@thereallordphoenix asked: plots please
Lance, recently and reluctantly out to himself but no one else, starts attending the same small parish as Skylar. Half genuine spiritual searching, half wanting an excuse to be near him. Skylar's easy, unselfconscious faith needles at Lance's guilt and longing in equal measure. Coffee after Mass becomes a ritual neither of them names, and Lance finds himself both drawn to Skylar's steadiness and terrified of what that steadiness might mean he's feeling.
Lance hadn't planned on going back a third Sunday in a row, and yet there he was, sliding into the pew two rows behind Skylar like it was accidental, like he hadn't specifically timed his arrival to catch sight of that mop of blond hair bowed in prayer. Skylar never noticed him watching â he was too sincere for that, too lost in whatever quiet conversation he was having with God â and that sincerity was the thing that undid Lance every time. It felt unfair, somehow, that a man could be that guileless and still make Lance's pulse do something humiliating.
Afterward, over bad coffee in the parish hall, Skylar talked about a hymn that had moved him, some melody he wanted to steal a chord progression from, and Lance nodded along and said almost nothing, terrified that if he opened his mouth the wrong thing might come out. Something too warm, too interested, too much. He told himself he kept coming back for the sermons. He knew, even as he thought it, that it was a lie he wasn't ready to stop telling.
Nathan, newly discovering his own werewolf nature, gets caught in a violent mountain storm and stumbles onto Kostas's isolated homesteadâa solitary place the centaur built with his own hands. Kostas is reluctant to let a stranger in, but decency wins over stubbornness. Trapped together for the night by the storm, the two men are forced into close quarters, and Nathan's clumsy attempts at conversation slowly chip away at Kostas's stony reserve.
Nathan hadn't expected the door to open at all, let alone reveal something quite so massive standing behind it. He'd braced for a hermit, maybe a grumpy old farmer, not two meters of dark-haired, hazel-eyed man filling the doorframe. Nathan's teeth were chattering too hard for him to manage anything smoother than "Iâsorryâstormâ" before Kostas exhaled through his nose, stepped back, and jerked his chin toward the fire. Nathan took that as a yes and squeezed past him, acutely, embarrassingly aware of how much space the man's shoulders took up, how the air near him felt warmer than the fire did.
He spent the next hour trying not to stare and failing constantly. Kostas moved around his own home with an economy of motion designed to take up as little room as possible, despite having none to spare, and every time he passed close by to add wood to the fire or shove a blanket at Nathan without a word, Nathan felt his pulse do something inconvenient. Nathan asked too many questions. About the mountain, the house, about Kostas himself, and got monosyllables in return, but he noticed, near the end, that Kostas had stopped scowling and started merely looking. That felt like progress. That felt like something to survive the night for.
In a setting where supernatural creatures are known but carefully policed, Cyrus's berserker side has flared badly enough that his community insists on a containment handler during his transformations. Someone strong enough, and calm enough, not to die when the bear takes over. Byron, ex-military and unbothered by things that terrify ordinary men, takes the job precisely because everyone else refused it. Trust curdles into something neither of them names but both feel.
Byron had seen men broken by war, by grief, by the slow rot of guilt, but he'd never seen a man look at his own hands the way Cyrus did in the minutes before a change. Like they belonged to someone else, someone he was ashamed of and afraid for in equal measure. Byron sat across from him in the barn, close enough that Cyrus could see him clearly, because he'd learned early that distance only made the man's dread worse. "You don't have to perform calm for my benefit," Cyrus had muttered once, testing him, and Byron had only shrugged and said he wasn't performing anything. He simply didn't scare easy, and Cyrus was still, for now, just a man sitting in front of him.
That admission seemed to cost Cyrus something, and he'd looked at Byron then with a rawness that had nothing to do with the beast waiting under his skin. Byron hadn't looked away. He'd stayed exactly where he was, steady, while the shaking started in Cyrus's shoulders and his breathing turned ragged, and when Cyrus reached out â not to strike, but almost pleading, fingers brushing Byron's forearm asking proof that someone would stay â Byron had let him hold on. He hadn't said anything comforting. He hadn't needed to. He'd simply stayed, solid and unflinching, until the shaking passed and Cyrus came back to himself, and in the quiet after, neither of them moved to close the distance a normal conversation would have restored.
