Hi how are youu? I hope fine
I love your work so much and everytime I check your page I feel so happy checking your amazing work, since you are one of my fav twst writers 💛
I saw that you have request open btw
May I request Leona and Lilia ( or any character you can add with them +) with a chubby insecure fem reader ?
Reader is insecure about her body because of the beauty standards etc..and the characters notices that so they help her and + make love ( smut but super romantic way) showing that they are worth it and beautiful
( you can change or add the plot, since you're the writer, it's okay since I love how you write and describe things. I just love how you put your heart into these fics)
Thank you 💛
"Shatter the glass, let the lie pass; breathe out the pain, let the flesh reign."
(The Spell of Reclamation)
Prologue: The Gospel of Glass
You have spent your whole life apologizing for the space you take up.
It started young—younger than anyone should have to learn the geometry of their own diminishing. Seven years old, standing on a bathroom stool, pinching the flesh of your belly between thumb and forefinger, wondering why your body didn't slope the way the girls on television did. Twelve, and you learned to suck in your stomach like a prayer, holding your breath in hallways and classrooms, a perpetual act of shrinking. Fifteen, and the word fat stopped being a descriptor and became a sentence—life without parole, handed down by a jury of peers who measured your worth in waistlines and collarbones and the gap between your thighs.
Sixteen. Seventeen. The years blurred together like watercolors left in the rain, each one washing out a little more of the girl you might have been. You learned a language no one should have to speak: the language of dressing room meltdowns, of sizes that didn't go high enough, of mirrors that reflected back a stranger warped by the funhouse of a culture that profitted from your pain. You learned that beauty was a country whose borders were drawn without you, and the passport required a body you did not inhabit.
The world had a thousand ways to tell you that you were wrong, and each one left a mark—not on your skin, but somewhere deeper. Somewhere that bled without showing. You tried to carve yourself into acceptability with the quiet knives of restriction and denial, the small cruelties that women are taught to inflict upon themselves in the name of love. Beauty is pain, they said, as if suffering were a cosmetic. As if starvation were a skincare routine. As if the road to loveliness were paved with the gravel of your own self-esteem.
What they never told you was that the road had no destination. That every pound shed was a mirage, and the oasis was always ten pounds away. That the woman in the magazine was a fiction—a collage of lighting and angles and digital erasure—and you were breaking your very real bones against her very unreal perfection.
You were drowning in a room full of people who couldn't see water.
And then you fell—through a portal, through a looking glass, through the cracked lens of a world that shouldn't exist—and landed in a place where magic was real and the rules of reality bent like reeds in the wind. Twisted Wonderland. A world of dark mirrors and older contracts, where the flowers conspired and the portraits judged.
But the mirrors here lied too. The beauty standards here had claws and fangs and centuries of tradition behind them. And you, the magicless girl from a world that had already deemed you insufficient, arrived in this new realm carrying the same old wounds.
The body you inhabited did not change just because the world did.
I. The Anchor — Leona Kingscholar
The heat of the Savanaclaw dormitory was a living thing—it pressed against your skin like a third body, heavy and slow and drowsy with the scent of sun-baked stone and wild grass. You were sprawled across Leona's bed, a tangle of limbs and borrowed silence, while the afternoon sun striped the floor through half-shuttered windows. He was dozing beside you, as he always was—the great, unbothered lion, his breathing a low, rhythmic rumble that vibrated through the mattress.
You were not sleeping. You were performing the ancient, agonizing ritual of Stillness—the art of lying perfectly, carefully still so that your body didn't spread. So that the softness of your stomach didn't pool outward, so that your thighs didn't press against each other with that fleshy insistence that made you want to crawl out of your own skin. You were holding your breath, literally holding it, your diaphragm locked in a perpetual suck-in, and you had been doing it for so long that your ribs ached from the effort of making yourself small.
The pillow was your shield. You'd drawn it across your midsection when you'd lain down—a casual gesture, or so you'd tried to make it seem. A buffer between his eyes and the part of you that you hated most. He hadn't commented on it. Leona never commented on things. He simply observed them, filed them away, and waited with the patience of an apex predator for the right moment to strike.
That moment came when you shifted—just slightly—and the pillow slipped.
You felt the air hit the strip of skin where your shirt had ridden up, and you flinched. It was involuntary, a full-body spasm of shame that yanked the pillow back into place and sucked your stomach in so hard your vision spotted at the edges. You held your breath. Your heart slammed against your ribs.
A hand closed around your wrist.
Not tight enough to hurt. Just tight enough to stop you.
"Don't."
Leona's voice was a low, sandpaper growl, rough with sleep and something else—something harder, angrier. His eyes were still half-closed, his ears flat against his head, but his grip on your wrist was absolute. He pulled your hand—and the pillow it clutched—away from your body with a lazy, inexorable strength that you couldn't have resisted if you'd tried.
"Leona—"
"Shut up." He tossed the pillow off the bed entirely. It landed somewhere on the floor with a soft, damning thump. Then he rolled over, and the full, devastating weight of him settled across your body.
He was heavy. That was the first thing you registered—heavy in a way that pressed you into the mattress, heavy in a way that forced every ounce of air from your lungs, heavy in a way that made it impossible to suck in. Your stomach was flattened against his, your softness pressed against his lean, muscled hardness, and there was nothing—nothing—you could do to hide.
