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seeingivy · 2 years ago

Text

the new romantics

actor!eren x f!reader

**part of my method acting series

content: la la la. good old usual clown angst show UNTIL it isn't.

an: happy thanksgiving! I recommend relishing on all the words in this one, this chapters a big one! <3

previous part linked here

Three days later, Levi walks into your room (Colt’s room) with a box tucked under his arm. You’re caught off guard by his presence, as he sits flat on the ground next to you.

In the four days following your meltdown, you were lucky enough that the scenes they were filming had nothing to do with you. And that Colt and Porco - who might be your new favorite person - were more than willing to bring you food so you wouldn’t have to leave the safe confines of their room (that you were ambushing).

“Hi kid.”

“Hi Levi.” you respond, hiking your knees to your chest and crossing your ankles over each other.

Levi’s quietly sitting at your side, and by the look on his face, you can tell that he’s simmering. There’s something on the tip of his tongue, that he won’t quite say.

That was always the thing with Levi. While you were easily able to discern what he was feeling, a skill that took practice throughout years, you could never quite figure out why. Why he was sitting here in your room with you, why the two of you were arguing, why he’s got this dusty box placed in between you.

You give him a strange look, before he opens up his little box. It’s filled with different cassettes, pictures, and letters - ones you had sent to Levi over the past few years.

You swallow hard, leaning against the back of the bed, as you flip the little leaflet in your fingers. Two little golden envelopes, with your name in big italic letters printed on it.

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Y/N L/N - Attack on Titan

“Didn’t realize you kept this.” you murmur.

“You were just so excited. All over the place that you forgot to take it. Figured you’d want it someday.” Levi murmurs.

You flip the second one over, mouth dry when you read it.

Triple Threat Commendation - Y/N L/N

“Why are you giving this to me?” you ask.

Levi looks over, steely gray eyes peering into yours.

“I want you to think about why you’re here.” Levi states.

You swallow hard, the tone in his voice biting.

“You were here before, for this. And now I need you to sit there and think really hard about why you’re here right now.”

You lean back, against the back of the bed, as you flip the little leaflet in your hand. And run your fingers over your italicized name, a sight that you had been waiting to see for years. Quite literally, the only thing you wanted.

“I don’t know, Levi. I don’t know why I’m here.” you respond.

It’s embarrassing. So embarrassing, that you’re crying straight onto the envelope, smudging the paper, as it courses through you.

That you don’t know what you’re doing, that you hate it here, and that really everyone else must hate that you’re here too.

“I’ll ask you again, Y/N. Really think about it.” Levi murmurs..

You look over at him, at his eyes fixed so neatly on the picture in his hands, one of the ones he plucked from the box. You scoot closer to him, only to catch that it’s a picture of him, Marco, and Eren, smiling right into the camera.

“Levi-” you start.

“I’m not trying to punish you. I just need you to think about it. It’ll make things easier for you too.” Levi states.

“I know you’re not trying to punish me, Levi.” you murmur, embarrassed that you had even said that to him in the first place.

Levi smiles, placing his hands over your closed ones and squeezing.

“I know. You’ve just got a shitty attitude problem.” he states.

“I get it from my dad.” you respond, nudging him in the shoulder and smiling.

Levi stands up, leaving the box and its content on the floor next to you. He shoots you a smile, one that you relish in, as he reaches for the door. Except he stops halfway on his way out and murmurs something that ignites the warmth in your chest.

“Y/N.”

“Yes, Levi?”

“I am not your father.” he responds, before shutting the door on his way out.

You’re staring at the door of the set, the tiny pebbles crunching under your shoes, as you nervously teeter on your heels. You can hear everyone in there, the cameras moving around in the air, Levi’s voice animated and louder than everyone else’s, and the pounding footsteps of the crew marching in unison.

“You okay?”

You turn your head over your shoulder to find Eren standing next to you, his script and notebook tucked under his arm.

“Oh. Hi Eren. Yeah, I-I was just taking a second I guess.” you murmur.

The thought of having a repeat of the other day, of being so overcome with that feeling that you could barely even function, scares you. And the possibility of it happening, it’s so probable that it makes your stomach hurt.

And it pokes at those deep fears that you had. About coming back, about doing this again. Because you’re filming Sasha’s death scene and…and you need to give a performance. A real one. And if you can’t do this, if you aren’t up to the par of your standards, you’re just…

Setting yourself up for that criticism. The ones that echo in the farthest corners of your brain, whispering into your skin and making you doubt every little move you make. You’ll get a shitty review from The Elms, while everyone else gets glowing ones. You’ll be the lackluster lead while everyone shines, before everyone once and for all, forgets you.

If they even remember who you are in the first place.

“We aren’t filming Sasha’s death scene today.”

You turn your head, eyes wide at Eren, as you beckon for him to explain. Because you were sure, almost positive, that this was the day you were going to do this. And you spent all night, trying to visualize it, how it would feel to have her staring at you lifelessly, in efforts to make the scene more palatable, the entire thing easier.

You barely lasted ten minutes before it all went crashing down.

“I requested that Levi switch the schedule. I just don’t think we’re ready to film that scene yet.”

The wave of relief takes over you in full flesh, that block of feeling in your throat suddenly clearing, as you take the deepest, crispest breath of fresh air in. And the new set of problems come rushing in.

You’re an actress. You can face anything, and-and the fact that they had to change the entire filming schedule for you just proves it. That you’re unprofessional. That you aren’t meant to be here, that this isn’t a place that you should be when you’re all but a fraud next to everyone else.

“I-I could have done the scene, Eren.” you murmur, not even giving yourself the full conviction to prove you believed what you were saying.

Eren gives you a soft smile, before responding.

“I’m sure you could have. You were always stronger than me in that sense. But, I-I really don’t think I could stomach it today. I’ve been anxious since we watched them.”

You pale, the embarrassment coursing through you. At the fact that you let Eren comfort you yesterday, till you could at least stand on your feet, just for him to be suffering in his own silence.

You reach for his elbow, squeezing hard on his skin.

“Eren. You could have told me.” you murmur, burrowing your eyes into his green ones.

“You shouldn’t worry about me, Y/N.” Eren states, making the motions for you to walk into the set.

The two of you walk in tandem, your footsteps lining up with one another's, as you walk into the chaos of the set. You and Eren get a few hello’s, which you happily return before walking up to the board and taking note of the scene lined up.

The table scene.

At that point, you feel a pair of arms wrap around your waist, as you look down to find Gabi looking up at you, with a bright smile on her face. You return it in full, resting your face against her cheek, as you smile.

“Hi Gabs. How are you?” you ask.

“I’m great! I love your new haircut.” she states.

You absentmindedly reach up to tuck your hair behind your ears, a slight shade lighter and the smallest bit shorter. Levi was increasingly serious on the fact that you were all getting makeovers for the season and you were no exception to the rule.

“Thank you, sweet girl.” you respond, pinching the skin on her cheek.

“Hi Hobo. How are you?” Gabi asks, turning her head to Eren.

Eren rolls his eyes, reaching forward to flick Gabi’s forehead, followed by her swatting him off in protest. Which is only followed by Eren making moves to tickle her and Gabi getting ready to attack him, as the two of them start laughing and moving around each other. The sentiment of it makes you smile, that Eren’s the same as he was before.

Always popular with the kids.

Hange walks up, slinging an arm around your shoulder, and squeezing as they call for Gabi and Eren to stop.

“Hey. Are you two ready?” Hange asks.

“Yeah. We’ll head over right now. Thanks Hange.” Eren states.

You watch Hange link their arm in with Eren’s as the two of them walk straight onto the set and settle into the chair. And you can tell that Hange’s teasing Eren about something, because they’re both lightly shoving each other and smiling.

You swallow hard, as you take your seat at the table across from Eren. He’s nervously shaking his leg, as he flips through his script and cracks all the knuckles on his fingers. It’s the first scene you’re filming after coming back, the anxiousness pooling in your stomach under the lights.

“Eren?”

“Hm?”

“Do you still make notes in your script?” you ask.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to switch? Like we used to before?”

Eren nods, sliding his set of pages over, as you hand him yours and start pacing through his notes. They’re largely incoherent, the meaning entirely lost to you, as Eren quickly realizes and looks over.

“Sorry. They’re not scene specific, they’re kind of…mental reminders for me. I didn’t realize we were still going to do this, but I-I’ll make sure I have good notes for the rest of the scenes.” Eren says.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to.”

“No, no. It’s what makes us the best, right?”

You give him a polite smile, as you read through Eren’s lines. They’re all highlighted in light green, with the tiniest bit of ramblings scribbled on the side. Silent reminders, he’s giving himself.

To breathe.

“Are you ready?” Levi asks, hands firm behind his back.

“Yeah.” you and Eren respond.

“Eren, go get Armin then.”

Eren nods, standing up from his chair, leaving you and Levi under the bright lights. He pulls the empty chair, leaning back and crossing his arms across his chest as he glares at you.

“Are you actually ready to film this scene?” Levi asks.

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” you ask.

Levi rolls his eyes, leaning forward on his forearms, as he brings his face closer to yours and whispers.

“There is nothing wrong with admitting you’re not ready for this yet. This isn’t a particularly easy scene to film, especially for you, and I don’t want-”

“I’m fine, Levi.” you respond.

You can tell from the look on Levi’s face that he doesn’t quite believe you, disapproving of your response, before he stalks off and starts setting the cameras into place. Armin and Eren walk up, followed by Gabi, as you each take your respective seats in the chairs.

Levi’s still stuck adjusting the cameras and the lights, which leaves the four of you awkwardly simmering in your seats. You shoot Gabi a smile, which she returns, before you tuck Eren’s script under the table and Eren does the same with yours.

“Eren.” Armin states.

“Hm?”

“I heard you’ve been writing some of the scenes with Levi and Hange now.” Armin states.

“Really? That’s so cool, Eren!” Gabi states, reaching forward to squeeze his tightly shut fists.

“Yeah. Thanks Gabs.” Eren responds.

“This one must have been real easy for you to write, huh?” Armin asks, all but glaring at him.

Eren sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, as he swallows hard and shuts his eyes.

“Save it for the scene, Armin.” Eren murmurs, nervously cracking all of the fingers in his bones, as he nervously looks over his shoulder and waits for Levi to finish.

It’s the smallest bit of solace you suppose. That you’re not the only sore thumb here. That Eren too has people who can’t stand to talk to him.

“Okay, Eren. On your count.” Levi states, giving the four of you a thumbs up.

You all shift in your seats, adjusting your hands on the table, as Eren all gives you a meek nod before starting.

“The things I do and choices I make are all decided by my own free will.”

Eren’s dropped his voice an octave, the tone in his voice more gravelly and hoarse as he speaks. And it immediately reminds you of that shitty argument the two of you had in the moonlight outside of the house in Seattle.

So that’s what Armin meant.

You can immediately feel your throat drying, rough as sandpaper as you’re suddenly too aware of the lights shining onto your skin above. The warmth of them singeing the ends of your skin.

“So your actions after meeting Yelena were all you?” Armin asks.

“Yes.” Eren responds.

“No. You’re being manipulated.” you respond.

You look up to find Eren looking at you, the emotion in his eyes so devoid, so far away that it makes your skin sweat. That it makes you deeply uncomfortable, like you’re talking to a version of him that’s somewhere else entirely.

“You-you wouldn’t get kids and innocents involved, even if they were enemies! Plus, I know you care about us more than anyone.”

You swallow hard, the words burning on your tongue.

“Don’t you? The reason you saved me in that cabin…the reason you gave me this scarf is because you’re kind, Eren.”

“I said keep your hands on the table.” Eren states, his voice so unrelenting that it sends tears sprouting down your eyes.

An entire five lines early. You fight down the urge to vomit, that disgusting acidic feeling accumulating in your mouth, as Eren continues, the gravel of his voice making the hair on your arms stand up.

You ball up your fists, as you mutter out your lines - knowing damn well they weren’t loud enough or with half of the fevor Levi wanted - as you reach the part you were dreading the most. The mere anxiety of it, of Eren’s grating voice saying those words, has you breaking skin on your palms, as you look up at his green eyes.

“Your family was made to forget who they are and live only to protect. In other words, slaves.”

“Enough, Eren!” Armin screams, slamming one of his fists on the table.

“Do you know who I hate more than anyone? Those who aren’t free. Just like livestock.” Eren states, the tears warm and burning as they start flowing down your cheeks, with no means of stopping this time.

“Eren!” Armin screams, again.

“Just seeing you has pissed me off, and now I finally know why. I can’t stand the sight of a slave who obeys orders without a question.”

You take a deep breath in, holding it in your chest.

“Ever since I was little, I’ve hated you, Y/N.” Eren states, the tone in his voice definitive.

Armin, right on cue, climbs on to the table and screams.

“How could you say that to her, Eren?”

And you miss your cue, to get up and tackle Armin onto the table, because Eren’s suddenly crying, his hands balled into fists as he stands up.

“I didn’t fucking mean it!” Eren screams.

You look over at Gabi and then Armin, as Eren quickly realizes what he’s said. And then he all but storms out of the set, almost like he’s embarrassed, as Levi calls for a fifteen minute break and Hange rushes out after him.

You and Armin share a weary look, as you help Armin off the table, and feel a tugging on your sleeve. You’re entirely thrown off by the outburst, his words hanging in your ears, as you readjust the table cloth on the table with shaky hands.

“Is Eren okay?” Gabi asks, a fixed frown on her face.

“He is. I’m going to go check on him, okay?” you state, giving her a pinch on the cheek before you stand up and make your way out to the set.

The pebbles are crunching loudly under your feet, as you pace around and look for Eren and Hange. Only to find them slightly to the left, Eren hanging with his head in his knees as Hange rubs circles into his back.

You swallow hard, before you walk up and clear your throat. Eren looks up, eyes teary and red, as he stares at you in disbelief.

“Hange. Can I talk to Eren?” you murmur.

Hange looks over at Eren, before giving you a smile and standing up.

“He’s all yours. Shout for me if you need me, yeah?”

You give Hange a nod and they lovingly ruffle Eren’s hair, before walking off. You take the seat next to him, sitting flat on your hands. He’s still crying, the tears falling straight into his hands as he hiccups.

“Eren.”

He clenches his eyes shut at the sound of your voice, almost like he’s wincing at your presence, as he starts shaking his head.

“Go away,” he murmurs.

You swallow hard, swallowing the nervousness in your throat.

“No.”

“What are you doing here? Like seriously, just-”

“You would do it for me.”

He looks up, his green eyes staring at yours in his confusion. His tears have momentarily stopped, the wetness spread all over his cheeks and his hands.

“You would do it for me. You did it the other day and at the funeral and I just- I owe it to you. You’re there for me and…”

“You think you owe me something? Do you even hear yourself?” Eren asks, tone biting.

You fight the urge to roll your eyes. Of course he thinks it’s okay for him to comfort you, but not for you to comfort him. You wrack your brain, trying to think of the best way to word this - or the best way to get him to listen to you - when it hits you.

You should take a page from his book.

“You’re not you and I’m not me.” you state.

“Huh?”

“You’re Bruce and I’m Margaret. Now talk.”

Eren scoffs, wiping the back of his hands on his cheeks, as he coughs.

“Y/N. Don’t be stupid.”

“Who?”

Eren stares at you, green eyes peering into yours, as he sighs.

“Are you going to let this go?”

“No.” you respond.

Eren sighs, leaning back on the heels of his hands as he looks up at the sky.

“I just had a long day. And I don’t really like this scene.” he states, leaning back into the grass.

You follow suit, the blades of grass tickling your skin, as you both look up at the cloudy sky.

“Sometimes, I can tell that the anxiety is like…bubbling. It’s not enough to make me freak out, but enough for me to notice it’s there. Like I’m hypervigilant, just-just waiting for it to come out.” Eren states.

You beckon for him to continue.

“Like I wake up late. It throws off how I get ready for the day and then I’m at set. I say the wrong things to everyone, say something weird or awkward, and then when I’m filming I know I’m not doing it right. That it’s all wrong and I try to take breaths, try to fix it, but that deep seated wrongness just doesn’t go away.” he responds.

“Does anything help?” you ask, looking over at him.

“Connie. He’s always good about this kind of stuff. He-he knows the right thing to say. And Hange’s comforting to be around.”

You wrap your hand around his wrist, sliding your hand down until your fingers are locked together. Your skin is burning from the touch, as you feel Eren’s hand tighten and his eyes shift over to you.

“What are you doing?” he whispers.

“I don’t know. It just felt right.” you whisper back.

Eren’s fidgeting with your hands, before he’s cracking every last knuckle on your hand. A nervous tick he’s had since you two were younger.

“Don’t crack the smaller ones.”

“I remember. You don’t like how those feel.” he responds, voice soft.

You hum in response as you absentmindedly give Eren your other hand, as he fidgets with every last knuckle of yours, waiting till he hears that satisfying pop before he stops. And then he’s holding both of your hands in his, his breaths calm and even, as he runs his hands over both of your knuckles.

And you both stay there, you completely dry of any words that could help him and Eren - the look on his face blank as he stares up at the sky. Eren was always better at this type of stuff than you and that much is apparent still.

“Thank you, Margaret.”

“You’re welcome, Bruce.”

And when you and Eren stand up - him brushing the smallest blades of grass out of your hair and you wiping the last of the wetness off your cheek - you curse yourself.

For falling back into it so easily with him. And for wanting to let yourself fall the entire way.

You cry almost the entire night.

You tend to avoid them when they all congregate in big groups. You’re not sure what it is exactly - maybe the fact that you've been living like a hermit crab for a better part of the past few months - but whenever you find yourself with them, it’s too awkward for you to stomach.

Except for a few situations, like this one, where you find that you have to be there.

“Y/N! Come here!” Jean screams.

You peek your head out of the little doorway, to find them all sitting around in a circle in the living room. There’s an obscene amount of flowers covering every square inch of the living room, a sweet smell in the air.

“Hi Jean. I was just going to go to bed.”

“And now you’re not!” Connie replies, giving you a smile which you can’t help but ignore.

You frown, as you feel someone join you at your side. And you look to your left only to consequently back straight into the wall behind you and hit your head.

“Jesus fuck, Eren. You scared the shit out of me.” you pant, rubbing the tiniest little spot on the back of your head.

He reaches forward, hands secured around his head, as you look up at him. And swallow hard.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Oh my god, Eren. What’s on your face?”

“Huh?”

You reach forward, fingers on his chin as you move his face to the left and to the right.

“Are you trying to grow a beard, Eren?” you state, disgusted.

Eren rolls his eyes, before swatting your hand off, and settling in next to Connie.

“I told you Y/N wouldn’t like Hobo Eren.” Gabi states.

“Well, I could have told you that. Y/N’s never really been into facial hair.” Eren states.

“You can barely even grow any, Eren.” you deadpan.

“Who wouldn’t like Hobo Eren? Look at him! He’s just so dreamy.” Reiner states, shaking Eren’s entire frame in his hands as Eren smiles.

“Yeah, he smells a little. But he’s got that….wet dog charm to him.” Connie states, smiling brightly.

You snort, as you settle in between Porco and Colt, the two of them shooting you polite smiles.

“I just got a bit…scared, that’s all.” you respond.

“I think Jean has the best look.” Mikasa states, twisting one of the sets of bouquets in her fingers.

“You’re like literally biased. He’s your fiance.” Porco states.

“It’s very hard to pull off a mullet.” Mikasa states, glaring at him.

“Who do you think has the best new look, Y/N?” Gabi asks, tugging on the ends of your ankles. She’s seated right by your feet, directly next to Falco, as they play a very tame game of cards. Falco has yet to acknowledge you, since the day you first got back, and you have yet to try either.

“Probably, Reiner. I couldn’t even recognize him.”

“Not seeing me for two years will do that to you.” Reiner states, earring a fit of laughter from the group.

You smile, cheeks burning with embarrassment, as the rest of them laugh. They all move along, but you’re stuck on that, as Colt gives you a reassuring smile. But it does little to curb the tears that are collecting in your eyes, the unease that’s coursing through you.

“That’s right! I was wondering what you were doing here.”

You look up to find the girl, seated right by Mikasa, looking straight at you.

“I swear every time I look up there’s like a new cast member I don’t know.”

The group of them laugh, as you bite the soft tissue of your cheeks and look back at her.

“This is Amy. She’s Mikasa’s cousin. She’s going to be the maid of honor at the wedding, which is why she’s here. With this god awful set of flowers.” Sasha states.

“I didn’t realize you would all have such strong opinions about the flowers!” she states.

You look around the sets at the table, with a new eye. And not that you’re biased (because you totally are), but the flowers really are…awful. A bit too gaudy, too artificial for people like Jean and Mikasa. You ease off of the couch, as you twist the vases in your hand.

“Do you guys mind?” you ask, looking up at Jean and Mikasa.

They both shake their heads, as you start sifting through each of the vases. You pick out the flowers that make the most sense to you, as Connie makes it a point to make fun of Porco’s British accent for the next twenty minutes.

