Lurker. I don't do anything interesting, I mostly just reblog other people's stuff. (i am above 18 years old).Multishipper. I'm in a lot of fandoms but my top three are Twst, Pjsk, and Bsd.
synopsis. lohen was not your boyfriend. he was the weirdo that kept trying to ambush you.
— content. 15k words · lohen x f!reader · reader has abyssal powers + hands like skirk's legs · lohen is down bad and touchy, but also wants to fight · canon!lohen but he's soft around reader, mentions of blood, injuries, and death · reader is socially unaware and awkward · mentions of the other mondstadt chars.
— foreword. this idea struck me when listening to 'starry eyes' by the weeknd, hence the title. this was actually gonna be longer bc i had sm more written and planned, but it'd become too long, so i'll definitely do a part two for this one at some point. if aspects of reader's past seem odd, that's why, so part two will deffo explain more even tho this already gives some context. reader's hands were very inspired by skirk's legs, bc her design is peak. please enjoy :)
— read on ao3.
— header credit: songpyeon990 on twt.
“how many times do i have to tell you?” your tone was sharp, but you never once turned to face the culprit. instead, you wandered into your bathroom and flipped on the lights, meeting lohen’s elated eyes through the mirror. “to stop breaking into my home whenever you feel like it?”
“awh. bunny, i thought we both knew you were kidding about that.” lohen’s mocking statement echoed through your bathroom, leaving you to roll your eyes as you washed your face and threw your hair up, watching as he casually got comfortable on your bed.
You switched off the rather rudimentary lights in your bathroom with your sharp nail, ignoring lohen’s eyes following you around your bedroom as you slipped off the clothes you’d been wearing. meanwhile, you slipped on a loose tank top and turned off the lights to your bedroom, slightly amused by how lohen threw back the covers with an eagerness in his movement, pulling you into his cold body the very second you were within reach. his arm curled around your waist, and his head came to rest in the crook of your neck, the grown man purring slightly like a pleased cat as you felt a small peck placed on your ear, leaving you flustered but quiet as your tired body melted into his arms.
lohen was not your boyfriend.
in fact, he was merely a man whom you’d come across one morning as you were walking through the forest, attempting to find more herbs for your healing potions. not many people dared to enter the dense and dark forest located outside dornman port, where the sun’s rays could never really reach. but that was the very place you called home, where you lived in your comfortable cabin with your pets; well, they weren't really your pets but small animals who’d found their way to your home. your black cat, salem was trailing after you, nipping at any stems of mint she’d spot, earning a head pat from you as you’d break off all the mint, placing them into your wooden basket. your cloak was thrown over your head, its long back concealing you from behind as your starry hands reached out for the stem of mint.
“well, that’s not what i was expecting this morning,” you whispered to yourself, shielding the cat behind your leg as an arrow came flying at you, damn near piercing right into your left eye, if you’d not caught it merely centimetres away. quirking an eyebrow at the intrusion in your part of the forest, you crouched down, running a comforting hand over the shaking cat while trying to spot whoever had tried to shoot you. in spite of his well-hidden figure in a bush with a camouflaged cloak thrown over his back, you’d already spotted the man with mint-green hair crouching with a crossbow in his hands, his aim directed right at you. “i don’t know who you are or what you want. however, please refrain from using such crude weapons near my animals.”
you wound your arm back, squinting one eye to determine where the best aim would be before you launched the arrow back to its owner, watching as it penetrated the tree within a blink of an eye… and then fell apart due to the sheer force of impact. a little too much power in that throw, you sighed to yourself, turning back around on your feet and heading back to your home with baby salem running on ahead, clearly very spooked by the situation. some would say it wasn’t exactly wise to turn your back on an enemy like that, but something told you that he would not be trying that move again. you were proven right when no more arrows came flying at you.
on the other side of the forest, vice captain lohen felt a fluttering in his chest that he had never once felt before. when was the last time he’d seen someone catch an arrow or someone anticipate one of his ambushes? he’d seen your hands, the starry and entrancing purple-toned arms, resembling an ever-expanding galaxy, but actually being a byproduct of abyssal power; you were definitely the woman he had heard rumors about, and he was determined to get closer to you, wanting to see just how strong you were.
during that very night, beneath the full moon and starry sky, you left your home once more with another basket clutched in your hands, your loyal cat following your trail happily. this time around, your goal wasn’t to find more mint but to gather some apples hanging high in the trees. each time you were in need of the produce hanging in the trees, you always resorted to venturing out at night. you were well aware that no one would be out that late and thus, not risking anyone seeing you use your abilities to gather the fruit. the basket was placed on the ground, your cat plopping down next to it with a sleepy meow. you stepped back, finally able to remove your cloak and bask in the moonlight. waving your hands around and mentally manifesting your abilities, the apples began flying to your basket, plucking themselves and making your work easier; the sort of simple but powerful spell you didn’t need anyone to witness.
people were afraid of you already. you didn’t need to intensify that feeling.
“i am aware you think you’re being discreet, but your hair stands out in the bushes,” you called into the forest, now seated on the ground with a half-eaten apple in your hands as your hair swayed around in the wind. your eyes may have been closed, but nothing ever seemed to catch you by surprise anymore. “are you here to ambush me again?”
out of the woods came a man holding a crossbow and a pistol, his crimson eyes standing out in the dark night, especially against the mint-green hair. he was dressed in a knights of favonius uniform with armor on, but not the standard uniform, leading you to believe that he might hold a higher title. your eyebrows shot up slowly as he directed the crossbow right at your head, a sick grin playing on his reddened lips as the surrounding winds swept his hair.
“and who might you be, little lamb? hiding out in these woods all on your own…” lohen trailed off teasingly, tapping his pistol against his chin as he pretended to think, glancing around at your surroundings. then his eyes suddenly snapped back to stare at you, a predatory grimace overtaking his sharp features. “a little suspicious, hm?”
for the first time in your life, you found yourself taken aback by his sick grin, finding yourself genuinely appalled at his words. “little lamb? i don’t know you, sir. i would prefer if you didn’t refer to me with such… odd words.”
“and you’re polite, hm. truly makes me wonder why someone like you is hiding in these woods.” lohen tilted his head in curiosity, eyes scanning over your seated form. he couldn't help but notice how you didn’t seem to fear him, nor fear the weapons held in his hands.
you let out a sigh, honestly finding this more troublesome than not. you hadn’t been anywhere near mondstadt city for months, if not years, and you were quite convinced that you and alice had made a rather lucrative deal for both, but now you were being bothered by a knight. even so, you were simultaneously fairly convinced that a knight should not be acting on his own, nor should he have been pointing weapons at a civilian. but even the strong winds couldn’t deter him from pointing the crossbow at you, and as your eyes took in the slight fangs poking into his reddened lips, you could tell he was genuinely enjoying this standoff. mindfully pushing yourself to your feet, you brushed off any dirt off your dress and directed your eyes back to him.
lohen’s eyes had fallen to your hands, stunned by what he was seeing. it was as if your hands were alive, the stars and shimmer within moving as you moved them, resembling a look into the galaxy. darker at the fingertips and steadily becoming lighter as the delicate shade of purple met your natural skin tone, your hands weren’t real limbs, he could tell. as you raised your head with a sigh and brushed back your hair, his eyes finally met yours, and once more, he was left stunned at your left eye. much like your arms, it was a deep purple, a lush black color at the center, slowly fading into a gentle shade of lavender around the outer corner. in the very center of your eyes was a diamond shape, almost resembling a shard of glass in that same delicate lavender tone—a stark contrast to your other, which still held its natural color and a regular-shaped pupil.
“you tried to ambush me earlier and failed miserably. you will fail again, knight of favonius. for your safety and the sake of my sanity, i’d like to end this conversation now and return to my home.” you picked up the basket from the ground, which was now filled to the brim with red apples. the knight across from you had gotten rid of his pistol and crossbow, but within the blink of an eye, he came charging at you with a spear. “you people never do give up, do you?”
he was faster than anyone else who’d come at you on the surface; you had to admit to yourself just as you dodged his lunge at you with that sharp weapon. rapidly placing your basket back on the ground and throwing out a hand, your manifested scythe hovered just above your hand as you grabbed it. you narrowly stepped to the side before holding it up to dodge the flying attack the knight was attempting to land. lohen jumped back with a loud thud, grinning happily at the adrenaline coursing throughout his veins, especially once he spotted the weapon in your hand. the same shades of dark purple, almost black, running around the sharp blade with various chains wrapping themselves from the edge of the blade to the staff itself, the color steadily losing its darkness until reaching the very bottom, where a lavender dragger protruded from the bottom. just like your hands, the scythe’s appearance seemed to be alive, its exterior seemingly pulsating and stirring like a true galaxy. but what really caught lohen’s eyes was how the entire scythe seemed like it was made of shards of glass, reflecting stars and moving matter.
“it blends in with your hands,” lohen exclaimed and even he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so impressed, seeing how the blade of your scythe was one-to-one with your hands. that made it difficult for him to spot your grip and thus hindered him from calculating what your next move might be. “what matter is that?”
“none of your business. i don’t wish to fight you, knight. i would rather you put down your weapon and leave me alone.”
“no can do,” he sang as the two of you began moving in circles around each other, an unmoving standoff that could explode at any time. “you’ve piqued my curiosity now, bunny.”
“consider me uninterested, knight.” your words sharpened, and lohen could see the tightening of your fingers around your weapon, anticipating an attack. “leave.”
“awh, but that would be boring. and varka told me i’m not allowed to pick fights with the other knights anymore, so i’ve seriously been itching for a good fight.” lohen sighed in frustration, rolling his eyes as he thought back to varka’s lecture after he’d jumped a pair of knights in the wild.
your eyebrows came together in confusion at his words, and whilst you had admittedly not socialized much in the past many years, you were quite convinced that this man was not normal. “uhm, did you ever consider that if this varka is telling you not to pick fights, he might have a point? it’s not nice to ambush people.”
lohen merely laughed at that statement, throwing his entire head back and letting his loud laughter echo throughout the silent forest. your eyes immediately caught sight of all the frightened birds flying away and the small squirrels rushing into trees. “you think i ambush people because it’s fun?! …well, actually, it is fun. but i do it ‘cause everyone else is weak. they’re weak and powerless.”
‘you’re still so weak!’ the man had laughed at your wounded form on the dirty ground, poking your broken leg with the tip of his shoe, as you let out a cry of despair. ‘powerless, useless, hopeless. what did sven even think when he picked up someone like you?’
you’d like to think you were a healed woman, someone not haunted so blindly by her past that she would commit ferocious attacks at such memories, or even attempt to hurt anyone else. you’d like to believe that such words did not trigger you, nor did they prompt you to make rash and unpleasant decisions. but you needed him gone this second. the moon was still high in the sky, your pets were most likely all asleep, and you truly had nothing to spend the rest of your night besides sleeping. however, this man clearly wanted something from you, which you could not provide.
you were used to people needing you for tasks, using you for their benefit only to toss you aside, but something about his request seemed so oddly different from all the others, yet it remained a request you did not wish to honor.
lohen had already noticed the difference in your stance, the glint in your eyes far away despite them being fixed onto his figure. the smirk on his face widened significantly when he noticed the small tick in your posture, noticing how your stance suddenly didn’t seem as rigid, as guarded. you were the woman klee had seen the other day, a conversation he had overheard between klee and kaeya outside the headquarters. klee was insistent that she had seen a woman with starry arms and a large cloak, claiming the woman was chasing after a boar, which held a small rabbit in its mouth. without harming the boar, she had managed to retrieve the rabbit and vanished within seconds, leaving behind no trace. kaeya seemed to not entirely believe klee, assuming this was another one of her overly enthusiastic stories. however, lohen had a different opinion on this situation, which would ultimately lead him to track down where someone had last spotted a person wearing a cloak.
a gust of wind brushed both of you just as lohen took off running, twisting his leg as he jumped into the air with his weapon raised high into the air, hoping to strike you with his foot to entirely immobilize you, then strike with his weapon. but the world turned before lohen’s head could even process it, and just as he thought he was still in the air, he’d find his body slamming into the ground. a rough groan escaped his throat as the pain began spreading throughout his body. his eyes, which had fallen shut on impact, struggled to open once more, especially as lohen felt a weight settle over his middle, something pushing into his sides and rendering him unable to move whatsoever. opening his eyes back up again and… wow.
“are you done now?” you asked the man beneath you, whose arms were pinned down against his sides by your legs, your body sat across his middle and your thighs pressing into his arms, effectively rendering lohen entirely useless in this situation. your arms were crossed over your chest with his polearm pressed against your skin, held behind your arms.
lohen had never seen himself as someone lustful, as someone who had ever laid eyes upon another person with the intent of courting them. he had never walked through the streets of mondstadt and felt as if someone was his type or that someone had piqued his interest. but now beaten to the ground in a manner that his brain still couldn’t fathom, feeling the warm skin of your thighs pressing against his cold hands; feeling you sitting on him with your arms crossed, staring down at him with a bored expression, he really understood it. he understood that feeling people often discussed, feeling butterflies in their stomachs, feeling flushed around certain people, or wanting to spend more around someone. but perhaps differently from those, for lohen did not feel butterflies, nor did he feel as if you were the only and one for him.
however, there was a buzz running across his cold skin, a sense of wonder growing deep inside his chest. he knew there were people stronger than himself, the grandmaster being an example, but not even varka had ever moved this rapidly. and lohen was sure that there was no better view than being beaten by someone stronger, the feeling of blood coursing in his ears and adrenaline flowing.
“uhm, are you alright?” you leaned down, uncrossing your arm to pat lohen’s cheek in confusion as those crimson eyes stared spellbound at you. he wasn’t even trying to break free, you realized, nor was he attempting to get you off; rather, he seemed rather content. “knight whose name i do not know, please answer me.”
“lohen, my name’s lohen.” his hazy eyes were trailing across your face, and if you noticed the way they skated across your body, lingering a little too long on your exposed throat before returning to your eyes, you pretended to not notice anything. “fight me.”
“what?!”
“tomorrow. i’ll be back tomorrow. fight me again.”
“…lohen, i think you’re misunderstanding something here. i don’t wish to fight you.”
lohen’s lips spread into a sort of smile that made a shiver run down your spine, a smile that just embodied the same glint of insanity you were seeing in his eyes. even with his arms pinned down and his chest desperately inhaling oxygen, he seemed so content trapped below you. “but i want to fight you, bunny.”
“you’re insane.”
___
lohen became a regular part of your life.
after that first night, when you’d eventually climbed off him and watched as he stumbled through the forest again with a dopey smile, you had hoped he was kidding, possibly a little confused from the harsh hit to his head. but you were mistaken, as the very next night, you’d narrowly dodge a dagger zipping your direction while you tried to collect some flowers from the nearby lake. once more, lohen would attempt to attack you but be overwhelmed and slammed to the ground, staring up at you with another demented grin.
“you’re too slow on that attack,” you stated in correction, catching lohen’s wrist in yours and twisting it, causing him to drop the dagger, yet not make another sound as if he refused to admit he was hurt. “most people wouldn’t be able to dodge that, but those with speed can. it could lead to your demise.”
usually, you refrained from offering him any advice, compliments, or even small talk as he tried to attack you. instead, you’d effortlessly dodge all his attacks and end the night with him beneath you, looking mysteriously pleased by his position as if the idea of ending up on the ground was appealing to him. but you had never claimed to understand other people, especially not someone as convoluted as lohen. gradually, you began thinking that perhaps his company wasn’t all too bad, even if he did only come by in an attempt to finally catch you off guard.
“hm, i don’t think anyone has ever dodged that before. good work, bunny.” lohen wrenched his hand out of your grip, poking at the front of his dagger as he gathered it from the ground. “i’m impressed.”
“don’t call me that, and i do not care. if you insist on showing up every day, i’m expecting to see some improvement from you.”
certain aspects about your disposition often irked lohen, leaving him to stare at you in silence for longer periods of time. your tone would often slip, as if you were imitating how someone had once spoken with you; this especially became very apparent to lohen whenever you’d pass a comment or advice about his fighting style or what he should improve on. your tone lost any and all emotion, not that it held much before, and you seemed mentally distant. fighting did not seem to be enjoyable to you, which lohen found puzzling given how strong you were. but he was no idiot; your abyssal-created limbs and abyssal powers made it quite obvious that your background was clearly not one filled with joy or to be deemed normal by any means. varka and jean would probably lock him in solitary confinement if they learned that he was spending his evenings getting his ass kicked by someone with abyssal powers, but lohen could tell you had absolutely no intention of harming anyone. hell, at that point, you hadn’t even fought back yet whenever he came at you, resorting to merely taking him out when you were done dodging his blows.
yet one evening, a mere few weeks after lohen had begun his routine of bothering you every night, you’d decide to actually fight back rather than back away. so as soon as lohen charged at you with a dagger raised high and a confident grin on his face, you sidestepped him like usual. but instead of merely stepping away and leaving him to ready another attack, you rapidly curled your fingers around the dagger in his hand, feeling his reluctance to let go just as you ripped it out of his hand, whipping around to strike right at his throat. however, you obviously had no objection to killing the man, so a mere millimeter away from his jugular, you halted your movement. panting heavily and eyes wider than you’d ever seen before, lohen stared down at you with an unreadable expression on his face.
“that was so hot,” he muttered lowly, eyes falling to where your starry hand was still pressing the very tip of the blade against his throat. “so you do fight back sometimes.”
“i was getting tired of merely acting like a punching bag—one who keeps winning.” you shrugged and dropped the dagger onto the ground, taking a few steps back from him. “and besides, you have shown improvement. it would only be right of me to acknowledge that.”
still, what you did not notice until stepping back and seeing the crazed glint swirling around his crimson eyes, was the trickle of blood leaking from his throat. you were sure you’d not physically pierced his skin, but something about him made you feel as if he was crazy enough to have pushed his own body forward into the blade, just to feel his own skin breaking. with a roll of your eyes, you motioned to his neck, wanting him to take care of it. in true lohen fashion, however, his hand shot up and dipped into the blood, but upon seeing the crimson fluid on his fingers, his grin only intensified.
“you are a lost cause,” you mumbled in annoyance, walking back to him and ignoring the way he was scrutinizing you, instead raising a hand to his throat. a small murmur later with your finger swiping over his cut, his cut stitched itself together, as if it had never even been there to begin with.
lohen could not take his eyes off you, no matter how he wanted to. the feeling coursing through his veins when you finally struck back, pressing the dagger to his throat with such a bored expression, yet making sure not to hurt him. even now, your cold but illuminated fingers skimmed across his throat, sending shivers down his spine as your two-toned eyes flicked up to meet his, then falling back down to his cut. he was truly more fascinated than he had ever been before. he wanted to know everything about you: where did you come from, why did you live all the way out here, how did you obtain abyssal powers, but most importantly, were you stronger than everyone else he’d ever fought before?
whenever he was fighting you, landing hit after hit, thrown to the ground, or shoved to the side, he didn’t get that same feeling of hopelessness. that same feeling of weakness. because he could see that you didn’t perceive him as being weak or beneath you—you didn’t judge him from his human body or mortal strength. moreover, you continuously kept your guard up, never once underestimating him, even if you did have more strength and faster reflexes. you may never directly express an appreciation for his dedication to becoming stronger, but you certainly did not seem to mind either, no matter how many times you’d roll your eyes at him.
that became a new part of your routine, too, even if lohen was no longer able to visit every night due to restrictions on entries and exits for the city. whenever he did come by, you would allow yourself to summon your weapon and parry his attacks, no longer shutting him down immediately, but rather sparring with him. when he would inevitably get injured due to his erratic nature or underestimating your strength, you’d push him to the ground and gently apply one of your ointments to his healing scars, running a finger over any fresh wounds, and offering him potions for comfort. he would always refuse the potions, insisting he didn’t mind the pain—and he would always be adorning a slightly deranged grin whenever pain coursed through his veins—but still let you heal his wounds.
“i’m starting to think you’re getting injured on purpose, lohen.” you shook your head at the man, who was sprawled across the lush green grass just outside your home, hands covering his lean torso in an attempt to heal the nasty cut.
lohen shrugged from his position, staring at you with admiration in his eyes, content to spend the rest of his night here. the beating of his heart had increased rapidly, so had the rush of blood he’d heard, when you went to parry his attack like always, having not realized that lohen’s movements were slightly different. perhaps reckless, perhaps a stupid move, but lohen decided to reach for your scythe, hoping to capture your weapon and use it against you, only to be struck with the blade. that was how he now found himself staring up at you and the starry sky behind you, loopy and slightly hazy from the loss of blood, but nevertheless enjoying the sensation of blood escaping his body and your hands resting over his cut.
“your hands feel so cold, so glass-like.” lohen’s incoherent mumbling became a bit louder, and you noticed the faraway gleam in his crimson eyes, clearly not completely in control of what was leaving his mouth due to the sheer shock to his body. luckily, he wasn't in serious danger, for you’d already started healing him. his mind was perpetually in that fragile headspace, so you merely let him continue his tangent. “like shards of glass. but there is this buzzing, bzzh, bzzh, i can hear it.”
“it’s the abyss calling,” you softly whispered back to him, applying an ointment to his now-healed skin to ensure no scarring. “they cannot reach anyone through my hands, nor can they hope to corrupt anyone. but the abyss is alive, forever moving and eternally tempting.”
“why are your hands like that, bun? your eye, too?” lohen quirked his head to the side in bewilderment, furrowing his eyebrows up at you, just as you lowered his shirt over his torso again.
you pursed your lips in an attempt to ponder whether you wanted to tell him. lohen had been coming by for the better part of a month now, mostly to fight you, yes, but simultaneously providing you with some company. the reality of your life was that you did not spend any time around other people, confined to your forest with your pets and the surrounding nature. whilst you didn’t hate that, enjoying the fresh wind and serene nights, you did yearn for some sort of human contact. the thought of telling lohen everything was terrifying, particularly what could’ve led to such vast changes in your appearance, but unlike the other citizens of mondstadt, he hadn't ridiculed you or seemed to be scared of you. rather, his fascination with your altered appearance didn’t seem nefarious or out of fear, but more so out of simple curiosity. he was obsessed with strength, wanting to become stronger and faster, and it seemed to you that he merely sought to gain experience from you, not to gain knowledge about your body or past.
“i won’t tell you too much,” you muttered to him just as you sat back down again, lifting his head to rest on your legs and his body to rest comfortably on the bed of grass. you reached for the thin blanket thrown to the side, covering his body with it. “but what i can tell you is it happened many years ago, when i was much younger. back when missing children in mondstadt were not given as much attention as they are now, when people could go missing without anyone batting an eye.”
lohen’s mind tried its best to pay attention, to hang onto every word spoken by your reddened lips in the wind, or to cling onto how your warmth was seeping into his bones, but sleep was poking at him. the blood loss’ effects were catching up, and so were the efforts made by his body to heal. in harmony with the soft blanket and your body’s heat, he was sinking into an early slumber beneath the stars, leaving himself wholly at your mercy.
unbeknownst to yourself, your hand would soon instinctively find his hair, running through the green strands and gently detangling knots there may be, working out the dried blood. lohen reminded you of your pets, sleeping in your lap peacefully, so in your head, it made sense to merely do for him what you’d do for them. you knew your lack of social interactions had warped your ability to relate to and communicate with others, making it difficult for you to understand what was considered normal and what was considered inappropriate. lohen sort of felt like a hyperactive bunny to you, oddly clingy in this pursuit of his goal, yet not someone who’d trust easily.
when lohen awoke the next morning, perplexed and confused, he would find himself still lying in the front of your garden, but with your cat named salem sitting next to him alongside a few birds and a fox. none of them would seem particularly scared, even if lohen’s weapon was by his side, just within reach to murder all the animals. his head felt foggy, and he had a bad taste in his mouth, but archons, he could not remember the last time he’d slept so well, so blissfully, and without waking a single time. the morning dew was still lingering in the air, with the grass slightly wet and the trees swaying in the delicate breeze, shielding him from the sharp sun. beside his side was a small basket of fruits and a few buttered slices of bread, alongside a large glass bottle of water, and a note.
i’ve gone to pluck my herbs as per usual, but i did not want to wake you. your wounds should be entirely healed, so i’ve left some foods for you to have for breakfast. the animals will keep you safe.
— ✩
lohen crumpled the note up with an odd grin, feeling his own eyebrows coming together at the weird tightness he felt in his chest as he picked up an apple, biting into it, pleased with its fresh and crispy skin. “interesting,” he muttered to himself as he waltzed out of the forest with the basket wrapped around his arm, steadily munching his way through all the food as he took sips of the water.
and if someone asked him later about the basket, questioning his nightly escapades and the handmade woven basket in his hand, well then lohen would merely offer a wink in their direction and head back to his home.
he didn’t want anyone else to know about you.
lohen’s visits to your home every day proved very useful to him, enhancing his combat abilities; even the grandmaster had offhandedly made a comment about lohen being faster in his attacks, pleasing the young man. becoming stronger, faster, and more powerful—these were the things he longed for so desperately. he never wanted to find himself in another situation of being too weak, too powerless, like he had been when he’d been kidnapped as a child, and likewise when he faced off against the sinner rerir, only to be reminded of his own shortcoming. being rushed away from the sinner, watching grandmaster varka through narrowed eyes as he held his own against rerir, only furthered lohen’s desire to become a substantially more powerful version of himself. someone who didn’t need to be rushed away from the battle due to injuries, but someone who could hold his own, someone who could win against an enemy like that.
“you swing your arm too much when striking.” you caught lohen’s arm in yours, rapidly kicking the other hand away as he attempted to bury his dagger into your torso. the grin on his face was maddening, showing his sheer determination in growing stronger, and you had to admit that you’d come to enjoy these spars with lohen. “it makes it easy for someone to counter your first attack. the second attack was good, though; it just needs to be a little faster.”
fighting was never something you had enjoyed as a child, finding it bothersome and needless. you simply failed to understand why people would pick up weapons and spill blood, when they could merely hold a conversation and aim for coexistence. that was why you absolutely adored your home in mondstadt, living just outside dornman port with your parents and your little kitten. your neighbors were wonderful, always so friendly and kind, sharing their produce with your parents and so on. everyone in the village got on great; all the children were friends, passing all hours of the day together, and all the adults regularly held dinner parties and traveled together, when headed out for work.
“taking the time to understand someone is harder than fighting someone,” your mother would whisper to you as her hand ran over your hair, the two of you sitting on your porch, watching two of the neighborhood children in an ugly discussion.
“so fighting is bad?”
“only if it’s not necessary. if you can solve a situation through mutual understanding, then why not take that route? but the anemo archon has blessed us all with freedom, and if that freedom is threatened, then we must fight.”
but at the sore age of ten years old, an ulcer of darkness and evil would open in the depths of the forest, discovered by one of the children during a game of hide and seek. most adults would never make it away before black smoke would engulf them, leaving behind nothing but screams and cries for the children to run. you didn’t remember much besides one of the older children grabbing your arm, dragging you out and away from the village, where you’d grown up. at your short height and surrounded by older children, you’d seen nothing more than monsters abruptly appearing from the forest, trying to chase you down with savage snarls and bloodthirsty grunts.
and that is when a large crack would appear in the ground, swallowing every single child present. in that dark place, nothing but emptiness and sorrow swirling in the air, the air heavy with death and desire, you and every single child of your village would be divided into categories: vision holders, potential, and useless. every child deemed useless, those unable to use abilities of any sort, with no fighting experience, or without a vision, would be slaughtered, fed to the creatures lurking everywhere around you. the vision holders would be dragged off, locked into cells unlike your own.
but the potentials category was the one with the most attention focused on it. you never saw any of the children divided into either of the categories again, only to learn years later that none of them had survived, forgotten in this harrowing world of crumbling walls and surroundings manifested at will by your kidnappers. your role as in the potentials secured you a fighting chance, to not be slaughtered immediately like your own peers.
but that wouldn’t save you from your own personal nightmare.
