Phainons wife

salem | she/her phainon yume sideblog | 21 solar halo canon! | ☀️🪽 @svndayy is my main acc

[solar-halo]

Yume sideblog •

Rules/BYI below

♪───Ｏ　　ʕ⁎̯͡⁎ʔ༄ Ｏ────♪

Unsure if I’ll change this blog as my fixations on my yumes change or if I’ll just keep it for phainon. Either way.

• I’m a (MOSTLY nonsharing) phainon yume/riako and i will only LIMITEDLY interact w other yumes as long as you’re respectful!!! Don’t make it competitive or I’ll block you basically. But otherwise I’m mostly chill

• Do NOT mention phaidei here (or any other phainon ships unless it’s phaistelle!!! i love phaistelle mostly bc i see stelle as me but that’s It.)

• Doubles can interact through likes and comments and whatever but don’t reblog my own personal solar halo posts (tagged ☀️🪽) with “This is so (self insert/oc) and phainon”

• Weird thing to have to say but do not go into my comment section and list reasons why you believe phainon is gay and doesn’t like women as a way to invalidate my yumeship (this has happened 😭. I’ll block you if you do this but that should go without saying)

• if you do any of the above things i’ll block but like I said Im usually fine and chill and if I’m uncomfortable I honestly just probably won’t respond or something idk 😭 no big deal

• I don’t really answer asks or dms or anything unless it’s a friend, please don’t ask me to (i typically have these off anyway)

That’s it for now. Just don’t do anything listed above and that’s all.

TAGS:

#solar halo posting - related to my yumeship, sometimes i reblog fics w this tag if it reads very similarly to my ship dynamic w him

#☀️🪽 - solar halo emoji tag, i’ll only use this for info/lore/art posts for my yumeship

anything with 🍀 mentions lucky (dog)

[dreamyy-eis]

my dawn, let me be yours

sfw | phainon x fem!reader 

note: happy 1 anniversary to me being a phainon haver <з note2: phainon is the most gorgeous beautiful malebride, art by gajyago (twitter) that changed the trajectory of my life and this fic note3: ukrainian version posted on my ao3

phainon is happy to be yours. since he had realized his love for you, he already was yours—he gave you his heart for it to beat in your chest. your fates have long been intertwined, but today he will officially swear to be yours.

even when he still dreamt about dawn, phainon allowed himself to imagine his wedding with you. traditional amphoreus wedding—ritual bath, beautiful wedding gowns, wedding procession, hymns in honor of the couple and the wedding, he, who led you home, an offering to the titans for good fortune. 

when that day finally arrived on the eternal page, phainon couldn't believe it was really happening. too good to be reality. too good to be a dream.

but there he is, dressed in white chiton, on his head is a veil embroidered with floral patterns, he holds a bouquet of wheat, mint, sesame, and wild orchids. although he had imagined you in that role as a sign that he was officially committing himself to you, phainon asked to switch the traditional roles.

out of the corner of his eye, he glances at his parents, who are carrying torches. they sing hymns together with everyone, their eyes shining with happiness. phainon remembers audata’s tears of happiness when he announced his wedding; hieronymus, who immediately began giving him advice on how to have a happy married life.

last steps to dome of the stars. there in that place where amphoreus can gaze up at the myriad stars, a celebrating crowd was left behind, and only the closest people gathered. even stelle, dan heng and march visits amphoreus to celebrate his wedding.

there, with the endless cosmos behind you, you’re waiting for phainon. you’re beautiful, more beautiful than dawn, than dreams, than stars—you’re the beauty, which can be perceived only through the eyes of those in love. your smile widens, you instinctively take a step toward him. phainon almost forgets how to breathe. in the moment when your gazes meet, everything comes to a halt—as if your souls were embracing each other. he’s yours, he’s yours, he’s yours—the only thought in his head. and he is grateful that you are allowing him to be yours.

all around, the lights of the torches shoot up into the sky. lights that scatter like fireworks across the sky. this sight is so heartwarming, phainon can't help but think of his sister, cyrene, and he thinks that it is her blessing. his steps are light, he doesn't even feel that he's walking—only that your warmth is getting closer.

“imperator blesses your union," these are cerydra’s words. according to ancient amphoreus tradition, she threw in his way dates, coins, dried fruits, figs, and nuts that symbolized the fertility and longevity of the new couple.

“may your love be vast like the ocean,” hysilens almost sings these words.

“you shall protect each other,” phainon just nodded to mydei’s words. yes, he will protect you.

“may your married life be full of gentleness,” castorice says, making phainon one more look at the bouquet. the bouquet she had carefully arranged for his wedding.

“be honest with each other,” it is so like professor anaxa, teach him a lesson, even at his own wedding, phainon thought.

“your love is truly beautiful, you shall preserve this beauty,” aglaea says. she was the one who sewed your wedding attire, choosing a design that reflected your personalities rather than following trends. the clothes seemed to tell the story of your love. phainon was endlessly grateful to her.

“your love will always make the sky smile” hyacine gave him a radiant smile, there are tears in her eyes just like on the day when phainon told her the happy news about his wedding. little ica’s wings flutter happily right beside her.

“may no hardships ever catch up with you,” cipher winked, throwing a generous handful of coins.

“may your love be permanent and your story never end,” dan heng solemnly said, right beside him vigethos wagged his tail, offering his best wishes as well. phainon is glad that his comrades, who gave a new dawn to amphoreus, are present at his wedding.

“may your life be filled with unforgettable, happy moments!” march 7th happily shouted, taking photos. phainon took a mental note that he must ask her later to send them to him.

“may countless new dawns lie ahead of you, and may nothing ever separate you!” stelle enthusiastically showered him with blessings. phainon can’t help but remember how she promised him that as soon as amphoreus becomes real, she will give you the best honeymoon, full of adventures, across all the planets she has visited.

“may all your tomorrows be full of love,”  tribbie, trinnon and trianne said in unison, rushing to meet him from my spot next to you. yes, them being officiant was indisputable. and honestly, phainon  wouldn't want his wedding to be any different. what could be better than having his closest friends and family there to witness this new chapter in his life?

soon phainon will become a married man, there are only a few steps separating him from you, and he covers them in an instant. he can’t help trembling when he touches your face. phainon whispers your name, but you can clearly hear him even amidst all that joyful cacophony. you place your hand over his, squeezing it gently. the fingers of your other hand brush against the flowers in his bouquet. he leans toward you, forehead to forehead. you can’t help but be drawn to each other; your hearts are already parts of a single whole.

“every dawn of mine belongs to you,” these words are phainon’s vow. seven words that are of more importance than the whole cosmos, that embody his future, his dreams and his hopes. his love that he carried through countless cycles, the love he carried into tomorrow.

“every dawn of mine belongs to you,” you answer him with exactly the same words. this vow isn't a traditional amphorean wedding vow, but these words belong only to you. the vow that unites you—just like every one before it, which you whispered to each other as you embraced and caressed one another, at the morning and at the night, in peaceful routine and in battle.

phainon looks you in the eyes—stars in your eyes shine brightly, and there is only him amidst them. the realization that you are now a married couple settles like a sweet warmth in his heart. he is your husband—how wonderful it is to realize this again and again. he is your husband—phainon squeezes your hand. he is your husband—from now on and forever, his fate and yours are bound together; your tomorrows are intertwined.

“and now, your home awaits you!” tribbie says, opening the gates, beyond which golden fields of aedes elysiae lie. another wish of phainon—to have the final part of the wedding at his home.

phainon leads you to the gates—one step and starry endlessness becomes a sea of wheat, and the fireworks become a gentle breeze. your home. almost immediately, he wraps his arms around you, holding you tight, basking in your warmth and breathing in your scent. his actions make you laugh—he’s so in love, and basking in his love is the greatest pleasure.

there is one last wedding ritual left, which you had silently agreed to hold in aedes elysiae. his heart, which has been fluttering like butterfly wings, is now peaceful, finally home, when you gently lift his veil, stroking the snow-white strands of his hair—like you are reassuring him, thank you that you entrusted your heart to me, i shall love and  protect you—and you kiss him. gentle and sweet, like a breeze, like the rustling of wheat, like ambrosia, like stardust. when you kiss, you don't take your eyes off each other; the sky and the sun in his eyes are just for you. 

“i love you”, now you’re husband and wife, it seems like this doesn't change your feelings at all, but still, they seem to have taken on new hues. 

[ruruumin]

happy anniversary, khaslana.

₊˚ෆ a love letter from the community to him.

⤷ there is a hero living in everyone's heart: but he will always be the first.

waking up with a gasp, phainon sits up from the golden fields of aedes elysiae. his heart thumps rapidly, with enough force to knock the wind out of his own lungs. fear shows in the back of his neck. hairs stood poised and tense, ready for danger to sweep his nation. in this moment, he remembers vividly now: thirty-three million, five hundred and fifty thousand, three hundred and thirty six cycles, living in constant misery and terror, surrounded by physical reincarnation of his nightmares. a sudden dryness coasts his tongue, throat clenching around nothing. another time, another life, another place for him to keep fighting this never-ending war that continues to rip away the ones he loved. 

when he thinks about living another cycle, his thoughts were swallowed whole by the gentle hum of your voice. you lay beside him, toying with the coarse tips of wheat. the golden ray of the sun descended down on your cheek, highlighting the warmth of your skin. he could see every corner of your face, every pore and bump, reminding him that this moment was real. your eyes were half-lidded, close to falling asleep in this new hard-earned peace. your gaze flickers upwards, hands instinctively reaching for his hand, intertwining your fingers.

another nightmare? you whisper, gentle on his ears as if the constant screams of war had left him deaf. as you lean closer, pressing your lips against his knuckles and wrists, you appear to him like a knight without armor, shedding echos of strife. in this life, the world no longer needed gods. no more praying and crying to a woeful soul. it was just you and him, amongst the sea of gilded threads. unlike him, you had left your weapon by the door, ridding yourself of destruction. your heart and soul was finally able to breathe in the fresh air of his home. 

now you lay before him, holding out your hand—for him to take on this new journey.

thirty-three million, five hundred and fifty thousand, three hundred and thirty six cycles: regret and hatred eating away at his gentle soul, burning up every tear he has ever formed, twisting his wishes into insignificant code, phainon has only known destruction. he has felt the heat of his flame devour his muscles, the black tide robbing him of the childish innocence he was born with, transforming his anguished soul into a vengeful beast destined to fight a losing battle.

however, the battle against irontomb has settled. amphoreus will reform itself, with new leaves and grass, it’ll bloom in the later year. his life will be recreated alongside his fellow flamechasers, having written their stories into delicate pages. even though he knows its not the end, he wishes he could have seen the cosmos, the one the trailblazer has long described as otherworldly beautiful. he wants to be there, sitting on those velvet seats, rocking back and forth as it warps through dimensions. he wants to experience the subtle humiliation of failing another appraisal in another land, to be taught a different language and culture. 

in his world, you’ll be with him every step of the way—reaching out with all ten of your fingers, grasping onto his face and grounding him. you will reassure him that despite his screams and sobs that have long bottled up in his throat, threatening to shatter his body into pure stardust, he will be eternally loved in every universe.

because in someone else’s life, phainon was a nobleman, having woken up in a new timeline with a profound purpose to protect you. he sees you tucked away in the libraries, shielding your nervous eyes from him, reminding him of your first encounter in a previous dream. you drown yourself in work, smiling through every papercut. he has lost you once before, so the fear that riddles him leaves him hovering by your side, watching from a safe distance as you interact with other patrons. your voice sounds as lovely as ever. a hum that soothes the ache in his raging soul. a calming medicine to the rot in his heart. 

in another life, he met you at the young age of twelve. having been two months, one week, and four days older than you, he constantly held this fact over your head, grinning as you nudge him with your elbow. although he was known to be a crybaby for all his life, you bore witness to the man he’s become; when he defended your honor from arrogant teens who knew better than to break the heart he’s spent protecting, you knew he was someone worth loving. the two of you were like two peas in a pod, destined to stay together until the very end. car rides with him usually involved childish giggles whenever he hit the top of his head on the car roof. sometimes you’ll spend the later evening admiring the stars, with one hand shoved into a bag of greasy fries he thoughtfully bought for you. in this life, he feels the most loved when he was with you, looking up with tears in his eyes, another sob racking through his throat as you allow him to slide the ring over your finger, solidifying your everlasting adoration for him.

again and again, he appears in different ways—but always loved. 

he has played the part of a defense attorney, fighting on the other side of the bench to remain by your side. 

other times, he is a devoted streamer with fans cheering his name, yet the only thing he yearns for most is the feeling of your lips on his skin, fingers drawing shapes into his chest as he struggles to turn off his facecam. 

he was also your childhood friend, hardened by the harrows of battle against monstrous kaijus. he returns to your side, slashing and beating every problem that has ever held you back. when he looked into your eyes, admitting he bought the house, the two of you knew it meant nothing without each other. 

he has appeared before you as a god, hovering just a few steps off the ground as he defies every boundary of the world. yet he will strip himself of this divinity, to be sent crashing down to earth with you in his arms, lucky to reveal to his only love the true color of his eyes that were ocean blue.

it didn’t matter where or what he was—if he was just a regular college student, rattled by the thought of adulthood and graduation, standing in front of the blinding stage with your eyes hovering over him. your smile takes away his worries and homesickness. the fear of growing up didn’t seem all so daunting with you by his side, encouraging him to take the first leap for himself. to do something that was profoundly him. to love with his entire heart. to cry with his soul. to admit that despite everything, he wants to keep moving forward. he won’t be stuck in the past no longer, chained by the insecurities that kept him worrying about tomorrow. instead, he will hold onto you, fingers pressing against your waist as he lifts you up, twirling without much care in the world for anything but the sound of his laugh mixing with yours. in this life, he has felt a love so real, it reduces him to tears.

he shows up no matter what: whether it be in someones arms as a small plush, or a standee that you’re taking photos with, he exists. he’s there in the crowd at every convention, smiling with all his teeth as he poses in front of the camera. he’s there on billboards, cherished by everyone who has stayed by his side. he is immortalized through every form of art imaginable, decorated in the stars with his name written across the cosmos. 

in every universe, phainon is forever loved.

₊˚ෆ author's note

⤷ i hope this piece is as emotional as i intended. phainon is a very important character to me, and for everyone else as well. i've made so many wonderful friends through him and i've never seen a character more beautifully written and loved as him. it fills me with pride to see what the community has created for him. the works referenced in this piece are the ones that inspired me the most to write for him, so please send your love and appreciation. furthermore, any work that you did not see that you want recognized, post them in comments!

⋆˚࿔ 𐔌՞. .՞𐦯 otherwise, all the authors, artists & people referenced:

୨ৎ danijaci: my husband suddenly became lovesick?! ୨ৎ meowdei: same but different ୨ৎ harmonysanreads: thinking about attorney!phainon ୨ৎ despairots: gameboy ୨ৎ ohitsmaeday: like gravity ୨ৎ salmonmakiii: to love a burning sun ୨ৎ m1ckeyb3rry: bellerophon ୨ৎ phainon0702_cn: phainon 1st anniversary project ୨ৎ cn community: 38 stars for phainon

⋆˚࿔ 𐔌՞. .՞𐦯 additional works not mentioned but recommended:

୨ৎ kaguP: over again ୨ৎ soltuneia: why does the sun rise so early? ୨ৎ rhenuvee: seventeen // took my bitterness and made it sweet ୨ৎ notesfromthemirror: shared smiles ୨ৎ earthtooz: say your stupid line ୨ৎ kisscenes: like real people do ୨ৎ luminaur: that one trend ୨ৎ meltedcoco: how to confess to your boyfriend in three failed steps

[notesfromthemirror]

Im so scared for phainon currently...like im so scared I cant work i cant sleep i cant do ANYTHING I need to hold him rn or I'll keep crying

Until the World Quiets (Phainon x Reader)

A/N: Hi anon. :) Normally, I write more in this section. But honestly? I feel anxious too. I wrote this once I saw your ask because I was actually writing something different for him to cope. So… this came at the perfect time, truly. Enjoy. :)

Tags: Comfort. Fear of loss/future events. Cuddling. Emotional vulnerability. Reassurance.

Word count: 941

⋆ ✦ ⋆

The world outside is too loud. Too uncertain.

You try not to think about it.

(You can’t stop thinking about it.)

You find him by the window, where pale light pools across the floor. He’s standing perfectly still, silhouetted against the glass, and for a moment you’re struck by how ethereal he looks. How breakable.

He looks like he’s listening for something that isn’t there. Memories, voices, maybe even hope itself.

When you touch his arm gently, he startles. Just slightly, but enough that your chest tightens.

“Sorry,” you murmur. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

He turns, and his expression is calm. Too calm. The kind of stillness that only comes when everything inside is shaking, when holding yourself together requires every ounce of strength.

“Hey,” you whisper, opening your arms. “Come here.”

For a heartbeat, Phainon just looks at you. Then something in his expression cracks—so subtle you almost miss it—and he steps forward.

He moves into your embrace like someone who’s been waiting for permission to rest, forehead coming to rest against your shoulder with a quiet exhale that sounds like relief. The warmth of him seeps through your clothes, solid and real and here.

You wrap your arms around him tightly, one hand coming up to cradle the back of his head. His hair is soft beneath your fingers.

“I keep thinking about what’s coming,” he admits quietly, voice muffled against your shoulder. “About everything that’s expected of me. How much I still haven’t done. How many people are counting on—”

“Stop.” You tighten your hold. “You’ve already done so much.”

He shakes his head, but doesn’t pull away. “It never feels like enough. There’s always more. Always someone else who needs—” He stops, breath catching. “What if I can’t—”

“Phainon.” You pull back just enough to look at him, hands moving to frame his face. His eyes are bright—too bright, like he’s holding back tears through sheer force of will. “Listen to me. You don’t have to carry everything tonight.”

“But—”

“Tonight, you just have to be here. With me. That’s all.” You brush your thumb across his cheek. “Let the rest wait until morning.”

He searches your face, and you see the moment he stops fighting it. The careful control wavers, and he leans into your touch like it’s the only thing keeping him grounded.

“Come on.” You take his hand, gentle but insistent, and guide him to the couch. “Sit with me.”

He follows without protest, and when you settle beside him, he immediately gravitates back into your arms. You shift until you’re half-lying down, pulling him with you until his head rests against your chest, your arms wrapped securely around him.

For a long time, neither of you speak. The silence hums. Not empty, but full of shared breath and steady heartbeats. His hands, always so steady in battle or when talking eloquently, tremble slightly now as they rest at your sides, fingers curling into the fabric of your shirt.

You run your fingers through his hair slowly, repetitively. A grounding rhythm.

“I’m scared too,” you whisper finally, the confession slipping out before you can stop it.

He goes very still. “You are?”

“Of course I am.” Your arms tighten around him. “Everyone talking about what’s coming like—like it’s inevitable.” Your voice catches. “And I’m terrified of losing you.”

His breath hitches against your chest.

“But you’re not alone in this.” You press your cheek against his hair. “Whatever’s coming—whatever you have to face—you don’t have to face it by yourself. I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

“You can’t promise that,” Phainon says quietly, but there’s no accusation in it. Just exhaustion.

“Then I promise this moment.” You hold him tighter. “Right now, you’re safe. You’re here with me, and nothing can touch you. Can that be enough?”

For a long moment, he doesn’t answer. Then, so quietly you almost miss it: “Yes.”

His arms finally wrap around you properly, holding on like you’re the only solid thing in a world that’s tilting sideways. You feel the tension in him gradually, slowly beginning to release.

“Thank you,” he breathes against your shirt.

“For what?”

“For reminding me that I’m allowed to be scared. That I don’t have to be—” He pauses, searching for words. “—to be on all the time.”

“You never have to perform for me.” You press a kiss to the top of his head. “You can just be Phainon. Not the Worldbearer. Just… you.”

He makes a small sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. You don’t ask. Just keep holding him, one hand stroking through his hair, the other rubbing slow circles on his back.

Outside the window, the light shifts—that peculiar quality of Okhema‘s twilight that never quite settles into full darkness. You watch it play across the walls, casting gentle shadows.

After a while, you feel his breathing even out. The trembling in his hands stills. The rigid tension in his shoulders finally, blessedly releases.

“Better?” you murmur.

“Getting there.” He adjusts slightly, burrowing closer. “Don’t let go yet?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” You settle in more comfortably. “I’ll hold you as long as you need.”

“That might be a while.”

“Good.” You smile against his hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He is here.

Alive. Here. Safe.

You keep holding him until his breathing deepens into something that might be the beginning of actual rest, until the fear that’s been clawing at your own chest finally, grudgingly loosens its grip.

Whatever tomorrow brings.

Right now, in this moment, he’s here.

He’s safe.

And that’s enough.

___

A/N: He’s going to be okay. I have to believe that. And until we know for sure, here he is. Safe, held, loved. Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.

MASTERLIST.

[soltuneia]

— 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐧 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐬𝐨 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲?

mornings are exhausting. but they're sweeter with him.

✦ info: phainon wakes up at a ridiculously early hour and kisses you into waking up with him.

✦ warnings: mornings, ew. none, this is pure fluff (edit: except for the fact that he bites you once affectionately). au ambiguous, but in my head: modern au. (0.8k words)

✦ notes: he's so needy and he's so sneaky i love him i'm going to sob ugly tears i love him so much i'd like him to wake me up like this please please please- ahem. AHEM. who said that jsjsjsjjsj lmao i hope you enjoy :)

i. recent. ii. masterlist.

morning rises, soft and slow.

rays of light slowly start to seep in through the eastern windows, illuminating the tiled floor, pale curtains fluttering in the gentle breeze that finds its way in.

your blanket is cozy, your bed is soft, your alarm is yet to ring. the world outside is still, and it is peaceful.

almost.

“darling.” kiss. “my light.” kiss. “wake up.” kiss. “sweetheart, wake up.” kiss.

you stir with a grumble. “phainon?”

he chuckles, voice still deep with his usual morning rasp. “good morning, sleepyhead.” he says affectionately, words drawn out, as he kisses your cheek tenderly. “did you sleep well?”

you’d often compare phainon to the sun.

with the way he always looked at you with such warmth, and the way his smile shone brilliantly, it was hard not to. truly, you adored him with every inch of your being, and he lit up your life much like the light of the sun on your skin.

now, if only he didn’t rise with it.

why does the sun rise so very early, anyway?

“i’d sleep well if you’d let me sleep in a little longer, phainon,” you groan out, turning away from him so that your face stayed out of his reach. 

you’ll get your kisses later. but first, sleep.

he hums. “let me think about it,” he says as he settles behind you.  you feel him pull you closer and pause, like he’s deep in thought, and when he stills, you think you’ve won the battle.

well, good.

 it is far too early for such antics, in your opinion.  

but just as his warmth lures you back into the arms of sleep, your eyes fluttering shut, soothed by the pace of his breathing, you feel a sneaky kiss on the back of your neck.  “i thought about it.” he whispers, smiling against your skin. “sorry, darling, the answer's no.”

oh. oh, no.

he teasingly drags his lips down to where your neck meets your back, ghosting over like the brush of a butterfly's wings, leaving goosebumps in his wake. he lingers there for a minute, his breath tickling your sensitive skin, before he retraces his path to reach the base of your ear. he kisses there gently, once, twice, and then— he bites. 

gently, of course, but it still has your eyes flying wide open.

“phainon!” you gasp, electricity running down the length of your spine. you turn around to glare at him.

“bet you’re awake after that, aren’t you?” he murmurs into your ear. you whack him playfully on the shoulder.

his bright laughter in answer is infectious, and you can’t help but crack a smile begrudgingly.

“yeah, yeah, laugh it up.” you huff, moving to hide your face in his shoulder as he still shakes with laughter. “you always wake me up too early.”

“sorry, sorry.” he says in return, not sounding even the least bit apologetic, and you pull away to give him a look.

"you don't sound very sorry," you huff indignantly.

his lips form into the slightest of pouts and you swear to kephale above that you could see faint dog ears drooping in his fluffy white hair.

“we haven’t seen each other since last night.” he says, blue eyes never leaving your own. they're wide, and they blink innocently. “i missed you,” he finishes, his voice dropping to a small whisper as he looks away, and your heart melts at the sight of him.

well.

you can’t exactly argue with that, can you?

you sigh in defeat, sitting up. “alright, alright, you win.”

the effect is instant. 

his pout disappears and his whole face lights up, eyes sparkling with joy, a dimple peeking out as he grins brightly.

he pushes himself upright, and with all the enthusiasm of a puppy, he pulls you on top of him, both arms wrapped around your face, and kisses you over and over and over, from your lips to your nose to your eyelids and to your cheek until you’re giggling in his embrace.

“there we go. not so grumpy anymore, are we, darling?”’ he murmurs, pressing one final kiss to your nose. 

you hum, rubbing the last remnants of sleep from your eyes. “i’m awake, that’s for sure.”

his grin never leaves his face, and he nudges your cheek with his nose. “have i ever told you that you have a beautiful laugh?”

“yes, a million times already,” you respond, smiling affectionately at him.

“well, then i’ll say it again. i love the way you laugh.”

“even when i sound like a hyena?”

“especially when you sound like a hyena.”

it is right then— cradled in his arms, watching him with a smile so dazzling, when the morning’s just begun and the whole day lies in wait for the two of you— that you find your answer. 

why does the sun rise so early? 

just so it can see you smile, of course.

(“so you’re saying i do sound like a hyena?”

“huh- what?! that is not what i meant and you know it.” he groans, resting his forehead on your shoulder.

“i’m just kidding.” you respond, running your hands through his soft, pale hair. “consider that payback for waking me up.” 

“would it help if i had breakfast ready next time?” his voice is muffled, but you can still make out the words.

“yes, yes it would.”)

✦ ending notes: first phainon drabble!! hehe this was a quicker piece but i thoroughly enjoyed every second of writing this (i know a very popular characterization is that he's needy WHICH I AGREE WITH but he's also excellent at executing a plan and setting it in motion ykwim? he contains multitudes jsjsjsj therefore, needy and sneaky)

✦ taglist: @maopll (taglist form is linked. send an ask to be removed!)

[soltuneia]

— 𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐧 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐬𝐨 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲?

mornings are exhausting. but they're sweeter with him.

✦ info: phainon wakes up at a ridiculously early hour and kisses you into waking up with him.

✦ warnings: mornings, ew. none, this is pure fluff (edit: except for the fact that he bites you once affectionately). au ambiguous, but in my head: modern au. (0.8k words)

✦ notes: he's so needy and he's so sneaky i love him i'm going to sob ugly tears i love him so much i'd like him to wake me up like this please please please- ahem. AHEM. who said that jsjsjsjjsj lmao i hope you enjoy :)

i. recent. ii. masterlist.

morning rises, soft and slow.

rays of light slowly start to seep in through the eastern windows, illuminating the tiled floor, pale curtains fluttering in the gentle breeze that finds its way in.

your blanket is cozy, your bed is soft, your alarm is yet to ring. the world outside is still, and it is peaceful.

almost.

“darling.” kiss. “my light.” kiss. “wake up.” kiss. “sweetheart, wake up.” kiss.

you stir with a grumble. “phainon?”

he chuckles, voice still deep with his usual morning rasp. “good morning, sleepyhead.” he says affectionately, words drawn out, as he kisses your cheek tenderly. “did you sleep well?”

you’d often compare phainon to the sun.

with the way he always looked at you with such warmth, and the way his smile shone brilliantly, it was hard not to. truly, you adored him with every inch of your being, and he lit up your life much like the light of the sun on your skin.

now, if only he didn’t rise with it.

why does the sun rise so very early, anyway?

“i’d sleep well if you’d let me sleep in a little longer, phainon,” you groan out, turning away from him so that your face stayed out of his reach. 

you’ll get your kisses later. but first, sleep.

he hums. “let me think about it,” he says as he settles behind you.  you feel him pull you closer and pause, like he’s deep in thought, and when he stills, you think you’ve won the battle.

well, good.

 it is far too early for such antics, in your opinion.  

but just as his warmth lures you back into the arms of sleep, your eyes fluttering shut, soothed by the pace of his breathing, you feel a sneaky kiss on the back of your neck.  “i thought about it.” he whispers, smiling against your skin. “sorry, darling, the answer's no.”

oh. oh, no.

he teasingly drags his lips down to where your neck meets your back, ghosting over like the brush of a butterfly's wings, leaving goosebumps in his wake. he lingers there for a minute, his breath tickling your sensitive skin, before he retraces his path to reach the base of your ear. he kisses there gently, once, twice, and then— he bites. 

gently, of course, but it still has your eyes flying wide open.

