You were the better half of Draco. Harry had always told people that.

When it came to Harry, you were the one who tightened the leash on him. It was the usual comments—about Hermione, about Ron, about Gryffindor. When you stood beside him, which was often enough, Draco’s tongue lost some of its edge. He knew it would start fights with you, and he knew they were not worth having over Harry Potter.

He appreciated you for that.

After Daphne, you had sworn off pure-blood friendships for a while. Harry had become a comfortable sort of friend.

Sometimes it meant walking together from Charms through the crowded corridors, arguing quietly over Quidditch strategies. Other times it meant coincidentally sitting across from him in the library while he struggled through Potions notes and you patiently correcting them.

Always when Draco was occupied.

Whether you had noticed that pattern or not, it was about to become very clear.

Because today, Harry had invited you to sit at his table for dinner for the first time.

“If this is some kind of pity invite, I’d rather not have it, Harry,” you joked.

Harry snorted. “For once you don’t have your evil half hoarding you. Trust me, this has been overdue for ages.”

And so you dined with him. And it did feel overdue.

SUMMER TERM

“So,” Harry said, leaning forward on the table, “you watch Slytherin practice?”

“Sometimes.”

Harry nodded thoughtfully.

“Hypothetically,” he said, “if someone wanted to know whether the Chasers still drop back in that defensive formation—”

You laughed. “Hypothetically, I wouldn’t tell them.”

Harry grinned. “Fair.”

There was something easy about being with Harry—an uncomplicated sort of ambition. He was like calm waters: you could see exactly what lay beneath.

Stable.

You knew, subconsciously, that Draco hated him for that. That kind of foolish honesty was a luxury Harry could afford.

Draco was more like looking through a diamond, light splitting through countless sharp versions of himself. It dizzied you if you tried to follow them all. He had learned to be that way.

Complex in every sense of the word—and pleasantly aware that it drove people away.

You met Draco’s eyes across the hall and couldn’t quite read the expression there. The way he stared at you silently haunted you—for the first time, the boy you had always seemed to understand had become unreadable.

Just scream at me. Be angry with me. Anything but this.

He quickly laced his fingers with Pansy’s. You looked away, back to your plate.

You noticed a few pieces of beef had appeared on your plate, which had been finished only moments before.

You looked up to the ceiling with a playful tilt of your head. “I wonder where these came from.”

Harry chuckled and nudged his plate closer. “Have some. That class was brutal.”

You hummed in approval and ate the pieces.

“Have you tried that Shield Charm Lupin mentioned?” you asked.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It works.”

“Show me later?”

Later meant the empty stretch of corridor outside the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, when most students had disappeared back to their common rooms.

“Alright,” Harry said, pushing up his glasses and stepping back a few paces. There was something so precious about his earnestness. “Try something simple.”

You raised an eyebrow. “You want me to hex you?”

“You’ll never learn if you don’t.”

You hesitated for half a second before lifting your wand.

“Expelliarmus!”

Harry moved quickly. “Protego.”

The spell struck the shield with a sharp crack of light and fizzled harmlessly away.

“Woah.”

He lowered his wand, looking impressed. “Alright. My turn.”

You shifted your stance slightly, preparing another spell.

Harry lifted his wand. “Expelli—”

“Protego!”

Harry stared at you.

“You didn’t even let me finish the spell!”

“Too slow,” you said, smiling. It was a curious feeling—you missed having a good volley with someone.

“Oh, is that right?”

Harry suddenly darted sideways, wand already raised.

“Expelliarmus!”

You barely got your shield up in time.

The red light ricocheted off the barrier and sparked against the stone wall behind you.

You laughed.

“Missed.”

Harry grinned.

You stepped backward, lifting your wand again.

“Expelliarmus!”

Harry ducked behind one of the stone pillars lining the corridor.

“You can’t hide forever,” you called.

“Oh, I’m not hiding,” Harry said.

He leaned out suddenly—

“Expelliarmus!”

Your wand flew from your hand this time, clattering across the floor.

You gasped. “Harry!”

Harry looked just as surprised as you.

You lunged for your wand at the same moment he did, both of you skidding slightly on the stone floor.

Harry grabbed it first, but you tackled his arm before he could raise it again.

“Give it back!”

“Never!”

You tried to wrestle the wand from him, both of you laughing as you struggled. With a mischievous grin, you bared your teeth near his hand—a childish tactic, perhaps, but a tactic nonetheless. Eventually, Harry lost his balance, and the two of you tumbled backward onto the cold stone floor.

“You’re terrible at dueling,” Harry said breathlessly.

You turned to look at him. His hair was even messier than usual, cheeks flushed from running, his glasses sitting crooked in the funniest way. Comfort seemed to live in his face naturally.

You laughed and propped yourself up on one elbow.

Without really thinking about it, you reached over and straightened his glasses. Your fingers brushed lightly against his cheek and the contact made your heart skip. You realized then you had never really touched another boy before.

Harry went still, his breath catching slightly as if he’d only just realized how close you were.

“That I am,” you said after a moment, a small smile tugging at your lips. “Maybe I need a teacher.”

“Alright then,” he said. “Lesson one: don’t bite your opponent.”

—

And that was the rhythm of you and Harry.

He would duel with you, helping you untangle the spells that still slipped through your grasp. Every session ended the same way—energy spiraling into reckless casting, laughter until one of you lost your footing or tired. Soon enough you’d both be sprawled across the floor, stomachs aching.

Sometimes you stayed there, lying on the cold stone, speaking in low voices about the day. Other times, the conversations drifted further, wandering into quiet, uncertain talk about the future.

And in moments like those, Draco always returned to your thoughts.

No matter how you tried to push it down, the sting remained. It felt as though your life had been cleaved neatly in two. Once, you had imagined your futures moving in tandem, woven together without question. Instead, you were forced to watch his life unfold somewhere separate from yours.

When you ran into Theo in the corridors, the question slipped out before you could stop it. “Has he eaten?”

Or when you crossed paths with Blaise, “His hair’s getting a bit long. I could trim it.” You always had.

Memories of the soft, cotton-fine wisps of his hair sliding between your fingers. The clean musk at the crown of his head. The closeness of his face to yours when you moved around to the front.

Draco sitting on the closed lid of a toilet seat while you cut his hair.

He was perfectly capable of doing it himself with a spell—it would have been quicker, neater, far more sensible than trusting you with scissors. But every time your nails scraped lightly through his hair, a quiet groan would slip out of him as he leaned into your touch.

And he loved the look on your face then: your brows drawn tight in concentration, the comforting heat radiating from your body—knowing full well you’d be dead if you messed with his hair.

He’d always inspect your work afterward, turning his head this way and that in the mirror. It was never perfect, never very even—but he loved it anyway. And then he’d take your hands in his, massaging your palms slowly, thumbs pressing into your skin as if you’d done him a great service.

Any excuse to get close to you.

You couldn’t help but feel like he'd stolen a whole summer from you. Harry felt like a bandage over a gunshot wound—something meant to hold things together while you still bled underneath.

—

Next month, an invitation arrived for a Slug Club party.

You considered ignoring it. For a while, you nearly did. But eventually you decided to go with Harry. It might be nice for the both of you to take a break and loosen up a little.

You asked him after a duel, both of you still catching your breath.

“Do you think we should wear matching colours?"

He blinked at you, completely earnest.

You couldn’t help the laugh that slipped out at his naïveté.

You returned to the Slytherin common room afterward.

When you pushed the door open, Draco was there, standing across the room. In the dim green light, he looked almost like a watchful feline—still, alert, eyes fixed the moment you stepped inside.

You didn’t realize how you must have looked: a small smile still lingering on your lips, your face flushed with sweat, breath uneven.

Alarm flashed across his face—so open, so startlingly unguarded that it made him look almost childlike. A rarity on the carefully composed version of Draco he’d grown into.

He looked shaken. The last time you had seen him like that was when you’d slipped in the Malfoy fountain and broken your ankle.

You stared at each other for a moment—until a quiet sob broke the silence.

You turned and found Pansy curled on the couch, crying.

Draco didn’t even look back. He made a straight line for the boys’ dormitories, disappearing up the stairs as if the room itself had become unbearable. He didn’t seem to care that he’d just left her there.

You hesitated, wondering whether you should ask if she was alright.

Pansy did not seem to have that kind of concern for you. Not when it seemed like everything between you and Draco had fallen apart. If anything, she had indirectly been a source of your torment.

But Pansy was also just a girl hopelessly in love, she didn’t know. Of that, you could be certain.

She had simply jumped at the chance with Draco, her love finally requited—perhaps she believed that having you around would never be to her advantage.

You decided to see her that way. You crossed the room and sat down on the couch beside her. “Parkinson? What happened?”

She glanced up at you, and the hurt in her eyes was unmistakable. It was unsettling to see her like that.

Yes, only Draco could have caused this.

She hesitated for a moment, and you thought you caught a flicker of shame cross her face. Then her mouth moved wordlessly, as if she didn’t quite know how to begin.

As if she had suddenly realised you might be the only one who could understand.

“I—I don’t know,” she stammered. “He just snapped at me out of nowhere and I—”

Her voice broke into a sharp gasp.

“I just wanted him to take me to the Slug Club party as his date. I don’t know how I could have upset him.” The sentence came out in fragments, broken by gasps.

You sighed softly. You had heard conversations like this before. You already knew how it might have played out. You knew many girls who tried to secure their place at a Slug Club party through Draco, fuelled by the opportunities.

“The entitlement alone is staggering. I suppose she assumed I’d be flattered," he’d cackle.

Of course, it wasn’t always true. Draco simply possessed a relentless cynicism about people.

“Draco’s a complicated person, Parkinson. That’s just the way he is. You know that. You can’t blame yourself.”

“M—maybe I was too persistent,” she said, breaths still shaky. “I just didn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me. He’d been so… caring.”

“Did he want to take you?” She asked suddenly, almost accusatory.

The question seemed to hold her entire world in it. Realizing that, you added quickly, “No—I’m going with Harry.”

She let out a long breath that sounded almost like relief, though she tried to disguise it as another shudder from crying.

And suddenly you remembered the Easter holiday—the moment you had kissed Draco—and the lie tumbled out before you could stop it.

“Yes, he’s not taking me. Maybe he’ll come around, hm?”

You felt a flicker of guilt the moment the words left your mouth. But if Pansy thought it was in her favour that Draco hadn’t invited you, you were more than willing to encourage the illusion.

Perhaps you weren’t better than Draco after all.

Two pure-bloods raised in houses where manipulation came as naturally as breathing.

And Pansy was painfully easy to lie to.

You shivered at the thought.

You patted her back gently until her breathing steadied, and when she seemed satisfied with your reassurances, the two of you made your way back to the dormitories.

“Surely not!”

Harry stepped around behind you, lifting the necklace to clasp it. His hands trembled slightly, as though he were trying far too hard not to brush against your skin.

“A gift?” you laughed lightly. “From Harry Potter himself? I should be eternally grateful.”

“It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “We both love Quidditch so much—I thought you might like it.”

In truth, you hadn’t expected Harry to be so thoughtful.

Earlier, you had slipped your own necklace into your bra, intending to put it on just before entering the party. You’d run out of time while getting ready.

It had been a gift from Narcissa. A family heirloom.

A simple silver locket engraved with two words:

Ab Initio.

From the beginning.

From the beginning, it had been you and my Draco.

Inside the locket were two tiny photographs—one on each side. Pictures taken when you were babies. Little hands, little toes.

With the weight of legacy.

You could imagine how it might have looked to Draco, seeing another necklace resting where the locket should have been.

But you had assumed he wouldn’t be there. And, truthfully, you did appreciate Harry’s gift.

Still, as you turned the delicate wing pendant between your fingers, it felt almost weightless. Not like the locket. The years. Promises. Expectations.

You hooked your arm through Harry’s and began weaving through the room.

The Slug Club party today was held at the Greengrass estate. Everything about it carried that unmistakable pure-blood polish—elegant, curated, and just a touch performative. The air hummed with polite laughter and murmured introductions, the quiet currency of influence and pedigree passing between guests as smoothly as the wine.

After enduring a few polite exchanges with the Greengrasses—carefully avoiding Daphne—and the Macmillans, Harry leaned closer to you.

“Bit of a stiff party, isn’t it?” he muttered under his breath. This was hardly his usual crowd.

A faint smirk tugged at your lips.

“I’ll get us something to eat."

Harry turned toward the long table laid with food. You slipped into a nearby chair, hardly paying attention to who it belonged to.

You nearly lurched out of it when you realised you were sitting across from Theodore Nott.

If Theo was here, then—

A familiar, sharp laugh cut through the room behind you.

You turned slowly, as if refusing to look might somehow make him disappear.

There he was.

Half-turned in conversation, a glass of wine balanced loosely in his hand.

Draco Malfoy looked like something cut from marble. He was dressed in his finest, the quiet opulence of a perfectly tailored suit. He looked every inch the heir he had been raised to be.

There was always something unsettling in the way a snarl appeared on his beautiful face. Like seeing a flower suddenly rot.

You watched the scene unfold from the sidelines.

“Remarkable,” he drawled. “You do have a talent for stumbling into things you don’t quite deserve.”

Harry bristled.

“Oh no, she hates those.” He made a show of tossing the food to the floor.

“Did you not know that?” He tilted his head slightly. He had a way of speaking to you that felt like a tight slap.

You rose then.

“Have you had quite enough, Draco?”

From the way he held himself—something not quite as rigid as his usual tall arrogance—you realised he was already drunk.

Draco’s grey eyes slid to you, cheeks warm.

“Hello, you.”

Harry spoke up quickly. “I’ll assure you, Malfoy, professor Slughorn personally urged me to come—”

His voice drifted away.

Draco had lifted a hand to your neck, sliding his palm lightly along your skin as he brushed aside the hair you’d carefully arranged to hide the necklace.

His thumb pressed briefly against your throat, the touch a little too deliberate. You couldn’t quite place the expression on his face.

Tired, perhaps. Something softer. Something sad.

What's going on in that mind of yours, Draco?

Harry had vanished entirely from his attention.

When he realised he had stopped talking, he released you.

