Blakeill

“You think so?”

You laugh softly. “You sound nervous.”

“I am nervous.” The honesty of it is so unguarded it catches you completely off guard.

You look at him properly.

He’s not in his armor. You knew he wouldn’t be but knowing it and seeing it are two different things. He’s in a simple linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearm. Loose trousers, worn boots that have clearly seen actual use, a wide leather belt that belongs to the practical world.

His white hair moves freely in the breeze, and the sunlight falls across his face and his collarbones and his bare forearms and he looks like a man standing in his hometown, hoping you’ll love it.

“I wanted it to be perfect,” Phainon admits.

Before you can answer, he presses his lips to your cheek. His hand finds your waist as he straightens like he needed the contact to complete the thought.

“The roads weren’t too rough?” he asks immediately, stepping back into practical concern like it’s safer ground. “I should have arranged for—”

“Phainon.”

“What?”

“You’re worrying.”

“I’m being attentive.”

“You’re worrying about the roads when I’m standing in front of picturesque fields.” You look at him. “I’m fine. Everything is fine. Better than fine.”

“Better than fine,” he repeats quietly.

“Honestly,” you admit, turning back to look at the wheat rolling gold all the way to the glittering line of sea beyond it, “it’s even more than you described.”

He laughs. “Then I clearly need to improve my descriptive abilities.”

You look at him. “Just keep talking.”

Something in his expression does something completely helpless at that, and then he smiles, and offers you his arm, and does exactly that.

He leads you through the village slowly.

Phainon walks differently here. That’s the thing you notice first, and then can’t stop noticing. He points things out as you pass. His voice gets warmer, less measured, slightly faster, like he’s remembering things faster than he can say them and wants to give you all of it.

He gestures toward the fields as you pass a low stone wall that separates the paths from the open wheat.

“I used to help during harvest season,” he says. “With my little sickle. I was very serious about it. Very committed to contributing.”

“You? With a little sickle?”

“I was hardworking.”

You grin at him. “You were tiny.”

“I was strong-willed.”

You snort. Phainon gives you a look of profound mock offence.

“And besides,” he continues, “I ate a great deal afterward. My parents always said I cost more in food than all the other children combined.” He pauses. “In retrospect I think that’s connected to the height.”

You look him over. Phainon notices immediately. His ears turn pink at the tips.

“Well,” you say thoughtfully, “you are very tall.”

“That is—yes. Objectively.”

“And strong.”

“That part is also,” he says, with slightly less composure than he started with, “a matter of record.”

“And gorgeous.”

He nearly loses a step. “I,” he says, with great care, “did not say anything about gorgeous.”

“No,” you agree, completely innocent. “I did.”

The look he gives you after that is so openly, helplessly fond that your heart does something inconvenient. Phainon opens his mouth, closes it, appears to be searching for a response and finding that none of his usual ones are adequate for the situation.

You lean up before he can recover and press a quick kiss to his cheek.

Phainon laughs, and you feel it in your chest.

Please kiss me properly, you think.

He doesn’t. Not yet. Instead he finds your hand, wraps his fingers around yours and keeps walking.

One moment you’re rounding a corner past a house and the next there’s a large white shape launching itself at Phainon’s legs with the unrestrained enthusiasm of an animal for whom the concept of dignity simply doesn’t exist.

Phainon catches him easily, one hand steadying him before he can take out his knees, and he responds by attempting to consume his face.

“Snowy,” Phainon says.

Snowy ignores him completely and turns his full attention to you.

You go down to one knee immediately. Snowy is impossibly fluffy, the kind of white that exists in cotton and clouds. He puts both paws on your knee and licks your face before you can prepare for it.

You laugh, hands already buried in his fur. “Hello. Hello, you’re very—” He licks you again. “You’re very enthusiastic.”

You look up at Phainon over Snowy’s head. At the white fluffy hair, the bright eyes, the absolute guileless warmth radiating from every inch of him.

“Phainon,” you say.

“Yes.”

“He looks exactly like you.”

Phainon stares at you. “He does not—”

“The hair,” you say. “The eyes. The way he looked at me when he came around that corner—”

“Hah, well, he is a dog.”

“He is a very handsome, very endearing being who apparently decided I was the most important person in the vicinity.” You scratch behind Snowy’s ears and he practically melts onto the ground. “Sound familiar?”

