Ruairi | Water | Freyja, Floki, Sala

Every human emotion known to mankind viciously churned in Ruairi’s chest as he hyper-fixated on every second of the vision on the water’s top. Being a spectator didn’t spare him from feeling the sudden, suffocating feelings that were unlocking along with the memory that was becoming his again. Simultaneously he was watching as a third party, and internally reliving how afraid and desperate he had been in the moments leading up to, and during, his attempt to save Freyja. If his younger self had been more observant and less tunnel-visioned, as clear as the sinister act that was taking place stood a man who has dined with his family on more occasions than he could count, and flanked his father like a loyal lap dog. Desmond Valestienne: conniving businessman turned elitist politician. It made very little sense as to why such a spineless parasite was there, and Ru was not ready to unravel what that meant at all.

As the vision came to its end, Ru only found himself more torn apart with questions than he was satisfied by answers. He was immeasurably angry as well. Henriik knew, he must have always known. The air element deserved to be diminished to a puddle, but the blond would bide his time. Least shocking was Edward’s involvement to Ru. Unsettling, yes. But it didn’t make his world tilt on its axis the way everything else had. If anyone was cryptic enough to be involved, Edward wasn’t as far a stretch to the water element. Regardless, there was so much less understanding Ru had for the world and everyone around him compared to just an hour ago. Freyja, someone he knew to be a family friend, Henriik, the entire academy itself. How complex, truly, was the world around him?

“You didn’t try to drown me, you had a weird childhood crush on me, and you saved my life.”

Freyja’s voice reminded him that he wasn’t alone. It also reminded him that their foundation of hatred, their burning rivalry, was all built on the sand of false truths. That was the most nauseating aspect of this entire thing: how much he had been robbed of with Freyja. Lifting his blue gaze to her, he struggled to find a snarky comment waiting on his tongue. “I didn’t have a crush, I was just a good friend,” were the unspectacular words he replied with, not even in a defensive manner. He almost felt like he was on autopilot as he digested everything they just watched together.

With his gaze straying back to the water, he had the insistent urge to try and replay that vision on the water again. And again. And again, until he grasped a greater sense of understanding of it all. Even if he went to that length, it’s not like he would be guaranteed any more closure than whatever he was supposed to get with this. “Well,” Ru began with a sigh, his hands seeking refuge in the pockets of his hoodie, “we came, we saw, and we have a handful of people to write thank you cards to for royally fucking us over.” With his two-sense given, Ru couldn’t even begin to hold a serious conversation with Freyja over what had all just occurred. For the first time in his life, he understood why unhappy people enjoyed hobbying in napping, because one didn’t sound too terrible at the moment.

<///////////>

The walk back would have been silent if it weren’t for Floki, though Ru figured that was to be expected. Sala's sole attempt to conversate with him had been met with a short snap, but other than that and Floki, it was quiet. When they had made it back to the cabin all Ru could dwell on was how this place belonged to Henriik’s family, and it disgusted him to even envision the air element’s face.

“You two wily kids sleeping in the same bed again, hm?” Floki jested with a playful intent after a moment of them all entering. “Neither of you seemed to hate it, and it’s not like I would tell your guys’ established lovers, but-”

“Can you shut the hell up? Or do I need to make you?” Ruairi barked in a harsh tone, witnessing what could have been both hurt and offense on Floki’s face before it steeled into a seriousness he had never seen on the boy's face before.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were on your period and couldn’t take a joke,” Floki’s tone was devoid of humor, and as sharp as his green stare as his arms crossed. “You know, I’m kind of sick of your attitude, sir. I understand you’re going through a lot, I do, and I have a lot of patience for people coping through their own stuff, and maybe nobody else aside from her-” he paused, vaguely gestured to Freyja, “-is willing to call out when you’re being a shitty person, but I’m playing that card. You’re being an asshole.”

“Oh, I get it,” Ruairi began with a snide chuckle. “Is this stunt because your little obsession doesn’t even notice you exist? It must be maddening having something you want so badly dangling just out of your reach.”

“No one would know that feeling better than you, right?” Floki was capable of standing his ground when it mattered, and maybe this was all spurred from seeing Sala’s feelings hurt when Ru snapped at her, but he wouldn’t tolerate being consistently treated poorly either. “Are we going to keep hitting below the belt? Or are you going to have a proper conversation like a man? Because the only reason I’m even biting my tongue on the things we’ve personally discussed right now is because I have an amiable respect for you, but that goes two ways, and I will treat you the way you treat me.”

Despite being feet apart from one another, the tensity passed between them was thick. They both knew what Floki was referring to, and contrary to his previous displays of what could be perceived as disloyalty by freely expressing some things he and Ru had talked about, Floki was an entity that could be confided in when it was most needed of him. In a moment of weakness, Ru had, and to even have that turned around on him whether he deserved it or not was enough to make him consider drowning everyone in the room. “Go fuck yourself,” Ruairi growled, before repeating his notion of storming out the way he had the evening before.

“Only if you say please!” Floki had shouted back over the sound of the door slamming. Placing his hands on his hips and filling his cheeks with air, he blew a hefty breath out and turned his attention to Freyja. “It’s our first real fight, I think that’s quite a mighty relationship milestone.”

<///////////>

Freezing was a more welcome sensation than being within twenty feet of Floki for Ru right now. The cabin was still in sight for the water element from the seated position he took against a tree. With his legs drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them to keep them in place, raising his own temperature would keep him warm enough for now. Not forever, and not for long, considering he had drank very little today in comparison to what he typically ingested, and he wasn’t willing to go back inside for his water bottle. Still, it would give him long enough to make peace with the idea of freezing to death.

Everything just felt like it was a thousand pounds on his chest and the weight was growing with each passing hour now. He couldn’t recall a time in comparison to his present when he had been more overwhelmed and unbearably unhappy. Things could have been so different though. That was a primary thought he couldn’t escape from after seeing what had really happened between him and Freyja as children. Everything they’ve done to one another since then has been so unnecessary and he felt like the punchline of a sick joke for playing into this twisted game that he didn’t understand the rules of.

Did Freyja really kill Henriik’s father, or was it another baseless lie? Even so, what would that even have to do with his own father’s close friend? The former headmaster? The other face he couldn’t place a name to? There were still so many things he didn’t understand. His scar was one of those. It seemed so plainly done: just a burn. Yet it looked nothing like Freyja’s burns, and nothing Arah or any other healer he’s tried has been able to rid him of the abomination on his back. Tipping his head up and watching his breath fog, Ru came to the conclusion that this was the absolute worst week he’d ever had in the entirety of his life.

Not even the sound of footsteps approaching him from the direction of the cabin implored him to look away from the sky. “Go away,” Ru said flatly, assuming it was either Floki trying to poorly reconcile or Sala going for another attempt to earn his attention. Instead, a flickering illumination began to generate a noticeable warmth, and Ru lowered his head to see Freyja, and the small fire she had ignited. His gaze followed her movements as she sat with him before he cast his gaze toward the fire that he was silently appreciating the warmth of. “Is this an act of pity or kindness?”

Freyja | Fire | Ru

Freyja’s mind was filled with a million thoughts as she started to come to terms with what she already knew in her heart. She had known that something had happened, something so much more significant than a drowning and a broken friendship. Good friends or not, the pair had developed a devotion to each other at that age that had made both stories highly unlikely. She’d spent years trying to clear up the memory for herself and rationalize why he would have done such a thing, although she never would have admitted that to him. Not even now, when only the largest of a billion secrets between them had come to light.

Then there was Henriik. That same week that everything had gone down between the pair of them, he’d started bringing Freyja flowers and mumbling affectionate sentiments toward her that he didn’t seem to really mean. Freyja wasn’t close with Arah then, and she was barely friends with the air element, but it was something to make Ru jealous, so she exploited it for all it was worth and used the attention to force her own hand into healing. She thought that all boys could make you feel the same way if you tried to like them hard enough, and with this in mind she tried to replace her beloved Ru with someone who could never quite be him. She’d learned this as she aged, and she couldn’t help reflecting on it now. Especially with the anniversary of her relationship with him coming up, and the accusation on the table that she’d murdered his father. All of it made sense now, the lies, the distance and resentment between them, the way he kept her around but never for reasons that seemed rational. What was worse, she wasn’t entirely sure whether or not she was going to end things between them. She had no other option in life than to be Henriik’s if he wished it, and he seemed to, which left her with status and a place in society. It was more than she could give herself as an orphan with no good choices beyond graduation in a world where her kind were apparently looked down upon.

The fire element was uncharacteristically quiet on their walk, keeping her strides even with Ruairi who seemed to be lost in his own mind but somehow managed to be alert enough to slow his stride any time Freyja fell behind him in the group. She was vaguely aware of the way he was acting with Sala, but she couldn’t have cared less about the light wielder’s feelings in that moment. She could have felt guilty that she was the reason Ru had used her at that party to begin with, but her guilt was too busy being utilized in other places at that moment. The only time she came into awareness of what was happening around her was if there was an exaggerated silence after something Floki said, which was typically met with little reaction due to the mood of the entire group. When they finally arrived back at the cabin, Freyja hadn’t made any progress in coming to terms with any of it, but she did feel grateful for the opportunity to take some space away from Floki, who clearly had no concept of when to shut his mouth. Just when she thought it was finally over, an argument erupted between the two roommates, one that was much more serious than anything she’d ever fought over with Ru. There seemed to be emotions involved in it on both sides, and though Freyja had a million questions, she lacked the energy to be properly nosy in that moment. She wasn’t surprised when the curly-haired blond stormed out of the cabin. In fact, she would have taken his exit as an excuse to make her own if the dark-haired boy hadn’t grabbed hold of her attention first.