“Very well, Potter,” he said lightly. “I’ll indulge you. Why don’t you sit with us? We ought to get to know you, seeing as you’re with my better half here.”

Harry hesitated.

“We’ve the best wine at our table.”

Then he draped his arms around you and Harry’s shoulders, roping you toward a table where Blaise and Theo were already seated, along with a few others from high society—though most alarmingly, Daphne Greengrass.

She sat rather close to Theo.

There must be something going on there.

You fought the urge to smile and lean over to Draco to whisper, When did that happen? Once, the two of you had delighted in gossip like that—the smallest shifts in loyalties and romances in your circle. It was an unspoken way of assuring yourselves that you two were the most sensible ones.

You bit your tongue.

Draco’s arm tightened slightly around your shoulders. His gaze had followed yours.

For a moment, the faintest hint of amusement flickered across his face.

You looked away. It felt too familiar.

You filed the question away in your mind for a time when things between you were better.

Soon.

You'd sat down with Draco on your left and Harry on your right. The boys snatched up the chance to interrogate the golden boy of Hogwarts.

"So which of Slughorn’s little favourites are you meant to impress tonight?"

"How many times have you almost died, Potter?”

The questions were teasing, playful—though coming from them, that was about as gentle as it ever got. Harry had been tossed into a sea of snakes.

You sipped your wine, offering him the occasional encouraging smile or light pat on the back as the conversation carried on around the table.

Then you felt it.

A warm hand sliding between the press of your thighs beneath the table.

You hadn’t noticed when Draco had shifted closer. Only now did you realize how near he was, the faint scent of wine on his breath as he leaned in.

“I do wonder, Potter,” Draco said suddenly, cutting through the conversation, “how you and my dearest confidante here became such close friends.”

His hand tightened around your thigh.

Too tight.

You winced, turning sharply to glare at him.

Harry replied earnestly, “Well, it’s a lot better when you’re not around. She’s a very good duelling partner.”

“Is she now?” Draco said lightly.

The hand on your thigh shifted, inching towards your core beneath your dress.

No—Not here. What is he thinking?

He pressed firmly against your clit through the thin fabric of your underwear.

“So you’ve seen how she handles a wand in a duel,” he said thoughtfully, voice smooth with quiet amusement. “All that energy.”

His grey eyes narrowed to Harry.

“I imagine it keeps you busy, Potter.”

While he spoke, he nudged the delicate fabric aside, his movements slow and deliberate. The slick warmth of your own arousal made it easy for him to trace slow circles on your clit.

Your fingers tightened around his arm. You bit your lip hard enough to almost break the skin, forcing yourself to stay silent.

You hadn’t known it was possible to feel this good.

Draco watched your expression very intently before finally pulling his hand away.

He lifted his fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean without breaking eye contact with you.

“What exactly are you implying, Malfoy?” Harry said at last.

“Of course,” Daphne whispered quietly at Theo, “good judgment rarely runs in her family.”

The moment Daphne finished speaking, a wine glass suddenly slid across the table and tipped, splashing red across the front of her dress.

She shot to her feet. “What—”

“You should get that before it stains,” Blaise said calmly.

You took the opportunity immediately, pushing your chair back. The damp heat between your thighs made every step feel overly sensitive.

“You’ll have to excuse me as well.”

Without waiting for a response, you slipped away from the table and headed toward the nearest bathroom.

The walk down the corridor felt strangely disorienting. Every brush of fabric against your skin made you acutely aware of yourself—your clit rubbed raw and sensitive for the first time.

You tried to find the quietest part of the estate.

The moment you stepped inside and pushed the door close—

A hand slammed against it from the other side, stopping it.

“Ow—fuck.”

Draco forced the door open and slipped inside, immediately cradling his hand.

“I will scream,” you said sharply.

He smirked, though it looked a little strained.

“That you will.”

You moved toward the door again, determined to leave.

“Wanna talk to you,” he slurred.

You paused despite yourself.

And you didn’t know what it was—the way he was nursing his hand, or the way he suddenly looked like a dog with its tail between its legs.

Your eyes drifted down to his hand. Just like that, you were already reaching for it, gently turning his wrist to inspect the damage.

It didn’t matter that you’d wanted to leave a moment ago.

With him, it never mattered.

While you turned his large hand over in yours, he let out a quiet, breathy laugh at the ticklish brush of your smaller fingers.

Then he leaned forward and rested his forehead against yours.

That familiar gesture. Vulnerability.

“Tell me what he did to you.”

You looked up at him then. Through the curtain of his pale lashes, his grey eyes searched your face.

He looked genuinely distraught.

As if he had already accepted it—accepted that you and Harry were actually becoming something real.

“Draco...”

“Tell me,” he insisted, biting his lip.

You gently set his injured hand down, though your fingers still held onto it.

Something in his eyes seemed to fracture. As if he had already lost you.

That was when you realized he wasn’t thinking clearly. A sober Draco would never have jumped to that conclusion; would have been far more discerning.

But tonight he was too far gone, thoughts racing ahead of reason.

He was getting hasty.

His eyes had turned glassy, and it reminded you of the times you’d found him as a child after one of his father’s harsher scoldings.

Eyes red. Rubbed raw.

He kept staring at you, pupils shifting rapidly, as though he could somehow read the thoughts moving through your head.

Harry had the one thing Draco didn’t: a life where instinct was enough. He would’ve been a great partner for you. And that scared him.

A small, strangled sound slipped from his throat. You saw his throat bob as he swallowed hard—

—and then his mouth crashed onto yours.

The kiss wasn’t careful or composed. It was desperate. Greedy.

Draco Malfoy had come completely undone.

He pushed you back against the sink, the edge digging into your hips as he pressed himself against you, grinding harshly.

“Tell me,” he breathed. “Did he make you come?”

His hands came up to cradle your face, though the grip was too tight, his fingers pressing into your cheeks until the skin flushed beneath them.

Before you could answer, he kissed you again—hard, messily—like he was trying to drag the truth out of you with his mouth.

“Where did he touch you? Hm?” he murmured against your lips. Where did he defile you?

His thumb dragged along your jaw.

Let me erase him.

You looked at him then and saw the desperation in his eyes. And it all just fit together.

You’d wanted him to hurt the way you had.

Now he stood in front of you, frantic to prove himself, and the dull throb between your thighs pulsed again, insistent and heavy.

So you lied.

“Yes. Here.”

Draco’s hand moved immediately, sliding down to the hem of your dress and pushing the fabric up slightly as he searched.

“Here?”

“Mhm…”

A low sound left him.

His lips brushed your neck as he kissed slowly down your throat.

“Mm… I will eat you until there’s nothing left of him.”

He moved with such quiet certainty that it made you blush—like he’d been waiting to show you exactly what he wanted to do with you. Exactly how to make you feel good.

He sank to his knees in front of you, pressing soft kisses along the inside of your thighs. The sight of him there made heat rush to your face. Draco—usually so proud—looked so pliant like this. Nothing but longing.

You'd done this to him. Made him yield.

He slid your underwear down your thighs before pressing his tongue flat against you. The cool air brushed over your exposed skin for a moment before the warmth of his mouth followed.

You shivered.

“Yes? Good?”

Draco kept watching you, his grey eyes flicking up to study every reaction on your face.

Then he pushed his tongue deeper, the angle of his nose rubbing perfectly against your clit.

It was so vulgar—the way your hips rocked forward, the way you found yourself riding the pressure of his nose without meaning to.

Just use me. Use me. Use me.

A soft moan slipped from you as your head fell back.

His tongue moved slowly inside you, swirling and the feeling was so overwhelming you had to grip the edge of the sink, your fingers tightening around the pristine porcelain just to keep yourself steady.

It felt juvenile, that blind chase of pleasure, careless and consuming. Corrupting.

He curled a finger slowly inside you, deciding you were wet enough now. His eyes lifted to your face, watching if you strained.

His mouth closed around your clit, sucking harshly—almost soothingly.

It reminded you of times his lips closed in on a piece of candy, staining them pink.

You felt impossibly tight around his finger, every movement sending a sharp, unfamiliar sensitivity through you.

It made his throat go dry.

Here, you were untouched.

He slipped another finger inside you, testing your limit.

Apparently two was more than enough.

He began to move them slowly, then steadily, pushing them in and out of you, the tender walls of your cunt making every movement easier.

The drag of his fingers inside you made you feel deliciously full, curling into a spot that made your head spin.

You were getting close to something.

You had never come before—but you could feel something building deep in your core, tightening and tightening with every movement of his fingers and every pull of his mouth. The sounds he made were so indecent, but somehow that only pushed you closer to the edge.

Your hand tangled in Draco’s hair, gripping tightly.

Your heel pierced into his back.

You’d probably hate yourself for this later.

But right now you only wanted him to keep going.

"Come for me,” he mumbled against you.

Then his teeth grazed lightly over your clit just as his fingers curled deeper inside you—

And you felt something snap.

It was so intense it almost felt like something had been torn out of you. Like you had just lost a piece of your soul, something sacred. Draco ripping your first orgasm out of you.

Your body arched back and shuddered as the pleasure rushed through you all at once.

As you came down, you felt him give a few more slow licks, almost as if he were guiding you gently back to yourself. You kept mewling his name as if that’s all you could remember.

“I know… I know…”

You looked at him then and felt a shift come into place between you.

He had consumed you—like teeth breaking into the soft pulp of a pomegranate, messy and inevitable—and it felt as though the moment had marked you both.

Something violent in its intensity. Carnal.

You wanted more. You wanted him to bite you, take you apart and chew.

Your hands found him, grasping his shirt as you pulled him back up to you. You kissed him, tasting yourself on his mouth. His tongue slid into yours the same way it had moved inside you moments before.

His hands closed around your waist, gripping tightly—as if he were afraid you might come apart if he loosened his hold.

You couldn’t think.

Your mind was in ruins, Draco had ceased to be just a boy; he had a mouth and hands that were able to draw something reckless and hungry out of you. Something primal.

You wanted everything he could give.

“More…” you whined.

You turned toward the mirror, catching his gaze in the reflection. Slowly, deliberately, you pushed back against him, mouth parted, your hips rolling against the hard outline beneath his trousers.

“Oh—fuck—” you whimpered.

Heat rushed to your face as your head fell back against his shoulder. Even like this he felt good, the rough drag of the fabric on your cunt turning it into a bundle of raw nerves.

Draco pressed you tighter against him, grinding slowly as he gripped your hips enough to bruise. A low groan left him, his breath hot and uneven against your cheek.

In the mirror, his eyes were fixed on the two of you.

Once, you had only been children.

Now you were pressed together like you were in heat.

Look at us and tell me you could part with me.

I used and broke someone’s heart just for you, who else can say that?

Just tell me you’re mine.

Draco watched you in the mirror, expectant.

You knew he wanted to hear something before he gave you what you wanted. But your thoughts were fogged over.

So instead, you reached for the nearest blade.

“What else will Harry do to me, Draco?”

Still grinding against him.

“As my best friend, you should prepare me.”

You knew it would sting.

In that moment, you didn’t really care.

You wanted to even the score.

Draco’s jaw tightened, something dark flickering across his face.

“I will do just that,” he said quietly.

“And you will watch.”

You wished you could watch in the mirror—see how his hands moved as he freed himself from the confines of his trousers. The way he stroked himself, the way he hardened in his grip.

Instead, all you could see were his eyes. The focus in them made you tremble.

Behind you, his fingers slid between your thighs, spreading the slick warmth of you over your skin, prepping you. He tapped lightly at your thigh, urging you to widen your stance slightly, then shifted your hips so your hands rested properly against the sink.

"Steady yourself, please."

The whole scene felt like you'd defiled the beautiful interior of the bathroom.

Something about being here—someone else's bathroom, the wide mirror reflecting everything you were doing. As if the glass itself were watching. Memorising.

You felt the head of him press slowly against you from behind, and a quiet sigh slipped from your lips.

“He’d press his cock right here,” Draco droned.

The tip of him nudged at your entrance.

A flicker of apprehension passed through you. You had struggled to take two of his fingers earlier—you couldn’t imagine how you were meant to take all of him, especially at this rather punishing angle.

You let out a slow breath.

“And then he’d enter you.”

Draco thrust forward suddenly, one sharp motion.

You gripped the sink, bracing yourself for the pressure—

But it never came.

Instead, he dragged himself through the tight space between your thighs, his cock sliding along your folds rather than entering.

You whimpered softly as the supple, swollen head brushed over your clit, making a filthy noise.

He pressed himself against you with hard pressure, as if trying to imprint the feeling of him there—the veins, the heat, the firm weight of him—without actually entering you.

He knew it was what you wanted.

And he had no intention of giving it to you.

Instead he kept rubbing himself, slow and controlled. He felt so hard, so tender against you, the curve of him brushed your clit roughly with every movement. But it made your cunt tighten around nothing. You wanted to curse him.

“He’d go in and out of you like this,” Draco taunted against your ear.

The creamy substance thickening between you was impossible to ignore.

You lifted your eyes to the mirror. The sight made your stomach twist—the flushed pink head of him appearing and disappearing between your thighs, unmistakably his.

But you didn’t want this. You wanted him inside you.

You wanted him to melt into you completely.

“Inside me, Draco. Please.” Your voice was breathless. You bit your lip as you reached back, guiding him, trying to slip him into you. For a moment the head of him squeezed at your entrance.

He hissed, pulling his hips back.

“No.”

Your eyes watered. A small hiccup caught in your throat as he bounced you back against him.

“Please…” you choked out.

“You’ll take what I give you.”

I laid everything at your feet, and you stepped around it.

I saved you a seat, and you said you preferred to stand.

He resumed the same rough shoving between your thighs, the head of him dragging mercilessly. The slick between you had turned frothy, coating his tip each time he slid forward.

Then his hand moved forward. His fingers circled your clit.

“He’d help you come with his fingers,” Draco murmured, “if he had any sense.”

You barely heard him.

Your mind was caught somewhere between pleasure and anger.

Part of you wanted to lash out—to turn suddenly, shove him down onto the floor and sink onto his cock yourself. To take control and wipe that cruel restraint from his face.

But you were close.

So close.

Your legs trembled, weak enough that you didn’t know how you were still standing.