“you’re injured again,” you sighed and forced him to sit down, smacking his wandering hands away to wash away the dried blood across his firm chest, working meticulously beneath the moon.
the abyss order, as you’d later learn, was the name of the organization, yearning for more abilities to add to their ranks, more numbers and feats. whilst the vision holders could be transformed into useful monsters of the highest caliber, your status as potentials gave you a different purpose: to foster unique and powerful skills for the benefit of their organization. the two who joined you in this category were expected to fight to harness the power of the abyss and become able to wield its immense power at a greater level than regular monsters, which would make them capable of targeting larger foes of the order, such as archons.
however, you were a healer, a potion maker. your mother had been known as the woman with magical hands, who would be able to create all sorts of potions: healing potions, strengthening potions, speed-boosting potions, and many more. you descended from a long line of natural witches, people with the ability to truly harness and embody the spirit and power from the surrounding nature—people who would never gain vision, for the heavens never sought to reward people with abilities beyond their control. the abyss longed for that power, you would later learn; they needed someone like you with the ability to harness the abyssal powers to constantly and consistently empower their forces, improve the longevity of their pawns, and elevate their prowess.
“what’s the fun in fighting if i’m not getting injured, bunny?” lohen laughed off the pain coursing through his body, lying leisurely on the damp grass. your hands delicately wiped all the blood away, and you began applying your own ointment, fingers cold but soothing on this inflamed skin. “especially if it means you’ll treat me this well.”
the words spoken by lohen merely made you roll your eyes, causing him to laugh boisterously at your reaction. he had heard people speak to others this way when interested in them, and whilst he was definitely interested in you, just hearing those words in his own tone made him cringe. lohen was quite self-aware, though, just as much as he was observant, so he was able to understand that as he struggled with normal social interactions, so did you. none of you seemed to communicate the same way he saw others do, but he simply continued staring up at your gorgeous eyes, enthralled by how they moved across his skin with such delicate focus. others would have been flustered to have him lie across the grass with his chest out, toned arms folded behind his head, knowing his intense red eyes were watching their every move with daggers available for his disposal.
but that did not seem to faze you, at all. in fact, it was as if you preferred if he kept his eyes on you, all so you could make sure he was fine. you hadn’t opened up entirely, not that he expected you to, since he hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about his own past and his desire to become as strong as possible, but certain things had been deductible about you, lohen would claim. it was obvious from your fighting style that you’d learned to fight for the sake of survival, not for leisure or power, like him. you were skilled at fighting, probably one of the best he knew alongside the grandmaster and acting grandmaster, but unlike everyone he knew, you didn’t seem to fight for glory or victory.
“you are lucky i’m an adept healer.”
“and fighter.”
“that too, although i don’t usually consider myself one.”
lohen scoffed at that statement, choosing to let his gaze venture away from your puzzled face, your fingers halting in their mission to wipe off the residual ointment from his chest. “bun, you’re the only person besides varka who’s ever dodged my dagger attack; i would argue you’re an adept fighter, too.”
“hmm…” you trailed off as if you were truly taking his words to heart, wiping your fingers off on the flimsy rag beside you and throwing your loose hair over your shoulders. you flopped back on the grass across from him, leaning slightly back with your palms pressed against the ground beneath you. “perhaps you’re correct. i don’t typically think of myself as someone who relishes in the feeling of fighting, but i presume i do have a certain appreciation for it now, unlike before. your nightly attacks are proving to be beneficial for us both, then.”
“awh, i knew you liked having me around, bun-bun, even when you uphold that infuriatingly polite tone with me.”
“what? would you rather that i speak informally with you?”
“duh, obviously,” lohen hoisted himself off the ground to sit upright, meeting your eyes once more, a teasing smile on his lips as he poked your forehead and noticed your eyes adjust inward to focus on his finger. “you don’t talk much with others, do ya?”
you wrestled with his words in your mind, letting them ruminate as you tried to see things from his perspective instead of your own. meanwhile, lohen kept gingerly poking at your head, fascinated by how your eyes were firmly locked on his, yet you were far away in your own head, leaving you more defenseless than ever. typically, this would’ve been lohen’s chance to strike you—to finally gain the upper hand and show you what he’s made of. but for once, lohen didn’t have that urge to one-up you, to harm you merely for the sake of his own satisfaction; not when you’d become comfortable enough around to allow yourself to let your guard down ever so slightly. so on second thought, he decided to pursue his venture of getting his hands on you, poking away at your soft skin and letting his fingertips run over your features in fascination, trailing over your face and down your throat as if you were nothing short of a masterpiece.
and, wow. now all the touching he saw between couples made sense; the gentle caresses to a partner’s face or a light hand always hovering above their stature made sense to him. you felt ethereal beneath his touch, soft and warm, just like something out of a dream. the glint in your eyes was magical, faraway yet drawing him in, and he knew that if he voiced this out, you would probably call it the abyss’ calling. however, lohen knew better. he knew that whatever about you that kept making him broaden his own views of society, people, and perhaps human connection wasn’t the abyss or its presence within you, but rather the light that shone from every crevice of your being, from every gaze you bestowed upon him.
“i’ve never really been welcome anywhere, where other people may be present,” you finally spoke up again after a few minutes of silence, halting lohen’s movements with your own hand, staring down at him with an open glint in your eyes. “alice is the only one i’ll talk to, and those conversations are usually quite short and to the point. it’s been a very long time, since i’ve had a regular conversation with anyone.”
lohen didn’t seem too shocked or surprised at this information, eyes briefly dropping down to your hands, then back to meet your eyes. “well, you’re doing oh-so-wonderfully, sweets. i’m loving this conversation.”
“you love when i kick your a—, i mean, when i gain the upper hand.”
“nuh, uh,” lohen tutted teasingly, his fingers drifting up to press against your mouth, his thumb running across your soft lower lip as your eyes met his in confusion. god, he was so happy you were so socially unaware; otherwise, you’d realize the weirdness of him deftly touching you so intimately. “don’t sugarcoat your words now, bun. say what you were gonna say, no filtering.”
“…”
“i’m waiting.”
you shook your head in faux annoyance, wrapping your fingers around lohen’s and pulling them away from your face, letting your hands fall to your lap. “when i kick your ass. you just like it when i kick your ass. are you happy now?”
“elated, bunny, so elated, goddamn elated.”
“lohen, you are such a bizarre person.”
“so i’ve been told.”
the evenings spent with lohen began unfolding differently, still retaining the original purpose but with something more profound blossoming between the two of you. it began as small touches, mostly lohen taking every chance he could to caress your hands or let his eyes linger over your form, sometimes gliding his dagger along your smooth skin, all while you simply stared at him, wondering what the glint in his eyes meant. admittedly, seeing the attention he paid you, never letting his eyes falter from you no matter what and always listening when you spoke, made you feel special in a way you’d never felt before. you could feel the air had changed between you, when you performed your usual takedown, keeping him pinned into the grass by straddling his waist, keeping all your weight in your legs as you hovered above him.
still that sick smile on lohen’s face, his crimson eyes freely devouring every inch of your skin with a shameless hunger in his eyes, made you feel warm like never before, a shiver running along your spine. his hands wiggled beneath your legs and managed to glide his fingers over your thighs, humming to himself, finding solace in watching goosebumps rise behind the trail of his cold fingers.
“your skin is so warm,” lohen muttered in fascination, amused by the slight flush on your cheeks as your eyebrows furrowed, clearly perplexed by your own reaction. “you like that, bunny?”
“i… i’m not sure,” you admitted awkwardly, feeling conflicting emotions rising in you. something about the way he was staring at you felt like pure hunger, something different from how anyone had ever stared at you, but in a manner that made you feel good; that made you feel wanted. “you’re messing with me, lohen.”
“i haven’t even started, and you’re already as jumpy as a little rabbit. bunny suits you well as a nickname, heh.”
the fluster creeping up your neck and spine, spreading into your cheeks, felt like too much at once, awakening a sense of urgency within you. swinging your leg over his abdomen, you flew to your feet before lohen could even attempt to grab you, leaving the man still on the grass with a cheeky smile dancing on his lips, folding his arms behind his head. your legs were already leading you backward, hands uselessly hanging by your side, as you tried to make up some excuse to escape from his hold over you. “i, uhm, salem needs me, i think. get home safe, lohen. it’s due to rain tonight; be careful on your way back,” you rapidly murmured to him and ignored the scoff at your lie, turning back to run back to your home. “what the hell?” you slammed the door behind you, leaning against it with exasperated breaths escaping you, legs giving out as you slid down the door and rested on the floor.
“goodbye, bun. don’t miss me too much now! i hope you’ll dream of me—i know i’ll be enjoying my dreams tonight.”
__
lohen soon began being assigned to considerably more important missions, taking more charge of his unit, of which he was the vice captain. you were not sure exactly what had happened with lohen, but whenever he did come by, no longer able to swing by every night, he seemed hurt. your usual training sessions steadily became a rest and recuperation outlet for lohen, being healed by your glass-like hands imbued with the abyss, all while he rested his head in your lap. often, he would stare up at you, fascinated by how devoted you seemed as you performed your soothing healing remedies on him, never leaving behind any scarring or pain. you’d even stay with him, allowing him to rest in your company, often sliding your fingers through his strands.
“you know, if any of my company members saw me like this, they’d think i’d gone crazy.” lohen was lying across your sofa in your home, the candles flickering in the warm living room, as your fingers gently removed the dried blood from his hair.
your eyebrows furled at his words, trying to make sense of exactly what he meant. but then, you began to speculate that perhaps anyone who knew you would’ve felt the same way about you. just a few months prior to this very moment, you lived all on your own in the forest with no real human interactions, connections, or relationships. you had a deal with a mage, you had your lovely pets, and you had your own company; nothing more, nothing less. but one incident had entirely altered the course of your life, and now here you sat, in your own living room with one of the knights on your lap as you meticulously cared for him in a way that you didn’t think you would ever be able to once again. your hands, previously gazed upon as cursed and evil, were the same ones softly nursing him back to health. whereas others had feared you due to your abyssal hands and the abyssal shard in your eye, lohen didn’t just seem fascinated by both, but more so curious about them.
he didn’t seem to just treat you or your abyssal features as a weakness, a power, or something foreign to your person, but instead, he considered them part of you and who you were. labeling your hands as a curse or ogling your eye intensely, both with poor or uninformed intentions, always somewhat discredited your past and how much you’d fought to be where you were now. nonetheless with lohen, well, he may have initially approached you with an intention of growing stronger, but even from that first interaction, he never made you feel overly aware of your own features, nor did he seek to fear them or you.
“i don’t think anyone has ever perceived you as being anything even remotely close to sane, lohen,” you murmured with a soft grin, amused by how his eyes shot open to glare playful daggers at you. “but i’m sure they’re all curious as to where you disappear at night, even after long missions with sustained injuries. you really should start heading back to the medics with your squad, instead of trying to make it all the way back here.”
half of lohen’s armor had been dropped on the floor, and so had his shirt, leaving him in just his bottom half of clothing, lying shirtless on your sofa. you’d wrapped large bandages around his torso to further protect the healing ointment you’d applied on his wounds, as well as healed the smaller cuts and bruises on his chest area. admittedly, as you began spending more time musing over your odd relationship with lohen, you found yourself identifying things that were closely pointing to perhaps something more complicated than just companionship. your limited knowledge and lack of social awareness did make you wonder exactly what was transpiring between you two, but something about his company kept awakening emotions you didn’t think were still present within you.
“why would i ever go back to those upright medics, who’ll give me an endless amount of lectures about staying safe, not being reckless, blah blah blah, when i could just come here?” lohen gestured towards you, a warmth in his smile. “where you’ll take the absolute best care of me.”
you rolled your eyes at his flattery, ignoring the way he chuckled at your reaction, and instead focused on securing the last bandage. his signature spear was standing against your wall, stained red from the dried blood, alongside his daggers thrown to the floor haphazardly. luckily, your cat was soundly asleep in your bedroom and nowhere near the weapons, but you still knew you’d have to get up and clean the blood off. well, you didn’t have to, but you didn’t want all that blood staining your floors.
“i’ll take care of it soon,” lohen suddenly spoke, catching your attention at the way he’d somehow read your mind, following your eyes over to stare at the weapons. “i’ll have to leave soon.”
“lohen, i do not think you should be moving right now. your wounds will be entirely healed soon, but you seem exhausted. maybe you should just get some sleep here.”
“are you finally letting me sleep at your place? take a man out for dinner first, bun.”
the snicker that escaped lohen as you swatted his chest was unlike any other, not laced with any sort of excitement for fighting or adrenaline, but rather sounded so innocent, so boyish. it was unlike any other you’d ever heard from him, but also the first time in many years you’d witnessed someone laugh so freely, so happily; the last time would be mere hours before your entire life fell apart. your hand fell limp to lohen’s chest, a soft smile sliding into your face as he carried on laughing, small crinkles forming beneath his eyes as he squeezed them shut. his chest was buzzing under your hands, attesting to his presence in your home and existence in your life.
eventually lohen’s laugh quieted down, and as his crimson eyes slowly peeked open, they instantly caught sight of the softness with which you were gazing down onto him. you’d never looked more serene, more peaceful than you did in this moment, and even lohen couldn’t help himself from reaching up and letting his fingers slide around your cheeks, his thumb brushing over your cheekbone. the warm lights in the living room delivered a glow to your soft skin, making you seem like nothing less than an angel. even with your hair messily thrown up and small specks of his dried blood staining your hands and arms, you’d never looked more beautiful than you did right now, gazing down upon him with an abundance of fondness and tenderness.
“you’re so beautiful,” lohen whispered in awe, feeling a surge of emotions passing through his body as your lips spread into a shy smile, rolling your eyes fondly. “especially with my blood on you.”
“you’re so odd.” you smacked his hand away, giggling at his stupid little comment, finding that his oddness was precisely why you felt so connected with him. no sane person would make a comment like that, but conversely, no sane person would actually feel flattered by such a disturbing compliment. “you are very lucky salem likes you.”
“salem is the only one who likes me? oh, bun, don’t be like that. i know you love my company.”
you patted his chest gently, leaning over to grab a blanket to throw it over his figure as you flicked your fingers, extinguishing all the candles and throwing the room into a state of pure darkness. the tiredness on lohen’s face had been as obvious as ever, and even if he kept insisting he wasn’t tired and didn’t need sleep, you were not oblivious to the way his eyes would try to fall shut, clearly readying him to sleep. even as the lights went off, lohen would try to protest and insist he was ready to get up and train again, but your hands kept him pressed into the sofa, keeping his head firmly resting on your lap. with soft pressure applied to his scalp and the whispered humming from you, lohen soon fell asleep in your lap, and not long after, your own eyes would shut as your head fell backward, leaving the two of you soundly asleep in each other’s presence.
sometime later that same night, lohen would awaken and find you asleep, still sitting up on the couch. perhaps he would be crossing anyone else’s boundaries, but lohen had never been one to care much for boundaries, and he also knew you didn’t process things like others. some would argue he was taking advantage of that as he pushed himself up from the sofa, stretching and feeling the lightness in his body as his wounds were fully healed from your magical remedies, cracking his neck and fingers loudly. sliding his lean arms under your knees and wrapping one about your waist, he gently picked your limp body up from the sofa and made his way through your home, kicking open the door to your bedroom and settling your sleeping body on the bed. you appeared as beautiful as ever, peacefully asleep and free from all the burdens he knew you carried on a daily basis.
“oh, don’t mind if i do,” lohen murmured to himself as he climbed onto your bed, aware that he may well be crossing every single boundary you had and invading your privacy, but also assuming that if you were comfortable enough to let him fall asleep on you, then you’d be comfortable enough to let him sleep in the same bed as you. he knew varka would’ve had his head for climbing into your bed and pulling your sleeping figure into his arms without your explicit consent; adorno would’ve never allowed lohen to merely make such bold assumptions, and even jean wouldn’t have hesitated to chew him out about his insolence.
but they weren’t here.
so he allowed his arms to wrap tenderly around your waist and pull you into his own body, your head falling to rest against his warm and firm chest, his one hand gently massaging the back of your neck, the other gripping your hip tightly enough to leave behind a bruise. your breathing was steady against his chest, your hands eventually settling against his cold skin as you fell deeper into sleep. lohen’s own eyes began fluttering once more, but as he held you close to his body, he knew he never wanted to let you go ever again. no matter what it took or who tried to stand in his way.
lohen would not come by over the next few days, leaving you alone to your own devices. you awoke a few days ago and found yourself tangled up with lohen, his head tucked beneath your chin as he rested on your chest, his arms secured around your waist, with your legs wrapped around each other’s. he was soundly asleep, and admittedly, even if you had no idea how you ended up here, you slid your hands into his mint-hued hair and let your sharp nails graze across his scalp, causing him to softly hum like a pleased cat, snuggling deeply into your chest as if he was trying to get even closer to you. when he'd woken up, a quick peck pressed to your forehead was all lohen gave you besides a lopsided smirk before he bounced out of your bed and rushed through your home, leaving you dazedly staring up at the ceiling, a hand drifting up to press against where his lips had just been.
you let out a sigh in your own kitchen, sealing the last few of your newly made potions, and putting them into the usual basket. alice had been by a few days prior, requesting more potions and assuring you that someone would be by as always to pick them up, flashing you a toothy smile and offering you some sweets in return. the sun was beginning to set outside, casting beautiful orange and pink rays of the setting sun into your living room as salem lounged on the sofa, mirthfully stretching in the soft light. lohen had made sure to clean any blood, which had dripped from his weapons, surprising you when you saw a small, rushed drawing of a bunny on your floor using water.
“who are you waiting for?” you found yourself asking salem as she dashed off the sofa and walked to the door, making noises and scratching at the door. she’d been doing it for a few days, and whilst it had initially confused you immensely, you now knew that she was waiting for lohen to come by to scoop her into his awaiting arms and offer her cuddles and small words of affection. “he'll be back soon enough, baby.”
or, so you’d hoped. lohen had carved a space into your life, your home, and even your heart. how your relationship evolved from him ambushing you numerous times, to him now being comfortable enough to seek you anytime he was injured, and sleeping so peacefully in your bed, you did not know. however, it was something you didn’t even realize that you needed so desperately. before lohen, you were so accustomed to spending every waking moment on your own, to never being able to tackle any of the battles brewing within your own heart due to a lack of social interactions. having said that, lohen’s persistence in fighting you endlessly had inadvertently caused the mental block you’d formed around your combat abilities to steadily crumble to pieces. his persistent and endless desire for strength, which would periodically force you to actually tap into your own power, had guided you to accept that this power was indeed yours; that your skills may have been developed due to bad intentions and horrible circumstances, but that couldn’t define the power you held. you were more than someone who just had abyssal powers, more than someone to fear.
a knock on your front door resounded throughout your home, and salem’s noises grew louder, as you tried to make her quiet down, rushing for the door. somewhere deep in your heart, you knew that it wouldn’t be lohen. it was most likely going to be the person whom alice had sent to pick up the potions, but you still allowed yourself to hope. lohen would never knock, but maybe this time around, he was too injured to even try to open your door, or he wanted to ambush you the very second you pulled the door open. frankly, you didn’t care which one of these options would prove to be true, for you simply wanted to see lohen. you wanted to push your fingers through his soft hair and feel his crimson eyes staring down at you with unbridled obsession and affection, to feel his cold hands wrap around your neck in greeting.
“uhm, greetings,” the person standing on your front step spoke nervously, rubbing the back of their neck as they attempted to avoid eye contact with you, someone who clearly was not the man you’d been expecting. “i don’t mean to intrude… or something.”
“no, you’re fine. my apologies if i’ve made you seem ill at ease. i was just… caught off guard. i was expecting someone else.”
“vice captain lohen, perhaps?”
your eyebrows curled inwards, hand tightening its grip around the door handle, as you began eyeing the person from top to bottom. "excuse me?” and perhaps this really wasn’t how you’d like for your newest social interaction to unfold, but something about the tone of this person made it obvious that they knew more than they let on. you didn’t like that.
“sorry, sorry, i didn’t mean to say it like that,” the blonde girl standing on your porch in a beautiful white dress stated, her companion a floating fairy-like girl with a sweet smile on her face, but both seemingly very nervous about the stoic expression on your face. “lohen asked me to come get you.”
you quirked an eyebrow at the young girl, letting your eyes glide over her entire body before moving on to her companion, mentally assessing both. the girl was clearly much stronger than she seemed, an immense amount of power present within her being, despite the awkwardly nervous smile on her face. the companion with her didn’t seem to hold all that much power, but you did find yourself examining her outfit a little closer, noticing some familiar elements. nevertheless, you could tell that they were not ones to fear or be wary of. that also became your conclusion once you saw how their eyes flickered down to your hands and then back up to your eyes, never letting them linger on your darker hands.
“where is lohen? and why would he send someone else?” you questioned the girl and her companion in confusion, leaning down to scoop a saddened salem into your arms, letting a finger run along her head.
the girl cleared her throat nervously, finally prompting your eyes to notice the specks of dried blood sitting on her dress, and a few dirt marks streaked across her skin. whilst her floating companion seemed fine, she seemed as if she had come straight from some sort of fight. your eyes drifted past her to view the now darker sky, tasting the small drops of rain beginning to trickle from the sky, and perhaps that ugly feeling that’d been brewing in your stomach would prove to be true.
“lohen got injured whilst fighting a horde of abyssal monsters,” the girl finally spoke with saddened eyes, noticing straight away how your eyes widened and your hands halted their movement. “he’s really injured, but he won’t let the medics touch him or heal him. he is insistent that only you are allowed to even come near him.”
“…what?”
“he was found in the forest by grandmaster varka, hurt but still fighting. varka killed the monsters and brought lohen back, but he won’t let anyone in. he keeps pointing his sword at anyone who comes near him,” the traveler explained with newfound vigor once she realized how affected you were about this news, setting the cat back on the floor as you stepped away from the door. “says you’re the only one who’s allowed to come near him, let alone touch him. he asked me to come find you and bring you to him. he told me to tell you that he knows you haven’t been to the city in years and have bad memories associated with it, but he’s hoping his little bunny will entertain his request.”
you had already thrown open a small bag and began to throw in some of your ointments and potions, panting heavily at the thought of lohen being fatally hurt and bleeding out, but refusing treatment. if he’d been fighting abyssal monsters, then he was definitely tainted by the darker forces that aimed to devour and usurp the ones they came into contact with; you couldn’t have that. once you had all the things you needed, you didn’t hesitate to slide on your shoes and throw your cloak around your shoulders.
“i’m ready.”
the travel through the woods and into areas that you had not been near in years upon years, was long but felt like the quickest journey of your life, as the three of you ran as fast as you could… or at least, two of you ran as fast as you could, whilst the third did her best to fly at the same speed. it was no surprise to you that the traveler was fast as well, able to keep up with your heightened speed as you ran throughout the rain, wetting your cloak. under any other circumstance, seeing the large city gate of mondstadt city would’ve made you feel sick to your stomach, prompting you to turn back around and never come back, but this wasn’t about you. this was about lohen, potentially on the brink of death, all because he opted to be a selfish asshole. so even as the people in town began staring after you, whispering about your hands and in disbelief about your eyes, your ears caught something about an honorary knight; you didn’t stop, and nor did the blonde girl by your side. your feet hit the ground with immense speed, sending the forming water puddles flying as you darted up the stone stairs of the town, following the traveler.
“he’s just in here,” she yelled over the loud rain, head whipping back to see you nodding, as she led you to the headquarters of the knights of favonius. the guards standing outside nodded at her, but as soon as their eyes centered on you, their brandished weapons came up to form a blockade in front of the large doors, glaring daggers at you. it was no surprise to you that they would be so hostile, but somehow, it still seemed to send a pang of hurt through your chest; had you really become so accustomed to lohen’s indifference to your appearance that you’d forgotten why you isolated yourself?
“honorary knight, we cannot follow this individual inside the headquarters!” one of the guards spat in disgust in your direction, speaking respectfully to the blonde girl by your side, but refusing to award you the same courtesy as their eyes scanned every inch of your physique.
the traveler’s posture immediately straightened up, and you could see the confused exchange she had with her companion, clearly not having expected such a harsh tone from the same knights, who were evidently more polite in their interactions with her. but frankly, you could not seem to care much about his unwavering dislike for you, or the way he was glaring at you like you were the dirt on the ground, for your mind kept reminding you of the crimson-eyed man waiting for you. so as you took a step forward, willing to make yourself enemy number one, an arm shot up to prevent you from even getting close. your eyes snapped over to meet the traveler’s warm eyes, and you found that she was already watching you with a warm glint in her eyes.
“i appreciate your concern, but the grandmaster and acting grandmaster agreed to let her in. vice captain lohen is in critical condition, and he needs her to heal him,” the traveler reiterated herself once more, still as polite as before but with less warmth in her tone, as the rain poured down onto you. “don’t you trust me?”
somehow, that seemed to do the trick. you could tell with ease that the guards were not pleased whatsoever, still glaring daggers into your being as they moved away from the door, instead grabbing the handles and pulling it open. you could hear their murmured dissatisfaction with you being allowed inside, and of course you knew it was due to sheer vigilance, with your hands that were clearly related to the abyss and your eyes, resembling a shard of a mirror, reflecting the darkness of the abyss. you weren’t oblivious as to why you were feared, but as you rushed after the blonde girl, ignoring the way all the knights in the hallway seemed to keep their hands on their weapons when they spotted you, there was a sincere desire to be believed rather than perceived, to be acknowledged and not condemned.
“he’s in here,” the traveler panted as she leaned forward, hands bracing against her own knees. “grandmaster varka and acting grandmaster jean are also there. i… i got you in here because lohen asked for you, because i believe he’d never be so adamant about someone untrustworthy.”
“i appreciate that,” you replied, speaking for the first time since the three of you departed from your home. nodding in agreement, you tightened your grip around the bag held in your hand. “i can understand your reluctance, but i truly appreciate your willingness to vouch for me, miss traveler.”
“i know someone else with similar attributes as yourself, abyssal hands and abyssal powers. she’s not a bad person, so i’m willing to believe your past doesn’t make you one, either. but that’s as far as my goodwill goes. this city, its people, they’re all very precious to me.”
you let out a heave, understanding the unspoken meaning of her words, even if the companion at her side seemed perplexed by the riddles in which she was speaking. “i understand. thank you.” you gave her one last nod before letting your hand press against the handle of the door, inhaling a deep breath, then pushing open the door to the room.
the first thing that hit you was the scent of blood, its potent and iron-heavy scent lingering in the enclosed room, alongside an underlying scent of dirt and sadness. your eyes were struggling to comprehend the scene before you, but it was as if your feet knew to move on their own. your eyes weren’t able to catch any glimpse of the bed, nor the culprit of all this blood, as there were a few figures standing in your way. an extraordinarily tall man, dressed in armor and with an aura of power surrounding him, leading you to believe he was probably the grandmaster. the woman next wore similar colors of clothing and armor, her arms crossed over her chest and hair up in a ponytail, but exuding an energy laced with power as well, most likely the acting grandmaster. hearing the door open had caused both to turn around, their eyes zeroing in on you, as you felt them assessing you silently, creating a physical blockade between you and lohen.
“ah, so you’re the woman he’s been yammering on and on about?” the man gazed down at you with a large smile, one that was meant to be seen as friendly and easy, but laced with an underlying sense of curiosity and hesitation; he was wary of you, and rightfully so. “never thought lohen would be one to create such a deep connection with someone like you.”
“uhm, i’m not sure who you are, my apologies,” you quietly stated back, trying your best to look past him and find lohen, but alas, unable to even look anywhere past the man standing in front of you. “but i was informed that lohen is very injured, and i would like to be able to attend to him.”
the woman seemed to indicate she wanted to protest, as if she wanted to object to your request and kick you out, and you couldn’t really fault her for that. you were an unknown to them, both a stranger in their domain and also an unknown factor; you knew your appearance being so intricately linked to the abyss would not benefit your credibility. but the older man, whose eyes had never once faltered away from your stature, let a large grin overtake his features as he moved aside, granting you access to lohen for the first time.
