Correction to the link sourced by OP! The Artemis II team did not take these photographs. These were shot by a Ukrainian student named Ildar Ibatullin sometime in the last year or so. Furthermore, the Moon does not have these actual colors in reality; Ildar does a lot of post processing and compositing to saturate the colors in order to artistically represent the mineral composition of the lunar surface.
If you would like to see photos taken by the astronauts aboard Artemis II (and more!), here is the repository that NASA is keeping.
Content: fluff, little kisses, cuddles, and laughter, a sprinkle of angst
Word count: ~800
Author’s note: based on this request
This was nice to write and I excuse myself in advance for the angsty start 🫣
Proof read again by the comma queen herself @dat-silvers-girl 🩷
Masterlist
Rain falls heavily against the windows of Rafayel’s Home at Whitesand Bay, the lightning in the sky illuminating everything in an ethereal glow as the heavy downpour veils everything in twilight.
The man of the house is sitting in front of a giant canvas, unmoving. As if he’s caught in time.
You walk over to him, throwing one of his favorite blankets over his shoulder from behind. A heavy sherpa blanket, covered with a print of flying blue fish on a light rose background.
You don’t know what put him in that numb, apathic mood, but as soon as your hands cradle his handsome face, the life returns into the unique ocean eyes of your boyfriend.
“Everything alright, Fishie?” you smile at him, trying to sound lighthearted, hiding the worry that enveloped you as soon as you entered his house for a cozy afternoon. Rafayel was like this since your arrival and didn’t even seem to notice your entry.
A sudden double blink, lashes fluttering like butterflies and his lips move into a half-curved grin. “You’re here.” and then, as he recognized your question with a second of delay “I’m fine.” but the smile doesn’t help to erase your worries. It’s tinged with a kind of sorrow, a grief greater than you can comprehend.
Then a slight confusion hits him, as he gets aware of the blanket thrown around him like a cape. “You brought me a blanket?”
A small giggle escapes you “Where the hell were you with your thoughts?”
Artistic hands ruffle the hair on top of your head, before he gets up from his stool. Fingers then intertwine with yours and guide you towards the large French windows, where some pillows are already thrown into a corner of their frames.
“It’s nothing. But I remember, that I promised you an afternoon date. Right ~? My darling Bodyguard?”
Rafayel sits down and pulls you into his lap, both arms craddling you against his firm chest. The blanket is big enough to host you both in its fluffy covers.
You sigh contentedly, leaning your head against his shoulders. The scent of him gently enters your senses and you close your eyes in delight and comfort. Being in Rafayel’s arms always feels like home. “Yeah, you did. But I guess the stroll on the beach has to wait.” Like on command a lightning strikes, followed by a loud rumble only a few seconds later.
Rafayel buries his nose in your hair, taking in your scent and exhaling like a weight just falls off his shoulders. “The beach can wait.” whispered words as his breath tickles your neck. “But not the time we spend together.” A chaste kiss on the side of your cheek.
Despite the chaotic weather outside, the room inside is serene. And soon after the first shy sunrays peek throught the dark clouds, announcing a wonderful sunset after the rain. And even a rainbow appears where only darkness was minutes before.
You watch the spectacle together with Rafayel, cozied up in his arms, sharing warmth and the simple company of each other.
Soon all the dark clouds have turned into something lighter, but the rain still trickles down against the huge windows. More silent and gentle.
“So, does Mr. Rafayel want to sit here till times end, or are we doing something fun?” Your gaze wanders up to meet his side profile. Your boyfriend is watching the sky like you as his attention wanders back to you. Blue and pink, both colors so different, and yet the most gorgeous combination, one that always makes your heart flutter. It captures you every time, a siren song you can’t resist.
“Yeah, sure.” This time Rafayels smile reaches his unique eyes and “How about we cuddle up in our own hermit shell?”
You can’t help but reciprocate his warm grin as he comes up with an extra idea. “And telling me some more stories about Lemuria and your childhood?”
Now he laughs genuinely, a breathy chuckle you adore with your entire heart.
“Fine.” A kiss to the top of your head “Storyteller Rafayel at your service, cutie.”
Half an hour later and a dozen blankets Rafayel gathered from who knows where in his house, you’re done turning the giant sofa in his living room into an impressive blanket fort. It’s big enough to host you two. You add some final touches like a little battery-driven fish lamp and some snacks.
“Ready! Set! Go!” you exclaim as you start crawling into the fortress. “Loser gets no kisses!”
But you don’t get far, as surprisingly strong hands cradle your waist and pull you back into the lap of your lover. A beaming smile meets you as you’re trapped between his long legs. “Then I can’t lose.” and then you’re trapped by his lips.
“Sha-la-la-la-la-la my, oh, my. Look like the boy too shy, he ain’t gonna kiss the girl. Sha-la-la-la-la-la, ain’t that sad? Ain’t it a shame? Too bad, you gonna miss the girl.”
Rafayel leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed and eyes fixed on you. The way your hips swayed as you tidied your room, hair done up messily and your (his) shirt practically falling off your shoulders. Your back was turned to him but that didn’t stop him from hearing your little giggles as you clumsily danced to the music.
He couldn’t help but grin, fighting the urge to interrupt your peaceful moment. You looked so beautiful, ethereal, glowing against the mundanity of it all. His hands itched for his paintbrush, though he knew he would never be able to truly capture the sight before him, or the way it ignited his heart like the flames that danced across his fingertips.
“Boy, you better do it soon. No time will be better.”
Crossing the room in a few swift strides, Rafayel brought his hands up to rest against your hips, turning you to face him. He pulled you tightly against him, warm breath fanning across your cheeks.
“Raf, what are you doing?” you giggled, grinning brightly.
His gaze was hooded as it flickered between your eyes and your lips. This was why it was all worth it. The small, simple pleasures of life with you, that quiet rhythm, that haven all your own. It was all worth it, because now he had the honor of coming home to you. It was all his.
“Kissing the girl,” he murmured before his soft, warm lips pressed against your own.
You pulled away slowly, tilting your head. “What was that for?”
Rafayel cocked a brow, smug smirk tugging at his lips. “Can’t I kiss my beloved bride?”
You chuckled, shaking your head softly. Rafayel pulled away just slightly, wrapping one arm around your waist and intertwining his other hand with your own. “Dance with me?”
You laid your head on his chest, letting him lead you both into the rhythm of the song. You swayed together, the warmth of him seeping into you. HIs chest rumbled under your head as he softly hummed to the music.
“Don’t try to hide it, how you wanna kiss the girl.”
He glanced down at you, pressing a soft kiss against your hairline. “This is right where you belong,” he whispered. “In my arms, our hearts beating to the same rhythm.” His breath caught, freeing his hand to tilt your chin up. His fingertips were soft, almost featherlight as they cradled your jawline, breath slow against your lips. “Just let me kiss the girl.”
you know what type of angst that i really love for the lads boys?
non-mc!fem!reader thinking that it's practically written in the stars that he (your specific lads boy) is meant to be with mc. it's the way that you perceive how he seems to gravitate towards her, as if there's an invisible pull controlling him, or that he's attached to mc with a string that you can't see—the red string of fate.
unknown to you, that's just your perception.
it's not the same for him.
sure, he treats mc as someone close, as family, as a sister.
but in his heart, there's only you. his mind is filled with you. every breath he inhales, every step he takes, his future, he builds it around you. the longing he has deep inside his chest is for you. he can't imagine having anyone else by his side—it has to be you.
he wants to date you, wants to marry you, wants to fucking grow old with you.
there's only ever been you.
you, you, you.
maybe he doesn't see it at first—how you think that he's meant to be with mc—but when he does? when he catches a glimpse that you reciprocate even an ounce of his feelings back? that your avoidance was due to this? it's all cards on deck.
he's relentlessly pursuing you, and if you push back because you still think that no, this isn't right, he's meant to be with mc... then you're in for a ride. for more chasing. for more courting. for more longing, deep yearning coming from him that you're forced to see that all he has ever wanted and needed is you. get it through your head.
it has always been you.
silly girl, why would he want mc when you're there?
there wasn't an "mc or you?" there weren't options.
it has always been you.
so quit pretending that you don't see how he'd defy fate and destiny themselves just to be able to have you, to hold you in his arms.
let him love you, let him cherish you, let him be yours.
and soon, you know that you do.
hehe, hiii, this is me coping from all the angst fics where lads boys are conflicted between mc and non-mc!reader
The tank exhaled a low, final hiss, followed by the heavy groan of retracting glass. Condensation poured outward in sheets, flooding the floor with a dense mist that caught the red emergency lights and fractured them into ghostly patterns. The air smelled of brine, steel, and something deeper—like the electric hush before a storm.
He hadn't moved yet.
Rafayel remained near the back of the chamber, partially submerged, framed in swirling light and vapor. His body rested in a coil, serpentine tail gathered beneath him in slow, shifting loops. Unlike the dull, utilitarian tones of the lab, he radiated color.
Starlit cobalt shimmered across his long, muscular tail, the fin trailing behind like a banner woven from moonlight and glass. Thin, transparent layers fanned out from the base and tips of his tail, edged in silver that refracted light with every breath he took. The fin was enormous—wide and translucent, nearly iridescent in motion—like the wings of a deep-sea butterfly.
His torso was partially human, yes—but not quite. The symmetry of his musculature, the carved hollows of his ribs and shoulders, seemed engineered by something beyond evolution. His skin shimmered faintly with a sheen like wet obsidian, patterned in soft constellations of bioluminescent freckles that flared in rhythm with his breath. Across his collarbones and down the sides of his ribs, you could see faint silver lines—like delicate circuitry, or scars arranged in sacred geometry.
And then there was his face.