“Close?” he stuttered.

You knew then he was nearing the edge too.

You could feel it in the way he moved, in the subtle pulsing of his cock against you and the way he moaned in between sentences like he couldn't hold it back anymore.

You wanted to feel it. Wanted to have it.

Wanted him to spill over you. 

Something unmistakably his.

“Mhm… don’t stop. Faster, Draco.”

He obeyed, his hips moving with more urgency. The sound of him pounding you was shamelessly loud, the sharp rhythm echoing through the lavish bathroom.

You lifted your head, wanting to see when he came. To be the one causing his pleasure this time.

But the orgasm building inside you made your body curl inward. Your chin dipped as you folded over yourself, on the verge of collapsing.

Draco caught your jaw before you could hide.

He forced your gaze back toward the mirror, his tongue clicking softly before dragging along the side of your neck.

“Keep looking.”

You did.

You saw both of you there—your body braced against the sink, his behind you, working desperately to bring you over the edge. His movements had lost their earlier calculation; his hips stuttered now, chasing the same release you were.

And in that moment you knew he no longer cared about Harry. Not really.

He only wanted to make you feel good.

For a moment the two of you looked almost unreal in the mirror—like a Baroque piece, lovers caught mid-motion in a gilded room.

Suspended in voluptate carnis, framed perfectly in the gold mirror.

You caught his eyes in the mirror. His cock was beating rapidly now, the tension in it unmistakable, as if you could almost feel the rush of his come through it.

“Come with me,” he whined, you could barely hear him through his sharp breathing.

Your second orgasm unraveled through you like another knot of your soul loosened in Draco’s hands. He gave one final thrust, the sight of him spilling across your thighs—warm, thick—and the feeling of his cock twitching was enough to push you over the edge.

Draco groaned against you as your head fell back against his shoulder, his teeth grazing your neck before his mouth closed there, sucking at the skin.

As you came, his hand clawed up your neck, catching on the delicate necklace that had been hanging down your chest.

The chain snapped.

It fell against the sink with a soft clatter, silver glinting under the light as he grabbed the edge of the counter to steady the both of you.

For a moment, neither of you moved.

You both panted, flushed and damp, staring at each other in the mirror—sweating, glowing almost. You almost laughed at the sight, you looked like you just finished wrestling each other.

His face nudged gently against yours. His sweat mixing with yours. You would smell like him.

He wrapped his arms around your waist from behind. For a moment he simply watched, as though committing the sight to memory.

You and I. You and I. You and I.

He breathed in the scent of you and loosed a deep breath. Like when he came back home after a term.

“Where’s my mother’s necklace?” he asked suddenly after a few minutes, releasing himself from you and tucking it back into his trousers. You tingled at the sudden loss.

You reached into your bra, but his hand followed a second later, as if he meant to retrieve it himself.

Heat rushed to your face. You pushed his hand away gently, fishing the chain out yourself before holding the locket up for him to see.

“I just made you come,” he said with a quiet chuckle.

He brushed your hair away from your neck, so gentle, setting the strands as neatly as he could. Then he draped the necklace back around your throat and fastened the clasp behind you.

His fingers moved through your hair, carefully combing it back into place, trying to tame the strands that had come loose.

Then he reached down and tugged your dress back into place, smoothing the fabric over your hips. His fingers brushed lightly up your thighs where the evidence of him had begun to trail downward.

He didn’t wipe it off.

He moved on to your face, gently fixing what remained of your lipstick with the pad of his thumb, trying to hide the evidence of his mouth.

“There,” he hummed softly. “Better,”

He was so tender.

Fixing you up like something precious.

Say it.

It could be like this forever.

I can’t be apart from you any longer.

And then it fractured—that quiet sanctuary you’d built in the space of a few stolen minutes—when the words left your mouth.

“We should head back."

it was subtle at first — just a flicker of realization — but it quickly turned into full-blown horror, like he had just witnessed the collapse of his entire legacy before his eyes.

"...did you just grunt?" you ask finally, breaking the silence. your tone is calm, but your face gives nothing away.

"no...?" he replies immediately, too fast.

"you absolutely did," you say at once, not letting him escape it.

"i didn't," he snaps, a little sharper now, shifting his grip slightly like he's trying to prove a point. "i adjusted my stance."

you keep staring at him.

he refuses to meet your eyes.

your hands slowly rise, gently cradling his face so he has no choice but to look at you. his jaw is tense, his ears faintly red, his entire composure hanging by a thread.

despite his obvious distress, you smile softly.

"are you calling me heavy?"

his shoulders drop a little.

he exhales, trying to recover.

okay. maybe he was overreacting.

it was just a grunt, you smiled. maybe it wasn't that big of a deal. maybe you had nothing to be upset about.

yeah.

"no, love," he says, forcing a small smile.

then your fingers press into his cheeks, squishing them together as you study him very seriously.

"then put me down and pick me up again," you say, tone flat, deadpan. "without the grunt."

his eyes widen slightly.

he fakes a cough, trying to hide the sound of his fast heartbeating, as if you can hear it.

If you were being honest, it was more amusing than you liked to admit. Watching how Sakura would flush and stammar and shout that you were in public, damn it all, when Suo would fix the collar of your shirt or tuck a strand of hair behind your ear like the lead straight out of a romance novel. 

But over time, it turns out the joke was on you, because you started to get affected by all Suo’s teasing. 

At first, it was mindless. Meeting Suo’s bright smile with one of your own, wrapping your arm around his when walking in the street, always choosing the spot beside him. Simple, easy stuff that somehow got Sakura flustered despite the fact that it was all completely innocent. 

Now you’re starting to think that maybe he just saw what you had originally been blind to. Your own overwhelming feelings for your friend. 

“There you are, sweetheart,” 

“Come on! I’m eating here!” 

“Sakura,” You grin, subconsciously sliding over in the booth to make room for Suo beside you. Plans had been made to meet at Café Pothos for breakfast before school, and you and Sakura had been the first to arrive. Then came Nirei, and now Suo has made his appearance with his typical charm. “You’re never going to make it in life if you can be brought to your knees by flirting.”

Except, you’re not much better than him, but that’s neither here nor there.

“You wanna take this outside?”

“Now, Sakura,” Suo hums, smiling like always. He takes his seat beside you, and you have to make a conscious effort to not look at him like he’s the sun and you’re in severe need of his rays. “Is that any way to talk to someone as beautiful as—”

“Shut up!”

You’re giggling into your breakfast in seconds. It’s funny, watching Sakura stutter over his false threats, but you’re also trying to hide your own rosy cheeks. You’re finding it harder and harder to convince yourself that Suo’s words are just teasing. 

Sometimes, you can convince yourself that he’s being serious. 

“Ruinin’ my breakfast, and shit.” Sakura grumbles through a mouthful of food that definitely doesn’t seem to be ruined to him. You roll your eyes with a grin, delving into your own food to try and force your mind to focus on something other than the heat of the body sitting next to you. 

It helps that Nirei steers the conversation into safer directions, always playing the middleman between Suo and Sakura’s teasing and bickering. You’re quieter than usual, but you don’t think it’s that noticeable, until you remember just who exactly you’re with. 

“Everything alright?” Suo’s voice is low, meant only for your ears. It helps that Nirei is excitedly showing Sakura something in his top secret journal to keep them both distracted, but you’re fighting a blush when you glance to your left and find Suo too close for being just friendly. 

And Sakura isn’t even paying attention to the teasing for it to have any effect. 

“I’m good,” You lie, because your heart is racketing up to a pulse that’s most definitely not good and you think Suo probably read just how not alright you were before he even asked. It’s a pain, truly, to have someone as observant as him in your life and try to hide something as massive as your feelings from him. 

You force a smile, hoping that it’ll convince him, and you think you might be safe for one more day when he meets your expression with a smile of his own. 

But then you remember who exactly you’re talking about, and that you could never hope to decipher what he’s thinking behind his smiles. 

“We’ll catch up with you two later,” Suo tells Sakura and Nirei as he stands. You’re watching him in confusion, an expression that’s only mirrored on Nirei and Sakura’s faces. It turns into a flush as Suo adjusts his stance to face you, having not followed him out of the booth, and he extends his hand for you to take and join him. 

You do so, mostly because you can’t find any words to decline. Sakura has no trouble, and your exit from the café is to the sound of his grumbles and complaints. Suo sets his hand on the small of your back to guide you carefully through the semi-crowded restaurant, but you know it’s only in an effort to tease Sakura one final time before departing. 

Except, he doesn’t drop his hand once the two of you step outside. 

You’re confused. There’s no one around for him to perform for, no one to tease but you. Your stomach twists at the thought, pout forming on your lips as you consider the possibility of Suo being affectionate to tease you. 

Maybe you owe Sakura an apology. It’s not so fun when you’re on the receiving end, and you kind of wish you were ever able to tell Suo no. But his tongue is too sharp and his smiles too sweet, and you find yourself agreeing to his every whim. 

“Where are we going?” You ask instead, hands shoved deep into the pockets of the hoodie you threw on over top of your uniform. You risk a glance to Suo out of the corner of your eye to find him smiling softly as always, his own attention fixed on something you couldn’t pinpoint ahead of you both. 

“Nowhere in particular.” He says, as if that answered your question. You think that if he wasn’t ushering you along with a hand on your back, you might’ve dug in your heels and refused to move. But his palm is warm against you and you hadn’t realized until then that you were chilled. Or maybe it was all in your head, and you were coming up with any reason to keep Suo close. “You seemed uncomfortable at the café, so we left.”

Like it was as simple as that.

“It wasn’t because of the café,” You confess before you really understand what you’re saying. You clamp a hand over your mouth, a tad dramatic, as Suo stops walking and turns to face you. You hadn’t meant to say it outloud, but there’s no going back.

“So something is wrong in that pretty little head of yours,” He states evenly. His expression only shifts minutely, but you notice the change in an instant. His easy going smile has disappeared, and in its place is what you recognize to be a concerned frown, though to someone who doesn’t know him as well as you do  he might just look unaffected. 

A gentle hand reaches up to remove your hand from over your own mouth. Except, he doesn’t let it go, and instead brushes his thumb over the inside of your wrist and holds it delicately. 

“There’s no need to hide things from me, you know.” His voice is smooth, gentle, and you gather all your resolve to build a defense against his sweet tone and even sweeter gaze. It’s barely enough to keep your confession at bay, but your blush seeps through the cracks of your self-made walls. 

“Mhm,” You hum, though you’re not strong enough to keep from looking away from him. Your stare darting to the side is no doubt a dead giveaway that you’re lying to his face, so you suck in a breath and decide to give him one truth to keep another hidden. “It’s just… do you always have to use me to tease Sakura? It was fun at first, but now I think it’s kind of annoying.”

It’s not a lie, per say. You do think it’s annoying, but not because it’s you Suo is using to get under Sakura’s skin. Mainly, you’re annoyed at yourself for getting attached to someone who wasn’t even taking anything seriously. 

“What are you talking about?”

You freeze up at the way Suo’s expression twitches with an edge of confusion, like he’s really not sure about what you mean. It makes your own brows knit together in a display of the unsure feeling slowly oozing through your bones. 

“Huh?” You manage to squeak out. He’s still holding your wrist, you realize in a moment of weakness, when you feel him squeeze just tight enough to draw your attention to his touch on you. And it’s not performative, the way he’s holding you, thumb once more brushing gently across your skin. It makes your face heat up, how softly he’s caressing you.  

“What do you mean, I’m using you to tease Sakura?” He repeats your words, and his usual carefree attitude is completely gone. It’s one sign of many that you’ve misread the situation, and your face flushes brighter as you bite your tongue to keep the first thought that tumbles through your mind from falling past your lips. 

“You, uh, you know…” You trail off, sighing when it becomes clear he’s waiting for you to explain further. You’re certain that knows what he’s been doing, but you can’t understand why he’d act like he doesn’t. You square your shoulders and lift your chin, trying to seem braver than you are by facing him head on. “The flirting, Suo. You don’t mean it, and it’s just a game to get a reaction out of Sakura.”

“I see.” Suo hums. You watch as his smile slowly finds its way back to his face, though you’re not sure what to make of it. For the nth time, you wish that Suo was easier to read. Except, you don’t really, because then he wouldn’t be Suo. “You’ll be happy to know that’s not what I was doing.”

You’re certain that you didn’t understand him correctly. He’s still smiling, still holding your wrist, and you feel your eyes narrow in suspicion. Suo finds it amusing, somehow, and his smile widens enough to make room for his soft laugh that tumbles through his lips. 

“You don’t seem convinced.” He grabs your other hand in one fluid motion, but you don’t dare tear your gaze away from him to track the movement. Instead, you’re left to guess based on feeling alone what it looks like as he threads your fingers together and pulls you half a step closer. With how confused you are, you tumble towards him easily. “I’ll admit, at first I was eager to see just how easily Sakura would fluster at the smallest sign of affection. But I quickly realized it was you whose blush I’d rather see.” 

So you were right, after all. It was just an excuse for Suo to tease you. You try to tug your hands from his, but he doesn’t let you. Instead, he pulls you another half-step closer, hands trapped between the two of you and his smirk entirely too close to your own face for any semblance of comfort. 

“But can you blame me when you’re just so adorable?” His words are like honey and you’re certain you flush from your ears down to your toes. It’s embarrassing, honestly, how you so easily forgot that you were supposed to be annoyed by his flirting. 

“You’re too smooth. A silver tongue.” You complain on a sigh. He’s still holding your hands, so all you can do is drop your chin forward until you’re resting your forehead against his collarbone. He chuckles at your conflicting words and actions, and you feel the vibrations. 

“Thank you,” He counters. Finally, he drops one of your hands, only to lift your chin so that you’re forced to look at him. It’s intimidating, honestly, but you’re struck by the determination in his expression that’s rooting you to your spot. “I’m going to kiss you now, and it’s because I want to, and I know you want me to.”

“Nothing to do with Sakura?” You’re asking the question before you really think about it, the words leaving you in a breathy whisper that has Suo’s smile widening just slightly. 

“Not a thing.” 

