more, when you’d smiled up at her and told her you knew. you knew her name, you knew her name. you, who had no idea how the way your mouth arced and bowed around your words made her want to pull her scalp apart like peeling an orange, to delve her hands into her skull and find anything that wasn’t rotten to hold out to you like an offering—you knew her name.
in that moment, when you’d gazed up at her like she was your darling thing and said ‘i know’, silena had been overcome with the nonsensical, overwhelming need to climb inside of your bones for shelter, to sit cross legged in the middle of your rib cage and run her fingers and tongue along the right side of your heart. her fingers are worn from years of wear and use, and her words have never been gentle, but for you—for you, god, she’d be that. she’d be gentle, reverent, moon-like in how she would breathe you in until it killed her.
like a fool, she’d kept talking. she’s always believed in the philosophy that actions spoke louder than words—but somehow, she thinks that falling to her knees in the middle of a half-packed grocery store and holding onto you for dear life like you might catch fire and slip through her fingers like ash at any second wouldn’t have been as palatable to you as the idea of it is to her.
but because she’d kept talking, you’d kept talking, and she had felt like the headlights of a car watching your steelstruck deer eyes drink her in like you were seeing her for the first time again. and then she’d gone home, sitting on her bed and wishing she’d done something other than become her own ghost again in the face of you, beautiful and brilliant, looking at her like she hadn’t spent half her life before you stalking the walls of her apartment and searching for the part of her that wanted life, the part of her that she thought had died in june and had forced her to autopsy her body every day—
and now she was here, smelling like detergent and angel’s share, twenty seven seconds late to knocking at your door and picking you up for joni’s party because she’d sat in the shower for longer than she’d intended to, water dripping from a showerhead long turned off and rolling down her face in a way that made her wish it was your hands and the way you smiled bleeding into her eyes and ears instead. she has very little time to think about how dirty she feels, keeping you in her mind in ways she can’t put to words or actions like you’re a secret (never, never), because you open the door nine seconds after.
“silena,” you murmur, astonished. “hi. you look wonderful.”
and the polite thing to do is respond, but silena can’t say that her father raised her right because she stands there, oxygen stuck in her throat as she takes you in. you’ve exchanged the loose lines of the clothes she’d seen you in that afternoon for something sharp, something sultry—black silk pulled taut, cutting brutal angles across your collar, mellowed with dark jeans and an overwhelm of thin silver chains around your neck. your perfume is something that chews at the sides of her tongue, languid and milk-warm, and silena feels like she’s filling out a body bag the longer she stands here and breathes you in.
you’re a saint, or maybe you’re just used to how she’s been with you, and so you don’t comment on her lack of words as you collect your vintage prada clutch beneath your arm and twine the other through hers, as if you’ve known her all your life. you’re affectionate, she’s noticed, especially with joni and the captain upstairs. the idea that now she finally gets to be on the receiving end of it instead of looking into a window to watch it happen grips at her gut and refuses to let go.
she squeezes your arm once, and you grin up at her. your lips are lined with something soft and muted. part of her heart spits itself out into your hands, and you don’t even realize it.
joni is extra loud when she opens her door and sees the both of you there at once, not quite as quick to tug either of you away from each other as she pulls you both inside. apartment 418 already smells like a miasma of all the things that would elicit a stern talking-to from their landlord, mrs. shepherd, and silena can’t help but tense up her arm a little, as if she’s scared you’ll flee into the noise if she makes any move to let you loose.
you don’t seem to notice her attempts at quietly asking you to stay with her, but you stay anyway. she wants to say something about it, but you’re looking at her like being at her side is the most fun you could have in the middle of one of joni’s parties, and anything she could say is lost in the enormous tenderness that abruptly rolls through her. she almost doesn’t notice you’re speaking until you say something while joni’s leading you both deeper inside.
“silena?”
god. she’ll never get used to how her name sounds on your mouth. “yeah?”
“i was just asking if you wanted me to get you any drinks,” you say, leaning up slightly to speak more clearly. “tav says miss price is makin’ them in the kitchen, so i thought—”
“i’ll come w’ you,” she replies before you can finish.
your face freezes in confusion. for a moment, she thinks you’re offended by the notion—but then you lean close and speak a little louder, and she relaxes; you just hadn’t heard her. “what?”
a hot and unexpected surge of something fierce lances through her chest. it’s not that she doesn’t trust the captain, no, but she’s heard enough rumors from her usual haunts. whispers from the other tenants in pubs and pool halls, loosened by liquor, chattering about how it was just so unfortunate that miss price was already in her early forties and didn’t have some sweet young thing to warm her bed, no darling damsel cooing in her lap…
silena does not consider herself a jealous woman, but it’s only fair that she sticks by you. the captain’s already gotten a head start.
