#stubborn reader

╭┈─────── ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-╰┈➤ ❝ [25/12/25] ❞

phew... you're in for a ride.

Neteyam is overjoyed at your pregnancy! However...

This joy is quickly overshadowed by him going into responsible mode. He immediately goes from elated to a hovering nanny (*cough* malewife).

He’s researched EVERYTHING that could be potentially bad for the baby.

Unfortunately for him... you are a Metkayina warrior. Taking it easy isn’t in your vocabulary.

"Ma Y/N, the healer said rest. Maybe just… sit by the rock pools today?"

To you, this translated to "go free-diving for the sharpest spear-shells in the reef? Got it."

Neteyam’s face: 😟

Tuk is your partner in crime. She’s the lookout for when Neteyam is coming so you can pretend you’ve been resting.

The shit you put him through is so fucking funny.

For instance, he catches you teaching the younger kids to do a sweep-kick.

Neteyam's nervous system immediately kicks off like a motor, but before he can run to your aid (you're fine), Jake gives Neteyam a heavy pat on the back, beyond amused. "She’s got good form, son! Don't let her hit you."

Or, there was the time Neteyam told you he’s going out with the hunters, and that you must stay back and weave baskets.

Halfway through the hunt, he sees a familiar figure dive-bombing a target...

It’s you.

OH MY GOD, IT'S YOU.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"

You, on the other hand, chewed on a piece of fruit looking completely unbothered. "Boredom is dangerous for the baby, Neteyam. I’m stimulating the child."

This time, Neteyam's face goes from 😠 to 😩. He can’t stay mad because you look so cool doing it lololol

Lo’ak lives for the chaos of it all. He'll actively encourage you just to watch Neteyam in distress.

Often, you'll have dinner with the rest of the Sully family. Neytiri secretly loves your spirit.

Once, she whispered to you, "I did the same thing with him. Don't tell him, he’ll faint."

Eventually, Neteyam tries to ground you.

Key word, TRIES.

You simply look him in the eye and say, "I am carrying a future olo’eyktan. They need to know how to hunt before they're born."

After sometime, he finally admits defeat.

He spends the rest of the pregnancy just following you around with pillows and extra water, looking like a stressed out bodyguard.

He really has his work cut out for him...

Now imagine this:

One day, Neteyam was sprinting across the woven walkways of the village, looking frantically into the heights of tangled vines.

"Y/N? Ma Y/N! Please tell me you are at the healer’s lodge and not-"

He stops dead in his tracks and looks up.

YOU ARE 30FT ABOVE THE MAIN WALKWAY.

Neteyam's voice cracks as he pleads with you.

"The wood is wet, Y/N!"

You, on the other hand, merely grinned down at him. "I’m fine, 'teyam! The baby likes the sea breeze up here!"

"The baby doesn't have eyes yet! And the wind is too strong! Please! My heart cannot take this!"

Lo'ak chimed in, shouting from the lower docks while cleaning a spear. "Do a flip into the water! The splash would be huge!"

Ooohhohoho, that made a vein pop out of Neteyam's forehead.

You built your walls the way castles were built—slowly, deliberately, with mortar made of clipped sentences and stone quarried from every disappointment you'd ever catalogued in the quiet museum of your chest.

It was not cruelty. You wanted that understood, even if no one was listening closely enough to understand it.

It was preservation.

And Lilia Vanrouge—who had lived long enough to watch forests become kingdoms and kingdoms become footnotes—recognized the architecture immediately.

He'd built similar walls himself, once.

Centuries ago. In a life that tasted like iron and smelled like dying wisteria.

The first time he truly saw you—not the passing glance across the dining hall of Ramshackle Dorm, not the half-acknowledgment when Crowley shoved yet another impossible task toward your already-overflowing plate—but truly saw you, it was raining.

It was always raining in your most unguarded moments, you'd later realize. As though the sky itself conspired to soften what you refused to soften on your own.

You were standing beneath the rotting eaves outside the kitchen door, arms crossed, watching the downpour with an expression that most would read as irritation but that Lilia read as something far more translucent.

Longing.

You wanted to stand in the rain. You just didn't want anyone to see you want it.

"Falling water suits you," he said from the window above, his voice carrying the particular lilting warmth that made half of NRC's student body simultaneously flustered and unnerved. "It makes your scowl look almost poetic."

You didn't startle. You were too well-trained for that. But your shoulders migrated north by a fraction of an inch, and your jaw set with the precision of a closed vault door.

"I'm not scowling. I'm observing."

"Ah." He rested his chin on his folded arms, the window frame casting cruciform shadows across his face. "My mistake. You observe the way a general surveys a battlefield. With great personal offense."

"I don't have personal offense with the rain."

"No. You have personal offense with the fact that you want to stand in it and you've decided that wanting things is a vulnerability you can't afford." He said it simply. Gently. The way one might comment on the color of the sky. As though he hadn't just reached through your ribs and plucked something.

The rain hammered between you.

Your throat did something complicated.

"I don't know what you're talking about," you said, and turned on your heel, and walked inside with the rigid posture of someone who had not just been seen in a way that made them feel like stained glass—beautiful specifically because of the cracks, and devastating specifically because someone was standing close enough to notice the light coming through.

Lilia watched you go.

He smiled.

But it was the kind of smile that had grief folded inside it, like a letter pressed into a book for so long that the words had pressed ghost-versions of themselves onto the facing page.

He recognized you.

Not who you were—what you were.

Someone who had decided, at some point, that love was a door that only opened out, and that if you let anyone in, they would take more than they left behind.

He could have told you that the opposite was also true.

But Lilia Vanrouge had learned, in seven hundred years of living, that some truths had to be earned.

And you were not the type to let anyone earn anything without making them bleed for it first.

ii. the siege

He began the way one begins any siege: not with force, but with persistence so mild it barely registered as an attack at all.

A cup of tea appearing beside your elbow when you studied in the library. Not placed for you—never with the theatrical generosity that would let you reject it on principle. Just… there. As though it had grown there naturally, like a mushroom in damp soil. Chamomile. The specific blend you reached for on the shelf but never bought for yourself because it felt like an indulgence you hadn't earned.

You didn't drink it.

You wanted to drink it. The steam curled upward in gentle, beckoning spirals, and your fingers twitched with the particular ache of someone denying themselves a small mercy.

But drinking it would mean acknowledging it. And acknowledging it would mean acknowledging him. And acknowledging him would mean—

"You know," you said aloud, to no one, staring at the cup with the fury of a general facing an undefeatable enemy, "this is ridiculous."

The tea sat there, steam curling like a question mark.

You drank it.

It was perfect. Of course it was. Because Lilia Vanrouge did nothing by half-measure, and if he was going to wage a quiet war on your defenses, he would do it with the precision of someone who had actually waged war, and who understood that the most effective siege was the one that made the besieged want to open the gates.

He found you in the courtyard three days later, attempting to repair a broken bench with a hammer and a expression that suggested the bench had personally insulted your lineage.

"Trouble?"

"No."

"The bench seems to disagree."

"I don't recall asking the bench." You drove a nail with more force than necessary. The wood groaned in protest. "Or you."

Lilia tilted his head, that ever-present amusement playing at the corners of his mouth like sunlight through leaves—dappled, shifting, capable of casting warmth or shadow depending on the angle. "You didn't ask. And yet here I am. Funny how that works."

"I have a term for people who show up uninvited."

"I'm certain you do." He crouched beside you, and the proximity made your hammer-hand stutter mid-swing, which you covered by pretending you'd meant to pause. "But I've found that most of the things worth having in this life arrive without an invitation. Sunsets. Rain. The realization that you matter to someone."

Your nail bent at an ugly angle.

"You can't just say things like that," you muttered, yanking the ruined nail out with a sound like a small, frustrated murder.

"Like what?"

"Like—" You gestured vaguely with the hammer. A dangerous gesture. "—that. Those. Words. Arranged in that order."

He laughed. Not the performative, mischievous laugh he wore like a costume in the hallways of NRC. Something lower. Softer. A laugh that had weight to it, as though it had been carried a long distance through a long life before arriving here, in this courtyard, for you.

"I've been arranging words for seven centuries," he said. "I've gotten rather good at it."

"I've noticed," you said, and then realized you'd admitted to noticing, and the blush that followed was the kind that started at your collarbones and marched north with military efficiency.

You stood. Abruptly. The bench wobbled dangerously.

"I have to go."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Anywhere that isn't here."

You left.

Lilia stayed crouched by the half-repaired bench, and if anyone had been watching closely—and no one was, because Lilia made sure of that—they would have seen him press his palm flat against the wood grain and close his eyes for a moment that lasted exactly one breath longer than comfort allowed.

He was not laughing anymore.

Because he remembered—intimately, viscerally, in the way that old wounds remember the exact temperature of the blade that made them—what it felt like to build a wall so high you forgot there was a world on the other side.

And he was beginning to suspect that your wall was not built to keep him out.

It was built to keep you in.

Safe. Alone. Unhurt.

The cruelest kind of prison was the one you constructed with your own hands and then called protection.

iii. the crack

It happened on a Tuesday.

Unremarkable by calendar standards. Catastrophic by the standards of your carefully maintained architecture.

You'd had a day. Not a bad day—you were too proud and too practiced to allow bad days to accumulate into anything recognizable. But a day of small erosions. A comment from a professor that landed too close to an old insecurity. A letter from home that said everything by saying nothing at all. The particular loneliness of being in a room full of people who spoke a language you understood but could not, for the life of you, speak back.

You found yourself on the roof of Ramshackle at midnight, sitting on the edge with your legs dangling, because there was something about verticality that made horizontal problems feel smaller. The night sky over Twisted Wonderland was not your sky. It would never be your sky. The constellations were wrong, the moon hung at the wrong angle, and every time you looked up you were reminded that you were somewhere else, and that somewhere else was not home, and home was—

Home was complicated.

You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes until you saw colors.

You did not cry. You did not cry. Crying was a luxury reserved for people who hadn't already spent their entire emotional budget on maintaining the structural integrity of their own walls.

"There you are."

You didn't jump. But your heart did something aerobically inadvisable.

Lilia landed on the rooftop with the gravity-defying grace that reminded you, viscerally, that he was not human. That the playful grandmother energy he projected was a choice, a costume worn over something ancient and sharp and not entirely safe.

He didn't sit next to you. He sat a careful three feet away—close enough to be present, far enough to not be a threat—and leaned back on his palms, tilting his face toward the wrong constellations.

"Grim was looking for you. Something about a tuna sandwich and betrayal."

"Tell him I'm dead."

"Shall I arrange a funeral? I know a wonderful florist in the Scalding Sands who does excellent arrangements for the tragically dramatic."

Despite everything—despite the letter, despite the comment, despite the wrong sky and the accumulated weight of being a person who refused to need anyone—your mouth twitched. Just barely. A seismic event disguised as a facial expression.

"You're not funny."

"I'm hilarious. You're simply too committed to misery to laugh."

"I'm not miserable. I'm—"

"Situated on a rooftop at midnight, alone, pressing your hands into your eyes hard enough to leave bruises." His voice was still light, but there was something underneath it now. Something that felt like the bottom of a lake—cold, still, and deeper than it appeared. "If that's not misery, it's at least its close personal friend."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing you'd ever heard.

"I don't need your pity," you said, and your voice came out smaller than you wanted it to. Which made you angry. Which made your voice sharper. "I don't need anyone's pity. I'm fine. I've always been fine. I'll continue to be fine. That's the whole— that's the point."

"The point of what?"

"Of—" You made a frustrated sound, somewhere between a laugh and a wound. "Of handling it. Of not being the kind of person who falls apart because some professor said something careless and a letter from home feels like a bomb with the fuse already lit and I miss—"

You stopped.

The wall shuddered.

Lilia did not move. Did not push. Did not fill the silence with his usual effervescence. He simply sat there, a steady presence in the dark, and let the silence be what it needed to be—which was not empty, but held.

"You miss what?" he asked, quietly. Gently. Like handling something made of glass. Or like handling something made of thorns—carefully, because the thorns were all that was holding it together.

You stared at the wrong stars.

"I don't know," you whispered, and the admission cost you something you couldn't afford to spend. "I don't know what I miss. I just know there's a hole, and I've been pretending it isn't there, and most days I'm fine, but tonight—"

Your voice cracked.

A single, traitorous tear escaped down your cheek with the audacity of a prisoner making a break for it while the guards were distracted.

You swiped at it with a violence that was really desperation.

