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@technowarden has posted
[user is going to show up in a very revealing sparkly dress] [pm] You're such a nerd. We can do better than storage wars tonight, I bet. Is there any non-hospital food that you're craving?
[pm voicemail] In a shocking plot twist, it is finally revealed that the marine archeology PhD student is a nerd.
[he scoffs gently] I wouldn't say no to something with flavour actually. Pad Thai and some proper ice cream, if we want specifics. You think that's doable?
🕒 When: May, 10th 2026 📍 Where: A warehouse in the outskirts of town 👥 With Whom: @technowarden & @hollow-sun Eve and Henri 🔹 Summary: So it was true.
Eve had read Daiyu’s messages over and over since she had received them. They didn't add up to the Henri she knew, who could not even stomach to let someone else kill Jenny. The idea of him going out of his way to attack another hunter was preposterous, beyond belief, even. Daiyu, for her many strengths, was prone to paranoia and pettiness, and this was exactly the kind of misunderstanding she could see coming from Henri’s… judgemental personality. That was all it had to be, she told herself. And yet… something lingered in the back of her mind; an itch she could not quite reach. A notebook of names of missing humans who had done terrible things in his bedroom, that Eve had been trying to tidy up when Henri had taken it from her. In the moment, she'd only wondered about it for a few minutes, but now….
Not that it mattered now. One of Augustine's newer associates had left her a series of messages that linked to a recent location of debauchery. Every time she heard from the faun, her heart grew colder, wondering if she would find another dead warden. He delighted in torture, and she felt a little emptier every time he called her. Even sitting in her van before she’d even walked into the abandoned store he'd told her about, Eve squeezed her steering wheel until the plastic buckled. There might be more hunter corpses in there, more people she knew, and as ever, she would be expected to smile and indulge his whimsies. Since Max, it took longer to fix the smile on her face. Her mask didn't fit the way it used to before it had been shattered, for better or for worse. Right. Get moving, Farran.
Eve stepped in cautiously. There was no burn in her shoulders, which was surprising considering who she was here to meet. Magic had been so out of whack recently that that didn't mean anything, although she worried that if her senses were dysfunctional, her immunity might be too. Or at least, that was what she worried about until the moment she saw who was in the room.
“Henri, what are you doing here?” Eve hissed. All thoughts of Daiyu’s message vanished from Eve’s head as she hurried forward, reaching for Henri’s hand. “Sunshine, it's not safe here. There are fauns coming. If he sees you, he’ll want to hurt you. You need to leave right now.”
___
Never. It never happened that Henri wished so ardently that he was wrong, even if it explained why he ever struggled to crawl to the center of a web, even if it made so much sense. Who else, in town, could have been possibly as thorough when it came to annihilating evidence ?
He had run the information through his head, over and over again, because it was impossible. Eve, who had expressed how important it was that Jenny died, was going out of her way to help monsters hide their atrocities ? It made no sense, even if…. He tried to keep that stupid thought hidden in a recluse corner of his mind, which would be where a lot of things went lately. Because Henri couldn't hunt anymore, no matter how much he wished it weren't so. He could only contemplate the horrors and his mind would work to make sense of them, and then his body would refuse to do anything about it.
The idea had spread like rot, keeping him awake at night (even more so that Eve seemed busier than usual, and he had to wonder what she was doing). And Henri loved her, the sort of love that had you smiling just thinking of her name, laughing on your own as you remembered something she said, a face she made, or the memory of a moment shared together.
Better this than what he heard about her. He hated himself for having ears, for listening in, for paying attention the second he heard her name come out of that stranger’s mouth.
The only hope he had left now was that she wouldn't show up. That she wouldn't fall for it. Because she couldn't. He told too little in the text he had sent her, only that he was one of Augustine’s protegés, that he was told to message her if he overindulged. Getting the information necessary to make it all look real had been easy for the seasoned researcher. The hardest part had been waiting here. Hoping.
The worst part was to see her pass through the door, and the shriveling sensation in his chest that came along with it.
His jaw stilled. No smile, no grimace. His gaze hardened because he couldn’t allow his eyes to do anything else but stare.
So it was real. “Jonah is coming ?” He didn't let go of her hand, wanting to enjoy the feeling while it lasted. One last time. “No one's coming, Eve.”
—
“What are you talking about?” Eve reacted, tugging at his arm to prompt him to move. It was gentle – he was still figuring out his balance – but insistent. But he did not move. The idea of Augustine arriving at any moment, seeing Henri for what he was, and taking his mind from him, filled Eve with worry. “Babe, I just need you to trust me. We can talk about it when we get home, but right now, someone dangerous is coming.”
How did he know Jonah’s name? Henri was looking at her like that, and he wasn't moving. The thought buzzed in her head, for the first time thinking through where they were, how far from any exit. Eve wore her kevlar under her clothes, and she had a multitude of weapons under her shirt, but that didn't change how precarious her situation was every time she walked into these cleans. If they knew about Henri (a distinct possibility thanks to Owen)… then this might not be Henri.
Her index finger flickered to iron, but the warm press of his skin didn't flinch away or melt into goo. This was no fae trap she'd walked right into, with a doppelganger pulling at her heartstrings. Good, Eve thought with a warm rush of relief, holding his hand tighter, fingers lacing between his, but it didn't change his facial expression in the slightest. Maybe that was the warning: that he hadn't run to meet her. He was always the one who melted first, the one with the smile just for her. And yet he had barely moved, as though he was the one turning to stone. Ice spilt down her spine before Eve’s mind had caught up. “Henri?”
___
“No one is coming, Eve,” Henri parroted, and his lip quivered this time, because she was worried for him and he couldn’t blame her, could he? He was the one who had invited her here tonight, the one who managed to sound so convincing with just a few words, and a name that he found out both belonged to someone terribly dangerous, and associated with the woman he had fallen so deeply in love with.
He could have cried now. He didn’t want any of this. To ambush her. To tell her what he knew. To make her feel anything close to bad. He didn’t want any of this. But he had to confront her, because this was terribly wrong, what she was doing. This was beyond fucked up. To cover for these people, to protect these people. How many deaths could have been prevented if she had just… They destroyed threats to human kind, they didn’t let humans get hurt, not when someone was intentionally causing them harm.
He wanted to reassure her, tell her that it was going to be okay, that he loved her, but his throat felt thick and hollow at once, and he just shook his head, as though that would do anything to the pain evident in his gaze. Finally, he took a breath, and he spoke. “I sent you that message, Eve. There is no Jonah.”
—
God help her, Eve’s first reaction to Henri’s chin wobbling was more worry, instead of processing what his words meant. Daiyu had told her what had happened between the two of them, and Eve still ran her thumb over his knuckles reassuringly. Until he explained.
Eve remembered looking up at the water tunnel of the aquarium, and feeling the water crashing down on her as she’d realised how much she loved him. That had been a dip in the Caribbean in comparison to the arctic wave that crashed over her now. Her thumb stilled on his skin, and her fingers began to loosen.
“Oh. I see. I guess we’re going through each other’s phones now. I guess that is a relationship stage people hit.” She was once again playing catch-up to Henri’s wordle scores, to his patience, to his commitment, to his love, and now, the accusation that he was clearly about to levy. Eve squared her shoulders, the concern peeling from her face, her expression becoming agonisingly still.
“I conceal evidence of the supernatural, Henri. You know that. In a town like this, I’ve had to figure out how to be efficient, to keep humans safe. Which, unfortunately, means going right to the primary source. That’s all that is.” And that wasn’t going to be enough for him, Eve knew. It was why she had never told him, in the way she hadn’t told most hunters. Henri, soft hearted Henri, could not see the numbers game at play. He could only ever see the people.
Except, maybe he wasn’t as soft-hearted as Eve had believed. She pulled her hand from his fingers, mourning the cool air that took its place.
“Why are we here, Henri? It’s not exactly giving cute surprise date. It’s kinda giving test. You can never resist a hypothesis. So, what now?” A lecture? She could feel him holding back. It was so rare for him to barely speak. When they were in a crowded room, sure, she was the chatterer, and he was quiet, but the roles reversed when they were alone.
Standing in this large, vacuous room, Eve felt very alone. Daiyu’s words curdled in her stomach. She had clocked the exits of the building before she’d even walked in. Door twelve feet behind her. Window eight feet left, three feet back, shuttered, but on ground level. Window to the right, behind a decaying desk, above a bookcase, so would likely have a drop on the other side. Door six feet to the right and forward, but she had no idea whether it was locked or barricaded on the other side.
