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hold me in the meadows

Summary: You are Ezra’s dreamcatcher and he is your burrow.

Request: “The sleepy prompts!! Lovely! Can you do “I have had nightmares every night for the past three weeks and now they’re gone because of you, how did you do that?” with (can you guess??) EZRA” - the love of my life, @opheliaelysia

Pairing: Ezra (Prospect) x Reader

Word Count: 4.6k+

Tags: angst?, fluff, more metaphors that don’t mean anything, weird touching lol idk what the fuck this fic is, this is also not beta read so send the flood send the flu

Author’s Note: If you left a like or comment or reblog on Dissolve Me I’m telling you with as little shame as is humanly possible that I definitely reread it at least 3 times. Feedback means the word to me! also this was supposed to be a 500 word drabble and now it’s over 4.5k words if that tells you anything about me. I apologize in advance I think I’ve really outdone myself w/ my bullshit this time

Gif Credit: @pascvl; Also shout out to @pascalplease sorry I spammed you for nothing dsfgdsg

Ezra is staring at you.

He’d met you on one of those toxic moons, one of those deceitfully picturesque mirages where the dust glitters like lily petals but the air would kill you before you could think to appreciate it. You were a floater; a nomad with no place to call home, but you figured you liked it that way. Homes were permanent. They set lives and futures in cobblestone and trapped spirits in gated properties, keeping just about anything and everything tethered under the farce of security. Homes make paraffin casings around dragonfly wings and turn footprints to concrete. So you never had one, and you never wanted one. Ezra had found you amusing. You had found him to be better company than just yourself. So with great reluctance, you established a partnership. Not one forged in steel or bronze but something still fleeting, its true meaning always escaping your lips like a forgotten thought. It’s too much work to try and think about it anyway.

You had let him invite you to reside in his tent. It took coaxing, required copious amounts of golden honey spilling from Ezra’s tongue to get you to tenaciously stick to him, but you were no match for his silver tongue. He did everything he could to assure that this wasn’t a habitat, but merely a shelter - a thing that could be taken down and built back up somewhere else, anywhere you wanted. So you had obliged. He let you take the cot closest to the zipper door; you liked being closer to the exit, just a rotation away from being back on your feet. He tries to let you truly feel like if you wanted to escape, wanted to elope with liberty and run away from the loose bonds of the canopy, you could.

Three weeks of sleeping adjacent to him and you still don’t want to.

Ezra is used to temporary relationships. He has done his fair share of companion hopping, although he wasn’t really making an effort to do so. It scares him a little - why can’t he make anyone stay, make anything last? Partners passed him by, either to traverse on their lonesome or to stay with that greedy man in the eternal sky. Teams disbanded around him like glass castles shattering in his wake. Ezra, whether he liked it or not, was accustomed to transience.

He is not, however, accustomed to fearing that sharp brevity. Ezra is constantly on his toes around you, frequently wondering if he’s pushing you away or pulling you closer. You aren’t skittish, don’t constantly question everything he says or get offended by the sound of his voice, but he’s still scared of losing you. Every time he looks into your eyes he sees wonder, a certain fascination with life that he tries so hard to match because he wants to find things as beautiful as you do. As beautiful as you are. He wants to mis-quote your favorite novels that you force him to read so that you’ll scold him so affectionately and tell him that perhaps he had garnered a little brain damage from his previous escapades. He wants to trip over tree roots that have herniated through the soil so you can laugh at him, maybe lay there on the grass with him for a little bit. Just a little bit.

In your own mind, you are guarded. You try your very best not to get too personal, too deep, too much. Because you don’t like it when people can see your flushed, bloody insides. You just know that the moment you open your chest, someone will steal your heart right out of your rib cage and like the pass of a hummingbird, all of your secrets will be free to float in the breeze like the ashes of your lost quintessence; it’ll all be gone and then you’ll really be empty. So how could you ever know what you mean to Ezra?

He knows what a truly locked up person looks like. He’s spent hundreds of cycles with people that don’t make a noise. He’s sat in bustling pods of people and felt like the only man in the room, like solitary confinement for his mind. No, you are not some warning-covered steel box, padlocked and duct-taped and glued shut so that even if he’s sitting right next to you, he’ll have nothing more than his own voice bounce to off of your walls and fly right back to him. You’re a music box, a gold-trimmed heart-shaped sound bottle, and he learns that if he winds you up the right way, you’ll sing so pretty for him.