"Don't—" you started.

"I won't," he said.

And he didn't.

He didn't reach for you. Didn't offer comfort in the way that people offered comfort—loudly, performatively, in ways that required you to receive it publicly and thus acknowledge your own vulnerability. He just sat there, three feet away, wrong constellations reflected in his red eyes, and let you fall apart in the dark without making it a spectacle.

It was, without question, the kindest thing anyone had ever done for you.

And you hated it.

You hated it because kindness that didn't demand anything in return was the most dangerous kind. It was the kind that slipped through the cracks in your wall like water through stone, and water, you knew, could bring down anything if given enough time.

You sat on that roof and you let the tears fall—quietly, furiously, in the way of someone who was angry at their own eyes for betraying them—and Lilia Vanrouge sat three feet away and watched the sky with the patience of someone who had once kept a vigil beside a dying queen and knew that some moments were not about fixing but about witnessing.

When it was over—when the tears had exhausted themselves and you were left hollow and trembling and furious at your own trembling—you spoke without looking at him.

"If you tell anyone about this, I will find a way to end you, ancient fae or not."

"Your secret is safe with me." A pause. Then, softer: "It's always been safe with me."

You stood. Brushed off your uniform. Straightened your spine with the determination of someone rebuilding a demolished wall brick by brick, starting now.

"Goodnight, Lilia."

"Goodnight."

You made it to the rooftop door before his voice caught you again—not because it was loud, but because it was the kind of quiet that travels through bone rather than air.

"For what it's worth," he said, still not looking at you, still gazing at those wrong, beautiful, impossible stars, "the hole doesn't go away. I know. I've been carrying mine for seven hundred years."

Your hand froze on the door handle.

"But it does," he said, "eventually, become a place where light can enter. If you let it."

You didn't turn around.

You couldn't.

Because if you turned around, he would see your face, and your face was doing something it hadn't done in years—it was believing someone.

You went inside.

You did not sleep.

You lay in your bed at Ramshackle.

==================================================(Version 2)

What Blooms In Defiance

The Art of Not Wanting

i. the inconvenient truth of dark hair

You told yourself it was the light.

The way the late afternoon sun caught the edge of his hair as he leaned against the doorway of the classroom, that was all it was. A trick of architecture and atmosphere. Nothing more. The fact that your pulse did something shameful and erratic behind your ribs was purely physiological—a fight-or-flight response to being startled, because he had appeared out of nowhere again, and any reasonable person's heart would seize under such circumstances.

"You're staring," Lilia said, without looking at you.

"I'm glaring," you corrected, because the alternative was unbearable. "There's a difference."

"Is there?" He turned then, and the smile he wore was the kind that had probably undone kingdoms. Not the bright, performative one he wore for the first-years—the one that said look at me, I'm harmless, I'm eccentric, I'm just a funny old man in a young body. No. This one was quieter. Smaller. A secret kept between the two of you, even though you hadn't agreed to keep any secrets with him.

Especially because you hadn't agreed to keep any secrets with him.

"There's a monumental difference," you said, and your voice came out steadier than you deserved. "Glaring implies hostility. Staring implies—" You stopped yourself before you could say fascination or longing or any other traitorous word that had been lodging itself in your throat like a fishbone lately. "—implies a lack of manners."

"And you have an abundance of those, I'm sure." He said it like he believed it. Like he'd watched you hold doors for people who didn't thank you. Like he'd noticed the way you straightened the collar of a first-year's uniform when you thought no one was looking. Like he'd been paying attention, which was worse than anything else he could have done, because attention from Lilia Vanrouge was not a casual thing.

It was a precision instrument.

It was a weapon you weren't armored against.

"Go bother someone else," you said, gathering your things with more force than necessary. A pencil rolled off the desk. You did not pick it up. You would not give him the satisfaction of watching you bend.

He picked it up instead.

He turned it over in his fingers—just a boring yellow pencil, nothing special—and you would have thought nothing of it, except that he looked at it the way he looked at everything. Like it mattered. Like the small, unremarkable things people discarded were the very things he found worth holding.

"You dropped this," he said.

"I know. Keep it."

"I intend to."

He slipped it into his pocket, and something in your chest cracked like a window hit by a winter stone—not shattered, but fractured, with a delicate web of damage you could hide but not repair.

You walked out of the classroom without looking back.

You always walked out without looking back.

You were becoming very good at it.

ii. a history of fortified walls (and the general who besieged them)

The thing about Lilia Vanrouge that no one seemed to understand— the thing that made him so insufferably, unreasonably dangerous—was that he was patient.

Not passive. Never passive. There was a difference there too, though most people were too dazzled by the performance to see it. Lilia was patient the way a river was patient with a stone. Not kind. Not cruel. Simply inevitable. He would wear you down not with force but with time, and time was the one thing he had more of than anyone.

You knew this.

You had studied him—carefully, from a distance, the way one studies a predator in the field, with binoculars and a healthy respect for the distance between you. You knew his habits. You knew he took his tea at four, that he haunted the kitchen at midnight to commit atrocities against cuisine, that he watched the first-years with an expression that flickered between amusement and something ancient and unnameable. You knew he had been a general. You knew he had fought in a war that had shaped the very land beneath your feet.

You knew, in the abstract way that one knows historical facts, that he had lost people.

What you did not know—what you refused to examine too closely—was why that knowledge made your throat tighten when you heard him laugh in the next room, bright and sharp as a bell, as if joy were something he had to choose every single day.

"Your observations are becoming less subtle," he told you one evening, appearing beside you on the bench outside the dormitory. The moon was a thin, suspicious sliver. The air smelled like impending rain. You had thought you were alone.

"I don't observe you." The lie was so automatic it barely required your participation. "I have better things to do than track your movements."

"Do you?" He tilted his head, and the moonlight did something terrible to his cheekbones. "I've noticed you don't spend your evenings with anyone else."

"Maybe I like being alone."

"No," he said, with a gentleness that felt like a blade slipping between ribs. "You don't. You've just learned to prefer it over the alternative."

The alternative.

Being seen. Being known. Being left.

You stood up so fast the bench scraped against the stone. "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you stayed up all night last week to finish a potion assignment that wasn't due for a month, because you needed a distraction." He didn't stand. He stayed exactly where he was, looking up at you with those eyes that had seen centuries and still somehow found you worth looking at. "I know you argue with your textbooks when you think no one is listening—not because you disagree with the material, but because you're testing it. Proving it wrong would be easier than trusting it."

"Stop."

"I know you keep a journal and you write in a language you invented yourself so that no one could ever read it, even if they found it." His voice dropped, not softer but closer, like a hand reaching through the dark. "I know that the first word you wrote in that journal, on the very first page, was why."

The rain began then, soft and indifferent, as if the sky had decided to weep on a completely unrelated matter.

You were not crying.

You would never cry in front of Lilia Vanrouge.

"You're a monster," you said, and you meant it in every possible sense of the word—ancient and terrible and impossible to escape.

He smiled, and it was the saddest smile you had ever seen on a human or fae face, and that was the moment you understood the true cruelty of Lilia Vanrouge: he did not pursue you despite knowing these things. He pursued you because of them.

"I've been called worse," he said, "by people I loved far more than you."

It should have been an insult.

It felt like a door opening.

iii. the culinary warfare that was not really about food

You found him in the kitchen at 1:47 AM.

This was not unusual. What was unusual was that you had come to the kitchen intentionally, which meant you had either lost your mind or surrendered to something you didn't have a name for yet. You were hoping it was madness. Madness was treatable. Madness could be blamed on stress or sleep deprivation or the peculiar atmospheric pressures of a school built on a nexus of magical energy.

The other thing—the thing with no name—was not treatable.

The other thing was Lilia stirring a pot of something that smelled like a crime scene and hummed a melody you didn't recognize but that made your chest ache anyway, because it sounded like a lullaby for someone who no longer needed to be lulled.

"Is that supposed to be soup?" you asked from the doorway.

"It is soup."

"It's hostile is what it is."

He laughed, and you hated—genuinely, sincerely hated—the way the sound moved through you like warm water, loosening things that had been clenched tight for years.

"Would you like to try it?"

"I would rather swallow broken glass."

"That can be arranged." He lifted the spoon toward you with an expression of pure, delighted mischief, and you took a step back, and he took a step forward, and suddenly the kitchen felt very small and the distance between you felt very negotiable.

"I'm not eating that," you said.

"I didn't ask you to eat it. I asked if you'd like to try it. There's a difference."

"You and your differences."

"You think about them a lot, don't you? Differences. Boundaries. The space between things." He set the spoon down. He set the mischief down too, and what was underneath it was so raw and so present that you forgot to breathe. "I've been alive for a very long time, and I've learned that most of the walls people build aren't to keep others out. They're maps. They show you exactly where it hurts."

"You're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Saying things that make me want to hit you."

"I know." He said it like a confession. Like something shameful. Like the fact that you wanted to hit him was proof of something he treasured and grieved in equal measure. "That's why I keep doing it. You're very beautiful when you're furious."

Your face burned.

Not blushed. Burned. As if someone had pressed a hot iron to your cheekbones, and the heat spread down your neck and across your collarbones and you wanted to die, actually. You wanted to sink into the kitchen floor and become one with the tile grout.

"I'm leaving."

"The soup—"

"Is a war crime and should be tried at an international tribunal. Goodnight, Lilia."

You turned on your heel. You made it three steps.

"You came to the kitchen at nearly two in the morning," he said to your back, quiet as a heartbeat. "Not because you were hungry. Because you knew I'd be here."

You stopped walking.

You did not turn around.

The silence stretched between you like a thread pulled taut, and you could feel it vibrating, and you knew—you knew—that if you turned around, something irrevocable would happen. Some last防线 would crumble. Some door you'd locked and thrown away the key to would ease open, and you would be standing on the threshold of something you'd spent your whole life running from.

You walked out of the kitchen.

But for the first time, the walking felt like running.

iv. an interlude in which you consider the weight of centuries

You could not sleep.

This was not new. Insomnia and you were old, intimate enemies—familiar as a married couple, hostile as a divorced one. What was new was the reason.

Usually, your sleeplessness was a formless thing. A free-floating anxiety with no anchor, a hum of unease that you couldn't name and couldn't cure. But tonight it had a face. And hair the color of endless night. And a voice that kept saying why in the language you'd invented, as if he'd cracked the code without even trying.

You pressed your face into your pillow and screamed, muffled and undignified.

Why him?

Of all the people in this school—the brilliant ones, the beautiful ones, the ones who didn't carry the weight of centuries in their spines like a second skeleton—why did it have to be the ancient war general who cooked like a supervillain and smiled like he knew every secret you'd ever had?

You thought about the things you knew of his past. Pieced together from overheard conversations and library books and the occasional, devastating slip of Malleus's tongue when the young dragon spoke of his guardian with a tenderness that suggested Lilia had been the only constant in a life full of loss.

He had outlived everyone he'd ever fought beside.

He had held dying friends in his arms and watched the light leave their eyes and then—then—he had gotten up the next morning and made breakfast for a child who had lost his parents, because that is what Lilia Vanrouge did. He carried his grief like a river carries the dead leaves of autumn—quietly, continuously, without ever stopping to demand recognition for the weight.

And you—what were you? A student with a sharp tongue and a tendency to build walls? A  person—who had been hurt, yes, but not in the way he had been hurt. Not in the way that leaves scars measured in centuries. Your wounds were ordinary. Common. The kind that everyone had and no one talked about, and you had built your personality around the conviction that if you never let anyone close enough, you would never have to explain the architecture of your damage.

Lilia had looked at your walls and seen maps.

You rolled onto your back and stared at the ceiling and felt something shift inside you, tectonic and slow, like a continent drifting toward an inevitable collision.

You were not afraid of Lilia.

You were afraid of what he would find when the walls came down.

You were afraid that he would look at the ordinary, common, unremarkable wreckage of your heart and find it not worth the effort of navigating.

You were afraid that he would stay anyway, and that would be worse, because then you would owe him something you didn't know how to give.

Why.

The first word in your journal. The question you'd been asking since before you could remember. Not why me or why this but just—why. Why anything. Why the effort of it. Why the architecture of getting up every morning and performing the rituals of being alive when the being alive part felt so fundamentally unconvincing.

You squeezed your eyes shut.

Sleep did not come.

But something else did—a quiet, terrifying awareness that you were no longer running from Lilia Vanrouge.

You were running toward him, and pretending, even to yourself, that it was the other way around.

v. in which the siege engine reveals itself to be a seed

It happened on a Tuesday.

