#romace

[mydarkawaits]

I can feel you miles away

[moonlit-mysticgirl]

[icantspellthings]

ADAM and EVE

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

[toastykaykes]

The Longest Shift - 9 PM

Dr. Jack Abbot x Scribe! F! Reader

As the first wave of trauma patients floods the ER at 9:00 PM, you and Dr. Abbott are thrown deeper into chaos than ever before—and the quiet tension between you only sharpens under pressure.

Word Count: 3.7K

Masterlist

7:00 PM 8:00 PM 9:00 PM 10:00 PM 11:00PM 12:00 AM 1:00 AM 2:00 AM 3:00 AM 4:00 AM 5:00 AM

9:00 PM

The change in the emergency department happens slowly enough that no one notices it right away.

At first, the noise simply softens.

Conversations at the nurses’ station trail off mid-sentence. Someone’s phone rings twice before it’s picked up. Even the steady rhythm of monitor alarms seems to stretch farther apart, the electronic beeping echoing longer than usual against the fluorescent-lit walls.

The department hasn’t gone quiet.

But it has paused.

Like a room full of people suddenly sensing something in the air.

You only realize something is wrong when Dr. Abbot does.

He’s standing beside the trauma board with his arms loosely crossed, scanning the patient tracking screen the way he always does—calm, focused, every line of text absorbed in seconds. When Dana slowly lowers the EMS phone from her ear without saying anything, Abbot’s gaze lifts instantly.

Dana never hesitates.

She talks fast, efficiently, as if silence itself irritates her.

But now she’s quiet.

Abbot studies her for exactly one second before asking, “How bad?” his voice low and steady as he pushes himself off the counter and steps closer to the desk.

Dana exhales slowly through her nose before answering, the sound sharp with contained frustration. “Multi-vehicle collision on the interstate,” she says, placing the phone carefully on the counter like she’s resisting the urge to slam it down. “Dispatch is still sorting out details.”

Abbot folds his arms again, but his posture shifts slightly, the subtle change signaling that his brain is already reorganizing the department in his head.

“How many vehicles?” he asks.

“Four confirmed,” Dana replies. “Possibly more.”

Abbott nods once, absorbing the information. “Injuries?”

Dana gives a humorless shrug. “Unknown.”

Abbot mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like fantastic before straightening and glancing around the department.

“Alright,” he says calmly, clapping his hands together once in quiet decision. “Let’s get ahead of it.”

The tone is casual, almost conversational. But the reaction is immediate.

Nurses begin clearing stretchers from the trauma bays. Respiratory rolls a ventilator down the hallway. Someone drags a cooler of emergency blood products across the floor, the plastic scraping loudly against tile.

The department pivots from routine to readiness in seconds.

You grab your laptop and follow Abbott into Trauma Bay 1, the familiar weight of the computer tucked under your arm as the smell of antiseptic and sterile plastic fills the air.

Abbott moves through the equipment with methodical precision, checking the airway cart first before testing the suction tubing.

“What’s the potassium on the appendicitis patient?” he asks suddenly, his voice carrying across the room while he flicks on the laryngoscope and checks the battery.

You glance down at the chart. “Three point two,” you answer.

“Replace it,” Abbot replies automatically, setting the laryngoscope back into its slot.

“Already ordered,” you say as your fingers move across the keyboard.

Abbot nods slightly without looking up.

Then he glances toward you.

“You ever worked a mass casualty before?” he asks.

You shake your head. “No.”

“Good,” Abbott says thoughtfully.

You blink.

“That’s supposed to be comforting?”

Abbot hums quietly as he checks the oxygen tubing. “It means you don’t know enough to panic yet.”

You stare at him.

“That might be the worst reassurance anyone has ever given me.”

For the first time since the phone call, the corner of Abbot’s mouth twitches.

He glances at you, one eyebrow lifting slightly. “I’m full of them.”

Despite the tension building in the room, you feel your mouth twitch in response.

Before you can say anything else, the trauma bay doors swing open.

Dr. Shen walks in first. He’s already pulling gloves onto his hands while scanning the room, his eyes flicking rapidly from equipment to stretchers to staff with sharp efficiency.

“What’s the story?” he asks as he steps fully into the bay.

“Highway crash,” Abbot replies.

Shen whistles quietly.

“Well that’s going to ruin everyone’s evening.”

Abbott glances sideways at him.

“My evening was already ruined when you walked in.”

Shen grins widely.

“That’s fair.”

Behind him, Dr. Ellis steps into the trauma hallway, tying her hair back as she surveys the cleared trauma bays and the equipment lining the walls.

“Tell me we’re exaggerating,” she says.

“We’re not.” Dana answers from the desk. 

Ellis nods once.

“Alright.”

She gestures toward the trauma rooms.

“You take Bay 1,” she tells Abbott. “Chen gets Bay 2. I’ll triage overflow.”

Abbot nods easily.

“Works for me.”

You notice he doesn’t ask where you’re going.

He assumes you’re staying with him.

.....

The siren reaches the ambulance bay before the vehicle does.

It rises sharply in pitch as the ambulance pulls closer, echoing through the department like a warning bell.

Every head turns toward the doors.

The moment the ambulance backs into the bay, the paramedics are already moving.

The stretcher bursts through the doors seconds later.

“Male, thirty-two!” one of them calls breathlessly. “Found near the highway crash site—possible debris strike!”

Abbot steps forward immediately. “Trauma One.”

The team moves with practiced coordination, transferring the patient onto the trauma bed.

You slide into position along the counter, laptop already open.

The cursor blinks.

Waiting.

“Patient was outside his vehicle when another car hit the median barrier,” the paramedic continues rapidly. “Debris scattered across the roadway. He took a hit from metal fragments.”

You begin typing.

21:19 — Patient arrival Trauma Bay 1.

The man on the bed groans weakly.

He’s conscious. Barely.

Blood mats his hair along one side of his head where a jagged scalp laceration cuts across the skin. Smaller puncture wounds dot his chest and shoulder where fragments of twisted metal have embedded beneath the surface.

Abbot leans closer.

“Hey,” he says calmly, placing one hand on the bedrail. “Stay with me.”

The patient blinks sluggishly.

Abbot begins the primary survey.

“Airway intact?,” he says.

“Breathing equal.” Respiratory nods.

“Circulation?”

The nurse checks the monitor.

“Heart rate one-thirty. Pressure ninety-eight over sixty.”

Abbott studies the wounds again. “Shrapnel injuries.”

Your fingers move rapidly across the keyboard.

Vitals.

Mechanism.

Exam.

The patient suddenly coughs and then grimaces. “My… chest…”

Abbott presses gently along the ribs. The man winces sharply. The older man’s eyes narrow. “Possible rib fractures.”

He glances toward the nurse. “Portable chest X-ray STAT.”

Across the hallway, Shen is already setting up Trauma Bay 2. Ellis stands near the entrance speaking with EMS, sorting incoming patients. The department is moving faster now, but it still feels manageable.

Controlled.

Then the patient grabs Abbot’s sleeve weakly. “There was… a bang…”

Abbott leans closer. “What kind of bang?”

The man struggles to breathe.

But he manages two words.

“Loud.”

Then—

“Explosion.”

Your typing slows.

Across the room, Shen looks up. “Explosion?”

Abbott studies the patient carefully. “Where?”

The man swallows painfully.

“Bus… station…”

The trauma bay goes silent.

Across the department Dana suddenly calls out.

“Abbot!”

He turns toward the doorway. “What?”

Dana’s voice is tight now.

“Dispatch just confirmed something.”

Abbott waits.

Dana swallows.

“They’re saying it wasn’t a crash.”

Chen straightens.

“What?”

Dana looks toward the ambulance bay.

“Police are reporting an explosion downtown.”

The words settle over the room like a storm cloud.

Abbott’s expression shifts.

Not panic.

Focus.

He pulls on a fresh pair of gloves. Then he looks directly at you.

“Y/N.”

You glance up.

“Yeah?”

“Stay on that chart.”

You nod.

Your fingers begin moving faster.

Outside—

another ambulance siren echoes through the night.

Then another.

Then another.

Chen steps beside Abbott. “How many victims?”

Dana stares toward the doors. “More than we can handle.”

Abbott surveys the department one last time.

The cleared trauma bays.

The waiting stretchers.

The staff already moving faster.

Then he nods once.

“Alright,” he says quietly.

“Nothing we haven’t handled before.”

....

Outside—

three more ambulances pull into the bay.

The first ambulance doors open before Abbot has even finished stabilizing the man in Trauma Bay 1.

The sirens don’t fade this time.

They multiply.

One cuts off just as another rises behind it. Then a third joins in, the sound stacking over itself until the whole ambulance bay seems to vibrate with it. It fills the department with a sharp mechanical urgency that settles under your skin and stays there.

The doors burst inward.

Paramedics pour through in a rush of orange vests, trauma shears, and quick, clipped reports that overlap before the first one has even ended.

“Female, twenty-six, blast exposure, multiple shrapnel wounds—”

“Pediatric male, possible head injury—”

“Another two behind us—”

The controlled readiness of the emergency department doesn’t break.

It transforms.

It becomes motion.

Abbot steps out of Trauma Bay 1 just far enough to see the hallway, his gloved hands already flexing once at his sides as he takes in the first wave of casualties. For half a second, the entire department hangs on that glance of his—Dana at the desk, Ellis at the ambulance entrance, Shen turning toward the nearest incoming stretcher, nurses moving with supply trays already balanced in their hands.

Then Abbot’s voice cuts cleanly through the noise. “Ellis.”

“I’ve got triage,” she answers immediately, already halfway to the doors, one hand lifted toward the incoming paramedics as she starts sorting patients before they’ve even cleared the threshold.

“Shen.”

“Working on it,” Shen says, pulling a face shield down over his eyes as he strides toward Trauma Bay 2.

Abbot points toward the room with two fingers, quick and decisive. “You’re primary on the next trauma.”

Shen grins under the shield, and somehow, even now, there’s still enough of his personality left for him to say, “Finally, something fun.”

Abbot exhales through his nose. “You need better hobbies.”

The woman being wheeled toward Bay 2 starts screaming before the stretcher even stops. It’s a hoarse, animal sound, the kind that rips straight through the center of a room and makes every nerve in your body tighten in response. Her clothes are torn and blackened with soot, and her arms are flecked with cuts where metal fragments have embedded in the skin. Blood runs in thin uneven lines down both wrists.

Shen is at her bedside before the brakes lock.

“Alright,” he says, his voice low and controlled despite the speed he’s moving at. “Eyes on me. Let’s go, people.”

Across the hallway, another stretcher appears. Ellis intercepts it before it can even be assigned.

“Stable?” she asks the paramedic, pacing backward with the moving bed.

“Leg injuries and partial-thickness burns.”

“Bay 3,” she says immediately, and points without hesitation. “Not a trauma room. Move.”

The stretcher veers down the side hall.

Everything is happening at once.

The department fills with overlapping voices.

“Get me vitals.”

“Respiratory to Trauma Two.”

“Where’s the ultrasound?”

“Open blood now.”

“Move that cart.”

You slide back into place along the trauma bay counter, laptop open, the edge of it resting against your forearm as the cursor blinks on the screen, patient note still open and waiting. The bright blue-white glow from the screen catches on Abbott’s glove as he turns back toward the patient already in Bay 1.

But the room hasn’t finished filling.

Another paramedic rushes in hard enough to nearly skid on the floor, steering a second stretcher straight toward the empty side of the bay.

“Male, mid-twenties!” he shouts over the noise. “Blast debris, abdominal injury, deteriorating en route!”

Abbot doesn’t waste a second. “Bring him here.”

The stretcher swings in close, the wheels clipping one of the metal legs of the bedside tray as the team crowds around to transfer. The patient is young—too young, you think automatically, though they all are—and pale beneath the smears of soot and blood on his skin. A makeshift pressure dressing has been strapped low over his abdomen, but dark blood is already blooming through the gauze in a slow, ugly stain.

Abbot steps to the bed as soon as the transfer is complete.

“Alright,” he says, and even now his voice is quiet, not loud. It doesn’t need to be. The room organizes itself around it. “Let’s get to work.”

You begin typing.

21:23 — Second patient arrival, Trauma Bay 1. Male, mid-twenties, blast exposure, suspected abdominal trauma.

The paramedic starts report while still catching his breath.

“Found approximately thirty feet from the blast site. Conscious when we got there, increasingly lethargic during transport. Abdominal pain, hypotension, possible internal hemorrhage.”

