Hello! How are you? I hope your day has been well. I'm not sure if you are still taking requests, but if you are, could you please do a snippet where the hero is left to die drowning in a lake by their "mentor", and the villain saves them? Thank you :)
The hero had never been a strong swimmer. There had been some rudimentary lessons at school but - well, water or getting wet wasn't really their thing. Fire and water were a somewhat classic for not getting along.
They'd always told their mentor that they thought drowning might just be the worst way ever to die.
The weights on their legs, on their wrists, pulled them steadily down down down into the dark. Their lungs strained. Their screams, their wit, were useless when to open their mouth was only to die faster.
The surface shrank further away still, or maybe that was their vision tunnelling. Maybe that was the opposite of going to the light.
Their eyes flew open again.
Lips pressed again their own, a body reeling back as the hero spasmed and coughed, rolling to retch up mouthfuls of murky lake water on the bank. They could feel their body shaking, shivering, with cold.
A familiar voice swore. Unfamiliar fingers carded through the hero's damp hair, holding it out of their face, lingering on their unsteady pulse.
The villain held their hands up in surrender.
The hero stared at them, too numb with betrayal and shock to even consider panic or fury. Too cold. The spark of them didn't want to come anymore.
Their mentor had left them to die.
Not just left. The hero couldn't think of it. Their brain flinched from the memory, drawing back, only able to poke at it the way a tongue may tentatively examine a rotten tooth.
"You're okay." The relief on the villain's face was both bewildering and obvious. "I thought I was too late."
The hero blinked at them.
The villain was as soaked through as the hero felt, clothes clinging to them, droplets of water dripping down their cheek like tears.
The hero felt sick with water.
"Right," the villain cast a look around them. "Fire powers. You need heat. Warmth. You must be freezing!" They came up with nothing, no jacket or convenient blankets.
"You saved me." The hero's teeth chattered.
The villain flushed, and the hero could feel the warmth of it like a siren call, even at a distance. It felt warmer than any of the blood in their own body. The hero edged closer, without even thinking about it, but didn't close the gap. Wary.
The villain cleared their throat. "Yeah. I - yeah. I thought they might try something, you know? I just didn't think -"
Something clicked, even through the fog. "That's why you were always following me. Stalking me. My mentor-" The hero's voice faltered.
Their mentor had always said that the villain was simply obsessive, a creep with a crush. But it had never been that, had it? Their mentor had always been perfect when someone was watching them. It didn't matter if the person watching was a villain; they were still a witness. That was why they had to come to the lake in the first place, because even if the hero didn't like it, the middle of a lake wasn't somewhere the villain could eavesdrop on their plans with their super-hearing.
The hero wrapped their arms around themselves and it did nothing to make them feel warm.
"Yeah." The villain tried for a smile; an uncertain thing. "I - yeah."
Of course the villain hadn't liked them. Even their own mentor apparently didn't like them - not enough not to try and -
The hero squeezed their eyes shut, choking on a sob, or maybe more water. They wiped their mouth.
It had been (even if they knew it had been wrong) nice to have the villain like them. They felt like even more of an idiot.
"We need to get you warm," the villain said, with such gentleness that the hero wasn't sure they could bear it. "Come on. Can you stand? We need-" The villain swallowed, and held out a hand. "We need to get you warm. Please."
The urgency in the villain's voice felt distant too. That was probably a bad sign of how well the hero was not doing. They tried to summon up some of the survival instincts that had kept them thrashing and struggling in the water until they couldn't anymore.
The villain's arm wrapped around them, warmwarmwarm, pulling the hero unsteadily to their feet.
The hero nuzzled in, thoughtlessly, with a sigh of relief and...oh. Their brain cleared a little again. Sharpened a little back to its usual edge. They tensed, but didn't pull away.
The villain's other arm wrapped around them too, cupping the back of the hero's neck in a firm embrace, holding them close.
"You saved me," the hero said again. "We're enemies."
"No." The villain pressed a kiss to their forehead, and it blazed with heat, like a match to kindling. "You were never my enemy. You are a goddamn treasure, okay? And you didn't deserve this."
There was too much to unpick. The hero's lungs hurt. The cold and the water still sucked at them, threatened to pull them down down down and they didn't want to go back to that place. They didn't want to die.
But there was the villain.
Their eyes met - another spark, another flare, another resuscitation.
Maybe vigilance was its own tenderness, too, sometimes. Maybe it was all more and less than what their mentor had painted the world as.
"Good." The villain adjusted their grip, and didn't pull away either. "Let's get the hell away from this lake."
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