“phainon!” you gasp, electricity running down the length of your spine. you turn around to glare at him.

“bet you’re awake after that, aren’t you?” he murmurs into your ear. you whack him playfully on the shoulder.

his bright laughter in answer is infectious, and you can’t help but crack a smile begrudgingly.

“yeah, yeah, laugh it up.” you huff, moving to hide your face in his shoulder as he still shakes with laughter. “you always wake me up too early.”

“sorry, sorry.” he says in return, not sounding even the least bit apologetic, and you pull away to give him a look.

"you don't sound very sorry," you huff indignantly.

his lips form into the slightest of pouts and you swear to kephale above that you could see faint dog ears drooping in his fluffy white hair.

“we haven’t seen each other since last night.” he says, blue eyes never leaving your own. they're wide, and they blink innocently. “i missed you,” he finishes, his voice dropping to a small whisper as he looks away, and your heart melts at the sight of him.

well.

you can’t exactly argue with that, can you?

you sigh in defeat, sitting up. “alright, alright, you win.”

the effect is instant. 

his pout disappears and his whole face lights up, eyes sparkling with joy, a dimple peeking out as he grins brightly.

he pushes himself upright, and with all the enthusiasm of a puppy, he pulls you on top of him, both arms wrapped around your face, and kisses you over and over and over, from your lips to your nose to your eyelids and to your cheek until you’re giggling in his embrace.

“there we go. not so grumpy anymore, are we, darling?”’ he murmurs, pressing one final kiss to your nose. 

you hum, rubbing the last remnants of sleep from your eyes. “i’m awake, that’s for sure.”

his grin never leaves his face, and he nudges your cheek with his nose. “have i ever told you that you have a beautiful laugh?”

“yes, a million times already,” you respond, smiling affectionately at him.

“well, then i’ll say it again. i love the way you laugh.”

“even when i sound like a hyena?”

“especially when you sound like a hyena.”

it is right then— cradled in his arms, watching him with a smile so dazzling, when the morning’s just begun and the whole day lies in wait for the two of you— that you find your answer. 

why does the sun rise so early? 

just so it can see you smile, of course.

(“so you’re saying i do sound like a hyena?”

“huh- what?! that is not what i meant and you know it.” he groans, resting his forehead on your shoulder.

“i’m just kidding.” you respond, running your hands through his soft, pale hair. “consider that payback for waking me up.” 

“would it help if i had breakfast ready next time?” his voice is muffled, but you can still make out the words.

“yes, yes it would.”)

✦ ending notes: first phainon drabble!! hehe this was a quicker piece but i thoroughly enjoyed every second of writing this (i know a very popular characterization is that he's needy WHICH I AGREE WITH but he's also excellent at executing a plan and setting it in motion ykwim? he contains multitudes jsjsjsj therefore, needy and sneaky)

✦ taglist: @maopll (taglist form is linked. send an ask to be removed!)

[notesfromthemirror]

Changing (Phainon x Reader)

The Wishbearer: Part V

Series masterlist

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Synopsis: For centuries, Phainon has been cursed to grant mortal desires—compelled to answer every wish, no matter how hollow or greedy, while being forbidden from wanting anything himself. Watched by a greedy god, he exists only to serve, never to choose.

But then he hears your longing, and it shakes something loose in him. Because whatever is forming between you was never meant to exist. And the universe is starting to notice.

A/N: This chapter grew considerably while writing and ended up containing the longest Phainon POV I’ve written so far. I kept returning to it because I wanted to get the emotional progression right, and I’m excited (and slightly nervous) to finally share it. Hope you’ll enjoy! 💙

Tags: Slow Burn. Angst. Demigod!Phainon. Mythic Fantasy AU. Vaguely Modern Setting. Mutual Pining. Cosmic Interference. Identity Issues. Touch Starvation. Light Deterioration (Phainon). Emotional Outbursts (Phainon). Brief Jealousy. Reunion. First Kiss. Heated Kiss. Reader POV. Phainon POV.

Word count: 10049

⋆ ✦ ⋆

When Phainon steps out of your apartment, the morning air feels wrong.

It takes him several streets and one long pause beside an empty fountain before he understands what the wrongness is. The air has texture against his skin. It has weight. It has temperature. It moves around him in currents he can feel. He has not noticed air on his skin in three thousand years.

He stops walking.

He stands in the empty plaza and lifts a hand and turns the palm slowly over, watching the morning light move across it, and he realizes that he can feel the light. The temperature of it. The angle of it against the back of his knuckles versus the inside of his wrist.

He breathes in.

Bread, somewhere. Coffee from a vendor’s cart further down the street. Stone. The faint mineral smell of stone that has weathered for centuries.

He thinks: Oh. Is this what it was like? Have I been not feeling this the whole time?

He should not be standing in a plaza in dawn light with tears on his face for no articulable reason. He does anyway. He stands for a long time. The light shifts. A bird he does not recognize sings from a roof above him, and he hears the song.

He understands, with a clarity that should not be possible after only one night, that he has spent three thousand years inside a kind of muffling he never named because he had nothing to compare it to.

He had known he could not sleep. He had known he could not be touched. He had known he could not want. But he had thought, vaguely, that all the other things were still happening. That the air still touched him, that sounds still reached him, that smells still arrived at him in the same way they would arrive at any body.

They didn’t. Not like this. He has been a body in name only, the whole time. A surface that did not, in any real way, receive the world.

And now he does.

You did this. Holding him did this. Letting him sleep against you did this. He starts walking again because if he stays in the plaza he will sit down on the stone and not get up.

The wishes come back within an hour.

They come quieter than they used to. The voices are there. The endless mortal chorus is there. He can still locate every wish, every want, every prayer, the way he could yesterday and ten years ago and twenty centuries ago. But the pressure of them is lower. The compulsion does not press as immediately.

He grants the first one. Then the next.

They feel different. Or he does. He can’t tell.

He grants a small thing—a young man’s wish for a job interview to go well—and feels the cost extract from the man’s marrow, and feels, also, his own response to having extracted it. Distaste. He has granted a wish for ordinary good luck and the part of him that has just learned what air on skin feels like is displeased about it.

He grants the next one anyway. He has to. The compulsion is quieter but not gone. He doesn’t know what to do with the gap.

He grants. He grants. He grants. He keeps moving.

The voice arrives, eventually. He had been expecting it sooner. Well.

Phainon doesn’t answer.

Don’t sulk, vessel. I’m trying to be congratulatory.

He grants another wish. He doesn’t answer.

That was, I admit, more impressive than I had anticipated. The sleeping. You have spent three thousand years being unable to nap, and one mortal lays a hand on your hair and you fold like a tent. Charming. Educational.

What do you want?

Oh, the god speaks. I was beginning to wonder. What do I want. What an interesting question. Let me think.

A pause that is not really a pause.

I think, he says, I want to know what you intend to do about it.

About what?

Vessel. The voice has gone fond, in a way that turns Phainon’s stomach. Don’t be coy. You have spent three thousand years without wanting anything. I had assumed that was the most elegant part of our arrangement. But perhaps this is better. Now there is something you want. Something you were never meant to keep. I admit I am curious how long it takes before that becomes unbearable. What do you intend to do about it?

Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing. Phainon’s voice does not shake. He has spent three thousand years learning how to keep his voice from shaking. I will continue. I will grant. I will not return.

A pause. Then a soft laugh follows.

Vessel, that is a lie so large I am embarrassed for both of us. You will return by sundown. You will not be able to help yourself. You will tell yourself it is a single visit, and it will become several, and then you will be sleeping in their bed every night within the week, and I will be feeding on a deeply diminished version of your service. You know this.

I won’t return.

Oh, but you will.

I won’t.

A longer pause. The god is no longer laughing. Hm, he says.

The first incident happens forty minutes later. A factory in the eastern district. An exposed gas line. Phainon feels the small, inevitable gathering of something about to explode. He is across the city in less than a heartbeat. He stands in the air above the factory and watches the pressure build and understands, with a kind of cold falling sensation, exactly what is being arranged for him.

Twelve workers inside. None of them have done anything to deserve this. None of them are wishing for anything in this moment besides the small ordinary wishes mortals carry at all hours: to finish their shift, to remember to pick up bread on the way home, to not have argued with a spouse last night.

The pressure builds. He could let it happen. He could turn away. Let the factory burn. Twelve mortal lives is a small number against three thousand years of statistics.

He has watched larger numbers die. He could decide, in this single moment, that he will not be moved by the god’s arrangements, and he could let the factory go up, and the god would learn that Phainon is not, in fact, susceptible to this particular form of manipulation.

He thinks, very briefly, about doing exactly that.

He is inside the factory before the thought finishes forming. He gets all twelve out. He puts out the pressure leak with his bare hand and the metal does not give him the courtesy of cooling for several seconds, but it does not burn him. He stands in the smoke afterward with twelve dazed workers staring at the impossible thing that just happened, and he is gone before any of them can speak.

He stands again in the air above the city. His hands are shaking.

That was beautifully done, the god observes pleasantly. Truly. The old reflexes are still in there, aren’t they. You used to be such a bright young hero.

Don’t.

Don’t what. Compliment you?

Don’t pretend this was anything but what it was.

And what was it, vessel?

A demonstration.

Oh, good. You’re going to make this interesting. Yes. It was a demonstration. Do you understand what it was demonstrating?

Yes.

Say it. I want to hear you say it.

Phainon’s jaw works. The rage is in him cold and large and going nowhere. He has known this kind of rage for three thousand years, the rage of a being who cannot act on his rage without paying for it in other people’s lives, and he has had three millennia of practice in housing it.

That if I focus on my desire, he says finally, low, you will arrange situations like this until I stop.

Very good.

That you will pile bodies in front of me until I cannot ignore them.

Mm.

That my discipline has a price and the price is paid by people who have nothing to do with any of this.

Now you’re getting it.

Phainon does not answer. He stands in the air. The shaking in his hands does not stop.

I am not angry, you know, the god says, lazy. About last night. Did I sound angry? I should not have. I am delighted. You finally cracked. After three thousand years of dutiful obedience you have given me something new to play with. I am enjoying myself enormously. But I will not have my vessel rendered useless by mortal affection. That is not a thing I am willing to permit. So we will play a small game. The rules are very simple. You will stay away from your mortal. I will not arrange any more demonstrations. If you go to them, I will. If you contact them, I will. If you so much as flicker a thread of warmth into their palm—I will. Are we agreed?

Phainon is silent, the familiar rage surfacing.

Vessel.

Yes.

Yes what?

Yes. We are agreed.

Good. I do enjoy it when you are reasonable. It happens so rarely.

The presence draws back. Lazy. Pleased.

Phainon stays in the air for a long time.

He has agreed to stay away. He has not agreed to stay away forever.

The god, who has owned him for three millennia, did not consider that a vessel he has worn for so long could be calculating a loophole inside an agreement made in the same breath.

Phainon does not say this out loud. He thinks it where the god is not paying attention. He files it away with the small things he is not yet ready to use.

He goes back to the wishes.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

Time has gone strange.

He has been doing this for hours and it feels like days. The afternoon light has not moved. Has barely moved. But inside him whole epochs are passing between wishes. He used to know how to ride this. The temporal smear, the way the granting-state stretches every minute into something longer. He used to find it merciful.

Now it is not merciful. Now every minute that stretches is a minute he is not with you. Every elongated hour is an hour you have been thinking he did not come back.

Phainon grants the next wish. The afternoon does not move.

It is worse now. Knowing the gap is there. Knowing the air has texture. Knowing the birdsong is birdsong. Knowing there is a thread leading to you that pulses warm under his sternum. Knowing all of this, and granting wishes through it, is a worse torture than three thousand years of granting wishes through nothing.

He had thought, before, that he was suffering. He had not understood what suffering was. He learns now what it means to know what one is losing and lose it anyway, hour by hour, while the body keeps moving.

The wishes pile up. He grants them. He grants them well, even, better than he has in centuries, because some part of him is using the work as a way to not think about you.

He grants. He grants. He grants.

A man wishes his neighbor’s car would break down. Petty. A grievance about a parking spot. Phainon grants it because he must, and the cost extracts cleanly from the wisher’s marrow but something else also goes through. Something Phainon did not authorize. A coldness. A sharpness.

The man stiffens, mid-wish, as though touched by a draft through closed windows. He shudders. He decides, suddenly, that the parking thing wasn’t so important after all.

Phainon stares at his hands. He had not meant to do that. He has not, in three thousand years, ever put any of himself into a wish. He has been a clean conduit. Now there is rage in him that is too large for the body, too large for the discipline, and it is leaking into the work. He can feel it. The next wish he grants, a moment later, has the same coldness in it. The next.

He grants them anyway.

If I am not careful, he thinks, I will start hurting people.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

He cannot sleep now. He could have, once. The night with you, he could have. He could feel the possibility under his skin the whole time, the way a body knows it can rest if it permits itself. He even did, for a few hours. He learned what sleep was, and he liked it, and he has not been able to lie down since.

He stands. He grants. He hears your voice. This is the part that nearly breaks him.

You talk to him. You have been talking to him since the morning he disappeared—the way you used to, before he ever appeared at your door. You are worried at first. Then angry. Then worried again. Then quiet. You press your hand to your chest and speak to him, and the words arrive in him as warmth:

Phainon.

Phainon, where are you?

Phainon, I know you can hear me.

Phainon, did the night mean nothing to you?

Phainon, please.

He does not answer. He does not send so much as a flicker of warmth back through the connection. He has agreed. He cannot. To answer is to invite the god back, and to invite the god back is to put twelve more workers in a factory, or four more on a bridge, or a child under a beam. He cannot.

So he hears you, and grants wishes, and does not answer.

It feels exactly like what he imagines it feels like to drown, watching someone on shore not realize you are in the water.

A window in a shop across the street cracks, for no reason. He looks at it. He looks away.

A pigeon on a wire dies of a heart attack as he passes beneath it. He registers the small wrongness of it half a second after it happens.

A streetlight bursts.

He is not doing these things. He is near them. The pressure of what he is containing is doing it.

He understands, dimly, that if he keeps moving through populated streets like this he will start affecting people, who will be unable to explain why their hands shook today, or why they suddenly forgot something important. So he stops moving through populated streets. He goes back to the space above them, where there is less to break.

The exception happens whenever he allows himself to think of you.

The first time, it is a flower. A small dying thing in a window box on a building he is passing. He has thought of you, briefly, what you might be doing, whether you have slept, and when he looks back, the flower has un-wilted. Lifted its head. It is a small living thing again, on a windowsill where a moment before it had been brown.

The second time, a child’s bicycle lying on the sidewalk with its chain off. He thinks of your laugh, and the chain slips back on.

The third time, a rusted gate hinge unsticks itself as he passes. He does not have time, in this state, to examine what this means. He just registers it: when he thinks of you, the world repairs slightly. When he doesn’t, the world breaks slightly. As if you are a tuning fork his entire system reorganizes around, and the only stable state for him now is the one that includes you, and the only state available to him is the one that doesn’t.

He files this away. He will think about it later, when he can think.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

Later, when he has lost all sense of time entirely, he goes to your window.

He should not. He knows he should not. He goes anyway. He stands in the air outside your bedroom, invisible, untouchable, and watches your sleep. You are curled on your side. Your arm is thrown across the empty space beside you where he was. You are breathing.

He understands, watching you, that he could go through the window in less than a thought. He could be beside you in a heartbeat. He could put his hand against your cheek and you would wake and you would forgive him before he even spoke. He knows this with a certainty that has nothing to do with optimism.

He does not move.

The god is watching. He can feel the attention. The god is waiting to see if he will move.

He does not move.

He stays for an hour. Longer than is wise. He watches your hand twitch in your sleep, watches you shift and frown and settle again. He memorizes the shape of you in your own bed. He gathers it like a coin he will spend later.

Then he goes.

The slip happens on what Phainon believes is the third day. A woman wishes her sister’s child would fail an examination. Sibling rivalry sublimated into something the mother would not say out loud. He grants it because the curse demands it.

Something in him says: let it cost her more than it should.

He almost does it. He feels his own will reaching for the gap, the place where he can enact rather than only channel. He could make her pay for this. He could make sure the wish cost her years instead of months. He could make her wake tomorrow knowing exactly what she had done.

He doesn’t. He grants it cleanly. He extracts the normal cost. The wish goes through. But he had wanted to.

He stood at the edge of doing it, and only the thinnest restraint held him back. And he understands with a fresh, specific horror that this is what happens to beings like him when they are angry enough. They begin to choose who to hurt. They begin to use the small powers they have been pretending not to have.

He hates himself for the gap-feeling. He hates the woman, briefly, for putting the option in front of him. He hates the god for making this his profession.

He grants three more wishes very, very carefully.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

He is losing his sense of where one moment ends and the next begins. The wishes have a way of doing this, when he is not anchored. He used to ride this fluidity with practiced indifference. He has spent centuries of his service in this same temporal smear, granting and granting until the days became a single long granting, marked only by the rare large prayer that pulled him briefly back to himself.

Now he is anchored to you, and you are not here, and the anchoring is cutting him.

He thinks of your face. He thinks of your laugh. He cannot remember, suddenly, what color your hair is in direct sunlight, only what color it was in lamplight, the night he was in your apartment. He panics about this for a length of time he cannot measure.

He recovers. He remembers. He loses it again after.

He thinks: this is what the god wants. This is the lesson. This is the cost being made plain to me. If I see them again, this only gets worse.

He thinks: I will see them again.

He thinks: I am going to die of this, in pieces, and the only way it stops is if I let it stop, and I cannot let it stop.

He grants wishes.

He grants wishes.

He grants wishes.

The god, eventually, gets bored. Phainon does not know what day it is when it happens, possibly the third, possibly the fifth, possibly the seventh.

All right, the god says. I am tiring of arranging entertainments for you. I had thought you might attempt to defy me, which would have been amusing, but apparently you are committed to being obedient about this. Disappointing. I would like to be fed properly for a while. You may grant in peace. Don’t go to them.

I won’t.

You don’t even sound convincing anymore, vessel. Save your voice.

The presence withdraws.

Phainon stands. He grants. He does not weep. He has not wept since the plaza when the wind moved across the back of his hand and he understood, for one moment, what wind was.

He grants.

He grants.

The days begin to blur the way they used to: the muffling returning, the senses dimming, the air going quiet against his skin again.

He could almost let himself sink into it. The numbness was easier. The numbness, if he is honest, is the only mercy this curse has ever offered him: that the more wishes he grants, the less of him is left to feel the granting.

He had almost found the numbness again.

He grants the next wish.

He grants the next.

He hears you, very faintly, somewhere far away, saying his name as though you have stopped expecting an answer.

Then, granting a wish for a man who wants his wife to forgive him for something the man has not actually apologized for, Phainon feels the small clean tear of a single tear sliding down his cheek.

He does not lift a hand to wipe it. He grants the next wish. He grants the next.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

Eventually, he has to go somewhere. Somewhere remote. Somewhere unpopulated. Somewhere whatever happens will not have witnesses.

He finds a cliff. The kind of place tourists come to in summer but nobody visits this time of year. An outcrop over a stretch of coast where the sea is hammering against itself in the wind. There is no one for miles.

He stands on the edge. He has been holding for what feels like months, possibly years, and has in fact only been days, and he cannot hold any longer.

He lets it out.

He has not made a loud sound, deliberately, in three thousand years. He has answered prayers. He has spoken when spoken to. He has never roared.

The sound that comes out of him is not human. It cannot be. No human throat could produce it. It is the sound of three thousand years of forced obedience arriving at its limit all at once. Broken and absolutely furious. The roar of a being who has been the kindly hand of a cruel god for three millennia and is, for one minute, no longer kind.

The cliff he is standing on cracks. A fissure opens in the rock beneath his feet and runs out toward the sea, splitting the outcrop along its length. The waves below answer. The wind answers. Something inside him answers too. The furious part, that has been buried under the helpfulness for centuries. And for one full minute he stands on the cracking cliff and he screams.

Then he stops. Then he hates himself.

The cliff has cracked. If anyone had been here, they might have died. He chose somewhere remote because he is at least disciplined enough not to want to hurt anyone. But the capacity was in him, and that is enough to be ashamed of.

He is not someone who screams. He is not someone who cracks geological features. He is someone who endures. That is the whole point. That is what he was made to be.

He breathes. He closes his eyes. He reassembles himself, piece by piece, into the careful contained vessel he has been for three thousand years.

The rage goes back underneath the gentleness. The roar goes back into silence. The cliff stays cracked, but he is composed.

I cannot do that again, he tells himself. Not while there are people I am responsible for. Not while there is a god watching. The rage is a luxury I cannot have.

He returns to the city. He grants the next wish. And the next.

He wonders how much time has passed.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

The first days of silence had felt almost normal, all things considered. Whenever the worry had risen, you’d thought about how Phainon had kissed your knuckles. About always yes. You’d held that line.

The first day had passed, and you hadn’t worried. The second had passed, and you’d told yourself he was working. The third had passed, and you’d reminded yourself that a little while didn’t have to mean immediately, and you’d made tea, and you’d opened your project, and you’d pressed your hand to your chest only when the kitchen was quiet and no one was watching.

By the fourth, you’d started talking to him. Just naming small things, the way you used to when he had been warmth in your palm and a voice in fragments. I’m making tea. I’m working. The neighbor’s dog was barking again. I miss you. The last one always at the end, always lighter than you’d meant it, always with something dry chasing it so he wouldn’t worry. I miss you. Don’t get a swelled head about it.

Nothing had come back. By the fifth, you’d stopped joking. By the sixth, you’d stopped naming small things.

And now it has been a week.

Something in the air feels strained. You can’t put your finger on it. Your palm is cold in a way it hasn’t been since before any of this started. Muted. Like a radio dial turned almost off.

Once or twice you think you’ve felt a pulse of distant urgency flicker through the connection and then just quiet.

You tell yourself, again, that he’s busy. That he’ll come back when he can.

You’re less sure how many more days you can tell yourself that.

You think, the way you have been thinking since the night the god spoke into your bedroom, about whether he is the reason.

Whether Phainon is paying for the night you had. Whether something has been done to him.

But the god told you, in that velvet inside-the-skull voice—he’ll wake afraid. He said it like a prediction. Like he was telling you what was coming.

So Phainon waking afraid was the expected outcome. The god accounted for it. Which means whatever is happening now isn’t necessarily the god making him pay. It might just be Phainon. Phainon afraid. Phainon retreating. Phainon doing what he has done every other time he has been close enough to be held: finding a reason to leave.

You hate this thought. You hate that it occurs to you. But it does, and once it does, it does not stop occurring. You don’t know what to do with it.

The second week, you’re angry. Because even if he’s dealing with consequences, he could say so. The connection works both ways. You talked to him through it for weeks before he ever appeared at your door.

He could leave a word. He could send a flicker of warmth that means I’m alive. I’m thinking about you. I haven’t forgotten. He could do the bare minimum required to keep someone from going insane wondering if they imagined the most important night of their life.

He doesn’t.

One night you sit on your floor, your hand pressed to your chest the way you have a thousand times before, and you try to send something through.

Are you there?

You wait.

You wait longer.

The warmth in your palm pulses once. Distant and muffled. He is somewhere. He is not unreachable. He is choosing not to reach back. You don’t know what is happening.

You only know that the warmth came and went, and he did not say your name back, and you have been sitting on this floor for forty-five minutes and nothing else is going to come.

You put your hand down. You go to bed. You do not try again.

You cry that night. You’re not proud of it. You don’t cry the next.

The third week, you try to stop checking.

It doesn’t work, but you try. You move through your days. You finish a section of the project that’s been giving you trouble. You meet a friend for lunch and don’t mention any of it, because how would you explain. I met a divine being, I think I’m in love with him, he stayed the night and he held me and he fell asleep for the first time in three thousand years and then he ran and I haven’t heard from him since. The sentence does not exist in any language you have.

So when your friend says, over coffee, I have someone I want you to meet, you do not say no.

You should say no.

You should say I’m not ready, I will never be ready, I’m not over something that felt more real than anything else, I’m not in a state to meet anyone. Instead you smile and say sure, because the alternative is sitting in your apartment for another week pressing your palm to your chest waiting for a warmth that isn’t coming.

His name is James.

Your friend tells you about him for fifteen minutes. He’s a journalist. He’s funny. He’s been through a difficult breakup. He’s kind, your friend says, with significant emphasis, and you understand that this is the thing your friend has noticed about you. He’s kind. He’ll be gentle. You’ll like him.

“I’ll meet him,” you say. “Once. Just for coffee.”

“Just for coffee,” your friend agrees.

It is not, you think later, that you’ve decided Phainon isn’t coming back. It is that you’ve decided you cannot keep being the person who waits in a room hoping the door will open. Whatever is happening to him—whether it is the god, or his own fear, or some combination of both—you cannot carry it alone in your apartment indefinitely. You had a life before him. You will have one if he never returns.

You don’t believe he won’t return. You also do not know that he will.

You get ready the morning of with hands that won’t quite settle. You change your shirt twice. And then you stand in front of the mirror, and you say what are you doing out loud. And the person in the mirror does not answer.

Tears well up in your eyes and your heart aches the same way it has been for weeks. You press your lips together, memories of Phainon flashing behind your eyes.

Your palm is cold.

You leave the apartment.

The café is one you’ve been to before. James is already there when you arrive: corner table, two cups already on it, the second one for you.

He stands when you come in. He smiles. He’s tall, you register, and he has a good smile, and you wait for that to mean something. It doesn’t.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“I got you a—” He gestures at the second cup. “I asked your friend what you like. I hope it’s right.”

It’s exactly what you like.

You sit. You smile back. You drink the tea he ordered and you ask about his work and you listen while he tells you about a story he’s writing about local urban planning. He’s articulate and self-deprecating in the right ways and his eyes go bright when he talks about something he cares about, and you think: this is a person I could like, in a different life, if I were a different version of myself.

It is a strange thought. It does not steady you.

He asks about you. You tell him about your project. Only vaguely because you can‘t bring yourself to be enthusiastic. Not with him. He asks the right follow-up questions. He laughs at the right parts. He reaches across the table once, gently, to brush a strand of hair back from your forehead. His fingers are warm in an ordinary, human way, and you flinch so subtly you hope he doesn’t see it.

He sees it. He pulls his hand back. He doesn’t comment.

“Sorry,” he says. “Too soon?”

“It’s not—” You catch yourself. It’s not you, you almost say, and stop. “It’s been a strange few weeks. I’m a little wound up.”

“That’s fair.” He’s still smiling, but more carefully now. “We can just talk.”

It occurs to you, halfway through the second cup, that the god might be watching this.

That if he is, he must be pleased. The mortal in his game—the “little anomaly” he addressed in your bedroom—has folded. Has gone on a date with someone unrelated to the cosmic situation. Has done, in the end, the most predictable possible thing.

You feel cold. Then you feel angry at yourself for feeling cold, because James is here, James is being kind, and you are not doing right by him.

You try to focus on his story.

You fail.

He’s exactly what your friend said he’d be. The kind of man who reads social cues and adjusts. The kind of man who would, for other people, be a gift.

He’s not Phainon.

The thought lands so cleanly it almost makes you laugh out loud.

He’s not Phainon. He could not possibly be Phainon. Phainon is a three-thousand-year-old divine being who has burned every other person who ever touched him. James is a journalist who likes urban planning.

You are comparing a journalist to a divine being.

You have lost your entire mind.

“What’s funny?” James asks, smiling.

“Nothing,” you say. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not really here.”

“I can tell.” He says it without judgment. “Bad week?”

“Bad month.”

He nods slowly. He’s looking at you with something kind in his eyes that you don’t deserve, and you hate that you can feel the moment his attention turns into want.