His hair fell long and loose around his shoulders, pale as moonlight—almost silver-blue, but not metallic. Damp strands clung to his cheekbones and collar, framing eyes so luminous they looked inhuman. Not just glowing, but alight with layered color: cerulean at the iris, ringed in radiant silver, and threaded through with fragments of violet. His pupils were slit, reptilian—but there was emotion behind them. Sharp, clear, unwavering.
He tilted his head slightly, water trickling from his hair in slow rivulets.
He was watching you.
You didn’t speak. You didn’t have to.
With a soft motion, he moved forward.
The shift of his tail was mesmerizing—silent and fluid. Water rippled outward from his motion, his fin catching and folding like gossamer. His clawed hands gripped the rim of the tank, pulling him closer, and you saw how his strength was carefully restrained. Muscles flexed under the glow of his bioluminescence, tail tensed with effort, but every movement was measured.
He reached the lip of the tank and paused.
There, at the edge, he hesitated. Not from fear, but from reverence.
This was not just a step into air—it was a crossing into your world. The glass was gone, but what stood between you now wasn’t material. It was the weight of every unspoken moment.
You stepped closer.
He watched you.
And then, with a slow, deliberate motion, Rafayel crossed the threshold.
His body was massive up close. Towering when upright, his tail trailing behind in long arcs, fins brushing the floor. His gills flared briefly, adjusting to the dry air, then sealed shut with a shudder. Droplets clung to the curve of his neck, his shoulders, his lower back. Water glided down his tail, pooling across the floor in reflective silver.
He faltered slightly, the change in weight pulling at him.
You rushed forward.
Before you could reach for him, he reached for you—one hand at your waist, steadying himself. His claws were gentle, curved away from your skin. He leaned forward until his forehead nearly met yours, breath cool against your cheek.
He smelled of ocean and starlight.
“You’re real,” he whispered, voice soft and husky.
Your hand came up to brush his cheek, fingers tracing the edge of a healed scar that curved just beneath his jawline. His skin was smooth there, cooler than yours, lit beneath by shifting hues that pulsed like soft bioluminescence under the surface.
You nodded, voice barely audible. “I’m here.”
His eyes closed for a moment, as if absorbing that truth. His tail coiled beneath him, securing his balance. He was powerful, but grounded. Tethered only by you.
Then the world reasserted itself.
The lab lights flickered violently above you, flashing crimson with every pulse of the lockdown sequence. The air was thick with steam and salt and something deeper—like the breath of a pressure system ready to collapse.
Rafayel’s form glistened under it all, coiled and shimmering. His hair clung to his jaw and neck in soaked strands of silver-blue, his tail heavy and unwieldy behind him on the slick floor, already beginning to dry at the tips. He was fighting gravity with every breath, each movement slower than the last.
“I can’t stay out much longer,” he rasped, voice strained, gills fluttering shallow and fast. You could see it now—the way the dryness was pulling at his skin, the way his bioluminescent markings were dimming.
You crouched beside the floor hatch at the edge of the lab—an old maintenance duct now half-buried under forgotten debris. You had ripped the access plate free minutes earlier, fingers bloodied from the metal, but the tunnel still waited beneath, dark and cold and damp. A drainage pipe, long since disconnected from main circulation, but if your schematics were right...
It led to the open sea.
You twisted the final valve on the manual flood system. With a mechanical groan, water surged into the shaft from below, gurgling and roaring as it fought its way upward through corroded pipework. In seconds, the bottom of the tunnel filled with swirling seawater, black and turbulent, glinting like oil in the emergency lighting.
“This is it,” you said, voice breathless. “You ride the current out. It opens into the inlet three miles off the coast. That’s your way out.”
Rafayel reached the edge, using the last of his strength to drag himself forward. You were already beside him, arms bracing under his, steadying the weight of his body.
His tail thudded against the floor with a wet slap. He groaned softly, teeth bared, not in anger—but in pain.
“Too dry,” he whispered. “I can feel the weight in my bones.”
“I’ve got you,” you said. “You just need to reach the water. Let it take you.”
He stared at you then, breath catching. His eyes were duller now, but still beautiful—full of galaxies and pressure and memory.
You slid your arm around his waist, guiding him to the edge. The water was rising fast, swirling just beneath the opening. The scent of salt filled your nose—fresh, briny, alive.
He hesitated at the edge of the shaft. Not from fear—but from something heavier. The realization that this was real. That he was leaving. That this wasn’t a simulation, a dream, or another test. It was freedom.
And you—still on the other side.
His tail coiled slightly behind him, dragging wetly across the floor, leaving trails of water in silver and blue. His fins twitched at the edges from exertion, and the way his chest heaved told you everything: he was almost at his limit.
“You should come with me,” he said, voice low and husky. His eyes flicked to yours—wide, unguarded, full of both hope and dread.
Your breath stuttered. You wanted to say yes. Every part of you screamed for it. But you couldn’t. Not now. Not if it meant they’d follow him.
“I can’t,” you said, voice catching on the edge of your throat. “They’ll follow. But if I stay, they won’t know where you went. You’ll have time.”
He stared at you. The air between you thickened with salt and electricity and something else—grief, maybe, or the ache of almost.
He shook his head slowly, painfully. “I’ll come back for you.”
“I know,” you said.
You stepped forward and cupped his face with both hands. His skin was slick and cool beneath your palms, but he leaned into your touch like warmth itself. Your foreheads met, his gills fluttering shallowly against your wrists.
The cold of his skin against yours was grounding, but what startled you most was the heat building behind your eyes—the sting of tears you hadn’t let fall. Not since the day they took you off the rotation. Not since the tank had gone dark.
For just a second, the chaos faded. There was no facility, no containment protocol, no security breach. There was just the salt on your lips, his pulse under your fingers, and the impossible light in his eyes that had never dimmed for you.
His gills fluttered against your wrists, flutter-light, fragile in a way nothing else about him ever was. You stood like that for a moment suspended in the storm—your body pressed into his, your mind falling quiet. All the alarms, the sirens, the red strobing chaos behind you faded into nothing. No containment. No mission. No escape.
Just him.
Just you.
His pulse thrummed under your palms, steady and strong, and you realized with a jolt of pain that you had never known anything more alive than this moment.
Tears welled up, thick and hot, blurring the glowing planes of his face. You hadn’t let yourself cry—not since they stripped your access, not since they darkened the tank. But now, here, the dam broke silently. The ache in your chest cracked wide, and the tears fell.
He lifted his head slightly, just enough to tilt his lips to your forehead. His claws grazed your waist with exquisite care. And then—
A kiss.
Soft. Barely there. A promise pressed into skin. It wasn’t desperate. It wasn’t hurried. It was reverent.
As if you were something sacred.
You gasped quietly, the touch searing deeper than any wound ever could.
He pulled away—just far enough to see you, really see you, as if committing every line of your face to memory. His eyes—glowing, full of salt and sorrow and something ancient—locked with yours.
And in that gaze, you understood everything he couldn’t say.
His lips parted, and he whispered, voice soaked in something fragile and final.
“Thank you.”
The words shattered through you.
Your throat burned with the urge to call him back, to beg him not to go—but your body wouldn’t move. Your nod was the only answer you could give, silent and aching.
His fingers lingered for a beat longer, claws ghosting across your wrist. Then he turned.
You watched as his body coiled, tail glowing in crescents of violet and cobalt, every movement smooth as silk in water. The shaft loomed open behind him—dark, spiraling downward into the unknown. He looked back once, just once, as if checking to see if you’d follow.
And then—he dove.
He slid into the shaft with a grace he couldn’t summon on land, the water cradling him as he disappeared into the dark below. His tail vanished last, streaking silver-blue through the rising current.
You didn’t breathe.
You crawled forward to the hatch, leaning over just enough to catch a final glimpse. His glow shimmered in the tunnel for a moment longer—luminous violet, flickering like a beacon. Then it vanished into the deep curve of the passage.
A beat of silence passed. Then instinct took over.
You reached for the hatch and slammed it shut, your wet hands slipping slightly on the handle before it locked into place with a heavy, hydraulic seal. You could hear the water surging downward, swallowing the tunnel behind the metal. He was gone.
You staggered back from the hatch, chest heaving, knees weak.
A dozen thoughts battered your mind all at once—What if the tunnels collapsed? What if they tracked his thermal signature? What if he didn’t make it? What if you never saw him again?
But louder than all of them was the single truth pulsing at the center of your chest like a lighthouse in the dark:
You had done what no one else would.
And now—you had to survive what came next.
You spun around, heading for the override console. The emergency lockout sequence was already in motion, but you could delay it—slow the security response by rerouting power through maintenance relays.
Just a few more seconds.
Just enough time.
Your fingers flew across the interface. The keys were slick from the saltwater dripping off your sleeves. Your heart pounded so hard it hurt. Red light bathed the walls. Your reflection in the console screen looked like a stranger—soaked, wide-eyed, trembling.
Then—
The lab door exploded inward with a mechanical scream, metal slamming against the frame as boots flooded into the room.
You turned, hands raised—but not in surrender.
In defiance.
Because you knew what they’d find.
—
The moment the hatch sealed shut behind Rafayel, the facility’s heartbeat changed. A violent, shrieking pulse echoed through the corridors as klaxons ignited in tandem with the emergency lockdown. The red strobe lights splashed the sterile halls in waves of crimson, as if the structure itself had started to bleed.
You stood motionless in the center of the observation deck, soaking wet, hands trembling at your sides, the hatch’s locking hiss still echoing in your ears. The space around you shivered with the aftershock of what you had done. Rafayel was gone.
And you had let him go.
The containment doors burst open with a metallic scream. Heavy boots thundered through the water pooling on the lab floor. You barely flinched as the first pair of gloved hands seized your shoulders and twisted your arms behind your back.
