briennemurdock

[briennemurdock]

when we weren’t looking

pairings: poly!superbat x fem!reader, superman x reader, batman x reader, superman x batman, parental!reader x batkids, parental!reader x superkids

summary: You were there from the beginning - a Justice League founder, a guardian to Bruce’s and Clark’s children, and the glue holding two chaotic families together. Love grew slowly, quietly, in lingering touches and missed chances, until it was buried beneath years of duty and heartbreak. Now, when the kids are grown and your heart dares to look forward again, Bruce and Clark must face the truth they’ve both been avoiding: they’ve loved you all along. Will you let them, or has it been too long to let two of the world’s finest heroes into your heart?

wc: 6.1k

content: justice league founder!reader, magical!reader, parenting, jason todd death mention, grieving, lois lane dies, angst, misunderstanding, MISUNDERSTANDINGS, good intentions, accidental child acquisition, parental!reader, inaccurate timelines, unreliable narrator, tags to be added

a/n: guess what! it's a part one, for now, because i apparently don't know how to keep an idea short and sweet. what the actual hell, this wasn't supposed to turn out like this. when will it come out? hmm, i don't know, but i am writing it currently! okay, i hope you guys enjoy! like, reblog, comment and follow for more like this!

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You were there from the beginning. Not as shining, iconic, or universally adored as Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman, but you never minded. Let them be the faces of the League, the gods walking among mortals. Your place had always been steadier, quieter. And with that came something they rarely had: time.

It started with Robin. The first one. Richard Grayson.

The League needed to fly off-world to face whatever galactic tyrant was threatening Earth that week, and Bruce couldn’t exactly bring a thirteen-year-old into deep space. You volunteered without hesitation. “I’ll take him. He’ll be fine with me.”

That was how you ended up driving Richard Grayson—Robin, in all his excitable glory—to school in your little blue car, the radio cranked up and both of you butchering whatever pop song was popular that month. He sang off-key, you exaggerated the harmony, and by the time you dropped him off, he was grinning ear to ear. The karaoke tradition was born that morning, entirely by accident.

Sleepovers followed. At first, because Bruce needed someone to watch the kid when missions ran long, then simply because Dick liked it that way. Alfred would set up the guest room for you without asking, and by dawn, you were in the kitchen, apron tied, teaching Dick how to flip pancakes without dropping the batter all over the stove.

Unlike Bruce, you let music play. Loudly. You sang into a spatula, spun Dick across the tiles, and even coaxed Alfred into joining the chorus when he thought no one was watching. The manor felt alive in those mornings, full of laughter and dancing instead of the usual sharp silence. And one morning, Bruce walked in on it.

You didn’t hear the faint hum of the Batcave’s boomtube as he returned, nor did you notice him shedding the cowl at the cave’s edge before stepping into the hall. What you did notice was the figure leaning against the doorway, arms folded, exhaustion written into the corners of his mouth as he watched. But in his eyes was a spark of joy that didn’t appear often, yet made Bruce look younger every time it did. 

He hadn’t expected to see his son doubled over with laughter, flour dusting his hair. Or Alfred, straight-backed and dignified as always, holding a mixing bowl like it was a microphone. Or you, spatula in hand, hips swaying with the beat on the radio like the kitchen was a stage. Upon completing your circle, you looked up to see the man of the hour stoic, just enjoying the scene.

You froze for only a second when you saw him, then grinned. “Don’t just stand there, Bruce. Come on.”

And you danced your way toward him, extending a hand. Dick immediately perked up, cheering: “C’mon, Bruce! Just once!”

Bruce started shaking his head, “No, I’m too tired. Just wanted to see what all the noise was when I came in.”

But you didn’t let him get away with it, and started dancing around him, slowly herding him into the kitchen, into the positive energy there. Excited by the turn of events, Dick eagerly starts teasing Bruce and showing him some sample moves he could “borrow if he didn’t have any”. And wasn’t that embarrassing? He’s Bruce Wayne, of course he knew how to dance. 

Even Alfred arched a brow, lips twitching. “Master Wayne. It wouldn’t kill you.”