You panicked. Your hands came up against his chest, pushing weakly, your breath coming in short, shallow gasps that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the screaming, spiraling terror of being seen. "I can't—you can't—please, I look—"
"Look at what?" He dropped his head, his nose brushing the curve of your jaw, and inhaled. A long, slow breath that dragged your scent into his lungs like he was memorizing it. "Look at this?" His hand slid down your side, over the ridge of your ribs, down to the swell of your hip, and he gripped—not gently, not delicately, but with the rough possessiveness of a beast claiming its kill. His claws dimpled your skin through the thin fabric of your shirt. "This?" He pressed his palm flat against your belly—the belly you'd spent a lifetime trying to erase—and held it there, warm and steady and immovable.
"Stop," you whispered, and your voice cracked on the word like glass on stone. "Please. I hate it."
His ears flicked back, and a sound came from his throat—not a purr, not a growl, but something in between, something that vibrated through your entire body like a seismic event. "You hate it," he repeated flatly. "And what do you think I hate? Hm? I'll tell you what I hate." He lifted his head and opened his eyes—those slitted, emerald eyes that saw through every defense you'd ever constructed like it was tissue paper. "I hate watching you strangle yourself. I hate watching you hold your breath every time you lie next to me, like you think the air isn't meant for you. I hate that you'd rather break your own ribs than let me feel you breathe."
The words hit you like a physical blow, and the tears came—hot and fast and furious, spilling down your temples into the pillow. You turned your face away, but he caught your chin in his hand and held you still.
"Herbivore." His voice dropped to a register that you felt more than heard. "In the Savanaclaw, we don't starve to look pretty for the vultures. Soft means fed. Soft means strong enough to survive the dry season. Soft means healthy." His thumb traced the wet track of your tears. "Do you think a lion wants a mate who crumbles in the wind? I want flesh that yields. I want warmth that bleeds into my bones. I want—" He broke off, his jaw clenching, and something raw and almost vulnerable flickered behind his eyes before he shuttered it away. "I want you. Not the version you think you should be. You."
He kissed you then—not gently, not tenderly, but with the fierce, consuming hunger of a creature that had waited too long and would wait no longer. His mouth took yours like it was taking territory, his teeth catching your lower lip, his tongue sweeping past your defenses with a ruthless efficiency that left you gasping. And still he didn't lift his weight from you. He kept you pinned, kept you grounded, a deadweight anchor that would not let you float away on the tide of your own self-loathing.
His hands moved with purpose now, pushing your shirt up, and when his palm met the bare skin of your stomach, you convulsed—an involuntary, desperate attempt to shrink, to flee, to disappear. But he was there, heavy and immovable, and he simply pressed harder, flattening his hand over the curve of your belly and holding you down.
"Breathe," he commanded against your mouth. "Breathe out. Stop holding it in. I want to feel you."
A sob broke from your chest, raw and ugly and real, and you breathed out—really, truly breathed out—and felt the full, unashamed roundness of yourself settle against him. He groaned. It was a deep, chest-rattling sound of satisfaction, and his hips pressed down against yours, and you felt the hard, unmistakable heat of him through his uniform pants.
"Feel that?" He rolled his hips, a slow, deliberate grind that made your vision blur. "That's what you do to me. Not some carved-out shadow. This. You."
He rid you of your clothes with an efficiency that bordered on impatience—not hurried, but decisive, the way a beast strips meat from bone. He didn't avert his eyes. He looked, and kept looking, and every instinct screamed at you to cover yourself, to cross your arms over your chest, to turn away from the scrutiny of that piercing green gaze. But he wouldn't let you. He caught your wrists when you tried, pinned them above your head with one hand, and held you there—exposed, trembling, seen.
"You have no idea," he said, his voice hoarse and thick, his free hand tracing the curve from your hip to your knee with a reverence that made your chest ache. "No idea what it does to me. This—" He squeezed the flesh of your outer thigh, his claws pricking lightly. "This is what a queen looks like."
He descended on you like a feast.
His mouth found every place you'd been taught to hide—the soft skin beneath your breasts, the stretch marks that silvered your hips, the swell of your belly that he kissed with a devotion that bordered on worship. He bit down gently on the meat of your thigh, and you keened, your back arching off the bed. He licked the sting away, his tail flicking lazily behind him, and looked up at you with those predator's eyes—dark with want, blazing with something that was not pity but fury on your behalf.
When he finally, finally slid into you, it was a slow, inexorable claiming—a heavy, pressing intrusion that stole the breath from your lungs and replaced it with something else. Something full. He draped himself over you completely, chest to chest, hip to hip, his weight driving him deeper with every slow, rolling thrust. There was no space between you. No room to hide, no room to shrink, no room to be anything other than exactly what you were—soft and full and wanted.
"This is mine," he growled against your throat, his hips snapping forward with a force that made the bed creak. "This—" Another thrust. "—is mine. And I don't let anyone take what's mine. Not even you."
You came apart beneath him not with a shatter but with a surrender—a letting go of something you'd been clutching so tightly for so long that your hands were cramped around it. He caught the sound in his mouth, swallowing your cry, his rhythm growing erratic, chasing his own release with the single-minded intensity of a beast closing in on its prey. When he spent himself inside you, he buried his face in the crook of your neck and roared—muffled, private, and devastating.
He didn't pull out. He didn't move. He simply lay there, heavy and warm and present, his heart hammering against your chest, his breath hot and ragged in your ear. And for the first time in as long as you could remember, you didn't want to disappear. You wanted to stay right here, pinned beneath the weight of someone who saw you—all of you—and didn't flinch.
His arm tightened around your waist, his claws tracing idle patterns on the curve of your hip. "Sleep," he mumbled into your hair. "And if I catch you holding your breath again, I'll bite you."
You almost laughed. It came out as a wet, broken sound, but it was closer to a laugh than anything you'd managed in weeks.
You woke in the amber light of late afternoon, and for a moment—just a moment—the old terror surged back. You were exposed. Your shirt was still rucked up around your ribs, your stomach bare and round in the warm light, and you could see it—the full, unedited landscape of your body, laid bare without the mercy of shadow.