And then his lips are on yours in a kiss so gentle you feel it buzzing all the way to your toes. He’s still holding your chin, controlling the pressure of the kiss, but you’re more than willing to let him lead. You’d still be stuttering over your words and refusing to believe that he’s flirting for any reason other than his own amusement if he hadn’t led the way in every step of the conversation. 

Suo kisses the way he lives his life—completely in control of every measured decision. It knocks the breath from your lungs, and you’re panting by the time you finally part. He’s still smiling, but something in the lines of his face seems more settled. 

“Sorry for assuming,” You murmur, voice gentle enough to spur Suo on to bump your forehead with his. You use the proximity to steal another kiss, because you can, because you’re still in disbelief that you can do so. 

“No need to apologize.” 

You’re thinking that he’s leaning in to kiss you again, so you close your eyes and tilt your chin forwards. Except, his movements freeze with the sound of a scream. 

“H-hey! It’s bad enough you ruined my breakfast, but now I can’t even walk to school!”

Sakura. You jump apart from Suo, though he’s quick to keep you close by with a hand wrapped smoothly around your waist. You’re still blushing, still grinning, as Sakura tracks the movement and somehow manages to go even more red. 

“What can I do to help you?” she asks you. This is how it always begins, and just like always, you shrug halfheartedly, tracing patterns in the dust gathering on the cedar surface of her desk. 

“I don’t know,” you say. She clears her throat, and you wait for the next line in your standard dialogue, where she will tell you that she can’t do anything for you if you won’t even tell her what you're thinking, but to your surprise she instead slides something across the table.

“He mentioned you like painting,” she says by way of an explanation. You don’t need to ask her who he is, because there’s only one person here who would know that about you, but you do raise your eyebrows when she gives you a canvas and a pot of pigment, nodding towards them. “How about you test them out?”

“What should I make?” you say, and although it’s impassively done, when you dip the brush into the pigment, you take a moment to marvel at the richness of the hue seeping into the bristles. After swiping a small, experimental stroke in the corner of the paper, you look up at her expectantly.

“Anything,” Lasthenia says. “Whatever’s on your mind.”

“Okay,” you say, and then the two of you sit in silence. She watches you as you go along, which disconcerts you slightly in the beginning, but then you grow so involved in it that you can’t bring yourself to mind very much, busying yourself with the swoops and lines and curves that are beginning to form a familiar scene, one you won’t ever forget, no matter how many years have passed since it happened.

When you are done, you present it to her shyly, biting your tongue as she inspects it. For some reason, you want her to like it, to praise you for your efforts and tell you you’ve done well. The longer she doesn’t say anything, the more the tension brewing in your stomach grows, and when she finally looks up with the slightest of smiles, you think you may throw up if another second passes.

“What is it?” she says.

“Huh?” you say. “Isn’t it…obvious?”

“Of course it is,” she says. “Your work is beautiful, after all; he wasn’t lying when he said you’re talented. I want to know the story behind it.”

“Oh,” you say, and to your surprise you find you’re actually a little eager. In all your years, only Anaxagoras has ever cared enough to ask you about your art, to touch the drying colors and beg to learn them. Yet here is Lasthenia, her face softening into something resembling a woman you knew as a child, a younger woman whose hair was pale as well, albeit not silver like Lasthenia’s, and who was so gentle that even the dromases sang for her.

A lump rises in your throat then, at the thought of her, of dear, beautiful Hellanike, and you try to swallow it back, because if you cry now then you will never stop, and you don’t want that, especially not in front of Lasthenia, who hardly knows you. Taking a deep breath, you wait until it abates, until the pressure on your chest vanishes, and then you squeeze your eyes shut with enough force that pricks of light begin to form behind your lids. 

I am in the Grove. I am in the Grove. I am in the Grove. You repeat this mantra enough times that Hellanike’s screaming abates, and only then do you open your eyes and face Lasthenia, who is blessedly back to being stern-faced and old and nothing like her.

“It’s a boy and a girl,” you begin, your index finger brushing against the rough outline of the boy’s face. You did not have time nor material to give him a proper expression, but you know he’s scowling, as he always is, not out of anger but because he is that deep in thought. You can picture so clearly how his brow was furrowed that day, his face pinched as he leaned against the headstone and stared at you and asked you what you were doing. “They’re in a graveyard.”

“A graveyard?” Lasthenia prompts. You nod.

“His parents have been dead since he was but a baby. You would think he’d be saddened by it, but he’s not, not really,” you say. “Not yet, anyways. It’ll be some years before either of them ever learn what it means to mourn.”

He’s an unfortunate and sorry sort, Anaxagoras, the kind of boy that one might pity if they have the heart for it and tease if they don’t. They whisper about him, your peers, their parents, pointing out his worn clothes and messy hair, the bruises on his cheekbones and the scrapes on his knees — they call him a mess, a boy whose dreams far outweigh his station, and then they laugh. How many questions he asks. How many stupid things he says, and yet he claims he will be the most knowledgeable man in the world someday! Anaxagoras the Idiot. Anaxagoras the Fool. He will certainly be remembered as such.

You both are in the same class when you begin school, though often, privately, you think that there’s some unfairness in that. The rest of you cannot even read, after all, and then there is Anaxagoras, who asks the teacher questions with words you cannot even pronounce, who says things that your tongue sits too thick and heavy in the cavern of your childish mouth to ever have hopes of replicating. 

The others call him names, but he is deaf to their barbs and their witticisms, which you do think you admire. You notice him first in this setting, where he is tucked away in the shade of an oak tree, hunched over something in his lap while someone or another berates him. You think of asking them to stop, but in truth you are afraid, and so you can only watch in silence as they snatch his work away from him, holding it up to the light before shouting and dropping it.

It’s a dromas heart, still beating. A girl vomits. A boy kicks him and calls him sick, which he does not respond to, only picking the heart up once more, curling in on himself and hugging it protectively to his chest, narrowing his eyes against the glares of your classmates.

Later, you find out that the heart is fake, made of steel and sap instead of flesh and blood. He made it, according to his sister, who is an animal tamer by the name of Hellanike. She rushed to the school as soon as she was summoned, a young dromas toddling after her and nudging Anaxagoras fondly when it sees him, and she is distraught when she hears that the heart has been destroyed by the school’s principal. He made that, and you took it from him! What sort of a principal are you?

The principal tries to reason with her, but then Hellanike sees the boot-shaped mark on Anaxagoras’s face and she is inconsolable. Taking her brother by the shoulder, she curses at the principal, and then they both leave, the dromas stumbling over its own feet as it tries to keep up with Hellanike's furious pace.

He comes back the next day like nothing ever happened, but now he has this reputation of being macabre as well as insufferable, so he continues to be left alone. You do not think he minds, not particularly; maybe he even prefers it, but that doesn’t stop you from your wishing and your gazing, for you are quite taken with him, and even more now that you know the heart was his all along.

Those flowers which bloom in his hands and never wilt, the glass scales he weighs dead leaves in, the brass frogs that leap in place by his feet — how convoluted they are, how fascinating! To you who are a child, he has touched life in the way only a god can, and so you regard him with the careful caution of a devotee, too frightened to go any closer but too endeared to ever go very far.

He speaks to you only once, in an activity where you are told to draw something to your tastes. You scribble out a dromas, the big, mean one that follows Hellanike around your small city and howls whenever anyone approaches her, and Anaxagoras leans over to look at it, inspecting it carefully with those discerning vermillion eyes of his.

“That’s nice,” he says brusquely, and then he takes the well of purple dye from you. You glance over, your cheeks warm from the praise, and see that he, too, has sketched a dromas, although his is far more scientific in nature, a diagram from the side, measurements marked out in neat tick marks, body parts labeled in sloping handwriting that you can’t quite read but can at least infer.

“Yours is—” you begin, but your voice dies in your throat when he looks back at you and tilts his head. He waits, but when it becomes clear you have no intentions of continuing, he shrugs and turns away, beginning to fill in the dromas’s sturdy body with violet like you never spoke in the first place.

When you are seven, your mother’s uncle passes away. He was old when you were born and you never knew him well, but it is your first intimate brush with death and so you are shaken by it entirely despite all of that. In fact, a week passes before you can bring yourself to trudge to the graveyard and place flowers atop the dark earth where he is buried, your head spinning curiously, peculiarly, at the thought that he is somewhere in the ground beneath you, still wrapped in that shroud of his, tucked away in a casket, his body rigid and grey and bloodless.

“What are you doing here?” The voice is soft, curious, but you cannot stop yourself from shrieking at it — you weren’t expecting anyone to be here, for you didn’t see a single soul when you entered the desolate place, and for a second you think it must be a ghost scolding you for some perceived misconduct. “Why are you screaming?”

He’s not a ghost, although he is waifish enough to be confused for one. Anaxagoras is slender and small for his age, after all, his little figure white and bony, his fingers too long for his hands, his eyes too large for his face. 

“I’m sorry, you just took me by surprise,” you say. “I thought — I thought you must be some kind of monster.”

“I see,” he says. 

“I’m visiting my mother’s uncle,” you say, because now that you are not seeing him in the harsh light of the schoolyard, he is a little more approachable, a little more like any other boy that you might be friends with. “And you?”

“My parents,” he says casually, tapping on the headstone for emphasis. “My sister says it’s the anniversary of their wedding today, and that I should visit them and wish them well.”

“Hellanike,”  you say.

“You know her?” he says. He looks kinder when he speaks of his sister, a smile dawning on his face, and even a blind man could tell from the unprecedented melody in his voice that he loves her in a way he loves little else.

“Who doesn’t?” you say rhetorically. Even the most difficult of beasts are turned to lapdogs by her touch, and even the most difficult of men are turned to saints by her gaze; you doubt there’s anyone in the city who hasn't heard her name.

He exhales at this, you guess in amusement. “True enough. Say, you’re in my class, aren't you?”

“Yes,” you say, though not without a moment of hesitation. Suddenly the bruise on his shoulder stands out stark against his skin, and you think of how easy he is for the others to abuse, how inviting it is to mock him, how simple it is to beat someone who cares so little they don’t even bother fighting back. “We haven’t really spoken much.”

“Right,” he says, and then he stands, brushing himself off, patting his parents’ gravestones, his expression dimming for the briefest of moments before he nods at you politely. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Wait,” you say when he turns to leave. You are sure you won’t have the boldness to do this ever again, but in the solemn gloom of the graveyard, you are suddenly spurred into action and loath to let him leave. “Wait, Anaxagoras, I — can I be your friend?”

He blinks at you once before shrugging. “Sure.”

“Sure?” you say, for you were expecting something elaborate, some profound declaration worthy of this designation you are bestowing on him. He has no friends, you are certain, and of the ones you have, you don’t like any as much as you think you may like him. So shouldn’t there be something to mark this moment? Something more grandiose?

“If that’s what you want,” he says. “Is there anything else?” 

“No,” you say, suddenly very relieved and more than a little flustered that you have been so worried all this while when it was so simple in the end. “No, that’s it.”

“Okay,” he says. “Bye.”

It’s a strange place to begin a friendship, but Anaxagoras is a strange boy, anyways. The two of you become something like a pair, and although your companionship cannot make him less ragged, cannot make his clothes finer and his hair neater, at least the whispers and the wounds are lessened now. He never thanks you for it, never pays enough mind to, but you know he must be grateful somewhere deep inside, because Hellanike tells you so, and Hellanike never lies.

It means so much to me, she murmurs in your ear, that first time you meet her, her arms winding affectionately around your torso, that you protect my little brother so well.

You tell her it’s nothing. She smiles and tells you it’s everything. 

“I think we made a lot of progress last time,” Lasthenia tells you. You furrow your brow, because you can’t quite understand what she means by that. All you did the last time you met her was paint a picture and explain what it meant; there wasn’t anything resembling a proper breakthrough like she’s implying. You feel the same, not worse but certainly not any better. Still, Lasthenia seems pleased enough, and painting is better than pretending to be deaf to her inane questions, so when she gives you a fresh canvas and a reed pen, you accept it without protest.

“Will you tell me what to do this time?” you say. She shakes her head.

“No, just do what you’d like,” she says. You hum and begin to doodle something or another, you’re not really sure what — it’s just nice to scratch the pen into the page, to gouge and gouge away at it until an image begins to form. “So, you’ve known Anaxagoras since you were a child?”

“Hm?” you say. “Oh, yes, we were very young when we met. He was my…”

“Your best friend?” she completes for you. You almost laugh at this, thinking back to that final night before he left your hometown for the Grove, the sound of his harsh breaths in your ear, the feel of his hand between your legs, but then instead of his bed you are remembering the floor beneath it and you are shaking and Hellanike is screaming and your vision is blackening, your lines growing jagged and long instead of sure and sharp.

“We knew each other,” you say shortly.

“You speak in the past tense,” she notes. “Did you two have a falling out?”

They’re killing Hellanike. They’re killing Hellanike. They’re killing Hellanike.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” you say. “There’s no bad blood between us. We just aren’t close anymore.”

“It’s natural. Sometimes you outgrow your friends,” she says, but she speaks like she knows that’s not what happened. You detest her for just a second, detest how self-assured she is, but you push it down. It’s not her fault. These people in the Grove, they’re all like that, and you shouldn’t resent Lasthenia any more or less than you resent the others.

“Exactly,” you say.

“That boy and girl in the graveyard from your painting,” she says. “You mentioned they wouldn’t learn grief for a long time. What do you think taught them? You seemed to have something in mind.”

“The boy’s sister,” you say immediately, without even thinking about it.

“She died?” she says. You grit your teeth.

“Eventually,” you say. “Everyone does at some point, right?”

“Of course,” she says. “But—”

“Anyways,” you say, shoving your half-finished sketch in front of you and cutting her off in one swift motion. “Here. Do you like it?”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” she says, thankfully taking the redirection with grace. “Are the boy and girl the same as the ones from the last painting?”

“They’re older now,” you say. “And that’s a dromas they’re with. The boy is fond of dromases.”

“Why do you think he is?” she says.

“Well, really his sister is the one who loves them,” you say. “But he loves her, and so it’s the same in the end.”

“Why can’t dromases fly?” he asks you one day. You are sitting at his dining table, and Hellanike is cooking dinner for you both, although you have told her time and time again that there’s no need to waste food on you.