“Vitals?” Abbot asks, already cutting away the remainder of the blood-soaked bandage.

The nurse glances at the monitor as leads are snapped on, blood pressure cuff inflating.

“Heart rate one-fifty. Pressure eighty-six over fifty.”

Abbott nods once. “We’re bleeding somewhere.”

Your fingers move faster. Mechanism of injury. Initial vitals. Declining mentation. Suspected internal bleed.

The patient’s eyes flutter open just long enough for him to register the bright lights overhead and the figures surrounding the bed. He groans and tries instinctively to curl around the pain in his abdomen, but Abbott braces one hand gently against his shoulder and keeps him flat.

“Stay with me,” Abbot says, leaning closer, his voice low enough that it somehow still reaches through the noise. “What’s your name?”

The patient swallows hard.

“D—Dylan.”

“Alright, Dylan. I’m Dr. Abbot. You’re in the emergency department. We’re going to help you.”

The man nods weakly and then winces as Abbot palpates lightly along the abdomen. Even the smallest pressure makes him cry out.

Abbott’s eyes narrow.

“Diffuse tenderness. Guarding,” He glances toward the nurse, “Two large-bore IVs. Start fluids. Type and cross. Trauma labs.”

“Already drawing,” she answers.

Across the hallway, Shen’s voice rises. “Pressure dropping— I need another line in here now.”

The sound of Ellis directing triage overlaps with him, efficient and clipped.

“This one can wait. That one cannot. No, not there— put him in hallway one if you have to.”

The room feels tighter now.

Hotter.

Like the air itself is being compressed by the number of moving bodies and urgent decisions being made inside it.

Dylan gasps suddenly, one hand clutching weakly at Abbot’s scrub sleeve.

“My— chest…”

Abbott shifts immediately, his hand sliding from the abdomen up along the ribcage.

He presses gently, making Dylan jerk, pain flashing over his face.

“Possible rib fractures,” Abbot says aloud, both for the team and for you, and your fingers record it immediately. “Ultrasound now.”

The ultrasound machine is wheeled closer. Abbot takes the probe without looking, because the nurse has already put it into his hand before he asks. That’s what the room has become now—everyone moving ahead of each other, not behind.

You are typing, listening, watching, documenting everything.

And then someone slams into you. Hard.

A respiratory therapist trying to cut between the trauma bay counter and the portable monitor catches your shoulder with enough force to knock you sideways into the edge of the counter. Your hip clips the metal corner, pain flashing hot and sharp, and your laptop nearly slips from your hands.

“Sorry—” the therapist starts, already moving.

Abbot looks up instantly.

“Watch it,” he snaps, the words sharp enough to crack through the room. “She’s charting.”

The therapist turns red beneath his mask, mutters another apology, and changes course.

Your heart kicks once hard against your ribs.

Abbot’s attention lands on you for one brief second, eyes flicking over your face, your shoulder, the laptop still secure in your grip.

“You good?” he asks. 

It’s quick. Quiet. But there’s something in it that lands hotter than it should.

You nod once. “Yeah.”

Abbot studies you just long enough to decide whether he believes it.

Then he turns back to the bed. “Time?”

Your gaze drops to the corner of the screen instantly. “21:24.”

The nurse repeats it aloud.

The FAST exam begins. Abbot slides the probe over the patient’s upper abdomen, his face illuminated by the shifting grayscale flicker on the small screen. For a second the room narrows to the image, to the angle of his wrist, to Dylan’s rough, uneven breathing.

Abbott pauses, then his voice drops. “Free fluid.”

The room changes around those two words. No one panics, but everyone gets faster.

The nurse already holding saline drops it onto the tray and reaches for blood paperwork. Someone calls for the trauma surgeon. The second IV line goes in. Respiratory hovers closer in case the patient’s mental status dips further.

You type it all. Positive FAST. Free fluid. Ongoing hypotension. Concern for intra-abdominal hemorrhage.

Dylan coughs, then coughs again harder, blood flecking his lips this time.

Abbot’s eyes lift immediately. “Lung involvement too.”

He steps around the bed and listens to the chest with his stethoscope, head tilted, face unreadable.

“Breath sounds?”

“Present bilaterally but diminished at the bases.” Respiratory answers from the far side. 

Abbott nods, then sets the stethoscope aside.

“Prep for intubation.”

Your chest tightens. The room surges into the next phase before anyone can pause on the decision. Medications are pulled. The airway cart swings open. Respiratory moves to the head of the bed. Across the hall, Shen is dealing with a trauma of his own, and you can hear it in the clipped pace of his voice.

“No, I need that pressure held lower. Lower. There.”

Ellis appears in the doorway of Bay 1 for exactly one second, one hand braced against the frame as she looks between Abbot and the patient.

“Two more red tags incoming,” she says.

Abbot doesn’t look away from Dylan. “Use Bay 3 and the resus room. If they can breathe and answer questions, they wait. If they can’t, they come here.”

Ellis nods once and disappears again.

The emergency department is no longer trying to look like anything but a mass casualty response.

Stretchers line the hall. The usual neat traffic flow is gone. A monitor alarm from triage competes with the hiss of oxygen in Bay 2 and the sharp rip of someone tearing open sterile packaging behind you. Still, Abbot remains exactly what he has been from the second Dana lowered that phone.

Steady.

The nurse holds up two syringes.

“Etomidate ready. Succinylcholine ready.”

Abbot nods. “Push.”

You record the time the instant she says it.

21:26 — Etomidate administered. 21:26 — Succinylcholine administered.

Dylan’s body slackens.

Respiratory steps in.

The laryngoscope passes to Abbot’s hand. He doesn’t rush. He never does. Even now, while the hallway outside is filling with blast victims and someone in Bay 2 is actively screaming, his movements remain economical and exact.

“Tube.”

Respiratory places it into his hand and Abbot advances. The whole room seems to hold still for one impossible second.

Then—

“Cord view.”

Another second.

“Tube’s in.”

Respiratory confirms immediately. “Color change. Bilateral rise.”

You type.

Abbot secures the tube while the nurse tapes it and another starts adjusting the vent settings. For one brief moment, the bay settles around the rhythm of the machine breathing for the patient. Then Dylan’s right hand twitches weakly against the sheet. He isn’t fully under enough to be still.

Abbot looks down. “Give him more sedation.”

The nurse nods and pushes the medication.

Dylan stills again.

You keep typing.

Because if you stop, even for a second, the pace of it all threatens to overwhelm you.

This is what mass casualty charting feels like, you realize—not dramatic in the way television makes it seem, but relentless. A thousand details trying to outrun your hands. Every medication, every procedure, every timestamp demanding to be caught before it disappears into the noise.

The patient from Bay 1—the first one, the man with the scalp laceration and chest shrapnel—has not stopped being your patient just because another one arrived. A nurse is dressing his head wound now while another physician assistant reviews his chest X-ray. Shen is still yelling in Bay 2. Ellis is still deciding which injuries matter most and in what order. Dana is somehow on two phones at once.

And through all of it, Abbot glances toward you again.

You’re still typing.

Still there.

Still keeping up.

The smallest flicker of approval touches his expression.

He doesn’t smile, not really.

That would be too much, too obvious, too soft for a man like him in the center of something like this. Instead he reaches for the next instrument the nurse offers, looks at the chart screen in your hands for one brief beat, and says under his breath, low enough that no one else would catch it unless they were listening for him specifically—

“That’s my girl.”

The words strike through you like a live wire. Your fingers don’t stop moving. They can’t.

But heat floods your face anyway, sharp and immediate, and for one terrible second you are deeply, acutely aware of every inch of yourself in the room.

The laptop in your hands.

The sting in your shoulder from being knocked into the counter.

The bright overhead lights.

The sound of the ventilator.

The fact that Shen absolutely hears everything, even if he pretends not to.

You don’t dare look up right away.

Because if you do, you’re afraid your entire face will give you away. So you do what you know, you just keep typing. Vitals. Intubation. Positive FAST. Suspected internal bleeding. Critical care time ongoing.

Across the hall, someone starts crying in Bay 3.

Not screaming, crying. The kind of sound that carries differently because it comes from a place that has already understood what’s happened.

Ellis’s voice answers it—calm, warm, practical. “I know. I know. Stay with me.”

Dana appears in the doorway of Bay 1 with another update sheet in her hand.

“Police just confirmed a second device,” she says.

The room stills for half a beat. Not because anyone is surprised anymore, but because the number changes things. 

“You’re kidding.” Shen looks up over his patient from the opposite bay.

Dana shakes her head. “No.”

Abbot strips one pair of gloves off and reaches immediately for another. “How many total victims on route?”

Dana glances down at the paper.

“Still unknown. They’re saying multiple self-transports too. Anyone ambulatory is finding their own way in.”

Abbot nods once. “Then we split triage. Ellis keeps sorting the walking wounded. Shen keeps Bay 2. I’ll keep one and call surgery for this one.”

Dana’s eyes flick toward you briefly. “You keeping up?”

You don’t stop typing. “Barely.”

Dana snorts.

“Good. Means you’re awake.”

Abbot’s mouth twitches, just slightly.

He turns back to Dylan’s bed. “Let’s get him upstairs before he bleeds out in my department.”

The room moves again. And so do you.

Because there is still another siren outside.

And another.

And another.

The first wave isn’t ending. It’s only just beginning.

[freddyxdo]

Trying to remember…

Summary: The need to feel normal again clashes with a moment Simon tried too hard to avoid.

Chapter one.

Warning: Low self-esteem, and mention of burns and cuts.

Note: Hello! Sorry for the delay in updating; university has been keeping me very busy. I hope you like it, and remember that I don't speak English and this is a translation, so I apologize if there are any typos.

Simon was lost, he didn’t know what he felt and he didn’t understand who up there was playing such a damn heavy joke on him. It was Friday, exactly three days had passed since he had helped you and he still couldn’t figure out why he had done it.

Yeah, you were about to faint and yeah, his morals as a person wouldn’t let him leave you there to your fate. But who was he to talk about morals when he was the one who had broken your legs?

It was night. It wasn’t a special day for him, but he needed to do something, go out and stop thinking about the fact that he had told you his name. Every time he got closer to you, you discovered things about him and that tormented him.

You know he smokes.

You know it’s a routine.

You know he avoids you.

And now you know his damn name.

He turned off the TV and checked his phone looking for nothing, just to focus his gaze on a smaller screen to rest his eyes, exhausted from so much light.

And he noticed a message notification he’d had for five minutes.

Soap.

L.T. I’m around the area, beers? You pay :]

He sighed. And reconsidered his options. He could either rot on a Friday night doing nothing and let his thoughts about the girl next door eat away at his mind, or put up with some of Soap’s bad jokes.

He picked up his phone.

In 10. Same bar.

....

It was pretty cold that night. So he went out wearing a black leather jacket, put on his helmet, and rode his motorcycle to a small bar a few blocks from his building.

It wasn’t a fancy bar nor very crowded. It was quite calm and most people knew each other for being regulars. Many knew him, and he had struck up several conversations with the older men who sat at the bar to watch American football games. He felt comfortable and not anxious around people; every time Soap suggested going out for a drink, he chose that place and the blue-eyed man didn’t argue.

They met at the bar’s entrance and shook hands.

-You look better than a few months ago. - John said.

-Anyone looks better outside the war.

They both went in and sat at the same table as always, in the back and to the right, against the wall.

-Tell me… what were you doing around here?

Soap answered while taking his coat off his shoulders.

-Honestly, I wasn’t around here, I was pretty alone on a Friday and I wasn’t going to waste it. What’s your excuse?

-The same.

He hesitated quite a bit about whether to tell him the wonderful surprise that you were his neighbor. You, daughter of a terrorist, wanted in too many countries for your last name to go unnoticed. But something stopped him; he didn’t know how Johnny would react. Even though Soap was a remarkable soldier with a personality that stayed fairly level in extreme situations, he didn’t want to risk him telling Price that one of his former targets lived next door to Simon.

Because yeah, it looked suspicious. It seemed like a twisted revenge plan for what he had done to you, or to keep an eye on a member of the 141. But you had made it clear too many times that you weren’t involved in any of that, and deep down Ghost knew it. Just like he knew it was just a damn joke from whoever was up there that you both ended up in the same building.

-I’ll order the beers, peanuts? - Simon asked as he stood up from his seat.

Soap widened his eyes at that.

-Will you buy me peanuts too? Come on, who are you trying to impress, Lieutenant?

He rolled his eyes, completely ignoring him, and walked toward the bar to order the two drinks, now doubting whether to get the peanuts too.