“said i’ll come w’ you,” she repeats, leaning down slightly. she glances to the side and watches the tips of your ears flush at the proximity, and that hard curl in her chest softens into something lax, rimmed with sugar. “th’ kitchen can get busy when everyone’s waitin’ on their drinks. i’ll make sure y’ don’t get lost.”
“oh,” you murmur before squeezing her arm. the way you smile at her is nothing short of devastating. “that’s sweet of you, silena. thank you.”
she nods and nudges past clusters of people in the living room, one pointed glance from her enough to send those around you skittering. silena’s never liked to be considered scary, by any means—but the way your hand presses into the crook of her elbow, small and warm, is enough to tide her annoyance.
joni greets the two of you in the kitchen, like she seems to be making a habit of tonight. she says nothing but grins wide enough to hurt, pushing two glasses of something milky and pink in your hands. you stand there, stunned with your jaw slightly agape before you laugh along and hand a glass over to silena, and she thinks that watching you fall victim to the endless earthquake of joni mactavish is the best thing to happen all night.
you’re a flurry of movement as you start to integrate yourself within the scene, rgb lights painting your hair and shoulders in flashing, explosive color. you knock back half of your drink—spiced watermelon margarita—and drink in the cheers of the girls sitting at the coffee table to your right; and somehow, your laugh rings clear over the din of noise clogging the room. it's like snowfall, settling in silena's chest and smearing itself like buttercream across her ribs. something crumbles in her, soft and tender, and her eyes seek you out shamelessly despite it all.
it’s only after you’ve knocked back the other half and worked your way through three more that she tugs her mask down to sip at her own glass. you shriek suddenly, and she nearly spills it down her shirt with how you jostle her.
“your face!” you exclaim, eyes sparkling under cobalt blue strobe refractions. “i’ve never seen your entire face before, silena. you’re so pretty!”
and good lord, if that doesn’t completely undo her. she feels your words like a physical thing, reaching in and pulling her open until she’s mangled, more wounds than blood. she wonders if it’s uncouth to copy you and gulp down half of her drink before responding, if only because she can feel her nerves fizzling like a landmine and doesn’t trust her voice to step around it.
“tha’s a new one,” she mumbles, unable to think of anything clever to say. you laugh like it’s the funniest joke you’ve ever been told, pressing your cheek to her shoulder. she feels every cell in her body dying and coming back alight—tiny phoenixes from the ashes of her marrow.
“you never been told you’re pretty?” you ask, raising your voice to speak over the music joni’s blaring—some 2000s pop bullshit. “i’on believe you, silena.”
she scoffs lightly, but there’s an inescapable upward tug of the corner of her mouth that you don’t miss. “maybe you just need t’ get y’r eyes checked.”
you’re swaying on your feet a bit. silena curses under her breath, reminding herself to chew joni out for going too hard on whatever the hell she’d put in the drinks, and carefully loops her arm under yours. she barely has time to let the thought process that her hand is warming your skin through the gaps and cuts in your shirt, shame in her chest unable to curdle like milk gone sour before you teeter upwards and press what she thinks hopes is a kiss to her shoulder.
“nah,” you mumble, your mascara smearing on her shirt—not that it’s noticeable, or that she cares. “i’m seein’ clearer than ever, si. you’re—”
you hiccup in tune to the downward plummet of her heart as your arms loop around hers, a snake choking out ivory.
“you look like the kinda woman who’d fuck me up forever.”
then you’re slumping forward, your glass plucked hastily out of your hand before you go ragdoll all over her baggy jean shorts.
silena, in the sudden stillness that follows, almost misses the fact you’d called her si.
then the bass rattles her teeth, thoroughly enough to pierce the rest of her skull with a sudden clarity that makes the dull throb behind her eyes light up like a wildfire. she nearly loses her grip on you as she stumbles to find joni, her own drink long abandoned to carry your clutch before it could drop on the ground.
as excruciating as the urge is to collect you into her arms and disappear from this entire party without so much as a whisper to anyone, it still feels shameful in a way. she’s done nothing to deserve this, has she? all she’s done was pretend to be nonplussed about you and keep you company at a party, listened to your laugh and watched as you moved like the fantasy that often crept into her thoughts on a good night, and now she’s in a position she’s only ever dreamt about on the bad nights.
but she’d rather eat her own teeth than, god forbid, drag you to go find joni—and so she carefully tucks one of your limp arms over her shoulders and hoists you up by your waist.
(she tries, very valiantly, to ignore how insufferably warm you are.)
it’s not hard to find joni. it never is, given how everywhere the scot can be, and so she’s looming over the girl with half her face stuffed against the lip of a bong in a matter of moments. joni hardly notices her until she leans down, keeping you as upright as she can.