But Leona's hand was still there. Heavy and warm, draped over the curve of your belly, rising and falling with each breath you took. He was still asleep, his face slack and unguarded, his ears twitching at some dream-sound. And his palm—his palm was flat against the part of you that you hated most, pressed to it like it was something worth holding.
You looked at your own body through his hands, and for the first time, the geometry of yourself didn't add up to a deficit.
II. The Waltz — Lilia Vanrouge
It was the Night Raven College annual gala—a spectacle of candlelight and enchantment, where the chandeliers floated overhead like captive constellations and the music wove through the air like an intoxicating spell. You were there because duty demanded it, swathed in a dress that you'd bought two sizes too small because the store hadn't carried your size and you'd convinced yourself that this time, this one, you could make it work.
You'd been wrong.
The dress was a velvet cage, its seams biting into the flesh of your arms, its zipper a held breath away from surrender. You'd spent the entire evening with your back against the wall—literally against the wall, the cold stone the only thing keeping the fabric from splitting—your arms crossed over your midsection, your smile held in place by nothing but sheer, brittle will. Every woman in the room seemed to move through the space like water, their bodies streamlined and weightless, and you felt like a boulder in a river of silk.
So you shrank. You pressed yourself into the shadow between two marble pillars, your shoulders hunched, your chin tucked, your entire body folded inward like a paper crane. You made yourself as small as you possibly could, and you prayed for invisibility—the superpower you'd never been granted but had spent a lifetime cultivating.
"Well, well," said a voice like a music box left slightly open. "What have we here? A wallflower wilting in the dark?"
Lilia Vanrouge materialized from the shadows as if he'd been born from them, his red eyes gleaming with a light that was equal parts mischief and something far, far older. He was resplendent in his formal uniform, his hair fell like a spill of black ink, his smile sharp enough to cut glass. He looked like something out of a storybook—the kind of creature that lured travelers off the path and into the woods.
And he was looking at you with an intensity that made you want to dissolve.
"Dance?" you said, too quickly, too desperately, because you'd rather light yourself on fire than have him see you as you were now. "I don't—I can't—people will see—"
"People will see what?" He tilted his head, his eyes narrowing—not with malice, but with curiosity, as if you'd spoken in a language he was trying to parse. "A woman standing in the corner like she's been sentenced to it? Yes, they'll see that. They've been seeing it all evening."
The words landed like a slap, and you recoiled. "I'm not—"
"You are." He stepped closer, and the scent of him washed over you—night-blooming jasmine and something older, earthier, like the smell of ancient libraries after rain. "You are shrinking. Folding in on yourself like a dying star. I have watched you all evening, little blossom, and I have watched you make yourself smaller and smaller and smaller, as if the world is a room with a ceiling that's pressing down on you."
Tears stung your eyes, and you blinked them back furiously. "You don't understand. You're—you're you. You've never had to—"
"I have lived for seven hundred years," Lilia said, and the playfulness dropped from his voice like a mask, revealing something underneath that was ancient and terrible and gentle. "I have worn corsets that cracked my ribs. I have painted my skin with lead and arsenic to meet the standard of a court that would have burned me at the stake for the color of my eyes. I have been the monster under the bed and the beauty on the pedestal, and I am telling you—" He reached out and took your hand. "—that neither is worth dying for."
He pulled you away from the wall.
You stumbled—your heels catching on the hem of your too-tight dress, your body ungainly and off-balance—and he caught you, his small hands surprisingly strong, his grip unyielding. He didn't let you retreat. He drew you into the center of the room, where the other couples swirled in their endless, graceful orbits, and he positioned your hand on his shoulder with the precision of a maestro tuning an orchestra.
"Now," he said, his smile returning—softer now, but no less luminous. "Dance with me."
"I'll step on your feet."
"You'll step on the air. I'm much too quick for that."
He moved, and you had no choice but to follow.
The waltz was a spell—a spiraling, breathless, terrifying spell that pulled you out of the shadows and into the light. Lilia moved like water, like smoke, like a dream you were half-afraid to wake from, and he guided you through the steps with a surety that brooked no argument. Your dress pulled at your seams. Your body jiggled in ways that made you want to scream. People were looking.
"Stop looking at them," Lilia murmured, his hand firm on the small of your back—pressing, guiding, refusing to let you retreat. "Look at me."
"I can't—"
"Look at me."
You looked. His red eyes held you captive, and in their depths you saw not pity, not assessment, not the measuring gaze of a world that wanted to carve you down—you saw awe. Pure, unguarded, seven-hundred-year-old awe, as if you were the most extraordinary thing he had encountered in all his centuries of existence.
"There you are," he breathed, and his smile was incandescent. "There is the woman I see when I look at you. Do you feel it? Do you feel how your body moves? How it breathes and bends and lives?"
You did feel it. Against your will, against every instinct that screamed at you to shrink and hide, you felt it—the music in your bones, the rhythm of your blood, the sheer, undeniable aliveness of having a body that could move through space. Your feet found the beat. Your hips swayed. The dress strained, and you didn't care, because Lilia was looking at you like you'd hung the moon, and for a moment—just a moment—the noise of the world went quiet.
He spun you. You laughed—a real, genuine, startled laugh that bubbled up from somewhere you'd thought was sealed shut. He pulled you back in, and the momentum carried you against his chest, and suddenly the music had slowed to a murmur and you were standing in the circle of his arms, your forehead nearly touching his, your breath mingling with his in the narrow space between your mouths.
"You take up space," he whispered, and his voice was fierce and tender and old enough to know better and young enough to still believe. "You take up space, and it is glorious. Never apologize for the room you fill. The world is vast enough for your magnificence."
