Biotic, Templar & Warden Butts @eternalshiva - Tumblr Blog

Aug 15, 2025

Beneath the Skin of the Sea [rafayel x f!reader ] — short story

oblivscend — to slowly let go of past hurts, like sinking them into the ocean of time

SUMMARY : Two souls bound across lifetimes meet again in a prison of steel and seawater. With the clock running out, love and fate close in, forcing an impossible choice. In the shadow of bullets and gods, one act will echo through every life they’ve ever lived—and lost.

THE SCORE : Raphael // Flower Face “in another time, in another life, maybe i could love you raphael” Love Letter From The Sea to The Shore // Delaney Bailey “i think i loved you in another life where i was the sea and you were the shore” Gilded Lily // Cults (slowed + reverb) “haven't i given enough, given enough?”

AUTHORS NOTE : This one’s been brewing in my mind for a while.

The past several days, I’ve been doubting my writing more than I’d like to admit. I know it’s just my mind being cruel, but it still gets to me. Somehow, I always find myself returning to Rafayel during these times—tortured artist and all, he’s my constant muse. I adore him.

This story is inspired by one of my favorite films of all time, The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro, whose beauty and strangeness have stayed with me for years. The Shape of Water is a story that captures beauty in the strange, tenderness in the unspoken, and love in the impossible. I hope this story captures even a fragment of that magic.

And to you, dear readers—I see your comments, your messages, your reblogs, and your likes. As always, I’m both grateful and humbled by your kindness and appreciation. You make it easier to keep writing, even on the days when doubt feels louder than inspiration.

— E.E.

NIGHT HAD SETTLED OVER the compound by the time she arrived. Here, that meant nothing.

Light bled from every seam in the concrete—a feverish hum that illuminated nothing, only exposing the dust hanging in the air. The place was breathing, but only just.

She cleared the first checkpoint without a word. The guards glanced at her badge, then away, their expressions collapsing back into the slow rot of the shift. To them, she was maintenance. Maintenance was nothing.

The deeper she went, the heavier the air became. A faint scent of salt lingered—not the clean kind that rolls off an open coast, but the stale, metallic tang of something stolen from the sea and locked inside a machine.

The hum never stopped. It throbbed through the walls, through her bones—the mechanical heartbeat of the filtration systems. She had worked to that sound for years. It had never once been beautiful.

Containment Wing D waited at the far end of a corridor lined with sweating pipes. She hated this walk. Even before she knew what it held, the place had felt alive in a way she couldn’t name—a place that watched you back.

The Wing D door was heavier than the others—a slab of reinforced steel painted the color of damp ash. Her keycard didn’t open it directly. A soldier took it from her, slid it into a secondary reader, and handed it back without meeting her eyes, as if touching the mechanism too long might be dangerous.

On the wall beside the door, in neat block letters, were the rules:

Do not approach the glass. Do not touch the water. Do not make contact with the specimen.

She read them every time. She didn’t know why. They had the cold symmetry of scripture—printed to be obeyed without question—yet the more she saw them, the more they felt like the confession of someone who had already sinned.

Inside, the air dropped several degrees, needling through her thin regulation jacket. Somewhere beyond the curve of the chamber, the source waited.

The first sound was water moving. Not the polite trickle of a fountain or the churn of a drain, but something slower—deliberate—as though the water itself had noticed her.

Pipes ran like veins along the ceiling, pumping whatever kept the thing alive. She couldn’t see it yet, but she felt it—the way one feels a presence in a darkened room.

Her orders were simple: check the filtration readouts, log the numbers, leave. None of them said anything about looking. But people look. Even when it feels like trespassing.

She rounded the curve of the chamber, clipboard in hand—and stopped.

The tank filled most of the far wall: a thick glass cylinder, steel ribs running its height, beads of condensation sliding down the surface. The water inside was lit from somewhere above, dim and cold, turning its contents into shifting silhouettes.

For a moment, she thought it was empty. Then the shape inside moved.

It did not move like a human.

The figure drifted forward—slow, deliberate—as though each inch was an assessment. Light caught along his skin, or what passed for it, tracing faint blue lines that shimmered like constellations in motion. A long tail uncurled behind him, muscle and fin rippling through the water.

