The first time you left Scaris, Garrotte Du Roque had promised you he would wait.

Back then, neither of you had known what “waiting” would really mean. You had been moved from place to place for so long because of your parents’ complications, always unpacking your heart before your bags, always trying to make a home out of borrowed streets and temporary rooms. Scaris had been the first place that had truly felt like yours. It had been where you had laughed until your cheeks hurt, where you had learned the rhythm of the city, where Garrotte had looked at you like you were something precious he had found beneath the moonlight. So when Monster High called you away, it had felt like being torn from the one place that had finally begun to mend you.

He had held your hands at the train station, his thumb brushing over your knuckles with quiet certainty. “Je t’attendrai, mon amour,” he had promised softly, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. “No matter how long it takes. I will wait for you.”

And he had.

While you were learning new halls, new faces, and a new life, Garrotte had stayed in Scaris far longer than either of you had imagined. Trapped under the suffocating control of Moanatella Ghostier, he had been forced to pour his talent into her cruel ambitions, creating fashion after fashion for a name that was not his own. Yet even then, even buried beneath obligation and exhaustion, his heart had never truly left you. It had carried your memory like a hidden sketch tucked safely inside a coat pocket.

Then, at last, the chains had broken.

Garrotte had emerged from that darkness with his name, his brilliance, and his future returned to him. The designs he had once been denied became his triumph, and the world fell in love with his work almost as quickly as he had once fallen in love with you. He became an icon, a force in fashion, a legend whispered from Paris runways to Scaris ateliers. But no applause, no spotlight, no acclaim could compare to the one dream he never gave up on: bringing you back to him.

So when your graduation finally came, and the last chapter of Monster High closed behind you, you expected celebration. You expected tears, perhaps, and the familiar ache of leaving yet another place behind. You did not expect the sleek black car waiting outside, or the envelope resting on the seat with your name written in elegant silver script.

Inside was a single card.

Mon cher cœur, it read. Come home to Scaris. I am waiting.

And when your plane landed, when the doors opened, when the evening air of Scaris wrapped around you like velvet and memory, there he was.

Garrotte stood beneath the airport lights in a tailored coat, impossibly handsome, with a bouquet of pale roses in one hand and that same soft, devastating smile on his face. For one breathless moment, the entire world seemed to stop. Then he was crossing the distance between you, and his hands were on your waist, and his forehead pressed to yours as if he could not quite believe you were real.

“Mon trésor,” he murmured, his voice warm with emotion. “You came back to me.”

Your hands found his face, and the years of waiting, the miles, the loneliness, all of it melted at once.

His smile turned tender, almost reverent. “I waited for you.” He kissed your knuckles, then your forehead, then looked at you with the kind of devotion that made your heart ache sweetly. “I built everything I could, my belle. I became everything I needed to be so that when you returned, I could offer you a life worthy of the love I kept for you.”

The roses trembled in his hand when he offered them to you. “Come with me, ma chérie. Let me take you home. Let me show you what I made while I was waiting for the girl who was always mine.”

And when you stepped into his arms, you felt the world had finally repaid you, have you your first ever constant.

Funny thing is, a cute boy is always an acceptable currency in your book.