He kissed you.
It was not the kiss of a boy—it was the kiss of a creature who had loved and lost and loved again across centuries, who knew the terrible brevity of beautiful things and chose to cherish them anyway. His lips moved against yours with a reverence that made your knees weak, his fangs grazing your lower lip with a delicious, dangerous pressure. His hands mapped the landscape of your back—sliding down to the curve of your waist, the flare of your hips, resting there with a proprietary warmth that said I have you, I see you, I will not let you fall.
The crowd had vanished. The music had faded. There was only Lilia—his ancient, gentle hands and his devastating mouth and the way he held you like you were made of starlight and gossamer instead of flesh and bone and all the things you'd been taught to hate.
He walked you backward, step by step, never breaking the kiss, until your shoulders met the cold marble of a pillar at the edge of the ballroom. The shock of the stone against your back made you gasp, and he swallowed the sound, his body pressing against yours—small and hard and impossibly present, a counterweight to the vast, terrifying lightness of being seen.
"Feel that?" he murmured against your jaw, his lips trailing down to the racing pulse in your throat. "Feel your heart? Feel how it beats? That is the only rhythm you were ever meant to follow."
His hand slid down, down, down—over the straining velvet of your dress, over the curve of your hip, down to the hem that was riding up your thigh. His fingers slipped beneath it, cool and certain, tracing the warm skin of your inner thigh with a delicacy that made you tremble.
"Lilia—" Your voice was barely a whisper. "Someone will see—"
"Then they will see something beautiful," he said, and his eyes were molten, burning with a light that predated the stars. "Let them see."
He kissed you again, slower this time, his fingers drawing maddening, feather-light patterns on the sensitive skin of your thigh. He didn't go further—not here, not in the hall with its watching shadows. But the promise was there, woven into the press of his mouth and the grip of his hand and the way he whispered magnificent against your lips like a benediction.
When he pulled back, his eyes were bright with unshed tears that he would never, ever admit to. He straightened your dress with nimble, practiced fingers, smoothed your hair, and tucked your hand into the crook of his arm with a theatrical flourish.
"Come, my star," he said, his voice bright and clear and carrying. "The night is young, and I have not yet shown you the proper way to waltz."
He didn't let you go when the music ended. He kept his hand firm on the small of your back, guiding you through the parting crowd, out of the ballroom, and through the winding, moonlit halls of Diasomnia—as if he were leading you out of a dream you had been sleeping in for far too long.
Later—in his room, in the dark, with the moonlight streaming through the window like liquid silver—he laid you out on his bed like a manuscript he'd been waiting centuries to read. He undressed you with the care of an archivist handling a priceless text, his fingers tracing every mark and curve and fold of skin as if committing it to memory.
"You are not too much," he said, pressing a kiss to the inside of your wrist, where old scars lay faint and silver. "You are precisely enough. You are more than enough. You are abundant."
He made love to you with his mouth first—tasting you, teasing you, his clever tongue drawing sounds from you that you didn't know you could make. And when he finally slid into you, it was with a sigh that carried the weight of centuries—a sound of homecoming, as if he'd been searching for this warmth for seven hundred years and had finally, finally found it.
He moved like a dancer still—fluid and precise, each roll of his hips a pirouette, each thrust a grand jeté. He was small but relentless, his hands gripping your hips, his body arching above you like a bow. And when you came, it was with a sob that was half his name and half a prayer of thanks—thanks for the ancient, impossible creature who had looked at you in all your too-muchness and called it glorious.
Morning. The light was gray and tender, and you lay in the tangle of his sheets, watching the dust motes drift. The old familiar impulse stirred—the urge to pull the covers up, to hide, to disappear—but his arm was around your waist, his fingers tracing idle, sleep-warm circles on your stomach.
"You're doing it again," he mumbled, his eyes still closed. "Thinking too loud."
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize. Just stop." He pulled you closer, his small body curling around your soft one like a parenthesis enclosing a beloved phrase. "Stay."
You stayed.
III. The Depth — Azul Ashengrotto
The contract lay on the desk between you—not a magical one, not really, just a piece of paper that said you'd agreed to work at the Monstro Lounge three nights a week to pay off a debt you'd incurred through the simple crime of existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. But you weren't thinking about the contract. You were thinking about the chair.
Specifically, the fact that the chair—a delicate, gilded thing that would have looked at home in an undersea palace—creaked when you sat in it. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a small, furtive, mortifying groan of wood under weight, and it was barely audible over the ambient music, and Azul hadn't even looked up from his paperwork, but your face burned like you'd been branded.
You shifted your weight. The chair creaked again. You froze.
"Your pen hasn't moved in three minutes," Azul observed without looking up. His voice was smooth as glass, measured as a metronome—the voice of a businessman who missed nothing. "Is the contract not to your liking?"
"No, it's—" You signed quickly, sloppily, just to have something to do with your traitorous hands, and pushed the paper across the desk. Then you stood, because the chair was a liability and your legs were safer ground.
Except your legs weren't safer ground. Your legs were the thing you'd been fighting all night—the way your thighs pressed together when you stood, the way the skirt of your uniform rode up, the way you could feel the seam straining across your hips. You tugged at the hem, a quick, automatic gesture, and then another, and then you were doing the thing—pulling and adjusting and trying to create coverage where there was none, a frantic, futile rearrangement of fabric that wouldn't cover what you needed it to cover because there was too much of you and not enough cloth in the world to—
"Stop."