Your palm has gone from cold to aching.

“I should—” you start.

The lights flicker.

Once. Twice. Then they burn impossibly bright before dimming to almost-darkness.

Every window in the café rattles in its frame. The temperature drops ten degrees in an instant, your breath misting in front of your face.

And your palm explodes. Desperate and furious in ways that steal the air from your lungs.

You stand up so fast your chair scrapes. “I—” You can barely form words. “I’m sorry, I have to—bathroom—”

“Are you okay?” James is half-rising too, concerned.

“I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

You don’t wait. You weave through confused patrons toward the back exit, palm burning, every step toward the courtyard door feeling like walking into a thunderstorm.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

You push through the door and reality tears. The world splits like fabric. Golden light bleeds through the seam.

Phainon steps through.

His hair is wild. His eyes are burning with light too bright to hold directly. Divine radiance crackles around him unstably, casting moving shadows on the courtyard walls. The air smells like ozone and burning wood. Frost is spreading from his feet outward in spiral patterns across the courtyard stones.

He looks furious. And underneath it, there is a clarity you almost don’t trust, because you have not seen him this gathered before. Three weeks under pressure has burned away some of the apologetic softness. What’s left is sharper.

He looks at you. The light in his eyes flickers once. “Tea,” he says.

It’s not the word you were expecting.

“What?”

“Tea.” His voice is low. There’s an edge in it that you have not heard from him before. “You’re having tea. With him.”

“Yes.”

“With him.”

“Yes.” You cross your arms. Your palm is still burning. The frost is climbing the walls behind him. “Is that a problem, Phainon?”

The way you say his name does something to his face. A small flicker. He absorbs it. “After three weeks of silence from me, you went on a date.”

“After three weeks of silence from you, yes.” You don’t break eye contact. “Did you have a different expectation?”

Phainon laughs. It is not a kind sound. It is a startled, bitter, almost-incredulous laugh. He runs his hand through his hair, and where his fingers pass, the air shimmers with heat distortion.

“My expectation,” he says, “was that I would handle what needed handling and come back to you.”

“Without telling me.”

“Without—” He stops. The edge in his voice sharpens. “I didn’t have the luxury of telling you.”

“You had three weeks—”

“I had three weeks of being run like a hound.” He says it flatly. The wood-and-ozone smell intensifies. “He’s been moving me. Bridge collapses. House fires. A woman in an alley. A child under a beam. Every time I tried to stop and think, every time I tried to find a way back to you that wouldn’t cost someone their life, he arranged another.”

You go still.

“He’s been using me to keep me from you.” His voice doesn’t rise. It gets quieter. “And I let him. Because every time I considered just walking through your door and damn the consequences, he showed me very clearly what the consequences would be.”

“Phainon—”

“I have not rested in three weeks.” He says it like an observation. “I have not stopped. I have not stood still long enough to send you a word because every time I tried, someone died who shouldn’t have. So I made a choice. The choice was: stay away, keep you safe, figure out a way to fight this from far enough away that he can’t use you against me.”

His eyes are very bright now. “And then I made the mistake of looking at the thread that leads to you again. And I saw a man with his hand on it. And the choice I made three weeks ago dissolved in front of me. Because apparently my discipline is very impressive right up until the moment someone else’s hand touches what’s mine.”

The word mine lands in the courtyard like a struck bell.

Your breath catches.

He registers what he just said. He doesn’t take it back.

“You should have told me,” you say quietly. “Some way. Any way. You let me think for three weeks that night meant nothing to you.”

“I let you think you were safe.”

“I didn’t know I was in danger.”

“You met him.” His voice cracks slightly for the first time. “In your bedroom. He told you not to tell me. You think he stopped at telling you not to tell me? You think he hasn’t been in your apartment since? In your head?”

You go cold.

“Has he—” you start.

“I don’t know.” Phainon’s hands are trembling now, but his voice is steady. “I haven’t dared come close enough to check. Because the moment he knows I care more about you than I care about the rules, he turns up the cost. So I have spent three weeks paying it. Quietly. From a distance. So that he would forget you mattered.”

A pause.

“And then this morning I felt him reach for your thread, and the calculus changed.”

You stare at him.

He’s enraged. It is a rage that you suddenly understand has been buried.

You should be afraid.

You’re not.

“You could have left a sign,” you say, voice thin. “Anything. A flicker. A word. Anything, Phainon. I wasn’t asking for protection. I was asking for the smallest possible indication that I had not imagined the significance of that night.”

His jaw works. “I know.”

“You let me believe—”

“I know.”

“You let me believe I was someone you could walk away from.”

He flinches. The frost on the walls cracks audibly.

“I cannot walk away from you,” Phainon says, low. “That is what he is exploiting. He has discovered that the only thing I will not do for him anymore is leave you, and he is teaching me what the alternative is. Every single life I pulled out of his arrangements these last three weeks was a lesson. And I—”

He stops himself.

Neither of you move.

“—and I paid it,” he finishes, more carefully. “Because the alternative was watching him hurt you to teach me the same lesson in a more permanent way.”

The silence stretches.

You don’t know what to do with your hands. “James,” you say finally. You don’t know why his name is what comes out, except that it’s the only solid thing left in the conversation. “James made a wish.”

“Yes.”

“You felt it.”

“I felt it.” His voice has gone very quiet. “He wished you would look at him the way you were looking at nothing. Like you were thinking of someone else.”

“Did you grant it?”

“No.”

“Could you have?”

“I should have.” A bitter laugh. “I’m forbidden from pursuing mundane desires, not from granting them. The compulsion was there. Stronger than it has been in weeks because I have been refusing every small mundane thing and stockpiling pressure. I could have given him what he asked for. It would have cost me nothing.”

A long pause follows.

“I would rather have torn the world open.”

“Phainon.”

“That’s not poetic. I mean it literally. I would rather have torn the world open than make you look at someone else the way you looked at me.”

The courtyard is very quiet.

You realize, belatedly, that the frost has stopped spreading. That the air is no longer dropping in temperature. That the violence around him has gone still because he’s no longer pretending he isn’t this too.

“I’m angry at you,” you say.

“I know.”

“You’re angry at me.”

“I am furious,” he agrees quietly, “at a great many things. Very few of them are you. But yes. A little. You went on a date.”

“It didn’t mean anything. And you were gone.”

“I was gone because—”

“I didn’t know.”

His eyes close briefly. “No. You didn’t.”

“You can’t ask me to live like I’m waiting for you when you give me nothing.”

“No.” The word comes out tired. “No, I can’t.” A pause. “I kept telling myself it was temporary.” His voice roughens. “That if I could just endure long enough, I could come back and explain.” He laughs once. “I thought keeping you safe was the right decision. But I already knew that this would never be enough.” He looks at you with an expression so full of emotion that something in you cracks.

Silence follows.

“What do you mean,” you say, although you already know. But you need him to say it.

He looks at you for a long moment. You can see the hesitation. Fear.

“I want you.” The words seem to cost him. His voice is trembling but his gaze is firm. Your heart is beating fast.

Maybe you should question this, should ask why he can state his desire like that. But you have missed him so much, and you are always existing on limited time with him.

So you step toward him.

His hand lifts, hovers near your face and then he goes very still. His eyes flick past you. To the café behind you. To the half-melted frost on the courtyard walls. To the entire impossible scene of a demigod about to do something the laws of his existence forbid in a public alley behind a coffee shop where seventeen people are pretending they didn’t see the lights blow out.

“Not here,” he says quietly.

“Phainon—”

“If I touch you right now, the way I want to—” His jaw works. “I cannot guarantee the building survives it. And I will not—I will not—let what happens next be witnessed.”

He extends his hand. You take it.

The world lurches.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

You blink and you’re on a hillside. It’s afternoon here, wherever here is. The sun is lower, the sky is golden, the air smells of dry grass and old stone.

A weathered temple stands at the crest, columns half-fallen, the kind of ruin that has been standing in its own slow erosion for a very long time. Below, far away, a city sprawls. Far enough that you can barely see the movement of people. Far enough that the only sounds are wind and grass.

You’re still holding his hand. “Where—”

“It doesn’t matter.” His voice is low again, but the controlled fury has gone, replaced by something hungrier. “Somewhere no one is watching. Somewhere old enough that the air remembers gods better than it remembers people. Somewhere I knew, once.”

You look at him. The wind is moving his hair. The light catches him differently here. Less divine radiance, more sun on skin.

He looks, in this moment, like the man he must have been before. The scholar who could lose himself in conversations until sunrise. The young man who had once been endlessly curious about the world and looked at it as though there was always something worth discovering.

“You took me to a place that matters to you.”

The look he gives you is something you don’t have language for. “I want you,” he repeats as if that explains everything. And it does.

You step closer. He doesn’t move. You can see his hand fist and unfist at his side. “Tell me to stop,” he says quietly. “After this, I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“Don’t stop.”

He kisses you like he’s starving. There is no carefulness in it. What’s left is hunger so complete and new yet so long denied that you feel it from your mouth to your knees.

His hands are in your hair, tilting your head back. His mouth is opening yours. His body is pressing against yours and the air around you both is humming.

You gasp against him and he takes it like it was offered, deepening the kiss with a sound that vibrates through both your chests and through the air itself, through the stone of the temple at the crest of the hill, which hums in response.

Heat rolls off him in waves. You clutch at his shoulders and pull him closer. He obliges with an arm around your waist that gathers you against him until there is no space left. The instant your bodies meet completely, the world reacts. The air around you both glows, golden-white and pulsing with a rhythm that is not quite either of your heartbeats but is somehow both.

The dry grass beneath your feet blooms. Small white flowers first, then larger ones, then strange impossible blue things you don’t have names for, spreading in a circle around the two of you. The ground is soft now where it was brittle.

You don’t notice it consciously. You’re aware of his mouth, his hands, the way he tastes, and the rest of the world is happening at the edges of your attention.

Phainon pulls back just enough to breathe. His forehead presses to yours. “Look,” he says, hoarse.

You look.

The temple at the crest of the hill is whole. Where there had been cracked columns and missing capitals and erosion eating the relief carvings, there is now pristine stone. As though time itself has remembered what it was supposed to be.

Your breath catches. “Phainon.”

“I know.”

“Did you—”

“We.” His voice is wrecked. “I have spent three thousand years taking things from people. Years of life. Capacity for joy. Pieces of themselves they never got back. I have never created anything. I have only ever hollowed people out so the god could feed.”

His hands come up to cup your face. His thumbs are trembling against your cheekbones. “Look what you made me make.”

You can’t speak. He kisses you again. It is slower this time. His thumb traces your jaw. His other hand finds the small of your back.

The world keeps going at the edges of your awareness. You become dimly aware that there are trees on the hill now that weren’t there a moment ago, full-grown, heavy with fruit. That the grass has gone impossibly green.

You cannot make yourself care about any of it, because his mouth is on yours and his hand is on your back and three thousand years of restraint is undoing itself in real time against you.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you for so long,” he murmurs against your mouth, low and ragged. “I never—I didn’t know it could feel like—”

You pull his head back by his hair and kiss him deeper. He makes a sound like breaking.

Vaguely you notice vines climbing the temple columns. Seeds become plants become blossoms in the space of a breath. The air is thickening with the smell of green and water and life. The temple is singing now, actual faint musical notes resonating from the stone.

His hands slide under the hem of your shirt and his palms are very warm against your back and you understand, distantly, that you should be terrified. That this is a divine being without a brake on it. That this is the demigod who can hollow strangers out from a continent away and you are letting him touch you with that same power barely restrained.

You are not terrified. Because you only sense the man who wants you.

You arch into him. Phainon shudders violently against you. You can see the way light blooms on his skin where your palms have settled on his ribs, can see gold spreading through him.

“Don’t,” Phainon gasps, but his hands are at your waist now and his mouth is on your throat. “Don’t stop. If you stop I’ll—please don’t stop—”

“I won’t.”

“You should.” A ragged breath. “I cannot—I don’t know what I’m doing. The power is—it’s responding to us, to this, and there is no precedent. I do not know what we are making—”

“Phainon.”

“What.”

“I don’t care.”

He laughs against your throat. “You really are going to destroy me,” he murmurs, repeating what he told you several times before. Then, he laughs again. “Or I you.”

And because you rarely let him have the last word, you say: “Promise?”

He kisses you again, harder this time, walking you backward until your shoulders meet cool stone. You realize that you are against the temple wall. That you crossed the hill without noticing.

The contrast steals your breath. You feel the stone cool against your shoulders and Phainon molten against your front, his hands trembling on either side of your face. “I never—I didn’t even—I didn’t know—”

“Know what?”

“That I could make anything.” He says it wonderingly.

You realize, distantly, that he’s crying. You realize that you are too.

His hand slides up your thigh, hitching your leg around his waist, and you can feel exactly how much he wants this. And the entire hillside blooms, not just flowers but life, the kind of green explosion that only happens in time-lapse footage of spring, condensed into a single inhale.

You roll your hips against his. His control finishes shattering. He kisses you like he’s drowning. Like you are the only real thing in a world of hollow wants. Like he is choosing you, against every rule the god ever wrote into his body.

The light around you both intensifies until it is almost blinding. The temple’s faint singing rises into something nearly musical. The fruit on the trees is impossibly ripe. The flowers are everywhere. The hill is more alive than it has been in any of the centuries the temple has stood here.

And then Phainon goes rigid against you. His mouth pulls away from yours. He turns his head, just slightly, listening. His arms tighten around you, shielding you. His body angling so that he is between you and the sky.

The sky, above the temple, tears. The blue rips open, and through the tear, a presence floods.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

You are still pressed against him, still feeling the shape of him through your clothes, still half-undone, when the temperature drops.

Well, says a voice you have heard before. That was a great deal of fuss for something as fleeting as a kiss. Three thousand years of admirable discipline, and apparently this was the breaking point. The voice is no longer only in your head. It seems to come from everywhere at once.

You feel Phainon’s whole body lock. “Don’t,” he says quietly. Not to you.

Don’t what? Observe? Bearer, that’s all I do. You know that. The voice is conversational. Almost pleasant. I must say I’m impressed. Three weeks of obedient little rescues and I thought we’d made real progress. And here you are, undoing all my careful pedagogy in a public space, in front of mortals, no less.

Phainon doesn’t answer.

You can feel his heart against your sternum. It is going very fast.

How generous of me, really. Most vessels are never permitted even this much. A reminder of what they left behind. But your work has been so thorough lately. So I can overlook a moment of… indulgence. His voice turns almost amused. Enjoy it while it lasts.

And you, the voice continues, and now it is pointed at you, and you feel the pressure of its attention slide along your skin the way it did in your bedroom three weeks ago. Little anomaly. Hello again. You’ve been busy.

Your hand finds Phainon’s back and grips. He feels it. His arm tightens around you.

I will admit, the voice says, almost lazily, I expected more cleverness from you. After our little conversation, I thought you might at least try to keep him a secret. Instead you’ve gone and let him kiss you in public, in daylight, where anyone could see. Mortals are so wonderfully bad at restraint.

You take a breath. You don’t know where the words come from. You don’t plan them. “There’s nothing wrong with this,” you say.

A pause.

Pardon?

“There’s nothing wrong with this,” you repeat. Your voice is steadier than you expect. “You keep talking about it like it’s a problem you’re allowed to be amused by. It isn’t. It isn’t wrong. It isn’t unnatural. You don’t get to call it a mistake just because you didn’t plan for it.”

A long, considering silence. Then laughter. Oh, my, the god says. Oh, that’s wonderful. Bearer, did you hear them? They think their little mortal want is special. They think because it feels large to them it must be cosmically significant.

Phainon doesn’t answer. His hand is on the back of your head now.

My dear, the voice says. Every mortal in every century has thought their wanting was the exception. Every single one. I have watched them argue about it. I have watched them die still arguing. It’s one of the most reliable comedies in my repertoire. You are not the first to mistake the strength of a feeling for the importance of it.

“I’m not arguing it’s important to you,” you say.

A flicker. A small recalibration. Excuse me?

“I’m not arguing it’s important to you.” You keep your voice level. Your hand is still on Phainon’s chest. “I’m telling you it’s important to us. That’s what you keep missing. You want me to convince you. I don’t have to convince you. You’re not the one this is for.”

Well, the god says. How charming. You've both decided you're special.

The pressure shifts. And then it changes register entirely. The amusement is still there, but underneath it now, something colder. Something deciding.

Let's test that, shall we.

You feel it before you understand it. The god is pulling, and you are drawn toward the place where the sky tore open, where something vast is waiting on the other side.

He will kill me, you think. The thought is creeping into your brain, making your body tremble on the way upwards.

“PHAINON—”

You don't finish his name. He has felt you being taken, and something in him that has been held still for three thousand years simply stops being still.

You thought you understood the scale of him. The buzz. The gold eyes. The broken glass. The wings. It is only now that you understand.

What happens next has no sound. The light around him inverts, goes white and then past white into something your eye refuses, and the air screams, a pressure so total it has no volume. And the tear in the sky that was pulling you stops pulling. As though it has struck something it cannot move.

And then, impossibly, it begins to give back.

You feel yourself drawn back onto solid ground, onto the hillside, into the circle of his arms, which close around you the instant you are solid enough to be held.

Phainon is shaking. His eyes are gold all the way through and burning. And his face is furious.

For a long beat, the whole world is silent.

You think the god should be looking at you. You are the one he almost took. Instead, all of his attention is on Phainon.

And then the god speaks. And for the first time since you have heard his voice, there is something underneath that is not amusement. Well, he says. That was new.

Phainon does not answer. His arms are around you. You feel the heat radiating off him. He is between you and the sky and he has not stopped shaking. You understand, suddenly, that he is shaking with the effort of not doing something much larger.

A vessel, the god says slowly, should not do that.

“I am not,” Phainon says, low and full of swallowed rage, “only a vessel.”

Silence. Then the god laughs. But it comes a half-second too late, and it is a half-degree too sharp.

No, the god agrees. You’re also stubborn. You always were. A pause. I haven’t seen that much force from you since the very beginning. And never with those powers. The voice sounds almost thoughtful. Well. Feelings do tend to make mortals react strongly. Even the quasi-divine ones. Three thousand years, and you’re still susceptible to the same impulses. How predictable.

Predictable, you think. As though that was all this was.

The pressure begins to withdraw.

Continue, then, the god says, the carelessness now visibly constructed. Enjoy your specialness. I find I have things to attend to. And then, almost as an afterthought: Do give my regards to the city.

The presence is gone.

The hillside is quiet. The realization comes strangely. The god had spoken about power. About emotions. But not once had he asked why a dead hill was blooming. Because he had not noticed it.

You are still in his arms, and he is still shaking, and his eyes are passing slowly back from gold to blue.

“What did he mean?” you ask. Your voice is not steady. “Give my regards to the city.”

Phainon doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is grim. “It means I frightened him,” he says. He looks at you, and the fury is banked now but not gone. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. He could have hurt you—”

“You saved me,” you interrupt quietly. Phainon looks at you with something fragile in his eyes. The corner of his mouth lifts. “He was making you ashamed of wanting,” you continue. “Making you feel like choosing me was some kind of failure. And I won’t—” Your voice hardens. “I won’t let anyone make you feel that way. God or not.”

His breath catches. For a moment you think he might cry. Or kiss you again. Or both.

Instead he pulls you against him and holds you like you’re the only solid thing in a tilting world. “I don’t know what comes next. But I am done letting him decide it for me.”

Around you both, the bloomed hillside continues to exist.

You know that Phainon will soon leave too. That he has been neglecting his duties for a long time today. You feel that Phainon wants to say many things. So do you. But this time, both of you stay silent.

Phainon presses a kiss to your hair and tightens his arms around you. You stay on the hillside, holding each other, just for a moment longer.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)

Masterlist.

━━━━

Taglist: @harujkookie @levia-chan @spiderfly-tree-rat

[notesfromthemirror]

Changing (Phainon x Reader)

The Wishbearer: Part V

Series masterlist

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Synopsis: For centuries, Phainon has been cursed to grant mortal desires—compelled to answer every wish, no matter how hollow or greedy, while being forbidden from wanting anything himself. Watched by a greedy god, he exists only to serve, never to choose.

But then he hears your longing, and it shakes something loose in him. Because whatever is forming between you was never meant to exist. And the universe is starting to notice.

A/N: This chapter grew considerably while writing and ended up containing the longest Phainon POV I’ve written so far. I kept returning to it because I wanted to get the emotional progression right, and I’m excited (and slightly nervous) to finally share it. Hope you’ll enjoy! 💙

Tags: Slow Burn. Angst. Demigod!Phainon. Mythic Fantasy AU. Vaguely Modern Setting. Mutual Pining. Cosmic Interference. Identity Issues. Touch Starvation. Light Deterioration (Phainon). Emotional Outbursts (Phainon). Brief Jealousy. Reunion. First Kiss. Heated Kiss. Reader POV. Phainon POV.

Word count: 10049

⋆ ✦ ⋆

When Phainon steps out of your apartment, the morning air feels wrong.

It takes him several streets and one long pause beside an empty fountain before he understands what the wrongness is. The air has texture against his skin. It has weight. It has temperature. It moves around him in currents he can feel. He has not noticed air on his skin in three thousand years.

He stops walking.

He stands in the empty plaza and lifts a hand and turns the palm slowly over, watching the morning light move across it, and he realizes that he can feel the light. The temperature of it. The angle of it against the back of his knuckles versus the inside of his wrist.

He breathes in.

Bread, somewhere. Coffee from a vendor’s cart further down the street. Stone. The faint mineral smell of stone that has weathered for centuries.

He thinks: Oh. Is this what it was like? Have I been not feeling this the whole time?

He should not be standing in a plaza in dawn light with tears on his face for no articulable reason. He does anyway. He stands for a long time. The light shifts. A bird he does not recognize sings from a roof above him, and he hears the song.

He understands, with a clarity that should not be possible after only one night, that he has spent three thousand years inside a kind of muffling he never named because he had nothing to compare it to.

He had known he could not sleep. He had known he could not be touched. He had known he could not want. But he had thought, vaguely, that all the other things were still happening. That the air still touched him, that sounds still reached him, that smells still arrived at him in the same way they would arrive at any body.

They didn’t. Not like this. He has been a body in name only, the whole time. A surface that did not, in any real way, receive the world.

And now he does.

You did this. Holding him did this. Letting him sleep against you did this. He starts walking again because if he stays in the plaza he will sit down on the stone and not get up.

The wishes come back within an hour.

They come quieter than they used to. The voices are there. The endless mortal chorus is there. He can still locate every wish, every want, every prayer, the way he could yesterday and ten years ago and twenty centuries ago. But the pressure of them is lower. The compulsion does not press as immediately.

He grants the first one. Then the next.

They feel different. Or he does. He can’t tell.

He grants a small thing—a young man’s wish for a job interview to go well—and feels the cost extract from the man’s marrow, and feels, also, his own response to having extracted it. Distaste. He has granted a wish for ordinary good luck and the part of him that has just learned what air on skin feels like is displeased about it.

He grants the next one anyway. He has to. The compulsion is quieter but not gone. He doesn’t know what to do with the gap.

He grants. He grants. He grants. He keeps moving.

The voice arrives, eventually. He had been expecting it sooner. Well.

Phainon doesn’t answer.

Don’t sulk, vessel. I’m trying to be congratulatory.

He grants another wish. He doesn’t answer.

That was, I admit, more impressive than I had anticipated. The sleeping. You have spent three thousand years being unable to nap, and one mortal lays a hand on your hair and you fold like a tent. Charming. Educational.

What do you want?

Oh, the god speaks. I was beginning to wonder. What do I want. What an interesting question. Let me think.

A pause that is not really a pause.

I think, he says, I want to know what you intend to do about it.

About what?

Vessel. The voice has gone fond, in a way that turns Phainon’s stomach. Don’t be coy. You have spent three thousand years without wanting anything. I had assumed that was the most elegant part of our arrangement. But perhaps this is better. Now there is something you want. Something you were never meant to keep. I admit I am curious how long it takes before that becomes unbearable. What do you intend to do about it?

Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing. Phainon’s voice does not shake. He has spent three thousand years learning how to keep his voice from shaking. I will continue. I will grant. I will not return.

A pause. Then a soft laugh follows.

Vessel, that is a lie so large I am embarrassed for both of us. You will return by sundown. You will not be able to help yourself. You will tell yourself it is a single visit, and it will become several, and then you will be sleeping in their bed every night within the week, and I will be feeding on a deeply diminished version of your service. You know this.

I won’t return.

Oh, but you will.

I won’t.

A longer pause. The god is no longer laughing. Hm, he says.

The first incident happens forty minutes later. A factory in the eastern district. An exposed gas line. Phainon feels the small, inevitable gathering of something about to explode. He is across the city in less than a heartbeat. He stands in the air above the factory and watches the pressure build and understands, with a kind of cold falling sensation, exactly what is being arranged for him.

Twelve workers inside. None of them have done anything to deserve this. None of them are wishing for anything in this moment besides the small ordinary wishes mortals carry at all hours: to finish their shift, to remember to pick up bread on the way home, to not have argued with a spouse last night.

The pressure builds. He could let it happen. He could turn away. Let the factory burn. Twelve mortal lives is a small number against three thousand years of statistics.

He has watched larger numbers die. He could decide, in this single moment, that he will not be moved by the god’s arrangements, and he could let the factory go up, and the god would learn that Phainon is not, in fact, susceptible to this particular form of manipulation.

He thinks, very briefly, about doing exactly that.

He is inside the factory before the thought finishes forming. He gets all twelve out. He puts out the pressure leak with his bare hand and the metal does not give him the courtesy of cooling for several seconds, but it does not burn him. He stands in the smoke afterward with twelve dazed workers staring at the impossible thing that just happened, and he is gone before any of them can speak.

He stands again in the air above the city. His hands are shaking.

That was beautifully done, the god observes pleasantly. Truly. The old reflexes are still in there, aren’t they. You used to be such a bright young hero.

Don’t.

Don’t what. Compliment you?

Don’t pretend this was anything but what it was.

And what was it, vessel?

A demonstration.

Oh, good. You’re going to make this interesting. Yes. It was a demonstration. Do you understand what it was demonstrating?

Yes.

Say it. I want to hear you say it.

Phainon’s jaw works. The rage is in him cold and large and going nowhere. He has known this kind of rage for three thousand years, the rage of a being who cannot act on his rage without paying for it in other people’s lives, and he has had three millennia of practice in housing it.

That if I focus on my desire, he says finally, low, you will arrange situations like this until I stop.

Very good.

That you will pile bodies in front of me until I cannot ignore them.

Mm.

That my discipline has a price and the price is paid by people who have nothing to do with any of this.

Now you’re getting it.

Phainon does not answer. He stands in the air. The shaking in his hands does not stop.

I am not angry, you know, the god says, lazy. About last night. Did I sound angry? I should not have. I am delighted. You finally cracked. After three thousand years of dutiful obedience you have given me something new to play with. I am enjoying myself enormously. But I will not have my vessel rendered useless by mortal affection. That is not a thing I am willing to permit. So we will play a small game. The rules are very simple. You will stay away from your mortal. I will not arrange any more demonstrations. If you go to them, I will. If you contact them, I will. If you so much as flicker a thread of warmth into their palm—I will. Are we agreed?

Phainon is silent, the familiar rage surfacing.

Vessel.

Yes.

Yes what?

Yes. We are agreed.

Good. I do enjoy it when you are reasonable. It happens so rarely.

The presence draws back. Lazy. Pleased.

Phainon stays in the air for a long time.

He has agreed to stay away. He has not agreed to stay away forever.

The god, who has owned him for three millennia, did not consider that a vessel he has worn for so long could be calculating a loophole inside an agreement made in the same breath.

Phainon does not say this out loud. He thinks it where the god is not paying attention. He files it away with the small things he is not yet ready to use.

He goes back to the wishes.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

Time has gone strange.

He has been doing this for hours and it feels like days. The afternoon light has not moved. Has barely moved. But inside him whole epochs are passing between wishes. He used to know how to ride this. The temporal smear, the way the granting-state stretches every minute into something longer. He used to find it merciful.

