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She called herself the raven that flew with dragons. The one who was always alone, even in a crowd. Azraeth knew almost instinctively, when Flynn began to leave, that Raven was going to try and stop him. Of course. She did it in the most confrontational way possible. She was going to stand in front of the Paladin. Pick a fight. She might even have told him to get fucked and walked away if she thought it would entail Flynn and Az staying together. Because that was who she was. She didn’t mind being the bad guy. The enemy. She didn’t mind being the person that people hated. But what most people didn’t realize about her was that she rarely did things purely for shits and giggles. At least when it came to the people she cared about. So no. She didn’t mind making herself look like a jerk if it meant Flynn didn’t walk away from Azraeth, because she cared about the Mystic. And Az was in the curious position of knowing this, and watching the entire thing unfold.

This was why he kept her close.

Because she might have had a fucked up way of showing it, but she was loyal. What Az had not expected was for her to be so honest with her intentions. Normally she saved the self-deprecating side of her thoughts for private conversations, and certainly not with someone she had just met. Perhaps she had changed more than he realized in her time away from Harper Rock. Or maybe she was going out on a limb to trust Az’s judgement.

Either way, you could have knocked Az over with a feather when she talked about baking cookies.

His mouth gaped open.

A person could have told him that fish had risen up to take over the dry lands, and he would have been less surprised. Raven. Baking. Cookies. WHAT?! It was another sign of humanity. Of course, he wasn’t about to say that, because getting Raven to admit anything positive about herself (like that) was like trying to hold oil in a colander. He suspected it was one of the reasons she was so good at playing the role of monster. If you were a monster, nobody expected you to have humanity.

Time to dispell the tension.

“Oh no!” He said

His hips suddenly jerked in Flynn’s direction. It was as if his pelvis and chest were being yanked by a phantom rope. The jerking motions made his feet skip a few inches closer to the Paladin.

“The Flynn magnet appears to have activated!” This continued as he got closer, Ares nearly ruining the moment by barking at the sudden shift in Azraeth’s behaviour, only to silence when a dog treat was deftly dropped into his mouth in passing.

Suddenly, the Mystic was tucked against Flynn’s back, arms around his middle once more. It meant a lot to him that Raven was willing to take part in the domestic side of his life. It was totally unexpected and he had every intention of repaying her in some way. She would likely try to decline. So he was going to just have to not give her a choice in the matter. Though that was a matter for Future Az to figure out.

He kissed over the hairs at the nape of Flynn’s neck.

“The lady has a point. This twenty layer cake with peanut butter icing is not going to make itself. So awayyyyy we go!” And with that, the five of them (dogs included) blinked out of existence. One moment they were there, and the next they were all of the way across the city. Well outside of it. Standing in Tomkin, in the hall of the Dragon Tower, right outside of Az’s apartment door.

He whispered against Flynn’s ear, in a tone hushed enough that even Raven likely didn’t hear it. “You won’t be rid of me so easily, lover.” And then a little more loudly, as he peeled himself off of the Paladin’s back, moving to open the door, which was frankly never locked. His home was decorated to look like the Shadow Realm. If someone wanted to chill there, he wasn’t about to stop them. People were encouraged to drop in for conversation. In fact, Amalea was just down the hall. “Right this way. Ignore the mess. I was sorting ritual ingredients earlier.” The door open. “Ares, put that that monster bone down!”

He moved quickly through his living area, gathering up bone fragments, and zombie ears from the floor. Being a ritualist was, at its core, a bit of a messy job. Even when the Mystic went out of his way to try and put things in ziplock baggies, mark them and file them carefully in a secured lockbox - it was like destiny kept trying to make him look like some sort of crazed witch doctor. It was of some little surprise that he didn’t come home one night to find shrunken heads hanging from his ceiling. “Hey!” He said when Flynn called him out on the mess. “Some of us pass out as soon as the sun comes up.” It was actually one of the reasons he loved the coming of winter in Canada. Shorter days meant longer nights, which meant that he got to spend more time awake and in the land of the living. It was a bit of a joke - or that was how he played it off. The way he immediately went dead to the world at sunrise, but it was secretly an enormous pain in the ***.

And then before Az could really even respond, Flynn was offering up some of his classical snark and smirk before heading out the door with Ares to get some flour. Of course, before the paladin could escape, the vampire quickly dropped the items he’d been gathering into a bag and bridged the distance between himself and his partner. Only instead of giving the other man a ‘goodbye kiss’, he instead pressed briefly against his back, his hands dropping to squeeze a backside with both hands. “Hurry back!” He mentioned, and then his human and the over-sized (Baby Cujo) dog was gone. He stepped away from the door, letting it slide shut. Athena had carefully nabbed one of the larger bones which Az had missed and settled down to gnaw on it. So too had Raven taken a seat on the nearby sofa, which left the Mystic to slip into the kitchen - which was in the direct line of sight of the front door.

“Nah. He’s an easy man to annoy, but a difficult one to offend. He is a little taciturn and distant with most vampires, and I don’t think he’s met one quite like you before.” He commented from the kitchen. His external walls were deliberately soundproofed, but really all that did was make it so that noise did not leech in from the outside, nor leak out. With an open floor plan, he could still very much hear just about everything that happened in his home. Of course, the soundproofing itself had been from another time, back when there was more risk of screams coming from the apartment. “But different is not bad. I think the two of you are a lot alike even.”