The look on his face is caught between genuine offence and the helpless amusement of someone who knows, on some level, that he’s lost this argument.

Phainon tilts his head, grinning helplessly, visibly regaining his composure. Instead of waiting for his reply, you ruffle his hair. He presses his lips together… until a little sound escapes him. A giggle. He looks so handsome in this moment that you forget how to think.

Snowy chooses this exact moment to roll completely onto his back at your feet, demanding further attention. Phainon crouches beside you and he immediately redirects the rolling onto him.

You watch him scruff Snowy’s ears and murmur something to him you can’t quite hear, his voice dropping into that soft register, and feel something pull warmly through your chest.

He’s happy, you think. Right now, in this moment, he is simply happy.

Snowy runs off again eventually, and Phainon shows you the outside of the house where he grew up.

It’s modest and sturdy. It also looks very comfortable. Phainon stands looking at it for a moment.

“I’ll introduce you to my parents later,” he says. “Properly.” There is something slightly bashful in the way he says it. “My mom will want to feed you and my dad will want to ask you a great number of questions about Okhema and you and us, and I would rather, if it’s all the same to you, show you some things first.” He glances at you. “Before I have to share your attention.”

You feel warmth bloom through you at that. “Lead the way,” you say.

The slight relief in his exhale is very endearing.

Before leading you farther, Phainon pauses at the courtyard near the center of the village. The statue of Oronyx stands there. Phainon looks at it for a moment.

“I used to leave things here,” he says, almost to himself. “Before anything I was nervous about.” A small, self-aware smile. “Which perhaps should have indicated something about my study habits.”

“Your study habits,” you say.

He turns toward you. “I was not always the most diligent student.”

You stare at him. “I don’t believe that for a moment.”

“It is entirely true.” He says it with great equanimity. “I spent an unreasonable amount of time staring out windows and thinking about things that were not the lesson. My teacher was very patient with me.” He glances back at the statue. “More patient than I deserved, I think.”

He leads you on after that, away from the main square, until a smaller building comes into view.

You slow as you pass it. “You studied here?”

“Studied,” Phainon says, “is a generous interpretation.”

You laugh. He tilts his head with the expression of a man who has made peace with this particular truth about himself.

“Miss Pythias used to tell me that curiosity was not a flaw, as long as I learned to follow it somewhere worthwhile.” His voice shifts into something fond and careful. “She was the one who first noticed I might benefit from wider horizons than Aedes Elysiae could provide. That if the Grove would take me, I should go.” He pauses. “She said it in a way that made it sound like a compliment. I suspect in retrospect it may have also been a practical suggestion.”

“She encouraged you to think for yourself?”

“Repeatedly. With great emphasis.” His mouth curves. “Which, as several people since have noted, I took somewhat too thoroughly to heart.”

“She sounds like someone who saw you clearly,” you say.

He considers that. “I think she saw what I might become more clearly than I did sometimes. Which is either wisdom or optimism, and she had enough of both that I couldn’t always tell the difference.”

You look at him, at the late light on his profile, the easy looseness of him in this place, the way he speaks about the past here.

And you think of all the things this mind has held. The way he talks in debates that people remember for weeks. The way he talked to you, the first time, and you understood immediately that this was someone whose mind worked differently, moved faster, found angles you hadn’t considered.

“You do have a fascinating way of speaking,” you say without thinking.

He stops walking and turns to look at you. “What?”

“Your mind. The way it works.” You’re smiling but you mean it, and you think he can tell. “The way you follow a thought through to somewhere unexpected and then make it sound inevitable. I think I would have liked listening to you even then. Even at a young age.”

Phainon looks at you for a long moment with an expression caught between something pleased and something slightly undone.

“You,” he says finally, with great care, “have a remarkable ability to destabilize what I had always considered fairly unshakable oratory skills.”

“Good,” you say and grin.

Phainon makes a quiet sound that might be a laugh and might be something more helpless. Then he seems to make a decision. “Come here,” he says.

He takes you around the back of the schoolhouse, through taller grass, down a narrow slope along the base of an old stone wall, past a cluster of wildflowers growing in the sheltered angle where the wall meets the foundation.

Then he crouches down, pushes aside a curtain of overgrown stems, and lifts a loose plank from the ground.

