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chryzure-archive · 1 year

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a century later, and now you ask?

ALT TITLE: somebody take pet names away from gil. he literally has anxiety?

AUTHOR’S NOTE: got a little too serious thinking abt chrysi’s death and the way it makes her think of azure while writing this. suddenly i am thinking abt chryzure instead of chrysigil. on chrysigil day. oh no :((

———

The first time Oz yelled at Gilbert after they reunited was on a lovely spring day, deep into one of Chrysi’s week-long spring cleanings. She’d assigned the three of them—Oz, Alice, and Gilbert—the kitchen, citing that the last time she’d tried to deep clean the kitchen, Gilbert had yelled at her.

He vaguely recalled the incident—not being able to find anything in the entire kitchen from Chrysi’s relocation of every implement, plate, and spice, for reasons she hadn’t specified—but he had half a mind that Chrysi dramatized the whole incident.

Either way, it meant that Gilbert wouldn’t have to brave the children’s closets and the dusty mess under their beds. He, himself, had been yelled at by Oz when they’d been children, and he would rather have Chrysi be the one to deal with accidentally throwing away some item of dubious value to Oz than have it be him ever again.

At least, he had—before the argument.

Oz slammed down the cast-iron pan with enough force to make Gilbert worry for the granite countertops.

“What do you mean you don’t call Chrysi by any pet names?” Oz cried.

Gilbert didn’t know how they’d gotten here. He also didn’t know why it upset Oz so much. It was a bad time for it to come up—when he was looking particularly ridiculous with a polka-dot bandana pushing back his hair (tied with a bow, courtesy of Chrysi), large yellow rubber gloves (well, glove—Gilbert didn’t like wearing the prosthetic after the majority of 100 years spent with one arm), and a blue gingham apron (he didn’t want to comment on this. He’d been gifted it by Chrysi sometime fifty years into their wait, and it held up remarkably—even if now it was only good as a clean-up apron).

“Now, wait a second,” he started. He held up the scrub brush in his hand as a defense. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Yeah,” Alice chimed in from atop the counter, not helping in the slightest, “what do you mean you don’t have pet names for her?”

Gilbert shot Alice a harried scowl. “You don’t actually care about that.”

Alice smiled wide in that feral, Alice way of hers. “Answer the question, Seaweed Head.”

He opened his mouth, but Oz cut him off before he could say anything.

“And even if she doesn’t, I do.” He crossed his arms over his chest, face twisted in disapproval. “Why has she even stayed with you for so long?

Heat shot across his face in an old, familiar way that he hadn’t experienced in well over 100 years.

“We don’t need anything like that between us,” Gilbert protested.

Oz clicked his tongue in annoyance and rolled his eyes. The cross of his arms tightened in unison with the eye roll.

“Serious,” he continued, feeling more defensive by the second, and his ears burning hotter still. “She’s never said anything one way or the other. It doesn’t matter.”

Alice sighed noisily from her perch. Gilbert glanced at her to find that she had stretched her hand up to the top shelf to search for the cookie jar he’d hidden up there.

Catching his look, she narrowed her eyes at him. Daring him to call her out.

He pursed his lips. With one arm, he didn’t think he could chastise her the way he used to—complete with lifting her entirely off the ground and setting her elsewhere. And besides, he had a rubber glove on. It made his grip less certain.

Her eyes narrowed further, all the way to slits. Whatever she saw there made her scoff.

“Useless,” she proclaimed decidedly.

Gilbert was not going to be insulted by the girl with her hand in the literal cookie jar. “Hey—”

“Indeed,” agreed Oz.

Electricity jolted through him, a hurt he didn’t know he could sustain after so long. He turned to find Oz’s eyes glinting like shards of green glass.

At his attention, Oz lifted his chin, a fearsome jut of his jaw.

“You said you waited for Alice and I until you guys got married, but who’s to say you’ll even get married when you don’t care enough to give her a pet name?”

Gilbert bit the inside of his cheek. “What—do you not want us married?”

The thought made him want to cry.

Expression darkening further, Oz snapped, “Of course I do! That’s why I’m trying to fix your mistakes!”

The ceramic lid of the cookie jar clattered shut behind them, followed closely by the sound of Alice flopping back into a more comfortable seat than before.

From his periphery, he could see Alice holding four cookies in hand. In any normal situation, he’d be nagging at her that too many cookies would make her stomach hurt. In this situation, he would’ve nagged at her.

But then Alice said, “Even that blonde bastard has a nickname for Chrysi already.” She crunched down on a cookie thoughtfully, her normal arrogant expression swapping for a simpler, wide-eyed look at the ceiling. Her mouth twisted to one side. “He calls her Princess.”

Oz recoiled at this information. “Still?” He shot Gilbert a dubious look. “You let him call her that?”

Gilbert shifted, heat collecting under his collar. He’d become a bit more comfortable with Jacks’s presence in recent years. To deny Chrysi’s friendship with him was to abandon her as a lover—though sometimes Jacks made it a little too clear that he’d rather that happen.

Whatever. He dealt with Jacks’s obsession with Chrysi, and Chrysi dealt with his brother with the same patience. Well—probably with more patience than Gilbert dealt with Jacks.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he protested.

