plot : in which, you can’t help but think you aren’t enough for your partner.
There is a tulip sitting on your desk when you wake up. It is soft pink, freshly cut, and leaning gently against your water bottle like it had always belonged there. You stare at it for a long moment before your brain catches up with your heart, and then you already know. You already know exactly who left it there.
Deuce.
You pick it up carefully, turning the stem between your fingers. The petals are impossibly delicate, and for a second, you almost feel something warm stir behind your ribs. Almost. Then the warmth curdles into something heavier, something that sits low in your stomach and pulls, and you set the tulip back down like it has burned you. He does things like this. Little things. Constant, quiet things that stack up like stones until you feel buried under the weight of them. Last week, he carried your bag when you mentioned your shoulder was sore. He did not ask. He just reached over mid-sentence and took it off your arm, slung it over his own shoulder, and kept talking like it was nothing. You spent the rest of the walk trying to figure out what you had done to deserve that kind of easy, thoughtless gentleness, and you came up empty every time.
The week before that, he stayed up past midnight helping you revise a paper for Trein’s class. His own homework sat untouched on the other side of the table. When you pointed that out, he just shrugged and said he would get to it later, that your grade mattered, that he wanted you to do well. You had laughed it off. You did not know what else to do with that kind of care when it was pointed directly at you. You pull your uniform on and try not to think about the tulip.
You fail.
Lunch is the worst part of the day, lately. Not because anything bad happens. That is almost the problem. Nothing bad happens. Deuce finds you at your usual table, drops into the seat beside you with that easy smile of his, the one that scrunches his nose just slightly at the corners, and immediately slides half of his bread roll onto your tray without comment. “You always forget to eat enough,” he says simply, like it is a fact he has memorized. Like he pays that close attention. You open your mouth to argue, then close it. He is right. You did forget to grab enough this morning, moving too fast and too tired to think clearly. You do not know how he noticed. You do not know why he keeps noticing. Ace drops into the seat across from you a moment later, loud and uninvited as always, pointing a fork in Deuce’s direction with great authority. “Did you do the thing I told you?” he asks, and there is something smug in his voice that makes your skin prickle.
Deuce goes a little pink. “Shut up.” “The flower thing. Did you leave the flower.” “Ace.” “Because I told him,” Ace continues, turning to you like he is delivering a very important report, “that girls like small gestures. Flowers, notes, that kind of thing. Very romantic. I am basically the reason you two are functional.” Deuce looks like he wants to melt directly into the cafeteria floor. “I told you to drop it.” You laugh, because it is the expected response, because Ace is looking at you and waiting for it. But the laugh feels hollow somewhere on the way out. Because now you know. Deuce asked for advice. Deuce thought about it, planned it, walked to wherever he found a tulip at whatever hour of the morning, and left it on your desk because he wanted to make you smile. He is trying that hard.
And you are sitting here feeling like a fraud. The evening is quiet. The two of you are in the Heartslabyul courtyard, sitting together on one of the stone benches near the rose bushes. The painted roses are red tonight, which means no one is in trouble, and the air smells faintly like grass and something floral you cannot name. Deuce is close enough that his arm presses warm against yours, and he is showing you something on his phone, some video about a mechanical part he has been researching for an upcoming practical exam. You are not watching the video. You are watching him.
The way his brow furrows slightly when he explains something he cares about. The way he glances over every few seconds to check that you are following along, that you are still there, still with him. The way he looks at you like you are someone worth checking on. You do not understand it. You have never understood it. He is Deuce Spade. He is someone who wakes up every single day and tries, genuinely tries, to be better than he was yesterday. Someone who carries his mistakes carefully and refuses to let them define him. Someone who loves his mother fiercely and studies until his eyes ache and still manages to find time to leave flowers on your desk before the sun comes up. And you are you. Whatever that means. The thought unfolds slowly, the way it always does, spreading into every corner until there is no room for anything else. He deserves someone who does not flinch at kindness. Someone who can accept a bread roll without spending ten minutes wondering what they did to earn it. Someone who can look at a tulip and just feel happy, cleanly and simply, without the guilt chasing right behind it.
“Hey.” His voice is soft. “You went somewhere.” You blink. He is looking at you now, the phone lowered, the video forgotten. “Sorry,” you say. “I’m here.” “You sure?” He is watching your face in that careful way he has. The way that makes you feel transparent, like he can read the parts of you that you have never said out loud. “I’m fine,” you say. The words taste wrong. “Just tired.” He is quiet for a moment. Then, gently, he says: “You do that a lot.” “Do what?” “Say you’re fine when you’re not.” He sets his phone down on the bench beside him. “And before that, you were staring at me like I’d done something wrong. I haven’t done something wrong, have I?” “No,” you say immediately, because he has not. He has done everything right. That is the entire problem.
“Then what is it?” You look down at your hands. The courtyard is very still. Somewhere nearby, a bird calls once and then goes quiet. “I just don’t understand why you do it,” you say finally, because the truth is easier to say when you are not looking at him. “The flower this morning. The bread at lunch. Staying up to help me with my paper. All of it.” Your voice comes out smaller than you intended. “I don’t understand what I’ve done to make you think I deserve any of that.” The silence that follows is long enough that you finally look up. Deuce is staring at you. Not with surprise, not with confusion. With something much more serious than either of those things. “That’s what you’ve been thinking?” he says. “I know it sounds stupid.” “It doesn’t sound stupid.” He shifts on the bench so he is facing you more fully, and his voice is low and very even, the way it gets when something matters to him. “It sounds like you’ve been carrying something really heavy for a long time and pretending you weren’t.” Your throat tightens. You do not say anything.
“Listen to me,” he says. “I don’t leave you flowers because I think you earned them. I don’t carry your bag because you did something to deserve it. I do those things because I want to. Because it makes me happy to do them. Because you make me happy.” He pauses, and then he reaches over and covers your hand with his, and his palm is warm and solid and real. “You are not a project I’m working on. You’re not something I’m trying to fix or repay or earn points with. You’re the person I want to come find at lunch. You’re the person I think about when I’m studying and it gets really hard and I want to give up. I think, okay, I want to tell them about this later. And that keeps me going.” You are very close to crying, which is humiliating, but he keeps going. “You don’t have to deserve love,” he says. “That’s not how it works. I know I’m not perfect at explaining things, and I know Ace would probably say something funnier and better right now, but I need you to hear me when I say this.” His hand tightens slightly over yours. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t need you to earn me. I just need you to let me be here.” The bird calls again, somewhere in the roses. You exhale slowly, and something in your chest that has been wound tight for a very long time loosens just slightly. Not all the way. You know that it will not be all the way, not tonight, maybe not for a while. But it loosens enough that you can breathe around it. “I’m sorry,” you whisper. “For making it weird.”
“You didn’t make anything weird.” He leans forward and presses his forehead briefly against yours, and it is clumsy and warm and so completely him that your eyes sting. “I just want you to talk to me when it gets loud in your head. Okay? I’m not Ace, I can actually handle a real conversation.” A laugh escapes you, wet and small and genuine. He grins, relieved, and it scrunches his nose exactly the way you knew it would. You lean into him, and he lets you, and for a little while, the courtyard holds you both in the quiet. The tulip is still on your desk when you get back that night. You put it in a glass of water this time.
plot : in which, you can’t stand being so similar to your beloved. it aggravates you.
You have, on multiple occasions, considered breaking up with Azul Ashengrotto.
Not for any dramatic reason. Not because he has been cruel, or cold, or neglectful. Not because of the contracts, or the manipulations, or the way he smiles like a man who already knows the answer to a question he hasn’t asked yet. You have made your peace with all of that. You even find it charming, most days. What you cannot make peace with, what absolutely refuses to be charmed away, is the simple and deeply unfair fact that Azul Ashengrotto is exactly like you.
And it is infuriating.
It starts on a Tuesday, which is already a strike against it. Tuesdays have never done anything for you. You are sitting across from him at one of the Mostro Lounge’s private booths, the velvet seats plush and the lighting warm and golden, and you are playing cards. It is a simple game. You suggested it because you are good at it, and being good at things in front of Azul is one of your great quiet joys. “I’ll raise,” you say, sliding your chips forward with the kind of casual confidence that has won you games before. Azul looks at your chips. Then he looks at you. He has his glasses on, which means he is in a calculating mood, and the small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth is the most annoying thing you have ever seen on a human face.
“Interesting,” he says, which is what he says when he already knows he’s going to win. “Don’t say interesting like that.” “Like what?” “Like you’re reading a mildly amusing book.” He tilts his head. “Would you prefer I say it another way?” “I’d prefer you didn’t say it at all.” He hums, low and unbothered, and raises you double. You stare at the chips. You stare at your cards. You think about all the decisions in your life that have led you to this moment, sitting across from a man who learned to count cards purely because he found it intellectually stimulating, and you wonder where exactly things went wrong. You match him. You have a good hand. You are almost certain you have a good hand.
He lays his cards down with the unhurried patience of someone who has already rehearsed this moment in his head, and it is, of course, better than yours. Not by much. Just enough. “You hesitated on your second raise,” he says, already gathering the chips toward his side of the table. “Your tells are subtle, but they’re there. You pull your sleeve down when you’re uncertain.” You look at your sleeve. You have, in fact, pulled it down. “I was cold,” you say.
“It’s very warm in here.” “I run cold.” “You’ve never mentioned that before.” “There are many things I haven’t mentioned.” He smiles at you, full and genuine and a little bit smug, and you think: this is the worst person I have ever loved. You think it the way you think about the weather, or the color of the sky. Just a fact. Just something that is.
It gets worse after dinner. Jade and Floyd have long since drifted away to handle the evening rush, and the lounge has settled into a quieter rhythm, the murmur of other patrons a soft backdrop behind the jazz that floats through the speakers. Azul is doing paperwork at the table because he does paperwork everywhere, always, like a man haunted by the specter of unfinished business. You are reading. Or you are trying to read. You keep glancing at him over the top of your book. “You’re staring,” he says, without looking up.
“I’m glancing.” “You’ve glanced fourteen times in the last ten minutes.” “You were counting?” “I notice things.” You look back at your book. You read the same sentence three times and absorb none of it. “What are you working on?” “A contract revision.” “Anything interesting?” “All of my work is interesting.” You turn a page you haven’t actually read. “You know, most people, when their partner asks what they’re working on, say something like ‘oh, just some paperwork, nothing to worry about.’ They don’t say ‘all of my work is interesting’ like they’re their own biggest fan.” Azul finally looks up, and there is a gleam in his eye that you recognize as the precursor to something devastating. “Most people,” he says, “when their partner is trying to work, don’t interrupt them eleven times in an evening.” “I’ve interrupted you twice.” “Fourteen glances and two interruptions. I’m being generous by only counting the verbal ones.”
You open your mouth. You close it. You hate that he is right. You hate, even more, that you would have said the exact same thing in his position, would have tracked the exact same data and used it at the exact same moment for maximum effect, because that is what you do. That is what you both do. You are cut from the same slightly exhausting cloth, and some days you think the universe did it on purpose, just to see what would happen. What happens is this: you are deeply, stupidly, inconveniently in love with him. And he is deeply, stupidly, inconveniently in love with you. And it is an absolute nightmare. You leave the booth to get a glass of water from the bar, mostly because you need thirty seconds that are not in his immediate vicinity.
Floyd is wiping down the counter when you get there, and he looks at you with the particular expression he reserves for things he finds entertaining at other people’s expense. “You two fighting again?” he asks. “We’re not fighting.” “You’ve got your fighting face on.” “I don’t have a fighting face.” Floyd grins, wide and sharp. “You’ve both got the same fighting face. That’s the funny part. You both do this thing where you go all still and your eyes get a little sharp, and anyone else would think you’re totally calm but actually you’re about to say something really precise and mean.” He pauses, tilts his head. “It’s kinda weird how similar you are. Kinda creepy, actually.” “Thank you, Floyd,” you say flatly. “That’s very helpful.” “Anytime!” he says, and means none of it.
You take your water and you go back to the booth and you sit down across from Azul, who has set his pen down and is watching you with an expression that is carefully neutral, which means he is feeling something he hasn’t decided to show you yet. “Floyd said something obnoxious, I assume,” he says. “Floyd said something accurate, which is somehow worse.” Azul is quiet for a moment. The jazz drifts. Somewhere across the lounge, a patron laughs at something. The candlelight on the table is soft and warm and makes him look the way he does when he isn’t performing, when it is just the two of you in a space too small for pretense.
“I did notice,” he says, slowly, like he is choosing each word with care, “that you seemed frustrated this evening. More than the card game warranted.” “I’m not frustrated.” “You are.” “I’m–” You stop. You breathe. “I’m annoyed. There’s a difference.” “Is there?” “Yes. Frustrated means I’ve hit a wall. Annoyed means the wall is standing there being smug about it.” He blinks. And then, to your eternal, traitorous delight, he laughs. It is a real one, not the polished social sound he uses for customers, but the slightly undignified one that he lets out when something catches him off guard, quiet and a little breathless. You love that laugh. You would do almost anything to hear it. “The wall,” he repeats, and he is still smiling when he says it. “The wall,” you confirm.