Eve’s mind couldn’t think the words, but that did not mean she was not already there.
___
Perhaps, if Henri didn’t look her in the eyes, he wouldn’t flinch.
Everything. Everything had been going so well lately. Living with one arm was still an adjustment of course, but Henri was all too aware that there were many hunters that never were so lucky. He knew how his father lost his brother, how his mother lost two siblings over night. He knew things hadn’t been easy for Eve either. He knew Emilio. He knew Owen. Hunters never had it easy.
He lost an arm, but how wonderful had the past few months been?
To wake up by her side. To walk home from a day on the sea shore, at the library or in the office, knowing that he was going back to her warmth. To catch her gaze in the mirror while he attempted to tame his hair, only for her to put his unruly curl back onto his forehead where she insisted it belonged?
And he had made so much progress on his work too. Take away the hunt, and you found yourself with a lot of time for what was always meant to be secondary. And he had reached out to the Scribes too and … well maybe his decision had not been made yet, but he told himself that it could work.
What was it Eve said?
I can see a future that isn't just about hunting with you.
Maybe hunting didn’t have to get in the way anymore, and they could build that future, he had told himself.
And then this. He had to find out about this. And he couldn’t pretend he didn’t.
“These monsters, we’re supposed to make sure they never hurt people again. You’re making sure they’ll do it again, because not a single hunter is going to know what they did, not once you’re done,” he lifted his residual limb as he attempted to point an angry finger on her, on what she was doing, on what she represented to him now, on the damage she was doing to what they were, on the damage she was doing to him now.
And tears started to pool in his eyes. “Why are you … Why would you help them? You’re supposed to protect mankind.” His eyebrows curled, a pained expression painting on his face as his gaze dropped, defeated, to the floor. “I want to understand, Eve.”
—
He sidestepped her question, because of course he did, and the weapon he drew to cut through her was not the one Eve expected. Tears in his eyes caused her to swallow. She wanted nothing more than to kiss those tears away. No, that wasn’t true. She wanted nothing more than not to be defending her choices as a hunter to someone who had made so many worse.
“I keep photographic evidence of every clean I cover up. If any hunter ever came to ask, I would tell them. I have never forgotten which side that I’m on.” Emilio was evidence enough of that. Her chest had felt broken ever since Emilio had emerged from that alleyway alone, and that ache was the consequence of her ignoring her own duty. They should never have remained friends. It had been a foolish thing to do, and the cost in the end had been her own heartbreak and the necessary betrayal of one of her closest friends.
Unlike every other fucking hunter in this town, Eve had not let her supernatural attachments get in the way of her hunt. Unlike every other hunter, she could accept the cost of her work. It was galling that Henri of all people was lecturing her on the ethics of her decisions when she sometimes still cleaned up the bloodstains of his.
“I am helping mankind. Our duty is two-fold: keep humans alive and keep the supernatural secret. Do you know how few hunters give a fuck about my duty? How many hunters will kill right in front of livestreams, leave corpses on the high street, and walk around town with enchanted weapons? There’s no putting that genie in the bottle. Knowledge of the supernatural will kill millions. It’s a question of proportions.” Eve took a deep breath, begging him to look back in her eyes. She wasn’t so sure why she wanted it so badly, not when this room felt like a beartrap closing around her ankle. “When some hunters can’t cope with the reality of the situation, the rest of us have to make harder choices. That’s how this works.”
She’d once thought Henri was one of the hunters who couldn’t cope with it. Now all the signs were pointing another way. Even as her stomach lurched in disgust, Eve wanted to reach out, and feel the warmth of his hand again.
“I’m not the one hunting humans,” Eve said eventually, hoping she was wrong. She hoped that Henri would react with the disgust the accusation deserved. Either way, she would know for sure based on the reaction on his face. Henri had needed a trap to catch her, but he couldn’t lie convincingly even when his life depended on it.
___
“Knowledge of the supernatural will kill millions?” Argumentum ad misericordiam. A fallacy. What did she want? His pity? She was allowing for possibly hundreds of literal monsters to walk around freely, all to protect secrecy. She didn’t protect the people, she protected a secret, and her argument was that her secret kept millions of people safe. And Henri thought to himself: why not billions while we’re at it, because he was fairly certain that his hometown had been doing perfectly fine without the Whistlers doing whatever it was that was apparently saving the lives of millions of people. Hunters, on the other hand, had always been here to prevent blood baths, they had always been giving up their lives, their loved ones, their families, all to keep people safe, and to hear her say that they were not being careful, that they were leaving corpses left and right or that they were walking around town being so very obvious ? Well, that was just insulting.
These were the people who were selfless enough to accept death before the age of 30. These were the sorts of folks who had been forced to give up their childhood all to ensure that humanity could raise their own children in a safe environment. “Where did you even get these numbers from? Another one of your spreadsheets?” He spat out the words with all the anger that had bubbled within him. “We are talking about actual people, with lives, and jobs, and families, and futures. Not numbers. Not statistics. Not fucking data. They are people, Eve, and we’re supposed to protect them from monsters. Actual monsters. And I don’t give a shit if you keep evidence in a folder somewhere on your computer, because who is gonna find out what these assholes are doing if it’s stored somewhere we cannot see?” He took a breath, and held out his index with authority. “We deal with supernatural incidents every single day, we don’t have time to search for things that have been erased from reality. We already have too much on our plate and maybe that’s because the actual worst of them know that you will help them get away with it. You’re… You’re making them get away with slaughters. With… With…” He took in a deep breath and finally looked at her.
“You’re so fucking out of line? You are so out of line,” his hand shot up as he held it to his forehead, in complete, utter disbelief. His head was hurting, and his heart was too, because how could someone he considered to be the smartest person in the room, anywhere and everywhere, someone who had taken all of the space available in his heart, someone he would have let crawl inside of him if that meant that she’d be safe, someone he still wanted to spend the rest of his (short) life with, could be so wrong about this?
“The reality of the situation? Like what? What happened with Jenny? You think I don’t recognize that what she’s doing is wrong?” He shook his head, scoffing, eyes wide open as though he couldn’t believe she’d bring that up now. “Jenny is learning how to deal with her hunger. She’s gonna get there, and if she doesn’t die at the hand of someone else, she’ll get the hang of it, because she’s a good person. She’s not a monster. And this is why she deserved to live. She is not a fucking monster and we protect humans from monsters, not other species. Monsters.” And as much as his heart rate picked up just thinking of what damage Jenny could do, how much she had done to him, Henri couldn’t bring himself to change his mind on the upior.
But it wasn’t Jenny that caused him panic now. It was what Eve said next.
His gaze hardened at the accusation, and he shook his head again, though this time there was no disbelief. This was Henri telling her to be very careful about what she’d say next, Henri begging her to not go there. “Don’t go threading where you shouldn’t. Please, Eve. I… You don’t want to do that.”
—
“I’m still a fucking hunter,” Eve snapped, even as he raised his finger to condemn her further. He lectured her like she was some child in her first hunting game at camp, and Eve at least had the decency to let him finish, even as he dismissed everything she’d ever done. Eve could at least understand the discomfort with what she was doing, because it made her skin crawl, too. She hated it every single day. The disgust had become less over time, every crime seating itself deeper in her gut, but that had also been true of hunting itself. Her third murder had been easier than her first. The fifth mass casualty event haunted her less than her first. The worst day of Emilio’s life had just been Tuesday. None of that meant it didn’t affect her a little, no matter how much of herself she excised away. Henri was often rational about his academics, but rarely about hunting. Perhaps even so much so as to try to kill hunters who disagreed with him.
And this abandoned storefront was the perfect place for a murder.
Eve did not reply to his point about no one knowing to ask her; she did not need to. She made herself pleasant and approachable, and fun to work with; there were very few hunters in town who did not like her. If they couldn’t figure out teamwork enough to ask around about their hunts, that was not on her. She did not need to answer it; the response was self-evident. He was wrong, he was lashing out, he was being vicious. The part of her capable of self-doubt had been excised long ago. Her jaw tightened as he told her that she was out of line.
“We all make sacrifices. We all make terrible decisions. You think I don’t know?” Eve asked him, her voice cracking. “I’m the one pulling their corpses out of their homes, going through their phones, calculating the risks of whether their children will become Nancy Drews or John Wicks if they get a hint of the wrong information, and end up being eaten themselves. Millions of people means millions of families, of broken hearts, millions of futures. Scale does not change the humanity behind the numbers. I have seen more suffering than you ever will. And I will gladly bear that so that hunters like you and Jade and Daniel don’t have to, but don’t throw that in my face when I’m the one hanging out with the actual corpses. If there was another way, any other way, don’t you think I would have found it?”