When you’re done - a mix of violets, daisies, and baby breath - you snag the ribbon off the little box they came in and tie it around the stems. And then hand it to Mikasa, who's running her fingers over the petals.

“It’s daisies and violets. Those are both of your birth flowers and the baby’s breath just kind of brings it together. The ribbon should definitely be white instead of pink, because it seems too loud when you add a color like that in. And you can easily make boutonnieres out of violets for the groom's party and have the girls wear corsages with daisies on them.” you state.

“I love that idea. Thank you, Y/N.” Mikasa states, handing the flowers to Jean as he twists them in his own fingers. He gives you a big smile, which is enough to curb that sense of unease in your skin.

“That’s what your name is!” Amy states, smacking her hand against her forehead.

And it’s back.

“Yeah, it’s nice to meet you.” you state.

“Wait, didn’t you like…quit acting?” she asks.

You swallow hard.

“Yeah.” you state, laughing awkwardly.

“Oh. So what are you doing here, then?”

You absentmindedly look over at Eren, before pinching your lips together.

“Just back for the final season.” you respond.

“Oh. Was it like a PR type of thing? To build up hype around the show? You celebrities do things like that all the time, right?” she asks.

You can feel the group of them looking at you, steely eyes staring into yours, as you set the last of the flowers down on the table. You knew that this would happen eventually, that you would get berated about what you did in your two years off. That some people wouldn’t understand it, that those whispering rumors of everything you do being fake would come back, but it was too early for this. The tears are warm and hot, the regret even hotter, as you stand up.

“No. It wasn’t. But that’s besides the point. It was um, really nice to meet you and I hate to cut this short and all but I have to wake up early tomorrow, so…”

“Right! I’ll see you at the wedding.” she states, extending her hand to yours as you begrudgingly shake.

And shuffle straight into Colt’s room and cry straight onto his pillow.

It gets easier to place yourself into the pacing on the set. Most of the scenes that Levi’s chosen to film are around Gabi, Falco, and Kaya, and it’s easier to be there and watch them than be in the house with everyone else. And it seems that’s someone’s always lingering around, an open ear to talk to.

“Are you enjoying your time here?” you ask.

“Yeah. It’s a nice environment to be in.” Niccolo responds, giving you a polite smile.

The two of you are playing solitaire, an invitation that he extended to you after you were content scribbling through the ends of your script for Eren.

“Levi and Hange always made it a point. To make it that way.” you murmur.

“I can imagine. Especially for Hange, all the scrutiny that came their way back in the day, it’s…” Niccolo states.

“The funniest part is I didn’t even know any of that had happened when I got here. Mikasa kind of had to tell me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I-I looked up to Hange a lot. Idolized her even. And all I saw was someone who was so…true to themselves. They said whatever they wanted and they came out on top anyways. Turns out, they were suffering almost the entire time. And they wouldn’t have even made it out if it weren’t for Levi.”

“Same could be said for you, no?”

You look up at him, at his brown eyes wide and peering into yours.

“Sasha talks.”

“And what does she say?”

“It doesn’t really mean much and I don’t want to rub salt in wounds or anything or-”

“Being here is a big salt in the wound regardless.” you respond.

Niccolo frowns, the look on his face fixed.

“She said that in the earlier years, people gave you a horrible time. For reasons that were out of your control, like Hange. They hated them because they were queer? Because they supported things that were right but weren’t mainstream? And they hated you just because your family wasn’t famous. Because you were a successful, self-made woman. You didn’t have any of that industry etiquette, when things seemed wrong to you, rightfully so, you called shit on it.”

You roll over the thought in your head.

“What?” Niccolo asks.

“I never really saw it that way.”

“But it’s true isn’t it? Historia all but got groomed by a guy, you didn’t let him get away with it. You had no ins with the industry, but still made it out on top like you did. The Lucky One basically immortalized you as a pop star forever.” Niccolo responds, setting his cards down flat on the floor.

“I guess. It just seems like at the end of the day, it wasn’t even worth it.” you respond.

“Well, you’re talking about it like it’s all over.”

“Huh?”

“Things are far from finished. For you, especially. I have a feeling you’re just getting started.” Niccolo responds.

You and Niccolo look up, to find Gabi and Falco at your sides, fresh off of the set. They’re both crossing their legs and taking their seats next to you as Eren walks up and joins you. He always seems to be here, since he is writing this all with Hange and Eren now, always giving the two of them pointers and leading them the right way.

“Hi guys.” Gabi says.

“Hi Gabs. You did great. You too, Falco.” you respond, reaching forward to ruffle her hair.

“Thank you, Y/N.” Falco responds, giving you a halfhearted smile.

“What are we talking about?” Eren asks.

“Sasha. And how much Niccolo loves her.” you respond, giving him a smug grin.

“Our favorite topic of conversation.” Eren responds, nudging Niccolo in the side, as a pink flush crawls up his neck.

You deal a set of cards to everyone, ignoring your awkwardly shaky hands when you hand Eren his and zone out through the rest of this conversation. Because all you can hear in your head is Niccolo, and Levi asking you what you’re doing here, and every tiny fractal of a memory playing in your head.

And really, it’s almost jarring how different everything is because you can barely bring yourself to get out of your head about everything. Because that god awful, damper of your thoughts brings ruin to everything. You thought you’d have Mikasa and Levi when you’d get here, that they’d walk you through this, only for them to be miles away from you.

You figure you’d fight the urge to throttle Eren every time he looked at you, but his presence seems to be one of the only things that puts you at ease. That he’s quiet, that you’re both not you and that it’s easier that way, that nothing happened.

That eventually, things would work themselves out. You’d all come back here and things would fall back into place again. That Connie would make a joke and you’d all laugh, that Armin would take a few pictures, that you and Eren would just be something again, no matter what it was.

But you sit here, stuck in how none of that is true. That you’re at the end of a bottomless pit. That things are going to stay this way, that this is how they are, that this is what happens when you make the wrong choice.

“Well, the convenience store is closing on Friday, so you better get a move on if you want something, Falco.” Niccolo states, setting his cards down.

“What?” you ask.

“Huh?” Niccolo repeats, looking up at you.

“The convenience store is closing? The one on Scott Street? With….with the slushie machine?” you ask, eyes wide.

“Yeah. The one run by that really old guy, with curly hair.”

You set your cards down, irritation flaming, as you turn to Eren.

“Did you know?” you ask.

“Yeah.” Eren responds, twisting his cards in his fingers.

“And you weren’t going to tell me? Or do anything about it?”

“What could we do about it?” Eren asks.

You roll your eyes, bending the cards as you set them down and storm out of the set. And look for that god awful bike, because god forbid that this is one of the things that changes too. That really everything else can change - that you’re going to hate each other, that the one place you love is going to be different - but god, if you can throw any money at someone to keep that place open, then so be it.

You find the bike in the shed, wheeling it out towards the front door when Eren runs in front of you, grabbing the handles and stopping you in your tracks.

“What are you doing, Y/N? You can’t ride this thing by yourself.”

“Well, watch me.” you respond, trying to wrestle it out of his grasp.

“It’s a tandem bike. You need someone to push the back. And you’ve always been shit at steering.” he responds.

“And you have a shitty personality, Eren. I guess there’s some things we just can’t really control, can we?” you spit, finally wrestling out of his grasp and moving past him.

Eren jogs up to your side, trying to stop you in your tracks again.

“Quit trying to stop me, Eren.”

“I-I’ll come with. Steer for you.” he states, reaching for the handles.

“No. I want to do this on my own.” you respond.

“Well, some things you just can’t.” Eren responds.

“I’m going to the convenience store.” you respond.

“To what? Stop it from closing?”

“Yes. I have money. I’m going to use it. It’s like an investment, basically.”

Eren frowns, stopping at your side again.

“Y/N. Maybe we shouldn’t go.”

And the irritation bubbles right to your head and you’re screaming at him in the middle of the pavement.

“I want to go! I want to make sure this thing stays here, that people get to enjoy it because it’s the only thing I can keep. I can’t get my brother to stop being mad at me, my best friend moved on and picked a new maid of honor, Levi’s ten different levels of disappointment in me, and you…you left me! I know you don’t give a crap about this place, I just want this place that made me happy to stay there.” you shout.

Eren swallows, before climbing onto the head of the bike and bracing his legs against the pedals. You oblige, climbing on and wrapping your arms around his torso as he starts pedaling. And when you reach there, he’s holding his hand out and helping you off, as you walk into the store.

The smell is still entirely the same, but the store is heavily hollowed out. Almost all the shelves are empty, the buzzing of the refrigeration turns off and you turn to find your culprit. The owner of the store, that’s been giving you and Eren free slushies since you were fifteen.

Michael.

“Y/N! Eren! My little movie stars.” he states, opening his arms wide and enveloping you two in his embrace.

You sink into the smell, the soft cherry wafting off of him, as he gives you a bright smile. His hair is significantly longer than when you saw him last, the years he’s lived hanging off of his skin. In wrinkles, in the permanent smile lines by his eyes, and his dimples - large and indented into his skin, as opposed to Eren’s. That really only come out on occasion.

“We’re in a TV show, Michael.” you deadpan.

“Same thing.” he responds, giving you a bright smile.

“Are you really closing your store?” you ask.

He sighs, giving you a smile.

“Yes. I’m sure that much is obvious.” he responds, placing more items into the box.

“Are you bankrupt? You should really stop giving free stuff to every kid who walks in here.” you murmur.

“I’m not bankrupt. It’s just time.” he responds.

You push yourself up on the counter, dangling your feet off the end as you turn to him. You’re toying with the ends of the tape on the counter, peeling it off as you rack your mind on the right thing to stay. To get him to stay here. And that insurmountable loss - that follows you everywhere - reaches this place too and you can’t handle it.

“Do you need money to keep it going? We can hire and staff and-”

“Y/N.” Michael states.

“We’ll invest. Me and Eren, we-we’ll keep it going. Make sure it’s in good hands. It should-” you mumble.

Michael sighs, setting the box down, as he glances over at Eren.

“Always the same, you two.” he states, before walking out of the store.

You give Eren a weary look, as you pad out of the store, to find Michael opening up the door of his car. You run up to his side, fists curled together.

“Where are you going?”

“We are going to the lake. I have something to show you.” he responds.

You angrily march over to the passenger seat and buckle your seatbelt on, only to find Eren standing at your side of the door.

“Well, get in.”

“I’ll stay. Fix up the store for you, yeah?” Eren says.

“Thank goodness. You god awful children know how to waste my time. And my money.” he responds, giving Eren a smile as he pulls out of the parking lot.

You glare at Eren as the two of you drive off, the ride not even a full ten minutes, before he pulls into the little meadow. There’s a tiny little lake at the center, expansive enough that you can’t see the end and green grass surrounding the edges. There’s large willow trees, basking the entire place in a shade, as the two of you walk out to a bench and sit on it together.

“You like the store, Y/N?” he asks.

“I love the store. It’s-it’s why you can’t close it.” you respond, crossing your legs onto the bench and fidgeting with your hands in the space in between.

Michael takes a deep breath, before smiling to himself and looking out at the water.

“I spent my entire life in that store.”

You look out at the lake, at the little ripples keeling through the water as the tiniest wave hits the shore.

“My mother passed away when I was very young. I don’t remember much, but…she was very fond of nature. Flowers, greenery, lakes.”

You smile.

“But my father. He….he spent his entire life in that store with me. And…he was an unrelenting man. Disciplined, principled, habitual. I didn’t know much about him, besides his name. That he worked at the store, that keeping it running was important. That he didn’t say quite much, that sometimes he would when he was angry.” he states.

You swallow hard, immediately thinking of Eren and Zeke.

“I moved away, the second I could. I turned eighteen and I-I went running for the hills.”

“To?”

“College.”

“That’s nice. Surely something entirely different, after all that.” you softly add.

“I was curious. So curious that I wanted to know everything. Every major was one I wanted to do, every class left me with a thousand questions instead of answering them, every person I met was a person I wanted to unravel, to know, deep in their bones.”

“And did you? Meet someone like that?” you ask.

Michael turns to you and smiles.

“Always the romantic, weren’t you?”

“Who said anything about being a romantic?”

“Picking up bottles on New Year’s Day is quite a romantic sentiment to me.” he responds.

You roll your eyes and he laughs, as you beckon for him to continue.

“Her name was Evangeline. She had ivory hair, long eyelashes, and the tiniest bit of freckles on her skin. Two dimples, one on each side, that were hard not to notice whenever she smiled at me. Smelled like strawberries, never walked on the cracks in the sidewalk, dreaded getting gas to the point that her car would stall and run out.”

“Quite the lady.”

Michael smiles.

“The first love. Always comes with impossible odds. There’s a sweetness, almost a purity to it. That feeling that there is no one else in the universe like this. There’s fumbling, there’s pining, there’s awkward and ugly mistakes.”

“But you think it’s going to work. You want your love to be real.” you add.

“Precisely. There’s always a first time for everything, right?” he adds.

And from that somber tone in his voice, grating in his chest, you feel the tears spill down your eyes. Because you know what happens next.

“How?” you ask.

How did she leave him.

“Accidental drowning. It seems she….she tripped over the ledge on a boat. Must have hit her head or something because when we got her out, she was…was already long gone. Didn’t fight her way back up, just…sank down.”

You feel a hiccup escape your chest, the feeling so disgusting. That this shitty loss, that it permeates everywhere. That everyone feels it. That no one is safe from it and that truly, nothing stays.

“I returned to the store. Worked with my dad for some time. It was nice to see the monotony of those types of things. Ring up the items, place them in a bag. Give two unrelenting kids a free drink here and there. Close the shop up until the next day.”

You frown, your eyes burning, as he smiles at you. He taps on your forehead, on the wrinkles from your frown.

“I was so deep in it. That feeling. I dug myself into that hole. And I stayed there. That I had experienced everything that I had needed to in life, that things were perfect that way and that nothing else was going to compare.”

He takes a beat.

“I was holding onto the memories. And they were holding on to me.”

“But-”

“Holding onto memories is a good thing. But not when they drag you into the abyss. And that’s where I was - in that store, doing the same thing everyday. Ringing up the items, placing them in boxes and closing up for the night.” he responds.

You swallow hard.

“My father talked to me one day,” he states.

“He was still there?” you ask.

“He met my mother in that store. That she was reaching for the gum at the same time as him. That their fingers brushed across one anothers, that they split the pack of gum because there was only one left.”

“And?”

“That he spent his entire life in that store, because she thought she would come back.”

You wipe your snot on the back of your hand, looking up at him. And at the fact that he’s still smiling.

“It made sense then. Why he was so untouchable”

“Because he was waiting for something that wouldn’t ever come back?”

“Because he was stuck in that store. Sitting in his little corner that he haunts.”

You swallow hard.

“When you sit inside, you seem to forget that the sun does rise again. That it falls behind the skyline, but it comes back. The moon follows the same - disappearing and reappearing to be a light in the night. The ocean pulls away from you just to come crashing right back.” he states.

“But-”

“I don’t want to live in the hole anymore. I don’t want to haunt that corner, I don’t want to shy away from the water just because it is deep. It’s cold, it bites your skin, but you feel free in the water. The possibility is there, to let your self fallin the abyss, but you can also choose not to.”

You can feel the tears falling in full flesh, the pain so palpable when you understand.

The convenience store is the stagnant spot. And he has every intent to destroy it.

“You cannot live life when you are so untouchable, Y/N. Living your life requires you to be vulnerable,” he states.

You feel a hand on your shoulder and look up to find Eren standing at your side, the bike laying in the grass next to you. You scoot over on the bench, as the tears fall out even harder, the pain of it all so aching.

At Eren. Holding a slushie, with two straws in the hole. Sitting right at your side.

You take it in your hands, securing both of your hands around the cup, as you sip the drink. And that familiar mix - of the soda and the cherry covers your tastebuds - sending a chill down your spine.

Michael sighs, smacking against the skin of his thighs before he stands up. He turns to give the two of you a smile, a hand on both of your heads.

“You’re just going to leave?”

“I’ll let Eren tell you the rest. I’ve got a wife waiting for me at home.” he states, walking off with a content smile on his face.

You almost drop the entire drink over your legs, as you watch him walk off and turn to Eren. He’s got a soft smile on his face too, his head angled up as he watches the clouds move across the sky.

“He has a wife?” you ask.

Eren slides the smallest bit away from you and taps on the inscription on the bench.

For Zola. You let the light in.

You look up at him, confused.

“Living your life requires you to be vulnerable. What’s more vulnerable for him than loving again?” Eren responds.

You nod, turning your head back to the lake. To the waves, pulling away just to come crashing right back.

“I do care about the convenience store.” Eren states.

“Hm?”

“Earlier. You said you thought I didn’t care about it….I basically did the same thing you just did now a few weeks ago when I got back and found out.” Eren responds.

“Oh.”

Eren looks over at you.

“This was one of the hardest things I had to learn when I went to therapy, Y/N.”

“What?”

“That you have to hold space for your hurt, to let yourself feel it, but not let it bog you down either.” Eren responds.

You swallow hard, looking down at the slushie - the colors mixing together into one.

“The wound is the place where the light enters.” Eren states.

You swallow hard.

“Marco gave me a poetry book. And months after he died, I stumbled across it. And it was open right on that page.”

“He did love his poetry books, didn’t he?”

“Turns out Michael loves them too. He seems like a Marco type.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” you respond.

Eren stands up, brushing off his palms on his shirt, before he turns and extends his hand to you. You place your hand in his, warm and soft, before you hold it in the air. He makes a move to let go, but you clench harder.

“Eren.”

“Yes?”

Your mind is blank. You can’t think of what to say. Or more appropriately, what to say first. Because he sends your mind into a spiral, that he overwhelms any normal sense, any rationale.

Because you loved him. And he looks like the person you loved. Feels like him too.

It’s why you can’t shout at him. Why every rational thought goes out the door, why that unyielding feeling that he’s still the person you knew is there.

“I know, Y/N. It confuses me too. We'll figure it out." Eren states.

You and Eren pick the bike up and make your way back in silence. But the air is somewhat lighter.

When you walk into the townhouse, you make it your first point to find Levi. To the point where you march up to his room and pound hard on the door until he answers. All disheveled and the slightest bit of annoyance in his face.

“Yes, Y/N?”

“I’m here for the right reasons, Levi.” you state.

Levi’s eyes go wide, almost in curiosity, as he looks up at you and leans against the door. Gesturing for you to continue. You sigh, before reaching forward and wrapping your arms around him.

For trying to push you to this spot, days earlier. By asking you the question.

“I’m here to make amends. To move forward.” you state.

“And?”

“And that….that requires work on my part. With you and Mikasa. Falco and Eren and-”

“Eren?” Levi asks, raising his eyebrows.

You smile.

“Always his biggest hater, weren’t you?”

“Naturally.” Levi responds, closing the door behind him before linking your arms and walking down towards the kitchen.

"Yes, even Eren. I-"

You take a deep breath in.

"I'm done feeling sorry for myself. And I'm done being so...so far away. This is where I'm meant to be. And it's where I'll stay until we're done." you respond.

Levi smiles at you for the first time since you've returned. And you know you'll win him over.

When you walk down, you and Levi move around each other in silence. He’s fixing the food while you drag out the plates, until the music starts blaring. Splitting both of your eardrums.

You give Levi a motion to wait, as you pad into the living room to catch the sight responsible for the sound. Only to find your heart swelling, burning at it.

They’re all dancing. Almost every single one of them, standing on their feet, hands pressed together, and screaming.

The lyrics to your song.

Baby, we're the new romantics Come on, come along with me Heartbreak is the national anthem We sing it proudly We are too busy dancing To get knocked off our feet Baby, we're the new romantics The best people in life are free

And maybe, just possibly, it draws something in you. That you wrote this song, years prior, to sick it to them. Because you were going to prove everyone, who had doubted you, that you were above them.

That you'll always rise above.

Falco and Gabi have their arms linked together and are swinging in a circle, while Connie tries to horribly swing dance with Armin. Niccolo’s spinning Sasha in circles, holding her flesh against his chest, while Mikasa and Jean - who are most certainly drunk - are excitedly screaming the lyrics in each other’s faces. Pieck and Porco are doing a very weird rendition of the original dance from the music video, while Colt tries desperately to teach them how to do it the right way.

Your presence silences them all entirely, each of them stopping from their dancing to look up at you wide eyed. But you clear your throat and sing the lyrics of your song - for the first time in years.

Please take my hand and Please take me dancing, and Please leave me stranded It's so romantic (it's so romantic) (Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah)

You hold your hand out to Mikasa and Falco, who are all too happy to oblige. And scream the lyrics into each other's faces and dance on your feet until your soles hurt. You let Jean spin you and Mikasa in one arm, Connie’s screaming she’s back for a good five minutes, and you’re trying to let it happen.

To let the light enter the wound. To keep moving forward.

Eren and Levi pad into the room forty five minutes later, to find you all nestled on the floor, a tangle of limbs, and fast asleep.

“Levi.”

“Yes, Eren?”

“I finally figured it out. The scene we’re missing.” he states.

When you come to, you make it a point to destroy your convenience store.