“jean, let her through,” he spoke calmly as he nodded for her to move aside, which she did, but not without shooting him several confused glances. “i have a good feeling about this.”
your eyes immediately set on lohen and a gasp escaped you before you could even begin to process what the hell you were staring at, your feet moving you forward towards his bed, where his incredibly injured form was laid. blood was leaking onto the floor, despite the several layers of bandages crossed over his torso and wrapping around several of his limbs, a testament to just how much blood he’d lost, both in his fight with whoever caused these wounds and also in his wait for you. the bag you’d brought was dropped onto the floor, and you ripped off the cloak, throwing it onto a nearby chair as you leaned over lohen’s crippled form, your eyes scanning his entire body in an attempt to assess what state he was truly in.
“h-hey baby,” lohen’s meek voice spoke in a whisper, leading to a coughing fit as you shook your head, trying to dissuade him from speaking anymore as blood trickled from his mouth. “knew you’d come.”
“lohen, for the love of barbatos, stop talking!” your hand clasped over his mouth in frustration, not wanting to see him hurt himself anymore. beneath your hand, you could feel a smirk crawling onto his face, his tongue darting out to lick your hand, but you didn’t budge whatsoever. instead you reached into your bag and pulled out a small vial of something, rapidly moving your hand away to drip some of its content into his mouth, letting lohen just about process what you’d done before his widened eyes fell shut and his head collapsed to the side.
a hand came to grip your shoulder, hard. the woman from before pulled you back with a firm hand and a hardened line on her face, glaring at you, as you calmly sealed the vial once more and met her eyes. “what did you just feed him?”
“it’s a healing potion. its purpose is to kickstart his body’s natural healing process from the inside to decrease the blood loss and inflammation, while also helping his muscles relax and not cramp as frequently. it’ll also allow his mind to turn off and no longer feel the pain, which will allow me to aid his healing quicker.” you felt no need to be offended by her harsh tone or the glare directed at you, for you were understanding of her hesitance towards you; after all, you had just fed her knight an unknown substance and caused him to pass out.
“jean, lohen trusts her, so we must do the same. lohen might be kind of crazy, but he would never resist treatment if he didn’t trust her. also, i’m kinda sure she’s the one he’s been sneaking out to see, ya know? the one who kicks his ass and heals all his wounds, somehow making him stronger.” the tall man injected and slowly detached her hand from your body, having somehow picked up on your discomfort in feeling her unwarranted touch on you, even if it was an obvious reaction.
you didn’t wish to say anymore to them right now, wanting to keep all your attention on lohen. nodding gratefully at the older man, whose eyes seemingly widened at your ability to understand whatever silent hint he was giving you, you stepped around the two and crouched next to lohen’s bedside, placing your bag on the mattress. most of the basic materials you would need were already in the room, and so, you tied your hair back and rushed over to the basin in the corner, thoroughly scrubbing your hands and nails, before rushing back to lohen’s side.
your attention narrowed in on the unconscious man before you, a pang of sadness shooting through your heart at the sight of him. several large gashes were present all over his body, blood oozing profusely from every single one of them, with copious streaks of dried blood painted across his fair skin. there were a few smaller puncture wounds on his legs, as if he had been attacked from below by something piercing. his face was scratched up, blood dotted all over his skin, and you knew most of it probably wasn’t his, but that didn’t stop the uncomfortable sensation coursing through you. surprisingly, none of his bones seemed broken or even remotely close to fractured, meaning you wouldn’t have to take into account that he may have injuries that were not visible.
you spent hours concentrating on lohen and his unconscious form, sometimes letting your hand halt their movement and your eyes merely take in the sight of him, contesting the troubled emotions settling into your own bones. you hated seeing him like this, knowing he’d most likely been ambushed and was unable to receive any backup. you also knew he was never one to back out of a fight, and while you really admired that, you wholeheartedly wished that this one time, he’d just abandoned the fight and sought shelter. firmly washing all the blood off his body with a wet washcloth, you never once noticing the steady rotation of company captains taking turns to guard lohen. none of them wished to admit it out loud, but even with the grandmaster’s approval, they were wary of you and wanted to keep an eye on you themselves; the rumors of your starry hands and shard-like eye had spread like wildfire already, people hearing about your hands, which looked like a moving abyss of darkness with stars bound within, and your eye with the glass shard-shaped pupil.
grandmaster and acting grandmaster varka and jean had the first shift and watched quietly as you diligently washed every splatter and drop of blood off lohen’s skin, once more revealing the fair skin of his with a slightly paler tint than usual due to the vast blood loss. they were quite surprised to see the sheer delicacy of your movements, never once pressing too vigorously into lohen’s skin or scrubbing any of the stubbornly dried blood, as if you didn’t want to hurt him even if he wasn’t awake to feel it. eula and kaeya got to lean back against the door with several candles lit, witnessing your steady hands sew some of lohen’s wounds back together before letting one of your fingers gently apply ointment onto the stitched skin.
varka had been very specific during the shift swap: do not interfere in your work and do not question anything you were doing.
however, you hadn’t heard this as it had been stated outside the door, all because none of the knights wanted you to overhear their conversation. they were all steadily beginning to notice the silent care in your presence and the tenderness in your eyes and hands, always displaying such devotion and attachment to lohen—something they never thought they would see for a man like lohen. your heart kept beating in your heart, and your hand kept working as devotedly as it could, but occasionally, your eyes would flicker up and stare leisurely at his face. the mole beneath his eye moving ever so slightly as he breathed peacefully, his lips slowly regaining their usual red nuance, and his long lashes framing his eyes. the shade of his mint-green hair seemed different due to the warmth of the room, but it was still so unmistakably lohen.
“i’ve never seen someone like her before,” albedo offhandedly remarked out loud to himself, standing against the door as he noticed you brush a hand over lohen’s forehead, closing your eyes in relief as you checked his temperature.
“those hands are a mark of the abyss,” diluc replied just as quietly, his arms crossed firmly over his chest as he kept his vivid red eyes locked onto your figure. once he had heard about lohen’s request, he felt an instant urge to make his way to the headquarters, and witness this for himself. perhaps it was because he was curious about lohen’s stubborn request, or perhaps it was due to his gut feeling, telling him that someone living so far removed from civilization must be someone unique. and boy, was he correct. regardless of whatever varka had said or the observations kaeya had thought out loud upon shift swap, he simply did not trust you, nor did he believe that you were someone with no ill intention.
after all, the abyss and its monsters were known to be bloodthirsty, vengeful, and cruel. why would he believe that someone carrying traits of that same force would be of righteous intention or with upstanding morals?
but days would pass, and even someone as initially wary as diluc would gradually begin to truly discern the genuine feelings between you and lohen, even if the latter wasn’t awake to testify. your ointments were clearly working as lohen’s instinctual accelerated healing abilities, courtesy of his cryo vision, began working their magic quicker than usual, stitching together his skin and healing his wounds beautifully. he was still in a deep sleep, and when varka asked you about that, your voice would break as you explained how the potion wouldn’t allow him to wake up until sufficient healing had taken place. in the many following days of various people shuffling in and out of the room, no longer keeping an eye on you but more so coming by to check on lohen, they’d taken to noticing your silence. how you never spoke beyond the one answer you’d offered to varka, instead gazing down at lohen with nothing short of fiery devotion, your hands either running lovingly through his hair or gently caressing his face.
it was a late night in mondstadt when you suddenly stirred awake from your sleep, confused by that weird feeling you were getting, glancing around the room to see everything looking perfectly normal: lohen was asleep, but slowly healing, and there were no knights or company captains keeping watch tonight. but that is when that sound reached your ear, jolting you up from the wooden chair and rushing to the window, throwing open its lock as your eyes locked in on the horde of monsters rushing towards the city.
abyssal energy was reeking off them, but you were also susceptible to that energy, sensing it quicker than most others. the two guards at the city gates had yet to spot the horde, both half asleep by their posts, and you swore beneath your breath as you debated what to do. you really did not want to leave lohen here on his own, having spent the past few days caring for him. however, that horde of monsters was undoubtedly too much to handle for a mere two knights, and you knew the chances of backup at this hour were barely nonexistent.
“just go, bunny,” a voice coughed from behind you, eliciting your head to snap back to see lohen’s crimson eyes crack open every so slightly, eyeing you with a teasing smile on his dry lips. your knees almost gave out under you, rushing to his bedside as you collapsed onto the bed, a hand immediately finding his cheek as the other checked his wounds, eyes frantically scanning his body. that was until a pair of fingers gripped your chin, forcing your eyes up to meet his, lohen staring at you with so much tenderness in his eyes, you were truly wondering if this was a dream. “i-i’m sure you’re tired of fighting me only.”
“i don’t want to leave you,” came out a whisper from your lips, your eyes observing how lohen’s teasing smirk melted into something more sincere, his fingers sliding around your cheek to cup your face in his hand, pulling you down.
his nose was almost touching yours, a breath escaping his lips and hitting your cheeks, assuring you inwardly that it was indeed reality and not a dream. “baby, i’m telling you to go. if not for yourself, then go fuck them up on my behalf,” he grinned, taking longer than usual to utter his words properly.
your hands slid up his warm chest, curling around his cheeks and letting your fingertips gently slide along his scalp. your thumbs were brushing over his cheekbones, a soft smile sliding onto your face as that stone in your stomach vanished, no longer leaving you in a state of limbo, not about this situation and not about your emotions for lohen. you could tell from the fluttering of his eyes that he did not have much energy left, dangerously close to falling back into a healing sleep. so before he did fall asleep, you allowed yourself to lean down and return the favor he’d once bestowed upon you, pressing your lips against his forehead in a soft kiss.
“get some rest, lohen. leave it all to me.”
rumors were beginning to spread around a dark figure spotted outside mondstadt multiple nights in a row, slaughtering abyssal monsters left and right. people had spotted the figure holding a pair of daggers and a sharp spear, both looking eerily similar to the weapons usually brandished by vice captain lohen. however, it was very clear that the person wasn’t the vice captain. not only was it abundantly clear that the person was a woman, but nobody had heard the usual cackle let out by lohen whenever he got to viciously slaughter monsters, instead being someone who maneuvered quietly but effortlessly.
“am i correct to assume you did this?” varka would question you a few days later, showing you pictures taken by a kamera, which showed you on the ground with a dagger jabbed into the side of an abyss mage. he’d been out of town alongside his forces, trying to track down the source that had made it possible for the abyssal monsters to appear, who’d then bumped into lohen and inevitably met their gruesome end.
you were sitting on the corner of lohen’s bed, your hand clasped tightly in his as you were leaning back against his chest, his chin resting on top of your head. lohen had fully regained consciousness yesterday, refusing to let go of you for more than a few seconds, insisting he needed you as close as possible. everyone coming by to visit had been promptly shocked to see lohen’s possessive behavior around you, glaring at anyone who’d dare stare at you for a beat too long, even leveling varka with a glare. all the wounds on his body had healed nicely, leaving behind minimum or no scarring whatsoever, which pleased lohen immensely, causing him to shower you with teasing praises, all while you tried to escape his suffocating embrace.
“perhaps.” you kept your tone as neutral as possible, merely staring at the grandmaster with a bored expression, triggering a laugh from lohen whose lips pressed against your hair in amusement.
varka dropped the pictures on the floor and rubbed his temple. “lohen was enough to deal with. why did he have to go find someone as proficient in fighting as you?”
“i have good taste, varka.”
“yeah, yeah, whatever you say. heal up, lohen. and don’t be so foolish ever again.”
many days later, you would be outside in your garden, watering the plants beneath the bright moonlight as you yawned, ready to head to bed. ever since you’d been to the city to deal with this situation, varka had become insistent that you should swing by on your own, doing his very best to make you feel included. but tonight was one of those calm nights, which felt like your life before you met lohen. you’d spent the day picking herbs, and plants, and collecting small bugs, all used to make new potions. wrapping them in your basket and placing them on the table in the living room, you were ready to head back into the city tomorrow and hand off the potions.
you had peeked around your garden one last time, then headed back inside. after making sure your door was locked and the windows were closed, you let out a sigh and headed into your bedroom, stretching as you threw up your hair, heading into the bathroom. after taking a quick shower and changing into a loose shirt, which didn’t belong to you, you walked back into your bedroom only to find a familiar, crimson-eyed man sitting leisurely in your bed, cleaning his dagger with a handkerchief.
“lohen, how many times do i have to tell you to stop breaking in?” you let out an exasperated sigh, not surprised to see lohen simply dressed in a pair of loose pants in your bed, his chest displaying some of the scars he’d obtained over the many years of being a thrillseeker. “just use the front door.”
“and where’s the fun in that, bunny?”
lohen was not your boyfriend.
but he was the same man who’d brought happiness back into your life, who’d seen you when everyone else was oblivious of your existence.
Hi hello yellow! How are ya doing? Hope this ask finds you well my dear 💙 Consider this another yandere lilia x reader request from yours truly 😂 With that said, what are your thoughts about a perverted lilia? Sounds weird, i know but imagine a darker and less (none) sugarcoated version of lilia, i keep seeing a lot of people portray him as just a kind peepaw 😔 you capture his character so well, so i wonder what a none sugarcoated lilia would be like in your writing style 💙💙💙
THE DARK HAS ALWAYS HUNGERED FOR MORE
You will not remember the first time Lilia Vanrouge saw you.
That is the cruelty of it—the asymmetry, the vast and terrible imbalance of a thing that began long before you knew to look for it. He will tell you later, much later, in a voice like velvet drawn over broken glass, that he watched you for nine days before you ever sensed him. Nine days of your life that you lived believing yourself unobserved, unbereft, untouched. Nine days of morning coffee and late-night research and the small unremarkable rituals of a woman who thought herself alone in a stone library at the edge of a world that was not her own.
You will not remember, but he will. He carries those nine days like some carry prayer beads—turning them over in the dark, counting each moment you existed without him, each breath that belonged to you and you alone. He has had centuries to learn patience. He has had centuries to learn hunger. And he has had centuries to learn that the two are the same animal wearing different skins.
The library at Night Raven College breathed differently after sunset.
You had learned this in your first week—the way the air thickened when the sun dropped below the Spire, the way the torches lit themselves in a sequence that felt less like automation and more like ceremony. The books murmured. Literally, in some cases; the enchanted texts in the restricted sections spoke in languages you had yet to catalog, and the older grimoires exhaled dust that tasted of copper and regret. You had developed a habit of working late, partly because your research demanded it and partly because the silence of the Diasomnia wing after dark was the kind of silence that made thinking feel sacred.
Your research—Fae Military Structures and Their Cultural Echoes in Peacetime Societies—had brought you to Night Raven College on a cultural exchange fellowship that most of your colleagues had envied and a few had called suicidal. The magical world did not invite human scholars with open arms. The fae world invited them with barely concealed contempt. But your work was good, your reputation solid, and the headmage had approved your access to the primary source archives with a smile so slippery it could have oiled hinges.
So there you sat, on a Tuesday evening in late October, with a text on Briar Valley cavalry formations open on the table before you and a translation that refused to cooperate scratching at the inside of your skull.
The Old Fae script was beautiful—flowing, organic, its characters like vines that wound around meaning rather than stating it. But it was also deliberately obscure, designed to be read by minds that processed language differently than human minds did. You had been staring at the same passage for forty minutes, and the words kept sliding just out of reach, like fish through reeds.
"That line reads, 'And the general turned his face from the burning so that his soldiers would not see him weep.'"
The voice came from behind you—close enough that its speaker could have rested a chin on your shoulder, light enough that it might have been a thought you'd accidentally spoken aloud. You twisted in your chair, heart ramming against your ribs, and found a figure leaning against the end of the bookshelf with the ease of someone who had been there for some time.
He was small. That was the first thing—you had expected someone taller, though you could not have said why. He barely reached your shoulder. His hair fell in long dark streams past his waist, and his eyes were the particular scarlet of embers in a fireplace that has been banked for the night. He wore the Diasomnia dorm uniform, but it sat on him the way a costume sits on an actor—worn rather than inhabited, as though his true clothes were something far older and stranger.
He smiled at you. It was a smile that belonged at a tea party, or a funeral, or a coronation. It fit all three equally well.
"I do apologize for the intrusion," he said, and his voice was music played on an instrument you could not name—bright and old and threaded with something that made the fine hair on your forearms stand at attention. "I couldn't help noticing you were struggling with General Vourneis's memoir. He was a dreadful writer, I'm afraid. All poetry and no precision. A disaster on the battlefield and on the page."
"You—" You caught your breath, pressed a hand to your chest. "You startled me."
"Did I?" He tilted his head, and the motion was birdlike, curious, the gesture of a creature assessing something it had found in the grass. "How interesting. Most people don't notice me until I want them to."
There was a beat of silence in which you felt the weight of that statement settle against your skin like a fever. Then he laughed—high, bright, crystalline—and the mood shattered into something ordinary.
"Forgive me, forgive me! A poor joke. I have a terrible sense of humor, I'm told." He drifted closer, peering at your translation notes with open interest. "You're a researcher? From the human side of the exchange?"
"Yes. I'm—" You gave your name, your institution, your field. The standard introduction you had delivered a hundred times since arriving. It felt thin in your mouth, inadequate, like presenting a visiting card to a cathedral.
He considered you for a long moment. His eyes moved over your face with the unhurried thoroughness of someone reading a map—tracing the geography of your features, charting the rivers and ridges, marking the places where the terrain might prove difficult.
Then he smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes, and the reaching was worse than the distance had been.
"I am Lilia," he said. "Just Lilia. No title, no surname, no grand declarations. A humble old fae who happens to be old enough to remember when General Vourneis was still wet behind the ears and crying for his mother." A wink. "I would be delighted to help you with your translation, if you'll have me."
There was a choice embedded in that sentence. You sensed it the way one senses a root beneath the soil—something hidden, something that could trip you if you weren't careful. But the translation had been fighting you for an hour, and his knowledge was clearly genuine, and you were, above all things, a scholar. Curiosity had always been your gravity, your orbit, the axis around which your life turned.
You pulled out the chair beside you.
"Please," you said.
Lilia sat.
And the thread wound once around your wrist.
The days that followed arranged themselves like flowers in a vase—beautiful, seemingly natural, and entirely the product of a careful hand.
Lilia appeared everywhere. In the mornings, when you took your coffee in the east garden, he would happen by with some excuse about watering the moonpetals. In the afternoons, when you worked in the archives, he would materialize between the stacks with a book you needed or a clarification you hadn't known you required. In the evenings, when the sky bruised purple and the candles in the library began their nightly whisper, he was already there, perched on the edge of the table like a gargoyle carved by a sculptor with a sense of humor, ready to walk you back to your quarters before the forest-things began their prowling.
He told you stories.
Not the sanitized fae tales in your textbooks—those bloodless morality plays with their clean lessons and tidy endings. Lilia told you the real ones. He told you about the Siege of Blackthorn Keep, where the fae defenders ate their own horses and sang death-songs to the children so they wouldn't cry and give away their position. He told you about the Truce of Ashes, when the fae and human generals met in a burned-out chapel and signed the peace accord in their own blood, mixing it in a single cup and drinking together like wedding guests. He told you about the lullabies mothers sang in the border villages, the ones with the hidden verses that mapped escape routes through the forest.
And you wrote it all down. Of course you did. You were a researcher. This was gold—the pure, unrefined ore of primary source testimony, and you were selfish enough, hungry enough, to reach for it without asking what it would cost.
"Tell me about the cavalry formations," you said one evening, your pen flying across the page. "The Silver Ride—I've seen references to it in three different texts but no one explains what it actually was."
Lilia was quiet for a moment. The candlelight caught his face at an angle that deepened the shadows beneath his eyes, and for a single breath you saw something in his expression that was older than the stones around you—something flayed and raw and patient in the way that only things which have survived unimaginable pain can be patient.
Then the moment passed, and he was Lilia again, your Lilia, the cheerful fae with the terrible cooking and the wonderful stories.
"The Silver Ride," he said, and his voice had dropped into a register you had not heard before, a low thrumming like a plucked string on an instrument tuned to a frequency below hearing, "was a formation of three hundred mounted fae who rode into the Battle of Hollowmere knowing they would not ride out. They wore silver armor—not for protection, but so their own people could watch them die. So the generals could see exactly when the line broke, exactly how many seconds three hundred lives could buy."
Your pen stopped. "That's—"
"Horrifying?" He smiled, and the smile was the knife-edge of something vast and cold and unimaginably old. "Yes. It was also necessary. Three hundred riders bought four hours. Four hours evacuated a city of twelve thousand. The math is simple, you see. Even a child can do it." He paused. "I was the child who did it."
The silence that followed was not empty. It was full—swollen with the weight of centuries, with the ghosts of three hundred riders in silver armor whose faces he had memorized, whose names he had never forgotten, whose deaths he had calculated like a musician calculating the intervals between notes.
You reached across the table and touched his hand.
He looked at your fingers on his skin as though you had placed a coal there. Not with pain. With wonder. With the bewildered, trembling awe of a creature that has lived in darkness so long it has forgotten that light can be warm.
"Thank you for telling me," you said.
His hand turned beneath yours and closed around your fingers. His grip was cool and dry and gentle.
"Thank you for listening," he said.
And the thread wound twice more.
He gave you things.
A pot of tea from the eastern valleys that tasted of smoke and honey and could not be purchased anywhere in the human world. A slim volume of fae poetry printed on paper so thin it seemed held together by intention rather than fiber. A flower you did not recognize—its petals black at the edges and pale as bone at the center, blooming only between midnight and dawn, fragrant with something that made your thoughts soft and slow.
"From my garden," he said, placing it on your windowsill. "It is called evening-heart. It only opens for those it trusts."
"Flowers can trust?"
"In Briar Valley, everything can trust. And everything can choose not to." He touched one of the dark petals with a fingertip, and the flower leaned toward him like a worshipper toward an altar. "This one likes you. I thought you might like it back."
Each gift was small. Each gift was perfect. Each gift was a knot in a net you did not yet feel.
You noticed the wrongness in fragments. A shattered mirror reassembling itself in your peripheral vision—each shard reflecting something slightly different, slightly off, but gone before you could focus on it.
He knew things. That was the first shard.
You had mentioned, once, in passing, to no one in particular, that you missed the sound of rain on a tin roof—a sound from your childhood home that had followed you into sleeplessness. Two days later, Lilia invited you to his rooms, and there was a small enchanted device on his desk that produced exactly that sound. "A curiosity I picked up somewhere," he said. "I thought you might find it soothing."
You had never told him. You were certain. You combed your memory, turned it inside out, shook it by the edges. You had not told a soul.
He was there. That was the second shard.
In places he should not have been, at times you had not mentioned, in moments you believed yourself alone. You would turn a corner in the library and he would already be there, book in hand, as though he had been waiting for the specific geometry of that encounter—the angle of your body, the light through that particular window, the expression on your face when you saw him.
"Are you following me?" you asked once, half-joking, the question wearing a smile like a mask.
He laughed. "My dear, if I were following you, you would never notice." And then, softer, with something behind his eyes that made your stomach tighten: "I simply enjoy your company. Is that so terrible?"
Other fae gave him room. That was the third shard.
When you walked through the corridors of Diasomnia together, the other students parted around Lilia like water around a stone. Not with the casual deference offered to a vice-dorm leader— with something sharper, more instinctive. Sebek would fall silent mid-sentence when Lilia approached. Silver would watch his father with a careful, measured affection that suggested love tempered by long experience of something unnameable. Even Malleus Draconia, the prince of Briar Valley, the fae whose name was spoken in whispers even among his own kind, regarded Lilia with an expression that hovered between fondness and wariness.
"He is dangerous," Malleus told you once, when you asked about Lilia's history. The crown prince of the fae said it simply, without drama, the way one says water is wet or fire burns. "He has always been dangerous. The kindness is real. Do not mistake that. But it is a kindness that has survived things which would have burned it out of a lesser being, and what remains is—" He paused, choosing his words with the precision of a surgeon. "—more complex than it appears."
You should have listened.
You should have taken that warning and held it against your chest like a shield and walked away from Lilia Vanrouge and never looked back.
Instead, you wrote it in your journal—Malleus says Lilia is dangerous. More complex than he appears. Must interview further.—and turned the page and continued your research and let the thread wind tighter and tighter and tighter.
The evening he finally told you his name—his full name, his title, the weight of seven hundred years of history pressed into a single introduction—you stood in his room, surrounded by his things, and felt the floor tilt beneath you.
General Lilia Vanrouge. The Blood-soaked General. The Right Hand of the Draconia Throne. The fae who had won three wars, survived four, and raised the most powerful mage of the current age. The creature whose name was carved into the foundation stones of Briar Valley's peace, written in the blood of his enemies, spoken in the lullabies of his allies.
You had been sharing meals with a warlord. Walking to your quarters with a tactician who had designed the deaths of thousands. Laughing with a monster who had worn the face of a grandfather so convincingly that you had shown him your research notes without a second thought.
"Why didn't you tell me?" The question came out raw, scraped from somewhere deep.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed, hands folded in his lap, watching you with an expression you could not decode. "Would you have treated me the same if I had?" He tilted his head—that same birdlike motion, that same assessment. "Would you have shared your tea and your thoughts and your translations and your time with a monster?"
"You're not—"
"I am, though." Simple, unadorned, delivered without self-pity or performance. "I am exactly that. I have killed more people than you have met. I have ordered deaths the way a conductor orders symphonies—with precision, with art, and without losing a moment's sleep over the notes that must be sacrificed for the music to work."
He rose. He moved toward you with the fluid economy of a creature who had learned to walk silently before your species had learned to write, and stopped at a distance that was precisely calculated—close enough for intimacy, far enough for safety. A distance that said I know exactly where the line is and I am standing on my side of it for now.
"I wanted you to see me before you saw the title," he said. "I wanted—" A pause. In it, you heard something break, or bend, or come apart at a seam that had been holding for centuries. "I wanted someone to look at me and see something other than the General. Just once. Before—"
He did not finish.
You realized, in that moment, that Lilia Vanrouge was lonely in a way that transcended the word. You had studied loneliness—you had written papers on the isolation of immigrant communities, the dislocation of refugees, the quiet epidemic of solitude in modern cities. But this was different. This was the loneliness of a being who had watched every face he loved turn to dust, every hand he held grow thin and cold, every voice that called his name fall silent. This was the loneliness of a creature who had survived not through strength but through the sheer, grinding, mechanical persistence of a body that refused to die, and who had been forced to carry the weight of every loss as though it were a stone placed carefully in his chest, one by one, century by century, until the weight was all he knew.
You reached for him.
It was instinct—the same instinct that made you touch his hand after the story about the Silver Ride, the same instinct that had been building in you for weeks like a tide rising toward a shore. You reached for him, and he let you, and his arms came around you, and his face pressed into your hair, and his breath caught in his throat like a bird in a cage.
Inhale.
You felt it. The deliberate drawing-in of your scent, the way a drowning man drinks air after breaking the surface. His arms tightened—just slightly, just enough, a grip that wanted to be fierce and was holding itself to gentle by threads you could not see.
"You're shaking," you whispered.
"I know." Muffled against your hair. Thick and rough and scraped raw. "I know. Give me a moment. Just a moment."
He held you until the shaking stopped.
When he pulled back, his smile was in place again—bright and warm and full of the easy charm that made you forget the things you should have remembered. But his eyes were wet, and the wetness was real, and you filed it away with all the other fragments of wrongness you had been collecting, and you told yourself it was evidence of his humanity, his capacity for tenderness, his essential goodness.
You did not yet understand that it was evidence of his hunger.
The first time he came to your room at night, he brought a manuscript.
You were still awake—sleep had become a fickle companion since arriving at NRC, skittish and easily startled by the sounds the castle made after dark—and the tap at your window was gentle enough that you might have imagined it. But you looked, and there he was, perched on the windowsill like a roosting owl, the moonlight turning his hair into a cascade of dark silk, a leather-bound folder in his hands.