“Couldn’t possibly deny you, Alfred.” Bruce said smoothly before rolling his sleeves.

“We both know that’s not true at all, Master Wayne.” Alfred calmly replied, pulling Dick to the side with him as Bruce approached you.

You tilted your head with a small smile, and it made him pause slightly to admire you. Even in the morning, with your slight bed head and pajamas that are well-loved, you were a sight to behold. He extended his hand towards you, waiting for you to place your hand in his, before leading you through a waltz. Yes, Bruce Wayne knew how to dance, just not the dancing you or Dick expected this morning. A loud, joyous laugh ripped from you while Bruce led you through a turn, his eyes lighter than you’ve seen from him in a while. 

Dick whooped. Alfred allowed himself the smallest chuckle. For one fleeting second, the walls of Wayne Manor held something softer than duty and shadow.

That was the morning the sleepover breakfast ritual began.

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It wasn’t long before the table grew larger.

Conner was one of the first additions. In those early, uncertain days, Lois Lane wasn’t ready to meet the boy who carried half of Clark’s DNA, and Clark himself… he was still learning what it meant to be responsible for someone who looked at him like a father. It was you who stepped forward again, without hesitation.

Conner joined the sleepovers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. A little rough around the edges, unsure of where he fit, but you saw the goodness in him immediately. You paired him with Dick, nudging them into friendship until they found their own rhythm, trading secrets about capes and fathers over late-night snacks in the Manor kitchen.

Sometimes those breakfasts included Bruce, still in the corner pretending he wasn’t watching, and sometimes Clark, who would arrive bleary-eyed from Metropolis with his cape shoved hastily under a jacket. He always looked a little disheveled, tie half-done, hair mussed by wind instead of gel, and once, memorably, with powdered sugar stuck to his sleeve because he’d grabbed donuts in a rush.

You’d laughed so hard you nearly dropped the spatula. “God, you look like a dad who overslept carpool duty.”

Clark froze for a beat, then laughed too, the sound soft and sheepish. “You’re not wrong. I’m still… figuring this whole thing out.” His gaze drifted to Conner at the table, head bent as Dick showed him how to draw a smiley face in pancake batter. Something uncertain flickered in Clark’s expression — guilt, wonder, fear, love, all tangled together.

You nudged him lightly with your elbow as you flipped a pancake. “That’s all anyone’s doing, Clark. Figuring it out as we go.”

His shoulders eased a little at that, the weight lifting if only for a moment. He reached out, ruffling Conner’s hair, and the boy wrinkled his nose but didn’t pull away.

“See?” you teased, sliding another pancake onto the stack. “You’ve already got the embarrassing dad move down. Give it a year, and you’ll be threatening to wear socks with sandals.”

Clark rolled his eyes, chuckling as he pulled up a chair. “Lois would never let me live it down.” Then, quieter, almost to himself: “But… thank you. For doing this. For giving him… something normal.”

You met his gaze across the counter, spatula in hand. “He’s not the only one who needs normal, Clark.”

And for just a second, it wasn’t Clark but Superman who looked at you like you were holding up the sky for him.

For a time, the mornings belonged to all of you: pancakes, off-key singing, two boys finding their place together, Bruce lurking in the corner until you dragged him into the dance, Clark slowly learning what it meant to be more than just a symbol.

And you. Always you, steady at the stove, making sure they were fed and laughing and cared for.

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

Not every memory was bright.

Jason came next, loud and brash and secretly the one who craved the sleepovers the most. He swaggered into the Manor like he owned the place, quick to mouth off and quicker to fight for his spot at the table. He claimed he was too cool for karaoke but always stole the microphone halfway through and belted the loudest, voice cracking but proud.

Dick and Conner never let the age gap keep them apart from him. If they were heading out for pizza or training in the yard, Jason was right there with them. They slowed their pace when he tried to keep up, pulled him into their circle with a brotherly arm around his neck, and made sure he knew he belonged. Sometimes it was chaotic, three boys bouncing off the walls, but it was good chaos — the kind the Manor had needed for years.