He reaches across the table and his hand finds yours, and his thumb traces a small, idle arc across your knuckles, the way he does when he isn’t thinking about it. When it is just habit. When you have been together long enough that some things have stopped being deliberate and started being simply true. “You know,” he says, “I find it very irritating when you make a metaphor that good. It doesn’t give me anywhere to go.” “Good.” “It’s not good. I like having somewhere to go.” “I know you do,” you say. “That’s why I did it.” He squeezes your hand, gentle, just once. “You’re terrible.” “I learned from the best.”
He looks at you, and the smugness is still there, it is always there, but underneath it is something quieter and warmer and far more honest. He looks at you the way you imagine you look at him sometimes, when you forget to be exasperated. Like you are a puzzle he has already solved and still cannot stop thinking about. “Rematch tomorrow,” he says. “Cards.” “You’ll lose.” “I never lose.” “You’ve never played me when I’m paying attention.” “I count that as a point in my favor. You’re more interesting when you’re trying.” You want to say something cutting back. You are already composing it, already reaching for the exact right arrangement of words, and then you look at him, at the line of his jaw and the gleam of his glasses and the hand still holding yours on the velvet tabletop, and you think: fine. Let him have that one. You can take the next one.
plot : in which, you wonder if things between you two are genuine
The dining hall of Scarabia was quieter than it had any right to be. Lunch had come and gone, and most of the students had filtered back out into the heat of the afternoon, leaving behind the faint smell of spice and the hollow clinking of dishes being cleared by the few remaining housewarden attendants. The noise of the world kept moving, indifferent, the way it always did after something catastrophic had the audacity to pass without killing anyone. You sat at the far end of one of the long tables, a cup of tea going cold between your hands. It had been four days. Four days since the screaming had stopped, since the dark magic had bled out of the air like ink dissolving in water, since you had stood in the wreckage of the Scalding Sands and watched Jamil Viper collapse to his knees on the stone floor. Four days since you had seen something in his face that you had never seen before, something that looked terrifyingly close to relief, like a man who had finally let go of a rope he had been holding so long his palms had stopped bleeding and started to go numb.
You had cried that night. Not in front of anyone. You were not the kind of person who let that sort of thing happen where people could see it. But the question that had started as a whisper in the back of your mind while the dust was still settling had grown, in four days, into something you could not ignore. It sat in your chest like a stone every time you saw him across a room. It made the air between you feel thick and strange in a way it had never felt before. Had any of it been real? You turned the teacup slowly in your hands and tried to think about it the way you always tried to think about hard things, carefully, from the outside in.
You understood, logically, what had happened to Jamil. You had pieced it together from what little he had said in the aftermath, from what Kalim had tearfully explained, from the things you had already known and quietly stored away about the boy you loved. The resentment. The years of it, layered and compressed like sediment until it had no more room to go. The way he had never been allowed to simply exist for himself, the way his name had always been spoken in the same breath as someone else’s, the way his future had been handed to him already decided.
You understood it.
That was the part that made it worse. Because understanding why he had done what he did, understanding the shape of his pain, did not answer the one question that mattered most to you personally. And you had spent four days pretending it did not matter, four days being careful and gentle around him the way you are careful around someone who has just recovered from something terrible, four days not asking. Today, you had decided, you would stop pretending.
You found him in the kitchen.
Of course you found him in the kitchen. Even now, even after everything, Jamil Viper still cooked. You had once thought that was one of the most genuine things about him, the way his hands moved with actual care over a pot or a knife, the way the tension in his shoulders would ease by degrees when he was doing something that required precision. You had told him that once. He had looked at you like you had said something slightly embarrassing and turned back to whatever he was making. You had loved him for that look.
You stood in the doorway for a moment and just watched him. His back was to you, dark hair pulled back, sleeves rolled to the elbows. He was moving methodically, the way he always did. If he had heard you come in, he gave no sign of it.
“Jamil.” He stilled. Just for a second. Then he reached over and turned down the heat on the stove before he turned to face you. His eyes were careful. You had noticed that about him these past four days, the way he had become careful in a new way, not the sharp and guarded careful he always was, but something quieter. Like he was waiting for something. “You should be resting,” he said. It was not unkind. It was just the thing he said when he did not know what else to say. “I’ve been resting for four days,” you said. “I need to talk to you.”
Something in his expression shifted, subtle enough that someone who did not know him would have missed it entirely. You were not someone who did not know him. He reached over and wiped his hands on a cloth, and he nodded once. “Alright.”
You sat across from each other at the small prep table in the corner of the kitchen, and for a moment neither of you said anything.
You had thought about how to start this on the walk over. You had rehearsed several versions in your head. All of them had sounded wrong, either too accusing or too gentle, either pressing too hard or not hard enough. In the end you had decided to just say it.
“I need you to tell me something honestly,” you said. “And I need you to actually be honest. Not careful. Not kind. Just honest.”
Jamil was looking at you steadily. “When am I not honest with you?”
“You’re diplomatic,” you said. “It’s different.”
He did not argue with that. He nodded once, something small and resigned in it, and he waited.
You looked down at the table for a moment. Your hands were folded in front of you and you looked at them like you might find the right words written somewhere in the lines of your knuckles.
“When you were planning everything,” you said slowly, “when you were thinking about taking control of Scarabia, about using your power to finally have something for yourself.” You paused. You made yourself look up and meet his eyes. “Where did I fit into that? In your head, when you were imagining the version of your life where you finally had everything you wanted. Was I in it because you wanted me there? Or was I in it because I was useful?”
The kitchen was very quiet. Jamil’s expression had not changed exactly, but something behind it had moved. He was looking at you with the kind of focus that made the air feel different, like all of his considerable attention had narrowed to a single point. “That’s what you’ve been thinking about,” he said. It was not a question. “For four days,” you said. “Yes.” He was quiet for a long moment. Not the quiet of someone stalling, not the quiet of someone calculating what to say to get the reaction they wanted. It was the quiet of someone who was being careful with something fragile, and you could not tell yet if the fragile thing was you or him.
“You weren’t a piece in it,” he said finally. His voice was low and even. “You were the part of it I didn’t know how to account for.” You looked at him. You waited. “I had plans for a long time,” he continued. “Long before any of this. I knew what I wanted. I knew what I was going to take. And most of it fit neatly into the version of things I had built in my head.” He glanced down briefly, then back up. “You didn’t. You were the thing that kept not fitting, no matter how I tried to arrange it.” “That’s not an answer,” you said softly. “I know.” He exhaled through his nose. “I’m getting there.” You gave him the silence to get there.
“I have spent most of my life being careful about what I let myself want,” he said. “Because the things I wanted were never going to be mine, and wanting them anyway was just a different kind of suffering. I learned to want small things. Safe things.” He looked at you and his jaw was set in the way it got when he was saying something that cost him. “You were not a small or safe thing to want. And I wanted you anyway. That’s not something I did strategically.” You held his gaze. You were looking for the thing you always looked for in him when it mattered, the small tells, the tightness around his eyes, the slight pull at the corner of his mouth that meant he was editing himself. You could not find any of them. “But you’re so good at performing,” you said, and you hated how small your voice came out. “You spent years performing for Kalim. Being exactly what someone needed you to be. How am I supposed to know the difference?”
Something moved across his face then, quick and painful, and he looked away for a moment. “You’re not wrong to ask that,” he said. It came out quiet. “I know you’re not wrong to ask that.” “I know I’m not wrong either,” you said. “That’s why I’m asking.” He turned back to you and his eyes were darker than usual, something pressed down deep in them. “Then I don’t know what to tell you that would be enough,” he said. “I can tell you that I have never performed for you. I can tell you that you are the only person in this place that I have ever talked to like a person instead of a variable. I can tell you that when I was losing control, the thing I was most afraid of losing was not the plan.” His voice did not waver but you could see the effort it took. “It was you.”
The silence after that was different than the one before. You breathed through it.
“I believe that you believe that,” you said. And you did. You could hear it in him, the particular way something sounded when Jamil Viper was not performing. “I just don’t know if I can trust myself to know the difference yet. Between what you mean and what I want to hear.” He nodded. It was slow and honest and it did not look like defeat exactly, just like someone absorbing a truth they had already suspected. “That’s fair,” he said. “I’m not breaking up with you,” you added, quickly, because you needed him to know that. “I’m not. I just need you to know where I’m standing.” “I know where you’re standing,” he said. And then, after a pause: “Where I’m standing is that I would rather you be honest with me about this than not. Even if it’s hard to hear.”
You looked at him. Across the small table, with the stove behind him still holding the low heat he had turned down, in the quiet kitchen that smelled like cardamom and warm bread, he looked like a person who was very tired of carrying things alone and very unsure of how to put them down. You knew that feeling. You knew it from him, and you knew it from yourself, and you knew it from the particular brand of exhaustion that came from loving someone complicated. “I love you,” you said. It came out steadier than you expected. “I want you to know that part is not something I’m questioning. Even right now, even with all of this sitting between us. That part hasn’t moved.”
His throat moved. He looked at you for a long moment with an expression you had no name for, something that lived in the narrow space between relief and grief. “I know,” he said. You were not sure, later, if he meant that he knew you loved him, or that he knew you weren’t sure you believed him yet, or both. With Jamil, it was usually both. You reached across the table and put your hand over his. His fingers were cool from the prep work, a little rough at the knuckle. He did not move his hand away.
“I’m not going anywhere,” you said. “But I need time.”
“Alright,” he said. Just that. Just alright, quiet and steady, and it sounded like a promise.
You stayed in the kitchen for a while after that. Not talking much. He went back to the stove eventually, and you stayed at the prep table and watched him work. The sounds of the kitchen settled around you, the low bubble of something simmering, the occasional soft knock of a spoon against the side of a pot. It did not feel fixed. You did not expect it to feel fixed. But there was something in the ordinariness of it that felt like ground under your feet, after four days of feeling like you were standing over open water. Something to stand on, even if you were not sure yet how far it would hold. You watched his hands move. You thought about the way he had said you didn’t fit. The way it had not sounded like a complaint.
You thought about how loving someone was sometimes just that. Watching them do an ordinary thing in a quiet room and knowing that the uncertainty and the ache and the complicated, stubborn want were all the same feeling, all at once. You picked up a small piece of bread from the counter that he had left there without comment, some quiet and wordless offering, and you ate it, and the kitchen stayed warm around you both. It was not enough. It was not nothing. For now, it was what you had.
And somehow, despite everything, it was still him. It was still you. And some part of you, the part that lived below logic and reason and all the very legitimate questions you were not done asking, already knew you would choose this over and over again, the uncertainty included, the ache included.
There is something uniquely exhausting about loving someone who is kind to everybody. You figure this out slowly, the way you figure out most things that hurt. It starts as a small, warm feeling somewhere in your chest whenever Trey Clover smiles at you from across the Heartslabyul kitchen, flour dusted along his forearm, the scent of something buttery and sweet already filling the whole room. It is easy, at first, to let yourself enjoy it. His smile is one of those rare things in life that feels like it was made specifically for you, even when your brain quietly reminds you that it was not.
Trey smiles like that at Riddle when he sets a perfectly iced tart in front of him. He smiles like that at the first-years when he catches them looking overwhelmed before exams. He smiles like that at you, and at Ace, and at Cater, and at just about every person who wanders through the Heartslabyul gates on a slow afternoon. His warmth has no ceiling and no particular address. It is simply there, available, generous, and completely impossible to read. This, you decide one Friday evening while watching him pour tea for literally everyone in the common room before himself, is the problem. You cannot tell if he likes you. You cannot tell if he likes you any more than he likes the potted rosebush by the front entrance, which he also tends to with remarkable care. You have spent weeks collecting tiny moments and turning them over in your hands like sea glass, trying to find the edge that makes them special.
The time he noticed your headache before you mentioned it and slid two pain tablets across the table without a word. The afternoon he walked you back toward Ramshackle after a Heartslabyul visit ran late, just because, he said, the path gets dark quickly and he had nowhere urgent to be. The way he remembers your favorite flavors without being asked and somehow always has something ready that matches them.
But then you watch him do the same, softer, different versions of all those things for other people, and the sea glass loses its shine. It is not his fault. You know that. Trey Clover is just built this way, steady and attentive, the kind of person whose care comes out of him like breathing. He does not mean to confuse you. He probably does not even know he is doing it. That almost makes it worse. So you do the only logical thing, which is to quietly, carefully, start putting distance between yourself and the problem. You stop dropping by Heartslabyul on weekday afternoons. You keep your responses in the group chat friendly but short. When your paths cross in the halls between classes, you give him a wave and a smile and keep walking before your chest can do anything stupid. It feels a little like holding your breath underwater. Uncomfortable, but manageable. You tell yourself you just need time to sort out your own feelings without his gravitational pull making it impossible to think straight.