“Stop speaking,” you say. “I’m working on your lips.”

He is your favorite model, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he is the only one who is willing to do it. In exchange for being allowed to tell you his favorite theories while you work, he poses how you command him to and does not complain when you study him intently; he calls it a symbiotic relationship, which is his way of saying that you both are friends and do things for one another when you can.

“Can you hurry up?” he says, for patience is not yet one of his virtues. It’s funny to you that the ever-tolerant Hellanike’s little brother is so short-tempered when he wants to be, so you don’t mind it too much, but today you nudge his leg with yours.

“I’ll be done in a minute or so,” you say, looking up from your practice only to glare at him when he opens his mouth again. He shuts it immediately, although his brows do draw together in silent rebellion. “Thank you. As for your earlier question, well, why would they? They’re children of Georios, are they not? They have no use for the sky.”

“I knew you would say that!” he bursts out, all at once. You sigh, because when he is like this there is no stopping him, and then you turn your paper so that you can perfect the shading of his hair instead. “Who cares, though? If they’re children of Georios or Aquila or Phagousa or whoever, why does it matter? Wouldn’t they be happier if they could fly?”

“Certainly,” you say dryly.

“Then they should,” he says. “Why should we let the gods tell us who we can or cannot be?”

“If you’re not careful, you’ll be thrown out of the church for saying things like that,” I say.

“Oh, whatever,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. “Those priests are useless anyways. They’re too scared to question the world around them, so they just spout nonsense from their scrolls and call it revelations. If I were a dromas, I wouldn’t let a priest or a god stop me from flying.”

“What about your lack of wings?” you ask. “That might be a problem.”

“Not so,” he says. “I can’t be limited so easily.”

“You’re ridiculous,” you say when he punctuates it with a snicker and you realize he’s joking.

“On a more serious note, though,” he says. “What’s to say you can’t fashion a set of wings from wax and put them on a dromas? It could fly then, surely, just like my birds.”

He speaks of the mechanical birds he crafts with his own hands, little creatures which can take to the sky and sing as readily as their living brethren. One of them sits in your room, and it likes to coo you to sleep, so you keep it on your dresser and pet its little head with your index finger whenever you walk past.

“A dromas is a bit bigger than a metal nightingale,” you say.

“Then I’d give it bigger wings,” he says, always so quick with a rebuttal, always so ready. “There’s nothing saying I can’t.”

“Well, go on and fashion a pair of wings for Rhode, and we’ll see how far she can fly,” you say, speaking of the young dromas that Hellanike has been raising for almost as long as Anaxagoras has been alive. She is lazy and affectionate, to Anaxagoras especially, for according to Hellanike she views him as her own son despite being younger than him. 

“Rhode’s inability to fly has nothing to do with her being a dromas, and everything to do with her being entirely unmotivated,” he says with a snort. 

“What’s all this about Rhode?” Hellanike says, balancing a steaming dish in one hand and three plates in the other. Her eyebrow is raised as if she’s angry, but she’s smiling, and anyways she’s incapable of anger, so it comes across as more of a silly thing than a true rebuke. “You shouldn’t tease her, Anaxagoras. She’s not bright for a dromas, but her heart is bigger than any you’ll meet.”

“What good does that do her?” he says, rolling his eyes and pushing the plate with the larger of the two portions towards you. You try to refuse it, but you’ve long since learnt that both he and his sister are too proud to accept anything resembling charity, so, pressing your lips into a thin line, you take it and begin to eat, albeit begrudgingly. “She’d never survive in the wild.”

“That’s right,” you say, interrupting sagely. “She can’t even fly.”

“Fly!” Hellanike says. “Why, have you heard of a dromas that could?”

Anaxagoras shoots you a look that makes it nearly impossible for you to maintain your composure, especially in front of the earnest Hellanike, who seems to really think that you have discovered such a thing. You open your mouth, but the only thing that escapes it is a strangled laugh, and so he kicks you under the table and gives his sister a bright grin.

“We were just discussing it,” he says. “If you give a dromas wings, might it not fly?”

“Oh, I see,” she says, because she’s better than you, better than anyone, and so she entertains his notions as if they are legitimate theories instead of just flights of fancy. “Maybe not Rhode, but Argos could.”

Argos is one of the dromases whose owner has sent him to Hellanike so she can attempt gentling him. He’s a beast of a thing, bred for war, and thus far she is the only one allowed close enough to him to touch. She’s right, too, it’s a lot easier to imagine him taking to the skies than Rhode, but even then it’s humorous, for he is such a behemoth that your mind cannot even fathom how he might lift himself into the sky.

“A fair point,” he says.

“I think that even if you gave him wings, he wouldn’t know what to do with them,” you say. “Just because he could fly doesn't mean he would.”

“We could teach him,” Anaxagoras says.

“Some things can’t be taught,” you say. “How could you make a creature that doesn’t even know what flight is understand that he must now take to the skies? How would wings be any different from a saddle?”

He’s about to shoot back with some other argument, you’re sure of it, but before he can, Hellanike is raising her hands in an attempt to calm you two. Neither you nor he can really refuse her, so you both grow silent and turn to her obediently, for it’s clear she has something to say, and this draws a smile out of her.

“I heard something interesting today,” she says. “From some merchants. They mentioned a holy sanctuary called the Grove of Epiphany.”

“So what?” Anaxagoras says. He’s never put much stock in divinity, and Hellanike knows this better than anyone, so you wonder what has driven her to bring this up.

“It’s an academy,” she says. “Devoted to Cerces, and to the pursuit of wisdom.”

Anaxagoras’s eyes light up, just for a second, although he immediately quashes that faint and fiery desire. You see it, though, just as you see every little change in his demeanor, in his very being. 

“Well, anyways,” she says. “I just thought you might find it interesting, that’s all.”

The conversation moves on to other, lighter things, but the wanting does not fade from his irises. It has been imprinted in his soul, that need, that hunger, and he cannot forget it so easily. That night was the first time, although not the last, that you grew aware of the fact he would someday leave you for good.

“Do you ever consider trying to reconcile with Anaxagoras?” Lasthenia asks you, the next time you visit her. You are busy glancing around her office, trying to see where she must keep the art supplies she keeps miraculously bringing for you, so at first you do not register the question. Then, when you do, your spine stiffens.

“Did he tell you to ask me that?” you say. She shakes her head.

“I was only wondering out of my own curiosity,” she says. “Do you think that talking to him would make you feel better? Like I keep telling you, he’s adjusting to everything quite well. He could help you.”

“No,” you say immediately. “No, he — it would make it worse. For both of us.”

“Why is that?” she says.

“Can I draw?” you say instead of answering. Then, cringing at your rudeness, you hastily add: “It doesn’t matter. It just would.”

She regards you with condolence brewing in her eyes; for a moment, you think that she’s going to keep pressing, that she’ll withhold her materials from you until you explain everything to her, and that’s something you can’t bring yourself to do. So you rip at the skin around your nails and chew on your lower lip, a habit you learnt from Anaxagoras when you both were young, and you try your best to pretend that it isn’t real, that none of this is real, that Hellanike is still alive and Anaxagoras still speaks to you and Rhode is there, waiting outside of the window for you to give her a treat she is far too spoilt to deserve.

“Alright,” she says. “But I do have a request this time.”

“What is it?” you say, for you are so desperate to move on that you grasp at her words and her parchment like they are lifelines, like the only thing saving you from drowning is the feel of the brush in your hand and her orderly inquiries.

“Draw something pleasant,” she says. “Maybe that boy and girl. We’ve spoken a lot about their sadness, but how about a time when they were happy with one another?”

“I don’t know if they ever were,” you say, worrying with the ink pot’s lid, screwing and unscrewing it absentmindedly. 

“Come on, now,” she says. “That isn’t fair to them, is it? Of course they must have been, at some point.”

“And if I said they really weren't?” you challenge.

“Then I would ask you why you did that to them,” she says. You let out a bark of laughter.

“I ask that, too,” you say. “Every day, I ask Thanatos why they did this to us, to me, but they never answer. Sometimes, there is no reason. Sometimes, it just happens.”

“But you can change that,” she says gently. “You can be better than Thanatos and the rest of the titans.”

“You sound like Anaxagoras,” you say, for even here, he has made something of a name for himself as a blasphemer.

“I don’t mean it like that,” she says. “This is your story. You can make them happy if you want.”

“Fine,” you say after a moment. “Yes. They were happy on one occasion, for a short while. An hour or maybe less.”

“Why is that?” she urges as you take the pen to your paper. “What made them so happy?”

“Because he fucked her,” you say sardonically, half-hoping the shock of it will bring her to leave you alone. She seems the prim type, but to your surprise, she doesn’t even flinch, only nodding pensively.

“Yes, that could make anyone happy,” she says. “Is that what you’re drawing, then?”

The detached approach causes your face to burn with shame, embarrassment flooding you as you sink deeper into your chair. She’s taking you seriously, and somehow this is more invasive, more violating than if she had been mortified by it.

“No,” you mutter. “I’m drawing a dromas.”

You show her as proof — it really is just a rough diagram of a dromas, the body parts labeled, Rhode written neatly in the corner. It’s contrary to her instructions, but Lasthenia doesn’t point that out, taking it in stride and examining it like it’s a piece in a museum.

“Incredible,” she says. “You have an excellent understanding of anatomy. You didn’t even have a reference, but this is nearly textbook-worthy. I know several people who would pay a lot of money for talent like that; I’ll be sure to recommend you if it ever comes up.”

“Thank you,” you say. “Is that all for today?”

“Do you think it is?” she says as you get up. You pause, and for a second your resolve wavers. A voice in the back of your mind whispers, wouldn’t it be nice? If you could tell someone about it…wouldn’t it be nice?

Then you realize that the voice is Hellanike’s, and so you leave before she starts screaming again.

Argos’s breeders made such a sum from his sale — apparently some representative of Kremnos’s royalty found him so fine that he was bought on their king’s behalf — that they were willing to give Hellanike a third of it, although she had not asked for any commission after sending him back to them, as docile as a lamb but with enough spirit to march alongside any army, even one such as Kremnos’s.

You and Anaxagoras only learn of this after the fact, and you are opposite in your reactions — he is delighted, for even that third is more money than he’s ever seen in his life, and you are irritated, for you believe she should’ve demanded more. She certainly deserves more, for without her, Argos would’ve long ago been put down for his bad manner, but she is too humble to ever give herself that much credit, and so all she says is this: a third is more than enough for what I want.

You’ve never known Hellanike to want much, so you ask her what she’s talking about, and although he doesn’t say anything, you know Anaxagoras is intrigued as well. She looks around furtively before beckoning you closer and lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper.

“I paid one of the traveling merchants,” she says. “He’s leaving in a fortnight, setting out for the Grove of Epiphany, and — and I asked him to take you with him, Anaxagoras.”

“What?” he says. “Me? Hellanike, why would you do that? You should’ve saved it.”

“What would I save it for? I make enough to feed Rhode and I as it is, and I know you’ve always wished to go. You’re meant for more than living the rest of your life here,” she says.

“What about you?” he says. “Where will you go?”

“Nowhere!” she says, as cheerful as ever. “I’ll stay right here, and I’ll brag to everyone that my little brother is going to be an eminent scholar. You’ll be the pride of our town!"

“I don’t want to go if you won’t be there,” he says.

“Oh, don’t say that, I already paid for your journey! Anyways, you can visit me whenever you’re able, so it’s not like you’ll never see me again,” she says. He turns to you as if for support, but you click your tongue.

“You’ve spent years waiting for this,” you say. “Don’t let something as fleeting and silly as homesickness stop you from going.”

“Alright,” he says, and when Hellanike crosses her arms and you pretend to scowl, he beams at you, like he’s proving a point. “Alright! I’ll go.”

“You’ll go!” Hellanike says, as happily as if she is the one who’s getting the chance to escape our remote hometown. “We have to start packing.”

“Two weeks isn’t long at all,” you agree. “The time for you to leave will be upon us before you know it.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he says. “It’s a long time.”

Then he does this thing he’s begun doing recently, his arm brushing against your own, quickly enough that it might be an accident but closely enough that you are left hot and shy from it anyways. And it’s just him, just Anaxagoras, so you shouldn’t feel this way, but you do, which only exacerbates it further. You’ve known him since you were little, you’ve braided his hair and fed his dromas countless times, so why now is it that your stomach knots itself into something tangled and sick from just that slightest, barest touch? Why is it that lately you are finding it difficult to speak with him, when your entire friendship thus far you have never approached him with anything but level candor? 

You know you should tell him something, especially as the day of his departure grows nearer and nearer, but you don’t know what it is that you should say. He’s confused by it, you are sure, because your conversations are stilted instead of easy as they always used to be, but he’s never been good with this sort of thing, either, so he never brings it up. He does stop touching you as frequently, though, which you are as glad for as you are saddened by — your mind is a bit clearer, at least, and if you turn your back it’s almost like you are children and he will never leave and you will never feel so unwell again.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he says. His room is empty, hollow without his things littering it, his various instruments and texts carefully packed away, his clothes folded around them to keep them safe. It makes the two of you feel closer than you are, although in truth he is perched on his bed and you are about to leave.

“Yes,” you say, and your voice does break when you do, but you do your best to pretend it doesn’t. “The journey isn’t too long by dromas, right? Write as soon as you get there.”

“Of course,” he says.

“To me, too,” you say. “Not just Hellanike.”

“I always planned to,” he says, and you can hear the way he must be rolling his eyes when he does.

“You’ll like it there,” you say, your hand resting on the doorframe, your forehead leaning against it. You are poised like you are about to walk away, but you have no intention to, not yet. You just don’t want him to see that your eyes are watering and your lower lip is trembling. “You can ask as many questions as you want, and there will be people who can actually answer them.”

“That’s right,” he says.

“It’s good,” you say. “It’s really good.”

“You’re crying,” he notes. 

“I’m not,” you say. It comes out brattier than you would’ve liked, but to your eternal relief, he doesn’t point that out.

“Turn around, then,” he says. You remain still instead of obliging, and he exhales with something like amusement. “So you are.”

“You’ll make fun of me if I am,” you say. “I’m not.”

