happy first of august to everyone who celebrates! air sure is salty, huh! i love love love folklore, and i love love love august, so here we are! to my folklore nerds, alex is augustine, reader (so, you) are james, and your boyfriend (berty) is betty. (i was going to make you have a girlfriend, called betty, but id hate cheating on a girl with a guy. feels illegal.) just wanna say, don’t cheat everyone! cheating = bad..!!
☀︎content warnings: implied stuff, angst, very sad, emotionally abusive, cheating, love triangle (kinda) guilt, crying, teenager!alex x teenager!reader
☀︎i came up with this fic this morning, and finished it in record time! wc: 3.4k
☀︎evidently inspired by ‘august’, by taylor swift! try to spot all the lyrics, i dare u
Friday, August 1st, 2025. 15:33, reads your phone as it buzzes, suggesting a different route, a turn onto the main street. It underestimates you, as it always does.
You know these cobbled streets like the back of your calloused hands, the stone matching the irregularities in your palms. Those lines, supposedly confirming your future- your three children and a long crease, indicating old age would slowly creep into your freshly eighteen bones. In some ways, it was reassuring. In others, you wanted nothing more than to draw your own line, curse your predestined decades.
The august heat settles in your lungs as it always does, somewhere between comfort and choking, and you can feel your forehead begin to glisten as the sun beats aggressively down your neck, placing kisses on your exposed skin. You love the familiarity of it all, how you find solace every year, in this very same place. Each curve of the road, each twist of the ivy, welcoming you back home. The salty air that you can taste on your tongue with each breath, the way your door rusts with each year in your absence.
You do not step in, not right away. You throw your scuffed suitcase and worn leather bag into the kitchen, and close the blue door, like it had never even been opened. Like you hadn’t yet disturbed the silence, the peace.
With the weight off your shoulders, you place each careful step down jagged boulders, trying to calm the anticipation of touching the sparkling water crashing on the pebbled shore beneath you. Your sanctuary, whispering your name with each aquamarine wave.
You love this beach, this small stretch of nature. It is hidden, it feels. For no one is ever here, other than you. Like it waits for you, as the season passes. Until august hits, and it knows. Knows of your imminent arrival, your deep adoration. How soon your golden limbs would slowly stretch out in its waters, your hair tangled but perfect. It shrouds itself, from anyone other than you.
You wonder if you’ll never need anything else, anything more.
But today, it seems to have let someone else in. A stranger, caught in the magic of it too. How the sun catches on each wave peak, blinding them. Transfixed, just as you so often are. But as you draw closer, they feel less and less like someone unknown. Their hair, blastedly familiar. The way they stand, somewhere between confident and gentle, you recognise it. Their dark hair, tinted by the rays you thought were only reserved for you.
You’d only brought one person here, ever. Let one person in, even though you knew you shouldn’t have. But it couldn’t be him, not again, not ever. Sometimes, the universe gives you a chance, and you make a mistake. When that happens, that chance passes, and it never returns. So the man stood unassumingly opposite you, his back turned, could not be Alex Albon.
Except, when he turns at the sound of the stones beneath your sandals, it is him. Somehow, incredulously, he is here, and he is looking at you.
Your name falls from his mouth before he can stop himself. A total, instinctive reaction. The sight of you makes him look like he’s watched a dead man rise, and his heart twists into some ugly, raging thing, drumming in his chest. He’s worried it might burst, so worried he almost clutches at it.
“Alex.” you reply, breathless. Almost like a way of proving you still knew his name, that he still played in your mind. That below the guilt, hidden under it all, he was still buried there, unrelenting. A ghost, haunting you. Plaguing you.
He’s taller, which you thought would never even be possible. Even from a distance, he towers over you. His arms, more defined than you remember. His hair, longer. Messier.
For it only having been a year, he looks more aged. Maturity is etched in his look of bewilderment, and you almost miss how boy-ish he was. You want to reach out for him, but you can’t. You know you can’t.
“You’re here.” he exhales, and you can’t describe his tone. Something between anger and acceptance, with a hint of relief. But also, a deep sadness. Like, somehow, you’ve ruined him.