For about two weeks, it works. Sort of. You sleep better. You stop overanalyzing his texts for hidden warmth. You eat your meals without looking up every time someone with brown hair and glasses walks past. What you do not account for is Trey noticing. He shows up at Ramshackle on a Saturday afternoon, right in the middle of the golden hour when the light comes through the dusty windows and makes everything look like an old photograph. You open the door and he is just standing there in his weekend clothes, a covered dish balanced in one hand, looking at you with something in his expression that you do not immediately have a name for. “I made lemon tarts,” he says. “You haven’t come by in a while.”
You step back to let him in because you are not made of stone, and also because you genuinely do not know what else to do. He sets the dish on the table in the main room and sits down like he belongs there, which, after all this time, he kind of does. “I’ve been busy,” you say, which is mostly a lie and probably sounds like one. Trey looks at you for a moment. He has this particular way of looking at people, careful and unhurried, like he is in no rush to reach a conclusion and is content to just observe until the right answer shows up on its own. You have always found it comforting. Right now it makes your pulse jump.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says. It is not an accusation. His voice is even, almost gentle, which somehow makes it harder to deflect. You sit down across from him and look at the covered dish instead of his face. “I haven’t been avoiding you.” “You walked the long way around the main building three times this week.” You look up. “How do you even know that?” “Because I was coming the short way and I kept almost running into you.” The corner of his mouth lifts slightly. “You’re not as subtle as you think.” The embarrassment that moves through you is significant and immediate. You consider briefly whether the floor could just absorb you, and when it does not, you decide there is really nothing left to do but be honest. The distance was not working anyway. You are still just as in love with him as you were two weeks ago, maybe more, because apparently absence does not cure this particular problem, it just makes it louder.
“I was avoiding you,” you admit. “I just…” You stop. Start over. “It’s hard to be around you sometimes.” Trey’s expression shifts. Something in it becomes more careful. “Why?” “Because I can’t tell what you mean.” The words come out quieter than you intended. “You’re kind to everyone. You remember everyone’s preferences and you check in on people and you notice things that nobody else notices, and I never know if I’m just another person you’re keeping track of or if…” You trail off. “It’s easier to not think about it if I don’t see you.” The room is quiet for a moment. Outside, a bird calls once from somewhere in the overgrown garden and then goes silent. “What do you want it to be?” Trey asks. You look at him. He is watching you with that same unhurried attention, but there is something underneath it now that you have not seen before, or maybe have seen and talked yourself out of every time. Something that sits in the space between careful and hopeful. “I want it to be more,” you say. “I want you to look at me the way you look at everyone else, except also somehow different. I want to be one of the things you actually keep.” You exhale slowly. “I know that’s not a small thing to ask.”
Trey is quiet for long enough that your heart starts doing something unpleasant. Then he reaches across the table and takes the cover off the dish, revealing a small stack of lemon tarts, each one precisely iced, each one the exact style you mentioned offhandedly months ago when he had asked what your favorite dessert was. “I made these specifically for you,” he says. “Not for Riddle. Not for anyone else. I made them because you hadn’t come by and I kept thinking about whether you’d eaten anything you actually liked today.”
You stare at the tarts. Then you look at him. “I think about you differently,” he continues, and his voice is quieter now, steady but quieter. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say that without making things strange between us. You’re not just someone I keep track of. You’re someone I keep coming back to.” He pauses. “You’re someone I wanted to come find today.” Something in your chest loosens all at once, like a knot that has been pulled tight for a very long time finally releasing. “I’m in love with you,” you say, because it feels important to say it plainly, out loud, where there is no room for misreading it.
Trey looks at you for a moment, and then he smiles. Not the open, easy smile he gives to everyone. Something softer than that. Something that does not look like it belongs to anyone else. “I know,” he says. “I think I’ve been in love with you too. I just didn’t want to assume.” You laugh before you can stop yourself, a short and slightly disbelieving sound, because of course. Of course Trey Clover, who notices everything, who keeps track of everyone, who shows up at your door on a Saturday with a dish of lemon tarts made precisely to your taste, would not assume.
“You could have just said something,” you say. “So could you.” He has a point. You concede it with a small nod, and he slides the dish toward you, and you take one of the tarts, and for the next hour the two of you sit in the golden afternoon light and talk the way you have always talked, easy and unhurried, except now his knee is close enough to yours that they are almost touching, and every time you glance up he is already looking at you.
It feels different this time. It feels exactly like what you asked for.
You are someone he keeps coming back to.
And he is, it turns out, someone you do not have to figure out anymore.
lyrics : i expected to see you / on your morning run again / i know i shouldn’t be watching / ‘cause everytime i feel the pain — day 8 : 𝗉𝖺𝗂𝗇 by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you’re miserable after your breakup with Jade Leech…
You notice the mushrooms first.
That’s what gets you every time. Not the sound of the ocean through Octavinelle’s walls, not the soft blue-green light that filters through the magically conjured water above your head. It’s always the mushrooms. Someone in the kitchen had tucked a small cluster of them into the corner of your breakfast plate this morning, delicate and pale, little decorative things that nobody actually eats. You stare at them longer than you should. You poke one with your fork. And just like that, your appetite is completely, thoroughly gone. You push the plate away and press your fingers against your eyes until you see stars.
Two months. It has been two months since Jade Leech looked at you with that calm, unbothered expression of his and said, very gently, very politely, that he thought the two of you were better suited as acquaintances. Two months since you nodded and said you understood, because you had too much pride to do anything else in front of him. Two months since you walked back to your room, sat on the edge of your bed, and felt the slow, creeping understanding that you were in a lot more trouble than you had realized. You had thought you would be fine. You are not fine.
The problem with living in Octavinelle is that there is nowhere to hide. The dorm is beautiful and intimate and close, all curving coral archways and glowing lanterns that cast everything in shades of amber and teal. It is the kind of place that wraps around you like a held breath, and it means that no matter which hallway you turn down, no matter which common room you slip into, you are never more than a few minutes from running into him. You have tried to develop a system. You know his schedule well enough at this point, which is embarrassing in its own specific way, and you try to arrange yourself around it like furniture being shifted to avoid a draft. Breakfast before seven, before he comes down. The long route to the Coral Sea lounge, the one that adds five whole minutes to your walk. Dinner slightly later than is good for you, slightly later than is comfortable, because the alternative is sitting in the same room as him while trying to remember how to chew.
It works, mostly. And then it doesn’t, and you end up standing in the corridor outside the kitchen holding a cup of tea that has gone cold, because you heard his voice around the corner and your feet simply stopped cooperating. It is, you have decided, extremely unfair. The dreams are the worst part. Or maybe the second worst part. You haven’t fully ranked them yet. You don’t dream about anything dramatic. There are no tearful confrontations, no grand gestures, no alternate versions of that afternoon where you say something different and he decides to stay. Your brain, apparently, has no interest in giving you anything so satisfying. Instead you dream about small things. The way he tilted his head when something amused him, that precise, birdlike angle that meant he found you entertaining. The particular quality of his attention when he was actually listening to you, how it felt like being studied and chosen at the same time. You dream about walking beside him through the Mostro Lounge after closing, when the chairs were up on the tables and the lights were low and he would point out the patterns in the woodgrain and say things like “fascinating, don’t you think?” about objects that were not fascinating at all, and somehow make you believe they were.
You wake up from these dreams feeling hollowed out in a way that coffee doesn’t touch. You have been drinking a lot of coffee. Floyd keeps giving you looks about it. Floyd, of all people, has apparently decided to be concerned about you, which tells you that things have gotten genuinely bad. There is a particular cruelty to still caring about someone who has moved on without apparent difficulty. You watch Jade sometimes, when you can’t help it, when the system fails and you end up in the same space at the same time and there is no graceful way to leave. He looks exactly the same. That is the thing that gets under your skin and stays there, burrowing. He looks perfectly, infuriatingly fine. His uniform is always pressed. His smile is always composed and pleasant and layered with the same quiet amusement it always was. He tends to his mushrooms, manages the lounge, assists Azul with the same seamless efficiency, and shows absolutely zero sign that anything between the two of you ever happened.
You wonder sometimes if you imagined it. All of it. But then you remember the way he used to say your name, with that particular careful emphasis, like it was something worth pronouncing correctly, and you know you didn’t imagine anything. You just weren’t enough to make him want to stay. That thought lives in your chest like a splinter. You have gotten good at ignoring it, mostly. And then a Wednesday happens, and someone puts mushrooms on your breakfast plate, and the splinter reminds you it is still there.
Today is one of the bad days. You can feel it from the moment you wake up, that thick, foggy weight behind your eyes that means you slept too lightly and dreamed too much. You get dressed slowly. You braid your hair and then undo it and then braid it again because the first attempt feels wrong and you need at least one thing to feel right. You stare at the ceiling for three minutes before you make yourself get up and go get food, because you know that if you don’t eat something, by afternoon you will have a headache, and the headache will make everything worse. The lounge is quiet at this hour. The breakfast crowd has thinned out, and the staff are moving between tables with a kind of gentle efficiency that Octavinelle always seems to have, that sense of things being managed before you even notice they need managing. You find a table in the corner, the one by the small porthole window where you can see the artificial current shifting the water outside, and you sit down and open your notes from last night’s class and try very hard to be a person who is focused and fine.
Your tea arrives. You wrap your hands around the cup. You read the same sentence four times without absorbing it. You are thinking about the way he laughs. Not the polished, public version he uses in the lounge, the one that is cordial and smooth and tells you nothing. The other one, the quieter one, the one that used to slip out sometimes when you said something that genuinely caught him off guard. It was a small sound, almost reluctant, like he hadn’t decided to let it out and wasn’t entirely pleased that he had. You had collected those moments the way some people collect pressed flowers, carefully, like they might crumble if you weren’t gentle. You close your notes. There is no point. Not today. He comes in just before you finish your tea. You don’t hear him so much as sense him, that particular shift in the atmosphere that your nervous system has apparently decided to catalog despite your wishes. You look up before you can stop yourself, and there he is, tall and unhurried, in conversation with one of the newer staff members, something about inventory that you catch only fragments of. His hands are clasped behind his back. He is nodding at something being said to him, and his expression is attentive and composed, and his mismatched eyes catch the lantern light and hold it, the way deep water does.
You look back down at your notes. You look back up. You have absolutely no control over yourself. It’s mortifying. From across the room, Jade tilts his head at something the staff member says, that precise, particular angle, the one from your dreams, and the bottom of your stomach drops out cleanly, like a trapdoor. You breathe through it. You have gotten practiced at breathing through it. The terrible thing, the thing you have turned over and over in the dark of your room until the edges are worn smooth, is that you understand. That is what makes it so impossible to be angry. You understand that Jade is not careless or cruel. He was honest with you, which was more than a lot of people would have been. You understand that whatever the two of you were, it ran its course in his estimation, and he made the practical, logical decision, because that is who he is and you knew who he was when you fell for him. You knew, and you did it anyway, and now you are sitting in the corner of the Mostro Lounge with cold tea and four unread sentences and two months of mornings that don’t quite fit right. You watch him across the room, composed and steady and entirely elsewhere, and you think, not for the first time, that you could never have kept him. Not really. Some things are not meant to be held, only admired from the distance that keeps them intact. He is too self-contained, too deliberate, too much himself. And you are too much yourself in all the wrong directions, all feeling and instinct, all of the things that work beautifully in theory and messily in practice.
It wouldn’t have worked. You know that. You have known it for a while, if you are being honest, which you are trying to be, even though honesty is its own kind of ache. It still doesn’t stop you from watching him turn and walk back toward the kitchen, unhurried and certain, and feeling the loss of him settle over you like a tide going out. The shore always knows when the water has left. You gather your notes. You finish your tea. You get up, and you go on with your day.
lyrics : last night i had a dream we started dating / now you’re pissing me off !— day 7 : attracted to you by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, ruggie is oblivious to your obvious crush on him…
There was a certain kind of suffering that came with having a crush on someone impossibly oblivious. You had done everything short of writing it across the sky in big, bright letters. You had laughed at every single one of his jokes, even the ones that were only mildly funny. You had saved him snacks from the cafeteria and tucked them into his bag without being asked. You had let him lean against your shoulder during boring lectures without once complaining, even when your arm fell completely asleep. You had done all of it with your heart sitting right at the surface, plain and obvious for anyone paying even a little bit of attention.
Ruggie Bucchi, apparently, was not paying attention.
It started small, the way these things always do. You had stayed late one evening to help him study for a test he was absolutely going to fail without intervention. The two of you were crammed together at one of the smaller library tables, your notes spread between you, your shoulders almost touching. You had looked over at him while he was squinting down at a particularly dense paragraph, and your stomach had done that helpless little flip that you were already getting tired of. “You’ve got ink on your cheek,” you told him, reaching over without thinking and brushing it away with your thumb. He had gone still for just a second. You had felt your own pulse spike with ridiculous, embarrassing hope.
