#brooding characters

For years, you’ve decorated your shared apartment with flowers. You planted them with him in spring. Cut them for the kitchen. Pressed petals into letters. You’ve never known a version of home that didn’t bloom.

But now, you know.

And you didn’t hear it from him.

Xavier doesn’t speak as you pass him by. Doesn’t reach for your wrist, or offer some soft contradiction. He just watches, frozen in the quiet realization that you won’t fight him on this. Not this time.

You place the bouquet down in the sink. Turn away without a word.

And that is the last time you bring flowers home.

You don’t complain. You don’t name the ache. But you also don’t try to fill the space with something else. You stop lingering near the flower stalls on your way home. You stop humming when you pass lavender fields.

Instead, you bring him other things. Books. Dishes he likes. An old album you found from a market stall.

You still tell him your stories. Still share the corners of your mind, your memories, your moods. But something’s changed.

Your voice is quieter. Lighter in some ways, heavier in others. You don’t wait for him to respond the way you used to. You still offer him your presence, but no longer your everything.

You have started keeping small pieces of yourself. To save him the burden of returning the favor of vulnerability.

And for that, Xavier is grateful. And afraid. Because he knows what he is.

A closed door. A still room. A man so careful not to be a burden that he became a stranger in his own home. He has pushed you away before any cruel fate ever could.

He knows all of you. Your favorite scents, your fears, the way your voice shifts when you're tired. But you only know the version of him that stays quiet. That nods. That lets you give everything without ever asking for anything in return.

He has kept you apart.

And you have noticed. But still, you are kind. You do not leave. You only stop looking for a gesture of reciprocation.

And somehow, that hurts worse.

Rafayel:

You never accept his love.

Not the paintings he leaves at your door. Not the carved offerings of their names...the ones he couldn’t save. Not the trembling hands, not the apologies he no longer knows how to shape into words.

You, who once burned bright with laughter and life, now wear silence like armor.

At every turn, you choose your duty. Your penance. A deathless life among the dead.

You became the Reaper. Not out of vengeance. Not out of power. But to pay the price he should have paid.

You chose to carry the weight of his sin, because he chose you over his people. Because he loved you more than the lives that depended on him. And now you make him pay for it every day.

Not with anger. With absence.

With eyes that refuse to meet his. With the soft death of distance.

He knows you cannot forgive him. Not after what was lost. Not after the smoke and blood.

But gods, he wishes you would at least look at him.

He knows what you think of yourself. That you are no longer worthy. That you are shadow, not soul.

But he still sees it...the heartache beneath your grief. The person he gave up a kingdom for.

You, in your robes of black. You, with your hands stained from centuries of guiding souls beyond. You, who never once looked back.

He cannot stop loving you. Even now. Even when he knows he is a monument to your guilt.

Even when he kneels beneath your judgment, not as a penitent, but as a man who still believes in what you were.

In denying him, you have denied yourself.

He knows it.

You know it.

And maybe that is why you cannot bear to see him. Because if you did, you would see not the god who fell…but the reflection of everything you once were.

Zayne:

You stood in the pouring rain, just beneath his window, as the cops dragged you from the hospital grounds.

Your guitar was still clutched in your hands, your fingers white-knuckled around the neck as you struggled against the grip of security.

No one sang at hospitals. No one brought an electric guitar to places where the fragile and dying tried to rest.

But you did.

Because you were reckless. Irrevocably impulsive. Like wildfire roaring through a forest that had never known flame.

Zayne had evaded you, slipped through your fingers like steam. So you sought him. Loudly. Rawly. With music and desperation and the weight of things unsaid.

He hears it halfway down the stairs. Your voice rising above the storm, hoarse and cracking, dragging its way up the hospital’s stone walls.

His heart lurches. How hard had he pushed you for it to come to this?

He knows your pain. Everyone does. You never hid it. You didn’t cage it in polite silence or whisper it behind closed doors. You bled it into your lyrics, into your voice, until even strangers ached when you sang.

Wildfires seldom whispered. They devoured.

He shouldn’t have left you in silence. Gods, he shouldn’t have let it get this far.

There would be cameras, wouldn’t there? Phones aimed through fogged-up windshields, recording the singer sobbing in the rain. Another scandal waiting to be spun. Headlines eager to tarnish your name, twist your grief into something performative.

He stumbles on the last step, heart hammering as his shoes hit the pavement.

