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xhoneygirlxx · 7 months

Text

We’re Not Friends

Best Friend!Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader

summary: Eddie is just trying to help when he offers to be your date to your sister's wedding, but with all the love in the air will you and Eddie be able to stay friends?

warnings: lots of angst. reader's family sucks. reader's mom makes a comment about her weight. anxiety attacks. reader has low self esteem. fluff. best friends to lovers. fake dating. modern au. (this is titled after an Ed Sheeran song and I also use another one of his songs in the fic, sue me). slight smut. allusions to sex. alcohol consumption. swearing. minors dni!!!!!!!!!! reader and Eddie are both in their 20's. no y/n used, reader is referred to as Birdie. skin color/ethnicity/body type is not mentioned. spelling errors/shitting writing, just pretend you don't notice lmao. also the venue is completely made up and so is the location if you couldn’t tell, im not that creative.

*if I miss anything plz lmk*

a/n: hi my loves!!!! this is one of the last fics on my birthday fic list!!! I want to thank all of you for being patient and being so so supportive of my work. I love you all so much!!! also I do go back to work on Monday so I'm going to try to get as many fics pumped out by the end of the weekend.

And that's why friends should sleep in other beds

And friends shouldn't kiss me like you do

And I know that there's a limit to everything

But my friends won't love me like you do

The turning color of the leaves create the prettiest backdrop, tall trees blooming with orange, red, and a pinch of brown. The ones that have already fallen to the ground get swept up under the wheels of Eddie's car, lifting up and swirling around in a pretty dance, and falling right back into place waiting for the next car.

Although the crisp fall morning is peaceful you can't help but feel like you're living a nightmare. As he soft hum of Eddie's playlist flows through the speakers, you're coming up with a plan to turn the whole car around.

So far you thought about faking an illness, one that would stop the whole journey in it's tracks, only to dismiss it because you couldn't put your best friend through that stress. The idea of pulling the steering wheel also came to mind but you quickly threw that out of the window, not wanting to cause injury to the innocent man next to you or anyone else. Your final idea was one you're sure you could pull off as long as you used all the power within your being. If you pushed your feet on the floorboard hard enough, you could poke them out like the Flintstones and stop the car that way.

Between science and logic, you knew that wasn't possible no matter how hard you wished it would. Instead you'll stare out the window, watching all the pretty trees dance in the wind while you push down the rising anxiety that's forming in the pit of your stomach.

"You good over there, Birdie?" The deep voice next to you shakes you from your thoughts.

Turning your head Eddie's already looking at you with a lopsided grin. His demeanor matches the landscape outside, relaxed and serene. As you look at him you wish you could trade places, be as pleasant as he is.

"Yeah I'm just tired." Trying to sell him your answer, you smile lazily at him even though your response holds more tension than a game of tug of war.

Turning his attention back on the road, you watch as the pavement moves on the darkened lenses of his sunglasses. Eddie looks pretty like this, even though you always thinks he looks pretty. Usually he would be a grump having to be up this early, but today he wears his smile like a badge of honor. The dark curls of his hair cascade down his back, while some falls over his shoulders.

He's wearing the same red and black checkered flannel he always does this time of year, the same one you said was your favorite three years ago and it still holds that title. Underneath is a plain black tee shirt, the only one he has that's free of any band name, and a dark blue pair of jeans that have no holes.

He's still the same Eddie, his rings still sit on his fingers and his pick still hangs from the chain around his neck, but it seems that he only gets prettier and prettier as time passes by - like the turning leaves that still hang on the branches of the trees that you drive by.

"I think you're worried about this whole wedding thing," His voice is unwavering, screaming "I'm right" like it always does. "I don't get what's so bad about an open bar and free food."

Although his point is valid, Eddie couldn't be more wrong than that. This wasn't just an event to get drunk for free and stuffed to the gills at no charge. This was your older sister's wedding, the same sister that was the apple of your parents' eyes. Veronica was your arch nemesis since birth, a rival that you had no option but to defeat in order to survive.

You were the outcast of the family, the black sheep if you will, and you had to endure eighteen years of nonstop torture because of it. Your parents, Christine and Tim, were nothing but successful. The doctor and his trophy wife, the star couple in your small community, that had two beautiful and healthy children.

However you were the hardheaded child, the daughter that didn't have a bright future, you didn't carry as much promise as Vee, and your parents made sure to remind you of that every day. So when you moved out three years ago, you made sure to distance yourself as much as you could. But when you received a pristine white envelope with a glamorous invite on the inside, you were roped right back into the hell hole you worked so hard to leave behind.

You could've just ignore it, faked that you were on a trip and couldn't make it but your mother pretty much threatened you into showing up. So that's how you ended up in the countryside right outside of Chicago, driving in Eddie's Toyota Corolla to the Jefferson Manner on a Friday at eight am.

"You're right, Eddie, I should be so thrilled by that. Thank you so much for pointing it out to me." It's snippy with a hint of malice, and your eye roll held enough venom to injure an army of men.

Whistling loudly, Eddie chuckles lightly. "Woah, killer. Relax, I was just tryna help." He's still soft despite your outburst, sweet like your pumpkin spice latte that sits in the cupholder.

Hanging your head, you inhale a deep breath and release it slowly. "I'm sorry, Eds. I just really fucking hate my family."

He switches his attention from you and the road, taking in your saddened features. Reaching his right hand over the console, he places his hand searches for yours and laces his fingers through yours, which you gladly except.

"Don't apologize for that, kay? That's a valid reason for you to not want to go, I was just trying to make you laugh." The sincerity in his voice wraps around you, easing the nerves that go haywire in your body.

His palm is warm like the coffee cups that sit in the cup holders, his voice is as calming as the trees in the wind, and his smile is just as pretty as it was the first day you met him. You're safe with him, the safest you've ever been in your life, and here in the front seat of his car he reminds you of that.

"They just make me crazy, s'why I don't like seeing them." You feel shy being vulnerable, refusing to meet his gaze by focusing on tracing the back of his hand with your free one.

Eddie doesn't mind, instead he reassures you with a quick squeeze of your hand. "If it makes you feel any better, Birdie, I like you a little crazy."

Dimples deep as the sea and smile still as delicate as a flower's pedal, Eddie looks like a painting that hangs in the Louvre. You want to capture this moment of him to have for the rest of your life, so no matter what you can always remember him just like this.

"You say that now." You tease and he eats it right up.

Looking back over to you, he shines his smile onto you, filling you up with the light of a million stars. "And I'll say it till the end of time." There's no tease to it, nothing but truth in the way he says it.

It turns you into jelly, the feelings that swim through your blood stream, and now you've become too sheepish to answer. You decided to trust your touch over your words, squeezing his hand the same way he did to yours, trying your best to communicate the feelings you hold secretly in your heart for your best friend.

The cobblestone driveway leading to the entrance of Jefferson Manner is, for a lack of a better word, beautiful. It is a straight drive to the property, but once you get closer, a large fountain sits in the middle where the arch of the circle driveway starts.

Different colored cars are already lined up, some you recognize and the rest you have no clue who they belong to. Either way it's pretty evident that Eddie 2018 Toyota sticks out like a sore thumb.

The same dread that you left 45 miles back, is now running through you again. Unintentionally, you squeeze his hand harder as your heart begins to pound in your ear and if it hurts him he doesn't mention it. Instead, Eddie gives you one, two, three squeezes and then lets you continue your attempt to stop the blood flow to his hand.

Pulling behind the Mercedes Benz S Class, he puts his car into park and then shuts the car off. Reading your expression the way he always does, he sits in the silence of the car with you until your features loosen up.

"You okay, Birdie?" Even though he knows you're not okay, you still appreciate him asking anyway.

Breathe in. This is temporary. Breathe out. This is not forever. Breathe in. I am safe. Breathe out. I am here.

You repeat this to yourself a few times, eyes clamped shut as you focus on your breathing pattern. Once your head is above water and your heart stops racing, you open your eyes back up to the real world.

Relaxing your shoulders, you let go of the grip you're holding Eddie's hand in. "I'm okay. I'll be okay." Despite answering him, it sounds like you're trying to convince yourself of what you're saying.

Another brief pause goes by and Eddie continues to monitor you, sunglasses now removed so not only can he see you but you can see him.

Your gaze is unwavering, the thousand yard stare has fallen over you and you have yet to dig out of it. "Are you prepared for what we're about to walk into?"

The tone of your voice scares Eddie, the emotion being sucked right out of the words that you speak despite the feelings that battle in your mind that he doesn't know about.

"Honey, I'm prepared for anything as long as I have you." For a split second he winces, wondering if that was too cringy but when your face breaks out into a sweet smile he feels better.

The two of you get out of the car, retrieving your suitcases and dress bags from the trunk. When the door shuts you begin to count the steps it takes to get to the big wooden doors of the mansion.

You don't have to ask Eddie for his hand, he's already giving it to you and you gladly except it, gripping on for dear life the closer you get. Despite the beautiful landscape and the soothing sound of the running fountain, you feel like this is the soundtrack that plays before your imminent death.

The tall, thick, wooden doors sit menacingly in front of you, the skeletons of your past standing just right behind it waiting for your arrival. The ghosts that have haunted your dreams, the graveyard of your history, and the phantoms of your family, mingle and laugh right behind this door.

Eddie waits for you, not moving a muscle until you say so, and you silently thank him with a smile. Like a switch, he watches your face change from flight to fight mode. In a flash your looking over your outfit, brushing down the long black sleeved shirt that sits on your torso, and then straightening out the jeans that stick to your legs.

Your hair is the next thing you frantically fix, pushing it behind your ears and out of your face, letting it fall over your shoulders while doing so. Like a buzzing bee, you zone in on Eddie, fixing the collar of his flannel and then smoothing the material of his shirt. With out speaking, you pick off a singular piece of fuzz from his pants and then let it blow away in the wind.

Moving your hands back up to his chest, you center the pick on his chain. Then move his hair, fixing the ringlets that got blown around in the breeze. Once your satisfied, you move back to your spot next to him and sweep his hand right back into your hold. Releasing on more deep breath, you settle your pinched eyebrows and your determined eyes, and let the worst fake smile settle onto your lips.

The smile doesn't reach your eyes the way it usually does, your teeth push against one another so forcibly Eddie wonders if you'll shatter teeth, and you simply look like your in pain. Either way, you push open the big oak door and let yourself inside with him following right behind.

The lobby of the manner is everything you expected, high ceilings, a crystal chandelier, and every single family member of yours gathered around sipping champagne and speaking to each other like a potential client.

Even though it's magnificent inside with the beautiful décor and lively plants, the sight of everyone in their gaudy outfits and cheap laughter makes it feel like an eternal hell.

Eddie must feel the way your shoulders tense because he's quickly leaning into you, his voice just a whisper in the shell of your ear.

"Hey, it's gonna be okay. You have me and I won't let anything happen." He reminds you, his smile is more sympathetic than anything.

Nodding your head you remain smiling, it's awful and it hurts even doing it but if you want to survive the whirlpool of piranhas, then you just have to fake it until you make it.

"If it isn't our lovely Birdie!" The sound of your mother's voice is like silk, smooth and confident, just like she always was. Walking over to you, she holds a champagne flute in her hand and you wonder how much the bubbling spritz cost your father.

The last time you've seen her was last winter, her million dollar smile outshining the Swarovski crystal tree decorations that sit behind her. Your mother has always been beautiful but her insides are rotten, ugly and maggot infested, all hidden behind the mask that she put on for everyone to see.

You gave up a long time ago trying to figure out her brain, finally accepting defeat to the maze that was her mind. Now when you look at your mother all you see is a shell, a hallow covering that has nothing to offer you other than it's pretty design.

Pulling you into a hug, you're hit with her scent. She smells like Dior and cashmere, the Chanel outfit that sits on her body scratches your skin, and the pearl necklace she wears jabs you right in your collarbone.

"Hello mother, thank you for inviting me to such a wonder occasion." You instantly revert back to your old accent, the same one your mother instilled into you from the time you could even under stand the English language.

A faux laugh comes from her bright red lips, "No need for that, darling, you're always welcome." Her manicured hand waves at you in fake genuineness.

The smile on your face continues to show and you hate to think it matches hers. Even with the sweet tone you use and the gentleness of your actions, the blood that runs through your body continues to boil the longer she stands there.

Eddie on the other hand stands next to you completely and utterly amused by your fake performance. The snort he lets out when you continue to use your "eloquent" voice is quickly covered up by a sniffle.

Like a vulture, your mother's eyes are quick to zero in on the curly haired man next to you. "Excuse my daughter for her bad manner of not introducing us, I'm Christine."

The minute her hand reaches out for a handshake, you're heart stops. This is the one thing that could make or break this whole trip and it was the only thing you didn't prepare your best friend for. Many years of your life, you were trained that a handshake is all it takes for someone to learn about you.

Without skipping a beat, Eddie simply picks embraces her hand like a prince out of a Disney movie and places a kiss to the back of her unwrinkled hand.

"What a pleasure to meet you, Christine, I'm Eddie. And might I say how beautiful you are."

He's all dimples and doe eyes staring at your mother, a true prince charming in his red flannel and jeans. His voice is like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day, it's smooth going down your throat and it warms your belly better than any blanket can.

That warmth is now tingling your body, a frenzy of butterflies flapping around in the walls of your heart. It clearly works on your mother as well but unlike you she doesn't hide it very well.

"You're really the charmer, Eddie." It's flirtatious and alluring, the same voice she put on for every pool boy your father ever hired.

Annoyance and anger floods through you and you know that your eyes would be shining green to anyone with a trained eye.

While she clutches her pearls and eyes Eddie like he's a four course meal, you intervene into the conversation before it can continue.

"Where's daddy? I'd really like for my boyfriend to meet him." You bat your eyelashes like a pageant queen and your arm acts like a python wrapping around Eddie's, making a mark on what is yours.

"Oh you're father's around here somewhere, you know how he is." She dismisses, taking a drink from her glass and swallowing down the golden liquid quickly. "So how long have you and Birdie here been dating?"

"It's going to be two years next month. Isn't that right, honey?" Eddie turns to you and gives you a playful smile.

Looking back at him you hope he can see the misery that hides being your eyes, a white flag of surrender.

Your mother on the other hand doesn't care about your answer, that's why she didn't ask you. She's reading Eddie, trying to see how much she can push your so called boyfriend until she gets what she wants.

"Well that's just wonderful, young love is a beautiful experience. You have to be careful with Birdie here, she's known to leave the nest quickly." It's a jab, a spiteful and mean comment headed right for your gut.

Eddie doesn't miss the way you're lips falter for a second, the flash of hurt in your eyes. It kills him watching you stand there and take all the comments from your mother like stray bullets.

Turning his attention back to your mother, he gives her a smile, one that you would know as a wicked one but to a stranger would seem kind. "I don't think that will be a problem. Birdie knows where her home is."

It's a direct warning, a clear sign to your mother to not mess with you or what is yours. Just him sticking up for you like that makes your stomach twist in excitement, a feeling you've grown so used to over the course of friendship with Eddie.

"Well, I'm glad she finally found her place then." Your mother responds coldly, clearly hearing the bite in his tone. "Why don't you two go find your room and get settled in, rehearsal dinner is in a few."

Before retreating into the large crowd of family, your mother turns back to you in one more attack.

"Oh and Birdie, wear something that will hide that stomach. Don't want anyone to assume you've been knocked up."

Once you've found your room, you all but rush Eddie inside slamming the door behind you. In the quiet safety of your suite, you can relax your shoulders that have been sitting high since you've arrive.

"Jesus Bird, you weren't lying." Eddie says as he flops himself on the queen sized bed.

You don't respond, instead you squeeze your eyes shut and try to calm the heaviness of your breathing. Behind the darkness of your eyes, little twinkles of stars flash from how hard you have them closed, the swooshing of your heart continuing in your ears like angry waves of the sea.

Breathe in. This is temporary. Breathe out. This is not forever. Breathe in. I am safe. Breathe out. I am here.

You repeat this to yourself over and over again, trying to erase the cruel words of your mother and the images of disgusted family member's faces out of your mind. You're not sure how long you've been standing by the door until a hand grasps at your wrist lightly.

"Birdie," Eddie's coax goes unanswered, "Come on, Birdie."

Warm calloused hands travel to the plump of your cheeks, lifting your face up just enough that he can see you. Finally opening your eyes, you're relieved to be looking into the golden whiskey pools of his.

Smoothing his thumb over your cheek he doesn't say anything, just lets your breathing calm down. Here you are, in the nice room behind the shelter of the locked door, and he's here.

Breathe in. It's okay. Breathe out. You're safe. Breathe in. You are here. Breathe out. So is he.

It's enough to let your feet move on the plush white carpeting, while Eddie leads you to the bed with the tug of your arm. Sitting on the plush mattress on crisp linen sheets you're grounded, and with the heat of Eddie sitting next to you and his hand in yours, you're anchored.

The rehearsal dinner goes over well enough, the Irish mule helping with every single speech that's given and every horror story of your childhood that is told. Luckily for you, Vee didn't ask you to be in her bridal party so you didn't have to attend the actual wedding rehearsal, and even better you won't have to deal with her for the real thing tomorrow.

Eddie does great at dinner, he talks to your father who surprisingly likes him, both getting along over their love for vintage cars. Your soon to be brother in law and his groomsmen also get along with Eddie, they laugh and cut up most of the time while clinking beer bottles together. Not to mention every single woman there wanted to get into his pants, swooning at everything he said and giving him the 'fuck me' eyes while doing it.

You hated it, every single minute of it. Like always you were ignored, simply looked over until some story was being told where you were ultimately the joke of. Any time someone asked you what you were doing with your life, you were met with cringing smiles and snickering laughs.

Four separate times your mother commented on your dress, the way it fit, the price value of it, and how it really wasn't a good color on you. All of your sisters friends rolled their eyes and whispered back and forth while staring at you, aunts and uncles acted dumbfounded when you told them that you were a freelance writer for a small music magazine back in Indy, and your cousins made comments about how badly you look since the last time you saw them.

It didn't matter anyway, even if your sister asked how you managed to get a stand up guy like Eddie to agree to be with you, in front of all of the guests. You had to remind yourself that you were there for the free booze and food or whatever the hell Eddie said in the car on the way here.

This wasn't a popularity contest for you, it was simply you being forced to do something against your wishes because your mother said so. You asked yourself why you even listened to her in the first place while letting the brown liquor burn in your stomach.

Why was it so important that you even showed up here? Why did you have to come to the awarding ceremony of favorite kid when you knew you weren't going to win? Why would you even set yourself up for such failure just because your mom said so?

Well, you're answer came when a flushed faced Eddie was laughing with your grandparents at one of the round tables in the corner. His eyes crinkled at the sides and his head was leaned back so you had a clear view of the neck you loved so much.

Then you looked over at your sweet looking grandparents who laughed loudly at whatever was said. Your grandmother had her hands on her cheeks, shaking her head back and forth, and beaming brightly. Your grandfather smiled around his cigar, big round belly jumping with laugher, and his cheeks smooshing up against the frames of his big glasses.

You didn't come here to win a competition. You didn't come here because your mother threatened you within an inch of your life if you didn't. You didn't come here because you thought it would be fun.

You showed up because you wanted to prove to the people who doubted you for so long just how happy you were. You wanted to prove that happiness doesn't come from the amount of money in your account or how many rooms sit in your house. You came here because you wanted to prove that they were wrong, that the grass on the other side of the fence could be green too, and that someone who grew up differently that you could still do amazing things.

Eddie was someone that your father would've had you kicked out over bringing him home in high school. Eddie was the boy your mother would tell you to stay far away from. Eddie was the kind of guy that your sister wouldn't look twice at because of who he was.

But right now, during the beautiful dinner the night before your sister's wedding, your best friend/fake boyfriend has them all wrapped around his guitar calloused finger.

Not much has been said between you and him, especially when he was the man of the hour. You're not really complaining though, you're happy that he made a good impression with them. When the night began to settle into your bones and the alcohol started to make you tipsy, you slyly walked up to Eddie and tugged on his sleeve to let him know it was time to go.

On the walk back to the room, you sway slightly with every step you take, balancing on the walls with one hand while the other holds your strappy heels. When Eddie stops and turns to the door of your room, you all but smack into him with clumsy steps.

While he fumbles with key, you're in blissful content with your eyes closed. The kick of the lock and the turn of the handle doesn't even pull you out of your daze, instead you hold your arms out like a mummy and feel around until you find Eddie's clothed back.

You can tell Eddie is laughing by the large breath that passes through his nose and the tell tale sign of him kissing his teeth. Large hands wrap around your wrists, guiding you into the doorway that you can't see.

Your cheeks are warm, the smile on your face is permanent, and the buzzing in your heart makes you feel light on your feet.

"Alright mummy, lets get you into bed." Letting go of his hold on you, you feel him slightly brush past you to close the door. His voice sounds like the way stars look, sparkling and bright, twinkling all around.

You giggle, eyes still shut and your nose scrunched up. "M'not a mummy but I could be if ya want."

Putting your arms out, you lean back and forth on your feet to mimicking what you think is a mummy but looks more like a zombie.

"Baaaaahhhhh, I'm a mummy. Be very afraid." You deepen your voice, dragging the syllables of every word to make them come out slower.

Eddie must be entertained because the sound of a loud raspberry comes from where he stands, the clear sign of him losing the grip on the laugh he'd been holding in.

Cracking one of your eyes open, you hope to find him with rose cheeks and dimples flashing, the look you love so much. Instead you see him, beaming at you without the shine of his canines. It's an admiring smile, one where your eyes go all gooey and your smile is simple yet dipped with so much love.

Opening your eyes all the way, you let your arms down slowly to rest by your sides, a meek look painting your face.

"Did I do good?" You ask, even though you didn't really want his opinion.

"I think you're perfect." It comes out even, smooth like the hilltops in December covered in a layer of the purest snow.

The two of you sit there for a while, soaking up the glow of each other and letting it sink into your souls. For a moment you wonder if he feels it too, the spark that you feel whenever he's around. You wonder if he feels like crying simply because he loves you that much. You wonder if he wishes this whole dating thing wasn't just a lie and that it was true, the same way you wish it was.

Once the moment ends for him, he's clearing his throat to clear any lovesick daze that's left. "I guess we better head to bed, huh?"

Scratching at the back of his neck, you try with everything in your power to not look down where his turtle neck rode up, where the patch of mouth watering hair trails from his belly button to underneath the waist of his pants.

A part of you wishes you stuck it out longer, stayed in your seat at the dinner table just to see him in his outfit longer. He asked you to help him pick it out this morning and when you think back to it, you get flustered with thinking how domesticated it felt. Making him try on different shirts and jumping for joy when he walked out of the bathroom wearing a turtleneck he swore he'd never wear. The khakis you pulled out of his suitcase was the cause of so much laughter and the pink tinge that sat on the rounds of his cheeks.

God, he looked so good, especially with his hair pulled back and the dangled earring that sat in his ear, but now it would all be a memory for you to file away in the back of your brain.

Eddie had already started taking off his dress shoes, sitting on the edge of the bed bent over and messing with the knots that kept the laces together.

The smile that once held your lips high and proud, now weigh down in a sad frown. Even after the success of the dinner and proving everyone wrong, you are now brought back to the reality of what you and Eddie were. Just friends.

"Since I'm a gentleman and I can't see to get these shoes untied, I'll let you shower first." His voice comes out strained from how hard he pulls on the knotted strings.

You don't say anything, quietly nodding your head before shuffling over to your suitcase that sits by the closet. Grabbing a sleepshirt and some shorts, you go to move around the lanky man that can't get his shoes off no matter how hard he tries.

Without a sound, you kneel in front of him, placing your clothes somewhere off to the side. Taking his calf in your hand, you place his foot on your thigh. Delicately, you remove the first shoe and then the next.

"Y'didn't have to do that." It's quiet but not enough to be a whisper, still you shrug.

"I didn't but I wanted to." It seems so simple when you say it, even though deep down inside you wanted that last piece of your fantasy before it goes away for the rest of the night.

"Will you help me with my dress?" You ask him, standing on your feet and turning so that the golden zipper is facing him.

In the mirrored closet door you can see him and how he hesitates for a moment, shaky hands lingering in the air before they close in on the gold slider.

The sound of the metal teeth unlatching from one another fills the room, clouding the unrhythmic beat of your heart. You try to remember the feeling of him on the sacred part of your skin, the way his light touch tickles you and makes goosebumps rise. You want to memorize it like your favorite song, so that when you leave this place and the fake nature of this whole thing goes away, you still have something to think about on those bad days.

It ends too soon for your liking, his hands retracting right back to the sides of his body like a measuring tape. With the fuzz of your tipsy has now wore off but the sting of everything still remains.

Giving him a small smile and muttering a thank you, you hide in the bathroom where the sound of running water hides the muffled cries that leave your throat.

Waking up felt more painful than any hangover you've ever had. The pain of Eddie's bare back facing you was heartbreaking. You force yourself not connect the freckles that litter his skin or trace your fingers along his spine and shoulder blades.

It's a sight you've seen plenty of times and sharing a bed is something you've done more than enough that you're not uncomfortable. Yet your heart squeezes, wrapping itself up in the tightest loop so that it hurts to even breathe.

The sound of his soft snores only makes it worse, imagining what he dreams about and if it's you.

You use all of the willpower that's left in your body, marching over to the small kitchenette that sits in the corner of the giant room. Pouring yourself a cup of coffee, you try to focus on the swirl of dark liquid mixing with the coffee creamer and how they mix together so perfectly. Without much of a peep, you slide the glass doors that lead out to the balcony and sit down in one of the plush chairs.

You look out over the mountains of colors, tracing over the lines of trees that go on for miles. Although pretentious, you think Veronica did an excellent job and choosing this location.

Sipping on the hot beverage, you watch the clouds in the blue sky go by, wondering what it would've been like if your sister asked you to be a bridesmaid. You imagine that the two of you would've actually gotten along and maybe even laughed together. You envision what it would've been like to have your mother compliment you in your gown and how it would feel to take a picture with your family where all the smiles were real.

Tears begin to burn the back of your eyes, falling rapidly like a fall rainstorm. The skin of your cheeks burn slightly from the heated trails of water that fall. You're sad and incredibly so. Within the first twenty four hours of being here, you remember how much of an outsider you really are to these people.

Even with the company of Eddie, someone that truly loves you, you still can't help but feel so fucking lonely. To put on the mask you wore for many year back on and pretend that the man standing next to you is yours to claim is harder than any other time you had to do it.

This time you weren't really faking it, the love that you showed to him, the happiness you felt with him was real, just the titles weren't. With the cool fall chill, your coffee has gone cold but your tears keep coming.

"You made yourself a cup of coffee but not one for me, and this is how I find out? That's just mean." Eddie's curly hair pokes out from the small gap in the sliding back door that he's created.

His eyes are squinted from the harshness of the morning sun but his cheeky smile is forever unwavering. Sliding a space big enough for him to go through, he stalks out onto the small space in his plaid pajama pants and a hoodie he must've thrown on.

Trying your best to cover up that you've been crying, you wipe the back of your hand across your cheeks, but Eddie still catches your movements.

Instead of embarrassing you, he sits down in the chair across from you and looks out over the balcony.

"You okay?" It's a simple enough question, one that you can answer with one word and he wouldn't pry for more information to not overwhelm you.

Sniffling, you shake your head yes and then move your gaze to where his is. "No, yeah, m'good. The view really does something for me." You say, chuckling just a bit at your own joke.

Eddie also laughs, only this time it's not as genuine as it usually is, just a hard exhale through his nose.

"Yeah, sure does." He agrees, letting his eyes follow the red and orange of the tree tops.

A calm silence falls over you two, only the sounds of the birds that fly and the ruffle of the leaves can be heard from where you sit. It's peaceful.

"You know, I really thought this weekend would be different." It comes out of your mouth as easy as the breeze that blows. Still your eyes stay trained out in front of you and past the mountains of trees.

Eddie doesn't respond but the hole that he burns through the side of your head with his eyes tell you he's listening.

"When I was little, I used to imagine the day Vee got married. I would fantasize that maybe one day we could be close enough that I could enjoy this day with her and we could be sisters for once." You exhale an uneven breath, moving your sights to the cup that still sits in your hand.

"I just wanted all of us to be a family for once. I wanted my mom to actually act like she liked me, for my dad to say that for once he was proud of who I was, and for Veronica, I just wanted her to say she's happy that I'm her little sister."

Just like that, every single thing you've carried since you were little is now out in the open, whipping around in the wind like the dead leaves. Even with the amount of burden that's been lifted, the pain still remains the same. It all hurts, stabbing you over and over again in the scars that you worked so hard to patch up.

Eddie doesn't say anything and for a moment you don't think he'll say anything at all. You watch him pull out the pack of cigarettes he had nestled in his pocket and place one in between his pretty pink lips.

Another second goes by and he's flicking the wheel of his lighter, shielding the flame away from the wind so he can light it. When the end of the smoke burns red, he takes a big inhale and then lets the cloud of smoke out.

"I know what I say won't matter," He starts before taking another drag of his smoke, "But these people don't fucking mean anything."

"They're you're family and I get that but they don't fucking deserve you, they never have. A fake boyfriend, a new haircut, or a cool job shouldn't define their love for you. They're shitty people who were blessed with an amazing person and they didn't even realize it."

Eddie looks at you the same way he speaks, with nothing but truth. You let the words settle in your mind, letting them soak in, in case you forget.

The tears that once ceased start to flow again, except this time it's from relief. It feels good that someone else sees your worth, to know someone actually holds value to you.

"It kills me that they treat you the way they do, that they can say all those things without batting an eye. I know why you asked me to come here and I know I have a job to do, but man do I want to rip them all a new asshole."

Although he speaks with fire behind the words, you have to laugh from the thought of the actions. The moment you giggle, his own smile forms.

"I hope you know that I love you and when everything is done and over with, we'll give them the bird." To make his point, Eddie raises his middle finger high into the sky.

Repeating his actions, you hold your own finger to the sky and smile happily while doing it.

Letting his arm fall back down into place, he pats the tops of your thighs and stands from the chair.

"That's my girl, now let's get ready for an open bar and free booze." Holding his open palm to you, he helps you up.

The wedding reception was what you thought it would be, drawn out and boring. The only saving grace of the whole thing was Eddie's commentary, the scruff on his face tickling you every time he leaned close to your ear.

A lot of the things he was saying was probably just to make you feel better but you did have to agree, the dress Veronica picked out was a bad rip off of Princess Diana's and it shouldn't have seen broad daylight.

You did however get choked up when the vowels started, not because you were happy with your sister but because you wish that were you and Eddie up there instead.

All and all it was okay, even though one of your brother in law's aunt's wore a hat so big you couldn't see past it most of the time.

The wedding reception though was beautiful. The décor of the manner looked exquisite against the maroon coloring of all the bridesmaids dresses. The tables had beautiful bouquets sitting in the middle and you can't help but laugh imagining your father cutting a check for all of them.

To much of yours and Eddie's delight, there is an open bar that is stacked high with pricey alcohol. Again you laugh thinking about your father having to pay the tab, which you and Eddie will be happy to run up.

So far this is the most the two of you had fun, both laughing and enjoying the company that's around you. The table you've been stuck at is also occupied by other family rejects that enjoy the titles they've been given.

Eddie's hand hasn't left your thigh, which you're more than happy about, and every so often he flexes his fingers squeezing the meaty flesh.

You feel good, the boost from the drinks and the feeling of your best friend makes you bloom like a flower in the spring. You watch as he talks to the people at your table and how his hand moves with enthusiasm. You trace the muscles in his neck and watch his adam's apple bob up and down when he speaks. Your chin sits in the palm of your hand as you watch him be himself like he always is.

He's so beautiful, he always has been, and in this moment he gets to be yours. You don't have to think about what anyone else thinks, you don't have to question how the two of you look from another's perception, because you know that your heart bleeds for him and it always will.