Perhaps if more hunters cared, Eve had thought. She had spent so many years begging other hunters to try to care. Instead, they had laughed in her face, or rolled their eyes. She had heard the jokes at the Three Daggers; she remembered how Owen had looked at her every goddamn day. Most hunters barely looked past their next hunt, and who could blame them? Their lives were so fucking short, of course, every hunter became myopic. That did not make Eve wrong.
“And it is millions.” Henri was the one who was always talking about the value of history, after all, especially when it came to predicting what the future held. How could he blame her for looking at that logic. “Look what humans do with the power over each other that they do have. How many people have been killed in the name of entities that no one can prove exist. Look at the people in power now around the world, tell me that they wouldn’t gorge themselves if they knew how cheap immortality was. Hell, nuclear bombs are slightly less scary if you can recover from the fallout by eating your enemies, and plenty of people are fine with damning everyone else if they will be okay.”
Eve pinched her eyebrows as he litigated his belief in Jenny, as if any of that mattered. They had talked about Jenny so fucking often. More than Owen, and more than Estella, it was Jenny who so frequently became a moment of discomfort between them. Because he could not see past her personhood, as if that personhood was more important than others just because he knew her. Eve had often wondered if one of Jenny’s victims had come to him instead, begging for his help, would Henri have gone after Jenny instead? In his mental court of law, whose stories was he really prioritising? “I understand you need this to be a question of what people deserve, but that’s not how this works. We are a defence mechanism against supernatural predation. Do the people she’s killed deserve to die, or is it only true about futures and lives and families when I’m talking about numbers, but not when you’re talking about food?”
But his being soft on Jenny was far less important than his next response. Not disgust, not horror, not even real surprise. Eve thought again of the notebook he’d pulled from her hands, and the messages Daiyu had sent. All that time Daiyu had spent hating Henri and complaining about him, and Eve had been pissed at her, putting it down to Daiyu’s abrasive personality. All that time, Eve had been defending someone who did not deserve her love. She stepped back again. “Jesus Christ. It’s true. That notebook was full of your hunts, wasn’t it?” Jenny didn’t deserve to die because she was not a monster, but apparently, some humans did. “Is that what you do with them, too? Play judge, jury and executioner?”
—
I’m still a hunter. Great. Well, so was he, and yet he hadn't fulfilled any of his duties in four fucking interminable months. Henri still had the excuse of giving himself time to properly heal, to learn to use his other limb efficiently, but he felt the truth creeping underneath his skull every time he took the time to think too much about it. He remembered the terror he felt the last time he laid his eyes on Jenny, and he couldn't deny that he hadn't been sleeping well either. Memories of crimson red pools would return to his train of thought more often than normal.
He wished he’d been stupid. He wished he had been able to convince himself that this was something else, that he wasn't permanently marked by what happened, not just in flesh, but within.
And now, he felt that dread again, because he noticed the way she was standing, he saw her eyes dart to either side of the building. Henri knew all about these sorts of calculations. You learned them before you even held onto your first knife.
“And how many people died because you’re letting these monsters roam free? How many ? Do they not count ? Are they just a percentage to you? Do we have a quota on people that can be forsaken?” She couldn't possibly be serious. She couldn't be serious. He shook his head. How could she do this and go to sleep the night of ?
“I’m not telling you that what you do is wr-” His gaze hardened. This was not what he said. “We have to keep things secret. Everyone fucking knows that,” and if people endangered the secret by being unable to cover up their own tracks, maybe they should be judged for it. And this much she could leave to him, because she knew that he cleaned up after each of his hunts. This was how they had met, after all. “But you can't protect people who harm humans, people who don't care about secrecy.” Beat. “That’s just… You’re enabling them.” And adding a whole lot of crap onto a plate that was already all too full.
“No one deserves to die like that. Fuck Eve, she almost killed me. You think I don't know how that fucking feels ? You think I… what matters is she never meant for any of this to happen. The people you help, they do.” And it was completely insane that she couldn't see how that was fundamentally wrong.
And if she was gonna come for his head because he did the right thing, he wasn't sure how this could end well for either of them. “Wow. And you sure ain't doing judge-and-jury duty right now, are you? No. Of course not. You’ll cover my tracks, won't you? Well, don't bother. I’ve done that already.” What the fuck did she want from him now? “So what are we gonna do now, huh? Get the computer out ? Do an excel sheet to see who saved the most people last year ? But oh right, you saved 7 billion people. How can I possibly compete.” Henri didn't deal in ifs and stats. He knew precisely how many folks he killed and how many survived because of him. And it was nowhere in the millions, but if he saved over a hundred people, wasn't it still fucking worth it ? Why couldn't she see that much ?
__
Eve snorted, stepping back again, the distance between them becoming a cliff’s edge. The hand that had held his moments ago felt cold as ice; she spun the ring on her finger just for something to do other than reaching for the weapons every instinct told her she needed. A year ago, Eve had stood in a barn, wondering how a fight ended without any casualties, and now she stood, staring at the man who had curled the hand that held her heart into a fist. Almost every night for the past few months, Eve had come home to Henri, peeled off her armour, shed all her knives, taken off her leg and curled into him, trusting him with both her safety and balance, and so much more besides. Now, she had none of it.
And he was ranting to her about quotas. It was an argument Eve had heard some flavour of so many times before, and so at least for this, she had an answer ready. “Humans die from the decisions every hunter makes. Humans die when we party instead of hunting, when we work, when we study. Humans have always died because of the secrets we kept. We keep the secret because we know more humans live because of it than die from it. We party, work and study because we know those things help keep us alive long enough to help other people. Every hunter makes the choices I make.”
His words, even though she had already known them to be true, stung. For all the benefit of her work, there were costs too, ones that she covered in the dead of night with bleach and wounds. In the cold, naked sunlight of Henri’s harsh tone, they looked harsher.
“I'm still not hearing a better fucking choice, Henri. I would love to not do what I do. More than anything. You think I don’t want to throw up every time Augustine talks to me?” Eve paused, thumb digging deep into the palm of her hand. At some point, that had stopped being entirely true, she supposed. The disgust had become a buried thing, lurking in the depths of her chest, but it rarely affected her anymore. She never flinched in the way she once had when Metzli killed a man in front of her. “But I'm just hearing a whole lot of holier-than-thous, and not a whole lot of solutions.”
His response stunned Eve. She didn’t know what she wanted from him, other than a flinching. Henri refused to let her turn the conversation to his choices, when his were far worse. Eve tried desperately to remember the contents of that note book. The names had escaped her (they always did), but she remembered the crimes. Murder. Trafficking. Bounty Hunter. “You can't be serious.”
“What I'm doing doesn't hold a candle to what you're doing. Supernatural beings have as many defenses against us as we have against them. Humans don't. You can’t be contained by human laws, they can’t put you on trial, can they? No trial of peers here. And yet, here you are, making decisions about human-on-human crime that they themselves wouldn’t. Dozens of humans are involved in trials to avoid bias and mistakes, but apparently, you're above all that too, you know exactly how they feel about their crimes.”
Eve ran her hands through her hair, agitatedly, looking for the signs of the man she’d fallen in love with. The question that had been on her lips since she’d realised that Henri had organised all of this finally burst forth: “Is that what you're doing right now? Am I on trial?”
Maybe someone should be, she thought. Killing humans went against every core reason that hunters existed. Hunters were not judges. They could not decide whether someone deserved to live, because that was a question with no objective answer. The question was only ever (and had to be) whether a supernatural being was a proven threat to human life.
There was only one exception. One that Eve had ignored to act on before. A hunter who hunted humans answered to no one for their cruelty. It was an uncomfortable truth: egregious hunters existed, and they all invariably died at the hands of a supernatural being. hunters rarely policed themselves because there were hundreds of fae, undead and shifters willing to do it instead. Talia was justified in going after Daiyu, because of course, shifters wanted revenge. Not that it changed that Daiyu was equally justified in hunting in the first place, nor that Eve's loyalties belonged to Daiyu over the shifter that so many loved. (It was almost like ‘justified’ was a poor tool to determine your hunting strategy on.) But a hunter who hunted other hunters had no such justification, and no one to answer to. They were too dangerous to let live.
Eve had almost killed Owen for that same principle. While Owen had made many choices, he had been coerced. The hunt had stopped the moment Rosel was ash. Henri apparently was under no such pressure.
