#@serstolas

To Malcolm,

You have become a disruption. A beautiful, maddening disruption.

I try to think of other things—duties, studies, even death itself—but everything pales beside the thought of you. You, with your easy laugh and sun-warmed hands, handing me fruit like you’ve always known what I needed. You, pressing a cup of tea into my palms and watching me drink it like you’re memorizing something sacred.

What spell did you cast on me? Or have I always been this vulnerable—only now discovering it in your presence?

I tell myself I ought to be careful. That affection must be paced. That devotion must be earned slowly. But the moment you enter a room, my reason is already reaching for its coat and abandoning me. I look at you and I feel something ancient stir in me—something that does not learn love, but recognizes it. As though this isn’t new at all. As though I have known you before, in some other life, and have only just found you again.

I listen to your stories—the ones about Dorian, about the Inquisition, about that ill-advised scheme aboard Isabela’s ship—and I feel like I’m thumbing through chapters of a book I cannot put down. There’s a richness to your life, a depth I ache to learn by heart. You’ve seen the world at its worst and its brightest, and still, you choose to offer gentleness. Still, you bring me fruit.

It is impossible not to fall.

You once joked that Dorian was the first necromancer to sweep you off your feet. And I smiled—because I knew, then, that I would be the last. You said it so lightly, and yet I have not stopped thinking about it. Not out of jealousy (though I would be lying if I claimed none), but because the idea of anyone else knowing you the way I now do feels… unbearable. I am trying not to be possessive. I am failing.

There is a comfort in you I did not expect. No performance, no proving, no explanations offered or required. You meet me in a place I thought long abandoned—where shared years lend quiet understanding, where experience smooths over the need to speak what is already known. You understand things I no longer wish to teach. The shape of grief. The exhaustion of being needed more for your skills than your soul. I did not know how much I longed for someone who speaks my language until you began, so effortlessly, to do so.

I do not know what you see when you look at me. But when you said I was kind, something in me cracked. It is not how most people see me. It is not how I have always seen myself. But you said it with such certainty—like it was obvious, like it was true—and now I am left reeling with the desire to become exactly the man you think I am.

I am not brave the way you are. I do not hurl myself heart-first into anything. I am cautious, measured, painfully aware of the cost of feeling too deeply.

And yet—here I am. Writing you a letter I should never send. Wanting things I should never name.

If this is recklessness, then may I never again be wise.

Yours, always,