You’re still there, soaked to the skin, tears mixing with rain, strumming your pain into the air like a siren song no one could ignore.

And all Zayne can think is that he needed to get to you. He needed to pull you away. Needed to take the pain out of your voice...needed to take the heartbreak out of your songs.

Sylus:

You’re passed out again on another workbook. Cheek pressed to the mangled mess of number 8 practice. Clearly, the student had stuck to the elite technique of combining two circles and hoping for the best.

Sylus stands in the doorway a moment longer than usual. Then he walks over and picks you up.

You’re heavier than you look when asleep. Warm, soft, your arms limp around the pencil still in your grasp. You murmur something as your head slumps against his chest.

“No... Brandon, put your giraffe in the cubby,” you breathe.

A preschool teacher. That hadn’t been what Sylus expected.

A hunter, maybe. A soldier. Someone like him. Isn’t that what the broken ones do? Build sharpness out of the pieces. Get strong. Get distant. Never be hurt again.

But you hadn’t.

You didn’t hide behind force. Didn’t chase strength like a weapon. You stood in the sun with both feet planted in a world that had tried to burn you down, and taught children how to hold crayons and be kind to each other.

It had surprised him. And then it had made something in him ache.

Because he remembers what it was like to want things that soft. To believe in them. He doesn’t, not really. Not anymore.

But you do. And gods, that does something to him.

You curl slightly as he lays you down, pulling the blanket around your shoulders like instinct. Sylus stays kneeling there a second longer than he means to.

Your face still carries exhaustion, but not bitterness. The lines are soft. You smile in your sleep. Smile, even now.

You’ve seen what he’s seen. You’ve walked through fire. And still, somehow, you came out of it gentle.

It makes his chest tighten. Like guilt. Like grief. Like a strange kind of awe. And somewhere under it all, a dangerous urge, to shield you from everything, even the things you’ve already survived.

To build you a world where you can keep being this kind. Even if he doesn’t believe in it for himself.

He brushes a piece of paper from your pillow. One of the kids had drawn you. Stick arms. Your name spelled wrong. Sylus folds it, quietly. Slips it into the cover of the workbook. Then he turns out the light.

Tonight he finds himself immeasurably weary.

Caleb:

You hear him before you see him. Boots crunching over broken gravel.

You don’t look up.

“I thought I told you not to leave the inner perimeter,” Caleb says, low and sharp.

You keep your gaze fixed on the sky, where smoke still curls toward the clouds. “And I thought you’d stopped ordering civilians around.”

“You’re not just a civilian. You’re...” He cuts himself off.

You’re still wearing your flak vest. It’s torn at the hem, ash-smudged. The word PRESS across your chest is faded from too many washes.

“You were five clicks past the safety zone.”

“I know where I was.” You don’t raise your voice. Don’t need to. You’ve filed dispatches in blast zones worse than this. You’ve sat with mothers cradling children who didn’t make it. You’ve written down their words because no one else would.

“I made the call,” you say, not unkindly. “It was mine to make.”

Caleb steps forward. His shadow stretches over your legs. His helmet’s still under his arm, dirt smudged across his temple.

“You could’ve died.”

“So could you.”

He exhales, frustrated. “That’s different.”

You finally look at him. “How?” you ask.

“I’m trained for this,” he says. “You’re not. I’m—”

“Expendable?” you finish for him. “That what they call colonels now?”

“If I go down, the mission continues.” He tries reasoning.

“And if I go down, the truth doesn’t.” That stops him. You sit up straighter. Not challenging, just clear. “No one else here’s going to ask the soldier on stretcher five what it felt like when the medevac didn’t come,” you say.

He says nothing.

“And I can’t do that from a bunker,” you add. “Just like you can’t lead from a command tent.” You let your recorder rest, light still blinking. “I know you’d die for me,” you say. “That’s never been the problem.” Your voice is quiet now. Careful. War makes people weary of loud.

“I just don’t want a love I have to grieve.”

He looks away like it hurts. Like it physically hurts.

You keep going. “If being with me makes you want to throw yourself into every explosion first, then maybe you don’t want me. Maybe you want a cause. Something worth protecting. Something worth dying for.”

He turns sharply. “That’s not fair.”

“No,” you say. “But it’s true.” You pick up your notebook. Wipe soot off the edge. “I won’t ask you to stop being a soldier, Caleb. But I won’t be your reason to die.”

He watches you stand.

“I want to be your reason to come back.”