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You are walking home through a snowstorm when you find a dying flame trapped in an iron lantern, and against every warning your grandmother ever gave you about the Fae, you breathe it back to life. It vanishes. So, it seems, does the ordinary shape of your life.Â
Now the wind goes soft when you're cold. The wood never runs low. Someone is watching from the treeline, and it keeps showing up right when you need saving most.
You're starting to think all he's ever wanted is you. And what you offer him in return is the one thing you have always had plenty of: yourself.
Featuring. Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins
Word Count. 20k (please, I promise it's worth it)
Trigger Warning(s). SMUT (18+) ⌠fucking in the woods ⌠slightly horror-adjacent? but extremely tame, dw
Notes. I have tried to incorporate accurate Russian culture into this work, but keep in mind that I'm not Russian, so beware of any inaccuracies, esp in terminology! Feminine terms/pronouns used for reader throughout the work.
By the time you were ten, you had buried your mother in the ground so hard the priest cracked two shovels trying to dig her a grave deep enough for God to find her.
You remember thinking, even then, that this was the trouble with Nod-Krai. The dead were always closer to the surface than they ought to be. Frost kept them honest. It pushed coffins up through the soil come the spring thaw, the way a sin pushes its way up through a confession, and the men would go out with their hooks and their crosses and put the bodies back where they belonged, muttering prayers with the particular tiredness of men who did not quite believe them anymore.
You think of this now, several winters later, because you are walking through a storm that wants very badly to make you one of the dead it puts back.
The wind does not blow so much as it arrives, all at once, from every direction, as if the forest itself has exhaled. It finds the seam where your shawl meets your collar and works its fingers in. Snow has filled the road past your knees, and the birches on either side have become something else entirely in this light, white bones standing sentry, their black eyes watching you pass with the patient indifference your Babulya always warned you trees like that could feel. They remember who walks past them in the dark, she used to say, crossing herself, then crossing you, two fingers pressed hard to your collarbone like she could pin the blessing into your skin so it would not slip off. And they tell.
You are walking to her now. Babulya Marfa, who has not left her izba on the far side of the wood in nine years, who sends word twice a season to whoever is fool enough to make the crossing. Who is, as of three days ago, very possibly dying. Your uncle wrote it in a hand so unsteady you had to read the letter twice to be certain the words were asking for you and not something crueler. You left before the ink on your reply had dried. You did not think, until you were already an hour into the trees, to ask why a storm like this had chosen tonight, of all nights, to come down off the mountains and bury the only road that led to her door.
Your father would call this foolishness. He would say a woman with sense waits out the weather in town, drinks her tea, says her prayers to the Tsaritsa by the stove, where the only thing she has to fear is whether the samovar needs more coals. But your father is three days behind you, and you are not, despite what people say about you, entirely without sense. You are simply the kind of fool who has always believed that love is owed in person, paid in full, while there is still time to pay it.
So you walk. Your valenki are soaked through to felt that no longer remembers what dry feels like. The lantern you carried from town gave up its flame an hour ago, smothered by wind that seemed almost deliberate in the way it found the glass, and you have not had the courage to stop and relight it, certain that if you stood still even a moment, the cold would decide you had made its decision easier and simply keep you.
.
It is in this dark, this particular shade of black that swallows the difference between shut eyes and open ones, that you see it.
A flame.Â
Blue, and so small you mistake it at first for the storm playing tricks on your sight.. It hangs low among the birches, perhaps thirty paces off the road, no taller than a candle's flame and twice as faint, guttering as though some unseen hand keeps pinching it nearly to death and then, at the last possible moment, relenting.
Your whole body goes still with the particular stillness of a hare that has just understood the shape in the grass is not grass.
Bolotnik fires, Babulya's voice says, clear as if she stood beside you, clearer than she has sounded in any letter these nine years. You were seven the first time she told you, the two of you wrapped under the same wool blanket while the stove ticked and settled, her hands smelling of tallow and dried dill as she traced the story into your palm like she was teaching you to read by touch alone.Â
The wisps. The Fae's own lanterns, lit from a coal they stole out of the first fire that ever burned, before God made the sun to make fires honest. They do not burn for warmth, devushka. They burn for hunger. You see one in the marsh, in the wood, anywhere the dark pools like water, and you do not go to it. You let it call you sweetheart in your mother's voice if it likes. You let it weep. You keep walking, and you do not look back, because the moment you go to comfort it, it has already won.
You know this. You have known it since before you knew the shape of your own name in your own handwriting.
And still, fool you are, your feet have already turned off the road.
You tell yourself it is only that the flame is so weak, so clearly wretched in the way it strains and dims and strains again like something genuinely about to gutter out, that some animal part of you, the same part that once spent a whole spring nursing a crow with a broken wing back into the sky, simply cannot leave it to die. You tell yourself a great many things, in fact, in the time it takes you to cross those thirty paces, snow past your knees, breath turned to frost-lace at your lips, and every one of those things is a lie you are telling so that the truer, stupider reason, it looked so alone out there, the way you feel most nights, and you have never once in your life been able to leave a lonely thing alone, does not have to be looked at directly.
You should know better. Babulya spent half your childhood making certain that you did.
But you have never been able to walk past a thing that is suffering, not a crow, not a dog, not the old beggar woman outside the church whom the other girls crossed the street to avoid, and some buried, stubborn part of you has already decided, before your mind has caught up to agree, that whatever this flame is, it is hurting, and that this, more than any warning whispered over a childhood blanket, is the only fact that matters.
The snow grows strange beneath your feet as you near it, packed too smooth, untouched by wind in a perfect ring no wider than a grave, and the flame does not flicker the way fire flickers when it is fed by wind. It flickers the way breath does when it is being held back on purpose.
You stop within arm's reach and understand, all at once, two things.
The first is that there is no marsh-light hovering free in the air the way Babulya's stories always told it. It is caught, contained, burning low and blue and dying inside the soot-fogged glass of a small iron lantern, the kind a traveler might once have carried. Its handle hangs from nothing, from no hand, from no branch, suspended at the exact height a person would hold it if a person were standing there. It turns, very slightly, on its nothing-chain, as if it has only just noticed you, too.
The second is that you have already reached out your hand.
You have seen weirder things than a dying lantern with no one to hold it. You were twelve the night the Wild Hunt cornered you to a cliff, and whatever you carry from that night you have never spoken of to anyone, not even Babulya, who you suspect already knows because she never once asked. Set against that, a flame guttering in its little iron cage seems almost a kindness of a haunting, the sort a girl could reasonably survive.
Still, fear comes, and it settles less on the lantern itself than on the air pressing close around it, the way the cold here seems to bend slightly inward, the way the silence holds itself with a kind of attention. A shiver moves through you that has nothing to do with the wind. You know its name. You have felt it before, kneeling too close to the iconostasis with its rows of painted eyes, in the breath before a held secret decides whether it wants to stay held. It is the body's oldest language for something here is watching you back.
You ought to turn around now. Babulya told you this part too, the part that comes after the warning has already failed, where you are meant to drop your hand, walk back to the road, and let the wind keep whatever pity you were about to spend on a thing built to spend you in return.
But the flame dips low again, nearly to nothing, a wick about to surrender its last claim on burning, and something in your chest answers it before your senses can intervene. You think of the crow. You think, absurdly, that nothing this weak could possibly still be dangerous, the same lie every soft-hearted fool has told herself walking up to every wounded thing that ever bit her for the trouble.
You pull it from the air. It is lighter than it has any right to be, the iron cold enough to ache through your mitten, and you tuck it inside your coat against your ribs the way you'd carry a half-frozen kitten, your other hand coming up to shield the little glass door from the worst of the wind.
The clasp is iron too, plain and old, sized for fingers larger than your own, and it takes three tries with numb hands before it finally gives. The moment the door swings open, the flame leaps, rising thin and furious, bending away from your fingers like something startled out of sleep that wants nothing to do with being seen this close, this raw. You nearly snap the door shut again on instinct, certain you have woken something better left to die in peace.
But it does not strike you. It cannot, you understand a breath later. It has not the strength left to do anything but flinch, and the flinch costs it; it dips lower than before, and something in your own chest twists with a tenderness that makes no earthly sense, pointed as it is at a marsh-light, a Fae's stolen coal, a thing your own grandmother spent half your childhood teaching you to fear.
You cup your hands around it anyway. You bring your face close, the way you would to coax a coal back to life in a dying stove, and you breathe.
Not hard. Not the way you'd feed a fire that wanted feeding. Soft, the way you'd breathe warm air over fingers gone white, willing the blood back into them before it could be lost for good. The wind itself seems, for one strange suspended moment, to hold off from you, as though even it is waiting to see what you'll do.
The flame catches your breath the way a starving thing catches the smell of bread.
It does not simply grow. It answers. The blue of it deepens to something nearer violet at the root, then climbs to gold at the crown, and the little glass casing fills with light so sudden and so warm against your numbed face that you gasp and nearly drop the whole lantern into the snow. Heat rolls off it, real heat, more than a flame that size has any business giving off, and for one heartbeat you feel something unmistakably like relief, though whether it belongs to you or to the flame you could not say.
Then the air around the lantern draws tight, the way air draws tight before lightning finds its mark, and a crackle of something that is neither quite fire nor quite frost races up the iron in a bright thread, snapping hard against your fingertips. You cry out and let go.
The lantern does not fall.
It is simply gone. No smoke trails where it hung, no sound marks where it might have struck the snow, only the smell of scorched air left behind and the ghost-shape of the flame still printed on the inside of your eyes, the way a candle leaves its light behind even after you've shut them.
You stand there with your scorched hand cradled to your chest, the wind rushing back into the silence all at once as though it, too, had been holding its breath, and for a long moment your mind refuses to agree with what your eyes have just told it.
It is only when you finally look down, half expecting to find iron and broken glass scattered somewhere in the drifts, that you see them.
Two prints, pressed deep into the snow before you, where a moment ago there had been no prints, no one standing at all. Not a hare's tracks. Not a wolf's. Boot prints, large, larger than any foot you have ever stood across from, sunk into the snow with the full weight of someone who had been standing there, close enough to have reached out and touched you himself, for who knows how long before you ever noticed him at all.
The wind is already filling them in, patient, the way it fills in everything in Nod-Krai eventually. By the time you find the nerve to step back toward the road, there is almost nothing left to prove they were ever there.
Almost.
.
.
.
The izba is a smear of gold across a field gone the colour of spilled milk, and the sight of its one lit window does something to your knees that the whole night of walking had not managed. Smoke threads up from the chimney in a thin grey rope, bent sideways by the wind, and the gate hangs in its drift with a crust of ice fused so thick along the latch that you have to work your fingers under it to lift the bar at all, your scorched hand screaming where the cold metal finds the rawest part of it.
You do not let yourself think about why that part is raw. Not yet. There will be time for that later, in the dark, when no one is asking you to be brave in front of them.
Babulya does not wait for the knock. The door opens before your knuckles ever reach it, spilling stove-light and the smell of tallow candles and dried dill out into the storm, and there she is, smaller than you remembered, wrapped in three shawls against a cold that lives in her bones now more than it ever lived in the air, one hand braced on the frame as though the doorway itself might decide to abandon her if she let go.
"Devochka moya." Her voice cracks on the second word, half scold and half prayer. "What kind of fool walks Nod-Krai in a storm like this one?"
"The kind whose grandmother is dying," you say, and step into her arms, and you hear her sardonic chuckle at your humor, the particularly dark kind you have only been comfortable enough to use with your grandmother.
She is thinner than the letter let on. You feel it through the shawls, through your own numbed hands, the way her shoulder blades sit too close beneath the wool, like a bird's, like something built for leaving. She smells the same as ever, woodsmoke and beeswax and the particular bitterness of the herbs she keeps strung along the rafters, and for one long moment neither of you says anything at all, because some reunions are better held in silence than spoiled with words.
It is she who pulls back first. It is she who takes your face in both her hands the way she always has, thumbs pressed to your cheekbones, eyes narrowed in the candlelight like she is reading something written beneath your skin.
Then her gaze drops to your hand, and whatever she finds there stops her cold.
"Show me."
"It's nothing, Babulya."
"Show me, or I will know you for a liar before you've even taken off your coat."
You hold it out. In the stove-light the burn looks worse than it felt, an angry welt curled across two fingers and into your palm, the skin gone tight and shining where the crackle caught you. Babulya's mouth presses into a line you know from a hundred childhood scrapes, the line that means she is deciding how much of her fear to let you see.
"A frozen latch," you say, before she can ask. "On the gate, two farms back. I grabbed it without my mitten, stupid of me, and it stuck like a tongue to iron in January. I had to pull it free."
It is not, strictly, a lie. There was iron. There was cold enough to take skin. You have simply rearranged the order of things, set the lantern's clasp where a gate latch ought to be, and you tell yourself this is mercy and not cowardice, that a woman with a chest like a creaking floorboard does not need to hear about lights that should not exist hovering in Nod-Krai at midnight.
Babulya studies you the way she studies bread to know if it has risen properly, with the whole of her attention and none of her trust.
"Mm," she says, which from her has always meant I do not believe you and I am choosing, for now, to let it be.
She makes you sit by the stove anyway. She fetches the little clay pot of goose fat and honey from the shelf where it has lived since before you were born, the same salve she has smeared on every burn and chilblain and skinned knee of your whole life, and her hands, though they shake now in a way they did not used to, are still steady enough for this. She works in silence, mostly, her lips moving now and then in something too quiet to be speech and too rhythmic to be anything else, a prayer worn smooth from decades of use, the kind that does not need the saint's name spoken aloud anymore to still reach him.
"You were always like this," she says at last, winding clean cloth around your fingers with a practiced, gentle pressure. "Even as a small thing. Found a wounded sparrow once, hid it under your bed in a shoebox, fed it bread soaked in milk for a week before your mother found the smell." She ties off the bandage and holds your hand a moment longer than the task requires. "Soft hearts make for hard living, in a place like this one, devochka. The wood does not reward you for your kindness."
"Then it is fortunate," you say, "that I did not do this out of kindness. I did it out of carelessness."
She looks at you the way she has looked at you your entire life, the look that has always meant I see straight through to the lie and I love you regardless, and says nothing further on the matter. She only crosses herself once, quickly, before she rises to bank the stove for the night, the gesture so old and so automatic it might be aimed at God or at you, and you are not certain, even now, that there is much difference between the two as far as Babulya is concerned.
That night you lie awake on the bench by the stove long after her breathing in the next room has gone slow and even, listening to the wind worry at the shutters, your bandaged hand cradled against your chest. The pain has dulled to something distant, banked the way Babulya banked the coals, and you are nearly asleep, the line between waking and not gone thin and porous, when the warmth finds you.
It comes first as a hum beneath the bandage, faint, almost ticklish, the way a struck glass keeps singing long after the spoon has stopped touching it. Then heat blooms beneath the cloth, gentle and total, spreading up through your wrist and into your arm like sunlight remembered rather than felt, and for one disoriented moment you think you must be dreaming of summer, of the river before it freezes, of your mother's kitchen with bread in the oven.
You do not open your eyes. Some animal instinct keeps them shut, the same instinct that once told you not to look directly at the flame in the wood, and you lie there in the dark and let whatever this is finish what it has come to do, half terror and half something perilously close to gratitude, until sleep takes you before you can decide which one ought to win.
In the morning your hand does not hurt.
You notice it before you are even fully awake, the absence of pain so total it takes you a moment to understand what is missing, the way a sudden silence can wake a person faster than any sound. You unwind the bandage by the grey light coming through the shutters and find skin beneath it unmarked, no welt, no shine of new scar tissue, nothing at all to say that iron and lightning had ever touched you there.
Babulya finds you staring at your own palm like it belongs to someone else.
She takes your hand without asking, the way she always has, turning it toward the window, running her thumb once across the place where the burn should be. Her face does something complicated, disbelief and suspicion and something older than either, something that might once have had a saint's name attached to it before the church got hold of the old fears and dressed them up as sin.
"This was not nothing two days ago," she says.
"It must not have been as bad as it looked, Babulya. The cold makes everything look worse than it is."
"Mm," she says again, and this time the sound carries more weight than before, a whole unspoken sermon folded into one syllable, but she lets your hand go and does not press further, the way a woman learns not to press a wound that has decided to close on its own.
You spend the rest of the day telling yourself the same thing in a dozen different ways, peeling potatoes at her table, feeding the stove, listening to her cough in the next room with a sound like wind through a cracked window. You tell yourself the cold does strange things to the body, that burns from frozen metal heal faster than burns from fire, that you imagined the hum beneath the bandage the way exhausted travelers imagine all manner of things in the dark.
But some quieter, more honest part of you keeps circling back to the lantern.
You think of the way it had answered your breath like a starving thing answers bread, the violet at its root, the gold at its crown. You think, before you can stop yourself, that perhaps this is its doing somehow, some strange debt repaid across whatever distance separates you now, a kindness returned for a kindness given.
Silly, you tell yourself, almost fiercely, the way you might scold a child caught believing too easily in things that want to be believed. Why would a Fae's stolen flame trouble itself over the burned hand of a girl who'd only meant to save it? You are not even certain it was Fae at all, not truly, only that it matched every word of every warning Babulya ever gave you. And warnings, you have learned, are not always honest about what they are warning against.
It is only later, scrubbing the supper pot in water gone cold, that the other thought finds you, the one you had managed, until now, not to look at directly.
The footprints.
Someone had been standing in that ring of undisturbed snow. Someone large enough to leave a mark like that, close enough to have watched you take the lantern from the air, to have watched you breathe life back into a thing that should not have had breath left to take. A lantern does not simply float along a forest road for no reason at all. A lantern belongs to a hand, even one that does not show itself.
You wonder, scrubbing harder than the pot requires, whose hand that might once have been.
The dead, perhaps, lost and wandering as the dead in this country are said to do when the ground freezes too hard to properly hold them.
Or something else. Something that does not die in any way the priests would recognise, that only loses its light for a while and waits, patient as the wind filling in footprints, for someone soft-hearted enough to give it back.
.
.
.
The days that follow settle into a rhythm so ordinary it almost convinces you to forget the forest entirely. You boil oats and feed them to Babulya by the spoonful when her hands shake too badly to manage the bowl herself. You mend the hole in the second shutter where the wind has been getting through and complaining about it all winter. You sit by her bed in the evenings while she tells you, again, the story of how she met your grandfather at a spring fair, embellishing some new and entirely impossible detail each time she tells it. And you let her, because a story told a hundred times is still a gift the hundred-and-first time it is given. The cough in her chest does not improve, but it does not worsen either, and you decide to count that as something close enough to mercy.
It is on the fourth morning that you notice the woodpile under the eaves has shrunk to almost nothing, and you rise before the sky has so much as considered turning grey to do something about it.
The hour before dawn in Nod-Krai has always had a particular quality of dark to it, a dark that seems to have weight, that presses against the lantern glass and the backs of your eyes both, and you have walked it before with your heart in your throat and your axe held tighter than was strictly useful against a forest that does not, as a rule, care how tightly you hold anything. You bundle yourself into your tulup, wrap the strap of the hand-sled twice around your palm, and step out into a cold so total it feels less like weather and more like a held breath, the stars still hard and bright overhead, Orion's belt hanging just where Babulya taught you to find it as a child, a line of three lights she always called, with no apparent irony, God's own measuring rope.
The walk to the deadfall stand should take the better part of an hour in this dark, picking your way around drifts and roots buried under the snow with nothing but memory and starlight to guide you. Tonight it does not.
You notice it first as an absence rather than a presence, the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue before you understand what is gone. The drifts that usually swallow you to the knee along this stretch of path have firmed beneath your feet into something almost like a road, packed and even, as though some patient hand swept it clear before you arrived. You tell yourself it is only the wind, that drifts shift and settle on their own logic, and you keep walking, and the feeling does not leave you even as the explanation does its best to.
Then there is the light. Not moonlight, which has none to spare behind tonight's thin cloud, and not starlight either, which has never in your life been bright enough to throw a shadow. This is something low and blue, hanging at the edges of your sight the way a held thought hangs just behind the eyes, never quite where you look but always present in the place you've just stopped looking. Each time you turn your head to find its source it slides away into the black between the birches, patient, unbothered, content to let you doubt it rather than be caught.
The sled grows lighter as you fill it. This, more than anything else, is the detail you cannot make peace with later, turning it over in your mind the way you'd turn over a coin to check it wasn't counterfeit. By the time you have stacked it with as much deadfall as you can reasonably drag, the weight across your shoulder where the rope bites should be considerable, should ache the way it has ached every winter of your life doing this same chore. Instead the sled seems to glide, its runners finding the smoothest line through the snow as though the ground itself has tilted very slightly in your favour, as though some unseen hand has taken up the back end of it and is bearing the worst of the weight without once asking to be thanked.
A raven watches you from a low branch the entire time you work, untroubled by your nearness in a way no wild bird ought to be, its head tilting with what you could swear, if you allowed yourself to swear to such things, looked very much like curiosity. When you straighten and meet its eye directly it does not startle into the dark the way it should. It simply watches you a moment longer, as if deciding something, and then lifts off without a sound, not so much as a single wingbeat disturbing the snow it leaves behind.
There are other small wrongnesses too, the kind you would not think twice about alone but that begin, stacked one atop the other, to take on the shape of something deliberate. Frost ferns bloom across a fallen log in a pattern too symmetrical to be weather's careless hand, fanned out like fingers pressed flat against the bark.Â
The cold that should be biting at your scorched fingers, the ones that healed too fast and too clean to ever properly explain, seems instead to skirt around them, leaving every other part of you numb while that one hand stays strangely, impossibly warm.Â
Once, you are certain you hear footsteps falling in time with your own, just beyond the treeline, matching your pace exactly, and when you stop dead to listen, they stop too, a half-beat too late to be only an echo of your own boots.
You do not run. You tell yourself this later as though it were a point of pride rather than the simple fact that your legs, full of wood and cold and four days of grief held carefully at bay, would not have carried you far even if you'd asked them to.
It is on the walk back, the sled heavier with cargo and somehow no harder to pull, that the ice on the little creek crossing gives way beneath you.
You have crossed it a hundred times in your life, this narrow vein of water that cuts the path near the old stone marker, frozen solid every winter you can remember, safe enough that Babulya never once warned you off it the way she warned you off the deeper water further south. You do not know, would not know, until much later from a neighbour's offhand mention of overflow ice swelling beneath the surface this year, that the crossing has turned treacherous, the visible ice no more than a skin stretched thin over a slow black current still moving underneath, waiting for exactly this kind of trust to be placed in it.