Azul's voice cracked like a whip, and you jumped, your hands flying away from your skirt as if it had burned you. He was looking at you now—really looking, his eyes sharp and piercing over the rims of his glasses, his silver hair catching the blue light of the aquarium that lined the walls of his office. Behind him, fish drifted like living jewels, and the light played over his face in shifting, watery patterns, and his expression was—
Not disgust. Not pity. Something rawer. Something that looked almost like pain.
"Come here," he said quietly.
You didn't move. "Azul, I should really get back to—"
"Come. Here."
You went. Your feet carried you around the desk on autopilot, and you stopped in front of his chair, your arms wrapped around yourself, your chin tucked, your shoulders hunched—the full architecture of shame, built in real time. He looked up at you, and his gaze traveled down your body and back up, and every inch of the journey was a slow, excruciating exposure.
"You're doing it again," he said.
"Doing what?"
"Hiding. Compensating. Performing the impossible mathematics of making yourself smaller." He took off his glasses and set them on the desk, and without them, his eyes were larger, more vulnerable, more human. "I know what that looks like. I've been that."
Your breath caught. Because of course he had—Azul, who had been the octopus in the tank, the thing that children pointed at and laughed, the creature who had signed away pieces of himself in desperate, grasping attempts to become something acceptable. Azul, who had built an empire on the foundation of his own self-hatred and called it ambition.
"Azul—" Your voice wavered. "It's not the same. You changed. You became—"
"What? Beautiful?" His laugh was short and sharp and brittle around the edges. "I became presentable. I learned to wear the right clothes and say the right words and project the right image. But the inkling in the tank is still here." He pressed a hand to his chest. "He is always here. And he remembers what it felt like to be looked at like you're looking at yourself right now."
You hadn't realized you were crying until the tear hit your lip.
He stood, and his hands found yours, and he held them with a tenderness that seemed impossible from a man who dealt in contracts and leverage. "The surface world teaches you that beauty is a shell," he said, his voice dropping to the low, urgent murmur of a secret. "That it's the exterior that matters—the smoothness, the symmetry, the conformity to a shape that someone else drew. But down in the deep, beauty is something else entirely. Down in the deep, the most beautiful things are soft. Unfathomable. Luminous." He lifted your hands to his lips and kissed your knuckles, one by one. "You are the pearl they were too blind to cultivate."
He kissed you then—softly, hesitantly, with the trembling uncertainty of someone who had spent so long building walls that he'd forgotten how to open a door. You tasted salt on his lips, and you realized with a start that he was crying too—silently, stoically, the tears tracking down his cheeks and disappearing into the collar of his immaculate shirt.
You reached for him, and he flinched—just as you had flinched, just as you always flinched—and the mirror of it cracked something open in your chest. You cupped his face in your hands and kissed him back, and he made a sound against your mouth that was half sob and half relief, and his hands came up to grip your waist with a desperation that bordered on violence.
He walked you backward until your shoulders hit the cold glass of the aquarium wall, and the shock of it—the cold on your bare skin, the warm press of his body, the fish drifting lazily behind you like spectators at a coronation—made you gasp. He swallowed the gasp, his mouth hungry and searching, his hands roaming your body with an urgency that said I need to know you're real, I need to know I'm real, I need to feel something that isn't the crushing pressure of the deep.
"Let me—" His voice was ragged, his composure shattered like a ship on the rocks. "Let me show you. Let me show you what I see."
He undressed you slowly, each inch of revealed skin met with a kiss, a murmur, a reverent exhalation. He kissed the stretch marks on your thighs and the soft swell of your belly and the tender skin beneath your breasts, and with each kiss, he whispered something—beautiful, exquisite, perfect, mine. His hands trembled as they mapped your curves, and his eyes—those deep, ocean-dark eyes—never left your face, watching every flicker of emotion that crossed it.
When he laid you down on the leather settee, he shed his own clothes with a vulnerability that laid him bare in every sense—not just the pale, marked skin of his body, but the quiver in his jaw, the way his hands shook as he unbuttoned his shirt, the way he looked at you for permission before every step. He was giving you the same power over him that he was asking you to surrender—the power to see, to judge, to accept or reject.
He moved like the tide when he entered you—a relentless, seeking pressure that drove the air from your lungs. Slow at first, then deeper, harder, a rhythm that ebbed and flowed with the inevitability of the sea. His hands braced on either side of your head, his silver hair falling around your face like a curtain, and his eyes—his eyes were burning, filled with a desperate, drowning need that had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with the soul-deep hunger to be held by someone who understood the crushing weight of the water.
"I've got you," he gasped, his hips rolling forward in a way that made your back arch off the leather. "I've got you. You're not drowning. You're not—ah—you're not alone."
The pressure built like a wave, rising and rising, and when it crested, it was like breaching the surface after a lifetime underwater—gasping, desperate, and blindingly bright. You came with his name on your lips, and he followed moments later, his body going rigid, his forehead pressed to yours, his moan a sound of salvation.
He collapsed against you, his weight slight but present, his breath coming in harsh, broken gasps against your neck. And for a long time, neither of you moved, and the fish drifted behind the glass, and the light played over your tangled bodies in shifting, watery patterns, and the silence was not empty but full—full of understanding, full of shared pain, full of the slow, tentative scaffolding of self-worth being built in the dark.
Morning. The office smelled of salt and leather, and Azul was already at his desk, his glasses perched on his nose, his face composed into its usual mask of professional detachment. But when you stirred on the settee, he looked up, and the mask slipped—just for a moment—and you saw the inkling in the tank, smiling at you with an openness that made your chest ache.
"Coffee?" he offered, and his voice was steady, but his hand trembled slightly as he poured.
You took the cup, and his fingers lingered on yours. "Thank you," you said, and you meant it for more than the coffee.