Había algunas personas, pero no demasiadas, en la barra de madera lisa. Algunos estaban sentados viendo un partido de fútbol y otros simplemente esperaban su bebida. Se dirigió hacia la zona más vacía, se remangó, dejando al descubierto su gran tatuaje, y apoyó los antebrazos sobre la rígida madera de dudosa higiene.

He loved that bar.

While he waited for a waiter to free up, a voice was heard beside him.

-A Martini and a bottle of white wine, please.

A voice, far too familiar for his liking, sounded next to him and instinctively he turned his head.

Damn.

Shit.

It was you. With your straightened hair, a short wine-red long-sleeve dress that reached your neck, and black tights. He would be lying if he said you didn’t look good. And he watched you for too long just to confirm that thought.

-Hello, Simon.

He cleared his throat, pulling his gaze away from you.

-Hello, neighbor.

-I didn’t know you left the building, I thought you were a hallway ghost.

Ghost.

What a coincidence.

-Depends on the day. During the week, I am that.

You let out a laugh and he wanted to grab the gun at his hip, take the safety off, and shoot himself right there at the bar.

-Going out makes you talkative.

He looked at you, more than he should have, and thought. You were right, going out made him different. More normal, more civil. Not a weapon of war, not Ghost who tortures. A person going for a beer on a Friday, and you a pretty girl smiling at him.

The sound of a glass clinking made that thought vanish from his head. He pulled his gaze away from you and saw them hand you what you had ordered moments ago.

-The bottle just for you?

He asked while you held the martini in one hand and the wine in the other.

-Maybe I’ll share it with someone tonight.

You said as you walked off, passing by him, and your scent filled his nose. He ran his tongue over his teeth and raised his hand toward the waiter.

-Dos cervezas y cacahuetes, por favor.

...

-And I know why you bought the peanuts.

Soap said as soon as he felt Simon’s presence at the table. He set down the two beers and the peanuts so he could sit in the worn wooden chair and stare at him with his blue eyes.

-Don’t start.

-A girl… I couldn’t see her face, but I saw yours, and I’ve never seen you like that. You’re quite the charmer.

Simon took his beer and, shaking his head, brought the cap to his mouth and popped it open with his teeth. He pulled the cap away and spoke.

-She’s no one, just acquaintances.

-From some dating app?

-De ​​ninguna manera

He took a long drink of his cold beer and unfocused from his friend’s face to look right behind him. And fix his pupils on a girl in the distance, legs crossed on a high stool, with her glass of white wine in her right hand, laughing at something a woman in front of you was saying.

Johnny noticed the look and turned his head to see you.

-Let’s see who caught the big fish…

Silence.

And Ghost swore on his mother that it was so long it could take the entire beer to finish while Johnny’s brain processed what he was seeing.

Were there better ways to tell him? Probably. Maybe being more direct and saying you were his neighbor, but it would have taken away this wonderful suspense running through his veins as he watched Soap slowly turn his head to look at him.

-No.

-I told you, she’s no one.

-Did you get in touch with her? -Simon sighed, knowing what was coming.

-No, definitely not. She had the bad luck of ending up next to my apartment.

-¿Mala suerte? ¿La estás excusando por no planear vivir al lado de ti?

-Yes, I excuse her. And I firmly believe that girl over there has nothing to do with us, much less with her father.

En ese momento, ambos estaban demasiado inclinados sobre la mesa, hablando en susurros bastante fuertes para no llamar la atención.

-¿Sabe ella quién eres?

-¿Crees que me habría hablado o incluso se me habría acercado como lo hizo si me hubiera reconocido?

Preguntó retóricamente, dando otro sorbo a su cerveza, tratando de mirar a Soap y no a ti, que parecías más hipnótica a sus ojos con cada momento que pasaba.

—De ninguna manera —Soap tomó un trago de su cerveza y no volvió a mirar atrás. Como si fueras una entidad maligna. —¿Le informaste a Price?

-I wasn’t even going to tell you.

-What? Why?

-I saw it as irrelevant.

-Having Haddad’s daughter living next to your place? Damn irrelevant.

-She doesn’t know anything and she’s not involved. He received videos of his daughter being tortured and even then he wasn’t capable of releasing the hostages. -He took another drink of his beer. - The father doesn’t even acknowledge her.

Soap stayed thoughtful and Ghost spoke again.

-Don’t think like you have to decide about the situation. It’s not your call.

-Is it yours?

-Yes.

-What did you decide?

-To do nothing.

Soap grabbed a handful of peanuts with his hand.

-That really reassures me, L.T.

And that’s how the whole night went. Johnny, far too worried about Simon having a nuclear bomb next to his apartment—that is, you. And in a way, that made Ghost laugh, so she slowed down on her motorcycle when she saw it veering to the side without even saying a word. Or maybe it was because her mind was on how you kept glancing at her while she chatted with your friend.

At first, he decided it was coincidence. Two gazes colliding in a bar full of people. You could have looked at anyone. The second time, he blamed Soap, who let out a laugh that caught your attention. And the other times—yeah, there were more than four—he blamed his drunk eyes, filled with too much beer and whiskey to keep focused on Soap. They drifted toward you.

And he blamed himself for that.

He climbed the building stairs far too slowly, calm, passive, waiting. But he didn’t know what he was waiting for, and that twisted his stomach, so ignoring all his senses, he walked faster toward his apartment.

He took a breath when he reached his floor and let it out slowly when he saw you.

He looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes, accepting the damn joke.

-If you’re going to faint, keep in mind I’ll have to drag you, you won’t get to be a damsel in distress.

He heard you say while you were sitting next to your door with the key in your hand.

-Again?

-The lock hates me.

Simon smiled.

-Or maybe you’re too drunk to open it.

You let out a laugh and showed the bottle of wine next to you, half empty.

-Not yet.

-I doubt it.

He held out his hand and, without expecting it, you took it. He expected your key, but instead received your warm, soft hand against his rough, large one. You used him for support to stand up and thanked him.

-The key...

You looked at him, frowning slightly, and smiled. And Ghost swore he was too drunk.

-And your knife?

I swapped it for the gun, he was about to say, but at the last moment he held back so he wouldn’t scare you.

-I left it inside my apartment.

-That's your way of getting me to your apartment?

Simon te miró mientras se mordía el labio inferior hasta sentir el sabor metálico de la sangre en la boca. Se giró sin decir palabra, intentando recordar quién eras, qué había hecho tu padre y algo mucho más importante: qué te había hecho a ti, para resistir la tentación. Caminó unos pasos hasta la puerta, introdujo la llave y abrió la pesada madera, buscando su cuchillo.

He went in and turned on the lights, ignoring whether you followed him or not.

-Wow, what a sad apartment.

You damn well followed him.

He heard you say behind him as he went to his kitchen to open the utensil drawer.

-I don’t spend much time here.

He checked the entire drawer but found nothing. He closed it and stood there for a few minutes, thinking about where he had left the knife. He had so many, and now none of them showed up.

The fact that you were leaning against the doorframe didn’t help the situation. You were on that thin line between breaking into his personal space and messing with him or just standing there, looking at him with those big eyes of yours while biting your plump lip to keep from laughing at his frustration at not finding the knife.

He was screwed.

-We’ll try to open the door with your key. -He finally said, and you smiled as you saw yourself finally stepping into his space.

He wanted to throw you out, tell you to keep your distance and never speak to him again. But his treacherous mouth didn’t say a word of his thoughts; instead, he let you walk freely toward him. He watched as you moved closer to the counter, passing by his side and filling his nostrils with your exquisite perfume.

-I think the drunk one is someone else.

He turned around to look at you. You were smiling, showing your teeth, leaning very casually against his kitchen while holding, just high enough for him to see, the damn knife.

-I’m not drunk.

-Doesn’t seem like it, you walked right past it and didn’t see it.

-It happens to me a lot.

You looked up and Simon’s gaze dropped to see how you ran your tongue over your dry, red-painted lips.

-Like you did with me.

They both looked at each other for a long moment, in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable but quite the opposite—and that scared Simon. And he blamed the alcohol for it.

He blamed it for everything.

For staring at you shamelessly.

For having you in his kitchen.

For talking too much with you.

For stepping closer to you now to try to take the knife from you.

He blamed it for cornering you against the kitchen counter.

♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡•♡♡•♡•♡•

You looked at him with amusement. The whole situation amused you.

You.

In his kitchen.

In your neighbor’s kitchen.

The one who opens doors with knives.

You smiled more when he got too close to you. You didn’t like it—you didn’t like people’s closeness—but you wanted it, you wanted to go back to who you were. The woman who was confident, who didn’t wear dresses with black tights, that woman who showed more skin when she went out, who wasn’t ashamed of some stretch marks.

No. You were ashamed of something horrible, and sometimes you missed worrying about those silly natural lines, because the ones you had now weren’t, they weren’t normal, they weren’t accidental. No, they had been made with hatred—too much hatred. Deep scars covered parts of your hips, your backside, and deep burns marked your forearms long after they had healed.

You missed yourself, and you wanted to be normal again. You didn’t like people’s closeness—after all that, you hated it. You hated any physical contact, but you wanted this too much.

You wanted to be normal, to pretend nothing had happened. To go back to those months before, when you would have grabbed Simon by the shoulders and dragged him to the bed.

-The knife… now. -He demanded while cornering you against the kitchen counter.

-You can take it whenever you want.

You saw how he resisted, how he refused to make a move, and the regret when he did anything regarding you. You frowned. You didn’t understand him at all, and that frustrated you more than you wanted.

You needed to find a hobby, you thought. Because thinking about your neighbor more often than you’d like wasn’t very entertaining—it was exhausting. Because you missed every reaction you got from him.

From how he resisted telling you his name until he finally did, to how he resisted now, having you too close and both of you too messed up for him not to do something about it.

You felt his breath on your face, and your gaze dropped to those full lips with a scar on them. He sighed, and resigned, took your lips in an extremely rough kiss.

There was no love, no affection, not even care. Just Simon’s lips on yours—and you loved that more than you expected.

His hands moved to your waist, and a wave of heat hit your whole body. You wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him closer, feeling how he deepened the kiss.

He squeezed your waist tightly and your back hit hard against the counter. And, without warning, he easily lifted you onto the marble of his kitchen, and as if it were a signal, you wrapped your legs around his waist, where his right hand traveled to the top of your thigh.

You shivered at the contact but ignored it. You needed this—it was your test to see if you had overcome everything and were no longer insecure about the scars. You felt his hand move up to your backside, and unexpectedly he lifted you while you were still lost in that rough kiss you loved.

You tightened your arms around his neck and he adjusted you better on his waist, giving you a small bounce as he walked toward somewhere you didn’t know. You broke the kiss with a soft, wet sound and looked at him with amusement.

-The knife thing was an excuse, right?

Simon laughed and opened a door.

-Did it work? -he said as he set you down on a bed with an exquisite scent—you doubted whether it was his bed or not.

He captured your lips again in that full kiss and you eagerly followed as he positioned himself between your legs. You felt that shiver again but tried to ignore it by gripping his hair tighter.

He was good at kissing—that much you were sure of, because he didn’t let you go. And he earned more points when his mouth started to move slowly down your neck, leaving a trail of wet kisses as his hand slid up the hem of your dress.

And that was too much.

Your hands quickly moved to his shoulders. You didn’t push hard, but Simon understood the message and slowly stopped, lifting his head to look at you with his tired eyes. And you feared he might be angry.

And that made the hairs on your arms stand on end, because you knew the man’s anger too well.

-I’m so sorry. -you said, regretful. -It’s not that I don’t want to… but— You thought of a quick excuse for cutting the moment short.

-Don’t apologize. Was I too rough?

-No, nothing like that. It’s me—I think it’s too soon to do this.

You felt the heat rise to your face and regretted saying that stupid excuse. He was going to think you were some teenager who had imagined a life with him, and that you were stupid enough to think he would wait for you to be ready.

His hand left your thigh and you felt cold as his body moved away from yours. You were about to get up when you saw Simon lie down on his back beside you. You looked at him, frowning, but didn’t move.

-Do you want a cigarette? -he asked.

-¿Do you smoke inside your house?

-On special occasions.

-Is this one? -you asked, and your chest filled with something you couldn’t explain.

He turned his head to look at you and nodded.

-Fucking yes.

He touched the front pocket of his pants and took out a pack of regular cigarettes, opening it and pulling out a single one. You, for your part, pulled your green lighter from your chest—your secret place to keep things—and brought it close to his face to light the cigarette. Once you saw the smoke leave his mouth, you put it out and tucked it away again.