“I can't believe this. Henri,” Her voice cracked, “Please tell me it isn't true.”
__
Henri kept his eyes trained on Eve as she spoke, his chin wobbling the more she spoke and tried to justify the impossible, because that couldn’t be coming out of her mouth. The woman he loved, the one he projected the next months, the next years of his life around, could not possibly believe that this was a necessary means to her end. As he listened, thoughts of those plans clashed with her words, incompatible. Could there be a future for them when their sense of ethics seemed so binarily opposed? Henri wanted to save good people from the evils of the world, she covered for the latter, condemned the former, allegedly to protect them. And though Henri could be close-minded (something he was working on), he knew that secrecy was necessary to keep humanity safe, but not like this, not at this price.
“What stops you from telling another hunter to go after them ? Cause I don't know a single hunter who would refuse to hunt these people,” even for a price, but he had made his peace with that. All in all, he understood where Daiyu was coming from, he agreed that bounties were never placed on someone without reason, and he understood that he had bigger fish to fry. “This… This is my better fucking choice. You could keep the secret and have someone else go after these people. Who the fuck would know it was you ? It could happen months later, they wouldn't trace it back to you, and…” With every word that slipped out, Henri felt himself recoiling, stepping away further and further from Eve. And all the while, there was this urge that demanded he wrap his arm around her, pull her close and tell her that they’d figure it out, that it would be okay, that they could talk through this. But he stood still, his eyes stinging because he refused to look away, because he refused to shed a tear.
“What I am doing? What I am doing?” He pointed a finger to his chest, thumping his sternum with it as he looked at her, anger infusing slowly past the hurt. “You can't possibly think all humans are equal when it comes to self-defence. You can’t possibly believe that I…” What he did, all that he ever did, was to keep people safe, and that was all that mattered : keeping people safe. And when had he ever threatened secrecy in all of his hunting years? Not once. Not one fucking time. So maybe, maybe it was possible to do both if you tried. “These people would have flown under the radar. They wouldn’t have ever seen a tribunal because everyone’s hiding behind animal attacks and freaky accidents,” he would know. The hospital was so very quick to accept that he had been a victim of an animal attack. The problem with sweeping the truth under the carpet, was that the problem would disappear and grow underneath, like mold, like rot.
“I don’t give a fuck how they feel about their crimes. It’s wrong, they were wrong, and I made sure they wouldn’t hurt anyone else again. Can’t you see how that’s a good thing?” How could she blame him for this, when she was protecting monsters, when she was allowing them to thrive and grow in the shadows of her hard work. How many hours had she wasted cleaning up after them? How many times had she left their bed to go to their rescue? For people that made her want to throw up? People whose action disgusted her?
And yet, was she on trial now ? He didn’t blame her for coming to that conclusion. It seemed like the logical explanation to all this, but if Henri couldn’t do this. Even if was certain of what she had done, where did that put her in the spectrum of lawfulness that he had crafted for himself. She didn’t kill anyone directly, and she owed to her credo to keep the secrecy alive. It was wrong, she allowed for terrible people to stay active, but didn’t that make her similar to those lawyers who managed to keep monsters out of jail through very convincing arguments (another reason why human trials weren’t all that great, really, based as they were on how much you could spend on your defense). “I love you, Eve. But this is … “ But his heart was aching, and he couldn’t finish his sentence just yet. His brain, ever so logical, was urging him to speak his mind, to demonstrate by a + b that she had everything wrong, that what she was doing was wrong, that what she thought him to be was wrong. His heart didn’t care for right or wrong, of course. It only wanted them to be okay again, to forget all this, to guide Henri’s hand into Eve’s, where it belonged. But instead, his voice broke, and he shook his head. “I think you should go.” Please stay.
___
“Yeah, there’s no flaws with that plan,” Eve replied coldly. Let me hide a corpse for you! Yeah, everyone I’ve previously done this for has died mysteriously. How could Henri possibly be this naive? But it all pointed to naivety, didn’t it, in a way. Henri lived in one of Estella’s fairytales, where he was always right and just, and everyone else was wrong.
Eve stared at him as he gesticulated, and insisted that, unlike any human in the justice system (which Eve knew was horrifically flawed), nothing got past Henri. That every bad person in this town was hiding behind the same excuses she crafted over and over. If anything, Eves heart started to decay, disgust curling in her chest right alongside the love. “Augustine thinks he only kills bad people too. Wicked’s Crest must be the depths of hell itself, if everyone who tells me they only kill bad people is right.”
And he was one of them. A kin killer. She hadn’t asked about Daiyu for fear that it would cause some kind of backlash to the ranger, in case he might change his mind again about whether Daiyu needed to die. But his righteousness only went as far as it benefited him. Daiyu was off the hook, because she’d saved his life, and Eve…
Henri told her that he loved her, and in doing so answered her question. “I guess it's a good thing I seduced you.” She replied, her voice cracking like metal splintering. He told her to go, and her heart faltered. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d asked her to leave. Maybe he never had, maybe it was always her pulling away, and him reaching towards her with an endless patience that-
No. Henri was a kin killer. Eve pressed herself into a music box with no song and pulled one of the knives out of its sheath. There was only one thing to do with a kin killer. He would not expect it, Eve thought. His throat was bare. His left side was weaker now; he still didn’t have the full practice to defend it. She could at least ensure it was quick. A knife through the spinal cord, or right into the cerebellum. He wouldn’t feel the oxygen starvation as his lungs forgot how to breathe, he wouldn’t feel anything at all, and at least she could hold him while he passed, make sure he wasn’t alone, perhaps even give him one last kiss as his lips turned blue. He wouldn’t suffer long, and she would figure out how to live with killing him.
Eve faltered, her knuckles white over the grip. Her wretched, twisted heart failed in its bravery and duty. Another sign of how her emotions had corrupted her. A year ago, she would have taken the shot at Owen, but now, facing a far worse crime, she could not will her body to move. Eve stepped back, inhaling sharply, looking up at him with steel in her eyes.
“If you ever go after another human of any kind ever again, I'll kill you myself. It doesn't matter how much I loved you.” That last consonant slipped out without any thought, turning the present into the past. Eve didn’t know if it was true, and then at once knew that it wasn’t, because if it was, then her heart wouldn’t be betraying her as she walked out. Just like with Emilio, she did not once look back.
The cool metal of her van door offered a small comfort as she yanked it open, her often-bent steering wheel familiar in her hand. Eve drove half a mile before her heart tried to crawl out of her chest. Eve gulped it back down, and it forced itself up again, so harshly that even her eyes began to burn. Her chest collapsed in on itself. These were sobs, ripping themselves out of her throat, hard and heavy as Eve crumpled over, head against her knee. They shredded her throat, and echoed throughout her van mockingly. There was a part of her that demanded to run back inside, to be with him again. There was the rest of her that could not remember how to move. Something tore inside her, right at the seams.
Eve’s phone buzzed. Was that what had prompted Henri to look at her phone in the first place: a call from a monster who thought she was a friend? She swallowed her sob and wiped her tears, a decade’s worth of practice enabling Eve to answer the call with her signature cheer. “Hey, how can I help?... At the high school? You've got it! I’ll be there in ten.”
There was no space to grieve or to process. Wicked’s Rest always had another horror on offer before the last got old. By the time Eve drove onto the parking lot, there was no evidence that there was anything amiss with her at all.
___
How could someone so smart be so naive? Of course a town like Wicked’s Rest would attract the worst possible people. This was a place where people disappeared and literally no one was surprised about it. This was a place where causes of death were a lot more likely to be correlated to a wild animal attack or to a freak accident, whatever that means. As such, Henri had no trouble finding people who belonged on Satan’s wishlist, for assistant jobs. Sure Eve should have known better, considering she apparently spent a great deal of her time covering for such crowds.
The thought made the bile rise in his throat again, and he didn’t bother hiding his disgust this once. They were now way past that. The betrayal ran too deep and the chasm between their sense of morality was too wide already. Protecting monsters was never justifiable.
When she spoke about how she seduced him, he had to pinch at the bridge of his nose. What relevance did this have to any of this? Why did this feel like a pertinent approach to the problem? He loved her. What was the point? Breaking his heart? Couldn’t she see how shattered it already was, from the redness of his eyes to the trembling of his jaw? The truth didn’t even matter then, because he knew how bewitched she was with every little story he told her, how enamoured she was with the rebellious strand of hair that fell onto his forehead no matter how much he tried to tame it, and he knew that she was only trying to hurt him here, to insult his morals by suggesting that he would spare her because he loves her. “You’re justified, but I still disagree with what you’re doing, Eve, because so am I.” His voice cracked, his defining eloquence destroyed along with his heart as she spoke, this time to deliver the proverbial coup de grace. Henri wished he hadn’t been so stubborn then, and that instead of staring at her with hurt and anger in his eyes, he had asked her to stay, to sit down and think of a solution. But he was too proud for that.