You take the lighter and burn that golden piece of paper. And it’s a sweet satisfaction, to see the letters go up in flames.

Y/N L/N - Triple Threat Commendation.

Reduced to ashes.

next part linked here

an: the emo y/n cannot come to the phone rn!!! she is letting the light in!!! she is about to build a castle out of all of the bricks that were thrown at her!!

(and for those of you worried that y/n has not rocked eren's shit yet, trust. trust. this poor guy getting the scolding of his life but all in good time)

taglist:

@k0z3me @kayleegomez @yihona-san06 @bsenpai @sweetenertea @mykyoon @violetmatcha ��@rebeccawinters @cutiejg @bokutosthings @bookwrmm @mblrrr @wheredidmycrowngo @somethinginyoureyes7 @chilichopsticks @okaystopwhore @you-always-made-me-blush @itzmeme @firelordazulaaaa @whoami-72 @g-ghostly @intimacywithceline @erensmoodygff @cocomellxn @princess-ackermann @jaegerfiles @cacapeepee @rui-0836 @moonmalice @invisible-mori @sofiasber @bbybeeb @timetobegone @tee4str @ttokki2 @leave-rae-alone @ec3lipsy @officialsimpp @gojojang @yookayyo @lordbugs @multiplefandomthings @iobeyfandoms @camilo-uwu @justanotherkpopstanlol @mel-star636 @fvckingeetar @ttalgi @najaemism @ilovekimchi123 @youraggedybitch @xoyumiqls @leafguitar

pls comment on this post or any of the chapters if you want to be added to the taglist <3

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lilmisshellfireswritingblog · 7 months ago

Text

Lavender Haze Chapter 1: Anarchy in the UK

A/N: Hello and welcome to the first chapter! I hope you enjoyed the prologue (I mean if you're here, you likely did). Anyway, this isn't beta read or proofread. This is just for fun and my procrastination from doing my grad school work. As always, this blog is 18+ only. Word Count: 7.9ishk....It was 16 pages on docs... Warnings: 18+ only, enemies to lovers trope, close proximity, friends scheming, eventual smut, Much Ado About Nothing, use of Y/N, reader insert, she/her pronouns for reader Chapter 1: Anarchy in the UK Synopsis: Reader leaves for London for her cousin's wedding, Dustin and Suzie scheme, and someone from the reader's past returns.

SIX MONTHS LATER

The hum of fluorescent lights overhead and the soft rustling of travel brochures fill the air as you step into the airport terminal. You clutch the wedding invitation in hand, the edges slightly worn from handling, the elegant gold lettering on the cream-colored paper showed a sharp contrast to the utilitarian surroundings.

The air smells faintly of stale coffee and the distant whirr of vending machines and buzzing of neon lights. The walls are lined with large, laminated posters advertising far-off destinations in cheerful fonts, but your mind is fixed on London, England — specifically the wedding of Dustin and Suzie, which has become a beacon of joy and anticipation. As you approach the check-in counter, the sounds of muffled announcements echo through the cavernous space, and you realize that in just a few hours, you'll be across the ocean, heading toward a new chapter in the lives of two people you hold dear.

You check in with ease, muttering a quick thank you to the attendant before starting your journey down the LAX’s vast labyrinths of terminals and gates. With your boarding pass in hand, you wander toward the gate, a slight bounce to your step as you escape the rush of the check-in counter. The gate is quiet now with only a handful of early birds settled in for the long wait. You find an empty seat near the window, the soft hum of overhead ventilation mixing with the faint chatter of fellow travelers.

Settling in, you pull a well-worn magazine from your bag—a glossy travel issue from a few months ago, its pages crinkling at the edges as you flip through articles on London’s hidden gems and tips for surviving long-haul flights. You adjust your walkman, pop in your favorite mixtape, and press play. The soft click of the cassette starting up is followed by the familiar crackle of the first song, an instant wave of nostalgia sweeping over you as the first notes of the track fill your ears. You lean back in your chair, one leg crossed over the other, eyes half-closed as you drift in the music and the pages of your magazine, the world outside the terminal window fading into a blur of airport tarmac and distant planes.

Time seems to stretch, and for a moment, the noise of the world falls away — just you, the rhythm of your music, and the thought of London waiting at the end of this journey. The quiet tap of your foot to the beat and the occasional rustling of your magazine are the only sounds, until the overhead announcement breaks the calm, signaling that boarding is about to begin.

You hand your boarding pass to the agent, who scans it with mechanical efficiency, then gestures for you to move toward the jetway. Your eyes scan the cabin as you enter the plane, relieved to see that the seat next to yours—an aisle seat by the window—remains empty, all through boarding too. You settle in with a deep sigh of relief, knowing you'll have a few hours of peace before the inevitable chaos of London and the wedding week. You stow your bag in the overhead compartment and adjust the seat belt around your waist, a soft hum of contentment rising as you nestle into your seat, slipping your headphones back on and starting another song on your cassette player.

The steady pulse of the plane fills your ears as passengers shuffle past, finding their own seats. The overhead announcements are drowned out by the rush of activity, but you can still catch the tail end of the call: "Final boarding for Flight 348 to London. Please make your way to the gate immediately." It’s a soothing, routine moment—until you hear the unmistakable sound of hurried footsteps approaching, and a voice calling out in a half-panic, “Wait! Wait for me!”

Your heart sinks as you turn your head. There, running awkwardly down the aisle with his oversized bag flopping to one side and a wild look in his eyes, is Eddie. Of course. Eddie. The last person you’d ever want to sit next to. You barely manage to mask the irritation creeping across your face as he barrels past rows of seats, scanning the numbers, his hand outstretched toward your aisle seat. He’s panting, cheeks flushed, and there’s that obnoxious grin of his as he makes eye contact with you—like the fact that he’s invading your space is some sort of joke.

"Well, fancy meeting you here," Eddie says, his voice dripping with that smug, self-assured tone you can never quite shake off. "Looks like this seat's mine, huh?" He practically drops into the seat next to you without waiting for an invitation, his bag thudding heavily against the armrest, leaving you no choice but to shift uncomfortably to make room.

“Hi Eddie,” you mumble, waving a hand haphazardly. “I guess it’s yours.”

“What? Your fiance didn't come?” He mocks, sliding his carry on underneath the seat in front of him. “Or did you leave for London unannounced?”

You should have known he would be coming to the wedding. Suzie did mention that Dustin had made him his Best Man during her bridal shower when she had asked you to be her Maid of Honor. Maybe you should have prepared yourself better, but nothing could have prepared yourself for a transatlantic flight sitting directly next to him.

And spending an entire week together in London.

“He didn’t come because I called things off.” You say simply, pulling a book from your bag before shoving it back under the seat. “We weren’t right for each other.”

Not long before the trip, you had ended your engagement with Billy and dropped out of law school, forgoing your internship. Your life was seemingly a mess. No school. No job. No engagement. You had none of it and while you felt free, you felt lost.

You didn’t know what you wanted to do in your life. Maybe London could help you figure that out.

“Oh. I - well, good for you?” Eddie didn’t know if calling off your engagement was a good or bad thing for you so, he left it as a question. He couldn’t find anything witty to say about that.

The flight attendants close the cabin doors, and you can hear the final, automated announcement: "We are now preparing for takeoff. Please ensure your seatbelt is fastened and all carry-on items are properly stowed." But the noise in your head is louder—the dread of having Eddie beside you for the entire flight, the rest of your peaceful journey shattered in an instant. You force a smile, but it feels as fake as his disingenuous charm. With a deep breath, you settle in, knowing it’s going to be a long, long flight.

HOUR 3

The plane hums steadily through the night sky, the soft vibration beneath your feet a constant reminder that you’re crossing the ocean. You’ve managed to ignore Eddie for a while, your headphones on, book open, your mind elsewhere, but the dull thud of his knee against yours—a little too close for comfort—pulls you out of your bubble. He’s not talking yet, but you can feel his eyes on you, the way people sometimes stare, hoping for a reaction and when he finally speaks, you almost wish he hadn’t.

"So, Billy, huh? You really called it off," he says, his voice low enough to sound casual but with that sharp edge that cuts through the hum of the plane. It’s not a question; it’s an observation laced with something you can't quite place—like a mix of curiosity and judgment, a little too pointed for a conversation that wasn’t invited. “You really ended it for real this time? It’s not just a break?”

You glance at him, resisting the urge to snap at him. Eddie leans back in his seat, tapping a finger on the armrest, as if he’s just casually passing the time. His tone, though, betrays his attempt to feign indifference, and you immediately tense. His eyes glanced over to the ring finger of your left hand, noticing the lack of the engagement ring you wore only six months prior when he last saw you.

It feels like a weight suddenly pressing on your chest, but you fight the lump in your throat.

"Yeah," you reply, keeping it short, hoping that’ll be the end of it.

Eddie, though, doesn’t take the hint. "Must be tough, huh? After everything…." His words are laced with a touch of something you can’t tell if it’s pity or schadenfreude, but it’s uncomfortable all the same. You brace yourself, feeling that flush of anger creeping up your neck, but there's something in his voice, a softness that wasn’t there before, that makes you hesitate.

You shift in your seat, trying to find a polite way to end this. "It wasn’t… like that, exactly," you mutter, focusing on the view outside your window, the blanket of stars now spread across the sky.

But Eddie’s not done. “I get it,” he says, his voice lower now, almost thoughtful, but with that unsettling edge of rudeness still there, like he doesn’t know how to stop prodding. "I mean, relationships, right? They can go from everything to nothing in a heartbeat. Or they can just fizzle out. And you’re left thinking, Why didn’t I see it sooner?”

You know he was alluding to your prompt exit after spending the night at his apartment and how he just viewed you as nothing. You knew it deep down that this wasn’t about Billy or your engagement at all. This was about you and Eddie.

His words hang in the air for a long moment, and you're unsure if he's trying to sympathize or just trying to make you squirm. Eddie leans forward slightly, his eyes searching yours, a kind of half-apology playing out in his gaze. It’s a strange, fleeting moment, but you almost catch the flicker of something close to empathy there—before he ruins it.

"You must be glad to be getting away from all that. A wedding in London... kind of a perfect escape, huh?" He shifts in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with the emotional territory he's ventured into, but he doesn’t pull back.

You nod stiffly, your hands folding in your lap. "Yeah, I suppose," you answer quietly, the words tasting bittersweet. "It’s not what I expected but it’s a fresh start, kind of a bookmark to where I am in life and where I’m not."

Eddie sits back, finally, and for a moment there’s a silence that’s just loud enough to be awkward. He gives a small, half-hearted shrug as if he knows he’s overstepped, then mutters, "Well, everyone needs a fresh start. Especially after that kind of mess."

And just like that, the empathy vanishes, replaced by the familiar sneer that you’ve come to loathe.

You turn your attention back to the window, trying to shake the unease in your stomach. The rest of the flight stretches on, the tension between you and Eddie hanging heavy in the cramped cabin. It’s a strange, uncomfortable dynamic—part judgment, part unwanted camaraderie, and it makes the miles to London feel like they’re stretching on forever.

HOUR 5

It starts small—just a little comment during meal service, a careless remark, but it’s enough to set things off. Eddie, leaning back in his seat with his hands behind his head like he's settling into his personal throne, taps the armrest between you with his fingers. You barely notice at first, too lost in your own thoughts, but then he mutters, "I still don’t get why anyone would choose tea over coffee, you know?"

You glance at him, frowning slightly. "What?" you ask, thinking you might’ve heard him wrong.

"Tea," Eddie repeats, his voice dripping with that condescending tone again, "I mean, seriously, what’s the appeal? It’s just hot, bland water with a leaf in it. Why would anyone choose that over coffee?”

You stare at him, dumbfounded. This is where he wants to take the conversation? Of all the things in the world, he’s bringing up tea versus coffee?

But then you remember where you first met Eddie and your interaction with him. You had ordered tea that day and he had bought it for you, pretending to be your husband. His comments now made complete sense.

"It’s not about waking up," you reply, a little incredulous. "It’s about comfort. Tea’s soothing. It’s calm. You don't need a jolt of caffeine to feel good." You feel your voice rise a little, the absurdity of the argument making you defensive. “Besides, not everyone needs to feel like their brain is on fire every time they drink something.”

Eddie scoffs. "Well, it’s not like tea is doing anything for you except making you fall asleep faster." He gestures like he's trying to make a grand point, though it only makes you roll your eyes. "And honestly, you can’t even get it right half the time. Too hot, too cold, weak, strong, whatever. At least coffee works."

You feel the annoyance bubble up in your chest. "You don’t even know how to make a proper cup of tea," you snap, irritated that he’s dismissing something you actually enjoy. "You just throw a bag in hot water and call it good. You have no appreciation for it. You probably think chai is just fancy spiced milk."

Eddie's face goes mock-serious. "Are you really going to lecture me about tea right now? Like, are we actually having this conversation?" He leans forward again, locking eyes with you, a mischievous smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Honestly, you’re the one getting worked up over a beverage. You need a hobby, or something."

“You’re literally the one who made the first comment, Eddie. This is incredibly stupid. To think this is all a grudge because you bought me a cup of tea all those months ago. You’re really going to hold a grudge on tea?”

You can feel your face heating up, but it’s not just from embarrassment. It’s from the ridiculousness of the situation—the way Eddie is so casually dismissive about something that feels so trivial, yet somehow so personal to you. You cross your arms, biting back a laugh at how ridiculous this is. But it only seems to egg him on.

"Look," Eddie continues, almost too smug for his own good, "I get it. Tea’s a ‘thing.’ But coffee is the thing. It’s a culture, it’s an experience. You know, things with substance, not just hot leaf juice."

You shake your head, now feeling a bit silly for being drawn into it. "You’re unbelievable," you mutter, throwing a glance out the window just to escape the conversation for a second.

Eddie leans back with a smirk, clearly enjoying the way he’s ruffled your feathers. "Well, hey, I can’t help it if I have taste."

Your jaw clenches as you open your mouth to respond, but the flight attendants begin making their rounds again, offering drinks. And for a moment, you realize that the argument, though petty, has somehow managed to distract you from everything else—Billy, the awkwardness, the gnawing frustration of being stuck next to Eddie for hours on end and him seemingly just finding entertainment from annoying you.

The stewardess pauses by your seat, offering you a drink, and you glance at Eddie, who’s still smirking at you, clearly proud of himself. You take a deep breath, reminding yourself it’s just a stupid argument. A dumb, pointless, small thing—but somehow, in this cramped, turbulent space, it feels like the most important thing in the world.

"Tea," you say, to no one in particular, as you place your drink order. "I’ll take the tea. No sugar. No milk."

Eddie rolls his eyes dramatically. "Of course you will."

The stewardess, a cheerful woman with a kind smile and a no-nonsense air about her, smiles softly as she hands you the tea she effortlessly prepared. Her eyes flickered between you and Eddie, who’s still wearing that smug, amused expression after your little "tea vs. coffee" debacle. She glances back at the both of you with a soft chuckle, her tone light and warm.

"So, I see we’ve got a newlywed couple here," she says, her voice almost like a comforting murmur. "First lover's spat already? Happens to the best of us, you know. Cramped quarters will do that to even the best of us." She grins at you both as if it’s all part of some adorable little story.

The words hit you like a slap in the face. Your stomach tightens, and your cheeks flare with heat. Newlywed couple? You force a smile—teeth gritted. Eddie, of course, doesn’t miss a beat. He leans forward, suddenly playing the part with ease, his voice dripping with theatrical charm.

"Oh, yeah," he says, all too casually, giving you a playful side-eye. "First big argument on our honeymoon." He winks at the stewardess, clearly enjoying the spectacle. "But you know, we’ll get over it. It’s all part of the ride, right?"

The stewardess giggles, her smile widening. “Ah, young love. So sweet,” she says, as if this is all some innocent joke. “Well, I hope it doesn’t ruin your trip, sweetheart,” she adds, turning her attention back to you for a second longer than you'd like, eyes twinkling with mischief. “I’ll just put you down for a romantic glass of wine to ease things over."

You sit there, completely frozen, the rage bubbling up like a pot about to boil over. Romantic? Eddie’s playing along like this is all some stupid farce, and the thought of him leaning into it, making light of your personal space and your frustration, twists something deep inside of you. This is the moment where everything—every last shred of patience—snaps.

“Excuse me,” you interject sharply, suddenly too aware of the weight of Eddie’s smirk next to you. “We are not a couple.” The words come out clipped and too loud, and the stewardess’s face shifts, a moment of confusion crossing her features. You push forward, as if you can physically distance yourself from the very idea of Eddie. “And I’m definitely not on a honeymoon with him.”

Eddie, for the first time, falters. He’s clearly caught off guard, his grin dropping for a fraction of a second, but then that trademark smugness returns. His eyes glint with mischief. “Whoa, hey,” he says, leaning back in his seat with his hands raised as if in mock surrender. “She’s just kidding. You know, a little fun on the flight. Can’t blame a couple for trying to help spice things up.”

The stewardess is now visibly awkward, trying to regain her composure, but it’s too late. The damage is done. The entire cabin seems to hold its breath for a moment, as if waiting for something to break. You can feel your face burning with embarrassment and fury. You can’t believe Eddie is playing this part, and the more he tries to make it sound like harmless fun, the more you want to snap at him.

“Listen,” you say through gritted teeth, your hands clenched tightly in your lap. “I’m just going to stick with my tea,” you bite out, your voice colder now, eyes narrowing.

The stewardess, now a little flustered and clearly not sure how to navigate the awkwardness, nods quickly, offering a sheepish smile before she retreats down the aisle, likely trying to avoid the awkward energy you've just created.

But Eddie, damn him, isn’t done. "You know," he says casually, shifting to lean in a bit closer to you, as if he’s completely oblivious to how much he's irritating you, "If it makes you feel better, we can still make up in London. I’m sure the city’s full of romantic spots." He laughs softly, that teasing edge back in his voice. "I mean, we’re going to a wedding, after all."

You clench your fists, trying not to say something you'd regret, the heat of embarrassment still lingering in your chest. You don’t even want to entertain him anymore, but Eddie, as always, doesn’t give you the option.

"Alright," he says, grinning wide now. "I’ll let you have your space but you know, that’s not the worst idea—London? We should totally go out, the two of us. Just the two of us.” His grin widens, and the worst part is, you know he’s doing it to get under your skin, playing into this whole ridiculous scenario he’s crafted in his mind.

You can’t even respond for a minute, completely caught off guard. The thought of him pretending to be part of your life like that, of him forcing his way into your head like this, makes your blood boil. You stare ahead, shoulders stiff with frustration, and the seconds drag on in a tense silence until the stewardess returns with your tea. She hands it to you with a nervous smile, and you take it, grateful for the distraction, but nothing seems to shake the odd, lingering bitterness that Eddie’s managed to infect everything with.

“I wouldn’t even go out with you if you were the last man on this planet, Eddie.” You spat, sipping your tea, hoping he gets the hint that you just want to be left alone. “We just have to get along for Dustin and Suzie. Besides, I thought I was nothing to you.”

This was supposed to be a peaceful flight to London. Now it feels like a slow, insufferable game of one-upmanship, with Eddie gleefully playing the villain and you stuck in the middle, trying not to explode.

As the plane continues its journey, you can’t help but wonder just how long you’ll have to endure this forced “comedy” of his, before it finally stops.

-------

The plane’s descent is gradual, the city lights of London beginning to twinkle below like a field of stars. You’re thankful the flight is over, but the prospect of what awaits off the plane brings an entirely new set of anxieties. As the plane touches down and the cabin lights flicker on, you hear the familiar chorus of seatbelt signs being clicked off and passengers stretching, gathering their things. You manage to stand, gathering your bag from the overhead compartment exchanging a few uncomfortable glances with Eddie, who’s now leaning back in his seat with that infuriating, too-casual grin on his face.

“You know,” Eddie says as the line at the gate starts moving, his voice almost cheerful again, “I’m actually starting to think we’re like a couple now. I mean, we’ve had the ‘first fight,’ and now we’re going to be the Best Man and Maid of Honor at Dustin’s wedding. It’s practically destiny.” He winks at you like it’s some kind of joke.

You don’t dignify his words with a response. The only thing you want is to get through customs, grab your luggage, and get away from Eddie, but the chaos of a busy airport only makes that more difficult.

Finally, you clear customs and head toward the exit. The hum of excitement from all the passengers fills the air, everyone gathering near the baggage claim area, talking about their travels, snapping photos, and exchanging excited greetings. You scan the crowd, finally spotting Dustin and Suzie standing near the front, waving at you.

You smile at the sight of them—Dustin’s easy grin and Suzie’s wide, radiant smile are enough to wash away most of your irritation. Despite the awkwardness of the flight, you feel a flutter of relief at finally being here and you hurry toward them.

“Hey!” Dustin greets you warmly, pulling you into a hug. Suzie follows suit, wrapping her arms around you in a tight embrace. The sight of them together is like a balm to your nerves—everything about this feels so right. They’re glowing with excitement for their wedding and the days ahead, and for a moment, it’s easy to forget about everything else.