Oz stared at him pityingly.

“100 years didn’t change anything,” he said. “You’re still totally hopeless.”

Alice chomped on her cookie in agreement.

And though Gilbert wanted to argue, he couldn’t help but look at himself from the outside view—with his ridiculous bandana headband, a 1950s apron, and his single arm with its single rubber glove—and he, too, wondered why Chrysi was still with him.

Should he have given her a pet name?

—

“What about lovebug?” Alice offered from her position at Gilbert’s left shoulder, her hand poking from the spot where his left hand once had been. She held a pen aloft in her hand, despite the fact that it wasn’t her dominant hand in the slightest.

Together they sat on the ground—Gilbert in cross-legged front, and Alice kneeling behind him. Oz bent over the paper from his perch on the couch. And Alice’s arm moved in the space that Gilbert’s left arm once took up, one hundred years ago.

The way her hand moved gave Gilbert the impression that he’d gotten a possessed fifteen-year-old’s arm grafted in the place of his old one. What was that movie Chrysi forced him to go see in the theatres twenty years ago?

…He couldn’t remember. But the hand was possessed, and the way Alice decided she’d play his left arm for the day brought back memories of the cool air of the theatre and Chrysi leaning her face into Gilbert’s shoulder sleepily.

“Um,” he said.

So far, the brainstorm for pet names hadn’t brought up anything that really caught his eye. Sweetheart sounded too childish for Chrysi, darling too formal, and Gilbert had never really been able to call anybody sunshine, for how absurd the nickname sounded in his voice.

“Write it down,” Oz said. He eyed Gilbert doubtfully. “We’ll need any help we can get.”

Gilbert frowned up at Oz as Alice dutifully scratched out the letters onto the paper. “I don’t know how many of these really seem like names that Chrysi would like.”

Like… any of them. Not a single one suited her.

At least, not coming from him.

“You don’t know that,” Alice said cheerfully, her face pressed somewhere behind Gilbert’s left shoulder. Her hand scribbled out something else sightlessly. “I think she might like buttercup.”

“Like the girl from The Princess Bride?”

She paused. “The hell’s that?”

Gilbert took a deep breath.

Oz peered over Alice’s half of the list before Gilbert could chastise Alice.

“Well, you know,” he said, voice breezy, “I don’t think that lice is a very kind pet name.”

“What?”

After an uncomfortable moment of jostling around Gilbert’s left side—his scars still bothered him at times—Alice poked her head out from under his shoulder. Now it looked like he’d grown a mutant head in addition to a possessed arm.

He closed his eyes. That wasn’t a very pleasant thought.

The paper crinkled in Alice’s hand.

“No, that says love!” Indignance colored her tone.

Tilting his head, Oz squinted at it.

“Oh. Never mind. That’s a good suggestion.”

Gilbert eyed the scratchings on the left margins of the page. He still couldn’t quite figure out which one was meant to read as love—or lice, as Oz thought it read.

Suddenly, Gilbert was exhausted.

“Is this really such a good idea?” he asked, thinking of the happy moments with Chrysi reading a book aloud and talking to him from her perch on the kitchen island. They’d gotten by just fine.

Oz’s sharp green eyes cut to him and narrowed.

“Jacks has a nickname for her,” he reminded him.

Ugh.

“Gil?” Chrysi called from the floor above.

His head snapped up. That same horrible anxiety he’d thought he’d left behind reared its ugly head in his chest, wrapping about his heart in a stranglehold.

“Yes?” he called back. Fortunately, the only hint of his inner turmoil was a slight tremor.

Oz jabbed him in the side.

He bit down on a yelp, but he couldn’t help the spasm that wracked his body. Instinctively, he curved around the electric shock in his side—a delayed attempt to protect himself from Oz’s sudden attack. Instead, he merely crashed onto his side.

Alice pitched forward onto their page of pet names. The paper protested—it had already been subjected to worse and worser nicknames, scribbled out in both the heavy, non-dominant hand of a fifteen-year-old and the morose hand of a century-old man.

It took Gilbert a moment, but he managed to flip onto his back to shoot Oz a glare, feeling distinctly like a beetle at the hands of a cruel kid-god.

“Are you going to help with laundry or not?”

Oz indicated their brainstorming page, crinkled underneath Alice’s scrambling limbs.

Biting down on a heavy sigh, Gilbert crossed his arm across his chest like a corpse in a sarcophagus.

“I’ll be right up, dear.”

“Oh.” Chrysi hesitated. “Alright?”

His eyes drifted closed.

Inwardly, he scratched dear off their list.

—

“Good morning,” Gilbert tried on another day, “darling.”

Chrysi rolled over in the bed to shoot him a narrow-eyed look.

“What did you do wrong?”

“What?”

“Sorry. Knee-jerk reaction.” She sat up, her eyes still narrowed in the sunlight. “Why’d you let me sleep in so late?”

Gilbert didn’t want to answer, mostly because he was curious about what could’ve possibly happened before he’d been with Chrysi to instill such a strong auto-response that it persisted after a century.

Well, no matter.

Clearly darling wasn’t in the cards either.