"I found something I thought you'd want to see," he said, climbing through the opening with a grace that made the motion seem like flight rather than entry. "The Marenthia Codex. Your research mentioned you'd been searching for it."
He was right. You had been. The Codex was one of the rarest texts on fae military history in existence—only three copies known to survive, all in private collections, all inaccessible to human scholars. You had written to four archivists and received four rejections, each more politely dismissive than the last.
"How did you—" You took the folder from him, opened it, and felt your breath leave you in a single rush. The real thing. Hand-lettered, illuminated, the ink still faintly luminescent after centuries. "Lilia. This is—this is priceless. I can't possibly—"
"You can. You will." He was already moving through your room, touching things—a book on the desk, the edge of your pillow, the evening-heart flower on the windowsill, which leaned toward him as it always did. "It's a copy, of course. I wouldn't risk the original. But it's an accurate one. I made it myself, two hundred years ago, when I was recovering from a rather nasty curse and needed something to do with my hands."
He paused at your desk, and his fingers lingered on your research journal. You watched him touch it—stroke the spine once, gently, the way one touches a sleeping child's forehead—and a small cold thing turned in your stomach.
"Lilia."
"Hm?" He turned, and the moonlight caught his face, and for a moment he looked ancient—the weight of his years pressing through the youthful mask like water through a cracked dam.
"The manuscript," you said. "Why bring it now? It's the middle of the night."
"Because you're awake." As if this were obvious. As if the answer were simple. As if the fact that you were awake at two in the morning were sufficient reason for a seven-hundred-year-old fae general to climb through your window bearing irreplaceable historical documents. "And because I wanted to see you."
The cold thing in your stomach grew teeth.
You should have asked him to leave. You should have noticed that the room felt smaller with him in it—not physically, but in the way the air seemed to compress around his presence, in the way the shadows bent toward him like plants toward light. You should have observed that he had been in your room for less than five minutes and already the space had rearranged itself around him, your belongings orbiting his gravity like moons around a planet.
Instead, you sat on your bed with the Codex in your lap and asked him about the Marenthia campaign, and he told you, and the hours unspooled like thread from a spindle, and when he finally left—pressing a kiss to your forehead that burned like a brand and lingered like smoke—you realized that the chair beside your bed had been moved closer.
Not by much. Three inches, perhaps. Four.
You told yourself you had imagined it.
You went to sleep with your journal beneath your pillow and your grandmother's silver ring pressed against your chest, and you dreamed of a garden with no gate, and a gardener with red eyes and gentle hands, and flowers that opened only for him.
He cooked for you.
This was presented as a joke—a comedy, a bit—his disastrous culinary exploits the stuff of Diasomnia legend. The first time he made you dinner, you watched him burn water (somehow) and reduce a perfectly good cut of meat to something that resembled the aftermath of a siege, and you laughed until your ribs ached, and he laughed too, his high crystalline giggle filling the kitchen like music.
But you were a researcher. You observed. You catalogued. You noticed.
You noticed that his knife work was flawless—the precise, economical cuts of a being who had field-dressed wounds on a battlefield, who had carved shelter from wood and bone in the wilds of Briar Valley, who had survived for centuries on the kind of knowledge that separates the living from the dead. You noticed that when he reached for ingredients, his hands moved with a certainty that belied the chaos that followed. You noticed that the "accidents" were too convenient, too perfectly timed, too precisely calibrated to produce maximum endearing mess without ever actually hurting anyone.
You noticed because you were paying attention, and you were paying attention because something in you had already begun to understand that Lilia Vanrouge was a text written in invisible ink, and you needed only the right light to read him.
The right light came at three in the morning on a Thursday.
You could not sleep. The insomnia had worsened—your dreams had grown strange, crowded with images that dissolved when you tried to grasp them, leaving only the impression of red eyes and an ancient melody you could not quite recall. You padded to the kitchen for water, the stone floors cold beneath your bare feet, the castle silent in that particular way that meant the nocturnal enchantments were dormant.
And there he was.
Lilia stood at the counter, and he was cooking.
Not the performance. Not the comedy. The real thing.
His hands moved with the precision of a surgeon and the economy of a soldier—each motion purposeful, each ingredient measured to the grain, each adjustment to the heat instantaneous and exact. The dish before him was something complex, something layered, something that required technique you had seen in professional kitchens and nowhere else. He was humming—that same melody you had been dreaming, low and old and winding—and his face in the moonlight was not the face of the grandfather who told funny stories and burned toast.
It was the face of the General. Attentive, calculating, in control. A face that had coordinated the movements of armies and the deaths of thousands and the survival of nations. A face that had learned, over centuries, that precision was the difference between victory and annihilation.
He looked up and saw you in the doorway, and for one terrible instant his expression did not change.
The General looked at you. Red eyes, flat and assessing, weighing and measuring and calculating something you could not name. The humming stopped. The hands stilled. The silence was absolute.
Then the mask descended like a curtain falling at the end of an act.
"Ah!" He grinned, and it was the Lilia you knew—bright, embarrassed, silly. "You caught me! Don't look, don't look—this is a complete disaster, an absolute catastrophe—"
"Lilia."
"You should be asleep, my dear! A researcher needs her rest, you know. The brain does its best cataloging during—"
"Lilia. You're cooking."
The grin faltered. Just a fraction. Just enough. "I'm making a mess is what I'm making. You know how I am in the kitchen—"
"You're good at it."
Silence.
The moonlight was merciless. It showed you the exact moment when the calculation behind his eyes shifted—when he weighed the cost of maintaining the lie against the benefit of revealing the truth, when the General's tactical mind processed the variables and produced a decision.
He turned off the heat. Set down the spoon. Faced you with his hands folded behind his back and his chin lifted and an expression of such careful neutrality that it was more revealing than any emotion could have been.
"Yes," he said. "I am."
"You've always been good at it."
"Yes."
"The disasters—"
"Are deliberate." He said it without apology, without embarrassment, with the flat certainty of a statement that needed no justification. "People expect a certain kind of creature when they look at me. The kindly old fae. The doting guardian. The harmless grandfather with the funny stories and the burnt dinners. That creature is safe. That creature is loved." A pause. "That creature is not the one who walks onto battlefields."
"Why show me this?"
The question hung in the air between you, and Lilia regarded it as though it were a riddle with no correct answer—a door that opened onto a cliff, a path that led somewhere he had not yet decided to go.
"Because you see," he said finally. Quietly. With the weight of a confession that had been pressing against his teeth for longer than you had been alive. "You observe and you catalog and you notice the things I work very hard to conceal, and I find that—" Another pause. Longer this time. The sound of something ancient and patient deciding whether to trust. "I find that I do not mind being seen by you."
He reached for your hand. You let him take it. His fingers were warm—warmer than they should have been, warmer than they had ever been—and when he raised your knuckles to his lips, the kiss was slow and deliberate and lingered like a question.
"Go back to bed," he murmured against your skin. "I'll bring you something proper to eat in the morning. Something I haven't pretended to ruin."
You went. You lay in the dark with your hand pressed against your mouth where the ghost of his lips still burned, and you thought: I should be afraid.
But you weren't. Not yet.
That was the cruelest part. That was the trap. Not the lying, not the manipulation, not the careful architecture of a personality designed to disarm—but the fact that when he dropped the mask, what was beneath was not a monster but a person, lonely and ancient and achingly real, and every instinct you had screamed at you to reach for him rather than away.
You reached.
You always reached.
And the thread wound tighter.
The girl from the botanical research division was named Elara, and she was kind.
You met her in the greenhouse—she was cataloging growth patterns of indigenous magical flora, you were researching the historical use of certain plants in fae military rituals, and the overlap in your interests produced a friendship that unfolded naturally and without calculation. She was human, like you. She understood the dislocation of existing in a world not designed for your species, the constant low-grade friction of being perpetually out of step with the environment. She brought you tea and asked about your work and laughed at your jokes and did not look at you the way Lilia did—as though you were a text to be decoded, a puzzle to be solved, a flower to be cultivated.
She looked at you the way people look at people. Equal. Uncomplicated. Free.
You began having lunch with Elara on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You began looking forward to it with an eagerness that surprised you—the simple pleasure of conversation without subtext, connection without calculation, presence without the sense of standing at the edge of something vast and incomprehensible and hungry.
Lilia noticed immediately.
You knew he noticed because he said nothing about it. The silence was the signal. He asked about your work, your research, your sleep, your meals, your dreams—but never about Elara, never about your Tuesday and Thursday lunches, never about the new warmth in your voice when you mentioned the greenhouse. He simply... omitted. As though she did not exist. As though the space she occupied in your life were blank and empty and waiting to be filled by something else.
Three weeks after you met Elara, she was gone.
Transferred. A family emergency, the official notice said. A situation requiring her immediate return to her home institution. She had left a message for you—short, apologetic, oddly vague—and then she was simply absent, like a book removed from a shelf, leaving only the outline of where she had been.
You stood in the greenhouse where you usually met, alone among the plants, and you reread her message for the fifth time, and something cold and formless moved in the water of your thoughts.
"How strange," Lilia said from behind you. He had appeared without sound—a habit you had stopped finding unsettling, which was itself unsettling. "I heard about your friend. A family emergency, how dreadful. I do hope she's all right."
"Yes," you said. "How strange."
"You must miss her." He moved to stand beside you, and his presence was warm and solid and achingly familiar, and you hated the part of you that was grateful for it. "But perhaps it's for the best? Now we have more time for our research~"
You turned to look at him.
He was smiling. The warm, bright, cheerful smile that had disarmed you from the first evening in the library. But his eyes—his eyes were still, like the surface of water that runs very deep and very cold, and in them you saw something that you would not have a name for until much later.
Satisfaction.
The satisfaction of a gardener who has removed a weed.
You wrote it all down.
Every detail, every fragment, every wrongness. Your research journal became less a scholarly document and more a record of survival—though you would not have used that word, not yet, not for months. You wrote about Elara's absence and Lilia's silence and the way the other students gave him room and the way he knew things you never told him and the way he moved through your space like water filling a container, assuming its shape, making it his.
You wrote: Something is wrong. I cannot say what. I cannot name it. But it is there, in the space between his smile and his eyes, in the fraction of a second before his mask descends, in the way he says "my dear" like a prayer and a claim and a warning all at once.
You wrote: I am afraid. I am not afraid of him. I am afraid of how much I want to not be afraid of him.
You wrote: He was in my room again. I did not invite him. I did not unlock the window. He was simply there, sitting in the chair beside my bed—closer now, always closer—watching me sleep. When I woke, he said he was concerned about my nightmares. I don't remember telling him about the nightmares.
You wrote these things, and then you closed the journal, and you placed it beneath your pillow, and you lay in the dark and listened to the sound of the castle breathing and wondered why the evening-heart flower on your windowsill had begun to bloom during the day.
The next morning, Lilia referenced something you had only written in your journal.
It was subtle—a turn of phrase, an observation about your sleeping habits that you had documented in private ink, a comment about your feelings that you had confessed only to paper. He said it casually, laughingly, as though you had told him yourself, and when you stared at him with the cold thing in your stomach blooming into something sharp and bright, he tilted his head and smiled.
"You must have mentioned it," he said. "Your memory must be playing tricks, my dear. You've been so tired lately—so much research, so little rest. Perhaps you should let me help you sleep better. I know several techniques that work wonders~"
"I didn't tell you," you said. "I know I didn't."
The smile did not waver. The red eyes held yours, and in their depths you saw the General looking back at you—not the kindly old fae, not the clumsy cook, not the charming storyteller. The General. Patient. Calculating. Certain of the outcome before the battle had begun.
"Then I suppose I must have guessed," he said. "I am very good at guessing, when it comes to you."
He reached out and adjusted the collar of your shirt—a small, intimate gesture, the kind of motion that should have been casual but was not, because his fingers lingered at the hollow of your throat and his touch was feather-light and impossibly warm and you felt your pulse beating against his hand like a bird against glass.
"Better," he said softly. "There. Now you look proper."
He withdrew, and the absence of his touch was its own kind of wound, and you stood very still and did not move until he had left the room, and then you sat on your bed and pressed your hand over your heart and tried to remember how to breathe.
You started sleeping with your journal inside your pillowcase.
You started sleeping with your grandmother's silver ring on every finger.
You started sleeping with the door locked and the window latched and a line of salt across the threshold—an old folk remedy from your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother that you had always dismissed as superstition and now clung to like a life raft.
None of it mattered.
Lilia came and went as he pleased. The locks did not hold—though they showed no signs of tampering, they simply did not engage when he was near. The salt remained undisturbed, but you woke in the morning to find the evening-heart flower had been moved from the windowsill to your bedside table, its petals brushing your sleeping hand. The journal remained in your pillowcase, but the entries you wrote about him began to feel like letters to someone who was already reading them.
You were being hunted. You understood this in the way a mouse understands the owl—not with logic, not with evidence, but with the deep and primal certainty of prey that has felt the shadow pass overhead.
But you could not run. You could not hide. And the most terrifying part, the part that made you sick with shame and confusion and a desire you could not name, was that some small and secret part of you did not want to.
The gathering was a Diasomnia affair—some celebration or another, the details lost in the blur of candlelight and music and the low thrum of fae voices raised in harmony. You attended because Lilia asked you to, and you wore the dress he had selected (a gift, delivered to your room without a card, in exactly your size, in a shade of green that matched the tiles of his garden), and you smiled when he introduced you to the other guests, and you felt the weight of his hand at the small of your back like a brand.
A fae from another dorm—you did not catch his name—found you by the refreshment table. He was tall and silver-haired and his smile was easy and uncomplicated, and he asked about your research with genuine interest, and he laughed at your jokes, and for a moment you felt the tension in your shoulders ease.
"You're the human scholar, aren't you?" He leaned against the table, his posture open and friendly. "I've heard about your work. The fae military history project—it's fascinating. We don't get many human researchers who actually listen."
"Listening is my job," you said, and he laughed again, and the sound was warm and ordinary and safe.
His hand brushed yours as he reached for a glass of wine. A casual touch. An accident. The kind of thing that happens at parties between people who are enjoying each other's company.
Lilia appeared between you.
He did not walk. He did not hurry. He was simply there, as though the space had folded to bring him to you, and his body was positioned with the precise geometry of a shield—between you and the silver-haired fae, between you and the door, between you and every exit in the room.
"Having a nice conversation?" he asked. His voice was light. His smile was bright. His eyes were red and still and absolutely without warmth.
The silver-haired fae went pale. You watched the color drain from his face in a single wave—the blood retreating like an army abandoning a siege—and his easy posture collapsed into something rigid and careful and very, very small.
"Lord Vanrouge," he said. "I didn't—I was just—"
"I can see that." Lilia's hand found your elbow, and his grip was gentle, so gentle, but underneath the gentleness was a pressure that said I could break you and I will never let you go and mine. "I believe I was about to introduce my dear companion to the visiting dignitaries. If you'll excuse us."
It was not a request.
The fae vanished. You did not see him leave—simply one moment he was there, and the next he was not, and the space where he had stood was cold and empty and ringing with the aftershock of a terror so intense it had become atmospheric.
Lilia turned to you. His smile was still in place, but his hand was trembling—fine vibrations running through his fingers where they gripped your elbow, and you realized with a shock that the trembling was not fear but its mirror image. The effort of holding back. The strain of a leash pulled taut against a force that wanted, with seven hundred years of accumulated hunger, to unleash.
"Lilia." Your voice came out steady, which surprised you. "What did you just do?"
"I introduced myself," he said. "That's all. Just a friendly conversation between old acquaintances~"
"He was terrified."
"Was he? How odd." He released your elbow and folded his hands behind his back, and the trembling stopped, and his smile widened, and you were suddenly and completely certain that you were standing next to a creature who had once turned a battlefield into a mass grave and had felt nothing but satisfaction at the efficiency of it.
"Come," he said, offering his arm. "The dignitaries are waiting. And you look so lovely tonight—it would be a shame to waste it."
You took his arm.
You do not know why you took his arm. You will spend years—not months, not weeks, but years—turning that moment over in your mind, trying to find the point where choice became compulsion, where free will dissolved into something murkier and more desperate. You will never find it. The line was not a line. It was a gradient, and you had been walking along it since the first evening in the library, and the ground beneath your feet had been tilting so gradually that you had never noticed the descent.
You took his arm, and he led you into the crowd, and his hand covered yours where it rested in the crook of his elbow, and his thumb stroked your knuckles in slow, deliberate circles, and you felt the thread wind so tight that it cut, and the cutting felt like love, and the love felt like drowning, and the drowning felt like coming home.
The night you tried to leave, he was waiting at the gate.
Not because you feared the light—you feared what the light might reveal, the shape of your own hands folding shirts, the expression on your own face in the mirror, the undeniable evidence that you were choosing to flee. Darkness made it simpler. Darkness made it survival rather than surrender. In the dark, you could pretend you were the same woman who had arrived at Night Raven College months ago with a research grant and a suitcase full of ambition and a heartbeat that belonged entirely to yourself.
The suitcase was lighter than you expected. You had accumulated so little that was truly yours. The clothes Lilia had given you hung in the closet like questions—each one tailored to your body with an accuracy that suggested measurement without permission, each one in colors he had chosen, each one smelling faintly of the night-blooming flowers from his garden. You left them. You took only what you had brought: your research notes, your journal, your grandmother's silver ring, and the stubborn, burning, furious conviction that you were still capable of walking away.
The corridors of Diasomnia were empty at this hour. You had timed your departure with the care of a general planning a retreat—which routes were monitored, which doors locked automatically, which shadows belonged to the architecture and which belonged to something older and less forgiving. You had spent three days watching. Three days mapping. Three days pretending to smile while you memorized the rhythm of the night patrol and the location of every exit and the particular quality of silence that meant you were alone.
You made it to the main gate without incident.
And there he was.
Lilia Vanrouge leaned against the stone archway with the loose-limbed ease of someone who had been waiting for hours and found the waiting pleasant. The moon hung fat and orange above the Spire, and its light turned his hair to a dark waterfall and his eyes to twin coals and his smile to something that belonged in a fairy tale—the original kind, the kind with teeth.
"Going somewhere?"
The question was soft. Almost playful. It floated through the night air like a leaf on still water, and beneath its surface you felt the current—the pull of something vast and cold and patient that had been flowing toward this moment since before you were born.
"I'm leaving." Your voice did not shake. You were proud of that. You would be proud of very little by the end of this night. "I have to leave."
"Do you?" He tilted his head. The gesture was familiar—the same birdlike assessment you had come to know, the same curious angle—but its meaning had shifted. It was no longer a creature examining something it had found. It was a creature examining something it had kept, trying to understand why the kept thing was struggling. "And where will you go, my dear? Back to your institution? Your colleagues? Your empty apartment and your empty life and your empty, empty research?"
Each word landed like a stone in still water, sending ripples through the silence. You felt them in your chest—in the space where confidence should have been, where certainty should have lived, where the conviction that you could escape had been building all day and was now, suddenly and terribly, beginning to crack.
"That's my business."
"Is it?" He straightened from the wall, and the motion was unhurried, almost lazy, and in its lack of urgency was the most frightening thing you had ever seen. He was not worried. He was not afraid. He was not uncertain of the outcome. He was simply rising, the way the sun rises—inevitable, indifferent to anyone's desire for night to continue.
"Let me pass, Lilia."
"No."
The word was quiet. Gentle, even. Spoken the way one speaks to a child who wants to run into the road—patient and firm and laced with the absolute certainty of someone who knows better.
"If you walk through that gate," he continued, and his voice dropped into the register you had heard only once before—the voice of the General, the voice of battlefields and body counts and decisions that had reshaped nations—"you will die within the week. Not by my hand. I would never." He said this with such tenderness that your eyes burned. "But there are things in that forest—things I have lived alongside for seven centuries, things that know my name and fear it—that will destroy you. The moment you step beyond my protection, you become prey. And I have—" A pause. A breath. A fracture in the composure so thin you would have missed it if you hadn't been watching his mouth. "I have made certain they know you are unprotected."
The cold that moved through you then was not the cold of the autumn night. It was the cold of understanding—the cold of a door closing, of a key turning, of a wall where there had been a window.
"You arranged this."
"I arranged nothing." His hand found your face. The touch was feather-light, impossibly gentle, his palm cupping your cheek like something precious and fragile and breakable. His thumb traced the line of your jaw. His eyes held yours, and in their red depths you saw centuries of loss and centuries of hunger and centuries of a loneliness so immense it had collapsed in on itself and become something gravitational, something that pulled everything toward its center and refused to let go.
"I simply told the truth. I told the forest what you are. A human. Alone. Unclaimed." His voice was a whisper now, his forehead almost touching yours, his breath warm against your lips. "The forest knows what to do with humans who wander without a fae's protection. I have seen it before. I have watched it before. I have held the remains of humans who thought they could walk where they were not wanted and I have—" His voice cracked. Actually cracked, like ice over deep water, and beneath the crack was something that sounded like grief. "I will not hold yours. I refuse."
"You're threatening me."
"I am begging you." The words came out raw, unmade, stripped of every mask and every performance and every carefully constructed layer of charm. His hand trembled against your face. His eyes were wet. He looked, in that moment, like what he was—not a general, not a guardian, not a grandfather, but a creature that had been alone for so long that the thought of being alone again had driven it to the edge of something irreversible. "Stay. Please. I will give you everything—I will be everything—I will spend every remaining century of my existence making certain you never regret it. Just—"
His voice broke.
"—don't leave me."
You stood at the gate with your suitcase in your hand and his tears on your face and the moon hanging orange and terrible above you, and you understood that this was not a choice. It had never been a choice. The moment you turned that first page in the library, the moment you pulled out that chair and said please, the moment you reached for him after the story about the Silver Ride—you had been walking toward this gate your entire life, and the gate was closed, and the key was in his hand, and his hand was on your face, and his tears were real.
Every part of it was real.
That was the horror. That was the heart of it. His love was not a performance. His loneliness was not a manipulation. His grief at the thought of losing you was as genuine as the stars above you—ancient and burning and impossibly, punishingly vast. He was not lying. He was not pretending. He was simply a being who had survived so much that survival had become the only language he knew, and in that language, love and possession were the same word.
You dropped the suitcase.
It landed on the stone with a sound like a closing door, and you felt the click in your chest—in the place where resistance had lived, where the conviction that you could escape had been burning—and the flame went out.
"Okay," you whispered.
Lilia's arms came around you, and he held you the way the ocean holds a ship—completely, overwhelmingly, with the absolute certainty that what it holds will never be free of it. His face pressed into your hair, and you felt him inhale—deep and shuddering and hungry—and his body shook with the force of something that might have been relief or might have been triumph or might have been the terrible, beautiful, devastating weight of getting what you want after centuries of wanting nothing.
"Thank you," he breathed against your temple. "Thank you. Thank you. I will make you happy. I swear it. I will make you so happy you will never think of that gate again."
Over his shoulder, you looked at the forest.
The trees moved. Just slightly. Just enough. A rustle that was not wind, a shadow that was not shadow, a presence in the dark between the trunks that watched you with eyes you could not see and waited with a patience that had been promised by the creature currently holding you like a prayer answered.
You closed your eyes.
The gate disappeared behind you as Lilia led you back into the castle, and the thread wound tight enough to cut, and the cutting felt like surrender, and the surrender felt like silence, and the silence was the sound of a cage closing around a life.
You did not sleep that night.
You lay in your bed—your bed in your room in Diasomnia, though both adjectives felt provisional now—and stared at the ceiling and listened to the sound of your own breathing and tried to locate the exact moment when the floor had tilted beneath you. You could not find it. The gradient had been too smooth, the descent too gradual, and every step had felt like level ground until you looked up and realized you were at the bottom of something with no stairs and no ladder and no voice to call up to the world above.
The evening-heart flower on your bedside table bloomed.
It bloomed in the dark—in the absolute absence of light—and its petals unfurled with a soft, wet sound, and its fragrance filled the room, and the fragrance was the same as Lilia's breath when he had held you at the gate, and you understood that the flower had never been a gift. It was a monitor. A sentinel. A living thing that reported to its master whether you were sleeping or waking, peaceful or afraid, present or absent.
You picked it up.
You considered throwing it against the wall. Considered crushing it beneath your heel. Considered the small, petty satisfaction of destroying something he had grown in his garden, something that leaned toward him like a worshipper, something that belonged to him in the way he believed you belonged to him.
You set it back down.
You could not do it. That was the most humiliating part. You could not bring yourself to destroy the flower because destroying it would mean admitting what it was, and admitting what it was would mean admitting what you were, and what you were was a woman who had dropped her suitcase at the gate and walked back into the castle with the creature who had built the cage around her.
You were a prisoner who had locked the door from the inside.
You wrote in your journal. The words came out jagged and raw, the handwriting of someone who was holding the pen too tightly and breathing too fast:
I tried to leave. He was waiting. He said the forest would kill me. He said he had made sure of it. He cried. His tears were real. His love is real. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. I don't know if there's a difference anymore between being kept and being loved. I don't know if I want there to be.
You closed the journal. Slid it under the pillow. Lay in the dark and listened to the flower breathing.
In the morning, Lilia brought you breakfast.
He entered your room without knocking—without needing to, the lock turning of its own accord as he approached, the door swinging open at his touch like a subject bowing to its king. He carried a tray with your favorite foods, prepared with the skill he had stopped pretending he didn't possess, and he set it on your bedside table with a tenderness that made your chest ache, and he sat on the edge of your bed and stroked the hair back from your forehead and smiled at you with an expression of such uncomplicated joy that you could almost forget the gate and the forest and the trembling in his voice when he said don't leave me.
"How did you sleep?" he asked.
You looked at him. At his small, clever hands, at his ancient, knowing eyes, at the curve of his mouth that could be a smile or a blade depending on its angle. You looked at him and you saw the General and the guardian and the monster and the lonely, lonely creature who had held you like a drowning man holds driftwood, and you felt the terrifying, shapeless, inadmissible thing in your chest that was not fear and was not anger and was not love but was some fourth thing for which no word existed in any language you knew.
"Fine," you said. "I slept fine."
He knew you were lying. You could see it in his eyes—the flicker of something that was not quite amusement and not quite disappointment and not quite satisfaction but some alloy of all three. He knew, and he did not press, and the not-pressing was its own kind of victory, because it meant he was confident enough in the structure of the cage that he did not need to check every bar.
He leaned down and kissed your forehead. His lips lingered. His breath stirred your hair. His hand rested on the curve of your shoulder with a weight that said here and stay and mine.
"Eat," he murmured. "You'll need your strength. I have plans for us today."
He left. The door closed behind him. The lock clicked—not locking you in, you realized, but locking everything else out. The flower on the bedside table leaned toward the space where he had been, petals still warm from his proximity.
You ate. You ate because he had asked you to, and because the food was perfect, and because the alternative was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling and thinking about the gate, and you could not think about the gate without feeling the click in your chest, and you could not feel the click without acknowledging what it meant, and acknowledging what it meant was a door you could not open without falling through.
The cage was golden. That was the cruelest part. The bars were warm and the floor was soft and the keeper was kind, and the kindness was real, and the warmth was real, and every comfort was a thread that wound around your throat like a caress and tightened when you pulled away and loosened when you leaned in.
You leaned in. You had no other direction.
Weeks passed. Or months. The measurement of time had become unreliable—days blurring into each other like watercolors left in the rain, the boundaries between them softened by Lilia's presence and the steady, hypnotic rhythm of a life that had been reshaped around a single axis.
He read to you in the evenings. Books of poetry and history and philosophy, texts you could never have accessed on your own, stories from civilizations that had risen and fallen while your species was still learning to write its name. His voice was music—old music, modal and strange, pitched in frequencies that resonated in the hollow spaces between your ribs—and when he read, the world contracted to the size of the room, and there was nothing beyond the sound of his voice and the warmth of the fire and the weight of his gaze on your face.
