@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.

he likes to think he leaves every door between them cracked just a bit. a sliver of light in the darkness. when he was a boy, he would hear the click and lock of rooms closing too soon and too fast, of blackness swallowing him whole in a complete and terrible quiet. there was no way out that he could see except for the one-inch gap by his feet. he would kneel until his knees bled. press his cheek to the cold wood below. if he laid still and peered out beneath it, perhaps he could catch a glimpse of the sun on the other side.

he likes to think jake does not have to crawl to see the light.

it is bright in him. severe. dripping from the parting of his lips and the spread of his fingers. clinging to his teeth and banking behind his eyes. arthur stares at jake and sees, for one awful moment, the little boy still living beneath the man. curly brown hair. big brown eyes. color draining from his face. dirt smudged against his skin. breath heavy with a war no child should have been asked to survive.

that boy is closing the door between them. slowly. inch by inch. until, in the horrible silence of his decision, the door clicks shut.

arthur’s fingers hover over the knob, feeling the space around the absence. there are things about him too that still lead to closed doors, their cracks small and dim. and yet. he finds he is too scared to test if this door between them is already locked.

he feels something in him get on its knees and peer at the sliver of light across the floor.

“ that’s okay, ” he says through the gap. his voice is steady. small and warm. his eyes, brown with that tremor of light beneath the surface, glance to the floor as if he might see the other’s shadow from the other side. “ i’m not trying to take anything away from you. ” he looks up again and smiles, tender and terrible.

arthur catches him. he knows that. feels it in his hands, in the sharp awareness shooting up each finger clinging to lean muscle. pavel’s body is tense against him. one arm wraps around the scholar’s waist, holding half his weight upright, the floor slick with rainwater beneath their boots. pavel’s back is pressed into the wall. this close, arthur can see the flicker of light behind the other’s eyes, a flame banked deep and unrelenting. and lower still, the soft surprised part of too-pale lips.

the slayer’s pulse skips. their faces are inches apart.

warmth fills behind his teeth, sickly sweet, trapped between gum and bone. a candle’s flame, wick threaded silver and gold. he exhales and feels the heat ease from his chest, only to gather somewhere worse. face flushed, eyes shining at the edges with gold-white stars, he holds the other tighter. something thrums beneath his skin—the curse, perhaps, sensing a form of life and turning it toward hunger. or his own power, restrained so tightly that it slips against any crack in control. or wanting. to be seen. to be felt. to be reminded that life is a choice that does not have to end in pain.

his eyes widen with the realization. pavel stays still beneath him, unable to move or unwilling to. then his name breaks from those lips in a startled gasp. ‘ art— ’

their lips collide.

arthur swallows the word within the span of a breath, all lonely wanting and cold skin, desperate for a fire that burned but did not yet consume him. he holds the sound in his own mouth, between his own teeth, as if a name could be made into warmth if he kept it close enough. the kiss is sudden and awful in its tenderness, hungry only because he has been starving so long. his fingers grip too tightly at pavel’s waist. the curse screams, pain white-hot against his chest, and beneath it comes an overwhelm so complete it makes his knees tremble.

yes, his mind says. yes, yes, yes. warmth.

then he breaks away, a jerk just a second too late, leaving pavel kiss-swollen and startled against the wall. the gold in arthur’s eyes widens with eagerness first, then shame. horror follows close behind. he steps back abruptly, hands flying open, arms half-raised in surrender as if the act itself had become a weapon and he needed pavel to see he had dropped it.

he crossed a line. he knows that. he cannot take it back.

hands shake him senseless. arthur winces, feeling his ribs jostle with the motion, breath catching shallow where the pain bites through him. the bruise against his lip starts to split. blood warms the swell of it, dark and immediate. but this pain is normal, he thinks. the field, the fight, the heat of flesh broken—this, he knows. this is familiar. a reminder of the life he has led, the little war prince of him. the demon. the thing made useful by the swing of a sword.

adrenaline burns hot behind his eyes. fire banks behind his teeth. smoke gathers in his head. he wipes death from his sword against the corpse’s cape with an ease that still frightens the little boy in him, the one bleeding somewhere quiet beneath the armor. then edmund comes like a storm, all shaking hands and furious worry, and now—now arthur is lost. the just king rattles him. the motion cools heated embers still waiting for violence and rage. somehow, only worry arrives, care threaded like tight thread stitching the wound of him closed. and the demon prince has the bizarre, terrible thought that he has never really been so openly fussed over before.

pale, bloodstained hands move to grasp edmund’s, pulling them gently from his arms. he holds them still between their bodies as if the act might calm them both. arthur’s own hands are cold to the touch.

midnight washes them in navy hues. sapphires, embedded deep in the dark rock of the room, four brick walls and a tussled bed between. arthur's hands shake over the laces of his shoes. he feels the urge to smoke like claws at his lungs. suffocate me, the organ says. his anxiety compiles. i need release.

matthew's voice sounds like reprieve and regret all at once. how could he find relief in someone he's just met ?? though that isn't quite true—they've known each other a while now. windows of themselves, reflecting the sunset behind them. but that glass between still blocks a pure view. something matt isn't telling him twists in his chest like a thorn embedded to the thumb. and at the same time, there is many a secret he has never thought to tell himself.

they dance around the hole they leave behind. absence. he is scared to take the first leap in. he is scare that if he jumps, he may never come back. he may drag the other with him. they may both die in the bottomless pit below.

he swallows, breath thin. pulse trembles with the unease of him. the nervousness. how do i be human again ?? it hurts to be alive, he thinks suddenly. it hurts to be reminded that i am alive.

“ i'll come back. ” he says softly. his eyes close shut as they sting. laces tie too tight. the day looms ahead like a predator waiting to strike. office, case, lab. he feels his cage shrink around him, the bars pressing into his skin, the leash asphyxiating. his phone buzzes again on the dresser, loud like a warning bell. waiting for him to come willingly and alone.

he straightens, hands still shaking over the knees where he grips them. it's the safest thing he can say, and the only thing he can promise right now without falling apart.

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.