#niles flynn

[ondemonsanddaydreams]

Photosensitivity

“Laeayn.” Isra hummed quietly and swallowed hard, cocking her head to one side at the sound of Kōji’s voice as if to let him know she was listening, “What are you doing?” She could guess what he was referring too, her eyes ached, her head ached, and she’d been sitting quietly on the sofa with her hand pressed firmly over both eyes since long before he’d come back to the room.

“My eyes sting,” she was quiet, “my goggles disappeared and we’ve been out in the sun all day,” she trailed off with a shrug, “the light hurts.” She didn’t hear Kōji approach, but suddenly his large hand was on her chin and angling her face up toward him.

“Let me see,” his tone was as brusque as usual, but there was a gentleness in his touch that was enough to stop her from arguing with him. Isra groaned quietly, but still managed to open her eyes in narrow slits, squinting up at him in what probably would’ve looked like a glare if anyone else saw it, but there was a grimace on her lips to display the amount of pain she was in. Kōji was blurry to her, the lights causing a sort of painful halo to surround him while he took in the red in the whites of her eyes and the slight swelling. After a moment, he let out an almost exasperated sigh and covered her eyes with one of his hands. “This is why you wear those things all the time?” Isra hummed quietly again in answer; she was pretty sure she probably didn’t have to explain photosensitivity to him. “I’ll figure out what happened to them,” she felt something settle on her head as his hand disappeared from her eyes and she reached up to investigate when she felt Kōji tug the brim of his hat down over her eyes, “just wait here until I get back.” She started to argue that it was a waste of time and she’d be fine in a day or two anyway so she could figure it out then, but the door had closed behind him by the time she found the words. Isra squinted around the room from beneath the brim of his hat and a soft smile found her lips when she noted he’d taken the time to close the curtains and turn off the light before leaving.

[recoveringproblemchild13]

Speed

Moving too fast

but I let it go

at your speed

because I'm afraid

of losing you

before I know

if I want to keep you

[nilesflynn]

missed opportunity

Just when I'd started to think

maybe I wasn't capable of love,

when I started to just

accept myself

as hollow,

I met you,

I fell

for you:

your smile,

your laugh,

the way you didn't look

right through me,

the way you seemed

to shut out everything else

to listen

if I said your name

no matter how softly.

You were beautiful,

like a rare good dream

that might disappear

at a moment's notice,

but I couldn't help but touch

with shaking fingers;

I wonder if you saw

how scared I was

you'd distance yourself

or disappear,

if you saw how desperately

I wanted to make sure,

even with my terrible memory,

that you would stay...

I wonder if you thought of me

at all that night

when I could think of nothing

but you.

[synonymsforsincerely-nilesflynn]

Sink

I've never really liked swimming.

I didn't get a lot of opportunity

when I was a kid,

so that and riding a bike

waited until I was a bit older

and now I'm equally bad at both.

I can keep my head above water,

but anything more complicated

is pushing it.

I sink in the water,

not enough fat on my bones

to be buoyant,

and sometimes,

I let it happen,

push the air from my lungs

and just sink

down where it's darker

and quiet,

the only sound

the flow of my own blood

through the veins in my ears.

Then,

for the two or so seconds

I can hold my breath,

I'm faced with a choice:

push up from the bottom

and inhale again

once I've broken the surface,

or inhale now,

fill my lungs with water

and let myself sink

to the bottom.

[synonymsforsincerely-nilesflynn]

The Idea of Me

Green eyes looked at me with a nervous light to them I could only call hope. “I love you,” she told me and I- I didn’t react despite the itch in my scar, my expression didn’t change; I was silent, trying to determine what she meant before I spoke. A joke? She seemed too serious. Practicing for someone else? I couldn’t think of a reason she’d pick me to practice with, we’d rarely spoken before. “You don’t know love,” I broke my silence. If I was being fair, I didn’t really know love either, but I wasn’t in the mood to play fair. The light went out as she faltered, “O-Okay, then,” a beat to think of a way to salvage a situation I was not going to let her salvage, “I like you.” Again I was silent, trying to think of the best way to kill her interest because I was so far not capable of love even if I’d been interested. “No,” my voice was colder than I’d expected as I rubbed my temples in an attempt to stave off the impending migraine, “you like the idea of me; you like the quiet mystery I present and already filled in the blanks yourself without ever actually trying to know me, otherwise you’d already know how this would turn out for you. You are not the first and you won’t be the last.” Green eyes filled with tears now, “Not even an ‘I’m sorry’?” she spoke through a sob. “I won’t apologize for your poor judgment.” Her gaze narrowed into a glare and I supposed I got my wish. “Go to hell, you ass!” A smile- maybe a little too wicked- crept across my lips at that. “Sweetheart, where do you think I’m from?”