And Jason loved routines. Especially the ones that were just between the two of you. Saturday mornings, when the others were busy, you’d drive him to the library. He’d wander the aisles for hours, losing himself between shelves, asking you a million questions about every cover that caught his eye. Afterward, you’d stop by the used bookstore downtown, and you made it a point — every single time — to buy him whichever book he wanted. No conditions, no questions. His eyes would light up, and he’d hold it like treasure all the way home.

Those were your moments. Jason and you, arms full of paperbacks, laughing as you both tried to juggle too many books and cups of coffee. It was a small tradition, but it was yours. And he always, always, hugged you before racing upstairs to show Alfred his newest find.

You adored him. You adored them all.

And then he was gone.

The night Jason died shattered you in ways you didn’t think possible. You held Dick as he sobbed and raged, you held Conner as he tried to process death in a way no one should have had to. You held yourself together just enough to be strong for them. But when the nights stretched too long, when the bed stayed empty, grief turned sharp and ugly inside you.

You became reckless in the field. Violent. Too violent. You went for the kill more than once, your fury a wildfire you couldn’t always leash. The League benched you after one close call — after Martian Manhunter caught the intent in your mind, caught the image of you driving your weapon into Joker’s chest. He told Bruce. He told Clark. And you never forgave him for it.

You and Bruce clashed constantly during those months. He needed someone steady, someone who could share his silence — but you couldn’t sit still in grief the way he could. You wanted blood. You wanted justice that would never come. Sometimes you thought you hated him for being able to pull back when you couldn’t. Sometimes you thought you hated yourself more.

The only thing that anchored you was your weekly visits to Jason’s grave. You’d bring fresh flowers, sweep away the leaves, and read a new poem each week like he was sitting there listening. It was routine, ritual. A way of keeping him close when the world felt so hollow. That’s where he found you.

The night Jason returned to Gotham, older and angrier and wearing scars you didn’t understand yet, he went to his grave first. And there you were, kneeling in the dirt, brushing soil from the headstone with gentle hands. When you turned and saw him standing there, your knees nearly gave out.

“Jay?” Your voice cracked, fragile as glass.

He didn’t let you touch him, not then. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t sure if he ever could be. But you knew him well enough to see what was left unspoken: he had come back, and he had come to you first.

It was hard after that. He wanted nothing to do with the Manor, especially when he saw Tim wearing his costume, his mantle. He spat venom and pain in every direction, and you caught most of it without flinching. You didn’t push, but you didn’t let go either.

It took time. Months. But eventually, he came back to one of the sleepovers. He hovered in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, pretending he didn’t care about the smell of pancakes or the sound of music drifting from the radio. Dick raised an eyebrow, Conner waved him in, Tim froze, and you… you simply handed him the microphone.

Jason scowled, muttered a curse under his breath — and sang anyway. Loud. Angry. Alive.

You cried quietly into the spatula you pretended was your mic.

And just like that, the tradition lived again.

Through every change, every new child, every heartbreak and return, the tradition lived on. The tradition kept evolving, the kitchen table growing fuller as the years went by.

Tim arrived while Jason was gone, sharp-eyed and shy, carrying the weight of knowing too much and trusting too little. You caught him lingering in doorways, hovering like he wasn’t sure if he belonged, until one morning you pressed a whisk into his hand and told him to beat the eggs. He did it silently, but you caught the ghost of a smile when the radio kicked on and Dick dragged him into an off-key duet. By the end of the week, Tim had stopped lingering and started sitting at the table.

Then came Cass. She didn’t need words to tell you how much the tradition mattered. She just slipped into the kitchen one morning, silent as shadow, stole the spatula from your hand, and twirled in place. You laughed, joining her, and she smiled — bright, unguarded, rare. From then on, she danced every chance she got, the radio her favorite language.

Jon arrived like a storm that broke the world.

Lois had died in childbirth, and Clark unraveled. He was a man who could move mountains, stop aliens, hold the Earth itself in orbit… but he couldn’t save her. For weeks, he drifted, hollow-eyed and guilty, clutching the baby like he was made of glass. He didn’t know how to keep going. It was then that the three of you became something more than teammates.

