Archive of Our Own

There's a buzzing noise getting more and more persistent in her ears and Severa has no idea of what's to blame the most.

So far she's cursed the cicadas, the scorching heat, her own low blood sugar and Cynthia, of course. Especially Cynthia.

"If I collapse here and now," she hisses between gritted teeth, tugs at the hems of her straw hat with nervous hands, "I expect you to carry me all the way back home. By feet."

Cynthia, bangs sticky with sweat and cheeks alarmingly pink, has the nerve to snicker at her.

"And you say I'm the overdramatic one," she sing-songs, and Severa's never wanted to actually fight her this badly.

She's about to voice her bellicose intentions when Cynthia stops dead in her tracks, causing Severa to bump right into her.  (It's all because of the heat, really.)

"What the―"

"Was there always a shop here?" Cynthia cuts her off before she can spout any of the profanities that have just exploded in her mind, finger pointed to the alley in front of them.

There's a tiny glass door at the end with a sign that reads open; Severa doesn't remember ever noticing it but before she can say anything Cynthia's already made her way through the alley and is, Severa realizes with a pang of sheer horror, walking right into the supposed mystery shop.

All Severa can do is follow, as usual.

The first thing she notices is the fresh air, blessedly cool against her skin, then comes the dim, almost intimate light. All around her there are shelves and tables and piles of stuff that looks like it's come out of some vintage fairytale.

A woman with green hair tied in a high ponytail turns to her and her eyes smile along her mouth in a way that makes Severa almost miss how she doesn't seem able to understand just how old the woman might be.

Cynthia has slid back by her side in the meantime and she looks ecstatic, which means they both should go before things skyrocket into something they might regret later.

Usually Severa is the one doing the most of the regretting part but that's irrelevant, especially if there's a shop full of weird antiques involved.

"Check this out," Cynthia says with sparks dancing all over her vowels, what looks by all means like an old polaroid nestled in her careful grasp. "Isn't it so cool?"

Severa takes a second to look at the polaroid: it probably used to be of a nice blue but the colour has faded to a pale grey-ish azure now and the poor thing is covered in thin scratches too.

"Uh," she deadpans, unsure of how to get Cynthia out of the shop without shattering her starry eyed grace. "It... doesn't look like it works anymore."

"Oh, it works just fine," the clerk chirps from behind the counter and there's something more fox-like than human in the glint of her smirk, the red of her hair.

"I'll take it!" Cynthia declares, sparks now a wild fire, and the clerk's smile grows wider as her eyes grow sharper. It makes Severa's blood run cold in her veins.

.

"I don't understand," Cynthia says for the uptenth time, brows knitted in a way that definitely doesn't make Severa want to smooth the wrinkles out of her forehead. "I really don't understand."

"Tell me something I don't know," she comments out of reflex but there's not a single smudge of snark in it and Cynthia doesn't even seem to fully register the words anyway, too engrossed in what they've just found out to truly care about anything else at the moment.

The thing is, the polaroid seemed to work just fine at first.

It would take pictures and spit them out like any other rusty polaroid until Cynthia had the great idea of trying to take a picture of Severa, possibly already the pinnacle of betrayal.

The picture only showed the background behind her.

"You just won't show..." Cynthia continues, shuffles through the bunch of photographs she's tried to take: of course Severa doesn't appear in a single one.

"That's it!" Owain shouts (he's literally sitting right next to them, he doesn't need to do that), and it makes every fiber of Severa's brain shudder. She still doesn't get why did they have to bring the others into this.

"What. What is―"

"The decisive proof that you're a vampire!"

"I fucking hate you."

By the other end of the room, sprawled on the couch and actively trying to sink deep enough to become one with it, Morgan chokes on her own laughter in a fit of shrill, breathless giggles.

"And I hate you too," Severa adds, but it's mostly a meagre formality considering no one out of her friends believes her anymore whenever she says that.