Now it is not merciful. Now every minute that stretches is a minute he is not with you. Every elongated hour is an hour you have been thinking he did not come back.

Phainon grants the next wish. The afternoon does not move.

It is worse now. Knowing the gap is there. Knowing the air has texture. Knowing the birdsong is birdsong. Knowing there is a thread leading to you that pulses warm under his sternum. Knowing all of this, and granting wishes through it, is a worse torture than three thousand years of granting wishes through nothing.

He had thought, before, that he was suffering. He had not understood what suffering was. He learns now what it means to know what one is losing and lose it anyway, hour by hour, while the body keeps moving.

The wishes pile up. He grants them. He grants them well, even, better than he has in centuries, because some part of him is using the work as a way to not think about you.

He grants. He grants. He grants.

A man wishes his neighbor’s car would break down. Petty. A grievance about a parking spot. Phainon grants it because he must, and the cost extracts cleanly from the wisher’s marrow but something else also goes through. Something Phainon did not authorize. A coldness. A sharpness.

The man stiffens, mid-wish, as though touched by a draft through closed windows. He shudders. He decides, suddenly, that the parking thing wasn’t so important after all.

Phainon stares at his hands. He had not meant to do that. He has not, in three thousand years, ever put any of himself into a wish. He has been a clean conduit. Now there is rage in him that is too large for the body, too large for the discipline, and it is leaking into the work. He can feel it. The next wish he grants, a moment later, has the same coldness in it. The next.

He grants them anyway.

If I am not careful, he thinks, I will start hurting people.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

He cannot sleep now. He could have, once. The night with you, he could have. He could feel the possibility under his skin the whole time, the way a body knows it can rest if it permits itself. He even did, for a few hours. He learned what sleep was, and he liked it, and he has not been able to lie down since.

He stands. He grants. He hears your voice. This is the part that nearly breaks him.

You talk to him. You have been talking to him since the morning he disappeared—the way you used to, before he ever appeared at your door. You are worried at first. Then angry. Then worried again. Then quiet. You press your hand to your chest and speak to him, and the words arrive in him as warmth:

Phainon.

Phainon, where are you?

Phainon, I know you can hear me.

Phainon, did the night mean nothing to you?

Phainon, please.

He does not answer. He does not send so much as a flicker of warmth back through the connection. He has agreed. He cannot. To answer is to invite the god back, and to invite the god back is to put twelve more workers in a factory, or four more on a bridge, or a child under a beam. He cannot.

So he hears you, and grants wishes, and does not answer.

It feels exactly like what he imagines it feels like to drown, watching someone on shore not realize you are in the water.

A window in a shop across the street cracks, for no reason. He looks at it. He looks away.

A pigeon on a wire dies of a heart attack as he passes beneath it. He registers the small wrongness of it half a second after it happens.

A streetlight bursts.

He is not doing these things. He is near them. The pressure of what he is containing is doing it.

He understands, dimly, that if he keeps moving through populated streets like this he will start affecting people, who will be unable to explain why their hands shook today, or why they suddenly forgot something important. So he stops moving through populated streets. He goes back to the space above them, where there is less to break.

The exception happens whenever he allows himself to think of you.

The first time, it is a flower. A small dying thing in a window box on a building he is passing. He has thought of you, briefly, what you might be doing, whether you have slept, and when he looks back, the flower has un-wilted. Lifted its head. It is a small living thing again, on a windowsill where a moment before it had been brown.

The second time, a child’s bicycle lying on the sidewalk with its chain off. He thinks of your laugh, and the chain slips back on.

The third time, a rusted gate hinge unsticks itself as he passes. He does not have time, in this state, to examine what this means. He just registers it: when he thinks of you, the world repairs slightly. When he doesn’t, the world breaks slightly. As if you are a tuning fork his entire system reorganizes around, and the only stable state for him now is the one that includes you, and the only state available to him is the one that doesn’t.

He files this away. He will think about it later, when he can think.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

Later, when he has lost all sense of time entirely, he goes to your window.

He should not. He knows he should not. He goes anyway. He stands in the air outside your bedroom, invisible, untouchable, and watches your sleep. You are curled on your side. Your arm is thrown across the empty space beside you where he was. You are breathing.

He understands, watching you, that he could go through the window in less than a thought. He could be beside you in a heartbeat. He could put his hand against your cheek and you would wake and you would forgive him before he even spoke. He knows this with a certainty that has nothing to do with optimism.

He does not move.

The god is watching. He can feel the attention. The god is waiting to see if he will move.

He does not move.

He stays for an hour. Longer than is wise. He watches your hand twitch in your sleep, watches you shift and frown and settle again. He memorizes the shape of you in your own bed. He gathers it like a coin he will spend later.

Then he goes.

The slip happens on what Phainon believes is the third day. A woman wishes her sister’s child would fail an examination. Sibling rivalry sublimated into something the mother would not say out loud. He grants it because the curse demands it.

Something in him says: let it cost her more than it should.

He almost does it. He feels his own will reaching for the gap, the place where he can enact rather than only channel. He could make her pay for this. He could make sure the wish cost her years instead of months. He could make her wake tomorrow knowing exactly what she had done.

He doesn’t. He grants it cleanly. He extracts the normal cost. The wish goes through. But he had wanted to.

He stood at the edge of doing it, and only the thinnest restraint held him back. And he understands with a fresh, specific horror that this is what happens to beings like him when they are angry enough. They begin to choose who to hurt. They begin to use the small powers they have been pretending not to have.

He hates himself for the gap-feeling. He hates the woman, briefly, for putting the option in front of him. He hates the god for making this his profession.

He grants three more wishes very, very carefully.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

He is losing his sense of where one moment ends and the next begins. The wishes have a way of doing this, when he is not anchored. He used to ride this fluidity with practiced indifference. He has spent centuries of his service in this same temporal smear, granting and granting until the days became a single long granting, marked only by the rare large prayer that pulled him briefly back to himself.

Now he is anchored to you, and you are not here, and the anchoring is cutting him.

He thinks of your face. He thinks of your laugh. He cannot remember, suddenly, what color your hair is in direct sunlight, only what color it was in lamplight, the night he was in your apartment. He panics about this for a length of time he cannot measure.

He recovers. He remembers. He loses it again after.

He thinks: this is what the god wants. This is the lesson. This is the cost being made plain to me. If I see them again, this only gets worse.

He thinks: I will see them again.

He thinks: I am going to die of this, in pieces, and the only way it stops is if I let it stop, and I cannot let it stop.

He grants wishes.

He grants wishes.

He grants wishes.

The god, eventually, gets bored. Phainon does not know what day it is when it happens, possibly the third, possibly the fifth, possibly the seventh.

All right, the god says. I am tiring of arranging entertainments for you. I had thought you might attempt to defy me, which would have been amusing, but apparently you are committed to being obedient about this. Disappointing. I would like to be fed properly for a while. You may grant in peace. Don’t go to them.

I won’t.

You don’t even sound convincing anymore, vessel. Save your voice.

The presence withdraws.

Phainon stands. He grants. He does not weep. He has not wept since the plaza when the wind moved across the back of his hand and he understood, for one moment, what wind was.

He grants.

He grants.

The days begin to blur the way they used to: the muffling returning, the senses dimming, the air going quiet against his skin again.

He could almost let himself sink into it. The numbness was easier. The numbness, if he is honest, is the only mercy this curse has ever offered him: that the more wishes he grants, the less of him is left to feel the granting.

He had almost found the numbness again.

He grants the next wish.

He grants the next.

He hears you, very faintly, somewhere far away, saying his name as though you have stopped expecting an answer.

Then, granting a wish for a man who wants his wife to forgive him for something the man has not actually apologized for, Phainon feels the small clean tear of a single tear sliding down his cheek.

He does not lift a hand to wipe it. He grants the next wish. He grants the next.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

Eventually, he has to go somewhere. Somewhere remote. Somewhere unpopulated. Somewhere whatever happens will not have witnesses.

He finds a cliff. The kind of place tourists come to in summer but nobody visits this time of year. An outcrop over a stretch of coast where the sea is hammering against itself in the wind. There is no one for miles.

He stands on the edge. He has been holding for what feels like months, possibly years, and has in fact only been days, and he cannot hold any longer.

He lets it out.

He has not made a loud sound, deliberately, in three thousand years. He has answered prayers. He has spoken when spoken to. He has never roared.

The sound that comes out of him is not human. It cannot be. No human throat could produce it. It is the sound of three thousand years of forced obedience arriving at its limit all at once. Broken and absolutely furious. The roar of a being who has been the kindly hand of a cruel god for three millennia and is, for one minute, no longer kind.

The cliff he is standing on cracks. A fissure opens in the rock beneath his feet and runs out toward the sea, splitting the outcrop along its length. The waves below answer. The wind answers. Something inside him answers too. The furious part, that has been buried under the helpfulness for centuries. And for one full minute he stands on the cracking cliff and he screams.

Then he stops. Then he hates himself.

The cliff has cracked. If anyone had been here, they might have died. He chose somewhere remote because he is at least disciplined enough not to want to hurt anyone. But the capacity was in him, and that is enough to be ashamed of.

He is not someone who screams. He is not someone who cracks geological features. He is someone who endures. That is the whole point. That is what he was made to be.

He breathes. He closes his eyes. He reassembles himself, piece by piece, into the careful contained vessel he has been for three thousand years.

The rage goes back underneath the gentleness. The roar goes back into silence. The cliff stays cracked, but he is composed.

I cannot do that again, he tells himself. Not while there are people I am responsible for. Not while there is a god watching. The rage is a luxury I cannot have.

He returns to the city. He grants the next wish. And the next.

He wonders how much time has passed.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

The first days of silence had felt almost normal, all things considered. Whenever the worry had risen, you’d thought about how Phainon had kissed your knuckles. About always yes. You’d held that line.

The first day had passed, and you hadn’t worried. The second had passed, and you’d told yourself he was working. The third had passed, and you’d reminded yourself that a little while didn’t have to mean immediately, and you’d made tea, and you’d opened your project, and you’d pressed your hand to your chest only when the kitchen was quiet and no one was watching.

By the fourth, you’d started talking to him. Just naming small things, the way you used to when he had been warmth in your palm and a voice in fragments. I’m making tea. I’m working. The neighbor’s dog was barking again. I miss you. The last one always at the end, always lighter than you’d meant it, always with something dry chasing it so he wouldn’t worry. I miss you. Don’t get a swelled head about it.

Nothing had come back. By the fifth, you’d stopped joking. By the sixth, you’d stopped naming small things.

And now it has been a week.

Something in the air feels strained. You can’t put your finger on it. Your palm is cold in a way it hasn’t been since before any of this started. Muted. Like a radio dial turned almost off.

Once or twice you think you’ve felt a pulse of distant urgency flicker through the connection and then just quiet.

You tell yourself, again, that he’s busy. That he’ll come back when he can.

You’re less sure how many more days you can tell yourself that.

You think, the way you have been thinking since the night the god spoke into your bedroom, about whether he is the reason.

Whether Phainon is paying for the night you had. Whether something has been done to him.

But the god told you, in that velvet inside-the-skull voice—he’ll wake afraid. He said it like a prediction. Like he was telling you what was coming.

So Phainon waking afraid was the expected outcome. The god accounted for it. Which means whatever is happening now isn’t necessarily the god making him pay. It might just be Phainon. Phainon afraid. Phainon retreating. Phainon doing what he has done every other time he has been close enough to be held: finding a reason to leave.

You hate this thought. You hate that it occurs to you. But it does, and once it does, it does not stop occurring. You don’t know what to do with it.

The second week, you’re angry. Because even if he’s dealing with consequences, he could say so. The connection works both ways. You talked to him through it for weeks before he ever appeared at your door.

He could leave a word. He could send a flicker of warmth that means I’m alive. I’m thinking about you. I haven’t forgotten. He could do the bare minimum required to keep someone from going insane wondering if they imagined the most important night of their life.

He doesn’t.

One night you sit on your floor, your hand pressed to your chest the way you have a thousand times before, and you try to send something through.

Are you there?

You wait.

You wait longer.

The warmth in your palm pulses once. Distant and muffled. He is somewhere. He is not unreachable. He is choosing not to reach back. You don’t know what is happening.

You only know that the warmth came and went, and he did not say your name back, and you have been sitting on this floor for forty-five minutes and nothing else is going to come.

You put your hand down. You go to bed. You do not try again.

You cry that night. You’re not proud of it. You don’t cry the next.

The third week, you try to stop checking.

It doesn’t work, but you try. You move through your days. You finish a section of the project that’s been giving you trouble. You meet a friend for lunch and don’t mention any of it, because how would you explain. I met a divine being, I think I’m in love with him, he stayed the night and he held me and he fell asleep for the first time in three thousand years and then he ran and I haven’t heard from him since. The sentence does not exist in any language you have.

So when your friend says, over coffee, I have someone I want you to meet, you do not say no.

You should say no.

You should say I’m not ready, I will never be ready, I’m not over something that felt more real than anything else, I’m not in a state to meet anyone. Instead you smile and say sure, because the alternative is sitting in your apartment for another week pressing your palm to your chest waiting for a warmth that isn’t coming.

His name is James.

Your friend tells you about him for fifteen minutes. He’s a journalist. He’s funny. He’s been through a difficult breakup. He’s kind, your friend says, with significant emphasis, and you understand that this is the thing your friend has noticed about you. He’s kind. He’ll be gentle. You’ll like him.

“I’ll meet him,” you say. “Once. Just for coffee.”

“Just for coffee,” your friend agrees.

It is not, you think later, that you’ve decided Phainon isn’t coming back. It is that you’ve decided you cannot keep being the person who waits in a room hoping the door will open. Whatever is happening to him—whether it is the god, or his own fear, or some combination of both—you cannot carry it alone in your apartment indefinitely. You had a life before him. You will have one if he never returns.

You don’t believe he won’t return. You also do not know that he will.

You get ready the morning of with hands that won’t quite settle. You change your shirt twice. And then you stand in front of the mirror, and you say what are you doing out loud. And the person in the mirror does not answer.

Tears well up in your eyes and your heart aches the same way it has been for weeks. You press your lips together, memories of Phainon flashing behind your eyes.

Your palm is cold.

You leave the apartment.

The café is one you’ve been to before. James is already there when you arrive: corner table, two cups already on it, the second one for you.

He stands when you come in. He smiles. He’s tall, you register, and he has a good smile, and you wait for that to mean something. It doesn’t.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.”

“I got you a—” He gestures at the second cup. “I asked your friend what you like. I hope it’s right.”

It’s exactly what you like.

You sit. You smile back. You drink the tea he ordered and you ask about his work and you listen while he tells you about a story he’s writing about local urban planning. He’s articulate and self-deprecating in the right ways and his eyes go bright when he talks about something he cares about, and you think: this is a person I could like, in a different life, if I were a different version of myself.

It is a strange thought. It does not steady you.

He asks about you. You tell him about your project. Only vaguely because you can‘t bring yourself to be enthusiastic. Not with him. He asks the right follow-up questions. He laughs at the right parts. He reaches across the table once, gently, to brush a strand of hair back from your forehead. His fingers are warm in an ordinary, human way, and you flinch so subtly you hope he doesn’t see it.

He sees it. He pulls his hand back. He doesn’t comment.

“Sorry,” he says. “Too soon?”

“It’s not—” You catch yourself. It’s not you, you almost say, and stop. “It’s been a strange few weeks. I’m a little wound up.”

“That’s fair.” He’s still smiling, but more carefully now. “We can just talk.”

It occurs to you, halfway through the second cup, that the god might be watching this.

That if he is, he must be pleased. The mortal in his game—the “little anomaly” he addressed in your bedroom—has folded. Has gone on a date with someone unrelated to the cosmic situation. Has done, in the end, the most predictable possible thing.

You feel cold. Then you feel angry at yourself for feeling cold, because James is here, James is being kind, and you are not doing right by him.

You try to focus on his story.

You fail.

He’s exactly what your friend said he’d be. The kind of man who reads social cues and adjusts. The kind of man who would, for other people, be a gift.

He’s not Phainon.

The thought lands so cleanly it almost makes you laugh out loud.

He’s not Phainon. He could not possibly be Phainon. Phainon is a three-thousand-year-old divine being who has burned every other person who ever touched him. James is a journalist who likes urban planning.

You are comparing a journalist to a divine being.

You have lost your entire mind.

“What’s funny?” James asks, smiling.

“Nothing,” you say. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not really here.”

“I can tell.” He says it without judgment. “Bad week?”

“Bad month.”

He nods slowly. He’s looking at you with something kind in his eyes that you don’t deserve, and you hate that you can feel the moment his attention turns into want.

Your palm has gone from cold to aching.

“I should—” you start.

The lights flicker.

Once. Twice. Then they burn impossibly bright before dimming to almost-darkness.

Every window in the café rattles in its frame. The temperature drops ten degrees in an instant, your breath misting in front of your face.

And your palm explodes. Desperate and furious in ways that steal the air from your lungs.

You stand up so fast your chair scrapes. “I—” You can barely form words. “I’m sorry, I have to—bathroom—”

“Are you okay?” James is half-rising too, concerned.

“I’m fine. I’m sorry.”

You don’t wait. You weave through confused patrons toward the back exit, palm burning, every step toward the courtyard door feeling like walking into a thunderstorm.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

You push through the door and reality tears. The world splits like fabric. Golden light bleeds through the seam.

Phainon steps through.

His hair is wild. His eyes are burning with light too bright to hold directly. Divine radiance crackles around him unstably, casting moving shadows on the courtyard walls. The air smells like ozone and burning wood. Frost is spreading from his feet outward in spiral patterns across the courtyard stones.

He looks furious. And underneath it, there is a clarity you almost don’t trust, because you have not seen him this gathered before. Three weeks under pressure has burned away some of the apologetic softness. What’s left is sharper.

He looks at you. The light in his eyes flickers once. “Tea,” he says.

It’s not the word you were expecting.

“What?”

“Tea.” His voice is low. There’s an edge in it that you have not heard from him before. “You’re having tea. With him.”

“Yes.”

“With him.”

“Yes.” You cross your arms. Your palm is still burning. The frost is climbing the walls behind him. “Is that a problem, Phainon?”

The way you say his name does something to his face. A small flicker. He absorbs it. “After three weeks of silence from me, you went on a date.”

“After three weeks of silence from you, yes.” You don’t break eye contact. “Did you have a different expectation?”

Phainon laughs. It is not a kind sound. It is a startled, bitter, almost-incredulous laugh. He runs his hand through his hair, and where his fingers pass, the air shimmers with heat distortion.

“My expectation,” he says, “was that I would handle what needed handling and come back to you.”

“Without telling me.”

“Without—” He stops. The edge in his voice sharpens. “I didn’t have the luxury of telling you.”

“You had three weeks—”

“I had three weeks of being run like a hound.” He says it flatly. The wood-and-ozone smell intensifies. “He’s been moving me. Bridge collapses. House fires. A woman in an alley. A child under a beam. Every time I tried to stop and think, every time I tried to find a way back to you that wouldn’t cost someone their life, he arranged another.”

You go still.

“He’s been using me to keep me from you.” His voice doesn’t rise. It gets quieter. “And I let him. Because every time I considered just walking through your door and damn the consequences, he showed me very clearly what the consequences would be.”

“Phainon—”

“I have not rested in three weeks.” He says it like an observation. “I have not stopped. I have not stood still long enough to send you a word because every time I tried, someone died who shouldn’t have. So I made a choice. The choice was: stay away, keep you safe, figure out a way to fight this from far enough away that he can’t use you against me.”

His eyes are very bright now. “And then I made the mistake of looking at the thread that leads to you again. And I saw a man with his hand on it. And the choice I made three weeks ago dissolved in front of me. Because apparently my discipline is very impressive right up until the moment someone else’s hand touches what’s mine.”

The word mine lands in the courtyard like a struck bell.

Your breath catches.

He registers what he just said. He doesn’t take it back.

“You should have told me,” you say quietly. “Some way. Any way. You let me think for three weeks that night meant nothing to you.”

“I let you think you were safe.”

“I didn’t know I was in danger.”

“You met him.” His voice cracks slightly for the first time. “In your bedroom. He told you not to tell me. You think he stopped at telling you not to tell me? You think he hasn’t been in your apartment since? In your head?”

You go cold.

“Has he—” you start.

“I don’t know.” Phainon’s hands are trembling now, but his voice is steady. “I haven’t dared come close enough to check. Because the moment he knows I care more about you than I care about the rules, he turns up the cost. So I have spent three weeks paying it. Quietly. From a distance. So that he would forget you mattered.”

A pause.

“And then this morning I felt him reach for your thread, and the calculus changed.”

You stare at him.

He’s enraged. It is a rage that you suddenly understand has been buried.

You should be afraid.

You’re not.

“You could have left a sign,” you say, voice thin. “Anything. A flicker. A word. Anything, Phainon. I wasn’t asking for protection. I was asking for the smallest possible indication that I had not imagined the significance of that night.”

His jaw works. “I know.”

“You let me believe—”

“I know.”

“You let me believe I was someone you could walk away from.”

He flinches. The frost on the walls cracks audibly.

“I cannot walk away from you,” Phainon says, low. “That is what he is exploiting. He has discovered that the only thing I will not do for him anymore is leave you, and he is teaching me what the alternative is. Every single life I pulled out of his arrangements these last three weeks was a lesson. And I—”

He stops himself.

Neither of you move.

“—and I paid it,” he finishes, more carefully. “Because the alternative was watching him hurt you to teach me the same lesson in a more permanent way.”

The silence stretches.

You don’t know what to do with your hands. “James,” you say finally. You don’t know why his name is what comes out, except that it’s the only solid thing left in the conversation. “James made a wish.”

“Yes.”

“You felt it.”

“I felt it.” His voice has gone very quiet. “He wished you would look at him the way you were looking at nothing. Like you were thinking of someone else.”

“Did you grant it?”

“No.”

“Could you have?”

“I should have.” A bitter laugh. “I’m forbidden from pursuing mundane desires, not from granting them. The compulsion was there. Stronger than it has been in weeks because I have been refusing every small mundane thing and stockpiling pressure. I could have given him what he asked for. It would have cost me nothing.”

A long pause follows.

“I would rather have torn the world open.”

“Phainon.”

“That’s not poetic. I mean it literally. I would rather have torn the world open than make you look at someone else the way you looked at me.”

The courtyard is very quiet.

You realize, belatedly, that the frost has stopped spreading. That the air is no longer dropping in temperature. That the violence around him has gone still because he’s no longer pretending he isn’t this too.

“I’m angry at you,” you say.

“I know.”

“You’re angry at me.”

“I am furious,” he agrees quietly, “at a great many things. Very few of them are you. But yes. A little. You went on a date.”

“It didn’t mean anything. And you were gone.”

“I was gone because—”

“I didn’t know.”

His eyes close briefly. “No. You didn’t.”

“You can’t ask me to live like I’m waiting for you when you give me nothing.”

“No.” The word comes out tired. “No, I can’t.” A pause. “I kept telling myself it was temporary.” His voice roughens. “That if I could just endure long enough, I could come back and explain.” He laughs once. “I thought keeping you safe was the right decision. But I already knew that this would never be enough.” He looks at you with an expression so full of emotion that something in you cracks.

Silence follows.

“What do you mean,” you say, although you already know. But you need him to say it.

He looks at you for a long moment. You can see the hesitation. Fear.

“I want you.” The words seem to cost him. His voice is trembling but his gaze is firm. Your heart is beating fast.

Maybe you should question this, should ask why he can state his desire like that. But you have missed him so much, and you are always existing on limited time with him.

So you step toward him.

His hand lifts, hovers near your face and then he goes very still. His eyes flick past you. To the café behind you. To the half-melted frost on the courtyard walls. To the entire impossible scene of a demigod about to do something the laws of his existence forbid in a public alley behind a coffee shop where seventeen people are pretending they didn’t see the lights blow out.

“Not here,” he says quietly.

“Phainon—”

“If I touch you right now, the way I want to—” His jaw works. “I cannot guarantee the building survives it. And I will not—I will not—let what happens next be witnessed.”

He extends his hand. You take it.

The world lurches.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

You blink and you’re on a hillside. It’s afternoon here, wherever here is. The sun is lower, the sky is golden, the air smells of dry grass and old stone.

A weathered temple stands at the crest, columns half-fallen, the kind of ruin that has been standing in its own slow erosion for a very long time. Below, far away, a city sprawls. Far enough that you can barely see the movement of people. Far enough that the only sounds are wind and grass.

You’re still holding his hand. “Where—”

“It doesn’t matter.” His voice is low again, but the controlled fury has gone, replaced by something hungrier. “Somewhere no one is watching. Somewhere old enough that the air remembers gods better than it remembers people. Somewhere I knew, once.”

You look at him. The wind is moving his hair. The light catches him differently here. Less divine radiance, more sun on skin.

He looks, in this moment, like the man he must have been before. The scholar who could lose himself in conversations until sunrise. The young man who had once been endlessly curious about the world and looked at it as though there was always something worth discovering.

“You took me to a place that matters to you.”

The look he gives you is something you don’t have language for. “I want you,” he repeats as if that explains everything. And it does.

You step closer. He doesn’t move. You can see his hand fist and unfist at his side. “Tell me to stop,” he says quietly. “After this, I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“Don’t stop.”

He kisses you like he’s starving. There is no carefulness in it. What’s left is hunger so complete and new yet so long denied that you feel it from your mouth to your knees.

His hands are in your hair, tilting your head back. His mouth is opening yours. His body is pressing against yours and the air around you both is humming.

You gasp against him and he takes it like it was offered, deepening the kiss with a sound that vibrates through both your chests and through the air itself, through the stone of the temple at the crest of the hill, which hums in response.

Heat rolls off him in waves. You clutch at his shoulders and pull him closer. He obliges with an arm around your waist that gathers you against him until there is no space left. The instant your bodies meet completely, the world reacts. The air around you both glows, golden-white and pulsing with a rhythm that is not quite either of your heartbeats but is somehow both.

The dry grass beneath your feet blooms. Small white flowers first, then larger ones, then strange impossible blue things you don’t have names for, spreading in a circle around the two of you. The ground is soft now where it was brittle.

You don’t notice it consciously. You’re aware of his mouth, his hands, the way he tastes, and the rest of the world is happening at the edges of your attention.

Phainon pulls back just enough to breathe. His forehead presses to yours. “Look,” he says, hoarse.

You look.

The temple at the crest of the hill is whole. Where there had been cracked columns and missing capitals and erosion eating the relief carvings, there is now pristine stone. As though time itself has remembered what it was supposed to be.

Your breath catches. “Phainon.”

“I know.”

“Did you—”

“We.” His voice is wrecked. “I have spent three thousand years taking things from people. Years of life. Capacity for joy. Pieces of themselves they never got back. I have never created anything. I have only ever hollowed people out so the god could feed.”

His hands come up to cup your face. His thumbs are trembling against your cheekbones. “Look what you made me make.”

You can’t speak. He kisses you again. It is slower this time. His thumb traces your jaw. His other hand finds the small of your back.

The world keeps going at the edges of your awareness. You become dimly aware that there are trees on the hill now that weren’t there a moment ago, full-grown, heavy with fruit. That the grass has gone impossibly green.

You cannot make yourself care about any of it, because his mouth is on yours and his hand is on your back and three thousand years of restraint is undoing itself in real time against you.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you for so long,” he murmurs against your mouth, low and ragged. “I never—I didn’t know it could feel like—”

You pull his head back by his hair and kiss him deeper. He makes a sound like breaking.

Vaguely you notice vines climbing the temple columns. Seeds become plants become blossoms in the space of a breath. The air is thickening with the smell of green and water and life. The temple is singing now, actual faint musical notes resonating from the stone.

His hands slide under the hem of your shirt and his palms are very warm against your back and you understand, distantly, that you should be terrified. That this is a divine being without a brake on it. That this is the demigod who can hollow strangers out from a continent away and you are letting him touch you with that same power barely restrained.

You are not terrified. Because you only sense the man who wants you.

You arch into him. Phainon shudders violently against you. You can see the way light blooms on his skin where your palms have settled on his ribs, can see gold spreading through him.