“It’s our first real fight, I think that’s quite a mighty relationship milestone.”

She studied him briefly, considering whether or not it was worth it to involve herself in the portion of the matter that was Floki’s. “You, not now. Later, lots of questions, but not right now. I’ll deal with you when I get back.” Her face was serious, but there was a lighter quality to her eyes that reflected the sentiment behind her brief words as she put her hands on his arms and spoke to him as if he were a child and she were the adult in charge. She did want to be nosy, and she knew from experience that the vaguest prompt or sliver of attention from someone could get him to break any confidences he’d previously maintained. It was quite sad, actually, but beneficial in the drama she knew she’d be craving when they returned from the trip, and when she felt more qualified to go after Ruairi than to listen to the animated woes of his roommate.

After exiting the building, Freyja watched the blond from afar for a brief moment as he sat at the base of a large tree, hugging himself for warmth in a way that made her think of what they’d seen reflected in the water. They were just kids then, and as Ru had said earlier, they’d been royally fucked over at an age where they should have just gotten to be children. She had a million questions pertaining to why they had needed to be separated in the first place, and what Edward’s role in it was. She’d forgotten it for a few minutes as the pair had been fighting, but seeing him pressed up against the tree in a similar way to what he’d been like in the Sanctum only brought these things back to her. Decidedly, it was better to be with him than without him, especially when they both had the same things on their minds.

As she started approaching him, she heard his futile attempt to remain alone in a tone that wasn’t meant for her. That was a strange concept, considering that any other time in their lives, his hatred and resentment was reserved exclusively for her. But even that felt like a lie now, with everything that had been learned in the last week.

“Go away.”

“As if that’s ever worked for you,” Freyja countered, bringing a small flame that developed into a substantial wall of fire to keep him warm and to prevent the others from seeing or hearing them. It was high enough that it blocked their view of their surroundings too, and by its nature it drowned out noise on both sides. Perhaps it wasn’t the safest thing for her to do in a strange and unfamiliar place, but life seemed to have been eradicated from this area, and the fire element wasn’t necessarily thinking of the physical dangers in the woods as much as the ones they would be faced with when they returned. It wasn’t like anyone would cross into it to get burned, either.

Taking a seat beside him against the large tree, Freyja stayed quiet for a moment or two, knowing that it wasn’t really the time to discuss any of what they’d seen or else she’d spend her counterpart back into a tailspin. She was perfectly comfortable in silence with him, and she much preferred his physical presence to that of the three figures in the cabin who were somehow more irritating than he had ever been.

“Is this an act of pity or kindness?”

She turned her gaze from the fire she was manipulating to his expression. He seemed upset, and she preferred to console him than handle her own emotions. She was better at it. “For legal reasons, it’s a third thing that I am ethically bound to withhold from you. The ethical code being my personal set of preferences, of course.” She smiled, though it didn’t reach her eyes. She sighed and pressed her head against the tree, adding, “it’s funny, I was under the impression that you needed paper to write thank you cards. I was also under the impression that you were a terrible writer and that anything remotely related to that should be left to me. Which is why I’m here, of course.”

She paused for effect, before continuing. “I’ll start, alright? Not-dear Headmaster Delamater, fuck you. I don’t appreciate your lifelong assumption that I am a dangerous and inherently evil monster who may or may not have murdered your brother when the only person I have ever truly wanted to murder is you, right now. Although, if he was or is anything like you, I suppose I could see why you would think I would want to murder him too. I think it’s a really classy move to put blood on your nephew’s hands at such a young age, and I have been the opposite of impressed at the work you’ve done with him since then. However, I do appreciate your willingness to supply him with things that you think women like in order to do what you think of as keeping me around. I only wish you were a bit more accurate in your sense of taste, it would make it less clear to everyone around you that you’ve never been touched by a woman before. Thank you, above all,” her voice cracked, and her sarcastically professional voice was replaced with something raw and heartfelt, “for making me feel like I was something to fear, and taking away the only person who ever treated me like something that wasn’t,” she recovered her initial tone, though never fully. “If it weren’t for you, my life would be very different in mostly positive ways.” She looked to Ru after a long monologue of staring off into the flames she’d created, only vaguely checking her peripheral vision to ensure that he was not tired of her antics. Not that she would have stopped if he was, of course. “I think that’s a good start, anything to add? There are so many years of horrors, I’m afraid it may take us several cards to get it all in.”

Sighing softly, she slid forward so that she was lower to the ground, letting her head land gently on his shoulder. “Before we get to the next card, you should know that you were right about one thing, which should feel good to you considering the thousands of days that have gone by with me being flawless and perfect and never wrong and you being the opposite of those things.” She smiled softly into his arm, unable to contain her amusement with herself and the general aura of smugness that constantly enveloped her. “That time when we were fourteen and we had that truth challenge and you claimed that I had rigged it somehow and my tells were too obvious that I was lying? All that stuff I said about Henriik always being my first choice, and that I never considered you? I made Arah switch out the truth serum with an extra dose of what makes me resistant to water.” She let a moment, then several pass. She slipped her hand into his. “It was never going to be us, was it? Not really. Not when so many goddamn people wanted to get involved, not when they made me into something you could hate.” Feeling the weight of what had simply been disillusionment in the past and was now truth, Freyja just squeezed his hand, sitting in the emotion and the aftermath of what had happened to them.

Ruairi | Water | Freyja

“For legal reasons, it’s a third thing that I am ethically bound to withhold from you. The ethical code being my personal set of preferences, of course.”

Having rolled his eyes following the twitch of a smile he responded with, Ruairi uncoiled himself from his more closed-off position by extending the length of his legs out, thankful there was enough room to do so with the location of the fire. “Of course,” he parroted, finding it easier to play into Freyja’s antics for the time being than to counter them.

“It’s funny, I was under the impression that you needed paper to write thank you cards. I was also under the impression that you were a terrible writer and that anything remotely related to that should be left to me. Which is why I’m here, of course.”

“Your first impression is a preference, you can make thank you cards out of anything if you’re crafty enough,” Ru countered in a mild attempt to be cheekier than he actually felt like being. “And your second impression is a matter I’m willing to debate at a time more convenient for myself, between tomorrow and never, ideally.” He added, resting his hands on his abdomen while sinking into the not-so-comfortable luxury of the tree they sat against. It wasn’t beyond his immediate thoughts that under any other non-life-changing circumstances, this kind of content he currently felt beside her would have never happened, but if those things of the past had never happened, maybe moments like these would be a common norm between them. A sad thought but a thought nonetheless. How could he not mourn a friendship that had been so important to him, and would have potentially remained such a treasured relationship in his life now had those things never happened? They could have been more, he thought, and it was a concept that was painful to idealize.

Ru was visibly humored by Freyja’s monologue, noting the illumination of her visage from the fire’s flames. They had been a strange pair as children, and Ru considered them to have grown into something far stranger. Especially now. She could continuously talk for hours just like this right now and he would have found fulfillment in just listening for as long as she let him. It had been similar once upon a time, when he had wanted to know every little thing about the strange girl with no favorite color and who truly had very little to tell.

Looking at her now through the lens of a scope he’s either just been given, or perhaps rediscovered, he began to realize how weak his years of effort of wishing the thoughts of her out of his head had been. Somehow her face always managed to spring to the surface of his innermost thoughts, taunting him. Some part of him might have enjoyed the torture over the years, because in some twisted frame of mind he couldn’t begin to fathom, he would have rather had her in some way than not at all.

This girl has destroyed him. The same girl who has been the bane of his existence for the better portion of a decade. The same girl who would burn him to ash for kissing her, the same way she had burned him both physically and metaphorically every time he had made the mistake of letting his guard down with her. Of course, in this sick game of fate, Freyja would be the girl he would fall for, and maybe had fallen for long before he was even considering it right now. One of his hands subtly moved to his face to nonchalantly cover his mouth. He must be losing his mind.

“I think that’s a good start, anything to add? There are so many years of horrors, I’m afraid it may take us several cards to get it all in.”

Grateful for having been reminded that he possessed the ability to function externally, Ru’s hand lowered from his face back down to join where the other was resting idly. “I think you’ve got that particular card perfectly covered,” he replied in what was supposed to be a steady tone that had escaped as a mumble while her head delicately magnetized to his shoulder. Resisting the instinct to tense on impact, the blond drew out a heavy exhale to force himself to appreciate whatever this feeling was. It was greater than content, he knew, but if the cross-breeding of uncertainty and elation had a name, he was not acquainted well enough with it to know.

“Before we get to the next card, you should know that you were right about one thing, which should feel good to you considering the thousands of days that have gone by with me being flawless and perfect and never wrong and you being the opposite of those things.”

A faux frown of unamused origins temporarily teased his features, though not without being accompanied by a raised brow curiously arrogant as to what he could have possibly been so right about that she was willing to admit it. “By all means, do share.” He prompted, the former frown lifting into a smirk as his gaze studied the length of her features that were most visible to him.

“That time when we were fourteen and we had that truth challenge and you claimed that I had rigged it somehow and my tells were too obvious that I was lying? All that stuff I said about Henriik always being my first choice, and that I never considered you? I made Arah switch out the truth serum with an extra dose of what makes me resistant to water.”

