A stranger breaks you out of a secret lab, but he loses his life in the process. Unable to let him go so easily, you and your five husbands take to the skies in a busted spaceship for the simple mission of finding your fated mate.
(This is a little WIP of mine. I want to finish the chapter, but I get too sad every time I open the file.)
MC
It was supposed to be a normal mission. Go into a lab abandoned by Ever to investigate a burst of metaflux. What you weren't expecting was those labs weren't abandoned—they were set as a trap for you. As soon as you entered the building, someone slipped a needle into your neck, injecting you with something to make you fall asleep.
"Wake-up! Wake-up!"
You're not sure how long you've been passed out when you're jostled awake by a large man with red hair.
When he sees you open your eyes, he quickly works on untying your restraints. "We have to get out of here."
"What?" It takes almost all of your energy to say the word.
"Please, MC."
Your head lulls to the side. "Who are you?"
His answered is drowned out by the sounds of gunshots.
"We have to go. Now!"
The stranger scoops you into his arms and sprints out of the building. Fading in and out of consciousness, you're carried out of the building and into the woods. He gently leans you against a large oak tree.
"You're safe. For now."
"What's going on?" you ask.
He gives you a half-smile. "You're a wanted woman."
"Why?"
Kneeling in front of you, he taps your chest above your heart. "Because of that. You have something very important to them."
"The aether core," you think to yourself, wondering how he knows your secret. "You're with Ever?"
Shaking his head, he mutters, "No. Well… kind of but… it's complicated."
Reaching for the gun that is usually on your hip, you realize you're in a hospital gown, completely unarmed.
With a smirk, the stranger grabs your favorite gun from the waistband of his jeans. "Promise not to shoot me?" he asks.
Logically, you know you should do everything to fight this man to get to safety, but something about the way he looks at you gives you pause. "I promise… for now… since you got me out of there." When you go to take the gun from him, your fingers touch, and you're overwhelmed by visions of you and the stranger falling in love. He likes chocolate milk, playfully rubbing his head all over you, and he makes you laugh. In this life, you don't laugh nearly enough, but with him, you're able to leave your struggles behind because you know he will always be there to protect you.
"Get away from the girl!" Two men with guns drawn approach you.
The stranger stands, and with a harsh growl, he orders them to leave. "Go back to the lab, and I'll let you live."
The men look between each other before one yells, "Traitor! We should have put you down a long time ago, mutt."
"It's not too late," the other shouts and fires.
The stranger's fingers grow talons as he lunges at the shooter, and he slashes the man's throat before a second bullet leaves the barrel.
The other man shoots the stranger in the chest, but it doesn't slow him down at all as he slashes a second throat. They collapse onto the ground, and the man fires one more shot before succumbing to his injuries. Neither of them move, and as seconds turn into minutes, you realize the stranger is barely breathing. You crawl over to him and roll him onto this back.
His shirt is soaked with blood.
"No, no, no!" you plead with fate as you try to stop the bleeding, but nothing you do even slows it down. More visions flash in your mind. You cradle his face, and his eyes barely crack open as he mumbles your name with his last breath.
Something inside of you dies the moment he does, and the pain is deeper, harsher, than anything you've ever felt. Something precious has been stolen from you. Holding him against your chest, you start to sob, and your heart feels like it's literally breaking in two. Whoever this man was… you were supposed to have more time.
~~~
Rafayel
While on a night drive looking for inspiration, the oath above his heart burns. The seering pain almost makes him drive off a cliff, but he's able to swerve to safety at the last minute.
Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong with his bride.
A little MC/Rafayel/Valko fic I was cooking until this morning (I’m so devastated they removed Valko). The whole idea stems from Rafayel’s line “Our new Boing Fish is here to join the couple, not break them up.”
🐺~~*~~🐠~~*~~ 🐺~~*~~🐠~~*~~ 🐺~~*~~🐠
“What happens if a god falls in love with someone who already has a fated mate? If that love is true, he would only ever want the best for her and what would make her happy, yeah? Aaaand let’s say the mate in question shows up too late to save the god’s bride from her self-inflicted demise—what happens then?”
A second mark, a teal fish, appears on Rafayel’s chest, entwined with the red one that is his oath to you.
“If the Tome of the Sea God is to be believed, he makes a second vow with the lonesome mate.”
“What was the vow?” you ask.
Rafayel glances to Valko. “Do you know, wolfie?”
The color drains from Valko’s face. “It’s nothing more than a legend…”
“Yes, yes, and werewolves are only found in fairytales, right?”
“What was the vow?” you ask again.
There’s a prolonged silence before Rafayel says, “I’m bored. Let’s eat something and watch a movie.” He pours a glass of wine, and even though he carries himself with an air is nonchalance, you can tell something is off.
“Rafayel, you can’t just barge in here and—“
Rafayel sighs and the corners of his mouth drop into a frown. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No.” Valko replies before Rafayel even finishes the question. They stare at each other like you’re not even in the room.
“What the hell is going on between you two right now?”
Valko sighs and grabs a tablet from his backpack. It takes him a moment to find what he’s looking for, but when he does, he passes the device to you. It’s a digital copy of the Tome of the Sea God, and it’s opened to a passage titled The God and His Chosen Mates.
🎶 It’s rutting season… I need a big boy, I need a big boy~ Welcome to Linkon, Valko! 🐺 I see the potential now. Exciting times. Also Sylus is still my husband, team vampire 😂 I’m excited to hear Valko’s voice though. Hopefully it’s deep. Btw, no bush in Patreon 🌿
⋆˙⟡ Grief is not sad all the time and that will mess your character up more than the sadness does. There are going to be hours where your grieving character forgets. Where they're laughing at something stupid on their phone or annoyed about traffic or genuinely hungry and thinking about what they want for lunch and then it comes back and the forgetting makes it WORSE. The return of it after a moment of normal is its own specific violence. It feels like betrayal. Or it feels like proof that you're not grieving right, that you didn't love them enough to remember every second. Writers keep their grieving characters sad in every scene because it reads as respectful and consistent and it is WRONG. The grief that ambushes you in the cereal aisle is realer than the grief you perform at the funeral.