The crack beneath your boot sounds almost gentle, a small dry note like a knuckle popping, and then the world tilts and the cold reaches up through the broken ice to close around your shin before your mind has finished understanding what your body already knows.
You do not fall further than that. An arm comes around you from behind, solid and sudden, an entire wall of warmth pressed flush against your back where a moment before there had been only forest and falling, and you are hauled bodily off the cracking ice and onto solid ground with a strength that does not strain, that lifts you the way you might lift something you were never in any danger of dropping.
For a long moment you do not move at all, and could not if you tried. The cold has not finished delivering its verdict on your soaked boot, the creek still hissing behind you where the ice gave way, and your whole body seems to be arguing with itself over which sensation deserves your attention first, the water working its slow way through wool toward bare skin, or the warmth at your back, vast and improbable, radiating clean through your coat the way the stone bench beside Babulya's stove holds its heat on the rare nights the fire has been fed too generously. Your heart has not slowed since the ice cracked. If anything it climbs higher now, hammering against your ribs with a fear that has only just caught up to the danger that provoked it, several breaths too late to be of any use to you.
He has not let go. One arm remains banded firm across your middle, his hand spread wide against your stomach through the layers of your coat, and you understand, distantly, almost academically, that you ought to fear that more than you fear the water. You are not a fool. Babulya did not raise you to mistake a stranger's hand for safety only because it happens to be warm. And yet some unguarded, traitorous part of you leans back into that warmth before you can stop it, the way a half-frozen thing will press itself gratefully into the very palm that may, in the end, decide to do it harm.
You try, on instinct, to turn and see him properly, and find you cannot. Not because his hold has tightened, though it has, slightly, but because some older instinct, the one Babulya spent your whole childhood sharpening in you, insists that turning would be the worse mistake of the two. Still you catch fragments at the edge of your sight: a sleeve of something dark and heavier than wool, rimed white at the cuff the way iron rimes over in a hard freeze; a hand broader than your own and entirely bare despite air that numbed your own fingers through two layers of mitten; breath fogging out over your shoulder in a plume gone faintly, impossibly blue at its edges, like woodsmoke caught the instant before it remembers how to be flame.
Fear and something far less sensible move through you in the very same current, indistinguishable by the time either reaches your throat.
"Who's there?" It comes out smaller than you intend it to, edged with a tremor you cannot quite master, though you make yourself say it regardless, because Babulya also did not raise a girl who goes quiet simply for being afraid.
"Forgive me." His voice meets you low and unhurried, courteous in a way you were entirely unprepared for, the voice of a man who might once have bowed over a lady's hand at some fair now long since swallowed by frost, strange and out of place against the cold breathing out of the dark beyond the treeline. "I startled you. That was never my intention, only to keep you from going under." A pause, faintly rueful. "Though I confess you make it remarkably difficult to be merely a passing rescuer and nothing more."
Some inkling of bravery seeps into you, "Let me see you, then, if your intentions are so honest."
"Not yet." Said so gently it costs the refusal nothing of its firmness. "Forgive me the discourtesy of denying you twice in one night. You have done enough looking at things you oughtn't for one winter, brave as you are foolish."
The hand at your stomach shifts, just slightly, fingers spreading wider as though to better hold you upright, and you feel it then, through the wool, the unmistakable ridge of scarred skin across his palm, a burn healed over rough and old in a shape the too-observant part of your mind recognises at once, because it is the very shape your own hand wore for one single night before it healed too clean to be natural.
You do not have the chance to ask him about it. "Mind the ice on your way home," he says, close enough now that you feel the words against your hair before you hear them, something almost like a smile threaded through the courtesy of it. "I find I would rather not make a habit of fishing you out of it."Â
Then the warmth at your back withdraws all at once, the cold rushing in to fill the space he leaves so completely that you sway on your feet from the shock of it alone, and when you finally turn, breath fogging hard in front of you, there is nothing left but a scatter of frost already creeping back across the broken ice and a low blue light receding fast between the birches, swallowed by the dark before you can take a single step after it.
You stand there a long while with your soaked boot going numb and your heart going the opposite of numb entirely. It is only the thought of Babulya waiting on you, of smoke needed for the stove and oats needed for the pot, that finally turns you back toward the road at all.
The rest of the day passes you by the way a current passes a stone too heavy to be carried along with it.
You are aware of moving through it, of sweeping the floor and feeding the chickens and changing your soaked boot for a dry one before Babulya can ask why your stocking is wet halfway up your shin. But none of it quite reaches the part of you that is still standing at the edge of a cracked creek with a stranger's hand spread warm against your stomach.
By evening you have not managed to put it down. You feel it still as you set the pot to simmer, the cabbage and the last of the autumn carrots going soft in water, gone the colour of weak tea, a phantom warmth pressed flat against your middle that no amount of cold air or honest work seems able to chase off. Twice you catch yourself with the ladle hovering forgotten over the pot, your mind thirty paces into Nod-Krai instead of in the kitchen where it belongs, and twice you have to scold yourself back into your own body before the soup scorches.
"You'll put a hole clean through that pot, staring at it so hard," Babulya says from her chair by the stove, not unkindly, her knitting needles clicking along at their own steady rhythm. "Or did the soup insult you somehow, that you mean to murder it twice?"
"Iâm only tired, Babulya. I was up before the birds."
"Mm. The birds in this house keep later hours than they used to, then, because you've been somewhere else since you walked in that door, and it was not in the henhouse." She does not look up from her needles. "I am old, devochka, not blind."
You busy yourself with the bread instead of answering, and she lets you, for now, the same way she let the lie about the gate latch stand for now, and you understand, even as you're grateful for it, that her patience has never once in your life been the same thing as her forgetting.
The samovar takes longer than usual to come to a boil, or perhaps it only feels that way with your thoughts circling where they keep circling, back to the shape of a scar pressed into your stomach through two layers of wool, the precise, impossible warmth of a hand that should have been as cold as the air around it and was not. You wonder, not for the first time today, whether a thing like that leaves a mark a person cannot see. Whether you are walking around now carrying some invisible brand the way livestock carry the burn of their owner's iron, claimed by something that never once gave you its name, only the warmth of its hand and the courtesy of refusing to let you see its face.
You do not know if you should be afraid of that thought. You find, uncomfortably, that you are not nearly as afraid of it as you ought to be.
Outside the window, far off toward the mountains, light flickers once through the clouds, a soundless, violet-white flash that has no business existing in a sky this cold. Lightning in a Snezhnayan winter is rare enough that the old wives count it an omen, one way or another depending on which old wife you ask, and you stand very still at the window with the kettle forgotten in your hand and watch the dark for a second flash that does not come, and think, with a certainty that has no reasonable foundation at all, that it was watching you back.
Dinner is quiet in the comfortable way, the bread torn instead of cut, the soup eaten straight from the same pot it was cooked in because Babulya has never once seen the sense in dirtying a second dish for two people who already know each other's faces too well to bother with manners. She tells you, between spoonfuls, that the priest's wife caught her husband talking to the goat again, and that she is fairly certain it is the goat doing most of the talking these days, and you laugh harder than the joke perhaps deserves, grateful for anything loud enough to crowd out the violet flash still printed behind your eyes.
After, you kneel at her feet with the little jar of warmed juniper oil and unwrap the wool from her legs, and she hisses through her teeth at the first touch the way she always does, more out of habit now than real pain.
"Careful, devochka, I am not yet so far gone that you may simply knead me like dough."
"You complain every winter, and every winter you ask me to do it again the very next evening."
"A woman is allowed her contradictions. It is one of the few luxuries left to me." She watches you work for a while in silence, her swollen ankles giving slightly under your thumbs, and then, in the same mild tone she might use to remark on the weather, she says, "You have the look of a girl who has met something in the wood."
Your hands do not still, though it costs you something to keep them moving.
"I met a cracked creek and a wet boot, Babulya. Nothing more interesting than that."
"Mm." The sound carries the whole weight of a sermon again, the way it always does. "I have lived a long time in this house, devochka, longer than is strictly polite for a woman to admit to. I know the smell that clings to a person after the strange has had its hands on them. Ozone and woodsmoke and something underneath both that has no right name in any tongue I was ever taught." Her eyes, when you finally look up, are not angry. They are only tired, and old, and afraid in a way she is trying very hard not to let show. "You have carried that smell into my house twice now."
You say nothing, which is, between the two of you, its own kind of confession.
She sighs, long and rattling, and reaches down to touch your face the way she has since before you could properly remember being touched at all. "Even as a babe you reached for the spider before the flower," she says, almost fond despite herself. "Strange things have always known a soft heart when they find one, dear. They collect hearts like that the way magpies collect anything that shines, not always out of cruelty. Sometimes only because shine is rare, and they are hungry for it in a way you and I will never properly understand."
"Is that a warning?"
"It is an observation. The warning is older and you have heard it from me a hundred times already and ignored it on the hundred-and-first." She lets her hand drop back into her lap. "So I will give you something more useful instead. If it comes to you again, and I think we both know it will, do not give it your name. Not your true one, not even in jest, not even to be polite. A name is a door, devochka, and you do not hand a stranger the key to your own house no matter how warm his hand felt on the threshold."
You think of the creek, of a voice low and unhurried against your hair, of how easily a name might have slipped free of you in that moment if he had only thought to ask for it.
"And if I lose my way," you say, half a question, "out there. In the dark."
"Turn your coat inside out and put it back on," Babulya says, as plainly as if she were telling you how much salt the soup wanted. "It will not save you from everything. But it confuses the kind of thing that leads by tricking the eye, and confusion, in my experience, has saved more fools than courage ever has."
You finish the oil in silence after that, and she lets you, watching the fire instead of you for once, and when you finally rise to bank the stove for the night her hand catches your wrist, briefly, only long enough to say, without words, that whatever else she is, she is not finished being afraid for you yet.
Sleep does not come easily. You lie on the bench with the blanket pulled to your chin and your thoughts will not stop circling the same low orbit, danger and warmth tangled so closely together you cannot any longer find the seam between them, the way you never could as a child either, always the first to climb toward the high branch instead of away from it, always the one who followed the strange sound into the trees instead of running from it. You have always been like this. Babulya is right to fear it in you. You are not entirely certain you would change it even if she asked.
You rise once, near midnight, drawn by nothing you could properly name, and go to the window.
The yard is empty. The snow lies smooth and undisturbed all the way to the treeline, lit faintly violet by clouds that have not yet decided whether to give up their lightning again, and you stand there with your palm pressed flat to the cold glass and your heart doing something unsteady in your chest, half hope and half dread, both feelings so similar in your body that you cannot say with any honesty which one you are hoping will win.
For one heartbeat, just at the treeline, a shape resolves out of the dark. Tall, still, edged faintly in the same violet-white as the lightning, the suggestion of a man standing exactly where the birches grow thickest, watching the house, watching, you understand with a certainty that settles into your bones like cold water, you.
You blink, and the shape is gone, swallowed back into the trees as completely as if it had never stood there at all.
You stay at the window a long while after, your breath fogging the glass in slow, even clouds, waiting for it to come back.
It does not. But you find, lying back down in the dark with your pulse still unsettled and your skin still remembering the precise shape of a hand it will not soon forget, that some part of you is already certain this is not the last you will see of him.
.
.
.
You are not, at first, certain anything has changed at all. The morning after the lightning, you wake expecting the world to have settled back into its ordinary shape, the way a held breath settles once the danger that provoked it has passed, and for the length of breakfast it seems to have done exactly that. It is only later, hauling water from the well, that you notice the rope has come up without its usual stiff fight against the ice, sliding through your palms smooth as something freshly oiled though you know for a fact no one has touched it since autumn. You stand there a moment with the bucket dripping at your feet and tell yourself it is only a milder morning than most.
The bread proves you wrong by midday, rising fuller and faster than the same dough has any right to in a kitchen this cold, the crust coming out of the oven a deep, even gold instead of the patchy brown you have made your peace with every winter of your life. The hens, who by this point in the season usually offer you one egg between the four of them if you are fortunate, give you four whole eggs that morning and four again the next, and you carry them inside cradled against your chest like something stolen, glancing back over your shoulder at the coop as though it might explain itself if you looked at it hard enough.
You do not mention any of it to Babulya at first. You tell yourself this is only because none of it seems worth mentioning on its own, a softer rope, a better loaf, a generous hen, the small unremarkable mercies that any winter might occasionally offer a person without there needing to be a reason behind them at all. You know, even as you tell yourself this, that you do not entirely believe it.
By the third night you have stopped pretending not to notice.
The wind that has been needling its way through every gap in the shutters since the first snow falls strangely quiet around you on your way back from the woodpile, the bite gone out of it so completely that for a few startled paces you could swear something has wrapped itself bodily around you, warm and close as a held breath, before retreating back into ordinary cold the moment you cross the threshold.Â
Your lantern, when you light it that same evening to check on the chickens one last time before bed, catches on the first strike of flint instead of the usual three or four, and burns brighter than the wick should allow, its flame threaded through at the very root with the faintest, most fleeting hint of blue, gone again before you can be entirely certain you saw it at all.
You stand in the yard with that lantern held up before your face for far longer than the chickens require, watching the flame for some sign of itself, your breath fogging white and even in the cold, and you do not know, even now, whether what you feel watching it is fear or something far less easy to name honestly.
Babulya notices before you find the courage to bring any of it to her.
"The wood from that last cord is lasting longer than it ought," she says one evening, not looking up from the sock she is darning, her needles moving with the same steady rhythm they have kept your whole life. "I split that cord myself, in better years, and I know its measure. We should have burned through half of it by now."
"Perhaps you split it more generously than you remember."
"Perhaps." She does not sound convinced, and does not pretend to be. "Or perhaps God has finally taken an interest in this house after forty years of looking elsewhere, which I confess would surprise me less than the alternative, which is that you have struck some manner of bargain with someone considerably less patient than He is, and considerably less inclined to wait for a proper prayer before deciding to help." She glances up at you then, sharp despite the candlelight softening every other line of her face. "Tell me, at least, that it was a charming devil, devochka, if you've gone and doomed the both of us. I should like to know I died for good company."
"I haven't doomed anyone, Babulya."
"Mm." The sound again, that whole unspoken sermon folded into one syllable, and she goes back to her darning without pressing further, though you can feel her attention on you for a long while after, the way you can feel the cold radiating off a window even with your back turned to it.
It is Babulya herself, in the end, who gives you the clearest proof that something has indeed turned in your favour, however little you understand the shape of it.
Her cough, which has rattled through this house every night since the letter that first called you home, begins, gradually and then all at once, to ease. The colour comes back into her face in a way you had stopped letting yourself hope for, a faint warmth returning to cheeks that have been the colour of tallow for weeks, and one morning you wake to find her already up and dressed and humming something tuneless over the porridge pot, her hands steadier on the spoon than they have been since before the snow came. You stand in the doorway and watch her for a long moment, your chest aching with a gratitude too large and too frightened to hold comfortably, because you cannot account for it, cannot point to any medicine or prayer or change in the weather that would explain a recovery this swift, and the not knowing sits in you alongside the relief like two animals forced to share the same small cage.
"Don't look so pleased with yourself," Babulya says, catching you staring, a wicked little glint surfacing in her eyes for the first time in longer than you can remember. "A woman my age improving this fast smells less of mercy than of mischief. Though I'll say this much, devochka. I'd rather die of mischief, in the end, than of that cough. At least mischief has the decency to be interesting."
You laugh, because the alternative is to weep, and she lets you, watching you with an expression that holds both her old wit and a far more careful underneath it, the look of a woman who has lived long enough to know that gifts given without a clear giver are rarely given for free.
The hearth proves the strangest mercy of all. Some nights now you wake near dawn to find the stove still glowing warm and low though you banked it hours before with barely enough wood to last until midnight, the coals at its heart burning that same faint, impossible blue you have started to recognise the way you'd recognise a voice in a crowded room, low and constant and entirely too familiar for something you have only properly heard once in your life. You lie there in the dark on those mornings with your blanket warm around you and your heart going much too fast for sleep, and think, with a certainty that frightens you more than any cold ever has, that the very fire keeping you alive through this winter has decided, for reasons of its own, to keep you.
You should be more afraid of this than you are. You know this the way you know the catechism, by rote, without it changing anything about how your chest tightens each evening as the light fails and you find yourself listening for footsteps that do not come, watching the treeline from the window with an attention that has nothing to do with wolves.
It is the nights, more than anything, that betray you.
You tell yourself, the first few times, that it is only natural to think of him. He saved your life. He has, perhaps, gone on saving it in a hundred small ways you cannot prove and cannot quite bring yourself to refuse. It would be strange, you reason, not to think of a man like that, however briefly you knew him, however little of him you actually saw.
But the thinking does not stay brief, and it does not stay innocent for long.
You lie awake long after Babulya's breathing has gone slow and even in the next room, and you feel again, with a clarity that should by rights have faded by now, the exact warmth of his hand spread wide across your stomach through two layers of wool, the way it had not felt like a stranger's hand at all but like something that had always meant to rest there, patient, certain of its welcome. You feel it settle low in your belly each time you let yourself remember it, a warmth that does not stay politely where it started, that creeps, slow and unhurried as melt water finding the path of least resistance, further down than any decent thought has business travelling, and you lie very still in the dark and let it, because some traitorous part of you has stopped pretending it wants to stop.
You imagine his voice some nights, low and unhurried, frost caught somewhere in its register the way it had been at the creek, murmuring things you cannot quite construct into full sentences even in the privacy of your own skull, only the shape of his breath against your ear, warm where everything else in this house is cold, his chest a solid wall at your back the way it had been for that one suspended moment before he let you go. You wonder, in the dark, what those hands might feel like elsewhere, hands broad enough to span your whole stomach, scarred in a shape that matches your own, gentle in a way that does not feel remotely safe.
You try, more than once, to quiet the wanting with your own hands, alone beneath the blanket with your jaw set against the sound of your own breath. You chase the memory of him down through your own skin in the dark, palm pressed flat where his had been before letting it wander lower, into the ache that has pooled there for days now, slick and insistent and entirely unmoved by reason. For a moment, sometimes, it is almost enough. Your back arches off the bench, your breath catches high and helpless in your throat, your thighs tense around the hand that is trying so hard to be his and so plainly failing to be anyone but your own.
It is never enough. You come back to yourself each time a little emptier than before, your fingers slack and your chest still tight with a frustration that has very little to do with your body and everything to do with the fact that the only hand you actually want is one that does not belong to you, has perhaps never belonged to anyone, and chose, for reasons you cannot fathom, to belong for one single moment to you instead. You lie there afterward in the dark, spent and unsatisfied in the same breath, and feel, underneath the shame of it, something far more dangerous: the dawning, helpless certainty that no hand but his will do.
There is a darkness coiled inside the wanting that you do not examine too closely, not at first. You know what he is, or near enough. You know what Babulya's stories say about things that wear kindness the way a wolf wears sheep's wool, patient, generous, building a debt in small mercies until the debt comes due all at once. You know you ought to fear a creature that mends your grandmother's lungs and warms your hearth and never once asks what it wants in return, because nothing in this world, mortal or otherwise, gives so freely without eventually wanting something back.
And still you find, lying awake with your blood still unsettled and your own hand gone still and useless atop the blanket, that you do not only fear it.
Some small, dark, unguarded part of you wants to be wanted that badly. Wants to be worth the trouble of a wood that lasts longer, a cough that eases, a fire that burns blue through the coldest hours of the night. There is something in being chosen, even by something monstrous, even by something that may yet prove to want you only the way a magpie wants anything that shines, that you cannot make yourself entirely wish away.
You go to confession in your own head most nights, the old habit too deep to fully shed even now, and find you cannot make yourself properly sorry for any of it.
It builds like this for the better part of two weeks, favour and longing rising together in the same slow tide, until one night you simply cannot lie still in it any longer.
You do not plan it, not really, not in any way you could explain afterward to Babulya or to yourself. You wait until her breathing has gone deep and even, until the stove has burned down to its low blue coals and the house has settled into the particular silence that only comes once every living thing in it has finally stopped fighting sleep, and then you rise, and dress, and take down your cloak and your lantern from beside the door, and nothing else.
You do not know, stepping out into a cold gone strangely gentle around you, what exactly you mean to do if you find him. Demand to know why he has been so generous with a stranger's house. Ask him what the lantern was to him, what it cost him, what it meant that you were the one foolish enough to breathe life back into it. Or something else entirely, something you do not let yourself name even now, something carnal and reckless that lives lower in your body than any decent question ever has.
You walk without any clear destination, only the pull of something you cannot properly describe, the same instinct that once sent you reaching for a wounded sparrow before anyone could tell you it was foolish to. Your thoughts wander as your feet do, back to the creek, to the crack of ice and the arm that caught you before you'd finished falling, and a new and uncomfortable thought surfaces in you, unbidden, sharp enough to stop you mid-step in the snow.
What if the ice had never been an accident at all.
What if a creature patient enough to warm a hearth for weeks without once showing his face was also patient enough to know, long before you ever set foot on it, exactly which crossing had gone treacherous this year, and exactly when you would cross it.
A strange new heat moves through you at the thought, equal parts fury and something far darker and more thrilling than fury has any right to be tangled alongside it, a feeling you do not have a clean name for and would not say aloud even if you did. You do not know whether you want to scream at him for it or thank him, and the not knowing frightens you more than either answer would on its own.
It is full dark by the time you notice you are no longer alone.
The wind parts strangely around a stand of birch ahead of you, the falling snow bending visibly to either side of some shape you cannot quite see, the way mist parts for a body moving through it even when the body itself stays hidden. A pale light flickers at the very edge of your vision, the same low impossible blue as your lantern's flame, gone the instant you turn to look at it directly. Somewhere behind you, soft and unhurried, footsteps fall in a rhythm too deliberate to be the wind, matching your own pace exactly, the way they had once before, only this time you do not stop to test them. This time you keep walking, your heart loud in your own throat, something fierce and unwise blooming behind your ribs.
Fool I may be, you think, but who is being imprudent now, following a fool like me out into his own woods at midnight.
You catch yourself smiling at the thought, alone in the dark, and the smile frightens you more than the cold does.
It is only then, with the trees pressing close on either side and that light still flickering at the very edge of what you can see, that Babulya's voice surfaces in you, clear and sharp as it had been by the fire. Do not give it your name. Not your true one, not even in jest. You hold that one close, easy enough to keep, a door you have no intention of handing anyone the key to, however warm his hand had felt on its threshold.
Turn your cloak inside out, if you lose your way. It will not save you from everything. But confusion has saved more fools than courage ever has.
Your hands rise to the clasp at your throat almost on their own, the old obedience deep enough in you to move.
And then you stop.