A metal plate was bolted to the glass:

ASSET LERAF-721 Classification: Lemurian Retrieval Asset Status: Containment Priority — Lethal Threat

No origin. No history. No name. In the language of EVER, this was all the truth required: retrieved, contained, dangerous.

A guard entered briefly, glanced at a reading, and slapped the glass twice—hard enough to leave a smear of skin oil. He left without a word. The creature didn’t flinch.

When the door closed, his eyes turned to her. Not an animal’s eyes. Not a man’s. No curiosity—only recognition, as though she’d arrived late to a conversation he’d been having with her all along.

She crouched at the filtration console, clipboard angled toward the steady green pulse of the readout, willing herself not to turn toward that gaze. The numbers were stable. They were always stable. Her work existed because someone above had decided the machine should be watched by human hands.

The wrench slipped before she even registered the loss of grip. It clattered against the tank’s base, then slid into the water with a muted splash. She hissed a curse, reaching instinctively—then froze.

He had moved.

The water parted as he descended, his body coiling with unhurried precision. Silent. Closer now—far larger than distance had allowed her to grasp.

He didn’t seize the tool. He lifted it from the bottom as if handling something breakable—a glass ornament, a hatchling bird. Rising again, the motion was all grace, until he hovered directly before her.

Light traced the glowing lines across his shoulders, the ridged muscle along his tail. The water lapped against the glass as he extended the wrench toward her, holding it just beneath the surface.

She hesitated, then slid her hand through the service hatch. Her fingers brushed his.

Warm.

Not the cold, slick texture she’d imagined, but heat—startling, defiant, as though some part of him refused to surrender to the chill of this place.

She drew the wrench free, but he didn’t retreat. He stayed there, watching her—the slow curl of his tail punctuating the stillness like the end of a sentence she hadn’t yet learned to read.

After that night, she began to notice patterns.

Whenever she stepped into Wing D, he was already there—just beyond the glass, suspended in the water as if he’d been waiting. Sometimes utterly still, tail curled loose beneath him. Other times, a slow drift: the spiral of his body, the shifting glow of markings along his skin, like breath.

She told herself it was coincidence—the sound of the door opening had drawn his attention. But coincidence doesn’t happen every time.

Once, passing the observation console, she saw the feed from his tank flicker. Only for a second—then steady again. Later, she realized it always happened when she entered. None of the other cameras in the facility glitched. Only his.

She began shifting her rounds so Wing D fell last. She called it efficiency. It was not.

The guards had their stories: It’ll kill you if you get close. You’re just food to it. Yet when they banged on the glass or hurled insults, he barely moved. When she approached, he turned toward her with the slow certainty of a tide changing direction.

And the longer this went on, the more she felt it—the quiet conviction that she was being watched. Not as prey. Not as an experiment. As something known.

Near the end of her shift, she found herself in Wing D again. The corridors behind her were quiet; the guards had drifted into their corners of boredom, the low murmur of a card game swallowed by the hum of the facility. No one ever seemed to watch his feed.

She lingered by the console, eyes on the same green readouts she’d checked an hour ago. They never changed. Still, she bent over the screen until the numbers blurred, as if staring long enough might give her a reason to stay.

When she looked up, he was there.

No movement had betrayed his approach—one moment the glass was empty, the next it held the shape of him. Water clung to his skin in fine beads, turning the glowing markings along his arm into liquid stars.

He lifted a hand, fingers spreading until his palm pressed flat against the glass. The glow there deepened, pulsing like a heartbeat.

Her own hand hovered at her side. It would be easy to leave. The rules on the wall weren’t suggestions. The plate with his designation—ASSET LERAF-721—was a reminder of that.

She stepped closer.

The air cooled with each pace. Her breath felt too loud in the tight space. She set her palm against the glass, aligning it to his. The barrier was freezing, but the shape beneath was unmistakable—the breadth of his hand, the curve of his fingertips.

They stayed like that. Neither moved.

Her voice startled her when it came, soft and almost uncertain. “Why do you keep watching me?”

The water shifted. He didn’t answer at once. His eyes narrowed—not in threat, but as though weighing what the answer might cost. Then he leaned forward, forehead almost touching the glass.

