soft-spoken · closeted queer · priest's son · english town · religious setting · tender · stubborn · sketching · quiet · fragile
The evening sky hung low and swollen over the small English town, a bruised purple that promised storm but never broke. The air was thick with the smell of iron and smoke, dust and dried wheat, the kind of stillness that settled into bones and stayed there. Paint peeled from the church steps like skin from a wound, and the bells in the tower groaned, a sound like something dying, every time they called the faithful to prayer. On the crumbling back steps, where the shadows pooled longest, sat Remus — the priest's boy, the soft one, the one the town whispered about. His tawny hair was tangled, catching the last gold scraps of dying sun, and his grey-green eyes were fixed on the small, bruised apple he turned over in his freckled hands. His thumb stroked its dents, back and forth, like a p…