A Cat & Her Crow

Actively obsessed with Sylus

[bwennieisobsessed]

Margin of Error | CORTIS James SMAU

Pt 3. Darwinism

Synopsis: as soon as you get assigned to the same lab group as athletes, you figure you'd be pulling most of the weight. It doesn't help that one of them seems wholly uninterested in even reading the syllabus...

Genre: crack humor, social media, college shennanigans, fluff

A/N: again pls ignore time stamps 😭✌🏼

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[fromthebeehives]

same universe as this one, where caleb thought he loves brats until he met you.

caleb x non mc reader, where you turned his world upside down. he has never met someone else like you before—so selfless, so kind, so sweet, and yet so reserved at the same time. sure, when faced with bratty attitudes, it challenges him, but with you? he melts instead.

he never feels like he has to put up walls or keep secrets. he's always so tense and taut, especially with his work at the fleet, but when he's with you, it's like he can leave all his worries and stresses behind. his shoulders droop, his eyebrows unfurrow, his heartrate slows down, and he doesn't have to put too much effort in maintaining his emotions for the chip in his brain—you make him feel calm, and the only time he has to worry about his emotions feeling overwhelming is when he gets cuteness aggression, but you know what? that's not a bad thing. it just means that your mere presence alone is healing.

caleb is so used to giving and giving, but then you came into his life, equally a giver like him, showing him a new side to love that he has never been privy to. the first time it happened, it shocked him so much that he was speechless. it was when you secretly visited his office at the fleet, carrying flowers and a lunchbox you obviously lovingly made with your own hands since the food still felt warm. he was so touched that you spent the entire time on his lap, feeding each other bites, while he tried to hide his sniffles (but of course, you noticed. you only wordlessly made space for his emotions and just peppered his face with kisses. that shocked him too—that you know him enough that you didn't need words.)

how you describe your relationship with caleb is that it's tenderly reciprocal. he gives, you give, he takes, you take, you're equals. and your effect on him doesn't go unnoticed. the people around him has seen how lighter his steps has gotten, and how when he's hanging out with mc or gideon and his other friends, they'll witness how his smile is more genuine, and how it turns dopey when he looks at his phone and messages a certain someone.

you make each other's lives better, and someday, he wants to make it permanent with a ring. ♡

I FEEL SICK PLS LET ME SPOIL CALEB WITH LOVE ༎ຶ⁠‿⁠༎ຶ no more treating caleb like he's a loser, he deserves just as much care and affection

[hanimanny]

“i only know that i feel tired, antiqued; i feel as though i’ve been awake for a long long time”

HOMESICK

synopsis: when the exhaustion of loving finally takes you.

tags: xavier x non!mc, ANGST!!! hurt/ comfort(?)

word count: 4.4k

likes + comments + reblogs appreciated

authors note: xavier’s version of this. let me know if you want versions of the other Lis. also please give me some ideas!!! divider by: @fairytopea

ACT I: VIGIL

Laughter has never been so suffocating.

You watch, not from a distance, but next to MC.

You think it's worse to be this close and to hear everything you're hearing now. In all the years of trials and tribulations of knowing Xavier, have you ever heard him laugh so brightly, smile so widely, or love so loudly?

The quiet, ever aloof prince of Philos—the man you followed, crossing stars, passing meteors, abandoning the place you once called home—beams brighter than his evil.

You think about all the things that built up to this moment.

To you, he was the stars: bright and all-encompassing. His silence—always silent—ever consuming, as you trailed in the shadow he left behind. Throughout the years of companionship and camaraderie, you followed blindly, as you always do, even when you knew what following him meant: an ill-fated destiny you could never rewrite.

You knew MC once before—the same woman who took the world by storm, a hurricane in his life that devoured him whole, leaving nothing for you behind.

Just like the MC you once knew, this MC is just as captivating.

The universe is playing a sick joke. He is your longest companion, the very last of your kind—the last light of your planet, your world, your culture. You left it all behind because, to you, loving him meant more than the comfort of your people and the safety of your planet. Loving him was worth leaving everything behind.

Ironically enough, he thought the same thing.

And despite it all—the friendship, the companionship, the camaraderie—you’re not even a placeholder for the love he holds dear. Nothing but white noise that followed him around, that clung to him at every turn.

A persistent, pathetic, piteous echo.

You are so close, and yet, so far.

Pulled in by the gravity of his very being. You think—thought—that all this time, just being beside him would be enough to soothe the dull ache of your heart, the perpetual pain that roamed your bones, and the exhaustion that swallowed you whole.

Like a dreamer, you think of the ways he could love you in the same capacity he loves her. That if you show up enough times, reach out and fill the silence he leaves behind; that the days of dedicated devotion, the sacrifices made along the way, would surmise to something worthy of being loved.

Worthy of being seen.

You’re left stranded in his orbit, gravity pulling harder the more you think you’ve got a handle on your thoughts. The pain, the agony, the suffering. Thinking that sticking by his side was all you ever needed, that you can’t be greedy—because having him was enough, and having him be yours was pure insanity.

You hear the laughter erupt once again, likely from a silly joke MC made. You pull yourself out from whatever hole you've dug, pull your lips into a smile the best you can, laughing along. It's hearty and very becoming of your character, you think, since MC wraps a secure arm around yours and squeezes with affection.

You allow her, of course—straining your cheeks until they burn, letting out a long-drawn sigh that fills the room.

Despite what others may think, as you converse along luridly, as if the volume of your voice could hide the heavy heart you bear, you've never been so quiet.

…

ACT II: DREAM

You once thought that the convenience of being neighbours was a good thing.

Next door to Xavier—close to him, but never next to him.

Walking to the Hunters Association together, coming home together, eating together. Just being together.

But you could tell Xavier wasn’t ever there—not really.

Despite being with him for so long, his mind was usually elsewhere. Sometimes in dreamland, but mostly—actually, always—drifting to her.

At some point, in between the solo bickering and one-woman conversations, you, too, found yourself wandering.

Like your mind sanctioned itself in your own self-made isolation.

Quieter. Smaller. Dimmer.

You stop talking as vividly—maintaining just enough energy to keep up appearances. Your voice, so used to fading into the background, remained where it was so oftentimes pushed towards—away from everything. Everyone.

You stop tagging along in the mornings, early days, and late nights, save for the obligatory lunch with your co-workers.

You stop leaving your apartment, taking refuge in a bed you’ve grooved your body into, like a coffin awaiting your arrival. An apartment you’ve grown used to, replicating the only home you knew.

And you’re just so tired. Tired of it all. Exhaustion clings to you like chasing breath. Sleep evades you like the plague.

It was your choice to cling to hope—to leave your home and to follow, naively, in hopes that one day, he would look at you the same way you look at him. To experience his love: the soft edges, the warmth, the gentleness. To think quiet, everlasting devotion would get you anywhere—devotion that controlled you, consumed you. Devotion that you thought would be enough, as silly as it sounds, to at least hold a candle next to the sun.

Devotion that instead puts you in the hands of despair.

You’re stupid to still hope, to yearn for a love that was never yours to have. To attempt to go against fate—against an entire lifetime of love.

So really, it was your burden to bear—and bear it alone.

And the funniest thing of it all? Xavier never once visited you. Checked on you. Sought you out. Even the tenant right below you, Charlie, visited, offering warm welcomes of fresh bread and a simple smile.

As you lie on your couch, enveloping yourself in the embrace of your own naivety, forced by Jenna to take a day off, you listen to the familiar silence.

Which is soon broken by the snubbed sound of light that snuffs the room.

It’s the first time in weeks—29 days, 21 hours, 2 minutes—Xavier has stepped foot in your apartment.

You don’t make a move to look at him or say anything like you normally do.

You both reside in the deafening silence. One by choice, one succumbed.

For the first time, Xavier breaks the silence: “You weren’t at work today.”

You could laugh, scream, cry, or all of the above, but you don’t.

Quietness reaps your soul.

Xavier continues. “MC was worried about you.”

A lifetime's worth of companionship, and he wasn’t even here to seek you out.

You truly are stupid.

Xavier isn’t used to the silence—not this kind. Despite being so quiet all the time, this silence was completely foreign. It was heavy and uninviting, almost suffocating.

There’s a moment of unrelenting anticipation as he waits to see you respond.

When you don’t, he steps forward. One step, then two—then he’s at the foot of the couch, peering down at you like a deity summoned—unconsciously shining with that light of his.

Steel blue eyes bore into you, trying to read you.

But you’re too fractured to be read. At least not clearly.

“Are you okay?”

‘Am I okay?’ You want to laugh at the thought, to make fun of the words asked.

Were you ever okay?

You miss it all—your family, your friends, your people, your home.

To think, once there was a time you chose to abandon it all in the name of love—where you thought complacency was where you belonged: beside a man you knew never loved you, maybe never even liked you.

Now you can only sneer at the fact, as you reminisce about a place far and forgotten, only finding a place deep within your memory.

Xavier prompts a different question. “Have you been sleeping?”

And for the first time in a while, you finally speak.

“I’ve been dreaming a lot.”

First, about you. About us. About what could have been. About what never was.

“What about?” His voice holds something softer than you ever thought possible from him. Something reserved only for her, never for you.

It almost makes you break. To confess everything. To finally open up your heart and pour all your pain out. To free yourself from self-made shackles and unwanted thoughts. To hear the very softness you crave—to be held, caressed, embraced.

But you don’t. Because even with that unreadable look in his eye—the same eyes you’ve longed for all this time—you know what they hold.

Obligation

“Home,” you say simply.

For the first time in a while, Xavier looks at you—really looks at you. He’s known you all this time, the image of you ingrained in his brain like second nature. He knows you—you’re his oldest friend, most trusted companion. He's seen all sides of you, but the person he’s looking at looks nothing like the you he remembers.

He looks at you and can’t even recognise you. Cruelly, for a moment, he even wonders if it’s really you.

“I don’t see any changes.” Xavier takes a quick glance around; everything remains stagnant, as it always has.

You don’t correct him—not this time. You hum a noise between affirmation and acknowledgement and drift off to a place once forgotten.

Silence consumes the soul once again, with Xavier wondering when he had become so complacent with it all: with your constant presence, voice to fill the spaces he’s left behind, unrelenting energy, and unwavering spirit.

“You’re right. Nothing has changed.”

…

ACT III: DRIFT

Xavier hasn’t visited since.

Not that you didn’t expect it.

You still see him at work, at lunch with MC, and on the rarest occasion, you bump into him in the hallway of your apartment complex—like strangers.

You do your best to find a new rhythm in this life, as your absence becomes more common and your presence goes with the echo of your voice. You’re seen less and less.

Maybe you were never seen at all—not truly.

You find that it’s easier to deal with heartache in the same way Xavier deals with everything: in silence.

Silence, although not foreign, not even new to you, seeks you out and sticks to you like a foreboding message.

You’ve spent years so bright, a will so strong it held on tight enough to kill you. Your loudness brought you here, away from Philos, so as the bits of your spirit whittle away along with your soul, silence is left to fill in the gaps of an empty shell.

You learn to live without Xavier in your life—as though he isn’t the last thing you have of your home, of the love you once felt, the comfort, the security. You learn to live without Xavier and learn to nurse a pain that has become something of a lover.

You had to learn to live because the world kept spinning—even when you’re lost in a place, unfamiliarly familiar, and can do nothing but live on.

But are you even living at this point? Even a dead girl walking has rights to a life—to living.

You’re leaving for another mission. In spite of Jenna’s protests, you’d rather fight to exhaustion—to blend the pain in your chest with the ache of muscles.

Your face reflects your volition. Eyes pulled down by the weight of your burden, face pale like a dying star. Despite trying, your smile doesn't quite reach your eyes, your laughter isn’t as bright, and your voice isn’t as loud.

You wait for Jenna’s reluctant orders. She’ll be damned if she lets you out on another solo mission—because despite your incredible hunting rates, you too are human.

A voice so familiar pulls your attention, and you look up to see Xavier standing before you—ice blonde hair and steel blue eyes in tow.

How long has he been standing there?

“Jenna assigned me as your partner for the mission.” Your face shows no expression—and not for lack of trying.

You laugh inwardly at the thought.

You're too much like him, in a sense. Loving hard enough to abandon your home, to follow blindly with fate—in spite of your own shortcomings. To silently love, quietly devote, and slowly disappear.

You purse your lips and let out a sigh too heavy for someone like you.

Xavier is almost taken by surprise.

“Let's go.” Xavier can hear it in your tone, and see it in your voice. How truly tired you really are—incomparable to his ever-waking sleepiness.

Your exhaustion runs you dry.

Again, silence befalls the two of you—an unwelcome rhythm that has found a place in the cracks of your relationship.

For the first time, Xavier trails behind you. Watching you. Observing you. And if he didn’t see your face or know your frame, he’d think the person walking in front of him was nothing but a stranger.

This time, Xavier walks in your shadow.

…

ACT IV: SILENCE

You think you’re fading.

The remnants of who you once were have been whittled down to the bone. You’re broken—maybe you always have been. Maybe this was who you were always supposed to be.

You’re so tired, not just emotionally but physically too.

The never-ending stream of wanders is starting to take a toll, even on professionals such as you and Xavier.

Your sword is dull, chipped at the edges, and your wounds scatter across your frame, staining your skin in a dirty shade of red.

Even the almighty knight is struggling to keep up with the demand.

So, as you find refuge in a murky cave, to recuperate the best you can, you find that the full-body ache starts to return.

You lean against a well-placed boulder, breath shallow and your grip loose, as your eyes haze over the fire in front of you.

You feel the warmth reach out for you—gently, creeping through the shell of yourself.

It’s quiet, save for the crackle of the flame.

You feel peaceful for once—the hunt muddling your thoughts so much that you can’t even think straight. Or maybe it’s the exhaustion of not sleeping.

Despite it all, you feel a strange sense of tranquillity. One with the throb in your chest that makes it hard to breathe, but is easier to deal with now that everything aches.

It’s peaceful, you think, as you fade into whatever hole you’ve dug all those years ago. Your mind is muddled, and your soul flickers with the last bits of who you were.

Suddenly, you’re pulled back out—again by the very men who left you there, like a nostalgic toy forgotten all these years.

Your eyes pull away from the fire.

You soak in his gaze. It holds none of the same love you see him give out so freely to MC. It’s hard and stern—years of knighthood sewn into his features. He looks at you like he doesn’t know you at all.

Calloused hand gripping your shoulder—it’s firm enough to shift your attention, your body facing him.

You look at him and try to find the line between succour and obligation. Try to find one thing that says you mattered—even just for a second.

You were foolish to believe that you could remain just his friend, companion, comrade. You were stupid, dumb, idiotic.

You were completely blind to it all—to think that his love could have relieved something burning in you. Something insatiable. Something permanent.

“You’re drifting.” Xavier’s voice cuts through your messy thoughts and heavy heart.

You’ve been drifting.

You don’t make an attempt to joke like you used to—not even a weak smile. You sit back and stare at him like you don’t even know him.

“You’ve been doing that more often.” You take a moment to digest what he says—something he’s noticed entirely on his own, not by MC’s worrywart love.

Once upon a time, you would’ve thought it was normal for him to notice these types of things—the dullness of a close second. But now, you’re surprised. Shocked, even. Like he’s seeing you for the first time.

“Where are you going?” he prompts, and his voice holds something so intrinsic to the soul. Something you can’t find here. Something like home.

You’re fading, like the light of his evol—dimmer, as you’re pulled into the gravity of your own mind.

You’d like to tell him—if not as a lover, then a friend:

I’m lost. I’m gone. I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m furious. I’m not myself. Not with what’s left of who I am.

I am not home.

You don’t. Despite something inside you telling you you must. That it’s not worth dying on this hill.

You think: How much deeper of a hole can you dig before you vanish? Before you're gone? Forgotten? Never having existed in the first place.

Until you’re not a person, but a memory.

You don’t tell him anything, because that’s not the kind of relationship you have—not anymore.

In the midst of the silence, your voice finally breaks through.

Quiet. Cracked. Almost gone.

“I’m thinking of going home.” There’s finality in your tone. Weak as your voice may be, Xavier hasn’t heard such certainty from you in months.

His eyes knit in confusion, contort in concern.

Maybe you’re just tired. But there’s something to your expression—an unspeakable hollowness that wasn’t there before. Your eyes haze over with something distant.

A body without a soul.

Like he always does, he remains silent. Never reaching out. He’s seen you get through worse, come back stronger. He’s seen everything. He knows you.

Or maybe... he knew you.

All the years of companionship will amount to something. It has to. He’s known you for so long. You stuck by his side even through death. You truly were the one stable thing in his life. Never needing to chase—always there, beside him. With him.

It was always you and him—even as he fights his way through the forgotten memories of MC, you remain.

Though, something claws at him, as his hand gently travels down your arm. To reach. To ask what you meant. To wonder if you meant the apartment beside his, where it reflected the culture of Philos, somehow capturing the stars in every object you bought.

He wants to ask if home is with him.

But he doesn’t.

Silence is there to greet him again—him only, he thinks, because you seem so used to it now.

Unfamiliar territory.

His eyes travel to his hand on yours, afraid to let go for some reason. As if letting go meant never seeing you again.

Your head is slumped motionless against his shoulder. His eyes peer onto your back—and then he sees it.

The blood stains the rock behind you. Your back is adorned with gashes that soak your uniform.

“Y/N,” he calls out, like it’s the only thing he knows. Because it’s the only thing he can do.

He hears no response. Not even a whisper of a shallow breath.

It’s not quiet. Not even small.

It’s silent.

Then he feels it. The way your eyes droop down to the fire. The limpness of your hand on his. The paleness. The coldness.

The death.

His spare hand reaches out.

He shakes you. “Don’t close your eyes.”

But you don’t abide—swaying with the motion of his force.

You could do anything. Do everything. Move mountains. Slay beasts. You were strong. Firm. Confident. He knew you could get through anything.

“Come on, just open your eyes. Can’t you do that?”

“One breath. That’s all I need.”

“Hold me tight, Y/N.”

Xavier cradles your gaunt body as he pulls your head taut to his shoulder. He rocks you like a sleeping child, holding you tight—tighter than he ever has before.

He’s shaking—and not from the cold.

He doesn’t know what comes over him, but suddenly, the silence breaks.

And he hears everything. Sees everything. Feels everything.

And he cries.

Because that’s all he can do.

…

ACT V: LINGER

Xavier likes to think that he notices your absence.

The way people step over the shells of your name, the routes taken to avoid the common spaces you once occupied in the living. The untouched work desk, memorialised by those who remembered her. The vacancy next door — the home she built away from home — now barren, her things sold, thrown away, or forgotten.

MC, who was so loud with her affection, mourned just as passionately. Her heart sewn onto her sleeve as she cried the loss of a friend. Flowers tended on the desk of a fallen soldier, and distance built from the apartment upstairs.

But really, he doesn’t.

The way you’ve faded so naturally out of his life — never moving, never reaching. The walk to and from home is the same. His apartment is the same. His life remains the same. Like you were never there. Like the image of your smile wasn’t something that pushed him through distant times.

Like you never meant anything to him.

Like the years of friendship, companionship, camaraderie — all amounted to a tombstone with your name etched into it.

And he hates himself for it.

For being so complacent. For never seeing you. Never hearing you. Never reaching out. For always thinking you’d remain the same: the loyal, competent pillar in his life. For thinking that his silence meant nothing to you.

Because it did. It meant everything.

He hates how he’s living life like he always did — like you weren’t ever part of him. Regret, guilt, grief — they all settle in his bones, for a person he can’t even remember.

Along with the memory of you, time passed, as it always does. And as time passed, he slowly forgot.

Your goals and aspirations. Your loves, your hates.

Your dreams.

He can barely remember your face. The last time you laughed. Your smile.

He can barely remember you at all.

Only pulled in by the gravity of his grief, where he finds you at the centre of it all.

To think he was so far from you. The irony now is that he can’t ever leave.

Stuck on a cursed image of a woman who meant so much to him.

Who held the moon up so he could shine with the stars.

He sits on his bed, light voided from the room. The pictures from your apartment piled by his bedside, facing the stars, watching — as you always did.

For the first time, he’s not tired at all.

Is this how you felt? How restless you were?

When he showed up that time, too worried about MC and her anxieties. Too quick to solve her issues that he hadn’t noticed how your eye bags sank deep enough to stain your spirit. How you lay, lost, drifting to a place he couldn’t reach.

Dreaming of home.

And just like his home, his culture, his people — you too join the faint memory of Philos.

His phone buzzes, bright. The screen illuminates the room.

Xavier thinks it’s MC again — she doesn’t know the depth of what you and Xavier shared, but she understood the weight of long-term partnership.

At first, he answered every time — to relieve her worries, to silently say he was fine.

But now, everything feels like a farce.

A lie he tells himself as much as he tells the world.