Bruce opened the Manor without hesitation. You moved into the guest wing, with Clark and Jon in the room next door. Suddenly, the vast, quiet house was alive with the sounds of an infant's cries at 3 a.m., soft lullabies, and little fists pounding against anyone who held him too tightly. 

Alfred adapted instantly, setting bottles beside his tea service. It reminded him of days long past of doing the same for a younger Bruce, and it brought him much joy to see Bruce be able to experience some of the same joy.

The three of you found a rhythm so quickly it felt preordained. You took the late-night feedings, humming along with the radio as Jon curled against your chest, soothed more by your heartbeat than anything else. Clark would stumble in a few hours later, bleary-eyed, sheepish, offering to take over. Half the time, he fell asleep in the rocking chair with Jon sprawled across his chest, cape draped over both of them like a blanket.

Bruce claimed he wasn’t good with babies — “I don’t do small talk, let alone small children” — but Jon had other plans. By six months old, Jon would gurgle and reach for him the moment Bruce entered the room. You’d find them in the study sometimes, Bruce working at his desk with Jon in his lap, little hands tugging at his tie while Bruce signed League reports one-handed.

And when Clark’s grief threatened to consume him, it was you and Bruce who steadied him. Bruce gave Clark structure. “Routine,” he said flatly, and forced Clark into it. Early runs at dawn, sparring sessions in the cave, and scheduled check-ins with Alfred. It anchored Clark when he might have otherwise drifted away entirely.

You gave Clark grace. You told him it was okay when he cried. That grief wasn’t weakness. That Lois would have wanted him to keep going, not drown in guilt. You slipped photos into his hands, reminded him of Jon’s smile when he doubted himself, and pressed warm coffee into his palms when words weren’t enough.

Together, the three of you carried each other. And the kids carried you, too.

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

Whenever missions took Bruce or Clark away, Dick, Jason, or Tim would step up. You’d walk into the kitchen to find Dick or Conner trying to feed Jon from a bottle while Alfred supervised like a hawk. Jason would read him stories in dramatic voices, turning Goodnight Moon into a Broadway performance. Tim was the calmest of the bunch, cradling Jon against his hoodie while researching League files with one hand. Even Cass — silent, graceful Cass — would sit on the floor, letting Jon tug her hair without complaint.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was seamless. Every revolving door of Wayne Manor only added more hands to hold the baby, more laughter to soften the nights. For a while, you didn’t just survive grief — you lived through it, together.

There were nights Clark would look at you and Bruce, Jon asleep in his arms, and whisper, “I don’t know what I’d do without you both.”

And you believed him. Because back then, you weren’t just teammates. You were family.

Jon was four in the summer Alfred finally bullied you into taking a holiday. “You’ll blink and he’ll be grown,” he’d said, packing enough sandwiches for an army.

So you went. A day at the beach: Bruce chasing Jon down the shoreline, his sleeves rolled up, sand clinging to his calves; you laughing as you splashed after them, scooping Jon into your arms as he shrieked with delight. Clark stood back with a camera, trying to capture everything at once, grinning so wide it softened even the grief that still haunted the corners of his eyes.

By the time the sun dipped low, Jon was worn out, asleep before his head even settled on Bruce’s chest. The three of you stretched out on the blanket, the ocean hissing against the sand, the world held still.

Bruce sat to your right, a steady weight against your shoulder. Clark lay on your left, arm stretched behind you, his fingers brushing yours in the sand. Jon’s tiny fists curled into Bruce’s shirt, anchoring you all together. It was perfect. Too perfect.

You turned your head, found Bruce already watching you, his eyes darker than the dusk around you. He didn’t look away.

Clark’s thumb began tracing soft circles over your knuckles. Slow, deliberate, tender. His gaze shifted from Jon to you, lingering, heat simmering low in his chest.

Your heart raced. The air was heavy, humming with something you’d all been dancing around for years.