-You smoke regular ones? -you asked, noticing the single-color filter.

-That’s right.

-I like watermelon ones better. -you said, turning your face toward him as he exhaled smoke through his nose along with a laugh.

-That’s childish.

-Well, look at me.

He looked you up and down and handed you the lit cigarette.

-You never told me your name.

You took it between your fingers and took a long drag before answering with your name.

-Y/N.

Taglist:

@xncasi @angelryex @missj609 @marquiserose @flyingtiger2002

Tag the people who commented on my posts before (I'm not sure if I tagged them correctly, I'm still learning haha)

Third part?

[mistyiosea]

just finished reading Wings Of Starlight & I want to SCREAM! it was so heartachingly beautiful! I am in pain!

I've been obsessed with Clarion & Milori ever since I watched Secret Of The Wings so I was happy when I heard there was gonna be a book about them & the story of their relationship, as well as the relationship between the Winter Woods & the warm seasons. I've never anticipated anything so much in my life, & I am not disappointed. it was so much better than I ever could've imagined. Clarion interacting with the Winter Woods & the fairies who reside there was so sweet, she cared so deeply about a realm & people she's never visited before, & it hurt her heart how alone they were. she wanted so badly to fight for them & bring them back together with the other seasons. Milori having to bear the heavy burden of keeping the nightmares imprisoned & his people safe, & blaming himself for them getting out & causing devastation throughout pixie hollow, & Clarion just wanting to help him & ease his sadness. everything about the development of her relationship with Milori from their first to last meeting was so wonderful & also so full of sorrow. the way they fell in love felt so natural, every little interaction was so cute, & the yearning & angst was intense. they saw themselves in each other, the loneliness they felt & the duties they had to take on. (it was seriously one of the best written romances) he watched her star fall & made a wish on it! there was so much pain when they said goodbye but still so much love. I just wanted to cry. also how Milori broke his wing OH MY GOD I WAS NOT READY! THE FACT HE NEVER FOR ONE SECOND BLAMED HER (BECAUSE IT WASN'T HER FAULT)! I CAN'T!

just think, between the events of the book & the movie, they had to be apart from each other for 380 years. I can't imagine the immense loneliness the two of them felt being so far away in their own respective realms, still being so in love but unable to be together like they want (f**k I can't do this) their realms united but they remained separated. but I can't be too sad cuz they end up back together.

also I need to mention the fact that we got not one, not two, not three, but four kisses & they were so passionate! (the last one being so sad) romance & my inner childhood are healing!

god I loved this book so much.

also "Stay A Little While" by Amaranthe is definitely their song. 🥹🩵

[almostholyfest]

Look at Me Because I Exist

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁

A story about a girl who does not know how to be soft learning what it feels like to want to be — for one person, at the worst possible time. It is a story about the particular cruelty of falling in love with someone who is everything you are not. Someone good and steady and bright. Someone already promised to another. Someone who looks at you like you are worth looking at, which is the most dangerous thing anyone has ever done to you.

WARNINGS: — Strong language / profanity throughout — Physical violence, blood, injury — Reader portrayed as aggressive and difficult — Emotional conflict, unrequited feelings — Guilt, shame, emotional vulnerability — Impulsive kissing without consent — Open-ended / cliffhanger ending — NO resolution

Words - 14604k words

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁

You were not raised to be gentle.

You were not raised to bow your head, to soften your voice, to make yourself smaller so others could feel bigger. You ran with the wind in your braids and fire in your chest and you answered to no one — not the elders, not the warriors, not the sacred customs that everyone else seemed so eager to swallow without question. Rules were cages dressed in tradition. Expectations were chains made of flowers. You refused every single one.

You had not always lived among the Metkayina. You came with the Sully clan — or rather, you came near them, drifting in their orbit the way debris drifts near something larger without ever quite belonging to it. You were not their family. You were not anyone's family, not really. You had people who shared your blood and that was the beginning and end of that story. The ocean was new to you. The reef was new. The way these people moved through water like they were born of it — that was new too. Everything was new and unfamiliar and you met all of it the same way you met everything:

With your chin up and your guard higher. They called you feral. They whispered it when you walked past — the Metkayina mothers pressing their children closer, the young warriors watching you with a mixture of annoyance and reluctant fascination. That one, they said. She is too much. She does not know how to be still. She does not know how to be quiet. She does not know how to be grateful, and she should be — they took her in, didn't they? She should be humble. She should be soft. She should learn her place.

You wore it like a trophy. Let them talk. Let them press their children away from you like you were something contagious. You had heard worse from people who mattered more and it had not broken you then and it would not break you now. You were not here to be palatable. You were not here to make their lives easier by making yourself smaller. You took up exactly as much space as you wanted and if that made them uncomfortable then good — good — they could choke on it.

Your mouth was a weapon you never bothered to sheathe. Sharp, fast, deliberate. You said what others only thought, dragged it into the open air where it could bleed and breathe and make people uncomfortable. The elder who gave his favorite students better reef plots — you said it out loud, directly to his face, in front of everyone. The warrior who took credit for a younger man's catch — you announced it at the communal fire like it was nothing, like the truth was just weather, just a thing that existed whether anyone wanted it to or not. You had no patience for the polite silences people wrapped around their small hypocrisies. You had no interest in the performance of respect when the thing beneath it was rotten.

That was what they never understood about you. They thought you were cruel. They thought you were reckless, thoughtless, a fire with no direction. But you had direction. You had always had direction. You were just aiming at things they had agreed, collectively, not to aim at.

So yes. You were the girl who talked back. The girl who showed up late and left early and laughed too loud during ceremonies not because you didn't care but because the ceremony felt hollow and you had never learned to pretend otherwise. The girl who had been warned, corrected, reprimanded by five different elders in the span of a single moon cycle — a record, someone told you, not admiringly. The girl who had been called aside, spoken to gently, spoken to firmly, threatened with consequences that never quite materialized because even the people who wanted to punish you weren't sure what punishment would stick.

Nothing stuck. That was the truth of it. You were like water — everything slid off, every lesson, every correction, every disappointed look from someone who had briefly believed they might be the one to reach you.

You were not reachable. You had decided that a long time ago and you had not revisited the decision. You were fine. You were always fine. You didn't need anyone's approval and you didn't need anyone's warmth and you didn't need to be understood because being understood meant being known and being known meant being seen and being seen meant someone could find the soft parts —

And none of it mattered to you. The warnings didn't matter. The whispers didn't matter. The slow, tired disappointment on the faces of people who had given up trying — none of it touched you, not really, not where it counted. Not until the day you picked a fight with the wrong person.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

It started — like most disasters — over something completely stupid. A place by the reef. A basket of fish. A look Lo'ak gave you that you didn't appreciate. That was it. That was the whole beginning of the worst afternoon of your life.

He had been walking past with that particular expression he wore sometimes — the one that sat somewhere between casual arrogance and mild contempt, the one that said I am the son of the most important man alive and I know it even when I'm pretending I don't. You had been crouched by the water sorting through your catch, minding your own business for once in your life, and he had looked at you the way people look at something left in their way. An obstacle. An inconvenience. That was all it took.

Lo'ak: "Move. You're in the way."

You looked up slowly. Took your time with it. Let the silence sit just long enough to make the point that you were not someone who moved on command. "Excuse me? I don't see your name carved into the reef, sky people's son." That landed wrong. You knew it the second it left your mouth — the way his jaw tightened, the flicker of something old and sore and deep crossing his face before he shut it down. The five fingers. The sky people blood. The thing that had followed him here the same way yours had followed you, the thing nobody said out loud because they were polite about it, which you were not.

You knew it was a low hit. You threw it anyway.

Lo'ak: "What did you just call me?"

"You heard me. Don't play stupid — or maybe you can't help it. Maybe it's just your natural state."

Lo'ak: "You've got a real death wish, you know that? Walk away. Walk away right now before I —"

"Before you what? What are you going to do, Lo'ak? Run and tell daddy? Write it in your feelings journal? Cry into your fancy little human hands? What? I'm waiting. Finish the sentence."

His eyes went dark.

Lo'ak: "You don't want to do this."

"See, that's where you're wrong. I absolutely want to do this. I've been wanting to do this since the first time you looked at me like I was something stuck to the bottom of your foot. So come on. Let's go. Or are you all talk?"

He shoved you. Both hands, flat against your chest, hard enough to send you stumbling back two full steps and knock your basket sideways, fish scattering across the wet rock. It was the kind of shove meant to end things — a warning, a boundary, a back off. The kind that assumed you would take it and reassess.

You didn't reassess. You launched yourself back at him and shoved with everything you had and he went back harder than you did and then it was over — the pretense of it ending there, the last thread of restraint snapping clean — and then it was just war.

His fist caught you across the cheekbone first and your head snapped sideways and white light burst behind your eye and before it even fully cleared you were already swinging back. Your knuckles cracked against his jaw and he made a sound — half curse, half grunt — and grabbed your arm and twisted and you went down to one knee on the rock and the stone tore into your skin and you felt it, the bright hot scream of it, and it made you furious.

You wrenched your arm free and drove your elbow up into his ribs. He folded sideways. You used it — got your feet under you, grabbed a fistful of his collar, swung him into the nearest flat rock hard enough that the impact shuddered up your own arms. He recovered faster than you expected, got a hand in your hair and pulled and you snarled — actually snarled, the sound tearing out of you like something animal — and raked your nails down his forearm until he let go.

You were bleeding. He was bleeding. Neither of you cared. The crowd gathered fast. They always did. People love a spectacle and there was nothing more spectacle than you — wild-eyed, furious, a gash opening under your cheekbone where his ring had caught you, blood tracking down your jaw and dripping off your chin — going head-to-head with the second eldest of Toruk Makto's line. Lo'ak's lip was split. His forearm was a mess of red lines. There was a bruise blooming across his jaw that was going to be spectacular by morning.

Good. You hoped it hurt. You hoped it hurt for a week.

Lo'ak: "You are UNHINGED! You are actually, genuinely unhinged — what is WRONG with you?!"

"Everything! Everything is wrong with me and I STILL fight better than you so what does that say about YOU?! Huh?! The great warrior's son can't handle one girl — embarrassing, Lo'ak, that is genuinely embarrassing —"

Lo'ak: "I am going to —"

"Going to WHAT?! You keep starting sentences you can't finish! Is that a family trait or just you?!"

He came at you again and you caught his arm and used his momentum against him, pivoting, sending him stumbling, and when he turned back around his face was pure fury — not the performative kind, not the kind he'd been wearing before. Real. Raw. The kind that meant the next hit was going to be serious.

Lo'ak: "I swear to Eywa I will put you in the ground —"

"THEN DO IT! Stop talking and do it, you coward, you absolute waste of — you think you scare me?! You think I haven't been hit harder by people twice your size?! Come on! COME ON!"

Lo'ak: "You are INSANE, you are an absolute MENACE, I don't even know why they LET you stay here —"

"Oh that's rich coming from the boy who had to BEG the Metkayina to take his family in! At least I'm honest about what I am! You walk around like you BELONG here, like you EARNED something, like you're not just here because your daddy made a deal —"

Something ugly crossed his face. Something that went past anger into something more wounded, and you knew — you knew — that you had gone somewhere real and terrible and you should stop. You did not stop.

Lo'ak: "Shut your mouth —"

"Make me! You've been trying to make me since we started and you STILL haven't managed it so clearly that's not happening today —"

Lo'ak: "I said SHUT YOUR MOUTH —"

"AND I SAID MAKE ME, Lo'ak, those are your two options, pick one and commit —"

He grabbed your collar. You grabbed his. You were chest to chest now, both of you heaving, both bleeding, both past the point of reason or pride or anything resembling sense. The crowd around you was loud — shouting, some of them, urging one of you to stop, a few of the younger ones with their eyes wide like they weren't sure if this was horrifying or the most exciting thing they'd ever seen.

Someone screamed for you to stop. Someone screamed for Lo'ak to stop.

Neither of you did. Neither of you were even close to done. You had gone somewhere past stopping, somewhere in your chest where the anger had burned so hot it had become its own kind of calm, and you pulled back your fist —

And then — impact. But not the one you intended.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

You didn't see him step between you.

