#of course he’d be the one to fall first

[batsandbirdbrains]

I have this idea bouncing around in my head where after Jason dies people come up with like shit ton of conspiracies and one of the biggest ones is that Dick had something to do with his death. Like Dick was just mysteriously gone with a flimsy alibi when everything went down. He missed the funeral. He was never adopted and was probably jealous of Jason. There’s lots of motive there.

Anyways, people start sending hate mail and death threats to Dick, because they’re convinced that he helped get Jason killed. Dick doesn’t say anything about it at first because he feels guilty about not being there for Jason, and he doesn’t want to create a huge fuss or anything. Eventually he gets used to it and forgets to bring it up to anyone. But then one day, when Jason has already been back in the fam for a few years, Dick lets it slip that he still gets hate mail for Jason’s death.

And Jason supremely loses his shit. He starts tracking these people down. Not as Red Hood, though, as buff-ghost-Jason Todd seeking revenge for people who hurt his brother. At first, Jason manages to keep it off the Batfam’s radar. But then more and more reports start popping up about Jason Todd’s hulk of a ghost beating up people who are mean to Dick. Now everyone is like “wtf??” and they’re trying to figure out if the best course of action is to announce Jason’s alive or if they keep pretending he’s dead.

Omg I could see it becoming a Gotham online conspiracy theory that doesn’t actually have all that many people who believe it, but it’s just enough who do for them to consistently harass Dick. And he’s had such a falling out with Bruce over the way everything with Jason was handled that he has no one who can help him with it, no one to turn to. Besides, maybe it was his fault. He should’ve done a better job protecting Jason. He should’ve been there. This is his penance for being a terrible brother.

Then the hallucinations start, and he has this ghostly version of his brother telling him he deserves it and his death is all his fault and he deserves every nasty word and threat that gets sent to him. And Dick believes. He believes all of it.

It doesn’t matter that Jason comes back a couple years later. It doesn’t matter that he and Jason become close again. It was still his fault. He still deserves it.

Then Jason is at Dick’s apartment one night, waiting for him to get back from patrol because he has a case he wants to discuss with him, and he stumbles across a box Dick left out. It’s overflowing with letters and flash drives, and when Jason opens it, he feels like he just opened Pandora’s Box.

Because it’s all hate mail. Death threats. Accusations. That Dick was responsible for his death. Some of them are dated back as far as the weeks following his funeral.

And Jason has since learned why Dick wasn’t at his funeral, he’s learned about the blowout fight Dick and Bruce had over it when Dick got back from space to find his little brother dead and buried.

There’s a letter at the top dated just yesterday. Dick got it in the mail today. He read it before he went on patrol.

And Jason breaks. Because his brother has been dealing with this for years, and no one ever told him. Jason has been back for years, unable to announce that he’s still alive to the general public (so Bruce says).

Jason gets together with Tim and Damian to come up with a plan. First, they scare the shit out of all these people trying to blame Dick for Jason’s death. Then they shut down all the Reddit threads and comment boards and discussion rooms on the internet that talk about it.

Then they convince Bruce to announce that Jason is still alive. They announce that the body had been difficult to identify, but it wasn’t actually Jason they found those years ago. Jason had been kidnapped and held hostage, they found him not long after he’d been pronounced dead, but they kept up the ruse because there had been death threats against him or something and it was a security thing idk.

And Jason publicly condemns everyone who ever accused his brother of killing him.

[jeondesu]

FRI(END)S — ꒰ 양정인 ꒱

── ✧ ˚. 𝓹airing ˒˓ yang jeongin x f!reader ˒˓ childhood friends to lovers 𝓰enre/𝓽ags. fluff, angst (not a lot, i hope..?), some profanity, kissing, i believe that’s it.. 𝔀ords. 3.8k

[ 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒆. ] — hello peeps, i’m back from the dead w a new fic that i’ve been working on for a while but i’m glad i finally finished it :D this is for my sweetheart @jeonginslittledoll, i hope you like it bestie <3

𝓼ong 𝓲nspo. fri(end)s by v

Jeongin doesn’t remember a time in his life when you weren’t there. Dating all the way back to kindergarten, you were in all his drawings— your pigtails lopsided and stick limbs holding his hand. He remembers how he’d always draw the sun in the corner and you’d insist on adding glitter stars even when it was supposed to be daytime. You shared your crayons with him without hesitation, even your special sparkly ones, which at five years old was basically the pinnacle of loyalty.

You were there the first time he cried over a scraped knee, when he wanted to show you this cool trick and ended up falling off his scooter. He tried not to let it show, but you saw anyway, gasping so dramatically he cried harder, until you kissed his knee and told him you had ‘magical healing powers’. He never once questioned it.

In third grade, he failed his math test for the first time. His hands were far too shaky to hand the paper to his mom, so he showed it to you first. You sat beside him on the swings, bumping shoulders, and told him you’d help him study, even if you both sucked at fractions.

When sixth grade rolled around, you were there to console him when a girl told him that she “just wanted to be friends.” He didn’t even like her that much, not really. But he still looked for you after class and said nothing when you handed him your last fruit roll-up and gave him a little nudge, a signal that meant “I’m here for you.” You didn’t bother with the clichés or telling him there were plenty of other fish in the sea. You just stayed. That in itself was enough for him.

He never got over how easy it was with you. How stupidly, infuriatingly safe he felt around you. Like all the worst parts of him didn’t matter because you already saw them and accepted him exactly for the way he was— choosing to remain by his side.

You knew him when his voice cracked, when he had braces, when he tried hair gel for the first time and looked like he’d dunked himself headfirst in a bucket of oil. You gave him a beanie and said, “we’re pretending this never happened.” He wore it every day for two months straight.

You were his first crush, too. Of course you were. He was eleven, you had the most god awful haircut, a gap in your front teeth, and you laughed so hard at his stupid Pokémon impressions that chocolate milk came shooting out of your nose.

He swore that day that he’d marry you.

And even though he was just a kid who barely understood the concept of love yet, some part of him must’ve already known— because every person he’s tried to love since then were miles behind you.

You were his first sleepover. The first person who saw him cry when his goldfish died. The only one who remembered the day his great grandfather passed and left a cupcake on his porch even though you had just came back from out of town.

He fell in love somewhere between then and now. Quietly. Foolishly. Permanently.

Maybe it was sophomore year of high school, when you made a Spotify playlist just for him called “for when your brain won’t shut up”, and every single song felt like a lifeline. Maybe it was that summer you got into a shouting match with a guy who tried to cut in front of Jeongin at the movies, even though the guy was like twice your stature. Or maybe it was during junior year of college, when he saw you at 2 am— bare-faced, exhausted, curled up in his hoodie on the couch, nodding off mid-sentence and realized there was no one else he’d rather listen to ramble about life and cereal brands until the end of time.

But you never knew a thing.

Because what kind of selfish asshole would risk twenty plus years of friendship just to say, I wanna kiss you so bad it hurts?

What kind of friend looks at the one constant in his life, the only person who’s witnessed all his bad days, all his awkward phases, all his heartbreaks, and confess that he wants something more?

So he kept it all in. Repressed every emotion until it was buried so deep underground that there’s no way you could possibly detect his true infatuation for you. Through the birthdays, family gatherings, and movie marathons, the way you’d unconsciously rest your head in the crevice of his shoulder during long car rides. Every sleepy voice note you’d sent to him when you couldn’t fall asleep, every text that ended with a heart or a “love you!” that he knew was platonic… but still made his chest tighten.

He learned to smile while watching you fall in and out of love with other people. Learned to perfect the role of the supportive best friend you’d never lose— at the expense of being the boy you’d never choose. Because that’s the thing about loving someone who’s always been there.

You’re too afraid of what might happen if they’re suddenly not.

+

“You think this looks okay?” You ask, finally stepping out after rummaging through half your wardrobe.

Jeongin glances up from the TikToks he was watching on his phone, sitting comfortably on your bed. He hears the faint rustle of fabric swishing around before he sees you, feet shifting nervously against the hardwood floor. You’re in a white babydoll dress, thin straps, low-cut neckline, the soft flowy hem brushing your thighs— for a second, he forgot how breathing works.

You’re so pretty, it kills him, only causing him more stress and inner turmoil from staring at you for so long. He wants to thank your parents for creating such a masterpiece. If this were a cartoon, his eyes would’ve been filled with nothing but hearts and practically jumping out from his sockets.

You strike a awkward pose. “Is it too much..?”

“No,” he croaks, throat instantly going dry. “You- you look great.”

You look like everything he’s ever wanted and never got to have.

He sees the way you pause, smoothing down any wrinkles on the garment, then scrunch up your nose like you’re not convinced. You do a little half-spin toward the mirror and Jeongin props himself up on his elbows, watching as you inspect yourself with furrowed brows.

You beam anyway. “I’m a kinda nervous. Feels like it’s been forever since I’ve gone out on an actual date.”

Jeongin forces a stiff smile, straightening his posture, elbows now resting on his knees, hoping that his voice doesn’t give out on him. “You’ll be fine. Jake seems… like a decent guy.”

His voice dips ever so slightly on the word decent, but you don’t catch it. Of course you don’t.

You don’t notice how carefully he avoids eye contact. How he keeps wringing the hem of your throw pillow like it might save him from saying something reckless. You don’t see the way he keeps shifting on your bed like the mattress is made of nails.

You move towards the mirror of your vanity and start dabbing lip gloss on, tongue between your teeth like you always do when you’re concentrated. “You think he’ll like this lip color?”

Jeongin’s heart almost shatters. “Yeah,” he whispers. “He’s gonna love it.”

But he hates it. He hates all of this. Hates the way you hum a little tune to yourself while curling your lashes, the way your perfume already smells like a goodbye, and the way your phone lights up with Jake’s name and not his.

You suddenly groan, tossing the lip gloss onto your vanity that’s cluttered with a bunch of other products and dig through your makeup bag like it just insulted you.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” you laugh dryly, half out of fear and half out of excitement. “This one’s too pink, the other one makes me look like I’ve been kissed by a ghost, and I swear this eyeliner’s plotting violence against me��”

“You don’t need any of that,” Jeongin says quickly, before he can stop himself.

You blink, turning to him, lip gloss wand frozen midair. “What?”

He swallows. “I mean… you look fine. More than fine. You’re pretty without any of it.”

The room stills with a bitter silence and Jeongin panics.

“I-I’m just saying,” he stammers, scratching the back of his neck and glancing everywhere but at you, “if this guy can’t accept you for who you are, like, as is— then he’s not the one for you.”

You stare at him for a beat too long, then your gaze softens at his words, “…Jeongin.” Your lips tug upward, just barely.

He swears the way you say his name will be the death of him.

You look down at your feet, suddenly shy, your hand fluttering over your mouth as if the compliment just fully hit you. A rush of heat spreading across your cheeks.

“Thanks,” you mumble, eyes flicking up. “That was.. really sweet.”

Jeongin shrugs, trying not to combust. “Just being honest.”

You face to the mirror again, a little quieter now, a little more smiley and upbeat. Still touching up your mascara, still blissfully unaware that he’s sitting there on your bed, watching the love of his life get all dolled up to go fall for someone else.

Yet he stays, because there’s nothing else he can do.

Even when it hurts like hell.

+

The night feels like an itch under his skin.

Jeongin doesn’t go home, telling himself that he’s just “killing time” by driving around aimlessly like he always does when his thoughts get too loud. But somehow, he ends up parked outside the diner down the block from where your date is happening, pretending like he’s just “in the area” as if it’s some kind of coincidence.

The cars still running, headlights dimmed. He fumbles with the radio, trying to drown the silence with anything that doesn’t sound like his internal monologue going back and forth. But every damn station seems to be playing some kind of love song, sappy ballads or cheesy pop lyrics about holding hands and finding “the one”.

He switches the station again. Then again. And again.

No luck.

“You are the best thing… that’s ever been mine…”

He groans and smacks the power button. Back to silence, which is even worse, somehow.

His fingers twitch around his phone as he mindlessly scrolls through different apps, reading the same unfunny tweets, the same recycled memes, and the same dumb messages from the groupchat. Staring blankly at the screen until everything fades into nothingness.

Ultimately, he gives up. Tossing his phone into the passenger seat with a defeated sigh.

He’s now people watching through the windshield. Spotting a happy couple that’s walking as if nothing else exists around them, the girl’s giggling like some lovestruck teenager and clinging to her boyfriend’s arm like she’s been permanently glued to him. Another pair drinking a milkshake inside the restaurant booth next to the window, sharing a straw as they interlock hands. Some other guy pulls his girlfriend in by the waist outside the door and kisses her like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Jeongin exhales hard through his nose, balling his hands into a fist like he’s going to punch the air.

It’s like the universe was straight up mocking him at this point.

This is what it’s supposed to look like, right? The hand holding, the lingering glances, the closeness, the quiet knowing.

And he has that, with you. Just not in the way that counts.

Not in the way that lets him pull you close and kiss you in public. Not in the way that lets him say, God, I wish it were me instead of him.

There’s a constant ache in chest that settles behind his ribs, dull and relentless.

It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid. You’re allowed to go on dates. You have free will to go like other people and fall in love without asking for his permission, but that doesn’t stop the nausea that keeps rising in the back of his throat like bile.

The sick pit in his stomach just won’t dissipate.

He even picks his phone back up and hovers his thumb over your name in his contacts. Just to... check in. See how it’s going, or maybe make up some fake excuse. ‘Hey, did you leave your charger in my car again?’ Anything to hear your voice, to make sure you’re safe. To remind you that he is the one who knows your favorite coffee order and your allergies and the way you always double tie your shoelaces out of habit.

But he doesn’t hit call. He just stares blankly at the phone screen like it might explode in his hands.

And then it does.

His phone lights up with a new notification from you. Heart leaping out of his chest as he picks up on the first ring.

“Hey,” he says, trying not to sound too eager.

Your voice is small, sounding mildly upset. “Can you come get me?”

Jeongin’s already starting the car. “Of course. You okay?”

There was a long pause, but you reply soft-spokenly, “Yeah. Just… not what I thought it’d be.”

Your voice cracks a little on the word thought, and something in him twists hard.

“Stay there,” he reassures, “I’ll be there in five.”

Another pause follows suit. Then you respond with a quiet, “okay.”

He hangs up, his grip on the steering wheel grew tighter, trying his best to ignore the heat that’s crawling up the back of his neck.

He should be relieved. Over the moon even. But mostly, he’s terrified of the outcome of this. Because tonight, for some reason, he feels as though something’s going to break— and he’s not sure if it’ll be his heart, or the silence between you. Maybe both.

+

Not even ten minutes later, you’re climbing into his car, arms crossed, face unreadable.

Your perfume comes floating in with you, faint but familiar, like vanilla orchid and late nights— and Jeongin swears it knocks the air right out of his lungs.

You don’t say anything at first. Just buckle your seatbelt with stiff hands, staring out the windshield like it personally wronged you. Your eyeliner’s slightly smudged, your earrings are missing, and your cheeks are flushed, but not from laughter, he can tell. From frustration. From disappointment.

He doesn’t pry with questions. Just hands you the bottle of water he always keeps in his cupholder, label half-peeled from your constant fidgeting over the years.

You take it with a ‘thank you’ so low he barely catches it.

He watches as you untwist the cap and sip in slow silence. The streetlights flickering across your face in a rhythm that feels far too fragile.

It pains him to see you like this.

“He talked about himself the whole time,” you mutter eventually, still choosing not to look at him. “Didn’t ask me anything.”

Jeongin watches the way your fingers pick at the label on the bottle, thumbs moving in distracted little circles. You always do that when you’re thinking too hard. He wonders if you even realize.

He wants to tell you that any guy who doesn’t ask about your favorite Studio Ghibli film within the first five minutes doesn’t deserve a second of your time. That if someone can sit across from you and not feel a magnetic pull toward your laugh, your weird stories, the way you ramble when you’re nervous— then they’ve never had a heart worth trusting in the first place.

Instead, he replies, “that sucks.”

Because it’s the safest thing to say when his own heart is gnawing at the inside of his ribs.

“He also said we should hang out again,” you add, letting out a bitter laugh that sounds more tired than amused. “Said he ‘vibes with my energy.’ Whatever the hell that means.”

Jeongin’s grip on the steering wheel is so tight he could almost break it in half, knuckles whitening, clenching his teeth.

He’s quite a second too long before forcing out, “Do you want to?”

You finally turn your head towards him. “No,” you admit, looking at him. Really looking.

That almost undoes him.

Your eyes are searching, soft, but laced with something deeper. Something older. Something that knows him too well.

“He’s not you.”

He blinks rapidly, caught off guard. “Huh?”

You shrug. “I mean, I don’t know. I just kept thinking how easy everything is with you. Like… he didn’t laugh at my weird stories. He didn’t know how I take my coffee or why I hate pickles or that I cry during Pixar trailers. It felt like I was performing. But with you, I don’t have to.”

Jeongin swallows hard, throat going dry, his mind racing ten miles per minute.

You said it so casually. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s not unraveling every thread he’s spent years pulling taut just to keep himself together around you.

“You shouldn’t settle for someone who makes you feel like you’re not enough,” he tries to remind you of your worth, how there’s no need for you to deal with these sorry, weak excuses of men when he can be all you need and more.

“I’m not,” you say, voice gentler now. “That’s why I’m sitting here. With you.”

Something in his chest snaps upon hearing that. It’s so abrupt even he’s shocked by it. Like something he’s been desperately trying to hold back finally breaks free.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

You freeze, raising an eyebrow of confusion. “What?”

He turns to fully face you now, deciding that now was the time to change everything, everything he’s been suppressing for as long he could remember.

“I can’t keep pretending that I don’t love you.”

The car goes eerily quiet. Even the night outside seems to be at a standstill.

“I’ve been in love with you y/n, since we were kids,” he continues, the words come tumbling out— raw, scared, unstoppable. “Since you wore that coat that was a hideous shade of purple every winter and made me dance with you in your living room at midnight. I’ve loved you through it all. I can’t stress enough how much you mean to me. You’re all I think about, I can’t even look at other girls the way I look at you, there’s no comparison. It’s either you or nothing, I really don’t care about anyone else.”

You blink several times to register all of what he’s saying, but none of this still seems real to you. Even after he’s confessed everything, poured his whole heart out while looking at you with a straight face and candor of his actions— it’s still not clicking for you.

He can’t believe he just admitted to all of this out loud but truthfully, it’s like a weights been lifted off his shoulders, finally freeing himself of this mental prison he’s locked hisself in for so many years. If you say no he’ll ultimately have to accept it, though he won’t let you go just yet.

“Jeongin..” your voice trails off, too lost in thought to even conjure up a proper response.

He cuts in before you get the chance to react, “You don’t have to say anything. I know this’ll probably ruin everything and you might not want to remain friends, I- I get it. I just couldn’t watch you walk away again and wonder if maybe I should’ve said something. I had to say it. Just once.”

Your silence is a living thing, stretching thinly between you and trembling, full of everything neither of you said your whole lifetime. The car feels too small, too intimate, too heavy with history.

And then, you reach for him.

With no hesitation, a set of lips are pressed onto his. Eyes wide open from shock, but soon melts into you, deepening the kiss with a fiery passion that could only be ignited from years worth of pining.

He’s only ever kissed you in his daydreams but the real thing? It doesn’t compare one bit. It felt surreal kissing you, touching you, holding you this closely.

Your lips sync together in motion, connecting as one. His hands cupped your face perfectly; so soft, so warm, and inviting. Your fingers were now tangled in his hair and he tilts his head to capture more of you. The sweet taste of you was exactly as he imagined, he couldn’t believe he went this long without kissing those pretty lips of yours.

Dopamine floods his senses like static electricity, it was all too much for him yet he couldn’t stop himself. He was intoxicated by you. It was probably that favorite cherry chapstick you always wore, he knows that was your go-to flavor of choice. He wanted to savor you in this moment for as long as he could.

You left each other breathless by the time you pulled away. His lips red and puffy from all the pressure.

“I hope that clears up my response,” you express finally, “I know you said I may not want to remain friends after telling me this, but that’s okay. I don’t want to be just friends, I’ve always wanted something more with you too.”

His eyes lit up. It felt like he could finally breathe again. He poked your arm, lightly touching you to make sure this wasn’t another lucid dream he could’ve been having.

He was going to ask you to pinch him but he’ll save himself the embarrassment for later.

“I feel so secure when I’m with you, it’s like nothing else matters when I’m around you. I know how certain I am of my feelings for you. We don’t have to date right now.. we can take our time if you want. I just feel so truly blessed to have someone like you in my life.” Jeongin does his best to articulate his words but he never feels like it’s enough to convey.

There wasn’t a million words in the world that could ever describe the feelings he has for you but he was adamant on showing them.

“I love you Jeongin.”

His heart almost stopped once he heard that. This felt way better than a dream, the reality was far more sentimental. He wasn’t expecting the night to turn into a sappy love confession between you two but here you both are. Sitting in his car through the late hours, looking with nothing but admiration for one another.

“I love you y/n. Always have and always will, I’ll continue to love you in every way possible. I’ll never let you go from this day forward.”

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[verricherri]

Slightly pervy Spencer figuring out he has a size kink with petite!reader? 👀 (No i’m not projecting about being short why would you think that?????)

Statistically Significant (NSFW///MDNI)

A/N: I blacked out somewhere between “two fingers” and “fold you in half.” No I will not be recovering — well, lucky you anon. I’m considered petite too 😌 so this one’s for us Warnings: spencer reid that rearranges your insides, intense eye contact - dont say i didn't warn ya Masterlist Feedback and reposts are appreciated  ☀️

The movie played, but he hadn’t looked at the screen in almost twenty minutes — not really, not beyond the vague flicker of light and sound casting shadows on the walls and across your skin, where you were curled beside him on the couch like something effortless, completely at ease, legs tucked under one of the fleece blankets you’d taken from his lap halfway through the first act without asking.

He didn’t mind. Of course he didn’t mind. He couldn’t even think about the blanket now, not when every subtle shift of your body — the way you stretched, the soft crack of your ankle as you re-crossed your legs, the casual fall of your oversized t-shirt slipping further off your shoulder — made it increasingly difficult to do anything but think about you.

And then his eyes landed on your foot.

Bare, relaxed, resting near his thigh, the edge of your heel brushing the cushion between you like it had always belonged there.

He blinked once. Then again.

And before he could stop himself, he found his gaze locked onto the sharp curve of your ankle — delicate, birdlike, small enough that he was suddenly possessed with the certainty that he could probably wrap his entire hand around it and still have room to spare.

It wasn’t just the ankle.

It was the scale of you. The way your frame seemed to disappear beneath the blanket. The way your wrist had looked earlier tonight when you passed him the remote. The way his hand had accidentally brushed yours when reaching for the same piece of popcorn and had completely engulfed it without even trying.

It was like his brain had stored all those images somewhere quiet, subtle, harmless — and now, they were bursting to the surface at once, setting off a slow, startling awareness in his chest that he couldn’t look away from.

“Spence?”

Your voice was soft, a little amused, and when he looked up, you were already watching him, one eyebrow raised in quiet curiosity.

“You zoned out,” you said, your mouth curling into a smile that wasn’t mocking — not really — just gently, warmly interested. “Too much profiling going on in that big beautiful brain, or did I bore you with my excellent taste in movies?”

He blinked again, caught somewhere between guilt and fascination.

“No—no, not at all,” he said quickly, sitting up straighter, trying and failing to unstick the words from the tangle of thoughts crowding his head. “I was just… um. Thinking about your ankle.”

That made you laugh — a real, delighted sound that made his stomach flutter like it always did when he managed to surprise you.

“My ankle?” you repeated, clearly entertained. “Of all things?” He flushed, already regretting the honesty, but it was too late now. “I just—noticed it. And I realised how… small it is. Compared to my hand. I think I could probably wrap two fingers around it.”

