@brokenmagxc / ind. private, selective, fandomless original character / mutuals only, slow reply. est. 2014. reboot 2024. loved by abi. / please see navigation for details. plotting is encouraged, memes are accepted !!

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you are: soul-bound, destiny seeking, lost. curated by callous hands. fulgurite, husked power in yellowing sand, glass blown. casketed, torn asunder. like icarus to water, faithful to the fall, mistaking descent for devotion. heaven evades you. reaching and recoiling. sea-salted and drowning. drinking blood for your guileless naivety, seeking penance in duty. the unsavable savior.

his back aches. the pad does nothing to absorb the blow, spine arching against the momentum as the air is knocked clean out of him. for a second, the room spins. sleeplessness stacks over old injury. there is a numbness in his shoulder and a sharp, shooting pain down his leg. then his vision rights itself. he breathes.

the operative looms over him. for one ugly moment, arthur considers throwing him into the wall—all force and fury and the tired crankiness of him, patience worn thin and headache rising. he fights the urge, though not well enough to hide the way the edges of his eyes brighten for half a second before settling back to brown.

“ please don’t shoot me, ” he says instead, tone dry.

he rolls to his feet in a practiced motion that mostly hides the pain. thirty-six hours active with barely a stop between, and now this—test, the room says. all sterile walls and clean confinement. the kind of measurement men use when they want to know how many teeth it takes to make something bleed.

“ i’m practiced. i’m not invincible. ”

arthur huffs, wiping sweat from his brow. his eyes move from holster to hands. watching. then glance once at the camera tucked in the far corner of the room. there is a moment of calculation before he looks back at the mask staring at him. whatever the other man is thinking, it makes him uneasy. he rolls his shoulder once and widens his stance again.

it happens before arthur can think better of it. alex is too close. a silhouette of ruined grace and sharp edges, saying something blunt enough to be cruel if arthur had not learned to hear the subtly of care hiding underneath it. there is blood at the corner of the angel’s mouth—or maybe shadow. or maybe some old remnant of heaven finally remembering it had a body.

arthur reaches up to wipe it away.

his thumb brushes skin. alex stills. the air between them folds strangely, warm and charged, and arthur looks at him for one second too long. just a second. the ground seems to tilt under him, the windows catching the sudden gold of his eyes and bouncing it back like sunlight.

then he kisses him. quick. sudden. helplessly soft.

the moment breaks almost as soon as it begins. arthur pulls back with wide eyes, color blooming across his face, the gold stuttering out. “ i— ” he starts, then stops entirely. his hand is still near alex’s mouth. slowly, as if embarrassed by the evidence of himself, arthur lowers it.

it is her shoulder first. warm. his head fits there like a piece of a puzzle clicking into place. tired, always tired, arthur succumbs to the offer without protest for once. and as he finds a spot of comfort against her skin, he feels a tenderness fill him that he does not know how to hold.

she smells like smoke and gun oil and clean antiseptic. beneath the touch, she stills, chest rising and falling in slow breaths. his shaggy twine hair spills over the slope of her shoulder. eyes flutter shut. all he can think about is the wave of reprieve that slams into him, sudden and overwhelming, making his knees shake even as they sit against brick with their legs flat on the concrete and their bodies aligned at the hip. relief surges so strongly that it nearly knocks the air out of him. somehow, she steadies the beat of his heart. thud, thud, thud. it echoes in his pulse and into his ears. alive, he thinks. i am alive. and for once, it does not hurt to be reminded.

arthur kisses her shoulder first.

it is so instinctive that he does not even realize the motion. one second, his head is pressed into her, eyes closed, expression briefly serene. the next, his lips find the warm skin through soot and sweat, and he feels her tense beneath him. she turns her head to look over. he opens his eyes to her gaze. their faces are barely a breath apart.

heat creeps into his face, lashes fluttering over the tangle of brown-gold color sweeping through his eyes in his own fluster. he blinks once, twice, then thinks better than to take the moment back. instead, his pale hand finds hers over her thigh, tenderly placing his fingers over her own. a stuttering breath fans over her lips.

then he leans.

the moment hangs between them with the same tenderness that filled him prior, only now it blazes behind his teeth. her lips are soft. her hand is warm. he leans further, pressing himself against her. his other hand finds the side of her face, brushing hair behind her ear with a care that trembles at the edges. firmer now, he presses his lips into hers.

for just a second, he swears she can feel the thump of his heart against his mouth, pounding like an animal desperate to be let out of its cage.

he hums.

then, before he can get swept away by the contact, he pulls back. just barely. enough for their noses to bump, for his hand to stay in her hair, for his eyes—closed when they kissed—to flutter open, glittering golds dying back down to clay browns as the feeling in him finds ground somewhere against the ribs.

“ i can't. ” arthur says, and it leaves him like a breathless whistle between the teeth. he is pacing as she goes on and on, some explanation or another, some ultimatum, some knife under his ribs to press cold steel against the bleeding heart of him. she is telling him to leave her there. “ i can't. ” fiercer, angry. he shakes his head.