Unremarkable. Forgettable. The kind of day that history books skip over, the kind that exists only as filler between the moments that matter. Which, you supposed, was exactly the point. Lilia had always understood that the most important things happen in the spaces between.

You were in the library. Alone, or so you thought, because you had chosen the most obscure corner on the most remote floor, surrounded by books on magical theory so dense they could double as blunt weapons. You were not studying. You were hiding. There was a difference, though you had long since stopped pretending it was a meaningful one.

He didn't announce himself. He never did. He simply materialized in the chair across from you, as if the universe had always intended for him to be there and was only now correcting an oversight.

You looked up from your book—a book you had not read a single word of in the past forty minutes—and found him watching you with an expression you couldn't categorize. It wasn't the teasing smile. It wasn't the quiet sadness. It was something else. Something careful. Something that looked almost like—

Fear.

Lilia Vanrouge looked afraid.

The recognition hit you like a physical force, because in all your observations, in all your careful study from a distance, you had never once seen him look afraid. You had seen him amused and tender and weary and fierce and grief-stricken in that hidden way of his, but never afraid, and the fact that he looked afraid now, sitting across from you in a forgotten corner of a library on an unremarkable Tuesday, made your hands go cold.

"Lilia." You said his name without meaning to. It fell out of you, unguarded, and the sound of it in your own voice terrified you almost as much as the look on his face.

He heard it too. The difference. The absence of armor.

"I need to tell you something," he said, "and I need you to not run away while I'm telling you."

"I don't run away."

"You do. You're very fast at it. It's impressive, actually. I've seen you do it in the space between one heartbeat and the next." He folded his hands on the table. His fingers were still. Not fidgeting, not drumming, not performing any of the restless little gestures that usually characterized him. The stillness was wrong. The stillness was what made your chest hurt. "I'm going to say something, and you're going to say something cruel, because that's what you do when someone gets too close. And I need you to know—" His voice faltered. Actually faltered, like a candle flame in a draft, and the fragility of it was so staggering that you felt your own breath catch in sympathy. "I need you to know that I will survive it. Whatever you say. I've survived worse. But I need you to also know that it will hurt, and I'm telling you this anyway, because—"

He stopped.

He looked down at his hands.

"I have lived for a very long time," he said, so quietly you had to lean forward to hear. "And in all that time, I have never once met someone who made me want to explain myself. I have never met someone whose anger I wanted to earn honestly, whose walls I wanted to respect rather than dismantle, whose no I wanted to treat as sacred rather than as an obstacle."

Your throat was closing.

"I don't want to take your walls down," he said. "I want you to open the door. Not for me. For you. Because you deserve to be on the other side of them."

The library was silent. The books were silent. The dust motes hung suspended in the lamplight like frozen stars, and the whole world had drawn a breath and was holding it, waiting to see what you would do with the gift you'd just been given—not a declaration of love, not a demand, not a trap, but a doorway, offered without expectation, held open by hands that trembled slightly under the weight of centuries of loss and the terrible, reckless courage of hoping anyway.

You opened your mouth.

"I don't—" Your voice cracked. You swallowed. Tried again. "I don't know how."

The words came out so small. So unlike you. So stripped of every defense mechanism you'd spent years constructing that you barely recognized them as your own.

Lilia's eyes softened into something that was not pity—never pity—but a recognition so profound it bordered on reverence.

"I know," he said. "That's why I'm not asking you to do it alone."

Something broke open in your chest. Not dramatically, not like a dam bursting, but like a bud unfurling in slow motion—petal by petal, inch by inch, a process that could not be rushed or forced or pretended. You felt your eyes sting, and for the first time in longer than you could remember, you did not fight it.

A single tear fell onto the open book in front of you. It hit the page with an audible softness, blurring a line of text until the words became unreadable.

Lilia reached across the table.

He did not take your hand. He simply placed his beside yours, close enough that you could feel the warmth of his skin without the obligation of touching it. An offering. A proximity. A choice.

You looked at his hand—pale, long-fingered, a general's hand that had wielded swords and stirred terrible soup and cradled the faces of the dying and now rested, palm-up, on a library table on a Tuesday, waiting for you.

You turned your hand over.

Your fingers touched his.

The contact was so slight it barely qualified as a touch at all—just the merest brush of skin against skin, a whisper of warmth, a question asked in a language older than words.

Lilia's fingers curled gently around yours.

You did not pull away.

The ceiling did not collapse. The world did not end. Your walls did not crumble in a single, cinematic avalanche. They simply—shifted. The way tectonic plates shift: imperceptibly, over time, with a deep and rumbling certainty that changes everything even though you can't see it happening.

You sat in the library on a Tuesday and held hands with Lilia Vanrouge, and it was not a victory and it was not a surrender.

It was a beginning.

vi. the slow and terrible business of being known

After the Tuesday—which you did not call the Tuesday in your head, because that would imply it was special, and you were not yet ready to admit that—things did not change.

That was a lie.

Things changed constantly, in increments so small they were almost invisible, like the movement of an hour hand. You did not suddenly become soft. You did not suddenly become kind. You were still sharp-edged and difficult and prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and Lilia was still infuriating in that particular way of his where he saw through every one of your defenses as if they were made of glass.

But there were moments.

Small ones. Secret ones. The kind that would mean nothing to an observer and everything to you.

He left a cup of tea outside your door one morning—proper tea, not the nightmare sludge he usually concocted, which meant he had either made it himself with unusual care or coerced someone else into making it, and either way the implication made your face heat. There was no note. There was no signature. Just a cup of tea, still warm, placed with a precision that suggested he had stood there for several minutes deciding on the exact right spot.

You drank it.

You did not thank him.

He knew you drank it because the cup was gone when he came to collect it, and the smile he wore when he retrieved the empty cup from where you'd left it—balanced carefully on the threshold, neither inside nor outside, a liminal placement that said I accept this but don't you dare make a thing of it—that smile was so radiant that Silver, who happened to be passing by, stopped and asked if his father was feeling well.

"I'm feeling wonderful," Lilia said, and meant it.

Another moment: you were in the courtyard, reading, and he sat down beside you without asking, and you didn't move away. This was unprecedented. This was historical. This was the kind of seismic shift that registered on instruments you didn't know existed.

He didn't speak. He simply sat, and read his own book, and the silence between you was not the charged, combative silence of before but something easier. Something that breathed. Something that existed not as a weapon but as a shared space, a room with two chairs and a window and nothing that needed to be filled.

After twenty minutes, you shifted—just slightly, just a few inches—and your shoulder touched his.

You did not move away.

Neither did he.

The contact remained for the rest of the afternoon, a point of warmth that anchored you to something you couldn't name, and when you finally stood up to leave, you said, without looking at him, "Your tea was acceptable."

"I'll strive for good next time," he said, and the laughter in his voice was not at your expense but at the absurdity and the wonder of it—of you, of this, of the fact that after centuries of living, a single word of grudging approval could make him feel like he'd conquered something vast.

vii. a lesson in the grammar of grief

He told you about the war on a Thursday.

Not the whole war—just a piece. A fragment. A single shard of a stained-glass window that had once depicted something magnificent and whole. He told you about a friend—a soldier under his command—who had carried a pocket watch that played a melody when you opened it. A silly, impractical thing to bring to a battlefield. The friend had said it was to remind him that time was passing, that every second was a small music, that even in the worst places, beauty could be wound up and released.

The friend had died on a hillside that no longer had a name.

Lilia had kept the watch.

He still had it.

He didn't show it to you. He simply told you it existed, and the telling was such an act of trust—such a naked, unguarded offering of a wound he had carried for longer than your entire lineage—that you forgot every defense mechanism you'd ever learned.

"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "That's a terrible story. Why would you tell me that?"

"Because you asked."

"I didn't ask anything."

"You asked why." He looked at you, and his eyes were the color of something that didn't have a name—not quite crimson, not quite red, but somewhere in the catastrophic space between. "The first word in your journal. You've been asking it since before I met you. And I wanted you to know that I've been asking it too. For much longer than you."

Why.

The question hung between you like smoke.

"I don't have an answer," he said. "I've looked for one for seven hundred years. I haven't found it. But I've found—" He paused, and you watched him search for the word, watched him rifle through a vocabulary that spanned centuries and multiple languages, and what he settled on was so simple it broke something in you. "—moments. Small ones. That make the question feel less urgent."

You thought about the cup of tea on your threshold. The shoulder against yours in the courtyard. The hand on the library table, palm-up, waiting.

"Like what?" you asked, and your voice was so quiet it barely existed.

"Like this," he said. "Sitting with you. Being someone you don't push away."

The grief in that sentence was immense. Not performed, not displayed for effect, but simply present, the way gravity is present—constant, invisible, inescapable. He had spent centuries being left behind, being the one who survived, being the one who stood at the graves of everyone he'd ever loved, and here he was, telling you that not being pushed away by a difficult, prickly, thoroughly inconvenient person who drank his terrible tea and held his hand in a library was a moment that made the question of why feel less urgent.

You did something you had never done.

You reached for him.

Your hand found his wrist—his wrist, not his hand, because wrists were practical and hands were intimate and you were not ready for intimacy, you were barely ready for proximity—and you held on. Not tightly. Not desperately. Just held on, as if he were something that might drift away if you didn't anchor him.

He looked down at your fingers on his wrist.

His breath caught.

You watched it catch. You watched the rise and fall of his chest stutter like a skipped heartbeat, and the realization that you could affect him—that this ancient, untouchable, devastating creature could be undone by something as small as your hand on his wrist—was so powerful that it terrified you more than any darkness you'd ever faced.

"Don't—" You didn't know how to finish the sentence. Don't leave. Don't die. Don't be a story I have to read about in a history book. Don't become another reason I ask why.

He understood anyway.

He always understood.

"I'm here," he said. "For now. For as long as I can be."

It wasn't a promise. It wasn't forever. It was something better—something honest, something fragile, something that acknowledged the impermanence of all things and chose to exist anyway.

You held his wrist in a courtyard on a Thursday, and somewhere in the space between your bodies, a question began, very slowly, to transform into something that was not quite an answer but was no longer just a question either.

viii. the disaster of almost saying it

Three weeks after the Tuesday—which you now, privately, in the sanctuary of your own mind, called the Tuesday, because you had run out of lies to tell yourself—you nearly told Lilia Vanrouge that you loved him.

The word had been rising in you like water in a flooding basement—inexorable, relentless, seeping through every crack in your foundation. You had felt it building for days. It was in the way you looked for him in crowded rooms. In the way you caught yourself smiling at the thought of his laugh. In the way you had begun to write his name in the margins of your journal, in your invented language, as if even the alphabet you'd created to keep people out had been infiltrated by him.

You were sitting on the roof of the dormitory at midnight. You did not know how he'd gotten there—you had climbed through a window and crossed a perilous stretch of slate tiles to reach the highest point, specifically because it was inaccessible—but there he was, legs dangling over the edge, looking up at the stars as if they were old friends he was catching up with.

"How," you said.

"The same way I do everything." He patted the tiles beside him. "With flair."

"I hate you."

"You don't." He said it without arrogance. Without smugness. He said it the way one states the weather—clearly, simply, without room for argument, because the sky is blue and water is wet and you did not hate Lilia Vanrouge. "Sit down. You're going to fall."

"I'm not going to—"

Your foot slipped on a loose tile.

You didn't fall—you caught yourself, barely, with a graceless lurch that sent a shower of broken tile fragments skittering over the edge—but for one horrible, suspended moment, the ground was very far away and the air was very empty and your stomach dropped through the floor of the universe.

A hand closed around your arm.

Lilia had moved—actually moved, with a speed that reminded you, violently, that he was not a person but a fae, not a student but a warrior, not a funny old man in a young body but something ancient and powerful and capable of catching you mid-fall without seeming to exert himself at all.

He pulled you to safety. Not roughly, not gently, but with a precision that suggested he had calculated the exact amount of force required to bring you to solid ground without injuring you or dislocating your shoulder.

You ended up on your knees on the rooftop, gasping, his hand still on your arm, and he was crouched in front of you, and his face was very close, and his expression was—

Terrified.

Not of the height. Not of the fall. Of losing you.

The realization hit you with the force of the ground you'd almost hit: Lilia Vanrouge, who had survived wars and famines and the deaths of everyone he'd ever loved, was afraid of losing you. You—a difficult, contrary, thoroughly unremarkable person who couldn't even accept a cup of tea without making it into a power struggle.