You paused, blinking slowly.

Then, as if testing him — as if you knew exactly what you were doing and wanted to see how far he’d go — you shifted your foot just a little closer, letting it settle more firmly against his thigh, your toes nudging the seam of his jeans like an invitation disguised as innocence.

“Go on, then,” you murmured. “Try it. For science.”

He hesitated. Just for a second.

But then he reached out, carefully, his fingers brushing the inside of your ankle with a kind of reverence he hadn’t expected, and as his hand closed gently around the joint — thumb pressing into the fragile bone, his other fingers curving beneath — he felt his heart kick hard in his chest.

He wasn’t wrong.

His hand dwarfed you.

Your ankle disappeared beneath his palm like it had been made to fit there, like the size difference between you was not just anatomical, but designed, deliberate, something that shouldn’t have made his pulse quicken the way it just did — but absolutely did.

He swallowed, throat dry.

“See?” he managed, voice low. “Two fingers.” You tilted your head, lips parting slightly, eyes sharp now in the dim light. “You’re turning very red.” “I didn’t mean anything weird by it,” he rushed out. “I just… didn’t realise. Before.” “That I’m small?” you asked.

He nodded.

“That you’re… big?”

He hesitated, and something about that hesitation made your mouth curve, slow and dangerous.

“I mean—yes,” he said, voice going a little hoarse. “I guess I never really thought about the contrast before.” “You really didn’t notice?” you asked, shifting again — just enough for your t-shirt to slide higher on your thighs, enough for your toes to press a little firmer into his leg. “That your hand could probably wrap around my throat?”

His whole body tensed like a livewire.

You smirked.

And he knew — in that exact moment — that he was completely fucked.

—

“You’re flushed,” you said, still smiling, but quieter now, like you were observing him from under a microscope and finding something new, something vulnerable. “I’m not—” he started, but his voice betrayed him with how raw it sounded, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.” “Like what?” you asked innocently, but your eyes flicked down — to the hand still hovering near your ankle, to the slight twitch of his fingers, to the way his breath had started coming slower, shallower, like he couldn’t get enough air past whatever was building in his chest.

He wasn’t sure how to explain it. The way his brain had suddenly gone offline except for the part obsessively cataloguing every place where he was bigger — your wrist, your ankle, the curve of your waist, the whole of your thigh that he could probably cup with one palm. The way you were looking at him now like you knew exactly what he was thinking and were daring him to say it out loud.

“You know this is a kink, right?” you murmured, tilting your head, voice soft and heavy with suggestion. “The size difference thing.” He blinked, stunned. “It is?” “Mhm.” You shifted again, not dramatically — just enough that your knee brushed his thigh, enough that your voice was a breath too close when you added, “Some people get really into it. The whole big hands, big body, holding-you-down-with-one-arm thing.”

He swallowed. Hard.

“That’s…” he trailed off, and then nodded, a little helpless. “That’s very specific.” “Is it?” you whispered, resting your chin on your knees now, looking up at him with wide, almost amused eyes. “Or are you just realising that it might be your thing?”

He stared at you, throat tight, hands curling faintly on his lap like he didn’t know what to do with them anymore.

And then, very quietly, very carefully, he said, “Can I see your hand?”

You didn’t hesitate. Just offered it up, palm facing his, fingers relaxed.

He raised his own hand slowly and pressed his palm to yours — and the difference hit him like a punch to the gut.

His fingers overlapped yours entirely, knuckles past the tips. Your palm was swallowed in his. Your thumb looked like it belonged to a child next to his.

He didn’t move. Just stared, as if trying to process the size of it — not just the visual, but the feel, the confirmation that all his instincts had been right. That you were small. That he could probably wrap his hand around your throat or your waist or your thigh and still have space to spare.

And then, like he was thinking out loud, he said, “I could hold you down with just one hand.”

The words left his mouth before he had time to consider how they sounded — filthy, reverent, full of awe and something sharp underneath — but the second they landed between you, it was like the air shifted.

He didn’t take his hand away.

You didn’t pull back.

Instead, you whispered, “Show me.”

He paused, not because he didn’t want to — he did, God, he did — but because something about the way you said it made his pulse jump. Not a challenge. Not a tease. Just trust.

So slowly, gently, he slid his hand from yours and reached up to cup the side of your neck, his palm spanning the whole distance from your jaw to your collarbone. His thumb rested just under your ear. His fingers curved around the side, not squeezing — just fitting.

Perfectly.

You closed your eyes, breathing in through your nose, your body going still like you were letting yourself feel everything.

“Spencer,” you whispered, eyes fluttering open. “This okay for you?”

He shook his head once, then leaned in closer until your foreheads nearly touched, his voice low and wrecked.

“It’s more than okay,” he said, thumb brushing gently along your throat. “I think I’m obsessed.”

You gave a soft sound — half laugh, half gasp — and tilted your face into his palm.

“Then keep going,” you breathed. “Test your theory, Doctor.”

And oh, that did something to him.

He moved before he could overthink it — shifted closer on the couch, crowding your space but not forcing it, just letting his body speak what he couldn’t yet say out loud. His knee brushed yours. His other hand rose to cradle your jaw, thumb resting at the corner of your mouth, eyes locked on yours like you were the most fascinating puzzle he’d ever been asked to solve.

He looked like he was studying you — not in the way he usually did, not clinically or professionally or even analytically — but like every inch of you was new data he needed to understand by touch alone.

“You’re trembling,” he said softly, fingers trailing down your arm until they circled your wrist. He held it up, eyes wide, mouth slightly parted as he wrapped his hand around it. His fingers overlapped easily. He squeezed, just a little. “Barely any pressure.” “You’re turning red again,” you whispered, almost giddy.

He didn’t care. Not anymore.

“I think I want to measure everything,” he said, voice gone thick. “Just to be sure.”

You were already pulling him closer.

—

He didn’t even know when it shifted — when curiosity stopped being innocent, when the need to understand you turned into the need to unmake you — but he was past the point of return now, and it hit him with all the force of a theory proven true: you were tiny, breakable, and absolutely built to take every inch of him like a miracle designed just for him to solve.

And now he had to solve you.

You were beneath him — thighs spread, one leg folded over his arm like he wanted to frame it, preserve it, press it between glass and label it with some Latin classification that meant mine — and he was watching the head of his cock press against your entrance, thick and leaking and entirely too much for the body that trembled and pulled him in anyway.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, not even meaning to speak, his voice hoarse from restraint. “You’re shaking already.” “I’m trying,” you breathed, a little laugh caught in a gasp, your hands fisting the sheets because he hadn’t even gotten fully in and you could already feel the stretch of him, the steady, inch-by-inch burn of being filled beyond what your muscles expected — and the way he was watching it, wide-eyed, completely entranced, made the ache feel even sharper. “Spence—” “You’re perfect,” he muttered, and you could feel his body vibrating with the effort not to rut into you blindly, not to let his hips snap forward and ruin you too fast, too early, even though every part of him screamed to do exactly that. “You’re so small, and soft, and fuck, I can see you opening for me. I can see it—look—right here—”

His thumb brushed just below your belly button, trembling, and you whimpered, because the pressure alone made you feel like he was everywhere — not just inside you, but under your skin, stretching you from the inside out.

“You’re so fucking tight,” he breathed, more to himself than to you, his brows furrowed like he couldn’t make the math work. “This shouldn’t even be possible. Your body shouldn’t let me in like this.” “Then stop talking and move—”

That earned you a quiet, wrecked laugh, and then he did — he moved, slow and deep, and your eyes rolled back instantly, your mouth falling open without a sound, because nothing had ever felt like this — like him — and it wasn’t just the stretch or the thickness or the length, it was the way he held your body like it was sacred, the way he looked at you like you were divine proof that the universe loved him back.

“Oh my god,” he whispered as he bottomed out, chest shuddering. “You took all of me. You took all of me.”

You nodded, weakly, but the tears gathering in your eyes made it clear just how much it took to take him — how full you were, how raw it felt, how your walls fluttered with the effort of keeping him inside like your body couldn’t bear the thought of letting him go.

And still, he didn’t move. Not yet. Just stared down at the way your body clenched around him, one hand sliding under your thigh to lift it higher, spread you wider, test how far he could fold you without breaking the illusion of reverence.

“You feel like you were built for this,” he said softly. “For me.”

His voice cracked halfway through, like he still couldn’t believe it, like this was something his brain — so used to analysis and control and facts — couldn’t compute no matter how hard it tried.

“I could ruin you,” he whispered, voice gone dark now. “I could fuck you until you forget your own name, and you’d still beg for more.”

Your hand fisted in his hair at the base of his neck, desperate, grounding.

And finally, finally, he started to move.

The first thrust was slow, so slow, like he was dragging every ridge and vein of his cock against every swollen inch inside you, and when he pulled back, you felt empty in a way that made you ache instantly for him again — and then he slid back in just as slowly, just as deep, just as devastating.

It wasn’t pace. It was pressure. It was a scientist testing the theory of how many times he could hit the same perfect spot until the subject collapsed.

And you were going to collapse.

“I want to measure the way you fall apart,” he panted, his hand tightening on your thigh. “I want to watch how you react. What muscles twitch. What your voice does when I hit this angle—”

He adjusted, and you screamed.

Not loud. Not performative. Just a raw, honest sound like the breath had been punched out of you and replaced with nothing but him.

“That one,” he breathed, mouth against your cheek. “That sound. That’s what I want. Every time.”

He moved faster now, still deep, still devastating, and the sound of your bodies meeting filled the room — slick, obscene, holy — while your legs shook around his hips and your hands clawed at his shoulders like you were holding onto the only thing anchoring you to reality.

“I could keep you like this,” he muttered. “In my bed. In my lap. Every goddamn night. Just folded open and dripping and taking it all.” You whimpered, writhing. “Please—” “I want to see you stretched out the next morning,” he whispered, teeth brushing your ear. “I want to spread your thighs and see the outline of me still inside you. I want to look at your cunt and know I wrecked it.”

You came like a wave crashing against the rocks — sharp and loud and sudden, your body seizing beneath him with a sob so high-pitched it made his rhythm falter, his name spilling from your lips like prayer.

And he held you through it. Drove through it.

Spencer’s thrusts got erratic, sloppy, his jaw tight as your cunt clenched around him like a vice, like your body was trying to milk every last drop from him because it needed it. Because you wanted to be full in every way a person could be full.

And he gave it.

With a groan like it tore through his chest, he buried himself one last time, fingers digging into your hip, forehead pressed to your collarbone as he came inside you, hard, deep, too much — his entire body trembling from the force of it.

You were still shaking. He was still inside.

Neither of you said anything.

Not until he finally pulled back to look at you, eyes blown and lips parted, and said — barely above a whisper:

“You are… the most important discovery of my life.”

—

He didn’t move right away.

Didn’t pull out. Didn’t let go. Didn’t speak.

Just kept his body pressed to yours — his chest still heaving in the aftermath, skin damp with sweat, breath catching every few seconds like he couldn’t quite believe he was still breathing at all — and held you like he’d just survived something.

Like you had just saved him.

You weren’t sure who moved first — maybe you twitched, maybe you breathed a little too deeply, maybe your fingers brushed the base of his neck — but the moment you shifted beneath him, his hand came up to your face instantly, cradling your jaw with such gentleness it broke something open inside you.

“Don’t,” he whispered, eyes still closed, voice hoarse. “Just—just stay right here. Let me—please—let me feel you.”

So you stayed. Quiet. Still.

Your thighs were shaking. Your throat was dry. And he was still buried inside you, softening slowly, but not enough to make you feel anything less. If anything, it made you feel more — because he wasn’t holding you out of hunger anymore.

He was holding you like he’d been starving for years and didn’t trust the world not to take the meal away.

His lips brushed your temple.

Then your cheek.

Then your jaw.

Then he let out a long, slow breath and finally spoke.

“I’ve never…” He swallowed hard. “I’ve never felt that. Not like that. Not ever.” Your hand found his chest, fingers curled lightly in the dip beneath his collarbone. “Felt what?”

His eyes opened then — wide, dazed, impossibly soft — and when he looked at you, it wasn’t lust or pride or even satisfaction. It was awe. Pure, scientific awe. The kind that made you feel like he’d just discovered a planet where your body lived at the centre of every orbit.

“The stretch,” he said, like it hurt to say it. “The fit. The heat. The way you—God, the way you opened for me. Like your body knew me before I even touched you.”

You inhaled shakily.

“And when I was all the way in…” His voice cracked, and he pressed his forehead to yours, chest rising fast. “You were shaking. But you held me. You took every inch and still looked at me like you wanted it. Like you needed it.” “I did,” you whispered. He kissed you then — soft, reverent, like he didn’t deserve to — and pulled back just enough to whisper, “I don’t think I’m ever going to forget how that felt.”

You didn’t say anything. You couldn’t.

And that silence must’ve unraveled something in him, because his voice dropped even lower when he murmured, “Do you realise how small you are compared to me? How delicate your bones are, how tiny your wrists? I could hold both in one hand and still have fingers left over. I could fold you in half and carry you through fire, and you’d barely fill my arms.”

Your body fluttered around him at the words, and he felt it — because his whole expression changed again. From awe to ruin.

“Oh my god,” he breathed. “You like it.”

You looked away, embarrassed.

“No,” he said, catching your chin and gently guiding your gaze back to his. “No. Don’t hide from that. That’s mine now.”

You blinked.

“That sound you made when I said you were mine?” he whispered. “I want to record it. I want to play it back every night. I want to catalogue every fucking detail of what it feels like to fit inside someone who shouldn’t be able to take it. Who takes it anyway. Who takes me.” You felt your throat close up. “Spencer…”

He kissed your cheek. Your nose. Your lips again, slower.

Then, finally, he pulled out of you, slow and careful, eyes flicking down between your legs — and his breath stuttered at the sight of it.

His cum leaking out of you. Your folds swollen. Your thighs twitching from aftershocks.

And you — still soft, still open, still his.

“You’re ruined,” he whispered, not like an insult — like a prayer.

He disappeared between your thighs and kissed the inside of your knee. The curve of your hip. The sore, tender space above your mound.

Then: “I’m not done with you. I’m going to fuck this into your memory until your body recognises me like second nature.”

You whimpered, curling weakly.

He grabbed the blanket, laid beside you, pulled you to his chest.

And finally, when your breathing had evened out and you were half-asleep on his chest — legs still tangled, his arm wrapped tightly around your waist like he couldn’t let go — Spencer reached for his phone with the kind of quiet guilt only a man with too many tabs open could feel.

He turned the brightness all the way down.

Searched with one hand while the other kept rubbing slow circles on your back.

And typed:

“Can you develop a size kink after one statistically unlikely sexual encounter?”

Then:

“Is it normal to feel emotionally wrecked after sex with someone whose wrist fits inside your hand?”

Then:

“What does it mean when you think you just met the person you were scientifically designed to fuck forever?”

He stared at the last one. Didn’t hit send.

Just watched the blinking cursor.

Then tucked the phone under the pillow, pulled you closer, kissed the top of your head, and whispered — so soft you didn’t even stir:

“God help me if this wasn’t a one-time thing.”

You weren’t awake.

But if you had been, you might’ve smiled — because Spencer Reid didn’t need to write a paper.

You were already the only result that mattered.

[slut4kwon]

if you were anyone else

pairing: kwon jiyong x fem! reader

synopsis: you’re his best friend’s little sister. it was never supposed to mean anything, but now he can’t forget the way she looked at him like it did. and that’s the problem. because wanting her was already a mistake, but letting her go might be worse.

warnings: 18+, implied sexual content, swearing, angst, secret relationship, brother’s best friend trope, emotionally repressed men™, jealousy, regret, unresolved feelings, possessive behavior, emotionally charged spirals, mentions of anxiety/panic attacks, slight praise kink, yearning so intense it physically hurts.

authors note: this is my first time posting on here, so… go easy on me. or don’t. i probably won’t sleep either way. also this is long as fuck i am so sorry. if you read it, thank you. if you liked it, even better. if you’re here just for the angst, me too.

you should’ve known it would get messy the first time he kissed you.

it wasn’t sweet. it wasn’t slow.

it happened behind the wardrobe rack in one of the yg dressing rooms, thirty minutes before a run-through while the crew scrambled to fix a lighting issue.

you were in a sports bra and sweatpants, makeup half-finished, second-day curls falling effortlessly down your back.

he was in his usual all-black rehearsal outfit, a silver chain at his collarbone, and something unreadable behind his eyes.

“you’re not supposed to look at me like that,” he muttered, jaw tense, gaze fixed on yours.

you crossed your arms. “i’m not looking at you like anything.”

he stepped in closer. “you keep doing those little moves. the ones you know drive me fucking crazy.”

“you mean the choreography?” you shot back, lifting a brow. “i’m literally just doing my job.”

“that thing in the second chorus,” he said, his voice lower now. “when you drop low and bite your lip. you do that for me. don’t lie, beautiful.”

you rolled your eyes, but your breath caught when he moved again. closer, slower, deliberate.

“you want me to lose it, don’t you?”

you didn’t answer. couldn’t.

because the way he looked at you was hungry. frustrated. like he’d been holding something back for far too long. it lit something dangerous inside you.

before you could even speak, his mouth was on yours.

hot. desperate. possessive.

your back hit the wall. his hands gripped your waist.

your fingers curled into his shirt like it was an instinct.

his tongue, his hands, the way he groaned when you tugged his hair. everything about it was messy.

and it didn’t stop there.

the backstage hookups became a pattern. between rehearsals. after fittings. corners of the studio with fogged mirrors and locked doors.

always hidden. always rushed. always too much but somehow never enough.

you gave him your first time on the studio couch, the same one you always collapsed on after long nights.

not out of romance, but something heavier. needier.

your legs wrapped around his waist. your fingers in his hair like you were clinging to gravity.

and he let you.

let you take. let you tremble.

let you come undone in his lap while his mouth traced your collarbone like a promise he’d never speak out loud.

no one knew about this.

not the stylists. not the other dancers. not even his own bandmates.

and especially not seunghyun.

your older brother would’ve lost his mind. maybe even burned the whole building down if he ever found out.

because of course, out of all the people in the world, it had to be him.

kwon jiyong.

his best friend. his closest friend.

the one person who had no business even looking at you like that; let alone touching you, wanting you, needing you.

and yet somehow, he was always there.

for months, you told yourself it didn’t mean anything.

that the way he touched you like he needed you — like breathing wasn’t enough unless you were under him, around him, full of him — was just part of the act.

that the way he lingered after, brushing hair from your face like it mattered, wasn’t real either.

you told yourself you could handle it.

that you were strong enough to keep it casual. quiet. hidden.

but it got harder to lie every time he pulled you in and didn’t let go.

every time he stayed a little longer.

every time he looked at you like maybe, just maybe, you were more than a secret.

still, you never asked for more. how could you?

he was your brother’s best friend. this was never supposed to happen.

but it did.

over and over again. like a bad habit neither of you could quit.

you didn’t plan to fall for him. didn’t mean to hope he’d stay the night, or kiss you like it meant something.

but you did. god, of course you did.

i mean, how could you not?

he touched you like you were fragile, but fucked you like you were the only thing that’s ever made him come undone.

he zipped up your jacket for you like it was just an excuse to touch you again.

he continuously found your eyes across any room like they were the only ones that existed.

for a while, you let yourself believe he felt it too.

until about a month ago, when he decided that pretending it meant nothing became easier than admitting it ever meant anything at all.

it happened in your dressing room. you’d just touched up your lip gloss, and casually asked him if he was coming over that night.

same routine. same rhythm.

he didn’t answer right away though. he just stood there, still and silent.

you turned, confused, watching the way his jaw clenched and how he couldn’t quite meet your eyes.

“jiyong?” you spoke up quietly.

he finally looked at you.

and you knew. before he even opened his mouth, you felt it.

“we can’t keep doing this.”

your stomach still dropped. “what?”

“this… whatever it is… it needs to stop.”

“don’t do that. don’t act like this wasn’t real.”

his jaw tightened as he looked away. “it was a mistake.”

“say it and mean it,” you snapped.

he didn’t hesitate this time. “it was a mistake.”

your laugh came out sharp, bitter. “tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night, but don’t stand there and pretend that i didn’t mean a damn thing to you.”

“y/n—” he started, but you cut him off.

“fuck you, jiyong.”

he met your eyes again, his throat tight.

almost like he wanted to say something else. like it was stuck somewhere between his ribs and his pride.

but he didn’t answer. he just let the silence grow between you.

let it choke everything that hadn’t been said. let it mean more than the truth would’ve.

“i’m sorry.” he finally said.

not a reason. not an explanation.

just that. two words. and then he walked out.

no goodbye. no chance to respond. no space to fall apart.

just the door clicking shut behind him like none of it had ever meant anything. like you had never meant anything.

the worst part wasn’t even the way it ended.

it was how nothing else did.

rehearsals still ran long. the mirrors still fogged with sweat. the playlist still cycled through the same tracks you used to hum when you thought no one could hear you.

he was always there. of course he was.

not in the way that mattered though. not in the way you needed. just in the way that somehow made it worse.

that same smirk. same swagger. same easy charm that made everyone else feel like nothing had changed.

like he hadn’t ruined you with nothing but his mouth and a handful of whispered promises he never intended to keep.

he still showed up to rehearsals like none of it ever happened.

he still carried his favourite hoodie. the one he never left home without.

everyone thought it was a comfort thing; a habit, maybe. something worn-in and familiar. assumed he just loved it.

and maybe he did. but it wasn't because it was warm, or soft, or broken in just right.

it was because it was yours.

he never carried it for himself. he carried it for you.

you never brought your own.

you hated feeling cold, and hated asking for help even more.

but with jiyong, you never had to ask. he paid attention to the way you’d rub slow circles into your arm, tuck your hands under your thighs, sometimes even press your tongue to the roof of your mouth just to stay quiet.

tiny things. things no one else could ever pick up on.

and yet somehow, he always did.

you never had to ask. he’d just offer it. sometimes with just a glance, sometimes with a soft, “here.”

and if you ever hesitated, he’d pull it over your head himself. like he was allowed to. like it meant something.

the other boys never questioned it. of course they didn’t. they would’ve done the same. they had before, on the rare days jiyong wasn’t around. but when he was, they never got the chance.

but now, he wears it again like it doesn't hold your scent. your shape. every version of you he ever pulled close. like it's just a hoodie.

however, this didn't stop you from showing up to rehearsals every day too.

because that’s what professionals do, right?

they show up, even when it hurts.

even when the person they can’t stop dreaming about is stretching ten feet away.

still laughing with everyone like he wasn’t one secret away from getting his jaw broken by your older brother.

there was no wreckage. no huge fall-out. just absence.

no one knew what had been taken because nothing, on the surface, was missing.

but you felt it. in every glance he didn’t give you. every touch that didn’t happen, but almost did.

and you were angry.

angry that he ended it without warning. angry that he made that decision for the both of you. angry that he could walk away without looking back.

you were angry at yourself for still caring.

you hated that your eyes searched for him when you entered the room. that your skin remembered him better than your brain wanted it to. how some part of you still wished he’d turn around and take it all back.

but he never did. not once.

rehearsal had run longer than usual today. the sun had dipped somewhere behind the city skyline without you noticing. shadows were now stretching across the floor as the studio emptied, one by one.

you stayed behind, stretching in silence, letting the burn in your muscles distract from the burn in your chest.

you suddenly heard your brother’s loud voice, which snapped you out of whatever trance you were in. “dinner. let’s go.”

you didn’t even blink. still stretched out on the floor, one leg bent and arms braced behind you. “pass.”

seunghyun frowned. “you didn’t even ask where.”