“I won’t,” he says, uncharacteristically gentle. “You have to know I wouldn’t do that to you. Come sit with me for a while longer, and if you want to cry, then I promise I won’t say anything about it.”

“You should sleep,” you say, a last-ditch attempt at denial. If you sit with him it will hurt even more when you have to get up and face the loss anew; it’ll be better, you think, for you to flee now, while you are on your feet and hardened to it. “You’re leaving early, Hellanike said.”

“Who cares what she said or when I'm leaving?” he says. It’s so willful you're taken aback, even though you’ve always known him to be stubborn. “It might be a while before I see you next. I don’t mind staying up the entire night, even. Like we used to.”

The mention of your childhood is what causes you to cave, as he must have known it would. The reminder of your youth, when you both would sometimes share a bed and he would lull you to sleep with stories of great bursts of fire in a faraway sky, is enough for you to flinch and then, before you know it, you are crossing the room and collapsing beside him. You’re not sure which of you lies down first, but then you both are splayed out atop his blanket and his pinky is just a hair’s breadth away from yours.

“You’ve been angry at me recently,” he says.

“I haven’t,” you say, but you still can’t look at him. “I’m not angry. Especially not at you. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry at you.”

“But something is bothering you,” he says. “I’m not an idiot. I can tell these things.”

“I need more time,” you say finally, after allowing yourself a single chuckle at the prospect of anyone calling him an idiot, even him. “I thought I would have longer to understand it, but now you’re leaving and I’m still so unsure.”

“Understand what?” he says. You turn on your side, so that you can look at him; he’s staring at the ceiling, and you are suddenly struck by how beautiful he is. You’ve never really considered it before, never thought to call him such a sweet word, but it’s apt, and the longer you look at him the more you are convinced it is. He isn’t spindly and odd-looking anymore, the way he was when the two of you first met — he’s beautiful, he is, his skin gold in the candlelight, his eyes a dark, unreadable sanguine, his hair loose and fanned out on his pillow.

“All of it,” you say. 

“I can help you, if you’ll let me,” he says, and now your fingers are touching, although you are sure you haven’t moved. “Just tell me everything. I’ll understand it for you, so that you don’t have to.”

“You don’t need to do that,” you say, although it’s more of a deflection on your part than it is out of any real concern for him. You’re scared of what he’ll think, what he’ll discern. Will he laugh at you? Will he cast you from his bed and demand you leave at once? Of course he is going away tomorrow anyways, so maybe it doesn’t matter, but this makes you even more distraught, because it’s so immediate now. In the morning, he will set out for the Grove of Epiphany, and he will spend the rest of his life somewhere you can’t reach him, not for a long time. Maybe not ever.

“Please,” he says. “Just this once, let me listen to you.”

He tilts his head to look at you entreatingly; you are helpless to deny him, but you are also frozen, burdened by the weight of his stare, and so you do the only thing you can and roll over, your back to him as it has been more and more frequently.

The bed whines as he shifts with you, tucking his chin over your shoulder, his hand hovering over your waist but not yet touching it. You swallow, but you do not move away as you think he must anticipate — instead, you take his hand by the wrist and drag it up so that his cool palm can rest against your overwarm cheek.

“I like it when you do that,” you confess, because his newfound proximity has driven away all the will you might have mustered to argue. “Whenever your knee knocks against mine, whenever your arm slips past my own…I like it.”

“Hm,” he says, like this is a crucial finding that he must take into proper consideration.

“I don’t think I should, though,” you say. “Not so much.”

“Why not?” he murmurs.

“Because it’s you,” you say, keeping your gaze trained on a blank spot on the wall, willing your eyes to stay just as dry as they are now, your voice to remain exactly as steadfast.

“You want it to be someone else?” he says. “Echephron, maybe? Iasus? Hypenor?”

He’s naming boys from your town, the very boys who once tormented him. At first you think he is mocking you, and you almost get up and tell him you will go, if he means to be like this, but then an edge of despair enters his tone and it’s all you can do to cut him off before he can continue.

“No,” you say. “It’s just — I’ve known you for so long, and never have you made me feel so ill with…whatever this is. I have always told you everything, so why now am I shy? We’ve shared a bed countless times, so what about tonight is different?”

“I think,” he says, with the surety of a doctor describing some age-old and incurable malady, “you like me.”

“What?” you say, a knee-jerk reaction to this absurd new development, which perhaps isn’t so new or so absurd after all. 

“You like me,” he repeats, and although he sounds victorious, he’s the furthest thing from smug. His hand pulls away from your face, and you almost beg for it back, but then it’s dancing along your side and coming to rest over your navel and your supplication dies before it can form. “You do.”

“What does it matter?” you say after a long pause where you neither confirm nor deny the claim. “If you’re leaving tomorrow, then what does any of it matter?”

“It matters to me,” he says. “It would’ve driven me mad to go so far away without knowing for certain.” 

You lace your fingers through his rough ones, because you are so overcome with the need to hold onto him you cannot bear it any longer. His thumb pets along your knuckles, and a choked laugh escapes you, because it is so foreign and yet so familiar at once, and how could you have been so foolish? Of course it ended up this way. Of course it did.

“I like you,” you say, repeating it over and over as if it will make it more true. “Oh, I like you, I like you—”

You will cry if you continue, so you purse your lips and squeeze his hand, which is still on your stomach, and you do it so tightly you are surprised he doesn’t yelp. Miraculously, though, he really doesn’t; he only presses a kiss to your temple, a ghostly, lingering thing.

“Don’t stop,” he says. “Tell me again.”

“I like you,” you say. This time when he kisses you, it is at the angle of your jaw, and you must stop yourself from shivering for fear that it will chase him away.

“Once more,” he says. “So that I can be sure of it.”

“I like you,” you say. Now his nose is against your neck and his lips are at the tender place where your throat meets your shoulder and his palm is searing into you, you are sure it is, but you make no attempt at removing it.

“I like you, too,” he says. “So much. For so long. I was going to tell you, I swear, before you left to go home — well, I might’ve told you earlier, if only I had known…”

“Can I stay?” you say. “I don't want to go home. I want to stay with you tonight. Tell me I can.”

“Shall I wake Hellanike?” he says. “You might prefer sleeping in her room. Her bed is bigger.”

“No,” you say, and then, in the sort of bravery you can only summon now, when there is nothing left for you to lose barring your pride, which you have long ago relinquished to him anyways, you guide his hand from your stomach, taking it slowly, carefully, to where your waistband sits low on your hips. “No, there’s no need to wake her. I want to stay with you, Anaxagoras.”

Your hold on him loosens as he moves his fingers with deft curiosity, your nails digging into his forearm when he experimentally dips them into the place where your thighs come together. You inhale sharply, and you feel his chest vibrate against your back as he hums, cataloguing this reaction before repeating the motion, this time grinding the heel of his palm against you at the same time before pausing, only resuming when you make a small, pathetic sound to prompt him to continue.

He is so close to where you want him, but you want him closer and closer still, and you think he knows this and finds some humor in denying you that final plunge of his fingers inside of you, threatening it, tracing around it until you are sure you will burst, but never quite following through, leaving you to teeter on that precipice.

“Anaxagoras,” you say finally, when you grow tired of waiting. “Please.”

“Please what?” he says, and instead of sounding cocky, there is a faint hint of worry in his voice. You are reminded in that instant that you have never seen him with another girl, with anyone else, really, meaning that this is as foreign to him as it is to you. You swallow, and before you can burn away from the shame of asking, you steel yourself to it.

“Inside,” you say. “I want you inside of me, please, please…”

“You have to tell me if it hurts,” he says before indulging you slowly, methodically, with the same patience he uses to build those intricate models of his, the same delicacy and care. You groan at this newfound sensation, and immediately he freezes before beginning to withdraw, apologizing fervently until you cut him off before he can leave you empty again.

“Keep going,” you say. “Don’t leave.”

“Okay,” he says breathily, and then he is peppering kisses to your nape, you suppose to soothe your quivering, which only mounts more and more with every successive thrust of his fingers into you. 

“I feel strange,” you say, and you don’t know whether an eternity has passed or a mere instant, for your mind is hazy and all you can think of is him and whatever is building deep within me. “An—Anaxa, Anaxa, I feel strange—”

“Do you want me to stop?” he says, without even teasing you for the way your tongue has grown so leaden in your mouth that you are stumbling over his name, the very name you are generally so fond of repeating as often as you can.

“No,” you say, your muscles involuntarily clenching at the mere prospect. “No, keep going, keep going, I just — my stomach, or no, not my stomach, somewhere else, I don’t know, I’ve never—”

Your babbling tapers off into a soft exhale as the edges of your vision blur and you clutch his arm so that you aren't swept away. He is saying something to you, but it takes a second for the air to return to your lungs and your awareness to creep back.

“It’s okay,” he says when you realize that there are crescent marks indented along the inside of his elbow where you have pressed into him, not hard enough to draw blood but enough that the skin there is angry and red. “It’s okay, it’s okay, please don’t worry. It’s okay.”

A single tear drips from the corner of your eye, and then another and another and another, splashing onto the sheets that your cheek is pressed to as you sniff in a vain attempt to suppress them before he can notice. But Anaxagoras is far too observant to miss it, and he pushes on your shoulder until you are flat on your back, so that he can loom over you, his brow furrowing as you cry in earnest.

Before he can ask you why you are being so irrational, you wrap your arms around his neck, knowing it is selfish but unable to stop yourself, tugging him closer to you until your lips meet, the salt of your sobs mingling with the taste of his sincere mouth. You cling to him, only drawing back to gasp for air briefly before you return to him once more, your hands beginning to wander until they are tugging his clothes off of him. He responds in kind, albeit with far more control than you, and then you are left bare, his chest to yours, his palms on the back of your head, your own skimming along the ridge of his spine. 

“Are you sure?” he says, but it’s really more of a formality than anything, your legs already spreading wider to accommodate him, your fingers already combing through his hair. You nod anyways, and when he enters you, you begin to weep again, although it is not from pain, as you once thought it might be.

“Don’t leave tomorrow,” you beg. “Don’t leave me, I don’t want you to leave me — I’ve only just gotten you, please don’t leave tomorrow, please don’t leave—”

“I won’t,” he says, and he punctuates it with a roll of his hips against your own. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay here, I will, I will, I don’t care, I don’t care for the Grove or the merchants or any of it, I’ll stay with you, just like this.”

He kisses away your tears as he finishes on your thighs, and then his fingers find their home in you once more until you, too, are spent. You both lie side-by-side for a moment, neither of you looking at the other, the evidence of your union drying against your skin, pearly in the candlelight, and then he clears his throat.

“You know I still have to go,” he says, a little awkwardly.

“Yes,” you say, busying yourself with counting the dust motes swirling in the air. 

“I shouldn’t have said I wouldn’t,” he says.

“I shouldn’t have asked you not to,” you say. “I didn’t mean it. I’m happy for you. This is what you’ve always wanted.”

“I’ve always wanted you, too,” he says, matter-of-factly, the simpleness with which he does so nearly caustic. It’s just another thing. Just another truth. He’s always wanted you, too.

“You don’t have to say that,” you say, feigning a laugh, because the time for crying has passed. “It’s not the same.”

“Yeah,” he says with a heavy sigh, because he knows better than to lie to you. “I guess not.”

“I’ll be here when you come back to visit,” you say. “And when we’re older, maybe I’ll go to the Grove, too. It’s not like this is goodbye forever.”

“Yes,” he says. “You should do that. Come to the Grove, I mean. Rhode is almost old enough to carry two people and their things for such a long journey, so you and Hellanike can ride her and cut the cost of the passage in half.”

“Exactly,” you say. “It won’t be that long. Long enough for you to gain some acclaim, but not long enough that you forget about me.”

“I won’t forget about you. Not ever,” he says, and then he helps you stand so that you can sneak towards the washroom, cleaning yourselves off together shyly, kissing only when you are sure that your footsteps have not caused Hellanike to stir.

You remain in his bed with him that night, your head on his chest, his knuckles rubbing against your cheek idly as you both drift off. The faint scent of mint and lemon soap sticks to him, and the steady rise and fall of his breathing is a melody all on its own, the kind of lullaby that even one of his pretty little tin birds could never replicate. It is easy for you to pretend like nothing will ever happen to the two of you, to fall asleep and dream of the countless nights you might spend exactly like this — but when you wake up the next morning, he is already gone, and you can pretend no longer. 

“What’s that?” Lasthenia says. She’s given you paints again, but although they are your favorite medium, you cannot bring yourself to make anything beautiful from them. Instead, the colors bleed into one another, black ringing the canvas and red streaking through it, forming an incoherent tangle of something or another. Well, it may be incoherent to anyone else, but you can hear Hellanike’s voice emanating from the mess, can feel the floorboards digging into your back, can smell the corroding metal and taste rusty iron bursting from your unbitten tongue, so to you it’s the opposite.

“The bed,” you say. The page isn’t meant to take as much paint as you are slapping on it, and it crinkles in the most saturated places, protesting the thickness, but you continue without asking for a new sheet. “His bed.”

“The boy’s?” she guesses.

“Yes,” you say. “His bed at home.”

“Why is it dark?” she says.

“Because the girl is hiding beneath it,” you say without looking up, squinting and tilting your head before deciding that even now, it is too bright. Dipping the brush in the black ink, you splatter more without care for how it might fall, continuing to do this, although it is such a waste of what is no doubt the result of an entire month of efforts from some poor scholar or another.

“From him?” she says.

“No!” you say vehemently, for even the mere notion of hiding from him is unthinkable. “No, he left some time earlier to pursue greater things, and wherever he is, he is safe, at least. She’s hiding from the monsters.”

Lasthenia reaches across her desk to place a hand on your upper arm. The gesture is surprisingly maternal, but you do not allow yourself to dwell on it, because she isn’t your mother, she isn’t even Hellanike, and so you cannot embrace her and wail like a child.

“Such ugly things, those monsters,” you say. “They frighten that girl to no end, and worse so because they have paralyzed her completely. The boy’s dromas stopped its bellowing a few hours ago, and his sister has moved from pleading to resignation, and all the girl can do is hide under the bed and hope it ends soon.”

