A/N: Based off of a song from a show. Unedited and bad as usual and written in a bathtub. Enjoy :)

Rowan didn’t flinch as the ceramic bowl was smashed against the behind him. If she wanted to hit him, she would.

“I hate you, Rowan Whitethorn.”

The tears on his face were familiar but not familiar enough that he didn’t feel the sting as they rolled down her cheeks.

“I know.”

Her shoulders slumped and her face crumpled as she said to him, “I love you.”

He swallows hard before saying, “I know.”

A step is taken toward him. Good, he thinks, “Don’t go.” Bad.

“Aelin—“

“I know.” She glares at him as her hands shoot up beside her head.

As Aelin turns around to walk further into their living room, Rowan stays where he is. Her leg is shaking and her arms are crossed, back to him, but he still knows her. He knows what she’s feeling.

The shaking of her leg and soft weeps decline and he starts, “Fireheart,” she tsks at the familiar nickname. He smiles softly, “You know how it is. They need us so I have to go. Special tasks force. I’m not letting my team go without me. I promised them—“

“You promised me, Rowan. You promised me too.” Her eyes were welling with tears. Tears of anger at that moment. That much was clear.

Rowan nods solemnly, “Yes, I did. I promised you both. I have a duty to you both. My promise to them is I will go with them, no questions asked, for as long as we are all able to. I promised you that I will come home.”

Lip trembling and hands raking through her own golden hair, Aelin snaps, “You can’t promise me that.”

“I promise you, Aelin, I will come home to you.”

Her head falls and her eyes close. With arms wrapped so tightly around her body, she says, “Fine. Just go, Rowan.”

He takes his first step forward. Toward her, away from his duffel, “Rowan, go. If you can’t keep your promises then I don’t want you here. You make a choice and you have to stick by it,” the yelling starts and Rowan makes a beeline to his wife, “So, I want you to leave. Now,” his hands grab her arms, hoping for some way to get through to her but she just hits them away, “Don’t touch me.”

The malice and pain in her words cause him to step back.

“I want you to go.” Her gaze is on his boots.

“Aeli—“

“I said,” with her gaze locked on Rowan’s, her voice steady, she finishes, “Go.”

Nodding once, he turns around and grabs his duffel.

His hand is almost to the door knob when she tells him to wait.

He barely makes it to her before she falls.

Clutching his arm and sobbing, Aelin gasps for air. He tries to hold onto her as tightly as he can but it doesn’t seem to be enough. A tear slips out of his eye as she blubbers, “Please don’t die.” He can hardly hear what she’s saying but he knows.

“I won’t.”

“Please.”

He kisses her forehead and says, “I promise.”

“She took me to her favorite 24 hour diner where we fucked around for most of the night until we got back to the motel she was stayi—”

Aiden interrupts, “Dad, I don’t want to hear about your sex life, please.”

A surprised laugh escapes Rowan, “Gods no, I didn’t sleep with her. No one had, much less me. No one had at that point and she was constantly making jokes so everyone would remember it.”

——————————————————————————

“I’d ask you to come in but my vow of chastity permits any attractive male to enter,” she oozes sarcasm.

The sun was coming up in the distance. Her hair shone yellows and reds and golds and her head was framed in a halo of sunlight as though she were an angel sent from heaven with the rising sun. She was so beautiful he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. So captivating that he didn’t hear what she’d said as she handed him his phone back after inputting their numbers into each other’s phones.

He didn’t hear that she said she would be waiting for him outside of his 3 pm lecture the next day, the one he’d told her about earlier than night. She kissed him once, the first time since they’d met at the bar, and scurried up the stairs to her room.

She wasn’t kidding when she said she would be waiting after his lecture. She was waiting right outside the door, leaning against the wall and playing a game on her phone.

Rowan took a moment to admire her. She wore her shoulder length hair with a bandana the same color as her long sleeved minidress. The frustrated look on her face at whatever game she was clearly losing in caused him to press his lips together and cross his arms to avoid laughing. She was adorable.

When she finally looked up and saw Rowan, she jerked backward slamming her back against the wall behind her. She cursed profusely, only encouraging his laughter even more.

“Shit, I was going to scare you.”

Her hand rubs her back and tries to reach her shoulder blades to soothe them after the collision. Her back’s fight with the wall didn’t seem too damaging but, if he’d learned anything from the night before, Aelin is anything if not dramatic.