“Because you look back,” he said, the words carried in a low current the air couldn’t hold.

She blinked. For a moment, she could believe she’d imagined them. But his gaze told her otherwise.

A ripple moved through the water, his tail curling slow and deliberate—a motion that felt less like swimming than punctuation, closing something, or opening it.

She lowered her hand first. He let her go.

The door closed heavy behind her, but the cold in her palm lingered. Under it, the ghost of a warmth she had no business touching.

The next night, she came with an intent that had nothing to do with her shift.

The corridors felt longer when you carried a secret, the walls measuring each step.

In Wing D, she didn’t look at him—not at first. She went straight to the console, eyes on the monitor in the corner: the feed from his tank.

Clear. Steady. No static.

She stepped closer to the glass.

The feed blinked—a single sharp flicker—then steadied. She stepped back. Perfect image. Closer again. Flicker.

Her fingers tightened on the console’s edge.

She looked up. He was there, half-submerged, tail coiled beneath him, eyes fixed on her with the stillness of deep water. The whole tank seemed to hold its breath.

“You do that to the cameras?”

For a long moment, nothing. Then, without breaking her gaze, he tilted his head—not a nod, not a denial. “Would you rather they watch?”

His voice was deeper than she’d imagined, shaped by something older than the words themselves. It seemed to come from the water, from the walls, from the narrow space between them.

Her mouth opened, but no answer came that didn’t sound like a confession.

She turned back to the console, pretending to adjust a setting, aware that the feed still glitched with every breath she took toward him.

She should have left. The numbers were logged, her shift nearly done.

Instead, her feet carried her along the perimeter of the tank, past the steel ribs, to a recessed panel half-hidden in the curve of the glass. A service hatch. Feeding, maybe. Sample collection.

It was unlocked.

Her gaze flicked to the camera above the console. The red light was dead.

The latch gave with a soft click, the panel swinging open to a narrow mouth in the water. Salt hit first—sharp, clean—followed by the faint metallic tang. The surface shifted.

He was moving toward her.

“Not protocol,” he said, the words landing like a verdict.

“I’m not here for protocol.” The reply slipped out before she could catch it.

He closed the distance in a slow arc, stopping just beneath the opening. Blue light shimmered from the markings along his skin, washing over the steel and painting her fingers in color. When his hand broke the surface, water traced the line of his knuckles before touching her wrist.

Warm. Always warm.

His fingers moved with deliberate precision, mapping the inside of her wrist as though cataloguing the jump of her pulse. Droplets slid to her palm.

“You’re not supposed to touch me,” she said quietly.

“Then stop coming closer.”

She didn’t.

The hum of the filtration system deepened, a vibration she felt in her bones. The space between his hand and her skin seemed to thicken, heavier than sound.

When she stepped back at last, water ran from her wrist in thin streams—evidence she could never hand over.

After that night, she found herself returning to the hatch. Not long enough to be caught—just long enough for the water to still, for him to come forward, his face breaking the surface until the markings along his jaw caught the dim light.

He spoke rarely, each word weighed against its cost.

“The ocean,” he told her once, “is not a place. It’s a law. One EVER will never understand, no matter how many tanks they build.”

Another time:

“They didn’t take me in battle. It was parley. I stepped onto human soil with open hands. They bound them.”

She offered nothing about herself at first. It felt dangerous—as though the moment she gave him something true, the rules between them would shift. But one evening, when the silence stretched long enough to feel like a question, she said:

“My brother… tried to make it to the coast last year.”

His gaze sharpened, though he stayed quiet.

“They called it a security breach. EVER raid. No one survived.”

Her voice was flat, each word measured to keep it steady.

The water stirred—just once—his tail cutting a slow arc.

“And still you work for them.”

“I work here because it’s the only place left to work.”

He studied her. It wasn’t judgment in his silence, but recognition—the kind carried by those who know the cost of survival.

The hum of the filtration system filled the space between them. The air felt heavier. The water, darker.

“They’ll do to you what they did to him,” he said at last, voice low, “if they ever think you’re worth it.”

The truth of it lodged deep—not as fear, but as something sharper she had no name for.

She didn’t step back. Didn’t close the hatch. Her hand stayed on the edge, fingers hooked against the steel.