If the absence, the silence, isn’t acknowledged — maybe it’ll keep things still. To stop time from moving.

Because if time doesn’t move, then the memory of you won’t fade.

And you’ve faded enough.

He picks up the phone and waits.

Then he hears it — the soft laughter he longed for. It’s gentle and hearty, so full of life.

Xavier peels the phone from his ear to peer at the screen.

Then he sees it. The light. The brightness of a smile lost to memory, now alone. It’s displayed in front of him — teeth bared, lips stretched wide with a feeling he hasn’t seen in years.

It’s you.

Laughing so freely. Smiling so widely.

You’re alive.

Xavier scrambles upright, leaning forward to see the screen more clearly.

It’s you — in clothes he’s never seen you wear, in a room he’s never seen before, with a face he barely remembers.

But he knows it’s you. 

How could he ever forget? Not truly.

So desperately, he calls out. Announcing himself, finally reaching out.

Your eyes perk in surprise as you lean in.

“Holy shit, did he just say my name? That’s crazy!” you giggle, and Xavier is too overcome with emotion to even question the absurdity of your words.

“No wonder people were glazing this game on Twitter!” you laugh before the call cuts.

Xavier’s too stunned to react. He taps rapidly through his phone to check the caller history.

Unknown.

He scrambles to call again.

Anticipation sweating off of him.

He holds his phone tightly and then— You pick up.

Your face: confused.

“Damn, I didn’t even level his affinity up yet and he’s calling already,” you mutter, peering at the screen.

Xavier looks dishevelled, almost destroyed. His hair is a messy heap, and dark circles shadow his eyes. The usual soft glow of his skin— dulled, lifeless.

He’s worn thin. A dead man walking.

“Hey,” Xavier says softly, almost inaudibly.

He watches your face shift — confusion to elation.

“Oh my god, you can even talk! Let me try again.”

And then you speak — not offhand commentary, but to him.

“Hi,” you greet, brightly enough to light up the room.

Xavier is at a loss, and doesn’t reply. But unlike before, you speak again.

“This is so cool. So like, does this count as my daily interaction?” you ask aloud, maybe to yourself, maybe to him— he can’t tell.

“Right, probably not in his programming to answer questions like that,” you mumble, before turning your full attention back to him.

“I’ll see you soon, alright? I hope this mechanic isn’t a glitch.” You grin softly.

And nothing in Xavier’s entire career could’ve prepared him for this.

But he’s not letting this opportunity go. Not when he has another chance to hear you, to see you — and even if he can’t touch you, he’ll never let go.

He’s not letting you slip.

Not now. Not ever. Not again.

“All right... I’ll see you soon,” Xavier replies simply.

Watching your face glow is enough for him.

The way your lips stretch, teeth bare — a face full of life.

Here, he decides: he’ll wait as long as you need.

As long as you want.

He’ll wait until the phone screen glows once again. He’ll wait to see you again.

Close enough to hear you. To see you. But never touch you.

…

ACT VI: ECHO

“Hi Xavier”

The unfair proximity of a dream

[canned-iced-coffee]

any other autistics daydream about their special interests during particularly longer work shifts to get through the day or am i insane

[bwennie]

Me going about my day while mentally inhabiting several fictional universes at the same time.

[maffi-maffi]

💔 I know people will hate me for this, but I can’t stay silent anymore

I just want to find at least one person who feels the same way I do.

Even if a hundred or a thousand people will hate me for it, I want that one single person who understands what kind of scar this MC left on me.

---

For a long time, I couldn't quite explain why I had such a deep dislike - no, a visceral rejection - of the MC of Love and Deepspace.

It wasn’t just that I found her annoying, rude, or bland - though many users defend her as "just a cute sweetheart" or "not that bad heroine".

No. I think I genuinely hate her.

And recently, after sitting with this feeling for months, I finally figured out why.

She is an empty shell.

A hollow, perfect otome heroine who had everything handed to her by default. She has:

- A loving older adoptive brother who would literally do anything for her because he had to watch her suffer as a child and ended up traumatized (while she conveniently forgot everything - how convenient, right?).

- A serious childhood friend who possibly had feelings for her but had to hide them to avoid hurting her with his evol - and of course she’s the only one who can make him smile again

- A literal husband from the future, who time-traveled just to save her (because even time itself is on this woman’s side).

- Not one but TWO ancient creatures (a mafia boss who created and controls an entire shadowy underworld mafia just to protect her, and a literal mermaid sea god whose soul is tied to hers across lifetimes) both of whom have loved her across lifetimes and would destroy the world for her!

The love interests? Fantastic.

They’re well-designed, emotionally rich, and full of potential.

But the moment you add destiny threads, past life reincarnations, and mythic soulmate-level love, something breaks.

I stop feeling like I’m part of the story.

I don’t feel like the MC.

I don’t feel like I’m influencing or choosing anything.

I don’t feel... close.

It feels like I’m just watching someone else’s picture-perfect story - some unreasonably lucky girl - from behind a screen. And I have absolutely nothing to do with it.

I think what makes it worse is that Infoflds advertises this as otome game from first-person POV.

A dating sim for women.

Isn’t it supposed to fulfill the fantasy of being special?

Of being seen?

But all I felt after a few months of playing and watching her was:

MC is the center of the universe.

And I mean that literally.

From what I understand, the plot eventually reveals that she’s a kind of cosmic entity - a celestial being that gave birth to an entire advanced civilization on another planet. She’s the source of life itself.

Every powerful man or godlike creatures in this world exists and lives because of her.

Loves her. Worships her. Saves her.

Even the player feels like they’re supposed to worship her.

She’s the chosen one. The universe, the love interests, and the story all bend to her - and honestly? It felt like the game was screaming in my face:

"Look at her! Look at everything she has that you never will!"

Yes, I know the mythic destiny trope is just a lazy storytelling shortcut to justify why all the LIs fall so hard so fast.

But still… it hurts.

This game showed me something I didn’t expect:

That I’m a non-MC reader.

Just a side character. A background girl.

And that’s why I adore non-MC stories with a reader.

They mirror how I feel in real life - painfully, but in a cathartic beautiful way.

They say: yes, even if you’re beautiful, loyal, smart, kind - if you weren’t born the Chosen One, if you weren’t written into the myth - then you’ll never be her.

You’ll never be the one they cross time and space for.

You’ll never be the cosmic soulmate.

You’ll never be the MC.

And yes, maybe I’m just a jealous bitter bitch.

Maybe I just fell too hard for the guys and now feel like a miserable outsider.

Maybe I felt like I was being pushed out of a story that never included me to begin with.

But this post - this pain - is real.

If you’ve ever felt like the story wasn’t written for you,

If you’ve ever watched miss Hunter be worshipped and thought:

“Why not me?”

If you’ve ever craved a story where someone like you gets to be seen, wanted, and chosen:

You're not alone.

EDIT: I never expected this to blow up. Thank you for all the support (and the chaos). I wrote a proper thank you to my fellow non-MC enthusiasts here.

[bwennie]

Perfectly articulated, OP! I second everything. It particularly irks me how we, as players, have no real agency in the game. Our interactions with the love interests amount to nothing, because they’re meant to already be so in love with MC. She can do no wrong, so none of our choices matter.

You’re also spot on with the fated soulmate and reincarnation tropes being lazy plot devices. I don’t mind Chosen One narratives as long as the chosen one in question actually has flaws or struggles to overcome. Like, sure, they’re eventually going to win, but I want to see them try and fail and try again. The fact that MC does very little while the love interests literally rewrite history for her is frustrating. They never truly disagree or have to make compromises in their relationship; even if there is some conflict, it’s surface-level and treated as an excuse for romance.

I’m pretty certain that InFold will never finish the main storyline. They’ve already introduced every trope under the sun to try and check every box on the list of romance cliches, and they’re going to drag the story out for as long as they can to get our money.

Also, it’s totally valid to be upset at MC for all the reasons above. And it’s okay to be “too in love” with the boys. My mains are Sylus and Xavier, and I seriously hate how they’ve had to give up so much for MC who doesn’t really do anything to help them in return. She just takes and takes—if that’s meant to please me as a player, then I’m not pleased at all lol. As multidimensional characters, the love interests deserve better. I recently got VIP status on the game so maybe they’ll take my survey responses more seriously, but I doubt it.

[bwennie]

It’s actually PEAK boyfriend/husband behavior to fall asleep halfway through a movie and then deny it when we wake them up.

My girl out here letting him sleep anyways because he’s fluffy lol

[bwennie]

“Somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe, some time both long ago and not yet come to pass, atoms aligned just right to birth an ever-constant law: whatever substance constituted your being—it was bound to love this man unconditionally, irrevocably—to seek out your other self, your shadow, as sure as gravity pulls you to the Earth.”

—me, I wrote that line, I cooked that day

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 11

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate only 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Angst, Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: As always, thank you for reading and engaging!!! I think this is almost the last part of this series. Just one more chapter to wrap up all the subplots and all. I was afraid of making this part too melodramatic, but well...

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), 10, 11

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress, @miss-dior, @anon34570, @rosalietodd013, @souppooppie, @nommingonfood, @babyx91

How long had it been? Since that day you dropped your coffee order like an idiot in that little café? It had been winter, and you’d been craving a hot drink all day. Had it been a Wednesday? That middle-of-the-week, last-stretch sort of day. Silly as it was in hindsight, the ruined mocha had almost been your last straw.

Then everything changed. And now that felt like eons ago—or maybe it was, for all the growing pains you’d gone through since.

You maneuvered your motorbike through the crowded thoroughfares of Linkon City. You didn’t even have a solid destination in mind, heading in the general direction of chaos.

You were perhaps a couple of blocks away before the road was jammed by a turned-over truck. In one smooth motion, you discarded your vehicle, tossed aside your helmet, and resumed on foot. The sound of explosions and screams made you pick up your pace until you were running at full speed.

Smog filled your nostrils as you came up on the wreckage. An office building burned to you left. Someone was shrieking in abject terror to your right. The sky had turned to scorched iron, pulsing with red and gold, as if the heavens themselves couldn’t decide whether to bleed or burn.

Somewhere in the center of it all—him. The Harbinger of Doomsday himself. And the one person in this entire city you’d trust your life with. As much as you’d rather mope around in your room and never show your face again, you couldn't just stand by and watch.

He was airborne, vast and elemental, a silhouette cleaved from storm-clouds and hellfire. His wings—luminous and jagged at the edges—beat with a force that rattled window panes miles away. The scales along his spine shimmered with obsidian sheen, and his eyes glowed like coals banked too long. He looked like a deity sculpted from dusk.

Yet this was the same creature that had held you as you slept—who cooked for you in silence, who watched you laugh with that infinitesimal tilt of his lips. Every line of him—raw, massive, and magnificent—shouted Sylus in ways only your soul could comprehend.

Vaguely, you remembered a quote from an old movie you saw as a teen. It was one of those indie flicks, with a rusty color palette and a pair of nihilistic vampiric lovers for protagonists. And the quote had gone something like:

When you separate an entwined particle and you move both parts away from the other, even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected.

That’s it, that must be it. Somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe, some time both long ago and not yet come to pass, atoms aligned just right to birth an ever-constant law: whatever substance constituted your being—it was bound to love this man unconditionally, irrevocably—to seek out your other self, your shadow, as sure as gravity pulls you to the Earth. Because how else could one explain what was happening to you? What had happened and would repeat in your every lifetime, ad infinitum?

Figures in the corner of your eye snapped you out of your reverie—figures clad in uniform, undeterred by the destruction around them.

From the rooftops, the Hunters launched—four of them, rigged in light armor designed for vertical assault. They moved in a cross-formation, anchoring to their marks with wireline harpoons and magnetic grips. Sylus soared above the burning city, his wings a great black shadow cut against the drifting ash, his movements erratic under Voss’s influence. They met him midair.

The first line wrapped around the base of his right wing. The second found his ankle. The third embedded in the soft membrane beneath his spine. Each wireline was charged with suppressive current—meant to disrupt motion. Shock first, then collapse.

He roared, but it was a strangled sound, fury filtered through exhaustion. His body seized in violent recoil, and for a moment it looked as though the sky itself might break beneath him.

He crash-landed, wings flailing, battering wind currents, slamming against antennae and glass towers on the way down. Buildings groaned under the force of his body’s inertia. Before the plaza met him in a spray of shattered stone and fractured earth.

The impact left eerie silence in its wake, like the vacuum of sound that follows a big explosion. His form crumpled at the center of the impact crater. Steam rose from the seams in his scaled body.

Four of the Hunters remained. One raised a sword, two-handed. Another stepped forward with a wand ablaze with their Evol. There was a flash of light, like a comet slicing through the air, that you instantly recognized.

You raised a hand without thinking, a wall of force snapping into place just as a beam of light crashed against it. Sparks fanned out across the smoke.

None other than Xavier materialized a second later, expression taut with frustration, light-etched sword still humming. His eyes were a stormy blue and held no warmth as he regarded you. “Y/N.”

You had nothing against him—really, you didn’t. If anything, his less-than-conventional behavior around HQ had landed him quite high on the admittedly short list of colleagues you wouldn’t mind teaming up with. He looked harmless enough, half-asleep most of the times you bumped into him, but you were smart enough to know that there was much, much more than met the eye. If only people gossiped about you with the same sort of awe they reserved for gossiping about him. 

The Hunters slowly surrounding you weren’t machines—that would have been easier. Machines didn’t believe they were doing good. The protocol was clear: See a threat to civilians, eradicate it. They didn’t see Sylus. They saw a Wanderer. And in their world, that made him dead already.

As you planted yourself firmly between Sylus and Xavier, the latter’s indifference sent a flare of anger up your spine.

“I’m afraid I cannot let you do this,” you said, your voice rising above the noise of another detonation in the distance.

Xavier’s blade lowered half an inch. “Why is that?”

“Would you listen to me if I told you?”

“Please, Y/N, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” came a feminine voice. Naturally, where there was Xavier, his partner—MC—was never far behind. The blond man was half-blocking her view, unwilling to let any harm come her way. But as she peered over his shoulder, your gaze met hers, and you could see—evident on her sorrowful expression and innocent eyes—she pitied you. She probably thought you were a misguided thing, a pawn in a chess game manipulated by bigger, smarter players.

Another Hunter stepped forward, stance tense. “Stand down, Y/N. That thing’s a S-ranked threat. You’re lucky we’re too busy to bring you in right now.”

And something about how oblivious they were—how they were completely unfazed by the insidious machinations happening before their very eyes—rendered you irrationally, indescribably livid.

You’d spent years trying to follow these rules. You’d chipped away at yourself to fit into these neat angles, these holy absolutes. And this was what you got for it—not even the chance to plead your case.

Fuck that. You were fed up. Sick, exasperated. Filled with the kind of stone-cold rage like you’d been dropped into an ice lake.

The others could sense it. This ominous change in the atmosphere. It wasn’t the Wanderers, the rampaging Evolvers, or the fleeing masses.

Weapons surged around you, called to existence like faithful vassals—axes, spears, warhammers, blades of unreal size and shape, pulsing with the light of your unfettered will as they spun into orbit like moons around a celestial body.

The freedom was exhilarating. Your body and mind, having sloughed off the shackles of expectations, buzzed with energy. Your constructs flowed seamlessly from one form to another. Spears, blades, a mace with serrated edges. A short pike to disarm. A concussive disk to break cover. Members of the UNICORN Unit, elite soldiers in their own right, dealt you with their heaviest blows but succumbed to your deadly dance one by one—knocked unconscious amid the rubble or sent sprawling twenty feet away.

Out of the squad, only Xavier and MC remained. They were well-paired and well-trained, their chemistry undeniable as MC’s Evol amplified Xavier’s already impressive speed and strength. You moulded your constructs into a semi-transparent armor around yourself, narrowly avoiding flurries of slashes.

A part of you—the angry, fed-up part—wanted to cripple Xavier’s confident steps, but you resisted. Instead, you pivoted and swept MC’s legs with a low, fluid motion—just enough to send her stumbling. The girl landed hard but safe.

That did the trick; it sent Xavier into a frenzy, made him sloppy. You met his sword with a double-edged spear, both weapons locked in radiant clash. While his attention was on the frontal attack, you brought down a giant axe from above, forcing him to break the stalemate and fall back. 

You barely had time to catch your breath when the ground shook.

Sylus rose from the crater like a fury unchained, coils of restraint trailing from his limbs. His wings spread wide, dark and immense. The gleam in his eyes held no recognition. Only command. Whatever devious concoction Voss had brew up—it still held him.

And above it all, at the balcony of the ruined auction hall, stood the true villain of the story.

He looked absurdly at ease in his pristine suit, as though he weren’t responsible for an entire city’s suffering. One hand rested against the rail; the other lifted, gesturing toward the wreckage like a maestro conducting his finale. Behind him, masked attendees stood frozen in sick fascination.

“Behold,” Voss called, his voice magnified through unseen tech, calm as a man unveiling a painting. “The future of order. A dragon tamed by will alone. A city purged of dissent.”

The spectacle didn’t escape Xavier’s notice. He had heard words like those before, spoken from ivory towers and holy pulpits, from marble thrones and ruined gates—in his own family who had condemned his lover to countless deaths just to hang on to wretched immortality.

You saw it too. “My word might not be worth much to you,” you jerked your chin towards the councilman. “But trust me when I say I’d rather be fighting Voss right now.”

Xavier’s gaze rose again. The balcony, the decadence, the controlled chaos—there was too much precision in it. Too much anticipation.

“He was always too glib for my liking,” Xavier acquiesced, brows furrowed—somehow, he exuded the air of an old man with wary bones and one too many battle wounds. “I’ve seen this theater before. They always claim they’re building a better world—so long as they get to rule it.”

His blade dimmed. The hum faded. But he still kept the pressure on, staring you dead in the eye.

“If I let you do this, and anything happens to her,” he warned. “I will not hesitate to take your head.”

You nodded, expecting nothing less. “Fair enough.”

Just then, MC pulled herself upright, dusting off her uniform. Xavier turned toward her, his eyes softening, his hand flicking out. A thread of light connected him to her skin—Resonance stabilizing.

"Go. I’ll buy you time," he told you simply.

They came at you in waves. Voss’s mind-controlled Evolvers moved with the precision of a hive, blind to fear, to pain, to reason. A man with flames on his arms swung at your throat—you ducked, caught the arc of his swing with a spear, and drove the butt into his solar plexus, knocking the wind from him. Another came from behind, claws sharpened by some crude cybernetic graft; you caught his wrist in a bind, and used his own momentum to drive him into the pavement. Yet others took their place, stepping over each other to attack you like a horde of zombies.

Luckily for you, the twins had caught up by now—Luke shouting vector coordinates into your comm with rhythmic urgency, Kieran providing cover fire from an adjacent rooftop. “Another two floors,” Luke directed. “Voss is at the tower’s upper ledge!”

“I can’t get to him yet!” You shouted back, knocking aside a polearm aimed for your spine, your breath a hiss between clenched teeth.

Above them, the sky thundered. It seemed that a certain dragon hadn’t missed your approach. He circled once, above the chaos, before diving.

“Y/N, I just reviewed the footage Boss got from the auction—you need to get to that red gem Voss is holding,” Luke said, his voice distorted by static. “There’s no way we can beat him with that gem still intact.”

“Noted,” your answer was clipped. You couldn’t afford to lose your head now. Your eyes locked onto the tower’s spire where Voss raised the gem—a luminous core pulsing with malignant clarity. Its power hit the air like a tuning fork in your bones, calling to your Evol. Sylus shrieked, twisting mid-air as though caught in some invisible current.

Then he went straight for you.

You didn’t blink—planted your feet, launching a sequence of dull-edged blades in quick succession. They slammed into his side, knocking his trajectory off-center, but not stopping him. He veered towards the ground like a fallen Leviathan, concrete splintering beneath his mass. You were thrown back, shield flaring as a tsunami of rubble swept over you.

You rolled, scrambled to your feet just as he reared back. Claws slashed, straining your barrier. His roar was deafening, but it wasn’t hatred you heard—it was anguish. He was warring with himself as much as he was warring with you.

“Sylus,” You tried to call out, commanding your constructs to wrap around his torso like a brace. “It’s me!”

Heedless of your plea, he lunged, forcing you to counter. Your weapons reformed mid-strike, adjusting to his angles, your arms trembling under the sheer force of his might. You bit down on your bottom lip, drawing blood, as you pressed forward.

A flash overhead. Kieran again. “The gem!”

Voss, thrown off his feet by the tower’s shifting foundations, had dropped it. The gem tumbled from the spire, bouncing down the steps like a cursed relic looking for a new master.

You immediately released your constructs and sprinted. It was within reach. It was right there—

Sylus pursued, his roar producing a concussive shockwave that knocked you from your path. The gem skittered into the ruins. Gone. And his restraint went with it.