You nod, unsure on what to do. How to act. How to look into his eyes, without feeling guilty. Without dropping to your knees, and apologising. Begging for forgiveness that you don’t think you deserve. Forgiveness you know you wouldn't offer, if the roles were reversed. Forgiveness that you’re willing to bet he might.
“I am.” is all you can muster, and it comes out like a whisper, like you’re too scared to actually speak, to admit to your mistake.
He wants to shout at you. He wants to watch tears spring to your annoyingly magnetic eyes, watch as they trail down your cheek. He wants you to hurt, even half as much as he did. But also wants to run to you, to plant a kiss there instead, and tell you that it’s okay, even though you both know it isn’t.
“I’m sorry.” you add, louder, now. It’s genuine, although it’s obviously not enough. It obviously doesn’t make up for any of it.
He shrugs, and it aches more than if he’d yelled. But when his shoulders go back down, they slump, and you know he hurts. He’s been hurting, and you not only caused the wound, you’ve just reopened it.
He moves first. You almost expect him to barrel into you, but he does the opposite. He turns back around, and he begins to walk away. As unfair as it is, you don’t want to let him.
“Alex?” you call, tentatively, but you know he hears you, because you watch his back drop as he sighs. He doesn’t stop, but he shifts his head around, to look at you, his expression unreadable.
You forget what you were going to say. You don’t even know if you were going to say anything at all. Instead, you smile at him. A lopsided, ugly, sad smile. A smile that you hope, says more than words ever could. A heartbreaking curl of your lips, a vague last attempt at you don’t-know-what.
You don’t expect him to smile back. Especially not in the way he did every day last year, all the way to his eyes. A smile, much like the beach, a smile just for you.
But he does, and the sight of him knocks the air out of you, hard. Suddenly, every day of that godforsaken august last year hits you like a truck.
You try to stop it from playing in your head, but you can’t, it’s too late. And then you’re back, back to when you’d first seen him.
☀︎༄.°
Thursday, August 1st, 2024. 14:28, reads your phone as it flashes, suggesting another route, a turn into the main road. It underestimates you, as it did last year. And the year before.
You know these cobbled streets like you know true love, disgustingly sweet and frayed around the edges. He isn’t here, your boyfriend. He didn’t need to be, because he was there with every exhale, the way your heart tightened slightly.
When someone asks, you tell them winter is your favourite season. But somewhere, summer shifts in your blood, a constant warmth in your stomach. Each august, whispering your name.
The air gets saltier, and the iron rungs of the fence get rustier, as you close towards your favourite bench, overlooking the sea.
You notice legs first, swung sideways, and you almost walk away. But your bag sits on your shoulder, a book in one pocket and your headphones in another, and you decide you can co-exist with whoever is slung over the wood.
You don’t really look at him, as you sit down. Instead, you firmly plug your ears, and turn the dog-eared page, immersing yourself with each word, and each breath.
Eventually, you hear a gentle humming to your right. In time to your music, low and unexpected. You pull out a headphone and stare at the boy beside you expectantly, an eyebrow raised carefully.
“I can hear it. Great song, by the way. Although, I worry about your ears, frankly.” he comments, waving his arm vaguely.
You don’t know why, but you introduce yourself. A shy hand, and then your name, and then your age, and then more and more about your life. With each scrap of information you offer, he returns it gladly.
By the end of the conversation, you know possibly too much about seventeen year old Alexander Albon, and his extortionate number of pets. And he knows you cry too easily at films, and your favourite song is ‘To all of you’ by Syd Matters.
He doesn’t know about your boyfriend. Somehow, co-incidentally, he didn’t come up. You don’t know if you should feel bad.
When Alex messages you, to ask if you’re free tomorrow, you completely forget what you were just worried about, and you happily let him know you’re here for the entire month, and you’re happy to share your sanctuary of august with him.
You’re inseparable for the next week, and in some twisted way, you wonder if maybe you don’t know true love as well as these cobbled streets, because your stomach flips in a way with him that it doesn’t with Berty.
This is exciting, this is daring. This might be scary. It isn’t so comfortable, it isn’t so logical. Alex, from somewhere you haven’t heard of, with an accent that doesn’t mirror yours.