Glaring at him, she exhales, “Fuck off,” grabbing his hand, she drags him across the quad before realizing she has no idea where she is going and forcing him to lead her to his car.

As it turns out, the best tacos a person would ever find were only a few minutes off campus on the way to his apartment. A small restaurant smaller than Rowan’s bedroom basically had him moaning after biting into what Aelin had ordered him.

“You like?” She asks with a mouthful of her own food. The way she talks is so convoluted through her chewing that they can’t help but laugh. Through the laughter, she accidentally spits a piece of her food out of her mouth which causes her to laugh even harder.

Her smile was glorious. And her teeth had little mosaic pieces of cilantro plastered to them.

As Aelin wipes her mouth with a napkin, he asks her, “How did you know what building I was in?”

“I have magical powers,” He gives her a look, “I was supposed to take his course freshman year before I decided to take a gap year which is what I’m doing now. I’m learning to live which is better than any class at the Billings Lecture Hall if you ask me.”

Before he could ask any follow up questions, she starts digging around in the bag she’s been carrying around for the past few days, “What are you doing?”

She slams two cans of spray paint on the table and smirks at him, her eyes glowing with mischief, “No, my friend. The question is what are we doing.”

Aelin is wiggling around in her chair in excitement. She looks like a little kid, “I have a midterm I need to study for.” She scrunches her nose up at his insinuation that anything was more important than her illegal plans.

“Don’t be a buzzard, I’ll help you study for the rest of this week if you come with me today.” She presses her lips together in anticipation. Aelin juts her chin up at him and grins as widely as she can, it looks painful, “Please.”

“You sound like a little kid.”

“That’s not a no.”

It takes him a moment before he gives in, “Fine, but you have to help me study for the next week, deal?”

“Yes! Yes, yes, fucking yes. Thank you.”

He begrudgingly grunted his acknowledgment of her thanks.

He couldn’t quite ever find a way to say no to Aelin.

——————————————————————————

“Fun seemed to be the only thing she cared about and she seemed dead set on dragging me along with her,” Aiden smiled softly at his father’s words. At his father’s happiness, “She kissed me again after spraying me completely in neon green spray paint. She told me she could have spent the rest of her life that way with me. I agreed with her.”

“Have I ever told you how I met the love of my life?”

Rowan was sitting with Aiden, his only son back from college for the summer, in his home office, a large dark wooden desk separating the two. His son resembled him in every way except for his dark brown hair which came from his mother.

“Yeah, of course. Mom talks all the time about how you two met.”

“I’m not talking about your mom. Lyria is. . .” His son’s face is riddled with confusion. Rowan shakes his head, “She is a different story, one you’ve heard most of before. I found my soulmate when I was about your age, my real mate.”

Aiden cocks his head at his father, “How did I not know about this? I thought mom was your mate.”

Rowan gently smiles at him, “No. She—we thought it was better to tell you that she was but now that you’re old enough we figured you should know the truth. Not only the truth, the whole story. And for my own selfish reasons, I want to tell the story, to hear the words to remember it. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had the luxury of remembering her and, if you’d like to hear, I would like to share the story with you.”

Rowan’s health had been declining in recent years and he wanted to share his true self before he passed away with the one person he truly loved, his son. His hands shook just slightly as he waited for the response. After everything had happened, he wanted his son to know him for the man he was and not the man he became.

Quietly, Aiden says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” Rowan repeats, “Well.”

He takes a moment just for himself to remember it all, everything he wants to tell Aiden and everything he maybe shouldn’t.

“So, this is the story of how I met the love of my life,” Rowan can’t help the wide grin that spreads across his face, “This is how I met Aelin Ashryver Galathynius.”

——————————————————————————

The bar was packed with tweaking graduate students and honors students all, quite unsuccessfully, trying to drown out their worries of exams and papers with as many shots and drinks they could afford. Rowan sits on a barstool finishing his second beer of the night with a drunk Fenrys on his right who is thoroughly distracted by a group of freshmen sitting at a booth on the other side of the room.

“Drinking alone?”

He turns his head to see the owner of the voice. A blonde girl sliding onto the stool beside him with a smirk on her face and a drink in her hand.

“I suppose not anymore,” he grumbles. He didn’t even want to come to the bar tonight. Fenrys had coaxed him into it swearing that the drinks would cause him to forget the C Professor Aiken gave Rowan on his most recent essay. At the glare he received in response, Fenrys promised drinks were on him and Rowan finally agreed. He figured he’d talk to this girl until Fen would finally let him leave, it’s better than doing nothing.