The cuffs bit into your wrists with practiced precision. You were dragged through Lab C’s exit, your boots slipping on salt-slick tile, your breath loud in your ears.
You caught one last glimpse of the tank—the place where it all began. The water inside had stilled, but the glow lingered faintly on the glass, a phantom signature of his presence. The scent of brine and charged ozone hung in the air like an unanswered question.
They said nothing to you. No demands. No accusations.
You weren’t escorted to the debriefing levels. They didn’t take you to Security Admin or Medical. They took you down.
Past Sublevel 3. Past Research Storage. Past the doors marked in yellow hazard chevrons and warning seals in languages older than the base’s schematics.
This part of the facility didn’t hum with power.
It breathed.
The lights dimmed the further you went, until it felt like descending into the pit of something sleeping. The elevator halted with a hollow clunk. The guards marched you into a corridor where the walls sweated condensation, and the floors echoed too loudly.
You were led into a chamber without windows or screens. Just a single overhead panel flickering in cold white. A metal chair bolted to the floor. Walls that hummed with a low, constant vibration—the sound of a pressure system older than safety code.
You didn’t sit.
You stood in the center of the room, salt drying on your skin, fingers twitching against the chill. The cuffs dug into your bones.
Then, the door opened.
Two entered. One you recognized immediately.
Dr. Havers.
His expression was unreadable, but something had shifted in it—something hollow behind his eyes. He didn’t speak. He simply stepped aside.
And behind him—her.
Dr. Sorein.
You had never seen her before. Not in person. Her name had appeared in closed reports and clearance levels above your access. But now, standing in the doorway, you understood why her presence had always been a rumor until now.
She was tall, severe in posture, and dressed in a bone-white uniform without insignia or affiliation. Her hair was slicked back so tightly it gave her face the illusion of being sculpted from stone. Her boots made no sound, and her skin was pale enough to catch the light with an eerie pallor. There was a precision in her every movement—too smooth, too restrained—as though her very breath obeyed protocol.
Her eyes—ice gray, glinting like cut glass—studied you with impassive calculation. They weren’t empty. They were measuring.
She stepped forward and placed a black tablet on the table with the care of someone laying a scalpel on a sterile tray.
She didn’t introduce herself.
"You facilitated a Class-IV breach," she said, tone cold, crisp, and final.
You said nothing. The room felt narrower by the second, as if the walls were bending inward.
"You compromised the containment of an unclassified marine hybrid. You overrode secure systems, accessed obsolete exit routes, and destroyed surveillance logs."
Still, you stayed silent. The cuffs bit into your skin. Your heartbeat felt slow, deliberate.
Sorein took a single step closer. The overhead light caught the rim of her tablet.
"Tell me why."
Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t harden. It simply dropped like cold metal onto the surface of the air.
You looked up at her then. The overhead light threw long shadows under her cheekbones. Her face was unreadable—expressionless in the way cliffs are expressionless before they break.
Your voice, when it came, was hoarse. “Because he would’ve died.”
A slight motion—perhaps a breath through her nose. "You don't know that."
"And you don’t know that he wouldn’t."
Her eyes flicked to Havers, who remained a silent statue in the doorway. Then she activated the tablet with a flick of her wrist. A projection shimmered upward—a three-dimensional hologram of Rafayel in his tank, timestamped and flickering.
He lay motionless at the bottom, curled loosely around himself, his bioluminescent patterns dulled to a faint murmur of color. No movement. No reaction. Just still water and heavy stillness.
"Unresponsive to handlers. Complete nutrient rejection. No behavioral reflexes."
She tapped again.
"He wasn’t sleeping. He was shutting down."
Your jaw clenched. “He was grieving.”
Sorein looked back at you. For a moment, there was silence. A mechanical hum somewhere deep in the walls. The scrape of your cuffs when your fingers twitched.
"You’ve assigned meaning to anomaly," she said. "Dangerous mistake."
Another tap. The projection shifted—to a still of you, pressed to the tank wall, Rafayel mirroring the gesture from inside. The space between you was illuminated in pale cyan glow.
"You believe this... connection had merit."
You stepped forward, chains tightening with the movement. “It does. He responded to me. I stabilized him. You documented that yourself.”
"Instinctual mimicry is not evidence of sentience."
"He knew my name. He spoke. He chose."
Havers stirred. Not a word—just a subtle intake of breath.
Dr. Sorein didn’t blink. "You breached protocol. You acted without command."
You were shaking now. Not from fear.
From fury.
"Because none of you would have done anything until he was dead."
Her eyes narrowed. "Your emotional projection endangers this entire research ecosystem."
"He isn’t your ecosystem. He’s a person."
Another flick of her fingers. The projection dimmed, disappearing in a wash of static.
Sorein stepped back from the table, arms behind her back.
"You will be placed under indefinite observation. All data access revoked. All permissions suspended. You will remain confined to Sublevel 5 until reassignment or clearance strike."
Your throat closed around the pressure building in your chest. “You’re not even going to ask where he went?”
"We’ll retrieve him," she said calmly. "Eventually."
“No,” you said, louder now. "You won’t."
A pause.
"Why is that?"
You met her eyes. For the first time, she blinked.
"Because you’ll be looking for an experiment. But he isn’t one anymore. You turned him into a prisoner, and he still didn’t break. He chose to leave. And if you try to hunt him like a weapon, he’ll remember that, too."
Dr. Sorein regarded you like one might examine a specimen that had just spoken back.
Then she turned.
"You’re dismissed."
Two new guards entered. They said nothing as they seized your arms, removed the chain between your wrists only to replace it with a heavier restraint—one that hissed as it tightened.
As you were pulled from the chamber, you looked once more at Havers. His eyes flicked up to meet yours.
He didn’t stop them.
But he didn’t look away either.
You were led into the corridor. The door hissed shut behind you.
You didn’t resist. But your heart beat with the rhythm of a memory you could not surrender.
Rafayel was out there.
And he remembered, too.
—
They didn’t give you a window.
The walls of your new quarters were uniform steel, painted over in a sterile shade of off-white that somehow made the space feel even smaller than it was. There was no artwork, no markings, not even a facility insignia. Just smooth walls, seamless seams, and a door that sealed with a hiss and a coded pulse.
A cot—thin, nailed to the floor. A basin, stainless steel. A single folding desk affixed to the wall. The kind of room designed not to contain danger, but to erase presence. No identifiers. No comforts. Just waiting.
You were monitored constantly.
Two cameras tracked every movement—one in the ceiling, another embedded in the corner by the door. Every time you moved too quickly, the ambient lights adjusted. A quiet warning.
Your new ID badge didn’t display your name. Just a number.
All requests for information were rerouted. All terminals were access-locked. No outgoing messages. No unsupervised activity. When you were escorted for brief medical scans, the guards never spoke, never made eye contact. You weren’t a colleague anymore. You were a protocol.
Even your meals arrived through a sealed slot in the wall, like rations dropped into an airlock.
There were no clocks. No sense of time. Only cycles.
The room lights dimmed for six hours and brightened for sixteen. Rinse, repeat. You marked the days in your head, tracking the patterns of sound beyond the door—how often boots passed, how often the power grid hummed or staggered. It was the only rhythm left to follow.
But despite the cold logic of your imprisonment, you never stopped listening.
In the silence, you learned the language of Sublevel 5: the faint whispers of redirected orders, the muffled tension in overheard conversations outside the bulkhead, the repetition of reports about ‘Subject Loss Event’ and ‘Recovery Priority One.’
They hadn’t found him.
Not yet.
And the more they failed, the more pressure mounted. You felt it in the changes—the extra guards, the quiet footsteps of someone listening outside your door at night, the way your medical scans grew longer, more invasive.
In the days that followed, the facility above your cell became a hive of tightly coiled movement. Not chaotic—never chaotic—but buzzing with a low, intense current of urgency.
Something was building. You could feel it in the walls, in the rhythm of the boots passing by your door, in the increased traffic in the secure lifts.
Dr. Sorein no longer moved like a figure in the background. She was everywhere. Every hallway camera caught her in motion—flanked by a team dressed in matte black uniforms with no departmental markings, each one armed not with standard-issue tranquilizers, but high-output compression rifles and experimental sonar disruptors.
Her presence was a vector. Every room she entered straightened around her. Every technician’s shoulders lifted a fraction higher. Havers remained behind her often, shadowing her through the operation—never leading. Watching.
She reviewed footage personally. Not just of Rafayel, but of the old sea tunnels, the outdated records from the Lemurian sub-grid, and the long-redacted logs from Phase Zero of the facility’s foundation. You heard whispers of Directive Theta.
It wasn’t recovery.
It was eradication.
Her voice filtered through the halls in clipped commands:
“Double scan radius.”
“No contact. Full silence protocol.”
“If we lose visual—assume migration.”
“Terminate if retrieval becomes untenable.”
No one dared challenge her.
She issued her orders from a reinforced command wing refitted with deep-sea tracking tech you had never seen on any blueprint. One of the guards let it slip once—an entire sonar array had been reprogrammed to detect specific bioluminescent frequencies, calibrated not to find something, but someone.
Rafayel.
They were hunting him like a rogue weapon.
But they had a problem.
He wasn’t surfacing. He wasn’t feeding. He wasn’t responding.
And that’s when Sorein made a new decision.
She would use you.
The logic, she explained—cold, clean, spoken only once in a closed-door command briefing—was simple: Rafayel had bonded. Unusually. Persistently. He had formed a pattern of recognition that transcended mimicry. A fixation. A behavioral imprint so specific that it had overruled his natural aggression and induced pacification. You were not just a handler. You were a variable.
Now, you were a beacon.
They would fabricate a leak—leak footage of your relocation, create a false signal trace from a secure observation buoy, encode it with the exact wavelength of your voiceprint.
"He will come to her," Sorein said. "Even if he knows it’s a trap."