He has spent so long talking, nonsensically making those arbitrary noises burst out of his throat until they lose all meaning, but finally, for the first time in so fucking long, Ezra gets to listen.

He listens to you tell him you think his hair is stupid and that sometimes he smells bad. He listens to you lament about barren dig-sites and wasted time, about how it’s so fucking hot in your suit. He listens to you fantasize about touching the trees, burying your face in your flowers and squeezing the moss in your hands. About drowning in the river so that your body is filled with the water and then rolling in the sand so that it all sticks to you and you have to dive back in to clean off. About feeling something.

Sometimes, Ezra just wants to hear something other than his own voice. And you’re the cold towel to his inflamed skin, refreshing and addictive. You’re much braver than you think, so much stronger than you give yourself credit for, because for once, Ezra can talk into the forest and know that there’s someone to listen besides the leaves. He doesn’t feel alone.

Every night, when the moon has turned its back on the narcissistic Sun and opened its arms to the thousands of other stars, each just a prick of light but understanding of their place in the tapestry of the darkness, the two of you retire to that tent. You both redress into comfortable clothes, backs turned on each other under the guise of respect, and climb into your respective cots. Ezra would turn off that shitty lantern that illuminated the enclosure, and your shadows would dissipate into the darkness.

Except Ezra’s shadows don’t disappear; they hide. They blend into the black and mold into one man-engulfing untamable beast to possess Ezra’s throat. And they manifest again in his mind. They poison that movie that plays once you slip consciousness, instills fear into his bone marrow until he doesn’t feel safe in his own body, his own thoughts.

These slumber illusions haunt Ezra. His right arm waves at him in his sleep, the souls to which he was the conduit bridging life and death haunt his diaphragm with toothy grins to mock him, screeching into his cavities. They remind him that he was never really alone because he has the suffocating embrace of those spirits that are sewn so tight to his eyelids. Every night he somehow manages to pull himself from the darkness only for his own demons to pull him back by the throat. He is always oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness, being tossed around like a helpless rag with no hope of liberation. Nothing scares him more than his own thoughts.

And you know. You know all of it. How could you not? You were born a tumbleweed, wandering across desolation, so of course you’re a light sleeper. And you can hear Ezra’s choked cries, his tossing and turning as he drains himself of any sense of safety. But this man is a stranger to you. He is just a person you reside with, talk to all the time, nudge gently and tease and smile with. He is just the person that you wake up wanting to see, whose attention you always crave. A stranger.

So every night you turn your body to face the zipper of the tent and pretend that you can’t hear him cry. Pretend that you don’t sometimes cry with him. A pretty lavender lie that smells sweet, tastes sweeter.

You, in your cowardice, let him destroy himself. Watch as the bags under his eyes get bigger and greyer and the strings holding his shoulders up lose their tension.

Ezra, in his flawed cratered embodiment, is only human. And he had gone so long without holding anyone, without being held. He knows what he wants, knows who he wants. But he also knows how jittery you are, how fluttery your heart is, and he doesn’t want to approach it too fast lest he startle you and you fly off into the stars. But he can’t keep doing this, can’t live with himself when he knows he’s not the one in control but those horned, slimy creatures that claw at his maxilla with their venomous grins.

The lights are out in the tent per usual, so Ezra can’t really see you. His careful eyes can trace the outline of the curves of your body - or is it that his delusional eyes are envisioning some arbitrary glow around you, convincing him that what he’s seeing is real? Reality is a concept with which he is no longer familiar.

You, laying in your cot, decide that you just can’t take it anymore. You can’t stand to let this intruder of your life break you down the way he is without even trying. How dare he look into you, how dare he listen to you without passing judgement, how fucking dare he make you feel like a flower in bloom?

Ezra hears your breaths - they’re uneven. You haven’t gone to sleep. What are you waiting for?

“Ezra?” you practically squeak into the void. His ears perk up immediately; your cotton candy voice is enticing to him, flossing its way through his veins.

“What are you doing up, birdie?” Ezra asks softly, the air of his lungs floating on top of his words. He doesn’t mean to keep you awake, but he isn’t mad that you are. It’s stimulating his nerves enough to keep himself awake, and that’s something he probably won’t ever be able to repay you for.

“I-um….” Shit. You hadn’t expected to get this far. What would you say to him? How could you tell him that you wanted to help cleanse him, that you wanted to grovel in lime-coated thumb tacks with him and absorb his pain into your tissue paper skin? “I can’t sleep.”