Eddie's your home, he's your best friend, and he's your person. You think back to what he said to you this morning and how he called you a blessing but you think he's wrong. Eddie is the true blessing. He's sweet, he's smart, and he's so fucking caring it's disgusting. Behind all the jagged features and dark clothes, he's nothing but a giant teddy bear that wears his heart on his sleeve.

"Birdie." He smiles at you, all goo and mush it makes your heart skip.

You hum in response, still sitting in the same position, looking at him as if he were a painting.

"You wanna dance?" He blushes, embarrassed by the request and you feel like you're back in junior high.

"You, Eddie Munson hate dancing." You say, scrunching your nose cutely.

Laughing loudly, he nods, "Yeah, I know, but I'd dance with you."

That breaks you out of your daze, breath catching in your throat. "O-oh, yeah. I'll um dance."

Again he stands, holding a palm out to you so he can help you up. Leaning you to the dance floor, you can't help but feel jittery despite the wine that you've consumed.

Once out on the floor, he pulls you into his chest. Strong hands grip your waist through the silk fabric of your red dress and you desperately try to fight the need that rises in your guy.

You stand stiff, unsure of what to do with yourself and Eddie's quick to help you, placing your hands around his neck where they lay contently.

He looks good tonight, even better than last night, and you hate how it makes butterflies flap around in your stomach. The black button up shirt sits nicely on his torso, wrapping his arms so deliciously you want to take a bite out of them. The black slacks he wears fit nicely and you wonder if he had them tailored and you have to ignore the want to undo the sleek black belt with a bright golden buckle that holds them up. Again his hair sits in a low bun and that silver chain peeks out at you from underneath his collar.

"I can't believe you asked me to dance to Ed Sheeran." You say breathlessly, still nervous with being this close to him.

Eddie snorts, lopsided smile forming on his lips. "What, a guy can't like Ed Sheeran and metal? That's gatekeeping, sweetheart." He teases.

Rolling your eyes, you try to ignore that tingle that settles in your cheeks. "Whatever you say, Munson."

"I'm serious, Thinking Out Loud was in my top ten last year." The two of you hold eye contact until you can't take it anymore, both bursting into laughter at his admission.

"That's something you shouldn’t repeat." You sputter at him and he laughs even harder.

"Hey, I like this song, okay?" He defends, still swaying back and forth with you.

Raising your hands in defense, you pull back on your clowning for the sake of your friend. Placing your arms back around his neck, you lean your head on his chest and try to hear the beat of his heart.

The scent of him floods your nose, cologne and smoke, whiskey and linen, and you wish you could bottle it to keep forever.

"Why do you like this song anyway? It's kind of basic." You mutter at him.

His shoulders lift in a shrug, and he takes a moment to respond. "Honestly, I like it cause it reminds me of you."

Your eyebrows furrow in confusion and you remove your head to look up at him.

"Wha'do you mean?" You mumble, eyes searching his for some sort of answer.

Looking bashful again, red tints his cheeks and ears in a blush. Sticking his tongue out to wet his lips, he hesitantly answers.

"I always felt like he said everything I couldn't, ya know? Everything I ever wanted to say to you, he put in a song."

It feels like the whole world stops, that time freezes and it's just the two of you. You're in shock and for some reason you can't wrap your head around anything he's saying.

"What?" You say harshly and again he shrugs, shying away from your burning focus on him.

"Reminds me of you and everything I ever felt about you. I always wanted to call you mine but if you hadn't noticed, I'm a chicken shit."

You don't say anything, instead you stare at him with your mouth wide open. Eddie starts to loose his cool, frantically flexing his fingers against the material of your dress, looking around at anything but you.

"Sorry, I - shit, I really fucked this up," He doesn't get to finish his sputtering apology because you quickly smash your lips into his.

His lips taste like brown liquor and chapstick, like love and forever, and you can't believe you waited this long to experience it. Two heart sync as one, two people fall together like the leaves outside, and anxieties are finally laid to rest.

You hate that you pull away first but the need for air is too much. Eddie bends enough so that his forehead leans on yours, both looking into each other eyes living in the moment of your blissed out hearts.

"Tell me if I'm being too forward but do you wanna get out of here?" He flirts and you respond simply by pecking his lips once more.

"Thought you'd never ask."

thank you all for reading!!! love you guys <3

#eddie munson smut #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson #eddie munson fanfic #eddie munson blurb #eddie munson fluff #eddie munson angst #eddie munson x you #eddie munson x female reader #honey's birthday bash #honey's holiday celebrations

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totheblood · 1 year

Text

imagine me & you. (one)

pairing: modern!ellie williams x reader

summary: ellie is the florist for your wedding, and you wonder is love at first sight is real and if it is the universe hates your guts

warnings: occasional cursing, suggestive themes, angst/pining, could this be considered infidelity? maybe?, drug/alcohol usage/mention, you marry a man i apologize

a/n: AI AUDIOS AT THE END this is a series i'm writing that is completely based on the movie "imagine me and you" which is a phenomenal lesbian romcom... i would suggest that everyone watches it but i dont want the series to be spoiled for you.. this is sugar sweet fluff and i think is overall really cute. I DONT CONDONE CHEATING! this fic is.... a gray area tho so.. enjoy! I would greatly appreciate any reblogs, comments, asks you have about this chapter. thank you for supporting me through this journey!

This was the best day of your life.

The chapel was adorned with flowers, the smell of tulips heavy in the air. The streamers were hung between each seat with careful detail, just as you had planned it months ago. You could hear the quiet chatter among guests, all beautifully dressed for the occasion, and at the end of the aisle stood your best friend. This was the day your best friend became your husband.

You had met Sully in your first year of college when his best friend, Ezra, began dating your best friend, Tara. While Tara and Ezra’s relationship was short-lived, you and Sully had something nearly impossible to break. He provided a kind of comfort that only came with knowing someone as long as you had, and a promise of a life that you imagined for yourself.

You were in love with him, you knew this. This fact had never even come into question. You were sure of your decision every step of the way and you were positive that your walk down the aisle would be the easiest thing you had done in your lifetime.

The only thing that made you nervous was the fact that everyone had their eyes on you. As the doors opened and it was finally your turn to make your way down the aisle, you knew that this was the first day of the rest of your life, but not for the reasons you expected.

Prior to the start of the wedding, Ellie was already having a shit day. Her supplier hadn’t arrived with the shipment of tulips she needed for the shop that day and it was just her luck that her last batch was already loaded in the truck for your wedding. Dina had assured her that she would call and bitch out the supplier until he delivered them, but something was still unsettled in her gut. Reluctantly, she relinquished her power to Dina for the day and made her way over to your venue to set up early.

It was the silent morning that Ellie loved the most. The air was crisp with anticipation of what was about to happen, the quiet echoed chapel that would soon be filled with celebratory cheers and applause. The idea that eternal love may exist soothed her, but only temporarily.

Ellie had found herself in somewhat of a dry spell, her only intimate interactions being with her pillow. It wasn’t something that necessarily stressed her out, but it was something that she thought about often. It wasn’t that it bothered her either, she was simply growing impatient for her chance to have this kind of celebration of love. It is legal now, she reminded herself.

As the time for the wedding grew closer, Ellie found that she was in over her head. She assumed she would be able to finish decorating by the time guests started to arrive, so she could slip out unnoticed and no one would see her in her overalls, but she admittedly had paid too much attention to detail. It was no secret that she was a perfectionist, but she knew it would cost her.

Her anxiety only grew more and more as people started to arrive and sit in the aisles that she still was yet to decorate. By the grace of whatever was out there, she finished with little time to spare and had begun collecting her things but was stopped by who she assumed was a groomsman.

“Hi, you must be Ellie, the florist.” He reached out his hand, a broad smile on his face. His eyes were a stark blue and his face was perfectly symmetrical. He oozed confidence and Ellie could tell that he had never faced a day of rejection in his life. She had a feeling this was about to change.

“What gave it away? The flowers or my overalls?” She joked, reaching her gloved hand out to shake his, a polite laugh escaping from his lips.

“It was actually your indescribable beauty. I don’t know… I heard a thing about florists being hot. I’m Ezra, by the way.” Ellie wanted to scoff, throw up, do anything that would signify she wasn’t interested in the man before her, but more than that she wanted her tip.

“Wonder where you heard that. Didn’t see that article in this month's Florist’s Monthly.” She joked back, her sickly sweet grin still painted on her face.

“Well, just wanted to introduce myself. Hope you're staying for the reception?” He questioned, moving back after the pace of the room began to change. It was becoming evident the wedding was about to start and he needed to be in his place.

“It’s my job to be there so… I’ll be there.” She sighed, picked up the bucket that had scrap flowers in it, and began making her way down the side of the chapel, careful to not draw any attention to her. Ellie had never stayed this long before, she had never gotten the opportunity to watch the bride walk down the aisle and curiosity was getting the best of her. As she tried to sneak away, she attempted to get one glance at the girl about to be married.

As you made your way down the floral-lined carpet, a line was tugged on your heart. Something inside of you was telling you to look to the left. So you did. It was almost as if time stopped for a moment as you caught a glimpse of the girl. Her hair was half pinned up, little strands of hair framing her face, her lips in an adoring smile. She was all-encompassing. This is what you imagined love at first sight to feel like. It’s what you would have imagined love at first sight to feel like if it wasn’t your wedding day.

Ellie had to stop when she saw you, your beauty overwhelming her. She was sure all brides looked this beautiful on their wedding day, but she was also unsure of that at this moment. It was an almost impossible idea that someone on this earth could look more beautiful than you did at that moment. It made her heart drop to the pit of her stomach, even more so when she saw the comforting smile on your face drop as you locked eyes and you quickly turned away. Ellie assumed you hadn’t recognized her and became confused so she quickly and quietly made her way out of the venue.

When you turned back around to get one last look at her, she was gone. You were almost sure she was simply a figment of your imagination, an ethereal dream that you had hallucinated, but what you felt was real. Almost too real.

The wedding went off without a hitch, fulfilling every dream you had for yourself. As you kissed your now husband you felt a great sense of relief, the pit in your stomach from earlier being filled. Whatever feeling you felt when you and the florist locked eyes was now becoming a distant memory. The only thing you could think of was that you had done it, and completed this task. This was what love felt like. Right?

As the reception went on and the guests were full of liquor and good music, Ellie found herself wanting to introduce herself to you, as she did with every bride. She pushed past warm bodies till she found you hunched over the punch bowl, a ladle in your hands.

“Hi,” She began, causing you to drop the ladle and turn towards her. She stood with her arms by her side and a gentle smile on her face. She seemed calm. Warm. Inviting.

“Hi.” You replied, moving to stand in front of the punch bowl, a smile gracing your face.

“We- um, we haven’t met. I’m Ellie.” She introduced herself. She smiled as you simply responded with your name.

“I did your flowers.” She stated, assuming you were unsure of who she was.

“You did?” You breathed, your shoulders relaxing. “My flowers are nice.”

“Anyways, I was just going to get a-” Ellie pointed at the punch behind you, moving towards it but was stopped by your body standing moving in front of it, blocking it from her view.

“Drink.” Ellie said, suspiciously, brows furrowed in confusion as you gave her a nervous laugh.

“I wouldn’t.” You remarked through your laughs, slightly shaking your head.

“Wh- Is there something wrong?” Ellie questioned, unsure of what was happening right now. “I’m here to help.” She watched as you blinked for a second and your smile fell.

“My ring.” You told her as you turned around and picked up the ladle again, looking down into the punch. Ellie was at your side, watching as you stirred the red liquid, a smile back on your face. “I was getting some of this punch crap and-”

“Your wedding ring?” Ellie laughed, stealing a glance at your focused face.

“It fell off.” You giggled, a sound that made Ellie’s cheeks redden. “Off and in there. My wedding ring is in there.” You turned to her, the side of your lips curved downwards into an upside-down smile. You were impossibly close to her.

“And you tried the ladle?” Ellie questioned, humor in her voice.

“Nothing.” You shook your head, a huge grin still on your face.

“And you can’t empty-” Ellie shook her head, her internal monologue running rampant. “No, it's too big. Um, alright.” Ellie’s mind almost short-circuited when you laughed at her manic raving.

“Only one thing to do.” Ellie simply stated. “Cover me.”

“What?” You question, staring at her, confusion written all over your face.

“Use the dress, I’m going in.” Ellie answered, rolling up the sleeves of her shirt before pulling you by the waist in front of her. She tried not to be distracted by your consistent laughing, but reality shook her as she reached her hand into the punch bowl.

You stood in front of her keeping watch but quickly became alert when another guest began making his way over to you.

Moving to stand in front of him and Ellie, you looked up at him and gave him your friendliest smile. Clearing your throat you offered the man a polite, “Hello.”

“They say white’s the color of virgins… if I know Sully the only thing virgin around here is the olive oil.” He commented smugly, reaching next to you to pick up a plastic cup. Ellie couldn’t help but roll her eyes as she fished around in the punch. What makes this guy think he can just-

“The old jokes really are the best aren’t they?” You quipped sarcastically, a groan nearly slipping from your lips. Ellie was laughing to herself at the sound of your annoyed tone and body being in such close proximity to hers.

“I’m Dennis. Sully works underneath me but not in the biblical sense.” He reached out and shook your hand, unwarranted confidence coming off him in waves. Just at that moment, Ellie felt the circular metal between her fingertips and pulled it out victoriously.

“You’re just like he described.” You told the man, it being painfully obvious (to no one but him) that you didn’t mean that as a compliment. Behind you, Ellie shook the juice off the ring and tapped the exposed skin of your upper arm, causing you to put your left hand behind your back, right in Ellie’s view. Carefully, Ellie slipped the ring on your ring finger, its rightful place, and found herself beside you again.

“Now, I need booze.” Dennis remarked as he picked up the ladle and scooped some punch into his cup. If it was anyone else, you would have stopped him. But it wasn’t.

“Hi.” Ellie made herself known to the man.

“Hi.” He replied. Ellie tried to ignore the way he looked her up and down.

“This is Ellie.” You said, a proud smile on your face. “She’s a florist”

“Name’s Dennis. But you can call me anything you’d like.” He outstretched his hand to Ellie, a dumbstruck look on his face. Ellie’s drenched hand gripped his as if she was punishing him for his behavior.

“And I’m sure I will.” Ellie smiled, holding back her laughter as he pulled his hand away and shook the sticky liquid off his hand.

The wedding was as eventful as any wedding could be. Family members were getting drunk, Ezra was flirting with as many people as he could, and you were wrapped up in Sully’s arms. The music had mellowed out and people had found their way back to their assigned tables, ready to eat. Everyone began eating, only looking up when Sully stood up, prepared to make a speech.

You listened as he went on about how long he had waited for this day, how much he adored you, and the future he envisioned for the two of you. You wanted to relish in all the attention and love he was showering you in, but your mind continued to travel back to Ellie and the brief moment you shared with her. Ellie was most likely miles away by now, but that didn’t stop you from envisioning her there in the crowd.

You were starting to feel guilty about it too. While your husband was boasting about how you were the best thing to happen to him, you were fantasizing about the girl you had just who you were almost sure was your soulmate. There was a thickness in your throat that only grew as Ezra described how he and Ellie had ‘hit it off’ and how he was going to ask her out. It shouldn’t have upset you but you did.

The following week your mind was still on Ellie. She hadn’t reached out after the wedding, but you were also unsure of why she would do something like that. It wasn’t like there was any specific reason for her to call you, but you still waited by the phone like she would.

It felt like a regular day for Ellie, she reached the shop early and was finishing setting up. She had just opened the doors when a man had hurried in with a frantic look on his face.

“Hello.” She greeted the man, wiping the dirt from her hands on the apron wrapped around her waist.

“Hi. You’ve got to help me.” He exclaimed frantically. “I need a flower. Just one. A good one. The best!” He watched as she continued to move things around the shop.

“Okay.” Ellie said in her calmest voice, attempting to appease the man.

“This is my last chance. My last chance flower.” He told her, looking around at the various flowers on display.

“Your last chance?” Ellie questioned, finally giving her full attention to the man.

“I really fucked up. Only the right flower can save me.” He explained. “What about a rose? A red rose. What would that say?” He pointed to the basket of red roses sitting on the table.

“Love.” Ellie shrugged.

“Love’s nice.” The man thought out loud.

“And fidelity.” Ellie added.

“Not a red rose, then.” The man pushed past the roses and continued looking.

“No, not a red rose at all. It’s too obvious.” Ellie agreed with him, eager to make a sale. “If this really is your last chance we need to make it something spectacular.” Ellie moved to the other side of the shop and examined what she had in stock. There was a slight knock at the door, but Ellie didn’t look up, focused on the task at hand.

“Be right with you.” She told the unknown guest.

“That’s fine.” You spoke, your voice causing her to stand up straight. You had a pink scarf wrapped around your neck and your hair pulled back. You had this glow to you that only came with what Ellie assumed was natural beauty. Almost suddenly the air in the shop was much lighter.

“Hi.” She breathed, smiling back at you.

“Hey.”

“How are you doing?” Ellie asked.

“Good,” you shrugged your shoulders. “Great.” You corrected yourself.

“I just,” you began again but were cut off by the man making his way out the open door behind you to look at the flowers that were placed outside the shop. “Came by to say thanks.” You smiled, awkwardly putting your hands in your pockets.

“It was a total pleasure,” Ellie told you, her voice soft. She stared at you for a beat, almost forgetting what she was doing before you came in. “Listen, sorry, I’m just dealing with-” She pointed to the man outside scanning the flowers.

“Oh, of course. Go right ahead.” You blurted out, moving away from the door so she could tend to the man outside.

The man looked at you through the window, smiling upon seeing your face. “What’s your favorite flower?” He asked, making you blink at him.

“I don’t know, I think I like tulips.” You replied, giving him the kindest smile you could muster.

“They’re wrong.” He said, finger in the air as he continued to muck about. He made his way back into the store as Ellie pulled a long, colorful flower from one of the silver buckets attached to the wall.

“What about this?” Ellie asked him, showing him the exotic flower she had in her hands. “Bird of paradise.”

“Keep talking.” He instructed her.

“Real name ‘Strelitzia’. Named after Charlotte of Strelitz. She married King George the third and had 15 kids. They never spent more than an hour apart.” She explained, looking towards you to see the grin you were hiding on your face.

“Okay, stop talking.” The man said as he abruptly left the store.

“Do you want to come to dinner?” You asked her, just as abruptly.

“ ‘m sorry?” She asked, confused by the tone this conversation carried.

“Dinner, with us. Me and Sully.” You clarified, her chest deflating a little. You watched as an unreadable expression clouded her face, suddenly feeling embarrassed by the question. “I mean you don’t have to-”

“I’d love to.” Ellie cut you off, her heart blooming as she watched your smile grow.

“Really?” You asked sounding surprised. “This Friday?”

“Yeah, Friday. Why not?” Ellie nodded, unsure of why she was agreeing to this.

“Great. I’ll just write down-” You moved to write down your address on a card you saw sitting on the counter.

“Perfect!” The man from earlier screamed, walking back in with a cactus shaped like a dick in his hands. “This is the one.”

You and Ellie both couldn’t help but laugh.

Friday came around sooner than expected. You had spent the entire day cooking, dancing around the kitchen, and cleaning up the apartment. When you told Sully about the dinner party you were hosting, he decided that it would be best to invite Ezra since he and Ellie presumably ‘hit it off’ at the wedding. Admittedly, that made you want to not only pull your hair out but also Sully’s. Instead, you simply thanked him for being so thoughtful and tried your best to make it seem like you were impartial.

The place was decorated to the nines. There stood long colored candles lit on the table, new spring placemats laid out, and bright pink tulips in a vase at the center of the table. You would never say it out loud, but the tulips were there for Ellie.

You hadn’t realized how much time had passed since you began cooking, but the sun was setting and Sully was already dressed for the guests. He sauntered into the kitchen, talking about how much he hated his job and threatening to quit for the sixth time that week.

“You say that every day, baby.” You told him, stirring the pot before pulling the spoon out, swiping your finger on it, and tasting the sauce. It was perfect.

“I know, but this time I mean it.” He told you, walking up behind you and placing a kiss on your cheek.

“Do you like Ellie?” You asked randomly.

“Yeah, sure. She seems nice enough. I mean Ezra likes her.” He responded, walking around the kitchen island.

“Ezra likes anything with a pulse.” You reminded him causing him to laugh.

“That’s true.” He smiled to himself. “But if you want her to stick around why are you introducing her to him.”

“It wasn’t my idea. You know this.” You said, pulling the breadsticks out of the oven.

“Oh, right.” was all he said before he popped a grape into his mouth from the bowl sitting on the kitchen island. You were about to scold him for spoiling his dinner but your thoughts were cut off by the ringing of the bell.

“That should be Ellie. Get the door please.” You instructed him.

“On it, boss.” He popped another grape in his mouth before opening the door for Ellie.

“Hey, Ellie. Nice to see you.” He greeted, stepping back so Ellie could make her way into the apartment.

“Hey. I didn’t know what you drank, or if you drank, so I just made punch.” She smiled, handing the bottle to Sully. From the kitchen, you were blushing at the reminder of your first meeting.

“Thank you. She will love this.” He thanked her watching as you came up beside him. Instinctively, he put a hand around your shoulders.

“Hi.” You smiled at her. The air was thick between the two of you and there was an awkward silence. Ellie blinked at you. You looked as good as you did the first time she saw you. It always startled her how her pulse raced in your presence.

“Come look at our new sofa.” You told her, removing yourself from Sully’s grip as you led her into the living room.

“Expensive new couch.” Sully corrected you.

“Can’t put a price on comfort,” Ellie told Sully, smiling as she plopped down on the couch.

“A girl after my own heart.” You smiled down at Ellie, watching as her cheeks blushed once again. Sully sat down next to her, handing the bottle of punch over to you.

“Do you believe in reincarnation? It’s just that my lover here thinks that you two have met before.” Sully asked Ellie, causing you to send a dirty look his way.

“That’s not what I-” You started.

“I think I would have remembered.” Ellie said smoothly, eyes fixed on you. You ignored the way your heart picked up speed and your face grew with warmth.

“Well, I’m going to put this in the kitchen. You two talk.” You hurried away, checking yourself in the mirror before heading back into the kitchen.

On the couch, Ellie fiddled with her fingers as she examined the room around her. It was bright and well-decorated. She could tell that every piece in here was handpicked by you and it made her feel more at ease as she and Sully made small talk.

“Anyway. How about you? Married?” He questioned. Ellie was unsure of how the conversation had led here but she so desperately wanted you to come back. “Ever been married? Ever gonna be married?” He continued to press her.

“Uh, no, no, and maybe now the laws have changed.” She chuckled as she watched the confusion cloud his face, leaning back on the couch.

“What do you mean?” Sully questioned.

“I’m gay.” Ellie flatly responded. Sully let out a laugh, before humming to himself. He didn’t know what to do in these situations.

“Lovely. Well-done.” He told Ellie, cringing at himself. Luckily, Ezra’s arrival had saved him some embarrassment.

The dinner went on as well as you’d expected. Ezra consistently hitting on Ellie, Sully attempting to tell Ezra that Ellie was gay, and numerous stolen glances between you and Ellie all occurred within the half-hour you were sitting there.

Somehow the conversation drifted to how much of a player Ezra was, earning small laughs from the whole group.

“Well, that’ll all change when you meet Mrs.Right.” You told him, pushing your food around on your plate with your fork.

“And how am I supposed to know when I do that? Hm?” Ezra questioned, looking straight at you.

“You don’t know. Not straight away, anyways. It just feels warm, and comfortable, and you hang in there and give it a chance. Before you know it, you’re like yeah, this is it.” You were unsure if you were trying to convince him or yourself, but Sully was smiling at you from across the table so you found comfort in that. “Must be love.”

“Yeah, I’m with you.” Sully agreed.

“Yeah, I’m with her too.” Ezra chimed in.

“I don’t agree.” Ellie blurted out, causing everyone to look at her. “I think you know immediately. You know as soon as your eyes…” She was staring intently at you as her voice trailed off and she averted her gaze from you. “Then everything that happens from then on just proves that you had been right in that first moment.” Her eyes met yours again. It was almost as if she was speaking directly to you.

“When you suddenly realized you had been incomplete and now you are whole.” She finished, her eye contact with you making something inside you stir. You were staring back at you, mouth hanging open. It was almost as if she saw through you at that moment and it made you wonder if she had been feeling the same way. Whatever you were feeling, she had felt too.

“Nevermind, I’m actually with her.” Ezra spoke up, breaking you out of your trance.

“Me too.” Sully laughed. “Okay, who’s ready for desser-”

“No.” You stated.

“No?” Ellie questioned.

“No, if you think that, then you think that everyone who doesn’t have all that business is just settling for less.” You argued, unsure if you were trying to defend what you had with Sully.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” Ellie corrected you.

“That kind of is what you’re saying.” You fought back.

“I think she said it a tiny bit nicer.” Ezra quipped in.

“Cheesecake, anyone?” Sully said, bringing the cheesecake in from the kitchen.

The night carried on after that. You began to help Sully clean the dishes, but he insisted that he and Ezra should do it since you cooked dinner. You watched as Ellie made her way through the hallway, and out to the terrace, bringing her umbrella with her. Quietly you followed her, unsure of what your endgame was. You tightly wrapped your sweater around you, the chill from outside seeping through the walls. Ellie was sat on the edge of your terrace, staring out into the city. You watched her for a moment, content with just looking at her.

“What are you doing?” You called out from inside, causing her to turn her head and smile at you.

“It’s gorgeous,” Ellie told you, turning her head slightly towards the city beneath her.

“It’s raining.” You reminded her, the smile that was permanently on around her only growing.

Ellie closed her umbrella and ran back inside next to you. Watching you as you closed the door shut behind her. You both stood there for a moment watching the rain pour from the warmth inside.

“Sully won't come up here.” You blurted out. “He says there is a subconscious fear that you’ll throw yourself off, but he freaks when I get close to the edge too.”

Ellie remained quiet, smiling gently at you.

“Sorry about dinner.” You apologized for the tiny freakout you had.

“I’ve eaten worse.” Ellie laughed, trying to show you that she had no hard feelings toward you.

“I kind of went off.” You sighed, crossing your arms in front of you.

“You didn’t go off,” Ellie assured you gently, looking back at you with your eyebrows raised. “Okay, you went a little way off.”

This time you both turned toward each other, the air once again thick between the two of you.

“You’re wet.” You said simply as you rubbed the water off her clothes. Ellie’s breath caught in her throat as you touched her.

“I’m fine.” Ellie laughed.

“And you’re cold.” You told her, pulling off your cardigan and beginning to wrap it around her shoulders.

“I’m fine.” She plead again, reaching for your wrist as you attempted to put your sweater on her.

“You can have it, really.” You told her.

“I’m fine.” She said once more, finally giving up and you wrapped her in the sweater, pulling her close. If this was anyone else she would have kissed you right then and there. But you were you, and you were married.

“Hey, what are you guys up to?” Sully called from downstairs, once again breaking the moment the two of you were sharing.

Ellie took a step back away from you. This was a feeling she was unfamiliar with and that’s what scared her the most. She knew that you were going to be the death of her.

ai audios:

#mine #ellie williams #ellie williams x reader #ellie williams smut #ellie williams tlou #ellie williams x reader smut #ellie williams the last of us #ellie williams tlou2 #ellie williams fanfiction #ellie williams fanfic #ellie williams fan fic #ellie williams x female reader #ellie williams x you #ellie williams imagine #ellie williams oneshot #modern!ellie williams #college!ellie williams #ellie williams one shot

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beautifulletdownfics · 4 years

Text

Nothing To Him - A Harry Styles One Shot

Harry Styles is a liar.

He lied your whole relationship.

He promised to love you forever and then he walked away.

A lovers to nothing break up fic feat. blisters, heartache & two sides to one story.

Word count: 15k (Sorry! You’re going to want to open this little pal in a browser window probably. Eek)

Story Playlist:

The First Lie: Damn This Love - Thirsty Merc The Second Lie: Do You Remember - Jarryd James The Third Lie: Nebraska - Oh Wonder The Fourth Lie: I Saw You - Jon Bryant The Fifth Lie: Here We Go - Emily Hearn The Sixth Lie: Crying Dancing - Nina Nesbitt , NOTD

MY MASTERLIST.

The first lie was that you were different.

Harry felt different with you.

You just slipped into his routine and his life. You didn't buy into the spectacle of it all. You told him on your first date that you didn't play games, and that it wasn't often you connected with someone on an intellectual or emotional level. Harry sat there and listened to the woman across from him say she didn't expect to finish the date still attracted to him.

And he fucking loved it.

The next morning he called you at quarter past eight, because he figured you either started work at eight-thirty or nine o'clock, so he'd catch you on your commute or just before you walked into the office. You answered your phone like you would a business call. He teased you for it, but really he was just glad you answered at all. It felt like getting test results telling Harry he was in the clear.

The truth was when Harry first met you at the birthday party the night before he'd been angling towards you being a hookup. He saw you across the bar as soon as he arrived, gaze zeroing in on your legs in That Dress, his ears leaning to the sound of your laugh pulling eyes from around the room. Harry wanted you, and he'd been through a bit of a dry spell. You radiated the kind of energy Harry could get drunk on, the sort of body he wanted to lose himself in for a night.

It was almost an hour before he managed to edge into the same circle of bodies as you. You knew the birthday girl the same way he did; through work. Harry caught early on that you didn't still work for his record label, but did a few years before and stayed in touch with everyone. You seemed like the kind of person who collected people, who everyone wanted to keep in touch with. Harry just wanted to touch you.

Two tequilas in he got you to himself.

You were good at flirting, which excited Harry initially. You had a quip for everything or an interesting addition to each story he told. You were well-read and well-travelled, and you weren't hesitant in showing Harry that you had opinions and ideas of your own. Over the years he'd become good at getting people to talk, good at asking questions that make someone share themselves because the alternative—Harry sharing himself—wasn't something he could do. But something about you and the way you framed questions made Harry feel like it was safe to share a little more, you'd disarmed him quietly, and by the time he noticed Harry didn't feel the need to protect himself anymore.

"That's bullshit," you'd told him when he said he wasn't all that into contemporary fiction. You hated the artsy elites who listed off the Hemingway's and the Kerouac's and the Vonnegut's as though the only literature worth mentioning came from lifetimes ago. Your hair swished back and forth at your cheeks as you shook your head emphatically, "You're being lazy. Imagine saying the same about modern music."

Harry's lips ticked up into a smile, and he raised his eyebrow in concession, "That would be bullshit," he agreed, thinking of the album he'd just released and how he wanted to know if you'd listened to any of his stuff. (Very quickly he decided he probably didn't want to know because it stuck Harry the answer would be no.) His eyes couldn't pull away from watching your lips as you spoke, admiring the shade of lipstick you wore.

"Right," you continued, "Modern fiction teaches me about myself, about my life. It gives words to what my friends and I are experiencing. The classics are amazing—don't get me wrong—but I don't see myself in them."

"Seems like your criteria stem from narcissism," Harry was sure he had you there. He grinned at you happily.

"Exactly," you agreed without hesitation, "Maybe 'Hills Like White Elephants' is genius, and as a woman, I should be grateful to Hemmingway for horrifying his audience in 1927 with a normalised view of abortion but … I don't think he wrote that for me. He was challenging ideas then. I feel more connection and loyalty to an Instagram poet who's painting the world that actually matters to me, the world I'm trying to survive now."

Harry hums into his drink and says nothing. He expects you to back away a little, or ask him some question that watered-down your view and opened up the table to his. But you don't. You let your view sit on the slice of the bar between you and don't apologise for it.

"There's a reason artists burst out of every generation," you add, sitting forward on your stool. "If the classics were the perfect form, the perfect commentary of humanity, then there'd be no need for anyone after them to bother trying to put the world and life into words, or pictures, or music. You can't just dismiss a generation of voices because some smelly, old, white, university hasn't decided to name a building after them yet. I don't think being published as a little orange Penguin Classic is the singular hallmark to good literature."