Some of the team had hesitated. Even Havers had glanced at the floor.
Sorein didn’t blink. "That’s what makes it effective."
They never told you.
But you could feel it.
The change in the air. The way the guards lingered a little too long outside your cell. The sudden return of an audio panel, just functional enough to transmit pre-recorded messages. The reappearance of your file on external terminals, left visible just long enough to be intercepted.
They weren’t just hunting him anymore.
They were summoning him.
And they were using your heartbeat to do it.
You memorized their shift rotations. The brief lapses in surveillance. The tension in Havers’ voice when he was left alone to make his notes.
They were closing in.
—
The moment Sorein summoned you to the debriefing chamber again, you knew something had shifted.
This wasn’t another check-in, another round of sterile questioning. This time, she sat waiting—alone—no assistants, no techs. The room was colder than usual, the light overhead dimmed to a clinical amber.
You stepped in, shackled at the wrists. Your footsteps echoed once, then fell silent.
She gestured to the chair. “Sit.”
You didn’t move.
“I won’t help you,” you said before she could speak.
Her gaze didn’t flicker. “You misunderstand. This isn’t a request.”
Your heart pounded. “You’re using me as bait. You’re transmitting my voice. You’re trying to lure him out.”
“And it’s working,” she replied, voice like frost. “Proximity scans have begun detecting anomalies along the trench perimeter. His bioluminescent signature has flickered within range—irregular, but deliberate.”
You shook your head. “No. I won’t be part of this.”
Her jaw shifted, just slightly.
“You formed the bond,” she said. “You gave him something to fixate on. You knew what it meant the moment you stepped into that tank room and didn’t look away.”
“I saved him,” you shot back. “And you’re trying to destroy him.”
Sorein rose slowly, hands folded behind her back. She crossed the space between you with precise, noiseless steps. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.
“You will do what is required of you. Or we will change tactics.”
You felt your blood run cold.
She leaned in, just enough that her shadow fell across your face.
“If he doesn’t surface on his own,” she said, “we’ll flush him out. With heat. With current. With depth charges calibrated to fracture the trench walls. We will pull him from the sea if we have to. Bleeding or not.”
You stared at her, throat tightening. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would prefer not to,” she said smoothly. “But make no mistake—Directive Theta does not include contingencies for his survival. Only containment. Or termination.”
You clenched your fists, the cuffs biting into your skin.
“You’re threatening him to control me.”
“Control is a primitive word,” she murmured. “This is about leverage. And leverage, Agent, is how we decide who walks away from this.”
She straightened.
“You can help us bring him in alive. Or you can stay in this room while we drag what’s left of him from the abyss.”
The silence between you pulsed like a living thing.
Sorein turned away.
“You have twenty-four hours.”
The door hissed open behind you.
You didn’t move.
But as the guards took you back to your quarters, your legs began to shake.
And your mind began to burn.
Not with fear.
With rage.
───⋆⋅ ☾⋅⋆ ───
author note: ooo i wonder what's going to happen :3 thank you all for the love and support!! the next part will be coming out soon hehe!
GLASS BETWEEN US | II
Pairing: Merman Rafayel x Scientist Reader
author note: tyy for all the love and support on the previous one! ive decided to write a second part to this! maybe a third part? who know :)))) anywho pls enjoy!!!
Dr. Havers was already waiting when your shift ended.
He stood just beyond the junction outside Lab C, posture rigid, arms folded tightly across his chest. The dim security lights overhead buzzed faintly, casting bluish reflections across the glass walls of the corridor. You recognized the look on his face before he spoke—not disciplinary, not furious—but exact. Measured. Like the outcome was already decided and the only remaining task was to deliver the verdict.
“Walk with me,” he said.
You nodded, once. Your hand tightened slightly around the edge of your tablet, knuckles pale under the harsh fluorescents. Then you fell in beside him.
The two of you moved through the east hall without speaking. The air was too cold, dry from over-filtration. Every footstep echoed with sterile finality against the polished epoxy flooring. On your left, the wall-length display of Lab C showed only system diagnostics now—no live feed. The camera feed had been blacked out. You knew what that meant, and your stomach turned with quiet dread.
Havers led you through a security door you hadn’t passed since your orientation weeks ago. It closed behind you with a sound that echoed louder than it should’ve.
The briefing room was stripped bare—no windows, no active terminals, no live data displays. Just one heavy-duty table bolted to the floor and two brushed metal chairs. The walls were lined with sound-dampening panels disguised as blank white boards. Even the air inside felt different—stiller, heavier, like the pressure in a room seconds before a thunderstorm hits.
He gestured to the seat.
You didn’t take it.
He didn’t, either.
Instead, he pulled a slim black tablet from the inside pocket of his lab coat and tapped the screen. You heard a soft tone as the screen lit up. He turned it toward you.
It was paused on a still image: your hand against the tank wall, Rafayel’s claws mirrored against yours on the opposite side. His eyes locked to your face with unnatural focus. The background lighting bathed everything in a soft, immersive blue, as if you had both been submerged together in water.
Your breath caught—shallow, involuntary. You recognized the moment instantly. Not just the scene, but the feeling of it. The density of the air. The quiet vibration against the glass. The sense that the entire lab had narrowed into a single point of contact.
Havers didn’t speak. Not yet. He pressed play.
You watched yourself step forward on-screen, watched Rafayel respond—slowly, precisely, his body language unmistakably attuned to yours. The alignment wasn’t coincidental. It was intentional. He was echoing your movement with a kind of quiet precision that felt more human than instinctive. More conscious than reactive.
Then he spoke—his lips moved on the recording, though the volume was muted. You didn’t need audio to know what he said.
Free me.
The moment hung there, pixelated but real, hovering between you and Havers in silence.
When he finally stopped the video, he didn’t look up.
“This is not a reprimand,” he said.
But your muscles had already gone stiff. Your pulse was climbing, quick and uneven beneath your skin.
“Then what is it?” Your voice came out low, steady, but with a thread of static in it.
He swiped across the tablet again, this time bringing up a full behavioral overlay—sensor data logged over the last two weeks. Heart rate. Neural markers. Tail velocity. Cortisol-like stress proxies. All plotted in tight, color-coded patterns.
All tied to your schedule.
“He rises the moment you enter,” Havers said. “Activity levels stabilize within forty-five seconds. Sedation thresholds drop. Neuroresponse modulation increases. Mirror behaviors are precise, even anticipatory. Eye contact is sustained longer with you than any other observer by a factor of four.”
He paused.
Then, more quietly: “He doesn’t respond to anyone else now. Not even to direct provocation.”
You stared at the data, eyes scanning the peaks and troughs, remembering how those moments felt—not just as data points, but as experiences. As connections.
“I didn’t intend for any of this,” you said quietly.
“I believe you,” Havers replied. “But intention isn’t the problem.”
He finally looked up from the screen.
“The problem is attachment. One-directional. Immediate. And escalating.”
You opened your mouth to argue, but couldn’t find the argument. Your body tensed instead—jaw clenched, shoulders rigid, fingers digging slightly into the base of your tablet.
“He’s not mimicking anymore,” Havers said, as if reading your mind. “He’s focusing. Every behavioral marker suggests a fixation, not a response pattern. When you’re gone, he doesn’t shift to baseline—he withdraws. When we attempted to replace your observation window with controlled stimuli, he ignored it. The tank systems detected a full physiological shutdown cycle.”
You swallowed hard. Your breath fogged slightly in the cold air.
“What are you doing to him now?”
“We’ve begun sedation rotation. Carefully dosed. Enough to keep him compliant while we recalibrate protocol.”
Your voice cracked without warning. “You’re drugging him to make him forget me.”
He didn’t deny it.
Instead, he said, “We’re preserving containment integrity.”
And then, with quiet finality:
“You’re being reassigned.”
The world tilted slightly in your vision.
“What?”
“You’ll report to Neural Indexing, Sublevel 2B. Starting tomorrow. Your clearance to Lab C has already been revoked.”
He picked up the tablet and powered it off.
You stared at him. You could feel your chest hollowing, breath going thin.
“This will break him,” you said.
He hesitated—just for a breath. Then he said, “If it does, it proves he was never stable to begin with.”
And that was it.
You were dismissed.
No further discussion.
The first night in your new quarters, you didn’t sleep.
The room was a concrete cube, one meter shorter on each side than your old assignment bunk. The cot creaked when you breathed. The walls sweated faint condensation. No simulated day-night cycle. Just harsh fluorescents that flicked off at 2200 and left you in complete grayscale. No one spoke when they handed you the keycard. The silence had the flavor of punishment, even if they never called it that.
You turned over the same sentence in your head:
“You’re being reassigned.”
And the second one, delivered even colder:
“Your clearance to Lab C has been revoked.”
Your tongue kept finding the shape of it in your mouth. Revoked. Like a limb amputated with a signature. The moment the door sealed behind you that night, the silence was more than absence—it was separation. You could still feel the residue of the tank glass against your fingertips, as if your body hadn’t yet caught up to what was gone.
They said the reassignment was for “containment stability.” That the connection between you and Rafayel had grown too strong. Too unpredictable. Too disruptive to the scientific objectives of the project.
But you knew what it really was.
Control.
They couldn’t control him anymore. Because he had started responding not to data, but to you. And that terrified them.
You had expected the transition to be clinical. Procedural. A clean severing.
It wasn’t.
The new lab in Sublevel 2B bore none of the atmosphere that defined Lab C. There was no subtle dimming of lights to mimic marine depth. No soft thrum of oxygen injectors syncing with the artificial current. No hum in your bones that came from proximity to something ancient, breathing, and alive.
This place—Neural Indexing—was quiet in the worst way.