"Lilia—"

"Don't." His voice was rough. Stripped of its usual music. "Don't do that again."

"I didn't mean to—"

"I know. That's what makes it—" He stopped. Closed his eyes. His hand was still on your arm, and you could feel his fingers trembling—actually trembling—and the tremor traveled through your skin and into your bones and settled somewhere in the vicinity of your heart, where it lodged like an arrow. "That's what makes it frightening. The things we don't mean to do. The things we can't control."

He opened his eyes.

They were very close. Too close. Close enough that you could see the faint lines at the corners—signs of smiling, of frowning, of seven hundred years of making expressions that meant things. Close enough that you could see your own reflection in them, small and upside-down and seen.

"I lo—"

You stopped.

The word was right there. Right at the edge of your tongue, ripe and terrible and ready to fall. Three syllables. Eight letters. The shortest sentence in any language and the most dangerous one you'd ever almost spoken.

You didn't say it.

Instead, you did something braver.

You kissed him.

It was not a good kiss. It was clumsy and desperate and tasted like the tea he'd made you that morning—good tea, because he'd been practicing, because he'd been trying to get it right, because of course he had—and your nose bumped his and your teeth clicked against his and it was, by any technical standard, a disaster.

But Lilia made a sound against your mouth. A small, broken, grateful sound, as if you had handed him something he'd stopped believing existed, and his hand moved from your arm to the back of your neck, and he kissed you back with a gentleness that made your eyes sting, because he was holding you like you were the pocket watch—like you were a small music, like you were beauty wound up and released, like you were a reason to believe that time passing was not the same as things ending.

When you pulled apart, you were both breathing hard, and the stars were very bright, and the broken tiles were still skittering over the edge into the dark.

"You—" You couldn't finish. You didn't have words. Your invented language had no word for this. No language did. This was the thing that existed before language, the thing that language had been invented to try and fail to capture.

"I know," Lilia said, and his thumb traced a slow arc across the back of your neck, and you shivered, and he smiled—not the performative smile, not the sad smile, not the teasing smile, but a new one, one you'd never seen before, one that was only for you, one that said I see you and I am not afraid of what I see.

"You still haven't said it," he murmured.

"I don't know how."

"I know." He pressed his forehead to yours. His breath was warm against your lips. "I can wait. I've gotten very good at waiting."

"That's not—" You swallowed. "That's not fair. You can't just—be patient at me. I don't know what to do with patience. I know how to fight. I know how to run. I don't know what to do with someone who just waits."

"Then learn." So simple. So impossibly simple. "I'll teach you. I have time."

"You won't." The words came out before you could stop them, and the grief in them—your grief, your grief, the grief of a person who had just realized that she loved someone who might outlive her by centuries—was so raw that it startled you both. "You have too much time, Lilia. And I don't have enough."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing you'd ever heard.

He pulled back just far enough to look at you, and his expression was the most unguarded you'd ever seen it—every mask removed, every performance abandoned, and what was underneath was not the ancient general or the mischievous fae or the loving guardian but simply Lilia, a person who was afraid and hopeful and heartbroken and brave all at once, in the exact proportions that made up every person who had ever loved something they couldn't keep.

"Then we make the time we have count," he said. "That's all we can do. That's all anyone can do." A pause. His voice dropped to something barely above a whisper. "I've lost people who had centuries ahead of them. Time is not the thing that keeps us safe. Love is the thing that makes the time matter."

You stared at him.

You stared at him, and you thought about all the years he had carried, all the loss he had survived, all the moments he had collected like precious stones in the pocket of a coat that was far too old and far too worn, and you thought about the fact that he had chosen to add you to that collection—not as a grief-to-be, not as a future wound, but as a moment, small and current and alive, a small music in the middle of a battlefield.

"Okay," you said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'll learn." You said it like a declaration of war. Like a treaty. Like the most terrifying and the most necessary thing you'd ever said. "But I'm going to be bad at it."

"I know."

"I'm going to be terrible at it. I'm going to push you away and say cruel things and build walls and then get mad at you for not climbing them."

"I know."

"And you're going to have to—" Your voice wavered. "You're going to have to keep waiting. Even when I give you no reason to."

"I will." No hesitation. No conditions. Just I will, as simple and as absolute as gravity.

You kissed him again.

This time it was better. Slower. Less desperate and more deliberate, as if you were learning a new language and the kiss was your first sentence—clumsy but clear, imperfect but true. His hand stayed on the back of your neck. Your hand found the front of his shirt and gripped the fabric like an anchor, and the wind moved across the rooftop and the stars watched and the broken tiles fell and fell and fell into the dark, and none of it mattered because you were kissing Lilia Vanrouge on a rooftop at midnight, and the word you couldn't say was everywhere—in the press of your lips, in the grip of your fingers, in the ragged breathing between kisses—and he heard it even though you didn't speak it, because Lilia Vanrouge had spent seven hundred years learning to listen for the things people couldn't say.

ix. an epilogue, of sorts

Months later—months in which you learned to say thank you for the tea and stay when you wanted to run and I'm scared when the walls started rebuilding themselves—you opened your journal to the first page.

Why.

The word sat there, small and solitary, the way you had written it all that time ago, before Lilia, before the Tuesday, before the rooftop and the broken tiles and the kiss that had been a sentence in a language you were still learning.

You picked up your pen.

Beneath the why, in your invented language—in a code that no one else could read—you wrote a second word. Then a third. Then a fourth. A sentence. A paragraph. A page. Another page.

You wrote about pink hair in late afternoon light. About soup that smelled like a crime and tea that tasted like trying. About a hand on a library table, palm-up, waiting. About the sound he made when you kissed him—small, broken, grateful. About the terror of being known and the greater terror of remaining unknown. About grief, his and yours, and the way it didn't cancel each other out but stacked, creating a shared height from which you could both see further than you could alone.

You wrote about the fact that you still didn't have an answer to why.

But you were beginning to think that the question itself was the answer. That the asking was the point. That the very fact that you could sit in a library or on a rooftop or in a kitchen at 1:47 AM and feel something—pain, longing, fear, joy, all of it, all at once, a cacophony that was indistinguishable from being alive—was the closest thing to a reason you were ever going to get.

You closed the journal.

You went to find him.

He was in the kitchen, as he often was, stirring something that smelled marginally less catastrophic than usual. He looked up when you entered, and the smile he gave you was the one that was only for you—the new one, the real one, the one that was still learning how to exist.

"I made tea," he said.

"I can see that."

"It's good this time. I've been practicing."

"I know you have." You crossed the kitchen. You took the cup from his hand. You set it on the counter. And then—because you were learning, slowly, imperfectly, with all the stumbling grace of a newborn thing—you took his face in your hands and kissed him, soft and sure, the way you'd been practicing too.

When you pulled back, his eyes were bright.

"I love you," you said.

The words came out quiet. Matter-of-fact. As if you were telling him the time or the weather or any other simple, obvious, irrefutable truth. No drama. No grand gesture. Just three syllables, spoken in a kitchen that smelled like slightly-burnt tea, to a fae who had waited seven hundred years to hear something that sounded like that—like a door opening, like a wall coming down, like a small music in the middle of a battlefield.

Lilia Vanrouge looked at you as if you had handed him the world.

"I know," he said, and smiled, and meant it, and the word why—that ancient, relentless, unanswerable word—did not disappear, but it softened, the way a question softens when it stops demanding an answer and starts becoming a prayer.

You sat on the edge of the seat beside him, your legs pulled up to your chest, watching as he reloaded his guns with precision born of routine. Boothill didn’t look at you—he rarely did when the job was done and the silence crept in—but his voice still filled the space.

“Didn’t I tell ya not to jump in like that?”

You looked down, your hands tightening around the seams of your jacket. “You were getting overwhelmed. I wasn’t gonna run.”

His eyes finally flicked toward you. “Running ain’t cowardice, kid. It’s survival. You run so you can shoot another day. I ain’t trying to bury another body.”

“But there’s no one left to bury me,” you whispered. “If you go, there’s nothing else. So if you’re riding into Hell, I’m coming with you.”

Boothill’s jaw tightened. He muttered something about “darn stubborn kids” under his breath, stood, and pulled his red scarf off his neck. Without a word, he draped it around your shoulders and gave your head a ruffle.

“Then you ride behind me. Never in front. Got it?”

You nodded.

He didn’t smile, but the way he holstered his gun told you he’d accepted it. Maybe not happily—but fully.

The Coreflame of Strife burned somewhere in the heart of the world, and Mydei was chasing it with the tenacity of a man who had died and come back too many times.

And you were right behind him.

“Turn back,” he said again, standing in the shallow basin of some lost battlefield, the scent of ash still clinging to the rocks. “Your blood isn’t meant for this war.”

“I don’t have anything left to go back to, Mydei,” you said, voice shaking from exhaustion but not fear. “And I’m not letting you go out there alone. Not when you’re the only person who ever gave a damn.”

His eyes narrowed, glowing faintly in the rising dusk. He could’ve left you behind. He’d done it before to others.

But he never spoke those names aloud like he did yours.

“You follow me into Hell,” he said, “you might never find your way back out.”

“I’d rather burn with you than run by myself forever.”

For a moment, silence ruled. Then Mydei unclasped his cape and swung it around your shoulders, golden edges trailing in the breeze. He touched the side of your face, firm, like a vow.

“Then we burn together, Guardian’s oath.”

Blade wasn’t a man anymore. He was a weapon shattered a thousand times and reforged to cut through everything, even his own past.

And you—somehow—chose to walk beside that.

He sat silently sharpening his cracked sword in a dim corridor of the Stellaron Hunters' hideout. You sat cross-legged across from him, arms bandaged, not from battle, but from your desperate grip on staying close to him.

“You think following me will fix you?” Blade asked coldly, not looking up.

“No,” you said, unwavering. “But being left behind will kill me faster.”

Blade’s eyes lifted, red and seething with memories. “You don’t understand. I don’t want salvation. I want the end.”

“I don’t care. I just… I don’t want to lose someone else.”

Blade’s lips pressed into a line. He remembered what it felt like to carry loss in every breath. And he knew that kind of grief, once born, never died.

“You’ll break,” he warned.

You shrugged. “Then break me. At least I’ll still be with you.”

For the first time in what felt like lifetimes, Blade offered something other than pain—his sword. He laid it between you.

“Then hold this with me. Not as a warrior. As someone who remembers.”

You reached out, fingers brushing the hilt. His hand covered yours.

For the moment, broken things stood together.

The Sweet Dream Special was silent except for the clink of glass and the soft hum of machinery. Gallagher mixed drinks with the same care he gave to his sidearm—silent, precise, distant.

You leaned on the bar, watching him.

“You gonna tell me to run again?”

He didn’t answer. He poured a shot and set it in front of you—[your favourite drink]. You blinked.

“I know what it’s like,” Gallagher finally said, eyes never meeting yours. “To have nowhere else. To want to follow someone just so you’re not alone. I did that once.”

“What happened?”

“I lived.”

He leaned forward, voice low and full of memory. “It’s not the worst thing. But it is the hardest.”

You clenched your fists. “I don’t want to live without you.”

Gallagher’s eyes softened. “Kid… I’m not a hero. I’m just tired. And if you follow me, all you’ll find is regret.”

“Then I’ll carry it with you.”

A long pause. Then, he reached into his coat and took out a spare flask. He placed it gently in front of you.

“Then at least learn how to mix something worth dying for.”

He turned away, but his voice lingered.

“You stay behind me, yeah? If someone’s gonna fall, it’ll be me first.”

You sat by your window, waiting.

Law had called you thirty minutes ago, saying he was almost at your house.

Your nerves were trying to psych you out.

You knew exactly what Law drove.

A black Mercedes with his stupid but cute spotted white leopard printed decal or painted on the side. Of course, he did. You watched him pull up and stop in a vacant parking spot, turn off the engine, and step out of the car. He held something within his hands.

Needless to say, you were more than pleased with Doctor Heart Steeler's date night out outfit. There was absolutely no way Law wouldn't get lucky and paw at, if you let your inner fangirl out of the bag. Law looked as if he'd just walked away from a professional photo shoot. You couldn't help biting your lips as you drank him up to your greedy hearts' content. Damn, the date hasn't even started, and he's already made you nearly want to drop your lace panties for him. Let alone make your heart race for a different matter.