Morgan merely blows her a kiss.

"Anyway." Cynthia's voice is loud over the general mayhem, urgence dripping from the whole of her body language; she's tapping her foot and biting on her lower lip, a bundle of bad habits Severa's learnt to find almost endearing.

"I think we can rule out the vampire thing," Inigo muses, maybe even with a speck of good intentions. "We already know she doesn't combust in the sunlight."

"Clever remark," Owain concedes, with no good intentions at all. "As expected of my fated archrival whom Fate itself has bestowed upon me."

Morgan's giggles are a drawled out wail by now and Severa really, really just wants to go home.

"I think we should try to go back to the shop," Cynthia tries again in a rare display of common sense. She's perseverant like that sometimes.

"I think," Morgan starts, and Severa's blood runs cold for the second time in a day, "that this might be a sign. From the universe."

It takes her a few more seconds to get over the leftover giggling, which probably means she's got something funny in mind (Severa's never felt fear like this), then she gives them all a solemn look.

"It might mean that you two are soulmates."

Severa's sure she's going to murder every single one of her friends in cold blood.

.

"Are you still upset?"

They're walking around again but at least this time the sun is low and Cynthia sounds kind of like she's the one who's actually upset.

Severa makes a face at the way her hands cling to the polaroid.

"No," she forces herself to spit out, "I'm not upset, or like― not about what you think."

Cynthia's not looking at her but Severa can tell she's relaxed just a little bit; the curve of her nape is painted in red and gold and her hair sways right above her slumped shoulders in a way that catches the late sunset light.

"Wait, wasn't the shop here this morning?"

They've reached the same alley as before, there's no doubt about it, but this time the glass door is nowhere in sight.

"No," Severa says and it's about the whole of the situation because really, if a magical polaroid that just won't take pictures of her was already enough, for a damn shop to up and disappear is definitely beyond anything she could ever bring herself to handle.

"No," she repeats, this time louder as she presses her hands against the wall where the door should be.

"Um, Sev―"

"What the hell is this!" She's downright whining by now but she couldn't care less, not when reason seems to have forsaken the world as she thought she knew it. (The fact that her friends are going to blow the situation out of proportion way more than she’s already doing might be the most distressing part.)

"That," Cynthia states, "is a wall, I think."

It takes a moment for Severa to process what their conversation is supposed to be again, then another to decide whether or not to strangle her best friend on the spot.

In the end she can only find the energy to groan as she tries her best to convince herself it's all a slightly delirious dream she's going to soon wake up from.

.

Of course, she doesn’t wake up.

Cynthia is sitting quietly by her side, her legs swing back and forth and she’s kicking up dusty ground with the tips of her feet. Her voice sounds like she’s pulled the words out of the night sky when she asks, “do you think this means magic exists?”

She’s always been like this, even when they were kids and everyone was striving to grow up but there was Cynthia, still looking under every leaf in the hope of finding fairies tucked in between the green, still leaving treats for the spirits her mother would tell her tales about.

Severa remembers being envious of that bottomless awe of all things when she was younger herself and wiping her hands clean of stardust on clothes she felt so awkward wearing all of sudden.

Now she looks down at the faded blue polaroid sitting on Cynthia’s lap, wonders if there’s a right answer she could ever give her.

“I don’t know,” she admits, to the both of them in equal parts. “This is pretty strange, I guess.”

That gets a huff of laughter out of Cynthia at least, nose all scrunched up as her smile digs dimples into her cheeks.

It makes Severa believe there might be some stardust left under the skin of her palms, piling up in her lungs.

.

She’s starting to get really sick of these strategy meetings.

“Can somebody explain me why are you guys here?” Nah asks with the face of someone who would rather much not hear the answer. Severa’s sympathizing with her a lot.

“Because your house is nice,” Morgan says.

“And your mom is cool!” Cynthia adds.