—

Oz came skittering around the corner before Chrysi did. Though even if it had been Chrysi, Gilbert still would’ve sent the hot pan into the air from the jolt that went through his body.

The pancake he’d been making (caramel M&Ms sprinkled in, because Alice had insisted on using up a packet she’d brought home from school) flew straight up into the air. It hit the ceiling with a hearty thwack. And up there, it stayed.

The same couldn’t be said for the pan.

Gilbert leapt back from the stove before the burning metal hit his feet, a colorful curse on his tongue.

Oz screeched to a halt, his mouth open in an O. “Are you alright?”

Well, as luck would have it, Gilbert was not alright. It was one thing after another, ever since he’d woken that morning to their cat on his face (one hundred years with Chrysi aside, there was still an element of anxiety up close and personal to a cat—especially when said cat was suffocating him under his weight), he’d had to take a call from Glen and set up an out-of-town trip for the end of that very week (annoying, since he’d been actually excited to go to Oz and Alice’s first parent-teacher conference), and he was certain a rainstorm was rolling in (on account of his whole left side set ablaze with agony. The usual.)

He took a deep breath, then exhaled.

“I’m,” he said, “fine.”

Oz looked unconvinced. Gilbert couldn’t blame him. It took a deep inhale-exhale for him to speak a single word.

He ached to grab his lighter and his box of cigarettes, but Chrysi’d been trying to keep him from overdoing it most days—and besides, Gilbert didn’t like smoking while he was preparing food.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Gilbert stepped back from the remnants of disaster.

“I can help?” Oz said, uncertainly.

“No!”

Oz drew up short.

“It’s okay,” came Chrysi’s voice around the corner—then she was there, holding a bag of groceries that Gilbert needed to finish their dinner. She smiled when Oz looked guiltily at her, her eyebrow arched. “Unless you’re looking for an excuse to procrastinate on your homework?”

His eyes brightened. “Are you offering?”

“Nope.” Her gaze flashed over the state of the kitchen—pausing on the ceiling. Her eyebrow raised incrementally.

Gilbert flushed.

She continued, “But I bet you could finish it in ten minutes, tops. Then you won’t have to worry about it for the rest of the night.”

Oz loitered at the base of the stairs, frowning.

Chrysi rolled her head in his direction. Her smile dropped in favor of a vaguely amused line at her mouth and an unimpressed heavy-lidded look. “Go on.”

“Fine.” But that didn’t stop his desperate glance at Gilbert, begging him to set him free.

Gilbert mostly couldn’t stop wondering if and when the pancake would peel off from the ceiling and fall atop his head. It would be the icing on the cake of this miserable, miserable day.

What was more concerning was that it wasn’t coming off at all.

Oz tramped up the stairs, footsteps dejected.

Chrysi waited until he’d reached the top before she turned to Gilbert.

“You’d think I’d doomed him to essay work,” she drawled, “when I know for a fact Mrs. Lee only hands out fill-in-the-blank assignments and a video to go along with it.”

He cracked an anemic smile, then flicked off the burner. No need for the house to go up in flame too. “I think Oz would prefer an essay. He’s too smart for fill-in-the-blank.”

“Good point.”

Chrysi walked into the kitchen and set down her bag of groceries. Gilbert saw her eyes catch on the pancake again. Her mouth twitched.

“Don’t laugh,” he begged. He didn’t know if he’d laugh with her or cry instead.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” She bit her lower lip to battle the hitched corner of her lips. Her eyes remained glued to the ceiling. “Do you think that’s going to come down at any point?”

Gilbert couldn’t say.

“Maybe we could get a chisel,” she suggested, as if he’d answered. “Or Goo-Gone. Do you think Goo-Gone works on something like that?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

Chrysi planted her hands on her hips. Her eyes grew thoughtful as she gazed up at the half-cooked pancake. Whatever she saw there made her come to a decision.

“Yeah, okay,” she said after a beat. “I think I can get a ladder and a sponge and Goo-Gone it away.”

Wait, what?

“Er…” He stared at her worriedly. “Don’t do that. Don’t break your neck, love.”

“I wouldn’t… Huh?”

Gilbert blinked. “What?”

“What did you call me?”

And that was strike three.

—

He didn’t even know what he was doing anymore. He’d become tense at the thought of Chrysi coming around the corner, uneasy with the rapidly narrowing list. Lovebug, as suggested by Alice, reminded Chrysi of ladybugs, and he’d spent the rest of the day squinting in the sunlight while Chrysi hunted for them in their garden. Buttercup ended similarly, though then Gilbert had to also help Chrysi with the weeding—and his shoulder ached from the prothstetic he forgot he didn’t like as much as going one-handed about the world. Angel made Chrysi laugh, and sweetpea made her groan so loud that he’d forgotten what his sentence was going to be in the first place.

His head hurt.

Just when he was going to call it—Oz would be displeased, but Gilbert truly didn’t want to try and fight Jacks with an equally groan-worthy pet name—Chrysi walked into the living room with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Clearly aggravated, she rubbed her forehead.

“Can you take a look at these, Raven?” she asked.

Gilbert leapt up, stiff as a board.

“Absolutely,” he said. Then, unnaturality burning acidic on his tongue, he rushed out, “Honey.”