You stare at it. “No,” you say.

Phainon looks up at you, pleased with himself. “Yes.”

Beneath the plank, in the dry earth below, is a wooden box. Small, roughly made, the lid fitted with a leather hinge gone stiff with age. He lifts it out carefully, as though it might be fragile, and sets it on the ground between you.

“You hid a box behind your school.”

“I was preparing,” he says, “to create a tale like no other.” He says it with perfect lightness, with that voice he uses for things that are also, underneath, entirely true.

You sit down in the grass beside him. He opens the lid.

Inside: a wooden sword, small enough to fit a child’s hand, the hilt wrapped in cord that has mostly unraveled. Several smooth stones of various sizes, each one clearly selected for some quality invisible to anyone but the collector. A folded piece of paper, yellowed and soft with age. A tiny carved warrior with a greatsword.

“Don’t tell me you carved during class?” you ask him, barely able to contain a smile.

“Only during the less engaging lessons. Like history.”

“Phainon.”

“In my defense,” he says, with tremendous seriousness, “the warrior was progressing very well.”

“The sword,” you say, still laughing to yourself.

“Every hero needs a sword,” Phainon says with great dignity.

“It’s the size of my arm.”

“I was small.” He picks it up, turns it over. “I made this one myself too. With a knife I borrowed from my dad and returned without telling him I’d used it.” A brief, guilty smile. “I practiced with it against a hidden wall, spending the whole Month of Freedom on it, before I decided I needed a real one.”

“And the stones?”

“Treasure,” he says without hesitation. “Obviously. Payment for completed heroic deeds.” He picks one up and weighs it in his palm. “I charged a fair rate. Two stones per rescued animal, three per monster.”

“How many monsters were there?”

“An unusually high number, it turned out.” He sets the stone back. “The fields were full of them.”

You laugh, and watch him watch you laugh, and something in his expression goes quiet and warm the way it does when he thinks he’s looking at something he wants to keep.

He picks up the folded paper but doesn’t open it.

“Miss Pythias assigned us to write about our dreams and what we wanted to become,” he says. “I wrote several pages and she told me to try again with fewer words and more honesty.” His thumb moves over the fold. “The second attempt was shorter.” A pause. “I wrote: someone worth the stories.”

The playfulness in his voice is still there, but it’s a layer over something more careful, looking sideways at its own weight.

You look at him. At the box in the grass between you, with its small wooden sword and its counted stones and its child’s version of treasure.

“You’d always be my hero,” you say.

Phainon looks at you. His mouth opens, then closes. For approximately three full seconds, the most eloquent person you’ve ever met produces nothing.

The faint red at the tips of his ears spreads, perceptibly, toward his cheeks. “I—” he starts. “That is—” He stops and clears his throat. “You cannot simply—” There is something that might be a laugh trying to surface. “That is not—”

He gives up. He stands, sets the box down, and then he turns and lifts you, hands at your waist, raising you off the ground like this is a perfectly reasonable and proportionate response to the situation, which from his expression he has entirely concluded it is.

You grab his shoulders on instinct. “Phainon—”

“It is only fitting,” he says, and his voice has recovered its full equilibrium now, warm and wry and threaded with laughter he’s still containing, “that your very personal Deliverer, whose stated purpose has always been to bring about a better future—” His eyes are bright. His cheeks are still faintly red. “—should fulfill his duties by carrying you, specifically, toward what I believe will be an excellent afternoon.”

He shifts you slightly, settling your weight with an ease that is, frankly, unreasonable. “Which begins at the shore. If you’ll permit.”

You stare at him from your new elevation. “Did you just,” you say slowly, “turn a genuine moment of vulnerability into a formal announcement?”

“I turned it,” he says, already walking, “into an action. Which is better.”

“Phainon.”

“Mm.”

“Your cheeks are still red.”

“That,” he says, with tremendous dignity, “is the blazing sun.”

You rest your arms around his shoulders and press your smile into the side of his head, and Phainon laughs and carries you down toward the shore.

When he sets you down again, you walk with your hands still linked, following the line where the wheat gives way to rougher grass and then to the dock reaching out into the glittering water. A single boat sits moored at the far end of the dock, rocking gently. The water is very clear and very cold-looking and very blue.

“This,” Phainon says, with the particular satisfaction of someone presenting their best argument, “is where I used to fish with my dad.”