That was the thing that would stay with you long after the bruises faded and the crowd dispersed and the evening swallowed the whole disaster whole — you didn't see him. You didn't see him coming. You didn't see him move. One moment it was Lo'ak in front of you, Lo'ak with his bloody lip and his fury and his hands still twisted in your collar, and the next moment there was someone else entirely and your fist was already gone — already past the point of no return, already committed to the arc with every ounce of force you had left in your body behind it, momentum dragging you forward like a current you couldn't swim against — Your knuckles connected with the side of his face. The sound it made was horrible.

Not the dull thud of a bad hit, not the sharp crack of bone meeting bone that you had gotten used to in the blur of the last few minutes. This was different. This was the sound of something going catastrophically, irreversibly wrong. It rang through your fist and up your forearm and into your shoulder and for one suspended, terrible moment your entire body understood what your mind hadn't caught up to yet —

That was not Lo'ak. Silence.

Not the hushed silence of people being polite. Not the murmuring, shifting silence of a crowd deciding whether to intervene. The total, crashing, absolute silence of every single person present watching something go very, very wrong all at once. The kind of silence that has weight. The kind that presses down on your chest and holds you still whether you want it to or not.

Neteyam staggered. One step back. Two. His body turning slightly with the force of it, one hand shooting out to catch himself — forearm braced against the rough bark of a nearby tree, head dipping forward, braids falling across his face. He stayed like that for a moment that felt much longer than it was. Just — still. Bent at the edge, breathing, processing.

And then he straightened. Slowly. Painfully slowly. Like he was deciding how to do it, like every inch was a choice. He rose to his full height and the crowd saw his face and the silence, impossibly, got louder.

His cheek was already darkening. You could see it from where you stood — still rooted to the spot, fist still half-raised, your body not yet having received the message that the fight was over. The color bloomed fast and mean across his cheekbone, deep purple-red spreading under the surface of his skin like ink dropped in water. His jaw was tight. A muscle jumped there, once, and then went still. He raised his hand — slowly, like he wasn't sure he wanted to confirm it — and his fingers hovered an inch from his face before he thought better of it and lowered his arm back to his side.

He did not touch it. He did not curse. He did not make a sound. He did not look at Lo'ak. He looked at you.

His expression was carefully, deliberately, almost supernaturally neutral. Whatever he was feeling — pain, shock, anger, something else entirely — he had locked it somewhere behind those eyes and swallowed the key. The only thing on his face was a stillness so complete it didn't look like calm. It looked like control. Like a person holding something very large very carefully so it didn't break anything on its way down.

Neteyam: "Enough."

One word. One word spoken at a perfectly ordinary volume, not loud, not sharp, not raised into a command — just said, the way you say the sky is blue or the tide is coming in. A fact. A conclusion. The end of something.

And the crowd — the same crowd that had been shouting thirty seconds ago, that had been feeding the fire with their noise and their watching — exhaled as one and took a collective step back and was quiet. Like he had simply reminded them who he was and they had remembered. Your fist dropped to your side. You hadn't even realized you were still holding it up.

Lo'ak was saying something. You could see his mouth moving, could see the way he was looking between you and his brother with an expression that cycled rapidly through anger and shock and something softer and more guilty underneath both. He was talking. The words were happening. You couldn't hear a single one of them.

You couldn't hear anything.

The world had narrowed down to the roaring of your own pulse in your ears and the sight of that bruise and the sound — that sound, that horrible sound your knuckles had made — playing on a loop somewhere at the back of your skull where you couldn't reach it to make it stop.

You hit him.

You hit him.

You hit him.

The thought arrived fully formed and kept arriving, over and over, the same four words in the same flat horrified voice, because your mind had not yet found anything more sophisticated to do with what had just happened. He stepped in. He just — he stepped in, between you and his brother, because that was apparently just something he did, just a thing that was in his nature, to put himself in the space where the harm was going — and you had put your fist through that space without looking, without thinking, without stopping —

He wasn't even part of this.

He was never part of this.

He just stepped in and you —

Your hand was throbbing. You looked down at it without meaning to. Your knuckles were torn up from the rock and from Lo'ak's jaw and now from this — from him — and there was blood tracking across your fingers and mixing with the salt water still drying on your skin and you stared at it like it belonged to someone else.

Oh Eywa. What did you do.

Neteyam looked at you then. Done with whatever internal process had kept him still and silent — done or simply finished, the way he finished things, cleanly and without ceremony. He looked at you the way he apparently looked at everything: steady, measured, present. Those golden eyes that caught the light and held it. Calm in a way that had nothing to do with indifference and everything to do with something deeper, something more deliberate, something you did not have a word for because you had never personally possessed it. There was no anger in his face. Not a trace of it.

That was somehow the worst thing that had ever happened to you.

You could have handled anger. Anger you knew — anger was familiar, it was the language you'd spoken your whole life, it was something you could push back against and feel righteous doing it. If he had yelled at you, if he had looked at you with fury or contempt or even cold disgust, you would have known what to do. You would have found your footing. But there was nothing like that. There was only that terrible steadiness. That awful, patient, open looking — like he was still deciding what you were. Like the answer wasn't as simple as you'd made it for everyone else.

Neteyam: "You're bleeding."

The words landed soft and matter-of-fact. Not an accusation. Not even a particular expression of concern, just — an observation. A thing he had noticed. A thing apparently worth saying. Your mouth opened. Closed.

"…I know."

Your voice came out wrong. Too small. Scraped of its edges in a way you didn't authorize and couldn't immediately explain. He looked at you for another moment — reading something in your face that you weren't aware you were showing, filing it somewhere, making no comment on it.

Neteyam: "Go get it cleaned."

Not you should have thought about that before. Not look what you did. Not you ought to be ashamed of yourself — every phrase you had been waiting for, bracing for, the words you'd already started building walls against. Just — go get it cleaned. Like he was talking to someone who mattered enough to take care of. Like the next few minutes of your wellbeing were a thing worth directing you toward. Like despite everything — despite the crowd and the blood and the horrible sound and the bruise spreading dark and vivid across his cheekbone — you were still, to him, simply a person standing in front of him who was hurt.

He wasn't scolding you. He wasn't yelling. He wasn't performing his own injury for the crowd or making you kneel in it or extracting the full weight of what you owed him right here in front of everyone. He was just — looking at you. Steady and clear and without malice. Like you were real. Like you were worth the effort of being seen correctly. Something in your chest did something you didn't have a name for and didn't want to examine. You turned and walked away.

Quickly. Before the something could finish happening. Before Lo'ak could redirect his energy toward you. Before anyone in that crowd could get a good look at your face, because something was happening to it — something was pulling at the corners and pressing behind your eyes and you were absolutely, categorically not about to let a single person here witness whatever that was. You walked until the sound of the crowd was gone.

You walked until there was only the reef and the water and the wind and the distant, endless noise of the ocean — and you stopped, and you stood there, and you pressed your bloody knuckles against your mouth

And you breathed. And you did not think about the way he had looked at you. You did not think about it at all.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

You did not sleep that night. You lay flat on your back staring at the ceiling of your dwelling and replayed it forty-seven times. The swing. The sound. The way he staggered. The bruise already blooming across his cheekbone like a dark flower.

You did that. You.

It wasn't even the guilt that surprised you — you'd felt guilt before, faint and distant, easily ignored. This was different. This sat in your ribcage like a stone. This wouldn't move. You went to him the next morning.

He was outside his family's dwelling, seated on a wide, flat rock with a piece of rope in his hands — braiding it with the focused, methodical patience that seemed to be just part of him. He looked up when he heard you approach. The bruise was worse in daylight. Deep blue-purple against his dark skin, blooming from cheekbone to jaw.

Your stomach dropped to your feet.

"…I'm sorry."

The words came out smaller than you intended. Scraped raw. He tilted his head slightly.

Neteyam: "Are you?"

"Don't — don't do that. Don't make it a question. I am. I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to hit you, you just — you came out of nowhere and I was already mid-swing and I — I'm sorry, okay? I don't — I don't usually —"

You stopped. Pressed your lips together. This was excruciating.

Neteyam: "I know you don't."

"You don't know anything about me."

Neteyam: "I know you look like you haven't slept. I know you came here before the second tide. I know you've been standing at the edge of my sight since yesterday evening trying to convince yourself to walk over."

You stared at him. "…You noticed that?"

Neteyam: "I notice most things."

A beat of silence stretched between you. He went back to his rope. You stood there, completely unsure what to do with yourself, because you had come here with one purpose and accomplished it and now had absolutely no reason to stay — Except that you didn't want to leave.

That was new. That was a very new feeling and you weren't sure you liked it.

"Does it hurt?"

Neteyam: "Yes."

"Good. I mean — no. I meant — no, obviously not good, I just — that came out wrong."

And Neteyam — Neteyam, of all people, dignified and careful and nothing like you — laughed. Low and brief but genuine. Like you'd surprised it out of him.

Neteyam: "Sit down. You're making me nervous, standing there like you're about to run." You sat down.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

You kept coming back.

It started as guilt — a debt you couldn't stop counting, couldn't stop turning over in your hands like a stone with no smooth side. You owed him. You had split open his face with your carelessness and left a bruise that lasted nine days — you knew because you counted, because every morning you looked at him and catalogued its progress with the grim attention of someone monitoring damage they caused — and you owed him something and the only currency you had was presence. So you showed up. Every day, sometimes twice. You hovered at the edges of his space like something that hadn't quite decided whether it was welcome and hadn't quite worked up the courage to ask.

You brought him things sometimes. Small things. Stupid things. A particular kind of fruit — red-gold and sweet, something between a mango and something with no name in any language you spoke — that he had mentioned once, in passing, barely even a full sentence, just a half-formed observation about missing it, and you had spent an embarrassing amount of time the next morning locating a tree that bore it. You left it without comment. You told yourself it was nothing. You told yourself that anyone would do the same.

A shell from the northern rocks — perfectly spiral, pale as bone, with a faint iridescent sheen that caught the light and held it the way certain things do, the way certain moments do. You found it on an afternoon when you were supposed to be doing something else entirely and you picked it up and stood there holding it and thought he would think this was interesting before you could stop yourself, and then you stood there a moment longer feeling deeply stupid about that, and then you put it in your wrap and brought it to him anyway. He had held it up to the light and turned it slowly in his fingers and said where did you find this and the way he said it — quiet, genuinely curious, like the answer actually mattered — had done something to the inside of your chest that you chose not to investigate.

It's just repayment, you told yourself. This is what repayment looks like. This is nothing. Then it became habit.

The morning felt wrong without it. You would wake before the second tide and lie still for a moment and your mind would already be moving toward him — not dramatically, not with any of the breathless urgency you would later recognize in it — just the simple, animal pull of that is where I am going today. The way you moved toward water when you were thirsty. Instinct. Routine. Nothing more.

Then — slowly, stupidly, without your permission and without the decency to announce itself so you could prepare — It became something you wanted.

Not just habit. Not just guilt repaid in installments. Something that had its own weight, its own warmth, its own specific texture that you would have recognized anywhere. You didn't name it yet. You were not ready to name it. But you felt it — the way you feel weather changing, the way the ocean shifts before a storm, something in the air that your body understood before your mind caught up.

He was so different from you. That was the first thing. The most obvious thing, the thing anyone with eyes could see from a distance — but it was different, living inside that difference, spending time in it until you knew all its specific shapes.

Where you were loud, he was quiet. Not the quiet of someone with nothing to say — the quiet of someone who had decided that words were worth something and spent them accordingly. He did not fill silence for the sake of filling it. He did not perform. He simply was, in whatever room or reef or stretch of open water he occupied, present in a way that made everything around him feel more real.

Where you were sharp, he was steady. You came at the world with edges — with the particular aggression of someone who had learned early that the world came at you first, that softness was a liability, that the best defense was to be more trouble than you were worth. He came at it with something else entirely. Not softness exactly — he was not soft, you had seen him in training, had seen the particular focused intensity he brought to everything he did — but a kind of groundedness that nothing seemed to shake. He absorbed things. Processed them. Responded rather than reacted. You had never learned the difference. He had never needed to learn it because he had simply always known.

You ran from stillness the way you ran from most things that felt like they might hold you in place. Stillness meant thinking. Thinking meant feeling. Feeling meant the soft parts were exposed and the soft parts being exposed was the single most dangerous thing you could imagine. You had spent your whole life in motion for exactly this reason.But his stillness was different.

His stillness didn't demand anything from you. It didn't press. It didn't expect you to fill it or perform inside it or justify yourself against it. It simply existed — large and patient and strangely permeable, like you could step into it and still remain yourself. Like being near him somehow granted you access to a version of quiet that had nothing to do with suppression and everything to do with rest.

You had not rested in a very long time.

