Imagines (Beyonce x y/n)

Come home

The silence in the penthouse was a living thing, heavy and suffocating. It had been three months since the explosion, three months since the world Yn had so painstakingly built had imploded with a single, idiotic, regretful act. He'd cheated. On Beyoncé. The name itself felt like a sacrilege in his mouth now, a whispered prayer for a goddess he'd betrayed.

The immediate aftermath had been a blur of raw emotion. Kelly and Solange, a formidable tag team of righteous fury, had descended like avenging angels. Their words, laced with pain and disgust, had flayed him alive. "You had everything, Yn! Everything! And you just threw it away for what? For her?" Kelly's voice had cracked with genuine heartbreak, not just for Beyoncé, but for the shattered image of their family. Solange, always the quieter storm, had delivered her blows with surgical precision, dissecting his character flaws, his inherent carelessness, until he felt like a specimen under a microscope. "You don't just hurt someone like Bey," she'd hissed, her eyes blazing. "You hurt all of us. You hurt Ava."

Tina, the matriarch, had been the most unsettling. She hadn't said a word. Her eyes, usually so expressive, were blank, cold pools of unshed tears and profound disappointment. Yn knew why. Tina was a talker, a fixer, a force of nature. If she didn't know where her eldest daughter was, if Beyoncé had gone completely off the grid, it was because she couldn't risk revealing the location even to her own mother. The silence from Tina was louder than any scream.

Then came the void. Beyoncé took their six-year-old daughter, Ava, and vanished. Somewhere in Europe, with one of her sisters - Yn suspected it was somewhere remote, a place for healing and hiding. He tried calling, texting, emailing. Nothing. Just an automated message stating the number was no longer in service. His heart had shrivelled to a prune.

The only lifeline, the one thread holding his sanity together, was the daily FaceTime call. It was the brightest part of his desolate evenings, and the cruelest reminder of what he'd lost. Promptly at 8 PM EST, his phone would chime. He'd scramble to answer, his stomach churning with nerves and a desperate hope.

And there she would be: Ava. Six years old, with her mother's eyes and his smile. She'd be sprawled on a gilded European couch, or tucked into a bed with ornate headboards, or sometimes, just running through a sun-drenched garden, the camera jostling.

"Daddy!" she'd shriek, her voice a balm to his aching soul. "Look! I drew you a picture!" He'd laugh, a hollow sound he barely recognized as his own. "That's beautiful, sweetie! What is it?"

"It's us! And Mommy! And a rainbow!"

During these calls, Beyoncé was a ghost in the machine. He'd catch glimpses of her: a hand reaching into the frame to adjust the iPad, the curve of her back as she walked past, the whisper of her voice in the background, telling Ava to brush her teeth, or to share her toy. Sometimes, the camera would briefly settle on her, usually from the chest down, or just her arm, impeccably dressed. Never her face. Never her eyes.

He'd tried. On the first call, after Ava had gone off to show something to her mother, he'd whispered, "Bey? Please, can we talk?" The screen had gone dark immediately, only to flicker back on a moment later with Ava's face. After that, he stopped trying. He knew he wouldn't get through.

Three months. Ninety calls. Ninety evenings of forced cheerfulness for his daughter, and ninety evenings of heart-wrenching silence from the woman he still, incomprehensibly, loved. The iPad became his confessional, his window into a stolen life. He watched Ava grow, lose a front tooth, learn a new song. He saw her surrounded by love, safe, cared for. And he knew, with a gut-wrenching certainty, that he'd sacrificed his place in that picture.

One Tuesday night, the call came a little later than usual. Ava was sleepy from the start, her eyelids heavy. "Daddy," she yawned, clutching a stuffed unicorn. "Mommy said I have to go to bed now."