You, so full of life, hope, positivity. It almost angered Ray first, seeing how naive you were. How on earth were you thinking people would change, that world would become a better place, that a lot of that despair would just disappear if people would work for it. For Ray, even a thought of that kind of world was impossible to reach. It was an utopia, something that wasn’t possible, not anymore, after decades, centuries of it going like this. People just weren’t like you were anymore, yet you foolishly refused to dim yourself.

But the thing that Ray noticed was that seeing you, feeling your energy, how you managed to light up every grim room you were in did something to him — in him. It was irrational and crazy, but he slowly realised he was completely smitten with you.

He tried to hide it for the longest time, but more he tried, deeper he fell. And eventually, he was too tired to struggle against it, especially when you confessed your feelings to him. You told him you saw something more than bitterness and resentment in him, and that you believed in his lingering goodness, even if everyone else around him had long ago deemed him as an asshole who would never change.

So, he let himself to fall in love with you, he let you call him your boyfriend, something so foreign. He took you to dates, let you to take him to dates. Kiss you, you kissing him. Everyone who knew what kind of a person he was, would turn around and stare at how he looked at you.

He wasn’t entirely sure himself what exactly was he doing, if it was really him being romantic with someone. He had drilled negative thoughts about people and the world into his head long time ago, believing that being normal and empathetic would make him a lousy Harvester. And yet here he was, regaining those exact traits he had trained so hard to close out of his mind. And it was all because he fell in love. He almost felt the need to snort at how fairytale-like it was. Love conquers all and all that.

He didn’t live with you, or not officially. As a Harvester, he had travelled so much that in the end he just ended up sleeping at wherever he found a place from, but now that he had quit being a Harvester in hopes to settle down with you, he had just ended up hanging out at your home most of the time. That’s how he actually started falling for you, seeing how you welcomed him in even when you clearly knew most of the city secretly hated him because he had harvested so many of their loved ones, and his situation wasn’t even that bad, he wasn’t forced to do that for money, he didn’t seem to feel bad about it like most other Harvesters did. When in reality, he had just learned to mask it and push it under.

But then you came, unmasked him and revealed everything he had hidden over the years. And, after all this time, Ray finally gave himself a permission to hope.