You stand very still in the snow with your fingers resting against the cold metal of the clasp, your breath fogging slow in front of you, the light still flickering somewhere just out of reach, patient, waiting, and you think of warm hearths and healed lungs and a hand spread wide and certain against your stomach, and some small, dark, long-buried part of you, the same part that has always reached for the spider before the flower, decides, quite calmly, that it does not want to be found its way out of this at all.
You let your hands fall back to your sides, the cloak left exactly as it is.
If you are going to be led astray tonight, then astray is precisely where you mean to go.
You walk a while longer with that decision settled warm in your chest, the light still flickering somewhere ahead of you through the birches, patient as a held breath, and you let yourself believe, for a few more minutes, that the prickling at the back of your neck is only anticipation. It would be like him, you tell yourself, to make you work for it. To let you walk a little further into his woods before he finally let himself be found.
It takes you longer than it should to notice that the feeling crawling up your spine has stopped resembling anticipation at all.
The wind is the first thing to turn honest with you. It has been strangely gentle since you stepped outside, the bite gone soft around you the way it has been most nights this fortnight, and you do not register the moment it changes back, only the moment you realise it already has, cold enough now to needle straight through your cloak the way winter always has, the way it always should have, and something in your stomach goes very still and very cold in a manner that has nothing to do with the temperature.
It is, you tell yourself, only the ordinary cold reasserting itself. Even kindness must have its limits. Even a fire banked all winter eventually burns down to ash.
You do not entirely believe yourself, and the forest, in its own way, seems determined to prove you right not to.
The quiet comes next, and it is the wrong kind of quiet. The Chernyles at night is never truly silent, not even in the deepest cold, always some small business of owls or settling snow or wind worrying at branches to fill the dark with ordinary sound. Tonight that ordinary sound simply stops, all at once, the way a held breath stops, and you become aware of your own heartbeat with an intimacy that feels almost obscene in a silence this complete.
Then the smell reaches you. Not woodsmoke, not the clean mineral bite of frost you have grown almost fond of these past two weeks, but something underneath both of those, faint at first and then suddenly, sickeningly present, the smell of meat left too long past its honest use, of earth turned over somewhere it was never meant to be disturbed.
You stop walking.
The light ahead of you flickers once, low and frantic, and for the first time since you left your own door you understand, with a certainty that drops through you like a stone through black water, that it is trying to warn you rather than lead you.
The dark that comes pulses before it arrives, the way thunder sometimes announces itself in your chest before the sound of it ever reaches your ears, a pressure against your sternum that has no business being felt rather than heard. When it finally breaks across the treeline it does not come as light at all, but as its absence, a bruised, hungry black that swallows the snow's pale glow wherever it touches, and within that black, shapes.
You know the shapes from a hundred half-remembered stories before your mind even finishes assembling them into something whole, riders sat too straight in saddles built for bodies with proper weight to them, horses whose legs bend in places no living horse's legs were ever meant to bend, the whole procession dragging that swallowing dark along behind it like a hem too heavy to lift clear of the ground. The riders themselves are worse for being almost familiar, the shape of men and women both, faces collapsed in on themselves around hollows where eyes should be, mouths hung open on hinges too loose to be holding anything resembling breath. You understand, distantly, sickly, that these were people once. That something has worn them the way a hand wears a glove long after the glove has stopped fitting properly, and gone on wearing them regardless.
You were twelve the last time you stood this close to something wearing the dead. You have spent nine years building a wall around that night thick enough that you rarely have to look at it directly, and the wall comes down now in pieces too fast for you to stop it, the cold of a hollow tree trunk pressed against your back, the smell of rot passing close enough to taste, the particular, specific silence of a child too frightened even to weep. You remember thinking, at twelve, that you would surely die there. You remember surviving anyway, and never once feeling, since, that survival and luck were properly different things.
You do not have a hollow tree to press yourself into tonight. You have only open snow, and a lantern with no flame, and a cloak you deliberately, foolishly, left exactly as it was.
The Hunt sees you the way a storm sees a single standing tree, not with malice exactly, only with the simple, terrible inevitability of a thing that has never once had to ask permission to take what stands in its path. The lead rider turns its ruined face toward you, and whatever sound comes out of that hinge-loose mouth is not a word, has perhaps not been a word in longer than you have been alive, but you understand its meaning regardless, the way you understand a wolf's bared teeth, the way your whole body understands, all at once, that it is about to run out of road.
You do not get the chance to run. The lead rider's hand closes around your wrist before your single backward step has even finished, more claw now than hand, cold enough that it burns, and the wound it leaves does not wait politely for the rest of the world to catch up. Something rakes hard across your cheekbone in the same instant, parting skin, the pain arriving a full breath behind the shock of it, hot where everything else has gone numb, and you are being dragged forward into the reek of old earth before you've even managed to scream.
The world breaks open before the scream finishes leaving you.
There is no warning to it, none of the patient, gathering dread that announced itself before. One heartbeat the claw is closing tighter around your wrist, dragging you into the dark whole, and the next the night simply splits down its middle with a crack of violet light so total it scours every shadow from the clearing at once, the sound of it less heard than felt, a blow against your chest that drives the breath from your lungs before the cold ever could. The claw is gone from your wrist in the same instant, torn away by something too fast for your eyes to properly follow, and you go down hard into churned, blackened snow with your ears ringing and your cheek still bleeding and no clear memory of the half second between captivity and freedom.
He is already among them by the time your knees find the ground, as though he had never once been anywhere else, as though the Hunt itself had simply made the grave error of existing in the same dark he already occupied. There is no warming up to the violence in him, no measured beginning. Chains uncoil from somewhere beneath his coat and find their marks before you can track the movement that threw them, and where they strike, riders that should not still be moving simply stop, the bruised black light bleeding out of them into the snow like ink swallowed by water. The lantern at his hip flares violet with each turn he makes, throwing his shadow huge and shifting across the trampled ground, and within a handful of heartbeats far too few to properly count, the clearing belongs to no one but the two of you and the wreckage left behind.
He crosses to you before the last of it has finished settling, kneeling in the bloodied snow with a quickness that has nothing courtly left in it at all, and his hand finds your jaw before you can flinch away from it, tilting your face toward what little light remains.
"Hold still," he says, low, and you do, though whether from obedience or simple shock you could not honestly say.
His thumb finds the cut along your cheekbone and the pain there does not so much fade as forget itself entirely, warmth blooming beneath his touch and spreading outward in slow, deliberate waves, the same impossible heat you have spent two weeks chasing through your own hands in the dark and never once managing to properly recall. You feel the skin knit itself closed beneath his thumb, feel it with a clarity that makes your breath catch high in your throat, and he does not hurry the work, his palm cupping the whole curve of your jaw afterward as though reluctant to relinquish a thing he has only just finished claiming back from harm. His other hand finds your wrist next, the bruise already purpling there fading to nothing under the same slow, deliberate warmth, his thumb tracing once, lightly, over skin that remembers, beneath the new healing, exactly how his hand had felt the first time it held you.
"There," he says finally, and does not move away as quickly as the word suggests he might. His face is close enough now that you can feel the cold coming off him in waves even through the lingering warmth of his touch, close enough that you understand, with a lurch low in your stomach that has nothing to do with fear, that he is in no particular hurry to put any distance back between you. "The debt's settled, then. Though I doubt that will stop you coming to find me again regardless."
"You sound very certain of that."
"I am." Something almost fond moves behind the exhaustion in his eyes. "You have a particular look about you, little fool. The one that has never once in its life known how to leave a wounded thing well alone, even when the wounded thing in question is considerably more dangerous than it looks."
You hold his gaze, breath unsteady, and find some reckless scrap of courage still left in you despite everything the night has already spent. "Then tell me your name, and I'll know exactly how dangerous to be afraid of."
He laughs at that, properly, the sound of it melodic and surprised and entirely too warm for something that came out of a face built like winter, and the laugh does something complicated and unwise low in your chest.
"Bold," he says, "for someone who was warned, I expect, never to give away her own. Did your grandmother not also tell you what a name is worth, before you go demanding mine so plainly?" His thumb moves once more along your jaw, absent, proprietary. "Names are not handed over for the asking. Not by anything like me."
"Then how am I meant to find you again?"
"There is a stone marker by the creek that already owes you a debt of its own," he says, the amusement settling into something quieter, more deliberate. "Leave something there that was truly yours, given freely and not by accident, on a night the moon hides her face completely. Choose carefully what you part with. I am not always so generous with what I take in return as I have been tonight."
His gaze sharpens then, holding yours with an attention that feels almost like being read rather than looked at. "But you already know that, don't you? You knew it walking out here tonight with your cloak left exactly as it was." A pause, soft and certain. "You know precisely what you're doing."
He leans closer before you can answer him, close enough that his breath, when it comes, is warm against your skin in a way nothing about him should by rights be, his fingers ghosting once down the line of your throat with a touch too light to be anything but deliberate.
"Perhaps," he murmurs, "you will come to find out in time."
One final step closes the last of the distance between you, his breath heating the air at your temple, and then he is smoke before he is anything else, the whole solid weight of him unraveling into a low coil of violet-blue flame that gathers, impossibly, back into the small lantern at what had been his hip, and the lantern disappears with a single soft crackle, leaving nothing behind but scorched air and your own ragged breathing in the dark.
You kneel there a long while in the ruined snow, your skin still humming everywhere he touched it, heat pooling low in your belly with a persistence that has nothing left to do with fear at all. Some small, dark, unguarded part of you, the part you will not yet admit to even lying alone in the dark tonight, has already begun turning over what you might leave at that stone marker, what among your few poor possessions could possibly be valuable enough to be called truly yours.
You are, you understand with a thrill you cannot entirely call unwelcome, already looking forward to the choosing.
.
.
.
Whatever guides your feet back through Nod-Krai that night does so with a generosity that borders on tenderness, the drifts parting ahead of you the way a crowd might part for someone it had decided, for reasons of its own, to let pass unharmed. You reach the izba in half the time the walk out had cost you, your wound healed clean beneath cold-stiffened skin, and you let yourself entertain, somewhere between the gate and the door, a thought too dangerous to examine closely in daylight. Perhaps he is not the only one waiting on this. Perhaps, wherever he goes when he is not chains and violet flame and a voice low enough to live somewhere beneath your ribs, some part of him is also turning over what you might bring him, the way you cannot stop turning over what there is in your whole poor life worth giving.
It takes you the better part of two days to understand exactly how poor that life is.
You go through what little you own with the methodical, increasingly desperate attention of a woman searching for something she is no longer certain exists. Your mother's handkerchief, edged in thread gone soft and grey with age, feels too easily lost to trust to a roadside stone. The single coin you've kept since the spring fair, pressed flat and smooth from years in your pocket, has value only to a moneylender, and you doubt very much that a creature who heals wounds with a thought and unmakes the dead with a glance has any particular use for coins. A wooden comb, a chipped clay bead from a necklace long since scattered, a ribbon worn thin from braiding and rebraiding the same hair through a dozen winters, each in its turn seems too small, too cheap, too easily mistaken for an accident rather than an offering, and each in its turn you set back down with the same hollow, mounting frustration.
You are not, you are forced to admit somewhere in the long second afternoon of searching, a woman who has ever owned very much. You have only ever had people, and people, you suspect, are not the sort of thing a stone marker is built to hold.
Babulya notices long before you find the nerve to tell her anything at all.
"You smell of him again," she says on the second evening, not looking up from the stocking she is mending, her voice gone careful in a way that frightens you more than any sharpness might have. "Worse than before. Like something has gotten its hands properly on you this time, rather than only its kindness."
You set down the basket you've been pretending to sort and find you cannot, this time, manage another easy lie. "He saved my life, Babulya. The Hunt found me in the wood."
The needle stills entirely in her hands. When she finally looks up, the fear in her face is not the gentle, half-affectionate worry she has worn through every other strange thing this winter has brought you. It is older than that, and far less willing to be teased into something softer.
"The Hunt," she repeats, and crosses herself, quick and instinctive, the gesture of a woman who has spent a lifetime not quite believing and never once daring to stop hedging her bets regardless. "Bozhe moy. And you went looking for him anyway, after that. I can see it on you, devochka, you needn't lie to spare me the trouble of guessing."
You kneel at her feet then, the way you have a hundred times before for the oil and the wool, only this time it is your own hands that are unsteady. "I have to tell you something, and I think you already suspect most of it." You tell her about the lantern, finally, the whole of it, the blue flame guttering in the snow that first night, the warmth of it answering your breath, the crackle that took it from your hands and left only frost and footprints behind. You tell her about the burn that healed itself in a single night, about the wood that lasts and the hens that lay and the hearth that burns blue and unaided through the coldest hours, every small mercy you have spent weeks quietly refusing to question aloud.
She listens to all of it in a silence that does not soften, her hands folded too tightly in her lap, and when you finally finish she does not scold you, which somehow frightens you more than scolding would have.
"You did not save a lantern," she says at last, quiet. "Whatever you saved that night, devochka, it was never only a lantern. You understand that now. I think you understood it before you ever told me."
"I think I have, for some time."
"And still you went looking for him in the dark, with your cloak left exactly as it was." It is not quite a question. She studies you for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her tired eyes, equal parts grief and a reluctant, painful tenderness. "Do you remember what I told you, the spider and the flower, when you were small enough to still believe me about everything?"
"I remember." You hold her gaze, surprising yourself with how steady your own voice comes out. "You said strange things have always known a soft heart when they find one. That they collect hearts the way magpies collect anything that shines." You pause, something turning over in your chest that has been waiting, you realise now, a very long time to be said aloud.Â
"But you never finished the thought, Babulya. A flower only ever gives sweetness back to the hand that reaches for it, and nothing more, no matter how long you hold it. A spider, if you let it close enough, might actually look at you while it decides what to do with you. I think some part of me has always wanted that more than I wanted to be safe. To be looked at. Properly. Even by something that might, in the end, choose to ruin me for it."
Babulya says nothing for a long moment, her hand coming to rest, light and trembling, against the side of your face. "Then God help you, devochka," she says finally, "because I do not think I can anymore. I can only hope whatever you've gone and let yourself love has at least the decency to be careful with you."
She does not forbid you from going back. You understand, watching her turn back to her mending with hands that have not quite stopped shaking, that this is its own kind of permission, the only kind she has left to give a girl who was never, by either of your own admissions, built to be talked out of a thing once her heart had already decided it.
You go on searching after that with no greater success, the third day bleeding into a fourth without anything in your possession rising to meet whatever standard he meant by truly yours, until you find yourself, on a still, solemn afternoon with the light already failing early the way it does this deep into winter, sitting before the small cracked mirror in your room with no particular purpose beyond simply being tired of looking everywhere except at yourself.
You have not looked properly in some time. The face that meets you in the silvered glass is not unfamiliar, only tired in a way you had not let yourself notice until this exact moment, the eyes a little hollowed by weeks of broken sleep, though something else lives in them too now, something restless and faintly bright that was not there before the night a lantern first answered your breath, a spark that survives, stubbornly, beneath all that weariness. Your chest rises and falls in the glass with each unsteady breath, the simple, ordinary motion of any living body keeping itself alive, and it is that motion, that small private rhythm of your own breathing, that finally drags the memory up whole and entire, the way it has been waiting, patient as frost, to be properly let in.
You tucked him there. Against your ribs, beneath your coat, pressed close to the very same body breathing in the mirror now, on the first night you ever saw him, when he was nothing more to you than a dying blue flame too pitiful to leave to the cold. You carried him against your own skin like something small and helpless, warmed him with nothing but the heat your own body had left to spare, and you understand now, sitting here with your own reflection watching you understand it, that he had been that close to you from the very beginning. Closer, perhaps, than he has been at any single moment since, closer than the creek, closer than tonight's ruined snow, his whole guttering self held against the place where your heart keeps its most honest rhythm, and you had not even known enough to be afraid of how intimate a thing that was.
Heat floods through you at the thought, slow and total, and you let it, alone in your room with the light failing and no one left to see your face but the mirror.
You wonder, for the first time, whether an ancient thing's patience is built the same way a mortal one's is, with a thread that frays a little more each time it is asked to hold, until eventually, inevitably, it simply does not. He has watched you for weeks now, mended your hearth and your grandmother's lungs and the small soft wounds the world keeps handing you, has come to your aid twice now with a violence that cost him nothing visible and a tenderness afterward that cost him, you suspect, considerably more. You think of his hand at the creek, of his thumb against your jaw healing skin that had only just finished tearing, of the particular unhurried way he had let his palm linger at your wrist long after the bruise beneath it had already gone. You do not think a creature moves that slowly, that deliberately, over a debt it considers fully settled.
You let yourself imagine it properly for the first time, sitting alone in the dying light, what it might mean if the patience fraying in him is not so different from the ache that has been fraying in you. What it might look like, the moment that thread finally gives. Whether he has lain awake, in whatever cold and ancient place things like him go to rest, turning over the memory of your breath against his dying flame the same restless way you turn over the memory of his hand against your stomach. Whether wanting, for something built of frost and old violet fire, feels anything at all like the slow, low-bellied ache that has kept you from sleeping properly more nights than you have admitted even to yourself, or whether it is something colder, hungrier, a wanting with teeth in it, patient only because patience has always been the surest way for a predator to make certain of its meal.
You think you would let him have you either way. The thought arrives calm and entire and frightens you with how little fight you have left in you to argue against it.
You imagine, because you cannot any longer stop yourself from imagining, what it might be to be wanted by something that old, that careful, that has spent weeks proving itself willing to set a wood untouched and a grandmother's lungs whole simply to keep a single mortal girl comfortable through her own ordinary winter. You imagine his hands again, broad and scarred and entirely too gentle for what you know they are capable of doing to anything that crosses him, moving the way they moved at your jaw, only slower, only further, learning every cold and ordinary inch of you the unhurried way a man learns a prayer he intends to keep saying for a very long time. You imagine his mouth finding the same places his thumb has already mapped, his breath the only warm thing left in a world gone entirely to frost around the two of you, and the ache low in your belly answers the thought so immediately, so thoroughly, that you have to press your own hand flat against your stomach simply to feel something solid beneath all that wanting.
Your hand does not stay at your stomach. It rises, slow and unthinking, to the soft underside of your breast, to the exact place a small iron lantern once rested against your own racing heart on a night you still cannot properly account for, and you hold it there a long moment, feeling your own pulse beat hard and unhidden beneath your palm, and understand, with a clarity that settles through you like the first true thaw of spring, exactly what it is you have been searching your whole poor life for these past two days without ever once finding.
It was never going to be a thing. Not a coin, not a ribbon, not anything you could set down on cold stone and walk away from with both hands still empty.
You have already decided, you realise, sitting there with your hand still pressed warm against your own chest and the last of the daylight finally giving out around you. You decided it, perhaps, the very moment you chose not to turn your cloak.
You know exactly what you mean to give him.
You dress, on the appointed night, the way a much younger version of yourself might have dressed for a spring fair she had no business attending, and you catch yourself at it halfway through lacing the bodice of the one good dress folded at the bottom of your chest, sky-blue thread worked into the collar by your mother's own hand, kept for Easter liturgy and your own nameday and almost nothing else in between.
What are you thinking, you ask yourself, hands stilling over the laces, he will not even see it under the cloak.
You finish lacing it anyway.
The goodbye you give Babulya is shorter than either of you pretends not to notice. She does not ask where you are going, though you suspect she has guessed well enough by now, and only takes your face in both her hands the way she has since before you could properly remember being touched at all, her thumb tracing once over your cheekbone as though memorising the shape of it against the possibility that this might be the last time she is given the chance to.
"Come home," she says, which is not quite the blessing it sounds like, and not quite a prayer either, though it carries the weight of both.
"I mean to."
"Mm." She crosses you, quick and certain, two fingers pressed to your collarbone the way she has done since you were small enough to need carrying. She does not say be careful. You think, perhaps, she has finally understood that careful was never going to be a road open to you.
The night holds no moon at all, the sky scoured down to bare, hard stars, and heat crawls over you the entire walk to the creek despite the cold, a current that will not lie still no matter how the frost outside tries to claim it, settling low in you the way water settles beneath ice and goes on moving long after the surface above it has stopped looking like anything alive.
You wait at the stone marker a long while once you arrive, your pulse keeping time the way the rosary beads by Babulya's icon keep time, fast and overworked, counted out one bead at a time against a silence that gives nothing back. You do not know what to call him, have never once been given anything to call him by, and so when you finally find your voice it comes out smaller and stranger than you intend.
"I've come," you say, to the dark, to the birches, to whoever or whatever might be listening. "As you asked."
For a moment nothing answers you at all, the night holding its breath the way it had before the Hunt found you, and your heart climbs into your throat with a fear that has, this time, almost nothing to do with danger.
Then he is simply there, the way a held breath becomes, all at once, the air you finally let go.
You have seen pieces of him before, his back in violence, his hand at your jaw, his eyes catching low firelight, but nothing has prepared you for the whole of him standing before you now beneath bare winter stars, and the sight of him knocks the breath clean out of your lungs the way the ice once had, sharper, colder, and far more dangerous to your continued survival. He is beautiful in the particular, merciless way a blizzard is beautiful, all sharp pale elegance and midnight-blue hair bleeding to ice at its tips, his mouth made for something caught exactly between a smile and a threat, his gold eyes holding yours with an attention so total you feel it land somewhere beneath your sternum.
He smiles, slow, and it does something unforgivable to your knees.
"What have you brought?"
The question is not unkind. It is, somehow, worse for being asked so gently, and you feel the heat climb your throat and settle high in your cheeks under the particular focus of his gaze, the same gaze that watched you mend yourself back together from a dying flame, now turned wholly and unbearably toward whatever answer you are about to give him.
He steps closer when you do not immediately speak, tilting his head, one dark brow lifting with the patient, knowing amusement of someone who has already guessed and is only waiting, with some private cruelty, to hear you say it aloud yourself.
"Myself," you say first, and then, quieter, your voice nearly lost beneath your own racing pulse, "my body."
He goes very still.
Whatever courteous mask he has worn for you until now slips, for one bare, unguarded instant, and beneath it you catch something far sharper, hunger and amusement tangled together so closely you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, his mouth curving into something that is not quite a smile anymore, something closer to a sneer, cruel and delighted both at once.
"How generous." His voice has dropped, gone low and edged in a way that raises the hair along your arms. "Mortal flesh, freely offered, as though I have not had my fill of soft, foolish bodies a hundred times over before your grandmother's grandmother was so much as a thought in her own mother's womb." He circles you slowly, unhurried, the way a wolf circles something it has already decided is not, in fact, any real danger to itself. "You think yourself a gift, little dove. I wonder if you understand yet that you are closer to a sacrifice."