You look at the dock and the water below it. The considerable drop between them. “From the dock?”

“And from the rocks in the Month of Everday.” He’s already moving toward the edge, gesturing with unselfconscious enthusiasm.

“The fish here taste better than anywhere else in Amphoreus,” he says with complete conviction. “Sardines, anchovies, goatfish, snapper—”

He keeps going, naming them one after another with the earnest seriousness of someone discussing something genuinely important.

You find yourself watching the movement of his mouth instead of listening properly. The sea breeze catches in his hair. His eyes brighten even further.

“…and grilled over an open fire with enough herbs,” he continues, “they’re perfect.”

You smile before you can help it.

Phainon notices immediately. “What?”

“Nothing.” You take a step closer to him. “You’re just very cute when you get excited about things.”

His expression does something helplessly fond again.

“Will it make you happy,” he asks after a moment, softer now, “if I catch one for you?”

The sincerity of the question catches you completely off guard. You nod before your brain fully catches up.

His smile widens instantly. “Then I’ll catch one for you.” And before you have fully registered what is happening, he grins and pulls his shirt over his head.

Your thoughts stop.

But Phainon is already taking three quick steps and launching himself off the edge with a complete absence of hesitation, arms extended, and then he hits the water and goes under. And you’re standing on the dock staring at the place where he disappeared into the glittering cold blue and your heart is doing something rather alarming in your chest.

Shortly after, he surfaces. He pushes the water from his eyes with one hand, shakes his head, white hair plastered to his forehead. He’s grinning and then he ducks under again.

You wait. The dock rocks gently. The late sun catches the water.

He surfaces a moment later, closer to the dock, one hand raised above the water. He’s holding a fish.

You stare at him. “You—” You have no words. “You just—”

“I caught it,” he announces, with such transparent pride that you have to press your lips together.

“You jumped into the sea!”

“It was efficient.”

“You frightened me!”

“But I caught the fish,” he says again, lifting it slightly higher.

You laugh helplessly.

Phainon climbs up with a fluid ease that suggests this is not the first time, water streaming from him, and the afternoon sunlight catches everything: the wet line of his shoulders, the particular way his wet hair falls across his forehead, the droplets running slowly down the column of his throat, sunlight catching briefly on the sun mark.

Your thoughts are not functioning normally.

He notices. “Oh,” he says softly, looking at you with that particular attention. “Now you’re staring.”

“I’m—” You clear your throat. “I’m observing.”

“Hm.” He steps closer, water still dripping from his hair, eyes warm with something that knows exactly what it’s doing. “You’re very distracted for someone claiming composure.”

“You’re very smug for someone standing there soaked.”

“I think,” he says thoughtfully, “those are not mutually exclusive.”

He leans in without warning and presses a quick, cool kiss to your cheek and then immediately turns and starts toward the village path, fish in hand.

You stand there for a full three seconds. “Phainon.”

“I’m bringing this to my dad,” he calls back, bright and entirely innocent. “He’ll want to start the fire. I’ll be back in a moment.”

You watch him go, wet hair and bare shoulders and that impossible grin when he glances back at you, and think something very incoherent and extremely sincere about the next several hours of your life.

Phainon comes back changed and radiant.

He’s pulled on clean clothes, his hair is half-dried and going everywhere. He’s walking quickly, and his face when he spots you has that specific open brightness only reserved for you.

“The fish will be ready soon,” he says, falling into step beside you immediately, his arm brushing yours. Then, without preamble, he presses a soft kiss to your temple.

You blink. He keeps walking like nothing happened. His hand settles at your waist like it belongs there. Neither of you comments on it.

You wander through the village as the afternoon thickens toward evening.

He talks with his hands when he gets into it, gesturing loosely, his voice getting looser, warmer, a little faster when something amuses him.

You drift closer without meaning to. Your shoulder touches his arm. Then his arm comes around your shoulders, easy and warm.

“The wheat grew differently every year,” he’s saying. “You could tell what kind of season it had been just from looking. My dad has a saying about it—”

He notices, mid-sentence, that you’ve pressed your face briefly against his shoulder. He stops talking.

You feel him go very still. Then, slowly, his arm tightens around you. His cheek comes to rest against the top of your head, just for a moment, and the hand at your shoulder squeezes once.