‘ why ?? ’

he should listen, he knows. better for him. better for her. they can't escape their fates but maybe they can escape each other. leave before the death spiral wears them thin. but he sees her, red ink underlining his name like a promise and a threat all at once. he sees her. and she is shackled against the same machine by the hands just as he is by the throat and he can't leave her here.

his heart thuds in his ears. she shouts. his eyes widen.

hands move before the mind catches up, catching her coat, pulling her closer with some fevered desperation. “ no, ” he hisses, shaking. “ no, i will not leave you here like you're the only answer to a bad problem, because you're not just some tool or variable or bait to be dangled on a string. i see you. you're here and you're human and you care and i will not, ada—i will not leave you here to them. ”

their faces are close. he's reeled her in by the tremble of his hands. she's looking up at him with dark eyes and red lips and there's a flicker of uncertainty behind her face that breaks whatever in him was still hanging onto reason. he surges forth, lips on lips and hands gripping for dear life, holding her still where his knees threaten to give and his breath leaves him. he kisses her. and it hurts. but he can't stop himself. pulls back just to kiss her again. then steps away so abruptly that the air between them washes them in a sudden chill. his eyes are bright—there's gold eating at the center of them, spreading outward. he looks surprised. and then, he looks so sure that the glance seems to break the tension in the room clean in half.

cloud has blood in his hair. that is what arthur gets stuck on. the smear of red making blonde locks pink, death clinging to pale skin in ugly, stubborn streaks. the gold in the slayer’s eyes gutters. cloud is huffing from the encounter, battle-worn and bright with breath, sword slowly cleaned of its violence and sheathed with little qualm. but arthur only stares at him—sweat-slicked, alive, frighteningly alive—and something in him snaps open at the sight.

he crosses the space in three quick strides.

a gloved hand finds its place in the other’s hair, brushing the blood away with a jittery, urgent care. pale streaks follow the motion of his fingers. arthur looks at them once, then at cloud’s face, and whatever restraint had been holding him by the throat finally gives.

he pulls cloud down to him.

the kiss lands sudden and sure, enough to startle even himself with the force of it. his breath catches against the other’s mouth, a small, helpless sound swallowed between them. he does not let cloud run from him until they are both out of breath and laughing in disbelief.

his head is ringing—no, not ringing, splitting. the sound is too full to belong to one bell or one shrine or one ruin. voices overlap in the hollow of his skull until each one wears the shape of his name. a woman’s softness—arthur ?? a man’s old, stern concern—arthur, what is happening ?? something lower beneath them both, a demon’s whisper or the dark learning how to speak kindly: you are coming apart. you cannot be everywhere at once.

the brown of his eyes stirs. then burns.

gold spills through the iris in a sudden, blinding bloom. arthur sees flame. not one flame—all of it. the fire at the shrine, ringed in ash and thrones. the old stone by the fallen giants, wind pulling at a cloak that is and is not his. the shape of a castle gone hollow around its king. here, too—here most of all—swamp-stench and singed cloth, kind hands, the rough warmth of a pyromancer close enough to touch.

‘ arthur. ’ closer this time. beside him.

his soul is burning.

heart thuds in its fleshy cage, alive and spluttering despite itself. he gasps and reaches before the rest of him understands the motion, fingers catching hard around laurentius’ arm. balance. warmth. presence. the world lurches beneath his feet, and for one awful breath he is in too many places to belong to any of them. the corpse of astora with ash on her tongue and a name wearing thin. drangleic’s long shadow dragging after him, crown heavy with rot and memory. hollowing made flesh, kneeling in firelight while a pyromancer says his name like it might still be enough to save him.

slipping, he thinks. he is slipping.

he cannot leave yet. he cannot leave. not when he has only just remembered what it feels like to be wanted somewhere. “ laur— ” the name breaks in his mouth. warmth. there. there.

he hones in on it like air for the drowning, like a hand through fog, like a bonfire he has crawled toward on broken knees without knowing he was praying. laurentius looks down at him and arthur cannot breathe through the tenderness of it. cannot survive another world trying to take him by the throat. cannot bear the thought of becoming one more echo in one more age where he loved too late and left too soon.

so he reaches.

brazenly. desperately. perhaps already half-lost to the yearning in his chest. his other hand catches in cloth and pulls the man down, and arthur kisses him hard and quick, stealing the breath from his lungs to fuel his own.

here.

here.

here.

the visions shudder. the shrine dims. the giants fall quiet. the king in the dark turns his face away. for one suspended heartbeat, there is only laurentius’ mouth, the rough warmth of him, the proof of a body in front of him and not memory, not prophecy, not another cursed version of himself bleeding through time.

when they break, arthur is gasping.

his forehead leans against the pyromancer’s, trembling with the effort of remaining. the gold in his eyes gutters like a flame starved of air, bright and frightened and finally, finally dimming back toward brown. his fingers do not let go.

they barter, brief and almost silly, for a chance to understand the strangeness sitting in the middle of their case. arthur is used to strange. tired, reluctant mysticism sits around him like a second coat. what he is not used to is the other man’s insistence—the forward lean of involvement, the careful offer of an exchange where most men would have simply tried to take. the federal investigator cants his head at the proposal, eyes narrowing, soft but not quite trusting.

quid pro quo—how cleanly men dressed hunger when they wanted permission to bite.

“ dangerous offer. ” his hand settles against the edge of his glass, thumb tracing the rim. “ people rarely like what i know, and i rarely like what they want from me after. ” he pauses, considering the man with calm measurement. puzzle pieces fit one click at a time behind his eyes.

he scrapes across the floor, black cloth tearing in damning red lines until he rolls onto one knee. his pistol steadies on the space between them. wrists shaking from prior exertion, breath cut thin, the rotting mass slouched behind him against the concrete wall still steaming at the edges. before she arrived, there had been large flashes of light and scorching heat. now there is silence, save for the soft pant of his breath and the click of her boot on the smeared tile floor. across the way, she stands like a question that does not want to wait for its answer.