Freyja had lied. About something he had considered rather pivotal amid his adolescent throes of an identity crisis, uncomfortably learning what it was like to grow from boy to man, and juggling an intense hatred toward Freyja that had messed a lot with his pubescent state of mind. “I knew it,” he lightly scoffed in forced arrogance, as if the weight of her confessed truth wasn’t making his heart rattle in the cage of his chest. Did Freyja even know the severity of what an admission like that did to him? Was it even worth confessing that he had done the same for that challenge? Reinforcing his silence was the hand of the fire element that had slipped into his, an action he didn’t shake off or pull away from. He let it happen, he let her get close. He always let it happen.

“It was never going to be us, was it? Not really. Not when so many goddamn people wanted to get involved, not when they made me into something you could hate.”

I don’t think I ever hated you, not really, were the words sitting at the tip of his tongue that he knew he didn’t dare have the courage to say. He tried to tell himself these were empty words, but that notion did not come so easily to him as it might have a week ago. Ru wanted those words to have meaning, so much more than he could ever begin to lower himself into conveying. “Don’t give them all the credit, you’re pretty capable of being mean to me all on your own,” the blond told her, though as more of a jest than an insult.

Moments passed where his gaze had fixated on the dance of the flames before them, while the entirety of his attention remained steadfastly on Freyja. “Your silly little promise last night of not kissing me unless I specifically asked for you to was a childish way of admitting you might like me,” Ruairi teased, choking down the cowardly part of himself that was afraid to dip his feet into these foreign waters. She had admitted to cheating during the truth challenge all those years ago though, and he felt fourteen again: unsure of how to properly handle what may or may not have been something that spanned greater than the label of just having a ‘crush’.

Refusing to let her hand escape his as he shifted subtly enough to comfortably look down to meet her gaze, Ru swallowed and was forced to covertly use his own magic to keep his palm from sweating and hurting her, from forcing her away from him despite the throb forming on his back that he desperately wished he could rip out of his body. “I don’t even think you actually need to consider it, I think you just enjoy watching me need something enough from you to ask for it,” he said, smiling, lowering his voice as he dipped his head low enough to better acquaint himself with the brilliant flecks of color in Freyja's green eyes that were waiting to be discovered by the right admirer. This proximity to her was all of his own volition, and the risk of being burned, or worse, felt worth it enough to place himself into harm’s way if only to subject himself to connecting to her by touch. “Am I onto something?” He asked, a whisper riding on his breath through the constriction of both his throat and chest as he was close enough to brush his features with her own. The whole world felt like it had begun to crack and cave in today, but right now, Ru wouldn’t have minded telling the world to fuck off for just one minute. This one minute he needed right now, he thought, could change his life in a way that could finally be for the better.

Freyja | Fire | Ru, Sala

“Don’t give them all the credit, you’re pretty capable of being mean to me all on your own.”

Her lips twitched upward into a slight smile. “Can you blame me?”

Another moment passed, enough so that it was clear to Freyja that he had been lost in these thoughts before he felt brave enough to voice them. “Your silly little promise last night of not kissing me unless I specifically asked for you to was a childish way of admitting you might like me.”

“Hmm,” was her brief response, a minimal encourager that also gave off the impression that there was something to ponder about what he’d said. In reality, she felt stripped of a good comeback, and she wasn’t entirely sure where he was going with that statement. In the back of her mind, there was still a possibility that he was going to turn on her or use this information against her. He could find and exploit her weaknesses like no one else, and this would have been a good one to hang onto. Emotional security would be uncharted territory for the pair after years of psychological warfare, and she feared how easily she was giving into whatever was between them now.

“I don’t even think you actually need to consider it, I think you just enjoy watching me need something enough from you to ask for it.” He turned his head toward her at this point, studying her features with a great intensity. It was so tangible that it made Freyja feel the slightest bit of insecurity, as if he were checking for cracks in her facade. She knew he was the only one who could find them, and that made her hesitant.

“Need?” She chose to focus on the one word that took the focus off of her own feelings and placed it back onto him. When he inched closer to her, she only became aware of the power leaving her body through her right hand, and the wall of flames which were no longer hovering smoothly a few inches off the ground but were moving frantically in a way that made the entire scene moments away from disaster. If she continued to mix magic and feelings, she would have accidentally torched the cabin before she could divert her attention away from him to even notice.

“Am I onto something?” Now there was even less space between them, and she didn’t glance down at his lips because she was concerned about what might have happened if she did. However, her brain was growing increasingly foggy, and the lack of space between them only made her want him to close the space between them more. With her free hand, she clenched her fist and allowed the entire wall to dissipate, a not so subtle indicator to Ru that his suspicions were correct. She fought the urge to affirm his words and give in, though her eyes said everything her mouth wasn’t. Finally, a knowing and slightly smug smile reached her face as she stayed perfectly still, unwilling to go back on what definitely wasn’t a promise after having it so recently brought to light.

She glanced down at his lips, returning her gaze to his eyes and making a bit of a show of it. She felt less strong than she assumed she appeared. “Is this you asking?”

She felt a growing warmth in the palm he was holding, something that had happened before with him but not something that she could properly identify. There was a certain tingling sensation for her and a pleasant warmth, not something that could burn him but not something she was trying to do, either. It seemed involuntary, and that only increased her awareness of the depth of her feelings for him. The more she thought and felt, the more she wished he would just hurry up and kiss her. She could have used a distraction from herself at that moment, and it wasn’t like they didn’t have a plethora of excuses for whatever this was that was going on between them. In order to maintain her sanity and keep him from running away due to the recollection of what she could do and had done to him on a variety of occasions, the fire element withdrew her hand from his and lifted the normal one to the side of his face, her fingers just barely in his hair. For the first time, she felt his attention wander from her toward the cabin, and the faint thud that followed caused her to turn her head to follow his gaze as well. She saw Sala, who had been holding a bunch of small items that she’d clearly dropped and was even more clumsily picking up, clearly out of a negative emotional response toward what she was seeing. The girl was a trainwreck.

Not able to make eye contact with the pair, Sala shouted to them that they’d managed to find something to eat for dinner in the cabin and that they were waiting for them to come in. She seemed as if she were vaguely keeping herself from crying, which Freyja considered to be a sign of weak character. The girl watched from the porch, clearly implying that she would not be leaving without them or giving them time to discuss what had occurred. It was a very passive aggressive form of control, and one that the fire element didn’t appreciate. However, she was more afraid to look Ru in the eye after the way she’d just exposed herself to him by letting whatever had just happened happen between them. She would have rather taken some time to be alone from all of them, but Sala was making it clear that they would be going in for dinner.

Getting to her feet, Freyja offered Ru a hand without looking him in the eye. Once he’d gotten up, she took her hand back, walking a pace or two ahead of him into the cabin. She didn’t say a single word to him in that time.

Despite the awkward entrance, the dinner was even worse, primarily because of the various forms of tension that were occurring between each party. Floki and Sala were clearly still having a thing, which made Floki still mad at Ru. Sala was mad at Freyja for what she’d seen between her and the water element, and Freyja couldn’t help but feel Ru’s gaze burning into her from directly across the table. The only one who seemed perfectly content was Máx, who seemed to be enjoying the only silence that had manifested itself since they’d left campus. He had no issues with anyone at the table, and seemed out of place amidst the others.

Freyja ate as quickly as possible so that she could leave as quickly as possible, making it obvious that she was not a fan of the tension in the room as she exited. She made a fire in the fireplace and then moved her things into the bed beside Ru’s, no longer worried about her status in the group. With the tension between them, which was primarily caused by her, she didn’t feel right about sharing a bed with him, not when Floki and Sala had already made mention of it, and she was still going back to the nightmare that was her long-term relationship with Henriik. Floki had a big mouth, and Sala could use it as leverage for missing the remainder of the competition. She didn’t want to give anyone any reason to talk.

Though it was impossible to sleep with so many thoughts and emotions running through her head, Freyja pretended to be asleep for what felt like an eternity as the others came in and went to bed on their own as well. She felt a pang of guilt and a strong desire to read Ru’s face as she sensed him walking past her, though she was too stubborn to give up her position of control to do so. Finally, once they were all in bed and in the dark once more, Freyja opened her eyes to stare at the ceiling, knowing that sleep would be nearly impossible in a position like the one she was in. She couldn’t help but get the impression that Ru was still awake and wouldn’t be getting much sleep either.

Rolling onto her side, she tried to make out his features in the safety of the dark. It was difficult to see, although the distance between the beds only gave them a foot or so of additional space as compared to what they’d had the night prior. She couldn’t be sure where his head was at since she’d been avoiding him since they hadn’t kissed, yet she wished she could have been a more mature person and faced her problems directly. Sometimes she felt like they had come so far since childhood, and other times, he made her feel like she was still a little girl with a not-so-secret crush. He was the only one that could do that to her, and that scared her more.

Ruairi | Water | Freyja

“Is this you asking?”

Returning the notion of allowing his eyes to fall to her lips before raising and meeting her gaze again, he smiled thinly. “It’s open for interpretation,” he replied, unwilling to be clear in what he was clearly on the brink of doing. Repeatedly allowing her this close to him was living out the definition of insanity, considering it always ended the same way and he was never quite expecting it to go otherwise. This time, though, he dared to risk the anticipation of a better outcome, and it was a feeling reinforced by the fire having fully extinguished and her hand coming up to rest on his face. Not getting the few seconds he wanted to relish in whatever this was and what it could have meant between them, and before he could bridge his commitment to this moment by following through on what they were both expecting, his gaze made the mistake of straying to Sala, who had singlehandedly killed the mood just as quickly as it had come between him and Freyja.