“don’t need to,” you said coolly. “you’re painfully predictable.”

daesung raised a brow. “she’s got you there.”

“actually, i’m switching it up tonight,” seunghyun insisted. “new place. no kimchi stew.”

you finally looked up, unimpressed. “who’s paying you to try their new restaurant?”

he crossed his arms. “no one. i just think you need some real food in you. something with protein. maybe even a vegetable.”

“tempting,” you said, standing up and stretching your arms over your head. “but i can’t. i’ve got plans.”

“plans?” seunghyun’s voice cracked like he’d just heard you say you were moving out and never coming back.

you grabbed your water. “yep.”

“what kind of plans?”

“the kind that don’t include you,” you said, smiling sweetly.

youngbae’s head popped up from behind his duffel. “wait. are we talking… plans plans?”

you just sipped your water like it was nothing, which, naturally, made it something.

daesung narrowed his eyes. “that look. that’s a ‘plans with a boy’ look if i’ve ever seen one.”

you didn’t answer. you didn’t need to. it was more entertaining to watch them spiral on their own.

youngbae gasped. “you’re going on a date.”

“jesus christ,” seunghyun muttered. “no you’re not.”

“i didn’t say that,” you replied, smoothing your hair down.

“but you didn’t not say it.”

you gave the smallest shrug, which, unfortunately, said everything, once again.

youngbae gasped like he’d been betrayed. “you’re seeing someone? since when?”

“relax,” you said, throwing your towel over your shoulder. “you’re acting like i announced an engagement.”

“it’s hard to relax when you’re acting suspiciously vague,” daesung countered.

“which means it’s serious,” youngbae added while nodding. “you’re protecting him.”

you raised a brow. “or i’m protecting you idiots from a full-blown meltdown.”

seunghyun squinted. “who is it?”

“none of your business.”

“it is absolutely my business if some dude is out here making googly eyes at my baby sister behind my back!”

“googly eyes?” you echoed, half-laughing. “what are we, twelve?”

“i’m being serious, y/n.”

“i can tell, oppa. very intimidating.”

“is it someone we know?” daesung asked. “because i feel like it’s someone we know.”

“you don’t know him.” you replied, which wasn’t technically a lie.

there was no him. but they didn’t need to know that.

especially not the one sitting on the bench near the mirror, completely silent.

jiyong hadn’t said a word. hadn’t even moved.

just sat there with his towel around his neck, and his eyes on the floor.

but you saw the tension in his hands. the way his jaw was set so tightly, it looked like it hurt.

and it gave you just enough fuel to keep going.

seunghyun was still spiraling. “i don’t like this. what if he’s some asshole? what if he’s just trying to—”

“then i’ll deal with it,” you replied calmly. “i’m perfectly capable of throwing hands.”

“still don’t like it.”

“you’re not supposed to, oppa.”

and that’s when jiyong spoke. low. dismissive. deadly.

“just let her go.”

everyone turned.

seunghyun blinked. “huh?”

“if she’s got plans, she’s got plans,” jiyong said. not looking at you. not looking at anyone. “it’s not our business.”

“oh, wow,” daesung muttered. “traitor.”

“you’re not even gonna try to talk her out of it?” seunghyun asked, almost sounding dumbfounded.

“she’s allowed to do whatever she wants,” jiyong replied, tossing the towel aside like the whole conversation bored him. “if it’s a date, then…let her have fun.”

you said nothing. you just stared at him.

and after a long second, he finally looked up, just for a heartbeat. just long enough to meet your eyes.

and there it was. buried under all of it; jealousy. regret. hurt.

only things that you could see.

the things he couldn’t say. the ones you never needed him to.

so you smiled, small and sweet.

“thanks for your support, jiji.” you said sweetly, using the nickname you rarely used for him anymore.

he didn’t answer, but you didn’t wait for one either.

you grabbed your bag and threw it over your shoulder.

“anyways, don’t wait up!” you shouted, turning and blowing a kiss towards the boys as you walked towards the door.

youngbae clutched his chest. “she’s so going to make out with him.”

“i’m gonna vomit,” seunghyun muttered.

you walked out giggling without looking back.

jiong didn’t move. didn’t even blink. just stared at the door like it might swing back open and undo all of it.

it didn’t.

he noticed the tremble in your hands as you reached for your bag. it was faint, almost invisible. the kind of shake that came when your body had given too much.

he always noticed.

it was a curse. a reflex. a silent devotion to you that he never meant to make a habit.

you were clearly overstimulated, vibrating underneath your skin. and no one else seemed to care.

but he did. he always did.

the boys were still talking. still laughing, but their voices echoed as if they were underwater.

daesung was teasing seunghyun about running a background check. youngbae was already trying to guess the date’s name. one of them joked about texting you the restaurant address ‘in case lover boy stands you up.’

jiyong didn’t laugh. he couldn’t.

because the silence left in your absence was louder than anything. and beneath it, something ugly twisted in his chest.

he knew you weren’t dressed for a date. your hair was wild, your face was bare, still glowing with sweat and adrenaline.

you didn’t look like someone trying to impress a man, not that you needed to. you just looked like you. the version jiyong had memorized in the low light of his apartment, curled into his sheets, still trembling from his mouth on your skin.

and somehow, that made it worse.

because what if this new guy didn’t care enough to notice the small things jiyong had?

what if he didn’t realize how you go quiet when you’re overwhelmed, not out of moodiness, but because your brain shuts down under too much noise?

what if he didn’t know how sometimes you can’t ask for help, because you don’t even know what you need?

what about that you chew the inside of your cheek when you’re anxious? or that you tap your thumb against your middle finger three times when you’re trying not to cry?

would he know that you hated the sound of ticking clocks? that certain words made your skin crawl? that sometimes, dancing was the only thing that kept your thoughts from devouring you whole?

jiyong did. he knew all of it.

he knew how to sit behind you on the studio floor when everything got to be too much; legs stretched out on either side of you, chest pressed against your back.

he knew not to ask what was wrong. he knew that you didn’t always know, and that asking only made it worse.

just to let you press your ear over his heart and listen to the rhythm of his heartbeat until your lungs remembered how to breathe properly on their own again.

he knew the hoodie he always carried for you was your lifeline when you needed comfort. which songs made you cry even if you didn’t quite know why.

he knew you couldn’t sit in the backseat of a car because it always made you nauseous. which corners of your body held tension so tightly, you didn’t even realize they hurt until he pressed his fingers there.

he learned you like a prayer. a warning. a song that never stopped playing in the back of his head.

and now, someone else might get to touch you. might get to pretend they know you. run their hands down a body they hadn’t earned. kiss a mouth that didn’t belong to them.

and jiyong fucking hated that.

because yeah, it started as just sex.

reckless. rushed. hidden in between rehearsals and outfit changes. in cars, stairwells and hotel rooms too quiet for what the two of you were doing.

but it stopped being just sex a long time ago.

he didn’t know when exactly it shifted. maybe it was the first night you told him not to ask, but to just take. when you grabbed his wrist and pulled it to your throat. when you told him to ruin you.

or maybe it was the one night he didn’t.

the night he slowed down.

held your jaw in both hands like you were made of glass and kissed you like he had something to lose.

told you how fucking perfect you were. how you take him so well. how you were made for him.

you came apart for him like you believed it. like you needed it.

surely that’s when he realized it wasn’t just sex. at least, not anymore.

because you didn’t just let him have your body, you gave it to him. not with words. not directly.

in the way you trembled under his touch. in the way you arched into his hands. in the way you moaned his name like it meant something.

and fuck, it did. it meant everything.

he memorized you. not just the way your thighs shook when you were close or the spot beneath your ribs that made you gasp when he kissed it for the first time.

he knew your body better than he knew his own.

he memorized the curve of your spine. the pitch of your moans. the shape of your mouth when you were too fucked-out to speak.

he knew exactly where to touch to make you fall apart, but also exactly how to hold you when you couldn’t put yourself back together.

he hated himself for it.

for needing you. for learning you. for turning every sound you made into a song he couldn’t stop humming in his own head.

because the more he gave, the more he wanted. and the more he wanted, the more it hurt.

he told himself that ending it was the right call, and maybe it was.

maybe it was smart. you were seunghyun’s little sister, after all. this was doomed from the moment it started.

but god, he missed you.

you were the only one he ever let see him for who he really was, and now you were gone. and he has no one else to blame for that but himself.

his thumb pressed into the palm of his opposite hand; hard. a grounding technique, one that you taught him. one that never worked unless it was your voice talking him through it.

he barely felt the pain.

he just sat there, spine tense, gaze still locked on the scuffed floor where you’d been standing just a few moments ago.

the room still buzzed with conversation. low laughter, the rustle of jackets, someone still talking about dinner plans.

but it all felt far away. almost like he was watching it through a sheet of glass that was thick and smudged with fingerprints.

he didn’t hear what they said. he didn’t care either.

because all he could think about was the look on your face before you walked out.

not happy. not angry. not sad either.

he honestly wasn’t quite sure, and that scared him a little.

he remembers how you used to look at him. like you saw through everything; the ego, the performance, the chaos.

that was because you did, and yet, you still chose him.

every. single. time.

but now, you didn’t even look back.

“hyung?” daesung said cautiously, tone lighter than his expression. “you good?”

jiyong blinked like he was waking up from a dream. “what?”

“you’ve been kinda weird lately,” youngbae said from behind him. “and not just today either.”

“yeah,” daesung added. “like the last few weeks.”

jiyong exhaled through his nose, forcing a shrug. “just tired.”

seunghyun looked up from where he was zipping his bag. “ji.”

jiyong flinched like his name stung.

“talk to us,” seunghyun said, voice low, less like a demand and more like a plea. “we’ve been worried. you don’t laugh the same anymore. you barely show up.”

“i’m fine,” he said, sharper this time. like if he said it hard enough, they’d believe it.

“we’re not trying to push,” youngbae said gently. “we just miss you, man.”

jiyong’s throat was tight. he couldn’t look any of them in the eye.

“i’ll see you guys later,” he spoke suddenly, already halfway to the door.

“what?” daesung called after him. “you’re not coming to eat?”

“not hungry.”

seunghyun took a step forward. “jiyong—wait.”

but the door was already closing behind him.

and just like that, he was gone. his feet moved without thinking.

down the hallway, out of the building, and into the night.

but on the inside, he was somewhere else entirely.

back in the dressing room. back in your bed.

back in that goddamn moment where you looked up at him like you were his, even though you both knew you weren’t.

he can still feel it.

the weight of your body curled under his. your nails in his skin. his name on your tongue.

the breath you let out when he called you sweetheart like it meant something.

the quietness afterwards that felt like a promise, even though neither of you ever made one.

it should’ve faded by now.

but it hasn’t. it’s still there.

in the way his chest tightens when someone says your name.

in the way his hands curl into fists when he pictures you laughing with someone else.

in the way the silence feels heavier when you’re not around to fill it.

and now, he has to act like it didn’t happen. like it didn’t mean anything. like you didn’t mean everything.

he hates himself for how much he still cares.

hates that he let it get this far. that he let you in. that he let it mean something.

but more than anything, he hates that he can’t stop hoping it meant something to you, too.

because no matter how far he lets you go, he will always believe that no one else will ever have you in the way that he did.

and maybe that makes him selfish.

but it also makes him right.

[bitchinbarzal]

Blue and Gold, Cold and Alone | M Kesselring

summary: kess got traded.

—

When the news breaks, it isn’t from him. It’s a Twitter notification.

You’re still in bed, phone dimmed and fingers scrolling mindlessly when it pops up: Trade Alert: Michael Kesselring and Josh Doan to Buffalo for JJ Peterka.

The breath leaves your lungs.

Not because you didn’t know it could happen. But because he didn’t tell you.

Your phone buzzes again this time, his name lighting up the screen.

You answer with a quiet, “You got traded.”

He sighs. “I was going to tell you—”

“When? After you landed in New York?”

“I didn’t want to say anything until it was real. I didn’t want to stress you.”

You roll onto your side, pressing a hand over your eyes. “It’s real now.”

He leaves the next morning.

You don’t cry until the door shuts behind him.

Long distance, at first, doesn’t seem like the end of the world. You’d done it before. You had your life here work, friends, obligations you couldn’t drop. And he had the game. He always had the game.

You FaceTime every night for the first week. Silly jokes. Tired smiles. He shows you his apartment bare walls, new team gear in boxes. You send him a coffee maker. He sends you a sweatshirt.

It’s not the same, but it’s something.

Then the calls get shorter.

A missed one here. A late reply there.

“I’m just tired,” he says.

“I get it,” you say.

But it’s not just that.

He starts mentioning a name more than once.

“Avery said the sushi place down the block is killer.”

“I was late to skate ‘cause Avery’s dog ran into traffic—don’t worry, she’s okay.”

“Ran into Avery at the gym. She made me promise I’d stop eating like a frat boy.”

You laugh the first few times. It’s harmless. A friend.

Until it doesn’t feel harmless anymore.

Until it feels like replacement.

One night, you text him something soft

Miss you, wish you were here

He replies three hours later with a photo of his dinner. No caption.

You stare at it for a long time. You don’t write back.

You see him in a teammate’s Instagram story two nights later. He’s sitting at a bar, laughing, and she’s there. Her hair falling over her shoulder, her hand on his arm like it belongs.

Your heart squeezes so tight you forget how to breathe.

You don’t confront him right away.

You just pull away.

When he finally notices, it’s midnight. Your phone buzzes. His face fills the screen.

You answer, eyes already brimming.

“Hey, baby,” he says, smiling.

You don’t smile back. “Can I ask you something?”

He sits up, concern furrowing his brow. “Of course.”

You swallow hard. “Are you sleeping with her?”

His whole body stills. “What?”

“Avery.” Her name catches like fire in your throat. “Are you - are you with her?”

His face twists, broken and shocked. “Jesus Christ. No. Where is this coming from?”

“You talk about her more than me. She’s always there. I don’t even know what your apartment looks like anymore, but I know Avery’s dog’s name.”

He’s quiet. Then, “You think I’d cheat on you?”

“I think I’m not sure what we are anymore.”

He looks like you’ve gutted him. “You’re it for me. Always were.”

“Then why does it feel like I lost you anyway?”

His voice drops. “Because I’ve been a idiot.”

He shows up three days later.

You open the door in pajamas, bleary-eyed and cautious.

He’s holding your favorite coffee and a bag with that stupid sweatshirt he knows you love.

“I’m not staying long,” he says. “Just long enough to prove you’re the only one I want. The only one I’ve ever wanted.”

You don’t cry right away. But when he steps inside, when he wraps his arms around you like he’d fall apart without you and you let yourself believe him.

Maybe this isn’t the end.

Maybe it’s just where you learn how to begin again.

[undyingdecay]

i heard we’re talking about mean!walker and i would like to put pussy slapping on the table

he wouldn’t even give you the satisfaction of a real touch at first. palm cupping you just barely, thumb pressing in light, lazy circles over your clit, watching your hips jerk, a pleased grin tugging at his mouth. “so fuckin’ needy, baby,” he’d murmur, voice thick and low, “weren’t you talkin’ all that shit earlier? what happened to that attitude, huh?”

and then when you start to beg — quiet, desperate, hips tipping into his hand because you can’t help it — that’s when he does it. the slap isn’t brutal, it’s not meant to hurt like a punishment, it’s just enough to make a wet, sharp sound, the sting sharp and addictive, leaving you gasping before it blooms into heat between your legs.

he’ll groan too, every time he does it, like it turns him on just as much as it does you. maybe even more. the sight of you trembling, hole clenching around nothing, eyes going glassy while you whimper for him. and he’s a smug asshole about it, because of course he is. “aw, look at that,” he’ll croon, dragging his fingers through the wet mess between your thighs, teasing your swollen clit with the tips of his fingers. “pussy so fuckin’ pretty when it’s pink like this. think you like it, huh? yeah, you fuckin’ love it.”

and if you deny it — if you so much as try — he’s giving you another one. maybe a little rougher this time, just to hear you cry out, to see you fall apart that much quicker. and he won’t stop, not until you’re begging properly, voice cracking, promising you’ll be good, that you’ll take whatever he gives you if he’ll just please, please touch you.

and when he finally does? it’s with that same mean, mocking little grin on his face, because he knows he’s got you exactly where he wants you — desperate, messy, dripping down your thighs for him and only him.

god bless you anon. this is peak walker filth and we deserve it.

[dissociativewriter]

OH MY! congrats on the 400 followers!!! and for the event can't you write some angst with sylus x nonmc, please??? don't know if you have listened to WILDFLOWER by Billie eilish, but i really wanna see what would be born out of that??? not pressure tho! (also sorry for my english but im not a native speaker haha)

thank you!! this was an amazing request! it took me a while to write it, but i really like this. i hope you do too!

request event

The base hadn’t been quiet in months.

It was nice, you thought. A welcome change. In all your years at Onychinus there was always a tense silence. Always something that seemed to say this was an operation, not a home.

That all changed when Miss Hunter arrived, though.

Everything seemed warmer, splashes of color dotted around and a constant hum of chatter echoed through the space.

You’d never seen Sylus like this. Even when he was laughing and messing around with Luke and Kieran, he hadn’t allowed himself to be this happy. It seemed like there was something holding him back, something expectant.

Now the air was lighter, his shoulders lost their tension, his laughs came more freely. Things seemed to be looking up.

That made the newfound silence all the more jarring.

Miss Hunter had left just as quickly as she’d came. It wasn’t a huge ordeal. She hadn’t made a big deal out of it. There was just an conversation, spoken in quiet tones behind closed doors. Next thing you knew, she was gone in a mess of tears and broken promises.

You’d let Sylus alone for a time after that. Taken up the responsibilities of Onychinus in his stead, the role practically second nature ever since he’d promoted you to second-in-command a few years ago.

It was quiet again. You didn’t see much of the Boss, and you never expected to see Miss Hunter again.

But she’d shown up at your doorstep one night within the first week of their separation. Tear tracks on her cheeks and a heart-wrenching sob asking for someone to talk to.

You’d obliged, of course. How could you turn her away when she was like this? Pulling her into you, rubbing her back as she sobbed into your shoulder. She blubbered that she didn’t have anyone to talk to, that none of her friends really knew Sylus enough to cry about him to.

She explained that even if they weren’t together, she didn’t want to expose him and his identity like that.

You nodded, holding her close as she seemed to cry herself dry. She did most of the talking that night. Talking about how it had been a mutual decision, how they both felt like they just weren’t right for each other.

Miss Hunter had said she never expected falling out of love to hurt so bad.

The next morning, Sylus emerged from his room for the first time in four days. Silvery hair messy, eyes bloodshot, usually steady hands now trembling at his sides.

You sat with him. Wordlessly offered him a cup of coffee. He took it with a nod of thanks, holding it close instead of drinking it, like he was willing its burning warmth to thaw the cold that had taken over.

It became a routine. You’d sit with him, allow the quiet that had been uncomfortable, that had had something missing, to settle until it became something resembling understanding.

Sylus tried to distract himself with the work of Onychinus. You limited his access and told him he needed to sit with his grief and understand it before it consumed him entirely, not avoid it with gunfights and business deals.

Sylus never was able to fight you when you got like this.

He let you take care of him in a way no one had in a long time. It was gentle, quiet. A cup of tea here, a gentle reminder there. Never asking too many questions, never pushing for something more. He didn’t mention how much he appreciated it. He knew he didn’t have to.

You should have seen it coming, you thought. He was vulnerable. You were there. You should have expected it when the touches began to linger, when he began reaching for you.

You always thought of her when he did that.

Maybe you brushed it off because you thought you’d never compare to her. After all, what was the worry, when she was so bright and outgoing when you just seemed to fade into the background.

“No one knows me as well as you do,” Sylus muttered one night, brushing a strand of hair behind your ear. “You’ve always been there for me. I think— no, I know…”

Your breathing felt like it stopped. All you could think of, all you could see in the back of your mind was Miss Hunter. Should you feel this guilty? This hurt?

Were you just a replacement, something to fill the void, that fresh wound that kept bleeding?

“I love you,” Sylus whispered, low and reverent.

You didn’t move your hand from his. You didn’t say how all you could think about was how Miss Hunter must have felt.

Sylus didn’t mean to hurt you. You knew that.

Maybe being quiet was for the best.

comments and reblogs appreciated and asks open! <3

masterlist

@dolledbunnytail @sleepykittyenergy @orbitraiden @coffeedragonhobbyist

[angstywaifu]

Black Dahlia - 61. Pretty Boy

Summary: After Violet's run in with Barlowe on the mat, Xaden has them ramping up their training. And Liam is looking for someone else to challenge. But his flirty mouth may just get him on the bad side of a certain Section Leader.

Black Dahlia Masterlist | Masterlist | Links

The gym is a bit busier tonight. Challenges were back on, and with no one flying with how cold it’s been and the temperamental weather, everyone has been taking advantage of being up for extra training. As usual marked ones are spread throughout, training with the more experienced ones as per Xaden’s instructions.

Since Violet’s challenge with Jack, he’d been on edge more than usual, and was now more demanding about everyone under his care being on top of their training. Which mean Imogen and I had to increase the amount of training we were doing with Violet to keep him at bay. On the mats closest to the weights area, Bodhi and Liam are sparing, showing some techniques to some other first years who are watching them intently. Though with the amount of girls watching them I know they’re watching for reasons other than learning how to fight. And with the cocky smirk Liam flashes at them before putting Bodhi on his back, I know he notices the attention.

”Come on Durran, give me a real fight.” Liam complains as he helps pull him up from the mat.

”This is meant to be informative. Not a proper fight.” Bodhi points out.

Bodhi was never one to go all out in these sessions. Preferring to use the time to explain and show technique. Whereas Liam was always itching to prove himself. Which he didn’t need to. He was undefeated this year, and everyone knew he was a rider to look out for. Both on the mat and up in the air. He was a very talented rider.

”And what better way to teach then to show them a proper challenge. You’re holding back. I bet Imogen or Dahlia would give me a proper fight. Wouldn’t you ladies?” Liam asks as walk past.

”I don’t think tha-”

”Of course we would.” Imogen says a bit to eagerly as she cuts Bodhi off. “I’m sure the undefeated Squad Leader would love to put on a proper fight.”

I turn and look at her, utterly confused as to what the hell has gotten into her. Usually she’d brush the boys off and mutter something about pent up testosterone. Because this isn’t the first time they’ve tried to pull us into their training while he walk past.

”What do you say old Squad Leader?” Liam asks with a smirk as he braces his hands on his hips.

Imogen shoves me toward the mat as she relieves me of my pack. “Fine, but make it quick. I have other things to attend to.” I tell him as I walk onto the mat.

”I’m sure I can make that happen given my track record.” He says confidently as he starts to circle me.

”Come on then pretty boy, show me what you’ve got.” I taunt before he rushes me.

Despite his size he’s quick and agile. It’s what’s given him the upper hand against all the opponents he’s been put up against. Most people would assume due to his height and build he’d be a bit on the slower side. But I’ve watched him fight for most of this year, so I know what to expect. Especially when he come’s at me with a combo I’ve watched Xaden do countless times. I shouldn’t be surprised. They were fostered together, so it doesn’t surprise me that Xaden trained him during that time.

Liam lunges at me, pulling me from my thoughts as I dart backwards to get out of his reach. We fall into a rhythm with ease, as if we’d done this a thousand times before. Soon I get an opening and land a series of hits on him as he slows, clearly fatigued by the sparing he’d been doing with Bodhi prior.

”You’re getting slow.” I tease.

He grins, blonde hair falling into his blue eyes as he steps back to circle me again. He parries my next punch with a casual twist of his wrist. I pivot, trying to slip past his defences, but he grabs my wrist and spins me around, the motion pulling a laugh from my lips as he pushes me away.