Not a lie. Ezra knows you mean it. He just doesn’t know why.

“Well that won’t suffice,” he decides, outstretching his left arm blindly off the edge of his cot until his fingers brush against what he’s looking for: that goddamn lantern. With a little more fumbling, a weak but good enough orange glow is emitted on the floor between the two of you. You both catch each other’s pitiful gaze. You want to take care of each other, want to shield each other from the red sprites that nip angrily at each other’s hearts. Ezra holds his left arm out to you, tentatively. He’s never been more unsure in his life. He watches you glance at his arm, and then quickly to the side. You’re trying to decide if you’ll let him add another tether to you. If you’ll let him become something sewed so tight to your bleeding skin that to leave would rip you apart.

You slowly get up and walk over to his cot.

Ezra lets out a soft breath and his lips turn to a soft smile. He’s soft.

“C’mere, dandelion” he mumbles to you, and he hasn’t missed his right arm so much as in this moment. He wants to hold you properly, wants to keep you as close to him as possible. You’re hesitant, and he can tell. You’ve never been this close to him before, and you want to savor it. When your head finally touches his shoulder, it’s like a catalyst ignites underneath the two of you. You mold into each other the way the gods intended, like lake water seeping into the smallest of crevices of an empty river bed. Like the opposing poles of two magnets, like a key penetrating a lock. Like you were made for each other. Your arms immediately wrap around him, his neck now a fixture of your body, and his arm leads you to lay down on the cot. Without words, without that candid discourse that Ezra was so fond of, his face is buried into the warmth of your chest and he feels like you’ve cast an ethereal shield around him.

Ezra doesn’t need to hold you tight because you’re holding him tighter, like you’re trying to cling to something invisible and foreign before it can even think to leave you. Before it realizes that it doesn’t want you. Don’t leave. He can feel you breathe him in, face smashed against his wild hair, and he can’t blame you because he’s breathing you in too.

“Sweetheart-” he breathes, fanning against your skin in a way that sends a deep shiver down your spine and shakes your shoulders.

“Shh.” And for once in his cursed life, he’s speechless. There’s so much, too much that he wants to say to you, but his mind is shouting all of it at him at once and he doesn’t even know where to start. So he shuts the fuck up. He feels you. He feels your heat melt him until he can barely control his own muscles because they’ve gone limp, unable to perform a single contraction because his fibers are relaxed, are at peace.

He doesn’t know when he falls asleep.

When Ezra wakes, you’re still sweet and motionless around him. The lamp was still on, still shining pathetically on the ground. He doesn’t feel the need to look around or squeeze his lids closed in an attempt to wring the bad rest out of him.

Rest?

He thinks fucking hard. When had he woken up last night? When had his banshees infiltrated his thoughts and cried into the void of his packed mind? All he can recall are caramel dreams, whipped cream clouds and berry trampolines for him to jump high into the cotton candy sky. He thinks he might like it that way. Maybe every night can be like that, every morning can feel this transcendent.

He hears you moan quietly as you stir not long after him, breaths shuddering on their way out of your nose as you slowly come to your senses.

“Good morning, birdie,” Ezra finally says. He doesn’t know what to say to you, what he can say to you, without making you flip a switch and realize that it’s all a mistake, that he is a mistake. His eardrums smile as your sleepy whining settles.

“Morning, Ezra,” you whisper, throat not ready to talk yet. It’s okay; you’d rather hear him talk to you anyway.

“Did you…were you able to achieve some sort of comfort?” Ezra asks. For a second you’re confused until you remember what you’d told him last night, and you realize that you’re holding him the same way you were when you’d gone to sleep. He hadn’t woken up.

“Yeah, Ezra,” you finally say after letting yourself simmer in the silence for a second. “Thank you.”

He smiles wide against your skin, the blunt tip of his excitement the battering ram that beats against his racing heart. He’s given you something worthy of your gratefulness, and the feeling of being worthy light his chest with blue flames.

“It’s not my intention to blow you away, dandelion,” Ezra says, his nerves manifesting into his characteristic breathy laughs, “but I can’t deny how direly I want to just touch you.” You feel the air get knocked out of you as your diaphragm begins to spasm; what is he asking? You’ve thought about it before; god, of course you’ve thought about it before. To lay back as you let him study you, memorize you and then let you do the same. Analyze the sculpted marble of his body to remind yourself why you love it so much.

“Please.”

It’s barely a whisper, a secret told to the wind, but Ezra hears you. Ezra always hears you.