For once, though, Henri didn’t seek to get the last word, instead waiting to hear the familiar sound of her van driving away before he crumpled to the floor, feeling yet again like the shadow of who he once was, crushed by the weight of regret, stifled by a humanity that he thought to be a strength.
As his lower lip wobbled and he fought back tears that were bound to pour out, Henri thought of throwing it all away, he thought of going right back to his notebook to put her in front of that threat she just mad, his mind already set on the promise that came along with that threat: that he’d see her again. Nothing hurt quite as much as that realization, and nothing could have been the tipping point of his tears than the idea of never witnessing her face again, her laughter, that light in her eyes when she smiled earnestly, those afternoons spent running while she made sure he didn’t overuse his right arm, or those lazy mornings tracing patterns over the inside of her palm as she told him about her busy night cleans. And the tears finally came out, and Henri wailed in the emptiness of the warehouse, filling the void with his unequivocal pain. Tonight would be difficult, the morning would be worse yet. He hoped that it would, like all things, pass. Or perhaps, that this was another thing that he could fix.
[When Henri comes home from giving a lecture on the ethics of archeology today, it is clear someone has been through his apartment. There is a bag of things in the middle of his table: the contents of the drawer Henri had at hers, one of the first rat plushies he gave her, and the still-damp bouquet of flowers he got her earlier the week. The flowers are still in full bloom.]
[Similarly, some of the things around his apartment have been removed, but the work has been sloppy, Eve has only managed to grab some of her things.]
[Neither bag was the real reason that Eve was here, and she hasn't been careful about that either. Besides his bookshelves, some of the books are stacked in neat piles. Some books have been slid around within their shelves. A couple are left open, on his desk. While Eve was still gentle with his belongings, she did not bother to hide what she was doing. She would not have even needed photographs to ensure his bookshelf was restored to its pristine state, Eve knows its contents by heart. But she was looking for something, and she's not afraid of Henri knowing that she was.]
[There's an opened tin of cat food that's been fed to Livy. She didn't give Livy the full tin (it's too much food for one kitty, especially outside of meal times), and she has at least sealed the remaining food away and popped it in the fridge.]
[She also hasn't returned the key.]
"I think the class went well, yeah." This was something she apparently had not managed to reach and destroy, at least. Henri smiled as he thought of how well the students had responded to the questions asked. "There was a bit of a debate, but this was what I was hoping for. We're tackling something essential with that subject, mom. Yeah. I... Yeah, you can't do what we do if your heart is in the wrong place." Wasn't it ironic that he had been scheduled to do this class on Ethics today ? Right after that awful fiasco? His heart felt heavy just thinking of it. And Henri knew he'd need to find a way to cope with the pain. Some had crossed his mind, but he wasn't the sort to lash out. Decisions were final, and you had to be ready to carry their weight.
"Mmm? No I'm headed home. I'll come over Saturday morning? We can do brunch maybe? Or Lunch sometime this week? It'll be easier... You know... To talk about things." Melodie O'Dea fell quiet on the other end of the line and Henri had to add. "I'm fine mom. It's okay. I..." Well that was not here when he had left.
The young man left the key in the hole and stepped in, relief washing over him as he spotted Livy in her usual spot. "Huh... Can you tell dad to come over? With his tool box? I need to get the lock changed." His mother, of course was starting to ask him what was going on, but Henri was too busy inspecting Eve's handiwork to say anything. She must have been searching for his notebook. She wouldn't have found it here. He moved in last week already. Clearly, that had been a good call. As for lashing out, well maybe that could be a good call too.
@technowarden has reacted to your post
[pm] Oh, unlucky! Wow, it's almost like we're magic too. Idle? Is that while you wait for your PhD to begin? Spellcasters are a nightmare. On the one hand, great, I have to deal with a lot less dead bodies. On the other hand, his bedroom now looks like it came from a world that has only ever had shrimp in it. Everything is shrimp.
[pm] We must be. We don't need spellcasters, huh?
Correcto. I both can't wait to get started and......... I am considering changing identities and moving out of the country. With you of course, since we're now married and I'm apparently second hottest after Diego. Good job Diego.
How many drinks did you have last night? For science? :)
Shrimp? Wow, with the lolluscs, how you need now is some lobster and you'll get a full sea food platter. Nice.
[user spends as much of his birthday with Henri as she can, although she is called out a couple times to handle a clean. She arranges a brunch with his family, and in the afternoon she hosts a small "tournament" between the two of them of different competitions for the pair to beat each other at.
For his birthday, Henri gets a new hybrid smart watch, which has both a real clock face and a screen. The watch responds to voice commands and can be adjusted from his phone too, meaning he can use it one-handed.]
OOC: Henri was absolutely EMO about getting a new watch, considering the way he lost his former one and knowing Eve knows how important family is to him totally didn't do things to him, like I don't know, make him fall even harder for her. Nope, totally super chill about everything.
[The next time Eve sees Henri, she has bought him a couple new notebooks, in the same way he buys her flowers]
[And the next time Henri sees Eve, he can show her how he's doing with his handwriting re-education. A few bad drawings are there too, since he can't bring himself to tear off pages from her presents]
🕒 When: 14th of December 📍 Where: Eve’s neighborhood, Deersprings 👥 With Whom: Eve Farran @technowarden and Henri O’Dea @hollow--sun 🔹 Summary: Henri learns from Eve that she’s gotten injured, they both find more comfort than they’d ever have expected in seeing the other. 🚫 TRIGGERS : mentions of head trauma, injury, torture (non-graphic), captivity, trauma/PTSD
Many hunters were trained from birth to be hyper independent. In part because many hunted alone, in part because if you were completely independent you wouldn’t feel the loss of another hunter as keenly, and in part because your senses and sensibilities could be betrayed. Eve had learned over the years that that independence was also a lie to keep themselves feeling strong, and that every hunter did better with support. If every hunter did what they did best and trusted others to focus on their skills, they would all live longer, she thought. It was an ideology she lived by… which made it all the harder to admit that she needed more help than usual right now.
Especially when she had offered help she was failing to deliver. Now that the worst of the headaches and brain fog was gone, Eve had begun scouring the upior texts Henri had asked her to help with, but she was far behind where she ought to be. Even so, when she saw his face on her Ring doorbell, Eve grinned, propelling herself to the door in her wheelchair, and swung open the door.
“This looks much more dramatic than it actually is,” Eve said, pushing herself into standing on her foot with just a small wince to prove her point. The stitches along her collarbone and the beanie she was wearing to hide her hair were forgotten as she pulled him into a warm kiss.
She clung to the lapels of his beige winter coat, holding him close (holding herself steady). Kissing him was like a hot shower at the end of a winter expedition. Long gone were the playful, seductive kisses that had always had an end goal, and hadn’t meant anything more. Their kisses these days were rarely just expressions of hot-headed desire. The thought scared her, but that was nothing compared to the soothing warm balm of his presence. When it ended, she searched his eyes, still sticking close. He still looked exhausted. “How are you?” She asked, and knew that she was also asking; how is Jenny?
---
Years ago, Henri had noticed that when his life finally seemed to be taking a turn, if not peaceful, then at least pleasant, something would invariably happen to bring a swift and brutal end to his fleeting state of satisfaction. He usually tended to lift his chin and ask for more.
Turn the other cheek, get back up, and fight. That's what he had become accustomed to. That's what he had been taught.
And when something went wrong, Henri knew he had to find a way out on his own.
He couldn’t always count on other people, his parents taught him, and so, he resorted to doing most things on his own, and learning how to do the things he didn’t know how to do, also on his own, as though asking for help was the same as failing. This state of isolation was not one he enjoyed, but the idea of letting someone close was a dangerous one.
This also meant that the slayer was hardly equipped to deal with his loved ones getting hurt, which was a thought that he tried not to address, because he had no idea of where he and Eve stood. Their relationship made him feel all sorts of ways, and he knew how deeply he cared for her already. It was painfully obvious in the way he dropped what he was doing to come visit her, the instant she’d told him she had gotten injured.