”Oh please, I could go all night pretty girl.” He teases with a smirk.

”Alright, that's enough.” A familiar booming voice comes from the edge of the mat.

I turn to see Garrick who is practically shooting daggers at him with his glare, arms crossed over his chest as he focuses on Liam. It’s not hard to tell he’s jealous, clearly having heard the banter between Liam and I while sparring.

”We we’re just getting started. Unless you’d care to join us.” Liam throws back with a smirk, not helping the situation at all.

I watch as Garrick’s jaw ticks with his tell-tale sigh of being annoyed. If Liam wasn’t who he was, I have no doubt Garrick would have laid into him on the mat already. Fucking possessive man.

“I said that’s enough. Dahlia has other training to do.” He barks out.

Yep. Jealous as fuck.

I roll my eyes as I walk over to Garrick who keeps his eyes on Liam, as if looking for a reason to lay into him. He finally looks at me when I lay my hand on his bicep. His hazel eyes softening ever so slightly as they meet mine.

”Don’t worry, you’re a pretty boy to.” I tell him with a smirk before reaching up and placing a kiss on his cheek which flushes bright red almost immediately before brushing past him and joining Imogen who looks like she’s barely containing her laughter.

”You did that on purpose.”

”I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She says with a smug smile on her face as she hands back my pack.

We turn and head over to the door to the weights area just as Liam joins Bodhi on the edge of the mats behind us.

”You could have fucking told me she was Garrick’s girlfriend. I thought they were just sleeping together.” Liam whisper yells at Bodhi.

Bodhi just shrugs. “Not my fault you live under a rock.”

@imtoanonymousforyou @simplyme-fornow @omalmal @lalaluch @wolfbc97 @leptitlu @fullmoon-94 @the-fandom-ness @fan-of-many-bands @awkardnerd @heeseungthel0ml @acourtofsmutandstarlight @fairchild06 @freyagallileaevans @pit-and-the-pen @hannraumari @elliot-rain @thestarseternaal @stupid-and-contagious01 @hyperfixation-train-station @lxnvmvrzx @thebreadisthetruevillian @red0202 @fangirling-galore @craftytrashprincess @taliyahvermillion @xadenswhore @fenixyrie @lagrandeourse @hellodarling1357 @iambored24601  @thegiftofacreativemind @fanfictionjunkie1112 @mysticalfuncollectorus @ohlookitsasinglepoeceofpopcorn @emoravenwolf @imheretobeinvisible @pvrkacciosan @fuckingsimp4azriel @clarewinchester @i-am-infinite @prettylittlewrites @electronictimetravelninja

[chimckenns]

Showing vulnerability was something…foreign to Darlin’. They were so used to being on edge, reacting to other people’s actions, constantly being aware of what they might do or perceive them as.

Of course they never showed Quinn any of their real self. He was there for pleasure - a distraction from the loneliness they felt after running away from the pack.

And that clearly turned out well.

With Sam it felt different.

It wasn’t that they felt like they couldn’t show him any vulnerability in fear that he’d hurt them in some way.

Darlin’ was more scared that once they showed that side of themself he’d leave them alone.

Quinn always said they were a burden.

The last thing they wanted was to hear those words coming out of Sam’s mouth.

So they built up a mask.

They finally felt the touch of what heaven could feel like when the southern vampire made his way into their life. The last thing they wanted was for him to leave them.

They finally got a bit of their family back.

Darlin’ didn’t want to be alone again.

They spent five hours watching the love of their life be tortured by the poison of their past spilling out of Quinn’s mouth.

Five hours.

They couldn’t bring themself to look at Sam, afraid to see the look on his face as he heard everything they did with Quinn. Darlin’ kept their eyes to the floor, the only thing holding them together was David’s firm grip in their hand.

When they finally got the information about the girl out of Quinn, Sam came in the room, clearly exhausted, and wasted no time to pull Darlin’ into a hug.

Darlin’ didn’t reciprocate.

They felt like they didn’t have the right to anymore.

He knows how tainted they are now. The shit they did under Quinn’s control was out in the open. The past they tried desperately to hide was unearthed.

They kept their gaze on the floor, bracing for the moment Sam would tell them that he couldn’t do this anymore. That he wanted to leave. That they were more than he could handle.

That they were a burden.

The moments after felt like a blur, and when they blinked they found themselves in the living room of their home, sitting on the couch, with Sam next to them holding their hand.

Darlin’ couldn’t bring themself to say much. They tried listening to Sam’s words of comfort, but their mind kept echoing the toxicity Quinn had said moments before. It overwhelmed them, replaying over and over again.

That was all they were, wasn’t it.

A thrall. A blood bag. Something to be used.

How naive of them to think they could ever be more.

They spiralled, feeling themself slip away and start to accept the truth. Better to mentally prepare now for the inevitable. They’ll end up alone again. They were a fool to think they changed at all.

Darlin’ faded in and out, only registering some of the words Sam had said. They knew they should listen - it’s probably the last time he’d ever bother to talk to them. But the fear of hearing those words they dreaded kept them from focusing.

There was so much noise.

Sam’s hand on their cheek, gentle like he always was, stopped them in their tracks.

“Darlin’… you are nobody’s thrall. Least of all his.”

They finally looked up.

And he could see in their eyes that they were about the fall off the edge.

A singular tear spilled onto their cheek - a final call for help.

In one swift movement he gathered them in his arms, enveloping his whole body around them.

The comfort of his warmth helped them let go, and they released the dam of emotions they had built up over the months.

He held them through all of it, each sob racketing through their body like a shot to his heart. He held them like they did for him back when he was in a dark place, never letting go or loosening his grip.

The noise and mess of thoughts were immediately silenced the moment they fell into his arms. They didn’t know if it was the magic in him, but for the first time in what felt like a long time their head wasn’t splitting open, and they found themself relaxing in his embrace.

They almost forgot what peace felt like.

“I’m not going anywhere, Darlin’.”

[nightscythe]

primarchs and their unbalanced love

adapted this request slightly so it wasn't just a sentence and focused more on them. if this didn't meet what you wanted anon, please let me know!

pre-heresy, tw on curze/alpharius for yandere like behaviour // your relationship with the primarch would always be unbalanced because you're just a human. you reach your breaking point and end things.

lion: you’d noticed the looks, sat quietly as another questioned why you were there and the lion chose to glare rather than defend you, seeing it pointless to explain – it had been luther who told you to run far away and never look back, promising that staying within reach of the primarch would never end well for you. he’s stood upon the allure of the fortress, staring down at the people who praised him. loved him, even, seeing the primarch as a saviour to all they knew. though he was never blind to the criticism of the people when it came to him, especially when it’s voiced so clearly to him. he scans the crowd, slowly, taking every face in until he finds you; watching him already, expression numbed, eyes dull, the hint of your soul already faded. he recalls the last words you said to him as your hands clasped gently over his, the universe was not made for our two souls to be together. he’d grabbed your wrist, tried to stop you from walking away from him, but he never got the chance to tell you. then i will strip the universe bare until it allows us to be. instead you saw anger, rage, a vengeance you knew he was capable of, but he never allowed you to see before. his final words were a promise, leave now, before i remind you why the universe wouldn’t allow us to be together. this was his punishment, your eyes finding his whenever he left the four walls he knew you could never enter, a constant reminder of what he never had.

fulgrim: you’d ignored it at first, what some people were willing to do for the primarch, how they’d have killed for him, to be with him, or even just to hear his voice in person – and one person can only overhear so many discussions on how people plan to kill them before they decide a change is needed, even if it hurts more than anything. the seat at the head of his table felt shameful. all eyes on him, wanting, requiring more from him than he was willing to give. he hadn’t looked up from the embroidered and lace-trimmed placemat that his fingers played with in minutes, avoiding the conversation around him. there weren’t many things that could bring him to silence, let alone people. yet you had managed that. likewise, you’d managed to do the impossible and capture the heart of a man made to never have feelings. when he finally looks up from the placemat, eyes darker than before, the room falls to a sharp silence. the only person he can find the strength to look at is you. across the room from him, dressed in the colours he told you looked perfect, though every other part of you was concealed from him. your eyes never leave the floor, even as the silence continues. of course i’m afraid, you had told him when he approached you, cowering from his larger frame. the image was burned into his mind, torturing him each hour. i would protect you from everything, he reassured you, there is not a thing on this earth that could harm you whilst i still live. he can still feel the way your hand slipped out of his as you turned your back to him. from your father? you had asked, voice hollow, from yourself? fulgrim never answered. the room eventually starts to speak again as fulgrim looks back down to the placemat. only then do you dare to look back at him. 

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perty: it was never that you didn’t trust him, but you knew he would never believe that – you’d learnt of what he had done to those who failed him, asked him one too many questions and seen the side of him that everyone had feared but you hadn’t yet seen. he believed he’d ensured that you were erased from every record related to him. believed he’d never see your face again, never hear your voice, embrace your smile, or enjoy your laughter filling the halls. weeks had passed without any part of your presence, and he believed he needed it, yet every step he took his soul felt lonelier than before. he’d thought he’d heard your voice a few times, chased the sound down empty hallways to find nothing but the ghosts of his memories. he believed today was no different when he heard your call from one of the rooms; one which sounded so real it stopped him in his tracks. he waited, listened, wanted to hear more – a wish which was fulfilled within seconds and has him tracking down the source. he almost stumbles through the doorway where the sound is loudest, catching himself on the stone frame but still garnering your attention. you don’t speak, not even as the woman opposite to you bows and offers her apologies. but the longer your gaze is locked, the more his nostrils flare, the tighter his jaw tenses. leave, he tells you, coldly, lest i remind you how quickly i can have you removed for good. you only nod, slowly, stepping back from him quietly and dragging your eyes down to the ground. he waits, watches, hears your voice tell him how you felt unsure of your place within these walls. when you look up to him one last time, he feels the snarl at the back of his throat. if you did not feel safe then, why would you feel safe now? he questions. why would you trust me now? 

khan: you’d watched men die, seen how expendable life was with your own eyes, and seen how quickly he had moved past it, leaving only one thought on your mind – that you must have been just as expendable as everyone else he stood over. the hardest part of all was accepting it. he sat with a handful of his sons around, none daring to look at their primarch who had scarcely looked beyond the spot right in front of him for the past two days. all he did was think. about this, about him, about you. it could never go beyond that though, he never was able to find peace in his own thoughts nor in the conversation with others. but you had come on your own volition, hearing of the primarch’s unusual silence amongst other gossip from the crowds, and when he saw you in front of him, slowly coming to rest on your knees, it was the first time he found the right words to say out loud. you’re wrong about everything, he says, not giving you a moment to speak. you nod, once, though you do not speak. he fills the space between you with more necessary words. i would not make a promise so lightly if i did not know it could be fulfilled. but i assure you, with everything i could offer, that your life will never be in danger so long as i live. your silence is excruciating, the throbbing in his body getting quicker and quicker as he waits for your answer. but it never seems to come. but if you cannot trust me that i will make true on my promise, then i shall not ask anymore of you, but to remember how deeply i cared for you.  

leman: he had tried his best to keep you separate, despite the loyalty his sons offered and how deep their bond went – but when you’d started to understand why he was called the executioner, why his legion was known to be so deadly, and when you discovered everything he had been responsible in the name of his father, you realised that you would never have been spared. his body ached. he’d thrown himself into any situation he could, begged that the all father would bless him with something that could knock him out cold and give him some breathing room for just a few moments. every single one of his thoughts was about the same thing. doubt. of himself, of his capabilities, of anything he had ever considered a strength. each time raised his weapon and bared his teeth, your words took over his mind. you will never be enough. his mind falls silent to what you had actually told him. you do not have it in you to stand up to your loyalties over a mere human. you could not betray everything you know, everything you stand for, just because they disagree with me, or do not want me, or think i am unworthy. he didn’t want you to be right about it. and as he stood there, broke another man’s bones without even thinking, he realised he still couldn’t argue against you. the thump of a body hitting the ground forces him to tear his sight back to reality, focus shifting from the cheers around him, to the man laying before him, to your eyes at the back of the room, never looking away. you would never be unworthy, he’d told you before, a sentiment still felt, i wouldn’t care what anyone said about you, it is only me who gets to decide if you are worthy to be at my side. you’d smiled softly then, just as you are now. only until someone tells you i can’t be. 

dorn: you had gotten used to all his quirks, you’d grown to love it over time, and it was nothing in particular that had pushed you to your limit other than time – when you looked at him one day, you allowed yourself to wonder for too long what it might look like if he stopped loving you, and there was no space at his side for you. it took him longer than usual to process your words. far too long, in fact, because by the time he’d looked up to you, you were already walking away, your bow in his direction and a mumbled apology lost within his conscious thoughts. he watches you walk away from him, only taking a few steps towards you when you near the end of the long room, but freezing immediately when you turn back to him, only looking over your shoulder. you should know that i will always love you, you tell him, sigh leaving your lips as you turn to face the exiting doors once more. you take a step, slower than before, and that’s when he decides to finally speak. i will try harder, he promises, moving towards you again, whatever you need from me, say the word, i will do it. because i… he stops, both his words and his movements. you turn back to him again, this time fully, lips gapped and eyes clouded. his jaw tenses for just a moment as he finds the words, knowing already that they weren’t enough. i would do anything for you, to consolidate the love i have for you. won’t you let me have that chance? you shake your head slowly; you’ve already told him it was out of his control. won’t you at least let me try? he asks again. it wouldn’t have mattered, even if you did. not many things in the world made him feel powerless, other than you. 

curze: there was always whispers of what he was capable of, always a forgotten story of what he had done before, and you’d still fallen into his charm with open arms – realising soon that the real enemy within was the legion he had also grown to hate, but that didn’t mean you were able to leave . the room was cold, dark. everything he loved to have, especially seeing as you’re sat on the floor in the corner, wide eyes watching him with your knees pulled into your chest. he can’t help the way a grin creeps back onto his face as he approaches. did you miss me? he asks, gently, stopping only a foot or so away from you. he crouches down to your level, reaching out a hand to trace over your own. he sighs, content as you don’t pull away from him this time. i thought of you every moment. i wondered if you were thinking of me too. he leans forward, face closer to yours, hand reaching for your chin when you try to look away. i made a promise to you, my little dove. do you recall? he waits, though never expects an answer. not when your lips are quivering, body shaking. he only smiles, reaching around to drape his cloak over you as if it was the cold causing your reaction. i promised you that i would make this work. that you would never need to leave me, that you did not need to fear for anyone near me any longer. and where are we now? another silence falls between you. one enjoyed, revered. you’re with me, and you’re safe from any harm. he’d chosen to ignore himself in that equation, though. 

sanguinius: despite his sweetness, how he touched you as though you were the softest feather, you knew what followed behind him – when you became a target as well and realised that your life was in danger unless you were always at his side, you knew it had reached its limit. it never mattered that he’d commanded armies, that he’d survived impossible feats, that he was beloved by the imperium and treasured by all as the great angel that was impossibly perfect in all ways. something inside of him had broken, snapped clean in two as the weight of every emotion fell to him at once, overwhelming him beyond anything else he had felt. don’t walk away, he called, halting your steps with the tone of his voice alone. you turned, slowly, faced by his figure that approached you far quicker that you could ever run. is my love not enough for you? do you desire more? every part of me is yours already, yet you still choose to leave me? his voice shakes, words falling rather than being spoken. he drops to his knees before you, never reaching for you, yet begging with eyes that were bloodshot and shattered. i could protect you from anything this universe has to offer, he affirms to you, hands clasped together, i would stand before anything in existence that posed you harm, but that is not enough. he feels the corners of his eyes prick with a feeling unknown, and only then does he reach for your hand and bring it to his cheek, his own hand placed over your own. tell me what more i must do to prove to you that this isn’t a mistake. 

ferrus: his obsession with perfection had sat with you for far too long – you were human, weak, easily killed and willed away, so you knew that one day he’d turn you into something he considered stronger, better, even if he didn’t realise what he was doing. he’d found himself alone far more often since you’d gone. sometimes when he reached for tools on his bench, he expected to feel you instead, sometimes he’d hear the door open and look expectedly as if you were the one walking through the door. though it never was you; not your hand reaching for his when he was trying to do something else, not your cheerful greeting as you approached him. your missed presence was something he understood, but with each day that passed he only wanted to isolate himself more from others too. it all reminded him of you. especially those words that tormented him the most. i am just another weakness that will need correcting. he slams down his hammer harder than before, the sound running your voice straight out of his head. he could have told you that you weren’t a weakness. he could have denied it entirely, but he knew it would be a lie. others could perceive you as such, others would look upon the human at their primarch’s side and wonder why. instead, all he told you was that he wouldn’t correct you, not when he saw nothing for him to change. he let you go, let you walk out of the last space where you felt any safety around him, without telling you what he truly felt. you were already perfect, he speaks to no one, unable to find the strength to continue his work, i never wanted to change a thing about you. though he knew at the bottom of his heart that he may have needed to. 

angron: his mind fracturing wasn’t something you had no awareness of, and you believed that somewhere along the way you had been able to help – but the time he had killed another in front of you was the turning point, even if you claimed it was the whole legion. he had seen the way you always approached corners with caution, how you kept your voice quiet, how seeing you when doors were locked from the outside world was entirely different to having you stand amongst a crowd of people who claimed their support for him. it was his naivety or arrogance that led to ignorance each time, opting to let it pass without issue or never ask what caused it. not until you’d told him, quiet with him for the first time since he knew you, avoiding eye contact and hiding yourself when he drew near, that it was all too much for you. it could never happen, he tells you, pleading as he approaches you, i would never allow a soul here to touch you, to even look at you without welcome. he didn’t understand it fully still, how you believed such harm could come from those around him. or perhaps he did now, and again it was ignorance in the way. what is worse is that you did not come to me about this before, that you waited until the very end to speak a word of your worries and gave me no time to fix them. he sighs, still intent on changing your mind, ready to wage a war in your name if he had to. as he approaches you, reaches his hand towards your shoulder, he notices the way you flinch away. his brows furrow, eyes drifting to his hand before falling on you again. he didn’t understand, because he never realised the extent of it all. it is not just them, he speaks quieter than before, realisation a slow but heavy hit, you find reason to fear me, too.

rob: it wasn’t a quick realisation, but something that built with time; he was never committed, despite what he claimed to feel, and he never reciprocated past your hidden meetings away from the world he lived the rest of the day. he wasn’t mindful of how long had passed since he’d made his way outside to feel… something. he wasn’t sure what he needed, but staring at screens and seeing your reflection, sitting in thrones and wondering if you would approach him, it wasn’t helping. he remembered the last time you stood beside him, watching the stars quietly, you both enjoying company more than anything. but in a moment he wished to declare something forbidden in the eyes of many, you’d looked up to him with the most delicate of smiles and carried their views. this cannot continue, you’d whispered, softly, echoing the thoughts that had first crossed his mind, if i could make a wish for anything, it would be for this, for us, but… he’d reached for your hand before you could continue, noticed the way your eyes became glassy. let me make that wish come true, he’d offered, as sincere as he could be, it will not be easy, but i will make things as they need to be to ensure that this does not need to end. your privacy, your safety, it will be kept through every moment, i can ensure you as much. your smile began to fade as you answered, i don’t wish to be hidden, not at your detriment. he wishes he’d have tried harder, stopped you from walking away, or just confessed to you that this was more than just affection. it was never a detriment, not for someone i love. perhaps you’d hear his unspoken words when you looked at the stars, too. 

morty: he’d never changed, and you had loved it for him once, until you understood that mercy had never been something he wanted to offer, nor would learn to – and it reminded you that he was someone to be feared. he’s stood in a doorway watching you. hasn’t moved in minutes, maybe longer, never letting his eyes go further than just past where you’re sitting. if he moved, if he spoke, if he dared to even breathe every part of him would shatter in the reality that you had brought to him. no asking, no talking, just the simple words that he trusted you to never say to him, because you’d always promised him that he was enough. please try to understand, you say gently, eliciting nothing more than a scowl in response, i’m worried, i feel fear just treading the ground around you, afraid someone may take it the wrong way or see me in a different way to how you see me. he looks down from your eyes for merely a second, just long enough for everything inside to crumble. do you not think that’s selfish? he doesn’t move closer, doesn’t try to approach you. do you not think that you could have tried harder, just for me? his chest burns as you look away from him sorrowfully, but unlike him, you never look back. it never ceases to amaze me how similar all you humans are. he still doesn’t turn, even as his words turn sour. do you not think i worry too? i see your vulnerability, i consider it with every decision i make, every step i take, and you still wouldn’t believe that was enough. his laugh is bitter, a frail cover for the emptiness within, something only you had been able to fill, and seal away by a promise he wasn’t sure he could keep. go, but know that if i ever see you again, you will be treated no differently than everyone else, then you will truly know fear.  

magnus: you knew of his power, understood what he was capable of, never once feared for your life around him – but the whispers in your dreams telling you to move on only became louder, and so did the vision of your death at his hands. the only room he can sit in without memories beginning to haunt him is one you never touched. a small room that had been filled with old books and relics, now cleared so he could sit inside and feel freedom for five minutes of the day. your absence caused him more pain that he could admit to, let alone handle, but he had forced himself to leave you to the peace you wanted in the hopes that maybe you’d understand what it was like without him. his allocated five minutes of freedom are over before he hopes and he’s forced back into the emptiness that the rest of tizca brought him. as he walks the halls, he replays fragments of your words to him. i do trust you, beyond anything, but this is far bigger than just you or i. he’d contemplated the consequences of giving everything up. you could not prevent fate, even if you wished to. but he would always try. love was never meant to exist between us. those words stop him completely. his hands are curled into fists at his side, breathing deepening to the point where he can barely feel reality around him. he doesn’t have time to realise what’s changed, not until he can feel you with him, presence alluring as he feels your discontent, your sadness, filling every crack of time and space between you both. he’s not there, not physically, but he sees you turn to him as though you know he’s there. let me try to make it work between us, he asks, quietly, never expecting a return. it never could work, you answer, we were not made for each other. 

horus: of course there was talks about it, you’d heard of the intention to make him warmaster the second it had reached prying ears – and it was in that moment, you realised you could never stay with him. the feeling didn’t sit right with him, not when he knew you were right there yet entirely untouchable to him. he could bring planets to heel, he could crusade in the name of his father, but he couldn’t convince you that love was enough. it had sat on his mind for days as he tried to come up with a speech to change your mind, have you fall to your knees and accept him like he always wanted. the speech never came, the opportunity to approach you never manifested, not until he saw you speaking with a face he didn’t recognise within the grand hall one evening. weeks of stewed emotions and feelings seem to hit him at once as he approached you, ending your conversation as another person bowed to him. i don’t know how to change things, he tells you, honestly, eyes never leaving your own despite how they dart around the room. if i couldn’t convince you then, i won’t be able to convince you now. but that doesn’t change how deeply my love burns for you. he doesn’t care if others heard, but he knows you do. so tell me how i can make this work. what do you need from me?  you can’t answer him immediately, swallowing hard and breaths quick. you open your lips just a little, then shut them once more, looking down to the ground. he knows your answer; you’ve told him before. i need you to not be you.  