“And the lighting of your flawlessly furnished living room is a balm and a fuel for my ever brewing brain,” Owain finishes, and by now Nah looks beyond inconsolable, plus several shades of appalled.

Severa is pretty sure her own face must look a lot like that too.

“Can we get whatever we’re here for done already so I can go home and forget about any of this ever happening?”

She knows she’s being mean, technically, and kind of unfair too because in the end they’re meeting because of her , because of some old polaroid that seems to have a personal grudge against her, but she also knows the situation might snowball at any given moment were there no one to keep her friends from straying from the main point.

“Pretty sure the lighting falls under the Your House Is Nice category, Owain,” Morgan comments, confirming Severa’s point horrifyingly soon.

After that it’s anybody’s game for a while, the chaos and retorts loud until Nah slams her fist on the coffee table. It’s a wonder how she manages to get everyone’s attention with such tiny hands.

“One more word,” she deadpans, a chill in her eyes that feels too much like the calm before the storm for comfort. “And you’re all out. Hereby exiled for life.”

Severa can spot Owain’s eyes glistening at her choice of words but he’s wise enough to keep quiet; they all are.

“Oh my,” says a voice from behind them, making Severa skip a few beats.

When she turns, possibly to glare at whoever just scared the life out of her, she’s met with the same pair of placid eyes that smiled at her when she was at the shop the other day.

“Are you having some trouble with that thing?”

The lady with the green hair is pointing at the polaroid and Severa realizes with a churning feeling in her guts that she still looks as ageless as she did the first time she saw her. She looks a bit like Nah’s mother too now that she thinks about it, only far more complicated.

“Aunt Tiki!” Nah exclaims, which already says something about the resemblance.

The supposed aunt smiles at her (it’s a warm smile, Severa notes, the kind of smile that belongs in a family), then picks some of the photographs up from the table. She looks almost sleepy as she goes over them but when she’s done there’s something in the way she glances at Cynthia that looks far too attentive.

“Were you trying to take a picture of someone?”

Cynthia nods like she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do, then points at Severa. “Yeah, but she, uh, she doesn’t show up.”

“We’ve even tried to go back to the shop but apparently it wasn’t there anymore,” Severa adds, maybe with a tad bit too much vitriol in it but at this point the least of her concerns is to be polite.

That seems to make the woman laugh a little though, fingers curling in front of her mouth in one graceful movement.

“That shop is never in the same place for long I’m afraid,” she explains. “I can’t help you with that, but I can tell you that polaroid you’ve got is working just fine. It just reacts to the way the user sees the people around them.”

Then, before any of them can even process her words, she crosses the room with a smile that’s still warm but with a flash of amusement in the white of her teeth peeking from below her lips. She walks out of the front door so quietly Severa wonders if what just happened wasn’t yet another dream for a second.

When she turns back to the others Cynthia’s head is low and there’s red spilling all over her cheeks.

.

“So, am I invisible to you or something?”

She’s joking, of course she is, yet Cynthia still stiffens. It’s not enough to cloud her eyes but it’s enough for Severa to notice.

They’re alone in Cynthia’s room and the light is low, the shutters halfway down the window.

“That’s— the one thing you’re definitely not.”

Cynthia’s face is shadowed too, grey and blue like everything around them, her lashes casting cobwebs down her cheekbones. When she looks up there’s something uncharacteristically serious in her stare.

“To me you’re more like…” She stops, frowns as she bites down on her lower lip. “You’re so bright you make it hard to look at you.”

Severa doesn’t notice she’s leaned forward until the bed creaks under the weight of her hands and Cynthia’s eyes pierce right through her head; she’s about to say something, anything, maybe that Cynthia’s just as bright or even more, but there’s knocking at the door and warm light all too intense as Sumia simply stands there, blissfully unaware, her apron still tied around her waist.

“Dinner’s ready!” she announces right before disappearing downstairs with a few bouncy steps.

The rest of the evening goes by far too quietly, far too slowly.