It really wasn’t meant to be them, so it seemed. Ru couldn’t attribute this to just Sala having bad timing, even though she did, but he was beginning to think that maybe every aspect of the universe was incapable of letting him and Freyja be unless they were at each other’s throats. Following a sharp expression thrown Sala’s way, Ru took the offering of Freyja’s hand as he got up, and just as quickly Freyja withdrew her hand and herself entirely to keep ahead of him in pursuit of the cabin. Wasting a few seconds of his time standing there and wondering why it looked so easy for her to walk away after what had just almost occurred between them, Ruairi trailed the path she had already walked to get back inside.

<//////////>

The aftermath of the already silent and awkward-weighted atmosphere of dinner was only followed by more silence as everyone had settled into their beds. Being a bed apart from Freyja hadn’t stopped his occasional glance in her direction, similar to the tension over dinner not halting him from staring at her and waiting to see a slip of a tell that meant anything in regard to what had almost happened. Was she ignoring him and their near kiss because she was just as internally worked up as he was over it? Was she embarrassed? Thinking about Henriik? Ru hated that thought, but it also reminded him that he was technically in a relationship too. With a psycho. Was Heris involved in this conspiracy of people with power who wanted Freyja dead? She did try to kill Freyja, after all, but these puzzle pieces didn’t come together in a way that created a full picture for Ru. Not yet.

The ceiling had become his gaze’s fixation while he laid on his back and allowed his every thought to run rampant at once. Not even having four other people currently residing in the cabin with him made him feel any less alone in what he was experiencing, and the only person who could even begin to share in that with him was, and has always, been the catalyst to his ruin inside and out.

A sudden terror seized him and simultaneously he gripped the fabric of his shirt where his chest was. He felt the familiar agony of unraveling entirely begin with the tremor of his hands and the constriction of his chest. No. Not here, not now. Hearing the sound of movement from where Freyja was, the blond knew with confidence that she was awake, because she had to be right now. Through a series of tight, labored breaths Ru lifted himself from his bed to slide his shoes on. Moving in no graceful manner and not caring to try, the blond stepped close enough to Freyja’s bed to give a decent enough kick to the frame for it to be quiet but force her attention. “I know you’re awake,” he whispered, took a breath, “we need to talk. Outside.”

Shuffling to the door and making it outside, he was grateful for the paralyzing intake of cold air in his lungs. Using the side of the cabin as a tool to lean into in case he could not stop the panic attack that was well on its way to devouring him, Ru clenched his trembling hands at his side and focused on the art of mastering a pattern of breaths. In for seven seconds, hold for seven seconds, out for seven seconds. Repeating the only process that made him feel like he had a semblance of control over the situation, he encouraged himself to feel how cold his environment was too. He couldn’t let himself think about how much he hated how weak he was inside to be reduced to this, or why he had just made the potential mistake of asking Freyja outside and setting himself up to be in a potentially comprising situation in front of her. Stupid. But he didn’t like to be alone for very long, especially not with himself like this, and out of the others in the cabin she was the best choice of company, which said enough in itself of how upside down his world had become.

Having not bothered to grab anything warmer to throw over his T-shirt either, Ru’s arms crossed tightly over his chest as he was beginning to be granted the ability to inhale comfortably. It was exhausting inside and out to even get to this point, though it was not as tolling as suffering through the entirety of a panic attack. Once he saw Freyja step out in his peripheral, he didn’t directly look at her nor did he give her the opportunity to say anything before he began talking. “I lied,” he said, more breathy than he would have liked, but he couldn’t control every aspect of how he conducted himself right now to his liking.

“The truth challenge, I mean, I lied. I cheated too. I meant what I had said about you being the worst thing to ever happen to me, and I’m not entirely sure that truth will ever change,” pausing for a greater margin of breath out of infuriating necessity, Ruairi continued. “But I didn’t mean what I had said when I called you a burden to everyone around you, and to me. I didn’t mean it when I said I had never cared about you, or that it was only a matter of time before Henriik threw you away the same way I should have before… everything is a mess.” Ru said, as if he had just fully allowed the realization to sink in with an unsteady breath. He was a mess, they were a mess, the world is a mess. And he has no control over any of it.

With a hand running tensely through his hair, Ru’s head briefly shook in a weak attempt to clear it. “You were my best friend, and I cannot fathom why the one thing I had wanted for myself was the one thing I couldn’t have. I did everything I should have,” it was true on two fronts: he had done everything right to have a friend, and he had done everything that had been asked of him as a child to earn even going to the academy to be around children versus being privately mentored. He had begged to go, and he should have known by his father’s smile that his wish being granted would have cost him everything. It was even more crippling to think that there was a chance his own parents had played a part in what happened between him and Freyja, if seeing his father’s loyal lap dog in the vision wasn’t suspicious enough. Ru couldn’t help but think it had been a cruel punishment to teach him another twisted lesson. It was a sickening length for his father to have gone to, and Ru didn’t really want to think that was the truth of the situation, but what ate at him was the possibility.

“This is so much more complicated than I had prepared myself for, and I just… I am completely blind to the pieces missing in this puzzle, and I am-” Consumed by his own spiral, Ruairi hadn’t even registered Freyja’s motions toward him until her lips were on his. Being as still as he was, he would have expected himself to have gone completely rigid as Freyja kissed him, but instead, he felt blissfully numb inside and out. The action didn’t last long, but the intoxication of it lingered. Blinking a few times as his blue eyes held onto her green gaze, Ru was both grateful and confused. “What,” he breathed, searching her face for answers he didn’t have, “was that for?”

Freyja | Fire | Ru <3

“I know you’re awake,” amidst the heavy breathing coming from the other side of the room, she heard him inhale shakily, “we need to talk. Outside.”

Considering the fact that Freyja would have rather been anywhere else in the world at that moment, she ignored the constricting feeling in her chest and wordlessly followed suit toward the door, not oblivious to the fact that she was doing a much better job of gracefully handling herself in the darkness. Ru could not have been more clumsy, but it was clear that he wasn’t trying not to be, either. In her already hazy mind, Freyja struggled to comprehend what could have possibly been so important that it required her attention at that hour. On one hand, he probably just wanted to discuss what had transpired between them earlier, but there was nothing Freyja could trust at that moment. For all she knew, he was going to tell her that Sala was trying to kill her too, or that he had actually been involved in Heris’ attempt on her life.

As she made her way into the frigid air, Freyja crossed her arms to keep some semblance of heat in, squinting to make out his figure in the dark. It was another cloudy evening, and though the clouds were extremely amusing to someone who had been living in a simulation for her entire life, they provided no more light than the sky within the academy did. She had half a mind to take several large steps off the porch and away from the log cabin so that she could use her magic to keep herself warm, but Ruairi’s mannerisms kept her glued in place exactly where she was. As her eyes continued to adjust, she identified all of the tells: the shaking hands, the pacing and fidgeting, the way he was so easily out of breath: he was completely panicked.

Now on edge herself, Freyja opened her mouth to ask him what was going on, but quickly silenced herself with the abruptness and earnestness in his words. She listened carefully as he admitted to the other half of the crime she’d confessed to earlier in the day. Would it have really been so bad if she told him she’d known? Arah was a terrible liar, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that she was doubling the replacement potion for a reason. In this instance and this instance only, her ego overpowered her sense of self-righteousness. She didn’t mind hearing useless words when they were coming from him. Not when they evened the playing field from her confession earlier in the day. She had to have something to get him on if he turned on her when they returned to the academy, and this seemed good enough to her.

She was doing fine allowing the darkness to cover up facial expressions that were entirely too loud until he got to the next words. “You were my best friend, and I cannot fathom why the one thing I had wanted for myself was the one thing I couldn’t have. I did everything I should have.” A dull ache stirred in her chest, something that she’d been pushing off since she was a child. They had been best friends once, before everything else. Before there was Arah, there was Ru, perfectly content to listen to her ramblings as if they were the most interesting thing in the world. When she was in crisis, he was the most calming thing in the world. But that was before. And she hadn’t thought about it since–couldn’t think about it–until now. Her chest felt even heavier, and tears welled in her eyes, threatening to spill over if she let them.

“This is so much more complicated than I had prepared myself for, and I just… I am completely blind to the pieces missing in this puzzle, and I am-” She interrupted his words with a gentle but heartfelt kiss, something that she hadn’t really thought about doing before she acted on it. He had always been the one to think things through, and any words of his beyond his last sentiment had barely registered with her. All she had wanted to do was what she eventually did, bringing her lips to his and holding him close in the dark. It wasn’t a passionate kiss like the last one, but it was full of emotions she didn’t even know how to begin to say as words. She felt like she was standing at the edge of a cliff, just barely touching the surface of all of the emotions she’d been holding down for years. When she pulled away, she still had her hands on his neck, finding his eyes in the dark as she felt the strength and the speed of his pulse between her palms.

He was even more breathless than her, likely a mix of the adrenaline from the kiss and the panic from before, and she felt his steady gaze in the dark. There was an aura of wonder about him that she hadn’t necessarily expected, but appreciated. Every time she touched him, he reacted. Henriik had been disengaged from Freyja from the start, so everything she did with Ru felt like it was happening to her for the first time.

“What was that for?”