“joni,” she mutters, just loud enough for her to peer up blearily. “takin’ ‘er back down.”
joni grins, all teeth and lips like spiced wine. “yeah? play nice wi’ tha bon, lena. puir thing looks like she’s aboot tae break in half.”
silena elects to ignore how furiously her face burns. “piss off. ‘m not gonna try anything. just takin’ ‘er home.”
“sure, sure,” joni waves with one hand. “go on, then. git. shoo!”
with an extra exaggerated roll of her eyes, silena shifts your weight once more and stands up straight. finding a spot on your waist that doesn’t feel sacreligious to hold onto is a struggle of inordinate proportions, but she manages to carry you out of joni’s apartment and into the elevator. the ride down to the floor where both of your apartments are feels like it lasts ten eternities, and the walk down the hallway feels like a death march—but she makes it to apartment 145 in record time.
if you were awake, you’d be so proud of her. you were always so sweet about the littlest things.
slowly, treacherously, her gaze lifts up and down the hall. twenty five paces down the hall is her apartment—141. it would be so easy to pull you inside, so much safer for you; after all, she couldn’t just invite herself into your place, could she? that’d be intruding, and she’d much prefer to wait until you invite her yourself to finally get a good look at her future second home—
silena’s long strides eat up the twenty five paces like it’s nothing. you hardly stir, even as she fumbles one-handed to tug her key from her bum bag. and when she pulls you past the doorway and into her living room, setting you down on the couch—
god. you look so peaceful there, so at home, face pressed into the back cushions of her couch as you doze off. silena wonders if this is what it means to be warned by angels to ‘be not afraid’.
she turns away before you can wedge yourself deeper into her ribs, before the imprint of your mouth when you laugh can brand a hole into the side of her heart.
patience, she tells herself as she wanders to the storage closet. you still have time, silena.
she won’t be going anywhere.
this isn’t your couch.
that’s the first thing you notice. your couch is a little softer than this—it gives under your weight more easily, something you’d adored about it when you’d spotted it in a homegoods two months ago. it also didn’t come with this strange, soft weight sitting over your shoulders.
the second thing you notice is that in trying to sit up and figure out where you are, a sharp spear of pain punctures through all of your senses and tugs a low sound of discomfort from you. what had been in those drinks—?
you can barely hear the sound of footsteps rapidly approaching, which does a splendid job of waking you up a little more—that is, until you see who’s in front of you.
now you’re sure that you’re dreaming, because somehow silena’s knelt in front of you in the middle of this unfamiliar place, face bare and gazing up at you with something so painfully tender in her eyes that it aches.
“you’re up,” she murmurs, as if reassuring herself more than simply stating fact. her hand is an inch from your leg. it feels like miles. “how’re y’ feeling?”
“like shit,” you mumble, but you manage a smile anyway. it backfires slightly on you as her brow pinches in concern, so you reach out to take her hand despite the twinge of pain in your shoulder. “but i’ll be alright. where am i? what time is it?”
“my place,” silena replies. when you don’t say anything in response, she tenses up in that way she does that makes her look like she’s preparing for a fight. “it’s five in th’ morning. i didn’t know where y’r key was. didn’t wanna intrude in y’r place. figured it’d be safer t’ bring you here, so i could watch over you if y’ got sick or needed anything.”
you’re still quiet. she looks more like a deer in headlights than you’ve ever seen anyone, and there’s nausea rolling in your stomach that you can’t quite blame on a hangover. when she speaks again, her voice is so small that your heart clenches with something like pity—but not quite.
“i didn’t know what else t’ do,” she says, quiet, looking away like a kicked dog. “is tha’…is it okay? are you okay?”
there's a thousand words you could say right now.
you looked beautiful tonight. your earrings caught the light and made your eyes look like stars. i couldn't stop looking at you. i'll never stop looking at you.
you look her in the eye and tell her, "i think i'm gonna be sick."
her eyes go wide, startled, and the moment is broken—the ship righted to safety. as she helps you up and hauls ass to her bathroom, you clutch the silver chains around your neck as if in prayer and wish hard that maybe if you arch your back or let your hair fall in your face or look over your shoulder at her while you’re kneeling over the toilet bowl, she’ll be softer with you than she already has been.
you realize, as you clutch with white-star knuckles on the edge of the porcelain, that you want to know how soft she can be beneath all the hard lines and angles.
these feelings hurtle themselves from your stomach and out of your mouth, and not once does she budge or look away from you. you can feel her gaze on your trembling back, her fingers splayed across the wide pearls of your vertebrae through your shirt. you heave to the rhythm of her pulse between your shoulders and tell yourself it’s enough.
you sit up about six minutes later, and silena eases your head up and wipes at your mouth with a warm, wet towel. you’re not sure what about it undoes you so horribly, but you begin to cry.