The Metkayina had a word — syulang — that didn't translate cleanly into anything you'd grown up with. It meant something close to the peace of being known by the water. The understanding that the ocean held you not because you had earned it but simply because you were there, because you had come, because you had trusted it with your weight. You had heard elders use it in ceremony. You had never understood it in your body until you sat next to Neteyam for the first time in silence and felt, with a shock that you immediately suppressed and did not speak of, oh. this is what that means.

Neteyam: "You don't have to keep coming, you know. The debt, if there was one, is settled."

It was an afternoon in the shallow reef, the water low and warm and green-gold around the rocks. He was working on something — he was always working on something, always occupied with some quiet task that his hands did almost independently while his mind went elsewhere — and he said it without looking up, casual, like an observation rather than a question.

"I know."

Neteyam: "Then why do you?"

He looked up then. Just briefly. Just enough to catch your eye and hold it for a moment — not demanding, not pointed, genuinely curious in that particular way he had that made you feel like the answer actually mattered. Like you actually mattered. Like the specific contents of your interior life were a thing worth being interested in.

You opened your mouth.

Because you are the only person I have been around in longer than I can remember who does not make me feel like I am too much. Because I have spent my entire life being a problem and you look at me like I am a person. Because when I sit next to you the noise in my head goes quiet and I don't know how you do that, I don't know what it is about you specifically, and it terrifies me a little because what happens when this stops, what happens when you figure out what everyone else already knows, what happens when you decide I'm not worth the effort —Because I think I have been waiting for you to leave since the first day I came to apologize and you told me to sit down and you laughed and I felt the ground shift under me and I have been waiting for it to shift back ever since.

"Nothing better to do."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one — the motion of something fond and slightly exasperated moving through his expression before he reined it back in. He saw through it. He always saw through it. You could watch it happen in real time — the brief, quiet assessment in his eyes, the moment of recognition, the decision not to push. He never pushed. He never cornered you in your own deflections and demanded you be honest. He simply received what you gave him and left the rest of the space open, patient, available, like a door that stayed unlocked.

It made you want to walk through it so badly it scared you. So you didn't. You sat down instead. You picked up a piece of rope that was lying nearby and began to fray the end of it for no reason, just to have something for your hands, and after a moment he went back to his work and the afternoon settled around you both like something familiar.

Sometimes they talked for hours.

About nothing — about the color of the evening water when the bioluminescence came up and turned the whole reef into something out of a fever dream, soft blue-green light pulsing under the surface like a heartbeat. About which reef fish were the most irritating and which were merely annoying and which had, in Lo'ak's case specifically, a genuine personal vendetta. About whether Kiri's ability to speak with plants was unsettling or beautiful — you said both, you said it was the kind of thing that could be both at the same time, and Neteyam had gone quiet for a moment in that way he did when something landed somewhere real for him, and then said yes. you're right. it's exactly like that and you'd felt inexplicably proud of yourself for an answer to a completely trivial question.

About his mother sometimes — carefully, in small pieces, the way you share something precious. About Pandora, the old one, the forest one, which he carried in him like a country he'd left behind. About what home meant when you'd had more than one of them. You hadn't offered your own version of that conversation but he hadn't asked for it, and somehow the not-asking made you want to give it to him anyway. You noticed things. You noticed them the way you notice when the tide is changing — slowly, then all at once.

The way he tilted his head slightly when he was thinking through something complicated, like he was listening to it from a different angle. The specific sound of his laugh when something genuinely caught him off guard — rare, lower than his regular voice, like it came from somewhere he didn't usually let things come from. The way he always sat facing the water. The way he remembered things you said — small things, throwaway things, things you'd forgotten you'd even told him — and brought them back later with a naturalness that suggested he hadn't been keeping track, that he'd simply retained them because they mattered, because you mattered, because what you said was worth holding onto. Nobody had ever held onto what you said before.

People heard you. People reacted to you. People were exhausted by you and entertained by you and occasionally frightened of you. But nobody kept you. Nobody took what you offered and filed it somewhere careful. He did. Without making a ceremony of it. Without asking anything in return.

One afternoon he said, without preamble, you mentioned once that you don't like the smell of the low-tide mud near the eastern bank and redirected the walk you'd been about to take, so casual about it that it took you a full minute to realize what he'd done, and by then it was too late to react appropriately because he'd already moved on to something else and the moment had passed. You spent the rest of the afternoon trying to remember if that had been a dream or if it had actually happened.

It had actually happened. It kept actually happening.

Sometimes they sat in silence and it was the most comfortable silence you had ever occupied in your entire life. Not dead silence — the reef was never truly silent, there was always water and wind and the distant cry of something living — but the silence between you, the silence that lived in the small space where your shoulders almost touched when you sat side by side on the flat rock watching the tide come in. That silence had texture. Had warmth. Had a specific quality that you had started to recognize the way you recognized weather — the feeling of it on your skin, the way it settled differently depending on the day.

You had a secret. You had several secrets at this point, stacked neatly in the dark where you kept things you weren't ready to look at. But this one in particular: there were afternoons where you came not because you felt you owed him, not out of habit, not even out of wanting — but simply because the silence was there and it was the only place in your entire life that felt like enough. Sometimes Lo'ak appeared.

He came around the corner of the dwelling one afternoon with the energy of someone who had not fully decided whether he was still angry and spotted you sitting next to his brother and stopped dead.

Lo'ak: "Why is she here."

Neteyam: "She is visiting."

Lo'ak: "Visiting. Her. She is visiting."

Neteyam: "Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "I'm just — I'm noting it. I'm noting that this is happening."

"You can note it from somewhere else."

Lo'ak: "I still haven't forgiven you, by the way."

"I still don't care, by the way."

Neteyam: "Both of you. Please. I am begging you with everything I have and everything my ancestors left me."

Lo'ak: "She started it —"

"You shoved me first —"

Lo'ak: "Because you called me —"

"You were looking at me like —"

Neteyam: "I will walk into the ocean. I will walk in and I will not walk back out. This is a promise."

Lo'ak had pointed at you with an expression of profound grievance, then pointed at his brother with an expression of profound betrayal, and then left. You watched him go. You looked back at Neteyam. Neteyam was pinching the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed in the manner of someone communing privately with Eywa for strength.

"He's dramatic."

Neteyam: "You punched me in the face."

"I thought you were Lo'ak."

Neteyam: "Does that make it better?"

"…I'm choosing not to answer that."

He opened his eyes. He looked at you. And then — slowly, helplessly, with the air of a person whose own face had betrayed him — he laughed. Real and low and startled out of him, and you felt it move through you like warmth, like the bioluminescence coming up under the water, like something lighting from the inside. You laughed too. You couldn't help it.

Even those moments. Even the bickering and the Lo'ak standoffs and the stupid boring afternoons where the most exciting thing that happened was a particularly aggressive fish and the long comfortable silences and the small observations and the fruit and the shell and the way he said your name like it was simply a word and not a verdict —

You collected all of it. Quietly, carefully, without admitting to yourself that you were doing it. You kept them somewhere inside your chest in the place where the stone of guilt had been, the place that had been cold and heavy for so long and was now — without your permission, without your planning, without any input from the part of you that made decisions —

Warm. You didn't examine it too closely. You were afraid of what you'd find.

You were afraid because somewhere underneath all of it, in the part of you that was honest even when you didn't want it to be, you already knew.

You already knew what it was.

You just weren't ready to say it yet.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

Neteyam was like the sun.

You thought it one afternoon without meaning to — the thought arriving fully formed and uninvited, the way the most honest thoughts always did, slipping past your defenses in a moment of carelessness. You were across the reef from him, far enough that you could watch without it being obvious, pretending to be occupied with something else entirely while your eyes kept finding him the way water finds the lowest point. Inevitable. Helpless. Quietly devastating.

He was talking to one of the elder Metkayina warriors — something about the reef paths, you thought, something navigational, his hands moving in those careful illustrative gestures he used when he was explaining something he cared about getting right. The warrior was nodding. Of course he was nodding. Everyone nodded when Neteyam spoke, not because he demanded it but because he made sense, because there was something in the way he organized his thoughts and offered them outward that made you want to follow the logic all the way to its conclusion just to see where he'd take you.

The light was hitting him the way it only did in late afternoon — gold and heavy, the kind that made everything it touched look chosen. His braids caught it. His skin caught it. The careful architecture of his face caught it and held it and you stood there across the reef like an idiot and thought —

Oh. He looks like the sun.

Bright and clear and constant and warm in a way that reached you even when you weren't standing close. That was the thing about him that nobody talked about because maybe it was so obvious it had stopped being remarkable to everyone else — the way his presence radiated outward. The way people near him seemed to breathe easier. The way even difficult conversations, hard truths, uncomfortable silences felt somehow manageable in his orbit, like his steadiness was a thing you could borrow just by being nearby.

Everyone moved around him like he was a fixed point. You had noticed this early and filed it away as simple charisma, the natural gravity of a leader's firstborn, something political and practiced. But it wasn't that. You understood that now. It wasn't practiced at all. It was just — him. The Metkayina children who came to watch the Sully clan practice were always bravest near Neteyam. The warriors who had their doubts about the forest clan's place here softened first in his presence. Even Lo'ak, all sharp edges and restless energy, went a degree quieter when his brother was in the room.

He was something you could orient yourself by when everything else was shifting water and wind. You had needed that more than you wanted to admit.You are not supposed to stare directly at the sun.

Everyone knows this. It is not a complicated rule. It is the kind of thing children learn once and carry forever — a simple, self-evident truth that requires no reinforcement because the consequence enforces itself. You stare too long at the sun, you lose something. Your vision goes white. The image burns itself into your retinas and stays there long after you've looked away, a ghost of brightness superimposed on everything else you try to see.

Everyone learns this early and carries it like the simplest of safety rules. You kept staring anyway. And slowly — so slowly you almost didn't notice until it was already true, until you were already so deep in it that the surface was no longer visible — you realized that the warmth you felt when you were near him wasn't just comfort anymore. Wasn't just the relief of syulang, the peace of being held without condition. It had changed. It had grown into something else in the dark while you weren't looking, fed by all those afternoons and all those silences and all those small moments you had been collecting and telling yourself meant nothing.

It wasn't just safe anymore. It was something more intimate. Something that lived lower in your chest — quieter than anything you'd felt before and somehow hungrier for it, the way the quietest fires burn longest. Something that made your skin feel too tight when he sat close, when the space between your shoulders collapsed to inches and you could feel the warmth that came off him and had to actively, deliberately not think about it. Something that made you memorize the way he said your name without meaning to — the specific cadence of it, the way the syllables sat in his mouth, the way it sounded different from every other voice that had ever said it, like he was the first person who had ever said it correctly.

You noticed the exact moment he started looking for you when he arrived somewhere. That was when you knew it was bad.

It was subtle — barely a thing at all, just a brief sweep of the space when he entered it, a small orientation, like checking that something was where he'd left it. He probably didn't even know he did it. But you saw it. You saw it because you were always already watching, always already tracking him the way you tracked weather, and the moment you saw it your heart did something embarrassing and involuntary and you looked away fast and told yourself it meant nothing, it was nothing, you were projecting —

Oh.

Oh no.

You sat with it for three days. You carried it around like something you'd found and weren't sure what to do with — this feeling, this terrible specific feeling that had no business being in your chest, that had moved in without asking and rearranged the furniture. Three days of being near him and smiling at the right moments and saying the right things and meanwhile running a constant quiet internal argument with yourself that went in circles and resolved nothing and exhausted you completely.

On the third night you lay in the dark and the argument finally ran out of road. You admitted it to yourself in a voice so small it barely counted as words. The way you confess things you're ashamed of — quickly, quietly, to no one, in the hope that saying it once will be enough and you won't have to say it again.

I think I am in love with him.

The words sat there in the dark and didn't go away. You waited for it to feel like an exaggeration. You waited for the more reasonable part of you to come back online and suggest an alternative explanation — that it was attachment, that it was gratitude, that it was the simple confusion of spending too much time with someone who treated you with basic decency when you weren't used to it. You had thought all of those things over the three days. You had tried all of them on. They had not fit.

This fit. That was the worst part. It fit perfectly and cleanly and with a completeness that left no room for negotiation. You were in love with Neteyam and the love was not small and manageable — it was the size of the thing you'd been trying not to see for weeks, large and obvious and already fully formed, the way things get when you ignore them long enough.

And then the second part arrived. The part that followed the first like a shadow follows a body, inevitable, attached, darkening everything it touched.He would never.