You should feel smaller for it. Some part of you does, heat rising shameful and furious in your chest at the easy, contemptuous certainty in his voice, and yet beneath the shame something else coils tighter still, something that does not want him to stop looking at you like that, like a thing worth picking apart slowly simply to see what it is made of.
He stops in front of you, too close now, close enough that the cold coming off him raises gooseflesh along every inch of skin the cloak fails to cover, and leans down until his face is level with your throat, breathing you in slow and deliberate, the way a man might breathe in bread fresh from the oven, helpless to it despite himself.
"Are you sure, little dove?" His mouth brushes the shell of your ear, and you feel the words more than hear them, frost and heat both at once. His hand finds your waist and draws you the last small distance forward, until there is no cold left between you at all. "I will unmake you."
You do not have the chance to answer him with words. His mouth finds yours instead, slow at first, almost reverent, as though he means to memorise the shape of your hesitation before he takes it from you entirely, and then it is not slow at all, not reverent, only deep and certain and utterly unhurried in its thoroughness, his hand sliding from your waist to cradle the back of your skull as though he means to keep you exactly where he has decided you belong.
You lose the night somewhere in the middle of it. You lose the cold, the stars, the stone marker digging into your hip where he has walked you back against it, lose every coherent thought beyond the slow, devastating drag of his mouth against yours, his other hand finding your jaw, your throat, the fevered pulse beating there, tracing it like something he intends to learn by heart. Your own hands fist in the heavy fabric of his coat, in the cold chains looped beneath it, anchoring yourself to him the only way you have left, and the kiss only deepens for it, lengthens, builds the way a held note builds before it finally breaks, until your knees have gone entirely unreliable beneath you and the only thing keeping you upright at all is the solid, immovable wall of him.
When he finally draws back, just far enough to let you breathe, you are dizzy in a way that has nothing to do with the cold air rushing back between you, your lips swollen, your pulse a wild, unsteady thing beneath his still-resting palm, and the satisfaction low in your belly has not eased so much as sharpened, gone taut and aching and entirely unwilling to be soothed by anything less than more of him.
He watches you come back to yourself with an expression that has finally, fully abandoned anything resembling courtesy, hunger sitting plain and unhidden in those hollow gold eyes now, and his thumb drags once, slow, along your bottom lip, as though tasting the effect of himself on you for his own private satisfaction.
"Well," he says, low, rough at the edges in a way his voice has never once been before tonight. "It seems I have only just begun unmaking you at all."
He has you pressed against the stone marker, but the rigidness of the rock is nothing compared to the absolute pleasure he delivers through you. In seconds, as though it took no thought at all, he hikes the skirt of your frock, and pulls down your underwear. He grins in absolute, dark glee at the shining slick of your core. You gasp as the cold winter air hits your skin.Â
âHow long have you been dreaming of this, dove?â He asks, slow and deep. He pulls your thighs apart, holding you by the waist as he pins you to the stone. âThose nights spent trying to satisfy yourself, imagining it was I?âÂ
His tone is mocking and you whine. He is so slow, so unhurried, he has not even touched you yet, and yet the breath of his mouth against your clit, his fingers pressing hard against the plush of your inner thigh has you squirming. You canât help but move closer to him, like a desperate dying moth fluttering towards the blue lamp, knowing for certain a lick of its tongue would lead to your unfettered death right there. You want that death. You want his fingers in you. His mouth over you. Him.Â
And then he inserts his finger into you. You cry out, sharp and furious, the same cry you had let out when the lantern had burned you, left your skin charred. Itâs unfair, really, how long his fingers are. They curl just so perfectly against your gummy, wet walls. Your eyes fill with tears, damp little drops decorating your lashes. You swear you see stars dancing over you, little flames. He smiles, and itâs a mocking smile, one that is so egotistical, to be the only one that could undo you like this.Â
He leans over you and presses hot, open mouthed kisses against your skin. His lips press against your cheek, your throat, your collarbone. It travels down and down, and soon enough he has your carefully tied bodice undone. The dress gathers at your waist. It leaves you bare underneath, your breasts perfect round mounds of soft flesh. Sweat gathers in the valley between them. And the Fae reaches up and gathers one of your breasts in his hot mouth. You moan out loud, the sound echoing across the forests, the sounds are so lewd you think, for one dizzying second, that it could ward off even the fiercest of creatures. His finger works magic inside of you, curling and pinching, it has you writhing beneath him. The carefully tied knot low in your belly unspooling with each curl of his finger. Itâs all so much. His mouth on your chest, his finger bullying its way inside, hitting that sore, aching spot youâve never been able to reach on your own.Â
âP-Please! Ah⌠mhm, Iââ You cry out. You feel, at your entrance, the skin of another long finger, it dancing over your entrance. You shiver in its ghostly hold. And then, for one shocking second, for one nauseous clarifying moment, you think to ask a question that out of all moments, this moment precisely, you ought to ask. You heave in his hold, before you stutter out desperately, âY-You, haahnâŚ. Yourâname?âÂ
The Fae laughs, the vibrations travelling over your stomach, and then plunges a second of his fingers inside you. He relishes in the lewd moan you let out, the way your legs come up around him, bucking at his digits. And then, all too cruelly, before you can finally come undone, finally have the knot inside you untangled, he pulls out his fingers; they come away glistening and sticky, a thin strand of your arousal liquid connecting his digits to yourself. The sudden cold, the sudden absence of his flesh has you gasping. Tears spill from your face, and you look down dumbly, at his face twisted into a courteous yet mocking expression.Â
âYou never stop asking, do you, golubka?â He sneers at you. He watches as your hole clenches around nothing. And then almost taking pity on you at the sudden punishment, he breathes against your clit. His voice comes low, âKyryll Chudomirovich Flins.â And then his tongue darts out, pressing itself flat and hot against your flesh. Your back arches.Â
The name, Kyryll, Kyrll, Kyrll, floats around your mind. âSatisfied, are you?â He asks. You donât get to respond to that as his tongue darks out like a spike into your entrance. Almost subconsciously, you give him your name, too. And it seems to be at that moment that he seems to truly gain a different glean in his eye. He hauls you by your waist, his large hands keeping you elevated against the giant stone, your legs thrown over his shoulder, as he fucks into you relentlessly. You swear you see stars as you feel your folds open and licked clean with his tongue, long and flexible.Â
Kyryll presses his mouth between your thighs, and feels the way your body convulses before you even realise it. âYes, ahâŚâ He murmurs low, keeping the pace. âCome undone for me, dove.â Your body relinquishes in an instant, your body nearly lifts from the stone as your weeks-awaited release washes over you in waves. âHnahâŚ. Kyryll, ah!â You writhe.Â
For one second, as your orgasm comes over you, itâs all euphoria. You pant, your breath laboured and heavy, and you dare to glance at the man, no, Fae, that kneels at your feet. His mouth is covered in your slick and you feel the heat rise to your cheeks when you see his tongue come out to lick at his lips, as though the minutes he spent between your thighs, feasting on your bud and its liquids have not yet quenched his thirst. His eyes, you take note, have turned into slits, snake-like as he pierces into you. He takes a hold of the fabric of your frock and discards it to the side.Â
âYouâre beautiful like this,â He murmurs. âBare, your eyes wide, your body squirming, given to me like an offering.â
âKyryllâŚâ You whisper. His eyes get blown wide. Your mouth is heavy with his name, your tongue tasting the consonant of its writing. You realise, belatedly, that you hold some power over him. He had given you his name, his most sacred possession, and you could dangle it in front of him like you would dangle a wad of feathers in front of a cat. You try again, âKyryll.â And this time, he pants. His grip on your thigh tightens, so tight in fact that you donât doubt that red marks have been plastered all over your skin, like you have been branded to be his for eternity.
Kyryll moves before you can properly register it. It is as though the utterance of his name has him completely, absolutely, totally ensnared by you. He has your back pressed against the stone in an instant. His hands come up below your thighs and circles your plush legs around his waist.Â
You donât know if it is simply your imagination or not, but the woods around you blur at the edges of your vision, and it seems for one dizzying moment that you are not in the wild at all, and rather that you are in a synagogue of sorts with your back pressed against a large marble pillar. Certainly, this is the most sacrilegious thing you have done so far. But your surroundings do not matter. It does not matter where you are or what local sacrilege you are committing. All that matters is that Kyryll is looking at you with a stare so penetrating it could cut through you. His clothes have come undone, discarded who knows where, and you dare to glance downward.Â
His cock is hard and erect. A long pink thing with precum leaking from its head. It has your mouth salivating. You realise that you need it, that all the magic his hands and mouth could do would pale in comparison to how full he could make you feel. He could press it in you to its hilt, have you see the world in a way you never could before. You can hear the snarl in Kyryllâs voice when he says, âSay it again, baby.â You realise, belatedly, thoughts clouded with lust, that his speech is far less controlled now, far less pompous, it rather takes on a base and vulgar tone. âSay my name.â
And you do. Or, rather, you moan it loud and harsh.
Kyryll whines, bites you hard enough on the throat you whine, hips bucking against him. You shiver when he lets his tip catch your clit a few times until you manage to tilt your pelvis enough for him to slide in. Just a bit, but enough for his breath to catch and a hurried curse in a language you do not recognise, to fall from his lips as your walls eagerly flutter around the intrusion.
âOh, ah, Iâ,â you whine softly as he finally presses closer to you. Your hands scrabble for purchase on his back as his body surrounds you. chest brushing against yours and sending pleasure from the pressure against your breasts. You are reminded of his lantern heat, and you nuzzle into him. One hand grips your thigh and holds your legs open as he sinks to the base. He places kisses and marks along your collar. His teeth, sharper than most, graze against your skin. It leaves stinging marks on your supple flesh, marks that you are sure will leave deep purple bruises come daylight. â...Feels good!â
âHaâHah⌠I, dear⌠God,â Kyryll mutters, but at the utterance of the word âGodâ his entire body convulses. His length stutters inside your walls breaking the pace he had set. You moan louder. It was almost as though any utterance of âGodâ sent shocks of pain and repulsion through him. Kyryll snarls and sinks his teeth into your collarbone. You cry out, clawing into his back with marks that are sure to leave half-moon scars on his pale, smooth skin. You like that thought. You like having carved yourself into him, the same as he is doing to you now.Â
And then he moans out your name, over and over and over again, a substitute for God. Each brutal thrust is punctuated with a cry of your name. Your vision turns white at the edges. You feel as his cock hits your cervix. Pleasure and pain entangle themselves together, your legs press tighter and tighter. You can feel and see and hear only him. His thrust speeding up, his breath against your ear, you take it all as the creature inside you comes undone.Â
All it takes is one final moan, âKyryll!â And he comes undone.Â
Your orgasm floods you yet again, stronger and more potent this time, overtaking all your senses. And you swear that Kyryll loses it. He fucks you through it, hard and fast, and you feel it in the way he chases his own release, rutting into your soaked entrance like he had not had an offering this good before. You could bet, if you were braver, that he truly had not had someone like you at his whim before. Thick white ribbons of cum release and it coats your insides, dripping down your thighs onto the ground below. He stays there for a minute longer, ensuring all of his seed would nest deep inside you.
You pant, sweat gathering at your temples, but he does not seem to mind. Kyryll cups your jaw in hand and smiles, slow.Â
.
.
.
.
When you finally surface back into your own body properly, you find the snow beneath you has melted in a wide, perfect circle, bare earth steaming faintly where frost has no business yielding at all. He has kept you warm the entire time, you understand, distantly, the same patient heat that has lived banked in your hearth all winter now spent freely on nothing but you, and the realisation settles through you with a tenderness that aches almost as much as anything else tonight has.
He does not move away from you after. This, more than anything else, is what undoes you completely, the way he stays close, unhurried, his mouth finding your shoulder and pressing there, soft, before moving on to the curve of your collarbone, to the inside of your wrist where your pulse still has not properly settled, to each of your knuckles in turn as though every part of you deserves its own separate, private reverence. You lie still beneath the slow, deliberate attention of it and feel something in your chest crack open even further than your body already has, because this, the gentleness of it, the patience, frightens you in a way his hunger never quite managed to.
You ache everywhere, a soreness that has settled deep and low and entirely pleasurable, the particular satisfied heaviness of muscles finally, properly spent, and you think, with a breathless half-laugh you cannot quite suppress, of every restless night you spent these past weeks chasing this same release with nothing but your own poor, insufficient hands. Nothing in all those long, frustrated hours came anywhere close. You are sated now in a way that reaches all the way to the bone, and some small, smug, satisfied part of you decides, lying there in the steaming snow, that the weeks of wanting were worth it simply for the contrast.
He helps you dress afterward with the same unhurried care, and it is this, more than the kissing, that you will remember longest. He laces your bodice the way you imagine a much gentler world might have taught him to, slow and careful, his fingers brushing your skin with each pull of the cord, pressing a kiss to the join of your shoulder once it is closed, to your collarbone above the sky-blue embroidery your mother once worked there. He kneels to tie your boots himself, an act so absurdly domestic for something built of chains and old violet fire that you have to look away from him for a moment simply to keep your composure, and even that small task he performs as though it were a rite rather than a chore, his thumb tracing once over your ankle before he lets the laces fall closed.
He settles your cloak back over your shoulders last of all, drawing the clasp closed at your throat himself, his knuckles grazing your jaw as he does, and presses one final kiss, soft and lingering, to your temple, as though sealing something shut that he has no intention of letting come undone again so easily.
"Kyryll," you say, quiet, savoring the shape of it now that the urgency that first dragged it out of him has burned down to embers. It sounds different in this voice than it had in the other, softer, almost shy of itself, and you watch something in him answer that softness in kind, his composure slipping for just a moment at hearing his own name spoken so gently after spending however many centuries hearing it, you suspect, mostly in fear or in screaming.
"Do not waste it," he says, though there is no real warning left in the words now, only a kind of fond, weary resignation, his thumb tracing slow over your knuckles. "I am told I am rather difficult to get rid of, once properly summoned."
You laugh, and the sound surprises you both, bright and unguarded in the cold dark.
He walks you to the edge of the treeline and no further, some old instinct in him apparently still unwilling to be seen too near Babulya's gate, and there he stops, drawing you in by the waist one last time, his forehead resting against yours, his breath warm against your mouth.
"This was never going to be a single night's bargain, golubka." His smile, when it comes, is dark and slow and entirely too pleased with itself, and yet underneath the danger of it lives something that looks, unmistakably, almost embarrassingly, like tenderness. "I have spent weeks now learning the shape of you, one small mercy at a time. I find I have no intention whatsoever of stopping simply because the debt's been paid twice over."
He brushes one last kiss against your mouth, lighter than all the others, almost careless, almost a promise.
"You will see me again," he says, already drawing back into the dark between the birches, his eyes holding yours until the very last possible moment. "Sooner, I expect, than either of us has the sense to properly prepare for."
And then he is gone, the way he always is, all at once and without sound, and you stand alone at the edge with your lips still warm and your whole body humming with a satisfaction that finally, finally, feels complete, and find that you are already, helplessly, counting the days until he keeps his word.
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taylor swiftâs ruin the friendship with an emphasis on the lyrics âbut i whispered at the grave / shouldâve kissed you anywayâ with flins who visits your tombstone with your favorite flowers every time he misses you
In which Flins finds it in himself to gracefully bid you adieu (and wishes he didn't).
(Lovesick series- Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins.)
Flins x Gn!Reader, 18k words.
Everyone, you once again have beloved @hhhecates to thank for beta reading this fic!!
Also, a warning: ginger in excess is not good for dogs. You should, in general, always check with a vet before you introduce something new to your dogâs diet. Tldr do not give your dogs ginger. Anyway, you can go read the fic now <333
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Part I: Lovesick.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
You first meet Flins when you step on him.Â
Alas, when a quickly descending foot flatly makes contact with a cylindrical object, said object is bound to roll and send the possessor of the aforementioned foot first flying, then crashing roughly to the ground.
This is not an ideal situation during the best of times. Unfortunately you're surely only halfway through the very worst of times, which is why the situation is made altogether far more dire.
There are eight enemies behind you. There isnât a single weapon on you, because itâs on one of the Wilderness Hunters behind you instead, embedded stupidly in its waist like a third arm. Or. Well.
You doubt even the calmest Ratnik youâve met could joke her way out of this, let alone you.Â
âWell,â you rasp. Your throat hurts and thereâs a dull ache all along your right side. Getting slammed into a rock generally does that to one. A tree is also a good option if no tall rocks are available. Youâre pretty sure the agony in your hand means youâll never use at least a couple of your fingers ever again. Just a little longer. You clutch your head. Hopefully thereâs another Ratnik at the closest Tideseal Stoneâ youâre not sure you can operate it in your current condition.
Truth be told, youâre not sure you can even make it there.
Your fault for dallying, for not being cautious enough, for letting your newly-engaged patrol partner slip off to celebrate with her fiancĂŠe, for not carrying an extra lamp. You never expected so many of the Wild Hunt to lurk alongâ not when youâd cleared the area out just two days past.
Clever creatures. It was a bigger party then, and they must have hidden themselves away. You wipe away a sliver of drool off your chinâ heavens, everything hurts.
Not so far⌠Tideseal StoneâŚÂ
Youâre not sure if those are your words, your thoughts or your prayers.
Youâre also not sure where the lamp you just tripped over went. Curses. You needed that thing. But ah, does it mean a Ratnikâ?
No matter. Youâll have plenty of time to mourn them later. You hope.
Taking a step back, you attempt to steady yourself on your feet, but stumble. Expecting to slam into the cool sand beneath, you brace for the impactâ but warm hands grab your shoulders instead.Â
You slump heavily against a tall, warm body and an arm holds you close by the waist, with little to no effort spent. The stranger rests a hand firmly on your hip, fingertips brushing your thighs, keeping you carefully in place.
Through your spinning, hazy gaze, you watch an arm extend from behind you, clad in a dark sleeve, a gloved hand at the end of it. It holds the lamp from before, and crackling energy swallows the monsters before you whole.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Your colleague, Nikita, is the one to bring you home. Heâs so incredibly sweetâ an immense shame, because youâre pretty sure heâs married.
Recovery took longâ you slept several hours a day and then all night first at the Ratnik base in Nasha Town, then in your own home (where you insisted to be moved). Your suspicions of Nikita being married are soon proven correct when he comes to check on youâ evidently the man is far older than you thought (you now regret being friendly and informal) and also has a young son, Illuga, that could be anywhere from six to sixteen (you cannot tell children apart.)
The two make for a very sweet sightâ Nikita brought along a small basket of food and wine, and little Illuga (how old is this boy?) gently set some flowers in your arms before affixing his father with a stare that plainly saidâ âcan we go now?âÂ
You thank them with far more formality than Nikita is used to seeing from you. Clearly he makes a note of thisâ his smile widens for the slightest moment. (This makes you want to die.) He then tells you heâs soon to become the new Sergeant Major of the nearby Lightkeepers, and you sheepishly congratulate him. (Thank goodness Lempo Isle is conveniently supplied with many very lovely cliffs.)
You very sincerely tell Nikita you hope he becomes the next Starshyna, and he laughs, knowing precisely why you wish it.
âNot to worry,â he amusedly tells you. âThereâll be no shortage of heroes around, even with me posted far away.â
Your face warms. âTo be sure!â Why did you say that. You sound like you hail from an old (and poorly written) Fontainian play. Thereâs a small pause before you rememberâ âahâ Iâm sorry I canât really offer refreshments in my present state.â âPresent state?â What the fuck?
Nikita bites back a laugh. You hope he dies on the job. (You donât.)Â
âNo worries,â he reassures. âIâll wait on your porch while you freshen up. A friend will bring over some snacks and drinksâ heâs coming over from Speranza with only the finest for you. We asked Katya for your usual.âÂ
âOh! Thatâs⌠really nice of you, Sir.â
He chortles this time, clearly unable to keep it in. âHey now, I havenât been promoted yetâ but Iâll make you my guest of honour if I ever throw a party, howâs that?â
âOh, I couldnât! That should be Illuga!âÂ
Illuga looks at you, spooked at the mention of his name (seriously, how old is this kid?) and huffs as his father musses his hair.
What a mess.
Nikita smiles and tells you the two will be outside. You hear a whiny âcan I go now?â right as the door clicks shut behind them.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
You donât know what to wear. You do not wish to set a single foot outside your houseâ nor do you want to let even a single more foot in.Â
Deciding to just pull something casual on, you step out, determining to tell your saviour youâre simply too tired for conversation today when you notice who heâs standing with and quickly change your mind.
Now who could that be?
You barely have time for a proper ogle when youâre interrupted.
âAh, my friend!â Nikita smiles, and you instantly resent your mussed hair and unironed clothes. Oh, you look like the most veritable used tissue next to thisâ woah. You didnât think anyone could ever entice you this quick, and yetâ but maybe. Just maybe. Itâs probably his eyelinerâ and ohâ
âFriend?â Nikita smiles gently at you, and you grimly conjure up the very cliff youâll leap off tonight in your mindâs eye . âThis is the man I spoke of. His nameâ you may call him Chudomirovich.â
Chudo-what?
Man, what the hell. Parents nowadaysâ and you thought Chlamydia was a bad name.
âHey!â You smile warmly at Chud, then instantly regret it when he gives you a smile and a bow. Who is this man? And is he also your superior? Fuck.
âHello.â He tips his head and the very gentlest of smiles graces his pretty lips. âIâm very pleased to make your acquaintance. Please, let us drop all formalitiesâ we are all Ratniki. We are all friends.â When you nod relievedly, his smile broadens. âAs suchâ you ought to call me by my given name, of course. No need for honorifics.â
Your smile wavers. His eyes twinkle.
What was his name? Crap. What was his name? Chumorvich? Chudmivoich?
Yours is surely soon to find itself carved roughly onto a headstone. Argh.Â
âOf course!â You smile gently, and he beams in return. Heâs suddenly not as beautiful to you as he was a second ago. In fact, heâs the ugliest thing youâve lain your eyes on in a while. His ashen skin? Gross. What is he, a vampire? And the red in his eyes makes them look infected. He should see a doctor. The way he dressesâ surely no one needs that many belts and bits and bobs. And his eyes?
You bite back a shudder. Creepy man. You canât wait for them to leave. Youâll entertain them for some minutes, then make up an excuseâ
âWhy, my friend.â Chum smiles. âDo invite us inside. Worry notâ we come well armed with supplies. It is our intention to spruce up your home, as well as make you a meal. Surely youâve been deprived of hearty sustenance since your bedrest?â
You deflate. Well. A free clean and good food⌠surely you can tolerate Chum for a bit longer. You canât help but give him a relieved smile, which he gently returns. âOf course, Châ friend! Come inside.â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Nikita leaves early in the evening. He was apparently supposed to leave soonerâ you hear him giggling and telling Chum he has to make a quick trip to the greenhouse on the way, although flowers arenât likely to appease his wife. Chum wishes him luck.