“There’s my favorite cousin!” Suzie says, holding you at arm’s length and taking a good look at you. “You look great! How was the flight? No disasters, I hope?”

You smile, shaking your head. “It was… fine. Uneventful,” you lie, not about to get into the details of your flight companion just yet.

Dustin, as usual, is grinning from ear to ear, clearly in his element. “Well, you’re here now, that’s what matters! We’re so glad you could make it. Everything’s been a little chaotic with all the guests arriving, but it’s going to be amazing. We’ve got a lot of fun things planned this week!”

You nod, your excitement building again now that you’re here. But then, as you start to follow them toward the exit, Dustin’s expression shifts, and you can see the hesitation in his eyes as he glances at the two of you—Eddie still hanging nearby, looking like he’s trying to seem as unbothered as possible.

“Uh, so,” Dustin begins, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “We’ve got a little… situation with the hotel rooms.” He clears his throat. “It turns out we didn’t quite account for everyone when we booked. There are some constraints with the space, so… some of the rooms had to be reallocated.”

You frown, already sensing where this is going.

“What do you mean by that, Dustin?” You adjust the bag on your shoulder, casting a few gazes

Dustin’s gaze flickers nervously between you and Eddie before he continues, “And with a few last-minute changes, it looks like... well, you and Eddie are going to need to share a room.”

For a moment, your brain doesn’t quite process the words. “Wait, what?” you ask, blinking in disbelief. “You mean, together?”

Dustin nods, looking sheepish. “Yeah, I know it’s not ideal, but we really couldn’t get another room. Everything’s booked solid for the wedding. You and Eddie will just have to make do. It’s only for a couple of nights, and it’s... well, it’s just temporary. You’ll be fine, right?”

The words hit you like a cold slap to the face. You and Eddie? In the same hotel room? You feel your chest tighten, your stomach doing flips, and you turn to look at Eddie. He’s wearing that too pleased expression again, like this is some kind of twisted little joke he’s getting off on.

"Oh, this is going to be great," Eddie says, his voice so overly chipper you can almost hear the sarcasm dripping from it as he approaches the group. "I mean, what could possibly go wrong? It’s just two adults who just so happen to hate each other, alone in a room. What’s the worst that could happen?" He chuckles, clearly trying to make light of the situation.

You feel your pulse race with a combination of rage and disbelief. You want to scream, to tell Dustin no way in hell would you share a room with Eddie—of all people—but you know it’s not his fault. They did what they could with the limited space, and it's just one night, right? You try to remind yourself that this is all for Dustin and Suzie, and they’re already dealing with enough stress. You can handle this, even if it feels like an impossible request.

But then, of course, Eddie’s next comment isn’t helping. "I’m just saying, it’s kind of poetic, right? I mean, a wedding, and here we are, forced to share a room. Maybe we should start a tradition, huh?"

Your teeth grind together, and you force yourself to take a deep breath, the tension in your chest threatening to break loose. "This is not funny," you mutter through clenched teeth.

Dustin, clearly sensing the awkwardness, quickly tries to smooth things over. "Hey, hey, no need to stress! I know it’s not ideal, but it’s just for a week and it’s for Suzie and I. Think of it like a... bonding experience? Besides, London’s a beautiful city. You’ll both be so busy with the wedding stuff, you won’t even have time to think about it. You’d only be there to sleep"

You stare at Dustin, then at Eddie, who’s still grinning like this is all some ridiculous prank he’s pulling on you. You want to say something sharp, to make him understand how uncomfortable this is—but you just nod, knowing there’s no other option.

"Yeah, sure. A bonding experience," you mutter, already dreading the next week of this forced closeness. You try to remind yourself that it’s just for a week, that the wedding is the focus, but you can’t help the sharp knot of tension that’s already building in your stomach.

As you pile into the car, heading toward the hotel, you feel every second stretch out before you, knowing full well that this is going to be a full on migraine of a trip.

The car ride to the hotel is a blur of muffled chatter and the hum of the engine. You’re still trying to wrap your mind around the fact that you’re about to share a hotel room with Eddie for the entire week. The whole idea feels surreal—like a nightmare you’re waiting to wake up from.

Dustin and Suzie chatter excitedly in the back seat about the wedding plans, about the guests they’re excited to see, about everything going perfectly but all you can hear is the steady thrum of your own heartbeat and the tick-tick-tick of your brain reeling. You steal a glance at Eddie sitting next to you and you can almost feel the smug energy radiating off him, like he's already mentally preparing for the next round of “jokes” he’ll try to get away with.

When the car pulls into the hotel’s narrow driveway, the low hum of the city outside feels strangely distant, almost muffled. It’s not until you’re standing at the check-in counter, trying to force a smile while you’re mentally drafting all the ways you might strangle Eddie in his sleep, that it really sinks in: You’re stuck with him. For an entire week. With no reprieve.

You try not to glare at him as the clerk hands you both your room keys. You’ve been bracing yourself for this moment, but it hits like a punch to the gut.

"Here you go," the hotel clerk says, handing each of you a key card with a polite smile. "You’ll be in Room 204, just down the hall on your left. Enjoy your stay."

“Thanks,” Suzie says, giving you a quick, apologetic smile. “I know it’s not ideal, but—"

“It’s fine, Suzie,” you force out through clenched teeth. “Really.” You wave it off, trying to mask your frustration. Suzie looks like she’s about to offer some comfort, but you can’t bring yourself to let her fuss over you. Not when the real problem is still standing right next to you.

“See you guys at dinner!” Dustin calls over her shoulder as he and Suzie head off toward the elevators to return to their room down the hall.

You and Eddie stand there for a moment, the weight of the awkwardness between you hanging thick in the air. You avoid looking at him as you head toward the hallway but Eddie can’t leave well enough alone.

"Well, this is gonna be fun," he says, his voice dripping with too much sarcasm to be anything but a deliberate jab.

You roll your eyes and quicken your pace, but Eddie easily matches your stride. "You know, I’ve stayed in worse places," he continues, his tone light, almost carefree, as if he’s genuinely trying to make the situation seem less horrific. "This place looks... quaint. I bet it’s got charm."

You grunt, resisting the urge to snap something rude. You’re beyond sarcasm at this point. When you reach Room 204, Eddie reaches for the door, fumbling with the keycard like he’s trying to make a point. “You wanna do the honors?” he says, his face a perfect mask of innocence.

You roll your eyes and swipe the card yourself. The door clicks open with a soft sound, and as you push it open, your stomach twists.

The room is small, nothing particularly luxurious about it—standard hotel fare. A double bed sits against one wall, a small desk by the window, and a bathroom tucked away in the corner. There’s a single chair, a tiny TV on a dresser, and a faint smell of bleach still lingering in the air. The single bed, of course, stares back at you with the same quiet challenge that Eddie’s presence brings. It might as well have a neon sign above it that says “YOU’RE GOING TO HATE THIS.”

You try to take a deep breath, but Eddie steps in behind you, making himself at home as he casually tosses his bag onto the bed nearest the window.

“Well,” he says, looking around and letting out a long, exaggerated sigh, “this place is charming... like I said. So, what do you think? You wanna take the bed or the chair?”

You spin around to face him, frustration making your voice sharper than you intended. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Eddie grins like he’s enjoying the very sight of your discomfort. “Hey, it’s a double bed, right? Just slightly smaller than a queen size - guess we’ll have to get cozy.”

You stare at him, mouth open, not sure if you’re supposed to laugh or punch him in the face. "This isn’t ideal…That isn’t ideal,” you finally manage to say, your voice dripping with barely contained irritation. “But clearly you’ve already made yourself at home.”

He shrugs and flops back onto the bed like he’s lying down for a Sunday nap, grinning wide. “Well, you didn’t seem to have any objections when they handed us the keys. You could’ve spoken up earlier when Dustin gave us the news.” He pats the bed beside him. “But it’s fine, really. I’m cool with it. I’m a great roommate.”

You throw your bag onto the desk and stand there, trying to breathe through your nose, but the air feels too thick. You take a deep breath. You’re here for the wedding. You’re here for Dustin and Suzie. You can survive this. However, the very idea of sharing a bed with Eddie, even if it’s just for one week, makes your skin crawl.

Instead of answering, you turn to the window, trying to ignore the heavy weight of his presence behind you. “Fine,” you mutter under your breath. "We’ll just... deal with it. We’re going to have to make a pillow wall though."

But Eddie’s voice cuts through the silence again, too light, too cheerful. "We’ll make it work, right? I mean, it’s just a week. We’ll probably be so busy with wedding stuff, we won’t even have time to think about it."

You noticed how Eddie repeated Dustin’s exact words from the airport. You give him a nod before starting to unpack.

"Right. Just a week." You turn back around to face him, hoping your exasperation isn’t showing too clearly. “Just…don’t be a bed hog.”

Eddie is already sprawled out, hands behind his head, looking far too comfortable for someone who’s clearly just ruined your entire sense of personal space and your trip to London. You try to calm yourself down. You can do this. You’re just here for Dustin and Suzie’s wedding. You’re not here for Eddie’s games.

But as you continue to unpack your things in silence, you can’t help but wonder if this week might end up being the longest one of your life.

After unpacking and getting ready for the first dinner of the festivities, you sit down on the edge of the bed, trying to put some space between yourself and Eddie—who’s still sprawled out across the other half, clearly settling in for the long haul—you can’t shake the feeling that something’s off. The whole situation feels like it’s spiraling into one big, awkward mess, and all you can think about is how badly you want to escape it. You try to focus on the fact that you’re in London, here for a wedding, and you can’t let this stupid room arrangement ruin everything.

This was for your cousin, after all.

There’s that feeling, gnawing at the back of your mind. It’s too perfect, too convenient. Eddie's here. He’s always here. And for some reason, you can’t stop wondering if this—this weird, uncomfortable situation—isn’t just a random mistake. Nothing is coincidental.

First the flight. Now this?

Eddie isn’t making things any easier. He’s lounging on the bed, flipping through TV channels with an exaggerated, over-the-top disinterest, occasionally glancing over at you with a look that’s part smug, part playful.

“I gotta admit, I didn’t think this would be the way we’d end up in a room together,” he says, flipping the remote with a sigh. “But I guess life’s funny like that, huh?”

You shoot him a glare, the frustration bubbling up again. “Yeah, funny,” you mutter under your breath, but he doesn’t seem to notice—or he doesn’t care.

He stretches out, looking entirely at ease in the tiny, cramped space that should have felt like a disaster but instead, he somehow makes it feel… normal—like he belongs there. You can’t even figure out how to deal with that, or how much it’s irritating you. You shift awkwardly on the bed, feeling every inch of your personal space being invaded.

It’s then that the door opens with a soft creak, without a knock and Dustin and Suzie walk in, both looking way too pleased with themselves. You raise an eyebrow as you glance up at them.

“We just thought we’d check in, see how everything’s going," Dustin says, his grin far too wide, the kind of grin someone wears when they’ve just orchestrated something deliberate.

You’re about to respond with a polite, "It’s fine," when Suzie suddenly glances over at you and Eddie, then back at Dustin with a look that’s half conspiratorial, half completely over-the-top sweet.

“So,” she says brightly, her tone a little too casual. “Everything going okay with the room situation? You two, uh, getting along okay?”

You blink, not sure if she’s joking or not. You glance at Eddie, whose brow furrows just slightly, clearly picking up on the weird vibe. He shifts in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with the way she’s asking. "Uh, yeah, we’re good,” he replies, though there’s a trace of suspicion in his voice. “Just... you know, making the best of it. It’s fine.”

Suzie just keeps on smiling and it’s a little too bright for comfort. “Good, good. We were just so worried you might be... you know, uncomfortable. You are both so busy, what with the wedding and everything. We didn’t want you to feel... cramped or anything.”

Dustin clears his throat. “Yeah, and hey, if you two need anything, just let us know, okay? We’re here for you.”

You exchange a glance with Eddie, but this time, it’s more bewilderment than irritation. The whole thing feels... off. You want to say something, to ask what’s going on, but before you can, Eddie speaks up with a low chuckle, though you can hear the slight edge of uncertainty in his voice.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I definitely wasn’t expecting this when I came all the way to London. The whole ’rooming with a woman who ghosted me’ thing isn’t exactly on my bucket list, you know?" He flashes Suzie and Dustin a wry grin. “But hey, what do I know? I’m just here for the two of you.”

Dustin’s grin gets a little wider, if possible. “Yeah, we get it, man. You’re both so busy, with the wedding and all. So, really, enjoy the downtime together. Make the most of it. It’ll be nice, just the two of you after all the festivities…. Being here alone.” Dustin continues to grin, grabbing Suzie’s hand as he turns toward the door. “See you guys at dinner!”

There’s something about the way he says “alone” that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and suddenly it hits you like a bucket of cold water. This isn’t an accident. This wasn’t some weird hotel room mix-up or scheduling error. No. Dustin and Suzie have done this on purpose.

You stay silent as the couple leave, watching them closely and curiously. You swore you heard Suzie’s giggle down the hall. Quickly, you close the door and lock it, returning to sit next to Eddie in silence, just for a moment.

They did this shit on purpose. Dustin and Suzie set you and Eddie up—and you don’t know whether to laugh, scream, or throw something at the wall.

“They did this on purpose, you know.” You say, refusing to look over at Eddie. You nervously pick at your nails silently pleading he also caught onto Dustin and Suzie’s scheme. “You had to pick up on that, right?”

“Dustin has never been the most subtle guy.” Eddie laughed, running a hand over his face as he continued to lay on the bed. “I picked up on it, sweetheart.”

There’s silence between the two of you. A silence so thick you could choke.

Eddie, ever the unpredictable one, breaks the silence with a casual chuckle. "Well, I have to admit, this is almost impressive. I didn’t think Dustin had it in him." His eyes glint with amusement, the kind that always seems to follow your frustration like a shadow.

You shoot him a sharp look, still processing everything, but there’s something in his expression that makes you pause. He’s not upset about this. He’s… enjoying it. Suddenly, a realization clicks in your mind. You can’t tell if it’s panic or pure frustration, but you know what’s coming next.

Eddie knows you and you know him. You both realize, at the same moment, that there’s no escaping the trap. It’s not like you can tell Dustin and Suzie the truth—they’re already too invested. And you certainly can’t go around making a scene. You’d have to lie low, play nice for the wedding and get through this uncomfortable, forced proximity.

You cross your arms over your chest, standing tall in the face of his amused gaze. "Okay. Fine," you say, voice low but firm. "We’re stuck together for the week but for the sake of Dustin and Suzie’s wedding, I think it’s best if we just… play along so they focus on their wedding and not us." You hate the words as they leave your mouth, but it’s the only sensible thing to do.

Eddie raises an eyebrow, clearly intrigued. He doesn’t seem to be fighting the idea, which only makes you more suspicious. “Play along, huh?” he repeats, leaning back into the bed as if he’s settling in for a long conversation. “You mean, like, pretend we’re head over heels for each other for their wedding?”

You throw your hands up in mock exasperation. "I mean, what else do you want me to call it? We pretend we’re into each other, act like we’re happy, and get through the wedding without anyone suspecting we can’t stand each other. Then we never have to see each other again."

Eddie smirks, clearly weighing the idea. He lets out a soft laugh, almost like he’s trying to stifle his enjoyment. “Fake dating, huh? Yeah, I can see that. It’ll be like a rom-com, only with more sighing and eye rolling.” He eyes you up and down, a teasing glint in his eyes. “Alright. I’m in. This should be fun.”

You narrow your eyes, not quite ready to let him get the upper hand. “You better not mess this up, Eddie. I’m not in the mood for your jokes or your... whatever this is.” You gesture vaguely at him, already regretting the entire idea of having to spend more time in close proximity to him than absolutely necessary.

He raises both hands in mock surrender. “Whoa, whoa. I’m a professional. You’d be surprised how good I am at this,” he says with an exaggerated wink. “And don’t worry. I’ll be on my best behavior.”

You stare at him, suspicious, but you don’t have a better option. The whole “fake dating” thing might actually be the lesser evil. At least this way, you don’t have to worry about awkward explanations to Dustin and Suzie about how you really feel about each other. You just have to get through the wedding weekend, put on a show, and keep the peace.

You sigh, rubbing your temples. "Alright. Fine. But you better not ruin it. We’re not going to be all lovey-dovey, okay? We’re just... two people who are pretending. Got it?"

Eddie grins like a kid on Christmas morning. “Got it. You’re not going to catch me making googly eyes at you or anything. We’ll just act like we’re having the time of our lives together. What’s the worst that could happen?”

You glare at him, your nerves already fried from the thought of what’s to come. "I don’t know, Eddie. Maybe you’ll actually start believing it,” you say, your voice tinged with sarcasm.

Eddie laughs, flopping back on the bed. “Oh, believe me, I don’t want to get any ideas since you’re a flight risk,” he says, his voice dripping with mock sweetness. "I’m all about the performance here. Strictly professional. I’ll be the best fake boyfriend you’ve ever had.”

You turn to face the mirror by the desk, staring at your reflection for a moment. You really thought you’d come to London to celebrate a wedding, maybe enjoy some time away from the madness. Instead, you’re stuck with Eddie, playing pretend for the sake of two people who have no idea that you’re not just friends anymore.

And yet, a strange, nervous energy flickers beneath your skin. You tell yourself it’s just the tension of the situation—that’s what it is. You’re not actually… curious about what it would be like to have Eddie’s arm around you again or what it would feel like to pretend to be in a relationship with him. You can’t be. That’s ridiculous. He said you were nothing to him. That couldn’t have changed.

Still, as you glance over at him, still lying on the bed with that carefree smirk on his face as you begin to get ready for dinner. You can’t help but wonder if this week might turn into something completely unexpected - more likely a cruel joke than a fresh start but, you’d take a little bit of excitement over the mess you had created for yourself back home.

“Alright. We’re really doing this” you say, swallowing any remnants of doubt. “Let’s do this, then. Let’s pretend to be the perfect couple.”

Eddie’s grin widens, his eyes sparkling with mischief. “You’re on, babe.”

#Eddie munson x reader #Eddie munson #reader x Eddie munson #joesph quinn #Joseph quinn x reader #reader insert #x reader #stranger things fan fiction #stranger things #fanfiction #fanfic writing #Eddie x reader

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ghostbustermelanieking · 4 years ago

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tma fic masterpost

love letters (of a sort)

(jonmartin, seasons 1-5, fluff, angst, wc: 13k)

Want to grab dinner later? I know you're going to be working absurdly late anyway, and there's a new Italian place I've been wanting to try. — M

Yes, that sounds nice. I'll try to be finished by 7:00. — J

Oh, yes. God forbid you don't work absurdly late. ;) — M

Or: The notes and letters Jon and Martin have written each other, through the years.

cracks

(post mag 200, tim & sasha, jonmartin, wc: 1k)

Sasha finds a tape on her kitchen table. A new one. The last one. She doesn't even need to listen to it to know it's the last one. And she has a voice-mail on her phone from Annabelle Cane.

She calls Tim first, right then, at one a.m., and he picks up. She knew he would. She knows he felt the change, too. "We have to go," she says. "Right now. We've got to go back. Something's happened."

microfics: tender, trembling hands, drastic

in the moonlight

(wtgfs, pre-canon, fluff, wc: 2k)

6. things you said under the stars and in the grass

Or: Georgie and Melanie on a late-night ghost hunt (in an "unromantic" field).

after words

(jonmartin, mag 102 au, hurt/comfort, wc: 3k)

things you said prompts: "13. things you said at the kitchen table."

Or: After Jon's escape from the Circus, Martin offers for Jon to stay with him.

warm

(jonmartin, scottish safehouse period, wc: 2k)

things you said prompts: "1. things you said at 1 am"

Or: Huddling for warmth after the Lonely.

reunions

(post mag 196, canon divergent, jonmartin, wc: 2k)

Martin and Jon find each other again at the remnants of Hill Top Road.

cursed grounds

(bly manor au pt 1, jonmartin, ensemble, slow burn, wip, wc: 14k)

When there's a lull, Martin speaks up, because he has to, he knows he does, he won't get a better opportunity. He says, "I've got a story," and when they look at him with interest, he adds, "A… a statement, really. It might be hard to hear, but… I think we all need to hear it again."

He shifts in his seat, sits up straighter, clears his throat and looks out at the lot of them and begins. "Statement of Martin Blackwood," he says, "regarding the Magnus Institute, and everything that happened there." He takes a breath, hears the familiar words in their familiar cadence rattle through his mind: the Archivist is taking a statement. He says, "Statement begins."

Or: In 1985, after the disappearance of Gertrude Robinson from the reclusive grounds of the Magnus Institute, Jonathan Sims is brought in as a replacement. As he adjusts to the new job, and begins to bond with his new coworkers, the strange happenings on the grounds that the Magnus Institute sits on become harder to ignore.