He sang to you at night. Lullabies in languages that had died before the written record, songs that had been old when the stones of Briar Valley were still being quarried, melodies that wound through your dreams like smoke and left you waking with tears on your face and no memory of why.
He cooked for you—properly now, without the performance of incompetence—and each meal was a masterwork, each dish tailored to your preferences with an accuracy that should have been flattering and was instead another document in the case file of a woman being known too completely by a creature who had made a science of knowing.
He anticipated your needs before you voiced them. A blanket appeared over your shoulders the moment you felt a chill. A cup of tea materialized at your elbow the instant the thought of thirst crossed your mind. A book you had been wanting was placed on your nightstand the evening before you thought to ask for it, as though the desire had traveled from your mind to his through some channel you could not perceive.
It should have been suffocating. It was suffocating. But it was also—god help you—comfortable. The way a bed is comfortable when you have been walking for days. The way a fire is comfortable when you have been cold for years. The way a hand in yours is comfortable when you have been reaching into empty air for so long you had forgotten what contact felt like.
You were being digested. Slowly, gently, completely. Dissolved by the acid of a love so total and so consuming that it left no room for the person it loved. He was eating you, and the eating was warm, and you could feel yourself disappearing, and the disappearing felt like rest.
The man's name was Aldric, and he had been your thesis advisor.
He arrived at Night Raven College on a Wednesday—unexpected, unannounced, his presence at the gate explained by a letter of concern that had apparently crossed the desk of the headmage and been granted approval. You did not see him arrive. You did not know he was coming. You were in the garden with Lilia, listening to him describe the irrigation systems of ancient fae fortresses, when a message arrived via enchanted paper bird that a visitor was requesting your presence in the entrance hall.
Lilia's expression did not change.
That was the thing you noticed. The absence of reaction—the stillness that settled over his features like frost over a windowpane, the way the warmth in his eyes did not dim but simply focused, redirecting from you to the message to the implications of the message with the speed and precision of a war computer processing threat data.
"A visitor," he said. "How lovely. Shall we go together?"
You walked to the entrance hall with his hand on your lower back, guiding you through the corridors with the ease of someone steering a vessel through familiar waters, and when you saw Aldric standing in the doorway with his coat over his arm and his concerned, scholarly face turned toward you with the relief of a man who has found what he was looking for, you felt something crack in your chest—a seam reopening, a wound you had thought was healed splitting along its old lines.
"Thank god," Aldric said, and his voice was warm and ordinary and human, and the sound of it was like water in a desert. "I've been trying to reach you for weeks. Your letters stopped, your messages went unanswered—I thought something had happened. I had to see for myself."
"Nothing happened," you heard yourself say. "I'm fine. I've been busy with my research—"
"Too busy to answer a single message?" He stepped closer, and his eyes moved over your face with the searching concern of a man who had watched you grow from a nervous graduate student into a published scholar, who had read every draft of every paper you had ever written, who knew your silences and your evasions and the particular quality of your voice when you were hiding something. "You don't look fine. You look—"
"Who is this?" Lilia's voice cut through the reunion like a blade through silk. Not hostile. Not aggressive. Simply present—the way gravity is present, the way winter is present. An environmental condition rather than a social interaction.
Aldric turned. His eyes found Lilia—small, bright-eyed, smiling—and you watched the same process happen in reverse: the assessment, the sizing-up, the instinctive calculation of threat level that every human being performs when meeting someone new, running on subconscious algorithms that have kept the species alive for millennia.
You saw Aldric dismiss him. Saw the calculation return low threat based on Lilia's size, his cheerful demeanor, his harmless posture. Saw your advisor file Lilia under quirky local and turn his attention back to you.
"I'm taking you back," Aldric said. "Your fellowship is being reviewed. There are concerns about your well-being, your access to resources, the—" He lowered his voice. "The isolation. People have noticed that you've withdrawn. I've noticed."
"You can't—" You glanced at Lilia. His smile had not wavered. His eyes were fixed on Aldric with the steady, unblinking attention of a cat watching a bird through a window. "I'm not ready to leave yet. My research—"
"Can continue at home. I've arranged it." Aldric reached for your arm, and his grip was firm and familiar and safe, and you felt the pull of a world beyond the cage, and the pull was painful, like tearing a wound open to let the light reach the infection, and you wanted—
Lilia stepped between you.
The motion was fluid. Economical. A single shift of weight that placed his body in the exact position to obstruct Aldric's reach without making contact, without raising his voice, without any visible indication that the movement was intentional. He simply was there, in the space between you and the door, in the space between you and the world, in the space between you and every exit that had ever existed.
"I'm afraid that won't be possible," Lilia said. His voice was the voice of the General—not raised, not strained, carrying no inflection of threat or anger. It was the voice of a statement of fact. The voice of weather. The voice of death. "Her research is being conducted under the auspices of the Briar Valley cultural exchange, and her continued presence is required for the duration of the project. I'm sure you understand."
"I don't understand, actually." Aldric's voice had sharpened. The calculation was recalibrating—the low threat assessment being revised, the algorithms spinning faster, the ancient human instinct for danger beginning to prickle at the base of his skull. "And I don't believe you have the authority to—"
"I have every authority." Lilia tilted his head. The smile remained. The eyes remained fixed. The temperature in the room dropped by three degrees—not metaphorically, not imaginably, but literally, the air conditioning around the pulse of ancient magic that was beginning to seep from his skin like heat from a furnace. "I am General Lilia Vanrouge, vice-leader of Diasomnia, guardian of the Draconia heir, and I have been protecting things more valuable than you can imagine since before your great-grandparents learned to walk. This woman is under my protection. She is mine to protect."
The last sentence hung in the air like a blade suspended by a thread.
Aldric opened his mouth to respond, and Lilia raised his hand.
Just his hand. Palm out, fingers slightly spread, the gesture of a conductor preparing to bring down the baton. And in that gesture was contained seven hundred years of power—the accumulated might of a being who had reshaped the political landscape of an entire nation, who had commanded armies and toppled fortresses and made decisions that echoed through centuries, who was, in this moment, choosing to extend mercy rather than destruction, and wanted the recipient to understand exactly how much restraint that choice required.
"You will leave," Lilia said softly. "You will return to your institution, and you will file a report stating that your advisee is healthy and well and continuing her research as planned. You will not send messages. You will not arrange visits. You will not express concern. You will simply—"
His hand closed into a fist.
"—forget."
The magic moved through the room like a wave through water—visible, almost, a ripple in the fabric of the air that distorted the light and pressed against the eardrums and settled into Aldric's eyes with the weight of a command that was not a suggestion and could not be resisted.
Aldric's face went blank.
The animation drained from his features like color from a sunset—leaving behind a smooth, empty mask of neutrality, a face without a thought behind it, a mind that had been gently and precisely and irreversibly edited. He blinked. Once. Twice. His eyes found Lilia, and then they found you, and there was nothing in them. No recognition. No concern. No memory of a advisee he had traveled across an ocean to rescue.
"I—" Aldric shook his head. "I'm sorry, I seem to have—why am I in this hallway?"
"You were looking for the faculty offices," Lilia said, and his voice was warm and helpful and bright, and his smile was the smile of the kindly old fae who burned water and told funny stories, and the transition was so seamless that you could almost believe you had imagined the General. "They're down the corridor, third door on the left."
"Right. Yes. Thank you." Aldric nodded vaguely, his feet already carrying him toward the exit, his body moving through the motions of departure with the hollow automatism of a wind-up toy. "I don't know what I was—must be the travel. I'll just—"
He left.
He walked through the door and down the steps and out of the gate and out of your life, and he did not look back, and he did not remember your name, and the thread that had connected you to the world outside the cage was severed as cleanly and painlessly as a surgeon's cut.
The silence he left behind was absolute.
You stood in the entrance hall with Lilia's hand on your arm and the echo of a man's voice in your ears and the knowledge that you had just watched your last bridge burn, and the flames were warm, and the warmth was Lilia's, and his hand was gentle on your arm, and his voice was soft in your ear, and he was saying—
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't want you to see that."
You turned to face him.
He was crying.
The tears fell from his eyes without sound or ceremony, tracing silver lines down his cheeks, and his expression was not the mask of the General or the performance of the grandfather but something in between and beyond both—the face of a creature who had just done a terrible thing and felt the terribleness of it and could not undo it and could not stop himself from doing it again.
"He would have taken you from me," Lilia whispered. "I couldn't—I couldn't—"
His arms came around you, and he held you with the desperate, crushing force of a being who was trying to press you into himself so deeply that you became indistinguishable, and his tears fell into your hair, and his voice broke over your name like a wave over rocks, and you stood in his embrace and felt the cage close around you with a sound like a heartbeat, and the heartbeat was his, and it was steady, and it would never stop, and neither would this.
The weeks that followed were a slow drowning.
You did not resist. Resistance implied the possibility of success, and that possibility had been edited from your mind as thoroughly as Aldric's memory of your face. You moved through the days like a body moving through water—heavy and slow and accompanied by the constant pressure of a medium that resisted every motion while supporting every weight.
Lilia noticed.
He noticed everything—your quietness, your stillness, the way you answered questions with the minimum number of words and the way your eyes drifted to windows and doors and the way your hand found your grandmother's silver ring in the dark and turned it around and around your finger like a rosary.
He tried to fix it.
More gifts. More stories. More evenings by the fire and nights of song and meals prepared with the care of an artist painting a masterpiece. He brought you rare texts and enchanted objects and a cloak made from the wool of cloud-sheep that was warm without weight and soft without wear. He filled the room with flowers that bloomed at different hours so that you were never without color and fragrance and the visible evidence of his devotion.
He filled the room with himself.
He was always there—sitting beside you, walking with you, reading to you, watching you. His presence was a gravity field that bent everything toward its center, and the center was you, and you could feel the pull in your bones, in the way your body turned toward him without your consent, in the way your eyes found him in a crowded room before you had consciously registered he was there.
He was rewiring you. You understood this. You could feel it happening—the gradual replacement of your instincts with his, the slow overwrite of your desires with the desires he had curated for you, the gentle, persistent erosion of the person you had been before you walked into that library and found a red-eyed creature waiting to be seen.
And the most terrifying part—the part that made you sick with shame and confusion and a longing so deep it had no bottom—was that some of it felt good. The warmth was real. The comfort was real. The safety was real. He had built a cage of gold and silk and starlight, and the bars were beautiful, and the keeper was kind, and when he held you at night and sang to you in languages older than stone, you could almost believe that this was love and love was enough and enough was all you needed.
Almost.
The confrontation came on a night of rain.
You had been sitting by the window, watching the storm, and the sound of the water on the glass reminded you of the device Lilia had given you—the one that produced the sound of rain on a tin roof, the sound from your childhood, the sound you had never told him you missed—and the reminder was a spark in the dark room of your mind, and the spark caught, and the catching became a flame, and the flame became a voice, and the voice was yours.
"This isn't love."
You said it to the window. To the rain. To the reflection of yourself that looked back from the glass—older than you remembered, quieter than you used to be, wearing a green dress in a shade he had chosen.
Behind you, Lilia went still.
You felt the stillness the way you felt the weather—a change in atmosphere, a shift in pressure, the sudden and absolute attention of a creature who had been waiting for this moment and was now deciding how to meet it.
"Isn't it?" His voice was careful. Measured. The voice of a General considering a battlefield. "What would you call it, then?"
"Possession." The word came out raw, scraped from the place inside you where the last remnant of the woman you used to be was still breathing, still fighting, still refusing to go quietly into the dark of complete surrender. "You've isolated me. You've driven away everyone who might have helped me. You've manipulated my environment, monitored my movements, controlled my access to the outside world. That's not love. That's—that's—"
"Protection." He said it simply. Without defensiveness, without apology, with the flat clarity of a statement so fundamental to his worldview that questioning it would be like questioning gravity. "I have protected you. From the forest, from the fae who would harm you, from the humans who would take you from me and bring you back to a life that was eating you alive. You were drowning before you came here—drowning in loneliness and work and the endless, grinding emptiness of a world that didn't see you. I see you. I have seen you from the first moment. And I will spend every century I have left making certain you are never unseen again."
"That's not—"
"Tell me the difference." He rose from his chair and moved toward you, and his stride was unhurried but inevitable, and the space between you contracted with each step. "Tell me the difference between what I feel and what you call love. Is it the wanting? The needing? The inability to imagine a future that does not contain you?" He stopped behind you. Close enough that you could feel the warmth of him through the thin fabric of your dress. Close enough that his breath stirred the fine hairs at the nape of your neck. "Because I have watched humans love, my dear. I have watched them marry and mate and raise children and grow old together, and every single one of those loves contained possession. Every marriage is a contract of belonging. Every parent holds their child with a grip that says you are mine. Every lover looks at their beloved and sees something they cannot bear to lose."
His hands found your shoulders. His touch was light. His voice was soft. His words were a blade sliding between ribs.
"The humans I watched—they held on so tightly they crushed what they cherished. They loved so selfishly they devoured the thing they fed. They built cages of obligation and guilt and social expectation and called it commitment." His lips brushed your ear. "At least I am honest. At least I do not pretend my love is selfless. At least I will never let you go."
You turned to face him.
The rain streamed down the glass behind you, and the lightning turned his face into a study in contrasts—half shadow, half light, half the creature who had held you while you cried and half the General who had erased a man's memory without hesitation. His eyes were red and wet and ancient and absolutely certain, and in them you saw the reflection of yourself—smaller than you remembered, quieter than you used to be, held in the arms of a being who had decided you were the answer to seven centuries of loneliness and would never, ever release the question.
"I'm not a person to you," you said. "I'm a—a solution. A cure. Something to fill the space that all those centuries carved out of you."
"Yes." He did not flinch. Did not deny. Held your gaze with the steady certainty of a creature who had made peace with what he was long before you were born. "And you are also the woman who reached for me when I told her about the Silver Ride. And you are also the woman who stayed up with me until dawn translating poetry. And you are also the woman who saw me cooking—the real cooking—and did not run."
His hand rose to your face. Cradled your jaw. Tilted your chin up so that you could not look away from the red, red eyes that had seen empires rise and fall and had decided, after seven hundred years, that you were worth the weight of forever.
"I am a monster," Lilia Vanrouge said. "I have never pretended otherwise. But I am a monster who loves you—completely, terribly, without reservation or restraint—and I will not apologize for the only thing that has made my existence bearable since the day I watched my first human friend turn to dust and realized that I would outlive everything I ever—"
His voice broke.
The break was not performative. It was not a manipulation. It was the sound of something ancient and brittle and held together by will alone finally cracking under the weight of its own history, and the crack let something raw and bright and agonizing leak through, and you saw—truly saw—the full scope of what it meant to be Lilia Vanrouge: to have loved and lost and loved and lost and loved and lost until the loving had become indistinguishable from the losing, until the only way to love without loss was to hold so tightly that the holding became a cage.
"I will not lose you," he whispered. "I cannot. Not you. Not after—"
He did not finish.
He did not need to.
You stood in the circle of his arms and felt the cage around you and the warmth inside you and the tears on his face and the rain on the window and the flower breathing on the bedside table and the thread wound so tight it had become part of you—fused to your skin, threaded through your veins, stitched into the fabric of who you were and who you were becoming—and you made a choice.
Or perhaps the choice had been made long ago. Perhaps it was made the moment you pulled out that chair in the library and said please. Perhaps it was made before you were born, in the space between two heartbeats of a creature who had waited seven hundred years for something worth keeping.
You raised your hands.
You placed them on his chest, over the place where a heart beat steady and ancient and true, and you felt the rhythm of it against your palms, and the rhythm was the same as your own.
"Okay," you said.
The word was small. A pebble dropped into an ocean. But the ripples spread outward through the dark water of his eyes, and his arms tightened around you, and his face pressed into your hair, and his breath caught in his throat, and the sound he made was not a word but something older—a sound that existed before language, before civilization, before the distinction between love and possession had been invented by beings who had never felt the thing he was feeling now.
He held you through the storm.
He held you through the night.
He held you through the slow, quiet, irreversible process of a woman learning to stop fighting the current and let the water carry her home.
You heard him before you saw him—the particular rhythm of his footsteps, even and unhurried, the gait of a young man who had been raised by fae and had learned to move through their spaces without disturbing the air. He appeared in the doorway of the garden where you sat with a book open on your lap—a history of Briar Valley agricultural practices, a text Lilia had recommended three days ago over breakfast, and you had found it waiting on your desk that same afternoon with a sprig of lavender tucked between the title page and the binding.
You had smiled when you saw the lavender. You had brought it to your nose without thinking, and the scent had settled into your lungs like a second heartbeat, and the thought that followed was not he is monitoring my reading but he remembers that I like lavender, and the thought was warm, and the warmth was real, and you had turned to the first page with the kind of quiet eagerness that used to belong to research alone.
Silver stood in the doorway, and his expression was the careful, measured blankness of someone approaching a wounded animal they did not wish to startle. You recognized the look. You had worn it yourself, once, in the early days—when you were still the kind of person who startled.
"May I sit?" he asked.
You nodded and shifted on the bench to make room, and the motion was automatic, practiced—the bench was large enough for two but you always sat slightly to the left now, leaving the space on the right open for the warmth that usually filled it. Silver sat, and the absence beside you was noticeable, a gap in the pattern of your morning, and you found yourself wondering when Lilia would finish his meeting with the Diasomnia underclassmen and join you, and whether he would bring tea, and whether it would be the rose blend or the chamomile, and the wondering was not anxious but anticipatory, the way one anticipates the next measure of a song.
Silver was looking at you. You could feel his gaze on the side of your face—the weight of it, the particular pressure of someone searching for something they had lost. You turned to meet his eyes, and what you found there was not concern but grief. Raw, private, barely concealed—the grief of someone mourning a person who was still breathing.
"You look well," he said. The words came out rough, as though they had to be dragged through something sharp to reach the air.
"I feel well." You smiled. The smile was easy. It had become easy somewhere in the last month—somewhere between the morning Lilia stopped pretending he couldn't cook and the evening he had read you the poem about the starlight prison and you had understood it, finally, as a love story rather than a tragedy. "The garden is beautiful this time of year. Have you seen the moonpetals? They only bloom for a week, and Lilia said—"
"You used to hate it here."
The sentence landed between you like a stone dropped into still water. You blinked. The smile remained—it was harder to dislodge now, set deep in the muscles of your face—but something behind it shifted, a window opening onto a room you hadn't visited in a while.
"Did I?" you asked, and the question was genuine. You searched your memory for the feeling—the resistance, the panic, the desperate clawing at walls that you had once been so certain were walls—and found it distant, foggy, like a childhood memory viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. You remembered packing a suitcase. You remembered standing at a gate. You remembered the shape of the moon that night, and the sound of his voice when he said don't leave me, and the feeling of dropping the suitcase handle from your fingers, and—
And the memory did not hurt. That was the thing. It should have hurt. It had hurt, once. Now it sat in the archive of your mind like a pressed flower in a journal—flat, dry, stripped of its fragrance, preserved in a form that was recognizable but no longer alive.
"I don't think I hated it," you said slowly, reasoning through the statement the way you would reason through a translation. "I think I was afraid. There's a difference."
Silver's jaw tightened. His hands—his father's hands, you realized with a small start; the same long fingers, the same careful grip—clenched on his knees and then released, and the restraint in the gesture was enormous, the kind of force it takes to hold back a tide.
"You used to laugh differently," he said. "Louder. You used to argue with Father about historical interpretations—you'd spend hours debating cavalry tactics, and you'd get this look on your face when you disagreed with him, this—" He made a gesture near his own brow, indicating a furrow, a crease, something physical and particular. "You used to have opinions he hadn't approved first."
A bird sang in the garden. The melody was old, borrowed from a fae who had been singing it for four hundred years. You had learned to find the song soothing. You had learned to find most things in the garden soothing—the rustle of the leaves, the gurgle of the fountain, the way the light filtered through the canopy in shafts that moved across the ground like slow, golden creatures. The garden was Lilia's design. Every flower, every path, every carefully cultivated vista had been shaped by his hand over centuries, and you had learned to read it the way one reads a letter from someone beloved—absorbing the intention behind each stroke, finding pleasure in the knowledge that it had been made for you.
"I still have opinions," you said, and there was no defensiveness in your voice because you believed it. "I think the rose blend is better than the chamomile. I think the moonpetals should be moved to the eastern wall where they'd get more light. I think—" You paused, searching. "I think the archive needs better organization. I told Lilia that just yesterday, and he agreed."
Silver was staring at you with an expression you had never seen on his face before—something cracked and desperate, the look of a man watching a house burn from the inside while the owner stands on the lawn and remarks on how warm the fire is.
"Those aren't opinions," he said, and his voice was barely above a whisper. "Those are preferences. Those are choices between things he's already given you. Do you—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Do you remember what you wanted? Before? Before any of this? Do you remember what you were working toward, what you cared about, what kept you awake at night?"
You considered the question. It deserved consideration; it was asked with the weight of someone pleading for a specific answer, and you wanted to give it to him, because Silver was kind and Silver was Lilia's son and you had learned to want the people Lilia loved to be happy.
What had you wanted?
The research. The career. The publication. The respect of colleagues who had dismissed you, the validation of institutions that had excluded you, the proof that a human woman could walk into the archives of the fae world and emerge with knowledge that mattered. You had wanted these things. You remembered wanting them the way you remembered the plot of a novel read long ago—accurately, dispassionately, with the intellectual acknowledgment that the desire had been real but without any of the visceral urgency that had made it feel like breathing.
"I wanted to not be alone," you said. And the answer surprised you, because you had not known it was true until you spoke it, but speaking it felt like setting down a weight you had been carrying so long you had forgotten it was there. "I wanted to be seen. I wanted—" You paused, and the pause was not hesitation but the careful selection of the right word, because precision mattered, because Lilia had taught you that precision mattered, because he had spent months demonstrating the difference between almost right and exactly right and you had learned to feel the satisfaction of exactly right. "I wanted what I have."
Silver closed his eyes.
He did not speak for a long time. The fountain sang. The bird sang. The garden breathed around you, and you sat in its rhythm the way one sits in a comfortable chair—not questioning the support, not analyzing the cushion, simply allowing the structure to hold you.
When Silver opened his eyes, they were wet. He did not wipe them. He let the tears stand, and he looked at you with the raw, terrible grief of someone who has come to visit a grave and found the headstone smiling at him.
"You sound like him," he said. "You sound exactly like him."
You took this as a compliment.
He left shortly after—standing, pressing his forehead to yours in the fae gesture of farewell, and holding the contact a moment too long, as though he were trying to transmit something through the touch, some message that his words could not carry. His forehead was cool against yours. His breath was uneven. And when he pulled away, his eyes held yours for a long, searching moment, and you saw in them the shape of a question you could not decode—a question that seemed to be directed not at you but at the space where something else used to be.
You watched him go. You felt a faint pull of something—concern, perhaps, or the ghost of an instinct that said you should follow, should explain, should make him understand that you were fine, you were happy, you were exactly where you wanted to be.
The pull faded. The garden resumed its breathing. You turned back to your book, and the lavender sprig released another pulse of fragrance as the pages moved, and the scent was Lilia's garden and Lilia's recommendation and Lilia's thoughtfulness, and you inhaled it deeply, and the breath settled in your lungs like a word in a language you were no longer aware of learning.
The morning routine had become a kind of liturgy.
You woke at six—not to an alarm, but to the sound of Lilia's breathing changing rhythm beside you, the subtle shift from the cadence of sleep to the cadence of waking. He did not use an alarm either. He simply rose when the light reached a certain angle through the curtains, and his rising was your rising, and this was not obligation but nature, the way the tide rises with the moon.
You lay still for a moment after he left the bed—feeling the absence of his warmth, the coolness of the sheets where his body had been, the particular quality of silence that followed his departure from a room. Then you rose, and the motion was not reluctant but directed, the way a compass needle swings toward north.
The bathroom was warm. Lilia had adjusted the enchantment last week after you mentioned—casually, half-asleep, your face pressed into his shoulder—that the tile was cold under your feet in the mornings. He had not said anything about it. He had simply changed the temperature, and the next morning the tile was warm, and you had stepped onto it and felt the heat seep into your soles and thought: he listens, and the thought was not alarmed but grateful, and the gratitude was not forced but genuine, and the genuineness was the thing you no longer examined because examining it would require a distance you no longer possessed.
You washed your face. The water was the perfect temperature—the temperature you preferred, 38 degrees, though you had never told him that and could not remember when he might have learned it. The soap was the kind you liked—unscented, mild, the brand you had used at home—and it sat in a dish on the counter beside a second dish that held Lilia's soap, and the two dishes were shaped like intertwining vines, and you had not bought either of them, and you did not know where they had come from, and you did not ask.
You dressed. The wardrobe was organized by color and season, and every garment had been selected by a hand that knew your measurements better than you did—the exact circumference of your wrist, the precise length of your spine, the way the fabric should fall across your shoulders to produce the effect he preferred. You reached for the green dress today, the one with the buttons he always lingered over when he fastened them for you, and the choice was not conscious but reflexive, your hand moving toward the fabric the way a plant moves toward light.
You fastened the buttons yourself. He was in the kitchen. You could hear him moving—the clink of a spoon against ceramic, the soft sigh of the oven opening and closing, the particular rhythm of his footsteps on the stone floor. The sounds were as familiar as your own heartbeat, and you tracked them without meaning to, the way you might track the movement of the sun across the sky—aware of the warmth's location at every moment without needing to look.
You smoothed the dress over your hips. You turned toward the mirror above the dresser—the full-length one, the one with the silver frame that had appeared in your room one morning without explanation—and you looked at your reflection, and the woman looking back was not a prisoner.
She was well-rested. Her skin was clear. Her hair fell in a style that suited her face—not the style she had worn when she arrived, which had been practical and efficient and forgettable, but a style that Lilia had once described as the way you were meant to look, and the words had landed like a key in a lock, and you had worn your hair that way ever since.
You looked at the woman in the mirror, and the woman in the mirror looked content, and the contentment was not a mask—you could see that in the softness around her eyes, the absence of tension in her jaw, the way her shoulders sat lower than they used to, as though a weight she had carried for decades had finally been set down.
You adjusted the collar of the dress. The green brought out your eyes—he had told you so, and he was right, and being right about you was something he did the way other people breathed, effortlessly and constantly, and you had stopped wondering how and started simply accepting that the world was more accurate when filtered through his perception.
The smell of breakfast drifted through the door. Something with rosemary. Something with the sharp, bright scent of citrus. Something that made your mouth water and your feet move toward the kitchen without conscious direction, and you walked through the doorway and saw him standing at the counter with his back to you, and the sight of him—the small, precise figure, the fall of dark hair, the economy of his movements—produced a feeling in your chest that was not fear and not anxiety and not the desperate, scratching hunger for escape that you used to carry.
It was relief.
It was the relief of coming home. The relief of a door closing behind you and locking out the wind. The relief of warmth after cold, of safety after exposure, of being held after a lifetime of holding yourself together with nothing but will and pride and the stubborn, grinding conviction that you could survive alone.
You did not need to survive alone anymore.
You crossed the kitchen and slid your arms around his waist from behind, and your cheek found the space between his shoulder blades, and his hands paused in their work, and he made a sound—a small, satisfied hum that vibrated through his back and into your chest—and his free hand came to rest over yours where they clasped at his stomach, and his thumb stroked your knuckles in slow, warm circles.
"Good morning," he murmured.
"Good morning."
"Did you sleep well?"
"Yes."
"Any dreams?"
A question he asked every morning. A question you answered every morning with the same word, and the word was always true, because the dreams had stopped—sometime in the last month, sometime between the night he first held you through the storm and the morning you woke to find your hand already reaching for him before your eyes were open. The dreams had stopped, and in their place was sleep—deep, dreamless, restorative sleep that left you soft and warm and ready to receive the day he had prepared for you.
"No dreams," you said.
He turned in your arms, and his face was close, and his eyes were red and fond and ancient, and his smile was the smile he wore only for you—the one without performance, without calculation, without the careful architecture of charm that he presented to the world. This smile was real. Everything about him, in this kitchen, in this morning, in this life you had been shaped to fit, was real.