lorgar: you had been warned by many, knowing the threat you posed to their regime, knowing that you had taken the primarch’s attention away from what should truly matter – and revenge was promised. he believed this was his punishment. he had let his devotion slip and focused his attentions elsewhere, and his reward was replaced with a love that could never be returned. he kneels at an altar as his eyes fall shut. immediately he’s tormented by the ghost of your hands on his skin, pressing over his shoulder, skimming his chest; or your lips pressed softly against his neck. then he hears the echoes of a whisper, what was left of your presence in his world. i could never love another as much as i love you. his lips curl at each word. he’d replay it a thousand times over and over, never to be sick of the sound. but then it falls eerily silent, his mind pushed to another time he had tried so hard to hide. you cannot love me, you’d told him, words cutting through any remainer of the faith he held, not in the way that i love you, not in the way that anyone could love you. he opens his eyes, darkness of the room around him a greeting he wished never came. but your words don’t stop. your life has never been decided by you. he can feel how you sat in his lap and whispered it to him. i was never to be part of your life. i’ve become a variable that they cannot control. if i stay… you had never finished, but he knew. he’d watched you walk away, he’d reached out his hand to stop you but never called. was it better this way? he asks, call to the void ignored by all around him. do you truly believe love is only dictated to me? his world may have been controlled by others, but what he felt for you. 

vulkan: an offhanded comment was made, not by the astartes, not even by anyone close to the primarch, but a serf who was yet to know their place – and though it should mean nothing, the mention of your humanity is a harsh reminder of how separate your worlds were. the silence looming through the room was unnatural. if anyone had entered his private chamber, they’d have known he was mourning; not someone lost, but something gone. quietude was a welcomed guest around him for some time, the only break offered being a forced schedule or something he wished to not attend. but he knew his duties were not to be missed. do not think for a second i doubted you, he recalled you telling him, stood no more than a few feet from where he now sat. your love is true and i know that, but i also know that you are more than i could ever be. he hated how all he did was listen. how he agreed; how he let you walk away from him with little more than a kiss to the back of his hand and a request of a promise for him to try to understand. he did, somewhere beyond the depths of his emotions, but he also knew that to him, you were everything. you would never see that though. you would never have believed him when he told you that he would make sure your authority matched his, that no one would ever stand up to you or question your place. in every other lifetime we’d have found each other, he’d spoken quietly the last time he felt your warmth, i’d have given all of those away to have a chance to be with you in this one. 

corvus: you’d first noticed the way his attention seemed to always divert to you, but the moment you watched him make a mistake because of you, it was obvious your time at his side was limited. at first he was worried you’d be able to feel his presence. he wondered whether you’d see him in the corner of your eyes, hear his footsteps you knew so well, understand that your shadow wasn’t the only thing that had been following you this whole time. he shouldn’t be here, he should have given you the space you wanted and left you to what you had chosen, but the temptation was far too high for him to ignore it. whether you were doing the simplest tasks or something he chose to pay no attention to, he wanted to see it. he wanted you. and he truly thought he had gotten away with it, that his cover in the darkness of night and shadows was enough to keep him hidden away, prevent you from noticing the fear that lurked beyond. but as he turned into the alley where you had walked only moments ago, it was your smaller frame that stopped him with a hand held up to his chest. this only proves my point, you say to him, glare harsher than he expected, this is what i was afraid of. he only reaches for your hand to take it off him, chest already filled with anticipation and regret. i promised you your safety, he tries to tell you, his excuse meaningless. it was never that which you cared about. you were caught off-guard by a mere human in pursuit of me. the longer i’m around, the more of a danger you are to yourself. he never said you were wrong. he just didn’t want to admit you were right. 

alpharius: you’d found the collection of information that the alpha legion had on you, and believed there was no way you could ever live your normal life again – but you hadn’t stopped to consider if it really was the legion you were at risk of. watches you closely, head tilted slightly to the side. your happiness has faded, he can see it in the way you carry yourself so rigidly, tensing whenever anyone comes near. he sees the way your eyes scan the room like you’re waiting for something to surprise you; someone to be there that you were trying to desperately to avoid. he feels the smile falling onto his lips as he begins to approach, cautiously, truly believing that his surprise would be welcomed. as the room fell silent, you froze, and the grin that manifested on his lips only grew. are you okay, my love? he asks, hand on your back, tensed under his touch. you didn’t look to him, but he could feel all your attention on him already. i must applaud you on how convincing this all was. i did truly think that you had left. no one would dare question him, no matter how much fear was in your eyes. when you told me you were leaving, i’ll admit i was worried. but that i remembered that everything you said to me, how you were worried of what my father would do, or what my legion may say, or what my brothers might have done to you… it was all wrong. he reaches for your cheek, turning you to face him. his thumb ghosts your skin. he hums gently as he breathes in. it was an interesting way to test me, i will give you that much. perhaps not even a test of my loyalty, but this connection between us. i just wonder, my love, when did you realise that the only person you needed to fear was me?

i am getting on top of requests i promise, i've been very distracted with both catching pokemon and the nameless king, whose love i have rediscovered through nightreign, but the corvus fic is almost done ^^

[brain4stew]

PUPPETEER READER CRUMBS PLEAASSEEE ,,, ,,,,, like what would the forsaken killer cast do if the reader decides to be merciful and turn the round into a peaceful one then proceed to goof around

Interesting… I’ll see what I can do with your request for puppeteer reader, dear anon. 🙂‍↕️

(Note; Characters may be ooc, as I do not know how they’ll react, think or speak. I do not know their personalities, actions and behavior whatsoever!)

Killers reacting to Puppeteer reader going friendly, and making them do silly stuff!

(And what happens after the rounds!)

1x1x1x1 (1x4). ⚔️

The first time it happened they were arguably very confused. But, they thought you wanted to give the survivors false hope, so they just, went along with it.

However, when she sees your figure (avatar) goof around with the survivors, whilst she’s nearby, and can’t do anything?

Oh, he’s mad. (And a bit jealous. Though, don’t tell him I told you this!)

Why’d you make him go friendly? Do you like the survivors that much?

They’re glaring. Glaring at the survivors with pure hatred, especially Shedletsky. They think he did something to you.

Her glare does soften when it’s directed towards you however, but hardens when a survivor is nearby.

He gets practically forced into doing silly, and stupid things. Like, randomly attacking, just to see the survivors scramble a bit, and etc, etc. you get the gist.

So, when the rounds over, you (your avatar) is practically forced to stay within their room. Only to be let out a few minutes afterwards. They can’t stay too long away from you anyway, that’d break the helper and killer bond you two have.

(She’s just greedy when it comes to you.)

C00lkidd, Bluudud, Pr33typrincess, Mafioso. 🧱

They’re annoyed, sure. Especially C00lkidd and Mafioso.

Pr33typrincess is mostly annoyed because she’s not allowed to kill Two Time. (Fuckass nonbinary dagger person. /hj)

Bluudud doesn’t exactly care, even though he’d love to win each and every round.

Mafioso is annoyed because he cannot take care of those in debt. He does not fuck around when it comes to debt, which, is quite obvious with his occupation.

C00lkidd is annoyed because he can’t play tag and hide and seek with his father or the others! He just wants to have fun is all!!

Nonetheless, they all, especially the kids, enjoy the silly and stupid moments that happen. Mafioso, not so much, but he still likes the liveliness.

Mafioso is the one to be the most near you, just in case something happens to you. (He just likes being near you.)

The kids are well, being kids. They flock around 007n7 however, and of course, Elliot and Guest 1337.

C00lkidd actually once fell asleep by his father in one or a few rounds when it’s friendly.

Bluudud just, admiring Guest 1337.

Pr33typrincess just, playing dress up and all that with the others.

Mafioso kind of glaring at the survivors going near you. (He scared Noob on accident, poor guy.)

After rounds, it’s just a huge cuddle pile.

Basically; Mafioso behind you, as you lay against him, or on him. C00lkidd and Bluudud on either side of you and Mafioso, whilst Pr33typrincess is laying on you.

The kids end up falling asleep of course, since they had fun in the rounds and became drowsy afterwards.

Mafioso just giving you tips for future rounds, unless you decide to go friendly again, then he gives you random facts about him, his goons or bunnies and rabbits. Quietly of course, as to not wake the kids.

Jason. 🔪

He does not care if you go friendly or not.

If you go friendly, then he’s glad, you’re letting his mother rest for a bit!

As usual, he’s always quiet. The most he’ll say is just his usual; “Kill, kill” and “ma, ma”.

He doesn’t understand what you’re doing, but trusts you enough to just, make him go ftiendly.

Considering the silly stuff, you make Jason do gashing wound, just to get a survivor or two… Or more… Stuck in a wall.

The panic, and the struggle to get free from the walls makes you laugh, and it brings a faint small smile and laugh from Jason.

When the rounds are over, you will be helping Jason tend to his mother, to see if she still has energy to communicate with him when you’re not the one controlling him.

John Doe. 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣1️⃣1️⃣

He’s a bit annoyed, but not too annoyed. At least it feels like you’re giving him a break, which he appreciates. Although his corruption is being a b***h to him still…

You practically force him to go around one of the survivors, trapping them in a trail of corruption.

You also force him to fling survivors with his spikes when the survivors are in a corner, or not.

You’ll laugh of course, but John Doe doesn’t understand what’s gotten you laughing. Nonetheless, he smiles faintly. (As if he’s not already smiling like crazy…)

After the rounds, you’ll end up tired, and dozed off. John Doe just, being near you, while you lean against him to rest.

He glares at any killer that tries to wake you up. It works for most of the killers… Just… Not Guest 666 or Noli. (Just a few zaps of corruption on those two, and they’ll back off!)

Noli. 👾

This prick does not understand what you’re doing, or thinking of. But hey, at least he can silently admire 007n7 when he’s in a round too with you both!

You make Noli scare the survivors time from time, which, earns a small laugh from him, and a huge laugh from you, as you both watch the survivors flinch, and practically spin.

You’re mostly just, staying by Noli, or 007n7 whenever you’re controlling Noli.

Noli’s a bit annoyed, but oh well! At least he gets to hear you laugh, and you make him laugh too! So… Win-win!

After the rounds, Noli will surprisingly be tired, and he’ll lay on or lean against you, occasionally yawning as he tells you about the voidstar he has. Before he eventually dozes off, and falls asleep.

You of course, just let him. You do occasionally poke him and the voidstar for fun, which earns a grumble of annoyance from him, before he goes quiet again.

Azure. 🪻

He’s glad that you made him go friendly. He doesn’t really want to kill any survivors. Sure, he’d hurt them a little at least, but not full on kill!

He does occasionally steal glances at Two Time, from time to time.

You do make them use their tendrils to just, pick up a survivor or two, and just juggle them. Which earns a snicker from the both of you.

Otherwise, you’d be near Azure for a long while. Not like you can go freely, as you need to stay near the one you’re controlling to understand what to do, and all that.

They do wrap a tendril around you however, whenever Two Time is nearby, or too close for their liking. They don’t want you to get stabbed like them after all.

After rounds, Azure will wrap his tendrils around you, like a blanket, which makes you drowsy, and fall asleep. (He slaps Noli and Guest 666 with one or two of his tendrils, just to get them to leave you alone while you sleep.)

Guest 666. 👹

This guy… Feels like a puppy at most times. But he’s quite annoyed that you decided to go friendly.

He does look at Noob for a while, before looking back at you again when Noob looks at him.

You make them fling the survivors from time to time. Earning a chuckle and a cackle from him, and laughter from you.

You stay by him, or, well, his tail is wrapped around you, and carrying you around with it.

After rounds, they’ll be cuddling you, almost wrapping themselves around you, as much as they can that is. Like a dog or a cat cuddling up or around their favorite thing, place or someone.

They end up falling asleep by then, especially if you’re petting their head, and scratching behind their horns. They enjoy it quite a lot, surprisingly.

[foxtrology]

inertia (1)

reed richards x reader

star sailor series | ao3 link

notes: hi. so i’ve been writing this fic over the last three weeks (yes, three entire weeks, i know) and honestly it would not exist in its current form without my best friend, who is a literal physics major and walked me through so many of the equations and techy parts so reed didn’t sound like a fraud. i love her for that.

also, fun fact: reader is neurodivergent (i borrowed some of my own neurodivergent tendencies to shape her), so if you pick up on that... you’re right. thanks for being here!

word count: 12k

─────

You’ve always preferred rooms with humming machines to those filled with people.

It wasn’t shyness, not really.

Just an overwhelming awareness of your own rhythm, too far removed from the world’s noisy metronome. You knew early on you understood things differently—less about feeling out what someone meant, more about isolating the structure beneath their words, the pattern in their tone, the physics of an interaction.

Most people called it brilliance. You called it survival.

The Baxter Foundation didn’t feel like survival at first.

It felt like exile.

A postdoctoral placement handed to you like a sealed fate—"promising," "potential," "gifted." Euphemisms for "difficult," "obsessive," "odd."

They said Reed Richards might know what to do with you.

You assumed they'd meant “handle.”

But he didn’t handle you. He saw you.

Reed Richards wasn’t what you expected.

The name carried weight: prodigy, theorist, treasured in the scientific community. You imagined arrogance, an aging wunderkind with a room full of accolades and a voice like static.

But the man who stood waiting for you at the base of the Baxter Building's elevator looked almost misplaced—rumpled in a navy button up, absent-mindedly smearing graphite on the sleeve as he scribbled into the margin of a battered notepad.

He had those lines around his mouth—the kind that softened a face rather than hardened it. A sharp nose, brown eyes, and that unmistakable streak of grey curling through otherwise dark hair.

At first, you assumed it was dyed—it looked too perfect. But it was real. Of course it was.

You hadn’t realized you were staring until he tilted his head.

“You're early,” he’d said, voice warm and textured. Then, a smile that lit up his whole face—eyes first. “I like that.”

That was two years ago.

You’ve since learned Reed keeps a second toothbrush for you in his private quarters upstairs, though he’s never pointed it out.

You discovered it one night after a double shift, when he gently steered you towards the bed in his guest room instead of letting you fall asleep under your desk again. He didn’t say, “Stay with me.” He just adjusted the pillow, handed you a glass of water, and made sure the bathroom light stayed on.

It’s quiet love. A sustained frequency. A knowing.

On Tuesdays, you both eat lunch in the server room because it's the only place in the Baxter Building that maintains the kind of white noise you can disappear into.

Reed brings you a sandwich without tomato—he learned after the first week that you can’t stand the texture—and sets it beside your research without interrupting your thought process. You don’t thank him out loud. You just leave the crusts in the pattern he finds funny, concentric squares, always precise.

Sometimes, he laughs at that. Sometimes, he files it away like data.

Today, the two of you are working on a stabilization algorithm for experimental gravitational anchors—Reed's theory, your math. The simulation keeps failing, and Reed mutters something under his breath about quantum decay before turning to you.

“Show me again how you’re quantizing the drift interval,” he says, pushing his chair slightly closer to yours.

You don’t flinch. He always asks to see your work like this—not to correct, but to understand. He thinks your brain is a mystery worth mapping. And maybe it is.

You pull up your calculations, annotated with your usual shorthand that no one else in the lab pretends to follow. Reed doesn’t blink. He reads your annotations like they're a shared language.

“You inverted the modulus,” he says quietly, quite in awe. “God, that’s...elegant.”

You look down. Compliments still stick to you like static. You’ve never known what to do with them.

“It was obvious,” you murmur, tapping the screen once to clear the render.

“Not to me.”

His voice carries something like reverence. Not the kind people fake when they’re talking to someone younger, or different. His is heavier. Sincere. Measured.

You chew the inside of your cheek.

“Can I show you something?” you ask.

That’s how you always start, even though Reed never says no.

The observatory lab is empty when you both arrive.

He unlocks it with his palmprint, but you go in first, navigating in the dark by memory. You’ve had an idea simmering for days—a tweak in boundary calibration using harmonic frequency overlap, something even Reed dismissed initially as too unstable.

But last night, at 2:43 a.m., your model ran clean for the first time. No drift. No bleed. Pure coherence.

You bring it up on the projection wall, fingers moving fast. Words tumble when you’re excited—sharp, fast, too much for most people. Reed doesn’t interrupt. He never has.

When the model stabilizes on the fourth run, you glance over your shoulder.

Reed is watching you.

Not the simulation. Not the math. You.

You freeze.

He steps forward slowly, like if he moves too fast you might vanish.

“You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”

You look back to the projection. “No. But it was worth it.”

He exhales a soft breath, close enough now that you can feel the warmth of it on your temple.

“You can’t burn like this all the time,” he murmurs, but his voice doesn’t hold judgment—only concern.

“I can,” you reply simply. “And I do.”

He lets out a low laugh, almost involuntarily. Then, more gently, “Let me take care of you. A little.”

He says it like a hypothesis. Something untested.

You don’t answer. Not out loud. But you lean into his shoulder—not quite a nod, not quite an invitation—and he stays there. Long enough that the simulation cycles again, quiet and steady in the background.

Later, you’ll find that he’s updated the cafeteria schedule in your calendar to make sure no one disturbs you between 12 and 2 p.m. on Tuesdays. You’ll notice that he’s ordered extra noise-cancelling panels for the lab, without ever saying why. That the lights outside your lab space dim slightly when you stay past midnight.

All Reed’s doing.

He never says it out loud.

But this is how he shows you.

In recalibrated thermostats. In cups of tea left cooling on your desk. In letting you be silent when silence is the only thing that fits.

The world outside moves too fast. New York never sleeps, never softens. There’s always construction in the distance, always an ambulance shrieking down Fifth, always people spilling from cafés and rooftop bars like they’re late for something invisible.

But in the Baxter Building—six floors above the ghost of the old Avengers Tower—the hum of your controlled environment remains undisturbed.

For now.

It’s the kind of phrase that hangs in the air longer than it should, like steam after the kettle's been lifted, like the echo of a chord when your fingers already left the strings.

You don’t hear it, of course. Not consciously. But the sensation trails you anyway, ghost-like, as the day folds open and the building shifts around you.

You return to Lab B-3, where a data stream from the gravitational anchor prototype pulses in pale blue on the screen. You prefer this room to the others—less foot traffic, colder air, fewer variables. The walls are lined with the modular panels you installed yourself, after three months of fighting sensory burnout from the old fluorescents. The air purifier in the corner hums at a frequency you can tolerate.

It smells faintly of dust and ozone, like a server farm on a rainy day.

You’re cataloging the last ten hours of micro-interference logs when the door hisses open behind you.

“Hey.”

You don’t turn. It’s a mistake, maybe, but you assume whoever it is has entered the wrong lab.

You’ve put the sign up: DO NOT DISTURB — QUANTUM MODELING IN PROGRESS. A laminated shield between you and the rest of the building’s noise.

The voice cuts through again, sharper. Louder.

“Hey—don’t ignore me.”

You blink at the screen. Your heart doesn’t race. It clenches, tightens like your ribcage is shrinking inward. You turn slowly.

It’s Dr. Ian Delmont. One of the senior engineers. Jacket unzipped, badge swinging loose around his neck like a noose that can’t make up its mind. His face is already red, already pulled taut around the mouth.

You recognize the body language...shoulders set forward, hands ready to gesture. Angry people always move in patterns. You learned this years ago, the way some people learn fire drills.

“Why the hell did you rewrite my core schematic without logging the revision?”

You stare at him.

“I didn’t rewrite anything. I optimized the redundancy logic. It was bottlenecking the chain reaction model.”

“That’s rewriting.”

Your voice stays steady, your mouth forming the words in the exact order they should go. “No, it's not. It’s a correction. The existing code couldn’t handle parallel iteration under dual-load conditions.”

“You didn’t clear it with me.”

“It was a bottleneck,” you repeat.

Ian’s voice raises. “I don’t care if it was a goddamn chokehold, you don’t get to touch my work without authorization.”

He says it loud enough that it ricochets off the walls. Too loud.

Your neck goes hot. You feel it in your jaw, down your arms. Your hands twitch just enough to knock your stylus from the table and you bend down to retrieve it—too fast. You bump the corner of the desk, hard. The pain doesn’t register, but the sound does.

Too loud. Too loud.

Ian takes a step forward.

“Every time I turn around, you’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong—”

“I was fixing it.”

“You were showing off.”

That does it. You freeze.

This isn’t about the code.

You blink. You don’t blink. You can’t remember. You try to open your mouth, but your tongue sits wrong in it. The sound you try to make stalls halfway up your throat. Your hands curl into themselves like you could fold out of sight.

The lights feel wrong. The texture of your sleeves is wrong. The hum of the purifier is gone, replaced by the jagged, ugly timbre of yelling.

“I don’t care what Richards says about you,” Ian mutters. “You don’t run this place.”

“Hey.”

The sound comes from the door. Not a shout. Not sharp. But it cuts through everything like glass through butter.

You both turn.

Reed Richards steps into the room like he’s always belonged there, like his presence is not new or sudden or charged with a heat you’ve only ever felt in gamma pulses and untested energy chambers.

His mouth is tight, drawn. There’s nothing soft about his expression now.

“I suggest,” he says slowly, like each word has been smoothed against the edge of a scalpel, “you take your tone down. Immediately.”

Ian hesitates. Then his jaw sets. “With all due respect, Dr. Richards—”

“No,” Reed interrupts, walking further into the room, voice calm and sharp all at once. “Don’t. Don’t try to play seniority. This isn’t about protocol. This is about how you just cornered one of my lead researchers and yelled at her while she was running live code on a multivariable anchor model.”

“I was confronting—”

“You were posturing,” Reed cuts in. “And you were wrong.”

Ian blinks. Reed’s voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to.

“She didn’t rewrite your schematic. She corrected a critical flaw that should have been caught weeks ago.” He stops beside you. Not in front of you, not shielding—beside. “The only reason that anchor hasn’t destabilized is because she stepped in.”

Reed turns his head slightly, glancing down at you. His eyes soften, fractionally. He doesn’t touch you, but he lets the silence hang, as if waiting for you to reclaim your voice if you want to.

You don’t. Not yet.

“Ian,” he says without looking away, “I want you out of this lab. Now.”

Ian’s mouth opens, then shuts again.

Then he leaves.

You’re still breathing too fast. You know you are. You can feel the microtremors in your fingers, the irregular skip of your pulse. But the room feels real again. Your body is slowly remembering where it ends.

Reed waits until the door hisses shut.

Then, “Can I sit?”

You nod, once. He pulls a chair close—closer than he usually would in a shared lab space—and sits beside you with the kind of silence that doesn’t ask anything from you. His knees are angled toward yours. His forearms rest loosely on his thighs. His whole posture is a quiet question you don’t have to answer.

You stare at the screen. 

“I wasn’t showing off.”

Reed lets out a sound between a sigh and a laugh. Not at you. With you. “I know,” he says gently.

“I just…saw the error. It was obvious.”

“I know.”

He pauses.

“You don’t need to explain yourself to anyone in this building. Least of all him.”

You press your thumbnail into the meat of your palm, grounding.

“I’m not good at…tone.”

“That’s not a flaw.”

“I always think I can just fix it quietly and not deal with the…other part. The confrontation.”

He nods once, his eyes still fixed on you. “The way the world expects communication isn’t the only valid way to exist in it.”

Something in your chest cracks open at that. Quietly. Invisibly.

You lean back against the chair, your breath finally settling into a rhythm.

Reed stays where he is. His presence doesn’t press against you—it anchors. He’s always been like that. Dense and still, like a planet with just enough gravity to make sense of things.

You glance over at him.

“Thank you,” you say finally.

He shrugs. “I don’t like mean people.”

You look down at the table. You trace a line in the condensation ring your tea left behind earlier.

“Are you going to fire him?”

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “But I’m going to make it very, very clear who’s indispensable here.”

You don’t ask who he means.

You already know.

Later that night, you’re still in the lab, long after the rest of the building has gone dim.

Reed comes back with a takeout container—your favorite, though you don’t remember ever saying it aloud. He doesn’t mention the incident again. Just passes you the food, leans back in the corner chair, and starts updating his lab journal aloud, knowing you like to listen to the way he thinks.

Outside, New York glitters like a malfunctioning galaxy. Inside, the lights are low, the air quiet, the world small and manageable.

Just you, your notes, and the man with the grey streak in his hair who watches you like you built the constellations from scratch.

A quiet love, not yet named.

But it’s there.

Always has been.