“And did it?” Lasthenia asks you.

For a moment, you think to yourself that if she pries your brush from your hands and embraces you, you will finally give in. But of course, why would she do that? This is only her job, dealing with people like you, who are too difficult for anyone else to manage. She holds no love for it, for you. 

More dark ink. Now the entire canvas appears to have been dipped in black dye.

“No,” you say, finally satisfied with this final product. “She’s still there.”

“Still hiding?” Lasthenia says. 

In the back of your mind, Hellanike is weeping, her throat too raw for anything more. You weep with her, though only in that place tucked far away from the rest of the world; to Lasthenia, to this abhorrent present where you are now, you only offer a tight smile.

“Yes,” you say. “I think so.”

A trumpeting cry from Rhode is the only advance warning you and Hellanike receive when the Black Tide comes. She’s uncommonly docile even for a dromas, and you’ve never heard her scream before — judging by the frown on Hellanike’s face, she hasn’t either, and so instead of rushing outside to comfort her, she hesitates, peering through the window first and then gasping.

“Lock all of the doors,” she instructs you, her gaze trained on the horizon.

“Hellanike?” you say. “What’s going on? Is Rhode alright?”

“There’s no time,” she says, and so rarely is she stern that you comply without further complaint, glancing at her one final time over your shoulder before checking all of the doors, making sure that they are secured before returning to her side.

Rhode is still causing a ruckus, and you are surprised that Hellanike has not gone to her yet. After all, she loves Rhode, more than anything or anyone except her little brother, so how can she leave her to her suffering? You almost ask, your mouth going so far as to open, but Hellanike raises her finger to her lips, shaking her head before you can.

“We can’t delay anymore,” she murmurs, and then she places a hand on the small of your back, pushing you towards the stairs. “I’ve heard stories from the merchants about these fiends. They’re called the Black Tide, and they kill everything they touch slowly, without mercy. They travel quickly, fleeing once they have wrought complete destruction, but sometimes, if you are a particularly good fighter, or if you can escape their notice…you can survive.”

“Then we must hide!” you say, reaching for her wrist so that you can yank her along with you. She pulls it out of your reach, leaving you bewildered, and then she shakes her head, her eyes crinkling at the corners 

“You must hide. Hide, and no matter what you think you hear, do not leave until the beasts are well and truly gone,” she says.

“But what about you?” you say.

“Out there, they are killing Rhode,” she says gravely. “She is a dromas, and so she is no easy prey, but there is some gryphon-like creature rending her flesh with its claws, and soon she will fall and it will pounce upon her underbelly and she will die. It is her sacrifice which has given us a chance that no one else in the city got: a chance to adequately prepare ourselves. Maybe it’d be more prudent if I hid, but — but they are killing Rhode, don’t you see? I can’t.”

“You’re going to protect her,” you realize, because this is who Hellanike is. “Let me come!”

“Absolutely not,” she says. “I will not put you in danger. Enough of this; we’re running out of time. Go, and remember what I told you.”

“‘No matter what you think you hear, do not leave until the beasts are well and truly gone,’” you repeat uncertainly.

“Yes, that’s it,” she says.

“But—”

“No matter what,” she says emphatically, kissing your forehead afterwards with her typical good nature. “Darling little girl. Run now. Hide before it is too late.”

You want to tell her you won’t, but even in the best of times it is impossible and futile to argue with her, for she is more stubborn than she lets on, more stubborn than even her brother, who is notorious for the vice. So you turn and race up the stairs, crawling into the small space beneath Anaxagoras’s bed without thinking, lying flat and making yourself small behind his drooping blanket and praying to every titan you can think of to protect her, to protect you.

The day passes differently when you are stuck in a place like that. So many times you nearly stand in surrender, thinking that surely they must have moved on by now, but on each occasion, some instinct stops you. By the third occurrence, however, you resolve to ignore that insistence, but then the air is split by the moan of splintering wood, followed by a horrified shout.

Hellanike. The shout was definitely hers, and her words ring in your mind once more: no matter what you think you hear, do not leave until the beasts are well and truly gone. She swears loudly, and then there is the sound of fighting, of furniture breaking and dishes shattering on the ground, and all you can do is stuff your fist in your mouth, so that when you begin to sob in terror, at least it is soundless.

She sounds like a child when they tear into her, crying and shrieking, high-pitched and utterly frightened. You cannot see her, but her voice reverberates through the house, and so it is like you are there with her, watching those demonic creatures rip her into shreds until she resembles one of them, lifeless and bent in ways that should be impossible. Bile rises sour in your mouth, but you swallow it down, far too frightened at the prospect of accidentally inhaling it to even try spitting it out.

They are cruel and unhurried in killing her. You don’t know if they can understand revenge and so draw it out more than they otherwise would’ve, or if this is just how they always are; you also don’t know which of these options is worse, but that matters less. Whatever their motivations, the fact is that the Black Tide creatures take their time with Hellanike, refusing to kill her until she is reduced to an incomprehensible wreck that, in her final moments, can only whimper for her long-dead mother.

You don’t move from under the bed for what seems to be hours but could be more or less, and even then it is only because you hear footsteps, actual footsteps, not the spectral ones of the demons which have been haunting the house thus far. They are in a pattern you recognize, too, and so you clamber out of the cramped space and open the door to Anaxagoras without questioning why he is here, or how. You just fall against him, allowing him to hold you tightly, fisting the fabric of his himation for some semblance of grounding.

“You’re alive,” he says. “When I saw Rhode’s half-eaten carcass in her corral, I assumed the worst, but you — you’re alive.”

“Everyone else is gone,” you say, your knuckles pale as you cling to him with all the strength left in your cramped body. 

“Everyone?” he says, and his body, which had relaxed so readily against yours only a few seconds prior, stiffens again. “What do you mean by that?”

The longer you don’t answer, the more you feel his panic begin to grow, but the worst part is that you cannot even tell him that what he is thinking is wrong. You know what his next question is, and he knows what you will answer it with, but the two of you go through the charade in miniature anyways, because he still has to do it. He still has to ask, he’s just that kind of person, there’s no version of him which ever won’t.

“Hey,” he says, though he does not push you from the safety of the crook of his neck, where you have buried your face. “Hey. Where’s Hellanike?”

“Lasthenia says that you and I should talk,” Anaxagoras says. When he had come to your chambers, you had half-expected him to stand motionless in the doorway as he always does, as he always has ever since you told him that his sister is dead. “I told her I’m trying, but she seems to think that’s not good enough.”

“What are we meant to talk about?” you say, and although you do not explicitly invite him, he is more than quick enough to read into your implication. Ducking into the room, he shoves the door behind him, allowing it to slam shut with an air of finality.

“You know,” he says.

“I don’t,” you say, continuing to massage oil into your face. You can see his form reflecting in the mirror — he is becoming more and more a man with every day he spends in the abundance of the Grove, impossible to ignore, muscles covering bare bones, scowls replacing awed smiles — but you do your best to act like you don’t.

“My sister,” he says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“What?” you say. Of all the things you imagined he might come up with, the chance of that being the first thing he said to you was relatively low, if not nonexistent. Though then again, he thrives on such stakes, so maybe it’s not a surprise that he has once more proven himself eccentric.

“She died on her own terms,” he says. “You had nothing to do with it.”

The silver-backed mirror turns to water, your visage and his alike swimming in it, unsteady as the lump in your throat turns swollen and furious. You know you should set the bottle of oil down before you can drop it, because the crystal will be torturous to clean should it shatter, but the tendons of your hand have seized, and it’s all you can do to remember to breathe.

“I don’t blame you,” he continues. “Do you think I do?”

“I should’ve told her not to go to Rhode, to come and hide with me,” you say, your voice so quiet it is nearly inaudible. “I should’ve fought with her a little longer.”

“She never would’ve listened to you,” he says. “She would never have left Rhode like that.”

You squeeze your eyes shut. “Then I should’ve helped her. The two of us, maybe we could’ve—”

“You would’ve died,” he says dispassionately, cutting through the cacophony echoing in the chamber of your skull with an efficiency only he possesses. “You’re not some Kremnoan soldier or Okheman guard. You’re not a demigod or a Chrysos Heir. You can’t use a sword or a spear. What else would you have done but died as well?”

“Wouldn't it have been better that way?” you say.

“No, I don’t think so,” he says. “I would’ve had to mourn you both.”

“I’m sorry,” you say. “Anaxagoras, I’m sorry—”

“It’s not your fault,” he says again. You’ve lost track of how many times he’s repeated that phrase, but he hasn’t grown tired of it yet, and so he goes on. “Blaming yourself won’t change anything.”

“It should’ve been me,” you say.

“It shouldn’t have,” he says. “It shouldn’t have been anyone, but that tide is indiscriminate in who it takes.”

He shifts from foot to foot, like he is weighing the merits of further discussion, and you grieve for the time that the two of you spoke to each other without having to think about it. But now you are like this. Now his sister is dead and your home is destroyed and neither of you can ever go back.

“Thank you,” he says, all in a rush, like he cannot be rid of the words soon enough.

“What?” you say, taken aback.

“Lasthenia said I should be honest with you about how I feel,” he says. “So, thank you. For hiding. For running away. For living.”

When you finally bawl, it is excruciating, the months upon months that you have denied that blade of anguish from splitting you open compounding until you think it will kill you. You stain his tunic with your tears and cause blood to bead along his biceps from how you dig into him, and he does not complain, only murmuring in your ear in that wretched, broken voice of his, thick and profound with loss: it’s not your fault, I’ll bring her back, it’s not your fault, thank you for being alive, it’s not your fault, I love you. I love you. It’s not your fault. I love you.

image credits: official scene recoloring and blue line dividers by me; beige line dividers by @/thecutestgrotto

but aventurine has a flair for theatrics, you know that. his witty quips are as feather-light in weight as light-hearted they are in intent. but his touch - in the forms of kind caresses or rhythmic taps to a tune from his forgotten culture - lingers on your skin, with a yearning so heavy. you question whether it could be nostalgia or instead, silent awe at a reality he never imagined could ever be his.

(kakavasha remembers. clinging onto you for warmth like he once did to his sister, falling asleep with her prayers to mama fenge in his ears. the avgins believed gaiathra triclops to be the symbol of humility; so naturally, their prayers to her should also be humble, not too quiet but not too loud. all in moderation. for a frail child like him, those gentle prayers alone were enough to let him drift into a dreamless slumber and to ignore the shackles of reality if not for the briefest moments.

time passed. came a time where the melody he associated with slumber was no longer a soft voice lulling him but pure static, a noise to distract his mind from the chains around his wrists. they burned themselves onto his skin, searing, but he was already too familiar with the sensation to care. the mark on his neck was unwelcome, laughing at him, but he too laughed at his own pitiful reflection so what's the difference, anyway?

time passed again, the call of slumber then turned into clattering noises of chips doused in gold and dice thrown onto a surface. he thought it'd stay that way forever but before long, it morphed into up-and-down waves he couldn't decipher initially. they're gentle, faint like a human's breathing: your breathing as you allowed him to lie beside you for the first time, he realized back then. although he deems himself unworthy, an ugly grime on your pristine existence that still insists on cradling him — but despite it all, he finds this last melody to be his favorite so far.)

✧ a moment among the stars:

ticklish.

the sensation, minor yet still impactful enough, causes you to stir out of sleep. the light of noon greets your eyes and you become vaguely cognizant that the root of it all is the tufts of blond hair brushing against your neck.

there is a solid weight on your torso and a pair of slender arms loosely wrapped around your waist - but they're nothing you haven't grown used to. you comb your fingers through the messy locks licking at your skin, instinctively, and the fragrant scent of what you register as penacony's limited edition perfume kisses your nose.

“...ugh, what system time is it?” you let out a grunt, shifting around slightly to let your limbs breathe. you don't get an answer to your question, instead, aventurine's arms reestablish their hold on you. hooking you closer to him as if to wring out whatever proximity is left, if there is even any. his simple proclamation of “who cares?”, in a sense.

there it is again, that ticklish feeling. you feel soft lips grazing feather-like kisses against your collarbone. oh, he definitely isn't letting go just yet. truly merciless, a dozy morning thought accompanied by your tired sigh. the noise still comes out fond, however, so your feigned act of annoyance is fooling no one.

“it's warm, you know,” you grumble. but the yawn escaping your mouth right after betrays whatever stern image you're trying to adopt. not like you can ever be too stern with him. aventurine knows this, yes, and he gives you an A+ for effort each time.

“mhm,” he finally speaks, snuggling into your chest with no care about anything in the world, “g'morning to you too, lovely.”

his favorite mornings aren't his favorite if not thanks to your innocuous complaints and delightful attempts at pushing his pretty face away, no? a lazy grin graces the stoneheart's lips and eyes like exquisite gems, although sleepy, flutter open to gaze at you languidly. he takes the sight of you in then lets out a sigh - a fond noise just like yours earlier; the both of you really are two peas of a pod.

you must look a terrible mess right now and yet, the sight of you has aventurine smiling dazedly. “ah, what a spectacular sight. i really am the luckiest man in the galaxy,” he hums in approval. you want to roll your eyes but stops as he leans up to pepper (ah, one necessary correction: smother) kisses all over your face, arms dragging you closer to his chest like a cage. your eyes widen comically. what a nefarious trap, he has the advantage!

every remnant of sleepiness clinging to your mind evaporates. you squeal with laughter, shoving at his shoulder using the strength of a baby deer because no, you don't really want him to stop. he knows that too, of course.

“mwah, mwah, mwah—”

“pfft...! kakavasha, i can't breathe!”

(he has half a mind to pinch his skin, as if to remind himself that this is real. he can feel your giggles tickling his skin as if to tell him in return: yes, you are.)

will you let veritas pour his heart out after a long day? . . . well, that could count as too much of an overstatement. others say, “that man is like a brick wall!” some more dare to whisper, “doesn't his temper already exhaust whatever emotional quota he has?!” needless to say, everyone knows that dr. ratio is a man ruled by the mind, not by the heart. alright, that's quite true - but does that imply he has discarded the latter altogether? if so, then you beg to differ.