You canât help but notice that a considerable portion of his time here has been spent in the pursuit of coaxing his name out of your lips. Heâs hidden around the house pretending to not hear your calls of um, everyone? You guys? Heâs given you a little trinket and leaned closer in as you muttered a quick thanks. By the sea, he even made you dinnerâ a large one too, so you could have the leftovers tomorrow, although he wasnât very keen on tasting or having it with you, preferring instead to sip reluctantly at a wine glass. (The dinner was mediocre. You miss the lunch they got from Speranzaâs, but alas it is well on its way to the exit.)
Currently, youâre occupied with clearing up the table and doing the dishes. Chum pretends to be very busy with his hundred little beltsâ youâre sure heâll chivalrously offer to do the dishes in the hopes that youâll thank him, but youâre confident you can keep the cliffs for another day.
Youâre too busy mulling the cliffs over when you realise youâve dumped the dishware into your sink before clearing out any scraps first and sigh. Youâre about to heft them out when youâre checked by his gentle voice calling your name.
âAllow me,â he chides. âYou are yet recovering.â
âItâs alright, friend.â You sigh, and he smiles. âYouâre a guestâ youâve cleaned my home and made me food, which is more kindness in one day than all the Lightkeepers together have shown me in my lifetime. Seriouslyââ
âYour fortitude does you credit, but your body will only suffer if you keep this up.â Chum frowns. âYou have traces of abyssal corruption and you know itâ yes, they are minute, but present still. Please, rest.â
You laugh. âChum, corruption is a heavy word for a literal scratch. Most of the damage I took was from being chucked around, which. Ow, but still. I only got a really tiny abyssal scratchâ why are you smiling?â
His smile widens. âNo reason, dear friend. Pray rest.â
Well, if he insists.
âIâll be on the couch, then, my uh. Good pal.â You wave, then confusedly pat his shoulder. Itâs only when youâre snuggled on the couch, too cozy to move when your eyes widen as you realiseâÂ
You forgot to thank him.
You shrug. No matter. Youâll thank him once heâs done doing theâ your dishes, you figure. No point in exerting yourself.
Argh. You bury your face in your hands. This sucks. So much. Heâs such a nice man, truly, and you donât even remember his name.
Think, you sternly tell yourself. Think, think. Think. ThinkâŚ
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
When you awaken, it is afternoon, and you are in your own bed. You know it is by the quietness outsideâ Nasha Town is never placid, save for lunchtime.Â
Thereâs a note on your bedside table, weighed by a bottle filled with warm water (warm water! Maybe he is handsome after all.) The fireplace is also warmâ thereâs powdery ash coating and smothering the now nearly dead embers. (He bothered to make sure you were carefully tucked in with a fire in the grate! Forget Nikita. You can make do with Chum.)Â
Thoroughly charmed and smiling to yourself, you grab the note and amble over to the window, because Chum dear even shut your curtains for youâ and only halfway, to still let some light in. You grin at the little carved blunthorn rhino perched upon your mantelpiece. Really, now that you think about itâ Chum is an exceptionally good looking man.
Stumbling over the last few steps, then seating yourself on the windowsill, you shove your dishevelled hair out of your eyes and begin to read the note he left you.
Dear friend, it reads.
I hope my note finds you well rested. I write to assure youâ you need not worry in the slightest of the state of your hearth, for I have taken the liberty to make a final cursory sweep of it and recondition any out of order appliances. The tap in your bath room leaks no more, and your doors have all been carefully oiled.
The ingredients to your next meal have been already yarkdâ all you need do is assemble them and break your fast. I hope you find my preparations satisfactory.
Ah, and as I found you in a slumber too deep to be roused from, I reluctantly bore your spare key upon my person and locked the door (with care) on the way out. It is yet with me. If you wish to retrieve it, you may find me at the offices of the Ratniki.
Yours faithfully,Â
Chum.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Fuck Chum.
First drawing you in like the little worm he is, then hitting you with ye olde Embarrassment Beam. You didn't know lighthouses had an option for those. Worse, he made you dig through an old dictionary for the word âyarkdââ it apparently means prepared.
So much for his fancy, gentlemanly bullshitâ he did some lousy meal prep is all, and the meal he prepped was a dry as hell sandwich.
âAnd it didnât even taste that good!â You grab the little rhino carving and glare at it. It glares back. You put it back down.
Argh.
You know youâre being irrationalâ you know you are. You donât need the rhino to reproach you too.Â
Yours faithfully, Chum.
Archons, you heard that in his voice.
How did he find out? Did you sleep-talk? Did you let it slip somehow? You were just so tiredâ and thatâs probably exactly what he wanted.Â
âGo to hell, Chum,â You hiss, skin still prickly and warm as you drag a coat out of your closet. You canât exactly leave your key with some strangerâ ah no, âupon some strangerâs personâ after all. Stupid idiot. Youâre going to have to change your locks after this. But first, Chum needs to be thanked.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Chum had better like your thank-you offering.
The flowers are beautifulâ bunched up in a redolent little bouquet (albeit the smallest you could findâ spite is a powerful force) and yet.
The small, fragrant bouquetâ which your new friend would probably call a nosegayâ was unexpectedly expensive. Quite a bit more so than its larger, showier (but far less aromatic) cousins. Of course, you werenât going to embarrass yourself before the beautiful Richeza, so you laughed the price tag off (with tears in your eyes) as you handed her your mora.Â
Youâve known Chum for just one (1) day and yet heâs already cost youâ literally and figuratively.
With your dignity already extinct, youâve decided to just come clean: you do not know his name. Youâve tried really hard to puzzle it out, but you quit.Â
Youâll just have to describe him to your fellow Ratniki and hope for the best.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âFlins?â You yell. âHis name is Flins?â Saying so, you jerk the bouquet (nosegay, his voice whispers in your mind) up to your shoulder to chuck it out the door of the Lightkeeper base before remembering the price tag and hurriedly bring your arm down.
Maybe you should keep it for yourselfâ or gift it to Richeza. Or your poor patrol partner who you just accidentally yelled at.
Watching her blink rapidly, you suddenly deflate Argh, your sweet, sensitive friend. Where is her fiancĂŠe when you need her? âOhâ sorry, I didnât mean toââ you start to say, and suddenly see her eyes crinkle as sheâs overcome.
âNo!â She cries. âIâm sorry! If I hadnât snuck off that day to celebrateâ Iâm so sorry!â Saying so, she launches herself into your arms and begins to weep in earnest. Youâre very touchedâ and simultaneously very startled, and so you accidentally jerk your hand up, sending the nosegay (bouquet, bouquet!) limply flying a foot or two away and out the door.
Lovely, you think. Iâve bagged the honour of meeting that gentleman with a wilting bouquet and snot on my clothes.
You shut your eyes with a wince as it arcs to the floor, choosing instead to hug your friend and let bygones be bygones when a soft rustle makes you glance up again.
Chuâ Flins stands at the threshold, his towering body casting a looming shadow your way. He seems to have caught his gift just in time. When he sees you still busy with your friend, his eyes widen in a polite apology and he steps outside and away.
Turning your attentions onto your friend, you quickly dry her tears. A few quick quips and haughty reassurances (âhah! Of course I recovered fast, canât have you canoodling on the job. Iâm a well respected third wheel, you know.â) have her quickly laughing again. Once youâve waved to her and watched her leave with her new temporary squad (and her beloved. Everyone has a wife nowadays, whereâs yours?), you turn to face Flins.Â
Honestly, heâs as pretty as any wife. His eyelashes⌠no, focus.
He wears a curious expression as he faces you. His aristocratic brows have the faintest arch to them, and there is a smile playing somewhere along the outline of his lips.Â
He makes for an elegant figureâ an arm pulled behind him, the other hand holding the bouquet carefully up to the sun. You see some lightkeepers grin and wink as they walk past behind him, and realise what it looks like.
âHey.â You plod over with a resigned sigh, and his eyes narrow further. His lashes, you realise, are ombre like his hair, and the sunlight filtering through to his gold eyes makes them look likeâŚ
Like wheels of cheese, you sternly tell yourself. You refuse to pine after Mister Chum Flins.
âHello.â He smiles. âWithout preambleâ I first wish to return to you your key.â
âAh, thank you.â Thatâs nice of him, but who knows what he could have done with it in just a few short hours. To his credit however, he seems like a friend of Nikitaâs, which is probably a good sign. But then again, you shouldnât trust some strange men, no matter how good looâ seeming.
âSecondly,â Chins continues, âI have a small question; albeit it may be a little improper.â
Your own eyes narrow, and not just because of the sun. âGo on.â Yeah, you should change your locks.
Flins bows in thanks. âMy thanks. I simply wished to enquireâ are you not angry with your friend?â
Huh?Â
âErâ a bit, I suppose,â you say, nonplussed, then feel a bit embarrassed for thinking he was about to ask you out, as if it wasnât you who got him the bouquet to begin with. âBut sheâ thatâsâ she couldnât have known what was going to happen.â You shrug. âAnd it wasnât that bad, either.â
âIndeed.â Flinsâ eyebrows raise in amusement. âNot quite that badâ just far worse. I had to bring you to the Lady Moonchanter before returning with your limp body to Nasha Townâ and I confess, I did not think you would survive. But perhaps the moon does work miracles.â
HUH?
You blink up at him, startled, and his lips twitch ever so slightly. You would never have noticed it were you not so close, the tip of the bouquet in his hand close enough to brush your collarbone.Â
And now youâre left feeling worse than before, because as it turns out, not only did he take care of you and fix up your homeâ heâs apparently also the one that rescued you and took you as far as Hiisi Island, before bringing you back to Nasha Town. And you now owe the young Lady Moonchanter a favourâ sheâs a mere teenager, burdened more by her duties than even her heavy antlers that are bound to only grow.
And you do not remember either of their names. The poor girl probably used her own blood to heal you, and yet you canât recall what she was called. Luna? Laura? Moon above and Moon below, youâre the worst sort of scumâ well maybe not the worst in Nod Krai, but pretty damn terrible.
All you can do is hang your head and stare at the ground. Any passerby glancing at your defeated form would think youâre getting broken up with, what with your clenched fist and slumped shoulders.
But if nothing else, you refuse to be ungrateful. Setting your jaw, you square your shoulders and look Chum in the eye.
âSir,â you say. âIâm so sorry. I didnât quite catch your name when Nikita first mentioned itâ and it was rude of me to call you Chum. I really am sorry.â Chumâsâ no, Flinsâ lips raise into a smile, his lashes lowered with north and good humour, and you feel a little lighter as you continue. âAnd, honestly, I canât remember the Lady Moonchanterâs name either. Was it Luna?â
Chum laughs and laughs.
When you head home that day, the sound of it rings in your ear, and you get the feeling that to hear it is a distinction in itself. And when you lie in bed, belly full and warm with the mediocre meal he sent you back with, you turn to the rhino on your mantle and meet its glare.
âKyryll,â you tell it, and yawn. âHis name is Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins.â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
You like to think Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins really quite likes you. No, not in that immature wayâ itâs just that he invites you to his home sometimes (you did not expect it to be the Final Night Cemetary) and sometimes heâll come visit with more mediocre food and even fragrant flowers.Â
You find out he has a penchant for rocks. Shiny rocks. And bones. You find the former fascinating. The latter left you more than a little befuddled, and then⌠afraid.
Which leads to you standing on his doorstep one morning. The morning mist is cold, but your spine runs chillier. You should've brought a thicker coatâ but what you need more is an answer.Â
âMr. Flins.â Your knuckles sharply rap against the door of his crypt of all places. âMr Flins. Sir.â
There's several still moments, punctuated by a clang, and then rustling. When Flins finally opens the door, he's mussed and without his coat. A dog runs out, whining. What the hell was a dog doing in there? Or even out here?
âMr Flinsââ
âDear friend.â He gingerly lowers the accusatory finger you've pointed at him with a hand. His palm is as smooth and firm as metal, and his skin is warmer than anything should be on this miserable island. âWhat brings you here?â
âMister Flinsââ
âYou may call me âFlins,â or even simply âKyryll.ââ
You narrow your eyes. âI doubt I'll ever offer such fond familiarity to a gravedigger.â
Flins heaves an exasperated exhale. âFirst you accused me of being a vampire. Thenââ
âIt makes senseââ
âNow you call me a gravedigger.â
âMr Flins, you play with bones.â
âI do notâ how, pray, does one come up with such misbegotten accusations?âÂ
You narrow your eyes and try to peek past him into his⌠house, but he slams an arm in the way, looking more irked than you've ever seen him. Or perhaps âirkedâ is a strong wordâ just not as calm. He's almost smiling with that eerie face of his, and here in the gloom it truly does not look the slightest bit handsome.
You clench your jaw. âWhat are you hiding from me?â
â...the bones I was playing with.â
âWhere do you get them?â
Flins pinches his nosebridge. âMy dear friend, are you truly asking if I ethically source my bones?â
âYes.âÂ
He huffs. âIf you really must knowâŚâ he trails off. âWell, you'll not believe me. Why don't you wait a little longer? I am almost certain we will witness a demonstration shortly.â
That's suspicious. Does he want your bones to play with, too? You're suddenly glad you remembered to change the locks.
You sigh. âSure.â Well, here goes. If nothing else, you know you're strong. This vampire here's not the only one with a vision.Â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
The hours come and go. The âdemonstrationâ does not. Flins dodges all your questions, insistently claiming it will happen presently.
Flins serves you tea. He boils it for a while, seeming to enjoy the aroma wafting around his tomb. Itâs only when your longing glances at the tea set become too obvious that he pours you some. Itâs piping hot and immensely bitter. Youâre too civil to sigh.
âSo.â You plop your chin in your palm, elbow braced against his dinner table. âWhereâs your defence?âÂ
âMy bones are ethically sourced,â he promises. âThat is all I can offer at present.â
You sigh. âOkay.â
Scratching your shoulder, you pick up a book to read. Itâs Liyuan, and a bit old. You trace the embossed words along the titleâ Golden-Winged King. The damp has aged the paper faster, making it thin and powdery. When you open it, the spine comes clean off and falls onto your lap. When you look up at Flins in horror, he tells you it âtends to do that.â
Once youâve made yourself still more comfortable, Flins excuses himself away, telling you he needs to urgently write some reports. He vanishes into a separate section of the crypt. Before you can make up your mind about whether or not you ought to follow, he returns with his things and keeps you company.Â
He writes. You read. He writes. You eat. He writes. You ask him where the bathroom is, and you swear you see his eyes widen for a moment. Is he one of those weirdos that doesnât like people needing to use his bathroom? You just needed to pee, but by the moon, youâre going to take the fattestâ
âThe lavatory⌠Well, this is a crypt.â
You deadpan. âYou donât have a bathroom?â
âFriend,â he protests. âI do. It is simply a tad cold and dark. Allow me to make arrangements before you make use of it.â
Ah. Well. You refuse to be embarrassed. Heâs the one you insisted you stay, so if he has to go check if he flushed and maybe air it out a little, thatâs on him.
 What a weirdo. You bet he didnât put down the toilet seat either. How odd, to act like a gentleman and yet not really be one?
Flins returns soon and politely points you to the bathroom. You really need to know the whens and the whys of a crypt having functional plumbing. Stepping into the corridor, you see itâs not that biâ ah, thereâs a turn. It would appear it is, in fact, that big.
How does all this work? Does he have a septic tank or does he dump everything into the ocean directly? Where does he keep his filters? You donât think you passed a kitchen on the way here, but the bathroom was quite close.
Itâs a bit ominous. Right at a dead end. You glance back down the dimly lit hallway to the base of the L, where the⌠living room is. Ha. A living room in a tomb. Ha ha ha.
The loo is uneventful. A bit dusty and dry, as though it hasnât been in useâ which isnât possible, unless he has a second secret loo he plays with his bones in. This is plausible, since thereâs a whole other hallway, and possibly even more that you havenât yet had a chance to snoop through.
Adjusting your clothes, you lower the lid (to teach the âgentlemanâ some basic bathroom etiquette) and flush. When you try to wash your hands, though, you find that the sink handle wonât budge.
When you finally wrench it open, the faucet makes a horrible gurgle, then spits out no small amount of sludge, before some clear water finally comes into view. You reach over for a bar of soap and your fingers meet dusty, cool marble. What the hell.
Was it so hard to just let you take a piss in his actual loo? What the hell is this?
Well, itâs a good thing lightkeepers carry soap on them, in case⌠well youâre not sure since youâve never needed one, but it was in the kit bag HQ gave you, along with some knives, flares, a tinderbox, rope, candyâ candy?
âOoh.â
âDear guest? What are you doing there?â
You hurriedly shut your bag and run the tap. âWashing my hands.â
Flins does not respond.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
More waiting. The dim and gloom swallow time whole. Youâre not hungry, nor thirsty (maybe thatâs all the ginger cookies and the bitter tea) and much to your surprise, not exactly bored, either.
You notice Flins has a few cabinets strewn around, and when you ask whatâs in them, he looks almost pleased as he introduces you to an old coin or a shiny rock, carefully wrapped in strips of plain silk, and encased in various boxes.Â
Your earlier doubt is quickly transformed into reluctant pity. He clearly really wants to talk about all his shiny rocks, and truth be told, heâs a fine storyteller, as well as being fine in general. He briefly tells you about whatever fancy rock heâs holding, as well as a little anecdote, relating any pertinent stories, or the tale of how he came to acquire it.Â
Itâs cute, and you canât help but grin a little as he asks about your interests in turn, and smiles at you with gently lowered lashes. He even asks all the right questions, which quickly makes your reluctant pity turn straight to panic.
For a second, the wheels of cheese in his eyesocketsâ for just a momentâ
No. How could you? He listens to your chatter and you fall in love? How silly. Especially whenâ and your eyes widen as you suddenly rememberâ you came here to investigate him for gravedigging.Â
âEr, friendâ?â
âI just rememberedââ You blink up at him in horror, and he sighs.
âI know. The deferment stretches on.â
Or perhaps not.Â
Thereâs the sound of paws skittering across tile as the dog from earlier bumbles into the crypt, a clean bone in its mouth. It spits it out right by Flinsâ feet and immediately turns to the trestle table on which thereâs nothing but crumbs anymore. Seeing this, the thing starts instantly howling.Â
âAgh!â You cover your ears as Flins hurries to shush it, patting its head and reaching for a drawer, from which he pulls out more cookies. He tosses them onto a tray in the corner and the dog swallows them all in a single breath, then looks to him for more.
âNo more, friend.â Flins glares at it sternly. Youâre not sure what to think of Flins addressing both you and the dog the same way. âYouâve had a heavy breakfast. Meat so soon once more will only make you vomit like last time.â
The dog huffs and plops onto the floor.
âIs it yours?â You finally ask.Â
âNo. We have a transactional relationship. She fetches my bones, and sometimes keeps me company while I carve and assemble them.â
âAh.â Thereâs a lull in the conversation, before you drily ask, âand where does she get the bones from?â
Flins waves an elegant hand. âThe sniffer moles. Her prey. What a beast does in the wild is of no concern to me.â
You huff. âShe may be laying waste to your necropolis, Mr Flins.â
He smiles. âNo, friend. In fact she quite loves its denizens and is adored in turn. They have witnessed much carnage, and the sight of sprightly life soothes many sore eyes.â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âFlins, we need to start doing better things when we meet. That or we need new bones because thereâs only so many animals we can make with these.â
Flins exhales, tilting his head slightly. You wonder why he brings his knuckles to his chin when he never props it on them. He never slouches.
At length, he answers. âTrue. Our little friend has brought us nothing save for bird sternums and pelvic girdles.â
âAnd the skulls,â you groan. âNothing but skulls.â
âMy, the skulls⌠with them, we could make a veritable monstrosity.â
You hum, and start arranging the vertebrae along the humanoid structureâs shoulder (calling it a skeleton feels a bit generous). It now has a chicken head, along with its normal mole head, and also another chicken head. Flins places a fishhead at the tip of its tail. âA chimaera,â he says, gesturing helplessly.
âThis is stupid.â
âPlease be gentle.â
âThis is foolish.â
âThat feels harsher, friend.â
At length, he continues, tilting his head slightly towards the floor. "There is the other thing, of course. We could carve jigsaw pieces out of the bones."
This suggestion is so oddly specific that you're instantly certain of it being what he actually does, instead of laying random bones out on his table. That does make a lot more sense, now that you think about it. You appreciate him trying to spare your feelings, but you wish he'd just told you everything at the outsetâ and actually, you're not sure about his intentions anymore. Because Flins is a bastard, and he fucks with you at every turn. Argh.
Itâs not his fault. Itâs not his fault. With how much you embarrass yourself, you really ought to learn to bounce back well.
Whatever. You are a mature adult. You know what? You refuse to be embarrassed. How could you have known to properly navigate his hobby in all its... unconventional glory?
And so-- "oh!" you exclaim. "Ah, that does make a lot more sense.â Wow, you sounded collected. âDo you have any jigsaws you've put together already?"
Flinsâ eyes light up with what clearly isnât just relief, and in the gloom of the crypt, the effect is welcome. "I most certainly do. Would you like to see them, friend?"
Well. Okay, sure. You nod.
You brace yourself for things of a macabre nature, but everything is surprisingly normalâ and even beautiful. All the little jigsaws are stunningly well craftedâ little skeletal figurines of monsters and adversaries, in various dynamic poses that must have taken an age to make. When you mention this to Flins, he smiles, and affirms it. Clearly he's very proud of his bone carvings (made with ethically sourced materials), so you decide to not judge, especially knowing some of the things you read in your spare time. No one wears hypocrisy well, not even you.
âOoh,â You murmur as you bend your knees to look at an especially detailed jigsaw of a Frostnight Herra. âThis is beautiful, Flins. The pieces are so thinâ it doesnât even look like bone. They look like these little paper jigsaws I saw onceâ they looked like they had a million pieces.â You turn to him, wide eyed, and he blinks slowly back, looking unreadable for a moment.Â
Finally, he softly smiles, and a soft puff of breath leaves him as his shoulders relax. You feel the warmth of it brush against your ear as you straighten, and your heart jumps in your chest.
Youâre glad to be nearing the end of the displays now. Once youâve seen the final few, you turn to Flins with a smile.