“Don’t,” Phainon gasps, but his hands are at your waist now and his mouth is on your throat. “Don’t stop. If you stop I’ll—please don’t stop—”

“I won’t.”

“You should.” A ragged breath. “I cannot—I don’t know what I’m doing. The power is—it’s responding to us, to this, and there is no precedent. I do not know what we are making—”

“Phainon.”

“What.”

“I don’t care.”

He laughs against your throat. “You really are going to destroy me,” he murmurs, repeating what he told you several times before. Then, he laughs again. “Or I you.”

And because you rarely let him have the last word, you say: “Promise?”

He kisses you again, harder this time, walking you backward until your shoulders meet cool stone. You realize that you are against the temple wall. That you crossed the hill without noticing.

The contrast steals your breath. You feel the stone cool against your shoulders and Phainon molten against your front, his hands trembling on either side of your face. “I never—I didn’t even—I didn’t know—”

“Know what?”

“That I could make anything.” He says it wonderingly.

You realize, distantly, that he’s crying. You realize that you are too.

His hand slides up your thigh, hitching your leg around his waist, and you can feel exactly how much he wants this. And the entire hillside blooms, not just flowers but life, the kind of green explosion that only happens in time-lapse footage of spring, condensed into a single inhale.

You roll your hips against his. His control finishes shattering. He kisses you like he’s drowning. Like you are the only real thing in a world of hollow wants. Like he is choosing you, against every rule the god ever wrote into his body.

The light around you both intensifies until it is almost blinding. The temple’s faint singing rises into something nearly musical. The fruit on the trees is impossibly ripe. The flowers are everywhere. The hill is more alive than it has been in any of the centuries the temple has stood here.

And then Phainon goes rigid against you. His mouth pulls away from yours. He turns his head, just slightly, listening. His arms tighten around you, shielding you. His body angling so that he is between you and the sky.

The sky, above the temple, tears. The blue rips open, and through the tear, a presence floods.

✦ 𖤓 ✦

You are still pressed against him, still feeling the shape of him through your clothes, still half-undone, when the temperature drops.

Well, says a voice you have heard before. That was a great deal of fuss for something as fleeting as a kiss. Three thousand years of admirable discipline, and apparently this was the breaking point. The voice is no longer only in your head. It seems to come from everywhere at once.

You feel Phainon’s whole body lock. “Don’t,” he says quietly. Not to you.

Don’t what? Observe? Bearer, that’s all I do. You know that. The voice is conversational. Almost pleasant. I must say I’m impressed. Three weeks of obedient little rescues and I thought we’d made real progress. And here you are, undoing all my careful pedagogy in a public space, in front of mortals, no less.

Phainon doesn’t answer.

You can feel his heart against your sternum. It is going very fast.

How generous of me, really. Most vessels are never permitted even this much. A reminder of what they left behind. But your work has been so thorough lately. So I can overlook a moment of… indulgence. His voice turns almost amused. Enjoy it while it lasts.

And you, the voice continues, and now it is pointed at you, and you feel the pressure of its attention slide along your skin the way it did in your bedroom three weeks ago. Little anomaly. Hello again. You’ve been busy.

Your hand finds Phainon’s back and grips. He feels it. His arm tightens around you.

I will admit, the voice says, almost lazily, I expected more cleverness from you. After our little conversation, I thought you might at least try to keep him a secret. Instead you’ve gone and let him kiss you in public, in daylight, where anyone could see. Mortals are so wonderfully bad at restraint.

You take a breath. You don’t know where the words come from. You don’t plan them. “There’s nothing wrong with this,” you say.

A pause.

Pardon?

“There’s nothing wrong with this,” you repeat. Your voice is steadier than you expect. “You keep talking about it like it’s a problem you’re allowed to be amused by. It isn’t. It isn’t wrong. It isn’t unnatural. You don’t get to call it a mistake just because you didn’t plan for it.”

A long, considering silence. Then laughter. Oh, my, the god says. Oh, that’s wonderful. Bearer, did you hear them? They think their little mortal want is special. They think because it feels large to them it must be cosmically significant.

Phainon doesn’t answer. His hand is on the back of your head now.

My dear, the voice says. Every mortal in every century has thought their wanting was the exception. Every single one. I have watched them argue about it. I have watched them die still arguing. It’s one of the most reliable comedies in my repertoire. You are not the first to mistake the strength of a feeling for the importance of it.

“I’m not arguing it’s important to you,” you say.

A flicker. A small recalibration. Excuse me?

“I’m not arguing it’s important to you.” You keep your voice level. Your hand is still on Phainon’s chest. “I’m telling you it’s important to us. That’s what you keep missing. You want me to convince you. I don’t have to convince you. You’re not the one this is for.”

Well, the god says. How charming. You've both decided you're special.

The pressure shifts. And then it changes register entirely. The amusement is still there, but underneath it now, something colder. Something deciding.

Let's test that, shall we.

You feel it before you understand it. The god is pulling, and you are drawn toward the place where the sky tore open, where something vast is waiting on the other side.

He will kill me, you think. The thought is creeping into your brain, making your body tremble on the way upwards.

“PHAINON—”

You don't finish his name. He has felt you being taken, and something in him that has been held still for three thousand years simply stops being still.

You thought you understood the scale of him. The buzz. The gold eyes. The broken glass. The wings. It is only now that you understand.

What happens next has no sound. The light around him inverts, goes white and then past white into something your eye refuses, and the air screams, a pressure so total it has no volume. And the tear in the sky that was pulling you stops pulling. As though it has struck something it cannot move.

And then, impossibly, it begins to give back.

You feel yourself drawn back onto solid ground, onto the hillside, into the circle of his arms, which close around you the instant you are solid enough to be held.

Phainon is shaking. His eyes are gold all the way through and burning. And his face is furious.

For a long beat, the whole world is silent.

You think the god should be looking at you. You are the one he almost took. Instead, all of his attention is on Phainon.

And then the god speaks. And for the first time since you have heard his voice, there is something underneath that is not amusement. Well, he says. That was new.

Phainon does not answer. His arms are around you. You feel the heat radiating off him. He is between you and the sky and he has not stopped shaking. You understand, suddenly, that he is shaking with the effort of not doing something much larger.

A vessel, the god says slowly, should not do that.

“I am not,” Phainon says, low and full of swallowed rage, “only a vessel.”

Silence. Then the god laughs. But it comes a half-second too late, and it is a half-degree too sharp.

No, the god agrees. You’re also stubborn. You always were. A pause. I haven’t seen that much force from you since the very beginning. And never with those powers. The voice sounds almost thoughtful. Well. Feelings do tend to make mortals react strongly. Even the quasi-divine ones. Three thousand years, and you’re still susceptible to the same impulses. How predictable.

Predictable, you think. As though that was all this was.

The pressure begins to withdraw.

Continue, then, the god says, the carelessness now visibly constructed. Enjoy your specialness. I find I have things to attend to. And then, almost as an afterthought: Do give my regards to the city.

The presence is gone.

The hillside is quiet. The realization comes strangely. The god had spoken about power. About emotions. But not once had he asked why a dead hill was blooming. Because he had not noticed it.

You are still in his arms, and he is still shaking, and his eyes are passing slowly back from gold to blue.

“What did he mean?” you ask. Your voice is not steady. “Give my regards to the city.”

Phainon doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is grim. “It means I frightened him,” he says. He looks at you, and the fury is banked now but not gone. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry. He could have hurt you—”

“You saved me,” you interrupt quietly. Phainon looks at you with something fragile in his eyes. The corner of his mouth lifts. “He was making you ashamed of wanting,” you continue. “Making you feel like choosing me was some kind of failure. And I won’t—” Your voice hardens. “I won’t let anyone make you feel that way. God or not.”

His breath catches. For a moment you think he might cry. Or kiss you again. Or both.

Instead he pulls you against him and holds you like you’re the only solid thing in a tilting world. “I don’t know what comes next. But I am done letting him decide it for me.”

Around you both, the bloomed hillside continues to exist.

You know that Phainon will soon leave too. That he has been neglecting his duties for a long time today. You feel that Phainon wants to say many things. So do you. But this time, both of you stay silent.

Phainon presses a kiss to your hair and tightens his arms around you. You stay on the hillside, holding each other, just for a moment longer.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)

Masterlist.

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Taglist: @harujkookie @levia-chan @spiderfly-tree-rat

[solar-halo]

reblogging this before i read it but im so fucking scared 😭 that synopsis is scaring me

[notesfromthemirror]

omg it’s salem again. I’m so sorry to send in two asks in a row i completely forgot i meant to send this one in earlier before i sent the other one and i really don’t want to forget again 😭 I hope you don’t mind.

This is once again as niche as it was the last time i mentioned the topic, but i have an addition to the phainon with a halovian s/o brainrot i sent in the first time a few months (or was it only 1 month????) ago.

I Somehow completely forgot to mention in that ask that halovians, as we know, have the ability to project and read thoughts (apparently this is mentioned in planarcadia too but i haven’t played through that yet at all… i just remember it being something sunday mentioned halovians being capable of so i did a bunch of research into it for my own hsr persona/character 😭)

And i haven’t thought as much about this in a while compared to how often it came up in my selfship shitposting before, but I think the possibilities of things that could happen with phainon added into the mix of this would be basically endless.

Theres the obvious route of, Yes. It would torment him. i’m personally not this cruel at all but you could obviously say literally anything to him mentally at random and he would have to keep his composure. again i could never do this to him but i know some people would.

There is of course also the added layer of his s/o being able to hear his thoughts as well. I’m a little fuzzy on the specifics of this because it sounds like halovians, while having this ability naturally, still have to train it to some degree to be very precise with it? And i believe their skill in it at least partially has something to do with their position in the Family of penacony as well. Unfortunately sunday is a very bad example of how halovians in general work since, well. He has special circumstances to every degree 😭. But he’s also how we get most of the info on them so. I’m making estimates. Maybe they clarify this in planarcadia.

Anyway. You’d be able to hear his thoughts to some level, even if you’re just receiving the general Vibe of how he feels. and that’s also dangerous for him. But i also think he’d find it comforting after he gets used to the weirdness, once he realizes that he doesn’t need to worry about hiding his emotions from this person. He’d also have proof that they’re choosing to be near him despite the fact that they know for certain that he does Not have everything together like he always presents himself to. AND, later on in the relationship especially, i can see him having days where he really just doesn’t want to talk and explain anything. and having someone who could literally just Sense his feelings and the idea of what happened and be able to comfort him without him having to explain would be very nice for him.

(i feel crazy but i swear there’s something symbolic here. He has to speak and persuade and use his words when he’s being The Deliverer. But having an s/o that allows him to only use his voice when he feels up to it, and only have to use it to be Phainon who’s yapping about history and antiques and his favorite of his mother’s dinner recipes, and not have to use it for more Deliverer topics would be something completely new for him.)

And then yeah of course there’s other uses for all of this. When he’s overthinking and over-yapping and talking in circles and spiraling you can start talking directly in his mind to get him to snap out of it. It actually feels a lot like the inverse of your Wishbearer series, now that i think about it 😭 Which is very funny to me. Instead of him being a presence in the s/o’s brain and thoughts it’s the other way around. Which would be terrifying for him until he gets used to it and seeks it out and misses them if they’re ever too far from him and aren’t in his thoughts anymore 🥹 Just another reason for him to be clingy 😭.

Anyway 🙂 Sorry to be super hyper-niche. It will happen again. But either way, I think you’ll see my vision here of the potential situations that could happen and probably have your own possibilities of situations that i didn’t mention here. it’s just a very fun idea to me personally ☀️🪽

(don’t mind me, tagging myself so i don’t miss any response 🥹 @solar-halo)

Hi again Salem! :) Sorry for the wait. Oh, it was so lovely to read your ask. It’s clear you put a lot of thought into this. I really enjoyed reading it and please don’t worry about this topic being niche.

So, without spoiling Planarcadia for you, yes, Sunday’s abilities will be relevant there. :)

I think those abilities are especially interesting with Phainon for the reasons you mentioned. He is both used to talking a lot in his public position and not used to talking about his feelings (and usually keeps them to himself).

As for the obvious route: yes, I think many people might do what you described. Just talk to him constantly, maybe out of convenience. I think that would be overwhelming for Phainon, at least when he doesn’t expect it at first or when his s/o doesn’t pay attention to his current state (e.g. when he is already full of emotion or frustrated). Then again, I don’t think Phainon would be with someone who is inconsiderate. :)

Oh, but I love the progression you described because yes, Phainon would panic at first. As someone who is used to bottling emotions up, this would take him some time to get used to. Because intimate trust as such doesn’t come easy to him. And I think having someone perceive his thoughts and emotions so directly would feel almost impossibly vulnerable to him at first.

But I think once trust is there, it could actually help him in the ways you described too. I mean, speaking from my perspective: sometimes my mind is just too loud or my emotions are all over the place, and if someone could feel them, it would make it easier for me to just… exist without feeling the pressure to explain myself.

And with Phainon, I just think the symbolism you mentioned is so important. He spends so much of his life speaking for other people, persuading, reassuring, carrying responsibility, and presenting the version of himself that others need. So the idea that he could simply exist around someone who already understands how he feels without requiring an explanation feels incredibly meaningful to me.

He is very good at talking, yes. We all know how eloquent he is and how good he is at making public appearances. But I can only imagine how energy-draining that must be. So I really love how you described this. Because I think he would still love to talk with his s/o, of course, but I can also imagine that he would be relieved to only speak about the things he is passionate about or wants to ramble about.

I especially like the idea of his s/o snapping him out of his spiraling because that’s something he would struggle with often. I think this could even go further. I’m not entirely sure how the abilities work while sleeping, but if they extend that far then I think it would help him enormously. E.g. Phainon is having nightmares again and then his s/o could maybe soothe his feelings while he sleeps somehow. Or when he wakes up, they could immediately calm him down at least a little.

And yes, it is indeed funny that this is the reverse scenario to The Wishbearer. :D And I particularly like that here they are already together because this creates an extra layer of intimacy (and of course there is already so much trust).

And I agree that he would be terrified in the beginning. Both because he would have that irrational fear that he might get manipulated. This might apply more to the pre-relationship phase where he learns about the abilities (which haven’t even been used yet) and when he doesn’t know what to do with that knowledge. And then the fact itself would terrify him. Not like before. More the fact that he would be more vulnerable than ever before, or more vulnerable than he ever imagined possible. And it would probably leave him shaking. Not because he wants distance from his s/o, but because he suddenly has nowhere to hide.

I think maybe the first times this happens he would need to leave the room or something (but return immediately after). But then once he learns how much good it does him and how much he enjoys it, he would crave it, yes. Because like this he can feel even more connected to his s/o. :)

Side note: I think he would maybe think of Aglaea at some point. Because while her golden threads are not the same and are overall used to protect the city, more like a net spread throughout the city, she is able to perceive information. And Phainon trusts Aglaea, so he has at least experienced that an ability like that doesn’t have to be used with malicious intent.

I fully believe that once he’s comfortable he would encourage his s/o to perceive his thoughts and would love to use it to be sweet (and maybe a little teasing). I also like the idea of them being in public and his s/o being able to reassure him a little in between. They would take his hand while he talks to people or something and just send him a thought because maybe they can’t talk out loud at that time.

It could also play out in a lighthearted way. Reader telling him how much they want to kiss him and Phainon would, of course, still keep his composure but grin to himself. Basically, I think this could play out quite differently in public or private situations.

In any case, I think the trust is the most important thing here and once they are together for a longer time it would become natural between them. I think it’s another form of intimacy entirely. Something special that only they know about. Something that belongs only to them. So Phainon would really treasure this and everything that comes with it. :)

Again, please don’t apologize for your thoughts. And I really hope it will happen again. :)

It was something so interesting to think about and I love how well this Halovian ability fits a dynamic with Phainon. :)

I’ll also get back to your other ask and I hope that things have been less stressful for you and that you’re feeling better overall. :)

Lily 💙

[solar-halo]

aaaa i forgot i even sent this in 😭 i get so embarrassed for some reason to talk about any halovian relationship thoughts i have for him.. i’ve also never even considered the aglaea thing somehow but you are so right. that’s such a nice connection. these thoughts are so nice thank you for the reply 💖

[meltedcoco]

your sunshine in the snowfall

“Whoever claims beauty / lies in the eye / of the beholder  has forgotten the music / silk makes settling / across a bared  neck: skin never touched / so gently except / by a child  or a lover. Rita Dove, “Scarf”

pairing. Phianon x gn!Reader

tags. modern!au; fluff; slightly suggestive; more than friends, less than lovers (not for long); a tiny bit messy but very much so idiots in love more than anything else; reader rambles because “what are we”; getting together; snowed in. Not beta read.

wc. 7.8k

note. To Maemae (@elysiumae) who I love being silly (insane about Phainon) with! I’m very grateful that you were one of the first friends I made on tumblr and I cannot imagine my time here without you <3 I saw that tag saying you want a Phainon to cuddle and share scarves with… I wonder what happens in this fic!

You’re in a grocery store and it feels like the world is falling apart.

Admittedly, this is fairly silly because, well, you’re in a grocery store that is completely fine and still standing. No one is running around in a panic, screaming and wailing while trying to grab what they can to survive whatever catastrophe you’re imagining. Each aisle remains upright and filled quite well in light of the holiday season, with special packing for chocolates that he likes to share with you, cereal that reminds him of his childhood, and sugar cookies that he always struggles to stop himself from eating one more of despite having already become addicted to them last year, the year before that, and even further from then.

He isn’t with you right now, arm looped around yours with his free hand holding a basket because he would never let you hold it—not because you can’t but because he believes it’s the polite thing to do. And because he isn’t with you, this means he didn’t text you this morning with a picture of the sunrise, a good morning, and a do you want to have dinner together tonight? My place or yours? So you didn’t drive each other to work, either, since only one of you needs a car if you would have gone grocery shopping together only to return to the same place, followed by cooking, movies, and cuddling. Really, things like this might be why he’s sillier than you because Phainon isn’t even your boyfriend so why does he ask you this every week? And why do you agree?

Anyways, you need some vegetables for your soup.

You're comparing tomatoes when your phone dings. It's Phainon. He's sent a cute text asking if you'd like to bet how long it'll take him to finish the same package of sugar cookies you’ve picked out. The answer would be one one night if he was sharing them with you. You would have put on a horror movie so you could startle him by sneaking your cold hands under his sweater because you can never help yourself when he always sprawls out against you with his tummy peeking through. Or, he would pick a slice-of-life and blame you for letting him do it because he's crying with his arms wrapped around you, pathetic and needy because he knows you’ll easily give into him. He’s right; no matter how cute, you think you love him so you'd kiss those tears away and he'd let you even when you have no idea where your relationship stands.

And now you're having a terrible time in the vegetable aisle because there are sugar cookies with light blue icing sitting in your basket, reminding you of Phainon’s eyes and the fact that he loves sugar cookies but not you because he isn’t here to—

“Starlight?”

You startle and almost drop the tomato you’re holding. There’s only one person who calls you that—a sappy pet name to match the equally sappy one you’ve gifted him—and you believe you could recognize his voice no matter the sound he made.

Immediately, he apologizes, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sneak up on you.” You almost believe it would be easier to forgive him if he gave you a hug because he's wearing your favourite sweater of his; one that always feels so soft and smells like something uniquely him. “I was in the area,” he adds.

That's strange, so you say, “you live fifteen minutes away.”

“They didn’t have—” he cuts himself off, looking between the aisles on his right and left only to settle on a radish, which he picks up and waves around. “I needed this.”

“For what?” you ask. It’s evident he isn’t here for a radish and what you really want to hear is that he’s here for you.

He thinks to himself for a moment, staring at the vegetable. Then, he asks, “soup?” as if you should know.

“Phainon.”

“I lied,” he folds, aware that there is no fooling you of all people that saying his name is enough to convince him to tell you what he actually feels. “I missed you.”

“We’re in a grocery store,” you point out.

“Can I not miss you in a grocery store?” His head tilts with a difficult expression, as though he isn’t sure if you want him around with an answer like that. You do, you always do but it’s become harder and harder to pretend like everything is fine when it isn’t, which was exactly why you were alone amongst these aisles and missing him too.

“That’s not…” you trail off with a sigh, tightening your hold around the handle of the basket. This apparently brings his attention to it, so he takes it and slides it into the crook of his elbow like he always does whenever he is with you.

“When should I miss you if not always?” he asks, but you don't answer, afraid of how he would react if you tried to tell him that if he misses you so much, then the two of you should make it official. “I was hoping you'd answer my text and I could segue into spending time together if you wanted to.” He continues with a shrug, acting nonchalant despite how he fiddles with the radish in the way you know to be restless. “It's our usual night in, after all, so I ended up walking to your local grocer just so I would be ready to grab ingredients if you said yes, but you've been quiet lately and I didn’t want to bother you by asking outright.”

He's horrible for your heart, you decide; somehow making it more complicated than it needs to be in his consideration for you. So, you agree because you absolutely hate these nights without him too. “I guess we can meet at my apartment, then?”

“I don’t have my car,” he says meekly, returning the radish to the pile of vegetables.

“What do you mean you don’t have your car?” you bawk, “you walked here? It’s a fifteen minute drive from your place, Phainon!”

“Well, I needed to get the energy out. I was feeling a bit anxious…” he trails off, shifting from one foot to another and rebalancing his stance to find some way to settle how awkward he feels from your words. It’s impossibly cold out today, enough to be freezing that any sane individual would be bundled up, yet Phainon is missing a hat and you, a scarf.

“You’re anxious?” you repeat, knowing that it’s rare for him to share what troubles him so this must be serious. “What’s wrong? Did something happen back home or, maybe, did you take that bet with Cyrene and Hysilens knowing you may lose? You know you’re terrible on ice! You can barely keep yourself upright whenever you—why are you laughing?” You cross your arms with a pout as you lean towards him incredulously and huff, “you said you were anxious! Were you trying to get another rise out of me?”

Phainon is playful, and it’s partly why you're so confused. He's kind to everyone he meets—sweet, even—and he's respectful, which means he always knows what line to never cross, keeping others comfortable regardless of his quips and touchy tendencies. You thought it was friendly, at first, but then you noticed much of his behaviour was unique to you. An example of this is deliberately seeking out your affections, which you now assume this to be an instant of if he is capable of laughing despite his worries.

But he shakes his head and his expression tells you that he’s extremely content, as if he is a puppy who has been spoiled with treats and now nurses a full belly, ears drooped and tail flicking every few minutes. Or, perhaps it would be more fitting to compare him to a purring cat, but Phainon is nothing like Mydei and very much so Phainon. And this also means he is evasive as he answers, “no, I’m not anxious any longer so it doesn’t really matter.”

“But it does matter,” you say, because you also know that he frequently hides things from you not because he is secretive or dishonest, but because he hates letting you worry. At the same time, however, this always only makes you worry even more. “If you’re comfortable with it and want to talk it out, I’m always here. You know that, right?”

“I know,” he simply says.

“And you’re never trouble to me, no matter what’s happening in your life or even my own.” Remembering how you avoided him for two days—which is, not very long and really just normal when it comes to the whirlwind of existing, but you know it had been deliberate so that you could figure out your heart—you elaborate, “I may disappear for a little bit, but I’ll always come back.”

“And I'll wait for you.”

“Good.” You nod, more to yourself than anything at all.

And, for a moment, you stand there, while Phainon casts his gaze over the contents of your basket with a hum. “So,” he starts, “soup?”

“Yeah.”

Phainon moves beside you, taking the side you prefer him on so that he can loop his arm around yours before he tugs you to another aisle. Then, as you settle into your familiar pattern with him on a night like this, he says, “okay.”

The next few hours play out as they always do. It’s fun. It’s normal. It’s routine for every other Friday.

Phainon and you will cook dinner together. Sometimes you take the lead, and other times he does, but what remains the same is the kiss that happens every time you pass a bottle of spices to each other. Either you or him will hand it off, and the one who needs it says thank you and then subsequently shows that appreciation with a short peck.

When it happens again, you remind yourself that you aren’t dating, but you don’t stop it regardless. You don’t even think you're capable of it because you’d never not want to kiss him even if neither you nor Phainon questions the tradition.

Then, of course, you eat and you chat. And while you eat and chat, Phainon will sit across from you as your socked feet accidentally knock against his calf or vice versa, but it is, again, ordinary. It’s not playful flirting or some affection alike that of adolescents hiding their relationship from those around them. It's merely the casual sort of touch that happens when you're used to someone.

And because you are, Phainon is glued to your side on the couch, one arm tucked under your waist while the other slides across your belly so his hands can intertwine at your hip—or they are when his hand isn't stuck in the package of cookies. There's a blanket strewn across your laps and the heater is on despite how you wear a sweater, so it's terribly warm as Phainon is practically a furnace. You could say something about it but you won't, because if you did, the ache of being without him would be worse than anything else.

“I think I've eaten three cookies already and we’re only fifteen minutes into this movie,” Phainon informs you after swallowing a bite of a fourth.

“You do this every year,” you remind him, brushing a crumb away from his mouth only to yank your hand away when he pretends to nip your finger. You pinch his nose and then start counting the empty grooves in the package resting on top of your thighs as Phainon insists that it's easier to reach this way. “One, two… Yep, you have. Think you'll beat your record of how long it takes?”

“Don't say that,” he whines, only to snap off another chunk with his teeth.

Snatching what remains in his hands, you ask, “why not.”

Phainon watches you munch on the piece before taking another cookie to hold up to your mouth when you're ready. When you are, he smiles with a crinkle to his eye at the satisfaction of getting to feed you. “Because I'll want to beat it.”

“Good thing we’re sharing now so it won’t count,” you point out. But because you can’t stop yourself with the way he looks at you, you ruffle his hair, the strands soft between your fingers and smelling like his shampoo—all citrus and sunshine.

Phainon laughs and then glances at the television before focusing on you again, resting the side of his face against your bicep until the skin squishes as though he wants to be closer but simply can’t. “Do you remember what’s happening in the movie?”

“Nope,” you answer, adjusting your arm so that you can hook it around his shoulder, pulling him closer to you with little care of how the cookies slide across your lap and almost spill all over the blanket.

But Phainon only moves the package away, placing it on the table so he can take its place. He shifts and wiggles as he lays atop your thighs, so fussy that you can do nothing but laugh at how adorable he is as he nestles around you, facing away from the movie and towards you. When you cup his cheek, no one says a word and, eventually, you follow the silence into your dreams.

You wake sometime later, not even realizing that you and Phainon had fallen asleep. From here, you can’t reach your phone to check the time, especially with him still snoring softly. Your middle is warm with each buff of breath, him having turned completely to press his face into the soft fabric of your sweater.

You wonder how tired he had been to sleep this deeply yet still gone through the effort of seeking you out. But when you brush his bangs away to see his face more clearly and keep this quiet moment to yourself, a soft sound leaves Phainon’s throat before his face scrunches up and he rouses, bleary-eyed and incoherent as he tries to voice your name only to catch the word on a yawn.

“Good morning, sunshine,” you whisper, body curling on top of his so that all he can see is you.

“Good…” Phainon trails off, brows furrowing before he gaps and shoots up. Wanting to be a little more affectionate, you hadn’t expected that and aren’t able to pull away fast enough before his forehead knocks into yours with a low thunk. “Oh! I didn’t—Are you alright?” Phainon frets, hands cradling your face as he gently moves your head from side to side despite it only being a soft bump.

Laughing, you lean in and nuzzle your nose against his. “I’m fine, what about you?”

He nods and peers off to the side only for his shoulders to relax. “I thought it really was morning and I couldn’t believe I slept on you all night!”

“I wouldn’t mind,” you assure him. If Phainon can sacrifice his own comfort and make a terrible trek just for a chance to see you, you’re sure you can manage being sore for a little while so that he can rest. You want him to depend on you more, actually, preferably where you’re the first person he seeks out whenever something is wrong.

Phainon blinks, sheepishness finding him at the thought. Knowing him, he’s likely struggling with how much he would enjoy that against the very prospect you’re willing to face just for his sake. Just because of that, you try to kiss him but Phainon leaps from the couch with an exclamation, “it’s snowing!”