So Ezra’s fingers begin to wander along your skin. He wants to map out the scars on your body, wants to learn the shape of you so intimately that he could remodel you if he wanted to. He wants to know your body the way he knows when you’re disappointed or frustrated or amazed or confused. He wants to just know.

You feel the calloused pads of Ezra’s fingers put a little pressure onto that dip of your thoracic vertebrae, draw circles above your hip right under the fabric of your sweatshirt, caress your shoulder. He’s slowly exposing your skin to the humid chill of the dank enclosure, carefully making your top cover less and less of you, but you’ve never felt warmer.

As Ezra’s mind begins to really warm up and the cogs begin to grease themselves, his words begin to flow out the way you’re used to. The way you’ve learned to love.

“Sweetheart, I have had nightmares every night for the past three weeks and now they’re gone,” he blurts. Fuck. His hand stutters against the small of your back. He’s done it now, he’s really gone and blown it, because now you know he’s fucking broken and you’re smart enough to know when to avoid damaged goods. You have to know that if you were to take your hands and try and feel him you’d just get bumps and ridges and cracks. But Ezra is selfish, can’t help himself or his thoughts, so he keeps rambling. “It is not my intention to come off as presumptuous, but I just know it’s because of you. How did you do that, birdie? You never told me you were sent to me as a dreamcatcher.”

You can’t help but smile into his scalp a little at his words. You didn’t mind taking all of his bad dreams and refracting them far away into the space between the stars for him. A light, breathy laugh rolls off your tongue like a huff, because fuck, if you were going to be embroidered to something it might as well be him.

Your breath hitches again as the back of his hand runs flat along your stomach. It travels back around and up to the nape of your neck, tracing your shoulders and then over to your clavicles, paying close attention to the dips. You can’t help but wonder if this means as much to him as it does to you; it means everything to you.

“You’re right. I’ve been holding out on you all this time,” you say, and he can hear you smile through the roses of your words. He slowly and with purpose lifts his head from your embrace so that he can look up at you, maybe even catch a glimpse of that pretty grin of yours and burn it onto his lenses.

“I’m not confident that you’ll ever know how fortuitous I was the day I met you.” Ezra’s voice is low as he speaks, his drawl stretching and fraying the ends of his words, and you soak in every last syllable. You soak in the meaning of his words. He feels lucky to have you.

You look down at him, bringing a hand to run through his hair. That stupid blonde streak snatches your attention for a moment and you thumb at the strands. You want to tease him about it, mock him a little, but you don’t. The moon marine in your arms holds so much unbridled beauty, and it’s all yours to look at.

Ezra is all yours to look at.

Ezra’s hand travels up to your face, cupping your cheek while his thumb toys with the corner of your mouth in a way that makes you bite your lip through a smile. Throwing all caution to the wind, you turn your head and press a shy kiss to the heel of his palm. Ezra’s skin burns where you’ve sanctified him. His hand begins to crave your touch in other ways, he is craving something more from you, but he knows he does far too much taking. He’s already taken so much from you, has already stolen so many moments from you out of sheer gluttony, but it’s not always his fault because you’re so giving. He knows you were a little hollow from the start, knows you were a little frayed in the first place, but still you share your thoughts and companionship with him because whether you know it or not, you’re a little taken by this space mutineer. If you fled this little thing you’ve built with him, you’d be leaving the prettiest parts of yourself behind for him to keep taking care of the way a mother makes her son’s bed after he leaves for college because what if you want to come back?

But you haven’t left, haven’t abandoned him and in turn, yourself. You’re right here, letting him bask in your reverent lavender radiation, and as he looks at how you’re giving off your own intrinsic glow because the shitty orange light on the ground isn’t enough, he knows he hasn’t earned it. He doesn’t think this is a very fair transaction at all, but he’s too selfish to stop you from paying a little extra. You’ll let him keep the change.

Ezra wordlessly lifts his head, nosing at your wrist so that you’ll bring it lower and let him kiss the delicate skin there. He looks up at you with wide, eager eyes of adoration. His feelings for you are beginning to bubble underneath the surface of his silk-lined thoughts and he is willing them to stay at that low simmer because he doesn’t want to think about anything except how fucking gorgeous you look in the lamplight.

“I’m growing rather fond of the way you feel against me,” Ezra finally says. Everything is so foreign now, so new, so he tries to do the one thing you both know, the one routine you can both dance without needing to think about it: talking.

“I like it too Ezra,” you giggle. Not a long, flittery one, but a pass of air with a note under it. You’re a little nervous too.