It’s late now, nearly eleven, but the labs on the upper floors of the Baxter Building don’t abide by clocks. Here, time stretches. Pools. Slows down when the work is good. Speeds up when the math gets too beautiful to let go of.

You and Reed are the only ones left.

Everyone else has long since clocked out, their departure announced by the usual symphony of zipping backpacks and elevator chimes. The security team downstairs knows better than to check on you. You’re a known variable—an equation that balances best in silence, after dark, with only the man beside you and a cooling takeout container between you and the void.

Reed is sketching something in his notebook—a systems flowchart annotated with arrows that curve and overlap like a child’s drawing of a galaxy.

He’s humming, under his breath. Just a few bars of something he’s probably not even aware of. It’s familiar, not because you recognize the tune, but because you’ve heard him do it before, under the same kind of fluorescent moonlight and the same clean, ticking quiet.

You finish logging the day’s simulation data, close the terminal, and pull up your schedule for the upcoming weeks. The glowing display casts faint shadows over your face, which you don't notice but Reed glances at, once, over the edge of his notebook.

Monday. Field trip.

You hadn’t forgotten. Not exactly. It had just sat at the bottom of the week like a pebble in your shoe—felt but not seen.

You stare at the words for a beat too long.

VISITOR OUTREACH: 9:30–11:15 — RICHARDS / YOU

Group: PS 22 — Grade 2

Your fingers twitch at your side, a muscle memory of anxiety without the adrenaline to match. You don’t say anything, but your mind is already running the old loop, quiet and tight, like rewinding a tape you didn’t want to play in the first place.

You’d been paired with high school seniors last time.

They came in loud, late, and bored. One of them had a vape pen tucked into their hoodie drawstring.

You remember the boy in the back who asked if you “did anything real” or if you just “sat in rooms with graphs all day.” Another mimed falling asleep when you began explaining atmospheric coding inputs for small-scale gravitational fields.

You hadn’t raised your voice. You hadn’t snapped. You just shut down the projection early and handed the rest of the presentation off to the intern whose voice sounded like she smiled even when she didn’t mean it.

Afterward, you’d sat on the roof of the Baxter Building and stared at the clouds. Told yourself they were just kids. Told yourself they didn’t know.

But it stuck. The way they laughed when you said you worked on electromagnetic resonance feedback models. The way one of the girls whispered “so basically nothing” to the boy next to her like you weren’t even there.

They didn’t know.

That your work stabilized quantum harmonics in the kinds of silicon they tap on all day, every day.

That your programming makes the screen light up when their crush texts them back.

That the interface delay they complain about in video games used to be twenty seconds instead of two, and you helped design the equation that closed that gap.

They didn’t know you once pulled Reed out of a theoretical blind alley and into a breakthrough he’d later call elegant, a word he doesn’t use lightly.

They didn’t know how much you cared. That the caring was the point.

So after that, you asked to be reassigned.

“Elementary school kids,” you’d told Reed in his office one morning, already chewing at the inside of your cheek. “They’re too small to be cruel yet.”

He didn’t laugh, but you remember his eyes. How they softened. How he nodded and said simply, “Okay.”

And now here it was. Monday. Second graders. A classroom full of kids with juice boxes and velcro shoes and hands that still shoot up when they’re curious.

You can handle that. Probably.

You close the schedule tab. The screen goes dark.

Reed looks up from his notebook. “Everything okay?”

You nod once.

He doesn’t press. But he waits.

You speak without looking at him. “Monday's outreach.”

He leans back in his chair, notebook on his lap. “Right. You’re with me.”

You nod again.

“I asked for the younger group this time,” you add quietly, almost like you’re confessing something. “The older ones were…”

You trail off.

You don’t finish the sentence, but Reed catches the thread anyway. Of course he does.

He doesn’t say they were cruel. He doesn’t say you didn’t deserve that. He doesn’t fill the silence with anything easy.

Instead, he says, “You’ll be good with them.”

“Because they’re not old enough to be bored yet?”

“Because you care,” he says, looking directly at you. “And kids remember that. Even if they can’t say it.”

You pick at the corner of your sleeve. You’re still thinking about Monday. About the fear that your voice will tremble again. That the wrong word will come out. That your quiet will make them fidget and giggle and whisper.

But then you think about the last time a kid visited the Baxter—seven years old, wandered away from the main tour. Found his way into your lab by accident. You showed him how magnets repel in zero gravity fields and he tried to high five you with both hands at once.

You’d smiled for hours after that.

Maybe Reed is right.

Maybe caring is enough.

By the time you both shut down your stations and gather your coats, it’s nearly midnight. Reed holds the elevator for you without asking. It’s just the two of you, the soft gold of the lights reflecting off the brushed metal doors as they slide shut behind you.

You watch the numbers tick down.

Reed stands beside you, shoulder not quite brushing yours. Quiet, like always. Present, like always.

“Do you want me there?” he asks suddenly, softly, as the elevator hums downward. “Monday. With the kids.”

You blink. “You’re already scheduled for it.”

“I know,” he says. “But do you want me there?”

It feels like a trick question. But it’s not. It’s just Reed, offering steadiness in the places you don’t always know you need it.

You nod.

He nods too.

Outside, the city glows like it’s forgotten how to sleep. Yellow cabs streak past in lazy arcs. Rain clings to the pavement like it’s not ready to let go.

You stand under the awning of the Baxter Building, both of you half-heartedly pretending to check your phones, neither of you quite moving to go. It’s a ritual now—this lingering. Like the day doesn’t want to end, so you don’t let it.

Reed finally speaks, his voice low and near your ear.

“You know…you do more than keep this place running. You are this place.”

You glance at him. He’s looking at the sky like it might answer back.

“And if some bored teenager can’t see that, it’s only because they’re too young to understand the shape of things.”

You swallow. The city smells like damp concrete and neon and early summer.

You don’t reply. But the words lodge somewhere behind your ribs.

And they stay.

In the space between you and Reed, that sentence hums like background radiation—silent, but measurable.

He doesn’t look at you, not directly, but the softness in his posture says enough. The kind of softness he reserves only for you. For late nights and unsaid things. For quiet field trip fears and tired bones after thirty-seven straight hours in the lab.

You shift your weight from foot to foot under the awning, fingers fidgeting at the edge of your sleeve. The city is wet and warm and humming in that uniquely New York way—trash trucks groaning down Sixth Avenue, a taxi horn blaring three blocks over, the subway beneath your feet thrumming like some subterranean heartbeat.

Reed checks the time on his phone, but it’s performative. He’s not really looking at it.

“You can stay upstairs if you want,” he offers. Voice neutral, like he’s suggesting you borrow a pencil.

You know what he means.

His quarters above the Baxter labs—spare and quiet and clean, like an extension of his brain. You've stayed there before. Once after a storm knocked out the subway, once when you got a migraine so bad you couldn’t walk home without throwing up. The guest room is always ready, with a weighted blanket you know he ordered just for you. The lights dim at 30% automatically, and the fridge always has tea.

Still, you shake your head.

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“You wouldn’t.”

You shrug one shoulder.

“But I’d feel like I was bothering you.”

There’s no irritation in your voice. It’s just a fact. A line drawn lightly in pencil, not ink.

He doesn’t argue. Reed knows better than anyone that pushing you when you’re already overstimulated only drives you deeper into the quiet.

“I’ll walk you,” he says.

You almost tell him it’s not necessary.

That you’ve done the walk a hundred times alone. That it’s late and he must be exhausted too. But something in the way he says it—low, certain, without any edge—stills your protest before it can take shape.

You nod once.

The streets are emptier than usual, rain thinning to a mist that catches in your hair and softens the world around the edges. You button your coat up to your chin. Reed tucks his hands into his pockets, his long strides slowing instinctively to match yours.

You don’t speak for the first few blocks. You don’t need to. It’s not awkward—it’s companionable. Your silences have always been functional. Built like scaffolding. Structural.

You pass a late-night falafel cart and the warm, oily scent of fried chickpeas folds around you. Someone’s playing Miles Davis through a cracked open window above a bodega. A cab splashes through a puddle without slowing down.

You glance at Reed. His hair is slightly damp from the rain, curling a little at the edges. The grey streak catches in the streetlamp glow and glints like metal. He looks tired, but the good kind—brain-tired. Soul-deep contentment worn like a worn-in coat.

There’s something in the way he carries himself now that feels looser than it used to. Since you.

You think about that sometimes. The before of him.

You’ve seen the photos.

You’ve read the papers.

The man with ideas too big for gravity, with headlines like The Modern Da Vinci and Richards' Law stapled to his name before he was even out of his twenties.

You used to resent those profiles.

How they smoothed over the things that mattered.

How they all insisted on brilliance and ignored what he really was...careful. Constant. Gentle in ways that science rarely rewards.

He wasn’t always like this. He told you, once, in a rare moment of openness, that he used to believe love would only slow him down. That affection dulled the edge of genius.

He doesn’t say things like that anymore.

But he doesn’t say the other thing either.

You know what you are to him—friend, confidant, collaborator.

His mind matches yours, nearly. But not quite.

You run faster. Not always more elegantly. But faster.

You see the equations before he does.

You make intuitive leaps he can only reconstruct in hindsight.

He admires that. You see it in the way he watches you work, the way he lets you lead without hesitation.

And still, he hasn’t said the thing.

Because once it’s said, it can’t be unsaid. And Reed Richards has never risked a variable he couldn’t account for.

“You know,” he says softly as you cross Park, “when you rewrote that module today… I think that was the first time I felt—” He pauses. “Old.”

You glance at him. “You’re not old.”

He chuckles. “My knees would disagree.”

“That’s not science.”

He smiles. “No. But it is gravity.”

You snort.

He watches you carefully. Then says, “You don’t realize how good you are, do you?”

You look down at the sidewalk. The rain has turned the concrete slick and mottled.

“I do. I just don’t know how to be proud of it.”

He nods like he understands. “Because pride implies…audience.”

You don’t answer. But your silence agrees with him.

A block later, you say, “You’ve taught me how to be better without making me feel small.”

It slips out before you realize it. The kind of truth that rarely finds a voice.

Reed stops walking.

You look back at him. He’s staring at you like he’s memorizing the moment.

“You’ve done that for me too,” he says quietly.

It should be more than that.

But it isn’t. Not yet.

Your building is a brick structure tucked on a quieter side street. Sixth floor, walk-up. Rent-high, because New York is cruel and physics has been paying you back a lot recently.

Reed’s been here before—once when you locked yourself out, once when you were sick with a stomach bug and couldn’t get out of bed to pick up your prescription.

He always waits at the foot of the stairs.

Tonight is no different.

You fish out your keys and glance back at him.

“I’m okay,” you say.

He nods. “Text me when you’re in.”

You hesitate. Then, a beat later, “Thank you for walking with me.”

“Always.”

You step inside. The door swings shut behind you with a soft click.

Reed watches the rectangle of light shrink until it’s gone.

Only then does he turn.

He walks back slowly, hands deep in his coat pockets, rain heavier now. The city is hushed, its noise folded in on itself. His shoes splash through puddles he doesn’t try to avoid.

He thinks about you.

The way your voice tightens when you talk about the things you care about.

The way you never apologize for being brilliant, just for being visible.

The way you notice every small thing—every decimal, every gesture, every change in temperature—and store it away like evidence that the world can be read if only you learn its language.

Reed Richards has spent his life searching for patterns. For the math behind miracles. He’s found some. Lost others.

But you?

You remain his favorite unsolved equation.

He doesn’t say the thing. Not yet.

But it lives just under his tongue, waiting.

The next morning you wake up earlier than you meant to.

Not by choice. Not by discipline.

But because your upstairs neighbors, despite living in an apartment complex with allegedly soundproof walls, have spent the last six and a half hours making the most expressive use of their vocal cords.

Moans.

Laughter.

Something you’re fairly certain was a vase being knocked over around 3:12 a.m.

You’d counted.

You’d logged the minute it started—12:49 p.m.—and the moment it finally slowed to quiet again, or at least to something muffled enough that you could hear yourself think.

There was nothing logical about it, and therefore nothing you could fix. No formula to solve thin drywall. No algorithm to isolate human behavior into something quiet, contained, reasonable.

So you’d stared at the ceiling. Then at your wall. Then at your ceiling again.

And now it’s 5:47 a.m., and your alarm hasn’t even gone off yet.

You sit up.

The air in your apartment is slightly too warm—residual heat from the radiator you can’t adjust. Your mouth is dry. The muscles in your back ache in the specific way they do when your sleep’s been interrupted just enough to confuse your circadian rhythm but not enough to explain it to anyone else.

You don’t bother lying back down.

Your morning routine is exact. Not out of compulsion, but out of necessity. A lattice structure of steps that keep the rest of the day from collapsing.

Boil water. Black tea, no milk.

Brush teeth—no mint toothpaste, only the kind with baking soda, because you hate the artificial sweetness.

Shower. Warm, not hot. You step out and wrap the towel tightly around you like armor.

Dressing is harder. The shirt you wanted to wear feels off today—too scratchy, too bright. You change into the navy knit Reed once said brought out your eyes.

That memory shouldn’t matter, but it does. You feel steadier when you put it on.

Bag. Notebook. ID. Keycard. Noise-canceling headphones, just in case.

You skip breakfast.

You always do when you’ve been overstimulated. It makes your stomach feel like wires have been crossed.

The subway is half-empty this early. The kind of silence particular to Friday mornings—the city not quite buzzing yet, just flickering. You stand near the doors and stare at your reflection in the opposite window, your face hovering over the tunnel blur outside like a ghost.

You think about the model you left open in Lab B-3. About the field trip on Monday. About whether or not you remembered to reroute the final data loop in the harmonic anchor sequence.

You think about Reed, and then try not to.

By the time you arrive at the Baxter Building, it’s just before seven.

You enter through the side entrance, swiping your badge through the sensor and waiting for the familiar mechanical click. The lobby is dark except for the ambient lighting that glows along the baseboards. The city hasn’t reached in yet.

And then you see him.

Reed.

Sitting on the bench just inside the front hallway like someone who forgot what time it is—or didn’t care.

He’s wearing the same navy coat from the night before, his hair still slightly damp from whatever morning shower he took before stepping into the day. His notepad is on his lap, open, but untouched.

He looks up at the sound of the door.

“Hey.”

You blink.

“You’re early,” you say.

“So are you.”

“I didn’t sleep.”

He stands slowly. “Your neighbors again?”

You nod, already tugging your bag strap higher on your shoulder.

“I’m thinking of writing them a formal request to conduct their mating rituals at a lower decibel range.”

That makes you snort, despite yourself.

“They’d probably just find that hot.”

Reed’s laugh is soft. “You’re probably right.”

He falls into step beside you without needing to be asked. You head toward the elevators together.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” you say as you press the button. “You're never this early unless there’s a test run.”

“I was hoping you’d show up early,” he admits, sheepish but not apologetic. “You didn’t text last night.”

You look down. “I forgot.”

“Neighbors really did a run on you, huh?”

You ket out a breathy laugh meeting his eyes.

Soon the elevator arrives. You both step in.

He doesn’t say anything else, but the quiet settles around you like a blanket. You don’t have the words for it, but you know he does this often—positions himself near you, close but not invasive, like a planet finding the right orbit. Something about it always makes you feel tethered.

The elevator stops on your floor.

As you exit, he doesn’t turn toward his own lab. He follows you.

“I figured I’d sit with you for a bit,” he says simply, “if that’s okay.”

You nod. You don’t say thank you, but your body does—shoulders uncoiling, pace slowing, your breath evening out.

Your lab still smells faintly of ozone and the synthetic lemon Reed always insists on using in the electronics-safe cleaning spray. You flick on the under-lighting instead of the fluorescents. It’s quieter that way.

He watches you unpack, the same way he always does when he’s not pretending to be distracted by his own work. You can feel his gaze—clinical, affectionate, reverent.

You settle at your station and glance over.

“Did you get any sleep?”

“Some.”

He sits across from you at the small corner table, flipping open his notebook. “I kept thinking about the field trip Monday.”

You groan softly.

Reed smiles. “You’ll be fine.”

“They’re going to ask me if I built Fortnite.”

“Just say yes.”

You narrow your eyes. “That’s unethical.”

He shrugs. “You do kind of power their world.”

You chew the inside of your cheek.

“I know you’re dreading it,” he adds, more gently. “But you’re going to surprise yourself. I’ve seen you explain quantum turbulence to a twelve year old. You used two chairs, a glass of water, and a slinky. It was borderline performance art.”

You allow yourself the smallest smile.

He studies you for a beat.

“I waited this morning,” he says, voice lower now. “Because I wanted to see you before the day started. I figured if you didn’t sleep, you’d need a buffer.”

You look up at him.

“A buffer?”

“For the noise. The world. Everything.”

You don’t answer for a long moment.

Then, “You’re good at buffering.”

Reed closes his notebook. His eyes don’t leave yours.

“Only for you.”

You look away too quickly. Your stomach flips, your thoughts scatter like dropped dice.

This happens sometimes.

The intimacy of Reed. The nearness of what he doesn’t say.

The feeling that he’s handing you something fragile and invisible, and asking you to decide whether to name it or leave it untouched.

You pull up your simulation model and begin reviewing last night’s logs.

He watches you for another minute, then opens his notebook again and starts annotating something beside you, close enough that your knees brush once, and neither of you moves.

The morning settles.

Quiet.

Unspoken.

Waiting.

The building wakes slowly, like a body stretching into motion. The light outside the lab windows tilts, warmer now, brushing across your workstation and catching on the rim of your teacup. You don’t drink it, but it’s there—heat fading, a symbol of routine more than comfort.

One by one, the others begin to arrive.

Keycards beep. Footsteps echo off tile. The rhythmic click of heels and the soft, buzzing shuffle of rubber soles on linoleum fill the air in the way only a scientific institution ever sounds. Conversations start up in clipped, caffeinated tones. Someone’s talking about a failed simulation in Lab A-2. Someone else is complaining about the elevator skipping floors again.

You don’t look up.

You’ve already built a wall of focus, exact and methodical—three simulations running in parallel, an error log cycling in your periphery, two graphs comparing harmonic distortion levels under varying environmental noise inputs.

Reed hasn’t moved far from you since you sat down.

Every now and then, he leans slightly over to ask a question—never invasive, always curious. He taps the edge of your screen to point out something and waits for you to explain it in full before speaking again. His voice stays low. His body language remains small.

He is very, very careful with your space.

At some point, you adjust the variables in one of the testing loops. Reed notices before you explain why.

“You brought down the feedback tolerance?”

You nod. “I think it’s overcompensating for impulse drift. If we calibrate to a slightly lower resilience threshold, we might expose the weak nodes in the structural harmonics.”

He lets out a low hum of appreciation.

“I wouldn’t have caught that.”

You glance at him.

“That’s because you were trained to trust the tolerances.”

Reed raises an eyebrow, amused. “And you weren’t?”

“I was trained to notice what doesn’t belong. Even if it doesn’t make sense yet.”

He leans back in his chair, studying you with something just shy of awe.

That’s when the others start to notice.

There’s no whispering. No gossip. That’s not the culture here. Baxter doesn’t reward spectacle.

But still, people look.

It’s subtle—an extra second of eye contact, a glance exchanged between postdocs in the corridor. Even in a building dedicated to research and theoretical physics, attention has a shape. You feel it.

You’re used to being watched when you speak, but this is different. They’re watching him.

They’re watching how Reed stays near.

How he lowers his voice when he speaks to you.

How he doesn’t interrupt when you’re mid-thought.

How he laughs at things you don’t mean to be funny.

How he tracks your gestures with the full, unguarded focus of a man trying to memorize not just the content of what you’re saying, but the rhythm of it, too.

You register the attention. You don’t engage with it. You would get too flustered.

Instead, you pull up a different dataset.

Across the room, someone’s looking at you over their glasses. You minimize the screen and adjust your chair slightly so your back is to the rest of the lab.

Ben Grimm arrives around 9:15, coffee in hand, hoodie pulled up like armor against the morning.

You like Ben.

You liked him even before you knew him—when all you had was a list of his mechanical engineering contributions and the curious note in his file that simply read “Reed’s oldest friend. Trustworthy. Not academically inclined. Smarter than he lets on.”

He sees you before you see him.

“Hey, Doc,” he calls out, his voice gravelly but warm.

You glance up and, for the first time since the building really began to fill, smile openly.

“Hi, Ben.”

He walks over slowly, avoiding the edge of the test rig you have set up. His eyes sweep the table, reading the mess of wires and calibration notes without actually processing them, which is part of his charm—he doesn’t pretend to understand your work. He respects it anyway.

“You eat today?”

You blink. “Not yet.”

“You want half my bagel?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“It’s everything seasoning.”

He grins. “You’re too sharp for your own good.”

You raise an eyebrow. “I’m just observant.”

Reed, still beside you, chimes in dryly, “She’s also allergic to sesame.”

Ben winces. “Oh, right. My bad.”

You wave it off. “It’s not lethal.”

Ben hands you a sealed granola bar from his pocket instead. “From Alicia. She said you looked pale last week and told me to keep snacks on me in case I ran into you.”

Your mouth twitches.

“Tell her I said thank you.”

“Tell her yourself. She’s coming by Monday.”

You nod, then return to your screen, not rudely, just efficiently. Ben doesn’t take offense. He pats the table lightly and leaves you to your work.

Once he’s gone, Reed glances at you sidelong.

“You like Ben.”

“He doesn’t talk to hear himself speak,” you reply.

Reed smirks, folding his arms across his chest. “So I guess I should be worried.”

You don’t answer. But something in your cheek lifts. A small, unspoken response. Reed ntoices it. Files it away like he does everything about you.

By late morning, you’re too deep in the math to notice anything else.

Three out of five anchor simulations fail—but not catastrophically. The new feedback threshold is revealing the pattern you hoped it would. Reed asks if he can run his own version of the loop. You nod without turning, already exporting the baseline parameters to his terminal.

You hear someone outside the glass wall whisper, “Is Richards still in Lab B-3?”

And then, “I think he’s shadowing her today.”

“He shadows her every damn day.”

You pretend not to hear. You shrink slightly into your collar. Not from shame. Just to stay small.

Reed doesn’t respond to the comment. But you notice that he reaches over and very quietly pushes the door shut.

Not to hide.

But to give you quiet.

The rest of the morning passes like this—like a film spooling out in perfect rhythm. Reed occasionally types beside you. Sometimes you work in parallel, other times in sync. You don’t speak unless necessary, but the air between you is charged in a way you can’t name. Not love, not yet. But a proximity to it.

And even though others look—at him, at you, at the space between—you don’t notice anymore.

You’re too busy trying to catch the shape of something hidden in the data. Something just out of reach.

Like truth.

Or a confession.

Or gravity.

Fridays at the Baxter Building settle into their own kind of orbit.

Every lab has its rhythm—Lab A-2 always wraps their protein sequencing early, because Dr. Lyman likes to jog at 1:15 on the dot. Tech Ops syncs their systems for overnight updates before noon. Environmental Engineering runs its daily dehumidifier diagnostic with exaggerated ritual, a kind of inside joke no one explains to the interns.

It’s been that way since you arrived. It wasn’t written anywhere, but you learned it all the same.

And the unspoken tradition...Reed Richards forgets about time.

By now, everyone has made peace with it.

On Fridays, he’ll get caught chasing some quantum trajectory through a dozen notepads and open tabs, muttering to himself about temporal flux interactions or pattern resonance mismatches. If someone reminds him what time it is, he’ll blink, check his watch as though it’s betraying him, and then wave his hand vaguely in the air—“Take two hours, go. Ben, order something greasy.”

And everyone will. With relief. With a kind of reverent affection for their slightly scattered, brilliant leader.

Except you.

You stay.

Always.