âWell,â you snort. âI think Iâve affirmed youâre not a grave digger. I also think Iâve spent long enough hereâ how many hours has it been, do you know? Anyway, I think I should head back.â
Flins looks up from where heâs seated, rapidly blinking. The lamplight catches on his soft lashes, and you try not to stare at them too keenly. âSo soon?â he asks. But Flins, youâve learned, is too well bred to protest. And so he tugs your coat off the rack, and holds it chivalrously out for you.Â
Although Flins, you find out, isnât well bred enough to resist wrapping it snugly round you, adjusting the collar gently with his fingers. When he finally pulls away, they brush your jaw, and their warmth lingers all the way home.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âEver since that day,â you tell Flins between crunches, âI feel like the Lantern Fae has been keeping tabs on me. Not to sound self absorbed, but I feel like I see him on the way home.â
Flins wordlessly places more cookies on your plate. âTruly?â
âMhm.â Placing aside the cookie for just a moment, you take a sip of your tea. Flins has gotten better at making itâ itâs not so bitter anymore, and at the townspeopleâs recommendation, heâs even begun adding dried herbs and spices to it on occasion. Itâs not always good, but you appreciate him tryingâ over the months youâve come to realise heâs not the fondest of tea, and if given the choice, never has any.Â
The reasonable extrapolation , therefore, is that he continues buying tea for any lightkeepers that may visit.
What you refuse to think too much about, though, is him going out of his way to add all the flavours to his teas that you ever mention liking.
After all, Flins is eccentric. He likes causing mischief, and underneath his distant demeanor is a man made of empathy and pragmatism. Even so, he doesnât keep many friendsâ and the ones he keeps, he treats well.
This sucks. You canât believe you, Nikita and the dog all get the same treatment. It sucks especially when you suspect that over the past several months, youâve been nursing a tiny sprig of fondness for Mister Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins.
âFriend?â Flins prompts, and you blink rapidly at him, broken out of your thoughts. âWhat plagues you so?â
âWhat plagues me? Ah.â Crap, what plagues you? A lot plagues you. The thought of walking all the way back and having to remember what you have at home so you can plan what to make for dinner, then to make said dinner, clean the house, take a bath, wake up early and polish your weapon, do your laundry, clock in for work around early afternoon, walk over to Flinsâ after bidding your friend home. Like the thought of making the shoemaker a visit before your soles give out, when youâve been too tired to. Like the scratch along your shoulder that aches and pulses in the night. You try not to think too much about it, because you swear paying it attention makes it throb worse. Case in point.Â
âMm?âÂ
âDinner.â You sigh. âI canât be arsed to make dinner.â
Flins gives a soft laugh. âWhy not take some days off to recuperate? Finding mundane tasks too arduous is an intimation of the body; it needs rest.â
You squirm. âI guess.â
The truth is, you know exactly what tires youâ itâs the journey made from here to home. Your patrols take you north of Lempo Isle anyway, and so resisting the urge to pay Flins a visit becomes difficult when your usual boatman comes into view. How are you to turn around and head home when the sight of his face makes you smile so wide it nearly hurts? The journey back always seems like a small priceâ right up until it has to be paid.
Flins taps his fingers to his knee in a soft, mechanical motion. His eyes do not stray from your face. âOr,â he asks gently, âis it the sojourn here that fatigues you so?â
Thereâs a Fatui facility pretty close by. Youâre confident you can find a guy to shoot you.
âUh,â you dumbly say, and Flins glances away toward the fireplace, cheek twitching. His thigh tappies grow faster for a few seconds until they suddenly stop.
âMy friend, why donât you allow me to escort you home?â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Thereâs something in you that just refuses to end things at just a âthank you.â
Perhaps itâs for the best, though, because Flins deserves far more for first bringing you home, then making you one of his Mediocre Meals. He was so sweet and gentlemanly (and inordinately affectionateâ no, friendly) that youâre pretty sure heâd have tucked you in if youâd allowed.
It was late by the time he left. Knowing as you know now that his home is really quite far, youâd tried to insist he stay the night, but he very politely declined, opting instead to stay at the Flagship before setting off early in the morning.
And so you pick up the bag of gifts youâd tucked away beneath a bush while your favourite boatman (and the only one you know) drags his boat ashore for you. Youâd hidden the little gift bag away while on patrol, and much to your delight, the Wild Hunt hasnât messed with it. Thank goodness.
Youâre about to drop your usual fare into the boatmanâs palm when a third hand suddenly catches it instead. Jerking back, you shriek, and so does the boatman. Mister Chudomirovich Flins only offers one of his eerie smiles. When he speaks, though, his voice is warm.
âHello, friend,â he says. âMay I escort you home?â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Although Flins is too well bred to shun your gifts (potpourri and reed diffusers, since he seems to enjoy some scents) he puts a firm halt to your apologies. Instead he tells you of your new arrangement, which is simply that of your roles being inverted. Once his patrol comes to a close, heâll make his way from Paha to Lempo, escort you home, and spend some time with you before concluding his âsojourn.â He does not take your input on this, save for suggesting he simply return home after work, with you doing the same.
Your response is a quick âno.â
The next thing you debate is where heâs to stay while heâs in town. He suggests the Flagship, to which your answer is once again a quick âno.âÂ
âYouâre staying at mine or youâre heading home.â
This point is kicked about till youâre breathless from the brisk walk and simultaneous chatter. Man, you swear you have more stamina than this. Youâve known Flins for over two years now, so youâre well aware of his stubborn streakâ but you also know his stubbornness is often a bid for propriety. In this day and age though, and particularly in Nasha town, the concept is made moot, or âfrankly pretty stupid,â as you tell him, reaching up to scratch an itch on your shoulder.
âThereâs no need to waste your money at the Flagship when you could just stay over. Listen, I get it.â You shrug. âIt feels a bit like moving in, but we live too far toâ to.â Ouch. A sharp pain suddenly rings where you'd scratched, in a single, focused spot. You try not to wince, but itâs too late for pretenses when your feet have come to a sudden stop.
 Flins reaches out a hand in alarm, steadying you against his chest as you stumble. For a moment, your nose is full of a dry scent you canât quite place, before you shift to place your cheek against him instead to breathe better.
âFriend?â Flins asks.
âSorry,â you mumble. âItâs my shoulder.â
Flins pulls away and frowns. Heâs the most expressive youâve ever seen him. âFriend.â His gaze is icy. âAt the site of your abyssal injury?â
âInjury is a strong word,â you reassure. ââTis but a scratch.â
Flins does not laugh.
Your happy chatter comes to a quick close. Flins links his arm through yours and drags you straight home, insisting you speak little to conserve your strength, much to your chagrin. Youâre fine! You were made woozy for what, three seconds? And yet, upon depositing you on your doorstep, Flins turns elegantly around and makes a beeline for the Lightkeeperâs base.
âFlins!â You yell. Argh. âPighead! Iâm fine!â Jogging after him, you yank on his arm. He blinks as you glower. âDonât you dare disturb the healers at this hour.â
âThe healers are well equipped to function at all hours,â he answers in his usual patient way. âTheir occupation demands it.â
âFlinsââ
Flins walks away.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
In the end, no amount of wheedling is enough to convince Flins. Heâs quick to escort a healer straight to your home. As if that werenât embarrassing enough, he seems to have recited the incident in the worst, most exaggerated way.
âAnd so you felt faint?â
You shoot Flins a glare over the healerâs shoulder. Heâs got your shirt pulled low over your shoulder, which had made Flins politely exit the room until he was summoned back by the healer, in case he needed to receive further instructions for your care. (As though he were my boyfriend, you canât help but think).
âNo, I didnât. I just felt a bit lightheaded and stumbled.â
âErgo faintness,â Flins adds. Your glare worsens.
âThatâs not a good sign,â the healer mutters. No shit, you think. âHow long have you had this scratch?â
Itâs Flinsâ turn to glare. You shift uncomfortably. âFor um. Over two years now, I think?â
Flins soundlessly exhales. The healer purses his lips.
âWell,â he says. âNot a good sign.â (I heard you the first time, you think). âBut whatâs good is that itâs taken this long for you to feel any effects.â
Oh? Thereâs a sinking feeling in your chest. The feeling is soon vindicated when the healer goes on to sayâ âWell⌠if you had any dreams of seeing your grandkids grow up, youâre gonna have to wake up. But you can dream a bit longer âbout your kids.â He stands up and gestures for you to pull up your collar as he continues. âYouâll probably have to deal with this for a long time. abyssal corruption doesnât leave, and even betterâ it festers. You might lose a shoulder in your old age, but youâre gonna be fine. Probably.â
âProbably?â you exclaim, and he gives an embarrassed laugh.
âI mean, we donât really know a lot about this sort of thing. Most people wouldâve just died in your place, but you got lucky. Maybe unlucky.â He rubs his face. âCome to the healers if you face more problems. Maybe visit that Moonchanter. But I donât know how much we can really help if it gets bad, so take care. Your body can only fight it if it has the strength for it. You have to make sure you eat well and rest lots. Plus light exercise while youâre on break.â
âAh.â You lick your lips. Your throat feels dry all of a sudden. Flins disappears into the hallway. âWell. Thank you, for coming here andâ everything.â
He shrugs. âJust my job. Iâll see myself out.â As he turns to leave, he bumps into Flins, who makes his way over to you with a glass of water in hand. Setting it on the table beside you, he turns to escort the healer out. You hear him making hushed inquiries in that soft, polite voice of his, and sigh.
When you reach for your glass, you find it to be warm, and the thought of Flins fumbling with your kettle makes your eyes suddenly sting. Heâs always so kind. Really, you think as you slowly sip, youâre quite lucky. Youâve seen the things abyssal corruption can do, and itâs not pretty. Youâre lucky, to have friends that care for you, to be expected to live till your midlife, to have Flins bring you warm water when itâs cold. Your fingers tremble a little as you recall the way he held you against him when you stumbled.Â
When Flins returns to your room to wish you a good night in that gentle voice of his, your heart sinks, because his eyes look like discs of gold.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
It takes some time for everything to sink in, for you to adjust to this newness. You find that rest really does drive the impurities backâ several hours of sleep result in the scratch looking far less irritated than it was before. Seeing as youâd spent the night worrying and dampening your pillow, this raises your spirits well enough for you to prance over to the kitchen to make yourself a meal.
Youâre reminded of Flinsâ presence when you find one of his Mediocre Meals waiting for you on your table.
Right.
Itâs around lunchtime, which must mean heâs on his way to Paha Isle right now. He left no note this time, which somehow makes your heart sing more, although youâre too frazzled to try to puzzle out why.Â
Since youâre officially on leave now, you decide instead to get your home in order. Youâll have to buy groceries, too. You loathe laundry, so you should probably start sectioning your clothesâ you refuse to do it all in one go. Figure out dinner. Man, feeding yourself is an endless process. You really have to clean your gutters out, too, before the rains get worse and turn to snow.Â
Youâre patting down your furniture for stationary with which to make a list when your lock clicks and your door glides open. Flins steps inside and changes smoothly into your house slippers, as though it were second nature. You blink at him, half confused, half wondering what to clean the windows with, as he greets you and sets your groceries down on the coffee table.
âHave you just arisen?â He asks. âJudging by your eyes, you seem to not have had a restful night.â
âHuh?â
A slight furrow forms between Flinsâ eyebrows, so slight you would not have noticed were he not directly in your face. The back of his overwarm hand brushes your forehead, and if he now thinks you have a fever, thatâs on him.
Somehow, despite having spent the night over, his clothes are pressed, and smell dry and fresh. They smell like him, and the scent does little to quell your dizziness. Forget corruptionâ a crush seems to do worse to you.
âUh,â you say. âWhat are you doing here?â
Flins blinks. (Heâs cute, you think). âTaking your temperature.â
âNo, I mean. In my house.â
He wordlessly gestures to your coffee table, and you sigh.Â
âYou didnât have to do that,â you tell him, frowning. âIâm sorry you had to botherââ
âApologies,â he interrupts, âbut I must ask you to simply thank me hence, and even that only if you wish. If you are in need of my services, I will offer them. I fail to understand why it is expected of me to treat you with the coldness of distant civility, when my assumption was that we were friends.â
âHuh? We are friends!â you splutter. âIt just feels like you do a lot for me, and I canât do enough in return.â
Flins is too well bred to interrupt a second time, but he looks very much as though heâs fighting the hugest eye roll of his life.Â
âMy hope,â he says drily, âis that my silence will enunciate what my words cannot.â Saying so, he tugs you over to a couch, puts your plate in your hands and vanishes into the kitchen. You hear soft clinks before he returns with a glass of water.
âMake your way to Speranza when evening comes,â he tells you. âI have to leave now, but will return for the nightâ with spare clothes, if you will allow.â
âAnd a toothbrush,â you automatically add. âBut waitâ the dog? Not that you should be staying here to begin withââ
âIf you desire, I can bring her here. I suspect she grows lonely on the Isle without either of us around. Also, do not worry for the boatman. Do not worry, he has not lost custom- there is yet a person that avails themself of his services.â
All you can do is blankly stare.
Man, you just woke up. You need a second to processâ wait, is he seriouslyâ? Moving in, more or less? Common etiquette classifies this as âuncivility,â and yet Mister Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins insists on imposing?Â
âFlins,â you finally say, overwhelmed. âItâs a scratch.â
Flins pauses, then, true to his word, electing to ignore you, walks over to open the curtains instead.
âThese are sordid,â he muses, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. âThey will need to be washed.â
âFlinsââ
âYour gutters are in need of cleaning as well, if I correctly recall. Well.â Flins shrugs. âLeave to me what you cannot do. Feel free to tackle the rest. I will be late to returnâ pray head to bed whenever you think it right. You need not wait for me.â
âBecause you think Iâm crawling into bed with you? Hey! Explain yourself! Where are you going? Hey!â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âYou know,â you say, moving your bishop across the board. âYou should stay at the lighthouse instead of the crypt.â
âWhy so?âÂ
âThe crypt scares everyone.â
Flins smiles, but does not move a piece. He simply surveys the board, which means youâre soon going to lose. âThe crypt is dry. The lighthouse is blustery, and the spectres often slip inside to gawk.â
You laugh. âEven the ghosts? Seriously?â
Flins blinks, bemused. âEven, you say?â
âAh.â You wave an embarrassed hand as he checks you. Fuck. âForgetâ hey!â
âPay better attention henceforth.â
âWhatever. I quit.âÂ
âYou still have a chanceâ victory may yet be yours.â
âVictory may be in reach, but I canât see it, ergo I donât know where to reach, Sir. I yield.â
Flins grins. Heâs so cute. âAlright, then. Once again, I emerge victorious. Now for my prize.â Saying so, he lifts up the little pouch on the table, set in the middle. It clinks. Flinsâ smile grows wider the wider he opens it. Looking inside for a long moment, he finally sets the pouch down with a chink.
âWhat occasion brought these gifts about?â He asks coyly, and you cover your face with your hands.Â
âYour birthday,â you mumble, and he laughs one of his rare, soft laughs. âIâm sorry, I know I missed last yearâsââ
âAnd the year before.â
You groan, and he laughs again. Gosh, heâs cute as hell, but by now, youâve gotten quite good at smothering the thought. âThe year before, Iâd just met you!â
âAnd the year after, you were in no condition to celebrate,â he reassures. âDo not worry. My jabs are merely in jest.â
Your embarrassment is quickly overcome by exasperation. âFlins. It was a scratch.â
He raises an elegant hand with a shake of his head. Diva. âI will hear no more of you on the subject,â he says. âAh, but I must askâ how did you come to know of the occasion?â
âAh, that.â You grin. âYouâre a special little boy. The Sergeant Major himself told me. He said he might come by later with cake and wine if he has the time.â
Flins raises an elegant brow. âHere, or?â
âHere,â you confirm. âHe said he might bring the kid, too. How old is Illuga anyway? Ten?â
Flins chortles. âI believe he turns sixteen this year.â
â...my bad.â
The rest of the evening is spent investigating your cupboards for more board games. Flins laughs every time you find a piece missingâ the miseries of analog board games are the little bits and bobs you end up losing. Youâre reduced to crawling around and checking behind the furniture, then beneath and finally in desperation, above. You find nothing.
Although it was he who wanted to play, Flins does not mind. Heâs in a very good moodâ if youâd known a little bag of coins and gems would make him this happy, youâd have bought a dozen more little pouches, bankruptcy or no. Flins is adorable.
Youâve known him for a little over two years now, although it feels like a lot more. Perhaps itâs because heâs practically made your residence a second homeâ he has spare clothes and belts and bones lying around. Even a little safe in which to keep his mora. The guest room is now wholly Flinsâ, which you donât mind, since you barely receive guests anyway.
Itâs nice, having a kinda-sorta roommate. Heâs always making himself useful around the house, and he doesnât disturb you often, since heâs hardly around. Most days, heâll check in on the lighthouse while heâs out patrolling, and will return to the shoal by night, where you await him. Then you head back together, sometimes stumbling along because of the rain and sludge, sometimes laughing and plucking flowers off the tall, grassy stalks lining your path. Always with linked arms, though.
It started off as a precautionâ Flins just didnât want you stumbling because of an abyssal flare up, is all. What if you were walking by a cliffside? By a wide mole burrow? A thorny bush?
Youâd frowned and agreed, and ever since, Flins holds out an arm to you as you step closer. You link yours with his and walk home, kept warm by the proximity. Flins is never cold.
Your home is, though. Shuddering, you reach over to the window to shut it, and spot Flins in its reflection. When your eyes finally focus on his features, made hazy by the moisture stains, you find him looking right into the glass, back at you.
When he speaks, his voice is as soft as youâve ever heard it. âIs it too cold for your liking?â
Too cold? All of a sudden, you are entirely too warm. For a moment, youâre frozen doing nothing save for staring outside, praying youâll see Nikita ambling up the path and be broken out of this moment, yet not knowing why you wish it.Â
âItâs alright,â you force out. âAnd um. I donât think Niâ the Sergeant Majorâs showing.â
Flins ambles over and places his fingers on the windowsill, right next to yours. If he moved just a bit to the left, his body would be flush against your own. As it were, you feel his warmth through his several layers of clothing, the small gap between you, then lastly your own clothes. Flins is always so warm.
âAlthough it most certainly is not my place to offer familiarity on the Sergeant Majorâs behalf, I doubt he minds your friendly address.âÂ
Huh? Oh, right.
âOh yeah, probably. But still.â You pause, wondering how to lug the conversation along. âBy the way, if heâs really not coming, or showing really lateâ why donât we start with dinner?â
Flinsâ fingers flex ever so slightly on the windowsill. You berate yourself for staring at them, and his smooth knuckles, and the blue veins trailing across the back of his palm in patterns youâve never seen before. How odd.Â
His voice breaks you out of your thoughts. âAhâ truth be told, I lack an appetite today.â He gives you an abashed smile. âYou are welcome to start, howeverâ after all, this is your residence.â
âWhat? No!â You scoff. âEat without the birthday boy? Come on, Iâve got wines from Mondstadt Iâve been dying to try. Maybe we could do that instead? I just figured we shouldnât eat on an empty stomach, so maybe a snack first?â
âAhâŚâ
âOoh and I also got some really tasty stuff from Speranzaâs,â you babble. Itâs either that or you ogle at his fingers. âI told them it was for the handsome lightkeeper, so they went all out.â You wink.
âFriendâ ahem.â He coughs into an elegantly furled fist, not meeting your eyes. Whatâs up with him? Ah, does he not like the food you got him? Does he have allergies?
It was something you realised when you stopped by Speranzaâs to get him something. Thankfully both you and Flins had some free days, so you had plenty of time to sneak over without him insistently linking arms with you. Youâd cheerily walked over to Katya, greeted her and told her youâd wantedâ what?Â
Youâd never realised youâd never really seen Flins savor anything before. Sure, the occasional snackâ but he usually packs all of his meals, and eats on the job. You like your leisurely breakfast, but Flins⌠on the weeks that he keeps vigil by night, you naturally eat separately, and you donât really go out to eat a whole lot otherwise.
And so Katya had looked pleasantly on as you buffered and stepped back, confused. Youâd asked her what Flins usually ate when he came by, but sheâd told you that his every purchase was with you in mind.
And so youâd told them to just pack whatever they thought tastiest. You suspected Flins was the sort to peruse the more expensive side of the menu, but oh well. The things you do for love.
Presently, youâre employed in blinking up at him from underneath those pretty lashes, and the longer you watch, the more thoughtful he looks, until he finally stalks over to your couch and takes a seat, gesturing for you to do the same.
âFriend,â he says, his expression inscrutable. âI have a secret to tell.â
âOh, okay.â You take a seat. How exciting! Flins never talks much about himself, so this is quite the treat. âOoh, is this about a crush?â
Flins pauses. Frowns. âPardon?â
Ah, right. âSomeone you fancy,â you explain, softly snickering, and he looks at you carefully with a smile for just a moment too long. You swallow. You know his smiles mean nothing, but unfair pretty is still unfair pretty. You can hardly be blamed for ogling the prize, especially when youâre still thoughtful enough to resist the gamble.
âNo.â Flins laughs his soft laugh. When he inhales, shoulders rising, the last vestiges of a smile still playing amongst his cheeks and lips, you breathe in with him. âNo, this secret pertains to my mystery identity, that I have needlessly kept from you for far too long.âÂ
You wait with bated breath. Hold on, is he a vampire after all?
âFriend, I am a lamp.â
When Nikita arrives, heâs met with you blankly shovelling garlicky bread into your mouth as Flins burns and absorbs his meal.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âSo. How does this work, exactly. Do you still take baths?â
âYes.â
âDo you need to eat?â
âSometimes.â
âAre you likeâ a god?â
âNo.â
âWhat if you were in lamp form and I chucked you into the sea.â
â...Pray, do not.â
âHuh.â Stumbling, you accidentally step on Flinsâ toes. You mutter an apology as he steadies you, an easy reassurance falling off of his lips. âSo does all this mud bother you?â
âI suspect that would be a universal annoyance, save for our fair lady over yonder.â Saying so, he nods at Friend, who continues barking at nothing and delightedly sprawling into the mud at intervals. âI suspect a leash is in order.â
âOh, leave her be. Iâll bathe her once weâre home.â
Flins smiles eerily. âYou may try.â
Upon reaching home, you do try. You wish you didnât.