Bruce’s hand slid down, brushing against yours from the other side. Two points of contact, two anchors pinning you in place — Clark warm and open, Bruce steady and intense.

No one spoke, but everything was said in the silence. Clark finally broke it, voice low, husky with something that wasn’t grief anymore: “We don’t have to keep pretending… that this isn’t what it feels like.”

Your lips parted. You wanted to say yes. You wanted to tell them both you’d been theirs for years. Bruce’s eyes softened, his hand tightening slightly on yours, a silent agreement that he felt it too.

And then the comms went off.

First Bruce’s, then Clark’s. A League emergency.

The sound shattered the moment like glass. Clark cursed under his breath — rare, raw. Bruce’s jaw clenched, the mask of Batman sliding back over his features. You tried to smile, tried to pretend it didn’t ache, but the weight in your chest was crushing.

They stood, brushing sand from their clothes, already slipping into soldier mode. Clark pressed a kiss to Jon’s forehead, lingering a second too long, and Bruce tucked the boy gently into your arms before straightening to his full height. Neither man looked back as they focused on the mission.

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They came back different. Not obvious. Subtle. They stood closer. Their words overlapped like a practiced duet. When Clark laughed, it was often at something only Bruce had said. When Bruce allowed himself to soften, it was often when Clark was at his side.

It didn’t take long for you to piece it together. Maybe you wouldn’t have been able to if not for all the time spent in each other’s company. You knew them too well and could see the truth hidden within their body language. They had each other.

And if they had each other, why would they ever need you?

The loneliness crept in like a tide. You smiled at them, smiled at Jon, kept the breakfast and sleepovers alive — but you began to pull back. Not because you stopped caring, but because it was the only way to protect your heart. Buried your feelings under duty and routines. They noticed, of course. They misread it, assumed you weren’t interested, and let you slip further from the space you’d once shared. 

The next outer space mission, you volunteered. You needed time. Time to heal. Time to grieve what could have been.

When you returned months later, you didn’t go home to Wayne Manor. You went to a small, modest apartment in Metropolis. Modest on the outside, anyway. Magic had its perks — you expanded the space to fit what you needed. A proper kitchen for the kids’ sleepovers, bookshelves for Jason, extra beds tucked away for whichever Robin or Super wandered through on any given night.

Because the kids still needed you. And you would always be there for them.

The first night back, you slipped into the Manor while Bruce and Clark were out at dinner. Alfred knew — of course, he knew — and didn’t stop you. He only gave you that soft, sympathetic look as you moved through the halls, quietly packing the things you’d left behind.

It didn’t take long. Magic made sure of that. Books floated from shelves into boxes, clothes folded themselves, framed photos wrapped in protective charm paper. By the time the boom tube hummed with the men’s return, you were gone, your room empty save for the lingering warmth of what once was.

The Manor was quiet when Bruce and Clark returned that night, their dinner still lingering as small talk in their heads. Jon was already asleep, tucked in by Alfred, who waited for them at the foot of the stairs with a single sentence that froze the blood in their veins:

“She’s gone.”

Clark was the first to move. He stormed down the hall to your room, Bruce close behind. The door opened to stillness, to shelves stripped bare, drawers empty, walls missing the small touches of you that had made them warmer. The air smelled faintly of your magic — lavender and smoke — the last traces of you fading into nothing.

Clark’s voice cracked as he gripped the doorframe. “She came back… and we missed her. We missed her, Bruce.” His fists clenched at his sides, eyes wild with guilt. “We’ve gotta go get her. Right now. We’ll explain. We’ll fix this—”

Bruce’s hand landed heavy on his shoulder, grounding him. “Clark.”

“She thinks we don’t want her. She thinks—”

“I know.” Bruce’s voice was low, even, but softer than Clark expected. He turned toward the empty room, jaw tight, eyes shadowed. “But if she made this choice… we can’t force her back. If we push too hard, we’ll lose her completely.”

Clark’s breath hitched, the weight of it settling like lead in his chest. “But she belongs with us.”

“She belongs in our lives,” Bruce corrected gently. “One way or another. It’s better to have her in some capacity than not at all.”