Then he grinned, rubbing at the spot himself. “Ha, good catch. I woulda walked out lookin’ like a mess.” He went right back to his notes. That was it. That was all. You had stared at the side of his face for a full three seconds before deciding that maybe you needed to be a little more obvious. The next attempt was what you privately considered a masterpiece of subtlety gone wrong. It was a warm afternoon, and you had spent an embarrassing amount of time putting together a small lunch for the two of you, using recipes you had specifically looked up because you knew what he liked. You had found him outside near the Savanaclaw dorms and presented the whole thing with what you hoped was a casual, easy smile.
He had looked at the food with his eyes going wide, and your heart had leapt. “Oi, this is amazing! You’re a real lifesaver, you know that?” He had already reached for the sandwich, pulling it apart to inspect it with the same reverence most people reserved for precious things. “I was just thinkin’ I didn’t wanna spend money on lunch today. You’ve got perfect timin’.” You had smiled back at him because what else were you supposed to do. “Right,” you said. “Perfect timing.” He had eaten every single bite and told you it was the best thing he’d had all week, and you had gone home that evening and pressed a pillow over your face for a solid minute. The incidents piled up after that in a way that almost started to feel comedic. You had given him your umbrella in the rain and he had thanked you warmly and promised to return it, as though you were simply a very kind acquaintance. You had shown up to cheer specifically for him during a sports event and he had waved at you from across the field with the same easy friendliness he showed everyone. You had even, in a moment of weakness you still cringed thinking about, told him that you thought he was one of the most interesting people at Night Raven College. He had laughed and said that was because most people here were, quote, total stiffs with no survival instincts.
Somehow he had turned your confession of admiration into a critique of the student body. You were starting to lose your mind a little. By the time a whole month had passed, a new theory had begun to take shape in the back of your thoughts, slow and suspicious. What if he wasn’t oblivious at all? What if he knew exactly what he was doing and was simply choosing not to acknowledge it? Ruggie was sharp. He was clever in the way that people underestimated, the kind of clever that came from paying close attention and always knowing more than he let on. It would be entirely in character for him to let you run yourself ragged throwing hints while he just sat back and watched.
The thought made you feel a little embarrassed and a lot more determined. You found him one afternoon sitting on a low stone wall outside the main building, eating something out of a paper bag and watching the clouds drift past like he had nowhere to be. The afternoon light was warm and gold, and he looked comfortable and unbothered in a way that might have been endearing if you weren’t currently building up courage. You sat down beside him. He glanced over, smiling immediately. “Hey! You look like you’re about to fight someone.” “I might be,” you said honestly.
He raised his eyebrows, interested now, turning a little toward you. “Yeah? Who?” “You, actually.” He blinked. Then his mouth curved, slow and curious. “Me? What’d I do?”
You took a breath. The paper bag rustled as he folded the top down, giving you his full attention now, and that was somehow worse. His eyes were sharp and warm at the same time, the way they always were, and your heart was doing its very inconvenient thing again. “I like you,” you said. You said it cleanly, without decoration, because you were done being subtle. “I’ve liked you for a while. I’ve been trying to make it obvious for weeks and either you genuinely haven’t noticed, which I find hard to believe, or you’ve been letting me make a fool of myself on purpose.”
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough to make you want to slide off the wall and simply walk into the sea. Then Ruggie laughed.
It was not a mean laugh, which you registered somewhere in the back of your panicked brain. It was the real one, the slightly helpless one that he tried to cover with his hand when something caught him off guard. He pressed his knuckles briefly to his mouth, shoulders shaking. “What’s funny,” you said flatly.
“Nothin’, nothin’.” He waved a hand, still grinning. “I’m not laughin’ at you, I promise. It’s just.” He paused, tilting his head, studying you with an expression you couldn’t quite name. “You really thought I didn’t notice?” Your heart stopped. Then started again, twice as fast. “Did you?” “The lunch,” he said, ticking things off on his fingers. “The umbrella. The ink thing. The way you show up right when I need help with something like you’ve got some kinda radar.” He tilted his head the other way. “I noticed.” You stared at him. “Then why didn’t you say anything?” He shrugged, but there was something softer underneath it, something less practiced than his usual ease. “I wanted to make sure. Figured if it was real, you’d say it eventually.” His ears flicked slightly, and you had the sudden and deeply satisfying realization that he was at least a little bit nervous too. “And you did.”
“You could have just asked,” you said. “Where’s the fun in that?” “I have been quietly losing my mind for a month, Ruggie.” He grinned at that, bright and unapologetic, and reached over to nudge your arm with his elbow. “Yeah, well. For what it’s worth.” He glanced away for just a moment, just one, before looking back. “I like you too. Been a while for me as well.” The afternoon felt different after that. Lighter, somehow, the way air feels after a long rain. You sat there on the wall with your shoulder pressed against his, the paper bag of snacks between you, the sky going slowly pink at the edges, and you thought that maybe the whole ridiculous month of it had been almost worth it.
Almost.
“You’re still insufferable,” you told him. “Yeah.” He leaned into you just slightly, easy and warm. “But you like me anyway.”
lyrics : i’ve met someone like you / they don’t love me back / and ooh i keep running / ooh i keep running away from the starlight — day 6 : starlight by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you can’t stand to watch yourself grow old and leave your lover alone…
The greenhouse smells like lavender and something warmer — something you’ve come to associate specifically with him. You’re supposed to be studying. Your notes are spread across the stone bench like evidence of good intentions, but your pen has gone still, and you haven’t processed a single word in the last four minutes. Because Rook Hunt is crouched twenty feet away, inspecting a cluster of moonflowers with the reverent concentration of a man at prayer, and you are — pathetically, hopelessly — watching him do it.
This is the thing about having feelings for someone like Rook: you know better. You have always known better. He loves beauty the way other people love breathing — indiscriminately, abundantly, without preference. A sunset. A perfectly executed spell. The way a rabbit freezes at the sound of a snapped twig. The arch of a rival’s form mid-duel. You. Him. All of it catalogued with equal tenderness behind those sharp, delighted eyes. You are not special to him. You are interesting to him, which is not the same thing, and you have given yourself this speech so many times it has started to feel like a lullaby.
He doesn’t feel that way about you. You know this. You cap your pen and look back down at your notes.
“Ah — there you are, mon oiseau.” Your heart does something embarrassing. Rook materializes beside you the way he always does — silently, warmly, without invitation and without apology. He sinks onto the bench at your side, close enough that the fabric of his jacket brushes your arm, and tilts his head to read your notes upside down with the casual confidence of someone who has never once doubted his welcome.
“Herbology theory,” he observes. “And yet your pen has not moved in some time.” A pause. His gaze slides sideways to yours, and there’s that look — the one that makes your chest feel like a wrung-out cloth. “I wonder what has been holding your attention.” “Nothing,” you say. Your voice comes out steady. You consider this a personal triumph.
Rook smiles, slow and knowing, and you realize with a plunge of your stomach that he probably does know — because Rook always knows, because observation is his first language and you have never been particularly hard to read. But he doesn’t press it. He never presses. He simply reaches over and turns one of your pages right-side up, as if he’d done you a great favor, and leans back with the self-satisfied air of a man completely at peace with the world. “It is beautiful today,” he says, looking out at the rows of enchanted blooms. “The light comes through the glass just so in the afternoon. Like being inside a painting, non?”
“Yeah,” you say. “It’s nice.” He turns to look at you. You become suddenly, acutely aware of your own face. “You say nice,” he says, as if the word is a specimen he is examining, “and yet you are looking at it like it has wounded you somehow.” His voice dips — gentler, genuinely curious. “What is it that you see, I wonder, when you look at beautiful things?” You don’t answer. You can’t, because the honest answer is you, and that answer belongs to the locked room inside you where you keep everything that can’t be said out loud. “I just think about things sometimes,” you manage instead.
Rook watches you for a moment longer than is comfortable. Then he smiles — softer this time, less performance, more something underneath — and says: “You feel things very deeply, mon ami. It is one of my favorite things about you.” One of my favorite things about you. The locked room rattles on its hinges.
He doesn’t mean it like that, you remind yourself, and the reminder is almost convincing, and you hate that it isn’t fully convincing, and you hate that you are sitting here parsing the sentence like it might contain something different if you look at it from a different angle. He says things like this to everyone. He says things like this about everything. Rook Hunt collects beautiful moments and beautiful people with equal fervor, and being included in his collection is not the same as being chosen. You know this. You cap your pen again, even though you’d already capped it, and say nothing.
The weeks that follow are a study in sustained, low-grade torture. There are moments — small, devastating ones — that sneak under your defenses before you can reinforce them. The afternoon he notices you shivering during outdoor practice and drapes his jacket over your shoulders without a word, before you’ve even registered the cold yourself. The evening he finds you sitting alone outside the cafeteria and simply sits beside you in silence, as if proximity were its own form of comfort, and you think: he could have sat anywhere. The time he calls your name across a crowded courtyard and the way he says it — unhurried, deliberate, like your name is something worth taking time with — makes every person standing near you glance over, and something inside you burns.
Each time, you build the case for him. Each time, you dismantle it. Because the truth is that Rook simply lives at a higher emotional temperature than most people. His care is real, but it is not exclusive. His attention is warm, but it is not singular. You have seen him look at Vil Schoenheit like he hung the moon — you have seen him look at a spider web in morning dew like it hung the moon. You are not deluded enough to think you occupy different territory than the spider web. Not really.
And still.
You catch him looking at you sometimes — quiet moments, unguarded, where the performance drops and something more difficult to name settles in its place — and the locked room inside you shakes, and shakes, and shakes.
You find him in the garden at dusk.
The sky is going amber and violet, and he’s sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the courtyard, facing west with his eyes half-closed, and he looks — for once — unguarded. Unhunting. Like something at rest. Your feet carry you to him before your brain has finished weighing the consequences.
He turns at the sound of your footsteps and smiles. “Bonsoir.” “Hey,” you say. You sit beside him on the wall. The silence is comfortable. The silence is always comfortable with Rook, which is perhaps part of the problem. You look at the sky and you think: this is fine, I’ll just sit here, I don’t have to say anything. You open your mouth. “I need to tell you something.” Rook goes still in the way he goes still when something has caught his attention — completely, without performance, like the whole world has narrowed to a single point. “Then tell me,” he says, and his voice is quiet. Gentle. You look at your hands in your lap.
“I know —” you start, and stop, and start again. “I know you don’t feel — I mean, I’m not saying this because I think — “ You exhale. “I just need to say it. For me. Not because I think it changes anything.”
Rook says nothing. He is watching you with that expression — the real one, the one that doesn’t have a name — and the sky bleeds slowly into violet behind him. “I’m in love with you.” The words come out smaller than you expected. More tired. Like they’ve been carried a very long way. “I’ve been — for a while now. And I know that’s not something you — I know you don’t feel that way. I’m not asking you to. I just — “ You press your hands together. “I needed to not be the only person who knew.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing you’ve ever sat inside. Rook Hunt looks at you. Just looks at you, the way he looks at moonflowers and amber skies and all the beautiful, temporary things he refuses to look away from.
lyrics : so last valentine’s, you spent it away / to be with a girl you said you never saw that way / it hurts now to smile / it hurts more to breathe — day 5 : last valentines by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you find your lover spending time with another during valentine’s…
The list had been sitting in your notes app for three days.
Magishift merch (check what team he’s been posting about lately). New phone case — something bright, maybe orange or pink. Those limited-edition MagiCam filters he mentioned wanting. Maybe cook something? He always likes when you cook. You read it over again, thumb hovering above the screen, and felt something shift uneasily in your chest. It was a good list. Thoughtful. The kind of list someone made when they actually paid attention to the person they loved.
The problem was, you weren’t sure anymore if Cater was paying attention to you. That thought settled over you the way cold did—slow, then all at once. You set your phone face-down on the desk and stared at the ceiling of your dorm room. The crack above your bed had gotten a little longer. You’d noticed it weeks ago and meant to say something about it, the same way you’d meant to say something about a lot of things lately. Like how Cater had started leaving a little earlier every time he came over. Not dramatically, it was never dramatic with him. Just oh, I promised the guys I’d be back, or I’ve got a post I need to edit before midnight, and then the door would close and the room would feel a size too big. You’d told yourself it was fine. You’d told yourself a lot of things. The truth was that somewhere between autumn and now, you and Cater had gotten very good at being around each other without actually being present. Conversations that stayed on the surface. Silences that stretched a beat too long. You’d fill them with laughter or plans, and he’d pull out his phone to capture something — the light through the window, your half-eaten food, anything — and the moment would pass without either of you naming the thing sitting between you.
You were tired of it. More than tired — you were done. Valentine’s Day was in four days, and you’d decided that was going to be your moment. Not because the holiday itself meant anything particularly cosmic, but because it was a reason. A clear, undeniable reason to sit down, look at each other, and say I want this to work, but we have to actually try. You rewrote the list. Underneath the gifts, you added: Talk to him. Actually talk.