He didn't entirely agree with you, (he thought it was vital to learn from the past, thought those great authors you reeled off and dismissed set the benchmark artists today should aspire to) but Harry liked hearing your thoughts and seeing the passion burst out of you. He liked seeing how you didn't second guess yourself or try to soften your opinion by asking for his. You just said what you thought, and that was always one of his favourite characteristics in a person.

That night you met him, you were the designated driver for a few of your friends. He should have noticed the way you switched to pineapple juice after you finished your first drink, but he was too busy trying not to look at the curve of your thigh when you crossed one leg over the other. Trying to ignore the smell of your perfume or how you kept licking your lips and he wanted to taste them, desperately. Harry didn't like to say anything when he offered to buy you another gin and dry. Still, when it eventually came out in conversation—that you were strictly only having one tonight—he felt his excitement deflate. His warm buzz suddenly felt pervy and presumptuous.

"Well, that's bloody annoying, isn't it?"

His response surprised you, "Me getting my friends home alive?"

With his hand comfortably resting over your knee, Harry shook his head, "I was hoping to go home with you."

"Oh."

You blinked at him, not having expected him to be so bold. You didn't hate it though, you felt the twinge of realising you were going to miss something that could have been good. Could have been great, probably. The last time you had sex had been … sad. And disappointing. Still, you hadn't come out to meet anyone tonight, why the sudden rush of despondency? These were old work colleagues you rarely saw, and you figured it would be a night of catching up before six months of not seeing each other because life got in the way.

Then Harry asked for your number. Asked if you'd go out with him the next night. He didn't beat around the bush with it, he wanted to see you again and told you so. The way you said you would filled him with relief but also fear. Harry knew he'd need to really deliver with you, he couldn't half-arse it. He was terrified he'd overshoot it and lose the change to be someone who impressed you.

He settled on a Sunday evening picnic where the two of you ate takeaway on a beach towel at the top of a park halfway between your houses. Something told Harry you would be happier with him underplaying the date than you would be getting taken to an expensive, showy restaurant. You wore jean shorts and a long sleeve jumper which churned his body more deeply than the dress with the split from the night before. He was hooked.

"Do you not like olives?" Harry asked, sucking the oil off his fingers after just depositing one into his mouth. You instantly loved the way the inflection of his words rose at the end of his sentences, and you'd mock him for it your whole relationship.

You looked at the plastic container sitting between you, you'd been picking at the cheese and crackers, the antipasto was not your thing, "They don't seem like something humans should eat … Salty and rubbery with a tiny stone on the inside? No, thanks."

A laugh burst out of Harry's mouth as he picked up another green olive, "More for me then."

"I'm happy about the rosemary in these though," you held up a cracker before digging it into the hummus, a plastic-stemmed wine glass with a dry rose in your free hand, "You got the fancy ones."

"Only the best," Harry returned with a smile and then went on trying to playfully wedge more information from you about the secret poetry Instagram he was convinced you had. He was already feeling buzzed from the wine, but more from the way you kept looking at him and he couldn't catch a hint of you being anything other than yourself.

You didn't go home together that night either, despite The Kiss at the end next to his car. Despite Harry's hands on the back of your thighs as things got heated. The way the tips of his fingers feathered against the elastic of your knickers, just slipping under before pulling away. Your chests heaving together in a rhythm you'd never found with anyone else.

He felt like he had just auditioned for a part he wasn't sure yet that you were going to give him. Wine always heightened his anxiety, so Harry also wanted to appear controlled and measured. He wanted to be as thoughtful as you were. As connected to himself as you were to all your wonderful opinions and facts. There was some part of him that feared taking you home too soon might risk that being the only night Harry got. So he pulled away, kissed your cheek and promised to call you later on.

Somewhere along the line, Harry decided he wanted more than a little bit. He was greedy. Harry wanted the whole pie all to himself.

That was a theme, him wanting more. Even now, months since you've seen or heard from him. Harry always knew how to get you to take that one step out of your comfort zone, take that little bit extra risk. Letting go of him in one way felt like small release valve finally letting go. A tiny bit of your safety net tucking closer around you. A little quiet moment to take stock and check every part of you was still connected, still there. A deep breath in. A short pause of calming silence. Like getting your heart back … But then finding it didn't fit in your chest the same way anymore.

So you found it particularly cruel to have received a follow-up email from his assistant this week, checking to see if you were able to attend his show tonight.

The show that six months ago Harry drew you a mock ticket for and hand-delivered to you sitting outside in his garden with a tea and a biscuit. Even then, even as his girlfriend, you'd feigned not knowing if you could say whether you would attend. Now it felt foreboding, the way you'd pulled your features together thoughtfully and told Harry you'd have to see closer to the date. You waited just long enough for him to switch over into thinking you were serious before you laughed and told him of course and where else would I be?

Where else would I be, was right, in a sense. Because this is still your city, and you're here tonight. It's not his anymore. He moved soon after you broke up … Relocated to one of his—what was it you used to mockingly call them?—" location" homes. Houses you never saw in person. Places he never took you. Either Italy or France. Somewhere he could hide, be creative, recenter himself. All three of those things filled you with dread for different reasons.

Were you really going to go tonight though? Walk in through the front door of the venue with a ticket and barcode on your phone, sit in a crowd and listen to Harry for two hours? Look at him from across the room and just take it on the chin?

It certainly seemed you were dressed for it. And you were out of the house with time to get there. Would you get off the train at the stop though? Would you walk down the street with the bright sign his name lit up? Would Harry even know if you didn't go?

Part of you wonders if his assistant didn't mean to email you. Maybe she forgot you were no longer in Harry's life? Perhaps it was a scheduled email she forgot to stop? Probably it was Harry just being fucking nice, and polite, and worrying about how you'd feel if you were uninvited. Or if he didn't check in on you while he was here.

You accepted the reminder too easily and scolded yourself for it. His team was expecting you. Harry was expecting you. And now, sitting on the train and counting down the stops you felt caught. Felt like he had you again, even if it was just winning whatever tonight was.

Harry did always enjoy the chase. Admitted it himself, admitted to loving the beginning of meeting someone. Loving the audition process, the figuring each other out, the get. The Catch.

You wonder now if it was the chase he liked back then. Was it a thrill having you make him feel as though he had something to prove? Or was it Harry experiencing for the first time not having the upper hand, not having even the tiniest amount of weight around who he was count for anything. Now it felt like Harry was nothing but upper hand.

Whatever it was—the Chase, or your endless facts, pancakes on a Sunday morning—the part of Harry's lie about you being different that hurts the most is the way you bought into it so proudly. Wore it later as his girlfriend like a badge of honour. As though it signalled to others you'd been hard-won, and Harry was lucky to have you.

Different turned out to be such a dirty word.

Different turned out to mean nothing. To get you nowhere.

All different got you was Nothing To Him.

The second lie was that he saw a future with you.

Harry didn't shy away from talking about it. He made plans for you both.

Sometimes it was in the moments right before you both fell asleep at night, or in the final seconds before the kettle finished boiling. Always in some small window where his mind drifted and sat comfortably stagnant when all there was to think about was the next holiday you'd take together. Or what breed of dog you might have one day. Whether you wanted your kids to be close together in age or have larger age gaps between them. What you thought about silent retreats in Thailand.

He stored your answers away in the file full of you in his head or added them to the note on his phone with ideas for gifts for people or things going on in their lives he wanted to remember.

"My family have always had cats," he told you one night, fingers drawing circles around your bare kneecap, your naked thigh resting across his stomach, "When I'm settled I'd want to get a few of my own."

It was one of those hot summer nights no position felt comfortable for sleep, you raised your arms up over your head and stretched out further on the mattress, fingers dangling off the edge of the bed to feel the cold stream from the air conditioning unit above, "I don't trust cats. Isn't there something about them being evolutionarily build to hunt their owner?"

Harry turned his head to face you, "A fact for everything," he recited fondly, his common quip for your always having an answer for everything, "I'll let the cats hunt me, you'll be spared."

"As long as I can name them," you murmured, your eyes finally closing.

Close to three months later, an hour into unsuccessfully putting together a flat-pack shelving unit in Harry's garage, you heavily plopped yourself down on the concrete floor and hailed defeat. You tossed the small, silver Allen key onto the floor in Harry's direction and rested your chin in your palm.

A few minutes of watching his embittered attempts passed before he spoke.

"Hey Sulky, I can feel you looking at me," Harry was frowning at the short piece of timber in his hand, he was holding it next to what was supposed to be the base of the structure. This was your second attempt at pulling apart the shelves and starting again while you cursed the entire Swedish furniture empire. You were enjoying seeing Harry's stubborn frustration immensely.

He could be such a man sometimes.

"Yeah, 'cause you're hot," you said, mocking him dreamily.

"Ha ha," he drawled, rolling his shoulders back to try to regain his focus.

When he paused a moment later and looked up at you, his arms dropped as his brow softened and he let out a breath.

You grinned at him, "I'm pretty cute too, right?"

"All this shit is going to end up living on the ground because you're sabotaged the assembly!" He gestured wildly at the tools and spare paint colours for the house lying around you. His bike parts and the weird assortment of garden tools Harry collected were leaning against the wall waiting to be put on their new home as well, the shelf neither you nor Harry were skilled enough to put together.

"Baby," you began, but Harry waved you off, and you saw genuine frustration start to emerge on his face, "Okay! Okay, I'm sorry," you stressed, "Are you sure we're looking at this thing from the right way around? Maybe the designer meant for it to be wonky?"

He rolled his eyes at you. As if the mere thought anyone would design anything to look like the mess currently on the floor was purely preposterous—his temper for small frustrations on full display.

"Don't be rude!" You admonished, "It's a fucking shelf, we can do this, Harry."

It took you another hour and a half, but when it was done, Harry draped his arm around your shoulders, kissed you on the head and told you that you were the person he wanted by his side of all his future crisis. Someone to say to him, whatever the challenge was, it wasn't beyond him, wasn't something he couldn't handle or wasn't capable of.

You felt like you were floating that night.

It was one of those few times you could see your imprint on his life. See some evidence of it. There were shelves in his garage only there because you told him he needed storage there, and then you pushed him to keep trying assembling them. It was some proof you'd been in his life. An impression of your influence. A memory that would hover in his garage forever.

Two days after putting the shelves together, you and Harry had an argument about the plastic tubs he went off on his own to buy for all the loose bits and pieces he wanted to go on the shelves. You were annoyed he didn't purchase wooden ones, and he couldn't understand why it mattered that they were white plastic which would apparently be impossible to keep clean.

It's a garage, he thought, who's cleaning their garage?

And because arguments always dredge up things that they aren't supposed to, you made a jab about your relationship being secret.

You said something like, If I'd been able to come with you, we wouldn't be having this row!

Harry knew what you really meant straight away. You'd been together for more than nine months at that point, and nobody knew about it: nobody but your families and very very closest friends. There were no photos of Harry having lunch with you at a cafe, or of you walking a few steps behind him at the shops. Nobody had snuck a picture of you backstage at a show of his. He'd never appeared on your social media, even by suggestion, and Harry had never taken the risk including you on any private Instagram Stories.

Those photographs didn't exist, because those circumstances never had. There wasn't even a celebrity paper trail linking you to knowing Harry, let alone dating him. Harry didn't dedicate performances to you, or even to an unnamed significant other. You never got a song or an album dedication. Harry was so adamant on nobody getting wind of the relationship that sometimes it felt like … Like he enjoyed the sneaking around. The having a secret. (Later on, when you reflected on the relationship once it was over, you really weren't sure how there'd never been even one instance of you being seen coming or going from Harry's house. Hindsight made that feel suss to you.)

Most of the time you liked it, though, liked not having any fuss or interruption to your life but sometimes—a lot of the time—it felt like something silently eroding you from the inside—a silent acid eating your spirit.

But you'd never tell Harry that. Then anyway. Now … You're not sure what you'd tell him now.

The truth was a lot of the time you weren't sure how you'd managed to keep it going so long. Part of it was obvious, maybe, like not being in public together. But still, surely after being together months and having arguments about shelves you could afford a platonic appearing coffee trip or going for a run at the same time, together?

Instead, you'd gear up and run in opposite directions down his street. Or Harry would stay in the car while you went in for the coffee. You'd sit in a nosebleed seat if you went to a show, sneaking through some fire exit and into the main hallways of a venue with the public to get to it. You looked like a sad woman attending a gig on your own, not the girlfriend of the star.

Nobody would know you even knew the man up on stage. That you had something in the slow cooker at home for you both to eat when you got home, or that he'd stolen a tube of your favourite lip balm and had it in his blazer pocket for his set. Nobody would guess you made him late for the soundcheck with just a smile and the undoing of a zip.

Seeing him tonight would be just like it always was, you and Harry from across the room. But then not like always, because Harry wouldn't see you tonight. You wouldn't have the taste of a good luck kiss on your lips. Or the sound of Harry's warm-up in your ears. Yours was always an invisible connection that was kept invisible by design, and now being broken up, it looked no different than together. Not really.

Tonight though it would only be you seeing Harry. Like you see him on late-night talk show promotions and billboards. Like the times you get into an Uber, and his song is playing. How strange it feels, to have your heart crack in your chest again while also lifting somehow. Singing along with a song about you. Or hearing his laugh or even just Harry speaking, and being able to picture the exact expression that would go along with it.

Every raised inflection. Ever breathy giggle. Every brow crease at a thought that Harry was chasing or somehow unable to articulate. All of those turning into you picturing what he looked like every time he knew he was disappointing you. Every whined sorry and all the instances of him loving on you to move your mind away from his deficiencies.

"What's the plan for Y/N?"

If your relationship with Harry was a t-shirt, that would be the slogan across the chest. Those would be the words under the cartoon impression of you banging your head against a wall Harry's standing on the other side of.

How will Y/N get in? Who's staying behind with Y/N? Where will I meet up with Y/N?

There was always a question. Always a plan for you and it was decidedly separate to the plan for Harry. His team organised a second car or an earlier flight for you. A back entrance or some other smokescreen to keep you concealed. In the beginning, it felt like a kindness, but in the end, you were embarrassed by it. The bother, the way what started as a careful consideration for your wellbeing turned into something rotten that painted you a different colour to Harry and his public inner circle, the circle you were never invited or initiated into.

It was exhausting. But Harry assured you it was for the best.

You wonder what the future he saw for you really was though. How much further did Harry see a life like that going? A life with you perpetually operating under cover of darkness. A life of you decidedly not existing. Not really.

So when he said he saw a future with you, you're really not sure what Harry meant.

Did he mean one day he saw himself lifting the veil and telling the world he had a Someone? Or did he mean that he saw himself forever hiding you, forever living that lie?

Maybe he actually saw nothing.

Sometimes you could be convinced the fact Harry hid you was an action pointing to a more profound truth.

That the future he saw was an imagined indulgence; a convenience, and a comfortable lie. Comforting on a temporary level, like bowling alley bumper rails or the plastic covering on a new watch face. The fake sense of security—of protection, of immaculacy—was just that, artificial and temporary. It ceased to exist the minute you plucked the corner and pulled back the protective layer. Crashed as soon as the bumpers were flipped down.

You were a secret only Harry had any power over. He led from the front because you didn't know there was any other option. And in letting yourself be that, you made yourself easily dispensable.

Disposable. Replaceable. Erasable.

Which is precisely what happened when he left.

Harry left, and the You of the two of you ended. But more than any other relationship ever could, the silence that followed felt deadly. It wasn't just a relationship that once was, it was a relationship that never was. A year of your life made no imprint on his. Nobody looking at him could know there was anything—anybody—missing, and maybe that was the whole point.

Maybe that was the design of it.

The third lie was that you could tell him anything.

Harry's golden rule always was honest communication.

There's no such thing as an overshare, he'd say when you naturally hesitated.

He was all about that. All about hearing what was worrying you, or the mundane things that were going on in your world. Sometimes you felt like maybe it was an act because nobody had ever found your family, or your friends, or your life in general as interesting as Harry seemed to. He was always telling you he loved hearing the funny text conversations going on, or who was having a row and why, or what each of your friends was stressed about in their jobs or relationships or themselves. And Harry always said he loved hearing it from you the most.

(Now, that struck you as a strange thing to say. Where else would he hear anything about you? Harry was the only line connecting you back to him. You didn't have mutual friends or people who'd known you both before you dated each other. There was nobody for Harry to hear anything from. It's not like your friends were going to reach out to him with gossip about you. Not like how you could sneak a look at update accounts or read about his performance online while he was away.)

Still, you loved the stories he told from the road, ate them up. The missing coffee mugs where everyone got their caffeine fix served in wine glasses and lemonade tumblers for almost two whole weeks. And then the tour t-shirts accidentally ordered in bulk in children's sizes that Harry hand-delivered them to a local children's charity. The crumbs of gossip Harry picked up about who in his team was sweet on who (he loved a setup, loved watching crushes silently and awkwardly orbit around each other).

Your secrets were safe with him, he promised. He wouldn't ever judge you. Wouldn't dismiss your feelings or what kept you awake at night next to him. So you did it. You believed him. And you slowly drained everything inside of you into him. Harry got all your stories, even the ones you vowed to leave exactly where they sat in your past. Even the ones you felt like might kill you to dredge back up. The ones that made you look like a shitty friend or sister or daughter. He got them all.

And even now, he's still got them.

"What's the biggest lie you ever told?" He asked you one night in his kitchen, both of you elbow deep in making dinner. Harry rolled out the lines of gnocchi and cut the inch long pieces while you pressed them over a fork to decoratively indent them. (Although Harry likes to tell you how when he was in Italy he learned in patterns weren't just aesthetic—it was all about soaking up more of the sauce, For the sauce, of course! He'd sing out in an Italian accent, proud of himself.) "Like, a proper lie," he clarified, "Not like how you told my mum you didn't take sugar in your tea when you first met her."

You hinged your knee out to attack his calf for the teasing comment but then rolled your lips together in thought, "I lied to my parents a lot growing up," you told him honestly. "I think about eighty per cent of the time I wasn't where I told them I was. Definitely wasn't with who I said I was with."

Harry shook his head as he rolled out the next lump of dough, "No, I mean like … Like a lie."

A moment passed as you thought more deeply about the question, travelled around your memories until you landed somewhere suitable, "I lied to my boyfriend at university," you begin. "A pretty bad one, I guess."

"And the lie was …" Harry prompts.

"I told him I was a virgin before him."

Harry eyes raised, and then he nodded, accepting it, "I think that's probably a common one, really."

"I thought he'd like me more if I said it," I admitted quietly, pausing the work with your hands. "Wasn't too proud of losing my virginity in a tent in the sixth form … And I mean, at that age you just so desperately want to be the version of you that you think the people around you will like the most. A whole group of us went camping at someone's grandparent's farm during the summer holidays. Not sure how our parents let us, to be honest. Anyway, I had awful, painful, embarrassing sex in a tent with a guy named … Dylan Fraiser."

You were surprised by how long the name took to come to you. Years ago, that was such a defining event in your life. Now it hardly mattered at all anymore.

Progress, you thought.

"A tent," Harry winced.

"Really came back to bite me in the arse when my uni boyfriend went on to tell a group of his mates he was my first and—

—Tent Guy was one of them?" Harry guessed. Correctly.

"Yep. Small towns are a curse."

"I promise never to have sex with you in a tent," Harry teased, grinning at you over his wine glass and then leaning over to kiss your temple. He looked down at the line of gnocchi pieces you'd made together proudly, "We're alright at this."

"Hmmm," you hummed, now lost in the past, "I told that uni boyfriend him I loved him … I didn't though," you say without thinking, shrugging as the words came out, "I thought he was boring. But it was cool to have a boyfriend, so I didn't break up with him … Guess I've told more whoppers than I thought."

Harry gives you an understanding look, "I've said I love you to protect someone's feelings too. Thought it might come a little later, that I was just not feeling it as quickly as them."

It should have made you question whether Harry meant I love you with you. But it didn't. He was speaking in the past tense, and you were imaging that version of him being younger than the almost thirty-year-old you were dating. Now though … You wonder what love meant to Harry when you were together. Whether your wires were crossed by different definitions. Even now, you couldn't vilify him. Not completely. He was too thoughtful in general, there'd be a reason for it. There always was with Harry.

"What's your biggest lie?" You turned the exercise back on him, smiling as he refilled your wine glass and skipped a few songs on the playlist. These were your favourite moments with Harry. The end of the day, where you were the only thing on his to-do list. There wasn't a lingering work call, or a meeting to prepare for, an email to reply to. Harry was just finishing his day with dinner and some time at home. With you.

Harry gave you a withering look, "I think you know already."

"I don't," you said because you really didn't, "What was it?"

"There's no way I'll ever do anything else with The Band," he said tonelessly as he turned to rinse his hands in the sink, unable to look at you while he said it. And even then, Harry didn't admit to the lie. Didn't name it. He just said what the truth was instead.

"Why wouldn't you?" You asked, instead of what you were sure Harry thought you'd ask.

You weren't interested in why he told that particular lie though, the answer to that was pretty apparent to you: he cared about his fans—they all did—and didn't want to disappoint them. And they probably hadn't been able to deal with thinking about the ripples ending it completely, right off the bat, would have caused. Saying you were taking a break was a much nicer way to let a world of fans down. An easier pill to swallow than 'We're done' straight off the bat.

You gave Harry time to respond. He fiddled with the gnocchi pieces in front of him, waiting for the water to boil in the pot behind you both, "Not sure, really."

He was lying now, and you could tell. He was ashamed of the truth.

"You're not sure?"

"I just wouldn't, there's no one reason. No big thing. It's not like I hate them all or anything, I just …"

There was one big thing, though. And it was typical Harry to not be able to name it. He was always so in denial about his own arrogance, about what it was that drove him. Harry thought he was above them. His success since The Band far outweighed anything any of the others had done. Going back to that would be diminishing for Harry's career. Wouldn't help him any. He was stronger on his own, more successful. More widely appreciated. That chapter of his life was done, it had been a stepping stone—yes, a life-defining one—but Harry had moved to bigger and brighter stages on his own.

"It's not what you think," he told you lowly when you didn't ask anything further.

It was so typical of Harry to not see the forest for the trees. To not see how he, yet again, was blurring and confusing the lines between a business decision and an emotional, personal one. He was speaking about The Band emotionally, but his reason for distancing himself from it was all to do with business.

"It's not?" You asked plainly.

"I don't think I'm better than them or some shit," Harry said, "I just … That part of me is done. I'm not who I was back then, and I don't want to go back to that person."

"You also wouldn't get anything out of it," you prod, knowing that you shouldn't have. But it was true. So much of Harry's life was a business decision. Everything was so carefully done, so deliberately set into place by him and his team that results and his successes were almost guaranteed.

At the time, you didn't understand how he couldn't see it. Or you couldn't believe that he didn't. He was so calculating, and he hated you telling him so. But he was. He liked to say he wasn't defined by his job, but Harry's whole life was defined by his career, by the who he was.

He loved to spout off his public shit about staying grounded and having a life away from being Harry Styles ™, but he didn't let anyone see even a skerrick that life. The only thing Harry ever let be projected about him was his job, that was all was ever on the table for discussion. And so it was hardly surprising that became who he was away from the cameras and lights as well.

Hiding you was a business decision, you figured out in the aftermath of The End. It was his way of keeping the narrative about his music and career on track. As soon as there was a You, Harry's private life would distract from his real focus and goal, his career. And you mean, it's not like it didn't work for him. Because here you were, standing outside in the chilly night looking at his name up in lights.

Harry's name always looked so good up on billboards and the fronts of stadiums. You always used to tell him even the letters of his name were visually pleasing, they looked good together, like they fit. So you stand on the street across the road from tonight's venue and take it in—HARRY STYLES, SOLD OUT—for several minutes.

You don't know that you're ready for this. Seeing him. You've so perfectly avoided it until now. Until you felt like there was a promise you made lifetimes ago you now can't break. Even if you felt like he'd broken a thousand promises between the two points in time.

Where else would I be? you'd said when he first drew that stupid mock ticket.

Where else, indeed.

You scuttle across the street and sneak between people to get yourself in through the doors. Dodging lenders selling merchandise and ticket holders excitedly covering their painstakingly planned outfits with t-shirts Harry—aided by his perfectionism, you were sure— probably spent months deciding on.

The barcode won't scan though. And the usher at the door doesn't appreciate you pulling your phone back and trying to adjust the backlight, as though that will help the loud, angry sound his scanner is making each time he aims it at the email on your screen. He eventually reads part of your email and then tells you that you need to stand off to the side, barks something gruffly into his walkie talkie and dismisses you in favour of getting through the backlog of people behind you. You're filled with a white-hot embarrassment as you shuffle over and stand under a neon EXIT sign. A moment later you step forward and ask him to try again, but that doesn't get you anywhere different, and you think you're going to get in some kind of trouble when he insists Just stand back over there for a moment.

Your feet have already started hurting in your too-tight boots when finally the wall behind you opens up, and you very quickly come face to face with Harry's assistant.

"Y/N," she smiles, "I thought I said in the email to call me when you got here?"

You're dumbstruck, you didn't read the email, not properly. "I … I …"

"It's good to see you again," her smile hasn't moved, and it's genuine. She reaches one hand out towards you and deposits a VIP lanyard around your neck, "Follow me."

You get halfway down the emergency exit, and she sidesteps a security guard through a doorway, leading you into the veins of the backstage area where there's a familiar buzz of busy people you'd not realised you missed being around until now. Your heart is racing because you weren't prepared for this. You'd been deliberately dragging your feet getting here, and you've arrived barely fifteen minutes before Harry's due to go on stage. She's walked you right to the side of the stage where there's a curtain just to your left and scaffolding all around. You can hear the audience, and you know that one step through that curtain will take you to the pit side of the stage, where you'd seen Harry's family stand during shows before.

"He wanted to say hi beforehand but," his assistant looks at her watch, "But it's a touch too close now so are you okay if I leave you here for just a second? I'll be back in …" her eyes go back to her wrist, "Probably about twenty-five?"

"That's fine," you nod dumbly. "Are you sure this okay?"

You're looking around wondering if this is where Harry meant you to be. Really, you're sure this isn't where he intended you to watch his show at all. A few people are milling around but nobody you recognise, and you figure the majority of them are probably venue employees. Harry and his band would only walk through here at the very last second. He didn't like standing around beforehand with anyone who wouldn't be on stage with him. Harry got in his zone and needed to stay there.

When you look back at his assistant she's giving you a look you don't want to read too deeply, but it almost looks like pity, "Of course," she tells you, "I'll be back by the end of the first song."

"I might go stand through here now," you point to the curtain, preferring the thought of standing in the dark by yourself than waiting for Harry to walk straight past you during his thirty-second countdown. "Is that okay?"

You get a nod, and she tells you to grab a drink off the table behind you. Leaving you with your heart rattling and the heaviest lanyard you've ever worn burning through your shirt to your chest.

Finding a spot to watch the show was easy. You picked the furthest side of the pit, under the concrete overhand of the seats above, and stand in the shadows, only half the stage in your line of sight. It felt like a little cave almost, and you lean your back against the cold concrete and tap your boots together on the ground below you.

The area starts filling around you as members of Harry's team finish their part in preparing him for the show. There are a few women wearing belts with makeup brushes and combs peaking out of them, and two familiar faces from Harry's executive team. They don't see you, though, and you're glad. You watch the roadies' torches flash on the dark stage as they neaten up leads and manoeuvre over amp boxes double-checking the guitars are in the right order for the sets.

There's a movement in your periphery that draws your attention back, the group of people who joined you in the pit all gravitating towards something back at the curtain. And it's not until one of them steps to the side that you see the floating head that's poking through the dark material.

Harry.

He's staring right at you: no expression on his face, just his searching, green eyes that stop when they see you standing in the dark as far from him as you can possibly be. He takes half a step forward, and the shoulder of an expensive suit peeks out. You hear in your head echos of a moment in Harry's living room unpacking a delivery from Gucci, the way you nearly choked on your tea at the cost of a tailored trouser and his half frustrated dismissal, 'It's nothing, that's standard for me.' You felt small at that moment, thinking about how one of Harry's suits could pay for your education for a year, and that would be nothing for him.

You feel small now too. This isn't the space you're supposed to occupy.

The shadow of a frown barely cross his features, but then Harry tries to pull his dimples up to give you a small smile. But it's testing, it's not a confident smile or one he looks sure he's giving. Like he's smiling at someone he's not sure will smile back.

There's no way I'll ever do anything else with the band, he'd said.

But that wasn't the biggest lie he'd told, just the most public, the widest.

His deepest, biggest lie was you.

The fourth lie was that he loved you.

Harry was the one to say it first.

It came out like a compliment. A response to a fact of yours he'd particularly liked. A sort of well done, that was a good one.

It was nearly two months since you'd met, and what started as three or four dates a week morphed into you staying at Harry's house most nights. You spending your weekends off work trailing around after him on his errands or to work things, or hanging out alone at his place until he returned from them. A couple of times, you went to the same exercise class, which involved the two of you going separately and not interacting at all. Still, you'd peek at him from across the room and have to hold your giggles for later when Harry spent the hour concentrating beyond anything you'd ever seen just to stay in the seat of the spin bike.

Saturdays and Sundays he started taking off too though, around a month into dating you. No more 6am weekend PT sessions or midday conference calls with creative teams. The only work Harry allowed himself to do on weekends was housework. Laundry. Food prep. Touching base with his mum.

"Did you know blueberries are actually false berries?"

"No, I did not know blueberries are actually false berries," Harry parroted back to you. You catch the half rolling of his eyes at you where you're sitting up in your favourite spot on the bench next to the hob, peering at him keeping careful watch over breakfast: blueberry pancakes. He was wearing just his pants, chest bare and cool in the autumn morning air. You were rugged up in leggings and a sweater, unsure how he could stand being in such a state of undress.

"It's true," you reaffirmed your tidbit, popping a false berry into your mouth while Harry—with far too much concentration for the job at hand—dropped the small round berries on top of the batter sizzling in the pan. "Berries by definition are fleshy, pulpy ovary fruits that have their seeds embedded on the outside. Blueberry seeds are on the inside. So they aren't really berries."

"Ovary fruits?" He questioned, with a look of mild distaste.

Your shoulders dropped as you realised Harry knew less than you thought he did, "All fruit are ovaries, Harry. Think about it."

He does for a moment, and you can practically see the cogs turning. Harry thinking about how fruit grows on their plants and bushes and shrubs. The fact of what an ovary is when it comes to basic anatomy. And when he comes to the full circle of it, he groans, "That is so weird."

"I think it's cool," you grinned. "Like a little bit cannibalistic in a way."

He barked out a laugh at that, "I don't think that's what it is."

"Well, maybe not technically," you conceded, "But it's something … Really makes you rethink eating eggs."

"Oh my god," Harry was truly laughing then, "Stop, please."

"Sorry," you peeped with a cringed look, tossing back half a handful of the small, round fruit in front of you.

He was shaking his head at you, laughter bubbling out between his perfectly straight teeth, and then it just slipped out, "Fuck, I love you."

The words didn't bump over any hesitation. I love you, Harry said.

Your stomach dropped instantly, but the fond happiness dancing across Harry's face didn't go anywhere. He didn't look back at the pancakes or to where your hands were wringing together on your lap. Harry held your gaze and didn't dodge away from what he said at all. Like he knew you'd need a moment with it, that you weren't expecting him to just come out with that.

"I love you," he repeated after a moment, smiling when he saw your lips start to turn up, "I mean it."

Hearing him yell the same words through the microphone from stage sizzles your heart a little, like the pancakes that day crackled in the pan as Harry pushed himself into you on the kitchen floor. You remember the feeling of his hands under your clothes, your leggings barely halfway down your thighs before he was claiming you in a wave of lust, pushed by the new, invisible force in your relationship—love.

The floor under you now vibrates as everyone gets to their feet to join Harry dancing through his first song. You stare at him, daring him to look over at you but knowing he won't. The longer you stand there, the more you thaw out to it, the more you find yourself with a smile on your face and a slight sway to your hips. His music is fun and familiar and feels like clicking into place.

It's mesmerising. He's mesmerising.