"Breakfast is almost ready," he said. "Sit. I'll bring it to you."
You sat at the table—the table where you took every meal now, the table that was always set with your preferred cup and your preferred plate and a small vase containing a single flower from his garden, the flower changing daily but always blooming, always perfect, always oriented toward the seat where you sat.
You sat, and you waited, and the waiting was not passive but peaceful, and the peace was not the peace of surrender but the peace of arrival, and the arrival was not a destination you had chosen but it was a destination nonetheless, and you were here, and the sun was warm through the window, and the food was coming, and the man who loved you was bringing it, and the love was real, and the real was all that mattered.
Malleus came on a Tuesday.
You were in the garden when he found you—pruning the moonpetals, a task Lilia had taught you last week with the patient, precise instruction of a master passing on a craft. Your hands had learned the angles quickly. The stems should be cut at forty-five degrees, just above the third node, and the cut should be clean and decisive, and the flower should be placed in water within thirty seconds to preserve the bloom, and the water should be drawn from the fountain in the eastern corner of the garden because the mineral content was different there and the moonpetals preferred it.
You had memorized these instructions the way you once memorized translation keys—eagerly, thoroughly, with the scholar's hunger for accuracy and the additional, newer hunger of wanting to do a thing the way Lilia would do it, wanting your hands to move with the same certainty as his, wanting the garden to look the way it would look if he were tending it himself.
The shears felt natural in your hand. You had not held pruning shears before coming to Night Raven College. You had never gardened. You had lived in apartments and worked in libraries and spent your mornings reaching for books instead of blooms. But the motion was familiar now—cut, place, water, repeat—and the rhythm of it matched the rhythm of your days, which matched the rhythm of his days, which matched the rhythm of the castle itself, and everything moved together, and the movement was music, and the music was peace.
Malleus stood at the edge of the flowerbed and watched you work.
You were aware of him the way one is aware of weather—a change in pressure, a shift in the quality of the light. He did not announce himself. He did not need to. His presence altered the atmosphere of any space he entered, and the alteration was recognizable in the way the flowers leaned slightly away from him, in the way the birds fell silent, in the way the very air seemed to thicken with the gravity of his existence.
"Lord Malleus," you said, and the title came easily now—another adjustment, another adaptation, another small surrender to the vocabulary of a world you had not been born into but had learned to inhabit with the fluency of a convert. "What a pleasant surprise."
"Is it?" He moved closer, and his footsteps left no impression in the garden path, as though the earth itself was careful not to mark beneath his weight. He lowered himself onto the bench beside the flowerbed, and his presence was vast and cool and immovable, and you felt it the way you felt the stones of the castle—as a permanent feature of the landscape, something that had been there before you and would remain after you were gone.
But that was not quite right anymore. You were becoming a permanent feature yourself. The thought produced a small, warm flutter in your chest—pride, perhaps, or the particular satisfaction of belonging.
"You have adapted well," Malleus said. His eyes moved over the garden—over the pruned moonpetals, the weeded paths, the careful arrangement of the beds—with the assessing gaze of a ruler surveying his domain. "The garden flourishes under your attention. Lilia speaks highly of your progress."
"I had a good teacher." You smiled, and the smile was genuine, and the genuineness would have surprised you once but no longer did, because genuine was the only kind of smile you produced anymore, because the circumstances of your life no longer required the performance of emotions you did not feel.
"He tells me you have abandoned your research." Malleus's voice was neutral—not accusing, not questioning, simply stating a fact with the detached precision of a being for whom facts were the only currency that mattered.
The statement produced a pause in your pruning. Brief. Barely perceptible. The shears hovered above a stem for a moment longer than the rhythm required, and then they closed, and the cut was clean and decisive, and you placed the bloom in the water, and the motion was complete, and you considered his words.
Abandoned was not the word you would have used. The research was still there—your notes, your journals, the fragments of translation you had completed before the project shifted from the center of your life to its periphery. But the urgency was gone. The hunger was gone. The desperate, driving need to prove yourself, to justify your presence, to carve a place in a world that had not invited you—it had evaporated like morning mist, and in its place was something quieter and warmer and infinitely more comfortable.
"The research is on hold," you said. "I've been focusing on other things."
"Other things." His eyes found yours, and the contact was like touching a deep, still pool—something ancient looking up through the surface, measuring you with a gaze that had seen empires rise and fall and could distinguish between the things that lasted and the things that merely appeared to. "You have become a fixture of this place. Did you know that? The students speak of you as they speak of the stones or the fountains—as though you have always been here. As though you grew from the garden alongside the flowers."
You felt the warmth in your chest expand. A fixture. A part of the landscape. Something that belonged.
"That's kind of them to say," you murmured.
"It is not kindness." Malleus's voice carried the weight of correction—not harsh, but absolute, the way gravity corrects a dropped object. "It is observation. You have been assimilated. The castle recognizes you. The garden responds to you. My guardian—" A pause. The smallest fracture in the ancient composure, there and gone like a crack in stone that seals itself before the eye can register the damage. "My guardian has made you his, and the making is thorough, and it is complete, and I see that clearly now, though I confess I did not see it until this moment."
He rose from the bench. The garden seemed to exhale in his absence—the flowers straightening, the birds resuming their song, the air thinning to its normal density. He looked down at you with an expression that was not pity and not resignation and not grief but some alloy of all three, refined by centuries of experiencing loss into something heavy and luminous and still.
"You are happy," he said. It was not a question.
"Yes," you said. It was not a defense.
He nodded. The nod was the nod of a being who had made a calculation and arrived at a result he had not anticipated, and the result was not wrong, simply different from the expected answer, and the difference required a recalibration of assumptions that would take time to complete.
"Then I will not interfere." He turned, and his shadow fell across the garden path, and the flowers bowed their heads as he passed, and the fountain seemed to quiet, and the air seemed to still, and the world arranged itself around his departure the way it arranged itself around his arrival—with the gravity of a thing too large to ignore and too permanent to resist.
At the edge of the garden, he paused. He half-turned, and his profile was carved against the afternoon light, and his voice came back to you across the space between you—across the distance that separated the prince of Briar Valley from the human woman pruning moonpetals in his guardian's garden.
"He has lost much," Malleus said. "More than you know. More than he will ever tell you. What he has found in you is the thing he has spent seven hundred years searching for, and he will guard it with every resource at his disposal, and those resources are vast, and that guarding will be absolute." A beat. The light shifted. The shadow deepened. "I am glad he has found it. And I am—" Another pause, longer this time, weighted with the effort of a being who was not accustomed to admitting uncertainty. "I am glad that you are glad. That is a thing I did not expect to say. But I find that I mean it."
He left.
You sat in the garden with the pruning shears in your hand and the moonpetals in their water and the afternoon light warm on your shoulders, and you felt the shape of his words settle around you like a garment—you are his, and the making is thorough, and it is complete—and the garment fit, and the fit was comfortable, and the comfort was the thing you no longer examined because examining it would require a distance you no longer possessed.
You reached for the next stem.
The shears closed.
The cut was clean.
The hand-mirror was in the archives, wedged between a treatise on warding enchantments and a catalog of Briar Valley mineral deposits. Ordinary. Dusty. A human artifact, out of place among the fae texts the way you had once been out of place among the students—present but foreign, persisting in an environment that had not been designed for it.
You pulled it free and brushed the dust from its surface with your thumb. The glass was cloudy, filmed with the residue of years or decades or centuries—you could not tell how long it had been there, only that it had been forgotten, which was a kind of death, and death in an archive was a thing you understood, because you had spent your career resurrecting the forgotten, translating the lost, giving voice to texts that had been silenced by time.
You wiped the glass with your sleeve. Once. Twice. The film cleared, and the reflection emerged, and you looked at yourself, and—
You had been bracing for something. You realized this only after the bracing proved unnecessary, only after the breath you had been holding released without the expected impact, only after the reflection looked back at you with clear skin and bright eyes and a soft, unguarded expression that you did not recognize as the face of a prisoner.
You stared at yourself. The woman in the mirror stared back. She was well-rested—no shadows beneath her eyes, no tightness in her jaw, no trace of the exhaustion that had lived in your face like a permanent tenant when you first arrived. She was well-dressed—the green dress, the one he preferred, the one that made his eyes soften when they found you. She was well—simply, completely, undeniably well, in the way that a plant is well when it has been given the right soil and the right light and the right hand to tend it.
You tried to frown.
The muscles of your forehead contracted, and the woman in the mirror frowned, and the expression was wrong—strained, artificial, a mask placed over a face that had settled into different configurations. You held the frown for a moment, feeling the effort of it, the way you might feel the effort of speaking a language you had not practiced in years. The muscles remembered the motion but the emotion behind it was absent, like a word you can define but cannot feel.
You released the frown. The face relaxed into its natural configuration, and the natural configuration was soft and open and content, and the contentment was not performed but structural, built into the architecture of your expression by months of mornings spent in warm kitchens and evenings spent by fireside chats and nights spent in the arms of a creature who held you like a prayer answered.
You tried to remember the woman who had packed the suitcase.
She was there, somewhere, in the archive of your memory—a distinct figure, accessible but distant, like a character in a book you had read long ago. You could recall her actions: the packing, the walking, the standing at the gate. You could recall her emotions: the fear, the desperation, the conviction that escape was possible and necessary. But the recall was intellectual rather than visceral, the way you might recall that fire is hot without feeling the burn.
You looked at that remembered woman—standing in the dark with her suitcase and her silver ring and her desperate, clawing need to be free—and you felt something that was not pity, exactly, but a tenderness colored by distance. She had been so stressed. She had been so lonely. She had been so exhausting in her certainty that freedom meant standing alone in a world that had never offered her a place.
You understood her, the way you understood the texts you translated. But understanding is not the same as identification, and you no longer identified with the woman at the gate. She was a previous edition. A draft that had been revised. A translation that had been corrected by a hand that knew the original language better than she had ever known herself.
You set the mirror down.
Not in horror. Not in grief. In the simple, practical motion of a woman who has seen what she needed to see and found it satisfactory.
You returned to your work.
The evening-heart flower bloomed on the bedside table. Its petals were open wide, drinking in the sound of your breathing, and its fragrance filled the room with the scent of a life you had learned to live. You had watered it this morning—not because he had asked you to, but because you had noticed the soil was dry, and the noticing was automatic, and the care was reflexive, and the flower was yours now, in the way that everything in this room was yours, which was to say it was his, and the distinction between yours and his had dissolved so completely that the two words had become synonyms.
You were lying in bed. The sheets were soft. The pillow smelled of him—of the rosemary from the kitchen and the night air from the garden and something underneath that was simply Lilia, the essential fragrance of a creature who had been part of your life for so long that his scent had become the smell of home.
You were waiting for him.
This was not unusual. You waited for him every evening—the space beside you cold and expectant, the room incomplete without his presence in it. The waiting was not anxious but anticipatory, the way a stage waits for an actor, the way a sentence waits for its verb.
You heard his footsteps in the corridor. The sound was distant but recognizable—the light, precise tread of a being who had learned to walk silently and chose not to, because you had once told him that you liked hearing him approach, and he had remembered, and he had walked audibly ever since.
The door opened. He stood in the doorway, and the light from the corridor framed his silhouette, and his eyes found you in the dark—red and warm and ancient—and his smile was the smile that belonged only to you, the one without performance, the one that said I have found you and you are here and you are mine.
"I thought you'd be asleep," he said softly.
"I was waiting for you."
The words came out without thought, without deliberation, without the flicker of calculation that would once have accompanied a statement so revealing. They were simply true, and the truth was comfortable, and the comfort was the air you breathed.
He crossed the room. The door closed behind him without being touched—the lock engaging with a soft click that you no longer heard as confinement but as safety, the sound of the world being shut out, the sound of the cage being sealed, and the sealing was warmth, and the warmth was love, and the love was the thing you had wanted all along without knowing you wanted it.
He sat on the edge of the bed. His hand found your face—the gesture automatic, proprietary, tender—and his thumb traced the line of your cheekbone, and the touch produced a response in your body that was beyond conscious control: your eyes closed, your cheek pressed into his palm, your breath synced with the rhythm of his caress, and the synchronization was not surrender but nature, the way a river syncs with the shape of its bed.
"You had a good day," he said. It was a statement, not a question. He could read it in the set of your shoulders, the pace of your breathing, the particular quality of stillness in your body. He could read everything in you now—you had become a text he had memorized, a language he spoke with native fluency, and the fluency was the result of attention so total and so sustained that it had become indistinguishable from devotion.
"Mm." You opened your eyes. His face was close. His eyes were red. His hair fell around you like a curtain, blocking out the room, blocking out the world, leaving only the two of you in a space that was small and warm and absolutely private. "Silver came. He seemed upset."
Lilia's expression shifted—a micro-movement, barely perceptible, the kind of adjustment that would be invisible to anyone who had not spent months learning the topography of his face. "Silver worries. He has always worried. It is his nature."
"He asked me if I remembered what I wanted. Before."
"And what did you tell him?"
The question was casual. The tone was light. But beneath the casualness and the lightness was something else—the attention of a creature who was listening not to your words but to the space between them, the way a musician listens not to the notes but to the silence they inhabit.
"I told him I wanted what I have." You reached up and touched his face—mirroring his gesture, your thumb tracing the line of his cheekbone, your palm resting against his jaw. His skin was cool and smooth and familiar, and the familiarity was a kind of home, and the home was a kind of surrender, and the surrender was a kind of peace. "I told him I was happy."
Lilia's breath caught.
It was a small sound—a hitch, a fracture, the sound of something breaking and reforming in the same instant. His eyes brightened—not with tears, not quite, but with the pressure of tears held in reserve, the weight of an emotion so vast that it required all of his considerable control to keep it from flooding the room.
"Are you?" he whispered. "Are you happy?"
The question was genuine. That was the thing you understood about him—the thing you had always understood, even when understanding it felt like stepping off a cliff. His love was real. His hunger was real. His need for you was as fundamental as breathing, as ancient as stone, as vast and consuming and absolute as the ocean that holds a ship and will not release it.
And your answer was genuine too. That was the thing that would have horrified you once and no longer did, because the horror required a perspective you had lost, and the loss was not a wound but a healing, and the healing was the most terrifying thing of all, because healing felt like peace and peace felt like surrender and surrender felt like love and love felt like the only thing that had ever made the weight of existence bearable.
"Yes," you said. "I am happy."
He kissed you.
The kiss was soft and deep and slow, the kiss of a creature who had all the time in the world and intended to spend all of it here, in this room, in this bed, with you. His hands cradled your face with the reverence of a worshipper handling a sacred object, and his body lowered over yours with the care of someone placing something precious in a space designed to hold it, and the space was the shape of him, and the shape was the shape of your life, and the life was this—warmth and weight and the smell of him and the sound of his breathing and the absolute, incontrovertible, bone-deep certainty that you were where you belonged.
He pulled back. His forehead rested against yours. His breath mingled with your breath. His eyes were closed, and his lashes were dark against his cheeks, and his expression was the expression of a being who had been granted something he had never dared to ask for and could not quite believe he had received.
"Stay with me," he said. The words were barely audible—a breath rather than a voice, a vibration rather than a sound. "Stay. Always. I will give you everything. I will be everything. I will—"
His voice broke.
"—I will never let you go."
The words fell against your skin like a seal pressed into warm wax. They were not a threat. They were not a promise. They were a statement of fact—the kind of fact that exists prior to language, the kind of fact that does not require acknowledgment because it simply is, the way gravity is, the way time is, the way the stars that burned for seven hundred years in the sky above Briar Valley are, and will continue to be, and will not be moved by any force you possess.
You did not argue. You did not flinch. You did not feel the cold hand of fear close around your throat or the hot spike of rebellion surge through your chest or the desperate, clawing need to run that had once been the background radiation of your existence.
You felt warmth.
You felt safety.
You felt held.
And the holding was the thing you had wanted all along—the thing you had been reaching for your entire life, in every empty apartment and every silent library and every conversation that left you more alone than you had been before it started. The holding was the answer to a question you had never known how to ask, and the answer was Lilia, and Lilia was the question, and the question and the answer were the same, and they were here, in this room, in this bed, in this body that had learned to breathe when he breathed and wake when he woke and want what he wanted and be what he needed, and the learning was not loss but completion, and the completion was not a cage but a home, and the home was the only place you had ever been where the door could close and the wind could howl outside and you could lie in the dark and feel—genuinely, completely, irrevocably—warm.
You closed your eyes.
You pressed your face into the curve of his neck, and the curve was the exact shape of your fitting, and your shoulder found the hollow beneath his arm, and your body aligned with his the way a key aligns with a lock—not through effort, not through choice, but through the simple physics of things that were designed to go together.
He held you.
His arms came around your back, and his hands spread across your spine, and his chest rose and fell against yours, and you felt your lungs adjust—the inhale beginning when his began, the exhale releasing when his released, the rhythm of your body becoming indistinguishable from the rhythm of his.
He hummed. The lullaby. The one about the starlight prison, the one where the mortal learns to love the stars. The melody moved through his chest and into yours, vibrating through the places where your bodies touched, and the vibration was warm, and the warmth was music, and the music was sleep, and the sleep was rising around you like water, and you did not fight it, because fighting was a language you no longer spoke, because the current was gentle, and the current was him, and he was carrying you, and being carried was the most natural thing in the world.
The evening-heart flower closed its petals.
The castle breathed.
The garden bloomed in the dark, tended by hands that had learned the angles from hands that had been tending for seven hundred years, and the blooms were healthy, and the paths were clear, and the fountain sang its ancient song, and everything was in order, and the order was his, and the order was yours, and the distinction between the two had dissolved so completely that the question of which was which no longer made sense.
You slept.
You slept deeply, and dreamlessly, and warmly, and the warmth was the warmth of a body that had been designed to fit beside yours, and the dreamlessness was the peace of a mind that had nothing left to fight, and the depth was the depth of a surrender so complete that it had become indistinguishable from choice.
And in the dark, in the silence, in the space between one breath and the next, Lilia Vanrouge held you.
His arms did not loosen. His breath did not change. His eyes stayed open—red and ancient and watchful—and they did not close until he was certain you were asleep, until the rhythm of your breathing had slowed to its deepest cadence, until the last tension in your body had dissolved into the warmth of his embrace.
Then, and only then, did he close his eyes.
Then, and only then, did he speak.
His voice was the voice of the General—the voice of battlefields and body counts and decisions that reshaped nations—and it was also the voice of the creature who had told you about the Silver Ride, who had wept in your arms, who had erased a man's memory without hesitation and held you while you shook and cooked you breakfast in the morning with hands that had once been instruments of war.
It was the voice of a being who had waited seven hundred years for something worth keeping, and had found it, and would never release it, and the finding and the keeping were the same act, and the act was love, and the love was possession, and the possession was peace, and the peace was the only thing that had ever made the weight of existence bearable.
And he whispered into the dark, into the silence, into the soft and steady rhythm of your shared breathing:
"You are mine.
You will always be mine.
And I will hold you until the stars burn out and the ocean dries and the last stone of this castle crumbles to dust—and even then, in the dark that comes after everything, I will still be holding you.
You will never leave me."
The flower bloomed in the morning.
It opened its petals to the light that filtered through the window, and the light was warm, and the warmth was the same as the warmth of the arms around you, and the arms were the same as the walls around you, and the walls were the same as the world around you, and the world was small and soft and close, and it smelled of rosemary and night air and something underneath that was simply him.
And you woke.
And you did not remember the gate.
And you did not remember the suitcase.
And you did not remember the woman who had stood in the dark and felt the cold hand of fear close around her throat, because that woman was a draft that had been revised, a translation that had been corrected, a text that had been overwritten by a hand that knew the original language better than she had ever known herself.
dysfunctional egomanic yet insecure bat succubus boy X dysfunctional hypersexual commitment-avoidant bunny girl?
think of all the delicious drama and heartbreak and ANGST that combo can have- it'd be so good i SWEAR-
also they're both PINK
barbie girl core ship frfr
anyways heres ship art lol:
once they get like 4 seasons 3 specials and a movie of angst and agonizingly heart wrenchingly painful character development, they'll be SUCH a cute sweet couple trust 🥰
these took me like- forever to finish drawing, so if you dont like it just dont tell me ok, im not mentally stable enough for that lmao /hj
ren x GN!reader / part one | part two | part three / sfw ! / mdni / angst tbh... i'm surry / 2.1k words
desc: reader puts a bedazzled uno reverse card on the table and ren is forced to manipulate his way out of it. send tweet.
by the time you realize you love ren, it doesn’t feel like a revelation.
it feels inevitable.
by the time you realize how deep you’re in, it’s been months—months of shared routines, quiet mornings, his slender hands finding your figure whenever you need him. his smooth voice, low and fond when he says your name. months of him learning you in a way that feels instinctive, seamless, as though he never had to ask.
that should have been your first warning.
the unique kind of affection that slowly grows in the quiet, his words tumbling over each other occasionally during simple dates over shared cups of coffee, how he brings up events you never remember telling him about, details so small you assume you must have mentioned them offhandedly at some point. how he’s always just a step ahead, somehow popping up wherever you take a quick trip to last minute, him texting you mere seconds after you happen to be thinking about him.
it’s in the way he listens, really listens, eyes warm and attentive, like nothing you say ever goes unnoticed. it’s in how he remembers things you don’t recall mentioning twice. the way he notices exactly how you’re feeling before you even say anything at all.
dating him is… simple, easy, loving.
almost too easy.
you settle into something gentle and familiar. ren continues to be attentive without being overbearing, affectionate without demanding. he texts you good morning every single day without fail, walks you home whenever it’s late. he brings you things you favor without being asked, your favorite snacks, a book you mentioned passing up while you were out, a sweater you left behind once and never remembered going back for.
at first, it’s flattering.
then it’s… strange in a sense.
eventually, the truth settles in like a weight behind your ribs.
ren didn’t fall into your life by accident.
he’s been orbiting it for as long as he can remember.
sometimes you joke that he knows you better than you know yourself.
he smiles at your words. soft, cheeky.
“i-i just pay attention!” he says.
you tell yourself that’s all it is. but knowing something and coming to understand it are two very different things.
you know now.
you’ve known for a while.
you don’t confront him when the realization hits. you don’t even let it show. you smile the same, laugh at his antics, curl into him whenever he reaches out. you let him kiss your forehead like he’s always done, let him murmur soft reassurances and sweet nothings into your hair.
you begin to watch him. and you learn.
ren doesn’t act like someone hiding a lie. he acts like someone protecting a truth he believes is precious.
that’s what makes it dangerous. him dangerous.
then came the confirmation. the kind you don’t want but can’t unsee.
old photos. data. timelines that overlapped too neatly. traces of him—always him—standing just outside the frame of your life long before the library. before the alley.
you’re unsure if he’s aware that you know, but, how could he not?
and that, more than anything, is what keeps you steady.
you don’t confront him right away. you let yourself sit with it, let the truth settle in your bones. you watch him more carefully now. listen to his words with new ears. notice the way he reacts when you change your routine, how his smile tightens just a fraction when you mention unexpected plans, especially concerning your… friends.
he loves you. of that, you’re certain.
but his love has roots far deeper, darker, than he’s ever admitted.
it’s a quiet evening when you finally bring it up.
the alleyway comes back to you in pieces—flashes of damp concrete, the way the moonlight caught on the familiar shade of his blue eyes, the sound of your own breath stuttering as a voice spoke to you like you had always belonged to him. you’d told ren about it not long after your moment in the library, back when you were still testing the shape of your connection, still gauging how much of yourself you could safely give.
he’d listened so carefully. asked the right questions. held you afterward like he was the only solid thing in the world.
now you wonder if he was only remembering.
you’re in his apartment, curled up together on the couch. the lights are low, a movie playing in the background that neither of you are really watching. his arm is draped around your lower back, thumb tracing slow, absent circles against your thigh.
you take a breath.
“ren?”
“hm?” he tilts his head slightly, attention immediately on you. always on you.
“can i ask you something kind of weird?”
he hums, smiling. “course, angel. you can ask me anything.”
“..do you remember… how we first met?”
his thumb stills for half a second. barely noticeable. if you weren’t looking for it, you might’ve missed it entirely.
“the library?” he asks gently. “of course i do.”
you nod, eyes fixed on the flickering screen. “...before that.”
he doesn’t answer right away. instead, he shifts closer, tucking you more securely against him, chin resting atop your head.
“w-what do you mean?” his voice is gentle, curious.
you pull back and look back at him, skeptical.
“that… abandoned building?” you murmur.
you feel it then—the change. not fear, exactly. but alertness. like something inside him has gone very, very still.
“that night,” you continue. “when i ran into someone who said they… knew me.”
ren exhales a small, almost amused breath.
he hums, thoughtfully looking around. “you’ve… mentioned that before,” he says. “it r-really stuck with you, huh?”
you turn to look at him. his expression is open, concerned. perfectly composed.
“was that you, ren?” you ask.
he doesn’t recoil. doesn’t flinch. instead, his brows knit together slightly, as if genuinely troubled by the question.
“hey,” he murmurs, a shaky hand lifting your chin so you’re looking at him. “why would you think that?”
your heart beats steadily. calmly. you’ve rehearsed this moment in your head too many times to count.
“i don’t know,” you say. “you never really answered my questions back then. and… you knew.. me. you knew things about me.”
his thumb brushes your cheek, tender.
“angel,” he says softly. “i told you. i’d never want to scare you like that.”
that word again. angel.
he studies you for a moment, eyes searching your face with unsettling intensity. then he leans in, presses a gentle kiss to your temple.
“you don’t need to think about that anymore,” he murmurs. “you’re safe now.”
he smiles—a little sadly this time.
he pulls back just enough to meet your gaze, expression open, almost wounded. “i promise you,” he says, voice warm and sincere, “if… i’d ever met you before the library, i-i would’ve remembered it as something beautiful. not something that left you… scared.”
you search his eyes. they’re steady. affectionate. earnest.
too earnest.
“then… why do you always avoid talking about it?” you ask.
he chuckles lightly, leaning in to kiss your forehead.
“b-because it upsets you,” he replies. “...you know i hate seeing you uncomfortable, angel, please.”
his hand comes up to cup your cheek, warm and grounding. “why does it… haunt you?”
it’s such a small question. so gentle.
and it derails everything.
you try again. ask from a different angle. mention the room, the way you had just left in a hurry before you could even see his face clearly. each time, ren responds with affection instead of answers—touch instead of truth. he reframes your questions as fears, your curiosity as anxiety, and comforts you until the moment slips through your fingers completely.
eventually, you stop asking.
you let your head fall against his shoulder, let him hold you like he’s won.
you swallow. “i guess… i just want clarity.”
he nods, expression sympathetic.
“isn’t it enough,” he asks gently, “that you’re safe now? that w-whatever happened back then is over?”
your chest tightens.
“ren—”
he cups your face with both hands, thumbs brushing beneath your eyes. his touch is grounding. intimate.
