Shadows of the Night - Brahms Heelshire x Reader [The Boy 2016]

Chapter 20: Carpe Noctem - Part 1

Brahms stands in the middle of the main room of his secret apartment, frozen in frustration. His feet burn from the temperature change of going from hours spent outside at night to the warmth of the house and his ratty old sweater itches terribly. He left y/n just a minute ago after their walk and while their talk had soothed some of the rawness he'd grown accustomed to in the past few weeks, her words ripped the scabs from too many old wounds for him to ignore. She doesn't want to leave but says she has to, why? Was it him? It has to be and that hurts.

He is convinced that she isn't truly talking about the deadline for her job which ends with his parents' return when she says she has to leave. His parents are barely an annoyance and he can and will order them to let y/n stay if she desires to, which surely she knows. His parents are an excuse, she really does want to leave, to live out there where the people are, where he isn't and can never be, he knows it.

She lied to spare his feelings which is worse because it proves that she doesn't trust him enough to be honest and he knows she's right, even if she doesn't fully realize just how right she is to be cautious of him. She doesn't trust him to be good, to not throw a fit, to not do something drastic and get away with it like only a rich boy like him can, but he doesn't think she can imagine just how far he will go to keep her here with him. If she did she would have already left him, would have run after having realized that he's more monster than man, if he's even man at all.

He's played it safe so far, been as nice as he knows how but it's not enough, he has to take away her options right in front of her. Through sleight of hand make her choose him happily, rig the game so every door leads to him, to them. She wants to leave but she has to stay, for her own good. He can protect her, take care of her, love her with the specific knowledge of a man who always pays attention, who has only ever known love for her and her alone. She is his just as he is hers, forever, she just doesn't realize it yet.

The more he thinks about it the more he is convinced that she needs him just as much as he needs her. That one day she will thank him for deciding for her, that their inevitable happiness will absolve him of the sins he will commit to have her. He's lived for decades on the vague and futile promise of a happy future, the dark and damp of his existence made bearable by all of the lifetimes he lived in his head with her, and now that the genesis of all the happiness he has ever known has unwittingly laid herself on his alter he'd be foolish not to accept such an offering.

He breathes deeply, feeling at peace with acknowledging his final fall from grace, unashamed of plotting to keep a creature of light tied to him in the darkness, he is a demon, disgusting and unlovable to all but her. In a twisted way it makes him feel special, like how a child fakes sick just to be held.

He knows warmth only because she has made and let him feel it, and he won't be cast away from her again. He is selfish and he can't hate himself more for it. It will all be okay in the end though. He knows how to manipulate her and he's just desperate enough to do it. With that thought Brahms returns to the world, his mind twisting and warping further as he begins to go through the motions of life to fill up his time as a plan unveils in his mind.

Brahms cleans his apartment obsessively through the night memorizing the poetry he writes to her in his head as he moves about, an old habit. She made him a poet, first poetry borne from the saccharine love for her he knew as a child and then from the fungal rot of despair he knew in her absence. Now the poetry has morphed into songs and sonnets of longing. He pauses his cleaning to take out something to keep some sort of record of his amateur attempts at lyricism.

He keeps a tattered journal shoved under his mattress wrapped in the Iron Maiden shirt y/n had allowed him to borrow some time ago to keep his musings in. He pulls it out with embarrassed reverence, on his knees at his bedside, a position he is increasingly and guiltily familiar with. His literary pursuits are something he finds all the more embarrassing now that y/n is made flesh again rather than a near dream as she had been for the past two decades. He was taught about poetry as a child in the tutoring sessions he attended in lieu of typical schooling and kept up the interest during his life in the walls.