He came for you with fire curling from his throat. Desperate, you threw up a dual barrier, feeling your muscles burn with each passing second, halting his jaws inches from your face.

“Please!” You shouted, your voice hoarse with effort.

He pressed harder. The barrier cracked like porcelain. Your knees buckled, and in desperation, you rammed a gauntlet into his shoulder to dislodge his grip.

“We’ve been through too much for it to end like this. Do you hear me? You promised me you’d stay.”

In the debris below, Luke was desperately scanning for the gem with thermal imaging. Xavier joined them, his sword sheathed in prismatic light, his expression grim. He muttered into the comm: “We found it. One more minute.”

You were shaking. You didn’t know how much longer you could hold Sylus off. With a strained cry, you used the last of your strength to temporarily pin one of his wings to the wall. He whirled back, claws dragging furrows through concrete. His chest expanded with a thunderous breath, the fire coalescing again behind his bared fangs.

But when he charged, there was a minute shiver in his movement. At the last moment, his claws twisted, veering just enough to gouge the ground beside you instead of your chest. He loomed, the full shadow of his monstrous self thrown over you. The spines of his back rose and trembled.

Something cold and heavy coalesced in your open palm—rising from a blaze of smoke and fire, a nightmare given form. The Fiend Reaper.

Your fingers closed around its obsidian hilt—and in your grasp, it was reforged.

The blade deconstructed into shards, into dust, into energy that bled into your constructs like rivulets of blood into glass. You took it all in—his past, his fury, the full measure of what he was. From that storm of particle and flame, you brought into existence something new and infinitely more powerful—curved pylons of radiant matter that anchored themselves into the walls and ceiling, forming a shelter, a cradle. 

Around you, the tower groaned. Load-bearing beams had split under the pressure of a dragon’s might, and sections of the upper floors were sagging. Rubble poured in streams down the stairwells. The whole place was on the verge of collapse.

You kept your eyes squarely on Sylus.

 “You came here for me, remember? I wasn’t sure before, but I know now… I w-want us to have a chance—I want you!”

He snarled again, snapping his fangs just past your cheek. But he didn’t bite—he couldn’t bring himself to.

“It’ll all be okay,” you whispered, tears slipping down the sides of your face.

His snout was a hair’s breadth from your face, close enough for you to feel the heat boiling in his throat. Then—

Srng!

A pulse of energy slammed outward in a blinding flood of light. All the Evolvers around you collapsed, gasping for air like drowning men. The enchantment broke.

Sylus’s wings seized, then slackened—not gradually, but all at once, like a circuit breaker tripping.

He fell forward—talons scratched blindly into stone, scales unraveling. The transformation wasn't some elegant ballet of magic. It was biological, messy—joints recalibrating, bones shortening with audible protests. What remained was just a man—sweat-soaked, gray-faced, vibrating with the aftershocks of power withdrawal.

Inside his skull, phantom chains clinked like distant wind chimes. The gem lay in fragments. The hypnosis undone. And yet—

There you stood, backlit by smoldering debris, occupying the exact radius his fire should have sterilized. Not miraculously spared, but tenaciously present through your own doing.

His knees struck concrete with the dull thud of surrender. He hunched forward, elbows jittering against the rubble. Each breath rattled through odd corners of his lungs. He wanted to compress himself smaller and smaller until he became just another piece of wreckage.

But then— Your hands. Your fingers, gritty with soot and tacky with drying blood, found his human face. He twitched away, animal-quick, man-ashamed. "No," you said, pressing your forehead against his. "It’s okay. I’m here, I’m fine. We’re fine."

He locked his jaw. His palms hovered near your shoulders, wanting to create distance from a vertigo of emotions. The dizzying drop of being witnessed at his worst and not dismissed.

"I could have killed you," he said, consonants scraping like his voice had forgotten the words. "You should have—"

He pulled back, eyes flaring with something bitter, self-lacerating. “I was ready to burn you to cinders. That’s what I’m made for, Y/N. Destruction. I’m a cursed thing, a fucking monster.”

“But you didn’t,” you said softly. “I’m fine. Look—“

His laugh was sharp, wounded. “Only because you were faster. Stronger. Because you made me stop.”

“So what? All that matters to me is that you came back," you countered, shaking your head fervently. "You were fighting against yourself the whole time. I felt it, Sylus. Under all that rage and anguish, you were there,” A smile curved your lips. “I wouldn’t have let anything happen, even if you tried. You said it yourself—I’m just stubborn like that.”

He shifted to look elsewhere, but your hands tracked him like an inconvenient conscience. Your thumbs sketched incomplete circles through the grime on his cheeks, attentive in the way of someone repairing something delicate. His eyes closed. The air tasted like copper pennies left in the sun. His bones still hummed with the churning inferno of his inhuman self. “That was too close…” He still couldn’t shake the image from his mind. "If you hadn't— if they hadn't intervened—"

"But they did. And I did. And you stopped.” You leaned closer, the gap between you two thinning. Your breath ghosted across his face, warm against cooling sweat. "I told you, I won’t go down that easily. You taught me that—you showed me how strong I could be.”

"I used to think just seeing you would be enough," he admitted. "I thought if I could hear your voice one more time, I could let you go. But then you looked at me that first time in the café, and I knew I could never leave your side again. I love you so much it terrifies me. But that love—my love—it has teeth. It has claws. It is not safe. I don’t know if it ever will be.”

"It doesn’t have to be safe, Sylus," you chuckled. "It just needs to be yours… Because I love you, too.”

His eyes opened to find yours—not soft with forgiveness or wide with fear. Just clear—clear and certain, like someone who finally reached an oasis after days of wandering in a desert. And when you kissed him, it felt like coming home. The ambient chaos—the smoke stinging his eyes, the distant wail of sirens, the percussion of falling debris—it all receded. There was only this: your lips, the salt of sweat, the improbable warmth.

[astarswish]

this was so good!! i can't wait for the final chapter!!!!

[bwennie]

@astarswish thank you for your kind words, lovely!! 🥰 here’s the final chapter

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Epilogue

Synopsis: Will history repeat itself?

Content Warning: Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N, flashbacks of traumatic events, eventual fluff

Author's Note: edits for clarity after convos with readers (thank you for your patience and engagement!): a time paradox occurs if Sylus travels back only to the moment before he made the mistake and stopped himself (this would have been during Reader’s Life #2), thus eliminating the need to travel back in time in the first place. In the story, he fucks up -> he travels back to her very first life, before she’s meant to meet him -> he still gets to live one life with non-MC as himself.

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), 10, 11, 12, Epilogue

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress, @miss-dior, @anon34570, @rosalietodd013, @souppooppie, @nommingonfood, @babyx91

The meadow outside Taurus City lies cloaked in the deep, velvety blue of twilight. The wind whispers through the tall grass in rhythmic waves that undulate like a vast, verdant ocean. It’s just past the peak of summer, where the golden warmth has begun to yield to the crispness of autumn, which has stealthily crept into the green of leaves. The birds are quiet in their cozy nests, their usual chatter hushed by the approaching night, while the cicadas, who once filled the air to the brim with sound, have long ceased their song.

Sylus stands alone, arms crossed over his chest as if the gesture could still his heartbeat. He keeps his gaze locked on the hills in the distance—watching, waiting—for the shape he knows like his own shadow.

It’s been days since he left his foster home. Days since he stopped coming to school. It’s ridiculous how he already misses seeing you across the room, waiting to walk you home as he has always done since you two were about the same height (now, he easily towers over you and has grown a habit of flicking your forehead whenever you pout at him).

And just yesterday, he was standing under your window and calling for you, his heart soaring as you poked your head out to see who it was. When your eyes landed on him, you looked relieved, and he almost wanted to apologize. Instead, he asked you to meet—here, at the meadow into which you two retreat every time the world becomes too much—classmates too mean, teachers too harsh, parents too rough. 

He’s nervous—one of the few times in his life he is afflicted with such an emotion. His muscles are tense, his jaw locked in that particular way it always is when he expects a fight but prays for something else. And though he wouldn't name the emotion, wouldn't allow himself the softness of hope, he wants—desperately—for you to come.

Because he’s going to ask you to run away with him.

The idea seemed so bright when he first entertained it, but as the seconds pass, and the silence stretches on, it’s becoming apparent that he might have overestimated his own standing in your life. What right does he have to ask you to leave the comfort of your home and everything you’ve ever known? And to what end—to roam with him in the shadows like a pair of fugitives? With increasing alarm, he realizes he has nothing to give you but this stubborn longing that overtakes his rationality every time he thinks of you—the very thing that’s led him to this.

The silence breaks with the sharp crunch of a branch underfoot.

Sylus turns, nerves on edge.

In the shadow between two twisted pines, a figure emerges—tall, cloaked, and moving with unsettling certainty. The boy doesn’t hesitate. He jumps forward, fist clenched, his body all instinct. His punch cuts clean through the air—only to be caught mid-swing.

The stranger’s hand is like iron.

The cloak falls back.

And the first thought that enters Sylus’s head is—this must be an illusion.

Some wizard’s sick attempt at a trap. Or his own mind playing tricks on him.

But no, he’s staring into his own face—only older, sharper, more deadly. There are faint crow’s feet near the eyes, a scar over one brow, and an intensity behind the crimson gaze that is unmistakable. And this strange apparition of himself is astonishingly tall, clad in black armor threaded with red veins, a blade of polished obsidian secured on his belt.

For a moment neither speak. The younger Sylus feels nearly unmoored—struck by a bone-deep sense of dislocation, as if time had folded and he’d stumbled into the crease.

The man takes a slow, deep breath, raising both his calloused hands in a show of peace. “I don’t mean any harm,” he begins, voice low and steady with restraint, like a song played on an old instrument. “But I don’t have long, so you’d better listen.”

The teenager’s lips part, but the words die before they become sound.

“So this is how I looked,” his older counterpart chuckles ruefully. “I bet you’re pretty confident you know what you’re doing—I used to be like that. I used to carry so much pride and anger that I could wield it like a weapon.”

“Wait, what are you saying…? Who are you?”

A wind picks up, carrying the scent of cold metal and distant pine smoke. The man steps forward, and something in his gait—steady, regal, wearied—reminds the younger of the dragons from the old texts: creatures that move like kings even as their bones ache with the weight of millennia.

“I am what was and what could be,” he says plainly. You taught him to be kinder to himself, and his heart no longer holds resentment for this child—this version of himself that saw the world in absolutes.

The boy looks at him as if gazing into a mirror. “If you are me, you’d know I’m not too damn confident right now.”

“In her?” replies the man, one eyebrow quirked. “Or in yourself?”

The younger Sylus says nothing, though in his hearts of hearts, he knows the answer.

“I am not you, child,” the elder’s voice is softer—patient. “Not yet, that is. I let her die more times than I’ve lived beside her. Lifetimes went by while I let her think she didn’t mean anything to me.”

“What…?” the boy sputters in disbelief. Suddenly, he wants—no, needs—to put as much distance between him and this stranger as possible. “You’re lying!”

“No, you listen to me now,” the man commands, all without raising his voice, seizing his younger self by the shoulders. The boy is caught dead in the gaze of his left eye, which bleeds red like a ghostly flame.

And then he’s not standing in the meadow anymore.

The air smells of ash and metal. His shirt is soaked with rain, and the feeling of being exposed makes his skin crawl. One glance around and he realizes he’s surrounded. City folk—pious eyes staring out from gray faces, clothes as dreary as the sky above them. Another glance, and he realizes they aren’t even looking at him.

They’re looking at you. But it isn’t you—it couldn’t be? For why are you so still, your skin so pale, your eyes closed? The haze lifts, and he can see clearly now.

“No, no, nonono—” he hears his own words echo back at him. Spoken by his tongue but carried on someone else’s voice. An older, lower voice. A voice that he has just heard minutes before. His eyes land on the figure slumped near you, cradling you in his arms. Obsidian horns protruding from silver hair, crimson wings sagging like windless sails.

It feels like he’s wading through water when he tries to run to you, his arms outstretched in the vain hope of reaching you—of seeing for himself your broken body. The fear in his heart is total and all-consuming. Because he knows he’s already too late.

“Wait—” he tries to scream but he’s already being swept along by swirls of red and black. The current of memories deposits him elsewhere—in a semi-darkness made possible only by the scant light that trickles down from the mouth of a deep abyss.

A sound, like the rustling of clothes. Then a female voice—not yours, why can’t it be yours?

A deal is being made. A pact to bind one’s soul with that of another. But for the life of him, he cannot fathom why it’s not you.

Because you thought she betrayed you. The truth rings in his ears, and he flinches. You fool.

The scene changes again, but he’s too busy covering his ears to notice at first. Only when you walk through him does he lower his hands to hear the poisonous words he’s hurling at your retreating back. He raises his eyes to see, in full profile, his older self—a creature blinded by hatred, an accursed future he could never have conceived.

He wants to chase after you. He wants to say he’s sorry. He will beg if he must.

But before he can say a thing, he finds himself back at the meadow, faced with the same endless night. Except now there’s the flicker of torches in the distance and drawing closer. The clang of metal signals weapons, and voices warn of retribution. He blinks, and the Justiciars are on him, pressing his face into the dirt.

“Let me go!” he spits at them, claws digging into the ground. “I cannot leave her—!”

“Her?” his faceless persecutor mocks. “She’s the one who ratted you out, demon.”

“What?! No—” he doesn’t want to believe. He can’t. Not after what he’s just witnessed—your death, his cold rejection of you, his betrayal. The bones in his shoulders snap, and he can feel the wings breaking skin. He has to get out. He has to get to you—

“Easy!”

He doesn’t listen, keeps struggling until he’s hoisted off his feet.

“You can change it,” the elder Sylus’s voice breaks through the chaos. “Snap out of it, and I’ll tell you how.”

At that, the boy goes mostly still. When his feet touch the ground again, his knees nearly give. His hand flies to his chest, clutching at his frantic heart. His throat feels dry, like his vocal cords had been rubbed raw with sand. “I—no, you did that to her.”

“I did,” the older man nods, his eyes dimming.

“Why? You loved her.”

“I still do.”

“Then how could you?”

“I couldn’t. I went back. I changed the course of history just to see her again. She forgave me, even though I didn’t deserve it. And I held her hand when her hair turned silver. I memorized the shape of her laughter, the sound of her footsteps in the house we built together.”

The older man’s voice thins. “One full life with her was more than I could ever ask for. But you—” he reaches forward and places a hand on the boy’s shoulder, solid and grounding, the gesture almost fatherly—“you’re standing on the threshold of the mistake that cost her nine more. Nine lives wasted because I let my insecurities cloud my judgment. Do not make that mistake.”

He steps back. To the young Sylus’s alarm, his body has begun to fade, crumbling at the edges like parchment touched by flame.

“What’s happening to you?” the boy asks, voice barely there.

“My time has come, kid,” the elder answers as though stating a simple fact. “For centuries, I’ve had to go on without her, because I was waiting for this moment. My beloved is gone, but yours is still here. Never let her go.”

And as the wind carries the last of him over the tall grass, daturas follow, blooming across the earth in a quest to cover every inch. Deep red—almost black, sweet, ghostly.

Sylus stands silent, heart still thudding, the meadow no longer empty.

He stays there long after the last of the ash had vanished, long after the flowers have reached his feet, dizzy from the weight of what has been placed in his hands.

He feels raw, as if something has been peeled away inside him, exposing the soft, uncertain boy beneath the defiance he wears like armor. He looks down at the flowers—so fragile, so impossibly soft for something born of such ruinous power—and he kneels, fingers curling around a green stem.

"Never let you go," he whispers to the petals. Then, slow as though carrying a holy mandate, he rises to his feet.

Because from the crest of the hill, you come running.

You remember. For the most part.

You remember the way Sylus looked as he walked by your side. Not the Sylus of this life, but the Sylus from long ago. From when you were living in a city of steel and glass.

It’s come back to you in bits and pieces. Sometimes, a tune brings back the memory of him humming while putting your children to sleep—gods, your two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, with his eyes and your hair. Other times, a flavor reminds you of one of the dishes he used to make for you when you were sick.

Most of the time, it’s the fact that you see another Sylus in the flesh every day, every glance triggering a sense of deja vu. Your Sylus is much younger, the shadows under his eyes not so pronounced, the lines of his face more rounded with youth, but it’s him alright. Because regardless of which version of him you’re thinking of, he drives you nuts.

Nuts enough to make a rope out of torn bedsheets and sneak out of your locked room in the dead of night. Your parents will bury you alive if they ever find out. But if your memory serves you well—and if the Sylus knew in your first life had told the truth, then this is the night he could be taken away from you for nearly an eternity.

Your cloak snaps in the wind as you slip through the bramble and nettle edging the western wall of Taurus City. The sky hangs low, twilight bruised and sullen, brushing the ground with a hush of color. Your lungs burn with both effort and exhilaration, but you run in silence, as if the sound of your breath might give you away. You’ve waited until the last oil lamp guttered out in the hall, until your father’s snores unfurl in steady procession like the soft turning of pages. Your mother padlocked your door, and you kept it that way. They trained you to be obedient. They didn’t train you to be clever.

On the way, you identified and loosed the Justiciars’ horses, cut their reins, tossed handfuls of smoke powder to ignite panic in the animals. Even now, hooves thunder uselessly in the distance—pursuing shadows, not quarry. It won’t last. They will regroup, and quickly.

But for now, you’re free. Your feet could find the path to the meadow even if you were blindfolded, and you run.

Soon, you crest the hill and spot him exactly where he said he’d be.

Your wayward classmate is leaning against the trunk of a large oak tree, framed by the blackening sky. He doesn’t pace. He doesn’t look around. You make eye contact, and your heart beats out of control.

“Sylus!” you call, waving with one arm. “They’re coming! You need to leave—now!”

He doesn’t run. Doesn’t even blink.

You stumble toward him, chest heaving, the fabric of your cloak catching on the dry grass. “They’ll kill you. You don’t understand, they—”

“I do,” he says, moving toward you slowly, like he doesn’t want to startle you, and sets his hands on your arms. His touch is solid, warm. His eyes—those eyes that once flared with temper and recklessness—now hold a wisdom you’ve never seen before.

You shake your head. “There’s no time for this.”

“Then we make time,” he insists. Then on one knee, he changes your future forever. “I love you. I don’t care if we’re too young. I don’t care if we don’t make sense to anyone else. I would rather stand beside you for one doomed moment than live a long, hollow life without you.”

You think you might have stopped breathing. Any other day, and you would have thrown yourself into his arms with joy. Instead, you pull him up and start stuttering, “I-I love you, too. So, so much. But they’re almost here! You have to—”

He hushes you with a kiss.

It’s gentle, unhurried. The kind of kiss that carries the unspeakable weight of recognition—the way you might touch the face of someone returned from the dead. Your fingers find the fabric at his collar, clutching it like a lifeline, as though afraid he might vanish if you let go. The air between you contracts, and the world collapses into a single, trembling axis—the place where your lips meet his.

You feel it in your ribs, in the marrow of every life you will ever live, and it dawns on you: this is a rejoining. A reclamation. For a brief, impossible moment, there is no crusade, no prophecy, no blood-soaked future bearing down on you. Only the knowing. The astonishing fact that you’ve found each other again.

Torchlight spills through the trees. Horses neighing, men shouting. Unsheathed metal glinting coldly in the encroaching darkness.

You break apart. And understanding passes wordlessly between you before you both turn, hand in hand, to face towards the commotion.

Two dozen Justiciars—more than you expected. More than even Sylus could hope to take on without being hauled in chains back to Ivory City, where they’ll sentence him to death in the Abyss.

“Are you sure?” you check one last time, giving his hand a desperate squeeze. “I can hold them off, buy you some time. This is your last chance.”

“They can’t take both of us. You can fight, right? I’ve seen your work with the school bullies,” he replies, eyes twinkling with mischief. Once, it would have frightened you to see him so careless. Now, it only makes you love him more.

His eyes turn serious. Crimson wings burst from his shoulder blades, stretching to full span. Dark horns erupt from his forehead, curling like burnished metal. His transformation is more fluid than you’ve ever seen it. More controlled. His claws are longer than your fingers.

You ready yourself. A sharp white gleam takes form in your open palm. A blade—a dagger—conjured out of pure energy.

“Well, well,” a heavy voice booms across the meadow. “If it isn’t the runaway fiend and the poor misguided soul he tricked.” The captain, you think, steering his horse to the head of the pack. He doesn’t bother to dismount, but gestures at the rest of the Justiciars to form a tight semicircle around you and Sylus. He narrows his eyes and lets out a dry chuckle. “Y/N, I thought I saw your old man on his way to the Magistrate’s office this morning. This brat’s parents, too. Been making some interesting reports, they have.”