The kind of silence that didn’t make room for thought but pressed against it. You sat in front of rows of stimulation modules and feed monitors, reviewing endless neural scans: meaningless loops of synthetic cognition, shallow patterns designed to imitate thought, emotion, response.
There was no presence in the data here.
No gaze tracking yours across a pane of reinforced glass.
No ripple of bioluminescence in response to your voice.
You were surrounded by function but starved of connection.
The others in your department didn’t speak much. They had the tired, hollow eyes of people who lived too long with screens instead of subjects. You were the new variable now, a name without a narrative—transferred in the middle of a cycle, given no debrief, carrying a silence everyone had been instructed not to ask about.
At first, you tried to adapt. You told yourself this was necessary. Sensible. Safer—for everyone involved.
But the rationalizations peeled away by day four.
That’s when the dreams returned.
They started faint, like echoes.
Just fragments: salt on your tongue, the pressure of water folding around your body, the low vibration of something massive swimming just out of reach.
Then the fragments sharpened.
In the dreams, you stood before the tank again. But this time, the glass wasn’t there. Rafayel floated just a breath away, watching you with stillness so complete it felt like gravity. His eyes were brighter than you remembered—wide, expectant, but solemn. No words passed between you.
He didn’t need them.
But some nights, the dream changed.
You weren’t in the tank room. You were on a beach, barefoot, the water dark and glimmering as it crawled across the sand. The sky above was violet and streaked with long golden clouds, as if lit by a sun that had never belonged to this world. The shore stretched endlessly in both directions, flanked by black cliffs heavy with overgrown moss and deep blue vines. Strange constellations flickered in the sky overhead, unfamiliar and ancient, like stars from a memory long buried.
The surf was gentle, but its song was heavy—carrying something old, something mournful.
You stepped into the water.
And the moment it touched your skin, the dream transformed.
You were no longer on the shore, you were beneath it.
Submerged in a vast, tranquil ocean bathed in blue light. Columns of sunlight filtered down from above like cathedral beams, illuminating silt and floating motes of golden plankton. The water was cool but welcoming, dense with reverberant silence. All around you were ruins: ancient stone arches overgrown with bioluminescent coral, broken statues of sea kings swallowed by algae and time.
And then—he was there.
Rafayel.
He emerged from the shadow of a collapsed temple gate, his form luminous against the gloom. His hair flowed behind him in an ethereal halo, purple-mauve, drifting like silk ribbons. His body moved with impossible grace, every motion effortless as he cut through the water. His tail gleamed with streaks of cobalt and opal, curling around him protectively.
When he saw you, he stilled. As if time had paused. And then he came to you. Not with urgency. Not with hesitation.
With knowing.
You drifted forward to meet him, arms parting the water like a slow tide. Your clothes floated weightless around you, strands of hair suspended in the soft current. You reached out. So did he.
When your hands met, everything else disappeared.
The moment your palms pressed to his, you both inhaled. The water shimmered. Light flared from his chest and from your fingertips. You drew closer, your bodies aligning instinctively. His tail curled gently around your legs, not to trap but to anchor. His claws traced your waist, reverent, uncertain if you were real.
He pulled you closer, as if sensing your doubt. His hand cradled the back of your head, his lips brushing your brow, not a kiss—a promise.
He would not let you go.
You rose slowly the next morning, the weight of the dream still heavy on your shoulders like wet silk.
There was something about that beach—those ruins—that felt impossibly distant and unshakably close. You told yourself it was just the brain pulling symbols from subconscious grief. But that was a lie.
It felt real.
Not just real. Remembered.
You couldn’t explain the familiarity of his hands on your face. The exact shape of his breath, the warmth of his chest against yours, the way your fingers had threaded together like you had done it countless times before.
There were moments in the day—quiet, disarmed moments—where you would touch your own wrist or collarbone and expect to find him there. As if some trace of him should remain in your skin. As if he had once been stitched into the very rhythm of your body.
The more time passed, the more the dream solidified, not as fantasy—but as truth.
The day passed in pieces.
You reviewed three sequences of neural pattern recognition, sat through one impersonal systems check, and responded to zero messages. Your hands performed the motions, but your mind lagged behind, half-anchored to that sunken city beneath your thoughts.
And then you heard it.
Two lab techs stood just around the corner of the central corridor, their voices hushed but not hushed enough.
“Still not responding.”
“Nothing since the last handler shift. He’s not eating. Not even moving.”
“He’s never been like this. Even when agitated, there was still... something.”
“Now? It’s like he’s just... stopped.”
You didn’t breathe.
Your hand hovered over the touchscreen you were pretending to use. The hall hummed with fluorescent lighting, the air too dry, the walls too close.
You stepped back, slowly, unnoticed.
You didn’t know how.
But you knew it was something you were not meant to forget. And it led you to a decision you never voiced aloud.
You stopped trying to make sense of the protocols. You stopped rationalizing the transfer. You stopped pretending he was better off without you.
Because the ache that filled your chest when you woke—the ache of almost losing him again—was worse than anything the facility could do to you.
The decision to access the archived feed wasn’t a conscious one. It wasn’t premeditated. It was something your body decided before your mind could catch up.
It happened on the ninth night.
You hadn’t planned on stopping at the terminal. You had intended to walk the long way around, avoid the side corridor near the equipment maintenance bay, bypass temptation entirely. But your feet slowed as you passed it. Your gaze flicked sideways. The hallway was empty, as always. The low hum of the wall consoles and the faint click of pressure valves were the only sounds.
And the screen was there. Dark, waiting.
You approached without realizing it, your hand already reaching. The screen lit up at your touch, a soft glow blooming in the dim corridor. The system prompted for access. You entered the override code. The one no one knew you still remembered.
A few seconds passed. Then:
ARCHIVED VISUAL LOG — LAB C
TIMESTAMP: Day 9 – 01:46 HRS
The footage loaded.
And the ache in your chest returned full force.
There he was.
Rafayel.
At first, he was barely visible, curled in a shadow at the base of the tank. The lighting in the room was reduced to emergency-grade, flickering low blue and violet hues. Most of the central overheads were offline. The water itself was so still it looked like tinted glass.
He lay against the curved wall of the tank, his long body wrapped inward. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest, tail looped twice around his torso. The sight was almost fetal in its stillness—too still. Not relaxed, not conserving. Withdrawing.
His head rested on one arm, turned slightly in the direction of the observation deck. His hair drifted gently in the motionless current, no longer radiant or alive with light. His gills fluttered faintly—shallow, slow. One flick every few seconds. Barely enough to sustain him.
Your breath caught.
He wasn’t sleeping.
He wasn’t hibernating.
He was fading.
The vibrant shimmer that once pulsed across his body like underwater lightning had dulled to the color of bruises—indigo near his spine, violet near his chest, and something close to black along his lower limbs. The glow that had always signaled awareness—of you, of presence, of thought—was fragmented. It gathered dimly near his heart and left the rest of him in darkness.
There was no motion in his shoulders. No twitch of his claws. Not even a tail flick.
Stillness had taken him.
Then the camera angle shifted slightly.
And you saw his eyes.
They were open. Only half-lidded, but open. Just enough to confirm what you already suspected: he wasn’t unconscious. He wasn’t sedated.
He was aware.
And he was waiting.
Even now—silent, unmoving, forgotten by the staff rotating around him—he was still facing the same section of glass.
The place you had always stood.
Your throat closed. Your fingers curled tightly against the edge of the console as you leaned closer. The impulse to reach for the screen was overwhelming, but there was nothing there. No heat. No pressure. No connection. Just pixelated light and silence.
The feed time-stamped forward.
A technician entered. She moved through the chamber with a clipboard and an ambient monitor, barely glancing at the tank. Routine. Impersonal. She stopped, approached the glass, and tapped once.
Rafayel didn’t move.
She activated a low-frequency stimulus from her control panel. The pulse made the water shift.
Still nothing.
She made a note. Paused. Looked up again, perhaps longer than protocol required. But even if she noticed the difference—how still he was, how wrong his glow had become—she said nothing. Just turned and left.
The lights dimmed further after she exited.
You were left staring at the footage. Alone again.
And so was he.
Something cracked inside you: you couldn’t cry. Not here. Not now. Your body understood what your mind had refused to fully face.
This wasn’t just a physiological decline. It was a psychological death spiral. They thought they had sedated him. Pacified him. Reduced risk.
But they hadn’t seen what you were seeing.
They hadn’t understood that his stillness wasn’t peace.
It was mourning.
And you knew exactly what it meant. Because you felt it too.
You pressed a hand to the screen, even though it couldn’t feel you. You sat there, shoulders rigid, stomach hollow, barely able to hold yourself upright.
He was suffering because they had taken you away. It was killing him.
You shut off the feed.
And for the first time in nine days, you stood up not as a staff member. Not as a researcher.
But as someone who was going back.
No matter the cost.
The tunnels were colder than you remembered.
Condensation clung to the curved ceilings, gathering in long droplets that slipped soundlessly to the metal grates beneath your feet. Pipes hissed softly with steam every ten meters, venting pressure from unseen machines. The walls were a patchwork of corrosion and riveted seams. Red emergency lights pulsed slowly along the floor, painting everything in alternating waves of rust and shadow.
The silence down here wasn’t the passive hush of the main halls. It was active. Watchful. Like something waiting to be disturbed. Every footfall sounded like an echo inside a steel drum. Every breath you took came back twice as loud in your ears.
The auxiliary entrance to Lab C was sealed, just as it had been for days. But the access panel hadn’t been wiped. Your code still worked.
The light on the console flickered, then shifted green.
The door groaned open, metal scraping metal, and cold, salted air rolled out to meet you.
You stepped into a room suspended in time.
The room was colder than you remembered.