It’s nearing 12:45 when the lab thins out. Ben claps his hands once, loudly, to announce, “Twenty-four-inch from Mario’s. I got half with olives, don’t fight me about it.” Someone cheers from the hallway.

You don’t look up.

The simulation in front of you is finally stabilizing under increased pressure loads, and Reed’s scribbling new hypotheses across his tablet at a manic pace—“If we compensate for decay acceleration by adjusting the sequence resolution window down to 10 seconds, the cross-bridging might resolve on its own—”

You hum without meaning to, fingers typing out the updated code.

“I’m serious,” he says, pushing his chair closer to yours, legs brushing under the desk. “We’re so close. This could finally solve the vibration decay issues in the dynamic anchor builds.”

“It won’t,” you reply calmly, running the next set. “Not unless you account for the spectral density shift around the 170 Hz mark. It’s going to collapse again.”

Reed pauses.

“You already ran this model.”

You nod.

“When?”

“Last weekend.”

He looks at you like you’ve handed him a paradox.

You let the silence stretch, then: “Try adjusting the constraint to reflect a Gaussian distribution, not linear. The peaks are too soft, and the algorithm’s compensating for noise that isn’t actually noise.”

Reed exhales slowly, reverent. “How does your brain do that?”

You don’t answer. You don’t have the words for how you see things. You just do.

He smiles like he’s in the presence of something sacred.

He leans in again, close enough that his shoulder presses lightly into yours. You shift slightly to give him access to your terminal, and he doesn’t pull away.

He’s always been tactile like this—with you, at least.

Hands brushing yours when you pass equipment.

A palm steadying your wrist when you’re assembling small, sensitive components.

Once, you found yourself gripping his forearm without realizing it during a particularly volatile magnetic resonance test. He didn’t mention it. Just let you hold.

But today, it’s different.

Today, something lingers.

You're both staring at the screen. The simulation is stabilizing now, running longer than it has all week. Your throat tightens with something like triumph, or relief, or maybe just fatigue disguised as euphoria.

Then, softly—soft enough that it catches you off guard—Reed reaches up and brushes his thumb across your cheek.

You freeze.

Out of disbelief. Out of awe.

His hand is warm. The pad of his thumb gentle.

The touch isn’t performative. It’s not even decisive.

It’s hesitant. Like he needed to check that you’re real.

That this moment isn’t just one of his half-formed ideas scrawled into the margins of a late-night notebook.

Your eyes flick toward him.

He’s already looking at you.

Something unspoken and heavy passes between you. It hums underneath the fluorescent buzz of the lab lights, underneath the whirring fans of the machinery, underneath the working theory you’ve spent days fine-tuning.

You don’t lean in.

But you don’t lean away.

He doesn’t move his hand.

You don’t say a word.

Ben opens the door a few feet down the hall, holding a pizza box in one hand, a Coke in the other.

He sees you.

Sees Reed.

The hand. The closeness. The moment.

And just as quietly as he entered, he steps back. Sets the pizza down on the nearest desk. Walks away without a word.

You and Reed don’t notice.

The simulation pings complete. For the first time in eleven models, it doesn’t fail.

You blink.

Then breathe.

Reed drops his hand, slowly, like it doesn’t want to leave but knows it has to.

You don’t say anything. Neither does he.

But something has shifted.

In the lab’s stale, climate-controlled air. In the simulation still pulsing faintly on your screen. In the trajectory of two minds moving dangerously close to each other’s center of gravity.

You get up first, walking to the sink in the corner to splash water on your face. The cold helps. Reed stays in his chair, scribbling, though you can tell his mind isn’t entirely on the notes.

You find the pizza box. It’s already cold. You bring two slices back to the workstation.

You don’t mention the moment. Neither does he.

But all through the second hour of your “break,” you work with that electric tension still threaded between you.

You pass him a slice. He accepts it.

He says your name, once, softly, like an answer to a question you haven’t asked yet.

And you don’t look up. Not yet.

You’re afraid that if you do, everything will change.

Or maybe—it already has.

“Hey,” Reed says again, this time your name folded into it, spoken low and careful, like he’s afraid of breaking it. Like he’s afraid of breaking you.

You don’t answer right away.

Because you know what he’s asking without asking.

And you know that if you answer—if you meet his gaze now, if you name the thing humming between you—it won’t go back in the box. It will take shape. It will have mass. It will alter the gravitational field between you forever.

You chew the edge of your lip and keep your eyes on the simulation results, blinking too fast.

He doesn’t push. Reed Richards never pushes.

But he stays there, watching you like a question he’s been trying to answer for years. Like a proof that’s always been just outside the edge of comprehension.

He wants you.

You can feel it in the heat of his gaze, in the way his hands twitch with unspent energy, in the way he shifts closer every time he speaks. He wants you the way he wants knowledge, reverently. With hunger and hesitation in equal parts.

But more than that—he respects you. And that respect builds a boundary he’s too careful to cross without your invitation.

So he doesn’t speak again. Not yet.

Instead, he clears his throat gently and leans back into the moment he knows how to inhabit best—the work.

“You were right about the Gaussian window,” he murmurs, eyes returning to the data on your screen. “The mean deviation narrowed just enough to stabilize the micro-vibrational bleed. Look.”

He tilts his tablet toward you.

You peer at it, grateful for the anchor. “The variance dropped below 0.0003. That’s lower than the threshold for secondary echo.”

Reed nods. “It’s still not perfect. But it’s holding. For now.”

You echo it before you can stop yourself. “For now.”

He smiles at that—soft, and only for you.

The tension doesn’t break. But it shifts. Warms.

You pull up the residual energy pattern charts and begin comparing them to your older models. Reed swivels his chair to face you fully, chin resting lightly on his knuckles as he watches you work.

Your voice steadies.

“I think we can reduce the decay rate even more by using a layered harmonic buffer. Not just a single envelope. Something like... like a tri-modal stabilization frame.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Using phase-offset looping?”

“Yes,” you say, eyes lighting up. “But slightly desynchronized. So each frequency compensates for the loss in another—like an algorithmic relay. Less like a barrier, more like... a conversation.”

You feel him watching you, not the charts.

There’s a kind of electricity in your blood now, not from caffeine or adrenaline but from being understood, seen at the level you need to be.

And for once, the way you talk—fast, disorganized, precise, too much—feels like the exact shape of something he’s been waiting to hear.

You meet his gaze finally.

He’s smiling.

That soft, quiet, wrecked smile of his. The one he only wears around you.

“You know,” he murmurs, “you say I taught you how to be better without making you feel small. But you make me feel like I don’t have to be better all the time. Like just being...with you is enough.”

You don’t know what to do with that sentence.

It sits too heavy in your chest. It rearranges your molecules.

Reed notices your hands twitch—how your fingers twitch at your sleeves when the air gets too loud inside you. He leans forward just slightly.

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t,” you say too quickly. “You didn’t.”

Then, after a breath, “It’s just... I don’t know what to do when people say things like that.”

“Okay,” he says. “Then we don’t have to do anything. We can just stay here. With the work.”

But there’s softness in the offer. No withdrawal. No hurt.

Just the way he always gives you room.

It’s quiet again.

The others are still gone. Outside the lab, Friday spills forward in lazy arcs—someone arguing about where to eat next week, a song playing faintly from someone’s portable speaker. You can hear Ben laugh somewhere near the stairwell.

Inside, Reed starts sketching again. You realize, after a while, that it’s not a schematic. He’s drawing the harmonic layering you suggested, but not in code—in lines and waves, almost like music. It’s abstract and a little chaotic and not how he normally works.

It’s your method. Translated.

You watch him for a moment. Then you reach over and pick up a stylus of your own.

You add to it without asking. Adjust one arc. Shade one line.

He doesn’t flinch.

This is your intimacy. Shared language in waveform. A courtship of the mind.

The pizza gets cold. No one bothers you. Not even Ben, who peeks through the glass once more and then nods to himself like he's witnessing a rare solar event—better not to interfere.

And Reed…

Reed reaches over again at one point, softly, thumb brushing your cheek once more. This time he doesn’t look away when he does it. And you don’t freeze.

He doesn’t kiss you.

Not yet.

But you both feel it coming.

Not like a crash.

Like a calculation converging.

Like an inevitable, elegant solution.

Friday settles into its soft descent.

Outside, the city shifts into its end-of-week hum. That specific kind of tonal change—less frantic, more languid. Like the buildings are exhaling.

But in the lab, the world is still quiet, contained in the steady blinking of data streams and the near-inaudible whir of cooled processors.

You sit on the floor now, legs crossed beneath you, a cluster of components spread around you like offerings. The modeling station sits nearby, quietly compiling your last run.

Reed is at the console, sleeves rolled up, hair curling faintly at the temples from the humidity that’s crept in through the vents. He’s biting the corner of his thumbnail absently—thinking.

You watch him.

And then you remember.

“Did you finish the sensory-feedback demo for the field trip?” you ask, voice soft but cutting clean through the air between you.

He blinks up from the console, eyes going immediately bright.

“I did. Mostly. I was going to test it tonight.”

You tilt your head. “Can I see it?”

He smiles—a real one, unguarded and boyish. The kind he only wears with you.

“You can help me run it.”

He gets up, walking to the supply cabinet in the corner, pulling down a heavy black case the size of a carry-on. You follow, standing now, hands folding in the sleeves of your sweater as you watch him unlock the case with the smooth familiarity of a man who designs entire universes and still finds joy in the click of good mechanics.

Inside, a scatter of wires, motion sensors, a series of spherical objects that look like oversized ping pong balls, each one patterned with conductive filament and dotted with touch points. You recognize the layout—a modular, reprogrammable interface system with haptic feedback, originally built for mobility therapy.

“You modified the base algorithm,” you say, eyes narrowing with appreciation.

“For kids,” he replies. “It runs a simplified tactile-reward loop. Kind of like a visual puzzle—kinetic memory reinforcement. Color-coded neural feedback.”

“Accessible interface?”

He nods. “Built for neurodivergent learners. Adaptive texture mapping. It reacts to the user’s input in real time. No static pathways. No performance grading.”

Your chest tightens a little. Not painfully. Just precisely.

“You built a toy.”

Reed shrugs. “It teaches basic physics concepts. Friction, acceleration, force vectors. Just…disguised as fun.”

“That’s not just a toy,” you murmur.

He watches you closely.

“No,” he says. “It’s not.”

You set it up together on the floor of Lab B-3, moving the tables back, laying the tiles out in careful rows. The modular touch-nodes blink softly as they come to life—first red, then green, then a low, pulsing blue.

The algorithm kicks in after calibration. Reed holds the interface tablet, flipping through the menus. You hover close behind him, watching how he reprograms the environmental variables on the fly.

“Want to try it?” he asks.

You nod.

He sets it to manual mode. The first node lights up in your periphery. You move toward it, tap it lightly with your finger. It flashes yellow, then blue, and vibrates beneath your touch.

You laugh, just once—quick, surprised.

“Positive reinforcement,” Reed says softly. “Each node has a different tactile response depending on approach angle, velocity, and touch pressure.”

“So they learn physics by playing.”

He nods. “Exactly.”

You test the next one. And then another. As the nodes light up, the floor becomes a low-lit constellation, flickering gently around your movements. It’s beautiful. You crouch down near one, tracing your fingers across the filaments, letting the haptic buzz hum beneath your fingertips.

“Reed,” you say quietly. “This is... really, really good.”

He kneels down beside you.

“I just wanted to build something that made them feel like science was listening back.”

You look over at him.

That sentence hangs there, too delicate to touch.

Your hand moves before your brain registers the decision—slowly, instinctively—and you reach for him.

You had reached for his hand but landed on his thumb.

Just his thumb.

You wrap your small hand around it gently, like it’s the only part of him you can hold without consequence.

Reed freezes.

Not from discomfort. From something else.

He turns his head toward you, slowly, like he’s afraid you’ll disappear if he moves too quickly. His smile is soft, stunned. As if he can’t believe you’re doing this. As if he’s afraid that if he acknowledges it too directly, it might stop.

You don’t look at him. You just hold his thumb in both your hands, watching the floor blink beneath you.

It’s a strange gesture, almost childlike in its simplicity. But to you, it’s everything. It’s grounding. Permission. Trust.

Reed lets out a breath like he’s been holding it for years.

He doesn’t move his hand away.

Instead, he uses the other to reach forward and adjust a setting on the control interface without looking. The lights shift. The nodes pulse in a new pattern. You follow them without letting go of his thumb.

He’s smiling now, wide and quiet.

Completely and utterly gone for you.

You test every mode together—gravity simulation, frictionless slide, kinetic echo. Reed talks softly through each setting, explaining how he rewrote the original code to simulate Newton’s Laws in modular intervals, adjusting for sensor latency so kids could trigger reactions with slower or less precise movement.

You ask questions. Not because you don’t understand. But because you do. You want to understand it his way.

He answers everything.

By the time you’re done, the lights in the lab have dimmed into their evening cycle. Reed packs up the demo system slowly, like he’s folding something sacred.

You’re still holding his thumb.

Finally, gently, he uses it to tap the back of your hand.

“You know,” he says quietly, “you don’t have to hold back around me.”

You look at him, expression unreadable. You squeeze his thumb once, then let go.

“I’m not,” you say.

And you aren’t.

Not anymore.

The lab is dark when you both leave.

Outside, the city has begun to cool. You walk beside him in silence, shoulders brushing once, then again. Not by accident.

You don’t talk about the moment on the lab floor.

You don’t have to.

It happened.

It exists.

Like an inevitable, elegant solution.

The sky has turned the color of television static. Not black, not gray, just faded. Soft enough to feel unreal. Streetlights flicker on in stuttering intervals. A breeze curls up the avenue and catches at the hem of your coat.

You and Reed stand just outside the Baxter Building entrance, neither of you moving to leave, as if there’s some invisible membrane between the lab and the world you’re not quite ready to pierce.

You should go home.

That’s the next step, isn’t it?

That’s what people do when the day ends. They go back to the place with their name on the lease and try to remember who they are when no one’s asking them questions.

Except your place has neighbors.

And thin walls.

And you're too tired to pretend your own exhaustion doesn’t vibrate at the same frequency as their pleasure.

You shift your weight from foot to foot, knuckles tucked deep into your sleeves. You can feel the buzz of the day behind your eyes—not anxiety, not anymore. Just too many thoughts stacking on top of each other like tetris blocks, and you don’t have the energy to make them fit.

Reed stands beside you, hands in his coat pockets, quiet as ever. The edge of his sleeve brushes yours every so often, an unspoken rhythm that makes you feel here.

Not tolerated. Not managed.

Just here.

Ben soon exits the building. Hoodie zipped to his throat, a half-eaten brownie in one hand. He slows when he sees you both.

“Well, well,” Ben says, raising an eyebrow. “You two finally gonna leave the building or should we start paying you rent inside the lab?”

You glance at Reed.

He shrugs, noncommittal.

Ben smirks. “Alright. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Then he gives Reed a look. “Which ain’t much.”

Reed doesn’t respond, but his smile is quiet. Affectionate.

“Goodnight, Ben,” you say softly.

“Night, genius.”

He walks off into the dark.

You stay.

Reed doesn’t ask if you’re going home.

You don’t say anything for a while. You just look at the sidewalk. The cracks in it. The faint smudge of oil near the curb. The headlights of a cab bending light across Reed’s cheekbone, catching on the streak of gray in his hair.

Finally, you say, “Can I stay?”

You don’t explain. You don’t need to.

He doesn’t ask why.

He just turns to you, and for a split second, something in his expression softens so completely it’s almost painful. His eyes widen like he’s been caught off guard, but then his entire face warms, lips parting slightly, like you’ve just handed him something fragile and beautiful and unexpected.

“Yes,” he says immediately. “Yes, of course.”

You nod once, eyes down, and he opens the glass doors for you with his keycard.

Reed’s private quarters are located on the top floor, built into the architecture like a quiet secret.

The space is sparse but intentional. One long wall is lined with windows that overlook the city—lights shimmering like data points, static and alive at once.

You’ve been here before. The air smells like him. The surfaces are all smooth, clean, designed for function rather than comfort—except the guest bed, which he quietly upgraded after the second time you stayed, replacing the stiff mattress with something memory foam, orthopedic, weighted blankets in navy and grey.

He never mentioned it. But you noticed.

Now, you step out of your shoes and move instinctively toward the small kitchen alcove, placing your bag on the counter where you always do. You hear Reed behind you, taking off his coat, the soft clink of keys being set in the ceramic dish by the door.

“I didn’t want to go home,” you say, very quietly.

“I know,” he replies.

He fills the kettle without asking. He doesn’t ask if you want tea. He just knows that the ritual helps.

You settle on his couch while he prepares everything. There’s something deeply intimate about watching him move in this space—not as a scientist, but as a man who’s built a life designed for quiet. For stillness. For you.

“Did you finish that secondary circuit loop in the interface?” you ask, voice small.

“I did,” he says, turning toward you with two mugs. “Replaced the original buffer with a superconductive braid. Reduced the thermal variance by thirty percent.”

You take the mug with both hands.

“That’s going to make it more stable in hands-on mode.”

He nods. “Exactly.”

You sip the tea. It’s perfect. Rooibos, no caffeine. Subtle and warm.

You look down at your knees.

He sits beside you, not too close, not too far. Just right.

“I’m still thinking about that tri-modal stabilization relay you suggested,” he says. “It could actually be used in more than just the interface model. If we layer it into the resonance prototype, it could compensate for secondary harmonic bleed without adding mechanical dampeners.”

You glance at him. “It wouldn’t even need a power supply. It would just borrow from the existing vibrational field.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

You smile faintly. “We should test it this weekend.”

“We should,” he agrees.

But neither of you move.

You sit there in the dark, the city lights flickering behind the glass, the tea cooling slowly between your palms.

And then, Reed shifts slightly closer.

His fingers brush the side of your hand where it rests on the couch cushion.

You don’t pull away.

“I’m glad you asked to stay,” he says, quietly.

“I don’t always know what I need,” you admit.

“You don’t have to,” he says. “Not with me.”

You turn your hand palm-up.

He hesitates—barely a second—and then sets his own hand into yours. Warm. Long fingers. Calloused thumb.

You wrap your hand around his thumb again.

It’s small. Stupidly small. But it feels like precision.

Like the alignment of orbitals in a new chemical bond—unexpected, improbable, but somehow inevitable.

He stares at your hands like they’re a proof he’s just solved.

And you can feel it now, radiating off him.

That Reed Richards is completely, irrevocably in love with you.

It sits in his stillness.

In the way he lets you hold him without needing to be held back.

In the careful cadence of his breath next to yours.

In every half-finished sentence he doesn’t speak because he’s still calibrating the right moment to say it.

You close your eyes.

The lab can wait.

The world can wait.

Because here, in this quiet room on the top floor of the Baxter Building, the noise of the city fades into static, and two brilliant minds sit side by side, slowly, carefully falling into something that even physics doesn’t have language for.

Yet.

You’re still holding his thumb.

The weight of it feels small and ordinary and terrifying, in the way intimacy always is when it sneaks in sideways—quiet, soft, patient.

The tea between you has gone slightly cold, but neither of you moves.

Reed glances at your hand in his again like he’s not sure it’s real. Like he’s afraid any shift in air pressure might break whatever this is.

He doesn’t want to lose it. You can feel that. It lives in the quiet of his body. In the way he breathes more carefully now, like your closeness has changed the atmospheric composition of the room.

You can’t explain it.

Not exactly.

But you know the moment has arrived—like a threshold has been crossed without either of you noticing when.

You lift your eyes.

Reed is already watching you.

And then you kiss him.

There’s no warning. No lead-in. No poetic pause.

You just lurch forward and kiss him like your brain caught fire.

You cup his face with both hands—awkward, determined, imprecise. You feel the stubble on his jaw beneath your palms. You feel the soft surprised puff of his breath as you press your mouth against his with more force than you intended.

Reed makes a startled noise.

You pull back slightly, embarrassed, but he surges forward like a current finding its charge.

His hands find your waist, anchoring—not possessive, not demanding, just present. And then his mouth is on yours, properly this time. He kisses you with a slowness that makes your skin buzz, then deeper, until you forget how to think.

You chase it.

You chase it harder than you meant to.

You end up half in his lap, straddling his thigh on the couch. He grunts softly in surprise as you pull him closer by the collar of his shirt. Your hands roam. One settles in his hair, the other at the base of his neck, grounding yourself in the shape of him. His body is warm and solid and older than yours in a way that feels deeply comforting—experienced, steady.

“Wait—” he whispers into your mouth, breathless but laughing.

You pause.

“I—God, I didn’t think—” he tries to say, and then you kiss him again.

It’s clumsy and desperate and real. Your teeth bump once. Your nose is probably smushed too hard against his.

But Reed groans quietly like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

Because it is.

Because it’s you.

Eventually, you slow. Not because you want to. Just because you run out of breath. You ease back a little, your forehead resting against his, both of you flushed and dazed.

His fingers trace up your spine, slow, careful, reverent.

You say nothing for a while.

Then, softly, eyes still closed, you murmur, “I need to take a shower.”

He blinks, dazed.

“Oh,” he says, voice rough. “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

You make no move to get up.

He doesn’t push.

Then, without looking at him, you say, “Will you come with me?”

Reed stills.

It’s not a seductive invitation. Your voice is too quiet. Too vulnerable.

You mean with you. Not to see you.

There’s a difference.

A difference he understands immediately.

He exhales once, very slowly.

“Yes,” he says.

The bathroom in Reed’s quarters is clean and understated. No clutter. Neutral tones. A single towel folded perfectly on the heated rack. The kind of space made by someone who needs things to stay quiet, even in private.

You peel off your clothes with your back to him. You don’t ask him to turn away. You just move, deliberately, like someone trying to stay present in their own body. You don’t rush.

He undresses behind you.

You don’t look.

Not because you’re afraid.

Just because this isn’t about looking.

When you step under the water, he follows. The spray is warm. Steam begins to rise immediately, curling around your shoulders, softening the edges of the room.

You don’t speak for a long time.

He helps you rinse shampoo from your hair.

He rubs a towel gently across your upper back, washing you between passes of the water.

You stand in the quiet, eyes closed, while he reaches for the soap, his hands careful and broad. You’ve never felt so heldin a room without touch. Even when he does touch you, it’s so measured. Like he’s calibrating pressure in real time.

He never touches more than he needs to.

He never looks longer than you let him.

You begin to wash him in return—his arms, his back. Your fingers map the ridges of his shoulders. The plane of his chest. 

He smiles at you when you look up at him.

You smile back.

Afterward, you towel off side by side. You slip into the oversized sleep shirt he keeps in the guest drawers—the one you claimed without asking the second time you stayed over. Reed pulls on a soft cotton shirt and gray sweatpants, hair still damp, curls a little unruly.

You both brush your teeth in silence. The kind of silence built on trust, not absence.

You spit and rinse and then, leaning over the sink, you say, “You’re not what I expected.”

Reed glances at you in the mirror.

“I’m not?” he asks, toothbrush in hand.

You shake your head. “You’re a better equation.”

He stares at you for a moment, then leans over, presses a kiss to your temple, and whispers, “So are you.”

You fall asleep in his bed, facing each other.

You don’t touch—not at first. But at some point, your foot slides across the sheet and brushes his calf.

He doesn’t bother to move.

You drift off like that.

And he stays awake for a while longer, just watching you breathe, memorizing the sound of it, calculating the half-life of the moment in real time.

He doesn't think there's a formula for this.