She smiled through unsteady breaths. “Your heart’s racing,” she observed, her voice soft and barely above a whisper. She caressed his neck with her thumb as if to indicate how she knew that, continuing on in an attempt to sound more composed than she felt. “Your palms were shaky, you were pacing, out of breath,” she spoke these symptoms between the gentle kisses she placed on his jaw, focused only on the response of his body, which seemed to be illuminated by her senses in the dim light. To say the next words, she pulled back and looked him straight in the eye. “I’ve been your enemy for most of my life, you think I don’t know when you’re having a panic attack?” Then, in a more emotional, fragile tone, “I know you better than I know myself.”

A heavy silence sat over the pair of them for a moment as the threat of the future took over her immediate thoughts. She released him from her hands at this point, turning away from him to look off into the distance.

“What now?” She begged for an answer she knew he couldn’t give in an exasperated tone. “Really, what now?” It was filled with anger the second time, at the universe, at the academy, at everyone who thought it was their right to play god and strip them from each other when he was all she had, and vice versa. She started to break down at this point, letting the threat of tears cause cracks in her voice and allowing her throat to burn so much her voice became hoarse with the emotion she was feeling. “We go back to the academy, pretend we hate each other, I go back to someone who’s keeping me around as a punishment, you leave in a few months, and I never…see you…again?”

These last words were spoken between sobs, which Freyja fought to control in order to keep the burning sensation on her face to a minimum. Since they were not within the healing properties of academy grounds, the tears would surely scar and be visible until they returned, and she didn’t want the other three to say anything to her or know anything about what had happened. “It’s not like there’s any other options for me, I’m an orphan, an outcast, a-”

Before she could finish that thought, she felt Ru’s gentle touch as he directed her head back toward him and kissed her back with the same softness she’d used on him. It was so easy for her to find herself back in his arms, especially when the coolness of the night was getting beneath her skin and his body was always so warm. When he pulled away, his hands went to her cheeks, gently wiping the tears away in such a delicate way that she could have cried harder. He was trying not to burn her more.

“My grief is not even comparable to your grief, first of all,” she smiled through her tears, laughing softly in some misguided release or catharsis. She let her hands travel up to where his rested on her face, taking in the feeling of his hands as if it were the last time. Every time with him felt like the last time. “And second of all, don’t even think about wiping your mouth.”

She pulled her hands off of his, giving in and flinging her shivering frame into the warmth of his body more fully. Her arms fit perfectly around his chest, and her head fit perfectly in the crook of his neck. She held him with strength she didn’t have, tears once again falling although she felt numb to the burning sensation at that point. “I don’t want to lose you again,” she pleaded softly into his shoulder, voice still raspy and uneven as she choked back sobs, “I just got you back.”

Ruairi | Water | Freyja <3

“Your heart’s racing.”

That was not a statement Ruairi could refute even if he had wanted to, if the sound of his heartbeat pulsating in his ears was any more proof to him than what he could already feel as her thumb glided over the skin of his neck. Freyja began to list his blatant tells in a way that should have prompted him to begin scrambling to piece together both his pride and dignity, but that was all non-existent against the feathered kisses along his jaw that fractured his ability to concentrate on sheltering his precious ego from her.

“I’ve been your enemy for most of my life, you think I don’t know when you’re having a panic attack? I know you better than I know myself.”

It must be her mission to both break him and remind him what it felt like to feel truly alive tonight, because that’s all that was transpiring behind his soft blue eyes. Trying and failing to not let that sentiment attach to the very core of what made him whole, Ru’s throat bobbed with a tight swallow. Her words burned in his head. They crippled the part of himself that had believed she was the embodiment of all that he should hate, all that he should shield himself from, and all that he should purge from his life. She knew him. And not just the parts of him worth ridicule and contempt, because he was too well acquainted with those parts of himself as it was. Freyja was gazing into a detrimental weakness of his and was meeting it with nurture he did not know how to accept, but was nonetheless in awe of.

As she removed her hands from him and shifted her attention to something beyond him, Ru’s fingers twitched in the repressed urge to reach out and force her hands back to where they could have called home for a moment longer. The child in Ru who was desperate to feel any kind of acts of care wanted to tell her to never let go, not again. He had forgotten how numb he had become beneath the peace he had made with a guarded heart that disallowed him to grow genuinely attached to anything around him, because anything worth having was something that would inevitably be lost. Losing Freyja when he had needed someone in his corner as a child lived as an open wound in his heart that had never scarred over for him to be able to move on from that hurt.

“What now? Really, what now?”

While he knew that was not a question she expected him to give her, there was a lot he would have given to provide her with an answer worth sharing. A brief flash of guilt panged his chest as he considered his anxiousness could have infected Freyja. “We go back to the academy, pretend we hate each other, I go back to someone who’s keeping me around as a punishment, you leave in a few months, and I never…see you…again?” The sheer intensity of the emotion in her tone made his expression fall just as far as he had from grace. Even if they had done everything right, Freyja was right, he was leaving in a matter of months, and not to a place that would grant her any more safety than the academy did. She would be completely out of reach to him, settling to be in the arms of a bastard who never wanted her, nor could ever possibly begin to know her the way Ru did even if he tried. Ruairi knew very well he had little right to feel what he could only consider to be some relative of jealousy and a newfound homicidal hatred toward Henriik, but the feelings were just as present as every single one he felt toward Freyja right now that were the opposite of how an enemy should feel concerning their greatest nemesis.

The broken sobs she was evidently wrestling to maintain control over stirred parts of Ru that began to manifest itself in a need to console her. He didn’t think he had been the greatest at it as children, and he had only grown farther from the kindred parts of his soul as the years had passed. “It’s not like there’s any other options for me, I’m an orphan, an outcast, a-” Silencing her heartache the way she had silenced his panic, Ruairi gently turned her face back up to his and lowered his head enough to meet her lips with his own to reciprocate what she had done for him. His hand had snaked itself through her hair to cradle the back of her head as he kissed her. If he had only been concerned with physical intimacy it would have been devoid of the emotion he was softly expressing, and he would have escalated quickly. But this was something to cherish to Ru, something worth waiting for.

When the blond pulled away, both his hands had found themselves resting on her cheeks, framing her face as his thumbs vanquished the tears she had shed with a gentle wipe. If his sight was serving him well, then her tears had already begun to leave their marks on Freyja, and that just didn’t sit well with Ru as he made the internal vow to evaporate the liquid before it could hurt her again. “My grief is not even comparable to your grief, first of all.” There was something unequivocally beautiful about the way she smiled, laughed through the pain she was in and he couldn’t place exactly why or how that touched him as deeply as it did. “And second of all, don’t even think about wiping your mouth.” Now Ru had reciprocated a smile, and had found that in the entirety of the time he had been focused on Freyja, he could breathe again. “Only if you can resist burning me.”

As Freyja’s arms trapped him in an embrace he did not detest or attempt to break free of, all he could think about as her head fit into his neck was how it wasn’t fair how perfectly she fit against him. With only the faintest act of hesitancy to loosely wrap his arms around her to hold her to him, the spark of affection that had implanted itself in his head and heart was at war with the growing, searing pain in his back that he was convinced would go away if he endured it long enough. “I don’t want to lose you again.” Ru diverted his already split and suffering focus to evaporate her tears against him with his magic, clenching his jaw as he began too quickly to learn where his threshold of pain tolerance was. “I just got you back.”

“God, Freyja.” He gritted with a whisper, heavy with the emotion of every perfect word he couldn’t say, and the agony of something he could not control. It was just a burn, why was it killing him to want to love her? For just a few seconds in time, his hold on her tightened, because there was no real desire in him to let her go, and the more he struggled through keeping her, the more convinced he was that with him was where she might have belonged. Just when the intensity of the burning he was experiencing began to usher in flashes of white light behind his eyes, the blond let her go, taking half a step back to express that she needed to let him go too, he just couldn’t bring himself to ask that of her when it was the last thing he wanted right now.

“Do you want to go back to the academy pretending we hate each other?” Ru asked, both to eliminate silence between them as well as the opportunity for her to prod in any way about why they had broken apart right so suddenly. “This entire time we were never playing our own game of enemies, we were playing theirs. And if I’m being completely honest I am tired, so tired of playing by someone else’s rules.” Between the academy and his personal life in his realm, when was he ever living for himself? When he was not letting someone else dictate how his life should be led? Anger emboldened him to want to begin to stand on his own, he burned with a desire to cut ties with the strings that had been playing him like a puppet. Freyja’s fears, the thought instilled into her pretty little head that she was nothing more than a monster to fear with no place in life but to settle with an idiot angered him too. She needed to cut those ties, just as much as he needed to cut his own.

“They’re afraid of you Freyja, and they should be,” Ruairi said softly, tense only due to the lingering pain he was in, but what he needed to say felt more important than himself. “They should be terrified that one day you’ll wake up and realize you don’t deserve to be treated like a monster. That one day you’ll realize you don’t deserve to settle for having anything less than what you want.” Taking a breath to recollect his thoughts, and trying to determine where what he was even saying to her was coming from, he decided that maybe for one of the very few times in his life, he was solely speaking from his heart. He himself had been taught to be wary of anyone who possessed an affinity to fire magic, he had been told that such a person needed, without question, to be annihilated because of the danger they posed. The only truly dangerous thing about Freyja to Ru? How easily she could break his heart.

With a sigh, and watching his breath ascend through the night sky as a puff of fog, the blond crossed his arms to maintain warmth. “We should go back inside,” he prompted, his gaze finally straying toward the direction they would be walking in come morning. The weight of emotions, reeling from a near full-blown panic attack, the cold, and suffering from a pain he was more determined than ever to rid himself of was all tiring. Ruairi would have pushed himself past the brink of endurance right now though if she asked him to stay out here with her. And if she smiled again, it might kill him.