"I'm a businessman," he said, adjusting his glasses with a familiar, self-conscious gesture. "I don't give things away for free. So you should know that this—" He gestured between the two of you. "—comes with terms. Non-negotiable. You are not permitted to speak poorly of the merchandise. The merchandise is you."
You laughed—really, truly laughed—and it echoed off the aquarium walls like music.
IV. The Feast — Ruggie Bucchi
The cafeteria was a battlefield, and you were losing.
It wasn't the food—Night Raven College's dining hall was a marvel of magical gastronomy, the tables groaning under the weight of dishes that would have made a Michelin-starred chef weep with envy. It was the eating. The public, visible, undeniable act of putting food in your mouth and chewing and swallowing while the world watched and judged and whispered.
You'd gotten a salad. A sad, anemic thing, mostly lettuce and regret, because you'd learned—the hard way, the cruel way, the way that leaves marks that don't show—that a fat girl eating in public was an invitation for commentary. Does she really need that? Shouldn't she be watching her figure? Imagine what she looks like when she's alone.
You'd been pushing it around your plate for fifteen minutes, arranging the leaves into increasingly elaborate patterns, when a shadow fell across your table.
"Shishishi. That's the saddest thing I've ever seen, and I grew up in the Slums."
Ruggie slid into the seat across from you with the boneless grace of a creature who'd learned to move through spaces that didn't want him. His ears were perked, his grin sharp and crooked, and his plate was loaded with an obscene amount of food—meat, bread, pasta, a mountain of calories that made your jaw clench with envy and self-loathing in equal measure.
"I'm not hungry," you lied, and your stomach chose that exact moment to growl—a loud, prolonged, devastating growl that echoed off the cafeteria walls like a foghorn.
Ruggie's grin widened. "Your stomach's calling you a liar." He stabbed a piece of roast meat with his fork and held it out across the table. "Eat."
"I don't want—"
"Eat."
"Ruggie, I can't." The words came out sharper than you intended, edged with a panic that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the room full of people who could see you, who were watching, who were waiting for the fat girl to take a bite so they could confirm what they already knew—that she was greedy, that she was undisciplined, that she was everything the world told her she was.
His ears flattened, and for a moment, the grin disappeared entirely. "Yeah," he said quietly. "You can. You just think you don't deserve to."
Your eyes burned. "You don't understand—"
"I don't understand?" He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a register that was low and fierce and utterly without pretense. "I grew up in a place where food was a luxury. Where kids went to bed with their bellies aching not because they chose to, but because there was nothing. Nothing to eat, nothing to feed them, nothing but dust and broken promises." His hand closed around the fork, his knuckles white. "And you're sitting here, with a feast in front of you, and you're starving yourself because someone told you that taking up space is a sin?"
"I'm not starving myself," you whispered, but even as you said it, you knew it was a lie. You'd been starving yourself for years—not in the dramatic, hospitalizing way that made after-school specials, but in the quiet, quotidian way that so many women did. Skipping breakfast. Picking at lunch. Eating nothing but air and apology until the hunger became a permanent resident, a low, keeling emptiness that you'd learned to mistake for virtue.
"Yes, you are." He pushed the plate across the table. "And I won't watch it. Not today. Not ever."
The tears fell then, dropping onto the tablecloth, and you didn't bother to wipe them away because there were too many and they were coming too fast. Ruggie didn't flinch. He didn't offer platitudes or gentle reassurances. He simply picked up a piece of bread, tore it in half, and held one half out to you.
"Take it," he said. "Not because I'm telling you to. Because you're hungry, and being hungry isn't a crime."
You took the bread. You bit into it, and it was warm and soft and impossibly, devastatingly good, and the taste of it broke something loose in your chest—a dam that had been holding back years of denied want, and the floodgates opened. You chewed, and you swallowed, and Ruggie watched you with a fierce, protective pride that made you feel like you'd just won a war.
"Good," he said. "More."
He fed you.
It was the most intimate act you'd ever experienced—more intimate than any kiss, more intimate than any touch. He held each bite out to you on his fork, piece by piece, morsel by morsel, and you took them, one by one, your eyes locked on his. The roast meat, rich and succulent. The bread, warm and yielding. The vegetables, glistening with butter. Each bite was a small, defiant act of self-love, and each time you swallowed, he smiled—not his usual sharp, hyena grin, but something softer, something that looked almost like wonder.
"There you go," he murmured, his hand resting on your knee beneath the table, warm and steady and grounding. "There you go. That's it. That's my girl."
The cafeteria had fallen away. The watching eyes, the judging whispers, the crushing weight of a world that wanted you to disappear—all of it had dissolved into the simple, primal act of eating, and being fed, and being seen by someone who understood that hunger was not a moral failing but a biological imperative that you had every right to satisfy.
When the plate was empty, he wiped a crumb from the corner of your mouth with his thumb, and he leaned in and kissed you—soft and quick and tasting of bread and butter and salt, and you realized that this was what it felt like to be nourished. Not just fed. Nourished. Body and soul.
"Next time," he said, his forehead pressed to yours, his breath warm on your lips, "I'm making you seconds."
You laughed—a wet, shaky, incredulous sound—and he kissed you again, and this time it was deeper, his tongue slipping past your lips to taste the remnants of the meal you'd shared. His hands found your waist—your thick, full, fed waist—and he squeezed, pulling you closer, and the growl in his throat was not a hyena's laugh but a creature's promise.
"You're not too much," he said against your mouth, with the fierce, unvarnished conviction of someone who had known true scarcity and would not stand for manufactured lack. "You're not enough yet. I want to see you full. I want to see you satisfied."
