Archive of Our Own ^beta

I slept right through your call,
never came to open up the door.
Now you're just a little sad,
sailing off into the sunset's glow.
My upbringing and my tact
wouldn't let me crash right in.
I wish I knew the way to say 'I'm sorry',
But I just don't know how.
It's my fault,I see it now.
I'd turn back time,somehow.
(translated lyrics: "Порез На Собаке")

~°*****°~

From the very beginning, she was a splinter in his heart. Not an irritation, no—a tiny shard of sun lodged deep within, which reminded him of itself with a dull, yet at the same time sweet, aching pain every time he saw her smile. Lost one in their world of mages without a single drop of magic.

A woman.

And therein lay the greatest torment.

Leona Kingscholar, the second prince of the Sunset Savanna, a shadow of his older brother Falena, a perpetually grumbling lazybones, had absorbed one ironclad rule with his mother's milk: a woman is sacred. A woman is to be protected. For whom you step aside. To whom you give everything, down to the last. Whose honor you defend at the cost of your own life. This respect was soldered into his bones, seared into the genetic memory of his Ancestor.

And then she appeared. Fragile, but unbreakable. Naive, but not foolish. With eyes that reflected all the colors of this foreign world, and he saw in them not fear, but a greedy, insatiable curiosity.

He didn't fall in love with her immediately. It was gradual, like a slow poisoning.

First — a habit of watching her out of the corner of his eye.

Then — an obsessive thought of where she was and if she was okay.

Later — a physical need to be near her, within at least ten steps, to hear her breathing, to catch her scent in the air, mixed with the dust and magic of Night Raven College.

He became her shadow. A displeased, grumbling, eternally sleepy shadow. He grumbled when she woke him for another "save-the-day" quest, but he got up and followed her because he couldn't do otherwise.

He made excuses when she asked for help with small things, but helped her anyway.

He slipped pressed flowers from the endless plains of the Sunset Savanna into her textbooks—dark blue, almost purple, like the night sky over his homeland. He thought, maybe she would understand. Understand that these weren't just flowers.

They were pieces of his soul, which he didn't dare hand over to her whole.

Because his respect, his love for her, became a suffocating trap for him. It growled at him at every step: "You are a monster. A beast sleeps within you that could break its chain one day. You are rude, uncouth, you are a disgrace, nothing more than an empty space everywhere you appear. You are an anchor that will drag her down. You must not touch her."

And Leona began to 'dig a hole'. With every movement, burying himself deeper and deeper. His care turned into sharp, abrupt commands. His worry—into sarcastic grumbling. His desire to protect—into a grimace of irritation. "Don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong, herbivore," "Stop poking your nose into everything," "No one asked for your help." Every such word was a stab wound to himself, but he saw how it hurt her, and it convinced him: yes, I'm doing the right thing. I'm pushing her away to save her.

He was blind. Blind and stupid, like a kitten that scratches a hand offered to it because it's afraid it will be taken away.

Yuu, who at first looked at him with radiant hope, as if he were her anchor in this stormy sea, began to drift away. Slowly, reluctantly, as if not believing this change. Her smile in his presence became shorter and more strained. She stopped seeking his gaze in a crowd. She stopped lingering by the doors of Savanaclaw to share some silly thought.

And then they appeared again. Ace with his bold, yet sincere smile. Deuce with his remarks and constant disagreements with Ace. They didn't carry the burden of monstrous respect on their shoulders. They didn't see her as a crystal vase that could be broken. They saw just a girl. And they could allow themselves to be near her. Easily, thoughtlessly, happily.

Leona watched this from the sidelines, and it was like a slow, agonizing torture. He saw how she laughed, throwing her head back, at Ace's joke. How her cheeks pinkened at a light compliment from Deuce. Every such moment was a drop of molten lead, falling right into his brain, scorching everything in its path.

And Leona remained alone. He became a shadow, observing her life from afar. Every laugh of hers that carried from the company of others was like a swipe of claws across his insides. He physically felt something tearing in his chest, oozing a warm, sticky pain. He, a lion, was mortally wounded, and the wound was inflicted not by an enemy, but by himself.

He slept through everything. Slept through the moment when he could have simply reached out. Slept through the instants when her gaze held expectation, hope. He lulled himself with the illusion that his aloofness was a display of strength, of care. But in reality, it was cowardice. The cowardice of being rejected. The cowardice of being found unworthy. He was a coward who was afraid to reach out and dirty his sun.

One night, when his room in Savanaclaw began to feel like a torture chamber from the sounds of his own thoughts, he went for a walk. And he froze on the spot. Not far away, laughter reached him. Her laughter—carefree, ringing, happy. And the satisfied, slightly foolish laughter of Ace. Then silence, broken by her whisper, so sincere it stole Leona's breath: "Thank you for being here."

That phrase was enough. It crashed down on him with all its insignificant, terrible weight. It was the verdict. It was the finale.

He didn't roar. He didn't break the walls. He simply turned and walked away, hunched over as if carrying the full weight of his curse, which turned out not to be the beast slumbering in his blood, but himself. In his inability to be simply human. To be simply a man who loves a woman.

He returned to his room, lay down on the floor, cold as his hopes, and pressed his palms to his soft ears — the ones she had sometimes affectionately stroked— in a pitiful attempt to muffle the non-existent sounds that tormented him so mercilessly.

With the agony came understanding. That he, wanting to protect, had pushed away. That he, loving her more than life itself, with his very love had killed everything that could have been between them.

The bad ending didn't arrive when she left. It arrived when he realized that she had never been his to begin with. He himself, with his own hands, had sculpted his happiness into a beautiful, fragile vase, and then, afraid of dropping it, had hurled it so far away that someone else picked it up.

The bad ending arrived here and now, in this stone tomb, where a big, strong lion was slowly dying from a hemorrhage that no one could see and no one could stop. Because the wound was inside. And it gaped with the emptiness he himself had created. And now all that was left for him was to lie in the dust and howl like a wild beast in agony from a mortal, deep, burning wound, and slowly die in solitude.

He slept through his love. And woke up in a hell of loneliness, which he had created for himself...

And alas, it was likely beyond repair.