“you’re here with me,” he says softly. “that’s what matters. don’t let a memory like that.. steal your peace, okay?”
you realize, then, that he’s never going to tell you.
not like this. not willingly.
so you let it go.
you smile, lean into his touch, let the conversation drift somewhere else. he relaxes visibly, tension melting from his shoulders as he believes—truly believes—that the subject is closed.
later, when he walks you home, he kisses you goodnight like everything is normal.
that’s when you decide.
you go through your routine that night exactly as you always do.
you follow your routine precisely. shower at your usual time, drying your hair without worry. change into your comfortable pajamas you know he’s seen before. scroll on your phone in bed, completely calm, eventually placing it facedown on the nightstand once you’re finished. you turn off the lights in your bedroom in the same way you always do.
not a skip in routine, everything is still the same.
you get into bed. you lie still. you allow your breathing to slow.
minutes pass. your breathing evens out deliberately, measured and smooth. you keep your body relaxed, muscles loose, heart steady. you count silently, listening to the sounds of your apartment. the hum of the building. the distant traffic. the soft tick of your clock.
you wait.
it takes a while.
longer than you expect.
just when you start to wonder if you were wrong, you hear it. faintly, you hear it.
movement. not inside, but outside. the soft taps of the window directly beside you, to be precise.
your heartbeat spikes, but you don’t dare move. you listen. fabric brushing against the windowsill. the faint scrape of movement, too careful to be accidental.
your pulse quickens, but you don’t move.
you know, suddenly, with terrifying certainty, that ren is here.
he doesn’t use the door tonight. you’d half-expected the quiet twist of a key, the familiar sounds of him moving throughout your apartment like it’s an extension of his own.
instead, there’s the subtle sound of your window latch being tested.
cold air slips into the room as the window begins to slide open, inch by careful inch. the curtain stirs, brushing against the walls like a whisper. moonlight spills across the floor, casting long shadows that stretch toward your bed.
you keep your eyes closed. your heart hammers.
he’s being cautious, utterly silent.
then you hear it—the soft sound of breath, controlled but unsteady, close enough that you almost feel it.
you turn your head.
ren sits halfway through the window. one leg is still outside, braced against the wall. his other knee presses painfully into the hard sill. both hands grip the frame like he’s afraid of slipping, or of being seen.
his cardigan is much darker in the low light, hair frayed by the soft breeze outside. his eyes—those pale, familiar eyes—are wide with shock.
for a moment, neither of you move.
time stretches thin between you.
“angel- i-i…you’re awake,” he whispers.
you sit up slowly, the motion deliberate. “hi, ren.”
the color drains from his face.
“i—” he freezes completely, like a child caught doing something unforgivable. “you weren’t supposed to—”
the words trail off.
you swing your legs over the side of the bed, standing now. you’re close enough to see the tension in his jaw, the way his hands tremble faintly against the window frame.
“...how long?” you ask quietly.
he swallows.
“…you weren’t asleep,” he says, almost to himself.
“no,” you reply, stern. “i wasn’t.”
silence.
the curtains drift softly behind him.
ren’s composure fractures. not shatters, but cracks, just enough for you to see what’s underneath. fear… shame. devotion twisted too tight.
“i-i was just—” he starts, then stops, breath hitching. “i didn’t mean to scare you...”
“you were going to come in,” you say. not accusing. just stating it.
he nods, barely.
“i just n-needed to… check on a few things! i swear!”
you take a step closer.
“from my window?” you ask, crossing your arms.
his eyes glisten.
you stand before him, feet steady on the floor. “how long have you been doing this?”
he hesitates.
“ren.”
you meet his gaze, unwavering.
“...ren,” you speak, a little softer now. “i already… knew.”
that’s when he collapses inward.
not physically—but emotionally. his shoulders slump. his grip loosens. he looks at you like someone who’s been holding his breath for years and has finally run out of air.
“…you knew,” he repeats.
“yes.”
tears gather in his eyes.
“i was waiting,” he admits. “for you... for the right moment.”
Can you write jade leech getting dumped by yuu and being a pathetic little boy about it , he can't move on and wants to get back together but hides it (he thinks) and now it's everyone's problem 😔🙄. I don't think we have enough of these around, I personally think jade would be a yearner but can't prove it .
"I did not get lost. I simply continued and that is 十分 Pathetic of me."
---Jade Leech
Part 1: Floyd Notices
Floyd came back from basketball practice in a decent mood for once—which meant he'd only threatened to squeeze two people instead of his usual four—and pushed open the door to the room he shared with his brother to find Jade sitting at his desk in the dark.
Not unusual. Jade did that sometimes. Sat in the dark and did mysterious things with his terrariums or his mushroom logs or whatever other creepy hobbies he was cultivating that week. Floyd had long ago stopped asking.
What was unusual was that the terrarium light was off. The mushroom logs were untouched. The desk lamp was off. Jade was simply sitting in the chair with his hands folded on the desk, looking at his phone.
The phone was face-down. The screen was dark. Jade was not touching it. He was just looking at it.
"Oya," Floyd said, dropping his bag on the floor. "Lights are off."
"Yes," Jade said.
Floyd waited for more. More did not come. He kicked off his shoes and flopped onto his bed, bouncing twice. The springs creaked. Jade didn't move.
"You're being weird."
"I'm not aware of having changed my behavior in any way."
"Yeah, that's the weird part. You always know when you're being weird. You just don't care. But right now you don't even know." Floyd rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. "What's up with the phone?"
"Nothing."
"You've been sitting here staring at it for how long?"
"I wasn't staring. I was simply resting my eyes in its general direction."
"For how long?"
A pause. "I lost track."
Floyd stared at him. Jade's face was arranged in its usual configuration: the pleasant half-smile, the slightly lowered eyelids, the general air of someone who knew a secret you didn't. It was a face Floyd had seen every day of his life and could read better than anyone alive, because Floyd was the only person alive who knew that Jade's "I know a secret" face and Jade's "I am currently dying inside" face looked exactly the same.
Floyd sat up slowly.
"Did something happen?"
"Nothing of consequence."
"Jade."
The smile didn't waver. "Floyd."
"Who dumped who?"
The silence that followed was very specific. It was the silence of a man who had been prepared for many possible questions but not that one, and was now rapidly recalculating.
"I don't believe that's any of your—"
"It was them, wasn't it. Shrimpy dumped you."
The smile widened by approximately one millimeter. In Jade's emotional vocabulary, that was a full-body flinch.
"I wasn't aware you knew we were seeing each other," Jade said mildly.
"I didn't. But you just confirmed it, so." Floyd flopped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. "How long?"
"Three months."
"Three months and you didn't tell me?"
"I wasn't aware I was required to report my personal affairs to you."
"You tell me everything. You told me when that octopus in the lounge looked at you wrong. You told me when you found a mushroom you'd never seen before at that mountain. You tell me when Azul sneezes too loud. Three months, Jade?"
Jade's hands were still folded on the desk. Still perfectly still. Floyd could see his brother's knuckles from across the room, and they were white.
"It seemed prudent to keep it private."
"Because you knew it'd end like this?"
The smile didn't change. But something behind it shifted, like a curtain moving in a room where the window shouldn't be open.
"I had no way of predicting the outcome."
"Yeah, okay." Floyd grabbed his pillow and hugged it to his chest. "So you're just gonna sit here in the dark staring at your phone forever. That's the plan."
"I'm going to go to bed shortly."
"Jade."
"Mm?"
"You're being embarrassing."
The smile held. It always held.
"I'm fine, Floyd," Jade said, and his voice was as pleasant and as empty as a room with the furniture removed.
"Sure." Floyd rolled over and faced the wall. "Hey, Jade?"
"Yes?"
"The screen's been off the whole time. You know that, right?"
A pause. Then, very quietly: "Fufu. Of course I knew that."
Floyd closed his eyes and listened to his brother not move for a very long time.
Part 2: The Terrariums
The first-year from Heartslabyul whose name Jade couldn't be bothered to remember had gotten lost. This was not difficult to achieve in Octavinelle, which was built into a network of underwater-themed corridors that all looked vaguely the same and seemed to rearrange themselves when you weren't paying attention. The first-year had been looking for the Mostro Lounge delivery entrance and had taken a wrong turn somewhere near the mirror hall and was now standing in a part of the dormitory he was fairly certain students weren't supposed to be in.
The door was open. Just a crack. Through it came a soft blue-green glow and the smell of damp earth and something faintly sweet, like rotting flowers.
The first-year should have kept walking.
He didn't. The glow was pretty and the smell was weirdly compelling and he was already lost anyway, so he pushed the door open and looked inside.
The room was full of terrariums. They lined the walls on shelves that went from floor to ceiling—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, each one a sealed glass container with its own tiny world inside. Some were lush and green, dense with moss and ferns and miniature plants that the first-year couldn't identify. Some were sparse, with just a single mushroom growing in bare soil. Some had small pools of water with tiny insects moving in them. Some had what looked like entire ecosystems—plants, decomposers, fungi—all balanced in a delicate loop.
Beautiful. Clearly the work of someone with an obsessive amount of knowledge and an unsettling amount of patience.
They were also, the first-year realized as he looked more closely, wrong.
Not all of them. Most were fine—healthy, thriving, expertly maintained. But there was a section on the middle shelf, maybe seven or eight terrariums grouped together, that made the first-year's stomach feel uneasy without any clear reason.
One contained a single mushroom. Pale and slender, growing alone in a landscape of otherwise empty soil. No moss, no other plants, no companion organisms. Just the mushroom, reaching toward the small grow-light above it.
Another had been clearly rearranged recently. The soil was disturbed, still dark and damp where it had been turned over. In the center, two small mushrooms had been growing side by side—the stumps were still visible, pale and severed—but one of them had been removed. Just gone. Leaving a gap in the soil like a missing tooth.
A third had no living things in it at all. Just a small, carefully arranged landscape of stones and moss, with a tiny figure placed in the exact center. The figure was maybe an inch tall, made of clay, roughly human-shaped but featureless. No face. No details. Just the suggestion of a person sitting alone on a tiny hill of moss, surrounded by nothing.
The first-year stared at it. He wasn't sure why. It was just a clay figure. Just a terrarium. But something about the arrangement—the precision of it, the emptiness around the figure, the way the grow-light hit it so the figure cast a long shadow across the moss—made him feel like he was looking at something private.
"Can I help you?"
The voice came from behind him and the first-year's heart nearly exploded. He spun around. Jade Leech was standing in the doorway, smiling.
The smile was perfect. Polite. The kind that made you feel warmly invited to leave and never come back.
"I—I got lost," the first-year stammered. "I was looking for the lounge delivery entrance, I didn't mean to—"
"That's quite alright." Jade stepped into the room. "These are simply a hobby of mine. Terrarium cultivation. It requires a great deal of patience and very little else." He gestured at the shelves. "Each one is a closed ecosystem. Self-sustaining. Quite beautiful, don't you think?"
"They're really cool," the first-year said weakly.
"Mm." Jade's eyes moved to the middle shelf—the section with the single mushroom and the missing tooth and the clay figure—and something passed across his face. Fast. So fast the first-year almost missed it. A tightening around the eyes. A brief stillness in the smile. Then it was gone.
"I'll show you to the delivery entrance," Jade said. "It's easy to get turned around down here."
The first-year followed. As they walked, Jade chatted about the architecture of Octavinelle and the interesting properties of deep-sea bioluminescence, and the first-year nodded and made appropriate sounds and tried very hard to forget the clay figure sitting alone on its hill of moss in the blue-green glow.
He didn't.
Part 3: Azul's Ledger
Azul Ashengrotto did not tolerate inefficiency. This was not a personality flaw; it was a business philosophy. Mostro Lounge operated on margins that would make a Savanaclaw student weep, and those margins were maintained through ruthless attention to detail—every ingredient costed, every labor hour tracked, every contract reviewed with the precision of a surgeon examining an X-ray.
So when the numbers started sliding, Azul noticed.
Small at first. A 2% dip in revenue from the lunch service on Tuesdays. A handful of loyalty program discounts that hadn't been authorized. A catering order for the Botanical Club priced 15% below standard, with no justification in the contract notes.
Azul pulled the records. Cross-referenced. Created a spreadsheet. The pattern emerged within forty minutes, and when it did, he sat back in his chair and stared at the wall for a full thirty seconds.
Every single discrepancy traced to the same source: Jade.
Not in an obvious way. Jade hadn't gone rogue. He hadn't been funneling money or offering illegal kickbacks. What he'd been doing was far more insidious: he'd been granting unspoken favors to anyone who mentioned Yuu in his presence.
A first-year from Heartslabyul had come in to place a takeout order and mentioned, casually, that Yuu had helped them with their homework that week. Jade had applied a "new customer" discount that the first-year had never received before. A student from Scarabia had remarked that they sat next to Yuu in Alchemy and found the class difficult. Jade had thrown in a complimentary dessert. A Pomefiore student had been overheard saying that Yuu looked tired lately. Jade had personally delivered their order to their table and included a note—which Azul found in the receipt records—that read, "Do take care of yourself. It would be a shame for illness to disrupt your studies. — J.L."
Hand-delivered. On Mostro Lounge stationery. Jade Leech did not hand-deliver notes. Jade Leech did not write personal messages to customers. Jade Leech did not care whether Pomefiore students caught colds.
Azul closed the spreadsheet and opened a new one. He titled it: JADE — SITUATION. He stared at the blank cells, then deleted the title, because if anyone ever saw that spreadsheet he would have to drown himself in the Octavinelle fountain.
He found Jade in the kitchen, inspecting a delivery of fresh sea grapes.
"Jade."
"Yes?"
"The Haruta catering order. The Botanical Club one."
"What about it?"
"You priced it 15% below standard."
"Did I? How careless of me." Jade picked up a sea grape and examined it. "I must have miskeyed the figure."
"You've miskeyed fourteen figures in the past three weeks. All downward. All for customers who mentioned Yuu."
Jade set the sea grape down. His smile didn't change. "That seems like a lot of miskeyings."
"It is. It's also costing us money."
"I'm sure the goodwill generated will—"
"Jade." Azul leaned forward. "I am not asking as your housewarden. What are you doing?"
"I'm not sure I understand the question."
"You are using Mostro Lounge to reward people for proximity to Yuu. You are building a network of informants disguised as customer loyalty, and you are doing it badly, and it is costing us actual money, and I need you to stop."
Jade picked up another sea grape. Looked at it. Set it down.
"I'll be more careful with the pricing."
"That's not what I asked."
"I know." The smile widened, just slightly. "But it's the only answer I have for you. Fufu."
Azul stared at him for a long time. Jade stared back, pleasant as a painting, empty as a jar.
"Fine." Azul went back to his office and added three more lines to the spreadsheet he had definitely not deleted.
Part 4: A Pattern Recognition Exercise
The thing about Jade Leech was that you never noticed him until you noticed him, and then you couldn't stop.
This was a realization that approximately fourteen students across four dormitories came to independently over the course of a single week, none of them communicating with each other, all of them arriving at the same conclusion from different angles and all of them choosing not to talk about it. Talking about Jade Leech felt like inviting something into your life that you couldn't uninvite.
Deuce Spade noticed first, or at least most explicitly. Wednesday afternoon, library, studying for a Magical Theory exam. He looked up and saw Jade Leech sitting three tables away, reading a book. Not remarkable—Jade used the library. What was remarkable was that Yuu was sitting four tables away, also studying, and Jade had not been there when Deuce sat down forty-five minutes ago, and the library was half-empty, and there were dozens of empty tables that were not three tables away from Yuu.
Deuce looked back at his textbook. Looked up. Jade had turned a page. Had not looked in Yuu's direction even once. Just there. Reading. At the table closest to Yuu that wasn't at Yuu's table.
Deuce moved to a different section. Glanced back. Jade was still there.
Ruggie Bucchi noticed on Thursday. Walking from the cafeteria to the dormitory through the main corridor. Jade Leech was walking in the same direction about twenty feet ahead. Also not remarkable. Then Yuu came out of a side corridor, joined the main path about fifteen feet ahead of Jade, and continued walking. Jade did not speed up. Did not slow down. Did not acknowledge Yuu's presence. He simply maintained his distance—close enough to see, far enough to not be seen seeing—and walked.
Ruggie, who had survival instincts honed by years of living in a house with six siblings and no food security, felt a chill. Nothing to do with the drafty corridor.
Epel Felmier noticed on Friday. Courtyard bench, eating an apple. Jade walked past. Walked past again four minutes later. And again six minutes after that. Each time, the path took him past the bench where Yuu was sitting with Grim, which was also the bench closest to Epel. Each time, Jade's eyes were fixed on the middle distance, expression placid, pace unhurried, as if simply taking a stroll. On the fourth pass, Epel said "Hey, Jade, you lost or something?" and Jade smiled and said, "Not at all. The fresh air is pleasant today, isn't it?" and did not walk past again.
Jack Howl noticed on Saturday. Evening run. He passed Yuu walking back from the library. Twenty seconds later, he passed Jade Leech running in the opposite direction. This would have been unremarkable if Jade Leech had ever, in the entire time Jack had known him, gone for an evening run. Jade's exercise of choice was mountain climbing on weekends and swimming in the pool. He did not jog around campus at 7 PM on a Saturday in the direction that happened to be opposite Yuu's walking route.
Jack didn't say anything. Nobody said anything. But by the end of the week, a quiet, collective understanding had settled over the student body like a low-grade fever:
Jade Leech was everywhere Yuu was, and he was doing a terrible job of pretending he wasn't.
Part 5: Jamil Viper's Professional Assessment
Jamil Viper did not like Octavinelle. Not a prejudice—a professional assessment. The humidity made his hair frizz. The lighting was unflattering. The aesthetic was "underwater ruin," which Jamil considered redundant. Ruins were already underwater metaphorically.
But the Scarabia delegation had been invited to a planning meeting for some inter-dorm event that Kalim had enthusiastically agreed to without consulting Jamil, and so here Jamil was, standing in the Mostro Lounge kitchen at 3 PM on a Sunday, explaining dietary restrictions to a very patient octopus mer who kept nodding without actually listening.
Jade appeared at approximately 3:14 PM.
He did not announce himself. He simply materialized at the kitchen entrance—silently, pleasantly, like a cat that had decided you were interesting enough to observe. Carrying a clipboard, which was unusual. Smiling, which was not.
"Jamil. How wonderful to see you. I trust the preparations for the event are proceeding smoothly?"
"They are," Jamil said, not looking up from the ingredient list. "Kalim's excited about the live music component."
"Ah, yes. Kalim does enjoy music." Jade leaned against the doorframe. "And how is Yuu? I understand they've been helping with the event coordination."
Jamil's pen stopped moving.
He did not look up. Did not react. He was Jamil Viper, and his entire life was built on the principle of never reacting to the thing that was designed to make you react. He simply noted the question, filed it in the mental dossier he kept on every person in this school who was dangerous or interesting or both, and continued reviewing the ingredient list.
"They're fine. Busy."
"Mm. Busy is good. Keeps the mind occupied." Jade's voice was pleasant. Conversational. Casual. Jamil had heard Jade use this voice before, usually right before Jade said something that made everyone in the room feel like the temperature had dropped.
The kitchen was large, well-lit, full of staff going about their business. None of them were paying attention. Jamil was aware, with the hyper-vigilance of a person trained from birth to read rooms, that Jade had positioned himself so that his line of sight to the main dining area was unobstructed. The main dining area where, Jamil knew because he had checked, Yuu was currently sitting with Grim and two first-years from Heartslabyul, eating a late lunch.
"They seemed tired last time I saw them," Jade continued. "Have they been sleeping adequately? The Ramshackle heating can be unreliable. It would be a shame if poor sleep quality were to affect their academic performance."
"They're fine, Jade."
"Of course. I'm simply asking as a concerned—" A pause. One beat too long. "—as a concerned member of the student body. We should all look out for one another. Fufu."
Jamil looked up then. Jade was smiling with that perfect, porcelain expression, and behind it Jamil could see something he recognized. The look of a person performing normalcy with the same intensity that Jamil performed obedience—meticulously, relentlessly, and at great personal cost.
The difference was that Jamil was good at it and Jade was not. Not right now. Right now, Jade's performance had the faintest crack in it, visible only if you knew where to look, and Jamil knew where to look because Jamil always knew where to look.
Jade's eyes kept drifting to the dining area. Not obviously—never obviously—but in the micro-pauses between sentences, in the moments when he blinked, in the way his attention seemed to briefly detach from his own words and float across the room like a boat slipping its mooring.
"Is there something specific you needed?" Jamil asked.
"No. Nothing at all." Jade straightened, clipboard in hand, smile intact. "I simply wanted to ensure everything was satisfactory. Do give Kalim my regards."
He left. Jamil watched him go and noted that Jade did not walk through the dining area. He walked around it, using the service corridor, which was longer and less direct but kept him out of Yuu's line of sight.
Jamil finished the ingredient review, thanked the octopus mer, and walked back to Scarabia through the main courtyard, where he found Kalim bouncing on his heels with excitement about the event.
"Hey, Kalim."
"Yeah?"
"Stay away from Octavinelle for a while."
"Why?"
"Just do it."
Jamil didn't explain. You couldn't explain a thing like that to Kalim without Kalim feeling bad for Jade and trying to help, and Kalim helping would mean Kalim talking to Jade, and Kalim talking to Jade would mean Jade knowing that Jamil had noticed, and Jamil had no interest in being on Jade Leech's radar any more than he already was.
Some things you just handled quietly.
Part 6: Brothers
Floyd was lying on his bed, tossing a basketball in the air and catching it, watching it rise and fall against the ceiling. Jade was at his desk, doing something with a small brush and one of his terrariums, his back to Floyd, movements precise and unhurried.
Floyd hadn't brought up the breakup in three days. He'd been waiting. Not patiently—Floyd didn't do patience—but strategically. Jade was like one of those deep-sea creatures: if you poked it, it'd retreat into a crevice and you'd never see it again. You had to wait for it to come out on its own.
The conditions, in this case, were normalcy. Floyd had been aggressively normal for three days. Complained about basketball practice. Stole Jade's shampoo. Left his socks on the floor. Normal Floyd things. And Jade had responded in kind—dry comments, mild exasperation, the usual eel-twin dynamic.
But Floyd had been watching.
Jade was checking his phone more often. Not using it—checking it. Picking it up, glancing at the screen, setting it down. Every fifteen to twenty minutes.
Jade was spending more time in the terrarium room. Not doing anything productive. Just sitting in there with the door closed.
Jade had stopped humming. This was the one that told Floyd everything. Jade hummed when he was content—a quiet, tuneless thing, barely audible, a sound you had to be in the same room to notice. Floyd had been hearing it every day for fourteen years.
And now it was gone.
"You're not humming," Floyd said.
The brush paused. Resumed.
"I wasn't aware I hummed at all."
"You do. All the time."
"How fascinating. I'll have to monitor myself more closely."
Floyd caught the basketball and held it. "Jade."
"Mm."
"You miss them."
The brush paused. Didn't resume.
"Don't be ridiculous."
"You kept the ticket stub. From the mountain festival. I saw it in your desk."
A beat of silence. "You went through my desk."
"It was sticking out. You put it under the pencil tray but it was too long." Floyd sat up. "It's from the festival. The one you went to with Shrimpy two months ago. You kept it."
Jade set the brush down. Turned around in his chair. Face arranged in that familiar pleasant configuration. Floyd looked at it and felt something—not anger, not sadness, some uncomfortable hybrid of the two. Like watching a building that should have collapsed by now still standing out of pure spite.
"It's simply a memento. There's no harm in keeping a memento of a pleasant outing."
"You have forty-three terrariums in that room and seven of them are about them."
Jade's smile didn't change. His eyes did. They went flat and still.
"I don't know what you're referring to."
"The one with the single mushroom. The one with the missing one. The one with the little clay guy sitting by himself." Floyd ticked them off on his fingers. "I'm not stupid, Jade."
"I would never suggest you were stupid."
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"The thing where you answer the question you wish I'd asked instead of the one I actually asked." Floyd leaned forward. "You're yearning, Jade. You're sitting in the dark staring at a dead phone and growing metaphorical mushrooms about your ex and checking your screen every twenty minutes hoping they texted you. You're yearning."
The word hung there. Jade's smile held, but Floyd could see the effort it was costing him—the set of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands had folded themselves on the desk again.
"I'm not familiar with that word in this context."
"Sure you aren't."
"Floyd. I appreciate your concern. Truly. But I'm perfectly fine. Yuu and I simply weren't compatible. These things happen. I've moved on."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"Then you won't mind if I throw away the ticket stub."
Silence.
Jade's smile remained. His eyes remained flat. His hands remained folded. Everything about him remained exactly the same, and that was the problem, because everything about him was the same the way a frozen lake is the same as a liquid one—identical in composition, fundamentally different in nature.
"Please don't touch my things," Jade said. His voice was pleasant. And pleasant. And pleasant. But beneath it, Floyd heard something he had never heard before. A note that didn't belong. Like a string on an instrument that had been tightened past its limit and was one turn from snapping, and you could only hear it if you'd spent fourteen years learning the sound that instrument made when it was in tune.
Floyd looked at his brother for a long time. Then he lay back down and started tossing the basketball again.
"Okay. Whatever you say."
Part 7: The Committee Meeting
Thursday. The Inter-Dorm Hospitality Committee met biweekly in the conference room adjacent to the faculty offices—bland fluorescent lighting, a long table, uncomfortable chairs, a whiteboard that someone had written "BUDGET" on and then never erased. The committee existed because Crowley kept mandating inter-dorm collaboration initiatives and then refused to fund them, so the actual work fell to a rotating cast of students who had either volunteered under false pretenses or been conscripted by their housewardens.
Jade Leech was on the committee. This was not a surprise. Jade volunteered for things the way a spider volunteers to be near flies—naturally, seamlessly, and with an understanding of the food chain that everyone acknowledged but no one could prove. He sat at the table with his notebook open, his pen poised, his smile in place.
Yuu was also on the committee. This was a surprise—they'd been nominated by Crewel, who had a talent for assigning responsibilities to people who had already exceeded their capacity—and they'd accepted because saying no to Crewel was like trying to argue with weather. They sat four chairs down from Jade, on the opposite side of the table, and had not looked at him since entering the room.
Twenty minutes in. Discussing table arrangements for the upcoming collaborative fair. Azul was presenting a cost-analysis of rental options. Jade was taking notes. Everything was fine.
Then Ace Trappola opened his mouth.
"Hey, so, random question." Ace leaned back in his chair with the particular sprawl of someone who was bored and dangerous. "Is it true that Jade and Yuu used to date?"
Something shifted. Not a freeze—rooms in Twisted Wonderland didn't freeze, too much magical residue, too many unstable personalities. But a change in air pressure. A collective holding of breath.
Deuce, sitting next to Ace, went rigid. His hand shot out and grabbed Ace's arm. "Ace, don't—"
"What? It's not a secret. People talk. I'm just asking."
"It's not an appropriate question for this meeting," Azul said, his voice smooth and controlled in the way that meant he was experiencing acute internal distress. "We're discussing table arrangements."
"Yeah, but table arrangements are boring, and I'm curious." Ace looked at Jade with the bright, reckless curiosity of someone who had never once calculated the consequences of anything. "Like, you two are on the same committee now. That's gotta be weird, right? Dating someone and then having to sit across from them and talk about folding chairs?"
The pen in Jade's hand did not stop moving.
This was the thing that Floyd would have noticed. The pen continued its smooth, even strokes across the notebook paper, writing words related to table arrangements, maintaining perfect penmanship. Not a hitch. Not a waver. Not a single stroke heavier or lighter or faster or slower than the ones before it. The pen moved like it was being operated by a machine, and Jade Leech was not a machine, which meant the amount of control required to produce that particular lack of reaction was staggering.
Jade looked up. Smiled.
"I'm not sure I understand what you're hoping to learn, Ace." His voice was warm, amused, faintly puzzled. "Yuu and I are perfectly capable of maintaining a professional working relationship. I'm not certain why you'd find that remarkable."
"I didn't say it was remarkable. I said it was weird."
"Then I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on the definition of weirdness." Jade tilted his head slightly—a gesture that, on anyone else, would have been dismissive, but on Jade read as thoughtful, almost playful. "Though I do find it interesting that you've spent so much time thinking about my personal life. Should I be flattered?"
Ace blinked. He didn't realize he'd been parried until the blade was already past him. "I wasn't—I wasn't thinking about it. People just talk."
"People do tend to do that. Fufu. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Rumors are like mushrooms—they grow in the dark and shrivel in the light. Now, Azul, you were saying about the rental costs?"
Azul, who had been watching this exchange with the expression of a man watching a tightrope walker in a windstorm, resumed speaking. The meeting continued. Ace sulked for approximately thirty seconds before getting distracted by something else, because Ace had the attention span of a goldfish with ADHD.