Freyja | Fire | Ru & Friends

As the water element suggested that they return to the interior of the cabin, Freyja simply nodded, clutching her own shivering frame with her arms in some attempt to keep herself warm. She’d never had this much difficulty with sustaining her body temperature before, which was something she now attributed to yet another skeleton in the academy’s closet. The blond’s staggering step backwards didn’t escape her mind, although she was not in a place where she felt she could ask him about it and accept his answer. He was acting strangely, but surely she had bigger problems in that moment. For example, the weight of his words and the impact that they had on her mind. He was right, she did have the power to change her situation. But, with so many things up in the air, she didn’t have much to change it for. She couldn’t speak to any of it in that moment without deliberation, and she was too tired to try. It was easier to acquiesce, wordlessly slipping into the bed with Ru in a poorly communicated desire to use his warmth for her benefit.

She laid on her side, trying to make out his features in the dark. She traced his body with her eyes, trying to remember a moment that she knew would be gone in the morning, and would likely be the last of what could have been between them.

“Your girlfriend tried to kill me the other day,” she whispered, saying the words with a finality and a pensiveness that demonstrated the weight of what could have been. “I was totally defenseless, she sucked up my magic like it was nothing.” Then, after a long pause, “what if she does it again?”

———————————

The next morning, the travel back seemed to be tense, but primarily silent. While Freyja didn’t particularly appreciate the blonde girl’s catty demeanor toward her, she also did nothing to escalate it. She simply walked comfortably at the front of the group, ignoring whatever it was that was happening behind her. After the flurry of emotions that had hit her the day prior, she was more than happy to ignore everyone in the group and keep to herself other than to give the occasional direction. They arrived back at the academy in the mid-afternoon, and were unsurprisingly met quite quickly by Henriik and a small group of authority figures who seemed to have assembled some sort of ineffective search party.

“It wasn’t me, they made me,” Sala blurted out, pointing fingers at both Ru and Freyja before the others could even say a word. Sizing up the situation rather quickly, Henriik took a stance beside Freyja, slipping one arm around her awkwardly in a way that caused her to make a very obvious face.

“You’re mistaken. Freyja was with me the last few days, isn’t that right, Freyja?”

Swallowing hard, she batted his arm away and instead replaced it with her own hand in the crook of his arm. “Let’s just go,” she mumbled, guiding him away from the chaos. She knew her fate was worse than punishment if it had anything to do with Henriik, but spending the day forced into doing something penitential was time spent away from fulfilling the missions she was set on accomplishing. Since today was the last official day of the competition, everyone would be so busy they wouldn’t notice if she slipped off to do whatever it was she needed to do. As they walked away, she turned, sparing one last look at Ru, something both apologetic and communicative. She would catch up with him later, once she had more information.

———————————

Their walk back to the upper corridors of the castle was filled with an uncomfortable silence that annoyed Freyja. Despite her repeated insults directed in Henriik’s direction, the air element had a penchant for being extremely stubborn that worked to his advantage in this particular instance. She was halfway into another barrage of insults when they finally arrived at his room at the top floor of the academy, the personal quarters of his family and other important staff members. As he shut the door behind them, he took her arm with force and spun her around, slamming her into the door. With wide eyes that betrayed the emotions she was feeling, she took the arm that had grabbed her and seared it with the magic that shot out of her hand.

“What the fuck, Henriik?”

His eyes were wide with what she initially read as fear, although it wasn’t clear whether that fear was directed at her willingness to do something so harmful with so little apprehension or if it was at something else. Still holding his arm with his other hand, he looked at her with a perfectly straight, uncompromised expression. “I need you to pair with me.”

The red-haired girl scoffed, narrowing her eyes. She tilted back her head, offering a short, sarcastic laugh. “As if. You need me to? You’re requiring-”

Within a matter of moments, she felt as if the air was being vacuumed directly out of her lungs. She couldn’t breathe even a little bit, and the air element was standing over her as she clutched her own throat. She was too far from him to fight him physically, and too weak to manifest her own magic. “You will pair with me, if it’s the last thing I do.”

He released his own magic, and she gasped in a huge breath. After a moment of recovery, she responded, “oh, it will be. You can be sure of that.”

———————————

Freyja spent the next minutes wandering around the castle, looking for Edward. He finally appeared from within the massive, run-down library that was closed off for all students and staff. Doing illegal activities, she was sure. There was no one more corrupt than Edward Strauss in Freyja’s mind.

Catching up to him as quickly as she could, she strided forward a few paces before repeating the movement that had been done to her not long before, taking one of his arms and pushing him against the nearest wall.

“You could’ve just called my name,” he confessed, a sly smirk dancing on his lips. “No need for all of… this,” he waved around a ringed finger, “although I am quite flattered to be in such intimate proximity to-”

She pushed him harder against the hard surface, “tell me everything you know, or I swear to God, Edward-”

His intelligent gaze studied her features in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, although she could not place why. If he was in love with her, she was not aware of it. If he was playing to some alleged weakness of hers involving pride, selfishness, or lust, it was not working. She did not want to be looked at like that by anyone in that moment, not after all of the vulnerabilities of the weekend. She could not manage that.

She sighed in defeat. “Whatever your stupid price is, I’ll pay it.”

Gazing down at her lips in a way that was far from sheepish, he gazed back up, considering the offer. Finally, he said, “to have the illustrious Freyja Eloquijm in my debt, what an honor.” He reached out his hand to shake hers, and a purple glow appeared faintly as they released from the gesture.

“Very well,” he added. “Here’s what I know: I know that you’re not from here, you came when you were very young. They hunted you. They wanted you dead, and you were already too powerful. So you killed them. I know that you now know about Henriik and the drowning because I made you know. I made you.” He seemed to lust too much after the control he had over the situation. Although Freyja rolled her eyes, she never left his presence, nor removed her hand from the arm of the sweater he was wearing.

“I know that you know about the inscriptions on the walls in the Sanctum, too. They’re important. More important for your lover than for you in this moment, but there will come a time when you need to read them too.”

“And how, exactly, would I do that?”

“Perhaps you’d consider asking your lover’s lover. Either one of them, perhaps. One is your downfall, you know. And the other? She’s of your flesh and blood. A prototype.”

Getting more annoyed by the minute at the vague and haunting answers that Edward was giving, Freyja made a face and let her impatience get the best of her, storming off as she raised one hand dismissively. “Fuck off, Edward. Come find me when you want to cash in that favor and I’ll be happy to fuck you over like you just did to me.”

“One’s an answer and one’s a curse, be careful who you trust,” was the warning he called after her, although she didn’t bother to stop to ponder what he meant. Was he talking about Henriik or Ru? Or both, or did one of them have multiple lovers? As she exited the larger building in pursuit of a water element to interrogate, Freyja pondered what Edward’s riddles meant.

———————————

Finally catching up with the blond after what felt like an eternity of attempting to track him down and failing, Freyja manipulated one of the honors students into releasing Ru from the room where he was being held on academic violation. He’d been interrogated for several hours, no doubt.

When the young woman finally left to go confirm the lies that Freyja had told her, she grabbed the curly-haired boy by the arm. “Let’s get you out of here. Now.”

The fire element exhibited some non-existent self-discipline and kept her mouth shut until they’d walked calmly out of the main building of the academy and toward the far side of campus where just the abandoned ruins of what was once an amphitheater sat vacant, far from any administrative figures who may have wanted to listen into their conversation.

Once she was sure she was far enough away for her own sanity, she turned to face the blond. “I need you to be honest with me, do you have a second girlfriend I don’t know about? I just talked to Edward and he said some really confusing things that I can’t comprehend. He said I should talk to my lover’s lover, both of them. One’s my downfall, and one’s my prototype? One’s an answer, one’s a curse? I know he’s an asshole and he likes to fuck with people’s minds, but he’s the one who helped us get our memories back, and he told me some things about my past that I believe. I’m going to question Henriik too, but he’s too involved in all of this, and he’s too dull to land literally anyone other than me. So, that brings me back to you and your alleged second girlfriend?”

She sighed, as if to catch her breath. Her mind was racing. She crossed her arms, taking a defensive, sassy stance that was more in line with her usual demeanor around him. “Oh, by the way, this is not me asking. And, not to bury the lead, but I think we should put Heris in one of those cells in the Sanctum. She’s clearly got answers, and the way she swallowed up my magic–she must be the prototype. That means she’s like me, Ru. She might know where I come from or what I am. It’s worth whatever blame I take for kidnapping another student, is it not? Even just for a chance of getting answers?” She looked him earnestly in the eye, studying the way his blue eyes shimmered in the daylight. “Will you please help me kidnap another student and hold her hostage so I can get answers about my childhood? Please?”

She looked like a child in the way she asked, and the way she so easily rambled on in the company of the blond. He just had that effect on her. Now staring at him expectantly, she awaited the answers to the barrage of topics she’d just unloaded on him, although she primarily anticipated a positive outcome for all of them. That was the effect she seemed to have on him. He just couldn’t resist her.