“Leraf—”

The designation slipped out before she could stop it, the way you might say sir when you have no other name.

He moved before she finished. Not violently, but with such sudden precision that the water slapped the steel. His face filled the space between them, markings along his cheekbone catching the low light like cut glass.

“Do not call me that. Not... not you.”

It wasn’t loud. If anything, it was too quiet—but the kind of quiet that demanded obedience.

“It’s what they call you.”

“It is the name they chained me with.” His gaze didn’t waver. “Not mine.”

The words pressed into her—heavy, unshakable.

“Then… what is your name?”

A pause. The water stilled, as if the question had drawn something out of him. His eyes searched hers—not for sincerity, but for something deeper, as though deciding whether she could be trusted with a thing that, once given, could never be returned.

“You are not ready to know it.”

“And how would I be ready?”

“That,” he said, leaning just close enough that his voice curled in the space between them, “is for me to decide.”

The filtration system hummed louder, though she wasn’t sure if it was the machine or the blood in her ears. Something had shifted—not in him, but in her—a line crossed, and there was no way back.

She didn’t move when his hand broke the water’s surface.

It wasn’t abrupt—nothing about him was. The movement unfurled slowly, as if it had begun before she noticed, as if the space between them had been closing long before she’d stepped into the room.

His fingers stopped just shy of her face, pausing in the thin strip of air between water and skin. She could almost feel the decision in him, the weight of whether to bridge it.

Then he did.

The pads of his fingers brushed her temple, trailing in a deliberate arc to her jaw. It wasn’t a caress. It felt closer to study—a sculptor’s hands on unfamiliar stone, mapping angles he meant to remember.

She stayed still, though something in her chest tightened.

“What are you doing?”

The question came out softer than she intended, not from fear.

“Learning the language you speak with your skin.”

He didn’t say it like poetry. He said it like fact—the kind that doesn’t need persuasion. His hand caught a strand of her hair, turned it once, then let it fall.

“And what does it say?”

Her voice was more invitation than challenge.

“That you’ve already decided whether you’ll run. You just haven’t admitted it yet.”

Her pulse filled the space between them. His palm hovered near the base of her throat, close enough for her to feel the pull of his warmth. He didn’t press forward. He didn’t have to.

Something shifted in her—unnamed—and before she could stop herself, her hand rose.

She touched him back.

The first sensation wasn’t what she expected. His skin was warm—but not with human warmth. It was steady, constant, untouched by the cold of this place. Her fingertips traced the ridge of his cheekbone, the faint seam where his markings curved toward his jaw.

He leaned into it.

Not subtly. His eyes closed, just for a breath, his face stripped bare—the careful mask he wore for the world cracking under the weight of her touch.

She didn’t understand what she was seeing until she realized she’d seen it before—not here, not now, but somewhere beyond reach. A flicker gone before she could catch it, like trying to remember the shape of a dream after waking.

He was remembering too. She could read it in the way his mouth parted—not to speak, but because words would ruin it. The way his brow furrowed, not in confusion, but in the ache of recognition.

As if he had known this touch his entire existence. As if he had waited for it through centuries of absence.

Her thumb brushed the corner of his mouth. The markings along his jaw pulsed faintly beneath her hand, like something alive remembering how to breathe.

She wanted to ask. She didn’t.

When she lowered her hand, it was slow, reluctant—and his gaze followed it until her fingers slipped from view, the water claiming him again. But the look on his face lingered like a word she had almost understood.

Somewhere far down the corridor, voices rose—metallic barks, clipped and sharp. A chair scraped. A door slammed. She glanced at the corner camera. The red light was gone. Not flickering. Dead.

“They won’t come back yet,” he murmured, the certainty in his tone too precise to be guesswork.

Her grip on the hatch rim tightened. “How do you know that?”

“I know.” No explanation. Just a weight placed in her hands and left there.

The safe thing would have been to step away, walk back into the sterile corridor, keep her body and her record clean. Instead, she leaned in. The cold saltwater breathed against her skin. Below, his tail cut the surface with a patient, predatory sweep.

“Come closer,” he said. Not a command. Not a request. An inevitability.

She obeyed.