The words are a punch to your gut. Your father. He meant it when he told you to stay away from ‘that demon child.’ Your eyes burn with the sting of anger, but you tamp it down, not allowing these bastards the satisfaction of seeing you troubled.

“I’m not my father,” you tell the captain. “I’m here of my own volition.”

“Good to hear,” the man shrugs, waving a hand and spurring his men forward with a single word: “Seize!”

Sylus takes a step in front of you, wings flaring as the Justiciars advance. The first two are on him in no time, but fall just as fast to the quick arc of his arm—claws cleaving flesh from bone.

The third lunges to restrain you with a coarse shout, and you duck just in time. You turn, bringing the dagger’s edge across his face, and he cries out as he collapses to the ground. One of them gets smart, aims a crossbow in your direction, but the bolt never hits its mark. Sylus is there in an instant, catching it with one hand like a thrown spear, and launching it back at the shooter with the force of a god. The man drops. You two stand back-to-back in the darkening field, immersed in the chaos of flying steel and curses. For every Justiciar you take down, two more leap in to take his place. It seems hopeless. But you glance at each other, and you smile, and for some reason it feels like you’re winning.

“They’re putting up more than a fight!” one of them yells in panic. A handful of the soldiers begin to fall back, retreating into the night.

“Cowards! They’ll hang you for desertion!” the captain shouts at the defectors, finally dismounting and drawing his own sword. “Get back here!”

"This is it," you shout over the din to Sylus.

He closes his eyes, summoning a new roar from deep within. This one is different, erupting from his throat in a hot, orange burst. Some of Justiciars catch fire as they tumble to the ground.

You throw up a shield, a shimmering half-dome. It glows like a second moon as arrows rain down, disintegrating on the surface. You grit your teeth and focus, feel your energy pulsing with a strange and feral rhythm.

“Hold it!” Sylus yells, his voice raw. You nod, the force field flickering with your breath.

A flaming figure lunges through, a blazing comet of muscle and fury. A Justiciar, robes tattered, eyes wild. You jerk your hand, conjuring a spear. It solidifies midair, electric blue, and pierces him through the chest. He crumples, and with a flash of heat and light, you dissolve the spear and collapse the shield.

“Now!” you scream.

Sylus charges, his roar splitting the night. Flames leap from his skin—he is a firebrand, a meteor. You can hardly see him through the wall of heat. The Justiciars fall back, the sky raining ash. You mold a new weapon—a sharp, crackling sword—and follow him.

It’s chaos. You dance through the smoke, your bare skin unscathed by the blaze of Sylus’s wake. You are a tempest, a wild spirit. You are beautiful, and you are terrible.

The captain is shouting, orders or obscenities you can’t tell. You see Sylus bring him down in a single, flaming swipe, throwing the man’s sword to the grass and pinning him to the earth. The captain’s eyes widen in terror.

“Demon!” he shrieks, his voice surrendering to fear. “They’ll find you! They’ll hunt you down! They’ll—”

A last cry, and he goes limp. Sylus pulls back, chest heaving, his breath alive with embers and fire.

The few remaining Justiciars flee in all directions, their torches disappearing into the night.

“Scared of a little heat?” Sylus taunts, shaking the last of the flames from his wings.

You let out a breathless laugh, almost a sob, and run to him. He catches you, pulls you close, the edges of your cloak scorched and still smoking. His heart is a drum against your ear, steady, reassuring.

“Let’s get out of here,” he murmurs into your hair.

You pull back just far enough to look him in the eyes, and you see it again—the knowing. The memory of a life you thought was only a dream.

“I thought you’d never ask,” you reply, tucking a loose strand of hair behind his horn.

By the time you reach the edge of the forest, you are almost giddy with disbelief.

“Where are we going?” you ask, exhausted but happy.

“Wherever you want,” Sylus says—and you have no doubt he means it.

Then he wraps his arms around you, wings forming a cocoon. The air ripples like the surface of a pond, and the meadow vanishes from under your feet.

A heartbeat later, you are standing on the edge of a seaside cliff, the expanse of the ocean stretching to the horizon, the sound of the tide crashing below.

You let go of him and spin around, eyes wide with wonder. You’ve never seen the ocean before, and it is everything you imagined it would be. Wild, loud, untamed. It reminds you of the boy staring at you with a mix of pride and fear, as if he can’t believe you’re still here, still choosing him.

It reminds you of the man you once knew, the one you’re certain this boy will become, and you can’t help but love him for it.

“This is perfect,” you tell him, throwing your arms around him and burying your face in his neck. “You’re perfect, Sylus. But... how did you know? My parents, the Justiciars—”

“I’m not as cocky as I used to be,” he says, leaning back to meet your gaze. “Takes more than a stupid lie to catch me off guard now.”

You laugh, and it feels like the first time you’ve laughed in a hundred years.

“I mean it,” he says, holding you at arm’s length. “I know what I’m doing, Y/N. I know who I want to be. Just say you’ll come with me.”

“Always,” you answer. “Every part of me belongs with you, until the end of time.”

A cloud passes over the moon, and for a moment, the world is plunged into darkness. You stand together, unafraid, waiting for the light to return.

[bwennie]

hiii! i just wanted to ask if you have plans for any upcoming fics? also I REALLY ENJOYED READING ANGEL OF HER OWN MAKING!! aaa i looked forward to a new part evertime you posted (epilogue perchance 👀???)

Heyyy!! Thanks for your note! 💕💕

I don’t have any specific fics lined up, but I plan to make some fanart and/or character design stuff. Like I’m thinking I could do a design for Reader from Angel of Her Own Making, mimicking how the LIs get companion myth “skins” (I.e. Lumiere, Abysmal Sovereign, God of the Tides, etc). It’ll be based on Reader’s Saintess/Commander of Holy Knights myth.

As for the epilogue, it’ll most likely be written! I just need to get my creative juices going. Plus, my life is a bit hectic right now so I want to take it easy. Happy to take any drabble/oneshot requests though!

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 12 (FINAL)

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate only 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Fluff, Smut (MDNI), Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: This is it, folks! It's been an incredible journey with everyone! I thank you for your support and kindness!!! If you'd like to see an epilogue, let me know in the replies ;) I have a few ideas...

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), 10, 11, 12

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress, @miss-dior, @anon34570, @rosalietodd013, @souppooppie, @nommingonfood, @babyx91

The badge was lighter than you remembered.

You turned it over once in your hand—polished metal, embossed with the Association’s insignia, cool against your fingertips. You pressed your thumb into its center, testing its reality, then placed it on Captain Jenna’s desk with a soft, deliberate click. Your chest felt strangely weightless, as if you were a caterpillar finally breaking through its chrysalis.

The captain regarded you across the sparse office. "You’re certain?" she asked, her voice low, the usual command dialed to something more intimate.

You nodded, adding some pep to your voice as you spoke. “Yup, I heard you apprehended Voss recently. And I already gave my testimony in the case against Marcus."

"You won’t be attending the trials?"

"The investigators recorded everything I had to say and pulled records from the hospital where I was taken after Marcus’s attempt on my life, so they have plenty of evidence," you tactfully declined. You were simply glad to be done with the whole ordeal—there was no point putting on a show for a jury and the whole world. Your time would be better spent on other endeavors—like catching up on sleep. Your dreams were still patterned with fire and blood, Sylus’s roars folding into the piercing screams of faceless strangers. The scent of burning asphalt, the memory of shattering glass—these lingered in your mind like ghosts waiting to be exorcised.

Jenna leaned back, folding her arms, her expression hopeful. "You don't have to leave the force entirely. UNICORN could use someone like you. In his confession, Voss implicated EVER Enterprises—we need someone on our side who hasn’t been compromised by those technocrats."

"I appreciate that. But it’s time I moved on—fight my battles somewhere else. Maybe one day, I’ll come back… if the team will still have me,” you offered a small smile, more apology than pride.

Outside the frosted windows, the world went on—drones cutting air lanes through the city, neon bleeding into daylight. Somewhere beyond, N109 pulsed with its usual entropy. A siren howled, distant but present, like a reminder that the city was always fraying at the edges.

Captain Jenna signed your resignation letter with a practiced hand. The hallway offered no fanfare as you exited her office—just the faint hum of fluorescent lights and the echo of your footsteps against polished tile. But the triumph was yours: you’d made it out, proven the allegations wrong, and earned your freedom to do as you pleased. And that would be more than enough.

Downstairs, the lobby was half-empty. Hunters passed by with muted recognition; a few glanced at you with apologetic smiles, others with an awkward embarrassment for having jumped the gun on you. You moved through them with your head held high until a familiar voice halted your steps.

"Y/N."

You turned. Xavier, impeccably composed even in streetwear, stood beside MC, who had traded her usual battle gear for something subdued. Civilian softness, like a peace offering.

MC stepped forward first. "We just wanted to say—we’re sorry. For everything. For not believing you sooner."

You studied them for a moment. The sincerity was there, sweet and unassuming. No defensiveness in their posture, no insistence on redemption. And you realized you would miss them once you stepped outside.

"I’m glad you talked me down," Xavier added. He looked softer in the simple white hoodie, blond hair slightly ruffled and eyes a boyish blue. You were happy for him, for them both, and thankful that they had made no mention of the dragon Wanderer’s mysterious disappearance after Voss’s gem had been destroyed. Xavier’s forgetfulness had turned out to be tremendously handy, as he’d given Captain Jenna a sleepy-eyed, nonchalant account of slaying the Wanderer and seeing it disintegrate like Wanderers usually did after he’d run them through with his sword.

"Thank you," you said. "I mean that."

“Don’t be a stranger!” MC piped up, deciding this didn’t have to be a goodbye. “I’ll see you at Kitty Cards next Thursday!”

You beamed, letting her pull you into a tight hug. “You bet!”

Outside, sunlight fractured against the mirrored towers of the Association complex. And there he was—leaning against his bike, arms folded, black shades obscuring the half-lidded sharpness of his gaze. Sylus looked only slightly out of place in the broad daylight: black leather jacket, faded jeans, well-worn boots with scruff marks from untold skirmishes, and a cocky half-smile that suggested he relished the dissonance.

He held up your helmet when you approached. The sturdy piece of gear was made to match his—matte black with deep red internal padding and cat ears affixed to the crown—his way of reminding you that you were his ‘kitten.’ The moniker would have put you off if it had been anyone else…

"So, did you make it official?" he asked, his voice low and rich as ever.

You took the helmet from his hand, slipping it on. "I did. You’re looking at a completely ordinary civilian."

He adjusted the strap beneath your chin, knuckles grazing your jaw. He was close enough that you could stand on your tiptoes and press a soft kiss to his cheek—and so, you did—quick and earnest, like a memory you two hadn't had the chance to make before. He stilled at the contact, a flicker of warmth breaking through the cool veneer. For a moment, he didn’t want to move—in lifetimes past, he had been feared, condemned, hunted, but never kissed like this: gently, without ceremony, without strings. It struck him as absurd and unspeakably tender.

He cleared his throat, the corner of his mouth twitching. "Civilian, yes, but hardly ordinary. Let’s get you home, sweetie."

You swung onto the back of the bike, the leather seat still warm from the sun's generous rays, and wrapped your arms securely around his waist. The scent of smoke and metal clung persistently to his coat, a familiar aroma that made you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You pressed your cheek lightly against his back for just a fleeting moment—long enough to steady the subtle trembling in your fingers. No words passed between you. Just contact. Just comfort. Just the profound awareness of being alive, together, and moving forward into the unknown.

The engine beneath you roared to life like a beast reborn, its powerful growl echoing through the air as you slipped into the bustling arteries of the city. He felt it—your heartbeat, steady and reassuring against his spine, more grounding than any earthly tether.

For the first time in an eternity of lives, the road ahead didn’t feel like an exile.

You stood before the mirror, smoothing the velvet of your dress with absent hands, when Sylus stepped in behind you, something small cradled in his palm.

“I have something for you,” Sylus said, voice soft with a gravity that made you turn.

In his hand lay a pendant—sleek and dark, carved from a single piece of obsidian, strung on a slender gold chain. It caught the lamplight, gleaming like a night sky filled with stars.

You gasped. “What’s this…?”

“Once upon a time, there was a clumsy teenaged boy whose favorite classmate’s birthday was fast approaching,” Sylus began, speaking in that poetic way of his. “It was her fifteen birthday, but he had no idea what to give her. He had yet to amass any treasure, and even if he had, no gem could compare to her beauty. Then one day he overheard a traveling merchant’s sales pitch—something about obsidian having the power to protect and to reveal hidden truths. Perhaps, he was hoping that she would understand what he hadn’t yet learned how to articulate.”

You reached out, touched the gem like it might vanish. “Did that boy happen to have silver hair and red eyes?” You asked, trying not to grin.

Sylus pretended to contemplate your question before nodding. “Yes. But he’s no longer a boy, and this time he’s telling you directly how he feels. May I?”

Now there was no way you could stop the maddening giddiness that rushed through your chest as you turned your back to him, lifting your hair. His fingers brushed the nape of your neck as he clasped the chain, letting the stone settle above your collarbone like a promise reclaimed. He lingered, bending down to place a kiss on your exposed shoulder. “My beloved,” he murmured against your skin. “Now, and forever.”

Together, you looked into the mirror—you in your new dress, the obsidian pendant glowing softly at your throat, Sylus behind you in his tailored coat, his hand resting at the curve of your waist.

Your gaze flicked up to meet his in the reflection. “We look like something out of a dream.”

“It’s not a dream, sweetie,” Sylus chuckled, pulling you plush against his chest, his large frame enveloping yours. “I check every evening when I wake up.”

He could lose himself in the depth of your eyes—bronze-flecked, knowing, ever watchful. But it was your mouth, gently parted in concentration, that undid him: too soft for the world you’d fought through. And your voice—whenever it rose in challenge or curled into something quieter—it echoed in the hollows of him where memory lived.

You caught him watching, and your cheeks bloomed with heat. "You can stop looking now."

"I can, but I won’t."

You rolled your eyes, even as you let out a laugh, then turned back to the mirror, tucking in an earring. He kept watching you —elegant, self-assured, beautiful in ways that made time itself pause.

By the time you made it out of the base and into the Michelin-starred restaurant he’d reserved, heads were already turning. The gossip mill churned—hushed voices proclaiming a new queen of the N109 Zone as Sylus walked past with you on his arm. You let the whispers wash over you, almost reveling in the absurdity of it all, unashamed to be his equal—his partner, in life and yes, in crime, if need be.

The dining hall was delicately lit, every surface beckoning with understated opulence. Waitstaff in tailored uniforms glided between tables like actors in a play with no missed cues. The maître d’ greeted you with a bowed head and the deference reserved for heads of state or something far more fearsome.

"Good evening, Mr. Qin. Miss. Your table is ready."

You were led to a secluded alcove near the window. The skyline of Linkon and the N109 shimmered below you, cool and weightless behind the glass. Candlelight flickered softly on the linen-draped table, and a single red rose bloomed in a crystal vase between you.

You lowered yourself into the chair, gathering your dress under the table as Sylus signaled for wine.

"You didn’t have to do all this, you know," you said.

"I’ve hoarded treasure for a thousand years," somehow when he said it, it didn’t sound like bragging. "Who else would I spend it with?"

“You might regret letting me use your credit card one day,” you protested half-heartedly, your tone light. The sommelier returned with a deep red vintage, and Sylus swirled it expertly before nodding his approval. He poured for you first.

“I’d like to see you try.”

Your food arrived before you could take more than a few sips—duck breast seared to a crisp edge, sliced against the grain, plated with smoked cherries and roasted endive. The flavors were rich, perfectly balanced. You tried to scold him again for being too indulgent but ended up savoring every bite. Every detail had been attended to—from the cutlery to the softness of the music drifting through the space.

Sylus leaned back in his seat, wineglass in hand, content to observe the way the light played across your features as you talked about what you’d been up to while he was away for business overseas. The conversation drifted easily. You spoke of how you’d told your parents you were consulting for international security firms—how they’d mourned the loss of the prestige that came with being a Hunter but ultimately decided to respect your wishes—and how you’d made a little nook of your own in Sylus’s expansive collection of first-edition books and vinyl records.

"I have been working hard to learn ancient Philosian," you said, dabbing at your lip with the corner of a cloth napkin. "You’re a good tutor. When you’re not being distracting on our calls."

"I had to give you some challenge."

You arched a brow. "I already live with a fire-breathing cryptid."

"Who built you an entire rooftop greenhouse."

"It’s lovely," you smiled, and reached across the table to touch his hand. "So is the man who built it."

He said nothing, but the faintest flush touched the tips of his ears.

You began discussing your plans for construction projects in the outer blocks of the N109 Zone—low-incoming housing and free schools for the families and children of ex-convicts or those looking for a way out of the Zone’s lawlessness. It was tough work to fundraise for the projects—you staunchly declined Sylus’s offer to bankroll the whole enterprise (he found other means, but you would never know if he had his way)—but it was worth it knowing these kids now had a chance.

By the time dessert rolled around—a decadent sundae with ample hot fudge and whipped cream, you were tipsy and luminous, eyes bright with warmth. The world outside the restaurant no longer felt intrusive—it was something far away and dim, like a place you’d no longer owed.

Sylus’s chamber was a sanctuary of shadows, the air thick with the scent of anticipation and the faint musk of desire. The door clicked shut, sealing away the world, leaving only the two of you—two bodies, two hearts, and a hunger that had simmered for far too long. Your breath hitched as he turned to you, his eyes dark with something that made your stomach coil in delicious knots. He kissed you then, slow and deliberate, like he was savoring the taste of you, his lips molding to yours with a reverence that made you ache.

Your hands moved on their own, trembling as they slid up his chest, fingers slipping beneath the fabric of his shirt to find the heat of his skin. His muscles tensed under your touch, a low hum vibrating in his throat as you pressed closer, your body flush against his. The warmth between you was electric, a static charge that threatened to ignite at the slightest friction. His hands found your waist, his fingers digging into the softness there, pulling you tighter against him until you could feel the hard length of him pressing insistently against your stomach.

Your dress pooled at your feet with a whisper of fabric, leaving you bare and vulnerable in the dim light. Sylus’s gaze roamed your body, his eyes tracing every curve, every dip, like he was committing you to memory all over again. You stepped free of the dress, your skin glowing as if lit from within, and moved toward him with a confidence that made his breath catch. Your fingers found the buttons of his shirt, working them open one by one with agonizing slowness, your touch deliberate, teasing. You let your nails drag across his chest as you pushed the fabric from his shoulders, your lips curling into a smirk when you felt his muscles twitch beneath your fingertips.

His hands skimmed over your back, tracing the delicate curve of your spine, before sliding around to cup your breasts, his thumbs brushing over your nipples until they hardened under his touch. You gasped, your head falling back as he leaned in to press a kiss to the base of your throat—the heat of your skin contrasting with the coolness of the obsidian pendant, his lips trailing downward in a slow, torturous path. He paused at the swell of your breast, his breath hot as he dipped his tongue to taste you, drawing a moan from your lips that echoed in the stillness of the room.

“Please,” you whispered, the word barely more than a breath, but it was enough to make him growl in response. He lifted his head, his eyes locking with yours as he cupped your cheek, his thumb brushing over your bottom lip.

“Are you certain?” he asked, his voice rough with need.

Your hand closed over his wrist, guiding it down to the wet heat between your thighs. “Take me,” you said in a plea. “I'm yours.”

He didn’t need to be told twice.

Sylus lifted you effortlessly, carrying you to the bed and laying you down with a gentleness that belied the hunger in his eyes. His hands roamed your body with a reverence that called forth goosebumps, tracing the faint scars that marred your skin like they were relics of some forgotten battle. He didn’t shy away from them; instead, he kissed each one, his lips soft and warm against your flesh, as if he could erase the pain they represented with his touch.

When he finally settled between your thighs, the weight of him pressing you into the mattress sent a thrill of anticipation racing through your body. He reached down, his fingers slipping through your soaked folds, stroking and teasing until you were gasping for breath, your hips arching off the bed in silent plea. He slid a finger inside you, then another, curling them just right to make you cry out, your nails digging into his shoulders as you rocked against his hand.

“Sylus,” you moaned, your voice breaking on his name. “I need you.”

He gladly obliged. He positioned himself at your entrance, the head of his cock pressing against your slick heat, and slowly pushed inside. You both groaned as he filled you, inch by torturous inch, until he was buried to the hilt. He stilled then, giving you a moment to adjust to the stretch, his forehead pressed against yours as you breathed in sync.

When he began to move, it was with a slow, deep rhythm that had you seeing stars. His thrusts were deliberate, each one hitting that sweet spot inside you that made your toes curl and your back arch. Your errant hands traced the hard planes of his chest and the ridges of his abdomen before sliding down to grip his hips, urging him deeper, faster.