She’s alive. Is what Henri chose to comfort himself with. A hunter getting hurt was a normal thing. A hunter getting badly hurt was unfortunately a mundane thing too. Civilians broke their arm skiing. Hunters had their personal brand of skiing accidents, the lies they told non hunters. I fell down the stairs, off my bike, I got mugged, etc.
He appreciated that he and Eve wouldn't ever need to do that.
So when he saw her, and worse yet, heard her wincing, Henri didn't start tearing up or scolding her for minimizing this.
One night, a couple months ago, she had walked into his apartment late at night, with a hunger in her kiss that he gave into, because it’s what she needed then.
Today, he held onto her, and found comfort in the warmth of her body against his cold hands, the softness of her lips, in her scent, one that he missed having linger in his room and in the sound of her voice, which was what he wanted to hear the most.
His hand reached for her face, gently tucking away a strand of hair as he looked into her eyes. “I like the beanie,” he commented. “Very skater girl aesthetic,” that came with a small smile, and a kiss to her cheek. Maybe he wasn't doing great, but if he was making passable jokes, he at least hadn't entirely lost himself.
“I… Still no break through. Her symptoms don't even match what I thought she’d be experiencing. Feels like navigating with headlights in your face,” because navigating in the dark, was yet another expression slayers never used. Made no sense.
He shrugged uncommittedly and closed the door behind him, if only to keep the warmth trapped in.
—
“Makes me look like a badass, right?” Eve grinned, leaning into the comfortable warmth of his lips. She adjusted her hands to slide around his hips, anchoring him close to her. He smelled like stale coffee and old books, lacking that distinctive salt water air that usually permeated all his clothes. She suspected he hadn’t done much except research upior shit for Jenny the past few days. She could only hope that after her intervention, Henri had taken to sleeping at least a couple times.
He had only answered half her question, but it was enough to answer everything. “Fuck. I haven't found anything here either. I'm a bit behind on my readings, but…” she shook her head, even though they both knew she would have told him the second she found anything. “Anything to suggest that she'll change faster than expected?” She wanted to stay here, in his warmth, fingers rubbing in soothing motions around and around on his spine, but her foot was beginning to hurt. She folded a kiss into the crook of his jaw and lingered there.
“Let’s go for a walk. I’m all fed up of being cooped inside.” Still holding him with one arm, Eve reached for a thick puffy coat on her coat rack, and slipped it on before dropping back into her wheelchair. Out of her pockets, she pulled a thick scarf, grippy gloves, and a thick woollen sock to pull over her sock. She’d been itching for this since he said he was on his way, and had already set two thermos cups of coffee on the sideboard. She stretched over to the coffee, and the sleeve of her jumper pulled back, exposing a red ring of blistered and torn skin around her wrists that had halfway healed. “It looks worse than it is,” she admitted wrily, pushing the door open and back out into the wintery midday sun. It also was worse than it looked.
“My stump’s just a bit swollen, so I just can’t be bothered with the leg right now. It’ll be right as rain in a couple days.”
__
“Makes you look badass,” his eyes wrinkled with endearment, his thumb brushing against her cheek. Hard to tell which of his thumb on her cheek, or her fingers on his spine managed to make his weariness slip away with the most ease. What did it matter, as long as he was aware that it was all her doing?
But, the realization that they had not found a single thing that could help Jenny be saved from her fate was never far enough to let them linger in that quiet moment of warmth for long. “I should have seen it coming. All I ever heard about upiors has been from people who hunted them. I doubt they ever paid attention to how they transform.” Which wasn’t to say that he was better than them. A better hunter probably would have killed Jenny already by now, because it was safer than dealing with a new born upior, and being so very sorry. He sighed, soothed only by her presence.
The offer to walk out was not a terrible one, and Henri too could agree that fresh air would have been a nice change. His only experience with it, this month so far, had been his walks from home to his parents, the library, the town archives and a drive to his grandparents in the pines. He helped her through the doorway with the wheelchair and then stepped aside, waiting for her on the sidewalk. She said it looked worse than it was, which was exactly what he would have said had he been in her situation. Then… He didn’t know much about what had happened. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to ask. Maybe it was simpler to just ask : “Do you want to talk about it ? Or literally anything but this?” He glanced down, keeping his eyes off her wrists. He knew how she’d gotten that injury, so why even press her about it ?
—
Eve nodded, dread curling in the pit of her stomach. For a moment, a horrid question settled in the confines of her mouth, trapped behind her teeth. Henri was already a little soft by hunter standards, she didn’t want to suggest to him that killing a human before they turned might be the kindest choice left to him. They weren’t there, yet. She trusted him to know when they would be there. She trusted him. “Makes you wonder how many hunters didn’t even know an upior transformation was happening right in front of them. We’ll keep looking.”
The wheelchair wasn’t the easiest to manage when her collarbone burned with fresh cuts and stitches. But it was just pain, and she knew Henri would not judge her for a slower pace. It wasn’t true of every hunter in town, which was why Eve had forced on her leg for Owen the other day, despite the uncomfortable fit. Henri, with his endless patience, his gentle help, his warm fingers brushing over her skin, could never be anything like Owen. Owen had had his soft moments too, once, when he thought she wasn’t looking, but those days had been incinerated along with the corpse of his ex and his old home. Her chest twisted with a punch of guilt, both for comparing Owen and Henri, and for the gruesome favour she’d asked of the former just the other day. She shook away those thoughts, and smiled up at Henri wrily.
It wouldn’t get easier with retelling. But where telling Owen had felt like handing him scalpels even before she’d made her request, there was no such hesitation with Henri. She just hated how weak she sounded on each retelling.
“Guess it’s fair to share. Can’t exactly hide it, considering how often you see me naked these days,” Eve joked. More than anyone else, especially now that Jenny was… well. “A vampire wanted revenge on someone else, so decided to go after me. I- I ended up in her basement, part of her friday night entertainment or whatever.”
Her voice clipped briefly, as she looked in the other direction, pointedly admiring a large inflatable snowman across the street, with a string of fairy lights wrapped around it. Although… on close inspection, those were not LEDs. No, those were tiny cages with something glowing inside them. Huh. Wait, focus. “Long story short, turns out hair and nails are not part of the hunter healing package. But everything else is most of the way healed now, so not the worst.” She didn’t mention that alcohol made her think of acetone, or that her dreams were coloured by the perfect sterility of that basement, until she’d smeared her blood all over the floors and the walls. She could feel herself shrinking into herself, the way she had with Owen, heavy with the embarrassment of being saved. Hunters carried their scars like war trophies, but all of her worst scars were of failures. She wanted nothing more than to slam down her defenses, pull up her mask, spin a lie about how she had been the one to kill Max, that she wasn’t a failure of a hunter after all. But there was something she wanted Henri to hear. Something few hunters got to hear, and they all desperately needed to.
“In a way, it’s your fault I survived,” Eve began, looking up at him with a soft smile. It was meant to be wry, but even that defense failed her as she looked up at the warmth of his features. “Remember all those questions I asked you about furies, that were definitely very subtle and weren’t obviously about Emilio? Well… I know how he died, and I had the graveyard dirt, and… So, anyway, I called him to help.”
___
He lowered his gaze to the floor, nodding lightly at her words. “Yeah,” he quietly said after a moment. “Which means that ever since there have been hunters in this town,” and probably everywhere else, “no one took the time to look at the signs.” And he didn’t believe for a second that anyone human could have survived an upior’s attack without a hunter in the equation. If he hadn’t been here, all that would have been left of Jenny would have been pieces. The way that tongue harmed him, in spite of his thicker skin and caustic blood… He knew just how much worse this all could have been. “Maybe they didn’t want to.”
“We’ll keep looking,” he echoed. Because that’s all they could do.
At her joke, he shook his head, but still glanced down at her with a boyish, crooked smile. “You say that, like the exposure isn’t mutual.” Which, he agreed, made it impossible to hide the labyrinth of scars that had been drawn through the years over his body, and the aquarelle blue and purple shapes painted by monsters of all kinds.
He hadn't expected that he’d react so soon to what she said. It was the word basement that did it. Because he couldn't know what the place looked like, but his mind did a great job at imagining the place, and it had always been excellent at expecting the worst. But even when her voice clipped, he remained silent, leaving her room to explain what she had been through, making sure she had space to unravel the thread of her suffering, undo some of the harm that had been inflicted upon her. Because that’s what talking did. It made dealing with things easier.
He didn't expect that her retelling of these awful hours would reach an end with Eve sporting a smile like that one on her face. He’d been looking at her for most of it, of course, and hadn't even noticed there was something off with the Christmas decor on the other side of the street. “Oh it’s my fault,” the word choice amused him, but the central emotion that hit him was a mixture of relief, pride and something else he tried to shove away.