(not in the literal sense, of course! the heart is a vital organ of the body. saying otherwise would be akin to spitting on his shiny phd in biology... or his seven other phd's at that.)

the pedestal which the public places veritas ratio on reaches still great heights, even if it may not rival an ivory tower a member of the genius society resides in. it is so high up that mundane troubles of those below can't reach a genius like him, surely? well, as tall as he stands - somehow, the universe grants you a front row seat for a particular sight that proves otherwise.

if only they knew the doctor has a habit of mumbling these incomprehensible (more like barely intelligible) grumbles under his breath, striking a resemblance similar to a grumpy old cat. if you strain your ears hard enough, you might catch a “...this has to be it...” or “...i dare not think so...” from time to time as he roams around the room with materials in his hands.

(absurd, people would say. but you think it's extremely cute.)

veritas doesn't say it out loud - but you can tell by the hunch in his stiff shoulders, by the one or two sighs he huffs every six minutes - that he is itching to tell somebody of all the tomfooleries he has encountered today. of course, the topics he laments about vary; it's only when you hear him exhaling the loudest sigh that you get to find out.

mostly though, it's about his students and remarks on how they can further improve their performance — sure, he could phrase it a little gentler — but you still find it sweet that he cares. if not that, then it'd be about indolent colleagues, complicated formulae and more. on some days, he'll even let out an exasperated “truly mind-boggling! could you believe that?” to which you'd reply with an “uh-huh, go on.”

at the end of a ranting session, veritas takes careful note to leave a kiss on your person afterward. no matter where it is - on the lips, the cheek or your hand. no matter where you are - sitting on the couch beside him, behind the kitchen counter or across the room. the warmth that stays on your skin when he pulls away is somewhat tingly. appreciative, you think, especially when he looks at you with such loving eyes that his colleagues would be sure to retch in shock if they were a witness.

looks like you are right on the money; he has never discarded his heart, after all. so yes, to rephrase - will you lend veritas a listening ear when he needs it?

✧ a moment among the stars:

“...yet another headache.”

as unsubtle as ever, the doctor's complaint is barely hidden behind the guise of a mumble. those neatly styled violet bangs of his aren't doing an excellent job at concealing that frown strewn across his forehead either. veritas's posture is tense, a dead giveaway, as he goes over the piles of documents on his desk.

you cock an eyebrow upon seeing the stamp belonging to the intelligentsia guild on one of the papers. definitely work. it has been two system hours since he took a seat at the work desk, you concur, or lifted a finger to do something besides flipping through drafts. a mere glance at the stack of documents is enough to convince you that those researchers at the guild must really value veritas's input.

a perk of being a genius, maybe? the phantom of a weight lands alight on your shoulders. with a mug of black coffee in hand, you make your way to him. your footsteps are without a sound, only the noise of porcelain being placed down onto woodenware is enough to announce your arrival. “rough day at work?” you ask, peering down at his progress.

(a doctor's handwriting really is something. you resist the urge to squint.)

veritas doesn't seem to mind. if the way he smiles at the sight of you, albeit tiredly, is any indication. “hah,” he rests a hand on his temple and scoffs wryly, “so much grievances like you wouldn't believe.”

oh, he is teetering on the precipice of a tangent but stops himself. “...fret not, i'm fine. this is hardly something beyond my expertise,” he shakes his head, the motion causing his reading glasses to slide down a smidgen down the bridge of his nose.

you're too familiar with the self-assured bravado he puts on. you're quite endeared, actually. “okay, mr. i-require-no-rest,” you take the glasses off his face and he breaks into a frown. at the childish tone you're using or for having his reading glasses taken away, you don't know.

“why don't you take a little break?” you suggest. veritas sighs, “need i remind you that dilly-dallying is for fools who wish to waste their time?” and crosses his arms defiantly. he knows your strategy, he has come face-to-face with it several times.

“do you think a break with me is a waste of time?” you present him with a rhetorical question, quite the difficult adversary.

(and he keeps losing to it every single time.)

“well, that's—” the doctor nearly splutters, taken aback. “that's different if you insist on inserting yourself as a variable,” he infers, putting emphasis on the last part accompanied by an incredulous look.

“the answer is up for debate then,” you shrug with a cheeky smile. your hand then deftly lifts the mug you previously set down to your lips, veritas's eyes dilate in bewilderment. “so,” you hum at the rich taste of your handiwork, “wanna tell me about your day? haven't heard about the council in a while.”

“you—” he gasps in defeat, “i thought that was supposed to be my mug of coffee.”

(he has a slight pout on his face, but you dare not point it out lest it disappears in the blink of an eye.)

“our mug of coffee,” you take a few more sips with an innocent decadence. “all is fair in love and war, doctor.”

“i can never win with you,” he buries his face in his palm with a groan. you laugh heartily, a sound that chimes like quaint little bells in his ears - it elicits a reaction from his lips, for them to quirk up at the corners in the smallest of ways.

“regardless. . .” veritas relents and reaches for your free hand. you let him. “it seems a break wouldn't be so amiss, after all,” he then presses a kiss on the side of your wrist, affectionate.

(your heart skips a beat.)

will you let sunday regale you with facts you've never heard of before? . . . a man of eloquent words, no less a man of educated mind. you have no doubt that the books in the dewlight pavilion really aren't just there for show - not that you're allowed to browse through them at your own desire. a servant's voice would stop you in your tracks should your fingers ever brush against something in the family's secret bookshelf.

how mysterious.

but sunday makes it known to the staff that you, in particular, are allowed more access to the shelves - perhaps, not too much - but more than even mr. mccoy, at least. with the way you have to crane your neck far up to pinpoint the tallest height that the shelves reach, you wonder: has sunday gone through everything here personally?

your immediate answer is most likely. you know sunday fairly well; to have something that he hasn't scrutinized from the inside out in his possession will surely gnaw away at his psyche incessantly. not being in the know at all times is a looming fear for him. but of course, you have other ways to confirm the answer for yourself.

pick out a book from a shelf there, either intentional or purely arbitrary, and watch as sunday carefully traces his steps towards you. his curiosity is piqued, which topic has caught your interest this time? but he tucks it under proper cordiality. with a hand behind his back, he'd utter your name in the softest tone and ask the familiar question of “would you like to know more?” — asking for your permission to ramble, essentially — you find this tendency of his to be charming, so you nod each time.

(and he smiles when you do. a smile less refined at the edges, kinder and relaxed.)

the best place to start from is always the beginning. you think sunday agrees because he often starts by telling you the history and its origins before moving on to its impact on the galaxy, then his personal stance on the topic. it's a pattern, you notice, his ramblings have a pattern. and it's consistent every time, you might've believed he was reading off a script. and what's more? sunday is blissfully oblivious of it.

fascinating. you ponder: what kind of things you can do with this information? decisions, decisions, decisions. . . but ultimately, you opt for keeping it a secret like a treasure only you're allowed to see.

(that might be true in a way. you don't doubt that robin, his dear sister, is familiar with this side of him. does that mean he treasures you like he does her? your chest starts to feel a bit lighter.)

if you were to point it out, you fear you might never witness it again - goodness, to know that he has been displaying such foolishness or rather, what he viewed as an embarrassing freudian slip in front of you? his wings might as well resort to covering his face for good until the end of time.

as you listen to him talk (with such elegance at that), you can't help whatever tender look you have on your face. really, who would've thought the head of the oak family could be such. . . a nerd?

(you hope in secret that sunday will be more willing to show sides like these to you in the future. and that they're not a weakness at all, not when they're shared with you.)

✧ a moment among the stars:

“it looks like you're fascinated by the dreamscape nursery rhyme this time.”

sunday spares the article in your hold no further inspection. one glance at the cover and walls of memorized information rush to the front of his mind. he looks familiar with it; could it be a part of his childhood too? but then again, everything found here is within his knowledge.

“i am,” you say with intrigue, “it got me ruminating for a while.”

you meet his gaze, stumbling upon yellow irises that glimmer akin to gold under penaconian chandeliers. you think you see a hint of affection in them, swimming around your reflection like a school of fish in a pond. it makes you smile.

he smiles back, oblivious to your thoughts but returns your gesture. he asks, “how so?” and you reply without delay, “i read through it and the morbid undertone took me by surpri—”

or at least, it's supposed to be without delay until you realize sunday has stepped closer in order to peer down at the page you're holding open. and suddenly, you're extremely aware of every minute detail like how his breath brushes against the side of your cheek and how his chest rumbles as he hums in acknowledgement.

(you flush in the neck and he perceives this reaction of yours with mirth.)

“my apologies,” sunday chuckles and pulls away, “i've simply forgotten the rhyme and wished to refresh my memory.”

“somehow, i feel that isn't the case...” you mumble accusingly. that seems to amplify whatever little amusement he gets from flustering you. “oh, my dove. i can assure you that it is,” he caresses your head, a little placatingly.

most times, sunday isn't so laidback about giving affection in public — since he has an image to maintain — so you assume the fact that the servants are out and about, leaving only you and him here, plays a role in his unusual boldness. you accept the gesture with a bashful pout.

“now, where were we?” sunday clears his throat, “ah, yes. some people have noted on the nursery rhyme's strange quality but still, it retains its popularity in penacony. it is also widely assumed that the hound resembles the bloodhound family while—”

you hold back an amused sigh, but it's more out of fondness than anything. he'll start from the history then the effect on the general public, as per usual, but you're not the only predictable one here. you'd listen to him anytime too, won't you?

(you do adore when the head of the oak family would put off his public figure mask around you. if only for just a while.)

will you let dan heng rest his head on your lap when it's just you two? . . . the sense of comfort it provides isn't something he can explain with words. as if he has ever been good with words in the first place. saying a sentence bereft of logical reasoning or witty remarks doesn't come easily to the express’ guard. neither does intimacy. . . but you know that already, don't you?

after all, it isn't a secret that dan heng prefers speaking with his actions. if to show one's intentions is the end goal, then actions are the fastest route to choose. words, although able to sweeten the trip like how a beautiful scenery can, will eventually lead to actions regardless so why take the extra step?

but you're different from him; you articulate what you think and what you mean. you're honest in ways that keep catching dan heng off guard without fail — just like the first time you offered your empty lap to him when his head was swirling in pain — but he supposes that is one of your charms. “words can be useful. we're not all born mind readers,” you told him once and he hummed, accepting of your perspective.

(“look at you two! opposites attract!” march chirped. he recalled shooting her a look of indignation and she rubbed the back of her head sheepishly in response.)

dan heng has learnt to grow used to your propensities - but by far, your shameless invitations are still one matter that can't be comprehended even with time. he cannot understand; how you smile as you sit on his futon in the archives (he doesn't mind), how you link gazes with him so effortlessly, how you pat your lap knowingly and say, “why don't you rest your head here?”

(he has to restrain himself from bursting into flames like a heliobus.)

sometimes, he'll accept reluctantly or he'll decline with an underlying tone of longing he doesn't want you to notice. because as much of a good hold dan heng has on nonchalance, he cannot deny that this particular gesture of yours has left a mark on him.

(it remains persistently.)

when he rests his head on your lap, he can't help but take a deep inhale - your fragrance fills his senses and he discards the selfish desire to keep it all to himself. your fingers are soothing as they thread through his hair gently. the feeling that washes over him is serene, almost comparable to submerging himself in the pure waters of scalegorge waterscape.

when overcome by such a tranquil state of mind, dan heng wonders what expression he might be making at that moment? he always keeps his eyes closed, so it's a shame he may never know. but you do, and you don't think you've ever seen him look so at peace before like he does now.

(perhaps, that's why you keep offering him this in the first place.)

✧ a moment among the stars:

“someone looks tired,” you state with a pointed stare. the archives isn't a room too spacious and the only ones here are you and him. the target of your sentence is obvious.

but dan heng doesn't take the bait, barely looks away from the entry he is currently authoring. still, he spares you a glance and hums glibly, “are you projecting? if so, feel free to use my bed in the meantime.”

you let out a noise, something gibberish that conveys disappointment but it is effectively drowned out by the typing noises. “you haven't even touched the food i bought you,” your voice becomes mellow, “why don't you rest for a while?”

he isn't convinced, you think, since his fingers are still hard at work. the new info the team brought back must've been a lot if he's that focused.

“dan heng?” you try again, hopeful for the last time. you don't take him for a fool, of course, he'll know when he reaches his limit and have proper rest then. but would that really be ideal? a second passes and that hope flickers like a dimming light. but just an inch before the edge of giving up, the typing slows to a stop.

“. . .alright,” he murmurs. finally, after a good hour spent drawing patterns on his backside with your eyes, dan heng turns around to face you. he look tense, you note with abject concern.

“here,” you usher him to your lap, empty and conveniently so. dan heng shoots you a blank look - this isn't the first time you offered and this isn't the first time he reacted like that. you try to suppress a laugh, failing gloriously at it. “just for a little bit,” you utter through a stifled fit of chuckles.

dan heng shakes his head, not in rejection but in defeat. his eyes slip close, second nature, as he leans to situate his head on your lap. you welcome him with a hum and let your fingers card through his hair. a calm sigh falls from his lips like a water droplet in springtime.

“this. . . is nice,” he admits, sudden and unprompted. you nearly doubt your ears for a moment there. did he— “i don't hate it is, uhm, what i mean to say,” dan heng adds and it dawns on you that your ears are still working. his eyes are still closed, not that you'd expect anything else, he prefers to treat it as a shield from being face-to-face with embarrassment.

(or to avoid your ecstatic gaze. he can feel warmth rushing to his cheeks already.)

“i know,” you smile, brushing away a few messy strands from his forehead. he isn't an open book but you think you've read the pages enough to remember all the little details. “but thanks for telling me. i'm no mind reader but i think i can read yours pretty well.”

“i shall provide no further comment,” he holds back an incredulous exhale, yet his lips still curl slightly at the corner. you feel the teeniest desire to trace the curve of his lips with your fingertip but settle for silently admiring them instead.

“it's fine. i know the answer already,” you say, words dripping with affection. such a shame dan heng never looks up at you during a time like this. because if he did, he wouldn't have missed seeing the sheer fondness in your gaze that rains down on him in light showers. a true shame.

(one day, he'll gather the courage. maybe.)