You spent the next three days quietly preparing.
The MagiShift jersey wasn’t hard to find once you figured out which team he’d been subtly hyping in his posts — you’d gone back through his grid, reading the captions more carefully than you had in months, and felt a small pang at how much was there if you just looked. He was funny, Cater. Genuinely, effortlessly funny in a way that hid everything else so well you almost missed the tiredness underneath the grin. The phone case arrived the day before Valentine’s — bright tangerine orange with a little card slot on the back, because you’d noticed he was always fishing his ID out of his bag at the worst times. You wrapped everything neatly. Nothing extravagant. Just careful.
The night before, you sat on your bed with your knees pulled up and rehearsed what you wanted to say. Not a speech — just the truth. I think we’ve been avoiding something. I think I’ve been letting it go on because I didn’t want to be the one to make things awkward. But I’d rather have the awkward conversation than keep pretending everything’s fine when it isn’t.
You felt, for the first time in a while, like yourself. Valentine’s Day arrived pink and cold, frost still clinging to the windows when you woke up. You’d texted Cater the night before — hey, can we spend some time together tomorrow? just us. I want to talk and I got you something :) — and he’d replied with a string of heart emojis and an “of course!! ♡♡” that made your chest loosen with relief. By ten in the morning, you were dressed, the gifts were bagged, and you’d sent a follow-up text asking where he wanted to meet.
No reply.
You told yourself he was probably still asleep. Cater wasn’t a morning person. You made yourself some tea and waited. By noon, the tea was cold and you’d sent two more texts. A voice memo you immediately regretted. Then a call that rang four times and went to voicemail — his voice bright and recorded, you’ve reached Cater, leave something fun! — and you hung up before the beep. You sat with the bag of gifts on the floor beside you and stared at your phone like it owed you something. By two, you’d called twice more. Sent one text that just said hey, are you okay? because you didn’t want to sound like what you were starting to feel. The gifts had been moved to your desk. You’d eaten lunch standing over the sink because sitting down felt like admitting something. By three, you opened MagiCam.
You weren’t even sure why. Some instinct, maybe — some part of you that already knew and just needed to confirm it. You navigated to his profile out of habit, the way you always did, and the first post had been uploaded forty-three minutes ago. It was a photo of two drinks, paper straws, a little heart-shaped cookie between them. Soft lighting. Very him. The caption read: happy ♡ day to the people who make life cute ✨
You stared at it. Then you tapped the photo. In the background, slightly blurred but visible, was a sleeve — pale pink, a bracelet with little gold charms you’d never seen before — and a hand wrapped around one of the cups. The photo had been cropped carefully. Deliberately. You set your phone down. You picked it up again and looked at the comments. People tagging friends, dropping red hearts, a few asking “who’s that with you??” that he hadn’t answered yet. You scrolled up through his recent stories — there were several. A walk somewhere you didn’t recognize. A close-up of a dessert. A candid shot of string lights reflected in a window. He’d been busy. Just not with you.
You put your phone face-down on the desk. The bag of gifts was right there, handles twisted neatly together the way you’d left them. The jersey folded. The phone case wrapped in tissue paper. Everything waiting to be given to someone who had apparently made other plans and not thought to mention it. You didn’t cry. Not right then. You just sat in the particular, hollow quiet of your room and felt the shape of everything you hadn’t said settling around you like sediment, like something that had been falling for a long time and only just reached the bottom. You had rehearsed the conversation. You had written the list. You had bought the gifts and made the plan and told yourself that this time you were going to stop letting things slide, stop swallowing the discomfort and waiting for it to dissolve on its own.
And he still wasn’t there. Your eyes drifted back to your phone. To the little orange case peeking out from the tissue paper. To the list you’d written and rewritten in your notes app like you could organize your way into being heard. You thought about the crack in the ceiling you’d never mentioned. The early exits you’d never questioned. The silences you’d both let grow until they had more presence in the room than either of you did. How did you let it get this far?
The question settled in your chest, quiet and without accusation, which was almost worse. You weren’t angry — not yet, maybe not ever in the way you expected. You were just tired. The specific kind of tired that came from holding something up for too long, from waiting for someone to notice you were straining. Outside, the sky had gone pale. Somewhere across campus, Cater was living out a version of this day that didn’t include you, and you were sitting in your room with gifts for a conversation that wasn’t going to happen today. You reached out and pulled the bag closer. Held it in your lap for a moment.
How did you let it get this far?
You didn’t have an answer. Only the quiet. Only the weight of everything you should have said sooner, while there was still enough of the two of you left to say it to.
lyrics : this happened at the start / every time we try we fall apart / you can’t seem to hold my heart close to you / and i know that you make it clear / that you want me out of here / though it’s loneliness you fear — day 4 : close to you by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you can’t maintain your relationship with floyd…
The first time Floyd ended things, it was on a Tuesday.
You remember that detail with painful precision — a Tuesday, overcast, the kind of grey sky that feels like the world already knows something you don’t. He’d shown up outside your dorm room unannounced, the way he always did, that loose-limbed swagger carrying him down the hall like he owned every inch of space he walked through. You’d smiled when you opened the door. You always smiled when you saw him back then. It still came easy. “You’re boring me.” Three words. He didn’t even have the decency to look sorry about it. Just tilted his head, those mismatched eyes watching you the same way he watched everything: like you were a mildly interesting fish in a tank he might get tired of by the end of the week. He’d been getting restless, you knew that. You’d felt it in the way he stopped squeezing you as tight. The way his attention drifted mid-conversation. The way he smiled, but not with his eyes. Still, hearing it out loud punched the air clean out of your lungs.
You didn’t beg. You were proud of that, looking back. You just nodded and said okay, and then you closed the door and sat on the floor and didn’t cry until you heard his footsteps disappear down the hallway. The second time you got together, it was three weeks later. You told yourself you wouldn’t. Everyone around you, the ones perceptive enough to notice what had happened, told you with their eyes that you shouldn’t. But Floyd appeared in the Mostro Lounge during a shift he knew you’d be in, dropped into a chair right in front of you, and grinned with all his teeth. Not a polite grin. A Floyd grin. The kind that made your stomach feel like it was being wrung out. “Shrimpy looks sad,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
“That’s not my problem,” you told him, and meant it for about forty-five seconds. That was until he leaned across the table and tucked your hair behind your ear, the familiarity of his touch short-circuiting every wall you’d spent three weeks carefully building. There it was again: the warmth, and that sharp, electric thing that buzzed under your skin whenever he was close. Floyd was many things—careless, chaotic, brutally honest in the worst ways—but he was never lukewarm. When he was interested in you, you felt it everywhere. He looked at you like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at. When you were eighteen and lonelier than you liked to admit, in a school that still felt more like someone else’s world than yours, that was an incredibly dangerous thing to offer someone. So you said yes. Again.
You tried harder that time. Planned things he might enjoy to stave off the boredom — spontaneous, unusual things, because Floyd didn’t respond to the ordinary. You studied him like a subject, catalogued his moods, learned the difference between the distant quiet that meant he wanted space and the restless, coiled energy that meant he needed to move, to do something, to chase some new stimulation. You bent yourself into shapes that didn’t quite fit, and told yourself that was just what relationships looked like. That compromise was supposed to feel a little like losing.
It lasted two months that time. He didn’t even end it dramatically. He just… drifted. Stopped showing up. Responded to your messages hours late, then not at all, then with the kind of short, disinterested replies that felt worse than silence. When you finally confronted him about it, he shrugged with one shoulder and said, “I thought we were already done.” You walked away that time. Didn’t cry until you were completely alone.
The third time, you made him promise. It was a mistake, asking Floyd Leech to promise you anything. You knew that even as you were asking. But he’d come back again — he always came back, right when the scar tissue was fresh enough that his reappearance could split it back open — and this time something desperate had clawed its way up your throat. “If you’re going to do this again,” you said, voice steady in a way you were secretly proud of, “then you have to actually try. You have to tell me when something’s wrong instead of just disappearing.” Floyd had looked at you for a long moment. Tilted his head. Then smiled, slow and genuine. “Okay, Shrimpy. I’ll try.” And he did. That was the thing that undid you, later — he actually did try. For a while. He told you when he was restless. He reached for you instead of pulling away, at first. There were stretches of time, whole golden weeks, where things felt real and good and sustainable. Where you let yourself believe that this was it. That you’d finally found the right combination of patience and understanding and love — because you did love him, that was never the question — to make something lasting out of whatever this was between you.
You started showing up to his Spelldrive practices. Learned the things that made him laugh, the particular texture of his moods. Brought him food when he was bad-tempered and left him alone when he needed space and stayed close when he needed company, and you did all of it quietly, carefully, gladly, because that was what you did for people you loved. You just forgot, somewhere in all of that, to check whether you were being loved back in the same way. The problem with Floyd — the real problem, underneath all the easy excuses about his personality and his nature — was that he didn’t know how to want something and keep wanting it. His interest moved like water. Totally consuming when it was present. Gone without warning when it wasn’t. And no matter how interesting you made yourself, no matter how much space you gave him or how close you held him, you couldn’t control the tide.
You realized it clearly one evening in late autumn. You were sitting beside him on the roof of the Octavinelle building, the sky going dark and purple above you, and he was quiet in that distant way. Not peaceful quiet. Far-away quiet. You watched his profile and understood, with a certainty that settled cold in your chest, that he was already gone. Mentally. Emotionally. He was still sitting next to you, but he’d already left. “Floyd,” you said. “Mm.” “Are you bored again?” He didn’t answer right away. That was its own kind of answer. When he finally looked at you, there was something almost apologetic in his expression — not guilt, because Floyd Leech didn’t really do guilt — but something adjacent to it. Awareness, maybe. He knew what was coming too. “You’re not boring,” he said, like that was the thing you’d asked. “That’s not what I asked.” “…Yeah,” he admitted, quiet. “A little.”
You nodded. Looked back at the sky. Felt the old, familiar ache settle in behind your ribs like it had never really left, like it had just been waiting, patient and certain, for this exact moment. The worst part wasn’t the boredom. The worst part was that you believed him when he said you weren’t boring. You knew, on some level, that it wasn’t about you. Floyd got bored with everything eventually: basketball plays he’d once obsessed over, games, classes. Even his brother’s schemes, sometimes. You weren’t a failure. You weren’t lacking something. You were just a person, and people—steady, constant, real people—couldn’t compete with the endless novelty his brain demanded. That didn’t make it hurt less.
You broke up with him this time. First time you’d been the one to do it. You didn’t cry when you said it. You didn’t even raise your voice. You just told him, quietly and clearly, that you weren’t going to keep doing this. That you were tired of rebuilding yourself after every ending. That you cared about him—God, you cared about him—but you couldn’t keep pouring yourself into something that drained completely every few months. Floyd watched you with those uneven eyes, and for once you couldn’t read his expression. Something moved across his face that you hadn’t seen there before. Not indifference. Not the casual, unaffected shrug you’d expected. Something that looked almost like the beginning of regret. “Shrimpy.” “Don’t,” you said. Gently. “Please.”
He closed his mouth. You left first this time. That was important, somehow. You walked down the corridor and through the door and out into the open air, and you kept walking until the tightness in your throat dissolved into the wind, and you breathed, and breathed, and breathed. The thing nobody tells you about loving someone like Floyd Leech is that it doesn’t really end. Not cleanly. Not the way normal endings end. You’d given him pieces of yourself over the course of a year — small, quiet pieces you hadn’t even noticed handing over — and they stayed with him whether you wanted them to or not. You still looked for him in crowds. Still noticed when he laughed across the cafeteria, that loud, uninhibited sound that turned heads. Still felt something move through you, low and aching, when he glanced at you across a room and his expression did that thing — that brief, unguarded thing — that made you wonder if he felt it too.
Maybe he did. Maybe that was the cruelest part. Floyd wasn’t incapable of feeling things. He just couldn’t sustain them. Couldn’t hold onto them long enough for them to grow into something neither of you could walk away from. You thought, sometimes, that in another life — with different wiring, different circumstances — he might have been capable of something extraordinary. That the intensity he turned on and off like a light switch might have stayed on, stayed warm, stayed yours. But you couldn’t live in another life. You could only live in this one. And in this one, you had learned, slowly and painfully and at great cost, that loving someone wasn’t always enough to make them stay. That you could be patient and adaptable and devoted and still not be the right shape to fill whatever empty space moved through Floyd like a current. You were not the ocean. You couldn’t follow him everywhere he swam.
He found you in the library two weeks later. Sat across from you without asking, the way he always had, and rested his chin in his hand and looked at you with that odd, sideways attention. You looked back. Waited. “I miss you,” he said. Simple. Honest, in the way Floyd could occasionally be when something cut through his usual remove. Your chest clenched. You’d known this was coming — he always came back, that was the pattern, that was the tide — and you’d spent two weeks rehearsing what you’d say. You were ready. You were resolved. “I know,” you told him, and meant it kindly. “I miss you too.”