Hand still tangled in her hair, Chrysi paused to shoot him an odd look.

He froze. He hadn’t even reached out for the papers. Now they were just staring at each other, the word he’d uttered sitting between them like an awkward child that accidentally ran to the wrong parents.

Her gaze flickered over him, mouth hitching. In what sort of expression, Gilbert couldn’t say. Anxiety black-spotted his vision—another mainstay of a set of nervous, humiliated emotions he hadn’t felt with Chrysi since last century.

Why’d Oz have to bring up something like that?

“Oka-a-ay,” Chrysi replied. She tilted her head. “Thanks, peanut butter.”

He furrowed his brows. “What?”

She handed him the papers instead of replying.

“Alice bit another kid at school yesterday. We have a meeting with the teacher.” She paused. “Again.”

And with that cheery note, Chrysi walked from the room.

—

Chrysi still had nightmares sometimes. They both did.

They’d gotten better over time, but…

Well, Gilbert had no clue what Chrysi went through when she’d died. All he knew was that he was grateful she didn’t stay dead.

If she had, he thought he might’ve gone insane waiting for Oz and Alice alone.

That night, Gilbert woke to a suspicious lack of Chrysi in the bed, and he knew precisely what sort of nightmare had struck her this time. She always went wandering whenever she dreamt of that night in the Abyss—before it had returned to the golden-lit dreamscape with Alice’s twin sister, the Intention, and they’d visited regularly with the rest of the Baskerville clan.

Normally, he let her wander. But, with Oz’s fear of Gilbert losing Chrysi, he also found himself wondering if maybe he hadn’t been attentive enough to Chrysi’s needs.

So he pried himself off the bed and stumbled blearily through the house. No amount of rubbing at his eyes cleared his vision—which was just as well, with the blackness of the house. It wasn’t like he needed to see anything anyway.

He found Chrysi in the downstairs living room. She hunched over on the edge of the couch, holding a rod with a string and a feather on the other end, only the light of a lamp perched on the set of drawers to see by.

Half-heartedly flicking the feather, Chrysi looked blindly over the room.

Gilbert eyed the shadows—but not even their orange tabby showed himself. Odd.

“What’re you doing?” he whispered.

“Oh.” She stopped waving the feather around. Slowly, she leaned back in the couch, until she reclined over the armrest, her eyes foggy with sleep still. “Raven. You’re awake.”

He stared down at her, worry tightening in his chest. “What’s wrong?”

“Can’t a girl play with shadow cats on her own time without being questioned?”

“What?”

She smiled wryly. “Don’t worry about it. Here.” She scooted a bit on the couch and patted the spot next to her. “Come here.”

Gilbert obliged—mostly because standing there in the shadows alone unnerved him, just a little. Though Chrysi seemingly wasn’t playing with their cat, he couldn’t be certain Megalomaniac wouldn’t come pouncing out of the shadows to attack his leg. It he did, they’d have a cat flung off into the nothingness and two kids wondering why someone yowled like the damned in the middle of the night.

Squeezed between Chrysi and the arm rest, Gilbert thought only of the way their shoulders pressed tightly together. Sometimes, only that connection made things manageable.

He breathed out long and low. He laid his head atop Chrysi’s.

She paused, then leaned her head down slightly, pressed into his shoulder.

Gilbert’s neck would protest later, but for right now, he didn’t mind.

“What was it tonight?” he asked softly.

“What is it any night?” she replied. She pressed harder against him. “Just… before.”

Gilbert waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t.

How frequently did she do that? How frequently did Gilbert let her do it?

“Before what?”

Her sadness filled her voice, made distant by her fatigue. “Before everything became something I could handle again.”

Oh. He knew what that meant.

Back when Azure died.

Gilbert didn’t get anxious or jealous anymore. Sometimes, he even wondered if he would’ve gotten along with Chrysi’s dead fiancé, if they’d ever had more than two conversations. He hoped so. At least he knew that, in the last moments of clarity, Azure was happy that Gilbert could be there for Chrysi.

But he knew what those nightmares did to Chrysi. She’d been the one to find his body and she’d been forced to take the brunt of Azure’s father's rage when she did. He couldn’t even fathom the agony she felt when she realized that it was Mordecai LaFaye who had his own son killed.

“I’m sorry,” was what he mumbled.

She sighed and shrugged—something he felt more than he saw. “It’s over now. At least when I’m awake.”

Gilbert frowned.

He wrapped his arm around her, feeling distinctly useless. This was the best he could do.

He wished he could do more.

Chrysi began nodding off, nestled against his shoulder. She pressed into his side.

The weight and warmth of her felt so familiar that Gilbert wanted to fall asleep here too. The temptation only tempered itself with the knowledge that they’d both wake up sore and uncomfortable.

What cruel god made it so that a position comfortable enough to fall asleep in would only mean pain upon waking?

“Alright,” Gilbert said, fighting the sleep threatening to overtake him. “Let’s get up, dream girl.”

With a half-asleep, delirious laugh, she stirred against his shoulder.

“Dream girl?” Her voice lilted like a lullaby, unfiltered from the cleverness that normally trapped her in the daytime hours. “You have never called me that before.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a quick kiss across the lips.