Not by temperature, but by absence. The chill that came from a place left unattended too long. The tank’s filtration hum had slowed, its resonance no longer constant but stuttering every few seconds, like a faltering breath. A faint chemical tang hung in the air, sharper than before. The lighting had dimmed further—no longer the soft, ambient blue that mimicked ocean depths. Now the tank was lit from below, casting warped, ghostly shadows against the walls, like the inside of a body lit by its own flickering pulse.
And there he was.
Rafayel.
Floating in silence.
He was curled loosely, his arms hanging in front of him, palms relaxed and half open, the gesture somehow vulnerable. His tail hung like a long, unmoving ribbon in the water. His glow was barely there—a faint wash of violet through his chest, flickering intermittently like the last ember of a fire trying not to die.
The sight of him hit you like submersion.
It was too much, too fast, too familiar.
You stepped forward without thinking, boots echoing on the composite flooring. The air thickened with every stride, like pushing through static. Your heart drummed against your ribs, quick and uneven. You were afraid he wouldn't move. Afraid he wouldn't see you.
You reached the tank. Stopped.
“Rafayel,” you whispered, the word cracking in your throat like a fault line splitting open.
He didn’t respond.
But something shifted.
A flicker of movement along his spine. A ripple of light blooming faintly across his gills.
You held your breath.
Then—his eyes opened.
Slow. Bleary. At first unfocused, then… locked.
Right on you.
Recognition didn’t explode—it unfolded. Layer by layer, like thawing ice. His pupils narrowed. His chest lifted with a sharp inhale. The violet in his body surged brighter, edged with silver, crawling like veins across his arms and into the tips of his claws.
And then he moved.
Not swam. Not lunged.
He rose.
Weightless, effortless, he emerged in a slow, unfurling motion. The water parted around him in gentle folds. He drifted toward you, the sleek muscle of his torso shifting under the soft luminescence. He was broader than you remembered. Stronger. His body moved with the control of something ancient, practiced. But there was fragility under the surface—an ache in the way he carried himself, like a wounded predator willing itself toward the light.
When he reached the glass, he stopped just short, hands spreading flat against the transparent barrier. His palms trembled faintly. His claws clicked softly as they touched down.
You mirrored him.
Hand trembling, you placed your palm where his rested. A perfect match. Skin to glass. Heat to cold.
He blinked once, slowly, gills fluttering. Then his breath hitched, and a soft tremor ran through his shoulders. His face was unreadable—but in his eyes there was no question.
It was you.
He tilted his head slightly, hair drifting like a halo. You caught every micro-expression: the way his jaw tightened, the way his fingers twitched against the barrier. Not fear. Not confusion.
Emotion.
His voice, when it came, was a raw murmur.
“You came back.”
You nodded, a tear finally breaking loose and running down your cheek. You didn’t wipe it away.
“I couldn’t stay away.”
He leaned forward slowly, until his forehead pressed lightly against the glass. His eyes closed, and your breath caught.
You leaned in too, matching him, your own forehead meeting the cool barrier.
There was no sound but your twin breathing.
Then he opened his eyes again.
And they glowed.
Not violently, but with purpose. A steady, growing light. The silver along his ribcage rippled outward, trailing down his arms. The soft blue of his irises deepened to something oceanic, endless. His tail shifted behind him, wrapping once around itself like an anchor stabilizing him.
You stepped back.
His gaze tracked your movement, but he didn’t speak.
You turned toward the console. Slowly. Deliberately.
His hands didn’t leave the glass.
The screen lit under your fingertips. The system had locked you out days ago, but you bypassed the prompt using the old maintenance override. The keys clicked too loudly. Your heart beat louder still.
MANUAL OVERRIDE: CONTAINMENT LOCK
Confirm: YES / NO
You hovered over the button.
Thoughts pressed in all at once—about consequences, about duty, about what would come after. But none of it mattered more than this moment.
Not after what you’d seen.
Not after what he had become in your absence.
You didn’t hesitate.
You pressed YES.
A low mechanical chime rang out. Steam hissed at the tank’s base. The floor panels lit red and the water level began to fall.
And you turned—slowly—to meet his eyes as the locks disengaged.
He didn’t rush forward. Didn’t break the barrier. He stayed exactly where he was, eyes locked on yours, waiting.
He simply watched you.
The moment stretched, suspended in steam and soft red light.
It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t even particularly well-paid. But the offer came with minimal paperwork, restricted clearance, and one very clear instruction: ask no questions.
So you accepted.
The facility was the kind of place not listed on maps. Remote, underground, and heavily secured. It didn’t exist according to the public record, and yet it buzzed with life. Researchers , guards, engineers, and medics. They all moved with the quiet, tense urgency of people doing work that couldn’t be acknowledged outside these walls.
Your first day was a blur of orientation. Non-disclosure clauses, retinal scans, and procedural briefings stacked with redacted pages. You caught glimpses of terms like “specimen,” “cognitive divergence,” “aquatic containment.”
No one told you what exactly was inside Lab C. Just that you’d be assisting with long-term observation. You assumed it would be another mutated marine species pulled up from some trench, something grotesque and territorial. Maybe even dangerous.
But the truth was stranger.
When they finally led you through the corridors and into the observation chamber, you expected cold steel and sharp smells.
Instead, the room was quiet and dim. The tank was massive, more like an aquarium than a cell. It bathed in a low light that shimmered across the walls like waves. The water inside was dark, cold, impossibly deep. You stepped forward, clutching your tablet, already preparing to log oxygen levels and salinity.
That was when you saw him.
Not a specimen.
Not a subject.
Something else.
Your breath caught before you even registered why.
And just like that, the job you took to escape your life became the one thing you couldn’t walk away from.
You didn’t know it then, but that first glance would mark the start of something irreversible. Something that would pull you under, inch by inch, breath by breath.
The moment you saw him, your surroundings blurred into static. The beeping monitors, murmuring technicians, even the weight of your data tablet.
All of it fell away.
Inside the isolation tank, a living impossibility drifted in manufactured saltwater. Designed to emulate the hadal zone, the deepest part of the ocean, the containment system glowed softly under rows of harsh overhead lighting. The glass was nearly ten inches thick.
He floated at the bottom, not quite asleep but clearly subdued. His body was serpentine, a long and powerful tail coiled beneath him like an anchor. Its surface shimmered with deep cobalt and streaks of pearlescent silver, every movement creating subtle waves of reflected light. Even now, in apparent stillness, he seemed to shift with the current, his tail flicking faintly like a ribbon suspended in water.
The upper half of his body resembled a human form—broad shoulders, strong arms—but with a sleekness and symmetry that felt engineered rather than natural. It was hard not to stare. Harder still to assign him the term specimen, as though he were just another data point.
His face was unnerving in its beauty. Too elegant. Too calm. Dark purple hair floated around his head, surrounding him like a halo. Thin, branching scars ran near the gills along his neck.
Signs of struggle? Or surgery? You couldn’t tell. Around his wrists were red rings where restraints had dug in, proof that something here had gone very wrong before it got quiet.
You took one step closer to the glass.
His eyes opened.
Bright blue, slit-pupiled, and utterly alien, they fixed on yours with uncanny stillness. Not vague awareness—recognition. As if you were something known. Something expected.
You didn’t realize you were holding your breath until Dr. Havers spoke behind you.
“Sedated but semi-lucid,” he muttered. “You’ll get used to it.”
You doubted that.
You didn’t look away.
Neither did he.
_
Your formal role changed within forty-eight hours. A sudden shift, approved without ceremony. You were now responsible for the nocturnal observation cycle.
Lab C, 2300 to 0400. Solo rotation. Minimal contact. Maximum discretion.
It wasn’t framed as special. If anything, it felt procedural. But there was an unspoken reason behind it. He responded to you—consistently, uniquely, and visibly. While other personnel were met with either silence or aggression, your presence generated stability. Lowered agitation. Reduced biomarker volatility.
“You’re not a risk variable,” Havers said, handing you a new clearance badge. “He recognizes that. Use it.”
That first night on shift, you sat alone behind the curved monitor console, tank lights dimmed to deep ocean blue. The lab echoed with the soft churn of water filters and the occasional mechanical click of the oxygen injectors. You opened a new file. Began a log.
SESSION 01
2303 HRS — Subject floats near lower quadrant. Motion minimal. Eyes open, tracking.
2317 HRS — Approaches glass at station-facing side. Remains within one meter.
0010 HRS — Mimics observer posture. Arms crossed. Head tilted. Intentional or coincidental?
The entries became more granular with each passing hour. You logged pupil dilation, fin twitching, shoulder alignment. The angle of his fingers against the glass. The way he followed the rhythm of your breathing when you leaned forward. Occasionally, he'd trace your silhouette on the other side of the glass, following your hand movements with uncanny precision.
He blinked less often when watching you, and more when others entered the lab—a strange, deliberate contrast. He began to tap his claws rhythmically against the tank wall when you wrote, a pattern that shifted in tempo depending on your pace. When you stood up, he rose. When you sat, he settled. A mirror, distorted by water and light, but growing clearer by the day.
By your third shift, the notes had started to blur.
SESSION 03
2248 HRS — Subject at station wall prior to entry. Appears to anticipate schedule.
2350 HRS — Subject mirrors tablet tapping. When observer writes, subject responds with claw motions against tank interior.
0104 HRS — Sustained eye contact. Three full minutes. Observer initiated break. Subject remained locked in gaze.
You began categorizing his behaviors under new terms. Not hostile. Not adaptive. Instead: intentional. Self-directed. Curious.
And eventually: fixated.
There was a pattern now, undeniable and precise. Every time you entered the room, he was already waiting. Every time you left, he followed your departure with slow, measured turns around the glass, as though mapping your absence.
Your notes became less technical. More observational. And then, more personal.
You started writing things you didn’t submit to the shared logs. Quiet questions scrawled in the margins of your private notebook.
Why only me?
How much does he understand?