Years later, Martin Blackwood makes a statement.

variations on a death scene

(ensemble, jonmartin, wtgfs, aus, revenge stories, wc: 6k)

Or: Eight times Jonah Magnus was killed, and everything was fixed.

tapes winding forward

(jonmartin, time travel, season 1/season 5 au, word count: 48k)

Chapters: 6/6

Martin gets a closer look at the calendar, and his breath catches in his throat. He's gotten a look at the year, and it's wrong, it's all wrong. 2018. October, 2018. Right there, in Martin's own handwriting, on a Saturday, he's written things on little dates that Martin can't read, because he can't take his eyes off the year. 2018. 2018. They look differently. They have scars they don't recognize. Their hair is longer. 2018.

Martin seizes the calendar off the fridge and goes back into the living room. Jon's still at the coffee table, poking through the tapes piled there, but he looks up when Martin comes back in and says, "Martin, where…" with a familiar bite in his voice.

Martin ignores him, stops him mid-sentence to say, "Jon, what have you heard about time travel?"

---

Martin and Jon wake up two years in the future. It goes about as well as can be expected.

cat's cradle

(georgie & jon, wtgfs, the admiral, s5 au, cat angst & fluff, mag 189/190, word count: 5k)

Jon and Martin go out one day, on a trip to the eldritch horror-trap grocery store, and show back up in the tunnels after a few long hours, longer than any of the trips to the store that Georgie has been on. Martin has a bag of horrible spooky food, and Jon has a bag shut at the top that is wriggling suspiciously in his arms. "Oh, great," says Melanie, when Georgie fills her in. "What monstrous thing has he brought home now?" Georgie would giggle if the situation wasn't at least a little potentially dangerous, Jon could have anything in there, really.

---

Or: an exploration of the fate of the Admiral, after the end of the world.

rising static

(archivist!martin, jonmartin, s5 au/canon divergence/spec, word count: 14k)

Martin forces his eyes open to look at Jon, bruise blossoming at the top of his forehead, eyes red and wet. "Wh-what's gone?" he asks softly, almost afraid of the answer.

"It. All of it, or at least some of it, I don't know… I can't feel it anymore. The statements, the Beholding, it's—it's…" Jon breaks off mid-sentence, shaking his head. He leans forward so their foreheads are together, and Martin can feel him trembling all over. He says, voice low and thick with fear, "I'm… not sure I'm the Archivist anymore."

---

The initial confrontation with Jonah Magnus goes badly, and Martin wakes up outside the Panopticon to find Jon missing. In the wake of this initial loss, something about Martin starts to change.

northern-bound trains

(safehouse fic, jonmartin, post mag 159, pining, word count: 6k)

Martin rides with Jon to the train station. He insisted. Said he shouldn’t have to go there alone. “Nothing worse than leaving on a trip with no one to send you off,” he’d said. Jon had nodded, gratefully, and swallowed back the burning lump of what he wanted to say—Come with me, come to Scotland, I don’t want to leave you alone again. He kept hearing Martin’s words in his head: I really loved you. And he couldn’t ask Martin to do that, to leave his whole life and everything behind to become a fugitive, cower in Scotland and throw his whole life away. It’s too much. And Martin has already sacrificed so much for him.

He’ll be content with Martin seeing him off. That can be enough. That will be enough.

knowing

(s1 archives crew, timsasha, season 4 au, word count: 3k)

Jon falters, looks at the ground, one hand over his mouth. "You… you were both in the same place. In a… domain. D-Daisy was in one, too, a different one. I got her out. And I… I thought, afterwards, that maybe I could get the two of you back, too."

---

Or: After the Unknowing, after the Buried, Jon finds Sasha and Tim again.

journeys at the end of the world

(wtgfs, melanie king, season 5 au/spec, word count: 8k)

Melanie doesn't remember what happened after the world ends.

(Or: Melanie searches for Georgie in the wake of the apocalypse.)

a hidden statement

(season 1 au, s1 archives crew, jonmartin, timsasha, wc: 100k)

Chapters: 5/15 (wip)

Martin finds the tape in the wall. Specifically, in a small hole in the drywall, tucked behind boxes and stuffed with so much crumpled paper and tissue that it's almost impossible to see anything else in there. It's a cassette tape, the sort Jon uses to record statements, labeled on the front with a brown strip of tape. It's addressed to the Head Archivist in a spidery handwriting.

Or: Gertrude Robinson made a tape as a warning to the next Head Archivist. What if he had gotten it?

#for organization purposes lol... mastered after an xf fic masterpost from ages ago #tma fic #the magnus archives #archivist martin #timsasha #wtgfs #jonmartin #i wrote this #long post

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wherevermyway · 4 years ago

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roller rinks and raspberry berets (1/2) // jeongbin // 18+

chapter one: heaven and back navigation: next chapter [in progress]

pairing: seo changbin x yang jeongin | past bang chan x seo changbin rating: explicit! 18+ warnings/tags: explicit sexual content, recreational drug use (LSD, weed), 1980s AU, strangers-to-lovers, the roller skates stay on during sex, past infidelity, phone sex, masturbation, semi-public sex word count: 11,606 also on AO3

originally posted: 16 november 2021

It’s 1987, and the party scene is as vibrant and lively as the neon rainbow everyone is painted in.

Several months after a nasty breakup, Seo Changbin’s friends set him up with a mutual friend, Yang Jeongin. They speak on the phone a couple of times, then decide to go through with the blind date set up for them at a local roller rink. Changbin realizes he never really learned how to skate, but with Jeongin's hands guiding him, anything's possible.

They take some questionable substances and sparks start to fly when the lights drop and the music gets louder.

It's neon night at The Roxanne, and things are about to liven up, in more ways than one.

disclaimer: this is a work of fiction! any reference to persons in this work of fiction are purely coincidental. the characters referenced from Stray Kids are interpretations loosely based on their personalities in the group and do not represent the real people behind the personas. if this, or any of the content included in the warnings above make you uncomfortable, please stop reading now.

A murky haze surrounded two men lying on a shag carpet in a rundown apartment. The stench of scorched marijuana and incense clung to the walls like the dingy wallpaper that was slowly starting to yellow and peel. If it wasn’t for the Madonna calendar hanging up right next to the fridge that had “MAY 1987” emblazoned in big, blocky orange letters, it would seem like the place was stuck in 1973.

“You’re gonna want this,” a young man with spiky, neon orange hair passes off a dime bag with a couple of tiny blotters in it to the other young man with shaggy black hair. “Neon night at The Roxanne always gets fuckin’ dope, but if you’re not trippin’ on something, it ain’t as good.”

“Word,” the man with black hair rubs his eyes and tosses the bag onto his chest. He brings a joint up to his lips, taking a deep inhale, before passing it back to the other man. The smoke hangs in his lungs for a few moments, before he carefully exhales the vapour into the air, letting the smoke feed into the cloud hovering above them. “You really think this Jeongin is as rad as Seungmin keeps hyping him up to be?”

The orange haired man coughs while he laughs. “Dunno, dude.” He takes another hit from the joint, and a wide grin spreads across his face. “I’ve met him a couple times. He plays the electric bass some band and thinks he’s good at surfing. Seung keeps telling me ‘Oh, Changbin’s gonna love him, Jeongin’s got a collection of weird records and refuses to use cassette tapes’ like it means something.”

Changbin fumbles himself upright and points at Minho, dime bag sliding off of his chest and down to the floor. “He’s got a point, dude,” the younger man, despite looking higher than a kite, attempts to look totally serious. “I told you, records just sound better. Don’t give me that shit about cassette tapes. The only shit tapes have for them is that they’re convenient for road trips. Sound-wise, it ain’t the same.”

The two of them stare at each other before bursting into a fit of the giggles. They laugh until their stomachs hurt and the cherry burns out of their joint.

“Anyway,” Minho wipes the corners of his eyes and pulls a slip of paper out of his back pocket, “you should give him a call before your date. Might make things a little less awkward.”

Changbin takes the slip of torn notebook paper and stares at it. He was doing fine until he saw the ten digits and ‘Jeongin’ on the paper, then his palms started to sweat a bit. “You really think he’s gonna like me?”

Minho relights the joint between his teeth and smirks, giving Changbin a coy glance. “Everyone likes you, dude. Chill out.”

Changbin didn’t get the courage to call Jeongin until Wednesday night, two days before their blind date. Minho was out for the night, going to some lame house party with Seungmin again. The two were practically attached at the hip, unsure if they were going to ever officially become an item or not; they had been on-again, off-again for nearly a year now. Minho was seriously considering asking Seungmin if they should settle down, take things seriously, but then Chan had broken up with Changbin, and it made everyone question if relationships were really worth it.

“Man,” Changbin sighed as he flopped down onto his bed. He reached over to his nightstand and cracked his knuckles before he scraped together enough weed to roll a quick joint. Minho was always better at it than him, but he tried his damnedest. As long as he could smoke up enough to forget about frantic college students contemplating the true meaning of Shakespeare’s work while he helped them search for reference materials, he didn’t really care what exactly the joint looked like.

It turned out a little crooked, but it didn’t matter. As long as it got the job done, right? He took a stray match from the tray and struck it against a matchbox, spinning it around the end of his joint as he took a deep inhale, then shook the match until the flame went out. As he watched the smoke leave his lips, he chewed on his lip a bit.

Tonight was the night. It had to be. There were only two nights to go.

His eyes fluttered down to the same scrap of paper that Minho had handed him a couple of days ago, sitting right next to the phone on his desk. When they first moved into this apartment, Minho teased him for having a rotary phone, instead of something with real push buttons. “Dude, you’re, like, twenty-five and you’ve got an old ass rotary phone. You’re fitting that old, crusty librarian stereotype, now you just need twenty cats and argyle-patterned wool sweaters covered in your cats’ fur.”

Minho earned the elbow in the ribs that Changbin gave him for that.

Changbin wasn’t sure how long he sat and stared at that scrap of paper, but it was long enough for him to get through his entire joint. Would Jeongin really like him? Could he handle the weird, nerdy rants Changbin could go on about the Dewey Decimal Classification when he got really baked? Did Jeongin even do, much less like, drugs?

Okay, if he was friends with Seungmin, he absolutely had to be fine with the last concern. That was one fear off of the list, alleviating his concerns a minute amount.

After Chan got sick of Changbin’s oddities, he was nervous that his next partner would be overly critical of everything he did. Afraid that he would spark an argument over something stupid, like the way that their albums were organized, or whether or not plates should be on the bottom shelf of a cupboard, or the second shelf.

Domestic life with a partner was stupid, and being stuck in the middle of one’s twenties, when someone supposed to be in the prime of their youth, was not the time to argue over fucking dinner plates. Changbin figured that now was the perfect time to drop acid on a date with some dude he never met, even if he wasn’t sure if the stranger was even cute or not. It didn’t matter.

Fuck it.

He placed the remnants of his burnt out joint on the metal tray, pushing it out of the way as he stood up, grabbing his phone and the paper off of his desk, dropping them onto his nightstand. Hopefully, this conversation would be long enough for him to be able to relax up against the wall, to get comfortable and bond. Even if it wasn’t a guarantee towards forever, Changbin would let his guard down just a little, let someone in again. It had been several months, nearly a year at this point, and it was time.

His fingers were slightly clammy, holding the flimsy paper in between his thumb and index finger. He took in a sharp breath, then brought the receiver up under his ear, propping it up with his shoulder. Subconsciously, Changbin furrowed his brows and stuck the tip of his tongue out through the corner of his lips as he punched in each digit into the rotary, letting the dial spin and click between each number.

After the tenth number was in, he sat back a bit, listening to the dial tone trill in his ear.

Once.

Was this the right number?

Twice.

Would Jeongin pick up?

Three rings.

Was he even home?

Four.

Was this a good idea?

Five. Five was making Changbin nervous, more nervous than he expected.

“Hello?” The voice on the other line was breathy and he heard a couple of small pants. It was easy to get distracted, Changbin getting lost in the possible reasons as to why the other voice was so… occupied.

“H-hi,” he stumbled over his words, forgetting how to form a coherent sentence. Shit, this was awkward. “I’m looking for Jeongin. Yang Jeongin. Do I have the right number?”

“Heh,” the other voice chuckles. “Depends on who’s asking.”

Arrogant. Changbin liked that. “Seo Changbin. Apparently, we’re going on a date on Friday, thanks to our friend Seungmin.”

“Damn,” the other young man sighed, “took you forever to call. Seungmin said he wasn’t gonna give me your number, that I should wait for you to call.” There’s a sound of something metallic clattering against a hard surface. “I don’t like waiting, but I figured I’d give it a chance. I’m tired of dating guys that have dated guys I’ve dated already.”

Changbin swallowed hard, not sure of what exactly he should say.

“That was a joke, dude.” Jeongin sighs, and there’s a bit of shuffling on the other line. “Please tell me you know how to laugh. If you don’t know how to laugh, I don’t know how this is gonna work out.”

“Yeah,” Changbin squeaks, “I just, I dunno, I’m not really good at talking over the phone unless it’s for, like, work or something.”

“Oh yeah!” The other man exclaims, and a slap against a hard surface comes through the tinny receiver. “Seungmin told me you’re a librarian. You don’t hear of many 25-year-old librarians, much less ones that are dudes, and even fewer that don’t have cats. Weird.” He laughs a little bit, a cute, light, floaty laugh. “Why did you become a librarian, of all things? Sounds kinda nerdy.”

Without thinking, Changbin grits his teeth in nervousness, reminded of all of the shitty jocks in high school giving him shit for spending all of his free time in the library, nose in some nonfiction books about music theory. None of those bastards got anywhere in life, anyways, so who was really laughing now? “It’s because I am a nerd,” he says, a bit colder than he should have, “but I like organization, helping people find things, and, honestly, just being able to feel a little smarter than most people sometimes.”

The weed was starting to really have an effect on him, allowing him to physically relax, but also be a bit more open. Perhaps he was a bit too open.

The two men share a brief pause over the phone and then Jeongin laughs. “So, you think you’re pretty smart, huh?”

“I mean,” Changbin leans up against the wall, tangling the phone cord aimlessly between his fingers, “I don’t have two degrees in this for nothing.”

“Ha,” Jeongin’s laugh bubbles up again, “dweeb.”

They chat aimlessly for a while, and Changbin finds out that Jeongin is, indeed, a musician. Dropped out of university to be a bassist with a couple of his friends, but he works in a pawn shop half-time.

“Pays the bills and it lets me get first pick of all of the good, barely-played records,” Jeongin quips. “Even if sometimes people wanna try to steal shit and we get threats of armed robbery every couple weeks. Stressful, but I got a copy of The Wall last week, brand new and unopened, for way cheaper than my boss would’ve sold it for, so that makes up for it.”

Changbin found Jeongin startlingly fascinating. They seemed like total opposites on some things, since Jeongin was an extrovert and Changbin was an introvert, but they agreed on important things, like music. “That reminds me,” he slid down to lay up against his bed and stare at the ceiling, “my roommate, Minho? He tried to tell me there’s no auditory difference between records and cassette tapes.”

“Dude!” Jeongin scoffs with offence. “You need a new roommate. What a shitty opinion.”

“I know, I know,” Changbin curls into himself a bit, a wide smile on his face as he laughs. “Minho doesn’t get it, man. I tried playing a couple different things, but he still didn’t get it.”

The two of them share a laugh over the line. It had been so long since someone other than Minho made Changbin genuinely smile and laugh like that, and he was starting to have a bit less reservation about Jeongin. Maybe this would work out, after all.

“So,” the other man clears his throat, trying to calm himself from laughing so hard, “I gotta ask. What’s your favourite year in music so far, since ’80? Don’t get me started on the 60s and 70s, because I have a lot of opinions.”

“That’s tough.” Changbin bites his tongue and squints, rolling his eyes back and forth, scanning the ceiling as if it would give him some sort of answer. “’84, if I have to pick. I mean, dude, look at Queen; they’re fucking killing it. ‘Radio Ga Ga’ is still playing everywhere. Don’t even get me started on ‘Take On Me’, either.”

Jeongin politely chuckles. “Alright, man, I gotta disagree. ’85. ‘Raspberry Beret’ is so good, like, it’s my favourite by Prince. ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’? Come on, man, The Breakfast Club. You can’t tell me that’s not iconic.”

“That’s one of my favourite movies, man.” Changbin’s face starts to hurt from smiling so much as he quotes the film: “‘We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.’”

There’s a soft laugh on the other line, something different about it, like the mood has shifted into something a little more serious. “Ah, Changbin. I knew I’d like you, not just for your opinions on records and cassette tapes. You seem pretty neat, and I wanna get to know you more.”

The blush that creeps up on Changbin’s face is uncomfortably hot. They had to have been on the phone for about an hour, but everything was starting to unravel naturally, comfortably, and it was exciting. His gaze falls as he turns his head to the side, eyeing the metal alarm clock on his nightstand.

“I’d like that, Jeongin,” he says, nearly whispering it. “I’ve gotta head to bed here in a bit, since I’ve got an early day of being your local resident nerd at the campus library tomorrow.”

“I haven’t seen you yet,” the other man lowers his voice, practically growling into the phone, “but you might just convince me that librarians and nerds can be hot and sexy, after all.”

Changbin practically chokes on his saliva at that comment. His eyes widen and he shakes his head a few times, almost comically. “I wouldn’t say that I’m either of those things, but I’m curious to hear what you think of me. Maybe we could pick up this conversation tomorrow?”

“I’m free all night, baby. Call me up whenever.”

The two of them offer impolite farewells, then Changbin softly hangs up the phone. He checks his alarm clock to make sure his alarm is set, then pulls the drawstring on his desk lamp, turning it off.

“Nerds can be hot and sexy, after all.” Jeongin’s voice echoed in his head, and just the thought of the way he said that caused his nerves to come to life, for his breath to quicken. What did this mysterious pawn shop clerk by day, musician by night look like? Was he any good in the sheets? Was he aggressive, was he soft?

If he wasn’t so tired, Changbin would’ve let his mind run a little more wild, maybe let his hands wander south. Instead, he quickly fell asleep, losing himself in the memory of Jeongin’s voice and the possibilities they had ahead of them.

The next day went by slower than it should have, and it was completely unfair. It was two in the afternoon when things came to a complete standstill. It was Thursday, and a lot of students would likely be in the middle of exams, so there wasn’t much to do, other than daydream about Jeongin while aimlessly thumbing through a catalogue of items for archiving.

Changbin stood at the archiving desk, the area completely emptied out and quiet. The lack of people meant there was a lack of work, allowing for his mind to travel to some interesting places: imagining bony fingers scanning his body, running down his torso, grabbing his hips. He subconsciously gripped the red pen in his hand a little tighter, leaning against the desk as he bit his lip, trying hard not to rut against the oaken wood beneath him.

He should be focusing on the lengthy parchment in front of him, waiting to be indexed. Waiting, like he was, to be aimlessly fucked into. It had been over a year since he last slept with someone, and it was starting to become tiresome. It usually didn’t bother him, but Jeongin’s voice and his words had been dancing around in his head all day, making his entire body tingle and tense.

Their blind date was tomorrow night, but Changbin wasn’t sure if he could hold out on getting off for one more day. He had to know more intimate details about Jeongin, and, nerves be damned, he was going to work up the courage to find out tonight.

Changbin nervously paced around his empty apartment, soles of his feet dragging across the shag carpet in the living room. He told himself he wouldn’t call Jeongin until 19:30 at the earliest, and calling him at exactly 19:30 would just be overkill and stupid. He couldn’t come off as needy or desperate, so he waited. Every couple of minutes, he would anxiously look up at the clock that hung up on the wall above his prized record player.

19:24.

“Dammit all to hell,” Changbin grumbled, nibbling on his thumbnail as he continued to pace. Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ was nearly finished playing, which meant he was going to have to flip the record over to side B, but he decided against it. No, he’d suffer in silence until 19:33; an arbitrary time, but random enough to seem unsuspicious. That meant a little under eight minutes to wait impatiently. He’d get through it, he figured, even though it would be painful.

As the song ended and Changbin went to shut off the record player and slip the vinyl back into its papery packaging, the phone rang. A gasp silently escaped his lips as he looked up at the clock. 19:26.

No, it couldn’t be Jeongin. Changbin didn’t give him his phone number. Still, he ran off to his bedroom. He shouldn’t get his hopes up, but it was better to be prepared just in case. He slammed his door behind him and rushed to grab the receiver, anxiously bringing it up to his ear.

“Hello?” He tried so hard to stay calm as he answered the phone.

“Hey!” Changbin frowned as he realized the voice on the other line was Minho. “It’s just me. I’m gonna be at Seungmin’s tonight. We’ve got, uh,” he lowers his voice, “I’m probably not gonna be home until, like, Sunday at this rate. Seungmin’s got plans.”

He tried really hard not to, but Changbin still rolled his eyes in envy at his roommate. “Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled, “have fun getting the life pounded out of you. Hopefully you can still walk by the time you come home on Monday.”

“Oh come on,” Minho scoffed. “According to Seungmin, don’t be surprised if Jeongin’s got similar plans for the both of you if you two hit it off.”

Changbin shook his head and instantly flushed at the thought, his brain malfunctioning. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s nothing.” There’s some shuffling on the other end of the line, and then Minho gasps and laughs. “I gotta go, dude. Good luck this weekend, bye!”