When they pulled away, she looked at him with sleepy, gold-sparkling eyes.

“Where in the world has your head been lately, Gil?”

Heat colored his cheeks, but Gilbert allowed himself a tiny, sheepish smile.

“Worth a shot?”

“Sure.” She laid her head on his collarbone.

Gilbert anchored her to him with his arm and stood. With her grip around his neck, he lifted her easily. “Never again?”

Chrysi hummed sleepily against his neck.

“No,” she answered. “Probably not.”

No surprises there.

Gilbert sighed.

—

Chrysi finally snapped after a week. Honestly, Gilbert couldn’t blame her for it. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d chosen that particular pet name, besides utter desperation. Even Oz called it a last resort—but they couldn’t have known that Chrysi would have such an aversion to all the other, more acceptable nicknames.

He walked in from the en suite bathroom, toweling his hair dry. Chrysi sat on the bed, reading. Lamplight haloed her curls and gilded the slight furrow to her brow.

Gilbert couldn’t tell what that meant. Once, it was abject horror in response to step-cousins being reincarnated lovers. Another time, it was delight at a character being blown up in half by gingerbread-scented smoke. Just because Chrysi was an expressive reader didn’t mean that he knew what the expressions meant.

She didn’t look up as he came in. “Are you coming to bed?”

“Yeah, babe.”

Ugh. Even just saying it, Gilbert wanted to crawl out of his skin. Like all the others, it sounded wrong coming from him.

Lifting her chin, the book in her hands snapped shut. Chrysi tossed it onto the nightstand and sat back, threading her fingers together in her lap. She eyed him seriously.

“Okay, what’s wrong?”

Gilbert hesitated, the towel slipping over one of his eyes. His heart rate kicked up. “What’re you talking about?”

She opened her hand and gestured vaguely. “I have not heard my name from you in over a week. What’s going on?”

The whole week crashed down on him. The nervousness that he hated, that he’d tried to leave behind, and the weird looks Chrysi shot him, and the entirety of Oz bothering him over it. His limbs trembled, weak from coiling and tensing like a wrung-out towel.

He dropped the towel to the ground and crawled onto the bed.

On instinct, Chrysi opened her arms.

He gladly took the invitation.

Gilbert laid his head on her chest, curling his arm around her. Her heart steadily beat under his ear, warm with each breath she took.

Fingers already carding through his hair, Chrysi asked, “So what’s been going on, Gil?”

Shame flushed his cheeks. Somehow, he’d gotten swept into one of Oz’s ridiculous schemes. Things really didn’t change, not even after a century apart.

But he didn’t want to admit that to Chrysi.

“I feel bad,” he said instead.

Her hand swept his hair away from his face. “Oh yeah? Why would that be?”

He tilted his head, just so that his ear pressed closer to the thrum of her heartbeat.

He’d almost lost that once. No, scratch that—he had lost it, once. And still, despite that, he’d never given Chrysi a term of endearment. What was wrong with him?

“Jacks calls you princess,” he mumbled.

This made her soothing strokes pause.

“Hmm.” The noise vibrated through her chest like a purr.

Gilbert allowed his eyes to close as he settled into it. One hundred years with Chrysi meant a bit of desensitization to his fear of cats.

“He does,” she agreed. She tapped a thoughtful pattern over his skull. “Does it bother you? ‘Cause I can get him to stop. Easy.”

He shook his head. He wasn’t expressing himself right.

“No, I mean… the pet name… thing.” Ugh. He wished he didn’t have to explain this. Even just speaking it aloud made his face burn. “It’s just… I feel bad.”

“You already said that. I also still don’t know why.”

He wanted to bury himself in Chrysi’s arms and not think about it. The honeys and the sweethearts and the dears, darlings, loves. For some reason, none of them sounded right when he thought about using them in the place of Chrysi’s name.

Gilbert mumbled, “We’ve been together for over one hundred years and I still only call you Chrysi.”

She paused. “Well… yeah.” Her nails scratched lightly at his scalp. “Have you ever considered that I like being called Chrysi?”

He didn’t say anything. He hadn’t, not really. He hadn’t thought about the way he referred to Chrysi in the first place—the first time that it had been brought to his attention was when Oz complained about it.

She laughed and it warmed Gilbert’s ear.

“We’ve been together for over a century, Gil. I guarantee you, that’s more than enough time for me to have brought it up, if it really bothered me.”

He shifted. “Really?”

The smile in her voice wrapped around him like another hug. “Of course. Why, did Oz make you feel bad about it?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Oh, Raven,” Chrysi groaned. “Oz said you needed to propose to me publicly with a diamond ring, remember? That didn’t work out, now did it?”

“Well,” he started.

“He also dressed up like a girl and followed you when you went out with Dahlia to ruin your relationship with her,” she reminded him.

He grimaced. It wasn’t his best moment. “Oz really wants you as a sister-in-law.”

“And he’s super sweet for that. But he’s already got me as one.”

Gilbert lifted his head.

Chrysi’s eyes lingered on the ceiling, lamplight making her eyelashes angelic. Her mouth relaxed into a faint smile.

“Yeah?” he asked, hopeful.