Black blazer, yellow dress shirt, buttons unbuttoned to his breastbone, revealing a teasing and mouthwatering view of his muscled, tanned skin and ink. White slacks, black dress shoes. The Surgeon glanced down at his black smartphone watch as he approached the door to your shared apartment.

You didn't give yourself a second glance. You rushed out of your room, grabbed your phone, purse, and jean jacket, slipped on your black knee-high chunky high-heeled boots, well, more like hopping into your boots one leg at a time without flipping yourself over the couch. Your heart was running a mile a minute as you opened the door, slightly out of breath. "Hey, doc." Dammit, you've called him that nickname for too long, it practically slipped out of your mouth. "Ah, shit." You cover your blushed face. "Sorry, Law."

His eyes gleamed with amusement. "It will take a while before you break that habit, isn't it?" He lowered his gaze to give you an appreciative glance and assessment. "No uniform or your lounge wear, that's good."

You stared into Law's vivid gray eyes, his tanned and inked skin as he stood before you, hatless. His thick, unruly jet-black hair appeared fluffy and slightly soft, falling over his forehead. You had to stop yourself from physically suppressing your thick thighs together as you peered through your fingers. Then, of course, Law had to rile up your sass and temper. "Hey, the hell is that supposed to mean?" You huff, popping out your hip and crossing your arms over your chest. The belle sleeves on your pink gothic lace mid-thigh length dress flying around with your movement for a more dramatic flair. Maybe I should have listened to Nami and worn my little black and red dress. You inwardly sweat drop. Well, it's too late to change now. Then again, you had been dying to wear this one out since you got it. Tonight seemed a perfect excuse.

"Never took you for the goth type," Law commented, tilting his head.

"Is that a problem?" You did give yourself a classic black and pink smoky eye and a red lip, giving yourself a natural look with a hint of shimmer eye shadow on your eyelids. "I hardly believe that you didn't have an emo boy phase as a teenager." In fact, you know he did.

"Yes, I did." Law replies, shifting his weight to fully lean into the door frame. "Want to go down memory lane and swap polaroids?" His quicksilver and intense gaze doesn't leave your flustered and starstruck face as you look at him, as if he'd just give you a million dollars. "Or are you ready for our date?"

You opened your mouth, then snapped it shut. "Uh... sooo we can't swap polaroids then?" Why did you say that out loud?!

Law didn't roll his eyes, like you thought he'd do. No. Instead, he snickers, then tries to cover it with a cough. "That's all you heard?" He raised a brow, took something out of the crook of his arm, and handed it to you. "Here, Happy Valentine's Day, Y/n." He muttered, cheeks pinking.

Your brows burrow. "It isn't Valentine's Day."

Law blinked. "Yes, it is." Straightening his posture. "What day do you think it is?" His poker face is slipping back.

"There is no way." You took the big box of fancy Godiva chocolates, an amazon gift card, and one for Barns and Noble. You stared at the heart-shaped box. "Oh, shit, it is." You pulled out your phone, unlocked and stared at the date. It was, in fact, Valentine’s Day. "Our first day on Valentine's Day? Seriously?" You lifted your gaze to meet his smug smile.

"Would you rather I take the gifts back?" Law asked, nonchalantly, offering to take them off your hands. Of course, he wasn't going to take it back, even if you did try to shove it into his chest. He couldn't help but find your reactions cute. The offendment on your face was adorable and priceless. There's his stubborn nurse. Once you got something in your hands, it was yours and no one else's unless you wanted to share it, which you would, if he'd asked. He’d seen sharing candy and gum with nervous kids waiting in the waiting room or lobby of his hospital.

"No." You hold the gift cards and chocolate close to your chest. "It's mine now." You give him a light glare.

"Calm down, it's yours," Law replied coolly, turning and offering you his arm. "Ready?"

Curse stupid Ace, stupid Luffy, and stupid gluttonous Sabo for making you paranoid about anybody trying to steal your food, which Luffy would. He learned the hard way when you stabbed his hand with a fork or put habanero and ghost pepper hot sauce on your sandwiches, which you made for Ace as a prank. Needless to say, Luffy didn't learn his lesson. Even after he drank a mountain worth of ice cream and milk. "Yeah, I'm ready." You give him a smile, fishing your keys out of your purse, which Law took from you to lock your door, then wordlessly handing them back to you. "Has anybody told you that you have controlling issues?"

"Correction, I'm being polite and a gentleman." Law nodded his head and led you towards his car.

"Whatever you say, Cap." You smirk softly.

He huffed out an amused breath, rolling his eyes. Law opened the door for you; his hand slipped down your arm to lock your hand with his as he helped you sit down inside. He didn't let go of your hand. He kissed the back of it, keeping eye contact with your flustered face, blushing ever so prettily. "If you let me, Y/n." He mutters, lips smirking against your skin. "I'll treat you like a queen as you deserve, remember that." He said in a drop-dead, silky-smooth drawl.

You slowly took your hand back, swallowing thickly as your panties became wet. Loser Law is actually secretly a smoothie, I repeat, he's trying to make you break on purpose! You can't think of anything witty and sassy to say. You are speechless, trapped in a daze as he rises and gently closes the door to round the car, opens it, and sits down in the driver's seat. Acting as if he did absolutely fucking nothing.

You put your seatbelt on, body traveling on autopilot, then set your gift cards into your purse and chocolates into the floorboard.

After taking another steady breath, she lifted her slightly shaky hand and answered the phone. You could hear your heartbeat thudding hard in your ears as you tried calm down. "Keep talkin' like that n' you won't make it out of the driveway." You accidentally muttered out loud.

"What was that?" Law hummed, leaning his arm behind you as he stole a glance at you, then glanced behind his shoulder to look out for incoming cars after starting the engine and putting the car in reverse.

"N-Nothing!" You stammer. "That was just the wind! You heard nothin'."

Law stares at you for a moment before facing forward and shifting his weight back into the correct driving position. "Has anyone ever told you that your southern accent and drawl become more pronounced when you're acting all cute and brazen?"

"Oh, shut up." You fire back.

"Unfortunately, for you, I won't." Law shrugs in response, shifting the manual care into drive and drove off.

You tried not to focus on his hand placement. One large, tanned, inked palm on the middle of the stirring wheel, his other lying lazily out the window. You noticed the small smile gracing his mouth. His silver gaze was focused, concentrated, and cautious on the road. You quickly shook your head and in shifted your gaze to outside the passenger side window. The black leather was pristine, golden edges and seams gave it a more personal touch that fit Law's astatic. Goofball certainly has both good taste and a unique fashion sense. Makes you wonder if his adoptive father or uncle had a hand in it?

Within minutes, Law's eyes kept flicking over to you. He didn't say anything at first. His grip on the steering wheel tightens. Dammit, did he take his teasing too far again? Had he made you uncomfortable? Law usually loves silence. Peace and quiet. He hates small talk. But he wants to hear you talk. Talk about your day, anything. Anything to soothe over this unbearable, awkward, silent treatment? Inwardly sighing and deciding to bite the bullet, Law asked, "Do you have any idea what you want to spend the gift cards on?"

"There have been a few things on my wishlist." You reply softly, unknowingly unaware that your voice was soothing his own nerves and tension building within his shoulders.

"Clothes, makeup, snacks, or smutty books?" Law really couldn't help himself; his lips quirked high when he noticed you straightening your posture and how red your cheek had gotten. "Maybe a sex toy?" You turned even redder.

"That is none of your business." You did not want to admit that what all Law had said was true.

"What?" Law raised a brow. "You are a fully grown adult and have every right to experience sexual pleasure and relieve on your own time. It's natural." Law wouldn't admit that he thought long and hard about getting you one for Christmas as a secret Santa gift after he heard you and members of the female staff talking about it in the breakroom as he stood outside trying not to choke on his coffee. It did not contain the excitement growing and twitching hot and harder within his pants, or stop him from blushing and thinking about watching you use said toy on yourself to get yourself off and ready for him. He'll bring that up when he reaches higher in the boyfriend stage of the relationship.

"You make a fair point." You admitted, trying not to curl your hands in your lap, instead you cross your legs, resulting in your dress rising higher along your thigh.

Law caught that from the corner of his eye. His grip tightened on the steering wheel as he swallowed dryly. If he were your boyfriend. Law would spread your legs and shove his hand between your gorgeous, thick thighs to tease your inner thigh, then stroke you through your panties with his fingers. Tease you nice and slow, searching for every note of pleasure as he learned your body. What made you squirm? What made your pant breathlessly? What made you needy, whining and screaming, begging him not to stop? Begging him to feed your hot pussy with his fingers. Law inhales a deep, calm breath as his own fingers on the wheel twitched and curled on reflex. Jesus fucking Christ, it's been so long since he's been this obsessed and horny. Not to mention being in love with someone on top of it.

He's trying to be all that you need and deserve. He couldn't get that kiss or the view of you stripping out of his head last night when he went home. He was embarrassed by how hard and feral you made him. How much of his own essence and semen he had ejaculated to the perfect image of you stripping for him, climbing on top of him, and bouncing in his lap. Giving absolute control. Watching you grinding on him, chest heaving and bouncing in his face to palm and knead every delicious and beautiful curve from your fantastic breasts, swells of your hips, your stomach, and the meat of your ass and thighs. All of your insecurities were beautiful to him.

Law had to shake his head furiously and return his focus to the road. Law was not a holy man, or man of faith, but he'd bet even if he had been... he could be too bashful as a schoolboy if he had to admit his sinful, lustful thoughts about you to a priest.

His vision moved from the road to his gps on the phone stand. "I figured you wanted to get something to eat, then go book shopping." Law noticed you perking up, eyes widening a fraction of surprise and excitement.

"Really?" You faced him after what felt like forever.

Law stopped at a stoplight. "What do you think I gave you that gift card for?" He tilted his head in your direction to meet your eyes, the red hue reflecting on his face, which turned his molten silver gaze into a more intense and electric shade of lighting and storm. Beautiful and hypnotizing, then the sun hit his iris. Changing his eye color again to an amber, honey, or golden shine.

Dear god, if we have babies... You think to yourself, completely lost in his soul-piercing stare. I want them to have his eyes. You were inwardly shaking yourself, screaming and cursing your hormones again. I must be ovulating, if I'm this horny, right? You didn't want to chop it off, as you and Law had actual chemistry. Which was getting harder and harder not to believe, given yesterday.

The light turned green, Law focused on the road again, switching the turn signal, then placing both hands on the wheel to turn in the direction of the restaurant. He shut off the gps, having already known these roads and streets by heart now. "Where we are going is my favorite restaurant." He informs, waiting for your answer.

"Oh? Where?" You were excited to learn more about Law. Maybe more than you were willing to admit.

Law drove forward and parked the car; he turned off the engine, silently signaling with the wave of his finger. "See for yourself."

You turned your head. You could not believe where he took you. The restaurant was high class, but not too high prices. Okay, pricy and way above your budget for a regular date night out. If you wanted to spend your book budget money on someplace to eat, which you only did for your birthday. So, this place was reserved for a rare occasional spot, but always busy and jam packed. The restaurant's full name was "Rosé de Heart" or "Rosé" for short. "Rosés?" You spun around fast, making yourself lightheaded as you unbuckled your seat belt, only to discover Law had already unbuckled and opened your car door, offering to help you out. "You're kidding!" You exclaimed, practically bouncing in your seat.

"Why would I lie and flaunt it in your face, if I wasn't going to take you?" Law quipped, giving you a hint of a smile.

"Rosé's is way out of my price range." You admitted sheepishly. "I've never been." You tilted to the side to try to hide your embarrassment. "Now, I feel underdressed."

Law's smile softened. "We'll have to fix that." His silver eyes are assessing you again. "And for the record," Law hummed, gently bending down to lean down, grip your hand and pull you up, then grab your purse for you. "You look beautiful. No matter where we are or what you wear." He squeezes your hand in reassurance, bring it to his lips and kissing it again, then raising his head and kisses your cheek. "It is your inner beauty, stubborn, spunky attitude, and smile I'd rather see." He whispers, the coffee and mint of his breath fanning your heated cheeks. "You are perfect the way you are, curves, extra pounds, and all, Y/n-ya."

Your breath catches. Your heartbeat quickens. Now you feel like a perv ogling him and thinking dirty thoughts when he was being all sweet. "Thank you, Law." You murmur softly, turning your head, your lips brushing along the side of his jaw, staining his tanned skin. Your breath is hot and triggering goosebumps and shiver down his spine and along his tanned skin beneath his cloths.