And just like that, your bodies moved together like two halves of a complete whole, each thrust and grind bringing you closer to the edge. Sylus’s lips found yours again, his kiss desperate and hungry as he drove into you with increasing urgency. You could feel the tension coiling in your core, a crescendo building that threatened to shatter you into a million pieces. Your thighs tightened around his hips, pulling him deeper as you gasped into his mouth.

“Sylus, I’m close,” you bit out between sounds of pleasure.

He growled in response, his thrusts becoming more erratic as he chased his own release. He reached between you, his thumb finding your clit and circling it with just the right amount of pressure to send you spiraling over the edge. You came with a cry, your body convulsing around him as waves of pleasure crashed over you. He followed soon after, his hips stuttering as he emptied himself inside you with a deep groan.

Sylus’s hand trailed lazily down your spine, his fingers drawing invisible patterns on your damp skin as you lay entwined in the tangled sheets. The air was thick with the mingling scents of sweat and sex, and the faint hum of your shared heartbeat filled the silence like a lullaby. You nestled closer to him, your head resting on his chest as you listened to the steady rhythm of his breathing.

“That was…” you began, still slightly breathless.

“Two thousand years in the making,” Sylus finished for you, his lips brushing against the crown of your head. “And worth every second.”

You chuckled softly, your knuckles bumping against his collarbones as if to chide his scandalous nature. “You always know just what to say.”

He smiled against your hair, tightening his arms around you in a silent promise. “Only when it’s true.”

You drifted into a comfortable silence after that. Until… “You’re staring,” Sylus remarked, amusement evident in his tone.

You didn’t deny it as your gaze continued to move across his face in careful detail—the slant of his brow, the half-healed scar at his jaw, the way his lips softened now that he wasn’t using them to hide anything. His eyes, always edged in fire, were smoldering embers this night.

“I’m making sure I remember,” you said. “For all of my future lifetimes.”

He inhaled through his nose, one arm tightening around you. “Even if you forget,” he affirmed, “I’ll find you. You’re not getting rid of me ever.”

You tucked your knees against his, bare skin threading into the hollows of his frame. “But doesn’t this create a loop? Does the future you knew still exist?”

“It does,” he said at length. “And it doesn’t. Time doesn’t vanish. It fractures. We’re in one of the pieces now. As long as you’re here, I don’t care where it goes.”

—

Epilogue

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 11

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate only 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Angst, Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: As always, thank you for reading and engaging!!! I think this is almost the last part of this series. Just one more chapter to wrap up all the subplots and all. I was afraid of making this part too melodramatic, but well...

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), 10, 11

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress, @miss-dior, @anon34570, @rosalietodd013, @souppooppie, @nommingonfood, @babyx91

How long had it been? Since that day you dropped your coffee order like an idiot in that little café? It had been winter, and you’d been craving a hot drink all day. Had it been a Wednesday? That middle-of-the-week, last-stretch sort of day. Silly as it was in hindsight, the ruined mocha had almost been your last straw.

Then everything changed. And now that felt like eons ago—or maybe it was, for all the growing pains you’d gone through since.

You maneuvered your motorbike through the crowded thoroughfares of Linkon City. You didn’t even have a solid destination in mind, heading in the general direction of chaos.

You were perhaps a couple of blocks away before the road was jammed by a turned-over truck. In one smooth motion, you discarded your vehicle, tossed aside your helmet, and resumed on foot. The sound of explosions and screams made you pick up your pace until you were running at full speed.

Smog filled your nostrils as you came up on the wreckage. An office building burned to you left. Someone was shrieking in abject terror to your right. The sky had turned to scorched iron, pulsing with red and gold, as if the heavens themselves couldn’t decide whether to bleed or burn.

Somewhere in the center of it all—him. The Harbinger of Doomsday himself. And the one person in this entire city you’d trust your life with. As much as you’d rather mope around in your room and never show your face again, you couldn't just stand by and watch.

He was airborne, vast and elemental, a silhouette cleaved from storm-clouds and hellfire. His wings—luminous and jagged at the edges—beat with a force that rattled window panes miles away. The scales along his spine shimmered with obsidian sheen, and his eyes glowed like coals banked too long. He looked like a deity sculpted from dusk.

Yet this was the same creature that had held you as you slept—who cooked for you in silence, who watched you laugh with that infinitesimal tilt of his lips. Every line of him—raw, massive, and magnificent—shouted Sylus in ways only your soul could comprehend.

Vaguely, you remembered a quote from an old movie you saw as a teen. It was one of those indie flicks, with a rusty color palette and a pair of nihilistic vampiric lovers for protagonists. And the quote had gone something like:

When you separate an entwined particle and you move both parts away from the other, even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected.

That’s it, that must be it. Somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe, some time both long ago and not yet come to pass, atoms aligned just right to birth an ever-constant law: whatever substance constituted your being—it was bound to love this man unconditionally, irrevocably—to seek out your other self, your shadow, as sure as gravity pulls you to the Earth. Because how else could one explain what was happening to you? What had happened and would repeat in your every lifetime, ad infinitum?

Figures in the corner of your eye snapped you out of your reverie—figures clad in uniform, undeterred by the destruction around them.

From the rooftops, the Hunters launched—four of them, rigged in light armor designed for vertical assault. They moved in a cross-formation, anchoring to their marks with wireline harpoons and magnetic grips. Sylus soared above the burning city, his wings a great black shadow cut against the drifting ash, his movements erratic under Voss’s influence. They met him midair.

The first line wrapped around the base of his right wing. The second found his ankle. The third embedded in the soft membrane beneath his spine. Each wireline was charged with suppressive current—meant to disrupt motion. Shock first, then collapse.

He roared, but it was a strangled sound, fury filtered through exhaustion. His body seized in violent recoil, and for a moment it looked as though the sky itself might break beneath him.

He crash-landed, wings flailing, battering wind currents, slamming against antennae and glass towers on the way down. Buildings groaned under the force of his body’s inertia. Before the plaza met him in a spray of shattered stone and fractured earth.

The impact left eerie silence in its wake, like the vacuum of sound that follows a big explosion. His form crumpled at the center of the impact crater. Steam rose from the seams in his scaled body.

Four of the Hunters remained. One raised a sword, two-handed. Another stepped forward with a wand ablaze with their Evol. There was a flash of light, like a comet slicing through the air, that you instantly recognized.

You raised a hand without thinking, a wall of force snapping into place just as a beam of light crashed against it. Sparks fanned out across the smoke.

None other than Xavier materialized a second later, expression taut with frustration, light-etched sword still humming. His eyes were a stormy blue and held no warmth as he regarded you. “Y/N.”

You had nothing against him—really, you didn’t. If anything, his less-than-conventional behavior around HQ had landed him quite high on the admittedly short list of colleagues you wouldn’t mind teaming up with. He looked harmless enough, half-asleep most of the times you bumped into him, but you were smart enough to know that there was much, much more than met the eye. If only people gossiped about you with the same sort of awe they reserved for gossiping about him. 

The Hunters slowly surrounding you weren’t machines—that would have been easier. Machines didn’t believe they were doing good. The protocol was clear: See a threat to civilians, eradicate it. They didn’t see Sylus. They saw a Wanderer. And in their world, that made him dead already.

As you planted yourself firmly between Sylus and Xavier, the latter’s indifference sent a flare of anger up your spine.

“I’m afraid I cannot let you do this,” you said, your voice rising above the noise of another detonation in the distance.

Xavier’s blade lowered half an inch. “Why is that?”

“Would you listen to me if I told you?”

“Please, Y/N, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” came a feminine voice. Naturally, where there was Xavier, his partner—MC—was never far behind. The blond man was half-blocking her view, unwilling to let any harm come her way. But as she peered over his shoulder, your gaze met hers, and you could see—evident on her sorrowful expression and innocent eyes—she pitied you. She probably thought you were a misguided thing, a pawn in a chess game manipulated by bigger, smarter players.

Another Hunter stepped forward, stance tense. “Stand down, Y/N. That thing’s a S-ranked threat. You’re lucky we’re too busy to bring you in right now.”

And something about how oblivious they were—how they were completely unfazed by the insidious machinations happening before their very eyes—rendered you irrationally, indescribably livid.

You’d spent years trying to follow these rules. You’d chipped away at yourself to fit into these neat angles, these holy absolutes. And this was what you got for it—not even the chance to plead your case.

Fuck that. You were fed up. Sick, exasperated. Filled with the kind of stone-cold rage like you’d been dropped into an ice lake.

The others could sense it. This ominous change in the atmosphere. It wasn’t the Wanderers, the rampaging Evolvers, or the fleeing masses.

Weapons surged around you, called to existence like faithful vassals—axes, spears, warhammers, blades of unreal size and shape, pulsing with the light of your unfettered will as they spun into orbit like moons around a celestial body.

The freedom was exhilarating. Your body and mind, having sloughed off the shackles of expectations, buzzed with energy. Your constructs flowed seamlessly from one form to another. Spears, blades, a mace with serrated edges. A short pike to disarm. A concussive disk to break cover. Members of the UNICORN Unit, elite soldiers in their own right, dealt you with their heaviest blows but succumbed to your deadly dance one by one—knocked unconscious amid the rubble or sent sprawling twenty feet away.

Out of the squad, only Xavier and MC remained. They were well-paired and well-trained, their chemistry undeniable as MC’s Evol amplified Xavier’s already impressive speed and strength. You moulded your constructs into a semi-transparent armor around yourself, narrowly avoiding flurries of slashes.

A part of you—the angry, fed-up part—wanted to cripple Xavier’s confident steps, but you resisted. Instead, you pivoted and swept MC’s legs with a low, fluid motion—just enough to send her stumbling. The girl landed hard but safe.

That did the trick; it sent Xavier into a frenzy, made him sloppy. You met his sword with a double-edged spear, both weapons locked in radiant clash. While his attention was on the frontal attack, you brought down a giant axe from above, forcing him to break the stalemate and fall back. 

You barely had time to catch your breath when the ground shook.

Sylus rose from the crater like a fury unchained, coils of restraint trailing from his limbs. His wings spread wide, dark and immense. The gleam in his eyes held no recognition. Only command. Whatever devious concoction Voss had brew up—it still held him.

And above it all, at the balcony of the ruined auction hall, stood the true villain of the story.

He looked absurdly at ease in his pristine suit, as though he weren’t responsible for an entire city’s suffering. One hand rested against the rail; the other lifted, gesturing toward the wreckage like a maestro conducting his finale. Behind him, masked attendees stood frozen in sick fascination.

“Behold,” Voss called, his voice magnified through unseen tech, calm as a man unveiling a painting. “The future of order. A dragon tamed by will alone. A city purged of dissent.”

The spectacle didn’t escape Xavier’s notice. He had heard words like those before, spoken from ivory towers and holy pulpits, from marble thrones and ruined gates—in his own family who had condemned his lover to countless deaths just to hang on to wretched immortality.

You saw it too. “My word might not be worth much to you,” you jerked your chin towards the councilman. “But trust me when I say I’d rather be fighting Voss right now.”

Xavier’s gaze rose again. The balcony, the decadence, the controlled chaos—there was too much precision in it. Too much anticipation.

“He was always too glib for my liking,” Xavier acquiesced, brows furrowed—somehow, he exuded the air of an old man with wary bones and one too many battle wounds. “I’ve seen this theater before. They always claim they’re building a better world—so long as they get to rule it.”

His blade dimmed. The hum faded. But he still kept the pressure on, staring you dead in the eye.

“If I let you do this, and anything happens to her,” he warned. “I will not hesitate to take your head.”

You nodded, expecting nothing less. “Fa ir enough.”

Just then, MC pulled herself upright, dusting off her uniform. Xavier turned toward her, his eyes softening, his hand flicking out. A thread of light connected him to her skin—Resonance stabilizing.

"Go. I’ll buy you time," he told you simply.

They came at you in waves. Voss’s mind-controlled Evolvers moved with the precision of a hive, blind to fear, to pain, to reason. A man with flames on his arms swung at your throat—you ducked, caught the arc of his swing with a spear, and drove the butt into his solar plexus, knocking the wind from him. Another came from behind, claws sharpened by some crude cybernetic graft; you caught his wrist in a bind, and used his own momentum to drive him into the pavement. Yet others took their place, stepping over each other to attack you like a horde of zombies.

Luckily for you, the twins had caught up by now—Luke shouting vector coordinates into your comm with rhythmic urgency, Kieran providing cover fire from an adjacent rooftop. “Another two floors,” Luke directed. “Voss is at the tower’s upper ledge!”

“I can’t get to him yet!” You shouted back, knocking aside a polearm aimed for your spine, your breath a hiss between clenched teeth.

Above them, the sky thundered. It seemed that a certain dragon hadn’t missed your approach. He circled once, above the chaos, before diving.

“Y/N, I just reviewed the footage Boss got from the auction—you need to get to that red gem Voss is holding,” Luke said, his voice distorted by static. “There’s no way we can beat him with that gem still intact.”

“Noted,” your answer was clipped. You couldn’t afford to lose your head now. Your eyes locked onto the tower’s spire where Voss raised the gem—a luminous core pulsing with malignant clarity. Its power hit the air like a tuning fork in your bones, calling to your Evol. Sylus shrieked, twisting mid-air as though caught in some invisible current.

Then he went straight for you.

You didn’t blink—planted your feet, launching a sequence of dull-edged blades in quick succession. They slammed into his side, knocking his trajectory off-center, but not stopping him. He veered towards the ground like a fallen Leviathan, concrete splintering beneath his mass. You were thrown back, shield flaring as a tsunami of rubble swept over you.

You rolled, scrambled to your feet just as he reared back. Claws slashed, straining your barrier. His roar was deafening, but it wasn’t hatred you heard—it was anguish. He was warring with himself as much as he was warring with you.

“Sylus,” You tried to call out, commanding your constructs to wrap around his torso like a brace. “It’s me!”

Heedless of your plea, he lunged, forcing you to counter. Your weapons reformed mid-strike, adjusting to his angles, your arms trembling under the sheer force of his might. You bit down on your bottom lip, drawing blood, as you pressed forward.

A flash overhead. Kieran again. “The gem!”

Voss, thrown off his feet by the tower’s shifting foundations, had dropped it. The gem tumbled from the spire, bouncing down the steps like a cursed relic looking for a new master.

You immediately released your constructs and sprinted. It was within reach. It was right there—

Sylus pursued, his roar producing a concussive shockwave that knocked you from your path. The gem skittered into the ruins. Gone. And his restraint went with it.

He came for you with fire curling from his throat. Desperate, you threw up a dual barrier, feeling your muscles burn with each passing second, halting his jaws inches from your face.

“Please!” You shouted, your voice hoarse with effort.

He pressed harder. Th e barrier cracked like porcelain. Your knees buckled, and in desperation, you rammed a gauntlet into his shoulder to dislodge his grip.

“We’ve been through too much for it to end like this. Do you hear me?! You promised me you’d stay!”

In the debris below, Luke was desperately scanning for the gem with thermal imaging. Xavier joined them, his sword sheathed in prismatic light, his expression grim. He muttered into the comm: “We found it. One more minute.”

You were shaking. You didn’t know how much longer you could hold Sylus off. With a strained cry, you used the last of your strength to temporarily pin one of his wings to the wall. He whirled back, claws dragging furrows through concrete. His chest expanded with a thunderous breath, the fire coalescing again behind his bared fangs.

But when he charged, there was a minute shiver in his movement. At the last moment, his claws twisted, veering just enough to gouge the ground beside you instead of your chest. He loomed, the full shadow of his monstrous self thrown over you. The spines of his back rose and trembled.

Something cold and heavy coalesced in your open palm—rising from a blaze of smoke and fire, a nightmare given form. The Fiend Reaper.

Your fingers closed around its obsidian hilt—and in your grasp, it was reforged.

The blade deconstructed into shards, into dust, into energy that bled into your constructs like rivulets of blood into glass. You took it all in—his past, his fury, the full measure of what he was. From that storm of particle and flame, you brought into existence something new and infinitely more powerful—curved pylons of radiant matter that anchored themselves into the walls and ceiling, forming a shelter, a cradle. 

Around you, the tower groaned. Load-bearing beams had split under the pressure of a dragon’s might, and sections of the upper floors were sagging. Rubble poured in streams down the stairwells. The whole place was on the verge of collapse.

You kept your eyes squarely on Sylus.

 “You came here for me, remember? I wasn’t sure before, but I know now… I w-want us to have a chance—I want you!”

He snarled again, snapping his fangs just past your cheek. But he didn’t bite—he couldn’t bring himself to.

“It’ll all be okay,” you whispered, tears slipping down the sides of your face.

His snout was a hair’s breadth from your face, close enough for you to feel the heat boiling in his throat. Then—

Srng!

A pulse of energy slammed outward in a blinding flood of light. All the Evolvers around you collapsed, gasping for air like drowning men. The enchantment broke.

Sylus’s wings seized, then slackened—not gradually, but all at once, like a circuit breaker tripping.

He fell forward—talons scratched blindly into stone, scales unraveling. The transformation wasn't some elegant ballet of magic. It was biological, messy—joints recalibrating, bones shortening with audible protests. What remained was just a man—sweat-soaked, gray-faced, vibrating with the aftershocks of power withdrawal.

Inside his skull, phantom chains clinked like distant wind chimes. The gem lay in fragments. The hypnosis undone. And yet—

There you stood, backlit by smoldering debris, occupying the exact radius his fire should have sterilized. Not miraculously spared, but tenaciously present through your own doing.

His knees struck concrete with the dull thud of surrender. He hunched forward, elbows jittering against the rubble. Each breath rattled through odd corners of his lungs. He wanted to compress himself smaller and smaller until he became just another piece of wreckage.

But then— Your hands. Your fingers, gritty with soot and tacky with drying blood, found his human face. He twitched away, animal-quick, man-ashamed. "No," you said, pressing your forehead against his. "It’s okay. I’m here, I’m fine. We’re fine."

He locked his jaw. His palms hovered near your shoulders, wanting to create distance from a vertigo of emotions. The dizzying drop of being witnessed at his worst and not dismissed.

"I could have killed you," he said, consonants scraping like his voice had forgotten the words. "You should have—"

He pulled back, eyes flaring with something bitter, self-lacerating. “I was ready to burn you to cinders. That’s what I’m made for, Y/N. Destruction. I’m a cursed thing, a fucking monster.”

“But you didn’t,” you said softly. “I’m fine. Look—“

His laugh was sharp, wounded. “Only because you were faster. Stronger. Because you made me stop.”

“So what? All that matters to me is that you came back," you countered, shaking your head fervently. "You were fighting against yourself the whole time. I felt it, Sylus. Under all that rage and anguish, you were there,” A smile curved your lips. “I wouldn’t have let anything happen, even if you tried. You said it yourself—I’m just stubborn like that.”

He shifted to look elsewhere, but your hands tracked him like an inconvenient conscience. Your thumbs sketched incomplete circles through the grime on his cheeks, attentive in the way of someone repairing something delicate. His eyes closed. The air tasted like copper pennies left in the sun. His bones still hummed with the churning inferno of his inhuman self. “That was too close…” He still couldn’t shake the image from his mind. "If you hadn't— if they hadn't intervened—"

"But they did. And I did. And you stopped.” You leaned closer, the gap between you two thinning. Your breath ghosted across his face, warm against cooling sweat. "I told you, I won’t go down that easily. You taught me that—you showed me how strong I could be.”

"I used to think just seeing you would be enough," he admitted. "I thought if I could hear your voice one more time, I could let you go. But then you looked at me that first time in the café, and I knew I could never leave your side again. I love you so much it terrifies me. But that love—my love—it has teeth. It has claws. It is not safe. I don’t know if it ever will be.”

"It doesn’t have to be safe, Sylus," you chuckled. "It just needs to be yours… Because I love you, too.”

His eyes opened to find yours—not soft with forgiveness or wide with fear. Just clear—clear and certain, like someone who finally reached an oasis after days of wandering in a desert. And when you kissed him, it felt like coming home. The ambient chaos—the smoke stinging his eyes, the distant wail of sirens, the percussion of falling debris—it all receded. There was only this: your lips, the salt of sweat, the improbable warmth.

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 10

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate only 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Angst again (par for the course here, folks, don't @ me), Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: As always, thank you for reading and engaging!!! Unrelated, but I take pics in Photo Studio to make chapter pics, and SYLUS IS SO HOT like mans has no bad angles. I, too, would die 10 times back to back to see this man ONCE.

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), 10

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress, @miss-dior, @anon34570, @rosalietodd013, @souppooppie, @nommingonfood, @babyx91

The training room responded to you like a living thing. Light bent subtly across its high ceiling, mirroring the way you shifted your weight onto the balls of your feet. Steel walls pulsed and breathed, panels folding inward with a hydraulic sigh as the terrain reconfigured—slabs of stone sliding into jagged cliffs, drones deploying from hidden hatches overhead. A chamber designed not for drills, but for untamed demolition. Another generous gift from Sylus.