That evening, in his cramped room in the Savanaclaw dormitory, he cooked for you—simple food, poor man's food, the kind of meal he'd grown up on: a stew made from whatever was in the kitchen, thick and hearty and fragrant with herbs. He sat across from you on the floor, the bowl between you, and you ate together, knee to knee, his hand on your thigh, your fingers intertwined, and the warmth in your belly had nothing to do with the stew and everything to do with the boy who had looked at your hunger and called it sacred.
V. The Canvas — Vil Schoenheit
The bathroom was a crime scene, and you were the perpetrator.
You stood before the mirror in Vil's personal suite—a bathroom of alabaster and gold, lit by floating crystals that cast a merciless, unforgiving light—and you were at war with your reflection. The dress lay in a pool of silk on the floor, discarded after twenty minutes of tugging and adjusting and nearly dislocating your shoulder trying to zip it up, and you were left in your underwear, and the mirror would not stop showing you things.
The roll of flesh above your bra. The width of your hips. The way your thighs touched from hip to knee. The soft, rounded landscape of your belly, the dimples on your legs, the arms that jiggled when you moved. Every flaw, every imperfection, every deviation from the architectural ideal that Vil Schoenheit embodied—it was all there, catalogued and displayed in high-definition clarity.
You grabbed a towel and covered the mirror.
"Undo that," said a voice from the doorway, sharp and commanding as a crack of thunder.
You spun. Vil stood in the doorway, his golden hair loose around his shoulders, his beauty so overwhelming that it made your chest hurt. He was looking at the towel-draped mirror, and then at you, and his expression was a tempest—fury and tenderness and something that looked almost like grief, all warring for dominance beneath the flawless mask of his features.
"I can't look at it," you said, and your voice was thin and brittle as spun sugar. "I can't—I'm not—Vil, look at you. And look at me. I can't be what you need."
He crossed the room in three strides, and his hand closed around the towel, and he ripped it from the mirror with a violence that made you flinch. The glass was exposed again, and your reflection stared back at you, and you squeezed your eyes shut because you couldn't—couldn't—
"Open your eyes."
"No—"
"Open your eyes." His voice was iron wrapped in silk, and it brooked no argument, and you opened them because Vil Schoenheit had never once allowed you to lie to him, and you would not start now.
He stood behind you, his hands on your shoulders, his reflection towering over yours in the mirror. The contrast was devastating—him, all sharp angles and golden light; you, all soft curves and shadowed corners. You couldn't look at it. You tried to turn away, but his grip tightened, holding you in place.
"Look," he commanded.
"I am looking—"
"You are judging. That is not the same thing." His eyes met yours in the mirror, and they were blazing—not with anger, but with a fierce, ferocious conviction that burned like a brand. "You look at yourself through the eyes of a world that profits from your self-hatred. Look through my eyes."
His hands slid down your arms, over the soft flesh that you'd tried so hard to erase, and when they reached your waist, you flinched—a full-body, involuntary recoil that sucked your stomach in and pulled your shoulders forward and made you as small as you possibly could.
Vil stopped.
His hands paused on your waist, and his expression shifted—the fury giving way to something rawer, something that looked almost like heartbreak. He had been on the receiving end of a thousand cruel assessments, a thousand unkind comparisons, a thousand judgments that reduced a person to the sum of their parts. But he had never—never—stood by and watched someone do it to themselves.
"Stop retreating," he said softly.
"What?"
"You suck in your breath and curl your spine every time I touch you. You are constantly trying to disappear." His hands pressed gently but firmly against your waist, a counterpressure to your instinct to shrink. "I want to see you. Not the compressed version. Not the apologizing version. Stand in the light and let me look at you."
You trembled. Every fiber of your being screamed at you to hold on, to stay small, to keep the armor of sucked-in breath and tensed muscles between yourself and his judgment. But his hands were warm and steady and insistent, and his eyes in the mirror were not measuring you—they were beholding you.
You breathed out.
Your body settled into itself—your belly soft and round, your hips wide, your thighs pressing together, your whole unedited, unapologetic self filling the frame of the mirror. And Vil—Vil sighed, a sound of such profound, aching tenderness that it undid you completely.
"There you are," he murmured, and his lips brushed the shell of your ear. "There is the woman I see. Do you know what I see when I look at you? Not flaws. Not imperfections. I see abundance. I see warmth and softness and life, and I see a beauty that the world is too blind to recognize because it has never learned to look past the surface." His hands moved, gliding over your curves with the reverence of a sculptor encountering marble that was already a masterpiece. "The world's beauty is cheap, you know. A mask of powder and bone. It washes off at the end of the day. But this—" He pressed his palm flat against your stomach, feeling the rise and fall of your breath. "This is not cheap. This is not washable. This is enduring."
His hands traveled upward, unclasping your bra with deft, practiced fingers, and it fell away, and you were bare from the waist up, and the mirror showed you everything, and you wanted to vanish, to dematerialize, to be anywhere but here, exposed and vulnerable and—
"Look," Vil said again, and his voice cracked on the word, and you realized with a shock that his eyes were bright with tears—Vil Schoenheit, the fairest of them all, the untouchable idol, was crying. "Look at what I see. Look at what has held me captive since the day I met you."
He turned you to face him, and his hands framed your face, and his thumbs brushed the tears from your cheeks, and his lips met yours with a desperation that stole the breath from your body. It was not a kiss of conquest—it was a kiss of revelation, each movement of his mouth a wordless refutation of every lie you'd ever been told.
He walked you backward, out of the bathroom and into his bedroom, and the sheets were silk and the light was golden and he laid you down on the bed like a painter laying a canvas on an easel. He undressed himself with a deliberate slowness that was not performance but vulnerability—offering you his own body, his own imperfections, the small scars and blemishes that even his magic couldn't entirely erase. And then he undressed you, with the same careful, unhurried attention, pressing a kiss to every inch of skin he revealed.