The water broke around his rising arm—muscle slick in the dim light, droplets trailing from elbow to wrist. His hand closed around her forearm this time, not stopping at her fingers. The pressure of his grip was testing, measuring, as if confirming a suspicion he’d held for years.

She drew breath to speak—then the water took her.

Steel scraped her thighs, then the cold slammed into her like a fist, knocking the air from her lungs. Beneath the shock, there was heat. Not from the sea—from him.

He pulled her close, his body steady in the slow sway of his tail. Her hands rose on instinct to his shoulders—hard, coiled muscle under skin that was both human and not. His breath touched her temple, slow, deliberate, as though she might spook if he moved too quickly.

Up close, his eyes weren’t storms. They were wounds. Heavy, bruised things, made more vivid by her presence, as though seeing her had opened something he had learned to live without.

Her hair floated between them. He caught a strand, studied it like a relic, then let it slip, watching it unspool into the dark as though losing it cost him something.

“You—” His voice broke. The rest sank into the silence between them, not drowned by water but by refusal.

Her hand rose, cupping his cheek, her thumb brushing the ridge of his jaw. He stilled under her touch, eyes closing with the resignation of a man at prayer. And for a heartbeat, she felt sure he was remembering something she had forgotten.

Bootsteps rang down the corridor.

He didn’t release her at once. His hand slid to her mouth, his fingers grazing the corner of her lips before he let her drift toward the hatch.

“Please…” he whispered, not to her but to whatever god had made her. “Remember me.”

* * * *

Containment Wing D was never silent at night. Even when the generators held, even when the floodlights burned their unblinking white, the walls leaked a low, mechanical hum, damp and patient, like something alive.

She was nearly through her last round when voices slid under the security office door—low, muttering. Too casual for the hour. Too careless for this place. She slowed. Listened.

“Asset Leraf-721. Disassembly scheduled. Forty-eight hours.”

The number struck her chest and sank.

A pause. Paper shuffled. “Orders confirmed.”

The rest came in fragments, broken by the fan’s uneven rotation—vivisection… internal harvest… breach risk.

Her mind refused the words. They spoke of an object, to be taken apart, studied, thrown away. But she saw only him. The way his eyes found hers through the glass. The way his voice—low, fractured—had once said: Remember me.

Her breath hitched. She called up every reason to keep walking. Each slipped from her grasp like fish flashing into dark water.

She turned before she could think better of it. The air cooled as she went deeper, tinged with the faint brine of his wing. The light thinned. The pump’s hum rose beneath it like a second, mechanical heartbeat.

By the time she reached his cell, the ocean—not the real ocean, but its trapped, furious echo—was already in her ears.

She stepped to the glass. Let the corridors seal shut behind her.

He was already there. As if he’d been waiting.

Half in shadow, half in light, his body blurred in the water’s distortion—but his eyes cut clean through, as though the glass had been built to frame them. They searched her face with a gaze that was both accusation and prayer.

“They’re going to move you.” Her voice faltered in the stillness. “Forty-eight hours. They said—” She stopped.

He tilted his head, slow, deliberate. A predator certain of the next moment.

“And then?”

Her throat tightened. “Then… disassembly.” The word hurt her mouth. “Vivisection. They’ll take you apart.”

The water seemed to thicken. He did not look surprised—only stiller. His hands rose to meet hers, not in comfort, not in plea. Simply to be.

“Then release me.”

Soft. Absolute. No hope in it. No plea. Only inevitability. The words landed in her chest like a verdict.

Her pulse roared. “I can’t—”

“You can.” His gaze darkened, pulling her forward as the tide pulls the body. “You will.”

Her protest came apart before it reached her lips. The thought of him on some silent table was intolerable.

He swam closer. Light caught in his hair—a shimmer of something older, not born in this place. His mouth curved, not into a smile, but into the shadow of something human.

“If I die here,” he said, each word deliberate, “I die with their name in my mouth.”

A pause. Gravity closed the distance between them.

“My name…”

“My name is Rafayel.”

The sound was wrong and holy—an ancient word dredged from the seabed, one the light should never touch.

It didn’t just reach her ears—it entered her.

Rafayel. Rafayel. Rafayel.