Is this intelligence, or attention? Or is it something else?
You didn’t know the answers. Not yet.
But you couldn’t stop asking.
_
You hadn’t planned to speak to him. You weren’t even sure he could comprehend language.
But on the sixth night, everything was too quiet. The hum of the facility, the subdued flicker of the monitors—it all pressed in like static. You were tired. Frustrated. Your head rested on your folded arms, your mind drifting.
“I hate this place,” you muttered.
The water stirred.
Your eyes shot up. He was near the glass. Closer than before. His hands hovered just beneath the surface, claws relaxed. He tilted his head, as if listening.
Then he repeated it.
“I… hate… this… place.”
His voice was strange—raspy, resonant, shaped by a throat unused to speech. But he’d matched your cadence. Your tone. Even the way you’d slurred the words.
You stood.
“You understood that?”
He moved his mouth again. Slower. Testing the rhythm of speech.
“You… are… different.”
The room felt suddenly warmer. Or maybe colder.
Maybe both.
_
From that night on, your interactions became more complex.
Every time you entered, he was already waiting. You’d sit. He’d drift toward the glass, his body weaving gently behind him, as if pulled by invisible threads.
He began to mimic you in increasingly specific ways. When you tapped on your tablet, he tapped the tank wall. When you shifted in your seat, he mirrored the motion, down to the tilt of your head.
Researchers noticed. They logged it as proof of successful imprinting.
But you knew the difference between mimicry and obsession.
There was an intensity in his gaze that couldn't be dismissed. It was full of purpose. Of attention. He was learning you—not just your behaviors, but your moods. Your microexpressions. He watched your fingers when they trembled. He watched your lips when you breathed.
You tried to maintain boundaries.
But then the dreams started.
The dreams began as fragments.
At first, they were flashes—flashes of cold, of water creeping into your lungs, of sound that wasn’t quite voice but still carried meaning. Pressure without pain. Depth without fear.
Then they became immersive.
You were no longer watching from behind glass. You were inside the tank—or somewhere like it. A vast ocean with no surface and no floor. Everything shimmered in gradients of blue and black, lit by pulses of distant light. You were floating, suspended, and something was circling you.
You felt it before you saw him.
His presence. Electric. Intentional. Like gravity made flesh.
In the dream, Rafayel didn’t speak with words. He moved closer with the slowness of a creature that knew time was irrelevant. His fingers brushed your shoulder, your wrist, your waist—not with heat but with a chill so profound it burned.
You were never afraid.
Sometimes he held you. Other times, he watched you from below, his eyes glowing brighter than the deep. Always silent. Always there.
And always, just before waking, he would place his hand against your chest and say:
You belong here.
You’d wake gasping. Covered in sweat. The room dry, your lungs aching with the ghost of imagined water. And you’d feel it: a residual pulse. As if part of you hadn’t returned.
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when the emergency alarms shattered the stillness.
You were off-shift. Sleeping. Or trying to. The facility-issued cot in your quarters was thin, the recycled air too dry. But exhaustion didn’t matter—because when the klaxon blared and the lights above your bed pulsed red, your heart dropped into your stomach.
Containment breach — Lab C.
You didn’t stop to think. You didn’t change. You threw on your coat over your sleep shirt and sprinted barefoot through the corridors, barely registering the startled faces of guards and technicians scrambling toward lockdown protocols.
When you reached the lab, the glass was already webbed with cracks.
Inside, the tank churned like a storm-tossed sea. Rafayel was in full fury—no longer the silent, observant being from your shifts. He was something else now. Magnificent and terrifying. His tail whipped with bone-cracking force, slamming the reinforced walls, again and again. The steel supports groaned. Water frothed with foam and light. Machinery sparked along the edges. A lab tech screamed as a panel exploded.
Two guards aimed stun-rods at the tank. “We have to subdue him—!”
“No—!” You pushed past them, breathless. “Let me try first!”
They hesitated—just long enough.
You stepped into the observation chamber, doors sealing behind you. A protective barrier of glass separated you from the tank, but it felt far too thin. Rafayel turned—spun mid-air like a coil of silk and muscle—and slammed his claws into the tank wall right in front of you.
You didn’t flinch.
You raised your hand. Slowly. Palms open.
“Rafayel,” you said softly, almost whispering, “Stop.”
His body stilled, suspended in violent motion.
The roar of the alarms, the hum of the oxygen pumps, even the buzz of the failed lighting—all of it faded into the background.
His breath came in sharp, rapid bursts. His eyes glowed like deep-sea lanterns. He hovered there, inches from the glass, claws still pressed hard enough to screech against it. But he wasn’t attacking now. He was… watching.
You stepped closer, until you were nearly touching the tank wall. Your hand hovered where his claws had struck just moments before.
“It’s me,” you said.
He blinked.
Then, without a sound, he floated backward. A slow, deliberate motion. One hand slid down the tank’s interior, leaving a trail of pale bioluminescence behind it. His tail coiled gently beneath him. The water settled. Foam dissipated. The light in his eyes dimmed—not dulled, just… quieter.
And then, unbelievably, he pressed his forehead to the glass.
Directly across from yours.
The room held its breath.
He closed his eyes.
You mirrored him.
The silence stretched.
Behind you, through the speaker system, you barely caught Dr. Havers’ voice: “Subject de-escalated. Immediate threat withdrawn.”
The guards didn’t speak. They didn’t move. No one did.
Because they saw what you saw.
He hadn’t calmed because of sedatives. Or fear.
He had calmed because of you.
And something in your chest cracked—splintered under the weight of a realization you weren’t ready for.
Whatever Rafayel was…
He wasn’t just watching you.
He needed you.
After the incident, you were called in for multiple evaluations. The staff expressed concern. His reactions were too focused. Too specific.
“Forming a fixation,” they said. “You’re a variable he’s centering around. It might become dangerous.”
But you didn’t feel afraid.
Each night, he was waiting. Sometimes he pressed his hand to the glass, palm to palm. Sometimes he mirrored your face until it felt like looking into a distorted reflection.
You broke protocol.
“Why me?” you asked him softly.
He moved close.
“You… are mine.”
Your heart thudded. You stood frozen.
“You don’t know me.”
He smiled, faint but assured.
“I remember you.”
You shook your head.
“That’s impossible.”
He only repeated, quietly: “You were always coming here.”
_
You stopped sleeping.
Each night, your dreams blended into your shifts. You began bringing small things into the lab. A book. A ring. A scarf. He noticed all of them. Watched each object with careful interest.
One night, you left a pen on the console.
When you returned the next night, it was inside the tank—placed delicately in a shrine of coral, shells, and scavenged materials. A gift.
You didn’t say anything.
But your chest ached with something unnamed.
And he knew.
_
The lab was quiet when you arrived, as it always was during your late shifts. But tonight, something felt heavier in the air. As you keyed into the monitoring station, you sensed him waiting.
He was already pressed to the glass, body still, eyes glowing faintly in the dim blue light. His gaze locked on you the instant you stepped into the room. You hadn’t even set your tablet down before he moved—slowly, fluidly—closer, so close that his breath fogged the glass.
Your heart pounded.
You didn’t need to say anything. He already knew you were listening.
“Free me,” he said.
The words were clear. Measured. Spoken not as a plea, but as a promise.
You stared at him, your throat tightening. “I can’t.”
He didn’t move away. He simply watched you, eyes scanning your face like he could read what you didn’t say.
“You don’t belong here either,” he murmured, voice soft and steady. “Not with them.”
He pressed a hand to the glass, and instinctively, without thinking, you lifted yours. His fingers aligned with yours, claws brushing the barrier.
“They see a cage,” he whispered. “You see me.”
The words didn’t sound rehearsed. They sounded like something he’d been waiting to say for a long time.
You swallowed hard. “If I open that tank, they’ll—”
He tilted his head, interrupting gently. “They fear what they cannot hold.”
You felt the heat of your own breath fog the glass. Your hand stayed pressed to his.
“Take it away,” Rafayel whispered. “Let me show you what you already know.”
The glass vibrated faintly under your palm. Not from his strength. From something else. Something deeper. A resonance that pulsed in your bones.
Outside the tank, you were still an employee, a researcher, a name on a schedule.
Inside the tank, he was waiting.
And in that moment, the glass no longer felt like protection.
It felt like a wall you weren’t sure you wanted to keep.
Heya! I dunno if you're open to writing short blurbs for each LADS character for one prompt, but here it is nonetheless do with it what you want 😅 I just had to throw the idea out there
The LADS men when reader actually asks them to kill somebody for her... when she point blank gives a name and is like "this bastard fucked me over," how will they react when they realize she is letting them handle it for her?
XAVIER
You think he's going to say no. He's a hunter after all. He kills Wanderers, not people. But, Xavier already knows his answer, without hesitation. He would definitely kill someone for you. In fact, he has—many times. They were people he once considered friends and teammates, but once they crossed the line and dared to threaten you, they were obstacles he had to cut down.
ZAYNE
Yeah, no. Hippocratic oath and all that. Of all the love interests, Zayne is probably the most well adjusted and normal one who would be confused as to why you'd approach him to kill someone. It'd probably eat away at him though. He wants to do whatever he can to help you, but to ask him to kill someone? He doesn't think he could ever cross that line.
RAFAYEL
Rafayel acts like it's ridiculous. Are you kidding? He's just a humble artist. But then a week later, whoever fucked you over is mysteriously found dead with one of his paintings in their house. He brushes it off like it's a weird coincidence, but you both know it's not. He would never let anyone get away with hurting his bride.
SYLUS
Sounds like another Tuesday for him. He would probably ask exactly how you'd like it done. He wants to hear every twisted little detail you have in mind. He loves to hear you rant about how much you want them to suffer.