⋆˙⟡ THE STUFF!!! nobody talks about the stuff. Someone dies and suddenly there is a BODY and there are OBJECTS and both of these things require immediate logistical decisions that do not pause for your feelings. What do you do with their half-finished cup of tea. Their reading glasses on the nightstand. Their voicemails still on your phone. Their shampoo in the shower that you cannot bring yourself to use but also cannot throw away so it just. Sits there. Getting lower somehow. Did someone use it. Did you use it without noticing???? the material reality of someone's absence is brutal and specific and most grief writing floats above it in abstraction like feelings are the main event. The feelings ARE happening inside a body that is standing in a house full of objects and that matters. SO WRITE THE OBJECTS.
⋆˙⟡ Grief makes people act completely out of character and everyone around them handles that badly. Your character might get mean. Might get inappropriately funny. Might make a terrible financial decision or sleep with someone they shouldn't or stop showering or clean the entire house at 3am for the fourth time this week. Drief does not make people into better, softer, wiser versions of themselves on any reliable schedule. Sometimes it makes them into someone they don't recognize and that is terrifying on top of everything else. Snd the people around them (friends, family, whoever) they want the grief to be legible. They want it to look like grief is supposed to look so they know what to do. When it doesn't look right they get uncomfortable and then they get scarce and then your grieving character is also somehow dealing with the secondary loss of people who couldn't handle it. which is its own thing.
⋆˙⟡ Someone died and your character didn't like them very much. Or loved them and also resented them. Or is relieved and then immediately guilty about the relief. Or is grieving someone who hurt them, someone with whom things were unfinished in a way that can never be finished now, someone who they had been estranged from, someone who they were about to reconcile with, someone who they had been slowly losing for years before the actual death so the death was almost anticlimactic except that it closes the door in a way that slow losing doesn't. Grief for a complicated person is complicated. You grieve who you wished they were alongside who they actually were. You grieve the relationship you deserved and didn't get. None of this is clean. None of this resolves. Stop writing grief like the person who died was beloved and simple. MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT SIMPLE.
⋆˙⟡ The body keeps doing its thing and that's horrifying. You know what happens the week someone close to you dies? you get hungry. You get tired. You wake up at the normal time. Your body does not know. It has not been informed. It wants breakfast and it wants to stretch and at some point it is going to want things you feel like you have no right to want right now. The physical continuation of your own life in the immediate aftermath of loss is one of the stranger things a human being has to experience and almost nobody writes it. Your character needs to eat. They need to sleep. Their back hurts. They have a headache that won't quit because they've been crying and dehydrated for four days. They are a body doing body things in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened to them and those two realities exist at the same time with no resolution.
⋆˙⟡ Anniversaries and dates are only half the ambush. the random Friday is the other half. Everyone knows about the first birthday without them. The first holiday. The one year mark. Those dates are braced for. Your character knows they're coming and steels themselves and sometimes that even works. What nobody warns you about is the random Tuesday in March that isn't any significant date at all except that something small happens: the light is a certain way, a song comes on, they see someone wearing the same jacket, and it is somehow worse than the anniversary was. Grief has terrible aim. it does not respect the calendar you've organized it into. it goes quiet for weeks and then destroys you on an unremarkable Wednesday because you drove past a gas station you used to stop at together. Write the random Tuesday. it's realer than the anniversary scene and it will devastate people who know.
⋆˙⟡ People say insane things to grieving people and the grieving person has to just stand there and take it. They're in a better place. Everything happens for a reason. i know exactly how you feel, when my dog died--and your character cannot say anything because this person means well and grief has a strange etiquette where the bereaved is somehow responsible for managing the comfort of everyone who comes to comfort them. The grieving person ends up performing okayness for the people who came to check on them. Ends up reassuring people. Ends up saying thank you for coming when what they want is for everyone to leave and also for no one to ever leave. This role reversal is so common and so rarely written and it is one of the most exhausting parts of early grief. Your character is drowning and spending energy making sure everyone else feels good about the life jacket they brought.
⋆˙⟡ The person who died keeps getting fixed in time while everyone else moves. This one is strange and i don't see it written enough. Your character ages. Changes. Has experiences. Develops opinions. And the person they lost stays exactly the same age they were, exactly the person they were, forever. Which means the gap between who your character is now and who the person was gets wider as time passes. You become someone they never knew. You have thoughts you can't tell them. You reach an age they never reached. Eventually you outlive them. You are older than they ever got to be. And the version of them in your memory is younger than you now. The relationship you carry continues to evolve even though only one of you is still here to evolve it. That is bizarre and sad and completely human and almost nobody writes it. WHY??? :///
⋆˙⟡ Sometimes grief makes people feel closer to the person they lost than they did when they were alive. This sounds counterintuitive but it is real. You finally understand them. You find the journals, the letters, the things people tell you at the funeral that you never knew. You have time to think about them with a clarity that the busy mess of being in relationship with a living person doesn't allow. You miss them in a way that is also a kind of intimacy. The relationship after death is one-sided and strange and ongoing and real. Some people feel the presence of the dead vividly for years. Some people talk to them. Some people make decisions based on what they think the person would have wanted. it's just the relationship continuing in the only form it still can. And it can be written seriously, without irony, without it being a sign that the character is unwell.
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