The present buckled. Locked corridors in her mind groaned, splintering under pressure.

Images surged—violent, without order. His hand in her hair, not behind glass but in another life where the air smelled of rain, not steel and chlorine. A field of white flowers bowing beneath his shadow, the only shade that mattered. The heat of him at her back in a candlelit room, breath warm at her neck, voice steady—a voice she had belonged to before she had a name.

The sea: black and endless. Their bodies weightless within it, mouths meeting like the drowning cling to air. Blood on his jaw—hers, his—it hadn’t mattered then.

Worlds turned. The soil, the language, the gods changed, but he remained. A fixed star in the dark. Her ruin. Her anchor.

The glass chilled her fingertips. His gaze pinned her there, the same eyes, the same mouth, the same unbearable gravity.

Her breath came fast, unsteady. “I—” She pressed harder to the barrier, as if pressure alone could drag him through centuries.

Something in him shifted. Stillness trembled into recognition. A muscle in his jaw tightened, as though he might break the glass by force.

“You remember,” he said—not asking, but stating a law older than either of them.

Her throat closed around the truth. Tears threatened as the echo of his touch—touches she hadn’t yet lived in this life—burned through her like fever.

And she knew, with the clarity of a wound: she hadn’t met him here.

She had found him again.

The lock yielded with a metallic groan. The hatch swung wide like a mouth unhinged.

She didn’t hesitate. The air in the containment wing was already too thin, her skin too tight for her bones. The memory of him—of all of him—roared inside her, louder than the klaxon that would wail once the breach registered.

Cold water took her in a shock that stole her breath, turned her skin to glass. And in the space of a heartbeat, he was there—not the specimen, not the prisoner, but as he had always been.

His hands found her waist with terrifying certainty. Not groping. Not grasping. Claiming, as one claims fire—with reverence for the burn. The water shifted around them like an exhalation, a weightless chamber the rest of the world could not enter.

She broke the surface, breathless, their bodies still pressed together beneath. Droplets clung to his lashes, catching the pulse of the emergency lights.

“I remember you,” she breathed, her voice still learning the shape of his name.

He shut his eyes as if the words cut him. His forehead touched hers, water running between them, and the sound he made was not quite a laugh, not quite a sob.

“I knew you would,” he said—and it wasn’t pride or possession, but something far more dangerous: faith.

Her fingers slid into his hair, heavy with water. He leaned into her touch like a man who had wandered the desert and found the only spring. His hands framed her face with a gentleness that defied the chains he’d lived under.

“I’ve held you like this in every life,” he whispered, lips almost on hers. “Even when you didn’t know my name. Even when you left me.”

The confession struck her ribs like a breaking tide. The space between them closed, inevitable as gravity. Above, the cameras were blind, the guards absent. The water hummed around them, urging them closer.

If she let this happen, there would be no undoing it. No undoing him.

And still—she tilted her mouth toward his.

Her lips brushed his—a feather-touch that should have been nothing. Yet in the dark water, it shattered everything.

A sound tore from his throat, low and unguarded—the kind not meant for witnesses. The space between them vanished. His mouth claimed hers in a surge that was both plea and command, and four centuries collapsed into a single instant.

She had kissed before, in this life and others, but never like this—never like drowning while being held above the surface. His hands slid from her face to the small of her back, drawing her closer until her ribs ached. The water moved around them in its own slow pulse, as if listening.

Her fingers traced the ridges of his shoulders, mapping an atlas she had once known by heart. She broke away only to breathe, and he followed—drinking every ragged gasp as if she might vanish with the next tide.

It was reverent, yes—but the reverence of worshipers on their knees: unyielding, desperate, almost violent in its hunger. He kissed like a man prying open a locked chest, searching for something only he knew was there.

“Rafayel—” she began, but the name drowned on his tongue as he claimed her again. Her body answered without thought, legs brushing his hips, her heart hammering so hard she swore it must echo in the water.

When he finally tore his mouth from hers, it was not for mercy. His lips pressed to her jaw, her throat, her collarbone—each kiss heavier, deeper, as though staking a claim beneath her skin. His teeth grazed her once, a ghost of the predator beneath the man, yet his grip never lost its impossible tenderness.

“This life,” he whispered, voice frayed, “I will not lose you to them.”