You don't like admitting you'd forgotten how good at this he was. He has the whole crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. Even his crew around you are grinning ear to ear and singing along. Sharing private jokes between them and cutting dance moves in small groups as they watch the show. It's fun. And it reminds you that so much of your relationship with Harry was like that. That there were countless nights spent dancing in the living room or screaming at laptop screens doing board game nights with his family.

You'd forgotten that you could laugh so hard your belly hurt and that Harry was one of the few people who'd ever been able to get you to that point of joy. Watching him throw joy off the stage now at thousands of people was reminding you how very good Harry was—used to be—at making you feel like the only person in the world to him.

"Babe," his giggles filtered down the hallway and into the bathroom where you were plucking your eyebrows, "Babe! Come … Come see this."

You rolled your eyes as you put the tweezers down and padded into his living room, not at all surprised to see Harry pretzeled on his yoga mat in a fit of laughter. He did this a lot, called you away from a task or from work for something hilarious that ninety-nine per cent of the time wasn't hilarious at all. You'd end up snorting out laughter of your own though, at him.

Now, Harry had one of his feet hooked behind his neck while the other was prostrate on the floor behind him.

"You're doing great, baby," you condescended lightly, tilting your head to the side and frowning at his position. It looked awful and not at all calming, let alone comfortable. He wasn't a very good advertisement for yoga at all.

"They say this one's great for—great for," he giggled too much to get the words out, his arms holding his torso back so his legs would do what he wanted them to, he took a deep breath, "It's meant to be the yoga colonic."

Harry was heaving with laughter as he finally got it out, his position faltered, and you watched as his limbs all fell back to the mat as he leant forward cackling. You were grinning too, amused by how amused he was.

"Been feeling backed up, have you?" You asked him, crossing your arms as you hitch one hip out.

He rolled over on his back and wheezed out the final string of laughter, one hand holding his lower tummy as if it ached from the whole spectacle, as his other hand reached out for your ankle, "Come down here with me."

"Hmm," you hummed, pretending to be unhappy to be dragged down on top of him, your hips resting on his thighs as your chin propped up on your hands at his chest, "It's very entertaining how entertaining you find yourself," you mused.

Harry rubbed the tears from his eyes and then settled his hands on your back, breathing in the pleasant weight of you there, "I just—I was thinking about what they think the yoga colonic is going to do." His giggles started again, "Imagine being in a class and it literally working? Everyone just—everyone just shits themselves!"

You can feel his laugher, his bones pushing yours up as his whole body fills with his happiness. The stream of tears coming from the corners of his eyes start again as he squeezed his eyes shut while the sound of Harry's deep, uninhibited laughter filled the whole house again.

The memory brings back a smile, like so many with Harry do.

But there's still the Too Fresh Sting of your final moments with him, your last moments with him. You've not seen him since that evening months ago where you both yapped at each other things that couldn't be unsaid, unhappinesses that couldn't be reverted or unadmitted. It wasn't like the fights you had about Harry's casualised view of money and how he'd drop thousands of pounds on seemingly nothing without thinking how small it could make you feel. Or the times you'd snap in frustration when Harry tuned out of you complaining about an issue with your friends he deemed as superfluous or rooted in something silly or not as essential as the Important Thing He Was Planning. He could be so dismissive when he didn't think something mattered highly enough on his scale of measuring things.

The Harry dancing around on stage in front of you wasn't the man who said you were independent like it was a dirty word. Yelled across the kitchen that it was too easy for the two of you to be apart, you didn't miss him enough. The man who told you he didn't feel like you needed him, thought you were always standing with one foot out the door the whole time you were together. And you can remember being flabbergasted (still are, really) by what he was saying because it just wasn't true at all. You? Too independent? You spent every night at his house, and were at Harry's beck and call the whole relationship. And you can hear all the times you said 'what would I do without you?' when he talked you off a ledge or had answers to questions you believed to be unanswerable.

You can see how it was another classic example of Harry telling a non-truth to cover up what was really there. To distract from his own shortcomings. He accused you of what he was feeling, of his flaws. Making them your problem meant he didn't have to be vulnerable. Didn't have to take a risk his business manager hadn't guaranteed. Didn't have to gamble on your future together.

In the relationship, he always had the upper hand. And maybe you did have one foot out the door emotionally, but that was only because you had to. Harry never invited you in with him completely. You were always on the outer. After nearly a year of dating you were still The Girlfriend He Didn't Have.

But I fucking love you, he'd said when he sensed where that night was going. Like Harry had a list of grievances, and it wasn't until he got to the end of reading them out to you that he realised where it landed him. He told you he loved you as though it would erase all the things about you he seemed to dislike so much. Things about yourself you apparently couldn't see.

Hindsight has taught you that if anyone was too independent, or hesitant to commit fully in that relationship, it was Harry.

Halfway through his set, Harry's assistant comes over to check on you, and you end up chatting for a few minutes about how you've been. She speaks to you like there was some club you were a member of and she missed your meetings. Although neither of you references the breakup, or acknowledge in another life you had a lot more to do with each other, the unspoken things weigh on your chest. You find yourself wiping away a quiet tear when she walks back over to the main group watching Harry.

Of course, that's when he teeters over to your side of the stage and looks straight at you. His expression falls instantly, and you're sure that he only meant to glance at you in passing, but what he sees has him doing a double-take and fixing his gaze on you for two lines of the song he's midway through. He tugs on the collar of his shirt and Harry's eyes are desperately trying to read what you're thinking, just like that day he told you he loved you at the end of the breakup, as though you'd forget everything that came before it.

You stick your thumb out to him and give him your best fake smile. Like he might be led to believe you were crying about something else. As if you hadn't just pulled his attention from a room full of people who'd paid for his attention tonight. At that moment you think the fact there's a secret love and life between you must be too obvious to everyone else. There's a connection, something whirls around the room between you and it feels threatening and perilous to how you've been trained to think things have to be.

You wait until Harry turns and goes the other way across the stage before you push off from the wall and walk out.

At first, love was an encouragement between you. It was approval, a showing of appreciation. Love was a promise that was just for the two of you. A declaration that validated everything you were doing together. Love was a feeling that proved what every action meant.

Then, love was a bandaid, was a line used in desperation to fix something unfixable, and you walk the world with skun knees now because of it. Love was never just love. It was used to fix the wrong things.

And in the end, nothing healed at all.

The fifth lie was that he'd always fight for you.

Harry promised you that the two of you would make it work.

You'd make up after every argument, big or small. The little ones that were those tiny bickerings in the car which somehow roared into yelling matches. Or when one person's grumpiness from the day leaked into your evening together. You always expected his call or the long sigh that would precede his apology. You never got halfway home to your house if you left his after a row. He'd call and beg for you to come back, that nothing was worth you physically leaving being near him. You left knowing before the night was done the two of you would reconcile.

Until it was That Fight you were leaving after. The one that began The End.

It started because Harry was overseas for a few weeks. While he was away, you suggested the two of you going on a holiday together during the summer. An anniversary trip. From the other side of the world, it was easy enough for Harry to worm his way of out of it. He went off on a tangent about there being no holidays (rest) for the wicked and then got you talking about something else until you forgot how you'd been sold on the idea of lying on a beach with him for a week.

When Harry got home, you had it stored in an unhappy little pocket in your mind. Top of the agenda for when he returned.

"Can we talk about the holiday thing again?" You asked his first night home.

He sighed against you, his body gearing up for a reunion that didn't involve speaking, lips attached to your neck while his hands danced around the band of your bra, "Do we have to right now?"

"Well," your instinct was to back away from the tension rising between you, "I'd like to."

Harry pushed his hair up off his face and briefly looked at the ceiling, "I don't see how we can, babe. It's too hard, logistically. Just take a week off work and stay with me here."

"I already stay here," you counter, "I'm talking about a holiday somewhere. A beach. Or a ski resort. Something fun and different."

"Those places are all busy," Harry complained, his hands off you. He started to pack the dishwasher from dinner.

"I just want to go away with you, do something normal, you know?"

He clipped the side of the sink with a dinner plate and swore angrily under his breath, "Fuck."

"Don't get angry."

"I'm not fucking angry," he growled, tossing your forks into the plastic crate, "I just fucking got home, and you're straight into this. No 'I missed you so much' or 'It's so great to see you'… Just straight into going on a holiday as if I have endless time to mess about."

"What do you mean? We've just eaten dinner together, you told me all about your trip. I said I was happy to have you home!"

"Yeah, well, feels like you just don't give a fuck that I'm back."

You frowned at him starting to get annoyed yourself, "I cried on our FaceTime call on the weekend because I missed you! You have a lobotomy since then?"

"Don't yell," Harry instructed quietly like he was chastising a child for not controlling themselves.

"What's this about, Harry?" You asked. "Why is it such a crime for me to want to go away with my boyfriend?"

He sighed again, "It's not."

"Right," you crossed your arms over your chest and wondered how many times he could wipe down the chopping board.

Probably one more time.

"So …"

"So what?" Harry repeated, "What do you want from me?"

His words and their harshness shocked you, and that was the exact moment you started worrying this was going to turn into Something Else. Not just a Normal Fight.

"I want you to tell me why you're so annoyed by this?"

It would have been so easy for you to break down and scream about how insane it was that you were talking about celebrating your first anniversary with him and the relationship was still a secret. How badly you wanted to throw that out there, but there was a wise fear in you which said that would be a death wish. (That fact haunts you today, how you knew he'd never step out with you. There wasn't any hope in you or promise from him it wouldn't always be that way. You knew your place and where the boundary line was, don't push past this point. And you always behaved. Never peeped out of your box.)

"It's like you don't even need me," Harry said bitterly, "You're so fucking independent. What's the point?"

"What are you talking about?" You gushed, nearly swallowing your tongue when he turned back to look at you for the first time.

"You don't need me," he accused, "You've always got one foot out the door."

"I don't," came your defence, but you both knew it was the truth. You were halfway out the door because you hadn't been invited all the way in yet.

"You don't want this life with me," Harry shook his head, "You've never been happy where we are. Relationships don't work that way, you can't just keep demanding the same thing hoping you'll wear me down. That's not fair."

Tears shake out of your eyes slowly as your body catches up with what he's saying, "Harry."

"It's not fair!" He repeated loudly. "You can't keep on about it."

About what? You want to ask him because you hadn't mentioned a holiday until the week before. That's not what he was really angry about. He was talking about The Secret. And his guilt was showing. His anger was misdirected, aimed at the wrong thing. He muttered something to himself you didn't hear.

"I didn't hear that."

"I said," Harry looked up at you, and when your eyes clicked together you saw surprise rise and then quickly disappear as if he hadn't expected to see you there. "I said, I don't think we can keep doing this."

"You don't think we can keep doing this?" You repeated it because the words hardly sounded like English the first time you heard them.

I don't think we can keep doing this.

Harry stood across from you with no expression on his face. And it took a few moments for him to own up to what he said, but he does. He nods his head once, awkwardly, and then nods again.

"We can't keep doing this," he tells you, sounding defeated, and then his voice rises again—in pitch, not in volume—"But I fucking love you!"

But I fucking love you.

As if that was enough.

It was days of you expecting a call, and a make up that never came. Expecting the fight for your relationship Harry promised you he'd always put up. You wanted him to prove that you were someone he couldn't do without. You hated the thought of him walking around his house and not feeling the absence of you as some impossible weight he couldn't bear.

"Y/N!" Your name sounds out behind you, but you keep walking, an instantaneous decision that pretending not to hear her might work.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn't.

Harry's assistant keeps chasing you down the hall she initially led you through, calling your name and eventually getting you to stop and turn around because, well, you can't keep pretending she's not there forever.

"I'm just finding a loo," you lie.

"There's one this way," she points over her shoulder, in the direction you both came from, "Harry said if you tried to leave I had to go with you, which, for my own dignity I'd really prefer not to have to do."

You find yourself scoffing, "Who said he's in charge of how long I stay?"

Her expression softens somewhat, "He just wants to see you after."

How dare he think he can control this still, you think.

You know she's not the person to be frustrated with. You should be frustrated with yourself first, for coming, and then with Harry for deciding he could orchestrate this … This whatever it was. Still, you find yourself biting out your reply, "He saw me from stage," you tell her bitterly.

"And he'll have seen that you're not there anymore," she replies patiently,, "It'll throw off his focus if he's worried you've gone home halfway through."

You fall into step beside her but can't give him the win, "Quite frankly, it's not my concern or responsibility anymore if his focus is thrown or not."

She wordlessly points out where the bathrooms are just in front of you. You're trying not to make eye contact with anyone who's in these backstage hallways. They feel like ghosts from a life that's not yours anymore.

The first time you met any of Harry's People you'd felt absolutely mortified. The whole thing felt awkward to you, meeting assistants and managers and creative directors. Putting faces and humans to jobs done for Harry. He was a lot of people's boss, and it made you uncomfortable because you'd not seen that side to him before. You knew things like how hot he liked his showers and what yogurt he liked on his muesli in the morning.

That first—and only—step into his professional world, was in a venue just like this one where Harry was filming a music video for a few days. The stage was set up like it was for live a show, and you overheard someone saying setting up for a shoot was more involved than for an actual performance. Harry wanted you to see what this part of his world looked like and despite them not fitting in either of the Friends or Family categories you'd laid out for People Allowed To Know About You, his "Team" were people Harry felt safe introducing to you. (NDAs were a powerful thing) He led you through the hallways by the hand and stuck his head into every room with a cheery, 'Hullo, just bringing Y/N around to meet everyone.'

You remember one person declaring they were happy to be meeting you. Harry was too young to be married to his job, they said with a relieved tone, That it was good he'd found his Someone. Harry beamed at that, looking down at you as if thinking, Yeah, I have found my Someone.

Now you stand back in the pit side of stage, and Harry looks down at you with a hesitation that makes you more uncomfortable than when you were watching him film that music video. His assistant has brought you back to where his team are standing, and you feel more than one set of eyes take stock of you returning, a shared glance between a manager and the girl shadowing you. A wide-eyed exchange that says, That was the last thing we needed. When Harry comes to the side of stage between songs, he's hunting for a bottle of water, but you can see he's come to that side because his eyes are focused on hunting for you.

When he sees you've returned, he slowly takes a sip of water, eyes not leaving yours. You feel like he's admonishing you in his head, seeing how weak you were, that you ran away after a little eye contact. There's a distaste there, you think, and as he's putting the cap back on the bottle, Harry opens his mouth like he's going to try to say something to you, but he stops. He frowns at his hands as he puts the bottle down and then turns away, bringing the microphone back up to his lips and slipping back into entertainer mode.

"In a lot of ways, I hate this next song," he starts slowly, speaking over the band as they begin to slow down the tempo of the night. A smoke machine whirls to life and pumps out a few big clouds, shrouding the stage behind Harry. "I really hate it."

He pauses. And your insides freeze in your chest. You're hanging off his every word, just like every other body in the room. Harry stands right on the front of the stage, toes almost touching the drop off. He's looking out at the audience and lets the microphone hang at his side. Makes no move to keep talking. Was he looking for someone out there, or was he running over what he was about to say in his head? Rehearsing it, making sure it was exactly what needed to be said.

Where you used to see thoughtfulness you now see calculation.

Give nothing away. Sell only the product. Push the song. Let people come to their own conclusions.

"This is a song about," he says carefully, a crack to his voice that sends adrenaline shooting straight down your legs, "About regretting that you've hurt someone. And about the helplessness of wishing you could make them forget what you said, but … Knowing you can't take it back."

You watched Harry trail around to the upright piano on stage and sit himself down on the stool. He stares at his hands hovering over the keys for a moment too long, but you're sure Harry's audience would let him take a hundred more. You see what perhaps they don't—the hesitation. You'd witnessed it enough to spot it, even across the stage in the dark from thirty feet away.

He's not sure about playing the song.

You think about contacting him by telepathy. Saying, I'll leave so you can go back to your show. You don't have to pretend I'm not here, I'll just go. Like I wanted to. Like I tried to.

But he plays it.

You've not heard it before, but the rest of the room has, and they sing along with him. You hear a couple of thousand people sing with your ex-boyfriend about him regretting the way he treated you. And you're almost able to talk yourself out of believing it's about you, you can nearly reason with yourself that it's kind of vague. Other than naming the cafe he'd sat in the car park of a hundred times waiting for you to return with a takeaway, it could be about anyone, really.

But he sings out a line and looks straight at you, and his eyes say it's yours. The song. The apology that's not been said yet.

I get the feeling that you'll never need me again.

His voice cracks again as he sings it. And the hurt part of you says it's just a vocal technique Harry's trained to call on at any time. It doesn't speak to anything other than a creative choice on his part. But the vulnerability is hard to ignore, the low hanging, remorseful unease in the room. He fumbles a string of notes on the piano as he sings and you're hit by the overwhelming need to make him stop.

Witnessing whatever he's currently feeling with this song is more uncomfortable than you've ever been, and a switch in you to protect him flicks on. You look around at his assistant, his manager, trying to see if there's even a hint of anyone else feeling like this moment needs an intervention, needs to be stopped.

The song ends. And you're glad.

Harry takes a few moments on stage to get ready with a guitar for the next song. He doesn't come over to your side of the stage for a drink, or to ask the roadies for anything. Instead, he flies straight into the next section of the set. Seemingly recovered from the heavy moment you felt as though you nearly drowned in. He'd never sung about you before.

Nothing remotely personal about your relationship ever left Harry's house.

And you find yourself wishing it would all just go back there.

The sixth lie was that he wouldn't break your heart.

Harry did though.

He broke your whole life.

So when he comes off stage at the end of his gig, there's little in you that wants to hang around. As soon as the lights go down and you see Harry's silhouette cross the back of the stage and hop down the stairs to the floor, your gut churns, and you wish you were one of the people in the rest of the venue. The ones now turning and slowly filing out of the building. Going back to their lives peacefully.

Instead, you're ushered behind the curtain again, into the small area that's immediately buzzing with life. You watch Harry as if he's moving in slow motion though. As soon as his boots hit the concrete floor somebody is tugging the suit jacket from his shoulders and swapping it for a grey hand towel that he uses to wipe down his face. His hand pushes his hair up over his head as he smiles at a handful of people, and then his eyes find yours. The smile drops, and he takes a steadying breath in.

"Y/N," he says loudly. Straight. Without expression. It's a statement, but also you sense a question there too. As if you might not turn out to be the person who was standing there. He holds your gaze over and through the people walking around and in front of him. He's handed a bottle of water and offered a second one which he takes, "Y/N," he says again, pulling his head back to beckon you over.

You roll your lips together when you've made it to the vacant space in front of him. Harry passes you the extra water bottle and cracks the lid off the one he keeps for himself. You grip yours with both hands but don't make any move to open it. Standing in front of him didn’t feel like you thought it would. It’s less of a kick I in the gut, and more a reinforcing of things that you’d figured out since being without him.

"Hi," he says hesitantly, briefly looking at someone behind your left shoulder. Then, you feel his eyes back on your face.

You speak to his forehead, not ready to have things inside you unlocked by eye contact, "Hello."

"This way," Harry says after a moment, running the towel down his sweaty face again.

He leads you down a hallway, wiping his face on the towel two more times as he walks. Harry continuously looks over his shoulder at you to make sure you're still following him, as if there was somewhere for you to hide in the concrete hallway. When he gets to his dressing room door, he kicks it open and holds his arm out to let you in first. The room smells like his cologne, a whiff of his final moments before going out on stage and a time portal back to mornings you'd spritz it on yourself before leaving the house, it was your scent then too. There was a small sofa and table, a long mirrored table with his laptop open next to a stack of papers, his screen saver bouncing back and white photos across the locked screen. His overnight bag and its contents were sprawled out over the floor in the corner next to where you can see his phone charging.

"You look good," is the first thing he says to you. Trying to pull your attention probably. Maybe hoping to get on the front foot charming you. You could tell him he looked good as well, particularly in the cream suit they had him in tonight, but you were sure there were no shortage of people who already had.

"Your show was good," you deflect away from the personal, eyes tracing the bottles in the corner of the table, "Great setlist."

"Needs a shakeup, if we're honest. Getting stale," Harry shrugs, and you see it in the mirrored wall. He's still standing by the closed door, watching you walk into the centre of the room and take stock of what's around you. "How have you been?"

"Fine."

Harry coughs uncomfortably, "Thanks for coming, wasn't sure you would."

"I wasn't sure either."

You sense Harry realising this conversation was going to be exactly as difficult as feared it might be, he nods his head and moves over to the sofa but doesn't sit down, "Did you want a seat?"

"I'll sit here," you perch yourself on the chair in front of his laptop, crossing one leg over the other and hitching your elbow at the back so you're facing Harry. Keeping the room between you.

Harry sits on the arm of the small, burgundy sofa, and tosses the towel onto the seat next to him, "Looked like you were a little upset there for a moment."

"My boots are new," you quip, kicking your top foot out towards him, "Blisters."

He sighs again, and you start to feel chastised, but there's a more substantial part of you that stubbornly bunkers on down to playing this role, taking power when you'd never had it with Harry before. He knew it wasn’t blisters that had emotion welling up in you during his set. But just the same it wasn’t his place anymore to be privy to your feelings. And you weren’t going to let him gallantly try to take it. You weren’t old friends who could pick up where you left off. You were broken lovers.

"I just thought we could do with talking," Harry says finally.

"You could have uninvited me, you know, I assumed—Well, it's not like I've been expecting to still attend any of your shows the last six months. This one didn't have to be different."

He almost looks hurt, "You live here."

"How was Italy, Harry?” you turn the conversation around abruptly because you didn't like where it was going, and he was starting to frustrate you. You didn’t need him pointing out you lived in this city alone now since he left. As if you didn’t know.

Where watching him on stage hit you with longing and heartbreak, memories you found yourself irrevocably attached to, being in the same room as him now is only making you see the real Harry. The one who's so good at rearranging the energy in the room to make you feel you need to give more of yourself. The one who's an expert at asking a leading question and relying on the other person to be vulnerable first, lead the charge out the gates.

The man who lied to hide you every day for nearly a year, even when it was hurting you more than protecting you. The hurt from him was worse than the invasion of your privacy would have be. The distrust you felt didn't counteract the security you were still afforded by anonymity. The way you felt you still had something to prove—something to earn from him—and that you just needed to earn the right to your place in Harry's life.

"I've missed you," he said finally, "Just …"

"You've been lonely?" You raise your eyebrows at him.

"What?" Harry's defences click into place, "No, it's not that—obviously yes, I've been lonely—but also I just—I miss you."

You start nodding, and your gaze drifts around the room, "Yeah, I … What exactly do you miss, Harry? Because—I mean, it was kind of shit, don't you think?"

"Shit?" he looks horrified, "What was shit?"

"Harry," you say simply, telling him to cut the bullshit with your expression. "Come on."

"I loved you," he declares loudly, proudly, “We had a great time together. I don't think it was kind of shit at all."

That's when you feel tears come to your eyes. Of course he didn't think it was shit. He still didn't see where the problem was. Couldn't see it. He would go right back to That Fight and keep going the way you had been if he could. Harry would keep living that life with you, he would have kept on going the same way. You'd still be the secret. A fight about a holiday would have resolved itself with compromise and make-up sex, and you would have gone right back to sneaking out of venues and pretending not to know him in crowded rooms.

Your lips turn up in a smile of sorts as your tears beg to fall but don't, "You haven't changed," you state with a small, incredulous laugh, "You've not figured it out. Nothing's changed," you repeat, shaking your head.

Harry's confusion is plain, and if he thought your tears were because you miss him there's something like a flicker of doubt, as if he's reading what's in front of him again and maybe getting a different story.

"You can't have a life with someone who doesn't want anyone to know you're in their life," you state simply.

And that was it, really. That was the nuts and bolts of it.

The secrecy eroded any meaning your relationship with Harry had. The doubt that cast. The burden on you to continually prove yourself, to audition for the role every day only to never graduate from understudy.

You watch Harry's throat constrict tightly as he thinks about the words that come from his mouth, "I loved you," he repeats, "I didn't want anything outside of us to fuck us up."

"You can't control the world that way, Harry," you're observing him carefully, "You definitely can't control people that way. I get why we started that way, but a year in, Harry? A year."

He looks at his feet, and it's the first bit of remorse you've ever seen him show over it.

"I know you loved me," you keep going, "But you can't use that as some bandaid for the lying, for the hurt that was. You can't erase the consequences because you thought you were protecting me or us or yourself. The truth doesn't cancel out the hurt of the lie."

Harry's still starring at his boots, "You could have said something."

You blink once.

"Fuck you," bursts out before you can stop it, and Harry's eyes snap up to yours, you laugh at his nerve and rise to your feet, "Fuck you, Harry. I couldn't have. I felt like I had to earn it. Like maybe I was one gold star away from getting there. And then when I did push it, you ended it."

"That's not—

"—It is," you insist, shaking your head at him, "You put all your insecurities and shortcomings on me and then had the nerve to tell me you loved me as if I was the defective cog in the wheel. As if you saying you loved me put all the onus on me spoiling it."

"I'm a private person—

You put your hand up to silence him, turning on your heel to face Harry as your pacing halts, "Stop. I don't … I don't care," you breathe out simply, "I really don't. Our relationship wasn't The One. It's one we'll both learn from for the ones that are coming. I hope you learn from it," you add quietly, "Because I have."

"Y/N," Harry says your name like it's an idea he's unsure of.

"That song wasn't about me, was it?" You ask because on stage he said it was about regretting hurting someone and there's been no hint of a 'sorry' from Harry since.

His brow creased, "It is. I am. I wanted you to hear me play it tonight. It's for you."

You smile, the idea that you've grown beyond this situation blooming inside you, "You've not said it."

"What?"

"You haven't said you're sorry," your head shakes again, a fresh wave of your new perfume—the one that's just yours—filling your nose, "You've said you missed me. And that I look good, but you've not said you're sorry. You can put an apology into the song on stage, but you can't admit you were wrong to the person you wrote the song about."

His shoulders sink, just the slightest amount, and you know that you've seen enough. You've said enough. He's not going to have an epiphany on this, not in this conversation with you. You've gone as far as you can with this. As far as you're willing to.

"I'm going to go," you take a step forward, "Thanks for the song, your voice sounded really nice on it."

And you walk passed him with just a final wave and the slightest touch to his shoulder. He doesn't move from his seated position, but his neck cranes and he watches you leave. Eyes hunting your back for answers, like the manuscript for what just happened might show up there. But it doesn't, and you slip out the door, the clip from your shoes fading from his hearing quicker than he wanted it to.

Your insides are shaking by the time you make it out onto the street. No part of you wants to turn back and look up at his name in lights again. You're done with seeing the best of everything in him. Harry's one of the shitty boyfriends you'll tell someone about one day in the future, and they'll call him a dickhead with anger dripping from their tongue, promising to never treat you the same way.

And they won't.

You'll both have bumped and bruised your way into each other's lives, and there'll be a satisfying click with them there wasn't with anyone else. You'll have journeyed through all the maybes and not-quites, and you'll land in that forever place with the person who wears the badge of Yours with a fervour nobody before them has.

And Harry … You'll go and be Nothing to Him.

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missdawnandherdusk · 3 years

Text

once upon a flight

Draco X Reader (post war)

Summary: The Wizarding World earnestly searched for the newly discovered Heir of Gryffindor. After many failed attempts at the claim, McGonagall almost gives up hope, but sends off one final letter. Draco looking for a reason to clear his name has an ulterior motive to find you... that is until he meets you.

A/n: So, as promised, an Anastasia AU that is frankly one of my favorite things in a while. For all intents and purposes Snape isn’t dead because this is my blog and my word is law. Also, this is about 10k words... so you’re welcome.

Long ago, Hogwarts was founded by four great wizards: Godric Gryffindor, Salazar Slytherin, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Helga Hufflepuff. The Slytherin heir was found centuries later in one Tom Riddle who became the greatest Dark Wizard of all time, only to be defeated by the great Harry Potter. Yet, the story of the heirs does not end there. The unfortunate demise of Helena Ravenclaw ended the lineage of the Ravenclaw house for she had no children. The Hufflepuff heir, Cedric Diggory was killed in the war by Voldemort. Only one heir remains, and their whereabouts are unknown to all, but sought after by most. Minerva McGonagall is keen on the discovery of this witch or wizard, the last true heir of Hogwarts, and perhaps the most powerful of them all. Only in the hands of the true heir, will Godric’s mighty sword come alive with magic once more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“It’s a girl, raised muggle, in America,” Snape threw down the Daily Prophet. “This could be your chance,”

“My chance to what?” Draco huffed, running a hand through his hair before examining the paper. “Like a Slytherins could ever find this Gryffindor heir, let alone in muggle America,”

“But if you do,” Snape hinted, a smile curling on his lips. “It might clear your names,”

“Would you give that a rest?” Draco muttered, throwing the newspaper down of a very scared looking American girl. “Even if I do find this girl, why in the world would she trust me?”

“Because, she might have questions, and who is going to be there with the answers for her?” Snape raised an eyebrow.

Draco pondered the idea, then glanced at your photo in the paper in front of him. And he thought there perhaps might be a chance.

____________________________

“London?” I eyed the passport dubiously. “What long lost aunt wants me in London? And why did she show up now?” My fingers ran over the long letter explaining everything and nothing.

“Do you want to go or not?” Mrs. Greenwood asked. “Because I’ve got a lot of girl like you who’d kill for a chance at a family again.” Her snappy condescending voice wouldn’t be missed.

“Alright, alright. I’m going.”

I zipped my bag closed, folding the letter, and placing it in my bag with the plane ticket and passport. It was a long drive to the airport that was filled with people who all went about their business. I had never felt more lost. I read the letter again as I waited for my plane to arrive. Something proved magical about the parchment and inked letters. A style never used in a modern day. It gave me hope. Or an unsettling sense of dread.

“Excuse me,” His voice was polite and broke through the music of my headphones. It was his accent that caught me off guard. He was a brit.

“Yes?” I asked, taking out an earbud.

“You wouldn’t happen to know a Ms. McGonagall, would you? I’m supposed to be aiding her niece back to London,” I eyed him skeptically.

“Is that so?” I raised an eyebrow. “Alright pretty boy, tell me, what absolute stranger is going to trust a random brit who comes up to her claiming to know the name of someone that he could easily have read off the girl’s letter?” He seemed amused at my skepticism.

“I suppose you’re right,” The stranger didn’t seem cornered, however. His caviler didn’t waver. “What if I told this stranger that hypothetically I knew that her aunt wasn’t really her aunt but someone looking for her to be claimed as the heir to a school of magic?”

“Well, hypothetically, I’d probably laugh and call security,” I eyed the cop, whose gaze caught mine before flashing to the beautiful stranger before me.

“And if I proved to her that magic was real? Would this stranger believe me?” Danger lurked in his eyes.

I snorted. “If you can prove that magic is real, I’ll follow you anywhere buddy,”

“Careful there stranger, you’re promising something you might not want to,” He warned.

“I think I know what I can handle pretty boy,”

Without another word, he took my hand, clasping it in his. Glancing around he slowly raised his hand away from my palm, where a flower began to bud and bloom from nothing, sparking in the fluorescent lighting. I wasn’t impressed.

“Nice trick, but I’m not convinced.”

The stranger laughed. “I should have known it would take more to convince you,” He ran a hand through his silvery blond hair, looking around, before his gaze settled back on me. “What if I told you that you could do magic?”

“I’d say you’re crazy and were back to calling security,” I went to walk away, I had enough time before my flight that a quick walk wouldn’t be the end of the world.

“But you must have felt it,” His hand reached for mine. “When you were younger, and things happened around you that you couldn’t explain. A sense that you didn’t belong. That you were different. That you could see and feel and do things that others couldn’t.” His words were earnest and urgent. I paused.

“And if I did?” I didn’t face him.

“That you hear stories of magic and fairytales, and you thought maybe you belonged in them because there was no one quite like you,” My eyes met his, baffled, curious. “And you felt it just now, not on the surface of your skin, but in your hand, in your blood, a feeling in your heart that felt right. That felt powerful,”

“Okay, pretty boy, you seem to know a lot about who you think I am, so what’s your deal?’ I folded my arms, still not completely convinced but more than curious.