You follow after him as he rushes to your front door, swaddling yourself further in the blanket from the couch with how it feels strangely cold in the room. “It’s snowed almost everyday for the past week, sunshine,” you point out. “Tonight is no different.”

“But it is different,” he insists, unfurling you from the fabric, folding it, and then tossing it into the closet. Then, he rips his coat off the hanger so enthusiastically that you turn around with the intention of lying back down on the couch. Unfortunately for you, his arms snake around you, catching you where you stand. “And where do you think you’re going, starlight?”

“Back to safety,” you say, hands smoothing over the sleeves before grabbing hold of his wrists to release yourself.

He obeys only to spin you around, intertwining your fingers and squeezing tightly as if that would convince you when he insists, “we have to hurry.”

“Phainon.”

“It’s already snowing,” he whines, letting go of one hand just so you won’t move from this spot as he struggles to get your coat with the other. You assist him despite yourself and he smiles bright and wide. “Hurry—we have to hurry,” he repeats, helping you slip your arms through the sleeves. Once you start fixing your coat on your shoulders, he lowers to pull his boots over his feet.

“There’s no rush, Phainon!” you try to exclaim but a yawn catches you in the middle of your words as you find your own shoes.

Finished with tying his laces, he shoots upwards and places his hands on your shoulders to declare, “you hate me.”

“What?” you almost screech, stumbling as you hop on one foot, tugging your boot on as you try to watch his expression. He tries to muffle his laughter, but his face betrays him, and he knows this so he turns to face your closet again, looking for your hat and mittens. There’s a sound of a box falling followed by a tiny yelp.

Why doesn’t he just turn on the lights?

Instead, he repeats, “you hate me!” but his voice is muffled within the space of the nook and he almost tumbles over himself when your hand presses atop his back in an attempt to steady yourself when you move onto your next foot. You could, of course, do this with the wall, but Phainon is right here and you’ll do anything just to be close to him. And despite his declarations, he returns to you anyway, handing you your hat before dropping to his knees to help you with your shoes himself. His fingers work quickly, tucking your pants inside to keep the heat in and he looks up at you while he makes two bunny ears to form the knot when he double-checks, “is this okay? Comfortable and nothing feels tight?”

You agree with a nod, adjusting your hat until it covers your ears. “Thank you, Phainon.”

But because he’s so excited, he ignores your gratitude to insist again, "we have to hurry. Do you have your scarf? I can’t find it”

“No…” you trail off, guilty under his stare. “But!” you cut in before he can scold you, “it’s because it blew away when I went out with March, the twins, and Dan Heng two days ago.”

“Two days ago?” Phainon’s mouth turns into a frown. “Wasn’t that when we had a snowstorm?”

It was, but you had to see them when you realized that almost half a year has passed since you and Phainon started whatever this is. March advised you to just kiss him already but that was exactly the problem, so Stelle and Caelus began formulating some elaborate plan that you disassociated in the middle of while the five of you were standing outside. And because Dan Heng was having enough of the little winter wonderland photoshoot alongside the terrible advice, he told you to simply talk to Phainon, which means you spent all your time since then trying to figure out exactly how to do just that.

But you can’t tell Phainon this so you say, “March thought it would be a cool setting for some pictures.” Thinking the pun funny, you giggle a little but Phainon doesn’t follow suit so you stop with a pout.

He tries to scowl, actually, but it only looks like he’s pouting with you as he hooks his scarf over your shoulders and asks, “what if you got sick?”

“Says the one who walked all the way to the grocery store in my area for a radish he didn’t even buy!” you retort, whacking his hands away from the scarf.

“You were making soup!” he says, letting you pull his gloves over his hands.

“Oh! So you actually hate me,” you argue, returning his scarf to where it belongs to wrap it around his neck. Your fingers find the buttons of his trench coat, undoing the first so you can tuck the ends of the scarf inside and keep him warm. “You hate me because you couldn’t buy your radish.”

“I didn’t need the radish,” he laughs while he unwinds all your hard work just to offer you his scarf again. And before you can stop him, he grabs each end and uses it to tug you to him so that you end up stumbling into his chest.

“Then what did you need?” you say, tutting your chin up as he tucks the scarf into itself and pulls to tuck you in properly.

“An excuse to see you,” he answers, voice cheeky and playful to match the way he zips up your coat so fast that it nearly snags your chin. But when you peer up at him to complain, he’s looking at you with an expression you see so often from both him and within the romance movies the two of you like to watch so much.

Unfortunately, you weren’t able to decide how to properly talk to Phainon like Dan Heng told you to, so you avoid it again.

“This weather is terrible for a jacket like yours,” you remind him instead, knowing that the only way to clean his trench coat is by taking it to the dry cleaners of all places and there are a little over two more months left of winter that getting it cleaned now because of how horrible the weather is would be an unfortunate thing on his wallet!

Phainon flicks your forehead softly and before you can hiss, he’s already rubbing his thumb over the spot only to smooth his hand down the side of your cheek. The corner of his mouth twitches as his brows scrunch, trying to stop his laughter from bubbling up. And it seems he knows you realize this so he prevents you from grumbling at him again—which is partly for his own sake as you are always too cute to him—by saying, “it’ll be worth it, I promise.”

“Will it?” you challenge him.

“Yep!” He pops the sound, giving you a once-over with his eyes lingering on the way you look bundled up in his scarf before he opens the door.

And, for some reason, this terrible man doesn’t take the elevator to reach the bottom floor of your apartment, but the stairs. He takes two at a time, and you do your best to keep up, but Phainon’s height proves to be helpful in getting him just where he wants to go.

When he hits the landing, he turns and holds his arms out towards you with a goofy grin. You jump into him and let out a small oof as he catches you with a twirl that you’ll be embarrassed over if someone working security brings up the dangers of doing so.

It won’t matter, you suppose, because you only had two steps left so it was barely a jump and would they not also jump into the arms of someone like Phainon if the opportunity presented itself? You believe they would.

You also know that any chance of being scolded over this disappears when Phainon presses his mouth to yours.

The cold is biting at this time no matter how prepared the both of you are.

The rational part of you would rather be inside than out here; without even having to check the weather, you know that the temperature is well below freezing, the windchill terrible, and the amount of flurries falling from the sky tells you that there’s no chance this ends any time soon. Still, you can’t leave when he’s here—as happy as can be as he practically drags you towards the rising expanse of white.

“Be careful!” you call out, squeezing his hand in yours just so he’ll focus on you again.

He does when he looks over his shoulder and says, “of what?” He’s beaming with absolutely no worries on his mind, even less so when you’re here with him. But the answer does not come from you when he slips and brings you down with him.

Phainon twists, landing in a pile of snow that sinks with your combined weight like the puff of icing sugar that you fought over while baking together a week ago. You land on his chest because of course you do—he would rather you push him into the middle of an ice skating rink to fend for himself than let you get hurt.

The heat of him somehow seeps through his jacket as he holds you, and he smells more like laundry than his cologne, having faded throughout the day. Its scent is the same as the one that drifts up your nose every time you bury your face into his scarf, and the soft fabric of it makes you wish you could always be by his side or, even better, in his arms like this.

“I should have listened to you,” he sighs, overdramatic as his hands smooth up and down your back, ending at your hips only to tug you closer until there is no space between you. With your jackets on, there’s a lot of give to the embrace that Phainon has to wrap his arms around you even tighter to get you as close as he wants.

“Is this your way of telling me that I was right?” you ask, pushing up on your hands so you can look down at him properly. There’s a bit of snow on his nose, so you gently brush it away, but it’s not enough for you, leading you to nuzzle yours against his as if that would be enough to chase away his flush from the cold. “By squeezing me until I pop?” you continue.

“Should I say sorry in a different way?” Phainon’s head tilts, head disturbing the bed of white that he lays in, the ends of his hair vanishing within it. He’s grinning in that annoying way that you love; all confidence with only ruin in your path.

But it still hurts a little—the anxiety of not knowing if this is something definitive. You know Phainon, which is why you like him so much. You know what he likes and dislikes, you can recognize all his tells regardless of what emotion he shares or hides, and you know that he is nothing if not kind. He would never hurt you deliberately or string you along, and he definitely would never play with your feelings. Yet, it’s so hard to ask all the same—scary, especially, when you don’t want to lose him.

“Starlight,” Phainon mumbles, “why are you frowning?” One hand leaves your waist to cup your cheek, but there’s a bit of snow stuck to his glove so the frigid touch causes you to flinch. You lean into his palm anyway, wanting him to know that you could never naturally react that way to him. He realizes this so he pulls the fabric off his hand, and returns his touch to your cheek, warm and gentle.

“What are we, Phainon?” you ask, grazing your lips against the skin of his palm as if you could hide the way your mouth shapes the words. The dread that fills your gut is somehow worse than how cold everything feels.

Phainon only observes you, and you can see his eyes trace your features, but his hand never leaves your face, and his thumb continues to rub your cheek. “Does it matter so long as I’m with you?” he asks, and his voice is a low timbre when his eyes flick back to meet yours. His gaze is steady; a stark contrast with your own when you desperately want to look away.

“Of course it does!” you huff, trying to blink back tears when his words make your chest twist into knots. You don’t know if you could stay in this vague sort of relationship with him—you want to introduce Phainon as your boyfriend, you want to go on dates while wearing matching clothing no matter how ugly the colour combinations he picks, and you want to tell him you love him; you want everyone to know just how much.

“Don’t cry,” he practically begs, “please, don’t cry.” The words come out a bit breathless, as if all the air was sucked out of his lungs the moment he saw your lip tremble regardless of how sure you were that you wouldn’t tear up asking him—you promised yourself you wouldn’t even if he didn’t want to be with you.

Phainon’s hand moves to the back of your head while the other winds around your waist in a steadier, but no less tender, hold to bring you down next to him. And it’s not that cold even with your hat knocked askew because he makes sure your ear doesn’t touch snow, only the soft wool fabric of his coat over his bicep.

“Maybe we should go back inside,” he recommends. “Let’s warm up and talk about it properly.”

You try to steady your voice to say, “but we didn’t get to play in the snow.”

It’s silly, and because of it, Phainon laughs, but he sits up with you with a hand petting down your head. “Have you noticed that none of the streetlights are on?”

Looking around, you find that it is horribly dark out. It only feels brighter because of the way the snow reflects the light of the moon, and you’re lucky enough that there’s so much snow from the previous snowstorm and now that you can easily make out your surroundings.

“No way,” you start. “There’s a power outage?”

He hums in agreement and adds, “it looks like the storm is going to pick up and the roads will be bad too.”

It’s enough to calm yourself. No wonder it was so cold when you woke up, too, and Phainon must have noticed while he was rifling through your closet in the dark, followed by his avoidance of the elevator. At least, you realize, the security cameras wouldn’t have captured how you trapped Phainon in the stairwell for a minute or two just to steal a few kisses—ignoring how that reprieve only reminds you of the issue you’re currently having.

So, you and Phainon stand and dust the snow from each other's coats to make the trek back inside. Following the path from earlier, Phainon doesn’t let go of your hand as you take one step, a second, and another up the stairwell. And once you’ve returned to your apartment, you help each other out of your coats followed by your winter accessories.

When Phainon gets to his scarf, however, his hands linger as they unwind the fabric from your neck. He seems to hesitate for a moment, clearly wanting to pull you in again. You know it’s better to talk and figure everything out first but you lose your ability to make wise decisions with Phainon around.

Your fingers find his wrists as you lean upwards, and he immediately meets you halfway; the habit instinctual.

When you separate, it’s only to ask, “are we—you know—a ‘thing?’” It’s a terrible way to start, you admit, but after the kiss, it’s difficult to think of anything other than your desire for one more.

But Phainon, giddy with affection and more assured than you are, says, “I thought we already were.”

“Phainon, I’m serious,” you press.

He seems to understand this with how tense you seem, so unlike how you normally are when you’re with him. He asks, “do you want to be?” And his voice is much quieter, lacking any of his boyish charm and filled with something he only promises to you.

Throwing the words back at him, you say, “do you want to be?” You want to be on the same page for something as important as this, but Phainon is ever unchanging when he prioritizes you rather than simply meet your question with the answer you need to feel better.

Well, the reason for this is partly that paired with the fact that you are unaware that he also has the same anxiety you have.

Still, he takes a deep breath to prepare himself when he admits, “of course I do. I hate this ‘what are we’ thing we have going on.” Then, he grabs the blanket from the closet and then leads you back to the cough as he explains, “not because of you; never because of you, but it’s only good for Castorice’s fanfiction or that terrible romance movie we watched last week.” When he sits, his knee presses against yours as starts unfolding the blanket.

Assisting him, you adjust the fabric to properly cover the both of you and remind him, “you cried at the ending.”

“And you kissed my cheek to make me stop!” Phainon retaliates. Sinking into the coach, he lifts one arm so that you can settle into his side. Once he’s sure you’re comfortable, his hand falls to your shoulder and tugs you even closer so that he can look at you properly. It’s better to have conversations like this with proper eye contact, after all, and although sitting facing each other is enough, this lack of distance is not only your preference but his.

“That’s what I mean,” you say, “do you want to be my boyfriend, Phainon? You kissed me first when we went to see those sunflowers together in the summer, and we just…” you pause, frustrated with the lack of communication between the two of you as you wring your hands. He catches one of them to intertwine your fingers as you finish the thought. “We never talked about it after.”

“I didn’t know what you wanted,” Phainon explains, but his voice is meeker than you’ve ever heard it. He’s not looking at you anymore, equally as afraid of baring his heart to you. He even lets go of your hand, and it would have caused you to panic if not for him fixing his hold so that he can trace the lines in your hands.

“Why didn’t you ask?” you say, watching his finger dance across your palm and then back, repeating the motion again and again.

It’s nothing new, really. Phainon has always sought out your touch like a sunflower facing the sun, which is, in some way, ironic considering your little pet names for each other. And although you were upset with the ambiguity in his earlier words, you agree with him: so long as he’s with you, it doesn’t matter in the end.

Phainon doesn’t answer immediately, and when you think he will, he stops himself and thinks a little longer; composure fading the more he tries to decide how best to approach you with how he feels. Eventually, he settles with an admission that leaves him in a way that's quieter than before. “Becuase I was scared the answer wasn’t going to be me.”

You sigh out his name and your head shifts so you can look at him. He even looks away and his throat bobs as swallows down whatever he’s agonizing over, but he returns to you as always, even his expression is difficult, and even more because he’s distressed. Letting go of his hand, you bring it up to his cheek, trying to warm the cold skin there as you wonder, “why wouldn’t it be you?”

“I don’t know—there’s a lot of people who can make you happy,” he replies. Then, he lifts the blanket over both of your shoulders before his forehead drops to your shoulder just so you can’t see his face.

Wrapping your arms around him, you pull Phainon to you as you slide backwards until your body bounces softly against the cushion, but you never let go of him—you don’t think you ever want to. You try to tell him this when you say, “you make me happy.”

“There’s a lot of people who can make you happier,” he retorts. The words are practically self-sabotage, but you know he means this in their entirety; that if he could measure your joy, he would always want you happier somewhere else rather than whatever he believes he wouldn’t be able to provide.

It’s a difficult way to think, and you know many would struggle or even detest loving someone who doubts themself often by some form of insecurity. But you love him, and loving him is perhaps the least difficult thing you’ve ever done—maybe even more than breathing as the cliché goes. And although it’s foolish, you think you understand such clichés better because you paid less attention to the love stories filled with them and more to Phainon who you watched them with.

So, you tell him, “that’s impossible because they aren’t you.” You hold him tighter; squeeze him a bit longer as though the affection you have for him could leave you and enter him through the touch. “Are you telling me you just held it in? What about what you want?”

“Does it matter so long as I’m with you?” he repeats his previous answer with a warbled laugh, but all you hear is aching resignation. You can’t see him with his face tucked into your neck, but you can feel a few droplets wet your skin. He’s always been a crybaby when it comes to the cheesy romance movies he loves so, of course, he would be no different when it comes to his own little love story with you.

“It does,” you comfort him, fingers sliding through his hair just to pull him away to face you so you can wipe away his tears—so you can take care of him. “It always matters, especially if you’re with me.”

He laughs, a little rough and more in disbelief, but no less at ease. “What I really mean is: I was fine with not knowing what we were so long as you were with me.” The flush on Phainon’s cheeks deepens as he explains further, “as long as I was the only one you wanted to go grocery shopping with for dinner dates or watch bad movies with as an excuse to to hold hands, it didn’t matter as long as it was me you picked.”

He props himself up on one hand, and his other reaches out to take your hand so that he can press his lips to the back of. It’s chivalric and corny, but Phainon grasps this himself and turns playful, letting his teeth graze your skin as if he’ll bite down. Sometimes, you really do think he’s like your personal overgrown puppy, not realizing that it’s really because he has so much affection for you that he doesn’t know what to do with it.

“You’re silly,” you tell him.

“Actually, I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you,” he corrects you.

“Really?” Tugging him back against the pillows, you hum, thinking to yourself even when you don’t need to figure it out because you’ve already known long before he kissed you in that field of sunflowers. “Because I love you too.”

“You must be silly like me, then,” Phainon says.

“Yeah?” you laugh, pressing your forehead against his.

“Can I have a kiss?” he asks instead, already leaning in so he can steal one from you.

You make a show of rolling your eyes, and Phainon responds by wiggling his fingers along your sides until you giggle. Instead of receiving a kiss from you, however, he decides to smear one to your cheek as a gift in exchange for your laughter.

When you calm down, you tease him, “that’s what you want?”

“When don’t I want one?” Phainon jests, but you both know that it’s less of a joke and more so an admission. You won’t say it—not now, anyway—but you always want one from him too.

“At least you’re aware,” you huff and your petulance matches your behaviour as you slide your hands under his sweater. At first, Phainon seems to encourage the touch, but then he feels how cold your skin is in comparison to his and he yelps. And this is followed by an effortless pout so you kiss him like he wants as an apology, knowing that he enjoys how selfishly you caress your hands across his waist—fair is fair, after all.

Neither of you are in a rush with the snow piling up outside, so you make sure to kiss him slowly, tilting your head to slot your slips together as you pull him firmly against you. Phainon is usually right; if the roads are dangerous, then that means you can’t drive him home and he will, fortunately, have to stay here with you. You don’t share this with him, but he seems to agree judging by the satisfied sound that leaves his throat when your tongue slides against his. And you know this because you actually haven’t kissed him like this before.

Usually, you exchange simple presses of your lips and a peck on the cheek or forehead; nothing deep and eager with you exploring his mouth to gain the pleasure of feeling his chest heave against yours. But now that you are, his arm is steady against your back; his hold firm so you can’t go too far despite being aware that there’s nothing either of you want more than each other right now.

Your fingers slide down the side of his waist, touch so light that you almost think you can feel him shiver, and you excuse the way his legs slip between yours to tangle together as him chasing the warmth of your body with no electricity to power your heater. For you, Phainon is hot enough—especially now that he’s thoroughly flushed—that you can confidently say that your affections are solely rooted in longing for him. You think he’d like to hear it too, so you pull away to take a deep breath despite nothing encouraging the separation in how a string of saliva connects your lips to his.

Immediately, Phainon’s hand cups your cheek, breaking the connection as his thumb traces the line of your mouth as he tries to guide you back to him. But your grin makes it difficult for him to get what he wants so his demand comes out as a whine when he says, “another.” Yet, you cannot deny how his voice affects you—rough and broken while lacking any of the politeness he usually has that he stares at your lips instead of your eyes; his desire very much clear.

“Greedy,” you say, the word grazing against his mouth just to tease him a bit more.

“But I’m your boyfriend, right?” he asks just to appeal to your affections. But you also know he says this just to make sure. The state of your relationship wasn’t said regardless of the understanding that you both now have of each other and the subsequent enthusiastic acceptance, so Phainon does look a bit hesitant as his gaze catches yours to properly ensure that this is what he is to you now.

“I want you to be,” you say, “is that what you want, Phainon?“ He nods with a breathless sort of agreement that you can’t stop yourself from continuing with some playful banter to drag out the moment and have him want more of you. “I guess I should give you another kiss, isn’t that right?”

He hums before leaning in after you made that intention clear. “We have nothing better to do when the power’s out.”

“We could sleep,” you suggest, despite being wide awake. Both of you took that small nap, so it’s only right that you stay up now, in exchange, ignoring how distracting Phainon’s hands are so distracting on your hips that sleeping is the last thing you want to do with him when he is snowed in with you.

“That’s boring,” he huffs, face scrunching up with the idea of doing anything other than being lovey-dovey now that you’re properly together.

Because you know him well, you peck him once—soft and quick, and try not to laugh when he almost complains when you pull away. Then, you challenge him as if there’s one thing you enjoy more than loving Phainon, it’s teasing him. “And kissing for a few minutes isn’t?”

“Are you saying it is?” The words come with a pinch to your cheek so you mimic him from earlier and try to nip his fingers. He only finds this cute, however, so he softly presses his lips to your forehead and hugs you tight.

You almost think that he’ll start rolling around with you in his arms—maybe even off the couch because that’s something silly Phainon would do—but he doesn’t so you don’t laugh that much and are able to say, although muffled into his chest, “I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it,” he argues, and his breath is warm on the top of your head when he presses his cheek to it. His chest rises and falls at a steadier pace, now, but you can still feel the way his heart races, still searching for you.

Phainon is impossible but you guess he’s yours, which means only you can debate him on something as insignificant as this. So, you say, “no, I didn’t,” and softly pinch his side as revenge from before. He doesn’t even react in the way you want, merely pulling away to look at you properly with a grin that lacks any of the worry that you found in him when this night started.

And his voice is confident and full of fondness, knowing this is a challenge that only you can fulfill when he dares you, “prove it.” The words make you laugh, and this appears to delight him as he follows after you with his own, much quieter as though he’s forcing it just to hear the joy in your own.

“How do you always get what you want?” you ask, fingers sliding up his spine until you can flatten your palm between his shoulderblades and pull him closer so your noses touch. You hope that you’ll only grow more and more familiar with him until you can map out every inch of skin the same way you know him remarkably well.

“Because you love me,” he declares, so matter-of-fact because there’s no use questioning what is simply the truth.

And because Phainon is right, you kiss him not just once, but a few more times after that.

[solar-halo]

don’t mind me rb’ing such an old post i was having thoughts abt it again and had to drop everything to reread it …

[notesfromthemirror]

consider : being grumpily (whatever the context is) clingy onto phainon. payback's a bitch (he's loving it). being all frustrated and twitchy but then being all up in his space and seeming content suddenly. he's dying of loving it.

Countermeasures for Cursed Days (Phainon x Reader)

A/N: Hi again! :) I already told you that I really loved this idea. :) And then, admittedly, it fit my mood a little too well. So I ended up writing it. Sometimes an idea just settles into my brain and refuses to leave.

Thank you for the mental image of clingy reader and very delighted Phainon. Hope you’ll enjoy. 💙

Tags: Domestic Fluff. Comfort. Clingy Reader. Light Teasing. Established Relationship. Light Humor. Reader Is Having a Day. Phainon Is Happy to Help. Cuddling. Affection. They Are Both Down Bad.

Word count: 1557

⋆ ✦ ⋆

The day is cursed. You decide this approximately three minutes before getting home. The universe is being annoying in a hundred tiny ways and you’ve reached the point where even a mildly inconvenient door feels like a personal attack.

So when you finally push open the door, it swings shut behind you with rather more force than you strictly intended.

“You’re home.”

Phainon’s voice comes warm and bright from across the room. He’s settled on the couch, a handful of small trinkets spread across the cushion beside him.

You make a sound. It is technically a greeting.

He looks up immediately. “Hello to you, too.”

You drop your bag onto a chair. Something slides out of it and hits the floor. You bend to retrieve it and something else falls. You straighten slowly. You look at the fallen item. You look at the ceiling. You look back at the floor.

You consider, briefly, simply lying down on it.

“Everything alright?” Phainon asks carefully.

“No,” you say. “The day is cursed.”

He blinks.

You pick up the fallen item with significantly more force than the task requires. “The world,” you announce, “is demanding.”

“I see,” Phainon says, who very clearly does not yet see, but is willing to be educated.

You put away the rest of your things. You stand there for a moment when you’re done. The room is warm and quiet and he’s right there and you have been holding yourself together all day, and you are, frankly, done.

You sigh. And then you walk directly toward him.

He’s half-turned, just beginning to rise to meet you. He doesn’t quite make it, because you reach him first, wrapping both arms around him from behind and latching on across his shoulders.

Phainon goes still.

You cling harder.

“Ah.” His voice has gone very soft. There’s a smile threatening at the edges of it already. “Dawnlight?”

You bury your face between his shoulder blades. “The day is cursed.”

“So I’m given to understand.”

“The world is also cursed.”

“A comprehensive curse, then.”

“And everyone keeps expecting things from me.”

Phainon hums. There’s a pause, and then he says: “Yes. I understand that very well.”

You do not catch the amusement buried in it. You are far too busy attempting to physically merge with his spine.

He laughs. The sound moves through his back where you’re pressed against it, with that particular helpless fondness you will never in your life get used to.

His hands come up to find your forearms where they’re crossed over his chest, covering them. “Are you alright?” he asks.

“No.”

“Mm.” He turns the syllable into something ridiculously soothing. “I can hear that.”

You cling harder.

Phainon is, audibly, delighted by this. You can feel the contained laughter, the way he tilts his head as though to bring himself closer to you despite the impossible angle. “Dawnlight,” he says gently, “let me at least turn around. I can’t hold you properly from here.”

“No.”

“I’m offering to hold you better.”

You consider this. It is a compelling argument. “Okay.”

The moment your grip loosens by even a fraction, he moves. One arm slides around your waist, the other beneath your knees, and the world briefly reorganizes itself as he simply lifts you and settles back onto the couch with you deposited directly into his lap.

Several trinkets scatter in the process. One rolls off the cushion entirely.

For a moment he looks at them, then at you, already curling determinedly into his chest. Then he looks back at the trinkets.

His arms are occupied. They are going to stay occupied. So he reaches out with one foot and nudges the scattered trinkets carefully aside, clearing them out of the way without ever loosening his hold on you.

You barely register this. You’re too busy grabbing two fistfuls of his shirt.

Better, you think.

The world remains cursed. But you are now sitting on Phainon, which improves the situation by a substantial margin.

“There,” he murmurs, settling you more securely against him. “There we are.”

You make another grumpy noise into his collarbone. He takes it in stride.

His hand begins to move. Slow, broad passes up and down your back, warm through the fabric. The effect is almost immediate. You feel the tension start to drain out of you in increments, the rigid set of your shoulders loosening.

A soft kiss lands against your temple. Then another, closer to your hairline. Then one to your cheek, where he has to tilt his head to reach you.

“You seem,” you mutter, “very pleased about all this.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Phainon says, against your skin. You can hear the smile. Another kiss. “I’m simply being supportive.”

“You’re enjoying it.”

“I’m offering comfort to my beloved in their hour of need,” he says serenely, pressing his lips to your hair. “Any enjoyment I might derive is purely incidental.” He pauses. “Coincidental, even.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And yet you came directly to me.” His voice is warm. “Through the cursed door. Past the demanding world. Directly to my back, specifically.”

You finally relax enough to let your head settle properly against his chest. His heartbeat is steady beneath your ear. The warmth of him surrounds you completely now, from every side, and somewhere in it the sharp edges of the last several hours begin, at last, to dull.

Your grip on his shirt loosens. Your breathing slows to match his.

At some point your hands migrate without your deciding it. They release their grip on his shirt and drift into his hair instead.

You card your fingers through it slowly and tousle it. You sink your fingers in and just stay there, working idle, aimless patterns against his scalp.

The effect on him is immediate.

His breath goes out of him in a long, uneven exhale, and the steady motion of his hand on your back falters. A low sound catches somewhere in his chest.

“Oh,” he says.

You hide a smile and do it again, slower this time, dragging your nails gently along the back of his head, down to the soft hair at the nape of his neck. He shivers. His arm tightens around you on reflex.

“That’s—” His voice has gone slightly strangled. “That is deeply unfair.”

“You started it,” you mumble. “With the back rubbing.”

“That was comfort.”