There’s something cosmic, bigger, about him. He has a toothy smile and small freckles and every breath you share feels sacred, on borrowed time. The line between friendship and something more quickly blurs, until you can’t see it. Probably because you crossed it, the first time you slipped your arm into his.
The next Friday, it shifts. It changes. From something heavy, and secret, to something sinister and beautiful. But so lovely, so criminal, so painful.
He’s sat, legs stretched across yours. His head, resting on the cool pantry door. Your parents, nowhere to be seen. His, yet to be mentioned. You often wonder if he’s almost a figment of your imagination, and when you close the door at night, he disappears. Like he only exists when you can see him.
He mumbles a joke you don’t hear, so you lean in. Possibly too close, but he doesn’t recoil. He doesn’t seem to care. Once you understand, you laugh, and for a second, you don’t move. You stay there, face almost pressed against his. His brows furrow, a silent question.
“Are you sure?” he whispers, just barely above silence.
You nod. Imperceptively. You almost regret it immediately, and you hope he didn’t see it. But he catches it, and then there's not even room to breathe between you. He tastes like sun, and olives and secrets, and you wish it curdled in your throat just a bit more, just enough to make you push him away.
When you feel him grin against you, you can’t help but laugh, admiring the dazed look in his warm eyes.
But when you blink for a second, you see the unassuming, bluer pupils of the boy back home, waiting for your call. And then he’s gone, and you realise you’re drinking something dark, and red, and it’s bitter. But it also tastes like courage, and dulls your bruising heart.
Alex doesn’t go home that night. Instead, the evening slips from you with each sip, until talks on the floor become talks on your bedroom carpet, and then exhaustion sets in. And you wake up on his chest, his arm slung over yours, bedsheets twisted around you. He looks like a boy when he sleeps, weightless, holding you instinctively. You assume you must look evil, and you wonder how he hasn’t seen through you yet. How he doesn’t know that he is a ‘lover’, you suppose, but not in a poetic way. In a way that screams of deceit and something much worse.
What you don’t realise, hidden in that question, the implications of ‘Are you sure?’, was to see if you’d do it. Shatter your relationship back home, to risk one here, for him. And somewhere, intertwined between kisses and laughter and shaky breaths, Alex wondered if your nod was maybe you deciding to choose him. If anything, he was happy, living for the hope of it all. The hope that maybe, he did have you. In more than the physical sense, more than the way his arm was draped over yours possessively.
You don’t wonder why he picks up as soon as you call. Regretful whispers of “Meet me behind the mall,” pretending you know he hasn’t cancelled all his plans, just in case you want him again.
And you do want him, every time. His warmth, the strength of his hugs, the way he hides how much attention he pays to you, to your interests and hobbies. When he asks about a book you mentioned once, in a passing comment. When he always comes bearing a different fruit, or drink, or something. Anything. Anything to keep you interested in him.
You do like him, you’re not that cruel. If anything, you love him, in the way that summer lets you view everything a little more hopefully, like everyone is a little more beautiful. But you don’t break up with your boyfriend. You don’t tell him about Alex. You don’t tell Alex about him, even though you think he might know. You think you see it written all over his endearing face. The way his hands always linger on yours, like it might be the last time. Like you’ll get so clouded by guilt, by your unfaithfulness, that you’ll stop. Leave him stranded.
He’s right, you do. One day, you don’t call him. You hide, traipsing in your ocean, where no one has ever found you. A little piece of your soul, you kept hidden. Covered and clouded by boulders and shade and it’s just so perfect, so precious.
Time drags on, when you’re apart. You think it must surely be the end of the month soon, your departure inevitable, but days pass unwillingly. Warning you, to use the time you have wisely. To maybe let this mistake happen, to let the guilt catch you later. To let yourself love two people, and not think of the consequences. You’re so young, you’re still changing. Hopefully, somehow, for the better.
So when he pulls up, in a car you swear you don’t recognise, catching you off guard, you hesitate.
“Get in the car”, he says, but it's phrased lightly, like a question. Like he’s wary of you, darting again. And somewhere in his stare, you know what he’s saying, what he's asking. That he wants this, no matter if he knows someone else is weighing on your mind. That for him, it’s enough.