.

The next day she wakes up with her heart in her throat and buzzing bones, Cynthia’s eyes still too vivid for Severa to shove them aside and shut a lid over the memory.

Her mother raises an eyebrow at her from across the breakfast table but she doesn’t push it; instead, she offers her an extra bowl of rice and sees her off with a kiss on her temple.

Somehow outside it’s even hotter than the past few days but Severa needs to walk the buzz out of her legs and swallow her heart back where she can trick herself into pretending she can’t hear its drumming getting more and more furious, so that’s what she does.

She walks in the sun, tugs down at her straw hat, wipes the sweat from her forehead; her eyes never stop looking around.

When she catches the shimmering of a glass door right next to the entrance of the shopping district she thinks it might be just the sun playing with her eyesight but as she takes a step closer she can see the same sign as the other time. It reads open.

Severa pushes the door.

“Come on in!”

The clerk is the same too, and she’s smiling her sharpest grin as if she already knows, as if she’s totally not sold Cynthia a full fledged scam only a few days ago.

“You,” Severa hisses, louder than intended, “owe me an explanation.”

The clerk (her nametag has something that looks like it might mean Anna scribbled over it) hums below her breath and she’s so deeply, utterly unfazed it makes Severa’s blood rush up her neck as she walks towards the counter.

“Do I now?”

“Yes. ”

“About what?” The razor grin has spread to the rest of the Anna’s face and for a split second her eyes are as hard as the ones Cynthia looked at Severa in the shadow of her bedroom; it lasts too little for her breath to catch, or at least that’s what Severa tells herself.

She wishes people would stop expecting answers out of her.

“About the polaroid my friend bought here the other day,” she says, wills her voice to stay steady. If it has to come down to a game of sharpness she’s more than well prepared.

“Oh, the hexed one!”

The words linger in the air, dust dancing in front of a window, settling inside of Severa one by one until she can put them into place.

“That thing’s hexed? ” She can feel her face heating up as she says (almost shouts, to be fair) that but she can’t bring herself to care. “And you didn’t tell us because?”

“Well, you didn’t ask,” Anna states, far too matter-of-factly for someone guilty of selling hexed polaroids to unaware customers.

Severa can feel the headache looming over her.

“Let me ask now.” Her cheeks must be a blotch of angry red by now, her mouth a thin line as she continues, “what kind of hex would it be?”

Anna gives her an amused glance, taps her fingers on the counter.

“I’m in a generous mood today so I won’t be asking for anything in return,” she states, then gestures at Severa to come closer. “You’re one lucky little girl.”

“I’m not―”

“The hex is harmless, first of all. Someone cast it on the polaroid a few years ago.”

There’s silence after that, long enough for Severa to wonder if even somebody like Anna might feel at loss for words sometimes, but then, “I guess all there is to it is just that the polaroid can’t take pictures of the person the user’s in love with.”

The smile Anna’s giving her has gotten milder, kind of gentle; Severa clutches the feeling between her teeth as reality slips from all over her grasp, spills at her feet with a sound of something broken.

She wishes for Anna’s words to be just a bad joke, for the shop around her to dissipate and never reappear again but at the same time she tastes truth on her tongue, chugs it down before that can slip away as well.

“I, uh.” She takes a step back, then a few more until she can curl her palm around the doorknob. It feels cool against her skin, it’s nice. “I’ll be leaving now.”

She can see Anna waving a hand at her from the corner of her eye as she turns her back to the counter and opens the door, then she remembers.

“Does magic exist in this world?” she asks, one foot already on the scorching concrete outside of the shop.

“I’m feeling generous, not redundant,” Anna answers, and with that she disappears like a mirage in the morning air.

.

As much as it pains her to admit it, she’s been feeling awful.

Awful and guilty and like a horrible person in general; she’s pried into something that was meant to be Cynthia’s alone.