Not like a question. Not even like a conclusion you were drawing — more like something you already knew, something that had always been true, something that had been sitting quietly in the corner of the room this whole time waiting for you to be ready to look at it.

Think about who he was. Think about what he was. Neteyam — firstborn of the Olo'eyktan's line, raised in the shadow of Toruk Makto's legacy, carrying the weight of two clans on his shoulders with a grace that made it look like nothing. Neteyam — who moved through the world with dignity and intention, who chose his words like they were worth something, who treated every person he encountered with a consideration that cost him nothing because it was simply his nature. Neteyam — who the elders trusted and the warriors respected and the children followed without being asked, who was everything a leader's son was supposed to be and somehow also genuinely, privately, specifically good. And you.

You.

You, who had been called feral so many times it had stopped stinging. You, who had exhausted every elder in the village and picked a fight with his brother over a basket of fish and punched him — punched him — the first time he tried to help you. You, who had no stillness in you, no grace, no patience, no instinct for the kind of careful tending that relationships between people required. You, who ran from anything that tried to hold you in place and burned bridges so automatically you had stopped noticing the smoke.

You thought about the kind of person Neteyam would end up with. The kind of person who made sense beside him — someone steady, someone rooted, someone who understood ceremony and duty and the long responsibilities of lineage. Someone who could stand at his side and reflect something worthy back at the people watching. Someone who made the picture complete rather than disrupting every edge of it.

You thought about yourself standing next to him in any formal context — you, with your too-loud laugh and your sharp mouth and your comprehensive inability to be appropriate when appropriateness was required — and the image was almost funny. Almost. The kind of funny that lives right next to something else, something that sits in your sternum and presses.

He was light and order and intention. You were noise and motion and consequence. He deserved someone who would be easy to love. Someone whose love would not arrive with complications and bruises and a history of burning everything soft she ever touched. You were not easy. You had never been easy. You did not know how to be easy. You had tried, once or twice, in the distant past, and it had come out wrong every time, too much or too little, off-rhythm, graceless.

You thought about the way he looked at everything — that patient, present, receiving attention — and you thought about directing that look at you, fully, knowingly, the way it would have to be directed if this were ever a thing that was real. The way he would have to know all of it. The whole of you. Not just the afternoons on the reef but the rest — the anger and the damage and the long ugly history of being someone nobody quite knew what to do with.

And then you thought: he is too good for that. He is too good for you. This is not a self-deprecating thought, this is not you being dramatic — this is just true, this is just a fact of the world, this is the sun and you are standing in it and that is wonderful and that is enough and that is all it is ever going to be. Then you shoved it down as deep as it would go.

You were good at this. This was, in fact, one of your genuine skills — the burial of things, the compression of feeling into something small and dense and silent enough to carry without showing. You had been doing it your whole life. You were efficient at it. You took the love — the whole terrible warm specific size of it — and you wrapped it in the coldest water you had and pushed it down under the stone of everything practical and necessary and true, and you held it there until it stopped moving.Then you told yourself — firmly, clearly, in the voice you used for things that were not open to discussion —

It doesn't matter.

It can't matter.

It won't.

You said it three times. Once for each day you'd spent pretending it wasn't true. Then you lay in the dark and listened to the ocean and waited for morning, and when morning came you got up and went to find him because that was what you did now, that was the habit, that was the acceptable version of this — the presence, the afternoons, the comfortable silences — and you sat down next to him on the flat rock and the warmth of him reached you even across the small distance between you and you breathed through it.

This is enough, you told yourself. This is enough. This is enough. This is enough. You said it until it almost sounded true.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

You found out about the betrothal from Kiri.

Not from him. Not from anyone who thought to prepare you, to soften the ground before dropping something heavy onto it. From Kiri — sweet, strange, honest Kiri who loved her brother and assumed, reasonably, that this was simply information that existed in the world and could therefore be shared with anyone in it. She said it the way she said everything: plainly, without performance, the truth arriving in her voice the same way it arrived in everything she did — unadorned and absolute.

You were sitting together near the shallows. She was doing something with a cluster of sea plants, arranging them with that focused, quiet attention she gave to living things, talking about something else entirely — something about the reef ecosystem, something about the way certain coral communicated distress, something that you had been genuinely listening to because Kiri was one of the few people whose observations you found more interesting than your own thoughts.

And then, without looking up, without any change in her tone, without any indication whatsoever that she was about to detonate something inside your chest —

She mentioned it. His name. A girl's name you didn't recognize. The arrangement. Something about how it had been discussed for some time, how it made sense given the clans, how she supposed it was all very practical even if she personally found the whole business a little —

She kept talking.

You stopped hearing.

Not because the words stopped coming — they kept coming, her voice continuing its calm and thoughtful path through the subject — but because something had happened behind your eyes, some small catastrophic shift, like a support beam giving way in a structure you hadn't realized you'd been living in. The whole thing shuddered. You felt it in your back teeth. You smiled.

You don't know how. You don't know what combination of pride and survival instinct and sheer lifelong practice at performing feelings you didn't have and suppressing feelings you did — you don't know what assembled the smile on your face in that moment but it was there, fully formed, by the time Kiri glanced up. Present and plausible and giving absolutely nothing away.

"Oh — that's wonderful. Really. That's— yeah, that makes sense."

Wonderful. You said wonderful. The word tasted like ash and salt and you kept smiling through it and Kiri nodded and moved on and you followed along — laughed when she said something lightly amusing, responded when she asked something small, tilted your head and made the sounds of a person who was present and engaged and entirely fine — And you waited.

You waited the way you wait out a current that's stronger than you — not fighting it, just holding still, conserving everything, existing inside it until it passed and you could move again. You waited through the rest of the conversation and the easy goodbye and the walk away from the shallows, measured steps, nothing rushed, nothing that would draw a second glance.

You walked until you were alone. And then you stopped.

And you let the smile fall off your face like something dead.

It dropped. Just — dropped, the muscles releasing all at once, and what was underneath it was nothing. Not tears, not immediate visible grief — just nothing. The blankness that comes before the body figures out what it's supposed to feel. You stood in the space between the dwellings with the sounds of the village going on around you at a comfortable distance and you stared at the ground and you breathed very carefully in and out and you waited for the nothing to resolve into something navigable.

Of course. The word arrived first. Just that. Of course — not even a complete thought yet, just the conclusion, the two syllables of inevitability, the sound a person makes when the thing they were dreading turns out to have already been true for longer than they knew.

Of course he was. Of course there was already someone — someone chosen, someone decided upon, someone who had been considered and selected with the same care and intentionality that Neteyam brought to every single thing in his life. Someone right. Someone who made sense in every way that mattered and in every context that counted. Someone who fit. Of course. Of course. While you were sitting on flat rocks and pretending your reasons for coming were casual and collecting small moments like they belonged to you — of course there was already someone else. Of course the space you thought you'd been slowly, stupidly hoping to occupy was never empty to begin with.

Of course. Of course, of course, of course —

You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth and breathed through your nose and waited for it to pass.

Then you took it apart deliberately, piece by piece, because that was what you did with things that were too large to hold whole. You broke them down. You named them. You arranged them in a line and looked at them until they were just facts and not feelings.

His heart belongs to someone else. Say it again. Say it until it sounds like weather, like tide tables, like something impersonal and fixed and entirely outside your jurisdiction.

His heart belongs to someone else. It was never yours. It was never even close to yours — you were never in consideration, you were never in the room where that kind of decision gets made, you were never a name that appeared on any list of possibilities. You don't get to be surprised by this. You don't get to feel robbed of something you were never given.

You are not the kind of person that someone like Neteyam ends up with. That one landed harder than the others. That one had teeth.

Because it wasn't cruel — that was the thing, that was what made it so much worse than cruelty. It wasn't self-pity dressed up as honesty. It was just true. Plain and structural and true the way gravity is true, the way the tides are true — not a judgment, just a fact of how things were arranged.

Think about her. Whoever she was — this girl, this chosen girl, this person whose name had been mentioned alongside his like it belonged there, like they made sense in the same sentence. Think about what she probably was. Steady. Rooted. The kind of girl who moved through ceremony with her head up and her hands graceful and her voice never raised above what the moment required. The kind of girl whose presence was an asset and not a liability. The kind of girl who had never in her life started a fight over a basket of fish or punched someone in the face or been called feral by people who meant it as a warning.

Think about her standing beside him. Think about how that looked — the image of it, clean and complete and correct, two people who made sense together the way things make sense when they are made for each other.

Now think about yourself standing beside him. You are the kind of person he steps in front of to stop from hurting people.

That sentence. That sentence. You turned it over and it cut on every side. Because it was the truest summary of everything you were to him and everything you would ever be — not a companion, not a person he moved toward, but a force of damage he moved between. Someone to be managed. Someone to be redirected. Someone whose primary relationship with the world was collision and whose primary relationship with him had begun with your fist in his face.

You are the problem. You have always been the problem. You walk into rooms and something breaks. You open your mouth and something bleeds. You have spent your entire life being too much — too loud, too harsh, too sharp, too restless, too broken at too many edges — and you looked at a boy made entirely of light and steadiness and grace and you thought, what exactly? That you were the exception? That he would be the one person in the world who looked at everything you were and decided it was worth choosing?

You are a girl who punched him in the face the first time he tried to help you. What did you think was going to happen.

The answer, of course, was that you hadn't thought. You had felt — which was worse. You had felt things and followed them and built a small, secret architecture out of afternoons and silences and pieces of fruit and shells and the specific sound of his laugh, and you had lived inside it for months without examining the foundation, and now you were standing in the rubble of your own stupidity and the rubble was shaped exactly like you deserved.

You accepted it. You built the acceptance deliberately, stone by stone, the way you built everything — with your hands, with force, with the grim efficiency of someone who has had a lot of practice making peace with things that don't deserve peace. You accepted that he belonged to someone else. You accepted that he had always belonged to someone else. You accepted that the warmth you had mistaken for something personal was simply what he was — what he was to everyone, the sun shining on everything equally, not choosing, not directing, not meaning anything specific by the fact that it reached you too.

It doesn't mean what you thought it meant. It never meant what you thought it meant.

You were just standing in the light. That's all. Anyone standing in the same place would have felt exactly what you felt.

You accepted it. At least — that's what you told yourself. You kept showing up.

That was the shameful part. That was the part you couldn't dress up in any language that made you look like a person in control of yourself. You kept going back. Every day, nearly, the way you had before — sitting beside him on the flat rock, arguing with Lo'ak, existing in the comfortable orbit of his presence like you hadn't just rebuilt every internal wall you had around the specific knowledge that none of this was yours to keep.

You told yourself you were fine. You told yourself you were mature. That this was what maturity looked like — loving someone and wanting their happiness above your own and not making it their problem. That you could hold the feeling in one hand and his wellbeing in the other and keep them separate, keep them clean, never let one contaminate the other. You were so convinced you had it managed. And then he would smile.

Not the public smile — not the one he gave the elders or the warriors or the general population of people who existed in his life. This one. The small one. The private one that arrived without announcement and lived mostly in the corners of his expression, the one that meant something had genuinely landed somewhere real inside him, the one that you were — you were almost certain — not something he distributed freely. The one that felt, every single time it appeared, like something being handed to you specifically. Something in you broke a little more.

Quietly. The way things break when they've been holding too long — not catastrophic, no single dramatic fracture, just the slow accumulation of stress until the material can't hold its shape anymore. A little more every time. A little quieter every time. Until you weren't sure what was still intact and what was just the shape of something that had already given way.

And every time he said your name. He said it differently than other people. You had tried to talk yourself out of this observation because it was the kind of observation that a person makes when they are in trouble and looking for evidence to justify the trouble. But it was true. It was simply, factually, undeniably true that your name in his mouth was a different thing than your name anywhere else — unhurried, without the faint exhaustion or edge that most people put into it, like he had no complicated feelings about it, like saying it was simply a thing he did willingly.

Every time you heard it you had to remind yourself to breathe normally. And every time he noticed something.

That you hadn't eaten — he would say nothing, just redirect the conversation somewhere near food until you ended up with something in your hands almost without realizing. That you were favoring your left side after a training incident you hadn't mentioned — he had simply adjusted where he sat so you weren't reaching across yourself to hand him things. That you got a certain look — a particular tightening around your eyes — right before you said something you were going to regret, and he would ask you a question in that moment, just a small question, just enough to interrupt the momentum and give you the half-second you needed to reconsider.

He saw you.

