An excerpt from an old hxh urban fantasy/horror AU WIP I revisited recently centering around Cheadle, werewolf!Leorio, and the world falling apart around them. There are a lot of things I don’t like about that story, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back to it. However, rereading it, I found the most interesting parts of it - exactly as I thought last year - to be the ones about Cheadle and Ging’s expired marriage. Considering my current story, I was onto something with that. Either way, I remember liking these parts, of lesser quality as they are, and wanted to salvage them from the heap of forgotten things.
Parts 1, 3.
She can remember a sunny day spent on those same tracks more than a decade ago. Not on a train - the old train had disappeared long before that - but on foot, walking and walking under the spring light, walking tirelessly because the job was new and so was love.
They didn’t hold hands in public because she did not like it and neither did he. So they strolled side by side, his hands in his pockets, hers clasped behind her back, reeling back and forth, feet moving at matching speeds. With hindsight, she thinks that perhaps they never had fit together, but there were times when they had and that day was one of them. Is that why the memory of it persists? But so do other memories, of uglier times, of times when she had wished a train would run over one of them.
However, that day she had wished they could walk forever, just like that, silent except for the casual, teasing comment, or pointing out something in the desolate scenery with an awkwardness and shyness that had never left their relationship even after marriage.
Their shared moments of vulnerability were scattered about, few and distant. She used to blame herself for that. Knowing him, he blamed neither of them. He pretended not to think of such things at all but she knew otherwise. High above it all he still saw.
The last argument was strangely calm and civilized, crushingly quiet, like they were exchanging the finer details of a surprise party, hushed and wary as if a child was sleeping in the next room. But there was no child and no surprise parties, just the two of them in their bedroom - cold because the AC was broken, cold because everything was broken - deciding to get divorced.
For the first time after they made their decision, hunched over the divorce papers, she finally cried. He didn’t take her seriously when she shed tears and for that she remained dry-eyed until the very end, until she couldn’t anymore. She resents him for it now, but back then she believed it was her fault for feeling so small, for taking it too personally, for shrinking on herself like food left out to rot.
When the proceedings were over and they stood in front of each other - this is it, she thought, he’s not my husband anymore - her tears had dried and she knew she had to play the role of the friendly divorcee, to be mature and good-natured, to wish him a good life, hope to see him around, whatever bullshit people told each other when they broke up, and so she did. She said all the necessary things, acted in all the proper ways, yet all she had wanted then was to dig her nails into his skin, claw his eyes out, yell at him until her world was forced to make sense again, wished they could tear each other apart until love was miraculously rekindled.
He had seen through her façade and let her have it anyway.
She did see him, after that. Many times. Working in the same place made running into him an inescapable reality.
Coming here to this place, trailing the damaged, rusty railway with her footsteps, counting the trails left of it, the new, raw grass spearing out of the soil, she hopes to breathe, in a way to reconfigure herself without him in the same places they frequented, to reclaim what she’s always loved, without him. To finally accept that they exist in the same place and that it’s alright.
He still comes here, too, sometimes, probably not as much as she does, but it’s not forgotten; she knows that not because she had caught him in the act - as much as she wishes that were the case - but because he had told her. Over coffee in the tower cafeteria he divulged this to her like it was nothing, like it meant nothing, casually, in that breezy way he talks when he’s comfortable. She hated that he was comfortable in her presence.
Couldn’t she just be his crazy ex-wife, did she also have to be his friend.
It’s midnight and she is alone with the lulling waters to her left and an abandoned church with a front once adorned with long stained glass windows to the right, but even those are now gone. Broken, stolen. It stood discarded, gradually melding into the other structures around it, yellow even in the darkness.
He sees this in the daylight. His feet trot here in the afternoons and the day has long passed that time. It’s as if they are performing watching duty for each other.
Not for the first time, the attempt to appropriate the place for herself has failed.
This is the place where nothing matters anymore. Where things that don’t matter stay.
Thank you everyone for participating! We may have some late entries so I will do my best to add them to this post as they show up, but here are the posts for each of the days.
Day 1: Office Gossip / Office Party
Snapdragon - Pariging Hanahaki Fic
Kanzai and Piyon gossiping - art
Life of the Party (or lack thereof) - zodiac office party fic
Day 2: Coffee shop (feral) / “Who Broke the Coffee Machine?”
AITA For Breaking the Coffee Machine? -fic
Beans really does not get paid enough for this - fic
Day 3: pre-canon / how the zodiacs joined
the girl with the green hair- mizaicheadle fic
Day 4: role-swap / your zodiac year
Beans as Ging - art
Day 5: field mission / secret romance
Ging x Cheadle - art
Day 6: Beans Murder Mystery / there is a creature loose in the association building and it is eating all of the salt packets. saccho is losing his mind. he’s crying in a closet. he’s going through withdrawls. the other zodiacs have to . u h, catch the ceature,,, ,, to save. save saccho.
Detective Beans - art
Day 7: Free Day!
Cheadle ft. annoying corporate gay pride Pariston - art
Assorted memes thanks to cheadle-yorkshire
Kanzai and Cluck
Ging Pariston and Cheadle pt 1
Saccho Saiyuu Ginta and Pariston
Cluck Pariston Ging and Cheadle
Ging Pariston and Cheadle pt 2
Pariston Saiyuu Cheadle Mizai and Piyon
Leorio Cheadle Pariston Piyon and Netero
Friendly reminder that if you did miss zodiac week but still want to do the prompts / have your fic for the prompts added to the ao3 collection, DM me and I will add it / reblog the posts.
1. Pariston mentions to Ging that his “son is in the hospital” yet says nothing to Cheadle, likewise in the election hall everyone is focused on Ging being the father despite Cheadle being present. She also does not appear to have any strong emotion towards Gon, one way or the other.
2. I don’t think it adds anything to the story, especially since they’ve already been in the same vicinity (election hall) and nothing was brought up.
3. Do you really think Cheadle would willingly give a child to Ging to take care of? Doubt.