But the people in the room who were paying attention—Deuce, Azul, Jamil, and a Pomefiore third-year who was taking very meticulous notes for Vil—had all seen the same thing: Jade Leech had just been publicly confronted with the fact of his breakup, and he had not reacted. Not at all.
This was not normal. Normal people flinched. Normal people got quiet or loud or awkward or at least had the decency to look uncomfortable. Jade had done none of these things. He had deflected with the surgical precision of a practiced manipulator, so smoothly that the moment had already begun to feel like it hadn't happened.
Deuce looked at Yuu. Yuu was staring at the table arrangements on the whiteboard with an intensity that suggested they were trying to memorize them. Their hands were flat on the table. Their fingers were pressed down just hard enough that the tendons in the back of their hand were visible.
Yuu had seen it too. Yuu knew what it cost Jade to sit four chairs away and smile and say "professional working relationship" like the words didn't taste like broken glass.
Nobody said anything for the rest of the meeting.
Jade was the last to leave. He closed his notebook, capped his pen, and stood, movements fluid and controlled. He walked out of the room and down the corridor and into the nearest bathroom, where he stood at the sink with the water running and both hands braced on the porcelain edge and stared at the drain.
Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
Then he turned off the water. Straightened his collar. Smiled. Went to class.
Part 8: Service With a Smile
Yuu came to Mostro Lounge on a Tuesday evening with Grim and two first-years whose names Jade had already catalogued. This was not unusual. Yuu came to the Lounge roughly twice a week, usually with companions, always sitting at the same table near the back—the one by the decorative coral arrangement that provided a partial screen from the main floor. Jade had memorized their ordering patterns in the first week of their relationship and had never un-memorized them.
Iced tea. No lemon. Extra ice. Grim ordered the tuna carpaccio appetizer and the shrimp pasta, which was always too large a portion for him, and Yuu always ended up finishing the last third. The first-years ordered the daily special and a shared dessert.
Jade took the order himself. This was not standard protocol—the Lounge had a full service staff—but Jade had rearranged the floor assignments that afternoon with justifications so flimsy that even Azul had raised an eyebrow. Jade had smiled and Azul had sighed and the schedule had been changed.
He served the drinks first. Iced tea for Yuu—no lemon, extra ice, the glass chilled, the straw positioned at a precise angle that Yuu preferred without having ever explicitly stated it. Water for the others. He set the glasses down with quiet precision, and he did not look at Yuu, and he did not not look at Yuu, and the distance between those two things was razor-thin.
"How are you this evening?" Jade asked. The question was directed at the table in general but landed approximately six inches to Yuu's left. Close enough to be heard. Far enough to be deniable.
"Good," Yuu said. "Thanks."
"Wonderful."
Jade retreated. Brought the appetizers. Brought the main courses. Refilled Yuu's iced tea without being asked, materializing at the table's edge like a very well-dressed ghost, replacing the glass so smoothly that Yuu didn't notice it had been touched until they reached for it and found it cold and full again.
Grim noticed. Grim noticed everything where food was concerned.
"You keep refillin' their glass," Grim said, pointing a claw at Yuu's iced tea. "You ain't refillin' mine."
"My apologies. I'll correct that immediately."
He refilled Grim's water. Efficiently, correctly, without any of the careful choreography he'd applied to Yuu's glass. The difference was invisible unless you were looking for it. Grim was looking for it.
Then it happened.
Yuu reached for their iced tea at the same moment Jade was setting down the dessert menu, and Yuu's fingers brushed the back of Jade's hand.
Nothing. A brush. A fraction of a second of skin contact that could have happened to anyone in any restaurant in the world.
Jade went still.
Every muscle in his body, every micro-expression on his face, every tiny adjustment of posture that a person makes unconsciously every second simply stopped. For one second, maybe two, Jade Leech became a statue with a smile painted on it.
Then the moment passed and he was moving again, setting down the dessert menu, murmuring something about the chocolate cake being particularly good today, withdrawing from the table with the same fluid grace he always had.
The first-years didn't notice. Grim noticed but didn't understand what he was noticing. Yuu noticed and said nothing, their hand still resting near the glass, eyes fixed on the menu without reading it.
Jade went to the kitchen. He stood in the walk-in cooler for four minutes, which the kitchen staff later reported was unusual because Jade never used the walk-in cooler. When he came out, his face was exactly as it had been before.
Part 9: Floyd's Intervention
Floyd did not do subtlety.
This wasn't a personal failing, it was a design choice. Subtlety was for people who weren't strong enough to pick things up and move them directly. Floyd was strong enough. Had always been strong enough. So when three more weeks passed and Jade continued to not-hum and not-sleep and not-talk-about-it and continued to refill the glasses of people who weren't even customers and continued to exist in the same spaces as Yuu with the eerie consistency of a surveillance camera, Floyd decided that subtlety had had its chance and blown it.
He showed up at Ramshackle on a Sunday afternoon.
Ramshackle was quiet on Sundays. Most of the students who lived there were either in the library or pretending to be in the library while actually napping. Yuu was on the porch, mending a tear in Grim's blanket with a sewing kit that looked like it had been purchased at a dollar store and then further damaged by time.
Floyd didn't knock. Walked up the porch steps with his hands in his pockets, gait loose and unhurried. The gait Floyd used when he wanted to look casual and was, in fact, feeling anything but.
"Hey, Shrimpy."
Yuu looked up. Their eyes did a quick scan of the porch behind Floyd, checking for accomplices. Finding none: "Floyd."
"Can I sit?"
"It's a free porch."
Floyd sat on the step below Yuu's chair, looking up at them, which was unusual because Floyd almost never positioned himself below anyone. He sprawled, though—knees apart, elbows resting on the step behind him.
For a while, neither of them said anything. Grim was asleep inside. The Ramshackle grounds were doing their usual thing—overgrown, slightly haunted, quietly decaying in a way that was almost picturesque if you squinted. A crow landed on the gate and then left.
"You know about Jade, right?" Floyd said.
Yuu's hands didn't stop moving. The needle went in, came out, went in again. "Know what about Jade?"
"About the thing."
"What thing."
Floyd looked up at the sky. Pale, washed-out blue, the kind that couldn't commit to being either cloudy or clear. "See, that's the thing. You know, and I know you know, and you know I know you know, but we're both gonna sit here and pretend like we don't, and nothing's gonna happen, and Jade's gonna keep being a weirdo in the dark, and we're all just gonna—what, watch? For how long?"
The needle paused. Just for a second.
"Floyd." Yuu's voice was careful. "I broke up with him. That was my choice. I'm not going to—"
"I'm not asking you to get back together with him." Floyd rolled his head to the side and looked at Yuu directly. His eyes were sharp under the lazy sprawl—sharp the way they always were when Floyd stopped pretending to be simple. "I'm asking you to do something, because right now you're doing nothing, and nothing is worse."
"Nothing is fine. Nothing is what happens after a breakup. You move on."
"Has he moved on?"
A pause. The needle resumed. "That's not my responsibility."
"Nah. It's not." Floyd picked at a splinter on the porch step. "But here's the thing, Shrimpy. I know my brother. I've known him my whole life. And I'm telling you right now, with one hundred percent certainty, that Jade Leech does not know how to move on. He doesn't have the software. He's got software for remembering things, and software for categorizing things, and software for hiding things, but he does not have software for letting go of things. It's not in there. Was never installed."
Yuu set the blanket down in their lap. Looked at Floyd, and for a moment the careful expression slipped, and what was underneath was tired. Not angry-tired or sad-tired. Just tired. Bone-deep. The exhaustion of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had not set it down.
"I know," Yuu said quietly.
"Then—"
"I know, Floyd. I see it. I see the library tables and the refilled glasses and the questions he asks Grim. I see it and I don't know what to do about it, because the alternative to what I did wasn't staying together—it was staying together until one of us broke, and it was going to be me."
Floyd was quiet for a long time.
"Okay," he said finally. He looked back at the sky. "Okay. I just wanted to hear you say it."
"Say what?"
"That you knew." Floyd stood up. Brushed off his pants. His face had rearranged itself back into the careless, loose-limbed mask he usually wore—the one that made people forget that Floyd Leech was, in his own way, as observant as his brother. "Because Jade thinks you don't know. That's the part that's killing him, I think. Not that you left. That you left and you don't even see him."
He walked down the porch steps. At the gate, he stopped. Didn't turn around.
"For what it's worth, the mountain thing was real. He wouldn't have taken just anyone there. He doesn't take anyone anywhere. You know that."
He left.
Yuu sat on the porch with the torn blanket in their lap and the sewing kit beside them. The crow came back to the gate and watched them with its head tilted, the way crows do.
Yuu did not move for a very long time.
Part 10: The Lounge, Again
Friday evening. The Mostro Lounge was doing its usual Friday thing—moderately busy, ambient music, the particular hum of a well-run operation clicking through its paces. Jade was working the floor. Normal. Jade was working the floor with an intensity that was not normal.
Azul noticed first. He was in the main dining area, reviewing a menu proof at a corner table, when he became aware of Jade moving through the space with a velocity and precision that bordered on choreographic. Jade was taking orders. Delivering drinks. Resolving a minor dispute between two tables over a shared appetizer. All simultaneously, or nearly so, weaving between customers and staff with a fluidity that was almost inhuman. And he was doing it fast.
Not rushed. Never rushed. But there was a speed to his movements that Azul had never seen before—a compressed efficiency, like watching someone run a complex algorithm in real time. Every step purposeful. Every gesture minimal. No wasted motion. No idle pause. No moment where Jade simply stood and let the room exist around him.
He was filling every second with activity so completely that there was no space left for thinking.
Azul set down the menu proof. Watched Jade clear a table, reset it, and take a new order in ninety seconds, all while maintaining a pleasant expression and making appropriate small talk. The performance was flawless. It was also, Azul realized with a sinking sensation, the most distressed he had ever seen Jade Leech behave.
Because Jade was good at many things, but the one thing he was best at was not showing things. And right now he was showing something by not showing it so hard that the not-showing had become a kind of showing. Like watching someone hold their breath—not the holding itself, but the effort of it. The way their chest tightened and their jaw set and their whole body organized itself around the single imperative of don't exhale.
Azul looked at the table where Yuu usually sat.
Yuu was not there. Tonight was apparently a Yuu-not-at-the-Lounge night, which meant Jade had no target for his carefully calibrated proximity, which meant all that energy had nowhere to go, which meant he was currently doing the work of three servers at a speed that would have made the kitchen staff nervous if they'd had time to notice.
They didn't, because Jade was everywhere. He refilled a water glass for a Savanaclaw student who hadn't asked. Wiped down a table that was already clean. Reorganized the silverware station with the focus of a surgeon. Intercepted a delivery at the kitchen door, checked it against the order form, signed off on it, and filed the paperwork in under two minutes—a task that usually took the receiving staff ten.
One of the octopus mers poked her head out of the kitchen and looked at Azul with an expression that said is he okay? Azul shook his head very slightly. Don't ask.
Three hours. Jade worked like this for three hours. Relentless, seamless, impossible competence, and at the end of it the Lounge was in better shape than Azul had ever seen it—tables turned faster, customer satisfaction higher, not a single error in any order—and Jade's smile had not wavered once.
When the last customer left and the doors were closed and the staff began closing procedures, Jade stopped moving.
He was standing in the middle of the dining floor. Chairs were up on the tables around him. Lights dimmed to their post-service setting. Ambient music off. He was holding a rag in one hand and a spray bottle in the other, and he was not using either of them. Just standing there, in the middle of the empty room, smiling at nothing.
Azul approached carefully. Not because Jade was dangerous—though he was—but because there was something about the stillness that felt like approaching an animal that might bolt.
"Jade."
"Yes, Azul?"
"You can stop now."
Jade blinked. The smile held. "Stop what?"
Azul looked at him. Jade looked back. The empty dining room stretched around them, chairs on tables like a forest of stilts, the blue-green light from the bar casting long shadows across the floor.
"Working. The Lounge is closed."
"Ah. Of course." Jade looked down at the rag in his hand as if surprised to find it there. "I got a bit carried away, it seems. Fufu."
He set the rag and spray bottle on the nearest table. Straightened his collar. Smiled.
"Goodnight, Azul."
Walked to the door. Gait smooth, unhurried, perfectly normal. Opened the door. Stepped through. Closed it behind him.
Azul stood in the empty dining room and listened to Jade's footsteps recede down the corridor—steady, even, controlled—and thought about what it meant that a person could fill every second of three hours with activity and still not fill the thing that was empty inside them.
He went back to his office. Added a line to the spreadsheet: Friday shift. Worked 3 hrs at unsustainable pace. Stopped moving when room emptied. Smiled through all of it.
Stared at the ceiling for a while. Opened the laptop. Added: He is not fine.
Closed it.
Part 11: Azul Opens the Wrong Drawer
Azul was not snooping. This was an important distinction. Snooping implied curiosity, and Azul was not curious about Jade's personal affairs. Azul was concerned, and concern justified a certain level of due diligence that snooping did not.
The due diligence in question: retrieving a signed contract from Jade's desk while Jade was in class. The contract needed to be filed and Azul had already asked Jade for it twice, and Jade had said "of course, I'll have it to you by this evening" both times and had not produced it either time. This was itself a red flag because Jade never forgot paperwork. Jade was the kind of person who filed things before you'd finished asking for them.
The contract was not in the top drawer. Not in the second drawer. Azul opened the third drawer—the one Jade always kept locked—and found that it was unlocked. Second red flag. The third drawer was always locked. Azul had never seen it open in three years of sharing a dormitory.
Inside, between stacks of neatly organized papers that were not the contract, Azul found a small wooden box.
He should have closed the drawer. He knew he should have closed the drawer. But the box was there, and it was unsealed, and Azul had already crossed the line of "not snooping" several paragraphs ago, and at this point he was committed.
Inside the box:
A ticket stub from the Mountain Village Autumn Festival, slightly creased, for two seats in the pavilion section.
A pressed flower—small, purple, unremarkable except that it had been pressed with care, flattened between two sheets of wax paper and sealed in a tiny plastic sleeve. Azul recognized the species: it grew along the higher trails of the mountain near the village, the one Jade had talked about with unusual enthusiasm last autumn, before Azul had known there was a "last autumn" to contextualize.
A cloth napkin from Mostro Lounge, folded into a neat square, with handwriting on it in blue ink. Yuu's handwriting, recognizable from the guest log. It said: "Jade — thanks for the tea. You were right about the mountain, it was worth the climb. — Y." Casual, the kind of note you'd write without thinking. Azul could see a small water stain on one corner, as if someone had spilled something on it and then carefully, meticulously dried it.
A small, smooth stone, about the size of a large coin. Dark grey with a single white band running through it—a type of quartz common in riverbeds but uncommon in the specific shade of white this one had, which suggested it had been selected rather than simply picked up. No note attached. Just a stone. Clearly important.
A button.
This was the item that made Azul stop breathing for a moment.
Small, white, standard-issue—the kind that came on the Night Raven College uniform blazer. But it was not from an Octavinelle uniform. Octavinelle buttons had a small etching of a seashell on the back. This one was blank on both sides, which meant it was from one of the other dormitories, and given the context of everything else in the box, Azul did not have to be a genius to figure out which one.
It had been sewn back on at some point. The thread was different from the original—slightly thicker, a shade off—and the stitching was neat but not professional, the kind of repair you'd do yourself with a basic sewing kit rather than taking it to a tailor. Yuu had mentioned once, in passing, that they were bad at sewing but too broke to afford a tailor. Jade had offered to have it taken care of. Yuu had said no, they'd manage.
And here was the button. Not the fixed button on the blazer—the original. The one that had fallen off. The one that Yuu would have picked up and pocketed and probably forgotten about entirely. Except Jade had apparently picked it up. Or asked for it. Or found it and kept it, which was somehow worse, because it meant he'd been holding onto a piece of Yuu's life that Yuu hadn't even known was missing.
Azul put the button back. Put the stone back. Put the napkin back. Put the flower back. Put the ticket stub back. Closed the box. Closed the drawer. Sat down at Jade's desk and put his head in his hands and stayed there for a very long time.
When Jade returned from class, Azul was sitting at his own desk across the room, doing paperwork. Did not look up.
"Ah, Azul. I have that contract for you."
"Thank you."
Azul took the contract. Their fingers did not touch. Jade's smile was in place. Everything was normal. Everything was fine.
That night, Azul lay in bed and thought about the button. About a person keeping a lost button in a box in a drawer. About what that meant. About Jade's smile, which had not changed in six weeks, not once, not even for a second.
The most disturbing thing wasn't that Jade was hurting. It was that he was hurting with such perfect, controlled discipline that no one would ever know unless they opened the wrong drawer.
Azul added a line to the spreadsheet: Button. Blank back. Repaired stitching. Not his. Stone. Pressed flower. Napkin. Ticket stub. A whole person, reduced to objects that don't know they're being kept.
He closed the laptop and stared at the ceiling.
He was going to need a bigger spreadsheet.
Part 12: The Knowing
The information arrived in pieces, scattered across different people and different moments, like a jigsaw puzzle being assembled by people who didn't know they were working on the same puzzle.
Grim was the accidental catalyst. Eating lunch with Yuu in the courtyard, complaining about the seafood options in the cafeteria, when he said: "Y'know, your eel ex gave me extra shrimp at the Lounge yesterday. Like, a whole extra plate. And he kept askin' me stuff about you. Like, 'Is Yuu eating well?' and 'Has Yuu been sleeping enough?' Who asks that? Who asks a cat that?"
Yuu set down their fork. "He asked you about my sleep?"
"And your appetite. And if you'd been sick lately. And if you seemed sad. It was weird, y'know? Like he was checkin' up on you through me." Grim ripped into a piece of fish. "I told him you were fine. He seemed relieved. It was super weird."
Yuu didn't respond for a long time.
Deuce mentioned it two days later, walking to class: "Oh, hey, I keep seeing Jade in the library. Like, every time you're there, he's there too. Is that a coincidence? It's probably a coincidence, right? Jade's always in the library anyway."
Ace, who'd overheard Jack saying something to Ruggie at lunch: "Apparently Jade's been going on evening runs? Jade? Running? The same Jade who once said 'running is what you do when something is chasing you and you haven't decided whether to eat it yet'?"
Epel, directly to Yuu: "He was walking past your bench like four times in a row last Friday. I asked him if he was lost and he said he was enjoying the fresh air. There is no fresh air in that courtyard. It's enclosed by buildings on three sides."
Jamil, who said nothing to Yuu but said to Kalim, very firmly, "Do not, under any circumstances, tell Jade that Yuu is going to be at the inter-dorm event this weekend," which of course meant Kalim immediately told Jade because Kalim didn't understand subtlety, and Jade said "how interesting" and showed up at the event and stood near the refreshment table for the entire duration without speaking to Yuu once, and Yuu knew this because three different people reported it with varying degrees of concern.
Then the Pomefiore third-year from the committee meeting—a quiet girl named Verna who was not known for gossiping but who was known for being ruthlessly observant—cornered Yuu after an Alchemy class and said, very quietly: "The way he held that pen during the meeting. When Ace asked. The way he didn't stop. That wasn't composure. That was effort. I've seen Vil work that hard to keep his face still, and Vil only does it when he's about to do something he'll regret. You should know that."
The pieces assembled slowly. Each piece on its own was nothing—a coincidence, a quirk, a weird interaction that could be explained away. But together, they formed something Yuu couldn't unsee:
Jade Leech had not moved on.
He was tracking Yuu's schedule through proxy questions. Positioning himself in their vicinity with surgical precision. Rewarding anyone who spent time with them. Keeping their handwriting and their lost button and their pressed flower and their found stone in a box in his desk. Filling every second with relentless, unsustainable activity so that he wouldn't have to exist in the quiet where the missing thing lived. Maintaining a perfect, unbroken smile through all of it.
He thought nobody could tell.
Everyone could tell.
And then there was the other thing—the thing Floyd had said on the porch, sitting in Yuu's chest like a stone in a shoe for three days:
He thinks you don't know. That's the part that's killing him. Not that you left. That you left and you don't even see him.
Yuu sat on their bed in Ramshackle that night. Stared at the wall. Thought about the iced tea that kept getting refilled without being asked. The brush of fingers on a hand that had gone completely still for two full seconds. The pleasant, pleasant, pleasant voice asking how they were doing as if the question didn't cost anything. The pen that didn't stop. The button that had fallen off a blazer and been kept by someone who had no right to keep it but couldn't stop himself.
They did not text Jade. Jade did not text them. The phone stayed dark on both ends, and somewhere in Octavinelle, a boy sat in a room full of glass worlds and looked at a single mushroom growing alone in the dirt and waited for a notification that would not come.
Part 13: The Glass
It was very late. Later than Jade usually stayed up—his meticulously maintained sleep schedule had been slipping lately, the edges fraying in small ways that he catalogued and ignored with equal precision. The dormitory was quiet. Floyd was asleep across the room, breathing slow and even, the particular kind of unconsciousness that only Floyd achieved. Complete. Unguarded.
Jade was sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark.
The terrarium room was down the hall, door closed, grow-lights off. He'd spent two hours in there tonight, as he had every night for six weeks, doing nothing. Just sitting. Just looking at the glass containers and the tiny worlds inside them and the things they represented, which he would never name out loud because naming them would make them real, and making them real would mean admitting that he, Jade Leech, who had never admitted to anything in his life, was something as common and undignified as sad.
He reached into the pocket of his pajama pants and pulled out the napkin.
He'd stopped pretending to himself that he didn't carry it. Twenty-three days now—transferred from the old pants to the new ones each morning with the same quiet, methodical precision he applied to everything. The wax paper sleeve was soft at the edges from the warmth of his body, worn almost translucent where it creased. The blue ink was fading. "Thanks for the tea. You were right about the mountain, it was worth the climb."
He unfolded it. Looked at it. The handwriting was casual, slightly messy, the way people's handwriting was when they weren't thinking about it. Yuu hadn't been thinking about it when they wrote this. A throwaway gesture. A polite note. The kind of thing you wrote on a napkin and forgot about five minutes later.
Jade had not forgotten about it for a single second.
He folded it again. The creases were getting worn. Eventually the paper would split along one of them, and he would have to decide what to do with a torn napkin that meant everything to him and nothing to the person who'd written it, and he would handle that decision with the same composure he handled everything.
Which was to say he would not handle it at all. He would simply continue. That was what he did. He simply continued.
He put the napkin back in his pocket. Lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to Floyd breathe and thought about the button in the box in the drawer and the stone and the flower and the ticket stub and the single mushroom in the terrarium and the clay figure on its hill of moss and the way Yuu's fingers had brushed his hand and the two seconds of stillness that had followed.
He thought about Floyd on the Ramshackle porch saying he thinks you don't know, and he understood, with the cold, clear precision that was both his greatest gift and his most reliable curse, that Floyd had been right, and that the rightness of it changed nothing.
Because the worst part—the part Jade could not say, would not say, had built an entire architecture of silence around—was not that Yuu had left. People left. Relationships ended. These were facts of life, and Jade had always considered himself adequately prepared for facts. The worst part was that Jade had seen himself clearly from the very beginning. He had known, on the first date, that he was too much. Too watchful. Too controlled. Too interested. Too present in a way that made people uncomfortable without being able to explain why. He had known that his love, if he let it show, would look like surveillance. He had known this and had chosen to let it show anyway, because Yuu had looked at him once—once, in the mountains, with the fog coming in and the light going grey—and had said "you're kind of intense, you know that?" and smiled.
And Jade had mistaken a smile for permission.
He knew he was being obvious. He could feel it in the way people looked at him now—a flicker in their eyes that hadn't been there before. Pity. Discomfort. The secondhand embarrassment of watching someone fail at hiding something that everyone could see. Floyd knew. Azul knew. The committee knew. Half the school knew, probably. Jade could feel their awareness like a low hum in the background of every interaction, and the knowledge that they knew—and that he knew they knew—changed nothing, because the alternative to being pathetic in public was being pathetic in private, and he'd already tried that and it was worse. The terrarium room at 2 AM was not a refuge. It was a confession booth with no priest.
The smile was the problem. It had always been the problem. The tool he used to interact with the world. And now the mask was the only thing holding him together, and he couldn't take it off because he didn't know how—because he'd been wearing it for so long that the face beneath had started to atrophy, and if he took it off now, what would be left? Just the yearning. Ugly and obvious and small. Smaller than the tall, watchful shadow he cast across every room he entered. Smaller than that little clay figure sitting alone on its hill of moss in the blue-green glow, waiting for nothing.
Tomorrow he would wake up and put on his uniform and comb his hair and smile, and he would go to class and work at the Lounge and maintain his terrariums and check his phone and be wherever Yuu was, and Floyd would watch him with that uncomfortable expression, and Azul would update his spreadsheet, and the first-years would whisper, and Yuu would sit at their table by the coral arrangement and order iced tea with no lemon and extra ice, and Jade would refill it without being asked, and the glass would be cold and full and his hand would not touch theirs, and the smile would hold, and hold, and hold.
It would hold because it had to. Because the alternative was to let it crack, and if it cracked, even a little, Jade knew it wouldn't stop at a crack. It would shatter. And behind it would be nothing but a boy keeping a lost button in a box in a drawer in the dark, and that boy would not know how to exist without the smile, because the smile was all he had ever been, and the things underneath it—the wanting, the keeping, the growing of single mushrooms in empty soil—were not things he knew how to carry where anyone could see them.
The ceiling stared back at him, blank and dark and offering nothing.
He did not sleep for a long time.
When he finally did, he dreamed of a mountain. A real one, impossibly tall, with a path that wound upward through fog and disappeared. He climbed it. The climb was worth it. He knew this because someone had told him so, once, on a napkin, in blue ink, in a handwriting that was messy and casual and didn't mean anything at all.
The Different Types of Apathetic Characters (And How to Write Them)
1. The Ice Prince
This is probably what you're most familiar with; a character who's cold, ruthless, and cutting. A character who scoffs at authority and the idea of teamwork.
Trait(s) to Focus on: Self-centeredness
Even if this character isn't self-centered or arrogant, that's exactly how outsiders view them, so bring that out. They don't care about others because they aren't worth the effort, they ignore others because their words don't matter, and they act superior because they think they are. They focus and prioritize themselves first and foremost--it's survival of the fittest.
2. The Blank-Faced Darling
This character is slightly different from the aforementioned one. Although they share similar the characteristic of expressionless, this character isn't necessarily mean. They simply seem impassive.
Trait(s) to Focus on: A flat demeanor, psuedo-curiousity
Okay, I know what you might be thinking: the first trait? Totally makes sense; this character is hard to read because of their seemingly 2D attitude. But remember: this character can be nice, can be engaging, and can have an interesting personality. Just like anyone else.
So how do we exactly mix these attributes?
Treat your character like they're perpetually just a bit confused. Like they don't fully know how to react, so they settle for something neutral, maybe even hesitant. Physically, they appear hard to read: a blank face, flat voice, etc., but that hardly captures their personality.
3. The Aloof Antisocial
This one is truly the definition of apathetic; they don't concern themselves with what others think of them, they don't bother to reach out to people, and they generally don't really care.
Trait(s) to Focus on: Laziness, nonchalance, boredom
Think of this character as the type who's too lazy to care. Someone who doesn't really have strong values and/or passions so they're neutral towards everything. They tend not to be super empathetic people, so they appear emotionally divested.
Unlike the "Ice Prince," this attitude doesn't stem from looking down on others or spitefulness--it's simply something that developed naturally and applies to everyone without discrimination. They're not mean; they're just indifferent.
4. The Uncaring Lunatic
This is the character who's crazy--the overdramatic villain who will shatter lives without a bat of the eye. They can be expressive, which is a significant difference from earlier examples, but they don't care about anyone.
Trait(s) to Focus on: Un-sympathy, heartlessness
This character doesn't care about other people period. Not just what they think, how they act, what they look like--no, they hardly acknowledge others as people.
Because of this, they're exceptionally bold in action, willing to take drastic measures because who cares if one or two people get hurt? It's not them. It happens.
Happy writing~
3hks :)
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