Her eyes flashed down to him, the curve of her mouth twisting uneven.

“Well, I didn’t stay with you for over a century for no reason. Just call me Chrysi like you always do, and there won’t be any problems.”

He smiled embarrassedly. “It is a bit silly, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Gil.” Chrysi beamed at him. “That’s why I fell for you in the first place.”

#w.mine #s.chrysigil #happy anniversary :) i do not think gil is capable of giving pet names actually

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chryzure · 3 months

Text

winter to the bone

ALT TITLE: bed down with me, undead thing

AUTHOR’S NOTE: 🤕 gil was set up for failure 🤕 sorry you fell in love with her in the process of trying to solve and ensure her murder 🤕🖤

—-—

He’d failed.

Gilbert held her body in hands, sightless, unnerved by how light, how limp, she felt there. The feeling worsened when he stared at the bloody mess of snow where she’d once lain. Dirt had been dug up from under the thick carpet of snow, in great furrows, set five in a row. Clawed gashes, countless of them, filled with red.

She’d died, and miserably too. The seventh time. The final time.

Gilbert hadn’t stopped it.

That’s not fair, he wanted to say, but what point was there to whining? No, it wasn’t fair. Of course it wasn’t fair. An innocent woman died because he’d been chosen as her champion. In what world would that be fair?

Gilbert drew that still body closer to him, even though he knew it was no longer Chrysi. All that spark had left her. No more arched brow, ill-timed amusement, outraged core remained. Her body had already gotten cold—wick with winter.

It was when she felt as cold as the snow-laden sky that Gilbert felt the repeated day of New Year’s Eve break pattern. He’d gotten his dearest wish: 1911 had finally released him.

He only wished the price was not this.

Tears cropped up in his eyes, froze there. More came to melt them, hot with his shame.

“Didn’t save her, then?”

Jolting, Gilbert looked up to see the same golden-eyed man that had set him up to finding the truth behind Chrysi’s death. Behind him stood a living shadow—tall, immovable, with a cloak so engrossing that it swallowed the figure’s frame entirely.

His tears froze to his face and shock had stopped the rest in their tracks.

The golden-eyed man took his silence as confusion.

With a sigh, he gestured to Chrysi’s corpse. “From the mess, I presume she’s died. Again.” He looked to the shadow. “The final time, yes?”

“No,” croaked Gilbert.

“Yes,” the shadow reported stiffly.

His heart hit his rib cage with devastated vigor.

“Another chance,” Gilbert pleaded with the golden-eyed man.

He only stared at him, impassive. Gilbert got the distinct feeling that his begging was only heard by the cloaked figure behind the golden-eyed man—and that certainly wouldn’t be getting him anywhere.

He turned his pleading to him instead. “One more day. She deserves that much.” He swallowed around a lump in his throat. “I’ve almost solved it. She can—maybe she’ll—”

The golden-eyed man cut him off. “No.” He sounded bored and annoyed. “Why would I allow that? You either solve my problem or don’t, but saving her? That was never part of the bargain.”

Gilbert bit his lip. Again, he heard a silent whisper of unfair. “Why?”

The golden-eyed man stared at him coldly. “She’s a pest I’ve tried to rid myself of for ages. That I even bothered to solve her murder was to uphold a deal with another. She had her champion. I chose mine. This, boy”—he gestured to the dead girl as if she were nothing but an unfortunate eyesore— “is over. Seven times over, if we’ve done it properly. No more worrying over it.”

With each word, Gilbert thought of the silver-eyed woman. Just as cold as the golden-eyed man, yes, but he remembered her fanatic enthusiasm for Chrysi. For solving the mystery, for saving her, for keeping her indoors, away from the lakeside…

Gilbert wished he’d taken her deal over the golden-eyed man’s.

Heavy silence fell over the lakeside. The man stood, hulking, over Gilbert and Chrysi’s corpse. His shadowy companion said nothing, but his shoulders lowered.

“That’s it, then,” the golden-eyed man announced. With a lofty gesture, he looked to the sky. “I free you from your service. Time shall resume as normal. Daeshim.” He turned to the shadow. “I leave the rest to you.”

The cloaked figure inclined his head. His shoulders sunk even lower, but the golden-eyed man did not care. As soon as he got confirmation from his companion, he took his leave. It was disconcerting, the way a man so large in stature so easily melted into the words. His broad back couldn’t be glimpsed after he walked past the first line of trees. His breath did not plume. His footsteps were swallowed up by the thick blanket of snow.

The cloaked man didn’t move for a disconcerting number of minutes. He remained where he was, utterly still. Not a flake of snow dared mar his black cloak.

The air, already oppressive, grew heavier. Gilbert miserably held Chrysi close to him, like it would warm her back up. He couldn’t look away from the cloaked man, not for one second.

But between a heavy blink, the man moved without his awareness anyway. When Gilbert opened his icy eyelashes, he found the cloaked man kneeling in front of him. He reached out and pulled Gilbert’s tight grip around Chrysi loose. As much as he resisted him—intentional or not—Gilbert found the cloaked man’s strength immovable, unfightable.

Chrysi’s dead body lolled in his arms. Her head tipped back, revealing the horrible marks on her neck. Blood had dried and frozen along her jawline in an unsightly pattern, black and red and irrationally golden.