“I told you, I’m here to help you get to London in one piece and how to be an heir of magic.” The light in his eyes glinted as if he had won.

“Alright, let’s say hypothetically I believe you, then what?”

“I’d buy you a cup of coffee and we’d try this again?” He raised an eyebrow, nodding to a chain Starbucks that was near dead in the early hours of the morning.

I stared at the chai tea latte that was warming my hands. He didn’t say a word. Draco. The beautiful stranger who promised answers. Who looked a bit too good to be true.

“From here, I get a letter for an aunt I didn’t know that I had, and a plane ticket to London. Then I met you, claiming that you know her and that you’re here to help me. Then you tell me that my aunt really isn’t my aunt, and that magic is real and I’m the heir to some sort of magic school in London? This is a really good way to get kidnapped and never heard from again,” My skepticism grew. He could see that.

“You’re not wrong,” He leaned onto the table, closer to me. “And you wouldn’t believe me unless you knew that magic was real.”

“Every lonely girl dreams of fairytales and magic,” I countered. “Is it so far-fetched to really believe it?”

“Believing sure,” He gave an easy smile. “But you can do magic and you know it,”

“How do you know what I know?” I snapped back.

“I know you’re in denial,” He chuckled. “And easy, you’re doing it now, but no one could tell you that you were because it’s subtle and hard to pick up on,”

“In what way?” I demanded.

“Defense spell,” His smirk started the urge in me to deck him. He was so self-assured, and it drove me insane. What was worse, was that he might be right about everything.

“Sure, why not,” My tone fell flat. “Okay pretty boy, how exactly am I using a defense spell?” I leaned back in my chair, unamused.

“No one in this airport gave you any trouble. A strange man comes up to you and you show signs of distress, and yet no one helps you. You’re hiding yourself from their point of view. It’s very self-assured of you to think you can handle yourself,” His explanation made to much sense... again.

“I’m the self-assured one?” I muttered. “And sorry to burst your bubble English, but this is America and we all pretty much keep our heads down.”

“And yet the second you decided to trust me, the security guard walked the other way—away from his post I might add,” His confident smile didn’t leave.

“He... what?” Now I backtracked.

“You like to be left alone, I can admire that, but you have so much potential and you could do so much more,”

“And if I don’t want to?” I offered a bit hopeless.

“Sure, go be a faceless nobody in the sea of Americans, work a nine to five, and never see adventure or magic again in your life,” He leaned back in his chair, casual. As if what he offered was the option a rational person would choose.

“And I should trust you? To take me to London and bring me to this magic school to be an heir or whatever it is you Brits do?”

“You seem quite offset that I’m not American,” His amused smile returned.

“Force of habit,” I shrugged, giving a carefree smile that caused indignation to flicker into his eyes.

“Well, you have approximately thirty seconds to decide if you trust me before you’re called to board,” His devious smirk had me reeling to look at the gate and the flight attendant who was ruffling through papers and getting ready to signal boarding groups.

“God, I hate you,” I muttered, resigned. “Fine. Whatever. Life of adventure and magic, sure.”

We boarded and Draco took the seat akin to mine in first class without the bat an of eyelash. My anxiety began to flare again thinking of how easy it was for him to find a place next to me on a full flight to London in the early hours of the morning.

Then there was the matter of flying altogether. I had never been on a plane ride before. And I was about to be on a nine-hour flight with a supposed magician and a promise of adventure. What had I gotten myself into?

“I can hear you worrying.” Draco muttered as the plane left the runway and began to ascend.

“I’ve never flown in a plane before in my life. All things considered, I think I’m allowed to worry,” I snapped.

Draco reached into his bag and held out a small vial filled with an amber liquid.

“Here, take this,” He offered it to me.

“Oh, you’ve got to be joking,” I snorted. “There is no way in hell that I’m taking that.”

“Y/n, please,” It was the first time that he had ever used my name. A name I hadn’t told him. A name he knew. A name that got my attention and reminded me of the situation that I was in.

“What is it?” I took the vail from his nimble fingers.

“Anxiety potion,” He explained calmly. “It will calm your stress levels and allow you to think clearly,”

“Magic?” I eyed him dubiously.

“A form of it. Your people call it chemistry, but we have access to more ingredients than the causal muggle,”

“Muggle?” I raised an eyebrow, still examining the contents of the small vial.

“People who can’t do magic nor live with other wizards,”

“Wizards,” I mused softly to myself.

The pilot informed the cabin that we had reached cruising altitude and my anxiety came back, overshadowing the tales of wizards and magic and the perfect stranger beside me. Draco could sense that. He let out an aggravated huff and rolled his eyes.

“Use your senses Y/n, you don’t know how to control it yet, but you have magic in your blood. It’s kept you alive and ahead this long. What are they telling you? Not your fears and anxiety, but your heart and head.” His voice was low and urgent, and I had to concentrate to catch all of his words.

“This isn’t another one of your—”

“Y/n,” He pressed, not having it with my second thoughts and doubts. “Concentrate.”

Deciding to trust him, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. The air around me was artificial and frigid. It made my senses stand keen on edge. It was unnatural to me. I could feel the people as they settled down for the long flight. The pilot shifting and the attendants flitting about. They were all overly ordinary. Like most people I had been surrounded with my entire life.

Then there was Draco beside me. I could feel his warmth, his presence... his aura. Unlike anything I had encountered before. A halo of power and... magic that embraced and clung to the edges of him. It matched the silvery blue of his eyes trailing off into green. I could trust him. But there was a darkness underneath that I couldn’t trust. The one that I feared.

Then the vial clasped between my fingers. It held no ill will toward me as I thought of it. It promised to help in words that didn’t belong to Draco beside me. Something all of it’s own. All of my own.

Another deep breath out.

“Okay,”

“What did you gather?” He didn’t taunt me, but rather it was genuine curiosity that colored his tone.

“You’re... different. From the rest of the people on this plane. You... there’s like... an aura? A feeling but with color? I don’t know...” My eyebrows furrowed. “It told me I can trust you... but there’s something darker underneath... and I’m not sure... I’m not sure I trust that darkness.”

He stared at me, baffled. Not that I had said what I said, but instead what I had said.

“The... the darkness.” He muttered. “I thought...”

“That you could hide it?” I raised an eyebrow, only half teasing. We all had darkness. I wouldn’t hold his against him.

“That there would be more... the things I’ve done,” He was a burning man before me. I looked down to the vial in my hands. I toyed with it.

“Here’s to new beginnings?” I offered a bit hopeless, breaking the wax seal and downing the contents like a parched man in a desert who comes upon an oasis.

And I understood what he meant. A pack of stress and the ability to think clearly. All of the fogginess that the anxiety induced was gone. I looked at the world around me with new eyes.

“Woah,” I whispered, looking at Draco clearly for the first time.

A smile played at his lips.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

I nodded and looked out at the grey and blue beneath the plane. Closing the shade, I turned to Draco as much as the first-class seat would allow.

“So magic?”

“Where do you want me to start?” He was expecting my question.

“The beginning is a good place,”

“We’d be here forever,” Draco chuckled. “I’ll start at the beginning of what would be your story though”

I marveled at his words. Two worlds divided but always existing beside each other. Sometimes they would intertwine sometimes they would be forgotten. He spoke of being raised in such a negative perspective of muggles and the life I led, putting me on edge until he gave a placid smile and an apology. His tale turned darker with the war that was fought and a hope that was lost and found again.

“Potter,” Draco’s tone snarled around the name.

“Harry Potter,” I mused. “So why can’t he be the heir of this Gryffindor whoever?”

“Like that would help his ego any,” Draco muttered flatly. “And he can’t because he’s a half blood. The heirs are pure blood wizards, not a drop of Muggle blood in them,”

“Okay...” my brows knit together. “But how does that explain me? They told me my mother was... and my father walked out on her. She died giving birth to me,”

“Back in the early days of the first war, I can only assume your parents were against the Dark Lord which gave them their death sentence. Especially if he knew you were the heir of Gryffindor,”

“But I’m not dead,” I pointed out.

“Seems that way,” Draco gave me an amused smirk. “They must not have known you existed. And seeing as you were raised in America, I came see why they—no one knew. Not until recently anyway.”

“But how did they find me? How did you find me? How did this letter even find me?”

“Would you accept magic as an answer to those three questions?” Draco tried.

“Sure, but I’m still creeped out,” I folded my arms. “Heir to a school of Magic...” I pondered the words aloud for the first time. “What does that even mean? What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Whatever you want,” Draco shrugged.

Our conversation pulled after that into almost nothing. I closed my eyes once more and began to feel the world around me through my newfound sixth sense. It became overwhelming after a few moments but when homing in on Draco’s presence quelled some of that overstimulation. His aura was calming, as if it were a foreign lullaby to my heart. A lullaby that lulled me to sleep before long.

But a darkness lingered still in my dreams. It was alien. Not what I had seen in Draco and not what I knew was within me. Something else. An evil presence that yearned to be free. To take control. To have power. It wanted me. It was suffocating. It dragged me down. Down. Down. Draco felt further away. The plane, it’s passengers, nothing but specks. The darkness dragged me forward. Red eyes stared me down and a smile full of knifes taunted me.

I struggled back, away from the evilness, trying to break free of the darkness but I was trapped. By back was against a wall. There was no escape.

A flicker of silver caught my attention. Bright and beautiful. A ray of hope. My eyes dared to leave the shadow figure to follow that ray. When I saw it again it because more clear. The wisps of a dragon made of pure light. It did not come for me, rather it showed me the way out.

There was a way out.

I gasped, my eyes fluttering open to see the glow of fluorescent lighting and worried grey eyes.

“What—that—who—” I sputtered, my heart racing.

“Are you okay?” His genuine concern called to me. I nodded, tears stinging my eyes.

“What was that Draco?”

“I don’t know,” From his tone I knew that he did not like not knowing. “But you’re safe now,” The comfort of his arms around me made me believe his words more than I thought I would. “We’ll land in a couple hours, just try to relax,” His tone was soft, something new.

The grey dim of London didn’t impress me. I squinted up at the misting rain. Draco took my hand and led me through the maze of the airport, gathering our bags and ushering me toward an empty alley way.

“Draco,” I warned, not enjoying the situation.

“Just hold tight to me and don’t touch the edges,” He instructed. “Don’t let go of your bag either,”

“What? Why?” I broke away from him, to his annoyance.

“Can’t you just do what you’re told? No questions asked?” He seemed to be asking the sky more than he was asking me. I gave him a flat look. “It’s magic. It’s called apperating. It’s going to feel weird, but you should be fine.” He offered his hand to me again.

“Should be?”

“We don’t have time for this Y/n,” He stressed.

“Like hell we do,” I snapped.

“Fine, if you’re not fine then you have total permission to hit me, that make you feel better?” He demanded, insisting that I take his hand.

“No,” I mumbled, placing my hand in his.

That feeling of power was back when he took out a wand—his wand—and twirling it, before I could make fun of him, we were whisked away, and I had to remember to hold on. The distorted reality around me was so enticing to touch, as if it were an impressionist painting that replaced with the dingy grey around me. Then it stopped.

“Where are we?” The scenery changed, still a duller grey, but now in front of a large mansion that I had only seen in movies.

“Malfoy Manor,” Draco said curtly. “Come along,”

Taking a second to recover from the beauty that was all around me, I grabbed my bag and followed him inside where I gasped again. The house looked like something of those fairytales I had always dreamed about.

“Are you coming?” Draco asked promptly.

“I... do you live here!?” I scrambled after him up the stairs with my bag.

“Yes,” He didn’t understand my amazement. “Are you alright?”

“I’ve never been something this... beautiful before,” I turned back to look over the banister at the grand foyer. “You just... live here?”

“Yes,” Now there was a smile playing at his lips. “Come on, we’ve still got much to do,”

“There’s more!?” I followed him up the stairs.

“You haven’t used magic in your entire life, and you think I’m gonna let you waltz in there scared and unprepared?” Draco snorted opening up a random door. “This will be your room. We have a couple days—it won’t be enough time but perhaps I can make you somewhat believable...”

“No one said anything about having to prove I was the heir!” I argued, again taken back by the lavish room but ultimately was overridden by my anger and fear. “Show up, sure! Maybe take a DNA test! But act like some wizard protégée!?”

“Witch,” He mended softly. “And we’ve got this under control,”

“We?” I did not have this under control.

“Snape and I. He will be helping me help you. There’s a lot you need to learn. But for now, rest. Dinner is in an hour,” Closing the door he left me to my thoughts.

Sitting on the bed I looked around the room. Anxiety began to creep in my chest again, but not for the reason it had... this morning. Could it still be the same day? Could I have only met Draco a dozen or so hours ago? My thoughts were reeling.

“A witch, an heir,” I scoffed. “Magic,” it was more of a whisper.

I lifted my hand and remembering the power and golden feeling that had come when Draco created a flower in my palm, I surged for the magic within me. To my surprise, golden flames licked at my fingertips, shimmering in the evening light. A giddy laugh left my lips as I intensified the flame to consume my entire hand.

“He said you were a quick learner,” A stern and nasally voice drew me from my stupor.

My hand dropped and my flame fizzled out as I stood.

“I—uh,”

“I am Severus Snape. I am here to help you. It is in your best interest to do exactly as I say without any questions. Understood?”

“Uh... okay?”

“Dinner will be downstairs soon. Draco would like you to join us. There are clothes in the wardrobe. Change into something more suitable and come down.” His instructions left no room for argument, but my stubbornness flared, yet he left before I could snark a reply.

Mourning my sweater jeans and converse I headed to the elaborate wardrobe and opened the great oak doors to reveal an array of gowns, cloaks, and dresses. Together they were worth more than any amount of money I had come into contact with. And of much higher taste than I’d dare to ever wear.

Riffling through them there was a semi bearable dress that looked as if it were from the 1950s and held a navy-blue color. It would have to do, and it could have been worse. I eyed a heavy shimmering gown with pearls and lace, shuddering at the thought.

———————————————

Draco’s day could have been a lot worse than it ended up being. After finally giving in at Snape’s insistence that he fly back to England and not apparate he thought his day was a lost cause. But then he met you and Merlin were you a handful.

He could easily see the magic you were doing and the power you were giving off. It took a lot of his willpower to not submit and leave you alone, as your defense ordered. But as soon as your eyes met his and a smile played at your lips, he didn’t have to fight any longer. You allowed him to stay close to you, assured that he meant you no harm. No one had trusted him like that in years.

For the heir of Hogwarts, you were quite remarkable. An easy sorting into Gryffindor with or without the hat. He had to play his cards right however, to maneuver you into a world of magic from the mundane of America. But he accomplished the feat, easier than he would have thought done. Perhaps you were more than ready to leave your Muggle world and join his magic one. And not like he could blame you. If he never had to ride in a plane again, he’d do anything.

But just as he thought you were safe, your eyes closed in a peaceful slumber, something dark came back to hurt you. Red eyes that he knew well. How... how he didn’t know. But he could feel the cold evil presence seep into your skin and consume your aura. It terrified him. Draco knew you were defenseless. No amount of unintentional magic could keep the Dark Lord at bay, dead or alive.

So, he did something he never had before in a desperate attempt to protect you and him from that evil. He called his Patronus, touching his wand to your temple, willing it to go and pull you out.

Your eyes flashing open, fear written on your usual confident features, your hands digging into his arms, Draco’s heart churned in his chest. You looked to him for safety. Him—who you’d met barely five hours prior when you were sure he was there to kidnap you. And now you held to him like a prayer. He didn’t expect that. There was nothing else he could do but hold you close and assure you that it was going to be okay.

If you two could ever get off this godforsaken plane.

With touchdown, Draco wasted no time in dragging you by the hand through the throng of the Muggle airport before he lost his temper. In a secluded alley he was finally ready to apparate home. Of course, you had thoughts of your own and he really wasn’t about to fight with you on this. He just wanted to go home. So, he gave in. Just this once.

And Merlin he was thankful that he did. He had never been so happy to see the Manor. You had never seen a Manor before. He almost laughed at the childlike wonder on your face. But instead, he was enamored by it, the same way you were enamored by a house that had lost its shine to him over the years. Draco longed to see the mansion through your eyes even for a moment.

“Your mother wrote,” Snape offered a letter. “She’ll be here within a day,” Draco sighed and skimmed the letter. “Do you still think this is a good idea?” “It’s the best one we’ve got,”

Before Draco could argue, the clearing of your throat softly drew his attention. You had changed into one of his mother’s old dresses that he hadn’t seen in years and you looked quite sheepish about it. Draco stood, out of respect or perhaps startlement. Snape gave him a look which he promptly ignored, going over to you.

“I... I hope it’s alright,” You fiddled with the skirt. “He... he said I could—that I should...”

“You look wonderful,” Draco encouraged softly. “Come, dinner is ready.”

He took your hand and led you through the large house, tuning out Snape’s instruction to you about how to hold yourself as you walked. Draco smiled at the annoyance in your eyes.

Dinner was... more or less a disaster. Your stubbornness met Snape’s instruction, getting you both nowhere.

“If you want to become the Heir of Hogwarts you will listen to me,” Snape almost snarled.

“I don’t want to become the heir!” You stood abruptly, throwing your cloth napkin onto the table. “I just want to know who I am!” Storming out of the dining room, Draco watched you, before sharing a look with Snape.

“She’s hopeless,” Snape muttered.

“You’re dealing with an American Gryffindor; did you think she was just going to sit still and look pretty?” Draco chuckled, standing.

It took him a while to find you. Draco could only fathom that you had gotten lost in the house yourself and winded up on a balcony somewhere on the third floor. You had a blanket draped around your shoulders as you stared up at the stars. The night had cleared, giving clarity to its pathfinders.

“I know what you’re going to say,” You spoke softly, sensing him nearby. “I... I can’t do this Draco. I’m not some lady, some long lost princess in some sort of fairytale. Magic or not...” You took a sharp breath in. “Fairytales are just stories. I’m still a girl with no parents, no family, no past... and no future.”

Draco studied you, wondering how you had changed so much from the confident self-assured girl he’d met this morning. He also had little clue what to say to cheer you up. So, he did what normally comforted him, he spoke fondly of his mother.

“My mother wore that dress,” He began softly, leaning against the door frame. “When I was young, before Hogwarts. Father would always be away on business. She’d take me to the garden, and we’d have a picnic. I remember her in that dress on those warm summer days,” Draco let his eyes slipped closed, lost in the memory. “She used to tell me that I’d never be alone. That as long as I could do magic, I’d always have a place to belong. That there would always be someone out there like me.” He paused. “Hogwarts was my home for quite some time. Slytherins were my family.”

“Who am I to come and claim it as mine then?” The words barely left your lips.

“You’ve been alone and away from your family for so long now. Don’t you think you deserve to go home? To a place that you belong?” You turned to face him, hope flickering in your eyes.

“But I—” You ran a hand through your hair nervously. “I’m never going to be good enough. Dinner was a disaster and I’m never going to please someone like Snape, let alone any other wizard!”

Draco couldn’t do anything but laugh. “No one can please Snape, darling. Don’t take that personally.” He sobered a bit. “You’ve never going to please everyone. Believe me I know. But... it’s more about becoming someone you’re proud of,”

“I don’t know who that is,” You turned back to the stars.

“If you run away, you’ll never know,” Draco mused, standing next to you, leaning on the railing. “But... if you truly can’t stand it in the next three days... I’ll take you back myself,”

You looked over to him, a swirl of emotions unidentifiable on your face. Before he could start to decipher even one of them, your gaze turned downward. He let out a soft sigh.

“If it’s any consolation,” Draco began. “I believe in you. I think you belong,” He turned to leave.

“Draco, wait,” You called out, “Thank you... I know... I know I’m a handful,”

A smile played at his lips. “That’s one way to describe you,”

You rolled your eyes, but you still didn’t smile and that worried him more than he cared to admit.

“I’ll take you back to your room,” He offered.

“I’m quite capable—” You cut yourself off and sighed. “Thanks, again,”

Staring at your closed door, Draco found himself wanting you back before him, so that he could continue to talk to you. He enjoyed it more than he thought. You didn’t fawn over him, nor did you fear him. Instead, you treated him as an equal. As a person.

“Oh, she looks like a kicked puppy!” His mother fawned the next morning. “Draco Lucius Malfoy I’ve taught you better!”

“It wasn’t me!” Draco argued back. “It was Snape!”

“Don’t you talk back to me young man!” She scolded. “Poor thing,” She turned to you, tucking a strand of hair out of your face. “There, there, I apologize for my son’s behavior,”

There was a look of bewilderment on your face at your gaze met his. He didn’t know what to do but shrug and shake his head.

“It... it really was Snape, Mrs. Malfoy,” you stammered out. “Draco’s been...” He met your eyes again and the words you were about to say died on your lips. Not this his mother noticed.

“Oh, don’t you worry about him!” She consoled, standing. “Severus Snape what have I told you about manners!” His mother shouted. Draco was grateful he was no longer the one being shouted at as his mother left to go and reprimand Snape some more.

“Your mother is...” you started a smile finding your lips. It was the first time you smiled since dinner last night.

“I should have warned you a bit more, that was my mistake,”

“No, she’s lovely,” You insisted.

“You don’t have to lie on my behalf,” Draco mused, earning a laugh from you.

“She really is wonderful,” Your laugh faded to a smile.

“You say that now, but if you thought Snape was a lot,” Draco laughed at the dread in your eyes.

His mother insisted they go to Paris to shop for you. A way to take your mind off yesterday, as well as find you the basics of wizardry. Which started with a wand.

“This is stupid,” You muttered as the shop keeper flitted about the hundreds of wand boxes, tittering in French to his mother.

“You need a wand,” Draco whispered back. “Every wand is unique, so there’s one for you,”

It took a few tries, and a few shattered light fixtures—and repairing spells—before you had a loyal wand in hand. Draco made sure that you could use the wand comfortably and surprised him by calling a lighting charm without the incantation... or him telling you to. He caught his mother’s eye who was clearly impressed with you. A new set of robes, what seemed like a new wardrobe entirely and a few books later, you seemed satisfied.

“I really can’t ask anything more of you,” You argued. “This is all more than enough,”

“Nonsense, darling,” His mother laughed. “Think nothing of it. Every great witch needs the tools to help her be successful,”

You blushed, looking down. “I mean it,” You tried again. “Even a trip to Paris would have been more than enough,”

“You’ve never been to Paris!?” His mother was aghast. You had really done it now. “Draco! Why didn’t you tell me the poor girl has never been to our city?” She turned to you. “You really must forgive his rudeness, I blame his father,”

“He—I—” You stammered.

“But I won’t have you here and not show you the wonders of the greatest city in the world. Come! Come!” She ushered you off and Draco had no choice but to trail behind and make sure you didn’t get into too much trouble.

After what seemed like days—though it was only hours filled with shows, attractions, museums, antique shops and more—his mother finally found a resting place, and by the look on your face and your slumped shoulders, you needed it. It was a rooftop restaurant that overlooked the city scape of Paris, off to the Eiffel Tower that lit up the night sky. You had that look of wonder and enchantment in your eyes again as you took in the city scape. Again. Draco wished he could see it through your eyes... for the first time all over again.

“She’s a pretty little thing, isn’t she?” His mother whispered in his ear, far from your earshot. “I’m surprised at you Draco. I’ve never seen you this way around another girl before,”

“She not just another girl mother,” Draco retorted, trying not to blush. “She’s the heir of Hogwarts. The Gryffindor crown princess.” He sighed softly. “She doesn’t have time for...”

“A handsome young man who’s been on his own for too long?” His mother mused.

“A Slytherin,” He finished. “A Death Eater,”

“You’re no more a Death Eater than she is a muggle,” Narcissa said sternly. “I see the way she looks at you Draco,”

“Enough, mother,” Draco shook his head, pursing his lips. “Enough,”

“Fine, fine,” His mother scoffed. “Y/n, darling!” She called.

This dinner was a bit more successful. You were animated with conversation and excitement from the day. There was a way that you spoke about his city that had his heart. Dinner lulled to wine and dessert as couples began to take the dance floor, gliding along to the live band.

“Do you dance darling?” His mother asked, noticing your interested.

“Uh, no, not really,” You stammered, looking sheepish as you blushed.

“Oh, that won’t do! Draco, go on, teach her!” Narcissa gave him a pointed look.

“No really it’s okay!” You refuted before he could.

“Nonsense, every girl must know how to dance, magic or no,” You could both sense that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

So, he ended up with you in his arms on the dance floor as he tried to lead you through a simple waltz.

“You have to trust me,” He instructed, as your eyes met his. “I’m not going to let you fall,” His tone softened.

Your eyes didn’t leave his as you began to find your rhythm in the dance, letting him lead you through it all. Soon you were laughing with joy as he twirled you around the dance floor. He heart skipped a beat or two. The music ended before he wanted it to and a round of applause went up.

And Draco had to let you go.

______________________________

I laid in bed that night, staring at the stars I had created with a simple spell. With the use of my wand, magic was... easy. If I thought and felt what I wanted, it occurred. Though it seemed like a natural process to me, Draco, and Narcissa—and even Snape—were impressed.

Staring regardless, I replayed the night over and over. Dancing with Draco... in Paris... on a rooftop like some sort of stupid fairytale. Whose ending didn’t belong to me. It was the one question I didn’t ask through Narcissa’s lessons. What happened to Draco and I after I had claimed my ‘throne’?

It left me sleepless.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered to him the next day, in front of the grand gates of Hogwarts.

My anxiety was through the roof. Clad in new formal robes, and hair and makeup perfected courtesy of Narcissa, all I had to do was walk in.

“We can still turn back,” Draco gave.

“I can’t do that either,” I muttered, causing him to laugh.

“I believe in you, Y/n,” His earnest words caught my attention and out gazes lingered a bit too long, leaving us both blushing.

“Just... don’t leave me,”

“I remember you telling me that if I could prove magic to you, you’d follow me anywhere. I don’t think I have to worry about you ever leaving me,” He joked softly as we walked into the castle grounds.

“I suppose not,” I smiled at the ground.

“Y/n,” Draco paused, the mood shifting to something more serious and downcast. “You’re... you’re gonna hear somethings about me and... they’re not going to be good,” I pondered his words for a moment.

“You flew halfway around the world to find me, and you helped me get back on my feet, that’s good enough for me,” I smiled softly.

Draco pursed his lips and took a deep breath, still looking despondent about the situation.

“Draco,” I called softly. His grey eyes met mine. “I’d never have followed you onto that plane if I didn’t trust you,”

Deciding that he didn’t have an argument to that that he deemed should be voiced, he led me deeper into the grand castle and it took everything in me not to stop and stare at just about everything.

“You went to school here?” I squeaked. A smile parted his lips.

“Yes... you should have too,” He seemed to realize the injustice.

“We can’t change that now,” I comforted.

Magnificent doors parted the two of us from the entire school and quite a few wizard officials according to Draco. I stared at the intricate detailed work of the doors. If I wasn’t so nervous, I could have spent the entire day staring at these doors alone.

But there was something to be done.

The doors opened and the entire hall fell into a pin drop silence. I grabbed Draco’s hand without thinking for the comfort and support. He squeezed mine reassuringly as we began out steps forward to the front, where older, authoritative looking wizards stood.

“Death Eater,” A student hissed.

“Traitor,”

“Scum,”

“You don’t belong here,”

“Slytherin,”

My eyes glanced up to Draco, who had a mask of no emotion, but I could see the stress in the clenching of his jaw and tightening of his eyes. It was subtle but it was still there. This time I gave his hand a squeeze of reassurance and glared down the crowd, who immediately went quiet. There was not a menacing whisper to be heard.

At the front of the Great Hall there were three wizards who stood out among the rest. They were younger, but still assured of themselves as they stepped forward towards us. A boy with fiery red hair holding hands with a girl who had a glare that I was proud of and beside them a boy with a mess of black hair and piercing green eyes.

“Potter,” Draco’s eyes narrowed as he stood a bit taller.

“Malfoy,” There was the same distain in the supposed savior of the wizarding world’s tone.

I snorted, drawing both of their attention.

“What are you? Five?” I crossed my arms. “Y/n, nice to meet you,” I held my hand out for Harry to shake.

“I still can’t leave you two alone for five minutes,” A new voice sighed, stepping forward. “I hope they haven’t caused you too much trouble, child. I’m Professor McGonagall, headmaster of Hogwarts,”

“Y/n,” I gave again. “Supposed heiress to Gryffindor,”

“Yes,” She smiled. “I can see it in your eyes,”

Harry scoffed, sulking mildly. I looked over to him, then to Draco, confused and amused.

“I must apologize for the deceit in my letter.” McGonagall continued paying no mind to the interaction between Harry and me. “I feared that it was the only way to get you to come,” Her kind blue eyes held mine.

“I understand,” My smile was light. “In fact, if it wasn’t for Draco, I’m not sure I would have found my way here,”

“He used you!” Harry argued. “He wanted to clear his name so of course he helped you! You think he’d be a decent person if there wasn’t something in it for him!”

“That’s enough of that Mr. Potter!” McGonagall scolded. “Mr. Malfoy aided the heir of your house here from America unprovoked and I will not have you accuse him of such things,”

“If she trusted Malfoy there’s no way that she could ever be a Gryffindor. She doesn’t belong here,” Harry’s words were as cold as ice.

The malice and hatred in his voice and eyes was a fatal blow to my heart and confidence. Harry was right. I didn’t belong here. I looked around to the lavish hall and all of the students and wizard officials who had years of training and practice and grew up knowing who they were... this wasn’t where I belonged.

“How dare you,” Draco snarled, taking a step forward to shield me from Harry’s further words, but they had already hit their mark.

Their bickering silenced, but the tensions were high. Not that I noticed, I was too wrapped up in my negative thoughts.

“Come child,” McGonagall beckoned.

“Give me a minute,” I requested softly.

“We really need—”

“I said in a minute!” My raised voice shocked Draco and McGonagall. There was almost fear in their eyes. Harry still held the same hatred for me in his stare, now smug as if I proved his point.

It was enough to cause me to run.

Never being in a castle before in my life let alone a magic one, I was lost before I took my third turn. Tears streaming down my face, I never felt more alone. I found myself in a small courtyard with a lone old oak tree.

As I did when I was younger, I began to climb high into the branches, looking for an escape from the world below me. But there weren’t branches high enough this time. Resting on a high branch I leaned against the trunk, I let myself cry. The passage of time was hard to tell as the sun sank and the stars came out to play. It might have been an hour or two. I didn’t know and I was too miserable to care.

I didn’t belong here, and I wasn’t wanted here. Moments before I was only thinking that I didn’t care what they thought about Draco. I never imagined that there would be doubt and uncertainty about me.

I heard footsteps coming into the courtyard.

“Go away Draco,” I warned, pausing when I saw that it wasn’t Draco, but instead McGonagall. “I’m sorry, I thought—”

“I know who you thought I was,” She peered up at me through the branches. “Merlin’s sake what are you doing in a tree?” I heard the sternness in her voice, but I couldn’t help but here the amusement underneath.

“Hiding,” I offered sheepishly.

“Well come down from there,” She ordered.

I made my way down with ease. Dropping to the ground from a higher branch than I could have, I knew that I startled the headmaster. I gave a polite hesitant smile.

“What do they teach you in America,” McGonagall pursed her lips, an undeniable hint of mischief in her eye.

“I’m... really sorry professor,” I sighed. “I know I’m not what anyone thought. And I know I don’t belong here. I’m sorry I ever...”

“Never mind all that,” She cut me off. “Who are you, child?”

“I... I was hoping that you could tell me,” I glanced down, fidgeting, and straightening my robe.

“My dear, I’m old, and I’m tired of being conned and tricked.” She began.

“I don’t want to trick anyone,” I said earnestly.

“And I’m sure owning this castle means nothing to you either?” A silence passed between us.

“I just want to know who I am,” I finally spoke. “Whether or not I belong to a family, if I’m someone like you,” I sat on the stone bench that was to the side. “Draco said that Hogwarts was like home to him... a family,” Tears stung my eyes. “I never had a home, a family...”