“You fit here,” he murmurs. “Remarkably well.”

“In Aedes Elysiae?”

“With me.” The way he says it settles somewhere in your chest and doesn’t move.

He presses his lips to your hair, and then keeps walking. His arm stays where it is.

He takes you to the wheat field later.

The sun is going down behind the hills, laying gold across everything, and the sea in the distance has turned from blue to bronze.

Phainon stops at the edge of the high ground where the field ends and the land slopes gently toward the water. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just stands there, hands loose at his sides, looking at it. “This,” he says, finally, “is my favorite place in Aedes Elysiae.”

The wheat moves around you in long, slow waves. The wind carries salt and the warm dry smell of grain. Below, the sea breathes.

“When things became too loud in the village,” he continues, “or too loud in here—” He touches his temple briefly. “—I used to come out and hide among the wheat. Sometimes for hours.”

“You hid in wheat fields.”

He laughs softly. “Frequently. I found it very restorative.”

“And no one came looking?”

“My mom always knew where I was.” He chuckles, and you notice how young he looks in this moment. How glad.

You sit down in the wheat. It’s taller than you expected up close, the stalks rising around you when you settle, the heads of grain swaying overhead.

Phainon looks at you for a moment. Then he sits beside you, close enough that his shoulder is against yours, and stretches his legs out in front of him.

You lean against his chest. His arms come around you immediately, both of them, pulling you in, his chin coming to rest at the top of your head. You feel his exhale move all the way through you.

For a while, neither of you speaks.

“I think,” Phainon says, very quietly, “I missed you every moment you weren’t here.”

You tilt your head up to look at him.

His expression when he looks back at you is open. You are close enough to see the particular quality of blue in his eyes in this light, the slight unevenness in his breathing.

Phainon goes still suddenly. His gaze drops to your cheek. “There’s something—” He pauses, then reaches out, fingers coming lightly toward your face. “There’s something on your face. Hold still.”

“Where?”

“Here.” His fingertips brush near the corner of your cheekbone, so soft you feel it more as warmth than pressure. “Close your eyes for me.”

The tone alone does something to your heartbeat.

You close your eyes. For a moment, there is just the wind in the wheat and his warmth beside you and the sound of your own pulse. Then his fingers trace slowly over your skin.

“There,” he murmurs. His hand doesn’t move.

You open your eyes. He’s very close, watching you with an expression that has nothing in it except the truth. “You know,” he says, his thumb brushing your cheek once, “I used to think this place was beautiful because it was quiet.”

The wheat moves around you.

“And now?” you ask.

His expression is everything. Warm and undone and so full of you that you can feel it like pressure against the center of your chest.

“Now,” Phainon says, “I think it’s beautiful because you’re here.”

Then he closes the distance, and there’s nothing hesitant about it.

The kiss is soft. His hand cups your face gently. And then you lean closer, and his breath catches, and then the last carefully maintained restraint simply dissolves.

His hands tighten at your waist. He pulls you in and kisses you again and it’s deeper, more urgent, the long-held want of it finally getting somewhere.

You feel him exhale against your mouth like he’s been carrying that breath for weeks. His hand slides into your hair, fingers spreading at the back of your head, and he angles toward you and kisses you like the soft version was a draft and this is what he meant.

You go with it, both of you, the wheat moving in long waves around you, the sea and the golden light and the wind.

Phainon makes a low sound against your lips when you pull him close, so unguarded that it goes straight through you. And then you’re lying back in the wheat and he’s above you, forearms braced on either side of you, and he kisses you and you kiss him back.

The world contracts to the warm weight of him and the way the grain stalks rise overhead like the walls of your very own golden room.

Phainon keeps making small startled sounds every time you draw him closer, your legs sliding between his thighs, your hands roaming over his back like you’re grounding yourself through him.

At some point you roll, and the wheat closes around you both and you’re laughing, the helpless half-breathless kind, and he’s laughing too, forehead dropping to your shoulder before he lifts his head and looks at you.

His hair is completely wrecked. There’s a strand of wheat caught in it. His face is flushed, eyes bright, and he is looking at you with such open, undisguised happiness that something in you aches.

Wild, you think, distantly. His cheeks are red.

Phainon laughs again breathlessly, forehead coming down to rest against yours. He stays like this for a moment before pulling back just enough to look at your face, tracing it like he’s memorizing something he’s afraid of forgetting. “You have wheat in your hair.”