“I reckon I could get accustomed to this,” he whispers. Your lip betrays you, curling itself to reveal your reply before you even say it. Your teeth capture your lower lip for the act of treason, but it’s too late. “But I’d just hate it if I made you feel like you’re bearing my baggage.”

“Ezra, you don’t have crippling baggage,” you insist. What is this man talking about? You were the one with issues. You were the one that had to be convinced to stay with him, you were the one that insisted on the right cot, you were the real coward here. You were broken. “Everyone has their demons. There is so much more inside of you. You’re so full.”

Ezra’s eyes go a little wide at your words. You didn’t think he was half a man? Some incomplete mosaic that would never find his missing pieces?

“You flatter me,” he chuckles; no, he giggles.

“Well…I just figured there’s no way a broken man could handle his broken partner the way you deal with me.” His expression melts into something more than pity and less than ignorance - confusion. The tap in Ezra’s tongue pops loose and his words begin to cascade from his lips like some majestic phenomenon, like holy water spraying the filth off of your brow.

“I need you to look at me, firefly.” His voice is more stern now, his words more articulate as he shifts up the bed slightly so that he’s eye level with you. He’s still on his side, his left hand is still gripping the flesh at your hip. “I don’t think you’ll ever truly comprehend how much you’ve done for me these past cycles, but this life is quiet and toilsome. You’re capable of recognizing beauty in things I wouldn’t have even taken note of in the first place, and I hang onto your every utterance whether you’re aware or not. It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you how bad I always want you because you fill my thoughts, pretty dandelion. And if someone came here and regurgitated your exact words to me, it still wouldn’t hold a candle to the way you sing when you wonder out loud. I don’t need to ‘deal’ with you, sweet rose. I want you.”

Your lip quivers a little; you know Ezra likes talking to you, he’s told you before. But you couldn’t help but assume Ezra just likes talking, period. That he liked having you around about as much as he’d enjoy the company of any other talker. To think that someone wants you, your passions and afterthoughts and pondering notions, meant more than anything you could articulate.

“Ezra-” you start, but you cut yourself off. You want to let his words turn into condensation on your skin, to form little rain clouds above your head so that they pour back down on you in delicate drops. You want to let him linger, to sit and hang above you like the sky hangs above the ocean.

You look straight at him, deep into his inquiring brown eyes as you both begin to breathe the same air, scents mingling between you like the heat between two stars. His nose is right up against yours and you can feel his lashes caress your cheekbone. He’s so close, but you want him closer, need him to move his hand or blink his eyes or do something, because you can’t take the nothingness anymore when you’ve got everything pressed right up against your face.

Ezra decides he wants one last thing from you.

“My rose, I don’t want to ask too much of you, but I suppose if that were true I wouldn’t have invited you to stay with me anyway. In the tent, of course. Not the cot.” Fuck, what was he saying? He lets out a soft laugh as he tries to reorganize his thoughts, a blushing mess under your gaze because he’s so used to knowing exactly how to get what he wants, but he’s really pushing your boundaries and bending your fence posts now. You’re turning him into a man who fumbles, a man who doesn’t always have to know what he’s about to say, and he doesn’t mind being a little less talk around you and a lot more touch.

Suddenly, he’s reminded of what he wanted to ask you.

“Sweet creature, could I kiss you?”

You don’t miss a beat in this soft ballad you’re playing with him, letting out a gentle “yeah, Ezra.”

You don’t like homes, don’t like to be told that you’re forever nailed to walls and wood. But maybe, as Ezra’s scruffy chin leans up to slot his lips against yours, you could build a tent in him. Maybe this leaky soul was your permanent, your unyielding, your perpetual.

As Ezra tilts his head towards you with a soft moan so he can kiss you the way you deserve, speak to you through the blinding sensation of his mouth telling you how he wants you, needs you, loves you, without using a single word, he is confident that his hollow cavities are beginning to be filled by your amber essence. He can tell you’re letting yourself finally take root in him, clearing out the wretched foliage so that you can curl up in the meadow of his soul and rest your bones within him.

Yeah.

You’re home.

people who asked to be tagged: @bobafvtt @catfishingmorales@keeper0fthestars @1zashreena1 @blancatobarxoxo @honeyedspace @cryptkeepersoul

people who definitely didn’t ask to be tagged oops: @glowingpena @bestintheparsec @ezrasarm @murdermewithbooks

not me tagging strangers for clout-

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