✧TOP UP THE WATER, PLEASE ? ✧
art cred: @/zassyoku_DD twt
🍷☂️ Pairings: kafblade x gn! reader
🍷☂️Synopsis: you're the lighthouse they anchor to.
🍷☂️ content: slight angst, emotional, fluff.
🍷☂️ A/N: ....hello. I have written a lot during my impromptu hiatus, so I'll edit and upload them here, yay!
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You aren’t exactly an Emanator, part of the Trailblaze, or a part of the Genius Society. You’re mundane, born into a lackluster planet, the kind of person who folds grocery bags into neat triangles and leaves a bowl of food for stray cats to eat.
You were never chosen by a Path; nor did you ever want to be. A plain being, and you were content with that. You just wanted all your days to be simple and fulfilling, no stress, no drama.
Which is exactly why the two most dangerous people you’ve ever met keep ending up in your kitchen.
Blade arrives like rain over rust coloured blood, silent, too tall for the doorframe, hair in disarray but still decent, coat colour deep as night. He doesn’t speak at first. He never does. He stands there with blood in the grooves of his knuckles of his gloved hands and the faraway look of someone who's haunted, who has suppressed his emotions so that the disease wouldn't spread. You fetched the clean towel from the oven handle and held it out. He takes it from you like clockwork.
Then, a few minutes later, there’s a chime from the hall. The door unlocks without your hand, and she steps in on heels that make a crisp sound. Perfume like lilacs. Smile like a blade hidden underneath silk. Kafka never falters. She simply exists, immaculate, and the space seemed to rearrange itself around her.
“Sweetheart,” Kafka purrs, “Is there tea?”
“There will be,” you say, already lighting the burner.
She leans her hip against the counter and watches you measure the perfect amount of tea leaves. Then sat at the dining table, gesturing Blade to sit in front of you.
Blade sits, and the chair creaks under the weight. He says nothing while you patch his hands. You’ve learned the route of his scars; you know which ones to avoid. You know he flinches at sudden touch, that he's not used to your gentle healing. He does not thank you out loud. He places his wrists palm-up and allows himself the grace of being tended to.
It is enough.
Kafka talks for both of them: anecdotes light as a feather, disarming questions that pluck truth by accident. She never mentions the Stellaron Hunters like it’s a title. It’s like a weather pattern—unsurprising, inevitable. You stir honey into her cup and nothing into Blade’s, then sit between them at your cramped table with its wobbling leg, your knees knocking Kafka’s. Blade’s left shoulder nearly touches yours. The three of you drink, and you tell them about Mrs. Ko, your neighbor, who grows strawberries out of a bucket of soil on the fire escape, and the kid upstairs who practices the same four bars on a violin repeatedly until even your dreams hum with it.
Kafka props her chin on her hand and listens like you’re telling her how the stars taste. Blade’s fingers curl around his mug. He meets your eyes only once; it’s enough to feel a tide pull.
“Why us?” Kafka asks, lazy and pointed at once. She always knows when to tug on the thread.
You shrug. “You kept coming.”
She laughs, softly. Blade’s mouth tilts slightly, a ghost of a smile.
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You don’t know when the three of you became a we. It happens slowly, with the ordinary magic of repetition. They leave their weapons on your nightstand and shoes by your mat. You keep bandages in the second drawer now, and a jar of jasmine candies Kafka pretends she doesn’t eat, and a stack of spare shirts for Blade that you’ve mended so many times the stitches are a new map across old fabric.
Top up the water, please? A note you left for them as they left you in the morning.
They know that you're a late riser, so as thanks for the reprieve you gave them, they always did.
They do not ask you to follow. You don’t ask them to stay. But they do, sometimes, like a storm deciding to hover over one town for a little longer.
When the Stellaron Hunters work, they vanish for days or months, and your phone goes dark. You pretend not to notice the ache. You sweep crumbs from the counter; you water Mrs. Ko’s strawberries while she visits her sister planet side; you hum along with the upstairs violinist and make soup that simmers for hours. You remind yourself that loving is not the same as owning. Loving is the heat you save for someone’s return.
On a night when the moon doesn’t belong in your sky, they come back; it was like they never left. Kafka kissed you on both sides of your cheeks and left an expensive gift on the wobbly table.
“Stay,” you say, not pleading. A practical instruction. You place your palm on Blade’s sternum and feel nothing of a heartbeat, and everything of the man who still drinks his tea too hot because he likes the burn in his mouth. You take Kafka’s hand, thumb a smear of gunpowder from her knuckles, and she exhales, eyes closing, as if the door you open is the only one that isn’t trapped.
You make up the futon and draw the curtains. Kafka slides in with a sigh, her magenta hair drapes over her like a silk curtain, and her face is bare from her carefully applied makeup. Her night gown was long, yet it had the ghost of her curves underneath.
And Blade? After a hesitation that feels like crossing a ravine, laid stiffly. You sleep between them that night, you and your soft mortal lungs. Blade doesn’t sleep much. You feel when he sits up, when he paces, when he returns, and watch the rising horizon like it owes him an apology. Kafka sleeps like a cat with one ear always listening; in the four a.m. hush, she reaches blindly to find your wrist and counts your pulse. You dream of a life that could've been.
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The first time you quarrel, it isn’t about blood or danger. It’s about a casserole dish.
“Don’t,” Blade says, catching your hand when you try to lift it out of the oven. “It’ll burn.”
