Somehow, someday, someone is going to write a LADS X Non-MC fic using the plotline of those e-novels featuring millionaire CEOs.
LMAOO YES wait why wiuld i actually love to reaf this😭😭someone make a mutli where every LI is the ceo, but when it's sylus' part he's Y/N and reader is the rich ceo😭😹
I'm here with my second request.
May I request: Zayne finds out MC has been using her heart condition to pressure Reader to break up with him.
Untamed Pasts
LaDS. Zayne x NonMC!Reader
Untamed pasts haunt potential futures, which is why you decide to end yours with Zayne when he grows distant. But unexpected friendships grow, and so can hope.
2,451 words. angst, hospital visits, heartbreak, heart attacks, female friendships, MC is in the hospital b/c of Protocore Syndrome, f!reader, cross-posted on ao3
a/n: Thank you for this request, dear reader! I'm really sorry it took a while for me to get back to you. I also changed it to where Reader is given reasons to break up with him rather than MC pressuring her. I hope that was okay :)
dividers by @uzmacchiato | ao3 link here
chapter one | chapter two (soon!) | chapter three (soon!)
When you arrived at Akso Hospital, you expected hatred to well up in your chest.
You were going to meet the woman who takes up all of Zayne’s time. The woman who keeps him at work on days where you were supposed to be with him. The woman who consumes Zayne’s heart despite him saying he’s all yours. The woman he loves. The woman you will never be.
You take a sharp breath before entering the hospital room where she is supposedly laying. You step inside, absorbing the beeping machines and various bouquets, before closing your eyes. Anguish doesn’t have a place here. There is enough of it in your life.
But the sight of MC fast asleep, covered in white blankets like she’s decorated for her burial, pierces your chest. Hatred dissipates into a thing of the past, and realization replaces it.
She’s dying.
Your fists shake with how hard you’re clenching them, as though they are weapons you can use to fight your way through this grief. But you’re only hurting yourself. You’re only seeing your inadequacy in comparison to the demons that plague you.
She’s dying, and there is nothing you can do to save her.
Tears stream down your face now. You still have time to leave. You didn’t even have to visit her as soon as you got a call detailing the severity of her condition. You still have time to run, to make sure this beloved woman doesn’t see the mess you have become.
But your feet are stuck to the ground, and she eventually wakes up from her slumber.
“Mmm…” she murmurs, absorbing the world around her, seemingly surprised that she’s still alive. Her hair decorates her face like curtains hiding the sight of her exhaustion, and the sliver of what you can see in-between strands is evidence of death looming over her.
When you find your footing on this mountain of realization, you gently move strands of hair and tuck them in behind her ears, careful not to alter the tubes providing slivers of life into her body. Her eyes widen before she blinks. Once, twice.
“Oh, hi!”
Even though it’s soft, the afternoon sunlight spilling into the hospital room pales in comparison to her voice.
“Hello, MC.”
Your voice is colder in comparison. Like shards of ice sitting atop rooftops on snowy days, only melting when sunlight caresses them.
Despite that, a small smile appears on her face. You can see the battles she fights just to keep her eyes open, the efforts she places in keeping herself present in this conversation. You can see the happiness spilling out of her eyes at the sight of you.
If any drops of hatred still remained in your heart, then they all evaporated from the warmth of her compassion.
“You look familiar. H-have we met before?”
You can only nod because you have met her. It was during a dinner party celebrating the collaborations between Akso Hospital and the Hunter’s Association, and Zayne had introduced you to each other. You can still recall the smile on her face and her laughter that lit up the room. You can still recall how you were sitting on the table all night, sipping wine and conversing with almost nobody. You can still recall the jealousy that sprouted within you that night.
“Yes,” you manage to say. “We met at a dinner party.”
“Oh! You were the woman in the gold dress.” Her laugh is still so infectious, making a smile peek out of you despite the circumstances. “I was awestruck by you. I could hardly focus on anyone else that night.”
“Stop that,” you dismiss with a wave of your hand. “If any one of us was the light of that night, it would be you, MC.”
She shakes her head, her laugh still spilling out of her lips. You notice that her eyes have closed. “I highly doubt it. Was that the only time w-we met?”
In the literal sense, yes. That was the only time you’ve seen her, but it was enough for her to linger in your mind in every moment you shared with Zayne. When he comes home late from work. When he ends your calls abruptly with her as his excuse. When all of your dinner conversations are about treatments for Protocore Syndrome. When your relationship surrounded her needs and abandoned yours.