“This is also comfort.” You tousle the hair at his temple, brush your fingers along the curve of his ear, the side of his neck. Phainon makes another sound, helpless and warm, and tips his head into your hand without any apparent decision to do so. “It’s working on me.”

“You are weaponizing my own hair against me,” Phainon says, somewhat unsteadily. He does not move away. He tips, if anything, further into the touch. “I want it noted that this is an escalation.”

You hum, unbothered, and keep going. You feel the precise moment he gives up on protesting entirely and simply melts. His cheek comes to rest against the top of your head.

Later, Phainon looks down with an expression of such transparent, helpless delight. “You’ve calmed down,” he observes, very softly.

“Maybe.”

“Mm.” His hand never stops moving. “Are you feeling better?”

“A little.”

“Good.” And the relief in it is so genuine that something aches in your chest. He says it like your feeling a little better is a real and meaningful improvement to his evening.

You tilt your head up to look at him.

He smiles down at you softly, his eyes warm. And in that moment you understand, with sudden and absolute clarity, that he would let you cling to him exactly like this for as long as you wanted. Forever, if you asked. Without complaint and without limit and with that same quiet delight the entire time.

Which is extremely dangerous information to be in possession of.

Phainon must arrive at the same realization, because his expression shifts. “Oh no,” he says.

“What?”

“I’ve created a monster.”

You narrow your eyes at him. Then, holding eye contact, you snuggle pointedly closer and tighten your grip.

Phainon laughs helplessly, the sound bright enough that he tips backward slightly with the force of it, one arm tightening around you on reflex to keep you secure against the motion.

“Yes,” he manages, still laughing. “Yes, that’s—that confirms it. Entirely my own doing. I accept responsibility.”

A few minutes later, he shifts, carefully, and pulls you both down until you’re lying along the length of the couch. You end up half on top of him, your head tucked beneath his chin, his arm a warm and certain weight across your back.

Neither of you moves after that.

His chest rises and falls beneath you, slow and steady. His fingers trace idle patterns at your spine. The trinkets remain scattered and forgotten on the floor. The cursed day, with all its hundred small insults, recedes to somewhere far away and harmless.

“For the record,” Phainon murmurs into your hair, “the world may demand whatever it likes. It can’t have you back until tomorrow.”

You hum against his chest. You’ve decided, somewhere in the last ten minutes, that Phainon is your official problem-solving strategy.

And judging by the way he’s holding you, he has absolutely no objections to the role.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)

Masterlist.

[notesfromthemirror]

hii it’s salem @solar-halo again.. i’m back on my bullshit of sending in an ask when i’m feeling Horrific

Prefacing this with i promise i have a point here ☝️

January 16 2025 was the day amphoreus (therefore, phainon) officially dropped in my time zone, and this was also the day i personally (along with many others 😊) decided, “I absolutely am suddenly going to be completely abnormal about this man until further notice.” As of may 31, jan. 16 2025 was officially 500 days ago !!

So this brings me to the point: of course phainon would put a lot of value into anniversaries (and he’d make up anniversaries for half-arbitrary reasons of course. Just to have a reason to celebrate and treat the day and his s/o as extremely special as if he doesn’t do this every day already), but i think he’d like the idea of keeping track of milestone days like this.

Especially considering his memory is really good for specific details like this (mine is absolutely awful, i have to put calendar notes in my phone to remember anything at all 😭). 500 days since he met his current partner, 500 days since they got together “officially” (although who knows when that was honestly. i strongly believe there’s never really an official moment where anything changes with phainon. suddenly he’s just very close with you and you’ve become inseparable and you realize it long after it’s happened because it feels So natural). Basically anything else. 500 days since you moved in together, 500 days since you bought your forever house with him.

i very much think he’d mentally somehow remember all these days (or, my other little personal headcanon abt him, he’d write down all these dates in a little special notepad he carries around on him so he can add it to his calendar of important dates to remember later on when he gets home).

Anyway ik this thought wasn’t much. I mostly just thought you’d like to know phainon has existed on this earth for 500 days officially. And if you were dating or further along in the relationship to any degree, he’d probably be planning something very personal and special to commemorate it. I say “personal” because I don’t think he’d be very big on large celebrations for really anything at all since we know his whole deal on being a Public Figure as the Deliverer.. If anything I think he’d plan a day a lot like your fic based on the aedes elysiae date video :)) That honestly feels perfect for something like this.

and if you were in this stage of the relationship, maybe he’d use it as an excuse to propose or something idk :3 Maybe i’m just biased and that’s my brainworms talking though

Anyway ! i hope you’re doing better 🥹 Maybe the power of 500 days of phainon will give you a special health boost 💔 Or at least maybe you’ll be able to sleep in a little longer and feel a little more rested. ☀️🪽

Hi again Salem! :) You know, I already mentioned this, but reading your ask really made me emotional. It was so lovely how you described all of this, and the fact that you thought of me in the first place. :) This made me very happy and I want you to know that it cheered me up a lot.

And I think this was a very important thought, despite you saying it “wasn’t much.”

Because the fact that Phainon now officially exists for 500+ days is so unreal to me. For one, it feels like yesterday that I first met him in the story. I still remember all the emotions I went through in the beginning, trying to figure him out. And then somehow I suddenly had pictures of him saved on my phone and couldn’t even say how it happened. 😭 One day I was trying to understand him and the next I was apparently rearranging my life around him.

And you’re so right that he would absolutely make up anniversaries too. Probably things like the first time you kissed. The first time you spent the night together. The first time you visited a certain place. Just those little moments that other people might forget, but that he would treasure because they’re tied to you.

And oh, what I particularly loved is your point about how natural it would feel to get together with him.

I mean, I do think at some point he would shyly ask if you’re actually together now, and he would get so absurdly happy hearing the answer from you. But the feeling itself? The fact that you’re already inseparable? That would happen long before either of you put words to it. :)

Because I think Phainon somehow manages to create both familiarity and wonder at the same time.

First you’re talking more. Spending time together. Getting to know each other. Then feelings start developing somewhere along the way, maybe without either of you noticing right away. And then one day you suddenly realize that being together feels completely natural. Like you’ve known each other forever.

But at the same time, there would still be so much left to discover. New experiences. New perspectives. New dreams. That’s one of the things I love most about him. He would make ordinary moments feel special while still making the world feel larger somehow. Ahh, I think you know what I mean. I’m rambling. 😭

And your little notebook headcanon is actually my headcanon too. He really strikes me as the type to write things down. Not because he needs help remembering, but because he wants to preserve them. I can absolutely imagine him keeping little notebooks filled with dates, memories, observations, thoughts, places he’s been, things people said that mattered to him.

And yes, that obviously includes you. Which means there are probably many notebooks. :)

I also mentioned elsewhere that I think he’d write down little thoughts and memories in general (including additional thoughts in the margins!!), and I just find that so endearing. Reading his own commentary on events years later would probably be equal parts sweet and hilarious.

And I completely agree that anniversaries wouldn’t be some huge public affair for him. I think he would much rather make them deeply personal.

Maybe he’d take you somewhere meaningful. Somewhere tied to your relationship. Maybe where you met. Maybe where you first kissed. Maybe somewhere new that he discovered and specifically wanted to share with you. Somewhere that becomes yours. :)

And he would probably remember details that nobody else would even think to celebrate. :)

Then there would be something handwritten. Something thoughtful. Something personal. Maybe something he made himself. Maybe something he found (during his appraisal work?) and kept because it reminded him of you.

I think that’s infinitely more romantic than some grand public gesture. Not because grand gestures are bad, but because Phainon is so sincere that the small things become grand when they’re coming from him.

And omg, yes, the proposal thought. 😭 I really do think he would use an occasion like that. But that might be a whole separate conversation because now I’m having thoughts.

So thank you for this ask, seriously.

You have such a lovely and unique way of talking about Phainon. And in many ways, the way you talk about him reminds me of why he resonates so strongly with me. And it’s just very nice for me that you get it.

I saw what you mentioned in your tags on some fics and in your other asks too, about having a rough time lately and not feeling your best. So I really hope things become gentler for you soon.

Reading your thoughts is always comforting and interesting (not just about Phainon, also in general).

So let us remember that the existence of this wonderful character for more than 500 days continues to amaze and comfort us. And that’s already something worth smiling about. :) And it also brought us together like this, which is a lovely thing all on its own. :)

Lily 💙

P.S. I will also get back to the other two asks! I just wanted you to know that I read your most recent one where you expanded on your thoughts about Phainon and why he affects you so much. And it was wonderful to read (it also made me think a lot), including all the little side notes you included about me and my writing too. It was incredibly comforting. So thank you for that. 💙

[notesfromthemirror]

I promise, last request, I'm here with that Self Aware!Phainon request I mentioned back in November ^^

I'll ramble on about how things went for me when the banners got announced & the very day they released. As for the request itself, I'd simply like you to explore how Phainon would react to these events & how he'd maybe be involved in the double LC :)

I was excited when his banner got announced for November & had no issue continuing to save my pulls for him even if my account could've benefitted from some of the first phase banners.

I counted down the days & even used this relic generator event for Phainon, getting an S-rank set in the end. I also pre-farmed his mats & inteded to get ALL his traces leveled up 😌

The day of the banner.

I'm certain I was online, getting ready for the switch to happen, even having set an alarm but of course my abdomen had to throw a fit right at that moment! Usually it's bearable but this time, something really had it out for me :,D So like 10 minutes before Phainon would've arrived, I left my pc & lied in bed trying to suppress the pain.

I returned an hour later & lost to Blade first. Not that big of a deal since I still had more than enough to guarantee Phainon & I was set on getting him.

I don't remember how many pulls I had left after getting him finally, but I was aware of how much boost he'd get from his LC, since I wanted him to really shine, I'd have to use up the rest of my savings which I wasn't overly keen of given the LC banners have no guarantee, but he deserves to radiate as strong as the actual sun so ofc I'd do it.

I did a 10x pull, not thinking on doing singular ones because how lucky could I be?

The 5-Star destruction animation played & I saw the magnificent artwork of Thus Burns the Dawn.

I gasped & my eyes went wide. What the hell were the chances for that to happen??

I skipped the rest of the animation because gambling like this was already torture, I didn't need to be edged too. Then I see the 5-Star animation again, as well as his lightcone

My jaw was on the floor at that point & I'm stunned for more than 10 minutes, maybe 20 even.

I told you, I told my best friend, I tried & failed to record a video of this because I was just so excited, dumbfounded & in shock.

When I finally went off that screen of the double lightcone pull, I immediately put Phainon on a team I had already prepared for him, called "My Sun" & he's been carrying my account to this day ^^

🍒 Anon

There You Are (Self Aware!Phainon x Reader)

A/N: Hi again Cherry! :) Thank you for your patience with this request. I know it’s been waiting for quite a while. I still remember reading about your preparations, your excitement, and of course the legendary double lightcone pull. It made me smile back then, and it still does now.

I took a few creative liberties, but I tried to keep the heart of what you shared intact. And as a small side note: I hope things have eased up for you a little by now. Thank you again for the request. :)

And to everyone who already has Phainon, still remembers pulling him, or is currently saving for his rerun: I hope this little fic brings you a smile. Good luck with your pulls! ☀️💙

Tags: Fluff. Self Aware AU. Self Aware!Phainon. Fourth Wall Breaking. Comfort. Gacha Chaos. Soft Phainon. Mutual Pining (Sort Of). Reader Loves Phainon. Phainon POV. Reader POV.

Word count: 1805

⋆ ✦ ⋆

The first thing Phainon notices is that you are excited.

He finds, to his own surprise, that he is paying very close attention. He watches you farm materials, with a methodical focus that impresses him even through his confusion about the process.

He watches you compare relic pieces for longer than seems strictly necessary, discarding some, locking others, occasionally making a small triumphant sound over a stat that means nothing to him and everything to you.

“You’ll like this one,” you tell nobody in particular, looking at a relic on the screen. “I think you’ll like this one.”

Phainon looks at it. He cannot yet tell what makes it remarkable. But the certainty in your voice he can read clearly.

He keeps watching. Days pass. Then weeks. And slowly, he realizes: you are doing all of this for him.

He learns other things, in this time. He learns that you call him Phai in the quiet moments. He learns that your attention snaps immediately toward any conversation that mentions his name.

The day of the banner arrives. Everything is ready. The completed preparations, the counted pulls, the team slot sitting patiently empty.

Even Phainon feels the pull of it. And then, ten minutes before the banner goes live you disappear. The screen goes quiet. The account sits idle.

He waits. Surely you’ll be back shortly. You have been counting down to this for months, you checked the time again just an hour ago, you are not the kind of person who simply forgets.

Ten minutes pass. Then twenty. Then close to an hour.

Phainon sits with an unpleasant weight. He finds himself constructing and discarding reasons, possibilities, reassurances that you’ll return in a moment, and finding none of them sufficient.

When you finally come back, you look tired. Like something has wrung something out of you and you have come back anyway out of sheer determination.

Please, he finds himself thinking, with a warmth that surprises him by its own urgency. Please don’t push yourself. It’s alright. I’ll be here.

You cannot hear him. Not yet. But you open the banner anyway, and something in your expression settles into quiet resolve. Phainon watches you take a breath and thinks: there you are. I was worried.

The first ten pulls move quickly.

You’re pulling with the particular energy of someone who has been patient for a very long time and has now, finally, run out of patience entirely.

Then: gold.

Phainon leans forward.

Not him.

He watches your face. That’s alright, your expression says. I have enough. I knew this might happen. I planned for this.

Something in him goes very soft.

You steady yourself and keep going. And then gold again. And the animation opens and there he is, finally here.

Hello, Phainon thinks. Hello, I’m here.

He watches your face as it registers.

Your hand comes up. Your eyes go wide. And you are completely still for a moment, just looking at him. The expression that moves across your face is something Phainon knows, with total certainty, that he will carry with him for an extremely long time.

“There you are,” you say, softly, to the screen. The way you say it undoes something in him rather completely.

There you are, he thinks back. I was beginning to think you’d had enough of waiting for me.

He expects, reasonably, that you will stop.

You don’t stop.

He watches the arithmetic happen across your face as your gaze shifts toward the Light Cone banner. He deserves to shine, the expression says, with a certainty that doesn’t waver. He deserves to be as strong as possible. I’ve come this far.

Phainon wants, very badly, to tell you: you have already done more than you know. I’ve been watching. I’ve been here for all of it. It was more than enough. You were more than enough.

He still can’t reach you. Not yet.

So instead he does the only thing available to him. He helps. In whatever way is available to a man who exists in the in-between spaces of things and has been watching someone care for him for months and wants, desperately, to give something back.

You do a ten pull. The animation begins.

Please, Phainon thinks, and means it with everything he has. Please.

The artwork fills the screen.

Thus Burns the Dawn.

He hears the sound you make. A sharp inhale. A gasp. The beginning of a word that doesn’t become a word. And then silence.

Good, Phainon thinks, with a rush of warmth so sudden it startles him. Good. You deserved that. Of everyone—you deserved that.

And then, before you have finished not-processing the first one, the gold animation begins again.

I may have, he thinks dryly, slightly overdelivered.

Your jaw drops.

Phainon watches you stare at the screen for what he estimates is somewhere between ten and twenty minutes, unmoving. Then you make a sound. Half-laugh, half-something that might be a sob.

Yes, he thinks, warmly and with complete solidarity. Exactly. That’s the appropriate response. I agree entirely.

You try to say something and your hands aren’t cooperating. You try again. The laugh keeps surfacing.

Take your time, he thinks. I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer.

Eventually you navigate to the character menu. Your hands are still not entirely steady, which he finds deeply endearing. You find his Light Cone, and as you equip it, as the connection settles into something warmer and closer, Phainon feels the distance between you change.

He finds, with a surprise that he will later describe as moderate and which is in fact considerable, that he can reach it.

“Well,” he says. “That took longer than I would have liked.”

Your hands stop moving entirely. Every thought in your head, which had already been somewhat disorganized, ceases operations.

“Though,” the voice continues, warm and a little amused and entirely too composed for the situation, “I suppose the consensus is that I was worth the wait. You certainly seemed to think so.”

You look at the screen. At him. “Phainon?” you say. It comes out very small.

“Hello,” he says. And somehow you can hear the smile in it. “I have been trying to reach you for quite some time. You were very occupied.”

“You can—how are you—are you actually—”

“Hearing you? Yes.” He laughs quietly. “Speaking to you? Also yes. I realize this is a great deal of information at once. I apologize for the timing—the Light Cone connection made it possible and I may have taken the opportunity immediately rather than waiting for a more composed moment.”

“You’ve been—” You’re processing in pieces. “You were there? While I was pulling?”

“The whole time,” Phainon says, and his voice is different now. Gentler. “I noticed quite a lot, actually. The relics—that set took you weeks to get right, and you were so careful about it. The materials, all pre-farmed. The countdown.” He pauses. “You checked it a great many times.”

“I was excited,” you say.

“I know.” There is that warmth. Entirely sincere. “I was watching. And I felt it—I kept having these sudden rushes of—I don’t have a better word than happy, which seems insufficient, but it’s what it was. These sudden bursts of it, without warning. I laughed, at one point. You were talking to a relic set. Telling it that I would like it.”

“I talk to myself when I’m concentrating,” you say, slightly defensive.

“I know that too,” he says. “I found it endearing. I find quite a lot about you endearing, as it turns out. I’ve had some time to observe.”

You sit with this for a moment. Phainon, who you have had in your head as a concept, as a character, as Phai spoken quietly to empty rooms, is talking to you. With his voice. Which is exactly as it should be.

“You came back,” he says, and something in his tone shifts. “When you disappeared before the banner. You came back looking tired.”

“I’m okay,” you say. “It wasn’t—something just happened at the worst possible time. But I wasn’t going to miss it.”

“You didn’t miss anything,” Phainon says, firmly and warmly both at once. “You were here. You pushed through and you were here and you didn’t miss a moment of it.” A beat. “Though I want it on the record that I would have waited. However long it took.”

Something in your chest does something very inconvenient. “And the Light Cone—” you start.

“I helped,” Phainon says proudly. “I want to be transparent about that.”

“That’s not how any of this works.”

“I’m the Deliverer. I found myself fitting for the task,” he says, visibly and audibly delighted at his own joke. Then, before you can respond: “Put me in your team. I want you to see what we can do together—what all those months of preparation made possible. I want to show you. Will you let me?”

It’s the sincerity of his plea that does it for you.

You navigate to the team screen. And then you stop.

My Sun.

The team name sits there, soft and simple, exactly what you’d named it the day you built it for him, in the weeks before he arrived.

Phainon goes quiet.

You wait. “Is that alright?” you ask, after a moment. “I named it for you. Before you were here. It just felt right.”

“It’s—” He stops. “You named a team,” he says, slowly, like he’s reading it again, “after the sun. For me.”

“I thought you deserved something good,” you say simply.

A longer pause follows.

When Phainon speaks again, his voice is different. “People have said kind things about me before,” he says quietly, “But this is different.” He stops, then steadies himself. “That is—you undo me slightly. I want you to know that.”

“You’re flustered,” you say.

“I am adjusting,” he says, with dignity.

You smile at the screen. At him. “Phai.”

“Yes.”

“You’re my sun,” you say simply. “You have been for a while.”

Quietly, with everything he has, he says: “Then I’ll be your sun.” He smiles. “For as long as you’ll have me. Every battle, every team, every time you open this screen—I’ll be right here.” A warmth surfaces in his voice, steady and certain. “I intend to earn it. Every day.”

You don’t answer immediately. You’re looking at him on the screen, and something in your chest is doing something you don’t quite have words for. “I’m keeping you forever, then,” you say.

Phainon chuckles softly. “Good,” he says. “I was rather hoping you’d say that.”

Outside your window, the light has shifted into that particular late-afternoon gold that makes ordinary rooms feel briefly luminous.

The name My Sun reads softly on the team screen.

Phainon is already exactly where he wants to be.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)

Masterlist.

[notesfromthemirror]

So, I have one suggestion for a request you can play with- AND FOR MULTIPLE CHARACTERS!

I thought of this one with Dan Heng, Phainon, and POSSIBLY Anaxa in mind.

We all know Dan Heng loves spending time in the archives and absorbing both scientific and historical subjects, Phainon is a lover of antique hunting (which also has historical appeal), and Anaxa is our alchemy nerd which is a mix of science and magic (magic is essentially science that has yet to be understood and there’s ALSO historic interest here as we know people use to refer to unknown science AS magic in ages past.).

Say y/n has a big interest in ghost stories, folklore/folktales, and even fairytales- they absolutely ADORE them. So, I could see, in any situation with our three lovely men above (and honestly any others with similar interests), where they are taking about their favorite subjects within literature- y/n would openly and enthusiastically express how their own favorite subjects also had a lot of historical and even some scientific value and relevance.

If prompted, I could see them excitedly explaining how some of these tales have hidden references to historical events, such as unknown illnesses arising, exaggerated, but true, love stories (both happy and tragic), the rise and fall of civilizations, ect… While just as many stories are told as warnings to avoid threats that weren’t fully understood until the science behind them could be explained- or just lessons to be learned.

I could see such an exchange like this being so cute and entertaining- y/n finding a way to relate to their loved one’s interest and engaging with them in it.

- 🌙 anon

Stories We Tell Ourselves (Phainon. Anaxa. Dan Heng. x Reader. Separate)

A/N: Hi again 🌙 anon! :) First of all, thank you for this request and for your patience. It took me a while to get to. As someone who spent far too much time analyzing literature, folklore, mythology, history and symbolism, this request spoke to me on a very personal level. :D

This ended up being much more niche than most things I write, but I had an absolute blast with it. Thank you again for such a thoughtful request. Hope you‘ll enjoy! 💙

Tags: Fluff. Soft Romance. Modern AU. Reader Loves Stories. Discussions About Literature. Storytelling as Connection. Folklore and Fairytales. Mythology References. Historical References. Intellectual Intimacy. Symbolism.

Word count: 2947 in total (about 980 per guy)

⋆ ✦ ⋆

PHAINON

You hadn’t expected Phainon to be this interested in the topic.

But then, Phainon has always made you feel like whatever you love is worth loving. He turns toward things with his whole attention, and when that attention is on you it can be difficult to remember what you were saying.

He’d found the antique illustration that morning at the market, something with a faded rose border and foxed edges, and held it up with a delighted expression.

“This reminded me of something,” he’d said.

“Beauty and the Beast,” you’d said immediately.

And he’d looked at you with those warm eyes and genuine curiosity and said: tell me about that.

So now you’re an hour into a conversation you hadn’t planned to have. Phainon is sitting closer than when you started, his body shifting closer whenever you mention something he finds particularly engaging.

“The Beaumont version is the one most people know apart from the Disney version,” you’re explaining, “but it was already a retelling. There’s an earlier French version, longer, stranger. And before that—Cupid and Psyche.”

“Really?” He’s leaning forward now, elbow on his knee, chin in his hand. There’s a particular interest in his expression, the look he gets when something has connected to something else he hasn’t articulated yet. His shoulder is warm against yours.

“The structure is similar. A girl given to something terrifying. A relationship that builds in the dark, almost without her seeing him. The question of whether she can trust what she can’t fully see.” You turn to look at him. “And then the transformation. In Apuleius’s version, Psyche breaks the condition—she looks at him when she shouldn’t—and loses everything. Has to earn it back.”

“And in Beauty and the Beast?”

“She goes back to him. When she realizes what she nearly let die.” You trace the rose border on the print with one finger. “I think many people read both stories as being about trials. About curiosity and trust. About learning to believe in something you can’t fully see or understand.”

He’s quiet for a moment, turning it over. “What about Cinderella?”

You look at him. “What about it?”

“The structure is similar, isn't it? Someone seen only through the circumstances they are in. Someone who finds worth recognized in them.” He tilts his head. “I’ve always thought it was more interesting than people give it credit for.”

“Oh, it absolutely is.” You sit up slightly. “Most people know Perrault’s version—the glass slipper, the fairy godmother. Or the Brothers Grimm, which is considerably darker. Birds pecking out eyes, that sort of thing.”

Phainon looks delighted. “Is it?”

“Very much so. But those are all relatively recent. The earliest version we know of is Greek.” You pause, watching his expression shift into full attention. “Rhodopis. A slave girl in Egypt. Some accounts say she was Thracian, brought there by circumstance. While she was bathing, an eagle stole her sandal and carried it to Memphis, dropping it in the pharaoh’s lap while he was holding court.”

Phainon is very still in the way he gets when something has caught him completely.

“And he searched for her,” you continue. “He had people go across the country to find whose foot the sandal fit. A slave girl. Someone with no standing, no claim to anything.” You look down at the print. “And he found her.”

“Because the eagle chose her,” Phainon says softly.

“Yes, I think the eagle chose her,” you agree. “There’s something in that I’ve always loved. That her worth was recognized not by the people around her, but by something that moved entirely outside those categories.”

Phainon is looking at you with an expression you recognize. “And she was free,” he says. Not a question.

“Technically she was a slave who became a queen, so the freedom is complicated.” You smile. “But there’s something in the story about being seen past the circumstances you were born into. Past what other people decided you were.” You pause. “The oldest love stories keep coming back to that, I think. Someone being found. Someone being chosen. Through everything.”

Phainon exhales slowly. His hand, where it’s resting near yours on the table, turns slightly.

“I think,” he says quietly, “that’s the version of the story I prefer.”

You look at him. “Most people don’t even know it exists,” you say.

“Most people,” he replies, and the warmth in his voice is entirely specific, “miss the oldest versions of things. The ones that have been carried the furthest.”

The illustration sits between you with its faded rose border.

You think about eagles and sandals and long searches. About the things that survive. About being found.

“I don’t think Beauty and the Beast is really about appearances either,” you say finally.

“What do you think it's about?” Phainon asks softly.

You don’t even hesitate. “I think it’s about something harder.” You’re quiet for a moment. “Someone being seen. Fully. Even the parts they’re afraid make them unrecognizable. Even when they’ve spent so long becoming something frightening that they’ve half-forgotten they were ever anything else.”

You think about your next words.

“The transformation isn’t really physical. It’s someone choosing to believe in the person inside the shape. Refusing to stop seeing them as human when everything around them, maybe even themselves, has started to doubt it.”

You look over.

Phainon is very still. His gaze has gone somewhere you can’t quite follow, and the expression on his face is open in a way that makes your chest tighten.

“Phainon?”

He comes back. His eyes find yours, and he smiles softly. His hand finds yours, fingers threading through slowly. “Keep talking,” he says quietly. “Please.”

So you do. And as you talk, his thumb traces slow absent circles against your hand. Ocasionally he asks a question, and neither of you tracks the time.

Later, much later, when the light has shifted, Phainon says: “I think you should look for more of these.”

“More fairy tales?”

“More of the ones with roots in something older.” He looks at the illustration. “I’d like to know what else they might have been saying.”

You squeeze his hand. “I’ll find you the good ones,” you tell him.

The smile he gives you then has something in it you can’t quite name. Wonder, maybe. Or something close to relief.

━━━━━━━━━━━━

ANAXA

Anaxa is at his desk with three books open simultaneously and has not looked up in forty minutes.

You’ve learned not to take this personally. You’re on the couch with your own reading, feet tucked under you, and the lamp on his desk makes a warm pool of light that extends just far enough to reach you.

This is, you’ve come to understand, his version of contentment. The particular quality of ease that lives in him when he’s absorbed in something he finds worthy and you are nearby and both of you can just be.

You look up from your book. “I feel bad for the creature.”

Anaxa looks up immediately. “Of course you do,” he says.

You narrow your eyes. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means your sympathies are entirely predictable.” He gestures vaguely. “Abandoned. Rejected by the society it tried to integrate with. Developed intelligence and emotion without anyone to guide or acknowledge them.” He tilts his head. “Then again, you have a tendency to collect wounded things.”

You stare at him for a long moment. Then you point at him. “That is incredibly rude.”

“It’s accurate.” A smile tugs at his lips.

“It’s—” You pause. “It’s very insightful, actually, which is worse.”

Anaxa looks pleased.