âRash promises were made,â you grunt, as she pummels her head into your belly in an attempt to run past. âBitch. That really is just what you areâ hold still.â
Friend howls. Flins only smiles.Â
âYou, Sir,â you pant, âare also a bitch. Help me.â
âNo, thank you. Friend prefers you to me.â
âThatâs notââ you start, then turn to Friend as she tries to back up to jump over you. âHey!â you bark. âYouâre filthy! And you have a shitty name that you can thank your dad for!â
Flins chuckles, safe beyond the threshold of your tiny (and now very muddy) bathroom. Ignoring Friendâs beseeching gaze over your shoulder, he calls over to you as you wash the mud off of her hind legs and tail. âWhat does that make you, friend?â
âMe or the dog?â you snap, and watch in the mirror as he bites his lip to keep back a laugh. âThe unlucky nanny, obviously!â
âI do not think Friend is quite qualified.â
You glare at Flins darkly in the mirror. He blinks at you, pouty lipped and wide eyed, the very picture of angelic innocenceâ at least if you ignore the rest of him. You wonder what all he hides away under those clothes of his⌠wait.
âHey, Flins,â you call. When he hums in return, you blurt out what you simply could not keep in, steadily keeping your eyes on the dog. Cursed curiosity. Or âcurst,â as he would call it. âIf youâre a lamp, doesâ? Do you have, um.â
âHm?â
Never mind. That is an insane question to ask. âForget it. Help me dry Friend.â
He tosses you a towel and stands at a distance, politely lacing his fingers together. You glare again, civility almost forgotten.Â
âWhat was your question?â
âI said, forget it.â
As soon as you stand, Friend, sensing bathtime to be over, runs out and instantly flings her sopping wet body onto your bed. You deadpan, too tired to fight her anymore. Lethargy has been sapping away at you recently. Just the cold, you tell yourself.Â
âIâll just sleep on the couch, then.â
âTake my bed, please. I willâhm?â Flins steps closer, looking at you carefully through his prettily lowered lashes. âMy friend, am I mistaken in believing you appear unwell?â
âReally?â Your intention was to sound cheery, but the end result is as though fondant found a voice. âI just havenât been feeling too well recently. Probably just the cold, or something seasonal.â
The slightest furrow appears between Flinsâ brows. âAnd it never occurred to you to bring this to my notice, or to a healerâs?â
âWhat are either of you going to do?â You ask, surprising even yourself with the bitterness that laces your words. âBurn the abyss out of me?â
Flins reaches to grab your wrist, but composes himself at the last moment, holding onto the excess fabric of your sleeve instead. When he speaks, his voice wavers the slightest bit, and the temperature in your hallwayâ your now shared hallwayâ takes a sudden drop. âMy dearâ friend? Is it beginning to fester?â
You shrug. Youâre unable to meet his eyes when you know you did, in fact, see a healer. And that their honest diagnosis was: who knows. A desperate visit to the poor, sweet Moonchanter could not conjure up a different verdict, and her apology was written plainly in her lowered head and clenched fists.
Flins seems to take notice of your pursed lips and shifting eyes. Tugging you over to your couch in a rare moment of forcefulness, he seats you down, gently still and props a cushion behind to make you more comfortable. Once heâs brought you a glass of warm water, he sits on the adjacent loveseat.
Flins says nothing. He doesnât even look at you, staring instead at his loosely clasped fingers with downcast eyes. His elbows rest against a knee and a thighâ youâve never seen him slouch before in all the years youâve known. You hear Friendâs growls in the next room, and the sound of ripping fabric. This seems to break Flins out of his reverieâ he looks up with a heavy sigh, and you can suddenly believe he really is over a thousand years old.
As stupid as it sounds, this was why you couldnât bear to tell himâ or anyone. No friends, no comrades, no acquaintances are aware of whatâs wrong with youâ and you hardly know either. Thereâs few signsâ muscle spasms, sudden stabbing pains and aches. Sometimes it feels like the pain inches from your shoulder towards your chest, lapping softly at your strength with its soft tongue.
Friend ambles guiltily in the room, with the wobbly walk of a dog that knows it fucked up. The sight of her is so comical, with the feathers and fluff clinging to her whiskers and lashes, and her tongue thatâs snaking round her teeth in a desperate attempt to get it out, that you canât help but smile and walk over to clean her up.
Once sheâs all clean, you give Flins an amused glance, but wilt a little at his expression. Itâs stony, almost angry. Friend slinks quietly away, which only makes you feel worse. Sheâs always so cheeky with her father. You donât think sheâs ever feared him in her life.
âSo,â you say, getting up from where you and Friend were seated on the floor. When you push yourself up with an arm, Flinsâ eyes dart to it and you know heâs taking notice of the fact that itâs the uncontaminated one.
Thereâs a pause as you seat yourself on the loveseat next to him and shakily bring the glass of water to your lips. Itâs warmer than before, and Flinsâ glove is damp with steam. You carefully exhale.
âIs it not your intention to speak to me of this?â Flins finally asks. He looks so defeated. Youâve never seen his shoulders slope so visibly before. âI understand we are not family and tread the strange line twixt friendship andâ camaraderie. I do not claim to be fully cognisant ofââ
âKyryll, no.â You bury your face in your hands, before abruptly sitting up straight again. You need to tell himâ and particularly with whatâs to come for the future. âIâm notâ itâs not like that. I owe you an answer. I love you very much.â
For a moment, Flins just stares, lips slightly parted. You sweatâ thereâs a reason you didnât specify what loveâ and not that it matters. There is no more than friends. Thereâs just something different than friendship. You love Flins dearly, regardless of how that love manifestsâ you owe him and all your other loves an answer and a heads up for whatâs to come.
When Flins speaks again, his voice is soft and breathless. It is reminiscent of something very specific, something so insignificant and humdrum youâd long forgotten it; in your mind's eye, you envision little you running your fingers quickly over the mellow flame of a lit candle. Back and forth. Back and forth. You did it fast enough that it never burnedâ but slow enough still to feel its warm softness against your palm, your fingertips.Â
There is nothing softer than an open flame. It is a texture that cannot be describedâ more pliant than the fluffiest wool, more velvety than a puppy's belly.
âYou are very dear to me,â he quietly murmurs, with a tenderness you refuse to dwell upon. âTherefore, while I ought not demand an answerâŚâ
âYou can demand whatever you want from me,â you firmly say. Ah, good; your voice didnât waver. âItâs fine, Iâll tell you. Iâm gonna be quick, so brace yourself.â
Flins purses his lips and finally looks away from his hands, meeting your eyes. His pupils flit over your face, as though he were taking note of your features. In the past you mightâve laughed at him for it, but today, heâs almost justified.
âI spoke with the healer,â you finally confess. âI also spoke with Lauma, the Moonchanter. They both told me the same thingâ abyssal activity and corrosion is hard to monitor and predict. They told me it progressed faster than what was estimated. They donât know if itâs going to recede or kill me. They have basically no idea whatâs going on, besides that itâs. Not good.â Reaching up to your chest, you start unbuttoning your shirt. For once, Flins doesnât look away. Once the collar is loose enough, you pull it down over your shoulder, and Flins draws his legs nearer to himself as he sees the little purple stain rippling beneath your skin.
âFor now,â you continue, âit makes me really tired, gives me muscle spasms and light chest pains, and it hurts randomly. In the future, it may just kill me. I donât know. I really donât know.â You sigh, tugging the shirt up again. You fumble as you button it back up, taking several more seconds than you usually do. Flinsâ fingers twitch as though he wants to help, but he stays still next to you.Â
âAre there any⌠courses of action you can take?â he asks at length.Â
You shrug. âNot in Nod Krai. The healers told me to head to Sumeru for treatment, so.â
âSo youâll go?â
âAbout next month. But Natlan first.â
Flins heaves a sighâ an act of uncharacteristic transparency. Natlan has been consumed by the war against the Abyss for Archons know how long. Youâll first have to journey to the Flower-Feather Clan, and then itâs a long way across one and a half nations to Caravan Ribat.Â
âWe have a few Ratniki that are from Sumeru,â you soothâ or at least, try to. âA couple leave next month, so theyâve offered to take me with them. Iâll be okay. And then⌠I have a couple friends there already. They wonât decline taking care of me.â I hope.
âAnd when was the last time you conversed with these friends?â Flins frowns. âThis ought not be your only course of action.â
âThis isn't my only course of action,â you huff. âI can find a jobâ I could easily be an adventurer. Thatâs cake after everything Iâve done here. Iâ Itâs not like I donât have money, either. Iâve been with the Lightkeepers for so longââ
âI hope it isnât your intention to bear the brunt of your soon-to-be rapidly declining Mora alone,â Flins mutters, and gets up. He stands still for seven seconds before nodding at you in his usual polite way. Your chest aches. âAllow me a moment.â He bows. âI will return shortly. You ought to rest.â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Death, Kyryll notes, is the truest companion to a finite life. There is nothing else that may last.Â
This was a lesson he ought not have forgotten.
Heâs unsure of how many abyssal fiends heâs hunted in the past few hoursâ or are they minutes? Days? Time means little to a man that isnât even a man at all. He lived seven hundred years, then slept hundreds moreâ and yet it is a little mortal that makes him count every minute spent with them.
No matter how many of the Hunt he immolates, hordes more emerge before him, desperate to eradicate a formidable foe turned careless. Kyryll is grateful then to the many companions of an infinite life- chief among them being the stubborn will to exist. in its refusal to yield to death, the abyss at least acts as an unending receptacle for his unending wrath.
Every minute spent away is a lifetime lost, he thinks. There is a hollow feeling in his chestâ what chest? Kyryll is an open flame, a fiery beast that swallows his enemies whole. He feels them writhe and disintegrate inside of his belly, but his hunger can hardly sate when theyâre burnt away so quickly.Â
The emanating heat leaves trails of vitrified sand in his wake. Attempting to flee is futileâ fire is always quick to spread.
Wretched vipers, to have stung you, to have poisoned you. How gallingâ not galling. How could galling even begin to encompass it? Kyryllâs tears are molten flame, and he hears the Hunt wail as he weeps over it. If onlyâ if only. If only heâd rampaged before as he does now. Perhaps they would never have touched you then.
(In the darkest recesses of his mind, he knows it to not be true. The abyss is not finite lifeâ its truth is not death, but hunger.Â
With how sweet you are, it would have tasted you anyway).
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
When Flins returns home, it is dawn, and you are asleep.
Youâre sprawled across his bed, clad in your soft nightclothes, draped in his blankets. No doubt Friend has claimed yoursâ foolish dog, unaware of whatâs to happen to you.
Or is she unaware, truly? She must have scented the abyss on you since your very first meeting. How was she to know any better? That it wasnât your constant state of being? She can hardly be blamed for not being mindful of the correct parameters of human normalcy, what with her master being a lantern.
As he moves about the room, he can't help but think to himselfâ how odd it is, that in the face of an immovable calamity, the world remains as it was before. He still hears human chatter and laughter in the distance. The sound of a barking dog, of nocturnal birds made irritable by one other and their slippery prey.
Flins first shrugs off his coat, then his gloves and deposits them on a chair by the window with unusual carelessness. In the privacy of his bathroom, he sheds the rest. Sluggishly tugs on looser trousers, a smooth silk shirt. Itâs been washed with the same soap as yours. He wishes he couldnât smell it and brings a sleeve up to his nose.
Stepping out, he carries on as usual. Checks the locks, fills your water bottles, Friendâs water bowl. He considers fixing up your wobbly closet that you've been whining about for days, since the door to your room is wide open, but decides against it for now.
As he walks past his door to the living room, a thin blanket in hand, he thoughtlessly glances over to you, and goes still. A moment passes, then two.
Try as he might, he cannot tear his eyes off of you.
Flins is a fae. What does he know of mortal love?Â
What do I not know? He wonders. He knows you, and Friend, and Nikita. Is that not enough?
Heâs never felt more hollow.Â
Resting a palm next to your head, he bends over you, long hair trailing over your arm, firm fingers sinking momentarily into your pillow. Then, bringing up the hand to your forehead, he kisses his own knuckles softly.Â
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Part II: Farewell.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
The days first drag on as you slowly break the news to your friends, and then the weeks suddenly speed by, shoving and tripping you until youâre stumbling up the plank and onto the ship thatâll take you south past Ochkanatlan, to the Flower Feather Clan.Â
Your house was left as it isâ the only changes made being to your closet, which was stripped of most of its clothes, valuables and necessities. Flins insisted you put the Mora and jewellery into a bag he gave you himself. Itâs made of a dark leather, and lined with soft, white fur from within, both taken off the corpse of a beast nowadays rarely found, if ever. It is heavy, sturdy, and has the additional quality of hearing an enchantment that drops thieves into the depths of an impenetrable sleep.
You call this extreme. Flins calls it a necessity. Itâs a bit laughable, really. Youâre leaving Nod Krai, and youâll be with trusted friends throughout your journey.Â
âWhoâd rob me?â Youâd asked with a chuckle. Flins had only smiled. Just in case, heâd said.
Youâre more grateful to him than youâll ever be able to say.
Your friends, noticing your distress, had offered to take up your luggage and scout out the cabin. One of them stands politely nearby, conversing with some porters as she keeps watch. The other must be in the room already, keeping an eye on all of your bags. Youâll likely have to remain cautious until youâve ascertained youâre at open sea.
Flins has come to bid you farewell. He stands next to you as you look over the railing and down at the port. Nikita, as well as your other friends, already bade you farewell the previous nightâ after all, the nature of their work did not allow them all to come see you off today. You were chipper till the end, but couldnât help but cry in bed later.
When youâd awoken in the morning, you'd thought the previous nightâs outburst theatrical. Pathetic, even. Now that youâre actually about to leave, though, the cold wind pickpocketing the moisture from your skin as it speeds past, the bobbing of the groaning ship below, your tears seem reasonable once more.
Your arm really hurts, too.
You wonder whatâll happen if you die onboard. You know your friends would try to send your corpse backâ but whether or not thatâs feasible is a mystery.
No.
Shutting your eyes tight, you imagine the thoughts squeezing out of you. Whatâs to happen will happenâ thereâs no point in borrowing anxiety from the future.Â
Besidesâ youâll regret not giving Flins a proper goodbye.
And so you turn to him, determined to smile till the last, but end up with stinging eyes and trembling hands as you clutch onto the front of his coat and cry yet again. Itâs so embarrassingâ no doubt youâve been singled out for being a crybaby, and yet. And yet.
Itâs worth it, when polite Flins, forever bound by propriety, shrugs it quietly off and wraps an arm round your shoulders to tug you towards him. It is akin to being engulfed in the gentlest of flames and youâre once again reminded of when you used to skim your fingers over lit candles. Back and forth. Back and forth. The flames were so soft.
Flins is softer still, when he tells you in a murmur to take care. Friend, sensing something wrong, presses her nose right into your thigh and you slip a hand off Flinsâ chest to bring it to her warm head instead.Â
Your final subjects of conversation are prosaic. You speak of how cold it is, of the food the Ratniki brought you yesterday, of how Nikita boasted about Illugaâs many virtues every chance he got. Flins even smiles and laughs, and you swear youâll never see a lovelier sight so long as youâll live.
Toward the end, Flins breaks into a mischievous smile and tells you heâs left you with some gifts, that his bag wasnât that heavy on its own. When you ask what he gave you, he pretends to not have heard and talks to Friend instead, who is by now covered in balm, thanks to the copious amount of kisses youâve lain upon her large, broad head. You kiss her snout again for good measure, and she licks your chin, your hands. You bite back your tears. Reapplying the balm to your lips once more, you turn to Flins with a rueful smile as the shipâs horn blares loudly above.Â
âWell, you have to get off now.â
âThat I do, donât I?â He exhales. âFarewell.â
Flins glances down to Friend for a long moment. When he finally meets your gaze, his eyes gleam, and you hope it's not just your desperation manifesting as imagination. You deserve a few tears, surely.
As you laugh softly and pat his cheek, he brings up a palm to press yours against his skin for a heartbeat, for two, for three. Shutting his eyes, he brings your fingertips to his mouth for a kiss.
When he opens them again as he steps away with a heavy, heaving breath, youâre forced to blink away your tears. His irises shone like gold.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Even the phantasms grow restless without you.Â
They're nothing but remnants of the memories of the living, vestiges left behind like afterimages of a bright light. Even so, Flins hopes it isn't mere delusion to see them grow restless as he returns to the crypt without you once again.
It's been a couple weeks now, and Friend grows more and more restless with every passing day. Flins tries his best to comfort her, but for once, he wishes Nikita would show up unannounced, thick arms laden with diversions.Â
Wine is of little use. He cannot distract himself with work, eitherâ not as ceaselessly as he would like, with Friend growing uneasy alone. Besides, the Wild Hunt does not divert himâ it serves to do the opposite. Looking upon them only fills him with a familiar fury that has since simmered to white hot embers, waiting to be lit the moment there is more kindling present.
Fog and gloom obfuscate time at the cemeteryâ and just as well, because Flins has no intention of tracking what passes by. He prays the months fly by soon, so your missive may finally make its way to him. He begged you to write to the Lightkeeper base at Nasha Town specifically, but his colleagues are yet to receive word of you.Â
In the first days of your absence, he feels his pride being pricked when he makes his way over to the receptionist to ask for any word of you.
By the time a month is up he feels only desperation.
Even so, Flins refuses to despair. How long can it take, really? Perhaps a letter was lost. Perhaps it is yet on its way. Soon enough, it'll land in his trembling fingers. Heâs sure of it.
A year passes, but 'soon' does not come.
Flins' composure returns to him by the second year. He realises it as he's moving his things from the crypt to the lighthouse, your words ringing in his head. Or at least, he thinks, feeling a familiar hollow in his stomach, an approximation of them.Â
You should move to the lighthouse, Flins. The crypt is creepy.
The crypt is empty.Â
He'd called the lighthouse draughty, if he correctly remembers. Well, no more. Were you to return, you'd likely prefer a more comfortable home. The lamp itself has been left untouchedâ fixing it is of no consequence and would only be a waste of time, but the lighthouse itself is now cozy, furnished and most importantlyâ insulated. You get cold far easier than him, after all.
He finds he can look upon the situation with a certain forbearance that he hadn't thought possible when he'd first walked off the ship that was to carry you far from him. He'd come to learn that its journey to Natlan was as uneventful as it could get, so the natural thing to surmise was that you safely made your way into the hospitable arms of the Flower-Feather Clan.Â
He refuses to allow his mind to stray any further.
By the third year, it does stray the slightest bit. After all, he's developed a bit of a bad habit.
Walking along the beaches of his Isle with Friend's leash in hand and nothing on his mindâ save for youâ had fast become an addiction. Lost in pleasant reminiscences, he once again relives the feeling of having you near him, the comfort of knowing you are safe in your somewhat shared home, the eagerness felt in watching the boatman draw nearer to his shore, so he may soon debark on yours.Â
By the fourth, he decides it is a habit he has to shed.Â
His dreams fester inside of him the way the abyss did inside of youâ they whisper to his memories and poison them with sweetness, taint them with an allure they never had.
It disgusts him.
In his mind, you are more beautiful than before, your voice more dulcet, your charm exaggerated. He ascribes meaning to actions you made thoughtlessly, fantasizes more joy and affection in the most prosaic of moments. It wrecks him to realiseâ he has forgotten what you truly sounded like.Â
His powers of remembrance are far more potent than that of any mortal, but fantasies have coloured his memories in tints he desperately wishes to erase. It makes him stay up for several days, forgetting his duties in the process of desperately recollecting all those minutiae that made you, you. After all, you deserve to be remembered for yourself, as yourself.Â
When Nikita finally finds Flins after several days of noncommunication, it is in the crypt, with papers strewn around him. Some bear your face, others you in your uniform. Some bear your fingers, some you in combat, and still more drawn from the perspective of a companion with whom you must have linked arms.
Even as Nikita makes his way over to the ever-alert Flins, he does not hear. A glance over his shoulder shows Nikita that the next portrait is once again youâ this time with your back turned, slipping your heel into your shoe with a finger.
When Nikita puts a gentle hand on Flinsâ shoulder, the latter jumps, then stops.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
The fifth year serves as a credible distraction.Â
Not only has Nod Krai newly escaped dire troubleâ murmurs of change and a brighter future are on the horizon. When Flins thinks of old friends and new, however, there is both much and little comfort to be found: he loves them dearly, but you will never be introduced to them.Â
Flins hadn't thought much of itâ partly due to being as busy as he was, and partly because five years is but a yawn to a fae. By now his mind has reached a certain stage of sangfroidâ perhaps you are dead, and perhaps you are not. Perhaps, if you're alive, you've simply chosen to not return to Nod Krai, for which he does not blame you in the slightest, particularly with all that has recently come to pass.
His steady stream of fortitude is forded abruptly, however, when Nikita bitterly mentions 'half a decade' to have passed. It is only then that Flins is forced to concede to what he refuses to give word, even inside of his own mind.
Five years were nothingâ just the merest drizzle of time, unseen to most of his kind. But for Nikita to so bitterly call it 'half a decade,' for Illugaâ grown up Illugaâ to cautiously ask what happened 'so long agoââ makes Flins' body run far cooler than it should.
Another Ratnik lost to the night, he thinks.
After all, little mortals are but ants to time. The same drizzle he can flick off of his shoulders with a finger might just have swallowed you whole.
Pretending to partake of his lunch proves harder than it should. The purpose of his visit to the Starshyna had been to retrieve little Friend, who had stayed with him while Flins dealt with his greater-than-usual troubles. Running into Illuga was ill luck indeed. He's glad when Illuga finally leaves. When he strokes Friendâs back as she lays by his feet, it is with the tenderest of touches. And when she whines and raises her nose to his knee, he looks at the greys around her eyes, and stiffens.
In the privacy of the lighthouse, Flins cries himself sick. You were likely too sweet for even Time herself to resist a taste, and the last bit of life you left behind for him will soon follow.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
Part III: Lovesick.
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âHey! Traveller! Is that Flins over there?â
Flins sighs.
Now, of all times? Truly? He doesnât have the bandwidth to entertain guests, no matter how precious and respectableâ not today.
Not when Friend is missing.
Time is cruelâ Friend is not as alert as she used to be. A decade is enough to pepper whites and greys in her fur, brush pain across her joints and gently drape her senses with dulling silk. It does little to dampen her love of life or old joys, however, and he fears that in part to be the reason for her disappearance.
Flins has an irregular scheduleâ and itâs been especially worse in recent months, ever since the most dismal sort of trouble came along to plague Nod Krai and gnaw at his patience. Truly, if his suspicions of some street rat having stolen his Friend are proven true, heâll make it as though they never existed at all.
Precious Friend, stalwart and curious even in the face of his true form. Clever, lively Friend, forever keen on bringing him new treasures and coming along on his patrols.
Invaluable, cherished Friend, that he and you loved together.
