For @sofiemystique and her Rook, Allette Ingellvar 💜 Oh, Emmrich. He is absolutely the type to sit and stare fondly across the room while writing the sappiest love letter 🤭
My dearest Allette,
You are only a few paces away—half-sunk in pillows, surrounded by open books, hair falling over your shoulder in the way that always makes me want to move it just to kiss the skin beneath—and still I write to you as though I were miles off. Perhaps it is foolish, but I think if I do not spill some of this feeling somewhere, I will drown in it. You have filled every quiet space in my soul so completely, I don’t know where to place the overflow except here, in ink, in trembling confession.
I had intended to focus this morning. There were pages I meant to organize, annotations left half-finished, some brilliant and deeply important notion about runes that I can now no longer remember. You walked past me in the soft light of the window—kissed my temple in that absent, intimate way you do when you're thinking of something else—and I have been lost ever since.
You love me gently. As though you are not afraid of the dark corners. As though you know they are there and choose me because of them, not in spite of them. I have spent much of my life learning how to be useful, how to be clever, how to disappear into my work when the ache of the world grew too loud to bear. And now you look at me like I am not a collection of clever parts but someone worth loving whole. Do you know what that does to a man who had forgotten how to hope?
There are moments you don’t notice—when your hand lingers at the base of my neck, when you hum softly while reading aloud, when you murmur my name like a spell—and in those moments I feel touched by something ancient and holy. You, who walk through the world with such gentleness it puts every battle-hardened man to shame. You, who tend to the living and the dead with equal reverence. You, who would sit for hours in silence beside an unmarked grave just so the spirit within might remember what it is to be seen.
You made me feel again. Not just hunger or grief or passing delight, but life. And I cannot explain the gift of it. I can only show it, again and again, in how I touch you, how I listen, how I remember every secret smile you give me in the dark.
You once told me, in a soft voice that cracked halfway through, that you hadn’t allowed yourself to imagine a future. And I remember thinking how cruel it was that someone like you, someone so full of light, had been taught to keep her hopes small. But we’re here now. Not just alive, but together. Laughing about our endless books, debating over whether a third shelf in the bedroom is excessive or necessary. Planning where to go next. You take me to waterfalls and ancient tombs and call it a stroll, and somehow every place becomes beautiful because you are there to name it so.
I never believed in second chances. But you did. And now—I believe in you. In us. In the weeks still ahead of us, the years still waiting. I want all of them. The quiet mornings, the overstuffed shelves, the tea left on the table when I’m too deep in thought to remember it myself. I want the sound of your footsteps behind me, the way your arms wrap around my waist, your mouth at my ear as you ask, always so sweetly, if I’d like some company. (The answer is yes. It is always yes.)
I have no real conclusion to offer you. Only this ache in my chest and the certainty that I am, completely and irrevocably, yours. And if I don’t put down this pen and come to you now, I will start writing verse. Embarrassing verse. Or worse—I will begin cataloguing all the places on your body I wish to kiss at this very moment, and then neither of us will get anything done today.
Come interrupt me, darling. Please.
Yours, in every possible way, Emmrich
I am in absolute tears over this. Thank you for this so much @draco-illius-noctis . It is PERFECT.
Just reposting because this is one of my favorite things ever and @draco-illius-noctis is an incredible human.