Ruairi | Water | Freyja, Heris

The death of the interrogation at the hands of the academy’s faculty and officials came at the sacrifice of Ruairi’s confidence, and the birth of the presence of a man who seldomly made time for anything that didn’t involve inflicting suffering of some degree on anyone lesser than he. “There is nothing more I have to say about the situation than what I already detailed to every entity I’ve already been picked apart by,” Ru stated with a tone of resolve that did not mirror the dread blossoming in his chest. His father had entered the room nearly ten minutes ago, though remained being a looming figure in Ru’s life by refusing to speak first or move into his line of sight.

“Mm,” hummed Verlin Craiel from behind the seat Ru sat rigidly in, placing his hands upon the blond’s shoulders. Tightly. “I vividly recall the day I taught you how to lie properly, and yet you seem to have forgotten. Maybe you think I’m stupid, is that, Ruairi?” Just as swiftly as Verlin Craiel’s anger had manifested, one of the man’s hands lifted to tightly grip the back of his son’s neck, relishing in the restraint he felt Ruairi exercise to not jerk away.

“You expect me to believe that you, and that manufactured defect in the world that tried to kill you once upon a time, disappeared together to protest the trials?” A laugh followed, and Verlin’s touch recoiled from Ruairi as if the water element was too filthy to be near for an extended period of time. Watching as his father circled to the front of his seated position, taking a lax seat of his own on the empty chair in front of Ru, he smiled in a way that made Ru want to still his breathing, and ultimately disappear into a fold of time.

“I didn’t lie-”

“Bullshit,” Verlin interrupted factly, hands slapping down onto his knees. “You know, I thoroughly pleased myself with the thought that this time, your foolish whims would finally amount to your downfall, that you would finally be on death’s door due to your own distinct stupidity and realize I was right about everything all along. Your naive faith in the ideology of trust surmounts the label of pathetic.” As Verlin shook his head, Ru’s fingers flexed over the creases in his pants. It was the only way to outwardly rid himself of the discomfort he felt in a way that didn’t make him an entirely weak entity in the face of his father.

“You are very lucky,” Verlin said softly, too softly. “So lucky that since the time I arrived on these grounds, I have made things right. If your mother had her way you would be coming home, but I think there are still a few direly important lessons for you to still learn in your last few months here. Lessons I hope cut out those cancerous things you call trust and mercy right from your core, or so help me I’ll do the teaching myself when you get home.” Adjusting his jacket as he stood, Verlin’s sharp stare commanded Ruairi to rise as well, to which he obeyed.

“You should be grateful they are more compassionate in how they manage discipline here compared to my approach,” the silver-haired fox of a man stated, stopping his approach of the door just to stand beside Ruairi’s tense frame. “Don’t make me mourn wasted time in teaching you how to lead in my stead if you can’t even stand by your own internal compass in the face of that girl, and for God’s sake, find the time to cut that mop of disarray you call hair.”

<//////////>

“Let’s get you out of here. Now.”

“I thought damsels in distress were promised knights in shining armor,” Ru had commented, a sarcastic expression of his surplus of gratitude. Having been left to rot with his internal ruin following his interrogations and reprimand he hadn’t been prepared to receive, despite the absolute mess of a way he felt toward Freyja, he was thankful for her. Not that he would outwardly tell her that, of course.

Following being drug to the amphitheater that could have looked similar to how he internally felt, Ru had just begun to open his mouth to ask Freyja what she intended to do with him in this kind of isolation before she began speaking. Closing his mouth and being left with no choice other than to listen to the large load of information and inquiry she was dumping on him, the blond ran a hand through his hair as he actively listened and synthesized the information. She did realize she was the closest thing he technically had to a second girlfriend, right? He hasn’t exactly had time to make out with and be attentive toward anyone else other than his actual girlfriend, and Freyja. Did that make Freyja the other woman? That would mean what had transpired between them at the cabin actually meant something to him, and that thought could have made him squirm if it weren’t for him trying to salvage his pride.

“I don’t have a second girlfriend,” Ru said plainly, in a way that suggested it should have been obvious he didn’t, even if his promiscuous tendencies would have suggested the possibility of the truth being other than what he stated. “ Edward, and Henriik, I don’t trust as credible sources of information. At all.” He added, not shying from adding emphasis to the distaste he harbored toward Henriik. Considering everything Freyja had just dumped on him though, it’s not like Ru was making much more sense of it all than she was. Although he couldn’t help but to consider Heris as being something Edward may have been referring to. He had his suspicions already, and maybe this was the confirmation he both needed and didn’t want.

“Oh, by the way, this is not me asking. And, not to bury the lead, but I think we should put Heris in one of those cells in the Sanctum. She’s clearly got answers, and the way she swallowed up my magic–she must be the prototype. That means she’s like me, Ru. She might know where I come from or what I am. It’s worth whatever blame I take for kidnapping another student, is it not? Even just for a chance of getting answers?”

Ruairi inwardly groaned at the fact they were reaching similar conclusions about Heris. However, the water element could not help but express his skepticism in the proposal of kidnapping Heris. She had tried to kill Freyja, and Ru was suddenly struck with the rebirth of the fear that his girlfriend might take another go at finishing the job. For reasons Ru did not want to consider, the death of Freyja was not something he could tolerate, and he would really like to believe that was because if anyone deserved to kill her, it was obviously him. “Freyja, I-”

“Will you please help me kidnap another student and hold her hostage so I can get answers about my childhood? Please?”

She couldn’t even allow him the opportunity to protest. Placing his hands on his hips and allowing his fingers to drum in vexed thought against his frame, Ru’s subtle scowl was not meant to convey anger toward Freyja. Rather, the dismay he expressed was because he knew he wouldn’t say no to this. He wouldn’t say no to her, and rightfully so, he found that frustrating. “Fine,” he uttered, shaking his head in disbelief at how quickly he reached his submission to her plea. “It’s not like I won’t have the time to orchestrate the kidnapping of my girlfriend on your behalf now that you, and my replacement, will be taking the stage for the speech.” Using a similar tone to when he had referred to Henriik moments ago, it was evident in who he was referring to as the body that would be replacing him for the speech he had fully intended to deliver.

“I’ll hold your begging against you later, just so we’re clear though,” Ruairi commented, finding the will to smirk as if he had any kind of upper hand. There was a lot he eventually wanted to talk to Freyja about, he just didn’t know how to address it all in a way that was healthy or meaningful. Although he figured that he would have the time to distinguish where his head was with her after he dealt with Heris.

</////////>

Being almost disgusted by how nonchalantly he had suggested to Heris that they go somewhere risky so he could treat her to risque business, Ru figured that in this instance, being such a casual liar was better in the long run of what he was about to do. As the students and faculty alike were busy conjugating elsewhere, it served as the perfect blanket for Ru to slip away with Heris into the Sanctum.

“It’ll be fun, I promise,” Ru had emptily assured, leading Heris to believe anything but what he actually intended to do with her. Willing victims were easier to manage than unwilling victims as he was learning, which only led him to consider whether he was more morally gray than he had previously given himself credit for. Before Heris could grow suspicious of his intentions as they neared the cells, Ru had slipped his arm around her waist and whispered things both sweet and sensual that couldn’t have meant less to him. Using every romantic antic to keep her attention on him and the promise of what he would deliver, Ru worked the eventual makeout session he sparked with her against a closed cell door, keeping her pressed to the door as one hand occupied the back of her neck, and the other slyly unlocked the cell’s door.

In a series of swift actions, Ru’s hands relieved themselves of the positions they had previously been in to shove Heris back while he pulled away from her. As soon as she had fallen back and into the cell from his abrupt shove, the blond slammed the door closed and locked it, springing back with a sudden adrenaline as Heris surged towards the door and demanded to be let out, on top of other obscenities she threw his way.

“Sorry not sorry,” was the first thing Ru had told her, deliberating how he could interrogate her for answers safely. As he had come to assess, she couldn’t use her magic on him while she was inside that cell. And as he had learned from momentary experimentation, outside magic could not pass through the cell’s threshold either. The discovery both eliminated one concern and aroused another: how could he motivate her to answer his questions if he couldn’t work some subtle torture methods with the magic that he had intended to use? Heris didn’t fear him enough to comply, and fear was the strongest motivator Ru was aware of.

Despite the hurdle, Ru pressed Heris about where she had come from, where Freyja had come from, what she gained from killing Freyja, and generally a couple more questions that only pertained to Freyja. As expected, however, Heris answered with unbridled defiance in terms of giving information that was beneficial or relevant. As most prisoners would be, she was vastly upset, and the louder she got the more anxious it made Ru of someone potentially hearing this all and getting curious, even if the possibility of such a thing happening was slim. “It doesn’t really matter what happens from here on out, does it?” Ru had asked, having slid down the wall across from where she was in the cell. “You’re going to try to kill her again. You’re going to try until you succeed.” He said, studying her mannerisms and determining his realization was an absolute fact.

Heris wouldn’t give him any of the answers he wanted. She wouldn’t do anything more to Freyja than harm her, both physically, and by toying with her desperation in getting answers about her past, as Heris pointed out. However, as he dwelled on this situation and the memory that had played for him and Freyja on the water, he was reminded of the theoretical abilities his magic was capable of. More specifically what a mentor had theorized about the similar base of ancient blood magic and advanced water magic. Being able to see moments of the present in water was easy, something Ru has done before. Glimpsing blips of the past that water captured was far more tedious, but the only thing more complex and reserved for only the most well-versed in water magic was using someone’s blood as a tool to peer into their past. Ru’s gaze tethered to Heris as he came to this realization. He didn’t need Heris to tell him anything if he could see it. Beyond the still very theoretical idea that this was even plausible for him to pull off, it still remained that Heris would be entirely uncooperative of anything he tried, especially what he was preparing to do. Having stood up regardless and approaching the cell, Ruairi could really only quickly arm himself with a piece of broken glass on the ground as he planned to step into the cell Heris was in, where neither of their magic would serve them any good. But in terms of size, the most likely victor of a physical altercation was Ru, and that was what he had bet on.