"You're welcome," Law cleared his throat, his hand twitching as closes the car door behind you, locked it, and stuffed his keys into his pants pocket. He begins to lead you towards heavy traffic and across the road and sidewalk, waiting in the semi-long line. "It's just opened, so we've caught the busy dinner rush." He comments, keeping his attention forward, keeping his hand intertwined with your own before wrapping his arm around your middle, securing his fingers on your love handles, and gently tugging you closer.

You noticed the smudge of lipstick and gloss on the corner of his jaw. "Oops." You bite your lips to hold back a laugh.

"What is it?" Law asked without meeting your gaze. He raised a brow; he knew that tone. You found something funny and were about to burst out into a fit of laughter.

Should you tell him? It made you wonder how would Mister King of Poker faces react if you simply left it alone for him to find when he goes to the men's restroom. Then you thought better of it. "You... uh..." You began to dig into your purse for makeup remover wipes. "You accidentally have lipstick n' gloss on your face, Traffy."

Law's brows furrowed in confusion. "How?"

You pulled out a wipe, grabbed his chin, and scrubbed his face in smooth yet rough strokes without being too harsh on his skin. "I think it's when my lips made contact." You giggled to yourself. "Well, I suppose it could have been worse."

You were unaware of the attention you were drawing to yourself. Men and women were staring at you. Men glance at your dress and curves in silent appreciation and appraisal. Oh, Law recognized the envy and jealousy, or snobbish behavior, that every insecure, skinny, model-shaped woman was giving you. It wasn't just your curves they envied. It was him on your arm, basking in your attention. Law felt himself smirk smugly, just a tad.

Law couldn't help himself, snaking his arms closer around you, pushing you flush and closer into him. A soundless and unspoken signal that you were his and spoken for. He did not like the elder gentleman and drunk greedily, gluttonously, and shamelessly, eyeful of your breast or your rear. Or the obvious cheating bastard drooling over you with their girlfriends or side chicks hanging all over their arms. Any one of them who dared sneak a glance, then make the mistake of meeting Law's eyes were met with a seething, ice-cold, stone-hearted warning glare. He bit back a heated curse and grinding his molars until it was their turn in line.

Law made a mental note to leave earlier next time, so you and him would be the first in line.

He didn't give a damn if he had to look like an asshole and cut to the front of the line.

You were squished against his side. Which you couldn't really complain. You snuggled into his warm embrace and leaned your head into the crook of his shoulder. This is nice. You think to yourself. I could get used to this. Then again, if you didn't know any better, is Law being a little too handsy and territorial? You opened your eyes as you and him stepped forward. You couldn't lie. It was kinda hot.

"Trafalgar," the head chef greeted warmly on his way toward the kitchen. An elder man with light blonde hair, with a prosthetic leg and a beard, a mustache that extends into twin braids, and tied with two blue ribbons.

He looked familiar. You couldn't remember why. You watched the chief offer his hand to shake, which Law accepted with a hint of a smirk. "Zeff."

Oh! He's Zeff! Sanji's boss, adoptive father and trained him since he was a kid. But wait, doesn't Zeff own The Baratie downtown? Your confusion must have been showing.

Law chuckled and explained. "Zeff is an old friend of the owner of Rosés; he and Sanji train the newbies or run the place whenever the boss is away." He gestured towards you. "Zeff, this is my date for this evening, Y/n L/n."

Zeff shifted his blue eyes to you. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Young Lady." The blonde takes your free hand and shakes it, a sturdy and strong grip, then raises it and kisses the back. "If you need anything, don't hesitate to call my name."

Your mouth fell open. Was this why Sanji is so flirtatious? Or was he always like that?

Law clicked his tongue in annoyance. "Are you trying to steal my date, Red-Leg?" His gaze hardens.

Zeff chuckles, scoffs. "You and that brat are both too young to be taking me on, Doctor."

You bet that brat is a certain overly flirty, blonde-haired, curly-browed chief, Sanji.

"Sorry, but if you want a date, you will have to get your own," Law replied coldly, as one of the waiters led you two away.

You glance behind you, smiling and waving.

Zeff winks and waves. "Don't let that little shit bully you, belle." He calls out, smirking when Law's hold on you tightens, knowing the black-haired surgeon is grumbling up a storm. "His words are harsh and overly critical, but he's a big softie at heart."

Oh, you know. You know, Law is a big softie indeed after you get past his mountains of impenetrable walls of cold iron and icy exterior. "Thanks for the advice, Zeff." You reply back, raising your voice.

Then Zeff heads back towards the kitchen.

The waiter leads you to your table, Law helps you into your seat, and pushes you in.

"You don't have to follow that old man's nonsense." Law huffed as he rounded the table and sat down.

"It can't be helped, can't it?" You tease, you giggle, noticing his face is already a light shade of pink.

Law opened his mouth to retort when a blonde waitress approached the table.

You could understand that with the restaurant just opening, it tends to get busy from open to close. Usually, staff have to bounce around all night going multiple tasks from training, busting tables, dish washing and, delivering room, manning the front desk, answering the phone to writing down take-out orders. You've had to work your own share of waitressing jobs back home with Ace and Sabo. Luffy didn't last a day. The poor air-headed, StrawHat wearing teen kept eating orders, breaking dishes, and was bad, like really bad at taking orders.

He looked up from his conversation with you, already irritated. "May I help you?" he asks flatly.

"Yes, you can." The blonde waitress purrs, batting her lashes and giving him a seductive smile. Completely ignoring you. "What can I get for you?" Pouring a glass of wine for him, pouring it slowly, making a show of it to stall for time.

Law raised a brow. "You weren't the waiter who led us to our table." He gestured towards you and him. "Nor did we order this wine." His gaze focused on the wine "Nancy" was serving. It was an expensive and aged vintage. His anger was rising. He didn't want to look like too much of a jerk in front of you, but this woman was pushing his buttons in all of the wrong ways. He wanted to order a wine or a cocktail of your choice. Not whatever this annoyance shoved in front of their faces.

Law knew, if he let good wine go to taste his adoptive unlike would curse, give him a cold, smile and force him to drink the whole bottle. The black-haired surgeon shivered from that unwanted and unpleasant memory.

"Nathan's busy at the moment," she said smoothly. "I'll take over, if you'd like?"

Oh, this bitch. The corner of your lips twitched, narrowing your eyes. You knew Law was handsome. Knew he wouldn't have to walk too far to have both men and women flocking towards him. You seen it time and time again at work. Woman fake fainting and swooning like some Victorian era debutante to try to attract Law's attention, which he'd see right through and order another staff member to tend to them.

She pours your glass of wine with less grace, a more rushed and served type of pour. "Here you go, miss?" She flashed a fake assed closed eyed smile.

"Thanks." You reply out of courtesy's sake.

She acted like she didn't hear you. She kept her attention on Law. "Are you ready to order?"

Law picked up his wine glass, brought it to his nose to smell it before he tasted it. His brows furrowed in concentration. "We have not." He replied dryly. His eyes were closed, tilting it to his lips and tasting it, savoring it. He didn't see her moving closer towards him. She leaned in close, too close, too close for both yours and Law’s comfort to whisper into his ear. "Or can I have your number?"

Law's eyes snapped open as he swallowed his mouthful of wine way too soon for his liking.

You saw Law's jaw clenched and grind. His whole body stiffened and tensed as she pulled away. Oh, he's pissed. His silver eyes grew dark and stormy; the flickering of the candlelight made them appear harsher, colder, and arctic. She cannot read people for jack shit. You thought, picking up your glass of wine.

You watched as Law's grey eyes turned steely as he interrupted the waitress. "I don't believe asking for my number is part of your job, now, is it?" His voice was calm yet hard as his polite smile flipped into a scowl as his inked hand tightened on the wine glass.

The blonde’s eyes widened, the complete look of shock on her face as if she wasn't used to hearing the word no or being rejected often. "No." She replied, sounding unsure.

He'd raise one eyebrow, shift in his seat, and lace his fingers. His golden hues were sharp, cold, and calculating. He didn't raise his tone, but the authority and commanding presence he demanded within the room spoke volumes. Relaxed Law was gone, and his doctor persona had come out, his professional mask of stone walls and hard edges. Years of medical practice at looking stupid people in the eye and trying to walk all over him. It didn't work. This clueless blonde didn't realize how scary Trafalgar Law could be.

You were shocked, flattered, and in awe. Law was standing up for you and flat-out rejecting this woman's advances. You grabbed your wine glass to hide your smile and the heated blush growing on your face.

"Good." He gave a curt nod. "Now, leave the bottle and leave before I call the manager." Law tilted his head, smirking as a hard gleam sparkled in his eyes, as he waved her off with his free hand.

The blonde jumped as she nodded her head and bowed in apology. "My apologies, sir." She left the bottle and speed walked away.

Law clicked his tongue, sipping his wine as he muttered. "Idiot." Some of the tension left his shoulders.

You lowered your wine glass and snickered, trying to hide your smirk with the back of your hand, but Law noticed. "Damn, Doctor Heart Steeler being all cold and overprotective of me? Talk about making a girl feel special, Law."

Law's lips twitched, forming a small smile. "I meant what I said, you know." He met your gaze, lowering his glass and reaching for your hand. "My eyes are only on you, Y/n," he explains as he pours two more glasses full of wine and hands one over to you.

"You never made a move until yesterday." You muttered shyly, fighting with all you might not to glance away.

He tucked a loose lock of hair and threaded it back behind your ear. "You're the one who wasn't paying attention, Y/n-ya," Law replied, leaning back into his seat, shifting his gaze away as he noticed the manager hauling ass towards your table.

"I apologize for Kandy's rude behavior." The restaurant manager apologized profusely and handed each of you a menu. "As an apology, I'll throw in free dessert whenever you are ready, and I'll give you a discount, sir."

"Of course, it's the misspelled version of candy." You scoffed beneath your breath. "Barbie lookin' assed, preppy, thin girlie didn't grow up out of her high school phase." Dammit, it's like high school all over again You thought to yourself as you took another sip of your wine.

"Thanks," Law waved him off. He noticed your displeasure throughout the whole rude exchange. He found your brattiness and show of temper amusing at work, yet right now you two weren't at work. You were on a date. You getting upset made him upset.

Silence filled the empty space for a moment as you both tried to relax and return to enjoying the pleasant and welcoming atmosphere.

You knew it was cliche but decided to break the ice first.

"Do you come here often, then?" You ask, taking your menu and glancing over it. Oh shit. You were right, this is fancy. Oh, steak... but... holy shit.

"Don't give me that look." Law spoke simply without glancing away from his menu.

"What look?" Your cheeks heat from the back of your neck to your face.

"That pout on your face you make when you think nobody is looking." Law raises his gaze to meet yours. "It's my treat, I asked you out, and I'm paying." His firm lips quirk higher into a small smile. "Order whatever you want." His brow twitches as irritation flashes across his face for half a second and then leaves. "Just..." He sighed and returned his attention back to his menu and added, "Don't feel embarrassed if you order too much and pack it all away."

Your pout rises into an appreciative smile. "Thanks, Law."

Law's face grows flustered, which is noticeable since he isn't wearing his hat. "The steak is worth it, by the way." He clears his throat, coughing into his fist awkwardly. "I recommend the cheesecake and chocolate overload for dessert, if you are interested."

Your eyes sparkled; you knew Law had said the magic words. cheesecake and chocolate. "How could I possibly pick just one?" You flip your menu to the last page and see both pictures staring right at you. Tempting you. Teasing you. And looking absolutely fucking delicious.

Law inwardly chuckled to himself in amusement. "We could get both, or you could, if you want." There's his happy nurse.

Your eyes snap to his. "Can I really?" Your eyes were hopeful, sparkling beneath the lower candlelight, and Law felt his own heartbeat skip and pound within his chest.

"Of course, you can." He muttered as if you had placed him under a trance. Completely lost within your eyes and spellbound. The Surgeon blinked, lips curling into an amused and challenging grin. "Alright, since you are so worried about the cost, no matter what I say." He tilts his head in the sexy, cocky, and arrogant way of his. Law sets his menu aside and interlocks his inked, tanned hands together. "If you get the steak and eat it, I'll pay."

You opened your mouth to protest, he knew from the way your body straightened and the high notch in your chin.

Law raised a single finger, silently signaling for you to let him finish. "Let me finish, please," he pressed, waiting for you to challenge him. Smug smile growing. "If you don't, then we will split the bill." He nods his head, pleased with himself. "Fair enough?"