“You have wheat in your hair.”

“That seems like a natural outcome.” He grins, visibly pleased with himself. Then he reaches up and picks it out carefully, and you watch his hands, and then watch him watch you, and then neither of you says anything at all for a moment.

“You know,” he says softly, thumb brushing your cheek for the second time this evening, except nothing about it is incidental now, “I used to come up here alone. I had never once considered that it might be better with company.”

“And now?”

His smile is unguarded, belonging to the boy who hid in wheat fields and ate too much and grew too tall and learned to carry the world and never quite stopped missing this place and this breeze.

“Now,” he says, “I would like to revise my position significantly.”

You pull him back down, capturing his lips once more. Phainon comes willingly, laughing into the kiss.

The wheat moves around you. The sea glitters below. The last of the sun goes gold and then amber and then something softer, and neither of you goes anywhere for a very long time.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)

At first it is reasonable. Simple things. Bread. Honey cakes. Sweet biscuits. Something to occupy your hands before you dissolve into a puddle of longing on the kitchen floor.

Then, while icing a cookie, your eyes drift toward a photograph sitting on the counter.

Phainon smiles back at you from it, warm-eyed and bright, caught mid-laugh at something you’d said.

And your brain, unfortunately, produces a thought.

I could probably make that out of icing.

Things have escalated significantly since then.

Four days in, there are entire batches. Tiny Phainons line the kitchen counters in various stages of completion, some successful, some deeply concerning.

Early attempts had looked vaguely haunted. One batch had accidentally emerged from the oven with expressions of profound existential suffering: wide-eyed and somehow enraged, like small edible tragedies.

You’d eaten those first.

The newer ones, however, are getting frighteningly accurate.

You have somehow reached the point where Okhema’s citizens recognize you as “the person making Deliverer cookies” and engage with the project as if it is a matter of some civic importance.

“More gold detailing,” an elderly woman had advised just that afternoon, examining your latest attempt with the gravity of a master appraising a commission. “His armor needs more structure around the shoulders. And the eyes—you see, the irises have those little sun rays around them. Very distinctive. You want to capture this.”

You had nodded gravely. You had, admittedly, spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to get his eyes right already.

One shopkeeper, upon receiving a gifted batch, had gone quiet for a long moment before saying, very softly, that he would display them in a place of honor and mean it completely.

Now, standing in your kitchen in the middle of the night, you carefully pipe tiny gold accents along a larger cookie version of Phainon’s chestplate.

“This is becoming unhealthy,” you inform yourself quietly, and then add the sun mark on his neck anyway.

The ridiculous part is that you are actually improving.

The white icing of his hair has texture now. The blue of his eyes finally matches properly after three failed attempts involving entirely the wrong shade. You’ve even worked out how to pipe the little gold ornamentation near his collar, and the shoulder guards of this latest batch are, frankly, architectural achievements.

One cookie in particular looks so accurate that you’d felt briefly emotional while decorating it, which is probably a sign that you need him home immediately and also that you should perhaps get more sleep.

By the time exhaustion finally wins, the kitchen smells like sugar and vanilla and warm spice, and trays of tiny edible Phainons cover nearly every available surface in various states of completion.

You wrap a blanket around yourself, settle onto the couch for just a moment—

—and that is where Phainon finds you.

He steps inside quietly, the careful exhaustion of a long journey in the set of his shoulders, already reaching to unfasten his armor as his eyes move instinctively through the room.

Then they find the blanket-covered shape asleep on the couch. Something in his chest loosens all at once.

He crosses the room without sound, crouching beside you, and brushes a few strands of hair from your forehead with the particular gentleness he reserves for moments when he thinks no one is watching.

You stir faintly but don’t wake. Your face is relaxed in sleep, and he stays there for a moment just looking at you. Twelve days is not so long, in the scope of things. It feels longer than it is.

He adjusts the blanket around your shoulders, presses a soft kiss to your forehead… and pauses.

There is a smell. Sweet. Spiced. Something baked very recently and in considerable quantity.

Phainon straightens slowly and turns toward the kitchen. “…Huh.”

The counters are covered in cookies shaped like him.