Before he can say anything in response, Minho hangs up, leaving Changbin staring blankly at the receiver. He slams it down on the phone and groans loudly. A few moments pass before he decides to turn his overhead light off, and turn his desk lamp on. 19:30. There was only a little bit longer before he wouldn’t be worried about calling Jeongin, so he stared down at the drawer of his nightstand.

“Just in case, right?” A nervous scoff left his lips as he whispered into the air.

He pulled out a small bottle of lube, and set it down next to the phone. Even if his conversation with Jeongin didn’t go the way he was hoping it would, he wouldn’t let himself fall asleep unsatisfied tonight. There was no way.

19:31.

Two minutes to go until—

The phone rang again, causing Changbin to jump in place, nearly out of his own skin. “What the fuck?” He shouted to himself as he picked up the receiver. “Dude, Minho, I get it, you don’t have to rub it in my face.”

“Changbin?” The other voice was decidedly not Minho. No, it was too familiar, yet unfamiliar all at once. Painfully new.

“Jeongin? How did you…?”

The younger man chuckled. “I was with Seungmin today. Told him about our conversation yesterday, and he thought it’d be fine if he gave me your number. Maybe call you a little earlier, throw you off your guard.”

Changbin scoffed and flopped down onto his bed unceremoniously. “Well, it worked.”

“Clearly.”

There was a bit of an awkward silence, and Changbin bit his lip, trying to think of what to say next. He had all of these great topics for conversation run through his head while he was at work, but now they were all gone, like they never existed. The only obvious option that came to him was about their date tomorrow. “About our date tomorrow,” he starts, aimlessly watching the second hand tick away on his alarm clock, “how are we gonna know how to find each other?”

Jeongin hummed a mindless tune for a moment, likely contemplating his plans. “Wait for me at the bar. I’ll be there, wearing a neon pink shirt. I’ve got freshly-dyed teal blue hair, so you might need to get your eyes checked if you miss me.”

A soft smile crawled its way up Changbin’s face. “That sounds eclectic.”

“Comes with who I am; the whole package deal is a little unconventional. Hopefully you can handle that.”

“Hmm,” Changbin hums, then tsks, “might be a little difficult. A neon-clad, blue-haired musician and a boring, black-haired librarian that only owns dark clothes. We’re gonna be quite the duo.”

“Come on,” Jeongin whines, “you’ve gotta have a little neon in that closet of yours.”

“Nope. You can be the neon, and I’ll be the night, since it’s neon night, after all. Yin and yang. Light and dark.”

There’s a soft chuckle on the other line. “Can’t have the day without the night, huh?”

“When you put it that way,” Changbin starts, but lets his voice trail off. Musicians sure seemed to be good with words. He couldn’t help but wonder, with a silver tongue like that, if Jeongin wrote the lyrics for the small punk group he was a part of. Come to think of it, a punk bassist in neon was an interesting mental image, almost some sort of visual dissonance.

“What are you wearing?” Jeongin pulls Changbin from his thoughts, voice a bit lower than it was prior.

The question perplexed Changbin as he mentally thumbed through the clothes in his closet. “I dunno, probably my Bad Religion t-shirt so I’m noticeable and some ripped skinny jeans. Think it roughly fits the non-neon aesthetic. Is that fine?”

“Perhaps I should’ve phrased that better.” A laugh. “That’s not what I meant.”

Changbin knots his eyebrows together and cards a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what you mean, then. I figured it would fit for the location, and—“

“I meant right now.” The bluntness in Jeongin’s statement is jarring.

“Oh.” Changbin can’t manage much else, his brain slowly grinding its gears around as he tried to get back into the right mental space for… this.

This was really fucking happening. Not just a delusional fantasy he had hoped for.

He must have taken too long thinking about it, because Jeongin frantically starts stuttering on the other line. “Wait, no, sorry,” he starts, “that was abrupt. I’m sorry, like, shit, we’ve barely spoken for more than an hour to each other and I’m already trying to pull something like this and I probably just came off as—“

“What do you want me to wear right now?” It comes out a bit too naturally, too smoothly off of Changbin’s tongue, like it was obvious he wanted to see where this would go.

A beat passes. “Ideally?” Jeongin quietly whispers, shuffling a bit on his end. “I’d want you naked. But I don’t think I want you there yet.”

Changbin’s heart was about to beat out of his chest and his dick responded in kind, slowly pressing up against his briefs more and more as his blood coursed through his veins. “Not yet, you say? How come?”

“I don’t like instant gratification. If you can’t work for it, what’s the point?”

“Interesting. Am I working for it, or are you?” Changbin’s free hand slips down to the hem of his shirt, playing with a loose string, rolling it nervously between his thumb and index finger.

Jeongin hums. “Tonight? I don’t usually do this, since I like to be the one in control, but it’s been so long, I’ll make an exception.”

In the seven years that Changbin had been an adult, he had only tried phone sex once, and it was awkward. Chan was in northern California for work, and they were both drunk and lonely. They tried to make it work, but the pacing was off, the phrasing was awkward, especially since Chan didn’t try to experiment with dirty talk, and they ended up falling asleep on each other.

This, though, simply felt different and exciting.

“What if I don’t want you to be naked?” Changbin tugged harder at the string, starting to rip it from the hem, slowly unravelling it and ruining the stitching of his shirt. It didn’t matter, he hardly noticed. He could tear his shirt apart completely and he still wouldn’t have cared.

“Seems like you like to make people work for it, too.” Jeongin shuffled on the other line again, his voice a bit clearer, like he was closer to the phone. “Maybe you like to do questionable things in questionable places. I don’t know you well — at all, actually — but I just get this feeling about you. The quiet ones are always the fun, adventurous ones.”

“It must be true, then.” Changbin pauses to take in a breath, to calm his nerves over what he was about to say to a stranger over the phone. “I thought about you today while I was working on a catalogue for our archives. It’s a boring, thoughtless job sometimes, allows me to have a lot of time to let my mind wander. I was leaning up against the desk, pen in hand, and all I could think about was how pretty your voice would sound as I slowly fucked into you, made you beg to me to go faster, but I’d just slow down.” The string detached from Changbin’s shirt, yet he continued to roll it between his fingers.

Jeongin’s breathing started to pick up on the other end. “What else?”

Changbin discarded the string haphazardly and nestled the receiver in the crook of his neck, shuffling his shorts and briefs down just enough for his dick to spring out. “I’d bite the back of your neck all the way up your ear. Tell you to stay quiet, since you were being too loud and whiny, that you’d be the reason we’d get caught.”

“Yeah,” a pant, “can’t have us getting caught. It’d be quite a rush, getting fucked by the hot, nerdy librarian when he’s supposed to be working.”

He couldn’t take it anymore. Changbin grabbed the bottle of lube from the nightstand, haphazardly squirting some of it all over his crotch, somewhat missing his dick in his rush. “The only thing I’d be working would be your cock in my hand. Make you whine, make you fucking miserable as I bring you so close to coming but keep you hanging, begging for me to let you come.” He tossed the bottle on to the floor, then mopped up some of the stray lube off of his stomach, then moved to stroke himself a bit hastily. It had been so long, and to actually have an intimate connection with another human being, albeit over the phone, was enough excitement to have him close to the edge already.

Jeongin must have had a similar idea, because his laboured breathing comes over the line in a constant rhythm. “Maybe I don’t wanna take it slow.”

“Maybe I don’t care.”

“Oh,” the other man sounded a bit shocked, gasping quietly. “You’re interesting, mister sexy librarian. What if I decided to push back? Literally? Bring my hips back up against yours, grind my ass up on you and make you whine and make you fucking miserable?”

“Shit,” Changbin growled, not expecting that kind of reaction. “I might have to grab you by the hair, push you down into the desk and give a needy little brat like you exactly what you want.” The thought was almost too much. He knew he was getting close; he should’ve slowed the pacing down with his hand, but he couldn’t stop. Instead, he was increasing his pace and tightening the grip at the top of his hand a bit more. “How would you like that?”

“Fuck,” Jeongin sounds like he’s completely lost in the moment, breathing erratic and letting full gasps and moans escape now. It sounded like some sort of wildly inappropriate choral music. “Changbin, that’s so fucking hot. I wish this was your hand around me instead. It feels so good, but it’s not enough.” Changbin lets out a choked whine, lost in the thought of what Jeongin looked like as he jerked himself off. “Ah, Changbin, I need you so badly. To feel you around me, inside me, and I—“

Suddenly, the light on the edge of Changbin’s desk went out and Jeongin’s voice went silent. The ambient humming that usually filled his apartment was dead. It appeared as if his part of LA got wrapped up in a sudden blackout, since everything everywhere was dark and quiet.

This couldn’t have come at a more horrible time.

Changbin let out an exasperated, desperate yell in frustration. As he angrily tossed the receiver to the side, causing the entire phone to go flying, he stared up at the ceiling in the darkness and swore that he was never going to try phone sex again.

Zero for two. Phone sex was cursed.

Even though today was the day that Changbin was finally going to meet Jeongin for their date, he was in an absolutely dreadful mood. Sure, after the power went out for the entire night, he had managed to get himself off, but it was lacklustre and nowhere near as good as he was anticipating it to be with his conversation with Jeongin. The pathetic way that the younger man mewled his name followed him like a shadow all day, echoing in the space between his ears all day.

“Changbin,” the voice taunted him, “I need you so badly.”

He groaned and leaned up against his archive desk, not even bothering to try to pay attention to his work. There was no way he was going to get anything done while he was too distracted thinking about fucking this stranger up against it, pushing his face into the mass of open books and large parchment. They would knock off all of the paraphernalia, pens clattering like raindrops against the ground, sound being absorbed by the walls of books surrounding them. God, how good it would be to hear his name coming from those lips one more time.

“I wish this was your hand around me instead.”

His eyes lulled to the corner of the table, pushing up his glasses to better focus on a cheap digital clock showing 15:40 in bright red lights. “Goddammit,” Changbin grumbled to himself and let his head collide against the open book in front of him. The tension in his slacks was causing time to inch by impossibly slow, like he was stuck in molasses. He had less than five and a half hours to go until he would finally meet the man the engrossed his entire mind for the past 48 hours and he couldn’t wait to give Jeongin a taste of the thoughts that consumed him.

Only a bit over five hours, now. He could do this.

Changbin had to have mentally pored over his entire appearance several times as he showered. Glasses? No, those would just be a nuisance; it’d be best to just suffer with a little bit of blurry vision for distant things. Besides, he was going to be seeing crazy shit halfway through their date, if they hit it off well enough to trip together.

So, no glasses. One thing off the list.

After his shower, Changbin thumbed through his closet, lost in a sea of black and indigo clothing, with a couple of odd white button up shirts that were frequently ignored. His graphic shirts were towards the left-hand side, reserved for his days off and the nights he’d go out with Minho and Seungmin, where he tried to look as normal as possible, and not like the dweeby librarian everyone knew him to be. It took several flicks of the thumb, but he eventually found the Bad Religion shirt he promised he was going to wear. That, and the torn up black skinny jeans he already had on his bed, were the only things Jeongin had to go off of.

Changbin was desperately hoping that Jeongin would find him in the sea of people that would be there. If this date flopped, he was going to hide for weeks in embarrassment, showing up to something so high energy looking like a black cloud of doom and gloom and dateless. The first half of that was tolerable, but to be dateless after all of that would be devastating to his ego.

Thankfully, Jeongin was going to be the visual antithesis to Changbin’s all-black attire. He was going to be like a dark cloud, a shadow to be passed over, and Jeongin would be that bright ray of vivid neon pink and teal blue. They’d be eyesores in their own rights, but it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would really be paying close attention to them tonight; neon nights were always the nights where people would get drugged out, smoke weed openly and fuck in the washrooms, and everyone would let go of their faux daily life personas and be carefree for one night.

It didn’t take long for Changbin to change into his outfit. He turned his head to look at his nightstand, squinting to make out the time on the clock. 19:52. All he needed to do was fuss over his appearance in the mirror while he would throw on some eyeliner. He would then fix his hair, gelling it into some sort of puffed out “just woke up” look that would just deflate after an hour of hanging around a humid, cramped environment packed with people. Maybe he’d wear those knee-high platform combat boots he only wore once to a concert a couple years ago.

First impressions were important, even if he knew he’d look like a mess at the end of the night. He wanted to prove to Jeongin that librarians could, in fact, be hot and sexy, even if it wasn’t in the conventional ways society would prefer.

The platform combat boots were a bad idea.

It wasn’t a far walk, but as Changbin waited in line outside of The Roxanne, he was constantly adjusting his feet and kicking the toes of his boots against the firm concrete of the sidewalk. He knew he’d be off of his feet soon enough, but getting to that point was proving to be brutal. The line slowly moved, people gradually being allowed in after paying the cover fee. Changbin flicked his arm, looking at the silver Royal Oak decorating his wrist, eyeing the time. 21:05.

He huffed, furrowing his brows and staring at the gunpowder grey backdrop of his watch. This was his lucky watch that his parents gifted him for graduating with his master’s degree last year. It was what he wore for his interview at UCLA, almost positive he wouldn’t get the entry-level librarian position he applied for, since it was heavily competitive, but he somehow managed to get it. It was the watch he wore when he and Minho signed for their shoddy apartment. It was what he wore when he gained the courage to call Jeongin.

Maybe superstition was stupid, but Changbin really wanted to put all of his cards on the table and risk believing in it tonight.

The line continued to shuffle forward, and Changbin’s nerves started to really consume him. On the outside, he tried to look cool and composed, his thumbs gently tucked into the belt loops of his pants, shoulders tucked back, head propped upright. Internally, however, he was very much the opposite of the cool-guy persona he was putting on. If he could scream and still be seen as sane, he absolutely would.

Another couple of steps. Changbin pulled out his wallet from his back pocket, sliding out his driver’s licence and a fiver as he approached the sturdily built man that stood outside of the front door. The man didn’t bother looking at his licence and just took the bill from him. They exchanged no words, the man just tilting his head towards the door, and Changbin simply walked in.

His fingers trembled a bit as he anxiously jammed his licence back into his wallet, exchanging it for a ten-dollar-bill, and returned the billfold to his back pocket. A long sigh escaped his lips as scanned the room, seeing no one with teal hair and a bright pink shirt as he approached the bar, finding a spot where he could keep an eye on the front door. He waved down one of the bartenders, who glided over towards him on her skates as she smiled at him.

“Hey there, what can I get ya?” She smiled at him, excitedly tapping her hands on the wooden countertop.

Changbin passed her the cash and shrugged. “A gin and tonic is fine. I don’t care what kind of gin you use.”

“You got it,” she skated away, off to make his drink.

Again, Changbin looked down to his watch. 21:21. The lights flickered off nine minutes early, UV lighting illuminating the entire rink, save the halogen lights by the washrooms, entrance, and most of the bar. The bartender returned with Changbin’s drink and his change.

“Quinine sure is fascinating, ain’t it? I love anything with tonic water on neon nights. Lemme know if you need anything else, buttercup.” She smiled, then skated away to her next customer before Changbin could make any sort of commentary. He stared wildly at his drink, literally glowing in a nuclear shade of blue, wondering if it had been adulterated. Quinine. He recognized the word from one of his organic chemistry texts from university, but the details of it escaped him.

Fuck it. Might as well just drink it.

He fumbled the cash into his right pocket, not bothering to stuff it back into his wallet. There was no way he was going to stand up in these fucking shoes unless he absolutely had to. Another glance to his watch. 21:24. Changbin grumbled under his breath, bringing the glass cup to his lips, biting the plastic straw between his teeth as he sucked up some of the toxic-looking liquid and he looked to the door. The drink nearly went everywhere as his eyes went wide and he saw a human glow stick walk in.

Neon pink shirt. Hair as violently blue as his own drink, topped with a purple beret. This was his human glow stick. It was fucking Yang Jeongin, actually here, in the flesh. Changbin didn’t even try to doubt it.

The black-haired man dipped his head down in nervousness, his heartbeat thrumming so loudly, it overtook the music being played over the loud speakers behind him. He had gotten this far, but Changbin had no idea what to do now. These men had essentially fucked over the phone just the night prior — well, they had attempted to, for all intents and purposes.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

How do people do blind dates? In the six years he spent studying research and analysis, he never came across something like this in his texts and papers. The countless nights he spent researching the human connection and other psychological and sociological theories had meant jack shit when it actually came to experiencing them in person. If his hair wasn’t well-coiffed, Changbin would be nervously running his fingers through his hair and biting off every single fingernail he could. It had been years since he dated, and this could go very poorly.

Something inside of him compelled him to look again. Perhaps the human glow stick was a figment of his imagination, the wrong person. Something. Anything. Anyone other than Yang Jeongin. Changbin sucked down another large swig of his drink, and turned his head slightly, and saw that the glow stick was scanning the bar. Changbin was about to turn away out of nervousness when they made eye contact.

He hadn’t consumed any questionable substances other than a couple sips of his drink, but it was like a fire had been set alight within him, burning away some of his anxiety and replacing it with a sense of confidence. That was definitely Jeongin, the gaze they exchanged with each other left no room for question.

The younger man smiled, biting his lip as he excitedly trekked up to Changbin. He stopped in front of him, gazing down at the older man’s shirt, then wiggling a bit in joy as he opened his mouth.

“Please tell me you’re Seo Changbin, otherwise you’re going to be very disappointed tonight.”

“Well,” Changbin couldn’t help but half-smirk with a bit of a cocky arrogance he didn’t know he had. He set his drink down on the bar and leaned on his elbow, slowly looking up at the neon-clad man. “That depends on who’s asking, don’t you think?” He used the first words Jeongin spoke at him against him, and the younger man giggled.

“Yang Jeongin, at your service. Raspberry beret included. Still the best year in music this decade.” The blue-haired man winks and leans in close, very close to the older man, as he then rests his arms on the countertop, flagging down the same bartender as before. She nods and starts working on a drink without even talking to him. The young man sits back on his heels and boldly slaps a hand on Changbin’s thigh. He moves in, right up next to the black-haired man’s ear, lips practically touching it as he lowers his voice to a whisper. “You know, Changbin, librarians aren’t supposed to be hot and sexy, but man, am I glad I’ve been proven wrong.”

Changbin may have been nervous as all hell just a few minutes ago, but now he had a sneaking feeling that maybe, just maybe, this date was going to work out after all.

The two of them share a couple of drinks at the bar, really hitting it off. Jeongin doesn’t lift his hand from Changbin’s thigh, which the elder doesn’t mind, slowly getting the courage to place his hand on top of it after their second drink. At some point, Jeongin sticks his tongue out in defiance, showing off a neon green tongue ring on bright display, and Changbin is impressed.

“I’m full of a lot of secrets, you know.” The younger man teases, aimlessly biting on his straw.

“I guess I’m gonna have to slowly unwrap you in order to find out all of those secrets, huh?” Thanks to the alcohol, Changbin’s a lot smoother than he thinks he is, realizing that the words sounded a lot less innocuous than he intended. He blinks rapidly and stumbles over his words. “Sorry,” he apologizes, then rubs his forehead with his free hand. “I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”

“That was a good pickup line,” the blue-haired man giggles into his drink, emptying the contents of the glass, then slamming it down on the counter. He takes his newly-freed hand and rests his head in his palm, happily smiling at the man in front of him. “Now what?”

Changbin gently sets his drink on the counter, then reaches into his left pocket, scooping up the dime bag from the other day, tucking it into the palm of his hand. “I got these from Seungmin the other day. Kind of a strange question, but,” he looks up to the younger man and licks his bottom lip, “you trust me enough to get a little tripped out?”

Jeongin excitedly shimmies his shoulders back and forth a couple of times. “You’re friends with Seungmin, so that’s good enough for me. Whatcha got on the menu for tonight, hmm?”

“Something pretty to go right up next to that tongue ring of yours.” Changbin takes his hand off of Jeongin’s, inconspicuously fiddling with the bag. He pulls out a small baby pink square of paper, briefly flashing it at the younger man. “I can take it first if you don’t trust me.”

Jeongin doesn’t say anything, only moving in a bit closer, and he sticks his tongue out, mouth wide open, everything shiny with saliva and on full display. He looks up to Changbin with pleading eyes and makes a little cooing noise.

Changbin let his eyes flutter shut for a brief second as he sharply inhaled through his nose and then shifted in his seat in mild discomfort. “You’re dangerous,” he whispered, eyes half-lidded as he grabbed Jeongin’s chin, lightly tugging him closer for a moment, as he pressed the paper onto the moist, warm tongue in front of him. “I’m ready to get burned with fire, though.” He wastes no time to pluck the second piece of paper from the plastic bag, pressing it against his own tongue. “Let everything chill out on your tongue for a while, alright?”

“You say that like you think I’ve never dropped acid before, dude.” The younger man smiled widely, then tugged at Changbin’s hand, pulling him up to his feet. “Let’s go get some skates and roll around while we wait.”

Changbin’s eyes went wide and his feet screamed at him as he was jostled upright. It was going to hurt, but it didn’t matter. A bit of discomfort would be worth it to see the joyful look on Jeongin’s face as they glided around on the polished floor, waiting for the colours to slowly meld together and wrap around them in a hazy, yet incandescent rainbow.