You swallow to push down the lump in your throat. “Yes. That was the only time we met.”
“Oh, I wish we could’ve talked more. I feel like we would’ve been great friends.”
You stare at her saline bag as the liquid flows into her veins so you don’t have to see her expression when she hisses in pain. How does life consume a person so fully and manage to leave just as quickly?
And as you fix the blankets around her — still staring anywhere else but her face — you wonder how jealousy consumed you so fully yet managed to leave so quickly.
“Do I need to call a nurse-”
“No!” she exclaims, her breaths evening out into slow, painless waves. “I-I’m okay.”
You can finally look at her properly, but the sight of her small smile makes you wish you didn’t. You understand why Zayne would rather spend his time with her. While she can find the joys in everything, yours have died long before you met him, and who wouldn’t choose to bask in the light when given the chance?
Words perish in your throat. Everything and everybody seems to want to die today.
“How about you?” she interrupts. “Are you okay? You seem spaced out.”
You can only muster a small nod, because the words that refuse to spill out weigh too much for anyone to handle.
“I don’t think you are. A penny for your thoughts?”
“I don’t have my coin purse at the moment,” you lie. The metaphorical bag sits in your heart, waiting to spill out, but MC is the last person you would want to open up to.
She simply hums and doesn’t push further, closing her eyes once more. If you allowed yourself to care more than you already do, you would comment on the sharpness of her breaths or soothe the lines of her forehead.
But weapons are more useful, so the elephant in the room is addressed.
“How has Zayne been treating you?” you ask.
She answers like she doesn’t notice the harshness in your tone. “Like a child. Always in my ass about things.”
I bet he is, you almost say, but you bite your tongue until you taste copper.
“He scolded me when my friend Tara bought me a plushie from the gift shop, saying my happiness would make my heart explode.”
“He did that?”
Zayne wouldn’t even notice if you brought home a plushie.
She nods, your heart almost as damaged as hers. “He’s also so stern and serious. You’d think he was the one dying with how cold he sounds. I don’t know how you deal with that.”
You don’t, not when he’s never home.
“And he’s very… smitten.”
That gets your attention. Your gaze shifts from her saline bag — half-empty, you note — to her face, her smile unsettling.
“Smitten by you, I assume?” you murmur. You clench your fists like a child about to cry, waiting for someone who can comfort you.
The last thing you see before the loud flatline of the EKG is MC tilting her head, her brows furrowed.
Everything after that is a blur. Your voice echoes as you call for a nurse, a doctor, anybody to save her. The machine rings in your ears, quickly followed by voices, then by bodies, then…
“We’ll do our best, ma’am,” somebody assures, but it’s buried beneath harsh orders and beeping machines and everything that has weighed over you. You can only nod silently. You don’t know how you even managed that.
When you walk out of the room, the last thing you see is a familiar white coat bolting inside, and you almost wish you were the one dying.
“Water.”
Your hands are clammy under the bright hospital lights when you take the paper cup offered in front of your face. That familiar voice is here again, and if you were less disoriented, perhaps you would’ve addressed him nicely instead of saying nothing.
You don’t drink the water. You don’t lift your head. You don’t do anything in hopes that Zayne would leave you alone.
But he doesn’t. He lingers like he doesn’t have ten thousand other things to do. Like he actually cares about you.
On another night, him staying this long would feel like a dream come true.
“Drink it.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” you retort, and you swear you hear him step back. Your voice is unrecognizable even to you, your anger familiar yet foreign in its current intensity. The water sloshes, close to being your next victim.
Zayne doesn’t say anything for a while, and neither do you. You finally take a sip of the water because your throat feels too constricted, and you need to speak if you’re going to tell him off.
The voices of passing nurses and wheeled IV poles are all the noises that sit between your silence. It reminds you that life is happening beyond your grudges, burdens, and anger.
It also reminds you that life can be taken away too, turning your grudges, burdens, and anger into regrets.
“Is she okay?” you ask, your voice just as soft as hers.
“Yes. The resuscitation was successful.”
You sigh of relief before taking another sip of water. Her heart is still beating. The woman you despise most is okay.
Good.
Your eyes are glued to his shoes. You’ve polished them thousands of times even though 24-hour shifts leave them dirty regardless. Such a Sisyphean curse to always care for someone who doesn’t feel the same.
But if he doesn’t care, why is he holding your hand?
Zayne’s touch lingers, only leaving when someone calls him, and even then you feel the remnants of it as he walks away with a soft “goodbye.”