"Look at me," he said, positioning himself above you, his golden hair falling in a curtain around your face. "Don't close your eyes. I want you to see."
He angled the full-length mirror beside the bed—a deliberate, devastating placement—and you could see yourself, could see both of you—your soft body against his lean one, his hands on your curves, the way your flesh yielded beneath his touch. It was too much. It was everything.
"Look at how beautiful you are when you take me," he said, and his voice was a trembling chord, and he slid into you with a slow, agonizing tenderness that made your vision blur.
The mirror didn't lie this time. It showed you the truth—not the warped, funhouse truth of your own self-loathing, but the objective, undeniable truth of Vil Schoenheit's face as he moved inside you: the way his jaw went slack, the way his eyes rolled back, the way his body shuddered with the effort of restraint, as if you were something precious and powerful and devastating. It showed you the way his hands worshipped your body—not with the clinical assessment of a critic, but with the hungry, helpless reverence of a man on his knees before a goddess.
"You see?" he gasped, his hips rolling forward in a rhythm that was building, building, building. "You see what you do to me? You see how irresistible you are?"
You came with his name on your lips and your eyes open, watching the mirror, watching the woman in the glass—the soft, round, beautiful woman—who was arching off the bed in the arms of the fairest man in the world, and he was looking at her like she was the only thing that existed.
When he followed you over the edge, his cry was not a roar or a growl but a sob—raw and unguarded, pressed into the curve of your neck, and his tears fell on your skin like baptism.
Morning. The light was white and honest, and it fell across the bed in unforgiving bars, and you lay in Vil's arms and felt the familiar, icy fingers of dread close around your heart. In the daylight, without the mercy of shadow, every flaw would be visible. Every curve, every dimple, every imperfection that the night had hidden would be laid bare, and he would see you—really see you—and the spell would break.
But his arm tightened around your waist, and his hand settled on your stomach—your bare, exposed, un-sucked-in stomach—and he pressed his lips to your shoulder.
"Don't," he said, his voice still rough with sleep. "Whatever you're thinking, don't."
"I'm just—"
"You're composing a list of everything you hate. I can hear it." He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at you, and his eyes were clear and fierce and utterly without illusion. "The light is different now. I know. The morning is the most honest time, and honesty is terrifying when you've spent your life running from the truth." His fingers traced the curve of your hip, the swell of your breast, the softness of your belly. "But the truth is not your enemy. The truth is this: that I am looking at you in the full light of day, and I am not looking away."
He kissed you, slow and deep and certain, and the morning lost its power to wound.
Epilogue: The Sculptor
You walked to the mirror the next morning—alone, this time, in the quiet of your own room. The glass, the great and terrible liar, waited to whisper its poison. You stood before it, bare, your shoulders squared against the judgment of a world that had spent your whole life trying to carve you into something smaller.
But this time, you did not look through the eyes of the society that had raised you. You looked through Leona's hunger—through the way his weight had anchored you, heavy and sure and insistent, refusing to let you drift away on the tide of your own erasure. You looked through Lilia's reverence—through the way his ancient hands had held you like a text worth reading, the way he had spoken the word glorious like it was the only word that mattered. You looked through Azul's devotion—through the way he had wept against your skin, the way his contract had demanded you stop speaking poorly of the merchandise. You looked through Ruggie's greed—through the way he had fed you, bite by bite, the way he had called your hunger sacred. You looked through Vil's pride—through the way he had forced you to look, had refused to let you hide, had wept at the sight of you as if you were a masterpiece he had been waiting his whole life to behold.
You traced the curve of your hip, the soft swell of your belly. The stretch marks that silvered your skin like river tributaries on a map of a country that belonged to no one but you. The dimples, the folds, the fullness that the world had called excess and these men had called enough.
And you realized—with a slow, dawning, earth-shaking clarity—that their eyes were not the ones you needed to see yourself through. They were the bridge, not the destination. They had shown you that you could be seen, that you could be wanted, that you could be loved—but the final, most powerful gaze was your own.
The world had spent a lifetime trying to carve you down, handing you chisels and saying, Here, do it yourself. It'll hurt less if you do it. And you had believed them. You had taken the tools of your own destruction and called them self-improvement. You had mistaken shrinking for growing, and starvation for strength, and the world's applause for your own heartbeat.
But no more.
You were not the marble that refused to fit the mold. You were the sculptor now. You held the chisel, and you decided what shape to carve—not the shape the world demanded, but the shape that felt like home. The shape that breathed and moved and danced and ate and lived. The shape that took up space without apology, that filled rooms and hearts and the spaces between stars.
You were the cosmos carved into curves, a constellation of scars and stars, and as you finally met your own gaze in the glass—truly met it, without flinching, without shrinking, without the desperate, suffocating need to be anything other than what you were—you smiled.
Not because the world had changed. Not because the beauty standards had fallen, not because the magazines had started featuring women who looked like you, not because the whispers had stopped. They hadn't. They wouldn't. The world was still the world—sharp and cruel and hungry for your self-hatred, because a woman who hated herself was a woman who could be sold to.
But you were no longer for sale.
You pressed your palm flat against the glass, and your reflection pressed back, and for the first time, you recognized her. Not as the enemy. Not as the problem. Not as the body that needed to be fixed. As yourself. As the woman who had survived every cruel word, every skipped meal, every night of pressing her fingers into her skin and wishing it would yield to a different shape. The woman who had been told she was too much and had finally, finally, decided to believe it.
Let the world weep for the beauty it was too blind to behold.
You were learning to behold yourself.