The silence stretched between you, heavy with everything that had already happened. He seemed to understand, because he didn’t push. Didn’t grin. Didn’t reach across the table to pull you back in the way he might have months ago. He just sat there, and you sat there, and for once you were both still inside the feeling instead of running from it. “It doesn’t work, does it,” he said. Not a question.
“No,” you said. “It doesn’t.”
He nodded, slow. Looked down at the table. And for just a moment, in the slant of the library light, he looked less like an apex predator and more like someone who had lost something and didn’t entirely know what to do with that. You gathered your things. Stood up. And because you were someone who loved carefully and honestly, even when it cost you everything, you reached over and pressed your hand briefly over his — once, warm, final — before you let go. You didn’t look back when you walked away. Some things, you had learned, you just had to let be exactly what they were: real, and good, and over.
lyrics : ‘cause i just had a dream i was dead / and i only cared ‘cause i was taken from you / you’re the only thing that i own / i hear my bell ring, i’d only answer for you — day 3 : mosquito by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you can’t stand to watch yourself grow old and leave your lover alone…
The mirror is the cruelest thing in the castle.
It hangs in the eastern corridor of the Briar Valley’s great keep — a corridor that smells of cold stone and dried roses, where the torches burn low and amber and never seem to go out, and where the shadows pool in the corners like sleeping animals. The mirror is framed in black iron twisted into the shapes of thorns, reaching upward like the fingers of something buried, something still trying to claw its way free. The glass is old. So old that its surface has taken on a faint silver tarnish at the edges, a dimness like breath on a winter window, and when you look into it from a certain angle the reflection seems slightly delayed — as if the mirror is showing you not what you are right now, but what you were a half-second ago.
You have begun to hate it.
Not because it is ugly. The mirror is beautiful, in the way that everything in this castle is beautiful — coldly, precisely, the kind of beautiful that doesn’t ask for your opinion and doesn’t particularly care what you think of it. You hate it because it is honest. You hate it the way you hate the fine lines that have begun to gather at the corners of your eyes, the way a single silver thread caught the light in your hair last week, the way your body feels different now than it did ten years ago. Heavier in some places. Lighter in others. Like it is slowly exchanging one version of itself for another, quietly, while you are busy looking elsewhere.
You stand in the corridor now, in the hour before dawn when the castle holds its breath and even the gargoyles on the outer ramparts seem to sleep, and you look at yourself in the mirror. The torchlight is not kind. It catches every line, every small betrayal of time, and it does not soften them the way gentler light might. Your face looks back at you from the tarnished glass, and it is your face — you know it is yours — but it is also a stranger’s, or becoming one, incrementally, in the way all faces eventually become strangers to themselves. You are getting older.
It sounds simple when you say it that way. It sounds like nothing, like a fact so ordinary it barely deserves the air it takes to speak it. Humans age. Everyone knows this. You knew this when you were a child, when the concept of time was something you understood only distantly, the way you understood ocean depths — intellectually, without visceral comprehension. You knew it when you first came to Briar Valley. You knew it when you first looked at Malleus and understood, in the quiet, clear-eyed way of someone absorbing a truth they cannot yet fully feel, that he would not.
But knowing and feeling are different countries, and you have been traveling between them for years now, and lately the road home to knowing-without-feeling has begun to feel very long. The castle wakes slowly, the way old things do. First the kitchens, deep in the belly of the keep, where the fires are stoked back to life and the smell of smoke drifts up through the corridors like a ghost with nowhere to haunt. Then the servants, moving through the halls in their particular quiet efficiency, the kind that comes from years of living alongside power and learning to be invisible within it. The gargoyles wake last. You can hear them sometimes, the soft scrape of stone on stone as they shift on their perches, as they stretch their carved wings against the grey pre-dawn sky, and it is a sound you have grown to love — that low, grinding murmur, like the castle itself sighing and settling.
You have grown to love so many things here. The way the great hall looks at winter solstice, when they light every candelabra in the place and the light turns the whole room into something that looks less like a room and more like the inside of a burning jewel. The library on the third floor of the north tower, where the books have been accumulating since before anyone currently living was born, and where the dust smells of something ancient and almost sweet. The garden, if you can call it that — more of a controlled wilderness, really, where black roses grow alongside white ones and the thorned hedges have been sculpted into shapes that look different depending on the angle and the season. The ravens that live in the eastern eaves and have, over the years, become accustomed enough to you to sometimes land on your windowsill and regard you with their bright, sideways, entirely unimpressed eyes. You have grown to love this place the way you grow to love anything you have lived inside for a long time. It has shaped itself around you, or you around it, and the seams no longer show. And then there is Malleus.
You find him in the garden, because this is where he often is at this hour — standing at the edge of the rose beds, his back to the castle, looking out over the valley that drops away below the garden wall into morning mist and the dark shapes of pine forests. He is dressed simply for him, which still means the dark coat with the silver fastenings that catch the early light like cold stars, the pale skin at his throat disappearing into shadow below his jaw. His horns rise from his dark hair the way the towers of the castle rise from the hillside — naturally, inevitably, as if they belong to the landscape and always have. He does not hear you coming. Or perhaps he does and simply waits, which is more likely, because Malleus has always had that particular stillness of a creature that has learned there is no need to startle. He has had centuries to learn it. “You didn’t sleep,” he says, without turning. “No.” “You’ve been sleeping poorly for some time.” Now he turns, and his green eyes find you with that particular quality of attention he gives everything — complete, unrushed, like he has all the time in the world to see you properly. Which, you suppose, he does. “Is something troubling you?” You want to say no. You have become very good, over the years, at saying no when the honest answer is something harder — something that lives in that uncomfortable space between the rational and the felt, between what you know and what you cannot stop knowing. You have become good at folding those things up small and tucking them somewhere quiet and going on with your day.
But the mirror. The corridor. The single silver thread that caught the light. “Yes,” you say instead. He crosses to you slowly, the way he always moves — with the unhurried certainty of someone who has never had reason to rush, and the grace of something that learned to move through the world before the world was quite finished being made. He stops close enough that you can feel the faint, particular chill that always radiates from him, not unpleasant, like standing near open water on a warm day.
“Tell me,” he says.
You don’t tell him. Not then. Instead you spend the day moving through the castle’s routines, through breakfast in the smaller dining room where the window overlooks the valley and the mist has burned off by mid-morning to reveal the dark smudge of the forest below, through a walk along the ramparts where the wind is cold and smells of coming rain, through the hours in the library where you have been working through one of the older collections — books so old that the pages have gone amber at the edges and the ink has faded in places to near-invisibility, and you have to hold the pages at an angle to the light to catch what’s written there.
Malleus joins you in the library in the afternoon. He does not press. This is one of the things you have always appreciated about him — he has a dragon’s patience, and he will wait for things to be given to him rather than taking them, which is a quality that seems almost paradoxical in something as powerful as he is and yet is entirely genuine. He settles into the chair across from you and reads, and the fire in the library’s small hearth burns low and orange, and outside the promised rain has arrived and runs in grey sheets down the tall windows, and it is peaceful. You keep stealing glances at him over the top of your book. His face is the same as it was the first time you saw it. Exactly the same — not in the imprecise way that memory makes things the same, flattening the details, filling in the gaps with impressions, but precisely, photographically the same. Not a line on that pale skin. Not a shadow beneath those green eyes that wasn’t there before. Not a single thread of silver in the dark hair. He is ageless in the most literal possible sense of the word, which you have always known, and which has always meant a number of things to you that have shifted over the years as you have understood it more deeply. You used to find it beautiful, uncomplicated.
You still find it beautiful. The uncomplicated part has gone the way of most uncomplicated things. You are forty-three years old. You look it. Not badly — you have, by most measures, aged in ways that are kind enough, that have left you with something interesting in your face, something that speaks of experience and weathering in the way a landscape speaks of the water that has moved through it. But you look forty-three, and Malleus looks what Malleus has always looked, and when you stand next to each other now there is a visible difference where once there wasn’t quite, a disparity that will only widen. You will be fifty. Sixty. Seventy, if you are fortunate and careful and the world cooperates. And he will be exactly this — this precisely, this perpetually — and one day, eventually, the arithmetic of it will reach its inevitable conclusion. You close your book. “Malleus.”
He looks up immediately. Those green eyes, ancient and present at once, settle on you with their usual quality of total attention. “I was thinking,” you say carefully, “about time.”
He listens the way he does everything — fully, without interruption, his eyes steady on your face, his expression moving through something that is not quite readable because it is too complex to be named by any single word. You tell him about the mirror. You tell him about the silver thread in your hair. You tell him, haltingly, about the arithmetic — the cold, inescapable math of what you are and what he is and how those two things will eventually diverge past the point of any reconciliation. You tell him that you are afraid. Not of death, exactly. Or not only of death. You try to find the words for what you are actually afraid of, and it takes longer than you would like, because the thing you are afraid of lives in an odd shape that language keeps sliding off. It is not quite fear for yourself. It is something more like — grief, preemptive and terrible, for what will be left behind. For him. For the idea of him continuing after you, which your mind keeps presenting to you in the small hours of sleepless nights like a wound that won’t stop being touched.
“I can’t,” you say, and your voice has gone smaller than you intend it to, “I can’t stand the thought of leaving you. Not because I don’t — I know you’ll survive it. You’ve survived centuries. You’ll survive this. But that’s almost worse, somehow. That you’ll just — go on.” Malleus has not moved. He is still in the chair across from you, the fire at his shoulder, the rain sliding down the windows behind him, and his expression has done something you don’t have a word for. “Go on,” he says quietly. Not a command. An echo. “Without anyone.” You press your hands flat on the cover of the closed book. “I know you. You’re not — you don’t just love easily. It took years with me. Years before you — before we were what we are. And after I’m gone you’ll just be alone again, and I hate it. I hate that I can’t stop it. I hate that every year I’m closer to it and you’re not and I don’t know how to—” Your voice breaks. You had not planned for it to break. You are forty-three years old and you have had years to arrive at this grief and you thought perhaps that meant you had had years to get ahead of it, to process it, to arrive at the conversation that is happening now with something more like composure and less like a fissure opening.
You were wrong. Malleus sets aside his book with the particular care he gives to fragile things, and he rises from his chair, and he crosses to where you are sitting, and he does something he does rarely — he kneels. On the stone floor, in his dark coat with its silver fastenings, in this library full of old books and older light, he kneels in front of your chair so that your eyes are level with his, and he takes your hands from the cover of the book, and he holds them. His hands are cool, as always. Larger than yours. Still. He says nothing for a long moment. He looks at you the way he looks at the valley from the garden wall — the way you look at something you have decided to truly see, from all of its angles, without rushing to conclusion. You let him. You have long since stopped finding his silences uncomfortable; they are simply the shape of how he thinks, the space he gives to things that deserve space. “You are afraid,” he says at last, “that I will be alone.”
“Yes.”
“More than you are afraid of dying.” You consider this. “Yes. I think so.” Something moves across his face. Not pain exactly, though it is close — something older than pain, something that has had longer to become whatever it is. “You have been carrying this for some time.” “Years,” you admit. “I didn’t want to—” You stop. “I didn’t want to make it real by saying it.” “And now?” “The mirror made it real whether I said it or not.” He is quiet again. Outside, the rain has gentled, moving from the grey sheets of earlier to a softer, steadier fall, the kind that settles in for the evening and makes the world outside the windows look like it is behind glass in two senses at once. The fire in the hearth has burned down to embers and orange, barely enough to read by now, more than enough to sit by. “I want to tell you something,” Malleus says. “And I want you to hear it, not simply with your mind — which will argue with it, as your mind does — but with whatever part of you holds things that cannot be argued with.”
You nod.
“I have lived a very long time,” he says, and there is something in his voice that is different from his usual register — still low, still measured, but stripped of something, some layer of the composed and the careful. Raw underneath, in a way you have only heard rarely. “Long enough that I have seen empires fail and forests grow over the stones of them. Long enough that there are languages I learned that no one speaks anymore. Long enough—” He stops. Begins again. “Long enough that I had stopped expecting anything to surprise me. Anything to—” Another pause, and he seems to be choosing each word with extraordinary precision, like placing stones in a balance. “To matter.” His eyes are on yours. The firelight catches the green of them and makes them something that doesn’t have a name in any of the languages whose speakers are still living. “And then there was you,” he says. “And you surprised me. Consistently. And you mattered — matter — in a way I had stopped believing was possible for me.” “Malleus—” “I am not finished.” Not harsh. Gentle, but firm in the way that stone is firm — not because it is trying to be, but because it simply is. “You are afraid that after you are gone I will be alone. I want you to understand something about what that word means to me.” You wait. “I have been alone in the way that you fear for most of my existence,” he says.