But if there were, he’d already be solving for you.

taglist: @totallynotshine @the-curator1 @christinamadsen @imaginemixedfandom @randomuserr330 @princess76179 @little--spring @mielsonrisa @he-is-the-destined @in-pedros-smile @aysilee2018 @stormseyer @or-was-it-just-a-dream @strawberrylemontart1 @lovetings @peelieblue @just-a-harmless-patato @lizziesfirstwife @princessnnylzays @stargirl-mayaa @vickie5446 @everandforeveryours @jxvipike @sukivenue @neenieweenie @i-wanna-be-your-muse @sonjajames2021 @fxxvz @indiegirlunited

[themology]

harry castillo x curator!reader “a million dollar man”

masterlist | previous chapter

chapter 3 — spatial negotiation

You wore red.

Not crimson. Not something timid like maroon or softened like rust.

Red.

Clear, loud, undeniable.

The kind of red that felt like a warning. You chose it intentionally—the only form of armor that didn’t ask to be forgiven.

The dress was simple in shape, no glitter or tricks. Structured satin, sleeveless, falling just above your ankles. The neckline sharp enough to suggest elegance, the open back enough to suggest you knew what rooms you were walking into. Your hair was clean and off your shoulders, your makeup minimal but unforgiving.

You looked like someone who hadn’t needed to beg for her place at the table, even if you had, privately, many times before.

The Castillo estate wasn’t gaudy. It was discreetly opulent, the kind of wealth that didn’t bother proving itself anymore. The hallways were lit in soft amber tones. Art hung like language, every piece a sentence carefully placed, murmuring something about power, legacy, taste. The entrance hall opened into the main gallery dining room like a stage, all marble floors and hushed luxury.

You were offered a glass of Laurent-Perrier the second you stepped in.

There were ten people at the table. You recognized most of them by name, if not by face—curators, critics, one or two gallerists whose careers were rumored to have been fast-tracked by Harry himself. A silver-haired woman in couture who once chaired the MoMA expansion board. A young man whose sculpture review had caused an entire residency program to collapse. And him.

Harry Castillo stood at the head of the table, glass in hand, smiling in that impossibly even way that didn’t reach his eyes. The room moved around him, not toward him—but for him.

He wasn’t loud. He didn’t have to be. He welcomed each guest not with fanfare, but with small, intentional touches, a brief hand on the shoulder, a reference to a recent acquisition, a private joke with the man beside him about a badly timed Venice flood.

When his eyes landed on you, however, everything in him paused.

His glass lowered. His smile didn’t move.

You knew what red did in a room. But the way he looked at you was like he’d been expecting fire and still got burned.

“Glad you came,” he said, voice lower than necessary.

You didn’t let yourself smile. “I figured someone should represent the underfunded.”

He held your gaze, a flicker of amusement beneath something heavier. “And red’s a generous gesture.”

“It’s just a color,” you replied.

“No,” he said softly. “Not on you.”

You took the seat furthest from him. He clocked it. Didn’t say anything. Just poured your champagne himself before returning to the opposite end of the table.

Dinner was a performance.

The first course was a chilled saffron consommé with a single, floating quail egg—delicate, surreal, intentional. Followed by a halibut carpaccio laced with yuzu oil and pink peppercorn. Then came the real centerpiece: slow-cooked duck over black garlic polenta, garnished with edible petals and a foam you didn’t ask about. Wine was poured at precise intervals, white, then a bold burgundy that made your teeth ache.

The guests laughed, but not always out of humor. Some were performing, others genuinely enthralled.

You could tell who was used to this life by how little they flinched at the menu, or the curation of the guest list. Harry was magnetic in these spaces—not dominating, just quietly omniscient. He leaned in at the right times, called out a guest’s comment to draw chuckles from the others, recited a quote about post-war abstraction that had the older critic beside him nearly applauding.

Still, his eyes flicked to you more than once. Like you were a different kind of question he couldn’t quite fold into his script.

You weren’t passive either. You spoke when you had something to say. You matched their references, dodged a man’s attempt to box you in by mentioning your “youthful eye.” You countered it with a brutal but fair critique of the stagnant trends in commercial sculpture.

The woman across from you raised her glass. “She bites,” she said, smiling.

Harry watched. Not possessively—but with the quiet intensity of someone who wanted to know where your mind would turn next.

At dessert, the air grew denser. A plate of fig panna cotta with honeycomb shards, next to miniature spiced chocolate tarts. The wine turned golden. The table quieter. Someone asked if you’d seen Castillo’s newest acquisition, the oil painting in the west wing, the one “too dense to hang publicly.” You admitted you hadn’t.

“She has a thing for tension,” Harry said suddenly, not looking at you.

“She curates it,” another guest added.

He finally looked over. “She lives in it.”

That shut the room up for half a beat. You said nothing. Just lifted your glass, not in toast, but in subtle defiance.

Eventually, the table scattered. Cigarettes in the garden. A decanter of whiskey passed around the lounge. Some guests left with drawn-out farewells, others disappeared into side rooms, murmuring about funding and co-commissions.

You found yourself at the gallery wall near the exit, half on purpose, half because you needed air. The silence was cooler there. Marble beneath your heels. A soft whir of air conditioning overhead.

“You stayed longer than I thought,” came the voice behind you.

You turned. He was two feet away. No tie. Sleeves still rolled. A little tired around the eyes.

“I thought about leaving early,” you said.

“I would’ve stopped you.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Is that another test?”

“No,” he said. “That’s honesty.”

A beat passed.

“Do you always study your guests this much?” you asked, eyes scanning the painting beside you. A large abstract piece, deep reds and bruised golds, edges almost violent in their layering.

“You ask too much questions,” he said.

You turned to face him fully then. Neither of you smiling.

“Why am I here, Harry?”

He didn’t answer right away. Just looked at you like he was weighing every way not to say what he wanted.

“Because I don’t believe in accidents,” he finally said. “And you’ve disrupted too many rooms for it to be coincidence.”

You swallowed. His closeness made the air harder to breathe.

He stepped closer—barely—but it felt like a question. Not a move.

“I’m hosting something more private next week,” he said, voice quieter now. “A smaller dinner. Fewer people. Just artists. Come.”

You didn’t answer. You let the tension sit between you, like a wire you weren’t ready to cut.

But you both knew.

You’d say yes.

Just as you turned your head to break the gaze between you, something low and warm stirred in the walls, music. Distant at first. A faint, nearly imperceptible hum that filtered through the quiet like a fog. The kind of melody that wasn’t planned but always finds a way to settle in at the end of nights like this. Something old. A jazz standard, maybe, a brushed snare drum, a dragging piano, and a voice full of velvet and regret.

Harry glanced toward the sound system hidden in the gallery’s recesses, then back to you. His expression was unreadable at first, somewhere between amusement and challenge.

“Careful,” you said, watching him. “That almost sounds like intention.”

He smiled faintly. “Not everything is.”

You felt your pulse shift in your throat. He stepped forward, not to crowd, but to be known. To be in your frame of reference again, entirely. He didn’t ask the next question with words. He offered his hand, slow and open, like a soft proposal.

You looked down at it. The invitation wasn’t romantic, not entirely. It felt… deliberate. Weighted. A dare in silk gloves.

“This is not the Met Gala,” you said, half under your breath, fingers brushing against his palm without committing yet. “And I don’t dance with men who donate anonymously.”

He tilted his head, a smirk flickering just under the edge of his mouth. “Then don’t call it a dance. Call it… spatial negotiation.”

You laughed once—soft and reluctant—and finally placed your hand in his.

His hand was warm, steady. You expected it to be colder. More practiced. But there was something about the way he held yours, not too tight, not too loose, something curious, unhurried.

He didn’t lead you toward the center of the room. Instead, he pulled you into the shallow spill of light near the painting you’d both been standing in front of, letting the thick brushstrokes and gold leaf witness whatever this was becoming.

The music folded around you like breath.

His other hand found the small of your back. Not possessive. Anchoring.

You hadn’t danced in years—not properly.

Not like this. Not in a room where someone like him was watching you like this. You’d always thought of dances as something ornate, frivolous, reserved for people with less urgency, with more time to spare. But now, pressed into the sound of something languid and slow, your heels steady on the stone floor, your pulse echoing in your ears louder than the saxophone, you realized something terrifying:

You liked being seen by him.

You weren’t sure you liked him, not yet. But being observed by Harry Castillo felt like being translated.

He didn’t say anything. He simply moved with you, intent, restrained, respectful in posture but charged in proximity. You could feel the faint pull in his fingers when the tempo dipped. The slow glide of your bodies in tandem, a low hum of friction where fabric met fabric. His gaze never wandered, never dipped to your mouth or your collarbone, which would have been obvious.

Lazy. Instead, he held your eyes the way a man might hold a match, close enough to feel its heat but not let it burn.

“You’re a good liar,” you murmured into the space between you.

That caught him off guard, faintly. “About what?”

“About not orchestrating this.”

He grinned, slow. “Again, I don’t believe in accidents.”

A silence fell between you, not uncomfortable, just pregnant with things neither of you were prepared to say.

You let yourself lean in, barely, enough to feel the breath on his throat. Not out of intimacy, but to gauge him. To test. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t react. Just matched your energy like a mirror.

Outside, you could hear the shuffling of staff, the murmur of doors opening for departing guests, the low thud of heels on stone. Inside, this gallery-turned-dancefloor remained suspended in some other hour.

Eventually, the song dipped toward its final bars. The notes began to stretch, the singer’s voice fraying at the ends like thread.

You didn’t pull away.

Neither did he.

It wasn’t a kiss. It wasn’t a promise.

It was the breath before it.

He released your hand slowly, letting it drop with a trace of finality. The music faded into silence. Your heart did not.

“I’ll send you the address,” he said, voice quiet and even.

“To what?” you tilt your head curiously. “Just some small dinner, whiskey neat.”

You nodded once. “I’ll think about it.”

He said nothing more.

You walked out of the gallery alone, your red dress a slow flash of heat against the cool night.

And when you reached the car, when your fingers finally touched the handle, you exhaled for the first time in twenty full minutes.

You were no longer ascending.

You were spiraling.

And for the first time… you weren’t trying to stop.

next chapter

notes…

something steamy next chapter i promise 😏

themology, 2025.

[lumosflairr]

Lucky Socks - Ronald Weasley

summary: you accidentally shrink Ron’s lucky socks. However, a certain family member of his taught you how to knit them right back up.

warnings: none! just fluff :)

a/n: i haven’t written for Ron is SOOO long, so I came up with this short fic 🩷

You stood frozen in front of the fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, two very small, very shriveled socks dangling in your hands.

“Oh no,” you whispered. “Oh no no no—”

“What?” Ron asked, flopping onto the couch behind you with a grin. “Is this about how I destroyed you in Exploding Snap or—”

You turned slowly, holding up the socks like a confession.

“I shrank them.”

He blinked. “…My lucky socks?”

You winced. “Yes.”

Ron shot up like he’d been hit with a jinx. “My lucky socks!? The ones I wear before every Quidditch match? The ones I wore when I aced McGonagall’s test — the one she never lets anyone ace? Those socks?”

You nodded. “They’re now baby-sized.”

He groaned, dramatically falling face-first into a pillow. “I’ll fix it,” you promised. “I’ll make you new ones.”

He peeked up. “You knit?”

You gave him a smug smile. “Of course. Your mum taught me over the summer.” That got his attention. “Mum did?” You nodded, already grabbing your wand and yarn from your trunk. “She said, and I quote, ‘If you’re going to be in this family, you’d best learn how to charm socks not to shrink.’” You paused. “I didn’t use the charm this time. Obviously.”

Ron watched you work from the couch, his face slowly melting from pouty to completely smitten. “You’re actually doing it,” he muttered, voice thick with awe. “You’re knitting for me.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

He leaned over and kissed your cheek. “Too late.”

—————-

Later on that week, Ron sat on his bed, a half-finished letter spread across his lap and one bright red sock already on his foot — the new ones, hand-stitched by you, with little gold threads along the top and your initials charmed into the inside cuff.

He smiled down at the parchment and kept writing.

“Mum — you’ll never believe what happened to my lucky socks. Y/N shrunk them in the wash — on accident, but she KNIT me new ones. Just like you showed her. They’re amazing. I reckon I’ll play ten times better with these. They’ve got her initials inside them. Not telling anyone that bit. Anyway, just thought you’d like to know.”

He signed it with a scribbled Love, Ron, tied it to the leg of the family owl, and let Pig fly off into the night.

—————-

Molly Weasley stood in the kitchen in her apron, stirring a pot of stew when the owl landed on the windowsill. She wiped her hands on a towel and untied the letter, recognizing the scrawl immediately.

“Ron,” she murmured with a fond smile.

She read it once, then again, slower. And by the end, her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes sparkled with something warm and proud.

Arthur came in behind her, newspaper tucked under one arm.

“Letter from the boy?” he asked, sipping tea.

Molly nodded and wordlessly passed it to him.

As he read, a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He glanced up at her over the parchment.

“She knitted him socks, eh?”

“She did,” Molly said, stirring her stew again. “And she learned from the best.”

Arthur chuckled, folding the letter neatly and setting it on the counter.

“She’s the one, then.”

Molly just smiled, eyes on the bubbling pot, already imagining their future.

“She’s been the one.”

[moonselune]

Ugh I LOVE giths.... They consume my brain. Could I rq Gale falling for a tall, intimidating Githyanki man. Just. Tav is a monk pirate (love a githyanki space pirate, one of my favorite DND characters to play) and how he's just stoic and kinda quiet. Gale talks, he listens.

OOoooo I love this concept I have never come across it before.. I hope I do it justice!

Gale x Gith!M!reader | In Your Orbit

Gale prided himself on eloquence. On articulating nuance with perfect cadence, weaving magic and meaning into the same breath. His words had always been tools—no, gifts. He could coax trust from frightened villagers, impress archmages, negotiate peace with wild-eyed tiefling children.

But you. You were a different story entirely. The first time you met, you said absolutely nothing. Just stood at the edge of camp like a stormcloud with shoulders, arms folded, yellow gith eyes fixed on something far beyond the mortal plane. Your long coat—frayed at the hem and lined in storm-bleached silver—was damp with sea spray despite the dry land around you.

You didn’t even glance at Gale when he offered his hand.

You nodded. Once. He might have thought you rude—except there was something else there. A stillness. The same kind he’d felt inside the weave before a spell took shape. Quiet, tightly wound power.

You were a monk, he learned later. A pirate. You’d fought your way out of a shattered spelljammer ship and landed—literally—into their absurd little merry band.

You barely spoke. But when you did, it was like watching a glacier crack.

Once, as Gale was mid-ramble about the Weave’s delicate interplay with the Shadow-Cursed lands, gesturing animatedly with a book tucked under one arm, you’d looked at him and said:

“Magic makes your eyes too bright. Like you’re starving and full at once.”

Gale blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it. The book slipped from his fingers.

You knelt—gracefully, silently—to pick it up. Held it out with two hands like an offering. He took it without breathing. Your hands were calloused from combat, from rope, from pulling yourself up broken hulls and into shattered stars. Your touch lingered for exactly one second longer than necessary.

He did not sleep that night.

The others noticed, of course.

Karlach teased him endlessly. “So, Gale. How’s your boyfriend?” she’d grin, elbowing him with enough force to knock him into a bush.

“Not—he’s not—he’s very—taciturn,” Gale stammered. “But fascinating. And tall. Very tall.”

“Uh huh,” Karlach smirked. “Bet he could fold you in half.”

Gale turned an alarming shade of crimson and fled mid-conversation.

Even Astarion, smug and predatory, only raised one fine brow when you passed by, all sharp grace and glinting steel.

“You do pick the terrifying ones, don’t you, darling?” he mused, sipping his wine.

“He’s not terrifying,” Gale muttered, watching as you walked into the woods alone, every step controlled and fluid as a blade’s breath. “He’s... poised.”

And yes, intimidating. In the way that a stormcloud is intimidating. Or a sacred flame. Gale caught himself watching you across camp. Reading in your shadow. Preparing spells just loud enough to see if you’d glance his way. Sometimes you did. Sometimes your gaze lingered. Once you said:

“Your voice sounds like waves when you’re thinking.”

And that was it. No smile. No preamble. Just a single, devastating observation that sent Gale reeling. “I—thank you—I didn’t—do you like waves?”

You blinked at him. Then, slowly, nodded. Gale nearly set himself on fire trying to boil water after that. It wasn’t love all at once. Not with you.

It was slower. A steady rhythm like a ship rocking against a distant tide. You never touched without purpose. You never spoke without weight. But one day, sitting beside him near the fire, you looked at the stars and murmured:

“They’re loud, tonight.”

Gale tilted his head. “The stars?”

You nodded. “They hum, when it’s going to storm. You can feel it, if you stop thinking.”

He didn’t answer right away, he was caught in your orbit, in you. Didn’t try to fill the silence. He just looked at you—at the long lines of your face, gold eyes reflecting firelight, a cut across your brow from that last ridiculous ambush. You looked unshakable.

And somehow, impossibly, his.

Gale, once Archmage of Waterdeep, full of a god’s hunger and a thousand borrowed spells, smiled quietly and leaned his shoulder against yours.

“I think I’d like to learn how to stop thinking,” he said.

You didn’t smile. But your hand, rough and warm, rested against his thigh. Not possessive. Not fleeting. Just there. And that was enough.

This was super fun to write and I hope you guys enjoyed this! I am trying to get back on writing more regularly but work has been so hectic. Love you all ! xoxo - Seluney xox

If you want to support me in other ways | Help keep this moonmaiden caffeinated x

[noctiva]

okay but how would the guys react to the reader breaking up with them?

aha! the flip side!

Toby: Goes through four stages of grief in the span of like, ten minutes. everything except for acceptance. he won’t ever truly accept it. it could be literal years later and he’d still be dreaming of you, still touching himself to the thought of you.

the day it actually happens, he’ll try to play it off at first. hit you with a ‘th-that’s not fuckin’ funny’ with a soft snort and a roll of his eyes. like you being serious wasn’t even an option. but of course, you’ll insist - and that’s when the dam breaks.

first comes the anger. his eyes sharpening into a glare as his jaw sets. accusatory in every word he spits at you. throwing every single thing that he’s every done for you back in your face. glossing over everything he’s ever done wrong. hoping that maybe you’ll fight back - maybe you two can just get into another fight like you always do, and end up tangled up together in his sheets by the time night falls.

but that doesn’t happen. you just take it. just listen silently as you pack your things - already detached. and that’s when it really sets in. the anger will simmer, and then he’s apologizing profusely. offering up things he can’t even give you, all in the hopes of changing your mind. and when that doesn’t work? he just breaks. a mess of ugly sobs and hands trying to pull you to him. pleading. begging. borderline grovelling at your feet.

you’ll leave him a mess of tears. he probably won’t move from his spot on the floor for hours. days maybe.

- “W-What do you want? What can I d-do to make you stay? Just name it - I’ll g-give it to you.”

-

Jack: Just so incredibly cold. Like the moment you utter the words, every ounce of affection he held for you fizzled into smoke. You can practically see it when the switch in his brain flips, how his entire body tenses up, how his lips set into a firm line. He won’t say anything for a good long while. He’ll just stand before you, waiting, like he’s giving you a chance to take it back.

‘Jack? Did you hear what I said?’ To which he’ll just reply with a snippy; ‘I heard you.’ And barely elaborate further.

He won’t let you in. Won’t let you pry into his mind in an attempt to figure out how he feels about all of it. He’ll keep it all locked far deep down, under a shroud of bitter nonchalance. If you didn’t know him better, you’d almost think he didn’t care - but the slight tremble in his fingers proves that otherwise.

He won’t fight you. He knows better than that. Though he loved you to the ends of the earth, he knew he wouldn’t be able to continue on with you after this. Knowing that you don’t wholeheartedly want to be with him.

He’ll leave silently. Give you short, simple answers to every question you ask. Leave you second guessing if this was even the right decision at all.

- “What? Did you want me to scream? Beg? Cry? I’m not giving you that satisfaction.”

-

Brian: Horribly toxic. Blackmail supreme over here. You sit him down, tell him you want to break up with him, and the first thing he’s saying is, ‘are you sure you want to do that? with all the shit I have on you?’

And you know he’s right. He has drawers full of tapes depicting you in the most compromising positions known to man. Taken with the promise that they’d only be for his eyes. But, that was on the basis that you’d stick around. He’ll be patronizing, cruel, dangling this threat over your head with a raised eyebrow - daring you to have the guts to still go through with it.

Promising you that no one else will ever want to be with you after him. A little too calm, a little too composed. Like he’s so sure deep down that you’ll cave under the weight of what he’s saying and just roll over.

But if you don’t? If you hold your ground? You can just barely see him crack. A little twitch in his jaw, his gaze hardening over. The way his eyes flick away from you like he just can’t the sight of you any longer. He’ll freeze over until you gain the courage to pack up and leave. All that confidence lost, swapped for a silent resignation.

Won’t say a single thing to you on your way out the door.

(And he probably won’t actually make true on his threats, he was just really banking on that working).

- “Fine. Leave. See where it gets you.”

-

Tim: Just resigned acceptance. He saw it coming from the start, never really expecting you two to be in it for the long haul. He hoped that maybe you’d go against the odds, but he was smarter than to bank on that. Your life didn’t mix with his. He took a risk letting you in. He had set himself up, and he knew it.

It’s his shoulders slumping. His expression dropping. The slight quiver when he lets out a deep sigh and lets his eyes flutter closed for a moment like he’s trying to shut it all out. He doesn’t ask why, because he knows why. It’s everything about him. And he’d rather spare himself the burden of hearing that fact come from your lips.

He’ll be silent for a good long while. Reach into his coat pocket with trembling fingers, pull out his pack of smokes, light one and take a few drags before he speaks a word. And when he does, it’s just all apologies.

Apologies for dragging you into this in the first place. Apologies for wasting your time. For getting your hopes up. For making you believe that you could be the cure for everything that plagues him.

He won’t look at you the entire time, because he just knows he’ll break - and he doesn’t want to burden you with that too.

- “‘Bout time you smartened up. Always knew you deserved someone better.”

-

Cody: Really doesn’t know how to handle it - and maybe that was the issue all along. His good with the physical aspect of humans. The blood, the flesh, the chemical reactions. What he’s not good at, is the mind. The emotions. The inner workings of relationships, and person to person connection. He really tried with you, broke out of his shell in an attempt to let you have that closeness you craved.

It feels like an insult to have it thrown back in his face. He’s not upset, he’s offended, a silently brewing anger simmering in his veins with every word you speak. It just feels like he wasted so much time. Put in so much effort into something that ultimately proved fruitless. Like a failed experiment, but this time it affects him deeply. Like you were taking one of his limbs with you when you left him.

Asks you so many questions it makes your head spin. Why are you leaving him? What specific thing did he do? What could he have done better? Do you really truly believe there’s nothing that can fix this? Why are you giving up? Why don’t you want to try?

He’ll let you leave. He won’t beg and plead, but he will borderline interrogate you before he stalks back to his lab and shuts himself in there for the next week and a half.

- “All that time wasted. Such a needless distraction.”

-

Habit: Laughs in your fucking face. Cruel and mocking. Near doubles over with it. The type of laughter that absolutely stuns you, with the way he wheezes and cackles, wipes a tear from his eye and shakes his head like you’ve just performed a comedy special for him.

To him, you have. Because that’s fucking rich. You leaving him? As if you had that choice. It’s comical to him how you’d even entertain that thought, that you thought it might just be as easy as showing him the door and expecting him to walk through it. It’s not happening. Not by a long shot.

In fact, when you call him cruel, he’ll show you just exactly how cruel you can be. You hate him now? Let’s see how much you hate him when he chains you to the bed and leaves you there. Chuckling under his breath about how stupid you are. How you should’ve just kept your mouth shut, and appreciated the fact that he was being easy on you this whole time.

So, no. You will not be breaking up with him. This relationship ends on his terms, and his terms only.

- “That’s cute. You think you get to make that choice?”