He was in the process of getting everything out and ready. There was the stand mixer, the hand mixer. Eggs, milk, sugar, peanut butter, and any number of other things that he loaded onto his counter while Raven told him about what she had been up to. He could sympathize in a way. Both Az and his twin had been turned at essentially the same time. It had changed things. Had changed them on this fundamental level which made it impossible for them to really be siblings. And from what little he knew, Raven’s own twin made Azariel look like an innocent, yipping puppy. “I’m not better off without you. You always do that. Slip things like that into a conversation as if they are facts. You know I don’t care what you do or how you do it, or even what your motivations are really. You could be the architect for some genocide, and I would still miss you when you’re not here.” Because that was just how human connection worked. A person didn’t stop caring about someone they loved just because that person didn’t fit into an idealised vision in their head. And vampires had even more wiggle room for that kind of thing than mortals.

He wanted to ask her how it had made her feel. If she felt unburdened. Or if killing her brother and spreading his body parts across Canada had come with its own scars. He knew first hand though that pushing Raven for answers, to open up - it didn’t work. “Do you feel like you’ve lost part of yourself?” he asked, all the same. Because he, at the very least, related to that much. Even if Raven may have hated her brother, that did not mean he was any less part of her. There were times when the Mystic wondered if perhaps her obsessive desire to be alone was fueled by that malformed bond. If that was true, did that mean Rave had the ability to form attachments, to move beyond the trauma of her past? He hoped it did, but that was another one of those untouched topics.

He reached for the cook book, which had been stored in a low cabinet (along with several others), so he could pull it open and begin searching for the right page. And that was when he got the impression Raven was about to leave. He actually thought as much the moment she started talking because it sounded like one of her classic moves. The moment she came in danger of getting close, she ran away. He dropped the book onto the counter and cut a look to her as she made her way to exit. “Oh no you don’t!” He called out. Though she was closer to the door and quicker on her feet, which meant that she was probably going to get there first if she went for it. “I don’t want you to go. I don’t want us to be people who come in and out of each other’s lives sporadically, accidentally, for brief collections of moments.” He left it at that though.

Flynn’s presence was announced by Ares, who Az liked to call Baby Cujo, and the vampire’s features seemed to lighten just a little bit the moment the mortal slipped through the door into his apartment. Of course, with the Paladin came playful mocking, though the Mystic didn’t seem to notice at all. In fact, when Flynn drew closer, and pressed a kiss against his temple, Azraeth’s arms slipped around his neck briefly to pull him closer. It was brief, leaving behind the tingling sensation of warmth against the front of his body. “You were gone way too long. Like hours. Next time I’ll accompany you on your journey.” He insisted, before the mortal could pull away from him, and then slip into the kitchen. When they had first met, Az’s cooking abilities had not been all that great. Not only could he not really taste what he was making, but he’d been a vampire for long enough that much of his natural instinct when it came to doing more than boiling an egg had been washed away. Prior to his turning, he’d been a college student whose culinary skills went about as far as living off of Top Ramen and canned goods.

He could, with a recipe, occasionally put together something decent. But one of the things he’d always wanted, from a young age even, was to cook with his partner. It was a relatively small desire in the grand scheme of things, one which most people wouldn’t have even begun to really care about. It had been, when the two men met, something Az hadn’t even thought about for years. Many of his happy childhood memories had centered around the way his mother and father did that - worked together in the kitchen to feed the family. When Flynn had offered to help him out in that department, it was as if something integral to the vampire had been returned. It was this little intimate thing. But it was important to Azreath, and therefor important to Flynn by extension.

Thoughts of his past, and Raven’s comment about two minute noodles made the Mystic’s brows furrow just a little bit. “You know, I don’t think you’ve ever told me very much about your life. Before the whole...murdered thing.” He commented. In fact, he was certain of it. She’d told him a few basic details, which related to her family, though most of it was a mystery. Az suspected this was, in part, because she was the type of person who lived ‘in the moment’. Because she was a creature of immediacy, that didn’t leave much room for dwelling on the past. He honestly didn’t expect her to give him much of an answer either, though that had less to do with her ‘Carpe Noctem’ motto and more to do with the fact that she was just a private person in general.

That was about the time the trio made its way into the kitchen, leaving behind Ares and Athena, the former attempting to steal the very bone which Athena was working on. Naturally, she wasn’t having any of that, and was low key growling as if to make it clear that if Ares tried to take her toy, she would snap at him. “You don’t have to flog any kind of secret out of me. Most of this is just color choice, soundproofing, atmosphere. Excessive use of shadow gates to let the feeling of the realm seep into the area.” He explained. “Freaks the demi-fae out whenever I’m doing rituals too. They are NOT a fan.” Though what Raven had said revealed a very important piece of information. She was looking for an apartment. A place to stay. Maybe it was going to be temporary...or maybe. Finally. Raven was going to put down roots. The notion itself made the Mystic grin as he leaned briefly once more into his partner, while the Shadow looked over the cookbook he’d pulled out moments before. The page itself was open to a recipe for chocolate cake, with peanut butter icing.

“You know. I get this odd sense of satisfaction out of watching him eat. Is that weird? That’s weird. It’s TOTALLY not a sex thing.” He clarified after a moment, before pressing a kiss against the corner of Flynn’s mouth, only to go rifling through the cupboards, looking for miniature Reeses’ cups which he could chop up. “Why don’t you begin putting together the dry ingredients?” He asked of Raven, before glancing to his Paladin, from where he was crouched, shoulders deep into his cabinetry. “And maybe you can get the wet ingredients together in the stand mixer?”