And true, it should’ve stopped being hers alone back in her room when she looked at Severa like she was gravity reeling her in, making her crash, but in the end all Severa got from that were snapped strings that led nowhere.

You’re so bright you make it hard to look at you.

I’m really not though, she thinks as she stands out of Cynthia’s house, lips growing swollen from all the biting. They’re supposed to meet up with the others later and she would rather dig herself a ditch where to lie than deal with the guilt twisting her guts and a bunch of overly grown up children but she’s got a reputation to uphold after all and chickening out has never been an option.

(She definitely doesn’t want to meet Cynthia despite the latest events, definitely doesn’t miss her at all.)

(Except she does, and it’s choking her up way worse than the memory of Anna’s words.)

“Goodmorning!” Cynthia greets her, swinging the door open at full force. If she’s still feeling awkward for the other day she’s pretty good at hiding it, Severa must admit it.

“‘Morning,” she mumbles back, lets herself float in their usual small talk for a while; there’s a nice breeze for once and the cicadas are quieter, their songs a constant murmur.

She waits until they’ve run out of silly laughter to stumble on her feet as she stops, chin held up as her hands curl around the hem of her t-shirt.

“Can you lend me your polaroid?”

There’s no one around them, the city hollowed out by the summer like a heap of whitened bones, and the sound Cynthia’s breath makes when it catches in her throat resonates loud enough for Severa to hear it.

“Uh, sure,” Cynthia says in the end, already rummaging through her backpack.

When she hands her the polaroid she’s looking directly at her and there’s warmth pooling in her eyes. It almost makes Severa wish she wasn’t so in love with her, because that’s a look she’d want to immortalize.

Then she presses the trigger and the polaroid flashes with a click.

“You know,” Severa starts as she waits for the colour to appear on the picture, “I found the shop again yesterday. Got a few things answered.”

“I don’t show.” Cynthia’s voice sounds much calmer than expected, the breeze ruffling up her hair. “In the picture you just took, I don’t show.”

“You’re too bright to show.”

That seems to get her attention, eyes snapping back up.

“What kind of answers did you get?”

Severa’s not all that sure how to handle the whole of this, how to handle the need to spill the butterflies tossing and turning inside of her and the need to clip all of their wings and swallow them back down, but the way Cynthia’s looking at her says that they’re both equally lost and it’s grounding, it puts it all back into perspective as she lifts her hands and curls her fingers on top of Cynthia’s collarbones.

“I know that magic exists,” she says, voice a murmur lower than the cicadas. “And―” She trails off, the words brushed aside by the way Cynthia lightens up, by her dimples and her scrunched up nose and folded laughter and her lips on Severa’s.

It’s a light thing, a warm thing and when they part they stay close enough their noses are kind of pressed flush. Then Cynthia grins before kissing her again as Severa moves her hands to the slope of her jaw and soon enough the cicadas go silent.

.

“That thing was what?” Inigo shrieks, thankfully cutting off whatever much more elaborate and much louder variant of the same question Owain looks like he was about to ask.

“Hexed!” Cynthia shrieks back, though out of sheer enthusiasm. “Incredible, I know right!”

Severa’s doing her damn best right now to ignore the look Morgan’s giving her and maybe refrain from taking her shoes off just to throw at her but at least seeing Cynthia brimming with energy is endearing enough to help her out with that.

It’s rewarding, even.

“That’s so cool!”

Owain’s so excited he’s forgotten to put up his act for once and that’s endearing too, in a way; it makes Severa feel warm without the sticky, uncomfortable feeling of the summer still roaring around them.

“Right, whatever, now let’s get going.” She nudges at both him and Cynthia, crumbles into a smile when Inigo flashes her one of his own and Morgan laughs under her breath in her own fond way. “All the magic in the world won’t save us from Noire if we’re late.”

That gets a collective shudder out of them all but Severa shrugs it off making her smile wider. She’s just got the best of a hex after all.