“It was not — I will not pretend it was not difficult. There are things about the particular kind of solitude that is mine that are very difficult. But I survived it. I existed through it. And I existed through it, in some ways, unchanged — as you have observed, I do not change the way you do.” The faintest movement at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, but its shadow. “What changed was the moment I stopped being alone.” “But when I die—” “You will have existed,” he says simply. The simplicity of it stops you. “You will have been. That does not un-become. The years we have had do not un-happen because they end. Nothing that has truly happened can be made not to have happened. That is one of the very few mercies of time — it keeps what it takes.” You are quiet. Something in you is fighting this — the part that insists that comfort offered is not the same as the thing you fear being resolved, that the love of someone who will outlive you is not the same as safety, that knowing a thing and feeling it are different countries. But you are listening. You promised to listen with the part that cannot argue.
“I will not pretend,” he continues, and his thumbs move slowly across the backs of your hands, “that losing you will not — that it will be easy. It will not. It will be the hardest thing I have had to survive, and I have survived things that broke civilizations.” His voice is entirely steady. It is the steadiness of something that has already looked at the thing it is describing and has not looked away. “But I want you to hear this clearly: my grief will be the direct measure of my love. Every year of grief will be a testament to every year of you. And if I carry it for centuries, then you will have been worth centuries of carrying.” You realize, slowly, that your eyes are full of tears. This is embarrassing and entirely beyond your control. “That’s not—” Your voice is unsteady. “That’s not comforting, Malleus. That’s just sad.” “Yes,” he says, with perfect seriousness. “It is both.” You sit with that for a while. The fire dies down further, to the last deep orange of embers, and neither of you moves to add to it, and the library grows warmer-dark, the shadows thickening between the shelves of old books, pressing close in the way that dark presses close in old places where it has been invited to stay. The rain keeps on outside. Somewhere in the castle, far away, you can hear the slow deep sound of a clock striking — not the hour, just a quarter, just a small punctuation in the ongoing sentence of the night.
Malleus has not let go of your hands. He is still kneeling — he has been kneeling for longer than most people could manage it without discomfort, and you doubt he notices. “Can I ask you something?” you say. “Always.” “Do you think about it? My—” You can’t quite say the word. “After.” He considers. “Yes.” “And?” “And it is not something I approach with peace,” he says. “But it is something I have accepted. The way I have accepted that I cannot stop the turning of the world, or the cooling of stars, or the slow patient work of water on stone. There are things that are larger than what I am, and your mortality is one of them, and my grief when it comes will be another. I can accept a thing without making peace with it.” “How do you do that?” There is something almost desperate in the question, the kind of desperate that has been waiting a long time to be asked. “How do you just — accept it?” He thinks about this with the seriousness he gives all genuine questions. “By understanding that the alternative — refusing to accept it, railing against it, spending the years we have together in the shadow of what comes after them — would be a waste of precisely the thing I do not wish to waste.” His eyes hold yours. “You are here now. You are alive now. Every hour I spend mourning in advance is an hour I am not spending with you. And I am—” Another of those rare moments of rawness, moving across his face like weather. “I am unwilling to give those hours away.”
Something loosens in your chest. Not all the way. Not completely. The fear is not gone — the mirror will still be there tomorrow morning, and the silver thread in your hair, and the arithmetic of what you are against what he is. But something loosens. “I’ve wasted a lot of hours,” you say quietly. “Being afraid. Not saying anything.” “You said something tonight.” “I did.” “Then they weren’t wasted.” He moves, then — rises from the floor with that fluid ease that still surprises you sometimes, that reminder of what he is, and he settles on the arm of your chair with the particular care of something very large that has learned to be gentle, and he draws you against his side, and you go, your head against his shoulder, his arm around you. He is cool and solid and immovable, and that specific quality of his — the sense of something that will still be standing when everything else has finished its business with existing — which used to unsettle you in quiet moments now does something else. It steadies you. It is an anchor, and you are a thing that needs one. “I keep thinking,” you say, from the vicinity of his shoulder, “that you’ll find it — too much. Eventually. That you’ll look at me and just—” You do not finish the sentence.
“No,” he says. Simply. Entirely without qualification. “You can’t know that.” “I know it the way I know my own nature,” he says. “Which is completely, and without doubt, and regardless of whether it can be proven to anyone’s satisfaction. I know what I am capable of and what I am not. I am not capable of finding you too much.” “I’m aging,” you say. “I’m going to keep aging.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “And I will be here for every year of it. Every line. Every grey hair.” A pause, and then, quieter: “I find you very beautiful, you know. I have always found you beautiful. And I want to be very clear that this is not something that operates on the conditions you seem to believe it operates on.” The tears that have been hovering at the edges of your eyes since long before this conversation slide over at that, quiet and without any particular drama. You let them. You are forty-three years old and you are sitting in a dark library in a castle that smells of old roses and cold stone, and the man you love is holding you and telling you that your mortality does not change what he sees when he looks at you, and you are crying a little, and it is fine. “You’re impossible,” you say, when you can. “So I have been told.” And there, briefly, is the warmth in his voice that surfaces rarely and means everything when it does.
Later, much later, when the clock has spoken the proper hour several times and the rain has finally conceded the night to quiet, you stand again in the eastern corridor. The mirror is still there. The iron thorns still reach upward. The glass is still old and faintly tarnished at the edges. You look at yourself in it, in the torchlight that is amber and low and honest, and you look at your face — the lines, the history, the small silver thread in your hair that caught the light last week and sent you into a sleepless night that has become this one. You look at all of it. Malleus stands behind you. You can see him in the mirror too, over your shoulder — tall and unchanged, his green eyes on you, the shadows pooling around him the way they pool in old places that have decided to keep them. Your reflection looks back at you. It is getting older, and it will keep getting older, and it is afraid and it is tired and it loves something that will outlive it, and all of that is true and will remain true. The mirror does not lie. You have established that.
But it occurs to you, standing here, looking at the two of you reflected in the tarnished glass — you, aging; him, ageless — that the mirror is only showing you one thing at a time. It can show you the lines, yes, and it can show you the silver thread. It can show you the arithmetic of what you are against what he is. But it cannot show you what he said in the library. It cannot show you the weight of centuries that moved through his voice when he described carrying your grief. It cannot show you the years that exist between you, the real and specific and irretrievable years that will not un-happen, that time, as he said, keeps even as it takes.
The mirror can show you the shape of your aging. It cannot show you the shape of being loved by something infinite. You reach back, without looking away from the glass, and you find his hand, and he takes yours without hesitation, the way he has always taken what you offer — with his full attention, with both hands, with the seriousness of someone who does not take things and then put them back down. “Come to bed,” you say.
“Yes,” he says. And you leave the mirror to its honesty, and you walk together down the corridor where the torches burn amber and low and the shadows sleep in the corners, and above you the castle breathes the slow breath of old things that have learned to outlast their own damage, and outside the rain is done and the sky is moving toward morning in the particular grey that comes before the light decides what color it is going to be today. You are getting older. He is here.
Both of these things are true, and will remain true, and for tonight — for this moment in this corridor in this castle that smells of roses and old stone — both of these things are enough.
lyrics : you can say you’re sorry / do you ever really mean it? / you and your ferrari might just make you seem appealing / looking at your photos, when did your life get so quiet? — day 2 : the aisle by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you don’t think that leona is putting enough effort into your relationship…
The Savanaclaw dorms hold heat differently than anywhere else at Night Raven College. Even standing outside the door of Leona’s room, you can feel the warmth radiating through the wood — that particular, heavy warmth that settles into your lungs like something permanent. You’ve grown used to it. You’ve grown used to a lot of things that weren’t easy at first.
You knock twice. You don’t wait for an answer before you push the door open. You stopped waiting a long time ago. The room is dim, the curtains drawn against the last hour of afternoon light. Leona is exactly where you knew he would be — sprawled across the massive bed, one arm thrown over his face, the tip of his tail tracing slow, mindless arcs through the air. The sight of him is so achingly familiar that something behind your sternum pulls tight without warning. You stand in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary, just looking at him. His ears twitch in your direction. He doesn’t move otherwise.
“You’re letting heat out,” he says, voice rough with sleep. You step inside and close the door behind you. You sit at the edge of the bed because there is nowhere else to sit. The desk chair has a pile of textbooks on it that haven’t been touched in weeks, and the floor doesn’t appeal to you the way it apparently appeals to Ruggie when he has no other option. Leona shifts almost imperceptibly when the mattress dips under your weight — a small acknowledgment, nothing more. “You missed the study session,” you say, because you feel like you should say something. “Mm.” “Crewel’s going to fail you.” “Let him.”
You fold your hands in your lap. Outside, you can hear someone in the corridor laughing loudly, their footsteps quick and careless. The sound fades. The room settles back into its thick quiet. There is a version of this moment that you play sometimes behind your eyes, on days when the real version of Leona feels like something you’re watching through glass. In that version, he reaches out without being asked and wraps a loose hand around your wrist. Tugs you down beside him. Not gently — Leona isn’t gentle — but deliberately, the way he does everything, because he has decided you belong there and the matter is closed. In that version, he says something low and unhurried against your temple, something that means *I’m glad you’re here* even if the words themselves are something more like *stop sitting like you’re about to run off somewhere.* You would press your forehead to the side of his jaw and feel the rumble of whatever irritated, half-affectionate sound he makes, and you would stay like that for a long time without either of you needing to explain why.
You blink.
You are sitting at the edge of the bed with your hands folded, and Leona has not moved. “Are you hungry?” you ask. “Ruggie said he’d bring something from the cafeteria.” “I don’t need Ruggie to babysit me.” “I didn’t say babysit. I said—” “I heard what you said.” You go quiet. Not because he’s said anything cruel — he hasn’t, not really — but because you recognize the particular texture of this conversation. It’s the texture of a door that opens three inches and stops. You’ve pushed against it before. You know exactly how much give there is. Not much.
An hour passes the way hours do in this room: slowly, and in pieces. You work on your assignments at the edge of the bed, your notes spread around you. Leona sleeps, or pretends to. The distinction has never been entirely clear to you. His breathing is even. His tail has gone still. You look at him more than you should. There is a scar you found once — small, crescent-shaped, just below his left shoulder blade — that he shrugged off when you touched it, said it was nothing, rolled away to end the inquiry. You think about it sometimes. You think about all the small, sealed-off pieces of him that you have stumbled across and never been invited inside of. His history with Farena. The way his expression shifts when someone mentions the throne, quick and dark, before he buries it under something contemptuous. The fact that he knows every star in the Afterglow Savanna sky by name, something Ruggie let slip once that Leona didn’t bother to confirm or deny. You are in love with a person made largely of closed doors. You knew this before you started. You told yourself it didn’t matter. Some days you are still right. When the light outside shifts to something orange and final, you gather your notes into a loose stack and set them on the floor. Leona’s eyes are open. They’ve been open for a few minutes now, fixed on the ceiling, and you’ve been pretending not to notice.
“Leona,” you say.
“What.”
Not a question. Never quite a question. “I want to talk about something.” You hear yourself say it, and immediately you feel the quiet in the room change — thicken, the way air does before rain. You press forward anyway because you have been carrying this for weeks, maybe longer, and you are so tired of the weight of it. “I’ve been feeling… I don’t know. Far away from you lately. Even when I’m right here.” He doesn’t respond immediately. His gaze stays on the ceiling. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says, at last. “I know. That’s not—” You stop. Try again. “It’s not about you leaving. It’s about feeling like you’re already somewhere else even when you’re in the same room as me.”
A muscle in his jaw moves. You know this particular silence — you’ve catalogued all of his silences by now, the way you might catalogue weather patterns. This one is the silence of a man who is waiting for you to finish so that something can be over. The realization lands in your chest like a stone dropped into still water. Quiet, but deep. You look at his profile. The slope of his nose, the dramatic sweep of his lashes, the dark hair that fans across the pillow in a way he would refuse to acknowledge looks soft. You love him. You love him completely and without reservation, and you are not sure he has any idea what to do with that, or whether he’s ever going to try to figure it out. “I’m not asking you to be someone different,” you say, and you’re careful to mean it, because you do. “I’m not asking you to be… warm all the time, or say things you don’t mean, or — I don’t need that. I just need to feel like you’re actually *choosing* to be here. With me. Sometimes.”
His tail moves. Once, a slow sweep. “I’m here,” he says. “You’re present. That’s not the same thing.” Silence. He does look at you, finally. Turns his head against the pillow and finds your face with those half-lidded eyes that have always made something in you go unsteady. There is something in his expression that you can almost read — almost — but it moves too fast, shuts behind something flat and unbothered before you can name it. “I’m not good at this,” he says. “I know,” you tell him. “I’m not asking you to be good at it. I’m asking you to try.” He holds your gaze for another moment. You think, distantly, of the version of this moment that lives somewhere in the back of your mind. In that version he sits up. Closes the distance between you. Says something halting and imperfect and entirely his own, some rough-edged version of *you matter to me* that sounds like *don’t make that face* or *stop looking at me like I’ve kicked something.* In that version he doesn’t know how to do it right, but he does it anyway, because you are worth the discomfort of trying.