“What’s your name?” She asked him.

“Rowan. And yours?”

“I’m going home with you tonight,” she sticks her hand out to him. He tries not to roll his eyes as he takes it, “It’s nice to meet you.”

Still shaking her hand, he says, “Ah, so you’re the type of girl who’s bold because your philosophy is ‘live everyday as if it’s your last.’ Am I right?”

“In a way, sure. Maybe I just enjoy being bold.”

He grunts his response.

She drops his hand and says, “My name is Aelin. And by your logic I should be telling you right now that you are very much the type of person I’d like to kiss.”

His jaw clenches. Aelin just laughs; she thinks his irritation is funny, “You’re a freshman, right?”

She shakes her head, “I’m not in school.”

“But if you were, you’d be a freshman, yeah?” His beer was almost gone.

“Well, if we’re making assumptions, you’re. . .” She squints her eyes and examines him comically, “a junior. You like drinking but never learned how to properly have a good time because you’re too worried about your grades and I intimidate you because bold women who want to kiss you remind you of irresponsibility.”

“You don’t intimidate me,” he grumbles to her, looking down at the bar.

“So, if I kissed you right now it wouldn’t intimidate you?”

He turns to look at her, the smirk now softer on her face and her eyes glancing to his lips. They’re already seated closely together on the two stools so it doesn’t take much for her to lean forward and capture her lips with his.

To her surprise, and his, he kisses her back.

After a moment, she pulls away and smiles at him, “Do you have a car, Rowan?” The corners of his mouth twitch as he nods a ‘yes,’ “Good.” She grabs his hand and drags him out of the bar.

@tacmc

Due to quarantine, I’m offering free editing and like,, idk how to describe it but writing counseling? If that makes sense?

She was searching frantically through the attic, attempting to find it. She needed to find it. Boxes were knocked aside, she fell onto her knees and ignored how painful the impact was on her aged joints as she ripped open the cardboard. Her hands quickly shifted through papers and records and different books before she realized that what she was looking for wasn’t there. She pushed the box aside and grabbed another one.

Yet again, she grabbed the box cutter and it glided through the tape, not quickly enough for Aelin though. She was moving tenfold the speed of everything around her. She picked up the blade too soon and just barely nicked her palm with the sharp edge.

The box cutter fell to the floor and Aelin sat back clutching her hand, “Shit!” the house shook with her cry.

Her daughter rushed up the stairs, “Mom?” She ran faster, “Mom!”

By the time Evalin reached the top step of the attic, Aelin was already moving on to the next box, opening it with no regard for the blood oozing from the cut in her hand. She had tears in her eyes, her face was read and she shook her head back and forth violently, “It has to be in here.”

Evalin hurried over to her mother and leaned down next to her with a hand on her shoulder,

“What, Mom? What are you looking for? Just calm down, I can help.”

Aelin’s hands gripped the side of the box and, involuntarily, she shook, “It’s not here,” her voice broke, “I don’t know what to do.” She was manic.

The tears came down as rivers across her cheeks.

“What are you looking for? Why are you looking for it? Please, just calm down and I can help you.”

“The tape,” her voice was muffled and distorted from the sobs, “I can’t—Evalin. . . I can’t—“ she clutched her body as if she were shot. Blood from her hand stains her white shirt, “I can’t remember it. I can’t remember the sound of his voice. I don’t,” she was breathing so quickly, “He’s only been gone for three months,” she took a moment to inhale, gasping for air, “and I’m already forgetting.”

It finally hit Evalin what her mother was looking for, “It’s okay, Mom. It’s been a longer time than you’d think,” the only tape recording in the house with her father on it. It was him recording himself saying his vows from their wedding in 1924 when he was first able to have access to a camera. He payed so much to have the video made and Aelin couldn’t find it. One of the only tape recordings they had in the house and it was gone, “it’s normal for people to forget—“

Her eyes were fire when she turned to look at Evalin, “I don’t forget. I don’t forget my husbands voice.”

Her face crumpled for a moment before she clutched her hand again and collapsed onto her daughter, leaning her side into her daughter, “What if it’s gone? What if it’s truly gone and I can never hear him again?” She sounded so broken. All Evalin could do was hold her and lightly stroke her head until she eventually calmed down. It took hours.

@highqueenofelfhame