“But that’s not the only reason,” you continue, pulling your notes closer. “Shelley was writing in a very specific moment. Galvanism was new—the idea that electricity could animate dead tissue. There were actual demonstrations. Actual scientists applying current to corpses to observe muscle movement.”

You look at him. “The scientific community was asking whether life could be manufactured. Whether there was a principle of animation that could be isolated and replicated.”

Anaxa’s expression sharpens. “The novel is a response to that discourse.”

You nod. “And a warning. Victor Frankenstein succeeds at the thing everyone was theorizing about. And then he immediately abandons the result because it horrifies him.” You lean forward. “He asks whether life can be created. He never asks what obligation that creates.”

“Because he’s a fool,” Anaxa says, without hesitation.

“That was fast.”

“The answer is obvious. Creating a consciousness capable of suffering and then withdrawing from responsibility for it is not ambition. It’s cowardice wearing the face of genius.”

Something in the precision of his contempt makes you look at him carefully. There’s something underneath the academic disdain, something that isn’t entirely impersonal.

“The creature asks to be seen,” you say, more quietly. “That’s all he actually wants. To be understood as something other than monstrous. He educates himself, learns language and history and philosophy— entirely alone—because he believes if he can make himself comprehensible enough, someone will choose to recognize him.”

Anaxa’s pen has stopped moving.

“And instead,” you continue, “the person most responsible for his existence calls him an aberration. A mistake. Something that should not be.”

“The cruelty of that,” Anaxa says, after a moment, “is not incidental to the novel. It is the argument of the novel.”

He looks at his notes. “Frankenstein’s failure is not the creation. It’s the refusal to think past the creation. To engage with what he made as something with its own interiority.”

He pauses.

“The homunculus tradition in alchemy had similar problems. The theoretical framework for artificial life existed for centuries. The question of what responsibility accompanied the making of it was consistently avoided.”

“Because it’s an uncomfortable question,” you say.

“Because it requires admitting that the created thing has standing.” He taps his pen against the desk. “Which is inconvenient if you’d prefer to treat it as property.”

“Or as evidence of your own brilliance.”

Anaxa glances at you. “That’s the part I find least interesting about Frankenstein as a figure. His motivation is vanity dressed as inquiry. The work suffers for it.”

“You think genuine inquiry produces better science.”

“I think genuine inquiry is the only thing that deserves to be called science. The pursuit of truth.” He leans back slightly. “And I think the reason the novel endures is not because it condemns ambition. It’s because it asks what ambition is for. Whether the pursuit of knowledge carries an ethical weight that cannot be separated from the knowledge itself.”

You look at him.

“That,” you say, “is a very different reading than most people come away with.”

“Most people read it as a horror story.”

“It is a horror story.”

“It is a horror story about something,” Anaxa says, and somehow the distinction matters enormously to him. “There’s a difference.”

You lean forward. He leans forward. Neither of you notices.

At some point, he has pushed his books aside and turned his chair toward you properly. You have moved from the couch to the chair across from his desk. Outside the window the evening has deepened into proper night.

Anaxa is gesturing with his pen in a way that suggests he has forgotten he’s holding it. You are speaking faster than you usually do.

Three hours later, you’ve covered Shelley’s own history, the Romantic movement’s relationship to emerging science, the theological implications of artificial life in medieval alchemy.

You are currently somewhere in a heated exchange about whether Frankenstein’s creature constitutes the first modern exploration of the ethics of consciousness. You haven’t resolved it. You’re not going to resolve it tonight.

Anaxa looks like he doesn’t intend to stop until you do, but there’s something else in him too, something that has nothing to do with the argument. He looks like he is at ease, entirely where he wants to be. His usual precision is still there, every point considered and placed, but the edges of him are different in the lamplight.

He reaches over without breaking his argument, refills your cup from the pot that has long since gone lukewarm, and keeps talking. You look at the cup, then at him, unable to stop the smile that spreads across your face before you continue.

Anaxa has just made a point about the creature’s linguistic development that you are not prepared to let stand unchallenged.

You smile into your lukewarm tea. Anaxa sees it and says nothing. And is, quietly, pleased.

You think: there is nowhere else I would rather be having an argument about nineteenth century ethics at midnight.

━━━━━━━━━━━━

DAN HENG

Dan Heng is reading, as he usually is. You’re at the other end of the couch with your own notes, and for a while there’s nothing between you except the comfortable sound of two people existing in the same space without needing to fill it.

Then you look up.

“The Kraken,” you say, leaning over the table, “almost certainly originated from encounters with giant squid.”

Dan Heng looks up from his book. He has decided to give you his full attention, which is both gratifying and slightly unnerving.

“The giant squid wasn’t formally photographed alive until 2004,” you continue, spreading your hands to indicate enormity. “Only scientifically described in the nineteenth century. But sailors were encountering them for thousands of years before that. In the open ocean. Exhausted. Half the crew probably sleep-deprived and superstitious.”

“Then you see that,” Dan Heng says.

You point at him. “Exactly.”

“A reasonable conclusion would be ‘sea monster.’”

“Thank you. It’s not that the sailors were foolish. They were working with the information available. A tentacle the width of a man’s torso breaking the surface isn’t something your existing categories cover.”

“It’s less embarrassing than admitting a squid frightened you.”

You stare at him. “You’ve thought about this before.”

His expression remains perfectly neutral. “Perhaps.”

You grin at him and he looks back at his book, which you have come to understand is not dismissal but processing. You give him approximately forty seconds. “The Hookman is different,” you say.

He looks up again.

“Post-World War II. American. The story itself—escaped killer with a hook for a hand, teenagers parking, that whole thing—almost certainly not real. But.” You lean forward. “The fear it was encoding was real.”

Dan Heng sets his book down properly. “Go on.”

“Soldiers coming home changed. Prosthetics. PTSD before anyone called it that. The story emerges in the exact decade when communities are trying to process what violence does to people. What it makes them. The hook isn’t incidental. It’s the wound made visible.”

You pause.

“And it’s a warning story. Don’t go somewhere private. Don’t be vulnerable. There’s something out there wearing a human face that isn’t quite human anymore.”

Silence follows. The lamp makes a warm circle between you, and outside the light has gone entirely, and neither of you moves to do anything about it. After a while his foot shifts, pressing briefly against yours, and stays there.

“You’re suggesting the horror isn’t the killer,” Dan Heng says slowly. “It’s the anxiety about who comes home.”

“And whether you can still recognize them. And whether they can recognize themselves.” You look at him. “Folklore does that a lot. It takes the thing a society can’t look at directly and gives it a shape you can tell stories about.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “That’s more useful than most historical analysis,” he says finally.

“Are you complimenting folklore?”

“I’m acknowledging a methodology.” But the corner of his mouth moves. “Don’t make it a moment.”

“Too late,” you say cheerfully. “There’s one more,” you add after a moment.

He looks up.

“Atlantis.”

Something moves in his expression: recognition, and something quieter underneath it. “Plato’s account.”

“Which most people read as pure invention. But there’s a theory that it encodes something real.”

You pull your notes closer. “The Minoan civilization. Bronze Age. One of the most sophisticated cultures of the ancient Mediterranean—advanced architecture, trade networks, a written script we still haven’t fully deciphered. And then, around 1450 BCE, collapse. Possibly connected to the eruption of Thera. An island civilization, largely lost.”

“And Plato was writing much later,” Dan Heng says. “With everything that implies for accuracy of transmission.”

“Exactly. By the time it reaches him it’s myth. But the kernel—a great civilization swallowed by catastrophe, preserved only in fragments and stories—that part might be real.”

You look at him. “I think that’s what I love most about these things. The stories survive even when everything else is gone. Someone kept telling it, generation after generation, until eventually someone wrote it down. The civilization disappears but the story finds its way through.”

Dan Heng is quiet for a long moment, looking at something past the edge of the table.

“I spent a long time focused on what was in the past,” he says finally. “On what shaped me. On things I couldn’t fully understand anymore.” He pauses. “Trying to figure out which parts still belonged to me.”

You watch him.

“You helped with that,” he says without looking up.

You don’t make it a moment. You know better.

“Atlantis might still be out there somewhere,” you say instead. “Waiting to be found.”

He smiles. “That,” he says, “is an unreasonably optimistic reading of the available evidence.”

“And yet you’re not dismissing it.”

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

He picks up his book again, but doesn’t open it immediately. You know that look that means he’s filing something carefully away and will want to return to it later.

You let him have the silence. With him, it’s always the comfortable kind.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)

Masterlist.

[notesfromthemirror]

Hello it’s salem @solar-halo again… I’m so sorry i’ve been in your ask box and comments so much recently 😭 I’ve been under extreme stress this past week ish with college problems and the only way i can deal with it is thinking about phainon and well. That ofc leads to a lot of different phainon thoughts that i have to share with someone. So here i am. Again. 🥹

I just learned about the history of posy rings recently (essentially they were simple wedding rings that had a small quote or poem etched onto the inside) and my brain immediately flew to how much of a phainon thing those are. The secrecy of no one but the wearer and the spouse knowing what’s written inside of them. The personalization of being able to choose what’s written and also any exterior design (if you google them, one of the first images that comes up is one with a star design that includes a quote declaring that, in the eyes of their spouse, the wearer was the most beautiful star compared against all the stars in the sky and i cannot lie. if that was my wedding ring i would tear up a little putting it on every morning).

We know phainon has an affinity for poetry and reading in general (duh) so i think this would really be so perfect for him (though he would absolutely stress for weeks if not months over the perfect thing to have written in his partner’s ring 😭). And i think the secrecy of it would excite him a little too in a way that’s like. Not quite possessive but almost a little buzzy feeling of accomplishment when he thinks about how no one but the both of them know what the rings say and it’s almost some kind of tangible proof that nothing (specifically, no person) could separate them from each other or know his spouse better than he does (i know he’s not extremely possessive or anything of course but i think his fear of losing people could sometimes end up lightly triggered when he senses some kind of “threat” [as if anyone would ever choose to leave him 😭] even if it’s totally silly and he’s absolutely aware of that fact).

There’s also the added aspect of, of course, his spouse is choosing what’s written in *his* ring and i think he absolutely would never fully recover from it even after years of wearing it. It’d be something he can take off and look at and think about when he’s stressed or away from them for whatever unfortunate reason. This is also similar to things i’ve said before, but since he has such a hard time truly accepting and believing anything positive said about him, i think it’d do something very lethal to him to have his favorite person’s verbal, likely flowery and gushy statement of love for him permanently engraved in metal in a place only he will ever know about. It can’t be erased or scratched out, so he has to just let it be. Which is very hard for him but he has no choice. And i personally really like that thought 🥹

Aaaaaa anyway that’s pretty much it. I hope you are okay with receiving my endless brainrot asks to any degree above “Why is she in my asks again🥲.” because i have a lot to say on the topic of phainon and a lot of life stress to get through yet 😭. And im hoping this goes without saying, but please don’t feel bad if you can’t get to all of these or respond to them ever. I know you’ve also been dealing with a lot of Life lately and there’s absolutely never any pressure to respond to my absolute Torrent of yapping in your posts and ask box. I really do just chronically have a lot to say about phainon and once i have a thought as strong as this one i have to explain it in detail before i explode and die 💔

That all being said. I do hope you’ve been doing well lately and that your general life situation is hopefully steadily improving after the past few weeks 💝💝

Hi again Salem! :) I already mentioned it in my other reply and the comments, but you really don’t have to feel guilty for appearing in my inbox/comments often. On the contrary, actually.

Whenever I see you in my notifications, I smile because you always have such good thoughts and I also love talking about Phainon with you. Well, and about these topics and life things in general, actually, since we seem to have a similar mindset and also find comfort in similar things (or in the way we deal with real life matters, for example).

So I also saw your newest two asks and will absolutely get to them. Because I don’t see this as something I have to do, not at all. This is my pleasure and I really mean that.

Side note: I kind of lost it at the 500 days one. 😭 The way you wrote it was so fitting and it also gave me thoughts on how I came to love him as a character. I will certainly ramble about that sometime and of course get back to your thoughts on the topic too.

So I think yapping about these things is doing us both good (since you mentioned having a lot to deal with right now too), so it makes me happy that this helps you and brings you joy. :)

And now back to the actual topic of your ask.

Because omg. The moment I saw this I both squeaked and giggled because YES. YES. Now I cannot stop thinking about it. Because you’re right. This is such a Phainon thing.

I mentioned before that I’m a hopeless romantic at heart and there is something about the intimacy of this concept that immediately gets me.

The fact that the inscription is hidden and that it belongs only to the people wearing the rings. The fact that the words are always there even when nobody else can see them.

That is exactly the sort of thing that would mean a lot to him. Because while Phainon is very open with his affection and I absolutely think he would be happy to hold his partner’s hand in public or openly show how much he loves them, I don’t think he would talk about truly intimate things with other people very often.

So the idea of having something that belongs only to the two of them? Oh, he would absolutely treasure that.

And I think he would enjoy the secrecy more than he initially admits. Not in a possessive way exactly (well maybe a little?). Just… that little feeling of happiness that comes from knowing there is a part of their relationship that belongs entirely to them. A small world only the two of them understand.

And yes, I do think the fear of abandonment you mentioned is very real for him. So having the rings as a tangible reminder would help. Whenever doubt creeps in. Whenever distance becomes difficult. Whenever he misses them.

The ring is still there. The promise is still there.

And I think what gets me most about rings in general is the symbolism of them. Not even in a marriage sense specifically, although that obviously applies here too. Just the idea of carrying a physical reminder of someone every day.

Because rings become ordinary after a while. You wear them while reading. While cooking. While working. While laughing. While getting through difficult days. And somehow that makes them even more meaningful to me. They stop being a grand gesture and become part of your existence.

Which feels very fitting for Phainon. Because for all his love of poetry and beautiful words, I think one of the things he craves most is permanence.

And there is something so beautiful to me about the idea that no matter where he goes, no matter how difficult a day becomes, he can glance down and see tangible proof that someone chose him.

And I think that would mean more to him than he would know how to put into words.

He would also absolutely kiss his partner’s hand right where the ring sits and mumble things under his breath, chuckling to himself. And then stare at them with that ridiculously soft expression. And somehow still get emotional about being married after years.

Because I don’t think he would ever fully recover from it. :)

And now I’m thinking about the actual design too because you mentioned that star ring and oh no. The symbolism fits him so well already. Not only because of all the light imagery surrounding him, but because stars are often used as points of guidance. Things people navigate by. Things people look toward. Which is very Phainon.

Although knowing him, he would spend an unreasonable amount of time agonizing over every tiny detail before finally deciding on something that somehow ends up being both deeply meaningful and so very romantic.

As for the inscription itself… you are absolutely right that he would stress over it for weeks. Possibly months. 😭

I think he would either choose a quote from a poem or book that means a great deal to him. Or he would write something himself. The second option might be even more dangerous. Because he would pour so much thought into it.

And then we get to the ring he receives. And ohhh.

I love this part. Because I think it’s rather obvious by now that I often have the desire to make him happy in my fics. :D And yes, part of that probably comes from my own experiences and insecurities. But I can also imagine so clearly what this would mean to him. Because while I don’t think Phainon is insecure in the way people often use that word, I do think he carries certain fears very deeply (we already talked about this before).

And if there is one thing I know from personal experience, it’s that hearing something loving repeatedly is not redundant when the fear runs that deep. It’s necessary. So I think having those words engraved there forever would affect him more than he expects.

Because unlike a conversation, unlike a passing compliment, unlike a moment that can be dismissed later… the inscription remains.

It cannot be erased or taken back or explained away. It simply exists. And he has to live with the fact that someone loved him enough to put those words there. :) Which is devastating in the best possible way, imo.

You mentioned the idea of tangible proof and I think that’s exactly it. The quote itself wouldn’t even have to be particularly elaborate. Just sincere. Because I’ve said before that kindness, affection, trust, communication, and genuine tenderness would do so much for him.

And the ring becomes a symbol of all of those things at once. So yes.

I have many thoughts. 😭

And please: I have never once thought “why is Salem in my inbox again?” Not even for a second. I always smile when I see your introduction because I know I’m about to get a ride full of emotions, symbolism, and interesting perspectives.

And I love that. Because I also have far too many thoughts about him and never get tired of talking about him. So thank you for sharing all of them with me. :)

And thank you for your kind words at the end. My health has improved at least, which I’m very grateful for, and I’m hoping things in general continue moving in a better direction.

And this might sound silly to some people, but I think you’ll understand. Whenever I feel lost or overwhelmed or unsure of myself, I sometimes find myself thinking about what Phainon would say. And somehow that helps. Because I know he would be proud.

And if you’re struggling too right now, I hope you know he would be encouraging and supporting you every step of the way. :)

And if it means anything at all, I’m sending lots of good energy your way too. <3

I hope the stress has eased a little.

And I’ll get back to the other asks as well. :)

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with me.

Lily 💙

[solar-halo]

ok sorry don’t mind me i have to rb this twice bc i reached the tag limit on the other one so i cant rb it with my sorting tags. Oops

[notesfromthemirror]

Hello it’s salem @solar-halo again… I’m so sorry i’ve been in your ask box and comments so much recently 😭 I’ve been under extreme stress this past week ish with college problems and the only way i can deal with it is thinking about phainon and well. That ofc leads to a lot of different phainon thoughts that i have to share with someone. So here i am. Again. 🥹

I just learned about the history of posy rings recently (essentially they were simple wedding rings that had a small quote or poem etched onto the inside) and my brain immediately flew to how much of a phainon thing those are. The secrecy of no one but the wearer and the spouse knowing what’s written inside of them. The personalization of being able to choose what’s written and also any exterior design (if you google them, one of the first images that comes up is one with a star design that includes a quote declaring that, in the eyes of their spouse, the wearer was the most beautiful star compared against all the stars in the sky and i cannot lie. if that was my wedding ring i would tear up a little putting it on every morning).

We know phainon has an affinity for poetry and reading in general (duh) so i think this would really be so perfect for him (though he would absolutely stress for weeks if not months over the perfect thing to have written in his partner’s ring 😭). And i think the secrecy of it would excite him a little too in a way that’s like. Not quite possessive but almost a little buzzy feeling of accomplishment when he thinks about how no one but the both of them know what the rings say and it’s almost some kind of tangible proof that nothing (specifically, no person) could separate them from each other or know his spouse better than he does (i know he’s not extremely possessive or anything of course but i think his fear of losing people could sometimes end up lightly triggered when he senses some kind of “threat” [as if anyone would ever choose to leave him 😭] even if it’s totally silly and he’s absolutely aware of that fact).

There’s also the added aspect of, of course, his spouse is choosing what’s written in *his* ring and i think he absolutely would never fully recover from it even after years of wearing it. It’d be something he can take off and look at and think about when he’s stressed or away from them for whatever unfortunate reason. This is also similar to things i’ve said before, but since he has such a hard time truly accepting and believing anything positive said about him, i think it’d do something very lethal to him to have his favorite person’s verbal, likely flowery and gushy statement of love for him permanently engraved in metal in a place only he will ever know about. It can’t be erased or scratched out, so he has to just let it be. Which is very hard for him but he has no choice. And i personally really like that thought 🥹

Aaaaaa anyway that’s pretty much it. I hope you are okay with receiving my endless brainrot asks to any degree above “Why is she in my asks again🥲.” because i have a lot to say on the topic of phainon and a lot of life stress to get through yet 😭. And im hoping this goes without saying, but please don’t feel bad if you can’t get to all of these or respond to them ever. I know you’ve also been dealing with a lot of Life lately and there’s absolutely never any pressure to respond to my absolute Torrent of yapping in your posts and ask box. I really do just chronically have a lot to say about phainon and once i have a thought as strong as this one i have to explain it in detail before i explode and die 💔

That all being said. I do hope you’ve been doing well lately and that your general life situation is hopefully steadily improving after the past few weeks 💝💝

Hi again Salem! :) I already mentioned it in my other reply and the comments, but you really don’t have to feel guilty for appearing in my inbox/comments often. On the contrary, actually.

Whenever I see you in my notifications, I smile because you always have such good thoughts and I also love talking about Phainon with you. Well, and about these topics and life things in general, actually, since we seem to have a similar mindset and also find comfort in similar things (or in the way we deal with real life matters, for example).

So I also saw your newest two asks and will absolutely get to them. Because I don’t see this as something I have to do, not at all. This is my pleasure and I really mean that.

Side note: I kind of lost it at the 500 days one. 😭 The way you wrote it was so fitting and it also gave me thoughts on how I came to love him as a character. I will certainly ramble about that sometime and of course get back to your thoughts on the topic too.

So I think yapping about these things is doing us both good (since you mentioned having a lot to deal with right now too), so it makes me happy that this helps you and brings you joy. :)

And now back to the actual topic of your ask.

Because omg. The moment I saw this I both squeaked and giggled because YES. YES. Now I cannot stop thinking about it. Because you’re right. This is such a Phainon thing.

I mentioned before that I’m a hopeless romantic at heart and there is something about the intimacy of this concept that immediately gets me.

The fact that the inscription is hidden and that it belongs only to the people wearing the rings. The fact that the words are always there even when nobody else can see them.

That is exactly the sort of thing that would mean a lot to him. Because while Phainon is very open with his affection and I absolutely think he would be happy to hold his partner’s hand in public or openly show how much he loves them, I don’t think he would talk about truly intimate things with other people very often.

So the idea of having something that belongs only to the two of them? Oh, he would absolutely treasure that.

And I think he would enjoy the secrecy more than he initially admits. Not in a possessive way exactly (well maybe a little?). Just… that little feeling of happiness that comes from knowing there is a part of their relationship that belongs entirely to them. A small world only the two of them understand.

And yes, I do think the fear of abandonment you mentioned is very real for him. So having the rings as a tangible reminder would help. Whenever doubt creeps in. Whenever distance becomes difficult. Whenever he misses them.

The ring is still there. The promise is still there.

And I think what gets me most about rings in general is the symbolism of them. Not even in a marriage sense specifically, although that obviously applies here too. Just the idea of carrying a physical reminder of someone every day.

Because rings become ordinary after a while. You wear them while reading. While cooking. While working. While laughing. While getting through difficult days. And somehow that makes them even more meaningful to me. They stop being a grand gesture and become part of your existence.

Which feels very fitting for Phainon. Because for all his love of poetry and beautiful words, I think one of the things he craves most is permanence.

And there is something so beautiful to me about the idea that no matter where he goes, no matter how difficult a day becomes, he can glance down and see tangible proof that someone chose him.

And I think that would mean more to him than he would know how to put into words.

He would also absolutely kiss his partner’s hand right where the ring sits and mumble things under his breath, chuckling to himself. And then stare at them with that ridiculously soft expression. And somehow still get emotional about being married after years.

Because I don’t think he would ever fully recover from it. :)

And now I’m thinking about the actual design too because you mentioned that star ring and oh no. The symbolism fits him so well already. Not only because of all the light imagery surrounding him, but because stars are often used as points of guidance. Things people navigate by. Things people look toward. Which is very Phainon.

Although knowing him, he would spend an unreasonable amount of time agonizing over every tiny detail before finally deciding on something that somehow ends up being both deeply meaningful and so very romantic.

As for the inscription itself… you are absolutely right that he would stress over it for weeks. Possibly months. 😭

I think he would either choose a quote from a poem or book that means a great deal to him. Or he would write something himself. The second option might be even more dangerous. Because he would pour so much thought into it.

And then we get to the ring he receives. And ohhh.

I love this part. Because I think it’s rather obvious by now that I often have the desire to make him happy in my fics. :D And yes, part of that probably comes from my own experiences and insecurities. But I can also imagine so clearly what this would mean to him. Because while I don’t think Phainon is insecure in the way people often use that word, I do think he carries certain fears very deeply (we already talked about this before).

And if there is one thing I know from personal experience, it’s that hearing something loving repeatedly is not redundant when the fear runs that deep. It’s necessary. So I think having those words engraved there forever would affect him more than he expects.

Because unlike a conversation, unlike a passing compliment, unlike a moment that can be dismissed later… the inscription remains.

It cannot be erased or taken back or explained away. It simply exists. And he has to live with the fact that someone loved him enough to put those words there. :) Which is devastating in the best possible way, imo.

You mentioned the idea of tangible proof and I think that’s exactly it. The quote itself wouldn’t even have to be particularly elaborate. Just sincere. Because I’ve said before that kindness, affection, trust, communication, and genuine tenderness would do so much for him.

And the ring becomes a symbol of all of those things at once. So yes.

I have many thoughts. 😭

And please: I have never once thought “why is Salem in my inbox again?” Not even for a second. I always smile when I see your introduction because I know I’m about to get a ride full of emotions, symbolism, and interesting perspectives.

And I love that. Because I also have far too many thoughts about him and never get tired of talking about him. So thank you for sharing all of them with me. :)

And thank you for your kind words at the end. My health has improved at least, which I’m very grateful for, and I’m hoping things in general continue moving in a better direction.

And this might sound silly to some people, but I think you’ll understand. Whenever I feel lost or overwhelmed or unsure of myself, I sometimes find myself thinking about what Phainon would say. And somehow that helps. Because I know he would be proud.

And if you’re struggling too right now, I hope you know he would be encouraging and supporting you every step of the way. :)

And if it means anything at all, I’m sending lots of good energy your way too. <3

I hope the stress has eased a little.

And I’ll get back to the other asks as well. :)

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with me.

Lily 💙

[notesfromthemirror]

actually also consider if you're someone twitchy like me that gets instincts to knead and scratch at stuff. using phainon as a stress ball. go cat mode on him. like he's bread. he's just happy to be there

Hi again! :) First of all, I loved both your energy and the fact that you sent me two asks in a row. :D That made me smile because it felt very much like “I just had a thought and now Lily needs to hear it immediately.” Which I fully support, by the way.

And I absolutely loved both asks. I will also get back to the other one. :) For the clingy-and-grumpy Reader one, I still haven’t decided whether I will simply reply with my thoughts or if I might actually write a short fic because that scenario is so sgvujdkfjdlfjdkf. 😭

Now back to this ask. :)

So I read your tags on the clingy Phainon fic where you mentioned that you love the idea of simply doing your own thing while he’s nearby. And same, actually.

I love that dynamic. Perhaps because I’m somewhat cat-coded myself in certain regards. :D

Sometimes my hands just need something to do. Sometimes my brain gets loud. Sometimes I just start absentmindedly touching whatever happens to be nearby.

So this made me laugh out loud because yes. I immediately understood the vision. And Phainon would be perfect for this.

The hair alone. We need to discuss the hair because I am convinced it is ridiculously soft.

So naturally Reader would start threading their fingers through it without even thinking about it. Just absentmindedly combing through it over and over while reading something or focusing on another task.

And Phainon would absolutely notice. He would not immediately say anything, just quietly enjoy it.

Then there is the neck situation. :D Because if Reader is particularly cat-coded, I can absolutely see them lightly dragging their nails over the back of his neck or along his shoulders while they’re thinking.

Which would probably soothe both of them (well or not? I guess it depends :D).

And then there are his arms and chest. Because if we’re staying with the “Phainon as a stress ball” image, I think Reader would absolutely end up poking, squeezing, pressing or absentmindedly kneading him like bread while thinking about something entirely unrelated.

The funniest thing is that Reader is doing all of this completely subconsciously while Phainon is over there experiencing the emotional equivalent of being chosen by some divine being.

Like… Reader is absentmindedly using him as a comfort object.

And Phainon is thinking: “This is the greatest day of my life.” Without saying it out loud. ☺️

He would definitely tease Reader about it too. “You’re doing it again.”

“Hm?”

“You’ve been petting my hair for ten minutes.”

“Have I?”

“You have.”

“Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?”

And then Reader would immediately continue doing it.

I also think that if Reader is reaching for his arms or chest, Phainon would very obviously and very shamelessly adjust himself so they’re more comfortable.

Like Reader isn’t even paying attention and suddenly his arm is right there. Or his shoulder. Or his chest. Entirely by coincidence, I’m sure. :D

And I think this could go on for hours. Reader gets comfort. Phainon gets affection. Everyone wins.

Thank you for this mental image. It made me giggle. :)

Lily 💙

[solar-halo]

omg this made me nervous … (kicking my feet twirling my hair) 🥹