You flexed your fingers once, then stilled.

Your breath came slow, deeper than necessary. Your heart wasn’t racing—yet. The tension was elsewhere, curled somewhere deep in your chest, hollow and sour. You’d barely slept. Your parents were arriving soon.

You didn’t want to think about it. Not about the disappointment in your father’s voice. Not about the headlines. Not about the accusatory glares and wagging tongues.

You needed to move.

A spear bloomed into your hand—clean, angular, humming. You lunged.

The first drone dropped without a sound, cleanly bisected at the center. Your weapon shattered on contact, already rebuilding itself into twin glaives before the next barrage of fire arrived. You moved between it—no wasted effort, no flourish. Just angles, pivots, pressure.

What if they don’t believe me? The thought spiked unbidden.

A second drone swung in from the left. You turned into it, one glaive dissolving mid-motion, replaced by a shield that caught the strike. It slammed into your guard. You didn’t flinch.

They’ll say I should’ve stayed quiet. That I made this worse. That I always make things worse.

You countered with a hammer. The weight of it was satisfying—real enough to jar your wrist on impact. The drone crashed backward and vanished in sparks.

Twelve more replaced it.

You couldn’t stop the spiral. Even as your body moved, reacting with precision and violence, your mind twisted sideways—darting into worst-case scenarios, building them like scaffolds.

Your stance narrowed. You adjusted. A whip coiled from your palm, snaring one mid-turn and yanking it directly into the arc of a newly-forged sickle. Another construct spun into place behind you—a shard-like blade that hovered before launching itself into a drone’s eye.

Maybe they’ll pretend to understand and go home and call the Association anyway. Maybe Sylus will get tired of this, of me, of trying.

You weren’t exactly paying attention. You just went for it. Felt the rhythm, the distance, the weight of it all. Your body kept on going even while your mind was a million miles away.

The terrain changed again. Ledges. Cliff faces. Simulated wind.

You jumped, vaulting between outcrops, forming narrow bridges under your feet that disintegrated the second you moved off them. A bow unfolded in your hands. Three arrows notched at once, and when you loosed them, they moved like things alive.

More drones. More shifting.

You welcomed it.

Because here—here you didn’t have to explain yourself. Didn’t have to smile politely, or justify why your silence wasn’t rudeness, or why your anger didn’t always look like yelling. Here, your body spoke fluently. Here, you didn’t have to shrink to fit someone else’s definition of good.

When you finally came to a stop, the room was scorched and riddled with collapsed targets. Your constructs hovered in the air like ghosts, flickering, waiting to be dismissed.

You stood in the quiet, chest rising. The ache in your ribs was almost welcome. Your thoughts, for once, followed a beat behind you instead of racing ahead.

The silence didn’t soothe you, but it didn’t hurt either.

You could pretend, for just a moment, that all the pieces still fit together.

The car arrived without ceremony—sleek, black, silent as a knife unsheathed. From your perch at the mezzanine railing, you watched it glide to a halt beneath the portico of Onychinus’s north wing. The twins emerged first, dressed like men who belonged nowhere and everywhere, and opened the rear doors with an unsettling flourish.

Your parents stepped out as if walking onto a stage they hadn’t agreed to perform on.

Your mother’s coat—an ash-gray wool that clung too tightly to her thin frame—was buttoned up to the neck. Your father, taller but not broader, had the look of a man arriving at a diplomatic parley under duress. His shoulders were drawn in, his eyes behind his glasses already narrowed in suspicion.

You descended the stairs with a practiced grace. Your lungs stung with held breath, and the soft pat-pat of your socks on the stone steps sounded absurdly loud in your ears.

“Y/N,” your mother said, reaching you first.

You embraced, stiffly. Your father remained a pace behind, watching Sylus from the corner of his eye.

"Mr. Qin," he said coolly, extending a hand. "I presume."

Sylus took the offered hand with the calm assurance of someone used to such scenes—cloak and dagger, machinations dressed as courtesy. "A pleasure," he replied, voice smooth as oil over steel.

He did not elaborate, and your father did not press. Instead, they followed you deeper into the base, past security turrets artfully disguised as sculptures, through a corridor paneled in smoked glass. You led them to one of the more human rooms—less dragon’s lair, more sophisticated mansion. There were soft rugs, warm lighting, and a tea service already laid out on the coffee table.

You poured the tea yourself. Your hands were steady, though the rest of your was not.

They made polite conversation at first. Your mother complimented the decor. Your father asked if you were eating well. But it didn’t last. Soon came the questions: Where had you been? Why hadn’t you reached out sooner? What exactly was your relationship with the man who owned this strange, windowless empire?

You answered in clipped tones, each word measured like a stone set into the foundation of a defense you had rehearsed a dozen times. You explained the accusations, the falsified evidence, the coordinated smear campaign. You told them about Marcus and Voss, about Sylus’s efforts to help you expose the corruption at the Association.

Your father frowned. “So you’re hiding.” “I’m surviving,” you said. “That’s not the same thing.” “No. It isn’t.” Your mother reached across the table and placed her hand over yours. "We only want you safe."

“And I am,” you replied, glancing at Sylus where he stood behind the armchair. He hadn't spoken since the introductions. His stillness was purposeful, almost cautious, as if he understood the gravity of the moment and had no intention of intruding on it.

Your parents ended up staying less than an hour. When they left, it was with soft assurances that they wouldn’t alert the Association, but you saw it in their eyes—the doubt, the distance already forming.

You didn’t come down for dinner.

The twins noticed first. They were unusually quiet at the table, eyeing the untouched third place setting Sylus had laid out himself—grilled halibut, wilted greens dressed in sesame oil, jasmine rice. All the things you had mentioned once, offhandedly, in that distracted way you spoke when your thoughts were elsewhere.

“Think she’s asleep?” Kieran asked.

“Or hiding,” Luke said, flicking a grain of rice off his sleeve.

Sylus didn’t entertain their banter. He rose from the table without a word and climbed the stairs two at a time.

You hadn’t locked the door to your room, but it was shut. That alone said enough. He paused with one hand on the frame, the other balancing the plate he’d prepared again—a smaller serving, warm, with the grilled lemon still steaming faintly.

He knocked once. “Sweetie.”

No answer.

“I'm coming in.”

He pushed the door open carefully.

You sat on the floor beside the bed, knees drawn up, your arms folded tightly across them. Your face was turned away from the window, eyes vacant, unfocused. The dim light from the hallway cast a long shadow across the floor. Your shoulders were hunched like you were bracing for impact.

He said nothing at first. Just stepped in and shut the door behind him. Set the plate down on your nightstand. Sat beside you without asking.

Silence stretched between you, not awkward, just heavy, like the air before a thunderstorm.

“I’m sorry,” you said after a while, your voice hoarse. “I didn’t mean to ghost everyone. I just... I didn’t want to talk.”

“You don’t have to,” Sylus replied. He leaned back against the bed frame, arms resting loosely on his knees. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

You turned your head slightly, just enough to see him in your periphery. “I thought seeing them would help. That it would remind me who I was before all this. But it just—”

Your voice died. Your throat moved like you were swallowing glass.

“I didn’t belong there either. Not really.”

The room smelled faintly of citrus and fabric softener. Outside, the N109’s perpetual rain tapped lightly at the windows. Sylus waited. He didn’t press, didn’t try to fill the space. He let you find your own way through it.

“I know they love me. I know they just want the best for me. But I don’t think they’ve ever known what to do with me,” you said. “And all this time, if I could just say the right thing, maybe it would be easier for everyone involved. And I’d still be allowed to go home someday. But that house was never mine. I don’t know if any place ever was.”

You didn’t sound angry. Just tired. Tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix.

Sylus exhaled slowly. "Do you know what you looked like today? When you were in the training room?"

You didn’t answer, but he saw your brow twitch.

"Like someone who doesn’t need a home to be whole. Who makes space for herself, wherever she is."

You gave a weak, bitter laugh. "That sounds like something you’d say to someone you're trying to keep from falling apart."

"Maybe. But it's still true."

You pressed your face into your arms. “I feel like if I let myself fall apart, I’ll never be able to put the pieces back the same way.”

Sylus reached over, fingers brushing your shoulder, tentative but warm.

“Maybe they don’t have to go back the same way. Maybe they weren’t ever right to begin with.”

A beat passed.

“Do you think that?” you asked quietly. “Do you really believe people can—can rebuild from nothing?”

He answered, confident to the point of arrogance. “I don’t think. I know.”

You didn’t move. But you didn’t pull away either. Your breathing had started to steady, though you blinked too often and too fast, like you were trying to keep something at bay.

He stood then, briefly, to retrieve the plate.

“You haven’t eaten,” he said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“That’s why I made something warm.” He knelt and placed it beside you. “Just try. A few bites. Then you can yell at me to leave.”

You sniffed, rubbed your wrist across your face, and reached out wordlessly. Took the fork. Took a bite.

He sat beside your again, close but not pressing, silent as a stone.

Eventually, when the plate was mostly empty and the muscles in your shoulders finally remembered to relax, you leaned against him, your forehead on his shoulder.

“I’m scared,” you said softly. “Not just about being arrested, or hunted. But scared that... maybe this is who I really am. Someone no one knows what to do with.” Sylus turned his head. “Then they don’t deserve to know you.” “Thank you,” you whispered. “For what?” “For not being afraid of the mess.” He leaned down and pressed a kiss to your temple. “I’ve been worse,” he murmured. “And you still chose to stay.” A pause. “I’ll always choose you. Every time.”

Outside, the rain continued. The sound of it against the glass was slow and steady, a rhythm softer than breath. Inside, You finally slept, still curled against his side.

Sylus didn’t leave.

He stayed until the window fogged and your breathing evened out, his arm loosely around your shoulders.

The room was dark save for the pitter patter of rain, and the sound of Sylus’s breathing, deep and even beside you. You had drifted into sleep against his chest, curled in the circle of his arm. For a time, your slumber was dreamless. Weightless. Then the current pulled you under.

The world was not Linkon. It looked older, cloaked in stone and fire. Dark corridors led to a cathedral of marble and bone, where banners of the Justiciar Order hung from vaulted ceilings like the skins of flayed animals. The sky was red, not with sun but with blood that had long since dried in the cracks of prophecy. The air buzzed—not with heat or insects, but with the low hum of judgment, of something final.

You were not yourself—simply a spectator, suspended above a young woman in armor. Her white mantle was torn and bloodied, her claymore glinting silver beneath stained light. Her breathing was shallow, her stance weary, though her eyes blazed with fierce resolve.

Before her, Sylus stood.

He was in dragon form, but diminished—not in power, but in something more essential—hope, perhaps. His wings were half unfurled, as if in resignation. His scales glinted with soot and blood, cracked along the spine. He wasn’t fighting. Not anymore. He was kneeling in the center of the ruined execution ground, lit from above like a sacrificial offering.

And MC was there, standing behind the young knight, yet neither seemed to acknowledge the other’s presence. They were like two images overlayed, existing in the same frame—just on totally different planes. 

The claymore was already raised.

Your subconscious supplied you with information your logical brain never registered. This was what was supposed to happen—this was supposed to be Sylus’s fate if you hadn’t taken his place ten lifetimes from now. MC was supposed to be the protagonist of this narrative—she was supposed to be the dragon’s beloved, cursed to die by his hand...

Sylus looked up, crimson eyes shining like precious gems. There was no fear. No plea. Only a kind of haunted relief—as though this, too, had been inevitable.

Your vision warped, like film consumed by flames. Suddenly, you were no longer watching. You were there.

The armor pressed against your skin. The claymore hilt held aloft by your hands. Your palms ached from the force of your grip. And you saw Sylus’s face—his real face. Not the abstracted silhouette of the future-past, but the man who had held you in his arms hours ago. The man who had looked at you like you mattered more than anything else.

His lips moved. No sound came. But you felt the words, somehow: I’m sorry. And then the blade plunged into his chest.

You screamed—only it didn’t escape your mouth. It echoed inside your skull, reverberating like a cracked bell in a buried chapel. You couldn’t breathe. And you couldn’t let go of the sword.

His blood was warm on your hands. Viscous and dark red. Your vision blurred with salt and horror.

“No,” you gasped. “No—this isn’t real—”

But the dream wouldn’t release you.

Sylus collapsed, wings dragging, breath shuddering out of him in one final exhale.

The scene came undone at the seams. The banners tore themselves from the rafters. The light overhead became searing and white—

—and you woke up.

The room was still dark. The only light came from the street-lamps beyond the windows, flickering orange through the curtains. But something was wrong.

Sylus was gone.

You sat bolt upright, your breathing frantic, sweat clinging to your spine like an old wound reopened. Your hands trembled as if they still held the blade. Your chest ached like something vital had been carved from it in your sleep.

“Sylus?” You whispered, voice like that of a child scared of the dark.

No answer.

The sheets beside you were still faintly warm. He hadn’t left long ago, but long enough to make the silence feel cavernous.

The room boasted an obscene display of glamor. Velvet draped the walls, chandeliers hummed overhead with artificial light sculpted to mimic candle glow, and every attendee wore a mask—elaborate and strange—a masquerade hosted by the underworld.

Sylus leaned against the balcony rail on the mezzanine level, a crystal glass untouched in his hand. His mask was minimal—onyx black, angular, the shape of a dragon’s profile. The irony didn’t amuse him.

Below, a quiet storm of voices drifted between the auctioneer’s rhythm. Items were displayed one by one under protective domes: illegal augmentations, altered Protocores, exo-suits so thin they shimmered like silk. He had eyes on all of it—thanks to the recording lens embedded in his contact lenses, streaming footage directly to the Onychinus servers. Every name, every gesture cataloged. The purpose was simple: catch Councilman Voss in the act, talking deals with known syndicates. Evidence. Something you could use.

He hadn’t expected you to haunt his thoughts the way you did.

Even now, with music echoing in his ears and predators dressed in finery pacing below, all he could think about was the way you’d looked asleep in his bed. The slight furrow in your brow, like even dreams didn’t grant you rest. The way you curled inward, as if trying to make yourself small enough to vanish.

A low hum passed through the crowd. Movement near the stage. Heads turned. Sylus tilted his head slightly to track the shift.

Voss entered.

The councilman wore white. Not ivory or cream, but pristine white—like something out of a cult’s fever dream. His mask resembled a fox, lacquered gold, smiling too broadly. Two guards flanked him, their suits sleek and lined with stimulants, the kind you only used if you expected to walk into war.

Voss raised a hand. The crowd quieted.

"My friends," Voss’s voice carried, rich and modulated, amplified by unseen tech. "We are gathered tonight not merely to trade—but to reshape the future."

A hush fell over the room. Even the music died down.

“Too long have we been made to crawl before bureaucrats. Too long have we hidden what we are—our ambition, our brilliance. But no more.”

He was good. Charismatic. The kind of man who built cults from desperate men and myths from gossip.

“Tonight, I offer not only weapons. I offer liberation. Unity. The chance to turn chaos into order. We will bridge the gap between politics and power. With me, you will never have to bow again.”

There was applause—thin at first, then growing. Sylus’s fingers curled around the glass until it groaned.

Then the doors sealed. All of them. One by one. With the hiss of hydraulic locks engaging.

The crowd faltered. From hidden vents in the ceiling, an invisible mist began to descend. Soft at first, almost perfumed.

But Sylus smelled it for what it was. Not gas. Not poison. Control.

The air turned sharp in his lungs. His vision oscillated at the edges. The ambient hum of his powers—always there like static under his skin—flared once, then dipped. Hard.

He staggered back against the wall. Something inside him coiled, panicked. His control slipped.

The dragon. The part of him that was older, wilder. That had never accepted chains—not even the ones he’d put on himself.

His mask cracked. He could feel it shredding at the edges, scales surfacing along his jaw, the heat rising in his chest like a furnace about to break loose.

He glanced down. Already, chaos. The gas had reached the floor. Evolvers seized; some screamed, others fell to their knees. But gradually, one by one, they began to rise—with eyes glowing violet. Moving in sync like puppets.

You threw the covers back, stumbling to your feet. Your legs shook. The floor was too cold. Your mouth tasted like iron and ash.

You barely thought to grab a jacket before bolting into the hallway, barefoot, calling, “Luke? Kieran?”

You found them in the war room, illuminated by the soft blue glow of the monitors. Maps, data streams, camera feeds—the overload of stimuli assaulted your vision.

Luke turned first, startled. “Y/N—what’s wrong?”

“Where is he?” you rasped. “Where did Sylus go?”

Kieran rose slowly, his expression shifting from confusion to worry. “He went to the auction. The one Councilman Voss was rumored to attend. Said he’d try to catch Voss in the act—spy footage, backup plans.”

Your stomach dropped. Your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth. “When?”

“Hours ago. Said he’d be back by midnight.”

You turned to the clock. 2:41 AM.

Your gaze snapped to one of the side monitors. A breaking news banner scrolled across the feed. Headlines flashed, chaotic and jarring:

BREAKING: MASSIVE DRAGON WANDERER SIGHTED IN CENTRAL LINKON. HUNTERS DEPLOYED. CIVILIAN EVACUATION UNDERWAY.

Your heart stopped.

You couldn’t speak. You just gestured to the twins and reached for your boots. Jacket. Anything that would get you there faster. Because you knew. You knew what dragon they had seen.

Part 11

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 9

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate only 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Angst (and fluff!!! FINALLY!!), Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: As always, thanks for reading!!! You are the best!

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9)

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress, @miss-dior, @anon34570, @rosalietodd013

The motorcycle carved through N109 Zone's neon-drenched underbelly, its engine growling beneath the weight of unspoken words. Sylus leaned into each turn with precise control, his shoulders rigid beneath his leather jacket. Behind him, you clung weakly, your forehead occasionally bumping against his back as consciousness wavered. Each shallow breath was a victory against the pain radiating from your abdomen. 

The silence between you wasn't empty—it teemed with unvoiced accusations, with questions neither dared articulate. Sylus hadn't looked at you since hauling your bleeding form off the pavement, but his fury radiated like heat from a forge.

The Onychinus base materialized from the urban sprawl, its fortifications slicing upward like obsidian teeth against the polluted skyline. The security gates recognized Sylus's approach, parting without challenge. Guards stationed at the entrance flicked their gazes toward you—assessing, calculating—before returning to their vigilance. Their expressions said what words didn't: she is contraband, a walking liability.

Inside, Sylus finally helped you dismount, his hands steady but withdrawn once you found your footing. He summoned medics with a sharp gesture that brooked no argument, then stepped back, creating deliberate distance as attendants swarmed you.

Voices murmured technical jargon while hands pressed, prodded, examined. You focused on the ceiling, counting cracks in the paneling to distract from the violation of being handled, of being helpless.

Then—a shift.

A warmth bloomed beneath your skin, unexpected and foreign. The pain didn't just dull; it retreated, like a tide pulling away from shore.

Your gaze snapped toward Luke and Kieran, who hovered like anxious sentinels near the doorway. "What did you do?" The question rasped from your throat, sandpaper-rough.

Kieran gestured toward a sleek titanium case on the medical tray. A holographic interface pulsed above it, projecting cellular reconstruction data in luminescent blue. "Cutting-edge nano-regeneration tech. Black market. Worth more than most people make in a decade."

Wanting to test their words, you twisted your upper body. The movement came too easily, too fluidly. The wound that should have left you incapacitated for days now presented as merely a dull throb—a whisper where a scream had been.

Your stomach clenched in revolt. This unearned healing felt like cheating, like another debt accumulated.

Sylus stood framed between shadow and light, arms crossed over his chest. His crimson irises gleamed in the half-dark, inhuman and watchful. He said nothing, yet his silence spoke volumes.

Only now did you take in your surroundings properly. The room's opulence registered in increments: midnight-black silk sheets beneath your fingertips, heavy damask curtains drawn tight against daylight, furniture crafted from what appeared to be genuine wood—extinct luxury in the impoverished N109. This wasn't a medical ward or guest quarters.

This was his space. His sanctuary.

You searched his face for clues, for direction—Was he furious? Disappointed? Both seemed equally unbearable.

"Sylus—" you began sheepishly.

"What the hell were you thinking?" He cut you off, words barely rising in volume but falling like meteorites, dense with brewing fury. The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. “Why do you insist on throwing your life away like this? That wasn't just reckless. It was—" A muscle twitched in his jaw. "Stupid."

The word sliced deeper than any blade. Not anger but dismissal. As if you were a child who'd wandered into traffic, incapable of rational thought.

"I didn't—" You attempted to explain yourself, but the words were getting stuck in your throat. You forced yourself to meet his gaze, summoning whatever dignity remained. "I didn't ask you to solve my problems—the last thing I wanted to be was just another burden. B-But I had to try. I had to prove that I could—"

The sentence fractured, incomplete. Prove what? That you deserved your badge? That you weren't the traitor the whole city thought you were? That you were worthy of... of what? Of him?

