treacherous | druig x reader

18: harmonization

To say a person's world can change overnight was ridiculous but also very possible. You had experienced it once — granted, it was an afternoon and all you did was walk into a forest, but a change was certainly what occurred.

You now faced it again as you watched the direct messages and likes and emails pour in. It was like your ex's presence was the earthquake that started the avalanche.

Saying your forum post was gaining traction would be the understatement of the century. Somehow, screenshots of it ended up on some anonymous social media account, where it gained its initial attention, then the news sites swooped in, and now it felt like all virtual eyes were on your life. Although, no one exactly knew it was you. You thanked whatever higher being was out there that you had opted to keep your post as anonymous as possible. Even your email was a random string of phrases, giving you the opportunity to completely walk away.

Still, for the privacy you kept in real life, there was no doubt an absolutely deranged series of events seemed to have materialized in the dead of night. You held your suspicions on how it came to be — you didn't take your ex's cordialness at face value — but getting lost in the sudden chaos wasn't something that you were actually going to allow yourself to do. And maybe you'd do that eventually but for now, even as you watched the notifications tick up, you couldn't help thinking about the words you swore you heard in the silence of your bedroom.

It was nothing like you had felt before. Before, you had felt the bond, the connection, pulsing in the absence of one another. Druig was there and not there. That was different. This... These were words, a clear sentence, projected in your mind. You hadn't felt much like it before. The closest you could recall anything like that was when Druig had been in your mind, in control. But even then it was a different sensation. You had no explanation for it but you knew what you had heard.

Between that phenomenon and the one exploding on your computer screen, you found yourself in a tricky position. You weren't sure what you were doing anymore. Nor did you know what the point was. Your newfound notoriety should've felt liberating — people were listening — but the longer you sat with yourself, it just felt like the road was fading out.

Throwing a personal pity party had become second nature. You sighed and closed the soulmate forums, your emails, messages, everything, and opened a new browser tab. You clicked through until you got to the other things your regularly browsed nowadays: the news.

It was, admittedly, a random habit you picked up, but ever since you had found yourself much more secluded in your bedroom than you had been in the forest but with a window to the world, you took to reading news articles.

But your heart didn't let you ignore the fact that wasn't the only reason. You remembered what Druig told you he was setting off to do and surely the presence or actions of cosmic beings would garner a few headlines. Typically, you would immediately click over to the World section, mainly due to the fact you didn't know where Druig actually was, but your cursor didn't even get that far this time. A certain Breaking News article caught your attention.

What you read sounded straight out of a fantasy novel and you'd almost write it off as a hoax had you not seen the weirdness this planet could produce. A giant gold statue turned up on a volcanic island, half emerged, like it was trying to break out of the surface. You clicked on the headline and skimmed the story but there wasn't much information to go on. The literally larger-than-life structure wasn't there one second and now it was a permanent fixture on the Earth.

You scrolled through the comments and found others were just as confused as to what was going on in this remote area. Was it an art structure? An elaborate prank? Aliens? Superheroes?