So you do. And you try to give him everything, for the rest of the month, while simultaneously making sure each kiss is actually a whisper of a gentle ‘goodbye.’ He asks if you’ll call, when you go back to school. You don’t say yes. You don’t ask him back.
You show him where you could spend the rest of your life. Your little secret beach. He lets you enjoy the silence of the waves, without a complaint. He watches the sun on your back, and he knows that if he wanted to, he could kiss you just the same.
But tan lasts, and his touch doesn’t.
When you tell him you’re flying away, just as september rolls around, he tries not to hurt. He tries not to remember how he would call it love, how quickly ‘you’ had become ‘us.’
He tries not to remember that somehow, even though all the evidence suggests otherwise, you’re not his to lose.
That as you’re walking away, he shouldn’t feel anything. He shouldn’t feel like you’re ripping his heart out with him, that you don’t owe him more than what you gave.
He tries not to think about the fact he is absolutely, undeniably, hopelessly, enamoured with you.
You barely say goodbye. He doesn’t actually realise you’re gone until it’s too late, and he has to try to keep breathing, like his ribs aren’t broken.
☀︎༄.°
He notices you’re crying before you do, because you’re too lost in the memory. And when he sees the tears trailing silently down your face, it’s not nearly as satisfying as he hoped it would be. He doesn’t feel like it’s even now, because watching you hurt still makes his heart hurt.
You’re more beautiful than he remembers. Maybe because you seem real, now. You had slipped away, becoming something out of reach. Now, you’re here, right here, and he’s watching your shoulders shake with muffled sobs.
He knows what you're thinking. What you’re imagining. He’s doing the exact same, remembering it all. He lingers too long, on that night when he’d kissed you. The way you’d looked at him, the way he’d realised he was doomed.
He knew about your boyfriend. It hadn’t taken much sleuthing. But the way your eyes reached his soul, it was enough to make him forget, to make him hold out hope that you’d change.
You didn’t. Hadn’t. You fucked him over, no other way to describe it. But he knew he’d let you do it all over again.
And here you are, unravelling in front of him, guilt spilling from your shaking hands.
He’d forgiven you months ago. Played out this interaction an obscene amount of times. What he’d say, so his words would sting. How he’d walk away. He hadn’t let himself imagine one where you’d win, all over again. Where he’d buckle for you immediately.
But here you are, and he can’t leave. He can’t tear his eyes from you, but he can’t bear to keep staring. And when you look up at him, through damp eyelashes, that’s all it takes.
He’s by your side instantly, his arms around you just like they’d been every day last august. Your head, buried in his chest, his chin resting on your hair. You fit together like two jigsaw pieces, but neither of you could admit you were from different puzzles.
“I’m so sorry, Alex. Truly. You deserved so much better than me.”
You feel him shrug again.
“I didn’t want better than you. You made a mistake, and you clearly feel bad about it.” he murmurs quietly, but you shake your head.
“You don’t need to forgive me, you have a right to hate me.” you whisper back, but he scoffs.
“I could never hate you.”
You’ve stopped crying, but you can’t drag yourself away, not yet.
“I broke up with him, as soon as I got home. But I couldn’t do it to you, couldn’t dare to hurt you again, so I thought it would be better to forget me.”
He laughs, and you smile at the sound.
“I could never forget you, either. I’ve been disgustingly obsessed with you for the last year. Why do you think I’m here? This is your spot.”
You look up at him, properly now. Admiring his slight smirk, the new creases on his face.
“I’ve loved you since last year, too.” you confirm, saying what he was too scared to.
You watch his face explode into something so joyous, so hopeful, you can’t help but smile. And for once, you don’t feel bad, because the feeling is completely mutual. You could hand him your heart now, knowing no one else could have any claim to it.
“Just wanting, that was enough. For me, it was enough. Truly having you, that would be something else entirely. You, being mine to lose. That would be nice.”
He pauses.
“At least, for august. When september comes, I don’t expect-“
You cut him off. “Let’s save that for later. Let’s not let august slip away too soon.”
So you both turn and face the sea, and you let your humming hearts and the crashing waves be the only sounds worth hearing.