To your horror, something hot and treacherous gathered behind your eyes. No. Not now. Not in front of him. But your body had reached its threshold, and defenses long maintained began to crumble.

A single tear escaped, tracing a silver path down you cheek. You whipped your face away, cursing your weakness.

Too late. He'd seen.

“Fuck,” Sylus wanted to kick himself in the gut. He was no use at this—at being the man you deserved.

The distance between you vanished. Strong arms enveloped you, pulling you against a chest that radiated impossible warmth. That familiar scent of him filled your senses.

You stiffened, then melted. Your fingers clutched at his shirt with desperate intensity, anchoring yourself to him as the dam inside you finally, catastrophically failed.

The first sob wrenched from you chest with violence, years of accumulated grief finding release. Then another. And another. Each more raw than the last, each bearing fragments of a lifetime spent proving your worth to people who never saw you at all.

Sylus didn't offer empty platitudes. Didn't tell you to compose yourself. He simply held you, his embrace tightening with each tremor that passed through your body, his fingers threading through your hair with unexpected gentleness.

You pressed your face against his chest, surrendering to the storm. Somewhere amidst the tumult, a terrifying realization crystallized: despite everything, despite the secrets and lies and half-truths, you were falling in love with him.

And that revelation ached more fiercely than any wound.

Eventually, the tempest subsided. Your breathing steadied, though occasional aftershocks still trembled through your frame. Only then did Sylus shift.

His hands moved to cup your face, thumbs sweeping away the wetness on your cheeks with a reverence that made your heart constrict anew. His eyes searched yours—seeking something, permission perhaps, or absolution.

Was this what you were hiding from him all along? Now, and in every lifetime going forward? He should have known that beneath the strong warrior was a well of pain, should have thought about that before he’d let you walk to your final death. Because if he had spared but a moment to truly see you, he would have realized just how much you had been hurting. He didn’t deserve you, but you—you deserved the truth.

You gazed back, raw and hollowed out, expecting... what? An explanation? A confession?

Instead, something uncertain flickered across his features. He withdrew his touch.

"Wait here," he murmured, voice rough-edged with emotion.

You watched as he crossed to an antique lacquered cabinet you hadn't noticed before. From a locked drawer, he retrieved something that appeared fragile with age.

When he returned to you, he held out a folded parchment, edges softened by time, creases deeply worn from repeated handling. You accepted it with shaking fingers. The moment the paper touched your skin, recognition jolted through you—the handwriting flowing across the yellowed surface was unmistakably yours. The loops of your letters, the distinctive way you crossed your t's...

Yet impossibly, inconceivably:

"This isn't mine," you whispered, confusion fracturing your voice.

Sylus knelt before you, his gaze steady now, unflinching. "It is yours," he said quietly. "Just not from this lifetime."

You sat on the edge of the bed, the letter quivering in your hands. “What… What does this mean?” You understood every word—each one seemingly written by your own hand—yet none of it made any sense. The letter read like a fairy tale, speaking of knights and dragons and priests locked in a battle of biblical proportions. Of childhoods spent running barefoot through fields of flowers, of star-crossed young love, of reincarnations and transformations. None of it belonged to you, none of it your story.  

"This…” Sylus tapped a finger to the letter, “… is your future. Our future. Centuries from now, when you would be reborn again in a kingdom called Philos… and have the misfortune of knowing me for the first time."

Holding your rapt attention, he recounted the happier days of your youth—how you’d see his troublemaker self and decide to make him your friend, how you’d sit next to him in class, how you’d tutor him and he’d pay you back with stolen candy. Then under a veil of gloom, he explained the Justiciars’ crusade, how they’d fed him lies when they tore him from his place by your side. How they’d painted you as his betrayer, laughing as bitterness took root in his heart. His voice lost its characteristic confidence as he admitted the worst—he’d believed them without question.  

“I’m what they called a fiend,” He continued, flexing his hand to reveal obsidian scales. “A dragon. They said my kind existed only to tempt humans with their own desires. To corrupt and consume. In my rage and solitude, I only ever proved them right—I was your undoing in every lifetime, a monster who stole away all the lifetimes you should have lived, and I'm here because it is my nature to be greedy...”

He described the Abyss not through vivid imagery, but through the hollow spaces between words. Centuries in darkness, clinging to hatred for a ghost. Then freedom, and his misguided devotion to the woman—a future reincarnation of MC—who had broken his shackles. In his hunger for companionship, he accepted a transaction as love.

And when you had finally found him, he’d rejected you—sought to wound you with his words and hateful glares.

In a world where humans like you could create energy contracts out of thin air and teleport at will, you weren’t exactly taken aback by the fantastical account. But it hurt all the same to find out that, after all, he’d once chosen someone else… The old ache bloomed—not anger, but the ever-present fear of never measuring up.

With careful movements, you set the letter aside on the rumpled covers and reached out, taking his face between your hands. Your thumbs traced the sharp angles of his features—the pronounced cheekbones, the strong jaw with its faint stubble, the faint scar in the corner of his left eye, the slight asymmetry that somehow made the whole arrangement work. These contours felt as if your hands had mapped them before in some half-forgotten dream.

"I've been dreaming about you," you said finally, voice barely audible. "Not normal dreams. These weird flashes that come out of nowhere. Sometimes when I close my eyes, sometimes right in the middle of doing something completely ordinary." Your gaze dropped, suddenly self-conscious. "I see pieces of things—places I've never been, conversations I don't remember having. And there's always this boy with your eyes and this unbearable sadness, carrying something so heavy it makes my chest hurt just to see it. If I could somehow reach through time and take that pain from him, I would. In a heartbeat. The person who wrote this letter—if she is indeed a version of myself, I’m sure she would have felt the same…”

Sylus leaned into your touch like someone who'd been wandering in the cold for too long. His eyes closed briefly, surrendering to the moment. His breath hitched, lips grazing your palm in a kiss that felt like worship. When he looked at you again, the unvarnished intensity in his gaze was startling.

"That was me," he said, his usually confident voice stripped bare. "Those aren't just dreams, sweetheart. They're memories bleeding through the fabric of time—echoes bouncing back at you." He swallowed hard, fingers digging into his palms. "I was such an idiot. I let anger cloud everything. When things got complicated, I chose the easy path—suspicion instead of trust. I believed the worst without giving you a chance to explain. I-I don’t deserve forgiveness. But you need to know—I love you. I’ve loved every version of you, even when rage buried it."

The weight on your chest lessened at his confession, though wariness still lingered in your eyes. "And if she—that future version of me—hadn't died for you and your lover... would you even be here now, asking for forgiveness?" you pressed, finding unexpected strength in your voice. "Are you here because of who I am right now, or because you're chasing after some ghost of who I'll become? Because I can't compete with a memory, especially one I haven't even made yet."

Sylus moved his hands to cover yours where they still rested against his face. His grip was firm but gentle. "My love," he said, his voice carrying authority earned through hard experience, yet tempered by unmistakable fondness, "It’s always been you. Not some idealized version I've built up in my head, not the woman you might become tomorrow or years from now. In every life, you remain true to yourself—there’s no changing that frustrating stubbornness, that relentless determination, that self-sacrifice that scares the hell out of me because I understand it too well. Your will matches mine, sweetie—strong enough to bend reality when you need to. But underneath all that strength is a compassion that completely disarms me."

His words, while sincere, had yet to dispel years of insecurity. "But what if I do change? What if time turns me into someone different—someone who stops taking risks, who loses her edge, who gets cautious and boring? Will you still want me then?"

Despite it all, a rare, genuine smile broke across Sylus's face, warmth radiating from him as he teased, "If you ever stopped being stubborn, I might actually get a full night's sleep instead of lying there making mental lists of all the dangerous situations you might have thrown yourself into." His expression grew serious again, hands moving to frame your face. "But yes, absolutely yes. I'll love you regardless of how you change, because at your core, you'll always be you."

You exhaled slowly, letting the tension leave your shoulders, although you held back from saying everything you felt. "I need time," you started again, biting your lip. "But... I think I want you to stay."

Sylus's smile held the patience of centuries. "I've survived thousands of years with nothing but your absence. I can handle a little more waiting."

"And if—" You dared not believe this wasn’t too good to be true just yet, "If I eventually decide that this—us—isn't what I want?" The question hung between you two, fragile and solemn.

Pain flashed across his face before settling into something more complex—a mixture of resignation and honesty. "Then I'd respect that choice, even if it destroyed me. Your happiness isn't something I'm willing to negotiate. It never has been. Having you in my life in any way—friend, ally, even occasional enemy—is infinitely better than not having you at all."

At long last, relief washed through you, temporarily silencing the doubts that had been circling in your mind. You stood slowly, suddenly aware of how every muscle in your body ached. "I should clean up," you said, glancing down at your disheveled state—clothes wrinkled and stained, skin marked with the evidence of recent chaos. "Can I use your shower?"

The change in Sylus was immediate and fascinating—vulnerability retreating behind his usual charismatic charm. A playful smirk transformed his features, lightening the atmosphere. "We could share," he suggested, mischief in his eyes. "Save water. Very environmentally conscious."

Your face flushed hot, embarrassment momentarily overriding exhaustion. "Absolutely not!" You shrieked, taking a step back. "Separate showers or I'm sleeping in the hallway."

Sylus laughed. ”Fine," he conceded with an exaggerated nod. "The twins will leave some clothes for you outside the door."

Within the confines of Sylus's ridiculously luxurious bathroom, you surrendered to the perfect pressure of the shower. Steam rose around you in comforting clouds; your muscles gradually relaxed, exhaustion seeping into every part of you until you found yourself drifting, consciousness fading as you leaned against the cool tile wall.

A gentle knock jarred you back to awareness. "Kitten?" Sylus's voice came through the door, concern evident. "You okay in there? It's been almost an hour."

"I'm fine," you called back, hurriedly shutting off the water. "Just... zoned out."

Wrapping yourself in his robe—an outrageously soft thing that swallowed your much smaller frame—you cracked the door open cautiously. Finding the hallway empty, you padded barefoot back to his bedroom, relieved to see Sylus at a distance, absorbed in an old book at the coffee table. A small lamp created a pool of warm light around him, leaving the rest of the spacious room in comfortable shadow.

The promised clothes waited on the bed—simple pajamas that looked suspiciously new, price tags still dangling. You dressed quickly, fighting a smile at how Sylus's apparently endless resources extended even to spontaneous wardrobe needs. The bed called to you with irresistible appeal. Without overthinking it, you slid under the covers, sighing as your body sank into the mattress.

A while later, Sylus emerged with a towel slung low on his hips, water trailing the notched scars along his abdomen.

You lay curled on your side, one arm tucked beneath your head, the other splayed across his pillow. The new PJs hung loose on your frame, the collar slipping to reveal the pale curve of your shoulder. Your breaths came slow, deep, the rhythm syncing with the distant roll of thunder.

He stood motionless, watching.

You looked younger in sleep, the relentless worries of your waking hours smoothed away. Your lashes cast delicate shadows on your cheeks, and your lips parted faintly. Sylus’s throat constricted. This, he realized, was a privilege he’d never earned: to see you without the walls you’d constructed around yourself, to exist in the quiet bliss of your trust.

He approached silently, bare feet sinking into the plush rug. His fingers itched to trace the slope of your jaw, to relearn the map of you face, but he clenched his fists. Let her rest.

The mattress dipped as he slid beneath the covers. You stirred, a soft murmur escaping you as you rolled toward him, drawn by instinct or latent memory. Sylus froze, half-expecting you to wake up. Instead, your forehead pressed against his collarbone, your exhale warm on his skin.

“...’s cold,” you mumbled, half-conscious.

A laugh rumbled in his chest, quiet and disbelieving. He tugged the duvet higher, tucking it around your shoulders. “Demanding even in sleep, my beloved.”

You didn’t respond, your fingers curling loosely against his sternum.

Sylus wrapped an arm around your waist, anchoring you against him. Your hair tickled his chin, smelling of his shampoo—cedar and smoke, foreign yet fitting. Outside, the storm lashed the N109 Zone’s skyline, rain sheeting against the windows. Inside, your warmth seeped into him, thawing centuries of frost.

He pressed his lips to your forehead, lingering. “Sleep,” he whispered. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

When dawn crept through the curtains hours later, Sylus was still awake—eyes sharp, senses tuned to every shift in your breathing. Let the city burn. Let the Hunters scheme. For now, the world could wait.

Part 10

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 8

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate only 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Angst, Graphic Descriptions of Injuries, Violence, Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: Ahhhh I feel like the last chapter was my fav/peak, but the show must go on if we want to see these two not be sad for once lol. As always, thanks for reading!!! You are the best!

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo, @everythingistaken00, @lucifers-silhouette, @curryexpress

You counted the IV drips to avoid thinking about the phantom ache in your abdomen. Sylus’s absence was a live wire in the room—he’d left hours ago with a promise to “fix things,” hands clenched into fists as he vanished into the rain-soaked night. Now, only the twins remained: Luke sprawled in a chair, tossing a knife between his palms, and Kieran leaning against the window, his gaze tracking the neon smears of Linkon’s skyline.

“He’ll be back,” Luke said, apropos of nothing. He’d been filling the silence with chatter about everything except the one thing you wanted to discuss—Sylus. The way he’d looked at you—like you might dissolve into ash if he blinked. The kiss that tasted more like an apology than a promise.

“I know,” you said absent-mindedly, flexing your fingers against the starch-stiff sheets. Your body felt foreign, stitched back together by hands that didn’t care if the seams held.

Kieran snorted. “He’ll be back angrier. You should’ve seen him when he found Marcus. Looked like he wanted to melt the city block.” His voice softened. “He’s… not good at losing things he cares about.”

Things. You bit your tongue. You knew you weren’t a thing, but the word needled you anyway. Sylus had secrets coiled tighter than the scars on his knuckles, and you’d let him kiss you without thinking too much about the consequences.

Luke grinned, oblivious. “Remember when he dragged that Hunter—what’s her name, MC?—back to base last month? Thought she’d pissed him off, but nah. He helped her. Even let her use the private comms line. Real cozy, if you ask me.”

Your stomach churned, a sharp twinge of pain. MC. Your colleague’s face flashed in your mind—flawless, efficient, the Association’s golden girl. The same MC who’d clung to Sylus like a lover at the retreat, their heads bent too close.

Kieran shot Luke a glare sharp enough to draw blood. “It wasn’t like that. She needed to acquire an Aether Core. Business.”

“Business with benefits,” Luke singsonged, twirling the knife. “Kieran here tried to play wingman. Kept offering her drinks from the boss’s stash—single-malt betrayal, aged 20 years.”

The machines monitoring your vitals beeped louder, and your barely-healed scar burned. Stupid. You’d let Sylus cradle your broken body like it mattered, while he’d been playing savior to MC all along. You wanted to believe the sincerity in his eyes when he spoke to you, wanted to let the warmth of his embrace soothe your aching heart—except you’d been in this position before, with boys that strung you along while waiting on the true object of their desire, and you should have known better.

“He’s been single forever,” Luke added, kicking his boots onto the bed rail. “We figured he’d die alone, muttering about ‘legacies’ or whatever. But you—” He pointed the knife at you, grinning. “You’ve got him sprung. He’ll raze the city for you. It’s kinda sweet.”

Your laugh came out brittle. “Sweet.” The word curdled. You wanted to give Sylus the benefit of a doubt,  but already your mind was painting a vivid picture of him and MC in some shadow-drenched armory, trading favors and flattery. How many times had he ‘helped’ MC? How many times had he lied?

Kieran stiffened, reading your silence. “It’s not what you think. Sylus doesn’t—he doesn’t connect with people. Not since…” He trailed off, guilt flickering in his eyes.

Not since whoever broke him first, you filled in. You weren’t a stranger to this kind of story—you'd played a supporting role in them, contorting yourself to fit inside a mould of someone’s fancy. Knew the way loneliness fossilized into spite. But it didn’t matter. You were just another soul orbiting Sylus’s supernova, burning yourself up for glimpses of light.

“I need air,” you lied, swinging your legs over the bed. The movement tore a gasp from your throat, but you welcomed the pain—more palatable than humiliation.

“Whoa, bad idea—” Luke reached for you, but you shook your head.

“I’m fine,” you repeated the same phrase you’d given to co-workers after a horrendous mission. Your reflection in the window was enough to call your bluff: pallid, hollow-eyed, like a ghost clinging to borrowed time. Beyond the glass, Linkon’s towers speared the clouds, indifferent to the girl who’d survived a bullet but couldn’t survive a half-revealed truth.

Kieran hovered, tense. “He’s not with MC. He’s just… bad at letting go of the past.”

You toddled over to the window and pressed your forehead to the cold glass. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” you said quietly.

Luke whistled. “Yeah, no. Don’t think—stab. It won’t hurt him anyways.”

You almost chuckled, almost let it go. Your breath fogged the glass, and you closed your eyes. You’re not a second choice, you told yourself, trying to be the level-handed adult that you usually were. Yet the words rang hollow as your phone buzzed—a notification from the Hunter’s database. Your ID flashed alongside a case file: Internal Investigation Ongoing.

The bodega reeked of stale grease and spilt beer. Sylus sat in the upstairs dining room—a grimy, cluttered cubbyhole with cracked vinyl booths and a flickering hologlass menu advertising “Authentic New Mumbai Curry.” Below, gang enforcers in leather jackets slurped noodles alongside low-ranking Hunters. No one spoke, merely signalled: a tapped cigarette pack, a half-finished beer left at a specific angle, three fingers wrapped around a phone. Sylus watched it all through the smudged lens of a folded newspaper, its pages littered with pinprick holes—a low-tech surveillance aid he’d perfected over the years.

A gangster at Table 3 scratched his neck twice. A Hunter at the counter adjusted his belt. Seconds later, a data chip slid into the condiment tray. Sylus memorized the exchange, his mind cross-referencing faces with the Onychinus payroll. Third precinct. Bribed. Reliable. He sipped his tepid coffee, the bitterness grounding him. Dragons hoarded secrets as fiercely as gold, and this rot—this quiet, transactional rot—was his kingdom.

His earpiece crackled to life. 

Kieran’s voice emerged through the static: “Boss, Marcus got out. No trail yet, but we’re working on it.”

Sylus’s thumb dented the paper. Impossible. He’d sealed Marcus in at the cannery, welded the locks himself. Only three people knew the location. Traitor? His pupils slithered into dagger-thin crescents before he forced them human again.

Another voice came through on the comms channel. This time, it was Luke, infinitely more sheepish than his twin: “Uh… Boss, don’tkillmeplease but Y/N just checked out of the hospital… Couldn’t stop her because it’s her deci—”

Sylus stood abruptly, chair screeching. The Hunter at the counter flinched, hand drifting to his sidearm. Sylus tossed a crumpled bill on the table—exact change, untraceable—and descended the stairs. Outside, light rain misted the streets, melting holographic ads for Voss’s reelection campaign into neon sludge. He pulled down his cap, becoming another shadow in Linkon’s stream of pedestrians.

Half a block away, a bar’s wall-screen blared an obnoxious jingle before cutting to a press conference. Councilman Voss materialized, his smile a scalpel’s edge. The crowd inside the bar paused, noodles dangling mid-slurp. Sylus lingered in the doorway, rain dripping down his neck.

“—and let me be clear,” Voss said, steepling manicured fingers, “the Hunter’s Association has been compromised by corrupt individuals willing to sell their dignity for the highest bid.” The bar erupted in jeers. A bespectacled lady shook her head in disapproval. “Effective immediately, we will arrest those who’ve exploited their power for personal gain. Starting with Y/N.”

Your face flashed on-screen: badge photo, fresh-faced and bright-eyed. Sylus’s claws unsheathed, shredding his gloves. He flexed them under his coat, scales rippling up his wrists.

Voss leaned closer to the camera, his eyes glinting with curated outrage. “This woman conspired with Onychinus, the most dangerous syndicate in the N109 Zone, to sabotage our city’s security. Evidence will be released—”

The broadcast died, replaced by a toothpaste ad. The bar groaned, resuming its symphony of clattering bowls and gossip. Sylus parsed the room: a Hunter at the back table texting rapidly; a street vendor outside packing up, fear in the twitch of her hands. Panic spreads faster than fire, he thought. And Voss had just lit a match.

He strode into an alley, pulling up an encrypted map on his phone. Red dots marked Marcus’s known contacts—arms dealers, black-market surgeons, a disgraced lab tech—all clustered near the N109 docks. But Marcus wouldn’t run to them. He’d run to whoever freed him. Sylus zoomed in on the cannery’s blueprints, searching for weaknesses.

A rat, he realized.

Security footage from the cannery’s exterior showed a thermal blur the size of a small dog slipping through a vent an hour before Marcus escaped. Sylus enhanced the image: a rodent, its cybernetic spine glinting, something clamped in its teeth. Voss’s pet, most likely—the councilman had a known fondness for bio-augmented pests.

