#melancholycore

The Garden Doesn’t Know She’s Gone Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Fanfic by MythboundCal

Zelda’s garden doesn’t know she’s gone.

It still blooms like she’ll be back any second—like the sunflowers haven’t noticed she stopped humming to them, like the lavender didn’t watch her vanish into light.

Link stands at the gate. The wood is soft with age, half-swallowed by ivy. The watering can rests exactly where she left it in Hateno. Rusting. Waiting.

He doesn’t touch it.

Not out of neglect.

Just… fear.

That if he waters the garden, it might forget her—that its roots will stop searching for her footsteps, its blossoms will stop blooming in her colors.

So he lets it grow wild.

The basil climbs the wrong wall. The squash vines curl over the porch. The chimes still sing when the wind hits just right, a song no one ever wrote down.

And her gloves still hang on a bent nail by the shed. One turned inside out. He doesn’t fix it.

Somewhere beneath the soil are seeds she never named. He won’t dig for them. If they bloom, they bloom. If they don’t… he’ll wait with them.

Today, he sits. The Master Sword leans nearby, but he doesn’t reach for it.

The porch creaks under his weight. He watches the marigolds twitch in the breeze, reaching for hands that never come.

The villagers don’t ask anymore. He’s glad.

Because how do you explain a wound that grows flowers?

Even now, he hears her voice on the air—light, scolding, fond. “Don’t overwater the rosemary, Link. It hates being fussed over.”

He doesn’t answer.

Just lets the wind rustle the leaves. Lets the garden carry the silence.

And when a white lily opens—out of season, out of place—he doesn’t wonder how.

The garden remembers.

i tried to silence my mind, but it started breathing on its own.

every inhale was a memory, every exhale, a version of me i didn’t recognize.

now i’m not sure who’s thinking anymore.

Each year, he wound the broken clock, though it hadn’t ticked since his daughter died. But she stayed behind—waiting in the silence—whispering lullabies to the dust. And one night, the clock began to tick again… but only backwards.

— Spectra Noir

I Thought You’d Be Louder Jujutsu Kaisen Fanfic by MythboundCal

The apartment’s still here.

Second floor, third window cracked open like it always was. As if Geto had just stepped out for groceries. As if curses didn’t bleed out of the walls in Tokyo now.

Gojo lets himself in.

No key. Just memory. The door creaks like it remembers him. That annoys him.

He stands in the hallway too long, not looking at the coat rack where a black hoodie still hangs. The air smells like old books and hair product and something faintly citrus.

“I thought you’d be louder,” he mutters to no one in particular.

He doesn’t mean the apartment.

He means the grief. The silence. The absolute wrongness of this. He thought it would come like thunder—like Geto used to, all ideology and noise and conviction.

Instead, it’s soft. It’s suffocatingly soft.

Gojo moves to the table. There’s a chessboard there, half-played. Suguru’s side is one move from checkmate. Of course it is.

“Smartass,” Gojo whispers.

The chair opposite it is still pushed out, like it waited. Like it knew he'd come back and lose.

He sits. Doesn’t move the piece. Doesn’t touch anything.

Just… listens. To the quiet. To the ghost of someone who used to know how to pull a laugh out of him like a rabbit from a hat.

Geto once said the world was broken.

Gojo never argued.

He just kept trying to fix it anyway.

And now? Now he sits in a dead man’s kitchen, playing the last game they didn’t get to finish. And he loses. Gracefully. Silently.

“I hate you,” he murmurs. Then adds, almost gently— “You’d hate that I’m still here.”

The board says nothing.