Gilbert made a noise in the back of his throat.

The cloaked man took the opportunity to pass a hand over Chrysi’s head. His touch lingered, troubled, at her brow.

A sudden ray of hope lit up in his chest. He couldn’t trust this man, and yet—

“Can you—?”

The cloaked man stopped him with his other hand raised.

“I am not a necromancer. I am an assassin and have some semblance of control over time and space, but I don’t dabble in dead things.”

Gilbert wanted to yell at him. What use was he, then?

As if sensing his thoughts, the cloaked man looked up. Whatever expression lay in the shadows of his hood, Gilbert could not pierce through to see. But he got the skin-crawling sense that he was being studied, down to the muscle, down to the bone.

Then the man looked back down. His hand caressed her forehead, like a brother checking for a fever. “She does, though.”

This news washed over him like a wave. Some part of him tried to reconcile this news with the bright-eyed girl. Behind her cleverness, her sparkling laughter, the wit and love and life, there was a woman versed in the dead. It would’ve shocked him, maybe, but he kept getting stuck on the one universal truth, lying cold and still in his arms.

“But she’s dead,” Gilbert replied, voice cracking.

“She accounted for that. I made her account for it.” This was the first time emotion had entered his voice, a roughening of consonants and a throatiness of vowels. The hand at Chrysi’s head trembled.

A mounting anxiety took up its home in Gilbert’s chest. The wintery night sky pressed down like an anvil, the snowy ground colder and harder than ever before. Just by being close to this strange man, with his unnatural abilities, made calamity worse than ever. He was being suffocated by it.

The cloaked man continued after a beat, after he’d forced his hand to calm, saying, “The deal has been fulfilled. All that is left” —he traced his thumb over Chrysi’s temple— “is to bend the rules.” He paused. “Do you love her?”

The question smacked Gilbert right across the face.

He jolted back from the man, almost dropping Chrysi’s body.

“What?” His face grew too hot at the same time as his hands becoming icy.

The man seemed pensive. At least, that was what Gilbert guessed. Still, the man had not removed his hood.

Finally, he retracted his hand and stood.

“Do not let neither Eris nor Gavriel know about this, Raven,” he said solemnly.

He didn’t wait for an answer.

And Gilbert was too tongue-tied to give one.

—

Gilbert cloistered Chrysi up in her room for the remainder of the week, not caring how intimate it looked for him to be so close to a newly-engaged woman now on her sickbed. The cloaked man—Daeshim—had given him no rules to follow, no commands. All that he’d told Gilbert was that her breath wouldn’t return, that the only indication that she’d come back would be her awakening, and whenever she awoke would be of her own choice.

So Gilbert did not say anything, not even when Chrysi awoke. Not even when she asked him what happened, why she was sick, what she had missed.

Gilbert pulled the blinds back to squint at the slate-grey sky. With the gloom overhead, not even the oppressive blanket of snow sparkled. And a draft was coming in—though he still could not figure from where.

“You know you don’t have to worry about that,” she said quietly behind him.

He placed his hand on the window frame and spread his fingers out. Cold seeped into his dress glove.

She was right. He didn’t have to worry about that.

The cold no longer affected her.

For now, Gilbert prayed that Chrysi did not know what actually befell her the night he’d found her by the lakeside. That was all he allowed himself to worry about. But his emotions were ever so prone to disregarding his will.

He turned back to her, anxiously tugging his glove further down his wrist, no words on his tongue.

He found her peering at her hands, an odd expression on her face. Gilbert couldn’t place it, not precisely—but it was the same sort of odd look Oz would get sometimes, the one that Gilbert could never penetrate. His worry ramped up.

Gilbert thought Chrysi should’ve at least been trembling, confused. He should’ve looked at her and seen that same girl that screamed at the lake after her engagement announcement, when she’d thought no one was around.

The girl he looked at now looked nothing like that. She merely looked bloodless. And… assessing.

As if sensing his concerned gaze on her, she spoke up. “Do you suppose Laura Palmer also felt like this?”

The distinct sense of something else coming unmoored worried Gilbert. “Who?”

His question cracked through Chrysi’s detached study, just a little.

She lifted her head to him, her pale mouth slumping in a thoughtful frown.

His heart twisted at her face, peering at him head on. Her long white curls were hardly a shade lighter than her skin, save for the bruise-blue half-moons under her eyes, and the equally-bluing cut in her lower lip. He didn’t want to know what he would find underneath those heavy curls when he lifted them from the side of her neck.

At least she no longer had blood to make a mess with.

The thought brought him no comfort.

“Oh,” Chrysi said after a moment. Her mouth moved, a little uncertainly, and it made her words sound off-ish. “Right. That won’t come out until 1990.” She paused. “What year is it now?”

Gilbert refrained from making a tiny, strangled laugh. Mostly, he felt a panicked surge in his throat, and he couldn’t be certain if it were his stomach rebelling against him or if his heart had simply decided to jump out for him.

He’d said he’d handle any consequence if it meant Chrysi could be brought back. He wasn’t sure if he meant that anymore.

“1912,” he finally said, subdued.