You muttered over the deal in your head. The steak did look so good, but you really wanted the pasta. Oh, the crab carbinara delicious and comforting. You stared at it. Did you really want to take Law's deal? Such a generous man. You thought to yourself, inwardly fanning yourself. Standing up for me and doesn't care if I pig out? You didn't think this was how your first date with Law was going to go at all. Seriously, where the hell has he been all your life? If Law had become your boyfriend sooner, would he still act the same? Would he have noticed you in high school? A quiet, bookworm-loving, chubby teenager who adored him from afar? Your heart swelled and ached all the same. You can't change the past, but you can look towards the future, right, Lu?

Law hated that you were quiet. His heart sank and felt heavy within his chest. Did he overstep? Did he fuck things up already? He wasn't teasing you. He was being earnest. He didn't want you to go home hungry. Money was no issue. He'd gladly buy out this whole restaurant for the rest of the night, if you wanted. Screw the other customers. "If you don't want to, you can-" Law's eyes soften as he spoke, meeting your eyes.

You stood and focused on Law's expression.

Law's eyes widened, inwardly panicking that you were getting up and demanding he take you home. End the date so soon. "W-Wait..." He stutters, setting the wine down harder than necessary and nearly tipping over the glass and chair as he began to rise. "Y/n-ya.."

You don't say a word. You leaned over the table, your breasts pressed together, nearly spilling out of your dress, as your soft, manicured hands gently grabbed his face within your hands and kissed him. You had only meant to shake him up. Cause his composure to slip, but you stayed there. You heard a soft audible gasp and intake of breath leave The Surgeon's lips as he returned the kiss. Instead, you decided to tease him a little. Maybe show Kandy or whoever was looking at Law, that he was yours. It felt as if a possessive, greedy succubus was clawing its way out of your skin and attaching itself to your doctor. Inwardly, hissing that he was yours. Decided to give a show, you drag your lips from the corner of his mouth to press into a firmer, possessive kiss.

His own large, tanned, tattooed hands, shaking as he pulled you closer, or as close as he could with the damned table in the way. The kiss was slow and tender, then became hotter and more passionate. You moaned, and he groaned.

Your own pulse is skipping and jumping fast beneath your skin.

His thumb brushes your cheek, slow, delicate, and sensual as if he's familiarizing himself with the shape of your face. His mouth opens and parts, daring to slither out and dance along your lower lip. You moan breathlessly into his parted lips. His own liquid fire and need are growing hotter. His arm around your waist, tightened, blunt nails digging into your dress. Oh, you weren't playing fair. You can't just play with his heart and feelings like this. You can't. And he lets you. His own heart thudding harder within his chest, aching for you and tempting him in maddening, sinful ways.

Law forced himself not to drag you across the table and force you into his lap. He gave a quiet, frustrated huff. "Careful," he muttered softly, "If you tease me and test my patience too much, you might not like me afterwards."

You pulled away, face flushed. Lipstick and gloss smeared and smudged, but you didn't care. "It's a deal, doc." You muttered softly, pulling away and watching his eyes slowly open, dark, heavy-lidded pools of melted silver meeting yours.

Law's face had become flustered. Breathless and panting. "Y-You are a horrible tease and bad influence for my heart; do you know that?" Law asked, a slow, amused chuckle escaping him. Observing you sitting down gracefully, smirking as if you did not just steal another kiss from him.

"Had to get you back for yesterday, is all." You shrug, curling a lock of hair behind your ear. God, that simple gesture looked sexy. "Now, would you please sit down, Law?" You leaned your chin in your hand. "People are staring."

Law immediately sat down; his face, his ears, and the back of his neck were beet-red. "Dammit." He cursed beneath his breath, once again remembering that he couldn't hide his burning face beneath the hat he did not have on his person. "Could have started off with that." He grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest.

Here's Mister Grumpy's famous pout. You giggle to yourself, covering your mouth with your hand and trying not to laugh too loud, but you can't help it.

"What's so funny?" Law raised a brow, confused. His frown deepened.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Your shoulders are shaking. Your eyes are stinging with tears from laughing too hard. "Law, you are such a brat."

Law's face and mouth soften. "Takes one to know one, isn't that the saying?" He fires back.

"I regret absolutely nothing." You wipe your eyes, noticing you had left red gloss and lipstick on his mouth. "Whoops, here." You reach between your legs beneath the table to pull out your purse. "You... ah." You pull out your hand mirror and some makeup wipes. "You got gloss and lipstick on your face." You point at your own mouth for reserve.

"Oh." Law blushes, taking the offered items. Opening the mirror and gazing at his reflection. "It does look like someone's lips fell and stuck to mine." He paused and added, "Again."

"Why did you have to bring that up?" You gave an exasperated sigh. "That wasn't my fault. Bepo ran into me."

It happened a few months ago at the Valentine's Day fundraiser and annual blood drive.

People of all races and species can donate blood and give to charity.

You wore a cute black halter dress with red hearts. A simple, but cute dress. After dragging Nami and Robin along, you made your way to the buffet table. Food, drinks, and sweets were everywhere, and you wanted to sample everything. You were about to grab yourself a plate when Bepo accidentally bumped into you, bowling you over as you fell. You closed your eyes, bracing for impact, when no direct pain came, and you landed on top of something. No, someone. You felt something soft. Warm and pleasant. Something tickling your chin.

You crack open an eye.

You landed on Law.

What's worse?

You were straddling him. Your pink, lacy panties were pressed against his crotch, and your thick thighs were snug and plush against his waist. "Oh god, Law." Shit, that came out wrong. Your voice was low and breathless. It sounded raw and dirty.

Law's own heavily flustered, tanned face and wide silver eyes met your own. He couldn't move. Didn't want to focus on your lower warmth and heat, meeting his pelvis. Law couldn't breathe. He quickly became hazy from lack of oxygen. He had to stop himself from gripping your waist. The seductive way you said his name. Not his title, nickname, or last name, but his first name. So sexy, so breathless. He's not going to be able to get it out of his head now. Goddamn, his adoptive father's curse was rubbing off on him; he knows it. What's worse is that he knows both Rosinante and Doflamingo will ask him questions. Tease him. Ask him if you are his girlfriend and pester him to no end. "Be more careful." Law managed to choke out. "Now, please get off of me." He tried not to stammer. Ignore your heat, the weight of your body fitting perfectly and pleasurable against his own, or the scandalous hint of lace.

"Yes, sir." You quickly scramble off of him without flashing him.

He could feel Bepo, Penguin, Shachi, and Ikkaku staring at him.

Then, as he rose, he saw two familiar pairs of tall figures in iconic twin feathered coats, one pink and the other black.

"Oh my god, Y/n!" Bepo rushed towards you, helping to brush you off. "I'm so sorry." He was fretting over you by the minute. Bursting into earnest and big fat tears.

"Bepo, Bepo, hey, hey." You call out to him gently, motherly and affectionate, as you tilt your head back to meet his dark eyes. "It's okay, big guy." You offer him a smile. "I'm not hurt. Law caught me." You wince. "Well, more so I landed on him, but it's fine."

"Are you sure?" Bepo sniffs, rubbing his eyes.

"Yeah," You smile again, patting his shoulder. "No harm done."

Law slowly stood to his feet. Hints of jealousy flaring. "Bepo, shouldn't you go check on the patient in room 204?" He scowled.

"Yes, sir!" Bepo gave a salute and ran off.

A series of low murmurs and heated whispers simmered and flew through the room.

Law didn't crumble. He stood his ground, fixing his professional glare on everyone who met his gaze. "Shows over everything. The raffle for prizes will be drawn in twenty minutes; you have until then to submit donations. After that, everything is final." He didn't meet your gaze.

Your cheeks heated, strolling over slowly and grabbing your plate and began filling up with everything you wanted, then briskly back to the table where Robin and Nami were waiting.

Yes. Law remembered that night.

That god forsaken holiday focused on couples or men giving tokens of affection towards the woman in their lives. Someone they liked or loved. Lovebirds and lovestruck fools everywhere. A day dedicated to giving flowers and chocolates, professing their love and asking their wives, girlfriends, and lovers to become theirs again. Flaunting their lovers on their arms. Kissing them. Hugging them. And God forbid, make them more hormonal than love-drunk teenagers. Law remembers celebrating it with his parents and Lammy as a kid.

But he never wanted to celebrate it as an adult.

Not until he met you. He didn't know what to get you. Would you have accepted it? He couldn't very well give it to you at work. He could ask Ikkaku to sneak it into your locker, but then you'd probably think it was a prank. Ugh! He wanted to shove his own inked hand into his chest and pull out his own heart, then shove it into a safe. What if I found an actual heart-shaped mold? Filled it with chocolate, painted it accordingly and then give it to her?

That's when Law saw Bepo knock you over. Law's body moved on pure instinct. He ran towards you, shoving people out of his way, or they saw him and jumped back. He caught you. Resulting in you practically pinning him down and landing on top of him.

Law half turned, watching you go. His heart continued throbbing hard and stuck within his throat, squeezing impossibly tight. The impulse to immediately chase after you. Drag you to an examination room to explain to you himself for any injuries. He noticed a slight limp. You had twitched your handle. Dammit. He turned his gaze away, jaw clamped tight, covering his mouth with a hand and his free hand clenched. I wasn't fast enough. He continued inwardly cursing himself.

A familiar black feathered coat blocked his view of you when he turned again. "Is that the cute little, stubborn nurse you keep bringing up, Law?" Rosinante asked, smiling down at him.

Law lowered his hand and sighed, running his inked hand through his unruly raven locks. "Yes." His face softening into its usual mask of indifference, yet the ache and pain, disappointment within his eyes were bright enough for his adoptive father to see.

"Don't give up too soon before things even start, Law." Rosinante advised gently, placing his large hand on Law's shoulder.

Law wanted more than anything, but to retreat into the quiet and comfort of his office. However, he couldn't leave everything to his staff. He would have continued hosting this event, even if he knew his adoptive uncle Doflamingo would be more than happy to slip into the role of host. "You make it sound easy, Cora," Law grumbled.

"Well, well." Another familiar coat-wearing giant appeared. "Isn't she a cute little treat for the eyes?" Doflamingo's gaze went straight for your figure, trying to appear small while eating a handful of big, red, juicy-looking strawberries after dipping it in whipped cream. "Have you bedded her Law?" The giant sunglasses-wearing blonde practically purred as he shifted his hinted gaze down to Law.

"Don't even think about it, Doffy," Rosinante warned, narrowing his blue eyes, his tone hard. "You have plenty of girls in your endless harem of entertainment to control your monstrous appetite with, don't you?"

"Yes, but I haven't tasted her." Doflamingo's ever-present smile widened as he laughed, noticing how tense his adoptive nephew had become. The little snow tiger was all but seething and hissing, threatening to sink his teeth into his neck and rip his throat out.

"I don't see how that's any of your business?" Law glowered.

Doflamingo laughed that ridiculous "fufu" laugh of his. "I'll take that as a no, then." He shrugged his shoulders in his deep red and black suit. "Oh, I remember now." He hummed, swirling his glass of primrose wine and taking a large gulp. "She's the cute one who dressed like Santa during your Christmas party?"

Damn him. Law thought to himself. Of course, Doflamingo would notice.

"Doffy, I think your dates are calling for you." Rosinante pointed in the direction of the three women his brother had brought along with him to the event, getting drunk at their table from the jello shots, margaritas, and whatever alcohol free at the bar after Doflamingo had left a more than generous fat stack of bills on the bar. Rosinante wrapped his long arm around his brother's shoulder, guiding him back. "Come on, I'm sure they would love to hear all about the time you fell into a dumpster after losing your money clip." He teased, glancing back to give Law a wink and a smile.

"Oh no, you don't." Doflamingo's voice lowered, a challenging hiss. "If you dare bring that up, then I'll make you when you broke moms very expensive bottle of perfume playing with it because you thought it was pretty."

Law felt he could finally calm his breathing after getting himself a shot, well, two shots of whiskey. He sighed, leaning back against one of the walls. His black raven locks covered his eyes. He could still feel your touch. You skin on top of his own. Oh god, the heart patterns. Those stupid heart patterns that was everything, on everything like the plague was clinging so beautifully on your goddess-like figure and curves. At must as Law hated the holiday. He adored those patterns. A weird habit he inherited from Rosinante. You in those patterns, stole his breath.