Not the version of you that was visible to everyone — not the loud one, not the difficult one, not the one they called feral and meant it as a warning. The version underneath. The one that existed in the silences and the small admissions and the moments when your guard slipped because you'd forgotten to hold it up because he made you forget. He saw that version and he treated it gently and he never once made you feel like a project or a problem or a thing to be managed.

And he was engaged to someone else. And you sat next to him in the afternoon light and breathed through it and kept your face arranged into something peaceful and ordinary and fine —

And something inside you, in the place you'd buried everything, put both hands against the stone you'd built over it —

And screamed.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

The evening was the color of regret.

That pale purple-gold that comes just before the last light goes — when everything looks soft and bruised at the edges and the world holds its breath and you feel, briefly, terribly, like the only two people in existence. Like Eywa had drawn the rest of the world back like a curtain and left just this — just the falls, just the fading light, just him, just you, just the unbearable specific weight of everything you were not supposed to feel.

You'd come to the falls together without planning it. That was how it always happened with you two — no direction, no agenda, just movement, just the natural gravitational pull of two people who had somehow, stupidly, become each other's default direction. He had been walking. You had fallen into step beside him. Neither of you had said where. It hadn't seemed necessary. It was never necessary anymore.

That should have scared you. That had scared you, weeks ago, when you first noticed it — the way you had stopped needing to explain yourself to him, stopped needing to justify your presence, stopped performing the casualness of showing up. Somewhere in the accumulated weight of all those afternoons it had simply become true, and true things don't require performance.

You should have been more afraid of that than you were.

The path to the falls was one you both knew by now — the particular arrangement of roots to step over, the place where the canopy thinned and the sky came through in long gold panels, the sound of the water growing gradually from suggestion to certainty. You had walked it in silence, the comfortable kind, the kind that had its own texture and warmth, and you had not looked at him more than twice and you had kept your breathing even and you had told yourself —

This is fine. This is just an evening. This is what you do. This is allowed.

The water fell in long silver ribbons from the high rocks, catching the dying light and breaking it into pieces, turning to mist where it met the pool below — a soft, suspended cloud of it that caught the last gold of the sun and held it, glowing faintly, like something sacred. The sound of it was steady and low and covered everything like a blanket drawn up to the chin. Like the world had drawn close and hushed itself specifically for this moment, and you wished it hadn't, you wished there were noise and people and interruption, you wished for Lo'ak to appear from nowhere and start an argument, you wished for anything that would make this feel less like the universe arranging something.

Neteyam stood a few feet ahead of you at the edge of the pool.

Looking out at the water. Still, as always — that particular, practiced stillness that was not emptiness but its opposite, not absence but the most complete kind of presence, the kind that filled whatever space it occupied without effort or announcement. The last light was on him fully, the way it always seemed to find him, gold and honest and merciless.

You looked at him. You looked at the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders and the way his braids moved faintly in the mist-cooled air. You looked at his hands — loose at his sides, relaxed, the hands of a person who was at peace with where he was. You looked at the way he breathed — slow and unhurried and deep, like the world gave him all the time it had ever made, like nothing in him was braced against anything.

You looked at him and something in your chest cracked open like a geode — split clean down the middle, and what was inside was not stone but light, and the light was the worst thing, the most painful thing, because light in a cracked place has nowhere to go but out and you had been trying so hard, so hard, to keep it in —

I could die happy looking at him. The thought arrived whole. Fully formed. Devastating in its simplicity. Not morbid — not the dark kind of thought that comes from pain — just true, the way only the most honest things are true, without apology or decoration. That you could stand here in this light with the falls making their soft silver noise and look at him, and if the world ended in this exact moment, you would not feel cheated. You would not feel unfinished.

You would feel full.For the first time in your life. Completely, quietly, heartbreakingly full.

(barely a whisper, barely even a sound) "Neteyam."

He turned his head slightly. Not all the way — not quite looking at you, not quite looking away, that particular angle that meant he was listening, that meant you had his attention even when you didn't have his eyes.

Neteyam: "Mm."

Not a word. Just a sound. Just I hear you, I'm here, go ahead. The way he always responded when he was thinking about something and you pulled him back — no irritation, no impatience, just the simple signal of his presence offered freely.

"Do you ever — " You stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Do you ever think about how fast things change? Like — one day everything is one way and then something shifts and it's completely different and you didn't even — you didn't even see it coming."

A pause. He considered it the way he considered everything — genuinely, without rushing toward an easy answer.

Neteyam: "Yes."

"Does it scare you?"

He turned to look at you then. Fully. Those golden eyes finding yours in the fading light with that particular quality of attention that had always undone you slightly — the feeling of being looked at by someone who was actually looking, not scanning, not assessing, not preparing their response. Just seeing.

Neteyam: "Sometimes. But I think — " He paused. Looked back at the water briefly, then back at you. "I think the things that change you are usually the things that were always supposed to. Even when you didn't ask for them."

You stared at him.

(quietly) "That's a very peaceful way to see it."

Neteyam: "You don't see it that way."

"I — no. No, I don't. I think some things change you that were never supposed to. I think sometimes things happen and they just — they just wreck you, and there's no meaning in it, and you can't make it into a lesson because it just hurts and that's the whole story."

He was quiet for a moment.

Neteyam: "What are you talking about?"

"Nothing."

Neteyam: "That wasn't nothing."

"Neteyam —"

Neteyam: "You get a look." His voice was even. Gentle. Infuriatingly, unbearably gentle. "When something is actually wrong. When it's not the usual kind of wrong — not anger, not frustration. When it's something else. You've had that look for a while now."

The air left your lungs.

"I don't — I'm fine."

Neteyam: "You're not.

"Don't tell me what I am."

Neteyam: "I'm not telling you what you are. I'm telling you what I see."

(voice tight) "Then stop looking so hard."

Silence. The falls kept falling. The mist drifted between you, soft and cool and indifferent to the specific disaster unfolding in its midst.

Neteyam: (quietly, carefully) "You can talk to me. You know that." And that — that — was the thing that broke it. Not the light on his face. Not the evening or the falls or the accumulated weight of every afternoon you had ever spent beside him. That. The simple, devastating offer of you can talk to me — said without agenda, without performance, without any awareness of what it cost you to receive it.

You can talk to me.

As if you were someone worth talking to. As if what you carried deserved to be heard. As if he would still be standing there after you finished saying it, unchanged, unbothered, still looking at you with that patient and terrible clarity — He is engaged, you thought. He is engaged and he is kind to you because he is kind to everyone and you have mistaken the sun for something personal and you are standing here at the edge of the worst decision you have ever made in a life full of bad decisions and you should walk away. You should laugh it off. You should say something sharp and redirect and walk away and go home and never speak of this moment to anyone including yourself —

He turned his head slightly — not quite looking at you, not quite looking away — and the last light shifted across his face, caught the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the particular quality of his patience — And every single stone moved.

The whole architecture. Everything you had built — every wall, every buried thing, every careful construction of it doesn't matter, it can't matter, it won't — it moved all at once, like the tide taking sand, like the ground deciding it was done holding its shape. You crossed the distance without deciding to.

Your hands found the sides of his face — gently, for once in your life, with an aching, unfamiliar gentleness that didn't feel like yours but was coming from you anyway — and you felt him go still under your palms, felt the exact moment of his surprise move through him like a current, and you turned him toward you and you kissed him.

It lasted three seconds.

Maybe four.

Maybe a lifetime compressed into something small and irreversible — the way some moments are larger on the inside than they appear from the outside, the way some things, once done, immediately belong to a category of things that cannot be undone. His lips were warm. Completely still. You felt him go motionless under your hands — not pulling away, not leaning in, not doing anything at all except existing in it, suspended, like the whole world had taken a breath and forgotten to release it. Like he was waiting. Like he was in the middle of processing something too large to process quickly and his body had simply paused while his mind caught up.

Three seconds.

Maybe four.

You pulled back.

You opened your eyes.

You looked at his face.

And the bottom dropped out of everything.

Because you could not read it. You — who had learned him, who had spent months studying the specific geography of his expressions, who could tell the difference between his thinking silence and his feeling silence and his I'm about to say something that matters silence — you looked at his face and found nothing you recognized. Not anger. Not joy. Not the soft decline of someone who was sorry but certain. Not the warmth of someone who had been waiting for this.

Nothing. Everything. Something that was so many things at once it had collapsed into a single expression that had no name in any language you spoke. His eyes were wide. Just slightly. Just enough. His lips were parted by a fraction — the shape of a word not yet formed, a word still deciding whether to exist.

The mist drifted between you. The falls kept falling.

His eyes met yours and in them was something vast and uncharted and you could not read the map, you could not read the map, you had always been able to read him and now in the single most important moment of your entire life you could not read him and the not-knowing was going to kill you —

Neteyam: "_____"

He said your name. Or he began to — the first sound of it, the shape of it starting in his throat, his lips forming the beginning of it with that particular quality he always gave it, the one that sounded like he meant it, like it meant something to him that this was specifically your name and not anyone else's —

And you ran. You turned. You ran.

Like the coward you are. Like the girl who had talked back to every person who ever tried to hold power over her, who had never in her life walked away from a confrontation, who had built her entire identity on the principle of I do not back down — you backed down. You turned your back on the most important thing you had ever done and you ran.

Through the violet evening. Through the dark gathering between the trees like water rising. Through the soft mist that clung to your skin and your braids and your eyelashes as you passed through the edge of it. The falls grew distant behind you, their sound fading from a roar to a murmur to a whisper to nothing, and still you ran.

Your chest was cracked open. Not metaphorically — physically, or so it felt, the specific sensation of something structural giving way, something load-bearing that had been quietly failing for months finally going all at once. Your lungs burned. Your throat burned. Your eyes burned with something you refused to name and refused to release because if you started you were not confident you would stop and you could not afford to stop because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant — What did you do.

Your feet hit the earth over and over, the rhythm of it almost punishing, and the voice in your head was not loud but it was relentless —

What did you do. What did you do. What did you do —

You kissed him. You kissed him and he has someone and you knew that, you have known that for weeks, you buried it and built stone over it and you kissed him anyway because you are selfish and stupid and you cannot control yourself, you have never been able to control yourself, this is what you do — you ruin things, you burn things, you take something that was good and careful and real and you blow it apart with your bare hands because that is the only thing you have ever been reliably good at —

He looked at you and you couldn't read his face.

You couldn't read his face and that means it could be anything. It could be pity. It could be discomfort. It could be the careful expression of a gentle person figuring out how to let someone down without destroying them. It could be — it could be —

It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter. You ran. You made the decision for both of you by running. You are a coward and you ran and now he knows and everything is ruined and the only thing left to do is keep moving because stopping means feeling the full size of this and you are not ready —

You are not ready.

You are not ready.

You ran until your legs gave out their protest and the dark had closed in fully around you and the village sounds were still distant and there was nothing in any direction but the night and the ocean far below and the sound of your own breathing coming apart at the seams. You stopped.

You pressed your back against a tree. Slid down it. Sat on the ground in the dark with your knees pulled to your chest and your hands pressed flat against the earth on either side of you, grounding yourself, anchoring yourself, because the world felt like it was tilting and you needed something solid.

The tears came then. You didn't sob. You didn't make noise. You had never been a person who cried loudly — crying loudly meant someone might hear and someone hearing meant someone knowing and someone knowing meant — They came silently. Hot and fast and entirely without your permission. Down your face and off your jaw and dropping onto the backs of your hands where they were pressed into the dirt.

You ruined it, the voice said, quieter now. Not cruel anymore — just sad, which was somehow worse. You had something. You had the afternoons and the silence and the flat rock and the fruit and the shell and his laugh and his name in his voice and the way he looked for you when he walked into a space — you had all of that, it wasn't what you wanted it to be but it was something real and it was yours and now you have burned it down the way you burn everything down and it's gone.

It's gone.

Because you couldn't just — you couldn't just let it be what it was. You couldn't just keep the stone in place. You always have to push, you always have to take it too far, you always have to —

You pressed your hands against your face.

Breathed.

In.

Out.

In.

He said your name.

He had started to say your name and you had run before you could hear the rest of it and you would never know — you might never know — what the rest of it was going to be. That thought sat in the center of your chest like a coal. Not burning. Just — hot. Constant. Something you were going to have to carry now. The falls were far away. Invisible. Inaudible.

You sat in the dark alone and you breathed and you didn't let yourself think about his face.

You almost managed it.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

I'm back-ish Part one of this has finally been finish, sorry for the late upload hope you like this one!!!!!!!!

[im-lastgirlonearth]