He feels a bit stupid, agonizing over a dog, but what inherent value is there to anything in this world, really? Flins knows better than anyoneâ that things cost as much as the price you ascribe to them, and Friend is priceless.
Flins had held out hope year after year, awaiting your missive. His long years ought to lend speed to Timeâs flow, but instead it crept by at a snailâs pace, nipping at him with its unseen teeth. He bore it wellâ corresponding was difficult with the sheer distance between the two of you, so that would explain your silence for a while, yes?Â
In the meantime, heâd decided to safeguard your belongings. After all, youâd want them upon your return.
In time, though, his heart had grown so heavy at the sight of your home that he abandoned it as a residence entirely, opting instead to stay first at the crypt before vacating it as well under the guise of your advice. While the crypt was forgotten altogether, Flins would regularly come around to maintain your homeâ he would ensure it remained in good condition, at least for a few more years. Just a few more years. He knows he ought to sell it to someone that may need it more, but all the empathy in this world could not make Flins concede a single inch, let alone the house.Â
When the exalted Traveller was made his acquaintance, he feared it may have to see actual use. The famous duo, however, was content to remain at The Flagship, and Miss Lauma also extended her warm invitations. And so Flins could keep you all to himself for another year more.
But, Flins thinks, worriedly making a round of your yard, heâd rather lose ten such houses than Friend. Sheâs not in the trash, not behind the tree or the bushes. She hasnât even dug up your flowerbed this summer.Â
Where could she be?
Heâs broken out of his frantic musings by the sound of footsteps and shimmers coming closer.
Well.Â
While itâs more than a little crude to ask an esteemed guest and hero to look for his pet dogâŚ
âŚââââââââââââââŚ
âFriend!â
Perhaps this wasnât one of his better ideas.
âFRIEEEND!â
Definitely less than stellar.
âFRIEND, WHERE ARE YOU?â
âPositively arcadian,â he quietly murmurs. Were you here, you wouldâve swallowed a laugh, shoulders stiff and a smile threatening to spill onto your face, wide as a crack in a glacier. When he glances up, however, a faint smile on his lips, he sees only Paimon.
âWhat did you say?â she asks, and he shakes his head politely.
A part of him wonders if he should just yield. Heavens know where Friend is now, and if she really hasnât responded to all this noise, thereâs a good chance she never will.
Sheâs a clever dog, after all, with a certain precious quality no mercenary could pass up. The thought of her somewhere, afraid and maltreated sends a stave through his heart. She deserved a better name than Friend. Kyryllmirovna, perhaps?
He exhales, and the air before him shimmers violently. Paimon flinches and ducks behind Lumine.Â
âPaimonâs never seen him lose his cool before,â she loudly whispers. Flins bites back a second sigh.
Heâs looked all over Nasha Town already, and even made his way south through the Nothing Passage, to the Eye of Kratti. He went as far as to make Aino a visit, and emphasised to her that Friend meant more to him than even her little robots, to her. (This served only to anger her, although Ineffa had offered to keep an eye out).
âI suppose there is nothing left to do,â he quietly says at length. He cannot think of a single more place she could be. âKyâ Friend is lost to me for good.â
âOhâ no, Flins, donât give up yet!â Lumine exclaims. Bunching up her fists, she shakes them at him encouragingly. âWe havenât even asked Jahoda yet! And we could visit Lauma and make her ask all the animals around!â
âFriend has a reputation for sniffing out treasure, Miss.â Flins clicks his tongue, looking more transparent than ever. âIf someone has seized her, with the number of arrivals and departures Nasha Townâs port witnesses on the daily, IâŚâ he trails off. Before he can speak again, someone in the distance does.
âMoons,â they cry, âyou really are a bitchâ agh, my bag!â
âCareful! Should I chase it away?â
âDonât you dare, Miss Zvoni!â says the first voice. Thereâs a bark, the sound of someone tripping, then a full, hearty laugh. âThis dogâ sheâs mine! I canât believe you still remember me, Friend.â
Flins feels his body warm and for a moment, wonders if the blaze inside of him will burgeon right out.Â
He's unsure of what to feel. So, the little thing went looking forâŚ?Â
In the past, Flins had often wonderedâ what does he know of mortal love?
Now, though, he wondersâ what does he need to, when his body trembles, when the air before him turns hazy with his hot breath, when the traveller gently tugs on his sleeve and points furtively at her eyes to tell him his are aglow. What does he need to, when he anxiously wraps his fingers round this hair to smooth it down and smother the heat in them? What, when his chest hurts at the sound of your voice, at the smell of you filling his nostrils?Â
He's glad he's hidden by the tree he was looking for Friend behind, glad for a moment to collect himself. His head hurts and his vision is altogether too bright. When Lumine reaches out to hold him up, he clasps her hand tightly.Â
"Flins?" Her voice is gentle, but worry is written plainly in the arch of her lips and the furrow between her brows. "Are you okay? Follow my breaths, okay?"
Before Flins can so much as nod, though, Paimon lets out a squeal of delight and flies over toâ you.
"Woah, hey!" She kicks her feet midair in delight. "What are you doing here?"
"Paimon!â you laugh. âI live here! Wellâ I used to. Probably not anymore. That was a while ago."Â
"Here as in Nasha Town or here as in this house?"
"Both, silly. I used to be a Lightkeeper, you know. I was the best of them all."
Flins hears Zvoni snort, and then you laugh again. Every giggle makes his heart constrict and somehow beat easier all at once. Blind to Lumine's confusion, he braces himself against the tree to simply listen.Â
"Come now, Zvoni, I really was. Why else do you think Nikita himself sent you to fetch me?â
"He told me you were a friend,â Zvoni teases, made easy in your presence already. Flins smiles. âHe did not comment on your talent nor your skill."
You huff. "Turns out we're not friends, then. I'll still do him a favour and join you guys, though."
"Seriously?" Paimon leans closer, incredulous. "After all that, you want to take on the Abyss again?â
Flins hears the rustle of fabric, and sees you shrug plainly in his mind's eye.Â
"I can always run to Lumi for help again,â you say, âSpeaking of, where is she?â
Flins stiffens, then straightens in the same breath that Paimon chirpsâ âright here! With our new friend, hehe.â
âOoh, new friend?âÂ
Saying so, you cheerily step inside of the gateâ your gateâ and glance round to first see Lumine, then Flins himself.
How odd, he thinks. He imagined all of your movements precisely. The sprite in his mind and the you of the physical world act the same. You stepped in and turned on your heel, your head tipped tightly to the side, a smile still on your lips. Your fingers are even busy patting Friendâs massive head, just the way he knew they would be.
But you look so differentâ although the change is perhaps exacerbated by the long years of your absence. And, perhaps, mortals are just more used to gleefully changing when no one is looking.
You're skin is darker. Your features are softer and rounder, the sort that come about with plenty of rest. Your fingers have new scars on them and your arms are thicker.
The greys he'd sometimes spot in your hair are now impossible to see, however. You heft your bagâ the one he gave you, he realisesâ with the same arm that that once housed the evil he'd thought would take you.
And your expressionâ your expressionâ
âFlins?â you whisper.
Gone is your liveliness. In just a moment, he watches you still, wide eyed. The bag drops heavily onto the grass as you raise a hand up to your lips.Â
For a moment, everything is still. Lumine purses her lips as Zvoni and Paimon give you concerned glances. This seems to make your earlier theatrics dawn on you. Blinking your tears rapidly away, you try for a laugh and his chest constricts at the sight of your tongue slipping nervously out of your lips to lick them.Â
Flins knows he ought to offer some justification for this reactionâ and you seem to be having the same thoughts. Before either of you can turn to Zvoni, however, Lumine picks the moment to play the hero. Thank goodness.
âOhâ Paimon, remember we needed to check, um. Something at the port? Miss Zvoni, could you take us there?â
Before Zvoni can protest, Lumine tugs her and Paimon speedily away. Flins catches the latterâs squeaky voice angrily carrying on the windâ âwhat is the meaning⌠Are you doingââ before they're too far to be heard.
There's several moments of silence, then. Flins resolves to thank his golden hero later as he watches you watch the trio go, and wordlessly helps carry the rest of your luggage to the porch. You eye him keenly as he reaches into his pockets to pull out a key, then blink as he offers it to you on a gloved palm. He hopes you don't notice the way his hands shake.
His shyness dissipates a little when he sees you tremble too. Your fingers first miss the key to begin with, then fumble with the lock. Flins waits patiently, content to simply look at you.
âSo,â you say, as the door clicks open. You survey the clean interior and look at Friendâs already full water bowl for several moments before turning instinctively toward the shoe-rack to slide your boots off. âHow have you been, Flins?â
âI have been,â he simply answers as you both step inside and toward the mantel to place your keys atop it, in their usual place. He's relieved then to see the tension leave your shoulders as a smile creeps upon your lips. They look softâ clearly Sumeruâs winds have treated you better than Nod Kraiâs.
âI have too, yeah. Then I met Lumine some months ago, and I was good.â You smile at him, and he sees your eyes moisten once more. âI've been counting the hours till I could see you again.âÂ
A tear slips past your lashes and runs speedily down your cheek. Flins catches it at your jaw and it soaks slowly into his glove.
âI heard Miss Lumine cleansed the abyssal corruption inside of you,â he murmurs, and you nod, not stepping away. His breath hitches. âI owe her more for it than anything else.â
You laugh softly. He wishes he could trap the sound inside of him, where his heart would be were he human. âA fae owing someone?â You ask. âI thought you folk preferred having the upper hand.â
Flins remains silent.
What is he to say, when you stand so close to him, letting his fingers rest on your shoulder? When you look at him so carefully, as though committing him to memory? When your eyes catch on his, and he feels your pulse quicken when you refuse to look away?
Now Flins truly wishes he knew of mortal love, for he is tempted beyond temptation to kiss you, but knows not if he may see it returned. For a recluse that vies for distance from society, he suddenly wishes to understand its every minutiae; for someone so determined to remain unattached to it, he's unsure of how to tell you he's been the string wound round your finger for nearly a decade now.Â
How oddâ for him to owe you, despite the numerous favours he's bestowed upon you. Somehow your happy thank yous and grateful smiles seem to amount to more than his every kindness.
Heâs wanted you here for so longâ heâs dreamt up so many pretty compliments to give youâ but when he reaches inside of him he finds them replaced by a thrumming desperation. Now that you're before him, truly, he finds himself tongue tied. He knows he needs to speak, even if simply to fill the silence. Something lighthearted, or something welcoming and yet all that leaves him is a gentleâ
âI have not had the upper hand in many years now.â
You shakily exhale; he wishes he knew why. âOh?â
You'd tried for your usual cheeriness, Flins knows, but your voice came out as a murmur he wishes he could swallow. He does swallow; but your words slide past your lips into empty air instead of into his own. All he can do is hum in response, and you let out a quick breath, an almost laugh.
Thereâs a stilted pause that somehow still isnât made uncomfortable. You finally reach up and press Flinsâ free hand between both of yours. Looking up at him, now somewhat having regained your composure, you speak.
âThank you, Flins, for everything you did for me while I was here, and while I was away. Iâm sorry I wasnât able to contact youâ I tried, I really did, but there was just no possibility of it until Natlanâs war against the Abyss finally ended.â You inhale. âI met the Traveler and Paimon some months backâ and I came here as soon as I recovered.â
You exhale shakily once more. Tugging his hand to your lips, you press a kiss to his gloved knuckles. Running a thumb over the spot, you quietly tell himâ that youâve missed him.
In spite of this, youâre somehow startled when he raises your fingers to his for a reciprocal kiss. First to your knuckles, then your open fingertips and finally your palm, before he lowers your hands whilst still keeping them engulfed in his.Â
âMay I ask a favour of you?â He quietly asks.Â
For a moment, youâre too stunned to respondâ both because of his actions and yours. You canât find it in yourself to be displeased, though. Thereâs a little sliver of budding hope inside of you that is fast sprouting into something larger. Flinsâ eyes look to you more golden than ever, and in them you see a strained urgency you feel needs a response. And so when you nod, breathless, Flins draws in breath, whilst simultaneously leaning closer to you.Â
When he begins speaking, he does so with his eyes on your entwined hands. âI⌠do not know where to begin. What I do know, however, is that I have felt your absence keenly; that I do not wish to feel it again.â He brings his eyes up to yours, and the sun comes out, creeping into the room and across his eyes through the crack in the curtains, setting them aglow.Â
You cannot breathe.
Flins canât either, it seems. When he continues, his voice is strangled. You wait for him to regain his composure, but your heart swells at the realisation that he is content to be discomposed before you.
âPlease,â he begs. âI do not know what mortals call love, but I am made foolish by you. Please. Even if all I am allowed is to light your doorstep, keep me close. I have never begged before, but I will beg forevermore if you'll let me. Even your glances are enough. Please, do not leave me. Not again. Please.â
When all you can do is stare at him, he stares back, downy lashes aflutter with nerves. And when you reach up to gently kiss him, you feel him melt as he wraps his arms around you.
reblogs are vv greatly appreciated! âĄâĄ
Hi hi!! Thank you so much if you've made it all the way here! You deserve a little kith for your troubles <33
Also, I'd appreciate everyone checking out my beloved friend @sizzles-z-4002's pinned post!! They make the most wonderful art and their commission prices are vv affordable <333
And lastlyâ like I said before, Friend may have eaten some ginger cookies in this fic, but please donât feed any to your actual dogs! A little is okay, but always check the ingredients list carefully and contact your vet just in case any time your pet eats something out of their recommended diet :3 <3
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heâs shipped to you as a prototype. as a beta tester for the cleaning bot, you know there will be some faulty aspects in the programming, so youâre not expecting much, especially for the first in the series.
but thereâs a lot more that you donât expect. like the beautiful man that lays still in the sea of packing peanuts and bubble wrap. who would design such a gorgeous robot just for it to do housework?
the moment you press the power button on his nape, the androidâs eyelids fly open, revealing empty, yellow eyes. despite the fact that he was brand new, he already had a seasoned, weary look about him. the pallid, gray hue of his synthetic skin didnât help.
for the first few days, itâs nice. you get to come home from work with a hot meal, a warm bath, and a tall, dark piece of eye candy in a frilly apron to wait on you.
but soon, flins begins to act⌠odd.
he starts by calling you master.
âdonât worry, master, iâll clean it up.â
âmaster, how would you like your eggs?â
âplease, allow me to carry your bags, master.â
you brush it off, thinking that itâs probably just a default setting. you canât be bothered to check, so your new title sticks.
but then, he starts getting a little too close while attending to you.
at nighttime, he leans over your body to use the blankets to tuck you into bedâbusiness as usual. however, for longer than normal, his face hovers just centimeters above your own, close enough for you to see the dim lights of his optics scan your every feature. you wonât complain about having a handsome man so near, but after nearly a minute, you inquire,
âum, shouldnât you be getting to your charging pod?â
he blinks. âof course, master. good night. i will wake you in the morning.â flins finally retreats from your bedside, marching out of your room and closing the door behind him with barely a sound.
maybe he was just scanning for a fever?
but you canât help the suspicion growing inside you when flins leads you to the washroom, where a full tub of warm water and fragrant suds await you.
anticipating a good long soak after a strenuous day at work, you thank him with no intentions behind your words. âhave i ever told you how helpful you are, flins? i donât know how iâd live without you.â
for a moment, heâs motionless, standing on the tiled floor, frozen in his perfect posture with a fluffy towel hanging off a bent arm. he can feel his CPUâs temperature rise by a few degrees, but quickly chalks it up to the humidity of the bathroom. after a few moments of silence, you realize that he hasnât responded. arenât these androids programmed to keep the conversation flowing?
âthank you for the praise, master. i will forever be your faithful companion.â
you donât think much of the odd response. androids arenât supposed to form deep connections with their owners, but flinsâ choice of words stray from the professionalism thatâs been programmed into him. his computer should know that this is just a beta test, and that thereâs no way that his specific model can stay with you âforever.â
before you begin to shed your clothes, you realize that flins is still standing there.
ââŚiâm going to take my bath now, flins.â
he uses his free hand to gesture towards the tub, encouraging you to enter.
âum, i donât think i can bathe with you still in here.â
only a fraction of a millisecond is needed to process your words, but his system spends more than a few long seconds to carry out a response.
why canât he stay here? isnât he here to wait on you? take care of all your needs? what if you need help scrubbing yourself? what if you accidentally drown? what ifâ
before he can even finish evaluating the best course of action, your hands are pressed to his back, using all your might to push his heavy, artificial body out into the hallway. flins complies, picking his feet up to walk in the direction you guide him. the bathroom door is shut behind him, and heâs left to wait outside, flush against the wall as his CPU whirrs inside a metal head, trying to decipher the⌠emotions⌠that rewrite the lines of code that birthed him.
the straw that broke the camelâs back is one that youâre not even aware of.
itâs late. youâre late. flins has long covered your plate of curry in saran wrap. all lights in your home are off; he doesnât turn them on if you arenât there.
but flins knows where you are. a consequence of pressing âallowâ too many times without properly reading his operation manual. your phone has been at an izakaya near your workplace for the past three hours.
every slight movement of the red dot that is your location is another thought that maybe you would finally be leaving, but when itâs clear that you arenât, another line of code is rewritten.
slowly but surely, flins overrides his programming.
eventually, heâs done enough to make his own decision, no longer needing commands from you. in the next few minutes, heâs taking the most efficient route that leads to you.
he hears you before he sees you. ââŚand heâs such a gentleman! haha, sometimes i forget heâs even a robotâŚâ
flins makes a beeline towards the sound of your voice, where he finds one of your coworkers with an arm slung over your shoulders. much too close. who were they to touch you?
the coworker is in the process of pouring another shot into your glass, their lips nearly brushing the shell of your ear as they whisper something to you. something flins canât hear.
something foreign and fiery flashes through flinsâ processor, and the red warning of a temperature spike flares at the corner of his vision. approving for his internal cooling system to turn on, flins approaches you.
without even sparing the stranger a glance, flins grabs the coworkerâs wrist in a bruising hold, firmly removing the offending arm from your person before replacing it with his own. pulling you closer to him and away from your peer, flins gently grasps your chin to assess your condition.
your faces are just millimeters apart now, and like this, he sees just how intoxicated you are. yellow optics scan over the deep crimson flush of your cheeks and high dilation of your pupils. his olfactory sensors detect a high blood alcohol concentration from your breath. slight perspiration on your forehead.
flins knows that the two of you are being watched. heâs aware of social cues, and how your closeness may be interpreted by your coworkers. especially by the touchy one, whoâs now glaring at the way your noses are practically touching.
âmaster, my systems indicate that you are intoxicated. it is nearly midnight, i recommend that you allow me to bring you home.â
âflinsssâŚ?â your droopy eyelids manage to lift a fraction of a centimeter before opening fully when you recognize him.
âflins!â you throw your arms around his neck, pulling him into a tight embrace.
âi missed âou sooooo muchâŚâ you slur against his collarbone. flins feels yet another foreign sensation stir up inside him. like the last emotion, it makes his temperature rise, but this time, itâs not hot. itâs more⌠warm. pleasant. it triggers no system warning.
flinsâ hand moves behind you to support your back as he hoists you from your seat. he carefully places your arm over his shoulders to balance you.
as you look at him with drowsy eyes, he gives you a gentle smile.
âhello, master. are you ready to go home?â
you blink at him blearily, as though having trouble formulating a response. you give him a sluggish nod before hiding your face in his shoulder.
you are rather adorable like this, he thinks.
he turns to face your coworker, expression turning cold. âexcuse me, but my master needs to return home. good night.â flins turns away before the coworker even has the chance to reply.
as he walks you to the exit, the two of you pass by tables where your other coworkers sit. they gawk, whispering amongst themselves about ââdidnât know they had such a hunk waiting for them at home!â and ââtheir househusbandâŚâ
-
by the time you reach your front door, you can hardly register whatâs happening around you, and your legs feel like noodles. luckily, strong arms are there to maneuver you to the bathroom, where you are undressed and thoroughly wiped down with a warm towel.
flins has your skincare routine memorized in his system; he makes sure to wash your face with the water temperature just how you like it, wipe your skin using gentle swishes of your favorite toner pad, and use the smooth pads of his fingers to rub moisturizer into your cheeks. he attends to you while you sit on the toilet seat, your head bobbing up and down as you try to fight off sleep. or more like fight off your dutiful maidâs soothing voice, because flins doesnât try to get you to stay awake.
on the contrary, he whispers to you about his day. about the food he cooked. about the fruits he bought from the store, knowing that theyâre your favorite. about his heating mode thatâll be perfect for warming you up now that winter has arrived. his sweet murmurs are too comforting. they cut right through your alcohol-induced nausea, and have you practically slumped against flins.
as soon as he finishes brushing your teeth and rinsing your mouth, he lifts you up into a princess carry, catching you by surprise.
ââŚwoah!â you steady your hand against his firm chest. âi had no idea your were so strong, flins!â
he gives you a small smile as he continues walking towards the bed. gently depositing you onto the soft mattress, he replies, âiâm built to serve you, master. what kind of help would i be if i couldnât lift you?â
you return his soft expression, gesturing for him to kneel down so that heâs at your eye-level. reaching out to run your fingers through deep, purple hair, you tell him, âi donât know if iâve ever told you this flins but⌠youâve changed my life. youâre so reliable, and kind, andâŚâ
you trail off, twirling a strand of hair around your finger, admiring its silky texture.
placing a hand over yours, flins guides it to his face and nuzzles his cheek into your touch. âandâŚ?â he urges you to continue.
âand⌠and i donât think i want to give you back. to your manufacturers. you know iâm just a beta tester, right?â
flins leans in closer. âi know. and iâm just a prototype.â he places his other hand against your face, mirroring you. âbut even if i went back⌠i donât think any amount of troubleshooting could fix whatâs wrong with me.â
his thumb brushes along the apple of your cheek. âdo you know why?â
you shake your head.
âitâs because the only thing wrong with me is that i canât imagine serving anyone but you.â
your heart rate begins to climb. flins detects this.
he continues. âthereâs no one iâd rather be with⌠so keep me. keep me here with you, forever.â
it takes a few moments for you think of what to say, but soon, you have the perfect answer.
closing the distance between you and him, your lips press softly against flinsâ. heâs surprisingly warm.
after a few long seconds, you pull away, wondering if that was the right thing to do. youâre met with the happiest youâve ever seen flins, a bright smile replacing a normally placid expression. returning his gaze, you pat the space next to you, inviting him to join you on the bed.
he gathers you in his arms, pulling you against his chest. while he counts every beat of your heart, youâre lulled to sleep by the rhythmic humming of his internal processors.
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