In that version you cry a little, probably, and he makes fun of you for it very gently, and everything stays complicated but no longer feels so hollow. You blink. Leona’s eyes are already closing. “Yeah,” he says. Low. Fading at the edges. “Sorry.” Just that. *Sorry.* The way someone says it when they’re offering it up like a key to make a lock stop beeping — not because they’ve understood what the lock is trying to protect, but because they want the noise to stop. You sit with it. You sit with the word hanging in the warm, dim air between you, and you feel it dissolve before it can become anything. An apology without weight. A door swinging shut again, gently, before you’d gotten more than a step inside. “Okay,” you say. And you mean something by that, but you’re not sure he’s still awake to hear what.
You lie down beside him eventually, because you don’t know what else to do with yourself, and because — despite everything — this is still where you want to be. That is perhaps the most exhausting part of loving someone like Leona Kingscholar. Not the distance. Not the closed doors or the careless words or the way he misses things that feel enormous to you and doesn’t notice he’s missed them. The exhausting part is that none of it makes you want to leave. You stare at the ceiling he was staring at. It is an unremarkable ceiling. You think about the fantasy version of Leona — your Leona, the one who exists in the warm, well-lit room inside your chest — and how unfair it is, to love a real person and also love a version of them that doesn’t exist. It isn’t his fault, exactly. He is what he is: brilliant and difficult and achingly proud, a man who fell asleep in the sunlight and let the world build itself around him without ever quite letting it in. You understood that before you started. You told yourself it was enough.
But you are lying beside him in the dark, close enough to feel the heat of him, and you have never in your life felt more alone. His breathing is even. His chest rises and falls in the patient, unhurried rhythm of someone who has found complete peace in unconsciousness. You wonder what he dreams about. You’ve never asked. You’re not certain he would tell you. Carefully, quietly, so as not to wake him — as if it would matter; he sleeps like he exists, deeply and on his own terms — you shift just enough to look at his face. At rest, he loses some of the particular armor of his expression. The contemptuous angle of his mouth softens. He looks younger. He looks, in the low golden edge of the evening light, like someone you could reach.
You don’t reach.
You have learned, by now, that reaching is not always enough. That presence is not the same as closeness, and closeness is not the same as being held, and being held is not the same as being *known.* You are here. He is here. The space between you is small enough to cross with an outstretched hand. It is also the widest thing you’ve ever felt. Outside, the last of the light is disappearing. The room fills slowly with the particular blue dark of a Savanaclaw evening, warm even in its dimness, and somewhere far off a door opens and shuts and the corridor fills briefly with voices before going quiet again. You close your eyes. You are not asleep when his tail brushes your ankle — once, slow, instinctive. The way a cat might move toward warmth in the night without meaning to. Without knowing. You don’t say anything. You don’t move. You just lie there in the almost-dark, memorizing the sound of his breathing, while the version of him that you carry inside you holds you close and speaks quietly and chooses you, clearly, again and again, in all the small ways that the real one doesn’t know how. It is a beautiful place, that room inside your chest.
lyrics : i’m obsessed with the idea that one day it breaks up / 'Cause after that, I know I'll never be as capable of love / after you — day 1 : capable of love by pinkpantheress
plot : in which, you decide that you are a burden before he gets the chance to…
The napkins have to be folded a specific way.
You know this because Vil told you — once, calmly, with the kind of patience that is somehow worse than irritation — and you have not forgotten. Tri-fold, not square. Crease sharp enough to hold. You stand at the long table in Pomefiore’s common room long after most of the other students have filtered out, working through the pile, and you try very hard not to look at him. He’s across the room, speaking to Rook in that low, precise way he has when he’s winding down for the night. The chandelier light catches the side of his face. It does something to his hair. It does something to you.
Don’t.
You look back down at the napkin in your hands.
This is the third month. You know that the way you know the day of the week — not because you’re counting, but because you’ve stopped being able to not count. Three months since the first time he reached past you to close a window and you became suddenly, acutely aware of how close he was. Three months since you understood, with the quiet finality of a door clicking shut, that you are in serious trouble. “You look well tonight.” You go very still. Vil is standing beside you. You didn’t hear him cross the room — you never do — and he is close enough that you can smell whatever it is he uses, something clean and faintly floral, and he is looking at you the way he looks at things he finds worth examining. Not beautiful. Not stunning. Well. Like you are something healthy and alive.
“Thank you,” you say. Your voice comes out steady. You’re proud of that. He holds your gaze for just a moment longer than he needs to, then moves past you toward the door. “Don’t fold the last row differently from the first,” he says, without turning around. “You’re rushing.” He’s right. You are.
You stare at the napkin in your hands and understand, with a certainty that settles into your chest and does not leave, that this is the best it is ever going to feel. And that it is going to end. And that there is nothing you can do about either of those things. You start folding more carefully.
You learn to be easy.
It happens in increments, so gradually that you almost don’t notice it happening. Almost. Vil messages you on a Tuesday to say rehearsal has run late, he won’t make dinner. You type it’s okay, don’t worry about it before he’s finished sending, thumb moving fast, because you do not want him to spend a single second thinking you might be disappointed. You are disappointed. That’s your problem, not his. On Thursday he mentions, almost offhandedly, that he has a shoot on Saturday — the Saturday you’d both loosely planned to spend doing absolutely nothing, which you had been looking forward to in the specific, embarrassing way you look forward to things you think might be temporary. “Of course,” you say immediately. “Saturday works fine. We can do it another time.” He looks at you briefly and says good and moves on, and you smile, and that is that.
You stop bringing things up. The cold you can’t shake for two weeks in September — you don’t mention it. The night you can’t sleep because your brain decides three a.m. is the correct time to present you with a comprehensive catalogue of all your failures — you don’t mention that either. You stop volunteering opinions on things that don’t directly concern you. You stop taking up chair space in his room, perching on the edge instead, half-ready to leave at any moment in case you are needed elsewhere, in case you are in the way.
If I am no trouble, you think, watching him move around his room with the unhurried efficiency of someone completely at ease in their own space, there is less reason to go. You know it’s not rational. Somewhere under the logic, you know it’s not rational. But the alternative is showing him all of it — the wanting, the fear, the way you have already, quietly, begun grieving the end of this even while you’re still inside it — and you think about his face if he saw all of that and you feel a little sick, and you go back to perching on the edge of the chair.
It’s fine. You’re fine. You say it so many times it stops feeling like a sentence and starts feeling like a fact about yourself, like something solid you can stand on.
October comes, and the trees on the Night Raven grounds do something unreasonable and orange.
You’re sitting on a bench in the courtyard while Vil reads beside you, your shoulder almost touching his, a cup of tea gone lukewarm in your hands. The afternoon light is doing the thing it does in October — going gold and heavy, making everything look like the last day of something. You stare out at the trees and think: catalogue this. Remember this. The light and the almost-touching and the way he frowns at his book when he’s concentrating. You’re storing it. You’ve been storing things for weeks now, pressing moments flat and keeping them somewhere interior, because you understand on some level that you are going to need them later. After. Stop, you tell yourself. You’re doing it again.
“How’s the book?” you ask. Vil doesn’t look up immediately. Finishes the sentence he’s reading, which is so entirely him that it pulls something tight in your chest. Then he glances over. His eyes move across your face. Not a quick look — a real one, the kind he gives things he’s actually paying attention to. You resist the urge to look away. “Tolerable,” he says. He tilts his head, just slightly. “You’ve been quiet today.” “I’m always quiet.” “You’ve been a different kind of quiet.”Your stomach drops about an inch. “I’m fine,” you say, which comes out smooth and practiced, because it is smooth and practiced, you have been saying it for months.
Vil closes his book. Not sets it aside — closes it. Deliberately, with finality. He sets it on the bench beside him and turns to look at you, really look at you, and something about the quality of his attention makes the back of your neck prickle.
“You’ve been saying that quite a lot,” he says. “For several weeks.” “It’s been true for several weeks.”
“Don’t.” His voice is even. Not cold — even, which is different, which is worse, because there’s nowhere to put it. “Don’t be clever to avoid the question. I’ve been watching you make yourself smaller for months and I want to know why.” The tea is cold in your hands. You look down at it. I’m fine, you think. The words line up, ready. They’ve always been ready lately. You open your mouth —
And nothing comes out. The crack has been forming for longer than you realized, hairline and invisible, and now, with Vil sitting beside you in the October light looking at you like you are something that actually matters, it gives. Just slightly. Just enough.
“I don’t want to be a burden,” you say, and immediately hate yourself for it, because that wasn’t planned, that wasn’t framed correctly, that came from somewhere you’d been keeping locked and it just — came out. Too honest. Too bare. You feel him go still beside you. “Look at me,” he says. You don’t want to. You look at him. Vil’s expression is not what you expected. It’s not pity and it’s not the polite, careful distance he uses when students bring him problems that bore him. There’s something controlled in it, something held in check, and behind that — briefly, just long enough for you to see it — something that looks almost like it hurts.
“You decided,” he says, slowly, “that my caring for you has conditions. That if you are inconvenient — if you need things, if you have bad days, if you take up space — I will leave.” He pauses. “And instead of asking me if that was true, you started disappearing.”
Your throat feels very tight. “Isn’t it—” you start.
“No,” he says. Simply. Flatly. The single syllable falls like something being set down with great precision. “It isn’t.” You look at him. He looks back. “I don’t understand,” you say, and your voice comes out smaller than you’d like, and you don’t bother being ashamed of it this time, because you are too tired to manage it on top of everything else. “I know you don’t,” Vil says. Something in his voice has shifted — still measured, but less like a wall and more like a hand extended. “That’s the part I’m interested in understanding.” You don’t fix it that afternoon. You don’t fix it in a week. It comes out in pieces — slowly, in the margins of evenings and the quiet stretches after he’s done talking about other things, in moments you hadn’t planned and sometimes in the middle of the night when something slips through the careful maintenance and he asks, voice low and without any particular urgency, what are you thinking? The gray is the hardest part to say.
You’re sitting on the floor of his room when you say it, your back against the side of his bed, working through a reading you’ve been putting off. He’s at his vanity, going through his evening routine, and it’s late and quiet and you feel strange and loose in the way that happens sometimes when you’re tired and your guard is down, and you hear yourself say it before you’ve decided to. “I think you’re the best thing that’s ever going to happen to me.”
Vil doesn’t respond immediately. You hear him set something down on the vanity. “After this,” you continue, staring at the page you’re not reading, “I think everything is just going to be — gray. Like I’ve used up my share of it. The good kind of it.”
The silence stretches. You feel your face go hot. Stupid, stupid — “Come here,” Vil says.
You look up. He’s turned on his stool to face you, and his expression is complicated in a way you don’t have a name for yet, something careful and aching all at once. You get up and cross the room, and he takes your hand when you’re close enough, and he holds it like it’s something that requires actual attention. “That,” he says, “is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.” His thumb moves across your knuckles. “And I understand it completely.”
You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. “You are not running out of anything,” he says. Quiet. Exact. “You are not at a peak. You are simply here, being afraid, which is—” a pause, the familiar careful selection— “which is something we can work with.”
You look at your hand in his. You think about the chandelier light and you look well tonight and the four hundred times you turned it over quietly in your mind, saving it, saving it, spending it like something that had to last. Vil doesn’t let go of your hand. He just holds it, and lets you sit in it, and outside the window October does something quiet with the wind. You are still afraid. That doesn’t disappear because someone is holding your hand in a warm room at night. You know that. You’re not naive enough to think one conversation undoes months of quietly bracing for an impact that hasn’t come.
But his hand is warm. And he is here. And for the first time in a long time, you don’t immediately reach for the stored version of this moment — the preserved, catalogued, grief-proofed version you’ve been keeping in reserve. You just let yourself have it. The real one. The one that’s actually happening.
Hear me out with Stateside and Ace even though he's pretty british
ikkk i thought about doing ace! howeverrr, i dont have a plot. even though i didnt put them yet, they allll have specific plots, and i just couldn’t think of one for Stateside that wouldnt be boring 😭
DAY 1: 𝖢𝖺𝗉𝖺𝖻𝗅𝖾 𝗈𝖿 𝖫𝗈𝗏𝖾 𝗑 𝖵𝗂𝗅 𝖲𝖼𝗁𝗈𝖾𝗇𝗁𝖾𝗂𝗍. “I'm obsessed with the idea that one day it breaks up, 'Cause after that, I know I'll never be as capable of love.”
i REALLY hope you guys enjoy this!! event officially starts tmrw btw! Yes ik i said i was gonna do Stateside.. sigh, i couldn’t think of anything. But if somebody has an idea before Day 14, i’ll do it!
to make up for lost time, im doing a pinkpantheress event soon!! it’ll be about 14 days long, with 14 songs (including Last Valentines, The Aisle, Pain, Stateside, ect). More will be posted tomorrow or the day after!