McGonagall sat beside me, placing her hand over mine.

“Heir or not, you will always have a home here at Hogwarts. It is a safe haven to all witches and wizards who wish to remain,” She assured me. “And I am the one that must apologize. Mr. Potter is very hotheaded, a negative attribute to Gryffindors I’m afraid,” A smile played at her lips. “But... if Draco followed you to America and brought you here, I have no doubt that you are the heir.” I smiled down at my hands. “I see the way he looks at you,”

“I’ve never met anyone like him before,” I confessed.

“Then you are very special,” She stood. “Now come, you have a title to claim and a sword that belongs to you,”

“I get a sword?” My excitement grew as I followed her. McGonagall merely laughed and led me back through the castle.

Draco, who was anxiously pacing outside of the Great Hall, caught sight of us. He rushed over to me, looking me over before pulling me into a hug, before remembering himself.

“I’m so sorry,” He insisted. “This is my fault. Harry and I never got along, and as soon as I walked in there with you, I pinned you as a rival to him,” He cupped my face softly. “I’m so sorry,” He repeated.

Nodding, I gave him a smile.

“You destiny awaits inside my dear,” McGonagall motioned toward the entrance to the hall.

The second time I walked down the aisle of students, I no longer had the confidence I had before. Except, Draco’s hand in mine gave me the courage to keep going. Except this time, Harry’s malice was not the force holding me back.

As Draco and I were halfway across the room, a great darkness flooded the hall. Disquieted whispers of fear were exchanged among the students and official wizards.

“No other heir will take the throne,” A cruel voice hissed, that I had only heard once before, in a dream. I grabbed Draco’s hand. “No heir but Slytherin,”

I looked to Draco, trying to find what to do next in his eyes. He was just as uncertain as I was. Then something sparked in his eyes.

“The sword Y/n!” Draco urged. “Take the sword and claim your throne!”

“But how is that—”

“Just go!” He ordered drawing his wand and leaving little room for argument.

The darkness hung heavier in the room. Shedding my stuffy robes, I was free to run in nothing more than jeans and a sweater to the podium where the sword lay.

“Don’t touch that sword!” The voice hissed. “Or your lover here dies!”

I turned to see Draco almost entirely consumed by a thick black smoke, struggling for air.

“Don’t hurt him!” I screeched, pausing on my ascent toward the sword.

Hundreds of wizards and witches watched us with bated breath, warned by McGonagall to stay back. I could see the fear and fury in their gazes.

“Don’t hurt him,” I begged, taking a step away from the podium.

“Y/n, don’t—don’t worry about me,” Draco gasped out.

“You’ll die,” I argued weakly. “You can’t leave me! You promised!”

“I know,” He choked out. “Just trust me. It’s magic,” The sparkle of mischief in his eyes gave me the courage I needed to ignore the threatening evil voice and walked up to the sword for the third time since I arrived.

“No past... no parents...no home...” I muttered, looking at the sword. “But you won’t take my future!”

I gripped the sword handle and held it high above my head, watching as the Great Hall was bathed in golden light. Every person in the room stared at me, before bowing. I didn’t care. My eyes held onto one person.

The dark cloud has nowhere to run, it was vaporized. Draco fell to the ground gasping for air. I dropped the sword to the ground, hearing it clatter somewhere behind me as I rushed to Draco’s side.

“My god, Draco!” I worried over him, holding him close. “Don’t you ever do that again!” He coughed out a laugh and his arms weakly embraced me.

“Y/n, sweetheart, I don’t think now is the right time. You can yell at me later,” He nodded to the faces in awe that stared at me.

I scrambled to my feet, helping Draco up.

“All hail the Gryffindor Heiress and the Slytherin Prince!” McGonagall proclaimed with a clear voice. A loud cheer went up in the Hall that had me blushing and nearly clinging to Draco.

McGonagall came over to me, offering me the sword that laid in her outstretched hands. “I do believe this belongs to you,” She smiled.

I took the sword, and though the light wasn’t as great as it had been moments before, there was a golden shine to the silver metal. I held it up, examining it. A word burned into the metal, in a golden script.

Virtus

I smiled at the word. Glancing up at Draco, and the adoration in his grey eyes, the sword was soon forgotten from my attention.

“Hi,” I whispered.

“Hello,” He smiled.

“So... I’m the Heir,” I offered, nervous for a new reason.

“I see that,”

“Draco?”

“Yes?”

“I... I, uh,”

“I know.” Draco smiled, “I fancy you too,”

I laughed despite myself at his British vernacular. Of which I had to quickly explain because of the hurt look on his face. Rolling his eyes, he pulled me close, causing me to look up at him. I met curious warm grey eyes that held the secrets of a world. I smiled.

Draco leaned down and pressed his lips to mine, cradling my face with the utmost care as he kissed me. Another cheer went up causing me to laugh and forcing me away from his kiss.

“I love you,” He mended, whispering for just us to hear.

“I love you too,”

Then he pressed his lips to mine once more not caring if the world was burning or celebrating around us.

masterlist

more like this:

beautifully beastly

a death eater and a dancer

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jadekitty777 · 3 years

Text

On Your Six, Chapter 5

Day 5: Mission Go- Cooking for @taiqrowweek

Wait what do you mean I switched the prompt days around? Dunno what you’re talking about ;)

(Don’t worry it’ll make more sense in the long run)

Rating: T for this chapter, M for overall

Words: 2.5k

Summary: Qrow was what most of society would call a small-town criminal. But to those oppressed, he hoped only to be a healer. In an effort to make a change in the world, he moves from kingdom to kingdom, searching for branded omegas in need. His goal? To turn the derogatory words the reformatories forced them to bear on their skin into works of art.

Then one day, his past catches up to him in the form of Taiyang, his former best friend, with a brand of his own stained onto his skin and a plea for help in his eyes. Qrow has no choice but to answer, even if it means he’d have to face his mistakes once and for all.

[An ABO-style universe in a modern-day style Remnant. No Grimm, because people are the real monsters in this one]

Ao3 Link: On Your Sleeve

Tai had started feeding him.

At first, it had begun with little things, shortly following that fateful day he gave him the picture. Prepackaged snacks or fresh fruits or vegetables as a healthy addition to the cheap, instant lunch meals he could easily afford. Then it quickly dissolved into tubberware covered leftovers of various pastas or stews, things that kept well and were well adept at making in large servings.

By late May, with the advent of Qrow’s twenty-sixth birthday, Tai arrived at his place loaded with grocery bags, a proper skillet and a determined purpose to make his favorite dish of chicken curry. It was, hands down, one of the best meals he’d had in years.

Yet, even after the occasion passed, the trend continued until it seemed Sunday became the day his stomach most looked forward too. Normally, Qrow would put up a fight about being doted after – Tai wouldn’t be the first omega to develop the habit. The most prominent of whom had been Maria, whose sessions had to be shorter than most both due to her age and the difficulty working with thinner, more wrinkled skin.

But she had also been a grandmother. A feisty one, who smacked him on the head a lot with her cane, but was also kind and worried and constantly remarking on his too-thin frame until he just gave up and let her do whatever she wanted.

But with Tai, he couldn’t even manage to feign annoyance. In part because Tai’s cooking was damn good and he’d be a fool not to gobble it up at every opportunity. But also, because it gave an excuse for their sessions to run long.

He didn’t even think it was a one-sided endeavor. Beyond the innate omega instinct to care for and Tai’s naturally generous personality, there was a loneliness in those blue eyes that told the truth behind all the fumbled attempts to waste time or make breaks run longer. By July, Tai wasn’t leaving his place until at least ten at night.

Neither of them complained about the arrangement.

Then August rolled around, and Qrow had an absolutely foolish idea.

The first Sunday of the month was on the 5th and it passed with little incident or notice. They were back at the first of the designs, arguably the most complex with the amount of color layers needed, so their dinner was nothing fancy. Just simple sandwiches and side salads, so most of their time could be spent under the needle instead.

He’d banked on that happening so that what would happen next wouldn’t have a chance of paling in comparison.

You busy tonight? He messaged early Wednesday.

Tai responded a few hours later, probably when his first break popped up. No. Why?

Come over after work. I have something to give you. He replied after he’d finished with his client for the day, sometime early afternoon.

The final response was cheeky and towards the end of the school day. You’re about as subtle as a brick.

Almost at 6 P.M. on the dot, there was a knock on his door.

“Coming!” Qrow called, dancing between the kitchen and the table to make sure everything was perfectly in place. He gave it all a satisfactory nod, then hurried over, sliding the door open only enough so he could wedge between it and the threshold, blocking Tai’s view.

The omega looked different, fresh out of work. His blond hair had been lightly gelled, just enough to give it a bit of bounce. The casual wear he was normally in was swapped out for a more professional look; pants and a collared shirt ironed of any wrinkles and shoes shined enough they gleamed.

So of course his eyes fell onto the one thing that completely ruined the look with a teasing snort. “Nice tie, Tai.”

“You like it?” He grinned, pulling at the absolutely hideous yellow abomination that was covered in yapping cartoon corgis. “The kids love ‘em. They call me the Funny Tie Guy.”

Oh Gods. “Bet you get a kick out of it every time.”

“I literally can knot get enough of it.” Tai had the nerve to wink as he said it too.

Qrow groaned. “You are so lucky it’s your day. Speaking of-” He swung the door open, revealing the room with a flourish.

Admittedly, it wasn’t much. Still, it was satisfying to see the way Tai’s face lit up with joy as he spotted the modest little table set for two, dinner already set in their bowls and the most expensive white wine he could reasonably afford already poured. The omega looked from it to him, grin growing, “You did all this?”

“Yeaaah.” Qrow flushed, trying to hide his anxiety. He’d never been great with giving gifts. “Happy birthday ya big lug.”

Tai laughed, throwing an arm over his shoulders and pulling him into a hug. “Thank you. This is just what I wanted.”

He could have stayed there forever – but he didn’t work himself to death to let dinner go cold. He pat his back, mindful of the healing wounds, and said, “Let’s eat.”

Qrow’s relationship with cooking was disjointed and the spread seemed to reflect that. The fried rice was perfect; it was one of the first things his mother taught him how to make on the stove. The garlic broccoli, more of a staple in the Xiao Long family, had a bit of crunch where some of the pieces hadn’t fully cooked through because he hadn’t had Tai beside him to remind him to stir. Just like the many other easy things he helped him learn how to make when he found out he and Raven had been living off nothing but white rice and peanut butter sandwiches for months.

The moo shu pork was the trickiest and most complicated dish by far and nothing he’d ever even attempted before. His amateur hand left it looking a bit of a mess as they poured it onto the tortillas. Unpretty as it was in presentation and lacking a few of the pricier ingredients like oyster sauce and sesame oil, the marinade had the pork still bursting with flavor.

The wine was there to act as a garnish to make the food seem better than it was. Which was probably why Qrow kept pouring it until he and Tai had split two and a half glasses between each other. Either that, or because Tai was adorably chatty when he was tipsy.

“So, there we are, watching about thirty of these Fayblades spinning around, knocking into each other and some of the cheaper ones are falling apart. Everything is going too fast for any of us to do the math problems on them. And Missy and I just look at each other like we both just realized what a horrible mistake we made. It was only the first week back and I was pretty sure we were about to lose an eye or something.” As he told the story, Tai animatedly gestured around with his glass, liquid sloshing almost past the rim. “We get the kids to back up until they all stop. Then Missy starts gathering a few up, saying how this time we would try less so we can actually keep count – when Velvet speaks up from the back and says ‘Blue wins 124 to 90’.”

Qrow polished off his own glass, setting it on the table. “That’s the quiet one with the rabbit in her bag, right?”

“Mmhmm. She kind of tries to hide when everyone starts looking at her, so I don’t say anything right then. Just take it as fact and move on. But when recess comes around, I pull her aside and ask her how she knew the answer. And she tells me, completely serious mind you, that she’s a camera. So it was easy to do all the math when she basically had the pictures saved in her head. And I’m like, holy shit!” He taps his temple for emphasis. “She has a photographic memory.”

“Ain’t that just a myth?” He asked, starting to gather the empty dishes.

Tai waved him off. “Pfft. Qrow, you gotta stop thinking like the world’s just a big science textbook. It’s more like a-a fairytale! Where magic can happen at any moment.”

“Tai, you’re drunk.”

“I am not!” This time, when he gestured, some of the wine hit the table. He blinked down at it. “Ah, shit!”

He laughed. “Man, you still can’t hold your liquor.”

“You dishonor me.” The omega accused, pointing to his right hand as if it were an exhibit. “I’m holding it just fine.”

That only made him laugh harder, until he had to wipe tears from the corners of his eyes.

Somehow, they found themselves laying side by side on the bed, shoulders pressed together. Tai’s scroll was balanced between the head of the bed and the wall, the display playing the finale of their favorite show growing up, Silver Eyes. It was the height of the final battle. Rosette was locked in battle with Bastinda while the rest of her friends lay, unconscious or ensnared in traps, around them.

“Do you not yet see how pointless this all is? How my power eclipses you all?” Bastinda snarled as she swung her wand down. “You’re all just insignificant riffraff!”

Rosette seemed to find some strength, blocking the attack with her broadsword. “You’re wrong! No one is insignificant! Even the smallest of us has something good to contribute.”

“Foolish child!” A powerful gravity spell threw Rosette to the ground, knocking her sword out of her hand.

“Gods,” Qrow griped. “This is cheesier than I remember.”

Tai shushed him. “Hush, the best part’s coming up!”

He rolled his eyes, but his traitorous mouth smiled all the same. Alright, so maybe this part was pretty hype. Watching it play out again on the screen, he felt ten again, practically glued to screen as his excitement built.

A large shadow stretched across the valley, delaying the witch from striking the final blow as she turned to the source. Up on the hill, sun behind him, was Zwei. Rosette’s little corgi that had been with her from the start of the show. He came racing down the hill, stubby little legs barely able to pick up speed.

Bastinda sneered, pointed her wand at the dog. “Pathetic.”

“Zwei, no!!” Rosette cried, tears filling her eyes just as the blast fired.

It seemed like the end for the lovable pup as smoke filled the air.

And then, with a blast of light, something came flying out of the dust and landing before the witch. The world rumbled under powerful paws as the giant white wolf stood before her, letting out a powerful growl that brought her to her knees.

“I don’t believe it!” Blanca cried from her mirror prison. “Zwei’s a Guardian!”

The rest of the finale played out just as he remembered, Zwei turning the tide of the fight and giving Rosette a chance to free her friends, all of them coming together for one final attack that rid the world of the cruel witch once and for all. After that, the wolf turned back into the lovable and more marketable corgi pup, and everyone headed home to enjoy true peace for the first time in a millennium.

Tai sat up as the credits began to roll, stretching his arms above his head. “I still think it holds up pretty well.”

“Sure, if you ignore the fact they completely sidelined Silver Eyes. It’s only the title of the show.” He snarked.

“Come on now. It’s not about the power ups. It’s about the journey and the-”

“Friends they made alone the way.” He mimed gagging. It was only the motto shoved down his throat at the end of almost every episode.

Tai merely laughed at his antics, picking up his scroll and slipping off the bed. “It’s late. I better head home.”

Maybe it was the vestiges of the alcohol or maybe it was the other’s scent, sweeter and more inviting than usual, that loosened his tongue enough to offer, “You could crash here, if you want.”

“In your bed? We hardly fit.”

Acquiescently, he rolled onto his side, practically shoving himself against the wall as he pat the wide, empty space. “It’ll be fine. And your drunk.”

“Hardly. And I’ll have to get up early to get back home and get ready.”

“It’s fine.” The noise left him involuntarily. It wasn’t a growl, really; it was barely more than a rumble. Regardless, the regret hit him instantly as he bit down on his tongue and turned his face up apologetically.

The omega just arched a brow, entirely unaffected and unimpressed by his pitiful display. Then he chuckled, any meteor-sized tension there could have been burning up long before impact could be made. “Gods, you’re such a punk, you know that?”

“I…uh…”

“Alright, you win.” Tai set the alarm on his scroll with his right hand, while he crossed the room and got the lights with his left. He used the glow coming off of the device to find his way back, dropping it onto the nightstand. In the bits of moonlight coming from the window, Tai became an erotic beauty as he undid his tie and buttons, shrugging out of his shirt. His belt hit the ground next – though mercifully he kept his pants on.

Qrow watched him, utterly transfixed, as he lowed himself to the bed, mattress dipping anew with the readded weight as the omega stretched out onto his stomach. Beyond all comprehension, he had to fight every muscle in his body from reaching for him. The need to bring him close and curl around him was overwhelming. So, he shoved his hands underneath the crook of his neck and locked his elbows.

Why had he thought this was a good idea again?

Tai heaved out a long sigh, mumbling, “Goodnight Qrow.”

He swallowed, voice barely above a whisper as he responded, “G’night.”

Without a clock in the room, there was no telling how long he lay there, coiled up tight like a spring waiting for the pressure to come loose, listening to the sounds of Tai’s breathing slowly evening out. It wasn’t until Qrow was absolutely certain the other wouldn’t wake that he risked it.

Though it felt a bit reprehensible, it was with that same uncontrolled desire in which he found himself scooting his upper half forward, inch by agonizing inch, until the bridge of his nose was pressed up against the curve of Tai’s shoulder.

His eyes slipped shut, breathing in deeply. The omega’s scent swirled around him, sunflowers and soil and bright summer days; a smell that was unmistakably, irrevocably Tai.

Here. With him.

Slowly, the rigidity to his muscles relaxed and he finally drifted off, the scent embracing him as securely as its owner could.

#qrow branwen #taiyang xiao long #Taiqrow #taiqrowweek #rwby #fanfiction #Chase Firekitten's Tale

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accioromione · 4 years

Note

ok please I now I need a fic where its the yule ball and ron goes with Fleur and heroines jealous even though she's with Krum

Harry went to the common room to see Ron surrounded by people. He was sitting staring at the wall, and appeared to be frozen in place. Harry subconsciously wondered if a stunning spell had been placed upon him.

‘What’s wrong, what happened?’ Harry said, making his way through the crowd surrounding his best friend.

‘He just asked Fleur Delacour to the Yule ball’ Fred said, smirking at Harry.

‘What?’ Harry asked,

‘Yeah, he just came inside, told us he asked Fleur and sat down...now he won’t say anything’

‘He’s just sat there, frozen?’ Harry asked, looking at Ron, who was very pale in the face.

George shook his head, ‘Merlin Ron, can’t do one thing can you...earth to Ron!’

Ron took his eyes away from the wall and looked at everyone around him as if he had just noticed them being there for the first time.

‘Ron...are you okay? What happened, she’s part Veela you know’ Harry added, putting a hand on his shoulder.

‘That explains it’ said Lee Jordan,

‘She - she....she said yes’ Ron said, looking as if he was shocked by his own words.

‘You’re lying’ Fred said, but Harry knew that Fred wasn’t convinced, as Ron was not the type to lie about such things. And the look on Ron’s face confirmed that he himself was shocked at the information he had just revealed.

‘I- I didn’t even mean to ask her, I was walking by and something just came over me...’ Ron said, trailing away again to look at the wall.

‘How in the hell did you get Fleur to say yes.....Ron...I might just claim you as my brother after all’ George joked patting him on the back.

‘Merlin Harry, you got a date yet? Guess being a champion isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be huh?’ Fred joked, and Harry just looked at Ron in shock. It wasn’t like Ron was ugly, but Fleur, well at least this way Ron would be by his side during the champion calling. Now Harry was feeling nervous, he needed a date for the Yule ball, and it felt like there were no girls left.

As if on cue, Parvarti and Lavander came into the common room giggling. Harry took matters into his own hand, Harry took a deep breathe.

‘Parvarti, do you want to go to the Yule Ball with me?’ Harry asked, causing Parvarti and Lavander to giggle. Their giggles subsided, allowing Parvarti to answer.

‘Yes, sure Harry,’

‘Brilliant’ Harry said, smiling. Ron and Harry made their way down to the great hall for supper. Harry felt more at ease now that he knew he had a date to the Yule ball, but he could not help but feel a sad longing that he was unable to go to the Ball with Cho. Ron, surprisingly, did not seem to be in high spirits in light of his date, he had become a huge ball of anxiety.

‘Oh my god she’s going to take one look at my robes and ditch me’ Ron said in panic, Ron had not touched anything on the table.

‘Relax Ron you’ll be fine, the worst part was over, now that she’s said yes ...well you’re going with her.’ Harry said, putting a spoonful of mashed potatoes on his plate, he found it hard to feel sympathy for Ron’s case.

‘Going with who?’ Ginny asked, taking a seat at the table.

‘Er....’ Harry said giving a look at Ron, but the look Ron gave Harry told Harry that he was not to tell Ginny who he was going with.

‘Ummm...I’m going with Parvarti,’ Harry said, Ginny looked put out at this.

‘Oh, well, that’s great, I’m going with Neville, since I’m not old enough and he asked me...Hey Hermione,’ Ginny said sadly as Hermione approached the three of them.

‘Hello...Ron what’s wrong? You look as pale as Nearly Headless Nick..’ Hermione added, as she pulled a plate towards herself.

‘Did Ron not find a date then?’ Ginny asked, and Hermione laughed.

‘Eloise looking good now Ron?’ Hermione asked, as Ron still looked anxious.

‘No...he did.’ Harry interrupted

Hermione did not look at all happy with the news. Harry saw her frown but then replace the frown with what seemed to be an overly enthusiastic smile that did not at all look natural.

‘Oh that’s great, Harry you found a date too?’ Hermione asked, her smile now freakishly large.

‘Er...yeah,’ Harry said,

‘Great now all four of us have dates! Lovely!’ Hermione said, the grin still etched on her face.

This news seemed to bring Ron’s attention back to the table.

‘What, who are you going with?’ Ron demanded,

‘I...I’m not saying, you’ll only make fun of me!’ Hermione said, now blushing. ‘Besides, why do you care, you have a date! Who are you going with?’ Hermione hesitantly asked.

‘Why should I tell you if you’re not telling me?’ Ron responded.

‘Fine!’ Hermione said before stalking off angrily,

‘Who is she going with?’ Ron asked Ginny

‘It’s her business, besides, why should I tell you when you won’t tell me who you’re going with’ Ginny said coolly.

Ron did not seem happy with this answer. The next week there was clear tension between Ron and Hermione. Ron kept asking her who she was going to the ball with at random times hoping that she would be caught off guard and answer. It did not seem to work. And although Hermione had dropped the subject of asking Ron who he was going to the ball with, she seemed to be acting very coolly towards Ron, who was panicking more about the Yule Ball as it approached sooner. Harry had no idea how a ball had managed to create such a huge problem between his two closest friends.

The day of the Yule Ball finally arrived, Hermione had bid farewell early. Ron had asked her why she needed four hours to get ready but she just brushed him off. Ron had left soon after Hermione and Harry had gone up to his dorm to find his stressing about his robes, he had used magic to make them look more modern. And it had slightly worked.

‘Harry I’m not going, I look like an idiot’ Ron said, slumping on the bed.

‘Don’t be stupid’ Harry said

‘She’ll laugh as soon as she see’s me’ Ron said, head in his hands,

‘Now now Ron, that’s not ball spirit is it’ Fred said, as he entered alongside George into their dormitory.

‘I look like an idiot’ Ron sighed,

‘As usual’ Fred said, ‘but fortunately for you little brother, we may have something to help, we used it on our robes, and ours turned out good, news wheezes invention’ Fred said tossing him what appeared to be a sewing needle.

Ron caught it, ‘what does it do?’

George sighed, ‘gives you a massage, what do you reckon it does oh bright one? Did you curse Fleur to say yes?’

‘It modifies your clothes, just put it through any piece of the fabric and give it a go’ Fred interjected

Ron did that and as soon as he did the pin went zooming all over his robes, the frills and laces now gone, and the robe now modified.

‘Brilliant’ George said, ‘this is for the colour’ he added, tossing Ron a navy blue marker,

Ron took it, and learning from the needle, took off the cap and rubbed it on the fabric of his new improved robes. It turned a nice shade of navy blue.

‘That’s brilliant’ Ron said smiling,

Fred and George beamed, ‘can’t have you embarrassing us, your face is bad enough, don’t need robes ruining it...Harry you look dashing...Gryffindor men, minus Ron, not too bad eh, see you lot on the dance floor,’ Fred said, the twins winked at Ron and Harry and exited their dormitory. Harry took one last look at his green robes in the mirror, and waited for Ron, who had just looked at himself for the tenth time.

‘Ron...come on... you look fine’ Harry said, looking at the clock, he was due to meet up with Parvarti,

Ron gulped and took a final look at himself in the mirror.

‘Right..yeah...well....okay let’s get this done with.’

The boys went downstairs and saw Parvarti, who had her hair braided in golden bands, and was in a pretty pink dress robe.

‘Er.. you look nice’ Harry said awkwardly,

‘Thank you,’ Parvarti said, looking at Harry

‘Where’s Hermione?’ Ron asked, Parvarti shrugged her shoulders,

‘Right, well, we have to go meet up with Fleur, that’s Ron’s date,’ Harry told Parvarti and Parvarti looked shocked.

‘You’re taking Fleur’ Parvarti asked, wide eyed

‘Er..yeah..’ Ron’s ears turned red, ‘I said I’d meet her in front of the hall’

The three of them made their way in front of the hall, and sure enough, there Fleur was in silvery robes, looking as beautiful as ever.

Ron’s eyes widened and his mouth opened in shock, Harry nudged him to get a grip of himself.

‘Ello Ron...’Arry....I ‘ave not ‘ad zee pleasure, you ‘ar?’ Fleur said, looking at Parvarti

‘Parvarti Patel...’ Parvarti said in annoyed voice,

‘Zee gold in your ‘air, it eez nice, I wanted to do so but I felt it would clash you see’ Fleur said to Parvarti, and Parvarti warmed up at her compliment.

‘You look beautiful’ Ron said with a strangled voice,

‘Tank you Ronald’ Fleur said, ‘it eez nice that you ‘are friends with ‘Arry, we will all be able to join the champion dancing this way you see’

‘Right’ Harry said, ‘well we better be off’

The four of them entered the ball and it looked immaculate. Harry had Neve seen in the great hall look so nice.

‘Ouuuu’ Parvarti whispered at the sight

‘Zees eez nothing’ Fleur said, ‘In beaxbatons zee decorations would put these to shame’

‘Yeah, right , shame!” Ron said, looking at Fleur in awe.

‘Champions! Champions!’ McGonagall yelled, and the four of them made their way to her. Harry saw Cedric approach, accompanied by Cho, which made Harry’s heart sink. And then he saw Viktor Krum approach, with a pretty girl in blue robes that Harry did not know.

Harry looked at Ron to distract himself from looking at Cho, and saw that Ron no longer looked taken with Fleur. Instead he was looking dagger eyed at Viktor Krum and the girl beside him. Harry looked back to see why exactly he was so angry at Viktor and his date, and Harry’s jaw dropped.

It was Hermione.

But she didn’t look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her hair; it was no longer bushy, but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an elegant knot at the back of her head. She was wearing robes made of a floaty, periwinkle-blue material, and she was holding herself differently, somehow – or maybe it was merely the absence of the twenty or so books she usually had slung over her back. She was also smiling – rather nervously, it was true – but the reduction in the size of her front teeth was more noticeable than ever. Harry couldn’t understand how he hadn’t spotted it before.

‘Hi, Harry!’ she said. ‘Hi, Parvati!’ Parvati was gazing at Hermione in unflattering disbelief. She wasn’t the only one, either; when the doors to the Great Hall opened, Krum’s fan club from the library stalked past, throwing Hermione looks of deepest loathing.

Hermione had not yet noticed Ron, but as soon as she did the smile vanished off of her face. ‘Ron?’ She asked, looking shocked.

But Ron did not say anything, he just looked coldly at her.

Once everyone else was settled in the Hall, Professor McGonagall told the champions and their partners to get in line in pairs, and follow her. They did so, and everyone in the Great Hall applauded as they entered and started walking up towards a large round table at the top of the Hall, where the judges were sitting. The walls of the Hall had all been covered in sparkling silver frost, with hundreds of garlands of mistletoe and ivy crossing the starry black ceiling. The house tables had vanished; instead, there were about a hundred smaller, lantern-lit ones, each seating about a dozen people. Harry concentrated on not tripping over his feet. Parvati seemed to be enjoying herself. He caught Ron and Hermione stealing glances of eachother as they each danced with Fleur and Krum.

The six of them ended up taking seats next to eachother.

‘New robes Ron?’ Hermione casually asked, as she sat beside Krum.

Ron’s ears turned red, ‘new hair?’ He asked, both Krum and Fleur looked confused.

‘You two are knowing eeachother?’ Fleur asked Ron and Hermione

‘They’re both Harry’s best friends’ Parvarti interjected, ‘it’s well known, kind of funny how everyone is related to a champion’

‘Vut? Iz dees true Hem my o nini?’ Krum asked Hermione

Hermione blushed, ‘well yes, but it wasn’t planned, I didn’t know who Ron was going with and I didn’t say either’

Fleur did not seem to be bothered, ‘guess you jus’ attract champeeons, when Ronald asked me I thought, eet was very brave, I also like ‘is red ‘air’ Fleur added, looking at Ron, who turned red at this. Hermione looked simply furious.

Krum noticed this and attempted to bring his attention back on her, ‘care to dance to this Her-my-oninny?’ he asked, holding out his hand, which Ron glared at,

Hermione blushed, ‘Hermione, oh forget it, alright!’ and the two of them took off, leaving Ron to glare at them.

‘Would you like to dance Fleur?’ Ron asked, taking his glare off of Hermione too look at Fleur.

‘I ‘am a beet tired, zee next song if eet eez better,’ Fleur said, and Ron respected her wishes. Fleur decided that the next song was good enough to dance, and Harry saw her and Ron disappear into the dance floor.

‘Well, want to dance Harry?’ Harry looked gloomily at Cedric and Cho, ‘I don’t like this song’ Harry lied, Parvarti looked annoyed and remained seated.

As five songs went by, Parvati sat down on Harry’s other side, crossed her arms and legs too, and within minutes, was asked to dance by a boy from Beauxbatons. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Harry?’ Parvati said. ‘What?’ said Harry, who was now watching Cho and Cedric. ‘Oh, never mind,’ snapped Parvati, and she went off with the boy from Beauxbatons. When the song ended, she did not return.

Harry decided to go for a walk outside, and took his time doing so. He walked back to Gryffindor Tower alone.

The Fat Lady and her friend Vi were snoozing in the picture over the portrait hole. Harry had to yell ‘Fairy lights!’ before he woke them up, and when he did, they were extremely irritated.

He climbed into the common room, and found Ron and Hermione having a blazing row. Standing ten feet apart, they were bellowing at each other, each scarlet in the face. ‘Well, you were clearly happy with Fleur!’ yelled Hermione; her hair was coming down out of its elegant bun now, and her face was screwed up in anger. ‘Oh yeah?’ Ron yelled back. ‘And you weren’t happy with Viktor?!’

Hermione was now pink in the face.

‘Then there’s no issue then is there! But if you’re so upset about Viktor you know what the solution is don’t you?’

‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’ Ron yelled

‘Next time there’s a ball, how about ask me instead!’

Ron mouthed soundlessly like a goldfish out of water as Hermione turned on her heel and stormed up the girls’ staircase to bed. Ron turned to look at Harry.

‘Well,’ he spluttered, looking thunderstruck, ‘well – that just proves – completely missed the point –’ Harry didn’t say anything. He liked being back on speaking terms with Ron too much to speak his mind right now – but he somehow thought that Hermione had got the point much better than Ron had. As he had seen, first handedly, how upset Ron was at Hermione being with Viktor, even with a part Veela by his side. And he had seen how livid Hermione was at the sight of Ron and Fleur. And Harry knew that in that moment, Ron and Hermione had developed something deeper than a friendship.