The words should have terrified her. Instead, they felt like the only truth she had left.

His gaze lifted to the reinforced seals above. His hold changed—not to pull her closer, but to brace her. “They will come soon,” he said, and the water seemed to tremble with the sound. “When they do, they will not take me alive.”

She understood before her palm found the release panel. The hatch control was cold. One pull, and the locks would yield. One pull, and everything would unmake.

There was no plea in his eyes—only inevitability.

She pressed her thumb down.

A seismic groan split the water and her teeth. The tank walls shuddered, and then the flood hurled itself toward freedom.

“Stay with me,” he murmured—command or prayer, she couldn’t tell.

Then the world broke.

Glass imploded with the sound of a continent cracking. An ocean’s cold slammed through the containment wing, tearing cables from the ceiling, swallowing consoles, screaming down corridors. Lights flickered twice, then died—leaving only the roar and the pulse in her ears.

She clung to him as the current dragged them, his body shielding hers from debris, his hands unerring in the chaos—as if made to carry her through destruction. Somewhere beyond the flood, alarms wailed—muted under the rushing dark.

His mouth found her ear. “Hold your breath,” he said, and the water took them whole.

The dark was chaos and silence at once.

A roar in her ears—not from the guards shouting above, not from the gunfire that shattered the surface into jagged white scars, but from the pulse hammering inside her skull. It was a living thing, that sound—a final clock counting down in her blood.

Rafayel’s grip was unbreakable. His body moved with the ferocity of a creature who had never surrendered to tide or steel. Every kick cut the dark, every stroke a promise he would not let her go.

She wanted to believe him. But the air was leaking from her, little by little. Every bullet that ripped into the water above sent shockwaves through her chest, loosening her grip on breath. The cold was a hand dragging her under.

And she could feel it—the truth. She was slowing him down.

The tunnel loomed ahead—a throat of concrete narrowing into a grate. Beyond it, the ocean waited: silver on black, the night split open like a wound. But the gate was lowering.

She didn’t decide. Her body did.

Her fingers found his jaw—a final act of reverence—before she shoved him forward with everything she had left. The current seized him. For one heartbeat, his face was clear: panic, disbelief, and something worse—recognition. Not just déjà vu. The same look as the night they’d first kissed in another life, in another ruin—his lips brushing hers, the world trembling at the edges. The same flicker of awe and terror as if he’d finally found her, only to feel her slipping away in the same breath.

Then he was through. The gate slammed shut with a sound that split the world in two.

She broke the surface, gasping until her throat tore raw.

He was already there, on the other side, his hands slamming the bars, his shoulder driving into steel. The gate didn’t move. His chest heaved. His breath came ragged. His eyes—gods—were not predator’s eyes anymore. Not captive’s eyes. They were the eyes of a man being buried alive.

She let the current press her to the narrow window. His fingers speared through, finding her face, palms cupping her cheeks as if touch could anchor her.

Her breath shook against his skin. “We were always cursed by the gods,” she whispered, tasting salt. “Destined for ruin. You and I.”

He shook his head, violent, desperate. “No. I just got you back.”

“Not like this. Please.”

“Yes,” she said, a bitter curve in her mouth. “Exactly like this.”

She swallowed against the ache in her chest. “I love you,” she said. “I always have. In every life, in every death. Even in this one.”

Something shattered across his face—a fracture down to the raw, unarmored core. His forehead pressed to the bars until his skin blanched with the cold.

The bullets came. One slammed into her shoulder. Another tore through her side. A third bloomed in her chest—heat and drowning at once. The pain was a red sun rising inside her, burning away her breath.

Her lips parted. The words came like a tide receding: “Remember me.”

He roared—a sound swallowed by water, by steel, by fate. His hands clamped harder to her face, almost hurting, and she welcomed it. Wanted the ache to be the last thing she felt.

Her vision blurred. His features melted into moonlight and shadow. She knew she was sinking before her body let go.

Through the dark, she saw him once more: lips forming her name, hands still reaching, eyes still begging.

And then the ocean closed over her.

— fin.

taglist : @lemurianfire

#love and deepspace #rafayel love and deepspace #rafayel x mc #oops haha this is sad