Miniature edible versions of Phainon arranged across the kitchen in neat rows. Some upright, some mid-decoration, one slightly overbaked but still wearing an incredibly detailed recreation of his armor, right down to the shoulder guards.

He stares. Then he picks one up carefully.

The icing eyes look back at him. The tiny gold accents along the armor are meticulous. Even the collar ornamentation has been replicated with what appears to be genuine artistic investment.

His mouth twitches. “Oh no,” he whispers to absolutely nobody.

His shoulders start shaking.

The first laugh escapes before he can stop it. By the second he has to put the cookie down. By the third his legs have apparently stopped functioning and he is leaning against the counter for structural support.

The sound wakes you instantly.

You jerk upright beneath the blanket, disoriented for exactly three seconds. And then you see him in the kitchen, looking at the cookies.

“Phainon?”

He looks up, still visibly failing to recover.

You follow his gaze to the counter. To the cookies. To the one in his hand. To the entire, damning spread of them.

Horror floods through you. “No.”

He makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a wheeze.

“It’s not what it looks like,” you say immediately, already throwing off the blanket and standing.

At that exact moment, something slips from the folds of it. A half-eaten Phainon cookie hits the floor face-first.

Phainon stares at it. Then at you. Then at the cookie.

That is it.

He laughs so hard he nearly doubles over, one hand braced on the counter, the other pressed to his mouth in a completely futile attempt at containment.

“Don’t laugh!” you cry, mortified past all reason. “I was emotional!”

“I can see that,” he manages, voice entirely unsteady. “There are at least forty of me.”

“Those were practice batches!”

“That somehow makes this more impressive.”

“Phainon—”

“The craftsmanship,” he says, picking up another cookie and examining it with an expression of genuine wonder that only makes things worse. “This one even has the collar detail—”

“I had help!” you cry. “The baker gave me advice! She was very invested!”

He looks up at you. “The baker.”

“She said your armor needed more structure at the shoulders.”

He stares at you for a long, quiet moment. Then he starts laughing again.

You bury your face in your hands. “I cannot believe you came home tonight.”

“Oh, I’m very glad I did.” He sets the cookie down and picks up one of the earlier attempts. Slightly lopsided and haunted around the eyes. “This one looks particularly distressed.”

“That was day two,” you mutter through your fingers.

“Ah.” He nods with great solemnity. “The yearning phase.”

“Phainon.”

He laughs again, softer this time.

Then his expression changes.

The amusement stays, but something else settling beneath it as he looks slowly around the kitchen. At the trays. The icing tools. The painstaking gold details that would have taken hours. At all the ridiculous, entirely sincere evidence of how much you’d missed him.

His gaze comes back to you, and it’s soft in the particular way that still catches you off guard sometimes.

“You really missed me,” he says.

Your dignity has fully abandoned you at this point. “Maybe.”

“I missed you too, dawnlight,” he says softly. And then he picks up one of the cookies and takes a deliberate bite.

“Phainon!”

He chews thoughtfully. “These are excellent.”

“You can’t just eat yourself!”

“The icing-to-cookie ratio is very well balanced.” He considers the remaining half. “Did you use cardamom?”

“That’s not the point—”

“It should be. It’s impressive.” He finishes it with an expression of genuine appreciation that is somehow the most absurd thing that has happened tonight, which is a significant achievement.

By the end of the evening you are both sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by disastrously detailed cookies. Phainon listens, deeply entertained, to increasingly specific explanations about icing consistency and structural challenges and why his hair had been, objectively, the hardest element to render accurately.

He kisses you halfway through the explanation about the shoulder guards. Long enough that you lose the thread entirely.

When he finally pulls back, still smiling, he glances at the remaining cookies. “Can I keep one?”

You stare at him. “You want to preserve a cookie version of yourself.”

“I think,” Phainon says, with great thoughtfulness, “that being loved to this particular extent may be the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.” He looks at you, warm and entirely sincere. “I find I don’t want to eat all the evidence.”

Your face goes completely warm.

He smiles at that, then reaches over and picks up one of the more detailed cookies. He holds it beside his face and tilts his head.

“Do you think this one captures my good side?”

You throw a dishcloth at him.

Phainon laughs and catches it, and the kitchen is warm and sweet-smelling and full of tiny edible versions of him, and everything is exactly as it should be.

⋆ ✦ ⋆

A/N: Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. :)