#new canon #romione #my fic

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nerdgul · 4 years

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Could you explain the brain receptor thing and unmonitored internet usage?? I wasn’t monitored either and now I’m gay but like what else this shit do

i certainly can

first off ill start by saying the internet didn’t make you gay. it may have opened you up a bit and gave you more info on the subject, but thas you own shit my dude. good shit, but yours

and secondly, its way to late for me to be scouting academic articles n shit so this is gon be more of a long winded rant than anything proper. and even simplifying it down this is gonna get long and be badly spelled so sorry in advance (especially to mobile users who don't gets a keep reading break)

*** now for the tldr; you may not have been monitored but things are significantly different than it was a decade ago. internet addiction is a much more prevalent and real problem. addiction of any kind fucks up how your brain chemistry. today’s tech is essentially heroin for kids and children do not understand the concept of self control.

so children brains are not fully developed when they come out, but we’re learning and making connections from day 1. thing is is that when a connection is made it pretty damn hard to sever. even as an adult unlearning shit is a lot harder than learning it and when ur a kid your learning shit constantly and it gets cemented way faster. so essentially what happens to your brain in childhood will be pretty damn hardwired into you forever. (there exceptions of course but were talking habits and brain chemistry here)

which means it’s super fucking easy to get a toddler addicted to shit. like stupid insanely easy. they're little fucking suckers for some sweet sweet pavlovian conditioning.

but what qualifies as an addiction? a lot of people debate whether or not things like video games/internet can qualify as a legit addiction cause they aren’t chemicals that directly impact the brain but are instead things that cause your brain to produce its own feel good chemicals that still fuck up your brain. but they cause all the same reactions in the end.

basically the internet make you feel good. you want to feel good all the time. you fuck up your dopamine receptors by overloading them with cat videos. it takes more internet to get the same good feel. you start avoiding other less pleasurable parts of life (school, family, sunlight). bam, addiction.

i’ve seen toddlers that had symptoms compared to actual meth junkies, the only difference is that when a toddler has a screaming crying raging fit over not having their fix its seen as ‘kids just being kids’ and many parents will roll their eyes and to get them to shut up will just let the kid have 5 more minutes of screen time… or 50. but thing is, that shits not normal. sure tantrums every now and then happen but it is the responsibility of the parent to help their child regulate screen time because children are not yet developed enough to self regulate shit.

this is especially bad for video games. it might seem harmless enough to hand over some phone game to your kid while your busy running errands to keep em quiet but mobile games are designed to be colorful busy give constant achievements and keep you playing (so you’ll watch more ads or pay more money). its overstimulation and the child doesn’t even realize it, instead they see anything outside the game as being the ‘too much’ and lash out at the parent trying to get their attention instead.

and beyond the part of addiction too much screen time has also been linked to lack of sleep, delayed speech development, and poor social skills.

babies literally need to be touched or they’ll die. lack of eye contact at a young age can fuck up their sense of self and connections to others. so if your a parent looking at your phone instead of your kid it already is teaching them the phone is more important. and when they finally get to the screen they will also start prioritising it over socialising and i cannot stress enough how fucking important regular social contact with children is. they need it to develop right. seriously just look up ‘feral children’ and see what happens (granted those are worst of the worst cases but even self inflicted isolation still isn’t good for anyone).

so what does poor social skills and a fucked up domaine receptor get you??? DING DING DING, LIFELONG DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY!! a slu of mental health issues just waiting to feed on them poor deep fried serotonin nuggets.

now im not saying internet gives people depression. that would be a gross oversimplification of the subject. and in many studies its been shown the correlation (wich is very high btw) between internet usage and depression is because internet attracts people with pre-existing depression but when talking specifically about children who dont already have these issues its a different story.

however if you were born in the 1990s to early 2000s you have a different story than children today. so far i’ve been talking about mostly toddlers who use modern tech (phones, kids tablets ect). millennials and early gen z era were a little special having grown up with this technology but in such a way it was much harder for us to abuse it. sure there were some kids who would play webkinz for 5 hours a day and live in front of the TV, but there would also only be a single computer in the house which the whole family shared, and the internet was probably slow so it was a lot harder for this generation to have these kinds of issues. TVs also had to be shared and had regular commercials and reruns so your get bored and go outside sometimes. no constantly continuous streaming of any new content at your fingers. things just.. didn’t need to be monitored as closely back then.

thats not to say it didn't need to be monitored at all, but more so issues with technology were less likely to happen or developed to a far lesser extent. it’s also why i see a lot of millennials defending the internet. making memes about overprotective moms being worried about video games n shit. They dont relize just how different things are and what that means.

but the reality is technology as it is today is much different. everything wants your attention all the time and growing up in a world where you get your very own touch screen device at a young age to do with whatever you please, that opens the door to a lot more potential issues and they’re things we shouldn’t ignore.

and thats not even getting into the specific types of content children could be consuming or the effects of social media and internet culture has on older children and teens. but thats a whole other rant.

anyway if its requested ill make a more informed fully sourced post to tackle any particular subject with more depth, lord knows i’ve still glossed over about a million other parts of the topic, but for now hope this helps. ps; if anyone wishes to add on/correct me/phrase something better please feel free to doso

#applesauc-y #internet addiction #nerdstuff #asks

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chiseler · 5 years

Text

The Sound of Fury

“America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of life,” Robert Warshow wrote in his seminal 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Democracies depend on the conviction that they are making life better and happier for their citizens; only feudal and monarchical societies can enjoy the luxury of fatalism or a fundamentally pessimistic view of life. Praising the gangster genre as a form of modern tragedy, Warshow also accounts for film noir in his statement that, “There always exists a current of opposition, seeking to express by whatever means are available to it that sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create.” The gangster’s demise is the purest American tragedy because it is driven by his mania to climb the ladder of success. The end of his saga is inevitable, so in chasing success he is really chasing failure; his self-destructiveness expresses defiance at the inevitability of defeat, but also confirms it.

This underground river of pessimism and disillusionment unites the pre-Code films of the early thirties and postwar film noir; they share a tone of bitter gallows humor; a satisfaction in being wised-up, knowing the score; they flaunt the scars and calluses of lost innocence. Pre-Code movies reflected the free-fall of the Depression, the farce of Prohibition and the dizziness of a society edging towards anarchy. Noir exposed the suppressed anguish of WWII, the anxiety of the Cold War, the stresses of conformity and materialism.

Films like Cry Danger (1951)—recently restored to full glory by the Film Noir Foundation—depict a battered, abraded country that has turned cynicism into a running gag. A man just out of prison after serving five years for something he didn’t do trades sour wisecracks with a one-legged, alcoholic ex-Marine. They make their home in a dilapidated trailer in a scruffy park perched on Bunker Hill, where the proprietor sits around strumming a ukulele and ignoring the busted showers. The vet (Richard Erdman) falls for a pickpocket who steals his wallet whenever he gets drunk. The ex-con (Dick Powell) idealistically tries to vindicate his best friend, who’s still in jail, only to find out he’s a double-crossing liar. The film achieves an extraordinary blend of the glum and the snappy, a deadpan insolence that saturates the air like smog. “What’s five years?” Powell says of his stretch. “You could do that just waiting around.”

While pre-Code movies gleefully portrayed an “age of chiselry,” a country where everyone was looking for an angle, they never plumbed the depths of alienation, fatalism and misanthropy that noir opened up. For all their knowing skepticism, Depression-era films evoke a sense of camaraderie, a shared body heat from people huddled and jostling together—maybe cheating each other, but still sharing jokes and boxcars, Murphy beds and stolen hot-dogs. Noir, by contrast, purveys a chilling sense of isolation and social atomization; not only institutions but individual relationships are corrupt and predatory. There’s no longer a hard-times sense of being all in the same boat. As Kirk Douglas nastily smirks at his colleagues in Ace in the Hole: “I’m in the boat. You’re in the water.”

Noir used unpretentious, low-budget crime thrillers to smuggle this caustic vision into movie theaters during a time when, on the surface, America was at the height of prosperity and social cohesion. Unlike the early-thirties gangster cycle, which reflected a real wave of lawlessness, the crime movies of the fifties were made during a time when the murder rate was lower than in previous or succeeding decades, perhaps as a channel for other, submerged anxieties. Noir’s prophetic vision of disintegrating communities has become only more compelling with time, a development that may explain the passionate revival of interest in film noir in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Healthy, functioning groups don’t exist in noir; even gangs and criminal “organizations” fall apart because their members are out for themselves, ready to betray each other for a payoff or a bigger share of the take. Institutions like politics and business appear only in stories revealing their corruption. The police are the only representatives of government commonly seen, and they are often bullying and crooked, hounding innocent suspects with sadistic relish. Even films that take the side of law enforcement underline hostility between cops and the people they protect. Apart from the justice system, the public sphere does not exist: the town meetings and popular movements that crowd the screen in thirties films, with indignant and excitable citizens marching, rioting or celebrating, are unimaginable in film noir. People seem to exist in a vacuum.

In part, this vision reflects the privatization of life that accelerated in the postwar era, as cars replaced trains; television replaced movie theaters; appliances eliminated the need for servants, milkmen and ice men; suburban back yards took the place of parks, all part of the glorification of the detached home for the “nuclear” family. The homogeneity of the suburbs and the intrusiveness of media and advertising paradoxically diminished any sense of place or community. Meanwhile, Cold War paranoia meant that expressions of communitarian spirit or calls for collective action could rouse suspicions of communist sympathies.

Many of the writers, directors and actors associated with film noir were liberals, often former Communist Party members who had seen the left-wing idealism of the thirties buried by World War II and then vilified during the Cold War. Disillusioned, they used crime movies to indict a culture of rampant greed and cut-throat competition. Thieves’ Highway(1949), the last film directed by Jules Dassin before he left the country to escape the blacklist, slices open the produce business to reveal the rotten heart of capitalism. Even something as pure and nourishing as an apple becomes a poisoned agent of strife when it’s equated with money. A Polish farmer, enraged at being paid less than he was promised for his apples, flings boxes of them off a truck, screaming, “Seventy-five cents! Seventy-five cents!” The apples roll wastefully across the ground, an image foreshadowing the film’s most famous shot, when after the same truck has careened off the road and exploded, apples roll silently down the hillside toward the flaming wreck. When the dead trucker’s partner finds out that money-grubbers have gone out to collect the scattered load to sell, he begins kicking over crates of apples, fuming, “Four bits a box! Four bits a box!” Everyone in the movie is “just trying to make a buck,” and cash haunts the film, dirty crumpled bills changing hands in a series of soiled, coercive transactions.

It is easy to see why the House Un-American Activities Committee wanted to drive people like Dassin out of Hollywood. Films such as Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (another Film Noir Foundation restoration) and Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury, (a.k.a Try and Get Me! 1950, the FNF’s next project) are scathing attacks on a materialistic society, unmasking the American dream as a shallow and shabby illusion that breeds crime and shreds the social fabric. (Both directors fled to England in the early fifties to avoid persecution by HUAC.)

Endfield’s stark anti-lynching drama opens with a down-on-his-luck family man hitch-hiking on a dark highway; he tells the trucker who picks him up that he’s been looking in vain for a job. Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) moved his wife and son out to the postwar California suburb of Santa Sierra, hoping for a better life; “I can’t help it if a million other guys had the same idea,” he complains bitterly. They live in a shabby little bungalow behind a wire fence that makes the place look like a miniature P.O.W. camp. Howard’s pregnant wife hates the idea of using a charity clinic, and frets over money owed for groceries, while his whiny little boy begs for money to go the baseball game (“All the other kids are goin’!”) A bartender at a bowling alley sneers at his cheap customer: “You take a beer drinker, you got a jerk.” If Howard weren’t so dejected and humiliated, he would never fall under the spell of Jerry (Lloyd Bridges), the vain braggart he meets at the bowling alley.

Primping and preening, flexing his muscles and showing off his fancy aftershave (“Smells expensive!”), the manic Jerry boasts about his sexual conquests and the big money he makes, and he treats the modest, submissive Howard like his valet. He offers to put him onto something good—“nothing risky”—just driving the car for his hold-ups. When Howard hesitates, Jerry snorts, “You guys kill me! The more you get kicked in the teeth the better you like it.” Their first job is knocking over the grocery store at a cheap motel (“The Rambler’s Rest”), where Jerry easily intimidates an elderly couple and pistol-whips their son. Intoxicated with the easy money—and a few stiff drinks—Howard bursts in on his family with armfuls of groceries. His wife gasps at the extravagance of baked ham and canned peaches, and he brags that now they can get their own TV, and won’t have to go over and watch their neighbors’. “And we’ll throw this piece of junk away!” he crows, pointing to the family’s radio. Soon Howard is buying his wife new shoes and dresses with hot money, telling her he has a night job at a cannery. His little boy sports a cowboy outfit and ambushes his jumpy father with toy guns.

Unsatisfied with these penny-ante crimes, Jerry comes up with a scheme to kidnap a wealthy young man and hold him for ransom. He’s overcome by envy as he fingers the victim’s suit, tailor-made in New York, and after they’ve taken him out to a gravel pit in a disused army base, Jerry panics and kills him. When Howard gets home, dazed with horror and guilt, his wife wakes and tells him about the lovely dream she was having: she had the baby and this time there was no pain at all; “I got right up out of the hospital and took her shopping. I was buying her a pinafore.” Even in her dreams she’s a consumer, subconsciously linking commercial goods with the fantasy of a painless life.

As Howard mentally unravels, the shoddy vulgarity of the culture around him takes on a sinister cast. Jerry shows him the ransom note he’s written in a diner while ordering a steak sandwich (“Cow on a slab!” the waitress yells.) For cover, they go out of town to mail the letter, taking along Jerry’s girlfriend, a glossy blonde, and a lonely manicurist she has dug up for Howard. In a nightclub, he’s subjected to a string of dumb jokes and parlor magic tricks from a burlesque comedian. “Blame my psychiatrist,” the comic quips, “I didn’t pay my bill last month and he’s letting me go crazy.”

From its opening moments, the film depicts the crowd as a mindless and malevolent force, which will eventually be stirred to frenzy by sensationalizing newspaper articles. Crowds in noir are always bloodthirsty mobs, surrounding and destroying strangers in their midst; the communal desire for security is tainted by bigotry and ignorance. This is a dark inversion of Capra’s rallying citizens, or even the all-for-one armies of bums who fight for their squatters’ rights in Wild Boys of the Road. Movies of the Depression era never saw anything wrong with wanting money, good food, a pair of shoes, or even fur coats and diamond bracelets. They are tolerant of people—especially women—who do whatever they have to do get ahead. By contrast, The Sound of Fury shows materialism—the desire to keep up with the neighbors, to make a better life for your family—as a force that corrodes souls and breaks down social decency. The deepest well of pessimism in noir is a distrust of change, desire and ambition. “I just want to be somebody,” people are always saying, but the urge to squeeze more out of life, to grab a chance at happiness, is brutally punished.

Below the surface, the force driving noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty, from constricting relationships, from the limitations of the self. Noir found its fullest expression in America because the American psyche harbors a passion for independence, an impulse to be, in the words of Walt Whitman, “loosed of limits, and imaginary lines, / Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute.” With this desire for autonomy comes a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. The more we crave success, the more we dread failure; the more we crave freedom, the more we dread confinement. This is the shadow that spawns all of noir’s shadows: the anxiety imposed by living in a country that elevates opportunity above security; one that instills a compulsion to “make it big,” but offers little sympathy to those who fall short. Film noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society—or by themselves.

The gangster, Robert Warshow wrote, is driven by the need to separate himself from the crowd, but in doing so he isolates and dooms himself. White Heat (1949), which brought James Cagney back to the gangster persona that made him a star, came out one year after the publication of “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” It took the “man of the city” (as Warshow defined the gangster) out of the city, but Cagney’s explosive death atop an industrial gas tank is the supreme illustration of Warshow’s observation that the gangster’s pursuit of success—“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”—is a pursuit of death.

White Heat is also a perfect example of what Edward Dimendberg (in Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity) called “centrifugal” noir: it’s a film without a center, about a world flying apart like the cooling fragments of an exploded star. Cagney’s gang, decaying under the strains of resentment, betrayal and madness, moves between equally bleak urban and rural hideouts. After robbing a train in a rocky no-man’s-land, they hole up in a frigid, creaky old farmhouse “a hundred miles from nowhere,” as Cagney’s wife gripes. Cooped up together in this gloomy Gothic house, surrounded by split-rail fences and naked, rolling hills, they snipe at each other and grumble about their leader. Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) suffers debilitating migraine headaches and huddles in the lap of his gaunt, fiercely loyal Ma. The realization that came to Cagney in Public Enemy as he stumbled into the gutter in the rain—“I ain’t so tough”—is here amplified into an infantile weakness, perpetually on the verge of breakdown. Cody’s frailty only makes him more vicious. At his orders the gang leaves a wounded member behind, bandaged and in pain, to freeze to death once they make their move to a motor court in LA. The motel is typical of the “non-places” (in Marc Augé’s term) where noir flourishes: marginal, transient spaces where “people are always, and never, at home.”

The banality of the modern west makes room for Cagney’s majestically psychotic performance, fine-tuned and sensitive as a landmine. Cody Jarrett crumples inward under the crushing pain and then erupts, and White Heat similarly closes in and then shatters people are either cramped in suffocating enclosures (Cody shoots a man while he’s locked in the trunk of a car, cruelly offering to “give him some air”), or stranded in vacant, inhospitable spaces. At the rural hideout, the wind is always blowing bitterly around the house, tossing the trees; Cody walks alone at night, talking to his dead mother, who was shot in the back by his wife while he was in jail. He tells a friend—really a police plant who will betray him—how lonesome he is, because “all I ever had was Ma,” and how hard his mother’s life was, “always on the run, always on the move.” White Heat brings together the ultra-modern—radio tracking devices; drive-in movie theaters—with the pre-modern, even the primitive. It proves not just that film noir can thrive in the country as well as the city, but that noir was not merely a response to the new—industrialization, the bomb, etc.—but drew on deep veins in the American psyche and the American landscape: the desire to stand alone on top of the hill, even if there’s nowhere to go from there but death; and an accompanying fear of being buried “on the lone prairie,” having no one to talk to but the night wind.

by Imogen Sara Smith

#Imogen Sara Smith #The Chiseler #The Sound of Fury #James Cagney #White Heat #Raul Walsh #Noir #In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the Cit #Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy #the criterion collection

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pigeonteeth5-blog · 5 years

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blustersquall · 6 years

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Only Make Believe // Chapter 27: Back To Where It Started

Sorry for the delay in updates. With 4th July and stuff, I never know when is best. It’s technically Friday here in the UK, so have a new chapter. Only warning in this chapter is mentions of past torture, captivity and panic attacks.

December 29th

Cullen did not sleep well. Neither, it seemed, did Nevena. He was awake most of the night, her words whirling around his head like a tornado. He should not have exploded at her the way he had, he regretted it almost immediately seeing the fear in her expression when he raised his voice, how poised she was to run if he moved. Throughout the night he considered apologizing and trying to talk things out more calmly, but his own stubbornness and shame won out. That, and the fact it wasn’t all on him. Nevena pushed. Even though she apologized for it there was only so much prodding he could take on such a sensitive topic.

They barely spoke when they both got ready in the morning, and even over the complimentary breakfast they hardly said a word to each other. He knew the waiter noticed when he came to fill their coffee. The tension between them was palpable and it made the car feel uncomfortably stifling as they continued on their way to Gwaren.

The rain from the previous night moved on in the early morning, leaving the sky clear with the sun out, bright and cold reflecting off the wet road surface. The temperature dropped so there were warnings of ice on the road. Cullen kept to a reasonably sedate speed as he drove. A DJ spoke endlessly on the radio, cutting off the end of songs, and filling long periods with inane banter with his co-host. Cullen turned the radio down during those bits, but up again when the news and weather reports were aired and when music was played.

Nevena sat in the passenger seat, staring out of the window looking dejected. Since the morning he noticed she had the picture of her mother on hand. Even now it was clutched between her fingers and she was turning it over and over.

A sign flashed past Cullen's vision. He only noticed one thing on it.

Kinloch/Lake Calenhad 17 miles

Cullen cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. He needed to break the tension. It was suffocating him. The photograph was a good a place to start as any. "Have... have you decided what you want to do?" He nodded at the picture when Nevena glanced up at him. "In regards to your mother. When we get to the Free Marches."

"Go to Ostwick," shrugged Nevena, "like you suggested." She kept he eyes ahead. "My family home is there, I'd like to see if there have been any changes to it. As for her..."

"Yes?"

Another sign.

Kinloch/Lake Calenhad 17 miles

"Maybe there are records of her at the town hall. If I have her name, where she was born... Maybe that will be enough to find a record of her death. See if she was buried or cremated." Nevena sighed heavily. "I'm not sure if I'd want to visit a grave or not."

"Why's that?"

"I don't know who she is. Not really. And judging by what my dad said, she didn't have family and probably not a lot of friends. Whatever the case, I want to deal with this head on and not let it linger."

Cullen nodded very slowly and silence descended once more. He wasn't sure why he was so eagerly looking out for signs for Kinloch. Maybe he was hoping that once it was no longer on any of the road signs, it would be behind him again and he might be able to relax. He honestly wasn't sure. Nevena's words kept echoing in his head though. He hadn't been back since the attack, it never occurred to him to go back. But now she suggested doing so might help, it was an idea he couldn't shake.

It was a might. A huge, resounding might. There was a good chance it would be a waste of time and a better chance that it would bring up a lot of traumatic memories that he spent years trying to forget and working through. But if there was a chance that going back to Kinloch and visiting the site where everything happened might quell some of the guilt that crushed him down into the ground… wasn't that a chance worth taking? Wouldn't he be doing himself a disservice if he didn't try?

And what about everyone who died?

Kinloch/Lake Calenhad 15 miles. Second exit.

"Did you find anything out about her online?" Cullen asked, breaking the silence again.

"Nothing, really." Nevena was watching the fields rush passed from the passenger window. "A few mentions in newsletters, but nothing really ground breaking. I suppose search engines and things like Google weren't really in high demand when she was younger... Or maybe she wasn't very technically savvy."

"Maybe."

Not going back to Kinloch meant Cullen was never able to pay the right respects to the friends and comrades he lost. People he was close to, some of whom were his own age and younger. He never thanked them for their friendship. Never told them how grateful he was to them for accepting him into their elite family and helping him learn the ropes. He watched and heard so many of them die, and those screams and images revisited him daily. He wondered if their family members went to Kinloch to pay their respects.

What kind of person was he if he never did that? Was he truly so selfish to not even say a prayer for those that were lost? Was it selfishness or arrogance or simply guilt that held him back? Could he keep running away from those he saw suffer? Those who died deserved his respect and his remembrance. To think he hadn't been back to give what was due to them made his stomach sink.

Kinloch/Lake Calenhad 12 miles. Second exit.

His body cooled as he indicated and slowly pulled the car into the correct lane for the fast approaching roundabout. A sickly sweat broke out over his forehead, cold and uncomfortable while his mouth dried up and his throat threatened to close over. Nervous panic and anxiety started to take hold, and Cullen consciously took deep breaths to try and combat the fear. This was the right thing to do. It was long overdue, and perhaps it would help in the end. It was a risk he was willing to take. A risk he'd been too afraid to take before now.

Waiting for a gap in the traffic, Cullen eased the car forward drove passed the first exit and indicated to leave off the second. The clipped voice on the satnav told him he had made a wrong turn almost immediately and he clicked both it and the screen off.

Nevena whipped her head between the road, Cullen and the traffic behind them, confusion evident on her face.

"You took the wrong exit."

"No, I didn't," Cullen replied, surprised at how calm his voice was. "We're going the right way."

It took a few seconds for the penny to drop. "Cullen..." Nevena ran her hands over her face. "This is… Going to Kinloch… I know what I said last night was out of line. I shouldn’t have said anything. Are you going because of what I said? Please don’t go because of what I said. I said awful things… Is this really a good idea? I was being a jerk—I shouldn’t ha-- "

"No," he interjected, glancing at another road sign. "You were right. I... I have been running from this for too long. I should have faced my demons years ago. I was just too afraid."

"Cullen," sighed Nevena. “I…”

"I need to face this head-on." Cullen smiled for a moment, echoing the same words she used. Nevena returned a weak smile. "If you can deal with your past, then so can I." He went silent and took a settling breath.

She sighed, wringing her fingers in her lap. “If you’re sure… If your mind is made up.”

“It is.” Cullen nodded, more to himself as if to add conviction to his decision. "Will... Will you come with me?" He glanced towards Nevena after a few seconds. "Stay by my side? In... in case I need some help or support?"

Nevena reached across the car and placed her hand on his forearm, a warm smile on her face. "Of course I'll be with you." Cullen removed his hand from the wheel and her fingers slid between his. He squeezed. "I wouldn’t leave you to do this alone.”

Cullen wrapped his hands tighter around the steering wheel easing the car through a narrow space. Kinloch's idiotic one-way system was a nightmare. It did little to help Cullen's frame of mind. He tried to breathe through the anxiety rising within him but his throat felt as though it was closing over. His heart was pulsing at the back of his mouth and there were moments he felt as though he was choking.

Kinloch was bigger than he remembered it. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe Cullen simply forgot the size of the city in his efforts to banish the place from his memory. The winding, cobbled streets were labyrinthine and Nevena commented on the different buildings they drove past, trying to make idle conversation. More than once Cullen tried to apologize for his lack of response, but the words caught in his throat like thick bile. It was all he could do not to vomit.

They made their way through a quaint old-fashioned part of the town, the streets lined with thatched cottages enclosed in low flint walls. In front of each house a flawless, snow-covered garden. Picturesque and peaceful - and hiding the devastation of a decade ago. Following the traffic took them into a more built up and modern area. Driving into it between high rise blocks of flats and office buildings, it felt like entering an entirely different era, let alone town.

These buildings were almost all new or had undergone some kind of extensive repair. Cullen could see distinguishing colour differences between bricks on some and changes in architectural styles on others.

Everything he saw and noted in his head served only as a momentary distraction. Nothing could penetrate the cloud of panic in his mind for long. Part of him wanted to turn the car around and drive away. Turn tail, run and refuse to confront the past. Cullen tried to quiet that frightened part of his mind. The scarred nineteen-year-old petrified of facing the consequences of his bold and brash actions.

He could not turn back. He knew doing so would spell the end of this chapter of his life, just as much as confronting it would. If he ran away now, allowed his cowardice to win out, then he would be running the rest of his life. Hunted and haunted by screams and faces of ghosts he condemned. If he confronted it, faced his guilt, and allowed himself to fully begin to process everything that happened more than ten years ago, then maybe there was a chance that one day he would sleep soundly and the nightmares would leave him be.

And he so longed for closure. For an end to the nightmares and the constant self-loathing. Or at the very least, a reprieve.

Either way, a visit to Kinloch was long overdue and every corner of every street served as a reminder of what he experienced here. And not just him, his comrades too. Beneath his clothes, he could feel every scar tingle, as if they were connected by an unseen force to Kinloch. A painful throb started in his shoulder and leaked down the puckered flesh of the burn scar. It made Cullen's skin crawl, the sensation like cold fingertips sliding down his chest and nails digging in, as if trying to tear the scar tissue from him.

More than once he reached up and rubbed his left shoulder in an attempt to soothe the sensation away. It did little to help. Nevena did not comment, either because she did not notice or, more likely, because she did not wish to cause him further anguish by bringing attention to it.

As he pulled the car gingerly through a narrow gap and round a corner, the high steeple of the town chantry came into view. Cullen's breathing stopped and he reached across grasping blindly for Nevena's hand. She took it in both of her own and squeezed, rubbing his skin with her thumb. He could borrow her strength if she allowed it. If she could resolve herself to face the truth of her past, then he would be emboldened by her courage.

"It's all right," she murmured, soothing him. "I'm here, Cullen. I'm right beside you... Breathe..."

He did, sucking in a quick gasp and releasing it.

They drove past the steeple and it disappeared in the rear-view mirror. The vice around Cullen's chest relaxed somewhat to his relief.

Continuing behind the cars, they eventually came to a small multi-storey car park which was mostly empty and unmanned. Cullen parked on the ground floor. After turning off the engine he remained seated, hands on the steering wheel unable to move, frozen by fear it seemed. He stared dead ahead at an opposing blue car, eyes wide and watering where he wasn't blinking. Unable to blink. He could feel Nevena's gaze on him, questioning and concerned for him but could not find the physical strength to move or the mental strength to speak and reassure her.

His breathing was short and sharp, panic growing and seizing every inch of him, threatening to swallow and drown him in a cold, dark abyss. He teetered on the very knife edge of oblivion - as if walking a tightrope without a safety net between two vastly different worlds. His vision blurred at the corners, colours clashing before his eyes like a kaleidoscope. Wetness slipped down his cheeks; genuine tears or simply his eyes begging for moisture he wasn't sure. The drops clung to his chin though, before gravity caused them to fall and to drain into his jeans.

With his heart racing, sounding like the beat of a thousand horses’ hooves in his ears, a loud mechanical 'click' broke through the haze for a brief moment. Despite being frozen, Cullen allowed his head to be gently turned but his eyes were unseeing, his vision severely blurred.

"Breathe, Cullen. Breathe..." Nevena stroked his cheeks, her thumbs running rhythmically beneath his eyes. "Come on darling, breathe for me. Shh... you're safe."

He allowed her to pry one of his hands from the steering wheel and he felt her open his hand and his palm lie flat on something soft and warm. There was a steady, strong beat under his palm and a regular rise and fall. In and out. Slow and deep. In and out.

"That's it, that's it..." she cooed gently, voice soft, and warm, and familiar. "Close your eyes, sweetheart. Close your eyes for me." Somehow he was able to follow her instructions and Cullen's eyes slipped closed. "Just focus on my voice, on the beat of your heart. Your breathing." Her voice wafted through the haze, and lips feathered over Cullen's forehead with each word.

"Breathe in..." Nevena inhaled and Cullen found himself doing the same. "Out." He pushed his breath out. "Slowly, slowly now, there's no rush... And again, in..."

There was no measure of time in that car as Cullen followed Nevena's soft instruction and quelled the panic before it truly took hold. It could have been two minutes, it could have been twenty, or even two hours. It didn't matter. All Cullen knew when he blinked his eyes open and was breathing calmly, was that the fear was now only a niggle at the back of his mind and the oblivion he was suspended over was gone.

Nevena was kneeling up in the passenger seat, leaning uncomfortably over the parking brake and gear stick. Her hands encircled Cullen's face, eyes wide, concerned, and gentle on his. Still feeling warmth under his palm, Cullen realised she had slipped his hand up under her clothes. It was her skin he felt and he quickly jerked his hand away, a flush rising to his cheeks grateful as he was.

"Welcome back," Nevena whispered, feathering kisses over his forehead. Those on his forehead were followed by more on his eyelids, nose, and the corners of his mouth.

"You called me 'darling'," Cullen rumbled, finding threads of his voice from somewhere. "And 'sweetheart'." He sighed and closed his eyes, his body sagging as if exhausted. He wrapped his arms around her hips pulling her closer and relaxing under the calming effects of the raw affection she lavished upon him.

"Of course you remember that." The smile in her voice was unmistakable. A bright spot amid a moment of darkness. "I had no idea coming back would have such an effect." Her tone grew softer and regretful and her arms wound around his shoulders. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pushed for you to come back here. If I'd known ho--"

"Shh," Cullen shook his head, leaning it back enough to lazily open his eyes and look at her. "I didn't know how I would react either. And you didn't push or force me. I made the choice." He sighed, eyes slipping shut. Both were silent for a few moments. "I still want to pay my respects. Put some ghosts to rest, if I can."

"Whenever you're ready," Nevena said.

Cullen hugged her closer, practically pulled her into his lap in the driver's seat. It was a tight squeeze, but with her legs extended into the passenger side and her arms around his neck, they managed to sit reasonably comfortably. Cullen buried his face into the crook of her neck. More silence, steady breathing and soft touches exchanged. Mutual reassurance this time. Not one sided. Cullen sensed Nevena's guilt. No matter what he said, she would believe this was her fault.