“That’s what the mittens are for,” you say, amused, but his grip tightens, alarm threading through his voice like a crack through glass. Kafka looks up from her messages with a frown so elegant it could be framed.
“Bladie,” she says, a slight warning, then at you, “sweetheart.”
“It will burn you.” His eyes are sharp, desperate. “You are—” He stops, makes his mouth into a thin line, as if he can trap the word before it escapes. “Breakable.”
You set the dish down with your mitts, slowly. You turn and slide your hands up his arms, not to soothe, but to anchor. “Yes,” you tell him. “I’m breakable. That’s inevitable. It’s also okay.”
The room listens. The ticking of the wall clock seems obscenely loud.
You lean your forehead against Blade’s collarbone. He smells like petrichor again, and rusted metal, and... jasmine. “I know. I’m normal. I’m human. I’m here momentarily anyway.”
Kafka comes to your other side, slides an arm around your waist, and kisses your hair. “Then we’ll just have to be very careful with our most precious mortal,” she murmurs, playful coat over sincere bone.
Blade doesn’t laugh, but he loosens. He always does when you say something he couldn't argue with
Later, the three of you eat casserole on the floor because the table wobbles too much when you’re all tense. Kafka steals the best crust corner. Blade pretends not to notice and pushes his portion toward your plate.
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You did not become a fighter. You did not learn to shoot. You did not ask to be taught the ways a body becomes a lockpick for fate. They made sure you stayed soft. You keep yourself ordinary like a lamp that’s always lit.
To them, ordinary is rare.
When Kafka returns with the smell of danger still pressed into her hair, you rub shampoo into her scalp, and she leans her head against your belly in the bath until her shoulders loosen. She tells you lies with such affection you repeat them like lullabies, and she thanks you for believing even when belief is the least important part. You brush a strand of hair off her face, with a raised eyebrow and say, “What did you really do?” and she laughs, eyes bright, and revises her story into something truer that still manages to avoid the gore.
When Blade’s hands trembled after a fight, you take him to your tiny balcony. He doesn’t like walls when the world in his head is closing in. He stands there with the city reflected in his pupils, and you press your palm between his shoulder blades, count your own breaths out loud until he matches them. Kafka brings the blanket you keep on the couch, drapes it over both of you, and sets a cup of tea on the railing within reach. None of this is magic. All of this is was raw, gritty and real.
“I thought immortals never needed blankets,” you tease.
“I don’t,” Blade mutters.
Kafka folds the edge over his elbow anyway. “Shh. Warmth is a human superstition. We’re humoring our beloved dove.”
“I’m humoring myself,” you say, and Blade huffs—almost a laugh, almost a scoff.
Enough for you and Kafka to share a giggle.
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You go to the market on a morning filled with thin gold light. Kafka takes your arm and points at a fruit you’ve never seen; you buy it, and it turns out to taste like sunshine. Blade carries the bags. He pretends to be annoyed when two aunties call him handsome and try to feed him coconut pandan cakes; he eats one. You wipe sugar from his lower lip with your thumb; he goes still and looks at you like the market and people around him had vanished and he decided not to care.
“Don’t,” Kafka murmurs, amused, to no one in particular.
“What?” you ask, smiling.
“Steal my heart~,” she says, and kisses you in the middle of the aisle, unabashed. Blade doesn’t kiss you there. He waits until the three of you are in the stairwell, where the concrete smells like rain memories and the graffiti is old declarations of love no one bothered to scrub. He braces one hand above your head and leans in like gravity is a promise. His mouth is careful, then not careful at all. You make a small sound, and he swallows it. Kafka watches, fondly, a hand at your waist to keep you from falling through the gap where the rail should be.
But are already falling all the time they're near. The trick is learning to enjoy the moment.
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There are nights you lie awake and wonder if you are selfish. If keeping them here, however briefly, gives them something they shouldn’t want: an illusion of home. You do not want to be an illusion.
On one such night, Blade is awake too, staring at the ceiling like he’s reading a prophecy he’s memorized and still can’t change. In the near dark, you whisper, “Do I make it harder?”
He turns his head. The expression he makes isn’t one you’ve seen before. It softens the most frightening parts of him until he looks like what he might have been, once, in a distant land.
“Yes,” he says, blunt and honest.
Kafka’s hand slides, sleep-heavy, across your stomach. “Darling,” she mumbles, not opening her eyes, “don’t make me get up to soothe either of you. Come here.” She tucks herself against your back, legs tangling, breath warm.
You press your face to Blade’s chest and listen—not for a heartbeat, but for the sound of his breathing.
You are not just a safe house to them. You are an anchor. A being that's constant, with a crooked table and a kettle that whistles too eagerly, and a balcony that collects rain. You are a comforting footnote in a story full of conflict, and somehow that makes you the star in it: the one that reminds even monsters and myths where to lay their heads.
Tomorrow, they will be gone. Tomorrow, they will go somewhere you can't follow. You set the kettle on the side of the sink before you sleep. You leave a note on it, a habit you can’t break: "top up the water, please."
When you open your eyes late in the morning, there’s a second note beneath it, written in looping violet:
We did. —K
Under that, a narrower, impatient hand has added:
And I tightened the table screws. —B
You smile so hard it hurts. Being ordinary was...hard, but with them? You wouldn't trade it for anything.
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© otterneuvillette do not copy, repost, or translate any of my work without permission. reserved rights to any original ideas. I do not own any of these characters., except for my oc's. all rights reserved.