You remind yourself that he doesn’t care. That he hasn’t put you first in forever. That he’s willing to leave you in your despair because there’s something and someone else more important to handle.
But as the water cools your burning tongue and your eyes dart from the ground to Zayne’s retreating back, you can’t get yourself to.
That night, you decide to leave.
Half-empty bags decorate your bedroom floor as you hastily shove anything and everything you might need for a future you don’t even want to live through. Shirts overflow from your backpack, dresses coat your luggage in pesky glitter, and the zipper works overtime as your items struggle to stay inside.
“Come on!” you scream when your zipper gives up, and you toss the damn thing across the room without considering where it may land.
And when it shatters one of Zayne’s ice sculptures, you find yourself too angry to care.
You’re leaving today. He won’t be able to break your heart anymore.
But as you throw your clothes onto a different luggage — one of his luggages, specifically — life seems to insult you even more. You find shirts that he never bothered to take out, his travel bag of toiletries that you packed for him, and a million other signs of your presence in his life.
They all get tossed on the bed that both of you are supposed to share as though they hold no value to you.
Your clothes fit the luggage this time, with even some room to add your thoughts and grievances you’ve carried in this entire relationship. How nice of the universe to grant you something so useless.
In the midst of tossing your toiletries in the spaces, your phone buzzes in your pocket. With frustration and no regard to whoever is on the other side of the line, you press the green button.
“Yes?”
The voice on the other side of the line, whom you recognize as Zayne’s coworker, asks if he’s calling the right person.
“That’s me. Why?”
“Dr. Zayne requests your presence.”
Your heart sinks, akin to the ice sculpture that fell from your nightstand. “Please tell him I’m occupied at the moment.”
Silence ensues for a few moments before the voice comes back.
“He would like a few seconds of your time, ma’am.”
“Tell him I don’t have that much to spare.”
Your toothbrush peeks out from the luggage as you zip it up, and you bite your lip to prevent any profanities from escaping. God, why is leaving so hard when the universe has been pushing you to do so for a while now?
“Please ma’am, he really wants to speak to you.”
You exhale sharply, hanging up before he can say another word. Before Zayne can speak and undo your decision with his voice alone. Before your doubts can creep up and push you to make the decision you have regretted making for years.
Your luggage finally closes. Years and years of the same chapter finally ends. Now all you need to do is to leave.
But your phone rings again.
When you pick up, it’s not his colleague that answers.
“Are you all right?”
Zayne’s voice is soft, exhaustion coating every syllable. It reminds you of MC minutes before her cardiac arrest — like death has come for him too.
How odd that he would go to you in that circumstance.
“Does it matter?” you blurt out.
“Very much. I… I need to hear your voice.”
“Listen to your patients. I’m sure their voices are perfectly fine.”
Your thumb lingers on the red phone button, ready to push it and end this useless conversation, but he always finds a way to stop you.
“Please.”
A plea.
Zayne has asked something from you.
It’s the first time you were met with anything other than his indifference. Of course, it wasn’t always like this, but you can’t recall the last time he had actually shown any emotion towards you.
Quiet meals, expected tasks, a broken home.
Those are all you know now.
Not the past full of flowers, devotion, and sweet nothings.
You end the call before any word spills out of your lips, your legs succumbing to heartbreak’s hands. Tears spill out and caress your face. Your luggage is the only witness.
Just like life, time passes amidst your despair, unwilling to wait for you to stand up. By the time you push yourself, footsteps echo into your bedroom, a familiar duffel bag falling to the ground.
Zayne stands there, alarmed, as he carries a bouquet of jasmines.
a/n: I love this prompt, but I am so repulsed by my writing style here lmao 😭 The next two chapters will be longer, more in-depth, and better written!
Thank you for reading! Any form of interaction is appreciated. Take care :)
Your account somehow popped up on my 'For You' tab, so I have a question for your Followers Special.
Do you write for Non-MC (as in anyone who isn't in-game MC)?
See I’m gonna be honest, I’m not entirely sure what ‘non-mc’ means 🫠 I had thought it was for any reader insert that just wasn’t cannon compliant which then, yes, I do write for that! But I also see non-mc angst fics which I probably would not do (I’m sensitive) like I’ll do angst fics that aren’t with cannon compliant MC but I won’t do MC vs. non-mc or have you and MC be two separate individuals in one fic, if that makes sense 🤔
So technically yes (I think), just not the whole ‘Li chooses MC over non-MC’ thing, or having MC as a different character.
I hope that answers it, thank you for the ask! (Also feel free to comment which one you were referring to if you’d like 😚)