"I scared you," remarked Cullen after a while, nestling into the curve of Nevena's shoulder.

"Well, yes. I don't like seeing you in the midst of a panic attack."

"No," sighed Cullen. "Yesterday. Or, this morning more accurately. When I shouted." He waited for a response, confirmation or denial. He took Nevena's silence as reluctant affirmation and his gut grew heavy. "I'm sorry for frightening you. For raising my voice. Given your past experiences, I should have done better."

"I don't blame you. I was being pig-headed," Nevena replied. "I would have yelled at me too."

Cullen shook his head. "I don't want to see that fear I saw in your eyes ever again. I don't want you to be afraid of me."

"I'm not." Nevena twisted her fingers in Cullen's hair.

"I will never raise my voice to you. I will never give you a reason to fear me." Cullen's voice thickened, emotion making speech difficult until he swallowed. "I'm truly sorry for doing it. Even once."

"Cullen," Nevena tilted his head back so they could look at each other. "Please, it's okay, I'm not upset. Please don't focus on me. We're here for you." Tenderly, she curled her fingers around his ear, brushing his hair back, and stroked his cheek.

"I know," he nodded. "I just wanted to clear the air."

She smiled, a small, genuine smile that still somehow made her eyes light up despite the dingy car park. "Consider it cleared." She pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his lips and then Cullen tucked himself back against her. "We can't stay in here forever you know," she remarked after several minutes.

"I know," Cullen replied, the warmth and closeness of Nevena's body and the aftershocks of his panic making him feel drowsy. "We'll go soon, to the chantry. Just," he nestled closer, "a little longer."

They wandered into the city centre sometime later, hand-in-hand and bundled up against the blistering cold. The pedestrian streets were as confusing as the roads. Even the signs didn't seem sure of where they were directing people to. Cullen didn't mind it though. The stopping and starting as he and Nevena got their bearings gave him a bit more time away from confronting his fears. He couldn't see any sign of the chantry from their current location - the buildings were built too high and Cullen didn't recall the chantry being a particularly large building.

They did not see many other people out and about. The snow and cold were off-putting and it seemed that the large majority of shops - those that were independently owned - were closed until after the New Year. They passed a few chain coffee houses and two supermarkets that were open, but even they were not very busy. Kinloch seemed a world away from the modern era, despite the facade the concrete jungle of the city centre presented.

Wherever the pair of them walked, Cullen saw signs of the devastation of ten years ago. The damage done by the two fighting factions, and some damage done by the TEMPLARS as they fought to protect themselves and civilians. Years and new buildings tried to disguise it, and on some, the damage and the history were almost imperceptible. But it was all around him. An off-colour wall here. An unexplained different coloured slab of paving there. Cullen doubted many of the inhabitants cared to remember the history and the blood that was drenched into the buildings and stone they walked on. And maybe it was better they didn't know or tried to forget. Open battle and the stench of death was not something people needed to be reminded of as they walked to work, or escorted their children to school. Ignorance was a luxury some had. A luxury Cullen wished he also possessed whenever he noted another sign of past damage and the attempt to disguise it.

Their pace was slow, not just because of how winding the streets of Kinloch were. Cullen stopped several times to catch his breath as it left him. When a car backfired he practically leapt out of his skin and screamed. That one event took him a good ten minutes to calm down from. Pacing a path on the street back and forth while he pulled on his hair and sucked in quick breaths. Nevena remained at his side as she promised she would. Patient, talking him through the panic and the fear. Each time he expected her to grow frustrated with him, she surprised him with kindness and understanding he felt undeserving of. She hushed him, held his hands, kissed him, breathed with him, and was unendingly calm with him. The only time she rose her voice was if a vehicle drove past them. Otherwise, her tone remained steady and soft, somehow breaking through his blind panic each time it threatened to take hold again.

When Cullen apologised she simply smiled, offered her hand to him, and continued walking with him when he took it. She made idle conversation, pointing out things that took her interest in an attempt to distract him. She argued with the GPS on her phone when it led them down the wrong road and made a show of looking in shop windows treating everything as though it was every day.

It was funny, in a way. Despite only knowing each other a short time, Cullen found he could not imagine making this trip and confronting this part of himself with anyone else. He tried to think of it, of coming here with Cassandra and Varric. He could imagine Cassandra trying to be sympathetic and soft with him, but falling short. Not because she lacked sympathy or was unkind, but simply because those things did not come easily to her. He knew Varric would be making notes for another book. Not openly, but mentally. That everything Cullen said and saw Varric would be squirrelling away for future use. He couldn't come to Kinloch and make this journey with any of his siblings. None of them knew the true extent of what he experienced and witnessed. Though Cullen had an inkling his older sister, Mia, might have had her suspicions, she was in possession of enough tact not to ask, though.

Coming here with Solona was out of the question. When they were together he would never have made it within twenty miles of Kinloch, and even if he could have brought her, Cullen didn't think Solona would have understood. He wondered if that was the reason why he never truly told her all the details. She knew he had nightmares, but he never told her the contents. She knew he was scarred, but he never told her the real truth of their origin. She knew he was in the armed forces from his late teens, but he never told her where he was stationed before Kirkwall. He realised he kept her very much at arm's length when they were together and that had been unfair of him.

Yet, with Nevena at his side, Cullen knew he could do this. Nevena Trevelyan, a woman he had known a little less than a month and who had come to mean more to him in such a short space of time than he ever expected. She knew him better and more intimately than his closest friends, and his last girlfriend - a woman he was with for years. She knew the contents of his nightmares, the source of his injuries, his past, and she did not recoil from any of it.

Cullen did not believe in the intervention of fate, or in soul mates, but with her, he was beginning to. Beginning to think fate had a hand in bringing them together and that maybe, just maybe, without his realising it, his soul had been crying out for hers. A strange and, if he was being honest, a frightening thought. One he was willingly starting to entertain. That this young woman who was damaged like he was, but differently, was his match and his equal.

That thought, the more he considered it, warmed him from his stomach to the tips of his fingers as they walked. He threw her a look every few seconds, listening to her talk and finding himself watching her speak intently. The shape of her mouth, and the way she looked around at her surroundings. Aware, but curious. He loved her mouth, the way her lips formed her words and the lilt of her voice when she said something she found funny and when she laughed at her own little jokes.

He loved the colour of her eyes, how they lit up, and how those same eyes looked at him with affection he never expected to see again. He could watch and listen to her talk for hours, happy just to listen to her babble about whatever thought popped into her head. He could not imagine her not being in his life now. She was new and exciting, yet familiar and a calming influence. Almost as if they had known each other their whole lives.

He squeezed her hand and suddenly the sights of the past did not incite the blind panic of before. They were unpleasant, for certain, but Cullen could manage it. He could do this. He would do this. And he would be better for it. He knew no one else could have accompanied him on this trip because no one else would have pushed him the way she did, even if her timing was terrible. He was grateful. He would have to tell her so.

"I think we got turned around again," Nevena pointed out. They stopped in the middle of the city square. There were more people here, popping in and out of more chain shops that were open for business. She tapped the tip of her nose while looking at her phone screen and turning on the spot. "It says the chantry is that way," she pointed north-west, "but we just came from that direction."

"Are you sure?" Cullen held his hand out for her phone and she handed it to him without a comment. He tapped the screen, bringing up the marker for where they were and zoomed out to see the marker for the location of the chantry. According to the map, they weren't far from it and yet they could see no sign of the building or how to get there. Nevena placed her hands on her hips and huffed, breath appearing as a puff of steam. "Maybe there's a side street?"

"I'm going to ask someone."

"We don't nee--" Cullen stopped when he realised Nevena was already jogging towards an elderly couple just coming away from an ATM machine. "Nevena!" He chased after her.

"Excuse me?" Nevena came to a halt and Cullen was at her side a few seconds later. "--looking for the chantry and we're a bit lost. Could you perhaps point us in the right direction?"

"The chantry?" one of the two men repeated. He was dressed in a heavy navy overcoat with a flat cap pulled low on his head, a tartan scarf wrapped tightly and lovingly around him to fight off the chill. His husband - Cullen assumed at the very least, given their closeness and how the other man stood with his hand on the first's arm, smiling blithely and dressed up against the cold in a similar fashion. "Head down through the square," he pointed, "and when you get to a restaurant with a neon blue sign out front, you'll want to go left. Keep going along that road about three hundred yards and you'll find the back end of the cemetery."

"Neon blue sign," Nevena repeated, smiling. "Thank you so much."

"The chantry won't be open," the second man said.

Cullen looked at him, "Oh? Why's that?"

"It's under repair. The roof caved in about... six, seven months back. Been under construction since then. All the sisters have been moved to other chantry's until ours is repaired."

"Oh," said Cullen, crestfallen and glancing at Nevena as if she might conjure a solution out of the air. "That's... disappointing."

"Why's that?" the first man asked. Cullen met his eyes - grey, and milky with the early signs of cataracts. For the first time, Cullen realised he was carrying a white cane out in front of him. He was smiling though and seemed genuinely interested in what Cullen's answer was.

"We came here specifically to visit," he explained. "I... uh, I mean, about ten years ago I..." he found his voice catching and swallowed thickly against the sensation of his throat threatening to close over. Nevena's hand tightened around his, a physical touch to ground him.

"Cullen knew some of the people involved in the incursion about ten years ago. Friends. We came to pay our respects," she explained with warmth to her voice. "Forgive me for asking, but were either of you here during that time?"

The first man sucked his teeth. "I remember. Loyalists and Resolutionists, wasn't it? Stayed inside a lot during that summer. Too dangerous to leave the house. Residential areas were attacked if any house openly displayed support for the opposing side."

"Yes. Resolutionists and Loyalists," said Cullen once he found his voice. "Opposing political parties with vastly differing views."

"Always politics," the second man said, wearily. The first nodded and 'hmm'd his agreement. "The chantry might not be open, but there is a memorial ground you could go to if you wanted to pay your respects. It was set up about two years after the conflict."

Cullen brightened, "Whereabouts is that?"

"Just," the man turned and pointed down the long road leading away from the city square, "head all the way down. It's on your right once you get away from the shops. About ten minutes or so."

"We'll go there." Nevena clutched Cullen's hand. "Thank you so much for your help."

"Yes, thank you," Cullen nodded, suddenly eager to get moving.

"You're welcome," the second man smiled at them both and gave the first a gentle tug on the arm.

"Happy New Year!" the first added before Cullen or Nevena started moving.

"And you," Cullen replied. They both moved off in opposite directions, Cullen's pace a little quicker than before.

They came across the memorial ground after a brisk fifteen minute walk. It was some distance out of the main city and the bustle of shops, not tucked away by any means, but clearly not in an area that got much traffic, foot or vehicular. The snow on the ground was practically untouched, except by birds, foxes, other animals and perhaps two people at most judging by the footprints Cullen could see making a beeline straight through the grounds.

It wasn't much, simple and understated. It was a snow covered field surrounded by wrought iron fencing, with a single gate leading in and out. A central pathway led up to a monument which stood in front of a small building. From inside the building, Cullen could make out an orange glow spilling from the open door. Rows of gravestones popped up through the foot or two of snow, the tops of them jutting out of the crust of ice. There was a sundial, a few small trees that were bare of leaves, but probably looked nice in the spring and summer. The edges of the grounds were surrounded with flower beds, though the only plants Cullen could see were some evergreen bushes, no flowers.

Lining the path towards the monument were a few placards and boards on wooden platforms, a few benches too. One had been dusted of snow, and there were fresh flowers lying on the seat. A bench dedicated to someone who perished, then.

Cullen inhaled deeply. The cold air bit at his lungs and the breath in him shuddered when he expelled it. He flexed his free hand at his side, willing himself to push the gate open and enter. Something was holding him back though. If he did this, he would not be able to go back. There was no running away. This was a gesture that was long overdue, and perhaps it would do nothing to quell his fears and nightmares and his guilt, but it was something he needed to do. He'd allowed his cowardice to win out for too long.

"You all right?" Nevena asked.

Cullen nodded, "So far." He grasped the gate and pushed it open, holding it as he entered and Nevena followed after him. He closed the gate quietly so not to disturb the eerie serenity of the grounds. There was so little noise. No cars driving past, or people chattering. Just the occasional bird call, a light brush of wind and the naked branches of the trees clacking softly when they trembled in the breeze. It was like entering another world with how quiet and almost private it felt.

They made their way up the path slowly, boots crunching on the slush and grit. Cullen wanted to go straight for the monument but stopped when Nevena slipped her hand from his to brush snow off one of the placards lining the path. He stood beside her and looked. In white, on a blue background, were words detailing the reason for the memorial and what happened during the incursion.

"It's built on top of where the Resolutionists made their base," Nevena pointed out, reading from the board. "The tombstones are mostly for show, as those who perished are buried in the graveyard attached to the chantry or their remains were returned to their loved ones."

"Hm," Cullen said, walking to the next one. He dusted the snow off, revealing more words and a diagram. Blueprints for the building that once stood there. "Despite military efforts to act as peacemakers and keep the civilians safe, the Resolutionist movement was not quelled. More atrocities were carried out, resulting in a total of seventy-nine civilian deaths and thirteen military deaths over a five-month period," he read from the board and tucked his hands in his pockets. "I suppose we didn't really do much good in the end."

"You tried," Nevena told him, standing at his side and tracing a gloved finger over the building blueprint. "Surely that matters. And I'm sure there would have been more fatalities if you and your squad weren't on hand."

"We'll never know," Cullen sighed. He tried to make light of the situation, but how did someone make light of the massacre of almost a hundred people? No one should have died due to different political views, just as no one should have died for his youthful arrogance and stupidity. Yet they did. People with convictions so strong, and prejudices so immense took the lives of the innocent for a cause most of them probably only half understood. The ringleaders were corrupt and convincing, their influence spreading like diseases and riling up those of a similar mind into a mob.

More should have been done to quell the uprising and the building conflict before it started, but no one in any position of authority took it seriously enough. He remembered before being sent to Kinloch, hearing on the radio and watching on the news people debating what they should do, rather than doing it. The police were outnumbered and overpowered within days and without full approval of the governing Landsmeet, the army couldn't be deployed. The only reason the TEMPLARS were given the green light was because their purpose was more to protect than to fight.

The third board described the date the army was officially given sanction to become involved, and how quickly everything was quashed when the full might of the Ferelden military was unleashed. Most of the leaders of the Resolutionists either died while resisting or took their own lives. Underlings and grunts surrendered without much argument when confronted with automatic weaponry and armoured vehicles. Within six hours the uprising was ended. Cullen felt a bristling anger at that. At the thought of the lives that could have been spared and saved if the government had only acted earlier, instead of debating.

Nevena brushed the snow off the last board and read it aloud after a reading in silence for a few seconds, “Despite all the odds, during their efforts to find survivors of the specialised unit deployed early in the conflict and finding the majority dead, they did discover a single survivor. Having endured months of torture, pain, starvation, and horrors that defy imagining, the solider – aged nineteen at the time - was rescued and made a full recovery." She looked towards Cullen. "I suppose they're talking about you."

"I suppose so," said Cullen stiffly. "Honestly, I had no idea it went on for months," he said, walking to the board and scanning the words himself. "The days ended up becoming a blur, eventually."

"I can't imagine how you endured it," Nevena murmured, eyes on the white words that seemed bigger as if they were screaming at him their large typeface. "You survived, though."

"Yes," Cullen's voice was curt. He sighed heavily, stomach twisting and sinking like a stone deep into his abdomen. "You were right, you know," he tucked one hand into his pocket and brushed the scar on his lip with the other. "What you said. Last night."

"Which bit?"

He shifted, telling her after a long pause, "About me being afraid to come back here." His voice was thick, his tongue heavy and he kept his eyes forward, fixed on the words on the board. "About being afraid of confronting my past. About... not coming back because I don't know who I am without that guilt of what happened to my comrades weighing me down."

"Cullen..." Nevena gently touched his arm.

"I've spent ten years blaming myself for what happened. Wondering why..." he cleared his throat with a harsh cough, feeling his eyes stinging with hot tears and a sharp prickle behind his nose as he struggled to keep them at bay. "Wondering why I... why did I survive? And not them? I shouldn't have lived." He gasped, sighed, and lifted his head to stare at the dull glow of the sun as it tried to penetrate the thick grey clouds. Squinting helped him keep the emotion choking him in check. "I would give anything for one of them to take my place. They were all better men and women than me. So why did I live and they didn't?" He dropped his head and looked at the board again. "Why was I the only one to survive?"

"I don't know," Nevena answered, though he wasn't expecting her to do so. Her boots crunched on the ground and he felt her slip her arm through his. "But, I know you can't keep blaming yourself for what happened."

"Can't I?"

"No." He could see her watching him from his peripheral vision as he lowered his head again and quickly wiped his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "It's like you told me, about my mother, she made a choice to kill herself. It wasn't me. I didn't push her to do it. The same applies here."

A short chuckle pushed beyond Cullen's lips, "You were a baby. I was a nineteen-year-old idiot, who thought he knew everything."

"Your comrades made a choice to follow you, though," Nevena explained, her voice softening. "And the ones who did the killing were the rebels, the Resolutionists. You didn't pull a trigger, or wield a blade. And given their penchant for killing, who is to say they didn't plan to kill all of you anyway?"

"Hm." He shrugged.

"You've allowed yourself to feel this guilt. To let it swallow you and wash over you and become like a cancerous growth inside of you, festering and tainting everything." She echoed the words he'd used with her just a day before, almost making him smile. "This guilt you feel about surviving when others didn't, it's going to destroy you - it almost has once before, you said so yourself. Though not in so many words." She paused and turned her eyes to the board in front of them. "It wasn't your plan that killed them. It was the people who killed them. You made a plan to escape, a plan your comrades trusted and followed because they believed in it. In you. They didn't know if doing nothing would result in them dying, or trying to escape would result in it - but having a plan you gave them a chance they didn't have before. You gave them hope. And that is something far better to remember and cling to, don't you think?"

Cullen raked his fingers roughly through his hair. "They still died because I thought I was clever," he stated, not looking at her.

"You may have died anyway. Your plan at least gave them a fifty-fifty chance of survival. And your friends, your comrades, clearly thought it was a good plan, and were willing to take that chance, whatever the odds. Or they wouldn't have gone along with it."

"Maybe." Cullen gave a non-committal shrug of his shoulders feeling uneasy and weak in his body. He slipped away from Nevena and approached the central monument standing in front of the small building. It loomed over them on a marble plinth about six foot in height, engraved with a variety of names on three sides.

Standing on top of the plinth was an over-sized kite shield crafted from rough, dark grey metal and showing signs of battering and the ever-changing weather. Emblazoned on the shield was a symbol Cullen recognised, the symbol for the TEMPLARS, a sword with the blade pointing down to the ground with three waves on either side, supposed to represent holy fire. When he joined, he was told the story behind the mystic symbol: that TEMPLARS were an order founded on the holy ordinances of the chantry and the Andrastian religion. They became militarized due to circumstances lost to legend and had remained an unknown, elite sector of the military ever since. As fanciful as the tale was, Cullen never really believed it.

Scanning down the words engraved on the plinth, Cullen noticed names that immediately struck him like a slap in the face, making his stomach plummet to his feet. The side he stood before listed only the names of the soldiers whose lives were lost, he assumed the other two sides were full of the names of the civilians. He never took the time to get to know the civilians he and his comrades were supposed to protect. The names before him though, thirteen of them, each one caused a face to appear in his mind and a voice to ring in his ears as loud and as clear as if the person was standing beside him.

"You knew them?" Nevena was at his side, reading the names to herself.

Cullen nodded dumbly, choking on a breath as he fought to find his voice. "Alexander Carroll," Cullen pointed to the first name on the list, "he started with the TEMPLARS the same time as I did. He was older than me, didn't take things very seriously... You could never keep a straight face around him though... Agatha Ferguson was one of the oldest of us, she had a lot of experience. I've often wondered why she listened to me. She was a good sort. Given how few women there were in comparison to men, she really could give as good as she got. One look from her and you would swear you were suddenly a foot tall."

"You were fond of her?"

"She reminded me of my older sister, Mia," explained Cullen. "It made being away from home a little more bearable." Slowly, he went down the list of names, describing the people and their influence on him and the small group of them deployed in Kirkwall. He knew he was rambling, even as the words flowed out of him like water through a dam, but Nevena stood and listened attentively, asking questions about the men and women he described.

It felt good to talk about them. Strange, but good. As if speaking about them gave them all life again, and with each person Cullen spoke to her about, it was as though an invisible weight slowly sloughed off him. A weight he was never aware of, a force pushing down on him, or perhaps he was holding on to it instead. It was like the memories of these people were holding on to him and because he was so reluctant to revisit the past and revisit their memories they'd simply lingered. Restless spirits clinging to him. Now he was giving them urgency and a voice, bringing light to their memory and they could suddenly be released into the ether and allowed to rest.

Nevena ventured around the monument and Cullen followed after her, catching up as she stood in the entrance to the small building just beyond. The door was open and it led into a decent sized room furnished like a small chantry. At the far end was an altar, a white stone image of Andraste with her hands extended, a bowl of ever-burning fire held aloft. On either side were three wooden pews creating a central aisle for visitors to walk down. Lining the edge of the room were tables covered in dozens and dozens of candles. Despite the appearance that there was no one around, some of the candles looked to be recently lit, while others were burning, or almost completely burnt down. To the left at the far back, almost invisible on first entering was another door which Cullen could only assume led to a vestibule. A few decorative tapestries hung on the walls depicting images of the birth of the Andrastian religion, and by the door was a large, heavy book on its own table. The page open was filled with words and scribbles. Cullen assumed the whole book was like that, filled with visitor comments.

"Do you--" Cullen started, turning to Nevena.

She cut him off, "Take all the time you need." She gave his hand a gentle, supportive squeeze and turned her attention to the book. Cullen smiled at the back of her head, unable to find the right words to express his gratitude. Then he took slow, steady steps towards the altar and the vision of Andraste, his heart pulsing in his throat.

All the times he toyed with and imagined coming to pay his respects, he never thought he would truly come back to Kinloch and do it. All the words and sentiments he thought he would say and had rehearsed in his head over and over all now seemed too rehearsed and they would be insincere. They all flew from his head anyway as he lowered himself down onto one knee and clasped his hands together, bowing his head. He pressed his forehead against his hands and sighed, his shoulders sagging.

It was years since he recited the Chant of Light. Years since he felt worthy of speaking the words or even remembering them. As he knelt in solemn, respectful silence he could feel himself filling with the verses he memorized as a boy. He remembered speaking the Chant before every mission as one of the TEMPLARS. How he repeated it over and over during his early captivity to keep his mind focused. Some days, it was all he could do to distract from the pain of the lyrium withdrawal or the agony of hunger and thirst. Over time, he could only relate the Chant of Light to feelings of pain and hurt. The Resolutionists took that away from him too; only now, maybe he could reclaim it. If the place where he had been confined and tortured, the place that was filled with so much blood and death could be demolished and turned into a memorial ground - a place of peace and reflection - then perhaps the words of the Chant could be cleaned for him, too. Perhaps the meaning and the feeling could be purified and Cullen could find solace and comfort in it as he once did.

Closing his eyes, he inhaled deeply, somehow managing to block out all other sound and thoughts except the sound of his slow, steady breathing and the right words to say. He remembered his friends, the comrades he lost and, for the first time, chose to remember them differently. He could remember them as corpses, tortured bodies, their cries and screams echoing through empty hallways and shaking him to his core. Or, he could remember them as the people they were. As warm, and bright, and real. As people who laughed with him, and trained with him. Men and women with lives of their own, and families who adored them. Who were proud of them for the good they wanted to do. He could remember them as husks of themselves, half-mad with starvation. Or, he could remember them as vibrant human beings who died for something they believed in, and who wanted to do something good with their lives. As people who wanted to protect others who could not protect themselves. As people who wanted to make a difference in the lives of those unfairly under attack. He could remember them as people who did make a difference. As people who touched lives, and who would be remembered not just by him and by their families, but by the dozens of people they helped and assisted in their line of duty.

Feeling himself smile, and his body lighter than it had been in years, Cullen welcomed the tears of relief that dripped from his eyes and trickled down his nose. He didn't wipe them away, even as they tickled and some slid down along his lips. He allowed himself this moment to cry and mourn in a way he never allowed himself because of the leaden guilt he felt at the loss of their lives. A guilt he now realised he didn't need to carry around with him. It was another choice, like how he chose to remember the friends and comrades he lost. He could choose to carry the guilt or choose to release it. Choose to free himself from those shackles and live his life again, rather than allow himself to be chained to it for fear of forgetting them.

They would never be forgotten, not by him, or the people each person knew and touched in some way. They would be remembered forever because their names were immortalised in stone, and their deeds were remembered by those who survived. Their memories would live on through word-of-mouth, and that was a gratifying thought.

The verses of the Chant filled Cullen's head like the tolling bells from a Chantry calling the faithful to prayer. Words and lines he believed he forgot over time seemed to sing in his mind. The words came to him, easily and without ceremony, and Cullen was speaking before he even realised it.

"Draw your last breath, my friends, Cross the Veil and the Fade and all the stars in the sky. Rest at the Maker’s right hand, And be Forgiven.”

Standing, Cullen went to the nearest table with the candles on it. He took thirteen unlit ones from a box and carefully placed each one in a vacant hole on a metal stand to stop the candles burning the wood. Taking a candle already lit, he ignited the wick on each one, saying the name of the person he lit it for. When he was done, he returned the original candle to its place, clasped his hands together in front of him and bowed his head. He didn't speak or pray, just stood in the warm silence and felt the peace flood over him.

When he was finished, he quickly rubbed his face and looked around for Nevena. He saw her at another table of candles on the opposite side of the statue of Andraste. She was lighting a candle, though he did not need to guess for whom. She must have felt him looking because she lifted her head and found his gaze across the room. She smiled sheepishly, shrugging her shoulders, the two of the mirroring each other as they approached each other and stopped in front of the statue of Andraste.

"I'm not even very religious..." Nevena mumbled, looking at her feet, "I feel like a bit of a fraud, lighting a candle and everything."

"I'm sure it's the thought that counts," Cullen assured her, reaching for her hands. She allowed him to take them, and he ran his thumbs over her knuckles. "You know," sighed Cullen, searching for words, "I think part of the reason I was so reluctant to come back here was because of how much what happened here changed me."

"Oh?" Nevena took a step closer to him.

"I never truly told anyone what happened to me here in Kinloch. B-before you, I mean... I was so... angry after everything that happened here," explained Cullen, closing his eyes for a moment. "After what I endured, I didn't think I could trust anyone again. I closed myself off from everyone and everything. The anger I felt, blinded me for so long to all the good in the world. It twisted my perspective... I'm not proud of the man that made me."

Nevena inched closer again, though there was barely any space remaining. "Cullen..."

"Coming back here, I think... I can begin to put some distance between what happened. I don't want to still be carrying that anger, that guilt around with me my whole life." He shrugged and opened his eyes to meet hers, "It's not much, but it's a start." An uneasy smile tugged the corner of his mouth. He felt vulnerable letting her in like this, allowing her close to him, but it came easily. He could speak to Nevena like no one else, let her know him in ways no one else did. He hoped she felt the same. That she could speak to him and trust him.

"A start is a good place to... start," Nevena grimaced, laughing softly to herself and leaning forward to bury her face in his chest. "Sorry," she groaned, muffled by his clothing. Cullen chuckled, releasing her hands to bring his own up to her face. He curled her hair behind her ears, holding her jaw in a gentle grip. Kissing the top of her head, he coaxed her to tilt her head back, pressing a second kiss to her forehead.

"You're so eloquent," he teased, smiling.

"Words are hard, sometimes."

"I noticed." Cullen's lips lingered against her forehead again, his laughter dying with hers. "I needed to do this," he said, after a long, comfortable silence. "I needed to come back here and confront the past. Confront the memories and the guilt... Maybe the feelings won't ever go away, not entirely but... I know coming here has been a good thing for me."

"Good," hummed Nevena, "I'm glad."

"It's because of you, you know." Cullen stood tall enough to look down at her, to see her face, and hold her gaze. "You are so much braver than you think you are, to want to deal with your past head on."

"Brave or foolish, more like," Nevena snorted with a half-hearted eye roll.

"Brave," Cullen repeated, his voice growing thicker. "Very brave." Colour flooded Nevena's cheeks, her mouth open slightly as she peered up at him, unable to look away. "Thank you for lending me some of that bravery today... For lending me some of your courage." He ran his thumbs over Nevena's skin beneath her eyes, stroking steadily. "You are the most remarkable woman I have ever met." He pressed his forehead to hers, nuzzling as he closed his eyes. "You are..."

Words failed him for a moment, and in the wake of a beat of silence, Cullen gently inclined his head to press his mouth to hers. The kiss was soft, warming, yet held an intensity and passion all its own. Cullen could feel every unsaid emotion he carried being poured into the connection of their lips, every unspoken word exchanging through their breaths. Cullen couldn't recall a single kiss like it in his whole life. It was as if he suddenly realized what kissing really was. It wasn't just two lips meeting hungrily in a rush of heat and yearning, it was two people connecting. Sharing a little precious, piece of their soul for a few seconds. Giving it to the other person to protect and cherish, as they would do the same. It was painful honesty and heartfelt passion. It was angry tears and sad tears, and tears of laughter. It was lazy days on a couch watching nothing on television but being content. It was falling over each other ice skating or skiing. It was being thrust together by circumstance, and finding a piece of yourself you never knew was missing.

Cullen pulled away, his lips lingering a hairsbreadth away from Nevena's. "I have never felt anything like this before," declared Cullen, a knot in his stomach tightening and twisting around his lungs and heart.

"Neither have I," Nevena breathed, her fingers curling into Cullen's jacket, "but, I like it."

They stood together in the warmth and silence a few moments more, relishing the atmosphere of this secluded chapel, and Cullen wondering if Nevena had experienced even a thimbleful of what he just had. Then she shifted, scraping her boot on the ground and put some space between them, a small, uncertain smile on her face.

"We'll miss the last ferry if we linger much longer," she told him, offering her hand to him and waiting patiently. "Are you ready to go?"

Cullen took her hand. He nodded with a feeling of certainty inside him that he did not expect to leave Kinloch with. "Yes."

CHAPTER ON AO3

This chapter was a doozy to write, and if I'm being totally honest with you, I'm actually afraid of the reaction it'll get.

One thing I'm trying so hard to avoid in this fic is the trope of "love magically healing everything". And I'm worried this chapter falls into that trope. It's not meant to. Cullen's nightmares, the PTSD, it's not magically cured and gone because he went back to Kinloch. It's not suddenly an intrinsic part of him. It's still there. He stuff has PTSD and all the stuff that goes with it. But, I guess for me, him returning to Kinloch allows him to perhaps... begin to heal some wounds that are still raw.

I don't know. I guess you guys will be the judge of that.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter, at the very least. I appreciate it's very long and very wordy and quite heavy going. So I appreciate if you managed to get through it all.

Normally I have a list of questions that cover the chapter, but I don't really have anything at the moment. I'm kind of reluctant to upload anything, because of personal stuff. Confidence issues and just general... bad mental health that I'm trying to deal with. But it had been a while, and I hate the fact updates are already sporadic enough, without adding no uploads to the mix because my brain is not playing ball.

Sorry, I'm rambling. Thanks for all the kind comments and tag flails on the previous chapter. Please let me know what you think of this chapter as well. I'm really interested to see everyone's thoughts and feelings. There's a lot to unpack in this chapter.

Once more, thank you for joining me and reading, whether you're a new reader or a returning reader. Please let me know what you think in the comments or tags or by dropping me a message, or leaving a comment on AO3. See you in the next chapter. <3

#cullen rutherford #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #dragon age fanfiction #dragon age modern au #da:i #dai #modern au #dragon age fake relationship au #fake relationship au #cullen x trevelyan #nevena trevelyan #writing #cullen x nevena #my wriring #long fic #only make believe #new chapter #update

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