“Oh?” Chrysi glanced out the window. “Winter. I see. So the Titanic hasn’t occurred yet, either? Oh, but I’ll bet those people felt like this.” She tilted her chin and angled her head just so, like she was listening to something. Her eyes flicked across the cold-caulked ceiling, reading nothingness there. Whatever it was, she nodded once. “Yes. For certain, they did. They had to.”

The panicky lump in his throat moved slightly higher. Inside the silk of his gloves, sweat slicked his skin. “Chrysi? Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

His voice sounded too high, even to himself.

Her gaze returned to him, and now her eyes carried the silver snowstorm she’d seen outside. Gilbert made sure to bite down on his cry of alarm before it left him.

“Well,” she repeated, soft, so soft. “Well.” She hesitated, then smoothed a hand over her coverlet. Her fingers were as pale as bone, her rings dark slashes against them. Her knuckles shared the same bluish cast as her lips, which pressed together, then parted slightly.

He waited for her to speak. She did not.

Nervously, he prompted, “Chrysi?”

A tiny flame burned through her once more.

“Well? No.” Her shoulders lifted in the memory of a deep inhale, but then she paused. No breath stirred her chest. Her pale brow folded. “I don’t think so,” she whispered.

“Oh.” Gilbert didn’t know what to do now. Not really.

She came to conclusions a thousand times faster than he. He wondered why he had to solve her murder when she could’ve been warned. She would’ve then solved it before she had to repeat the day at all—and she would’ve saved her own life in the process too.

Helplessness threatened to suffocate him. It would in a heartbeat, if he let it.

So instead, he fell into the habit of what he’d learned as a child, and he bustled forward. He tucked the blankets tighter around Chrysi and he tried not to feel how cold her body was under his palms. He fluffed her pillows. He shut the blinds.

When he turned back to her, her eyes had lost the winter-silver of the outside. Now they sparkled dully, rubies under a thick layer of dust.

That didn’t stop Chrysi from smiling at his attention. It did nothing to warm her face.

“You can’t fix this, Raven. You can’t save me, and it was a mistake for you to try,” she said fondly. “But I love you all the more for it.”

His heart rattled tightly in his throat. It put an end to at least one of the questions blazing in his mind.

When he opened his mouth, he intended to ask her what she meant. Instead he told her, “You should get some rest.”

Her eyes lit up with that whip-smart sharpness. “Should I?”

He floundered. “Of… of course.”

Would that do anything? It had to, didn’t it? Gilbert didn’t know what to do.

With a tiny, elegant lift of her shoulders, Chrysi leaned back against her newly-fluffed pillows. Her weight buried her into them and she relaxed, until he saw that horrible image of her eyes closed and her blood staining scarlet and gold into her hair.

He blinked long and hard, trying to erase it once more.

It took longer than he’d liked.

Opening his eyes, he sighed. It was meant to ease the tension in his body, like Oscar had tried to teach him when he was thirteen and sometimes couldn’t breathe around his lungs tightening against him, but instead it came out as a sad gust of air that did nothing at all. He settled for looking at Chrysi leaned back in her bed, looking for all the world like a fairy tale princess.

If only she could just be cursed, Gilbert thought dully. At least then a true love’s kiss could absolve him of his ever-climbing heart and the sodden weight of failure.

He picked at the seam of his glove. “You…you said I can’t fix this. But isn’t there something I can do?”

Chrysi tilted her head to the side again, but this time, it burrowed her deeper into the pillows. Her elfin look of mischief didn’t translate properly into that pale face, into those bruised eyes. It made her look tired instead.

“I don’t know,” she answered him.

He nodded once, miserably. He didn’t realize he’d been expecting that answer until she said it, but now that it had been spoken, it was the only truth that could possibly exist in the whole world.

“I would like to be alone,” she added, quieter.

A hollow feeling took place in his chest. Gilbert nodded, eyes averted from her. “Do you need—”

“Raven, I’m perfectly fine.”

Biting his lip, he nodded again.

He felt totally awkward, in that barren room of hers, pale and dim with winter. A tall, gangly, unsightly thing, hovering over an undead woman.

It was that mental image that spurred him to the door, despondent. He paused, briefly, in the doorway, shooing a glance back at her.

“Er, Chrysi?”

She looked up from her pile of blankets and pillows. “Yes?”

Gilbert didn’t think he wanted to know, but he asked anyway: “What is it that… that you think Laura Palmer felt? Or the, um, the Titanic?”

Her brows shot up. He’s not sure what she’s surprised about, but she still didn’t answer his question.

“What you said you felt like?” he prompted again, feeling particularly silly.

“Ah, them.” She turned her gaze back to the window that Gilbert had shuttered. “Dead.”

He froze.

Dead. When did she figure it out? How had she known?

Chrysi turned back and smiled grimly. “That’s all. No need to worry about it, Gil.”

Then she turned over in the bed and pretended to rest, just like she had all those other nights.

#w.mine #memorie.txt #s.chrysigil #yayyyyy posting chrysigil fic finallyyyyy. finished my 7 1/2 deaths fic so now i can show my friend when she’s done w the book..#also juno said it was okay to post so i’m putting faith in her 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 um!!#au.seven and a half deaths

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