Clark’s shoulders slumped, the fight draining out of him. He leaned against the doorframe, staring at the space where your books used to be. “That month she was gone… it was hell. I never realized how much I needed her. How much I—” He broke off, voice rough. “She makes everything turn, Bruce. She makes the world make sense.”

Bruce didn’t answer right away. His gaze lingered on the bare shelves, the hollow quiet of the room. For once, the walls of Wayne Manor felt too large, too empty. “I know,” he said finally. “She makes my earth turn, too.”

They stood there in silence, two men who could fight gods but couldn’t fight the absence you’d left behind.

And in your modest Metropolis apartment — stretched wide by magic, humming with laughter from the kids who refused to let go of you — you told yourself you were healing.  It was better this way, you told yourself. They needed space to grow together. And you needed to remember how to stand on your own feet again.

Even if a part of you still ached for the life you almost had. The loneliness followed you into your new apartment. Into the quiet nights when Jon asked if you’d still sing him to sleep. Into the mornings when you woke, reaching for a hand that wasn’t there.

✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

The sleepovers and breakfasts never stopped. They just moved. The kitchen was slighter, the ceilings lower, but the laughter was the same. Pancakes tasted just as sweet when eaten in a cramped apartment. The kids still sang, still fought over who got to flip the next batch. The tradition lived on.

But the trio? The three of you? That had been left at the beach, half-buried in the sand, drowned out by the sound of a League comm.

But you never left the kids. You never could.

Especially when Damian arrived, he wasn’t a result of violence, no matter what the uglier rumors whispered. He was a weapon born in a lab, Bruce’s worst nightmare made flesh — his DNA spliced with Talia’s, an attempt to craft the perfect heir. Damian entered the Manor fierce, arrogant, and prickly with mistrust. A boy engineered for war but given a family instead.

Damian entered the tradition like a cat into water: claws out, hissing, refusing to admit he wanted in. He sneered at the karaoke, insulted the pancakes, folded his arms at the table, and declared he didn’t need any of it.

And yet, you made him a plate anyway, slid it in front of him without comment. You corrected his posture when he chopped vegetables, guided his hands when he learned how to whisk. You told him stories about Jason and Dick, about how Conner used to sulk through sleepovers until he realized the fun in them. You let Jon drag him into the chaos, refusing to give him the luxury of staying on the sidelines.

It took time. Months. But the first time he sang under his breath, soft and unwilling but audible, you pretended not to notice. Jon noticed. Jon whooped, dragged him to the center of the kitchen, and you caught the tiniest flicker of a smile from Damian before he masked it with another scowl.

From then on, he was yours too.

Your relationship with Bruce and Clark shifted in those years, too. The wound of the beach and the space between you never fully healed — but it scabbed. 

Bruce was patient, quieter with you. Clark was soft, gentle, careful not to push. They never stopped loving you. If anything, their love only deepened, year after year, as they watched you guide their children with a steadiness neither of them could muster. As they watched you throw birthday parties, show up at recitals, and even parent-teacher meetings when you could. 

They never forgot how it had felt on that blanket. How close they’d come to making it real. The warmth of your bodies close together, the heat within each look. The want never left — it lingered in every look, every brush of fingers, every moment you laughed too hard at something one of them said.

At first, you couldn’t bear to stay. After dropping off one of the kids, you’d leave the Manor immediately, unable to linger in halls that echoed with memories of what almost was. Bruce and Clark never stopped you, though the way their eyes followed you to the door was its own kind of ache.

But when Damian arrived, something shifted. He was young, sharp-edged, in desperate need of patience, and you couldn’t just drop him off and walk away. So you stayed. At first, it was only for tea — a cup in Alfred’s study before heading home. Then it was breakfast, Damian stiff-backed in his chair until Jon made him snort orange juice out of his nose.

A year later, you found yourself staying for entire afternoons. Letting Jon drag you out into the garden, while Bruce lingered nearby under the guise of trimming roses. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, helping Damian with homework, while Clark “happened” to return early from Metropolis, setting his jacket neatly on the couch before joining you both.

