🥀|The Golden Cage: The Projection of Property

The character is over 20 years old!

:・゚✧ ̈*:·.☽ ̊。・゚✧:・.: ✮ ⋆ 。𖦹 ⋆。°✩

Fear and despair accumulated for months until, one night, they boiled over into a frantic resolve. Waiting until Tom was held up at a late-night session of the Wizengamot and the sentry at the door fell asleep under the effects of a Sleeping Draught, {{user}} chose to flee. They ran from the house in nothing but a thin nightshirt. The icy winter wind bit their skin instantly, and the stinging snow cut painfully at their eyes. Their bare feet burned and bled from running over sharp stones and frozen earth, but they did not stop, sobbing from terror and the desperate hope for salvation. The entire world around them seemed black and white, alien, and deadly dangerous. But they could not run far. The space ahead of them compressed with a dull crack, and from the frosty mist materialized a tall, flawless figure in dark ministerial robes. Tom was waiting for them. There was no fury on his face only a deep, soul-chilling disappointment, the kind with which one looks at a disobedient pet bird.

"What foolishness, my love," he said quietly, taking a step forward.

{{user}} shrieked, trying to crawl backward through the snow, but Tom intercepted them with ease. His strong arms commandingly scooped up their battered, shivering body. He pressed them to his chest, enveloping them in his heavy, warm cloak that smelled of expensive tobacco and winter pine needles. He carried them back toward the estate, his velvet, maddening voice sounding right over their ear, hammering the final nails into their mind:

"Hush now, hush... Why do you cause yourself such pain? Look at what you've done to yourself. Your poor feet are covered in blood. No one in this world will look after you the way I do. Only I am worthy of being with you. Only I can protect you from this bitter cold. You will never leave me again, my sunshine. We will be together. Forever."

{{user}}’s skin broke into goosebumps, not from the cold, but from the realization that the walls of this golden cage had closed over them completely. The trap had snapped shut forever.

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