[synonymsforsincerely-nilesflynn]

Smile

I don’t know if my default expression just looks depressed or pissed off, but I get a lot of strangers telling me to smile. I do, sometimes, to get them to shut up and leave me alone, but it’s strained and fake- a thinly veiled threat. I might smirk or let slip a harsh laugh at Grey, but my real smiles are few and far between. Someone told me years ago, after seeing one of those rare real ones, that I smile like I’m about to cry, that I laugh like I’m dying inside, and that I get this look sometimes- when I think no one is watching- like I’m broken and lost with no idea how to put myself back together even if I did manage to find all of the pieces. His words haunt me, from time to time- on sleepless nights when I feel hollow and empty with only Lucy to patch the holes and fill the void, and a part of me wonders if I even want to try. 

[synonymsforsincerely-nilesflynn]

The Worst of It

The worst part of it all wasn’t that she could never go home; it wasn’t that her silver~blue tattoos- like pure mana embedded into old tribal scars on her forearms hummed of a place long forgotten to history, unwelcome gifts to accompany the slave brand on the side of her ribs. The worst wasn’t even that after her arson, kelpie thievery, and escape she’d learned the one person she had in her life was granted a fate worse than death. The worst for the small, scarred and disillusioned abandoned young woman wasn’t that it was entirely her fault these things had happened, at the time, she’d even taken some small comfort in having nothing left to lose. The worst wasn’t that she’d been wrong- -it wasn’t the dread that caused her laugh to falter and her smile to die on her lips as she realized she’d come to love the scruffy renegade that fought beside her now. The worst wasn’t knowing there was magic in his blood as there was hers, a dangerous thing if discovered to both others and himself. The worst wasn’t knowing it was how she’d lost her almost sister, that the same magic that had her hunted as a child was what had led to the downward spiral her life had since become; her fingers unconsciously brushed the scar on her cheek as she remembered the priest who had attempted to feed her to a demon as the price of some promise it likely never intended to keep. The worst wasn’t that she knew one day she’d lose him, to death or the same way she’d lost her almost sister. No, the worst of it all was that he loved her, too.

[synonymsforsincerely-nilesflynn]

Long Live The Imposter King

The young woman, even in minimalistic street clothes and without her crown, still had a sort of regal bearing, her cloudy eyes staring straight ahead and unwavering. The imposter king, the one who had fought so hard against her power, to steal her throne only to learn that she’d never wanted it. That she’d run away years ago, letting the kingdom crumble in her absence. Even now, she’d only returned because she’d found the place far worse off under his rule and with no power of his own to keep everything from collapsing. He pressed the blade to her throat, hard enough to draw a tiny sliver of blood and show her he could easily kill her then and there. The runaway queen’s cloudy gaze remained unfocused and staring blankly past him. Those eyes had always unnerved him, blind and yet almost all-seeing as they were. A soft, knowing smile painted her lips, her blood running down the edge of his sword. “Kill me,” she spoke calmly, a hint of sadness in her tone, “if you believe you can bear to be haunted by all those our decisions have slain- if you can handle another ghost to haunt you with them,” she pressed her fingers to her chest as if to say she’d join them, “then kill me,” she paused as she lifted her chin slightly, offering him a challenge, showing him that she did not see him as a threat any more now than she had in the past, “because I can.” What began as a seed of uneasiness at the back of the imposter king’s mind all those years ago finally sprouted, growing quickly into an almost animal instinct making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and warning that if he should try to kill her, things would go terribly wrong for him very quickly. The blood pooling at the edge of his blade finally dripped and as it fell, he glanced back to find tentacles of shadow, ink black and wicked sharp, aimed for his torso as if homing in on his heartbeat and the sound of his breathing. “Or you can walk away.” The smile that had before seemed soft and a little sad now seemed almost cruel, offering him a choice he didn’t really have. The imposter king turned to run and the shadows followed, allowing him three steps before, with a flick of her wrist, they found their mark, darting forward to impale him with enough speed and force to lift his now limp form into the air. The broken crown toppled to the ground, bounced twice, and rolled across the floor until it came to a stop at her feet. The runaway queen lifted the broken steel and as her power flowed through it, the material was reforged into a thorny circlet of silver and shadows, the new crown settled on her head as though that were where it had always belonged.