CALEB
He's very observant. In fact, he probably knows who fucked you over and was planning on taking care of it before you even asked. Just like how he took care of bullies when the two of you were younger. But, of course he'll take care of them for you. It means you still need him. As long as it keeps your hands clean, he'll bear the burden of it happily.
It’s making your skin prickle. This event. Dinner. Banquet.
It’s not really your scene, this fancy networking stuff, but you came as Rafayel’s plus one anyway, because he’s gone and pout—
“Pleaseee, cutie? You’re my bodyguard, right? What if someone tries to snatch me away? I need to be protected!”
Another thing that makes your bone feel like lead and your eye twitch if you’re not mindful of your expressions enough, is the presence of a green-eyed monster in the pit of your stomach—
Other people approaching Rafayel, whatever their intentions are, but they all came onto him holding conversations with a lilt in their voice and laughing a little too loudly. Some even dares to land their hands on Rafayel’s arm.
Jealousy.
It’s wrapping around your throat and it gets harder to breathe when you see another pompous man smiling too much, and giggling at almost anything, not getting the hint from Rafayel’s polite smile and short answers; that his friendliness is not welcomed.
The drink in your hand does nothing to quell your anger or even tame this— jealous and possessive beast inside you— but you held back because you haven’t gone public with Rafayel. What, with his status and fame, to be dating a hunter? You’re not ready to see what people will say.
This night was proof burnt into your retinas that people want Rafayel. Whatever shape or form of that want is, it makes you fume anyway because a want, is still a want, and with your newfound trait, this possessiveness towards your lover— and liquid courage, you guess the drink was indeed doing something— you stake your claim.
The scene around you is a blur when the man gets ahead of himself and hugs Rafayel’s arms— what the hell does he think he’s doing— your steps are sure when you approach him. Your heels click with each step onto the marble floor, and it all happens in a blur really.
You pull Rafayel by his tie, and kiss him right in front of everyone.
“Sweetheart..? Mmph—!”
You hear Rafayel’s surprised gasp, but he doesn’t push you away.
Good.
Perhaps it’s the alcohol, perhaps it’s the jealousy, but your lips don’t seem to want to part from him, you keep kissing him, quite scandalously, wrapping your arms around his neck and you feel his hands settle on your waist as he pulls you closer.
When you finally need to breathe, you pull away finally, and you watch Rafayel chase your lips, head leaning in, but he catches himself at the last second.
Suddenly it feels a little quiet, and you try your best to not look around. Focuses only on Rafayel’s spit glistened lips, now curved into a smirk. Your face flushes red.
“Do you realise what you have just done, cutie?” He asks and his tone is proud, pleased. His hold on your waist doesn’t falter.
“I-I…” You can’t answer him. So you hide your face into his chest. Then you feel his laugh more than you hear him, and then—
“Sorry, looks like I have to go home. It seems like I got a needy one in my hands.”
a/n: not sure how i feel about this one but to be honest i just really wanted to imagine rafayel chasing the kiss after we part… mmmm
• i feel like he’s lowkey gotta be lactose intolerant idk yall it’s just something about him that makes me feel like he’d get bubble guts
• rafayel is 100% a blanket thief. you’d wake up in the middle of the night freezing cause there’s nothing covering you & you turn to the side to see him wrapped up like he’s in a cocoon. he won’t let you unwrap him either
• he has pretty low screentime since he’s usually busy with painting, hanging out at the beach, etc, but he will sometimes have days where he accidentally spends 14 consecutive hours on tiktok
• i don’t think he would play video games on his own usually, but if you introduced him to the sims, he would be hooked, especially if you played together! he would make simselves of the two of you & yall would get married n stuff but then he’d also trap people in his basement & watch them starve or do the classic pool murder thing…his intrusive thoughts would win 😭
• he seems immature on the surface, but i know this man is deeply introspective and would give the best advice. he’s had to make a lot of difficult decisions in his life (see any of this myths) & has spent a lot of time reflecting on everything. he may not have all the answers, but he would know how to help you in any situation
• rafayel doesn’t even need a skincare routine he’s just naturally like that 🤭 i think he’d use a lot of nice products anyway, but his lemurian genes are responsible for how hydrated and smooth his skin is
• a lot of people think he’d be big into kpop, but i actually think he’d have a random obsession with british girl groups like spice girls, girls aloud, and even little mix lmaooo. in that same vein, i feel like he’d love british tv shows, too. you can’t tell me he hasn’t watched skins before. he’s like a weeaboo for britain idk
• kinda similar to the last one, i feel like he’d speak in random accents all the time to annoy you. his british accents are okay, but his french one is the worst. he’d twirl his non-existent mustache too 🥖
• rafayel has adhd idc. i know he’s just like me and his laundry is never put away or folded. everything is in piles…clutter everywhere. this is canon as far as i’m concerned
• anytime there’s an opportunity for him to protect you or do something for you, he will take it AND tease you about having to protect his bodyguard from a threat, such as swatting away a wasp, reaching something high up on a shelf, and catching you if you trip over something
you can find my xavier and zayne headcanons by clicking their names :)
Would like to request comfy relaxing dates (or just everyday life) for the lads 🖤 either like date idea thingies or little drabbles if you want 😊 just something for a slow day where you don't feel like doing much, just enjoying each other's presence ✨✨✨
Thank you ✨ ✨
𐙚˙⋆.˚ mainfive! x gn!reader ꒰੭
𐙚˙⋆.˚ fluffy fluff! ꒰੭
𐙚˙⋆.˚ sfw! ꒰੭
𐙚˙⋆.˚ do not translate/copy/repost! ꒰੭
﹙♡﹚i need all of these. also, i'm sorry if "baking" isn't considered a relaxing activity, but i like to bake when i want to release some stress and fill my lungs with the sweet scent of vanilla extract 𐔌՞꜆. ̫.꜀՞𐦯 anyway, thanks for the request! ♡♡♡
𐙚˙⋆.˚ caleb! ꒰੭
﹙♡﹚jigsaw puzzles! ideally, it should be a good, fun, and relaxing choice…!
﹙♡﹚if it wasn't for how teasing he gets. he'll peek over your shoulder and try to tell you where the pieces should go, only for them not to fit.
﹙♡﹚he'll also take short "kiss breaks" so your pretty brain can rest, and your pretty lips can be on his. sure, now solving a small 250-piece jigsaw takes more than nine hours, but who cares?
﹙♡﹚aside from that, it's a pretty fun time. cold drinks, snacks, missing pieces here, some pieces hidden in his pocket so you spend even more time looking for them…
﹙♡﹚by the time you two finish —or at least try to pull each part together (yours and his)— you either get a frame-worthy picture or an abstract piece. he'll treasure it forever, too.
𐙚˙⋆.˚ rafayel! ꒰੭
﹙♡﹚skincare day! oh, cutie, just close your eyes and he'll go through the bathroom cabinets for creams, lotions, or anything he can get his grabby hands on.
﹙♡﹚cucumbers on your eyes, steam for your face, taking care of your hair routine, no matter how long or simple it is; the whoooole package.
﹙♡﹚he'll expect the same, though. massages on his face, pore cleaning, your gorgeous face inches away from his as you carefully put a cute animal face mask on him…
﹙♡﹚obviously, all of this comes after a long, long, and warm bath. bubbles, steam, splashing—
﹙♡﹚by the end of the day, you two will be so, so relaxed and spent, free from the outside world's problems, that you'll wish every day could be like this.
𐙚˙⋆.˚ sylus! ꒰੭
﹙♡﹚massage night, massage night, massage niiiight! no going out, no fancy clothes, just him and you in towel robes.
﹙♡﹚he lets you go first, so you get the chance to massage his back muscles, his legs, the back of his thighs, his shoulders, aaaall as he rests on his tummy…
﹙♡﹚he won't close his eyes when he finally lays on his back, though. good luck massaging his chest without getting flustered —unless you want him to let you keep going for hours, just so he can make you even more nervous.
﹙♡﹚when it's his turn, he knows for sure you'll fall asleep. that's why he leaves his pampering for last; so he can guard your sleep and watch your eyelids get droopy. adorable.
﹙♡﹚his massages are always so good, too. he knows exactly where to caress, where to pull, where to knead, all while leaving a trail of soft kisses everywhere.
𐙚˙⋆.˚ xavier! ꒰੭
﹙♡﹚playing video games aaaaaall day long! no standing up from the couch, no cooking at all, just takeout and soft butts rotting on the plush cushions.
﹙♡﹚bonus points if you two have matching pjs, socks, and slippers —or matching game controllers and headphones!
﹙♡﹚you can either try out new games or replay scenes, as xavier probably read online about easter eggs or secret scenes you missed.
﹙♡﹚sometimes, it's infuriating how calm he is, even when fighting a final boss, whereas you're frantically pressing buttons left and right, up and down, moving the joystick like crazy.
﹙♡﹚but in the end, if you end up losing, his warm arms and soft lips will make you feel better, kiss by kiss, snuggle by snuggle… unless you two are playing against each other or on different teams.
𐙚˙⋆.˚ zayne! ꒰੭
﹙♡﹚baking those fast, three-ingredient cookies with zayne has to be a healing experience.
﹙♡﹚he measures, he cleans after using every utensil, he makes sure to add and mix perfectly, he's constantly checking the time…
﹙♡﹚he lets you boss him around if you want to take the upper hand, though. he'll be the perfect assistant, even when he secretly fixes your messes while you aren't looking.
﹙♡﹚baking time means 30% doing, 50% waiting, and 20% eating, so, if the math is mathing, that's 70% of free time for him to kiss you over the counter as the cookies bake in the oven, and to later feed you.
﹙♡﹚if the cookies aren't that good, don't worry. he'll take the blame and order your favorite pastries. to cheer him up for his "baking failure," you could feed him or let him taste the sweetness of your lips instead.~
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