Two problems now braided together: Voss moving publicly against you, and Marcus armed with whatever lies Voss fed him. A perfect shit storm.

Steeling his expression into one of indifference, he texted the twins: Scrub her apartment. Burn anything tying her to me. Then find Marcus—he’ll head for the sewage tunnels under Grid 7.

Luke responded in an instant: You sure?

Sylus loved the boys like his own brothers, but there were days when he wanted to wring their necks. Yes, he typed back.

A beat. Then:

A notification from Kieran: And you?

Sylus weighed his options, staring at your face still glowing on the bar’s dormant screen. I will do anything for her, he thought, pocketing his phone before melting back into the crowd.

The rain fell in sheets, sharp and metallic, as if Linkon itself were weeping rust. Your boots clicked on the cracked asphalt, your breath coming up short beneath the weight of Sylus’s oversized jacket. The fabric swallowed your frame, its sleeves hanging past your fingertips, but it smelled like him—sandalwood and amber, a scent that made you feel safe despite your conflicted feelings towards its owner. Neon signs blared overhead, their fractured light staining the puddles with garish hues of cyan and magenta. Councilman Voss’s face loomed on every screen, his voice a honeyed taunt. “Justice is not negotiable,” he declared, pixels glitching around his too-perfect smile.

Your phone vibrated non-stop:

Mom: You’ve ruined us. Turn yourself in. Captain Jenna: HQ now. Don’t make this worse. Unknown: How much did those thugs pay you, traitor?

You silenced it. The Association’s spire gleamed three blocks away, its glass façade like a beacon in the dark. Just get to somebody—MC, Tara, Simone, Andrew, even Xavier. Explain. Make them listen.

A delivery drone buzzed too close, its camera lens whirring as it zoomed in on your face. You snatched a brick from a pile of rubble—discarded remnants of a demolished tenement—and hurled it. The drone shattered, sparks fizzling in the rain.

The effort alone drained you, and you leaned against the alley’s graffiti-tagged wall, breathing through the ache in your side. It seemed that Sylus’s jacket would have to go—you needed your arms free in case another threat surfaced—and you made a mental note to buy him a replacement as you shrugged it off, leaving it folded on the ground.

A flicker of movement.

Two men stepped into the alley’s mouth, their postures coiled. The taller one held a police-issue taser baton, its prongs crackling faintly. The shorter one adjusted his brass knuckles. Bounty hunters. Not Voss’s elite. Desperate freelancers chasing the reward that Voss had no doubt put on your head.

You summoned a shimmering, translucent dagger with your Evol. It wavered, its edges dissolving like mist. But it was the best you could do given how fresh blood was seeping through your shirt.

The man with the taser charged. You sidestepped, slashing at his wrist. The blade grazed skin, drawing a hiss, but dissolved before it could bite deeper. The second man swung at you with his fist, and you ducked, pushing through the soreness in your limbs. You returned the favor with a jab, your knuckles connected with his jaw. He staggered, swearing.

A third figure appeared—a woman in a rain-slicked motorcycle jacket.  “Don’t make this messy,” she said, her voice flat. “Voss wants you alive.”

You backed up, your heel slipping on wet concrete. The dagger flickered back into existence, smaller now, could hardly be called a shiv. The woman tried to grab you by the collar—you cried out, driving the blade into her shoulder. She jerked back, letting loose a string of colorful expletives.

One of the other assailants pounced, taser crackling. You pivoted again, but the prongs caught your hip, the electricity locking your muscles. You collapsed, seeing stars, and he swung a steel-capped boot at your ribs. In desperation, you blocked with a half-formed force field, the impact driving you into the wall.

Pathetic, you felt shame rise like bile up your throat. All these years of training, can’t even shake off a few common thugs.

The self-loathing hurt worse than the taser and the boot combined, and you squeezed your eyes shut, forcing yourself to calm down and work out your next moves.

Then the air around you warped.

Crimson-black mist coiled around your wrist, subtle as a pulse yet strong enough to bolster your Evol like wind filling the sails of a ship. A weapon materialized within your grasp, responding to your unbending will—a claymore, its golden core threaded with veins of black and red. Stable. Lethal.

The brute moved to strike again. This time, you parried, the blade shearing through his calf. Blood splattered across your face, and you watched him stumble backwards, screaming his head off.

Seeing their comrade permanently maimed, the other two rushed into action, only to be caught by tendrils of mist. Sylus dropped from the fire escape above, silver hair plastered to his forehead thanks to the rain, eyes burning like smelted iron. His Evol lashed around him, alive and feral. It crushed the taser baton to scrap and coiled around the woman’s throat, lifting her off the ground.

“Run,” warned Sylus through bared teeth, the word vibrating with something not entirely human. Nodding their heads furiously, the bounty-hunters slunk back into whatever hellhole they had crawled out of.

Sylus didn’t give chase. He knelt beside you, the mist dissolving into the night. His hands hovered over your wound, with a barely perceptible tremor. Blood soaked through your bandages, staining his fingertips. In the semi-darkness, you thought you saw a scowl mar his handsome face. He gently wiped your face clean of your attacker’s blood and confirmed what you already knew, “You’re bleeding.”

Your face burned—you’d come to the conclusion that he simply had that unfortunate effect on you—and you feebly pushed his hand away. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” He stated plainly, voice edged with barely contained wrath.

You shoved herself upright, expending the last of your strength just to look him in the eye. “What am I to you?” You bit out—if you were to cry now, at least the rain would conceal your tears. You weren’t skating on the edge of unconsciousness this time—not yet, anyways—and you were all the more confused. All I am is a burden. That familiar feeling of shame still hadn’t subsided. If anything, having him save your life twice over the span of a week was quite a blow to your ego as a Hunter.

He didn’t answer, because he wasn’t sure he could keep a lid on his anger if he had. Instead, he slid an arm beneath your knees and lifted you. His heartbeat thudded against your ear, and you felt like a child who was in for a lot of lecturing.

Part 9

[bwennie]

I don’t sit on public transport with my headphones on, imagining I’m in a movie. I sit on public transport with my headphones on, imagining Sylus x Non Mc!Reader from my fic in a movie. Like I’m seeing montages with MIIA’s Dynasty as the background music.

Catch me learning animation in a hyperfixation-induced frenzy.

[bwennie]

Angel of Her Own Making | Part 7

Synopsis: You were meant to reincarnate 10 times. In your second lifetime, you met and befriended a dragon who was mistaken for a little boy, who eventually learned to resent you for something you never did. Only after you'd spent the rest of your reincarnations trying to save him, ultimately dying for the sake of his happiness, did Sylus realize the enormity of his mistakes. Now, having traveled back in time to your first life where you'd never met him, the dragon wanted nothing more than to make amends...

Content Warning: Angst, Graphic Descriptions of Injuries, Violence, Reader is not default MC, use of Y/N

Author's Note: Y'all keep surprising me every week - I didn't expect this series to be gather so many reactions! Thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy!!!

Parts: (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

Taglist: @sillyfreakfanparty, @exactlysizzlingdonut, @sylustoru, @nayukiyukihira, @sinnamon-bunn, @mangooes, @codedove, @vigtore, @wrimaira, @bxtchopolis, @phisen, @schrodingerskimdokja, @miffysoo

The car sped through the night, but Sylus didn’t hear the engine. All he heard was the ragged rhythm of your breath, each gasp sharper than a knife. Your blood seeped through his fingers, hot and accusing, and suddenly he wasn’t in the car anymore.

He was kneeling on the cracked, blood-soaked tile of the central square, a thousand years gone, cradling your body as rain slashed his face. Your armor was shattered, your eyes glassy, your hand still clutching the hilt of the claymore you’d used to carve a path through the Justiciars. “Please,” he’d begged, his voice raw as the wound in your chest, “I’m sorry. Please come back.” But you’d already left him.

“Sylus—” Your voice snapped him back. Your hand twitched weakly against his chest, smearing blood over his shirt. He stared at it, the crimson stark against white fabric, and for a heartbeat, he saw her blood—the you of another life, the one he’d failed.

“Faster, Luke,” Sylus ordered rigidly. The younger man obeyed, the car lurching forward. Sylus had acted as soon as he saw your Hunter’s Watch go offline; he’d sent Mephisto to trail you, and through the crow’s eyes, he’d seen everything happen. He abandoned a meeting and went straight to you, as fast as he could, and yet—

Your head rolled against his shoulder, your skin ashen. The wound in your abdomen pulsed with every heartbeat, and Sylus pressed harder, his palm slick with blood. Your blood. Always your blood.

Gunshot wound, bleeding out, stay awake—you chanted the words in your head, a mantra to keep the darkness at bay. But the cold was creeping in, numbing your limbs. You were losing blood too fast; just mere seconds ago, you had a series of questions to ask—now the only thought you were able to hold onto was: Sylus was shaking.

You forced your eyes open. His face loomed above you, pale and stricken, his red eyes wild. You’d never imagined seeing him like this. Not the legendary crime lord whose very name struck fear into the hearts of the most hardened felons. This man was raw, fractured, his hands trembling as they pressed against your wound.

“Look at me,” he demanded, his voice cracking. “Darling, look at me.”

You tried. God, you tried. But your eyelids were leaden, and the ache in your chest had nothing to do with the bullet. “M’here,” you slurred, forcing a weak smile. “Stop… yelling.”

He wanted to scream. This was the same stubborn tilt of your chin, the same reckless defiance that had gotten you killed lifetimes ago. “I’ll be back by dawn,” you’d told him then, too, right before you’d walked into the Justiciars’ trap.

“You didn’t come back,” he hissed, his hands shaking as he brushed hair matted with blood from your face. “You never did. Why do you keep doing this?”

Doing what? You wanted to ask. Surviving? But the words dissolved into a cough, blood bitter on your tongue.

His grip tightened, his fingers tangling in your hair. “Stay awake. Stay awake.”

You wanted to laugh. Or cry. Sylus was begging you, begging, like your life mattered more than his own. It made no sense. You were friends, maybe something fuzzier around the edges, but not this. Not the way his voice broke when he said your name, like it was a prayer he’d worn thin.

You didn’t answer, didn’t have enough air in your lungs to form the words—and panic clawed up his throat.

Memory tore through him: Your body limp in his arms, your warmth leaching into the cold ground. The way your fingers had felt slack in his, the way he’d screamed your name until his voice shattered— “Y/N!”

You jerked awake, unaware you’d drifted. His face was inches from yours, tears streaking through the blood smeared on his cheeks. He’s crying. For me?

In the front seat, Luke and Kieran exchanged a glance. They’d never seen Sylus unravel like this—their Boss who’d gut men without blinking now quivering like a child.

“You’re… scaring them,” you murmured, your gaze drifting to the twins. You didn’t even know them, but their anxiety was evident enough in the way they dared not make a sound.

“I don’t care,” Sylus growled. He cupped your face, forcing you to meet his eyes. “You don’t get to die. Not again. Not again.”

You frowned, confusion swimming in your dimming gaze. “Again?”

He choked. How could he explain? The centuries of guilt, the way your death had carved a hole in him that even time couldn’t mend. “You left,” he whispered, the words raw. “You left, and I—”

A sob ripped from him, ugly and unchecked. Your eyes widened, one hand lifting weakly to his cheek. “Sylus…?”

He caught your wrist, pressing your palm to his face. Your skin was cold. Too cold.

“Don’t,” he pleaded, the last of his composure crumbling. “Don’t go where I can’t follow. Not this time.”

This time? You couldn’t begin to understand. You two had only known each other a few months. But the way he looked at you—like he’d spent lifetimes searching—made your chest ache.

“Silly… man,” you managed, your voice a thread.

In the front seat, Luke white-knuckled the wheel, Kieran’s usually stoic face etched with shock. 

The car swerved, and pain blazed through you. You gasped, your fingers clawing at Sylus’s shirt. “S-sorry…”

“Don’t you dare apologize,” he growled, crushing you to his chest. “You fight, sweetie. You fight like hell.”

Why? The question barely made it through the murkiness of your brain. Why do you care?

But the words wouldn’t come. The cold was winning, your thoughts fraying at the edges. Yet even as darkness beckoned, you felt it—the ghost of a memory, hazy and warm. Wings. Obsidian scales. A boy with sad eyes, whispering your name like a secret.

The car rounded another sharp corner, jolting you both. Sylus snarled at Luke, “If she dies, I’ll burn this city to the ground.”

Despite it all, you laughed—a wet, broken sound. “Drama… king.”

But your eyes were drifting shut, your body sagging against his.

No. No no no—

“Y/N!” He shook you, his vision blurring. “Open your eyes! Look at me!”

You didn’t stir.

In the silence, Sylus froze. The world narrowed to the stillness of your chest, the blood on his hands, the silence.

Then—

A whisper. “Sylus…”

Your eyelashes fluttered. You were still here. Still here.

He pulled you impossibly closer, burying his face in your hair. “I’ll kill them all,” he vowed, his voice unsteady with tears and fury. “Every last one who hurt you.”

“Don’t,” you breathed. “Just… stay.”

He kept holding you, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against yours. Outside, the city blurred into nothing. All that mattered was your weight in his arms—alive, alive, alive—and the suffocating fear that this time, he wouldn’t be fast enough. Again.

Luke tossed him a file. “Councilman Voss’s dirty. Arms deals, bribes—the whole nine.”  

Sylus flipped through the documents, unmasked claws pricking the paper. “Burn it all.”  

“Including Voss?”  

“Especially Voss.”  

Luke whistled. “You’re getting sentimental, boss.” 

Sylus glared, but the kid was already jogging to the car. He stared at the hospital’s glowing windows, imagining your steady breaths, your stubborn smile. 

She’d forgive you, a traitorous voice whispered. She always does.

But forgiveness wasn’t the problem. It was the cost.  

His phone buzzed—a text from an unknown number: Back off, or the Hunter dies next time.  

Sylus crushed the phone in his fist, red mist rippling up his arm.

Rain lashed the abandoned cannery, the air thick with the stench of rust and rotting fish. Sylus kicked open the door, his human facade fraying. Marcus cowered behind a stack of crates, eyes wide.

“P-please! It was Voss! He wanted her dead!”

Sylus’s vision bled an ominous crimson. Scales slithered up his neck, claws elongating as he lunged. “You shot her.”

“I didn’t—!”

His fist connected with Marcus’s jaw, bone crunching under scaled knuckles. “You left her to bleed.”

“Please—!”

He pinned Marcus to the wall, claws piercing his shoulders. “Tell Voss she’s dead,” he snarled, fangs glinting. “Or I’ll carve his lies from your throat.”

The hospital room smelled of antiseptic, the plastic vase on the windowsill holding wilted sunflowers that you would have appreciated. You yourself lay motionless, your torso bandaged where the bullet had torn through muscle and viscera—grade III liver laceration, the surgeon had recited, as if cataloging parts of a machine. Sylus stood rigid by the bed, his knuckles white around the bed rail.

You’re still breathing. This time, he was fast enough—just about.

The heart monitor beeped a steady rhythm. Your face was pale, your lips chapped, your hair tangled from hours of fitful sleep. Sylus felt as though a hand had closed around his throat. Before him was the woman who’d laughed over a mocha in a dim café weeks ago, your cheeks flushed as you’d teased him for ordering black coffee. “Too bitter,” you’d said, pushing your mug toward him. “Try mine.” He’d sipped the sugary drink, revolted, and you’d laughed—a sound he’d rewound time to hear again.

The door slid open. Luke leaned in, placing a paper cup onto the side table. “Marcus is holed up at the old cannery. Kieran’s got eyes on him.”

Sylus didn’t turn. “Keep him there.” “You want him alive?” “For now.” Luke lingered, eyeing you. “She’s tougher than she looks.”

The tick in Sylus’s jaw was enough to cue the young man’s exit. Alone again, he sank into the chair, his hands curling into fists. Scales prickled beneath his skin, threatening to breach the surface. Control. You need control.

Eventually, you stirred, pain cutting through the morphine haze. Your eyes opened slowly, adjusting to the harsh overhead lights before landing on Sylus slouched in the chair beside you, a paper cup in his hand.

“Mocha,” he said, his voice even huskier than usual. “Decaf, two pumps of caramel. Just how you like it.”

You blinked, wincing as you shifted. For some reason, you were glad he was the first person you saw upon waking up. Your lips quirked up, “Mocha, huh? How ever could you have known?”

Because I memorized the way you smile when the whipped cream sticks to your lip. He shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

His dejected look was a grim reminder. You had been shot, and he’d shown up just in time to carry you to safety. You had been too weak to fight your way out. Disappointment in your own incompetence sinking into the pit of your stomach, you cleared your throat, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

He smirked, masking the tremor in his hands. “You’re paranoid.”

“And you’re evasive.” You reached for the cup, your fingers brushing his. A wave of heat crashed through him, and he jerked back, scales licking up his forearm like wildfire. Your close call with death had thrown him off-kilter, and the dragon was no longer heeding his commands, rising out of the depths of his soul to protect its most precious possession.

Of course, all of that didn’t escape your notice. “That’s… new.” Damn it. Sylus stood abruptly, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Hallucinations. Side effect of the drugs.” “Bullshit.” He turned toward the door. “Rest. I’ll send a nurse.” “Sylus.” He paused, pulse roaring. “What’s wrong?” I’m terrified. Of losing you. Of you seeing me for the traitorous fool that I am.

“Are you okay?” You didn’t let it go, though your tone was less hostile—more worried. The sight of him grief-stricken and pleading had stuck with you, and you were half-afraid you’d done something wrong.

He stood stock-still, watching as you reached out, your fingers grazing the rough ridges on his knuckles. “Does it hurt?”

The words shook him. In every life, you kept insisting on not seeing the monster before your eyes.

“No—”

“It’s pretty…” You murmured, almost to yourself, admiring the color of his scales—charcoal, with deep red marbling, like molten lava. 

He let out a breathless laugh, leaning back against the bedside chair. “Sweetie, you should worry about yourself first.”

Surprise crossed your features before you schooled your face into a lopsided smile that didn’t reach your eyes. “I know… I must look quite a mess…”

He saw it then—the way your shoulders hunched, the flicker of self-doubt in your eyes. He’d sworn he would never again be the cause of your pain, but it looked like he was failing miserably. Elbows on his knees, he gingerly lifted your chin. “What I meant was you got hurt—bad. The doctor recommended you avoid strenuous activity for the next month and a half, so no twisting, no heavy lifting, no straining and definitely no fighting anyone.”

If how your body felt was anything to go by, you figured your physical appearance must be haggard. And he was too close, just like how he’d been in the car before you’d blacked out from the blood loss. Your wrist still felt sore from when Marcus’s cronies stomped on it to destroy your Watch, and you had no idea if anyone at the Association had searched for you. At any rate, it appeared that neither your colleagues nor Sylus had alerted your family, for which you were grateful.

Looking anywhere but at Sylus, you caught sight of the sunflowers on the window sill. It made you smile, before you realized that you’d never once told him about your favorite flowers. It might be a coincidence but… “In the car, when I was—you know, fading,” you ventured, rubbing your wrist as you fumbled for words. “You said some strange things…”

“Did I?” Sylus feigned innocence, although he knew fully well that you had a memory like a steel trap.  “How’d you find me?” “I have my ways.”

“I’m going to need more than that from you, Sylus,” you rolled your eyes, but your gaze was kind—too kind. You wrapped your fingers around his hand that still lingered by your chin, leveling him with the best puppy-eyes you had. “You looked… distraught. And I can’t help but feel like it was my fault.”

“You blame yourself too much,” he remarked. And you blame me too little. He held your face in his large palm, his thumb grazing ever-so-slightly over your bruised cheek. The whole world gave way to the warmth of your skin beneath his touch. “And for the record, you look beautiful. You always have,” he closed the gap between you, igniting sparks deep in your chest as your lips touched.

He kissed you.

It was clumsy, desperate—a collision of guilt and longing. Your lips were chapped, your hands clammy as they slid into his hair. 

He expected you to pull back, to recoil at the heat of his skin, the inhuman sharpness of his teeth. Instead, you leaned into him, your sigh a balm against centuries of solitude.

When you broke apart, his claws had pricked the sheets, shredding the linen. 

You chuckled contentedly, your forehead resting against his. “Now I absolutely have to know,” you teased, nodding to the ruined fabric.

He huffed, scales fading as his pulse steadied. “You’re impossible.” “And you’re stuck with me.”

He took the opportunity to admire you once more—the flecks of gold in your eyes, the stubborn set of your jaw, the bandages that couldn’t hide your fire. She’s here. She’s real.

He caressed your cheekbone. “I’m not… good at this.” “At what? Kissing?” “At trusting.” You smiled, bittersweet. “Then let me.”

Part 8