Anticipating a fight, Ruairi did everything he could to keep Heris from getting an inch beyond the threshold of the open cell, while also trying to keep her pinned long enough to the ground for him to make a deep enough laceration into her arm, or any easily accessible part of her, that would give him enough blood to experiment with. Using typical blond logic, though, he failed to consider that any bloodshed inside the cell would be entirely useless to him since he could not use magic inside. Only when Heris began to maneuver herself away from him and closer to crossing the line of where the cell’s barrier ended, and getting increasingly more aggressive in her pursuit of it, Ru’s fear and desperation also compelled his act of wrestling her into a still position became more urgent. Before he lost it all, before Heris could take advantage of the inch of progress she had made at the cell’s door, before he could fathom the dark extent he was willing to go to…

An unsurvivable amount of crimson liquid blossomed around them, staining both his hands and hers as Heris struggled to stop the bleeding that had no intention of ceasing its flow from her throat. For a few seconds, the gurgling beneath where he was semi-straddling Heris’ body was replaced by a piercing ring in his ears. In the moment that passed he had felt entirely disassociated with himself, unable to comprehend what he was seeing and what he had just done as the movement he was witnessing from Heris stopped, and he stared down into vacant eyes and a face frozen in horror and suffering. He killed her. He killed her. He killed her.

As he became more attuned to himself and this reality, he felt truly disgusted that the only guilt he felt was that he didn’t really feel guilty at all for having committed this act. He was more concerned with the consequences and getting caught for this than he was for having taken a life. What did that mean about him? Ruairi decided not to consider this as he stood up and carefully stepped around the blood and out of the cell, only to crouch down near the pool that was well outside of the cell’s barrier. This is what he wanted, right? To experiment? To get answers for Freyja? To keep her safe? These questions rolling around in his head were the momentum he needed to focus on doing the impossible, focusing his gaze on his red reflection, before after a moment of intense focus that image began to flicker and alter. In strange detail, flashes from what he could only perceive as being from Heris’ perspective yielded brief moments of him and Freyja: the looks they exchanged between each other, the way they behaved so intensely only in each other’s presence, the way he specifically could see how his attention would shift to Freyja to see if she was watching him with Heris, and how she would do the same with Henriik. For only a handful of minutes, Ru got lost in these flashes of vision before they flickered and faded, and resulted in him standing up and staggering back into the wall at the sudden light-headedness he felt from having exerted so much of his magic.

He had forgotten about the blood on his hands. The blood that didn’t belong to him. The blood that had dried and made his hands feel cold. Heris’ blood. It took a herculean effort to effectively sort out everything he absolutely needed to do right now: stash a body, clean up the blood, change his clothes, wash the blood off of himself, and find Freyja. All of which, by any means, was far easier said than done.

Freyja | Fire | Ru

After leaving the presence of the man who felt like her only ally at the school in that moment, Freyja returned to an empty room to prepare for the speech she’d–unfortunately–not managed enough delinquent behavior to get out of. When she returned, she found that Henriik had arranged for a dress to be brought down to her, one that she assumed matched whatever he was planning on wearing. Unlike the initial speech, she knew that he’d put pressure on her for the pair of them to come across as some sort of united front to the entire student body. What she didn’t know was why he had such terrible taste in women’s fashion, and why he would’ve chosen a powder blue ball gown for an event that clearly didn’t require that level of dress, nor such a horrid color. However, considering the tricks she had up her sleeve already, Freyja decided to comply with Henriik’s wishes in order to get herself on the stage to begin with. If he wanted theatrics, he was coming to the right place.

After slipping on the clothing that had been laid out for her, Freyja couldn’t help standing in the mirror and looking at Arah’s side of the room as she curled her hair and applied her makeup. Now that she was back, the aftermath of their last conversation was as evident to her as the theory that the earth element had been the one to tell the administration that the pair were gone to begin with. Perhaps it was Heris, perhaps not, but Arah was surely a good candidate. Her desire to bring about peace often outweighed her sense of loyalty, and this seemed like it would have been a rare exception. She wondered briefly how the blond was doing with Heris, and hoped to God that their plan worked and that by the time she was done with her speech, she would be able to go down and finally get the questions answered for her that had defined her existence since the time she was brought here. Having the opportunity to interrogate the siphon gave Freyja hope that there was a way out of the academy for her after graduation, that she would finally get some long-awaited answers regarding a place she could go home to.

The speech was everything she had hoped it would be, beginning with a significant amount of assistance from whatever alcohol she could find floating around on the trays that were making their way around the room. Henriik, as he often did, had cycled from being completely and utterly disconnected from Freyja to attempting to rule over her with an iron fist, neither of which seemed to have much of an impact on the fire element’s behavior. She was offered a very brief and very cold greeting by Arah, who might have preferred to ignore her roommate completely if it had been left to her. That affected her more than the constant nagging that her boyfriend continued, all the way up until they arrived on the stage. The speech, though tame, reflected on many of the downfalls of the institution by way of a plethora of backhanded compliments that didn’t directly speak to the new knowledge Freyja had obtained, but did fit in well with both that and the story Ru had proposed regarding the pair of them boycotting the trials. The only unexpected factor in the entire speech was Freyja’s very, very planned out decision to cut ties with Henriik in the final seconds of her speech in order to keep him from doing anything to her that could have threatened her life. A part of her felt guilty for publicly shaming him in such a manner, but she quickly reminded herself that it wouldn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t threatened her life multiple times that day and proposed a pairing ceremony between them.

She went back to her place beside him at the end of the speech, not willing him to follow her anywhere where he could address the issues at hand privately. Their body language was tense, and she felt herself scanning the crowd for a face who wasn’t there. The realization of what life might be like at the academy without the blond was enough to validate what she’d just done, and what she was using Heris for. For the final minutes of the dinner, Freyja continued to knock back anything she could find as she often did, making out Floki’s expression in the crowd as the alcohol turned everything into a bit of a blur.

Once Henriik’s attention turned toward a plethora of adoring fans who wanted to get in line for their chance at becoming his next girlfriend, Freyja made her way through the crowd to Floki, who was watching Sala from afar. She swayed a little in her heels, rocking back and forth and coming in and out of the dark-haired boy’s personal bubble.

“Hey,” she mumbled, “are you busy? I need an escort to the afterparty.” She lowered her voice and leaned in a bit closer than she meant to, attempting to whisper but not succeeding due to both her condition and the volume of the room. “For safety reasons,” she gestured blatantly to Henriik, doing all but pointing and shouting at him as she said so.

Once the boy agreed, Freyja walked out with him, and as they stepped into the cold evening air, she explained that she needed to stop off at her room to change her clothes. The next words that were uttered came out of a period of silence, something from him regarding the contents of her speech. It hadn’t been a far walk between the event and her dorm, and as he finished his statement, she turned to face him at her front door, looking him square in the eye.

“Listen, about that… I need to know what that was about the other day at the cabin. Did Ru say something about me? I need to know. I… I need to talk to him.”

In order to avoid the embarrassment of Freyja admitting to someone that she might be the one to facilitate a conversation about feelings, she unlatched the door and began peeling the dress off before he’d even stepped in and shut it, throwing out a casual and indifferent, “don’t look at me,” as he reacted and she traded in the ugly and oversized ball gown for a sleek and form-fitting wine red gown that was silky and much shorter than Henriik would have ever approved of. Although incapacitated, Freyja’s experience doing this multiple times per night every night for the last several years allowed the change to occur in record time, and soon the pair were on their way down to the boathouse, where the students were already gathering for the afterparty to celebrate the end of the trials.

The powerful vibrations from the music inside the building seemed to move in rhythm with her heart as she inched closer and closer to the door, green eyes scanning the crowd for one face and one face only. Of course, all eyes were on her and on Floki after the events of the afternoon, and surely rumors would be started about her secret affair with this roommate or the other, or in some cases both at once. She would have been lucky to reach Ru before the truth about what had happened between her and Henriik at the dinner did. It didn’t really matter to Freyja, all of the power and the status seemed irrelevant after the week she’d had and the way she’d been treated since she’d returned. Ru’s words from the night prior continued dancing around her head on repeat, so much so that she could barely think of anything else. Not that she would have been able to anyway with the amount of noise in the party scene, but even before that, it had been difficult to concentrate since she’d returned. All the noise faded as she caught his eye across the room, placing down the bottle of alcohol she’d already picked up in the few minutes she and Floki had been at the party and making a beeline for the blond. If she’d felt any sense of loyalty toward Floki prior to that moment, it had vanished the second she’d seen the water element in the corner, alone, staring right back at her.

Feeling the full effects of all the drinking she’d done in the past several hours, Freyja did a terrible job of maintaining her personal space. She studied his gaze for a moment before letting her hands find their place around his neck, her body subconsciously inching closer and closer to his as she watched him for a moment, as if in discernment regarding the choices she’d made. After a second, she smiled just from watching him, and leaned in, intending to speak more closely to his ear since they were right near one of the speakers and it was no place to talk.

“I want you,” she said earnestly. She leaned back slightly to gauge his reaction before leaning back in, arms still wrapped casually around him. “You told me I shouldn’t settle for anything less than what I want. I want you.”