“Wait a second,” Jeongin cackles and drops the laces of his skates. “You mean to tell me you’re twenty-five and you’ve never been good at skating? Dude. Your childhood must’ve been boring as shit.”

“Come on,” Changbin drawls, sighing as he pouts at the younger man. “The only physical activity I really like is weightlifting, and that’s not even a frequent hobby of mine. I’d rather get baked after work and listen to records while laying on the floor.” The two men stare at each other for a minute, then burst into laughter.

“Alright, I can see you getting baked, but weightlifting? As if, man.” Jeongin shakes his head and bends back down to finish tying his laces. “Librarians aren’t supposed to be buff and shit, that’s not how that works at all.”

A sarcastic huff escapes Changbin’s lips. He drops to the floor, grabbing Jeongin’s hands and looking up to the younger man, his face getting dangerously close, close enough to almost brush their lips together. They stare at each other for a moment, the air stilling around them, before the older man moves to touch their cheeks together, lips against Jeongin’s ear. “You also said librarians aren’t supposed to be hot, but I proved you wrong with that, too.” Changbin lets go of Jeongin’s hands, moving them to dance his fingertips against the top of the neon man’s thighs. “Let me see how many times I can prove you wrong tonight.”

Jeongin lets out a shaky gasp, pressing his cheek up against the older man’s, moving in close as if he was about to kiss him, but Changbin pulls away too quickly, winking at him before he moves down to help tie his laces. “God,” the younger man sighs, throwing his head back and subtly rolling his hips in his chair to readjust, “you’re a tease, man. That’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair sometimes. Gotta have the dark to appreciate the light.” Changbin smirks to himself as he finishes knotting the laces in his hands. He makes his way to his feet, awkwardly stumbling a bit before he reaches his hands down in front of Jeongin. “Shall we?”

Jeongin takes one of Changbin’s hands and helps himself upright. “Awfully confident for someone who can’t skate.” He smiles, then gently tugs the older man towards the open air of the entrance of the rink.

Changbin sucks air in through his teeth as he starts to move, flailing his free hand a bit as he awkwardly shuffles his feet to help him move with a bit more purpose. They step on to the glossy hardwood floor, and Jeongin spins around, skating backwards as he pulls Changbin along. He reaches out for the older man’s other hand, which Changbin carefully reaches down and grabs. They interlace their fingers together, staring longingly at each other.

“I trusted you with the acid,” Jeongin says at a volume just loud enough to carry over the song roaring through the speakers, “now trust me with the skating, yeah?”

Changbin nods, his face slightly wrinkled up in nervousness. He bites his lip, starting to get the hang of the way they slid around the floor, only having some issues with the rounded corners. People were flying past them, but it didn’t matter. The only thing Changbin wanted to focus on was Jeongin.

“You’re getting it,” the younger man smiled, standing totally upright and pulling the older man closer to him, maybe just a few centimetres away from each other. They smile softly at one another, slowing down a bit as Changbin started to get lost in the way the brilliant lighting warmed against Jeongin’s face, highlighting his high cheekbones and his soft lips.

There was nothing more that Changbin wanted than to kiss those lips.

As he was leaning in, Jeongin let go of his hands. “You teased me earlier,” he scoffed, “now you’ve gotta earn that kiss.” He looks over his shoulder, then turns back and smiles. “You’ve gotta make one full loop around: from the entrance and back. Then you’ll have earned that kiss from me.”

Changbin opens his mouth to protest, flailing around a bit, and Jeongin winks and practically flies away on his skates. He grits his teeth and huffs. “I’m gonna show you, goddammit.” The black-haired man frowns in determination, getting bolder with each stride he takes. Jeongin loops around again when he’s about halfway through, sticking his tongue out and blowing him a kiss as he spins around and jumps up into the air, landing perfectly back onto his feet. The younger man is off in a flash again, a trail of pink following him as he rolls away.

Oh. Changbin shakes his head as he comes around a corner. The acid had started to kick in and things got a little brighter, colours blurring together in the distance, lazily trailing around in a stutter as he moved around. He stared at the entrance of the rink, maybe fifty metres away, smiling to himself as he got closer and closer. At about twenty metres, Jeongin flew past him and veered off towards the wall, waiting with a smile.

As he approached Jeongin, Changbin intentionally didn’t slow down as much as he should have. He slowed a bit, and the younger man winced a bit and recoiled, preparing for a rough impact. However, the crash never came. Changbin pressed his hands into Jeongin’s chest as he got close, gently colliding against him, both of them landing against the wall.

They didn’t say anything. Changbin snaked a hand to Jeongin’s hip, and another up under his jaw, pulling it up into his. Their lips danced up against each others’, and there’s an electrical feeling that runs through Changbin’s veins, a spark between them. Their noses brush, nuzzling into the other as their lips open.

Jeongin tastes like lemon-lime soda and vodka, his tongue feeling almost like it was still covered in carbon dioxide as it rolled around Changbin’s. The older man digs his thumb into the younger man’s hip, causing a muffled squeak to roll up into his throat. An explosion of yellows and greens cloud Changbin’s vision as sounds start to translate into colours and haptic sensations.

It almost feels like they’re meant to be. Jeongin is the treble to Changbin’s bass. The light to his darkness. He is the neon glow stick to his dark, unlit candle. It may have been the drugs and the alcohol heightening everything, but from the way their humour complemented each other, to their oddities being so different yet similar, to the way that how sweet Jeongin’s kiss was against Changbin’s sour lips, everything was perfect.

“You’re perfect,” Changbin breathes into Jeongin’s mouth. “I don’t know why,” he pulls the younger man’s bottom lip gently between his teeth as he pulls away, staring up into half-open eyes, “but I just feel it.” The synth music beating along in the background practically pushes them closer, inviting them to stay wrapped up into one another.

Jeongin pushes back up against Changbin’s lips for a quick, hasty kiss that feels like electric pink and sparkling green. “It’s the drugs, but I’ll take the compliment.”

“I’m serious,” Changbin smiles at the sweetness of Jeongin’s lips against his again. “Like, your cheekbones. They’re so prominent, sharp, perfect. Your whole face just radiates brilliance. It’s like all of the colours dance off of your face and wrap it in this warm energy that demands attention.”

“Your lips are perfect,” Jeongin retorts with a laugh. “The way that your face wrinkles up when you smile. I wanna take that in, make you laugh for hours just to watch you scrunch your face together. Listen to the way your laugh staccatos discordantly against the music playing in the background.”

A warmth spreads in Changbin’s stomach, deep purples and pinks blending around the edges of his vision. It was time. He decides to finally bite the bullet, swallowing hard as he tries to keep his volume low enough for only Jeongin to hear him, “I wanna hear you say it again.”

There’s a short pause as Jeongin stills. “What’re you talking about?”

Changbin pushes Jeongin into the wall, rubbing his waist against the younger man’s. “Last night,” he trails his lips up Jeongin’s cheek, all the way up to his ear, “you told me you wanted me. Needed me.”

There’s a burst of orange as Jeongin laughs. “That’s right, isn’t it? Whatcha gonna do if I tell you that again, now that I have you here in my hands?” His hands quickly slap up against Changbin’s ass, grabbing it tightly. “We’re still in public, baby.”

A strangled moan accidentally comes from Changbin, feeling every nerve in his spine erupt in baby blues and jarring yellows at the younger man’s touch. “I don't care where we are. I’m gonna give you what you want,” he whispers, nibbling on the earlobe in front of him. “I’m going to steal you away, pull you away into the washroom, and I’m gonna fuck you up against the tiling or the wallpaper or whatever dingy shit they’ve got in there.”

It was like nobody was around, not that anyone was paying attention, anyways. The two of them ground up against each other, practically fucking as everyone went along with their lives around them. They were far from the only ones becoming so acquainted on the hardwood floor, but it didn’t matter. As far as Changbin was concerned, they were the only two people in the room, in the entire building, in the entire world.

“It’s tiling,” Jeongin whispers and bites Changbin’s ear, causing a neon rainbow, rippling in time to the music around them, to cloud his vision. “I let you take control over the phone last night, so I’m gonna do the fucking tonight. Come on.”

Changbin doesn’t have the wherewithal to protest as he’s dragged away by Jeongin, pulling them off towards the flickering, nauseatingly yellow-tinted halogen that illuminated the washroom door. Somehow, they had gotten lucky and nobody was in the entire washroom. They roll into the large stall towards the back. Jeongin locks the door behind them and pushes Changbin against the back wall, crashing their lips together.

The weird mixture of normal lighting with blacklight paints a strange picture against the back of Changbin’s eyelids. Each grazing of Jeongin’s teeth on his lips causes purple lines to streak down a backdrop of orange and crimson.

Warm. Jeongin was warm. Everything about him radiated warm colours and energy, even if his hair was the opposite of that.

Jeongin trails his lips down Changbin’s neck, and he grazes his teeth against the soft skin. “Wait,” the older man quietly protests, “don’t do anything that’ll leave a mark there.”

“Why not?” Jeongin looks up to the older man and smirks. “Afraid your coworkers and students are gonna find out you’re actually a bit of a freak who wants to get fucked in public?”

“Actually,” Changbin huffs, “kinda, yeah. Anything below the neck is fair game, though.

“I respect that.” Jeongin huffs, tugging the loose neckline of Changbin’s shirt down, exposing his collarbone. “Oh,” he pauses, cocking his head to the side. “781?”

Changbin hums, flushing in slight embarrassment, as he feels Jeongin’s eyes on his tattoo. “Dewey Decimal Classification. Music theory call number. That’s why there’s a treble clef next to it.”

“God, you’re such a fucking nerd. That’s hot as hell.” The younger man groans, then starts desperately sucking and biting up against the sensitive flesh.

Changbin doesn’t try to hide a needy whine at the sensation of Jeongin’s teeth against his skin. His hips roll up subconsciously, craving for some sort of stimulation against his growing erection. “Jeongin,” he whimpers, “I don’t wanna wait anymore.”

The younger man relinquishes the skin from his teeth. “Funny,” he says, standing up and looking down at the older man, pressing their hips together. “Neither do I.”

They wantonly kiss each other as they fumble with their pants. Jeongin tosses his beret to the floor, pulling out a condom and a small, travel-sized bottle of lube out from his back pocket. “As much as I love kissing those lips of yours and looking at your face,” he pulls away, quickly pressing a kiss to Changbin’s forehead, “this is gonna be a lot easier if you turn around.”

A nervous laugh bubbles up from Changbin as he somehow manages to roll around, pressing his hands up against the clammy tiling. He bends over slightly, pressing his hips against Jeongin’s crotch, eliciting a small groan from the younger man. Within a moment, thumbs are haphazardly tugging his waistband down, exposing his skin to the warm, open air.

“Your ass is really nice,” Jeongin takes in a quick breath and ghosts his fingers over the smooth skin.

“You say that now,” Changbin whispers as streams of green drift up from the corners of his vision, “but wait until you’re actually inside me.”

A desperate huff comes from Jeongin. “Fuck,” he groans, squeezing some lube on to his fingers and bringing his hand up to the older man’s perineum, dragging them up slowly to rub against his entrance. “I’ve been thinking about this nonstop since you told me you’d fuck me against your stupid work desk.” He coaxes a finger inside, and Changbin whines, rubbing his cheek against the dingy washroom tile. “I was ready to come right then and there. I didn’t know you’d be that much of a freak when Seungmin told me you were a librarian.”

Jeongin’s finger curls around a bit as he explores around, causing Changbin to let out soft little pants as his skin stretched against the finger. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he manages to grumble in between pants, “or how freaky I am. Maybe one day I’ll show you my collection of glass sex toys I keep hidden under my bed.”

Another finger slips in, and another moan loudly comes from the panting librarian. “Keep it down. Don’t wanna get kicked out with a hard-on, do you?” Changbin weakly nods, his eyes rolling back as he bites his lips and moves against Jeongin’s fingers. The younger man continues to stretch the sensitive skin as he gently rolls both of his fingers around, occasionally separating them in a scissoring-like motion.

Changbin bites back a loud, throaty moan, bringing his hand up to his mouth so he can bite on his knuckle. Colours rippled around in discordant patterns, roughly clashing up against each other, sparks of white popping up at random. “Jeongin,” he whines out, voice slightly muffled.

The younger man shudders at the sound of his name being uttered, and he slips his ring finger inside. As soon as the finger is completely inside of Changbin, the older man throws his head back and slips a bit on his skates. Jeongin grabs his hip tightly with his free hand. “Don’t worry, baby,” he whispers, in a soft, loving voice, “I’m not gonna let you fall. I’ll keep you safe right here, so let yourself go.”

Changbin’s hand leaves his mouth and slams up against the wall, curling his fingernails into the grout between the tiles. He closes his eyes tightly and loses himself in the sensation of being filled by three fingers, slowly working his way up to being prepared for whatever Jeongin’s dick was going to feel like inside of him. What he wasn’t prepared for, however, was when Jeongin’s middle finger curled up against his prostate and he arched his back in surprise.

“Jeongin,” he panted, rubbing his cheekbone into the tile, “fuck, there, right there.”

“Don’t worry,” the younger man reassures him, “all in due time. Trust me, a bassist knows what he’s doing when it comes to his fingers.”

“That’s,” Changbin pants again, “a terrible fucking pun.”

Jeongin rubs all three of his fingers in a circle, causing the older man to writhe under him. “Yeah, yeah,” he coos, “you don’t seem to actually be complaining, though.”

“I’m only gonna complain if you don’t shut up and fuck me here soon,” Changbin whines through gritted teeth. “I don’t wanna come unless it’s from your dick, alright?”

“Fine,” Jeongin grins, removing his fingers slowly, making sure to drag them down the walls of the sensitive skin around them. He pulls them out one by one, causing Changbin to twitch under him. Once his hand is free, he wrangles his cock from his pants, then rips the condom from the foil packet, sliding it onto him. He pulls the bottle of lube from his pocket, squirting a bit more onto his hand, stroking it on his cock. “You ready for me?”

“Yes,” Changbin turns his head, staring down Jeongin with half-lidded eyes. “I need you, Jeongin, please.”

The younger man smiles, then lines himself up against the elder’s entrance. “Whatever you want, babe.” Jeongin slides in, and the composure held in his face falters, lips parting and eyes rolling back a bit. His slick hand grabs Changbin’s other hip, digging his pinky and thumb tightly into his skin as he slowly makes his way completely inside. “Yeah, you were right. Your ass is much nicer now that I’m inside of you.”

“I know, I know. Jeongin, please, shut up and fuck me,” Changbin whines, rapidly panting as he’s filled. “I just wanna feel you fuck me senseless.”

“Needy,” Jeongin hisses through his teeth as he pulls back, then slams back into Changbin, the sound of skin against skin echoing throughout the tiling and linoleum, overtaking the muffled sounds of the electronica from the other room.

Everything felt and looked so much more vibrant thanks to the acid. Every thrust was another colour splattered up recklessly in Changbin’s vision. Sparks of light went flying every time Jeongin hit his prostate. Sex usually felt wonderful to Changbin; he wasn’t sure if it was because of the drugs specifically, or if it was Jeongin, or if it was both, but he was sure of one thing: this was an out-of-body experience. His mind was floating up in the sky, up along the stars, as if he was the main character in some bad science fiction space film.

“Jeongin,” he panted, continuing to cry out the younger man’s name like a mantra.

The blue-haired man panted heavily, taking the hand previously inside Changbin and wrapping it around his cock, stroking it in time with his thrusts. “You feel so good, baby, I’m gonna make a mess out of you.”

The colours in Changbin’s vision slowly started to turn white, ribbons of pink and blue in the shades of Jeongin wrapping around the edges of his sight. “Shit,” a throaty moan escaped his throat, “I’m gonna come, Jeongin, don’t fucking stop. Fuck, please don’t stop. Don’t stop. Ah, god, fuck, I—“

His back arched, fingernails dragging down the walls as Changbin tried, and failed, to keep himself from shouting Jeongin’s name at a loud volume. The younger man pumped him one last time, and cum splattered up against the wall, dripping down onto the floor, as the older man collapsed into the tiling.

“Fuck, that’s so good, you’re so good, Changbin,” he pulled back and then slammed into the older man one more time, curling into his back a bit, stabilizing his stance by gripping Changbin’s hip. He spilled his cum into the condom, and the two of them stood there and panted for what seemed like forever.

After several minutes, Jeongin pulled out, shakily standing back upright. “What the fuck was that, dude?” He laughed, and Changbin managed to stumble himself back up to a vertical position.

The older man rapidly blinked as he came back down from space, and he let out a long sigh. “Amazing, that's what that was,” he pulled his pants up from off of the floor, haphazardly fastening the button of his jeans together just enough. Changbin awkwardly rolls a bit, then pulls Jeongin into him by the neck, the two of them exchanging a warm, soft kiss with each other.

They kiss for only a moment or so. “We should probably clean up a little bit and then get out of here.” Jeongin chuckles once. “You kind of made a mess and I’m sure we probably scared off some people.

“You’re the reason I made that mess,” Changbin quips. “Besides, we’re not the only ones that have fucked in here tonight, I bet. We won’t be the last, either.”

After a bit of awkwardly shuffling around in skates, some commentary about never fucking in roller skates again, and a bit of cleanup, they emerge from the stall. Jeongin rolls over to the sink to wash his hands, smiling at Changbin through the mirror. “I think I’m gonna like you,” he says, and the older man makes eye contact with him through the mirror, then rolls up next to him.

“Yeah?” He presses a kiss up to the younger man’s cheek and adjusts the beret on his head. “You say that now, but wait until I go on a rant about the Library of Congress’ organizational system versus the Dewey Decimal Classification, or about how dumb university students can be.”

Jeongin turns his head and gently kisses Changbin’s lips as water drips down from his hands. “It’ll be cute, I bet. You had me hooked at listening to records and smoking weed while laying on the floor, but nerdy ranting? Icing on the cake, man.”

Changbin scoffs and grabs a couple of towels from the dispenser behind the younger man. “Stop dripping all that water over my skates, dude. Maybe you should come home with me and we can find out just how fun that all actually turns out to be.”

“I think that’s—“ Jeongin starts to speak, taking the towels from Changbin, until they’re distracted by the loud squeaking of the washroom door. They both turn to look at the noise, and Changbin’s not really sure if he’s imagining what he’s seeing due to drugs.

“Changbin?” The voice of the intruder sounds as shocked as Changbin feels.

“Chan?” Jeongin squints as his face as he looks at the man that walks in.

The three of them awkwardly stare at each other, and Changbin frowns. “You know him?” He asks Jeongin, who stares back at him with wide eyes.

Jeongin shrugs his shoulders. “It was, like, a year or so ago, but yeah. You slept with him, too?”

#roller rinks and raspberry berets #sks smut #skz fics #seo changbin x yang jeongin #yang jeongin x seo changbin #jeongbin #changbin x jeongin #jeongin x changbin #wherevermyway

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darka-3363 · 7 years ago

Text

So. Let's talk about Bendy, shall we? Part one.

As all people who follow the Ink Demon knows, the last chapter of BatIM was released a few days ago. Some people are disappointed with the ending, some not, but what I wanted to talk about are the wrinkles in all of this that doesn't quite fit in, but if we were to take everything into perspective, it all makes sense. Let me explain.

Oh, and also disclaimer: I don't have reddit, and I'm not familiar with any theory other than the whole loop thingy, so everything that is in there, are my thoughts. Or in instances that are not, I'll clearly tell you about it.

So, everyone know that the leading theory, which proves to be true is that Henry is trapped in a loop by Joey Drew. But what is maybe even more important is why he CAN'T leave it.

It's because that Henry not only is trapped in a loop, but also a game script. Let me explain.

There aren't many proofs as to it, except what Henry from previous loops had Williton in golden ink. We know that he tried to leave (proof is that he written in gold ink at the very beggining to turn away, to leave, but when he tried the door was pernamently closed), but he can't. Later on, when we are about to start the ink machine, in golden ink was written:There was never a choice.

And that is our clue that he's following the script. He literally must start the IM, because otherwise the script won't allow him to take any action.

Another clue? Why would he even start the IM in the first place? JD wanted him in the old workshop, but Henry literally hadn't need to do anything and he just straight up say: Hey, let's start IM, I mean, what can go wrong?

Why he even know about IM? I don't think it was even there when he was in the company, but I can be wrong.

Also, the little wrinkles about Tom and Allison. Even if there is some sense to Tom, the one and only little wrinkle doesn't fit in.

Tom had suddenly turned into an ally after we fight with Sammy. This can mean two things, either Sammy was an enemy of Tom and thy enemy of your enemy is your friend, or that because Henry was able to escape his prison in the first place made him scarred to the point where being his ally was a much better option, because that means if he was able to escape from then, he could have done it much earlier, but he didn't. He could have kill either Tom or Allison in their sleep, even if he didn't. The possibility was there and it's enough to scare Tom.

Back to Allison. The one wrinkle is the thing that she says to Henry. Set us free.