He ran his hand heavily over his face, trying to erase the images still burning behind his eyelids. You bend over him, straddling him, your lower half touching his own. Awakening his own repressed desires and lusts as he tried to think about anything else. Anything to stop his libido from rising and poking you with it. Your full, beautiful, red, painted, and glossy lips pressed against his own, and your chest squished tight against his. He should not be drinking. Knew his emotions and thoughts would run amok. His professionalism and sanity, control would slip.

Law shook his head and raised his gaze. There you sat. Happy, smiling, so full of life. Surrounded by your friends, Bepo, Penguin, and Shachi. A picture-perfect sight. A smile he never wanted to see became dim and dull. A smile he wanted to protect. Someone he wanted with all of his heart and soul, yet was too scared to reach out and fully grasp. Not yet. He thought to himself. "Not yet."

"If you wait too long, she will become out of your reach," Rosinante muttered, brought a cigarette to his lips, and lit it.

Law hadn't realized he'd said it out loud. Then again, he wasn't surprised his adoptive father had snuck away from his nosy giant flamingo of a brother. "I know." He sighed, shoving his hand into his pocket where the small pink and red envelope sat, his long, inked fingers brushing the paper. "You'd like her, I'm sure, Cora." He muttered out loud, bumming a smoke after Rosinante had lit it. He knew it wasn't good for his own health to smoke, but he was stressed, and he often smoked when he drank. Which is why he doesn't drink, but once in a blue moon. If he doesn't drink, then he doesn't smoke. To vises broken and curved out of the way.

Law adjusted his posture, continuing to stare in silence. Welcoming the rare moment of peace where he could just fade into the background and not think. The heavy burden and weight he carries become nothing. Why would you fall in love with someone like him? Then again, whenever he looked at you. He'd become lighter. The blood that often marred his hands, his unclean, surgical hands, didn't feel like a curse. A slow tired and torn smile curved his lips. Yes, Law saved lives every day. He left a trail of blood out in the field and on the surgical tables, blood that wasn't his own. Blood of his patience. The people he swore an oath to heal and save.

But whenever he meets your eyes. Law swears he finds new ways to fall in love with you again. Yes, he saves lives. But you save him. Save him from his inner, darkest thoughts, memories, and miseries.

"A little bit longer," Law whispered to himself. He hadn't noticed Rosinante had left without saying a word.

You raised your head, and your eyes met.

Law left the electricity and heat your gaze to surge, red hot within his gut and throughout his body. His heated skin, already flushed and warm with alcohol, becomes hotter, scalding, hot, too hot. Too warm. A deep, searing flame coiling and tightening around his strong, broken, beating heart. He wonders if it's a fever when he mindlessly checks his own wrist, his thundering heartbeat drumming loudly within his eardrums.

You wave and smile in his direction.

He can't help but copy the gesture. You have him under a spell. Your eyes are bright and beautiful beneath the moonlit sky and fluorescent mood lights. He wanted nothing more than to grab your hand and slip away into the darkness with you. Stare at the moon and stars outside and ask you to become his Valentine. Tell you how you had become his moon, his stars, his love, his corazón. His hand tightens around the envelope once you've turned your dead away, noticing you, Robin, and Nami had gotten up and made your way towards the bathroom.

That's when Law made his move.

He set the card down right in front of your plate, his gaze shifting to his colleague and friends who pretended not to see. Instead, shifting their gazes toward the stage. Law slipped something else out of his pocket and set it down beside the card and left. His face a darker shade, shoving his unfinished cigarette into an ashtray along his way and downing his drink. He needed water. Ice-cool water would help cool him down.

You came out of the bathroom. Confused when you found a pink and red card with hearts on it and a stuffed pom pom in the shape of a heart, it looked like a snow leopard pattern? "Who put these here?" You question out loud. Searching Nami's, Robin's, Penguins, Shachi's, and Bepo's faces. "Did any of you see who-"

A chorus of nopes or no's answered.

You weren't convinced. "I'm not bringing anymore of my no-bake cheesecakes or sweets to our potlucks ever again, if you don't tell me who." You huff, sitting down in your seat a little too hard, plopping down.

That got their attention.

"No!" Penguin and Shachi yelled.

"Please, oh, please don't stop bringing your cheesecake and treats!" Bepo nearly yanked you out of your chair as he hugged you tightly in one of his polar bear hugs.

Nami and Robin stared at the snow leopard, heart-shaped, pom pom keychain, their eyes searching and scanning the crowd for a certain inked, moody, and grumpy doctor. He was nowhere to be found. How convenient.

The redhead and black-haired women giggled to themselves.

"Sometimes, I worry about her, you know," Nami whispered to Robin.

"It's endearing, really." She grinned. "At least, he's trying, which is a good sign."

Law blinked when your steaks and shrimp carbonara arrived.

He gave you back your makeup wipes and hand mirror. He watched you set your purse on the table, and that's when he saw it. The silly, little snow leopard printed, heart-shaped pom pom keychain, right there, on your purse. Law closed his eyes for a brief second. Law managed to control that constant fluctuation of a heartbeat, now skipping a beat and fluttering deep beneath his inked skin, flesh, and bones. "You kept it." Law found himself muttering, his voice a quiet whisper compared to the busy, loud noise of the restaurant, workers, and customers.

Everything became silent, background noise.

You paused, flickering your beautiful eyes and lashes at him.

Shit, he shouldn't have said anything.

Each moment of silence suddenly became unbearable, digging a terrifying, shadowed, black knife into his heart.

Law found himself foundering. Should he lay it off? Pretend not to notice, it's too late now. He did notice. He swears you did it on purpose. Dammit, he blames his big mouth on the wine. He shouldn't have had two glasses. His own breathing became too loud. The silence was too heavy and choking. He opened his mouth; he had to say something, anything. Nothing came out.

"So, it was you." You smiled. Your eyes twinkled with amusement and mischief. "Who else would give me something so cute and cheesy than you, Doctor Trafalgar Law?" You giggled, oh so cutely. Your chubby cheeks are flushed and rosy from the wine. "I'm glad. I like your snow leopard stripes, you know, doc." You pick up your fork, stab into your pasta, twirling it around until you make a perfect bite full, bring it to your mouth, and bite it.

Law swallows thickly. "Yes." He crocked, his in a trance again. One of his tanned, inked hands fisted the tablecloth beneath the table for dear life, white-knuckled. He reached for his glass of lemon water and drank half of it. He's too hot again. Dying of thirst. It doesn't help when you moan how delicious it was. God, you are trying to kill him. If you make that sinful noise after taking a bite of pasta, how much louder and more lewd was your voice going to become when you dig into your big, fat, thick, juicy steak? "Ikkaku recommending something travel size and something..." He answered, panting and gasping after drinking half his glass. "Something meaningful that would make you think of me."

"It does," You admit, licking the creamy, white sauce from your lips. "Well, anything snow leopard and heart patterns make me think of you now."

That calms his racing heart down. Lessens his anxiety and fear. The shock, thunderously drumming, calmed the storms raging within him. "I'm pleased to hear it." He said, taking a deep breath.

"What's wrong, Law?" You set your fork down, reach your hand out, and interlock your hands with his own. "You've been too quiet."

Suddenly, the silence eased. The noise came back. The candlelight bathed you in its light once more. "You look beautiful, Y/n-ya."

Your frown and look of concern rise into a bright smile. "Thank you, Law." You squeezed his hand, giving a reassuring squeeze. "You've already said that, but a few more certainly wouldn't hurt now, would it?"

Law found himself smiling along with you. "I suppose not." He guided your hand to his lips and placed a chaste kiss. "Are you trying to distract me from losing the bet?" He gave a teasing smirk.

"Of course, not." You shake your head as he releases your hand. "Don't make yourself suck, now, doc."

"That's my line," Law replied, cheekily. He raised a brow. "Can't have my date become sick on me."

"I'm not backing down." You puff out your chest, smirking. "If you thought Ace, Luffy, and Sabo can pack away food, then you haven't seen anything yet, mister money bags."

Law's smirk widened. "You're bluffing."

"Am I?" You kept your gaze locked on Law as he dug into his steak with a steak knife and fork. Well, shit. You didn't think he'd make eating look hot. You blame it on that stupid, impish, sexy ass smirk of his. You can't deny him anything when he looks at you like that. Challenging you. Prideful. The King of Kings of his own story. You shake your head and cut into your own steak. Your eyes widened as soon as you took the first bite. "Holy shit, it's soo buttery, tender, juicy, and melts in your mouth." You were practically bouncing in your seat, moaning in delight from the piece of meat.

Law's face bloomed a hard shade of red. Fuck, he knew it. Of course, it wasn't just Law paying attention to your food orgasm and blissful expression. He noticed the other men tried to sneak obvious and purposeful glances, eyeing your food, then your almost erotic expression, the drool slipping out of the corner of your mouth, or how your fully, supple, heavy breasts were bouncing up and down. You were scarfing the slab of meat now. A sense of deja vu hit Law. You weren't kidding; you really could pack it away. Ravenous, vigorous as if it were your last meal, and the waiter or waitress would snatch it away if you didn't inhale it.

Law narrows his eyes at the onlookers. They shifted their lustful and envious gazes away. Look all you want. But you can't touch. The surgeon thought to himself, a dark gleam in his eye. He can't let you win and pay, can he? He was going to regret this later. Law stubbornly matched your pace. He didn't touch his butter and garlic green beans or mashed potatoes until after he'd devoured his steak like a starved man. Law had the advantage. His mouth was bigger. His talented, trained, long, strong fingers cut the steak with medical precision. The steak knife was practically a scalpel with teeth; it didn't matter. He was going to win. He knew his adoptive father and uncle would scold him if they could tell you paid on your first date. Hell, he's sure Pen, Bepo, Shachi, and Ikkaku would scold him harder.

Law didn't care if everyone in the restaurant glanced at you two in disgust or awe. Was it wrong of him to admit he's having fun? Years of stoicism and professionalism were completely shattered. Freeing. Law felt his chest ease for the first time in a very long time. Here he was witnessing the same starved and gluttonous devotion he'd seen from your childhood friends. The childish side of you they had seen, grew up with. He could picture a childlike version of yourself, whacking the troublesome trio if they tried to steal anything from your plate.

Before Law realized it. He had already eaten his slab of meat, green beans, and mashed potatoes when he reached for the bread by mistake and nearly took a large bite out of it if you hadn't stopped him. He jumped, the last mouthful of green beans slid down his throat and tried to come back up against as he coughed, then reached for his lemon water. "W-What's the matter?" Law asked, confused, brows furrowed at your shocked expression.

"Damn, Law." You panted, smiling. Sauce running down your lips and chin as you snickered.

He didn't like being left in the dark. "What?" Law repeated.

You let go of his wrist, pointing out your observation. "I don't think you wanna eat that, Law." You snickered harder in between cleaning your face.

Law blinked. He followed your gaze to his right hand. He paled. Inwardly freaking out. His hand flew back in reflex, dropping the piece of bread as if the loaf was cursed or burned him. He swallowed, nodding his head in understanding. "Thanks." He blushed a dark shade of rosy hue. "I don't like bread." He muttered, pushing the little white basket of bread rolls as far away from him as possible. He glared at it as if he mentally declared vengeance on every single piece of bread in existence.

You cleared your throat after recovering enough to speak. "So, I've heard." You returned to eating the rest of your pasta and sides in peace.

"Pen and Shachi?" Law, asking, raising his voice enough to be heard over the loud noise of the dinner rush crowd coming in.

You hum in answer, drinking more mouthfuls of wine.

"Of course, it was those two. Nosy busy bodies." He grimaced, rubbing his forehead and exasperated with a handful of swears.

That got a smile out of you.

Before you could annoy and tease him more, the waiter, Nathan, arrived. "Would you like dessert?"

"One cheesecake and one chocolate overload, please?" You asked sweetly.

The waiter blinked, shifting his gaze to Law. "What about you, sir?"

"Cheesecake and coffee." Law relied, then added. "Black."

You glanced at the special menu. "Oh, can I have an espresso martini?" You glanced at him, that excitement and sheepish expression peering into his eyes.

"If you take your time with it." Law straightened, his face impassive as he asked for the check. "I win, so I pay." He replied with a triumphant expression marrying his features. "No take-backs."

---- end of chapter 9 -----

Sorry for the long wait! I was stuck how I wanted the date to go, then it was between the house to the restaurant. Happy Valentines Day, my lovelies and Traffy! I hope you love the extra cheesy goofy and hints of raw sexual want and attention between mc and Law.

I can't help, but at more teasing scenes with Law. Yes, I broke the date into 2 parts!

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