“oh, baby. you’re okay,” silena murmurs—coos, actually, and you hiccup into baby blue microfiber and try not to make it too obvious how grossly your heart splintered at that.
christ, you think as she cups the bottom of your skull with her palm, worn and rough but still so warm it chases away all of your lingering nausea. this is the kinda woman who’ll fuck me up forever.
“si?” you mumble, hoarse and muffled. she goes still, and you’re not sure whether you should be taking it as a sign to continue or a warning to shut up. naturally, you continue. “are we friends?”
her response is so quick that you almost feel silly for asking. “course, love.”
you swallow, tasting bile and words you don’t dare speak lodged in the back of your throat. when you open your mouth, it feels like a betrayal.
“really?”
silena hits you with a look you haven’t seen before, deadpan and blank. a brief flash of panic pierces through you, worrying that you’ve done something wrong, but then she speaks and her voice is vaguely amused. it does everything to ease the way your shoulders threaten to hike up to your ears.
since when were you the one getting all tense?
“y’ woke up in m’ apartment and had me holdin’ your hair back while y’ emptied y’r guts,” she says, something curving at the corner of her mouth. you feel a strange want to reach out and touch it with the back of your hand. “think that counts as friendship. i’d even wager that’s th’ only way to find a true friend.”
you laugh despite yourself, sudden and high. “that’s so corny.”
“worked t’ make y’r morning a lil’ nicer, didn’t it?” silena replies, bullet-quick, patting your mouth dry. you suddenly feel the inside of your mouth go much drier as your heart stumbles in your chest; you hadn’t expected such casual affection.
you realize that there's a fuzz in your mouth, soft and staticky, like chewing on the cotton of your words. a thousand of them you could say right now, and not one comes out.
so you smile at her and press your face into her shoulder—and for now, for this morning, it’s enough.
inquiry incoming. i've been considering what i want to do for my writing debut on here for a little while, and i think i have something i want to do but am worried as to how it might be received.
i think it's fairly common knowledge that i'm a lesbian who will not write reader - inserts for men. it's also (less) common knowledge that i'm into call of duty. it's a hyperfixation that went dormant and ended up coming back as a result of a lot of the less positive things that have happened in my life recently, which might make this fic come from sort of a bad place.
still, i want to get it out there regardless; there's more fear than anything else blocking me from actually posting this, and i want to get over that more than anything else because that's what holds me back the most.
so my inquiry is. . .i'm hoping to write something for fem!ghost, who would be called silena in the fics themselves. it's going to be centered around the idea of the reader moving somewhere new and unfamiliar and navigating that territory along with her feelings for silena, but the plotlines will be a little different. based on the following synopses, which story idea would you want to see?
🥃 : you and silena have been neighbors in the same apartment building for a little under two weeks. you've done everything in your power to show her the same hospitality and neighborly affection you've been showing to all the other residents that live nearby, but for some reason she's the only one who doesn't seem to receive it well. you've exhausted all your ideas and are incredibly close to giving up on trying to befriend her entirely. but unbeknownst to you, it's quite the opposite for her; she's been receiving it very well. . .maybe a little too well.
🍸 : you've just moved into your new flat for work, and you end up having to phone a local moving company and ask them to send someone to help. they end up sending only one person, which befuddles you at first. . .until she arrives and you get a good look at her. is this a moving company or a matchmaking service? maybe it's just you, but there's something familiar about her. . .are you sure you've never met her before? it doesn't really matter; because regardless of if you've met, she already knows everything there is to know about you.
vote here :
🥃
🍸
Voting ended onApr 8, 2025
thank you for reading this far. reblogs are always appreciated. love you always.
[ from kie : sorry i haven’t been around, my loves. life has been taxing as of late and i seriously just haven’t been in a good place to focus on this blog. i’m doing better now, so hopefully you’ll see more of me soon. love you all. ]
what animal’s krysha to you? this is very important information that i must know
[ from kie : i wanna say. . .a panther of some sort. maybe because i had a dream where i died from getting mauled by one. either way, i think krysha would be an animal that is very understated in its deadliness. i enjoy mystique. ]
imagine kupita sees ufo skitter around the base what is she saying
[ from kie : i promise you that will not be the strangest thing she’s seen on base. but considering that it’s ufo we’re talking about? there might be a confused blink here, a gesture to the closest rookie to question what the hell that was there.
between you and me, i’d pay money to see it sneak up on 141. ufo cod au? ]