Why would she say that? It doesn't quite add up when you thing about it. All she knew about Henry is that he was an old employee and that's it. Also, when I think about it, why she ask if Henry knows where to go after killing Sammy and Co.? For all that matter, why would Henry even know where to go in the first place?

That could be explained that he knew about it because he was the former employee, but somehow I don't think that's the case here. But even if, why Allison would ask something like this? She should know her way around the place like the palm of her hand and she just asked if Henry knows where to go.

Next thing with the script theory is that he says exactly the same things in every loop that we witness. Doesn't matter if we have the tool or not, and one would wonder why he don't make any sort of comments about it. Which brings us to the next point.

Why would Henry do the comments in the first place, of it was him that wrote the messages?

He forgot.

Or rather, he sealed away his memories. Maybe not even specifically him, but his brain.

After so many loops, where you can't do anything and you just follow the script because you have to, you might go slightly mad.

You can see a little of this in his messages throughout the whole game. He's bitter (Joey Drew Nothing) man after all of this and there are some messages that might look cheerful, but they aren't.

Ouch, Boo! Peekaboo!, they look cheerful but they aren't, they are at the places that Henry gets hurt. Why would he be so cheerful about that?

Also, the drawings on the letters, like a skull or horns.

And also those messages that may imply that he's desperate or slowly loosing his mind,like You bring death and Say hello to Sammy. Especially the second one is creeping me out a little.

So, as to bring some normalcy back to his life, he chose to forget about all of those loops, so he won't go more mad than he already is.

There is a small chance that he still remembers about all the loops, but then the amount texts in golden ink would be increasing after each playthrough and I don't think there would be additional content in third run.

Okay, next in the agenda. Someone has pointed out in jacksepticeye playthrough, the game was actually been made by Joey Drew Studios. Or this might be even more precise, by Joey Drew himself.

We know about it because of his drawing, where he was showing us Alice Angel and Bendy.

And the text underneath: Bendy wins.

Also one more thing points out to this — the last cassette in Bendy's throne room. How would Joey knew that Henry would even need the "The end" thingy? Why he even recorded that thing?

It wouldn't make sense, if the script hadn't been at least written by Joey Drew.

Okay, next. The coffin thingy.

We see coffins of so many people, Susie coffin most prominent of them all. We can assume that all of them were put through the IM.

But, curiously enough, we never seen Tom's and Allison's coffins. Weren't they put thought the IM like the rest of them?

No, they probably weren't. The only proof except lack of coffins would be the letter Joey had received from Allison. She had a career in film industrial, Tom also was probably working somewhere and we can say that they were happy.

So I think there are two possible options: Joey had invited them, just like he invited Henry, and throw them in the IM and he didn't have time to make coffins, or even the will to do it so he left it like this. Or they are programmed in the game as characters, but not actual people. They aren't real.

The real Allison and Tom are happily living in some town or city or something.

This might even explain the weird wrinkle in Allison dialogue about setting everyone free.

And the last thing on the list. Sammy.

It's obvious observation, but I wanted to include this here anyway. How is that Sammy had mistaken Henry for Bendy? This man was saying that he's a prophet of Bendy, that Bendy is his messiah, so why would he feel betrayed by Henry of all people?

Well, the conclusion isn't obvious, I'm not even sure if I'm right.

It's not because Sammy is mad or have some kind of schizophrenia (both of what has might be true), but maybe, just maybe he also remember every loop and Henry might'be promised him that he'll do everything he can to save them all and take them out from workshop. And after so many loops, Sammy finally had had enough.

It's half baked theory at least, but I wanted to share it nonetheless.

That would be all I wanted to rant about. If you had read all of this, we'll, thank you for bearing with me.

#bendy and the ink machine #bendy the dancing demon #batim bendy #bendy the demon #theory #alice angel #allison angel #boris the wolf #boris #mechanical boris #joey drew #joey drew studios #that one loop theory #script rheory #games #indie games #henry stein

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councilof9 · 5 years ago

Text

DEFCON 28 Badge Challenge

If you are still working on the Badge challenge, be warned! Spoilers below!

If you’d like to play along, you can grab all of the required materials for free at:

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20Mode%20Badge.rar

Exposition:

Before getting into the badge challenge write-up, we would first like to take a moment to thank all those who helped make this possible. First and foremost, a big shout out to 1o57 for putting together these amazing puzzles every year, and the sacrifices required to make it happen. Also a big thanks to the DEFCON organizers as a whole, who allow people like us to engage in these puzzle-solving shenanigans, and giving 1o57 a place to create and foster the hacker mindset.

Finally, a big thank you and congratulations goes out to Co9’s newest members, and four complete DEFCON newbies (congrats on your first con!):

Cr0wn_Gh0ul (@Cr0wn_Gh0ul)

JTobCat (@jtobcat)

LeFevre (@Lefevre)

motive (@leemsparks)

With that, let’s get into it.

The DEFCON 28 Badge

The Council of 9, undaunted by the irregular startup routine of DEFCON Safe Mode, prepared to scuffle and rumpus against the bewildering puzzles of 1o57 once again. After purchasing our DC28 badges, the fun began.

As 1o57 puzzles go, you never have an official starting place. You have to find it. So as we found answers or interesting information, we would record it for possible future use, and move on to the next thing we could find. Eventually, the breadcrumbs resolve into a path to follow.

This years badge consisted of three physical items:

A traditional printed cassette tape insert booklet

An old school audio cassette tape

The Lanyard

Booklet

The cassette tape insert booklet had several codes printed across it.

First, looking at the track listing:

Taking the first letter of each song on the side A tracklist spells out “LOSTINTIME”. For the uninitiated, 1o57 is the longtime Defcon badge designer and puzzlemaster. These track names also contain hints for later - Keywords like Lissajous.

Color Block Sub Cipher

Written, the color boxes read

Orange White Pink

Purple White/Green Orange/Green

Blue/Green Green Pink White

Purple/Green White/Green Orange White

and

Orange Blue Yellow/Yellow Green/White Purple

Green/White Green/White Yellow

By substituting the letters directly below for colors the first image, decodes to DEF CON SAFE MODE. It's basically a key.

So the second is

Skull Text

This string of text wasn’t nearly as simple to decipher. This skull artwork was a throwback to DC21, which had us scurrying to find notes and write-ups on the Badge puzzles from that year. Ultimately, however, we found the solution by taking the text string and pasting it into a 6x6 route transposition cipher, yielding:

tIstFCOnRFoofFioumYrgureoohrDOuntlon

Which is read Come on four dot four is right in front of you

We didn’t yet know what to do with this, so we put it aside for later.

Cipher Text Page

Xbaw maek wzme pgty zvxy izwk iwhk lnhy

agrl rrlp fsis xadh uflx dsqh rzrg qegu

itwb wveq aslo moii xmzx mvea rtil yekd

lvks jrbo arvy nmjz wodi gcxe tkrr cyir

xbsu rwyf slwr ixyk lrwz sbzr zbpg rrrw

hjsi alXX 1o57

The solution to this text really came from the fact that we were paying attention to 1o57 dropping random hints in various locations - not from anything in the booklet itself. 1o57 had played a video on his Twitch channel from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. Most notably, Buckaroo is famous for using the phrase: “No matter where you go there you are”

Using this as an OTP key...

nomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothere

...you get another Buckaroo quote (actually written by Greek philosopher Odysseas Elytis) :

Know that as in life there is much that many have looked up on but few have seen because as my father told me and his father told him you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth

Cassette Tape

With the booklet sorted, we turned our attention to the DC28 cassette tape. Upon listening to the tape, there are some immediate … features… that stick out.

Tones

One of the first things anyone listening to the tape will notice is the odd tones that sound at different times, and seem to repeat. These were halves of a DTMF (Dual-tone Multi-Frequency) tone, known better by many as “touchtones”, and appeared in two (2) groups of fourteen (14) tones that repeated three (3) times. By combining these single frequency pairs back together, we restored the dual frequencies and, by examining the peak frequency of the tones, we were able to identify the keypresses that generated the given tones. The flow of tones came out as:

DTMF Numbers: 2 6 3 3 9 6 7 3 7 9 9 9 4 9

We’re not done yet, though! Not yielding any immediate plaintext, we continued checking for a second-stage decipherment. As we’ve learned from other puzzles, any phone-related cipher should be checked for T9 coding, which turned out to be exactly what we have here.

By looking at a phone keypad,

Reading those indices onto the available letters, we get: CODEWORDSYZYGY

Oscilloscope

It’s not just the obvious side of the audio that we need to examine - the audio on the cassettes had much more than meets the … ears. Based on some hints that 1o57 dropped, and our experience with past puzzles, we decided to examine the audio for any hidden waveforms or other hidden data. Using a software oscilloscope, we examined the tape audio and discovered plenty of hidden text, as well as Lissajous patterns (remember that word from the Tracklist? Ya, that was the hint to get us here). The patterns we saw included a spaceship, a heptagon, a butterfly, and some very interesting text. The text we needed was:

The full text that shows up in the oscilloscope reads:

FIND A KEY AT LOSTBOY.NET SLASH PALEBLUEDOT

These two lead us to http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot

When we found this, though, the site was not yet active (since DEFCON hadn’t officially started). Oh well, better solve the Lanyard while we wait.

The Lanyard

This year’s lanyard proved to be quite tricky. We went through several iterations of attempts to make sense out of it. Pictured below is the lanyard with our attempts at dividing up and delineating each shape.

1o57 offered quite a few hints about the symbols on the lanyard - and with good reason. Finding the appropriate reading for the text was pretty difficult. Here are some of the most important hints that came out:

...now excuse me while I go read more about French aristocrats fleeing a post 1789 revolution.

More hints will start flowing from the font of knowledge tomorrow after DEFCON officially starts....

These sorts of hints eventually point towards the Crackly font, hosted on emigre.com (https://www.emigre.com/PDF/Crackly.pdf). Using this font, we were able to extract the following values from the lanyard segments:

Note first those mad MSPaint skills. Note second that all of those numbers are below 26, we immediately changed them into letters, giving us:

Q X U N

E K K E

V I O Q

Q G C O

Throwing this through a ROT, because you should always ROT everything, discovered that it was ROT-24’d. (Side note: Why ROT-24? Because ROT-24 is a negative ROT-28. Tricksy)

O V S L

C I I C

T G M O

O E A M

While not immediately obvious, one observant council member noted the presence of the C-O-M series of letters when reading in the vertical 4x4 pattern. Reading it in this way gave us what we were after:

OCTOVIGESIMALCOM → http://octovigesimal.com

Octovigesimal.com

This new page contained quite a bit of new content that we needed to sort through, and any answers were certainly not obvious.

Image filename: besidenequals2.jpg

The summation equation written at the bottom of the Goonies skull key implied that we need something that follows the pattern 1.1 + 2.2 + 3.3 + 4.4. The banner of the website implies that we need to look at the album “The Great 28” by Chuck Berry. This is further hinted at by the text “Record your answer~”, as in a record. We even think the tilde, from the latin for ‘title’ was probably part of the hint.

Upon looking at the Track list of “The Great 28” we saw that there is a track called Come On, which is right before a track called “Nadine (Is it You)”. This seems to link back to the text that we extract from the cipher text on the cassette tape insert “Come On Four Dot Four is right in front of you” Come On happens to be Section 4 track 4 of the album (4.4) and is “right in front of” (before) “Is it You”.

Going with that train of thought, and concatenating the titles of tracks 1.1, 2.2, 3.3, and 4.4:

Chuck Berry - The Great 28:

we get: MaybelleneRockandRollMusicMemphisComeOn

However, we don’t know what to do with this yet. Note it and move on.

Last on this site, but certainly not least, is another URL. Hidden right in plain sight underneath the logo is a pointer to the URL “Base-28.com”.

Alright, time to move on.

base-28.com

The first thing to look at here is the ciphertext in the top center of the page. We have a few strings to play with from previous solves. With the earth, moon and sun being in a line on the page, we figured it was a good opportunity to try the key that we found previously (from the audio DTMF codes): SYZYGY. This ciphertext is Vigenere encoded with SYZYGY as the key, and decodes to Who are you going to call? Definitely sounds like Ghostbusters to us.

Also of note here, is that the image on the arcade cabinet was identified as being the Temple of Gozer - a Ghostbusters scene. This scene is actually Chapter 28 on the GhostBusters DVD, and is titled “Crossing Streams”. This reinforces the Ghostbusters clue that the vigenere text gives us, and will prove critical to the next step.

On either side of the website we see pictures of members of the band The Commodores. 64 of them, in fact. These two clues combined tell us that we need to look at the Ghostbusters Commodore 64 game. What specifically about it? We don’t know yet.

Visually, it looks like this...

Pale Blue Dot

The Lissajous from the audio on the cassette tape pointed us to lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot. Upon accessing this page, we were greeted with… a wall of numbers. A giant freaking wall of numbers. Oh, and a joke.

How many Sagans does it take to change a lightbulb?

A quick google search will reveal the hilarious answer: “Billions and billions”

How it’s supposed to be solved

The numbers in the image are divided by the decimal, with a number of seemingly arbitrary length on the left, and eight (8) digits to the right of the decimal.

Left-Hand Numbers

Noticing that the numbers, with appending a few leading 0s, can be paired into values all less than 26.

Separating them out, and converting them via Letter-Numbers

Then, Vigenere decode using the key “billionsandbillions” (from the Sagan riddle) to get the plaintext:

ChineseTakeout

CrunchBar

Eggs

Twinkie

Marshmallows

Popcorn

Pizza

PotatoChips

Gum

Cheezits

Beer

These resulting words are the Game Franchise Username for the Ghostbusters c64 game, save bankroll amount. This consists of the Username (left side decoded) + 8 digit account number (right side number), with the decimal separating the two.

Right-Hand Numbers

The numbers on the right of the decimal, being 8 digits, are the account numbers for the Ghostbusters game. These can be plugged into the game (via an emulator) to discover the corresponding amount of money that is ‘saved’.

Emulator Franchise Username and account number screen:

Account Amount after validation of Username screen:

The Final Step

Realizing that these account balances all have trailing ‘00’s, remove the 0’s and convert the remaining numbers into letters to reveal the next destination.

Numbers: 13 25 19 20 5 18 25 19 3 9 5 14 3 5 20 8 5 1 20 5 18

Letters: M Y S T E R Y S C I E N C E T H E A T E R

Also, noting that each segment in the graphic is separated by the text ‘PaleBlueDot’, place a dot between the words, to arrive at a web address.

https://mysteryscience.theater

How we actually solved it (the narrative of pain)

One of our immediate observations was that the numbers always had eight digits on the right of the decimal. From the base-28.com site we knew about the c64 Ghostbusters game, and had the Crossing Streams chapter title as a potential hint that we needed to use clues across websites. In our reading about the c64 game, we learned that it was one of the first that allowed players to ‘save’ their game. Researching how this ‘save’ feature worked, we noted that it always used 8-digit account numbers, which curiously lined up with our 8-digit numbers to the right of the decimal. This felt like a crazy idea at the time, but we were frustrated enough to try it. Given the account numbers, we needed to find a way to reverse out the Names and Balances that would give those account numbers.

This video explains how the ‘save’ feature works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3cpbCCfK5A

Rather than digging into the algorithm, like we should have done, we discovered a Chrome extension that generated Ghostbusters accounts.

We tempted fate and downloaded the extension, only to rip out the code in order to reverse the algorithm. With that, we wrote the below brute forcer which, after inputting a Name, would try all possible account balances and then check if any of the resulting account numbers matched any of the account numbers from the image.

We immediately set out trying names that came from 1o57’s Twitch streams or other areas of the puzzle so far - and we found a few that worked:

'REAGAN,RONALD',

'POLLY,SKATING'

'SOTER,STEVEN',

'MORANIS, RICK',

'BROLIN,JOSH',

'HOUSE,BRICK'

But note that we said ‘a few’. We couldn’t find hits for every account balance. Fortunately, these were enough to assure us that we weren’t crazy, and we began attempting to interpret our output. While working through this, we realized that we didn’t even need the names. Using the information from the aforementioned YouTube video, we learned how to derive the information we needed. Take the account number for 1o57 which is 27710104. Reverse the number by pairs to get 04017127. Then convert from octal to hex, you get 101E57. The middle byte, 1E, is the hash of the name. The account balance is the first and third byte, so 1057. We filled in the remaining few accounts to come up with a full dataset. As it turns out, the whole page could have been solved like this on a calculator.

Examining the resulting balances, and knowing that the game’s algorithm divided the balance by 100, we dropped the trailing ‘00’ and then converted the remaining numbers into letters, revealing the string mysterysciencetheater. After trying this on a few of the known sites with no luck, we discovered that this was pointing us to mysteryscience.theater The PaleBlueDot in the middle of the numbers was also a hint to look for a domain.

While we had discovered some new information, it was not a complete solution. We still hadn’t used the left-hand side numbers from the PBD image, so we now shifted our focus to those numbers. After realizing that the numbers seemed to be relatively low when split into their component digits, we tried Letter-Number conversion again. We then Vigenere’d that output with the riddle answer ‘billionsandbillions’, and came up with a list of delicious food from the Ghostbusters movie. As it turns out, these were the names we were supposed to use to get the balances via a Ghostbusters c64 emulator. oops.

The complete output was:

Mysteryscience.theater

This page was kind of interesting in that there wasn’t really much to do with it… at least not immediately. From time to time, 1o57 will time-gate an area of his puzzles, and this is exactly what we ran into here. So, fast forwarding something like 24 hours, let’s begin examining the final puzzle-filled state of the page.

The top of the page now contained ciphertext. After a few attempts at deciphering it, we tried one of our old unused pieces of data (the concatenated list of Chuck Berry song titles) as a key and were greeted with a successful decipherment:

An y QewpFyyvRqd,

WehjhwpIclpVtme:

Ioqfig oloage.

Using OTP key: MaybelleneRockandRollMusicMemphisComeOn

On a PaleBlueDot,

WrestleWithThis:

Things change.

The meaning from this was clear! Head on over to http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot/WrestleWithThis

WrestleWithThis

Not much to see on this page, just the text “It’s only a tiny problem” and a YouTube video.

In the page source was the following comment:

<!- bFNhZ2FuQExv ->

And the title of the page was:

Wrestle With This y6nk3z9y

The comment Base64 decodes to lSagan@Lo

Additionally, the hint on the page about a ‘tiny’ problem, combined with the page title, resulted in a tinyurl link for our next destination:

tinyurl.com/y6nk3z9y → http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot/EverythingWasFineWithOurSystem.jpg

EverythingWasFineWithOurSystem

The image on this page immediately presents us with two sets of ciphertext, and a curious little man yelling at us from the corner.

As seen lightly overlaid into the blue of the car:

U2VuZCBDb3Nt =base64=> Send Cosm

And in the rear light:

TG9zdGJvWSBkb3Qgc2xhc2ggSEhI =base64=> LostboY dot slash HHH

Navigating to http://lostboy.net/HHH, we were greeted with two more youtube videos. The first one was titled “Close but no Cigar”. Immediately realizing that this meant we hadn’t interpreted the clue correctly, we Nope’d right the heck out of there. Luckily, we also knew what HHH was referencing from watching 1o57’s Twitch stream on 8/7. so we wasted no time in discovering the correct endpoint.

lostboy.net/HappyHarryHardOn

Here we go, a YouTube video and some encoded text. This feels right. The video was of RayParker Jr. performing the GhostBusters theme song, and below it was the text “What a singer! LostboY.net/PaleBlueDot/?” Also on the page was the text “F1LZuQ9E4JQ”.

The F1… text was another YouTube video; Chuck Berry and Tina Turner performing Rock n Roll Music. In an interesting twist, we discovered that by sorting the video comments by Newest first, there was a comment from NEW SOUND AGENCY with the text “b3MgdG8gQ2Fy”.

Also, if we look at the NEW SOUND AGENCY channel on YouTube, it has just one video of 1o57 playing around with a MiniMoog. Yep, this is a clue. This text of the comment base64 decodes to “os to Car”....hmmm.. That seems to fit with the other ciphertext we’ve found so far.

As for the URL, the team immediately recalled that Ray Parker Jr. may have, probably, almost certainly, likely, stolen the Ghost Busters theme music from Huey Lewis and the News’ “I Want A New Drug”. The next URL, then, was pretty simple to guess:

http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot/HueyLewis/

HueyLewis (and the Solve)

This page was pretty simple. A single ciphertext was present on the image and gave us the following:

c3Rib1kubmV0 =base64=> stboY.net

And finally, putting together all of the fragments that had been discovered:

U2VuZCBDb3Ntb3MgdG8gQ2FybFNhZ2FuQExvc3Rib1kubmV0

Base64 decodes to => Send Cosmos to [email protected]

We shot off an e-mail (several e-mails?) as directed, and got replies letting us know that Defcon 28 Badge Challenge: Complete … phew. The e-mail also linked to another video and requested that we watch it as a team.

We immediately shared a screen as a team and viewed the video together.

With that, DC28 badge challenge was complete.

@TheCouncilOf9

Co9.io

[email protected]

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