He remembered the very subtle questions, yes. He hadn't suspected at the time that she was investigating Emilio’s transformation, because the town was surely large enough for two different furies, right ? Perhaps it was, but they surely knew the same one. He didn't ask how Emilio died, even if the question was definitely the sort he had already asked himself. Now was not the time, and she was not the one to say that. “Oh that vampire mustn't have seen that one coming.” Was that excitement here ? Because Henri knew how this had ended now. “You truly are formidable, Eve Farran. Simply formidable.” And maybe he was marching happily toward simping territory, but he was never taught to underestimate women, and that didn't scare him at all. “And brain beats muscles once again,” he made a point to note, reaching down to plant a kiss on her head. “Do we want to celebrate that?”
—
“Maybe they looked, and it was too painful to write it down,” Eve said quietly, if only because she knew all too many texts where that was true, not least in the stories of wardens being turned into the undead that she had looked into for Emilio. But it wouldn’t settle all of their dis-ease, she knew. He was right. This had to have happened before, so they owed it to themselves to acknowledge that not every hunter was as connected to the mission of saving humans as they were of slaughtering humans. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, reaching over to rub his arm.
It was a relief when his boyish smile returned, and he lost the years of hunter guilt clinging to his shoulders like a drenched coat. Even if the topic of conversation was just torture instead of death. Dry leaves crunched under Eve’s wheels as she began to roll herself over the lawn, towards the inflated snowman she’d spotted, and the fairy lights made of real beings strung around it.
“And logic beats emotions. She was easy to manipulate, once she was riled up enough. Even if that had some downsides.” But if Max had never left to get something worse to hurt Eve with, Eve would have never made it out. The name written into her skin (and now unwritten in the only way she knew how) was a worthwhile price to pay. But the memories didn’t feel so heavy out in the winter sun, with Henri’s lips pressing to her cut up scalp. Eve leant into his warmth like it was a salve that could heal her, and let herself feel the pride and excitement in his voice. He saw her not as someone he had failed, but as someone who had succeeded in her own escape, even if she had wielded Emilio to do it. She didn’t know how to say it, but it meant everything.
“Definitely,” The next words sat in her throat, as tight as the admissions to Owen had recently, like this was as difficult an admission as the confession of being tortured. In some ways, it was. This warmth in her chest, the butterflies in her stomach, no, the very act of feeling so light around another person hung heavily around her. Eve had felt this way before “... As long as I'm celebrating with you. …Because it was your fault, so thank you. I wouldn’t be here without you. Guess I really wanted to see you again.”
___
“It's not your fault. We’ve got plenty to be sorry about, but not other people’s mistakes,” now if Henri could take his own advice, then maybe he would be able to forgive himself for letting Jenny get within range of the damned upior.
He looked up at the snowman, at last, and his eyebrows furrowed as he finally noticed it too. Judging by the direction of her own gaze, he assumed that she'd seen it too. Besides, she was always a lot more perceptive to their environment, surprising Henri often with the details that had clearly slipped past him. “Will-o'-the-wisp?” He tried. Good news was that humans had made up a plausible story to justify these things existing (or was it suggested to them?), bad news was that humans typically expected those in cemeteries and bogs not… around a snowman.
“One could say you managed to annoy someone to death, then?” An achievement worth writing about, or being humorous about. As for Henri, he hoped that he would be able to bore someone to death, eventually, and not in the way he seemed to bore people like Owen or Daiyu with his tirades on justice or archeology. Henri planted another kiss on her temple, careful to place his arm away from any injury he’d been made aware of, and yet, pulling her into his embrace once again, not so much because she needed it, but rather because behind the bravado, the attempts to find humor and his supportive words, Henri had been trying to conceal just how crushed he had been when it finally dawned upon him that she could have died. The realization wasn't so much like a punch in the teeth as it was the sort that left a tear in his chest.
Funny how the fear of losing someone was the best way to evaluate how far you’d fallen for them.
Walking around her chair, he squatted down in front of her, gloved hands grabbing gloved hands, and he smiled up at her. “Oh so now it’s my fault?” His crooked smile bore the same warmth it did earlier, but there was now a certain uncertainty to the way he looked at her, because she said these things and he felt the way he did, and … well he needed to know. “Can I ask you a question Eve? About you and I?”
—
“Maybe,” Eve agreed. “Not fae, that's for sure.” Presumably not undead either. Either way, they couldn't just leave it there, as a trap for someone else to fall into, or even just as an inexplicable oddity that would inevitably be shared to Pinterest. But before she could start to untangle the Wisp lights, Henri's arms wrapped around her, holding her close.
There was something unspoken in the weight of his arms around her chest. It hovered between them, a trigger on a gun neither of them wanted to fire. It was another sign of what had changed between them without either of them knowing, when their dates had gone from playful competitions to long evenings spent murmuring conversations in the dark. It was like the first night she'd stayed over after a quick fuck, when his arm had wrapped around her like an electric sheath as she'd gone haywire. No decent hunter wanted another to die, but this was something else, both more delicate and more dangerous.
He crouched in front of her, and she wanted to pull him up to his feet. In a fight, you were best upright, safer and stronger. He took her hands, which meant he was no longer able to reach for his own weapons. His face was an open book, spine cracked open for anyone to rip out the pages. She was always good at ripping out the pages.
“That's technically three questions in a row. You're lucky I'm not a genie,” Eve pointed out with a mischievous smile, deflecting. She wanted to treat her eyes away, to keep cracking jokes, but his gaze held her captive. Maxine had ripped off her mask, and here was the one person she didn't want to put it back on for. She didn't know what the question was, except in the rabbit-thumping beat of her own heart, that only knew because she wanted to ask the same one, even though her fear strangled the words in her throat. “I think I know what you're going to ask. If I’m right, then it’s not like I haven’t been thinking of- Actually, I’m going to be the coward here, and be a generous genie, and let you ask one more question. Go on.”
He sat there with his eyes like windows to his soul, and she still did not know how to let herself in. Eve cared too much to be carefree with his affection now. That hadn’t even been true a few weeks ago.
A few weeks ago.
It was rare to get this much sun, this late in the fall. But the trees were a warm constellation of oranges and yellows. Occasional gusts of wind pulled on Eve’s hair and her long woollen red coat. Normally, she didn’t want to stand out too much, but today was a day for enjoying the good that the town had to offer. They both desperately needed it. So, florals on her leg, and red on her coat, and a smile on her face when she spotted him on the other side of the road.
He, of course, was in beige. Maybe camel, if she was feeling generous. But the more she saw him in it, the warmer it felt, like those memories of exploring the shipwreck on a summer beach. He was as steady as the tide pools, as comfortable as the evening sun. Eve bounced up to him, swinging her arms around him. “Hey there, handsome. Ready to have some fun?” She gestured at all the autumn festivities.
—-
His inability to repress the large smile that took over his face the moment he spotted her should have had him turning around and leaving before it was too late. Instead his arms found her waist and he pulled her close, checking the surroundings for familiar faces (his sister the most prominent member of that caste) before leaning in for a proper greeting. “Each and every time you call me handsome, I become more insufferable. I hope you know this.” Or maybe he wasn’t sure how to respond casually to those things she called him.
He also wasn’t sure how to deal with the current situation. People could see them, and they still hadn’t really talked about where they stood. He was personally fine with never addressing it. They did not need to address it if people did it for them.
“As long as the fun still remains free of clams, I’m always going to say yes to that,” and yet when he thought of that day on the beach, it wasn’t dread or disgust that took over the rest, but rather holding Eve’s hand for the first time, sitting in the sand, exhausted, but thankful for the job well done. “So where are we getting started?” His hands found hers around his shoulders : “Not opposed to staying here, of course. This is very nice.” But he appreciated the change of scenery, being out of his flat, and attempting not to think about upiors and studies on undead cures.
—--
“Insufferable for everyone else, maybe,” Eve corrected him, and then, without thinking through the words, “I like having you all to myself, anyway.” If her skin flushed pink immediately after she realised what she’d said, he would be the only one to know. The memory of the frauss rattled its tail in her chest.
“I make no promises about any clams, we’ll just have to see how the day goes,” she grinned, even though she completely agreed. Getting covered in goop was not high on her priority list. She entwined her fingers with his, and lowered their hands between them. He was right, physical contact was nice, but they were more than capable of that in between study sessions reading about upiors. Today was about enjoying what the town had to offer. She glanced over at the road, where a handful of carriages pulled by horses awaited. “Hay bale ride? I hear the horses pick out your next activity.”
__
Of course, he noticed the new shade of pink on her cheeks, and although it wasn't the first time he found himself endeared by something she did, knowing that he was responsible for it made all the difference, and the slayer was once more confronted to a twinge of warmth seeping into his chest, the sort that he knew better than to further pay attention to.
His gaze had been drawn towards the horses too, his sister's designated favorite animal. While he reminisced on the pain of growing up in a horse girlie household, Henri decided that he couldn't let that stop him from having a nice afternoon with his not-girlfriend, thank you very much. “They pick your… what ?” He raised an eyebrow in suspicion, but that didn't deter him from dragging Eve toward the carriages. “Well I won't believe that until I see it,” although he suspected that consisted simply in the horse choosing to go eat a bit of hay or oat from one spot or another. Inevitably, he had to add : “Speaking of horses, were you aware that we’ve found evidence of horses being used for transportation since 3500 Before Common Era?” and that would be when the stall owner approached them with a smile on her face, looking the picture of warmth and pittoresque. “And what I can I do for you two love birds,” she chirped, running one hand against the horse’s throat. At that, Henri decided it was most appropriate to just look at a very fascinating speckle of dirt on his shoe.
-
Eve just laughed in delight at the woman’s question, despite Henri’s obvious blush, and answered without disarming the woman of her assumption. She hopped into the back of the carriage, offering Henri a hand she knew he didn’t need. As soon as he was seated and the horse she leant in with another kiss, careless as to who else might see. “Presumptive, wasn’t she? At least you and I know what we are.” She grinned against his skin, leaning in for both the electric static between them and the proximity to whisper her next words as her shoulders itched to flap non-existent wings. “Speaking of casual hunter fun, I didn’t plan this, but we’re going to have to kill these horses. They’re about to try and drown us.” It was an easy mask to wear: that of the delighted, dry-witted hunter. Knives in their hands were always going to be a more comfortable fit than whatever the ticket-seller had been alluding to.
—
“Not a genie, just a genius.” Which he already told her before, because clearly that didn't intimidate him. He found it rather humbling, of course, and at the same time, absolutely enticing and challenging. This was something he definitely liked about her, and them : the way they were drawn to competitions. At this current hour, they had perfect stats regarding their likelihood to beat the other in a fight, at Wordle, reading a book the fastest (while being able to answer questions the other asked about it), and practically anything they both liked and agreed to turn into a competition.
Even now, as he looked up at her, Henri couldn't help the metaphors away and he could only assume the same about Eve, the way he put his guard down and presented his heart on his sleeve.
If I'm right, she said. Henri fought back a snort and just smiled up at her, even though his stomach was in a tangle of knots and butterflies, because he couldn't mess this up. He didn't want to risk ruining everything. But he knew what his heart desired, and he knew what made it ache.
Maybe he was wrong to even consider it and maybe he could have waited for her to feel better too. But they were hunters, bound to injure themselves till they met their end. And you never knew how soon that would be.
“I just… I like you a lot, Eve.” Hardly news, but count on him to make it sound like a surprise. “I like your mind, and your smile, and your butt,” he wrinkled his nose in apology, but went on. “And I
…” Well he had no idea how to put that in a way that was anywhere near poetic, because that just wasn't him. “I’d like us to be in a relationship. A … proper one ?” And of course his eyes looked into hers, because it was easier than wait potential seconds for a verbal response.
—--
Eve split in half the moment he asked his question. Half of her wanted to laugh, pull her hands out of his, and shrug it off as a silly idea. This was working, wasn't it? Why get more entangled when they didn't need to? The other half of her wanted to pull him out of the crouch and into a kiss, so that her body could give the answer her mouth could not bear to. It was the question she expected, and yet, the moment he asked it, she didn't know how to answer. She sat frozen.
And yet. She didn't listen to the beating muscle in her chest often, especially with how often she stained her hands with human and hunter corpses these days. She had learned to silence the guilt and pain. It was not silent now. In that basement designed to suffocate all hope, her heart had brought her respite in the form of his remembered face. Not just because of what he knew, but who he had become to her. This young, soft hunter, who barely had the stomach to kill horse-shaped fae. When Eve opened her mouth to speak, her words surprised her. “I want that too.” And then, stumbling out after, her voice guttural, “I want you.”
But that wasn’t all she had to say. The ghost of Henri’s smile wasn’t the only one in her dreams, after all. There was the boy on the football pitch, bright eyed and innocent as sunlight. There was the girl watched from across the pulsing lights of the prom, dancing with a boy that had seemed like the worst person in the world back then. “I don’t do this. I normally don’t make it past date three. You’re something special, Henri O’Dea, even if you cheat at Wordle. But… the last people I felt like this for are dead because of me. I almost killed my last situationship.” Her eyes dropped down, belying her nearly-playful words. “I’m a high risk gamble, all things considered.”
___
It was cold today. In fact, it couldn't have been more than 20°F. Henri, however, couldn't say he was cold, not because he was from the area and had known since he was three years old that it was important to wear several layers of clothing, but because he felt that his heart and cheeks were warming him from the inside. Even when she told him about the untimely deaths of people dear to her heart. He smiled at her with his usual gentleness, and although his eyes betrayed his fatigue, Henri knew he was confident with his choice.
“I do not cheat at Wordle.” He simply pointed out, wondering (and knowing) why they both had to make jokes in such a very serious time. “I solved it in three tries today. Nothing special,” his smile grew a tiny (whole lot) smug, a smile which he placated against her lips in what was his most victorious kiss yet. “Though I suppose,” he glanced up at the little things in the snowman as he went on with his teasing, “now that we’re a thing, I can teach you a few little things about Wordle.” He stood up again then, and looked down at her.
“How do you suggest we get that snowman rid of those now?”
—
“Hmmm, that sounds like lies to me,” Eve murmured with a teasing smile, before her fingers tangled in his hair, smiling against his lips as he claimed his prize for being the braver of the two of them. For all she had chased him early on, her impossibly sweet little conquest, his kiss claimed her properly now. Even though it was brief, when he pulled away, she felt a little dizzy. “You can play teacher any time you like, handsome.”
It took her a moment to remember why she’d wheeled the wheelchair onto the grass, and laughed as she looked up at the giant inflatable snowman. A knife slipped from her pocket with ease, slashing a hole through the polystyrene. A gust of stale air whipped through her hair as it began to deflate, and the cord began to fall.
“Maybe my boyfriend can bag them up, and we can figure out a safe strategy to release them?” There were no ways to destroy a Wisp, after all, although whatever contraption caged them must be magical in some way, but Eve was barrely thinking about it. Boyfriend. The word felt foreign in her mouth, and brought a warmer flush to her cheeks than she'd felt in a while. It wasn’t a comfortable feeling, this level of vulnerability, her heart beating fast in her chest, but the warmth of his smile was worth the effort. For him, Eve could get used to not just pretending, but being like this.
For once, what a joyous thing to become used to.
___
“You won’t have to say that twice,” he remarked with a smile that could have easily counted as cheeky or even smug, though he made sure to look up at the snowman then, instead of her.
As the snowman deflated, he glanced around at the still very empty street. Everyone must have been at work at this time of day, he presumed. There was definitely a tragic dimension to the way this titanous snowman was reduced in less than a minute to a heap of plastic on the floor, as though it had melted away in the sun. If he had been the sort for cheesy cheap comments, he’d have said that, in a way, it did, because that’s how Eve felt to him lately, especially this past month : like warmth and light.
But no matter if there was truth to that, he thought there were much nicer things he could tell her, he just had not found the way to tell her those. Even if today, he at least had managed to get one of these things out. And to hear it from her mouth, that was definitely another one of these sunny moments. He looked over his shoulder, if only to catch the warmth on her cheek, and match it with a smile. “Here’s to hoping they like the scent of coffee then,” and tossing the rest of his coffee, he cut them off the string with a pocket knife, and filled his thermos cup with tiny ghostly lights.
And once he was done, the pair went on with their walk through the neighborhood. The cold followed them, but it seemed less insistent now, his thermos warm in his hand, her presence steady at his side as they disappeared down the street together.
FMK your first three @
@vengeancedemon @technowarden @highoctanegem
Oh great. The most mature, 2026 ask meme is back.
I'm gonna say
Jade - because we can both pretend that never happened and it would be a safe place
Emilio - why not, he's grown on me, and he deserves nice things (me)
Eve - you can't save everyone, I guess.