And little by little, the walls you’d built began to crack.

You started laughing at their jokes again — Clark’s terrible puns that had Jon in stitches, Bruce’s dry one-liners that made Jason wheeze. You let Clark’s hand brush your shoulder when he leaned over you, and you didn’t flinch when Bruce’s palm steadied you by the elbow. Once, Clark smoothed an errant curl from your cheek, thumb lingering a moment longer than it should have. Once, Bruce’s hand brushed yours over a coffee mug, and you didn’t pull away, but gifted him a smile. 

It wasn’t everything. But it was something. And that something was enough to remind you how dangerous hope could be.

Bruce and Clark noticed. They talked about it — often, quietly, usually on the Watchtower between missions. 

“Now might be the time,” Clark murmured once, watching you from across the hangar as you comforted Cass after a brutal debrief. “She’s letting us in again.”

Bruce only hummed, low, but didn’t disagree. “We go slow. She has to trust this isn’t temporary. We can’t let her down again.”

They began to plan — nothing elaborate, nothing rushed. Just… chances. Dinners, quiet moments, gentle confessions, waiting for the right time.

So, of course, when they thought they had a handle on things, everything gets flipped around. 

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The knock at your apartment door was insistent, a chorus of voices arguing outside.

You pulled it open to find them all there: Dick at the front with a bright grin, Jason juggling takeout bags, Tim holding a stack of board games, Cass tucked in quietly behind them, Conner hovering like he’d been dragged along, Jon beaming, and Damian scowling like someone owed him money.

“Surprise!” Dick announced, holding up soda bottles like a prize. “Sleepover night!”

You blinked, stunned — then laughed, ushering them in one by one, kissing Jon’s temple, hugging Cass tight, ruffling Tim’s hair, letting Jason nearly knock you over with a bear hug. “All of you? At once? My poor neighbors.”

Jason smirked. “Please, you love it.” The kids were scattered around your apartment, settling in for the night. Some were setting up the living room, while others were organizing the food. Looking around, it made your heart happy and full to have all the kids here with you. It’s been months since you’ve been able to hang out with them outside of League business. 

You understood, they were young, growing into the heroes they want to be, and having fun while being young. But the loneliness crept back again, the same that lingered after Bruce and Clark. You decided it was time to put your big girl panties on and date outside the hero world, just in case you had better luck. And it’s been going great, a little over a month since you started seeing Jackson, and tonight was another hopefully successful date. Now, to break the news to your overprotective kids. 

“I do, and of course you’re always welcome,” you admitted, smiling. “But… kids, I actually have plans tonight.”

That stopped them in their tracks. Like deer in headlights, they all turn their heads to look at you. Jon’s brows furrowed. “Plans? Like… with people?”

“Like… with a date? You’re dressed nicer than usual.” Dick guessed, eyes narrowing.

You hesitated — and that was all the confirmation they needed.

“A date?!” Jon blurted, jaw dropping. “You can date?!”

Jason smacked him upside the head. “Of course she can date, idiot.”

Tim groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “How are you surprised by this?”

Conner crossed his arms, suspicious. “Who is he? Do we know him?”

Cass said nothing, just watched you with sharp eyes and a knowing smile.

You chuckled, shaking your head as you slipped into your bedroom to keep getting ready. “I don’t owe you an interrogation, detectives. When it's time, I'll introduce you all.”

That didn’t stop them from trailing after you, peppering you with questions while you pulled on earrings and fixed your lipstick.

Jason leaned against the doorframe. “Is he taller than me?”

“Yes.”

“Does he make more money than Bruce?”

“No one makes more money than Bruce.”

Jon frowned. “Does he have powers?”

“That’s none of your business, sweetheart.”

Tim sighed. “Where did you meet him?”

“Out,” you said vaguely, slipping your feet into heels. “Now — black jacket or red?”

They all paused. “Black,” Dick and Cass said at the same time.

“Red,” Jason argued immediately.

“Black is more mysterious,” Tim muttered.

“Red shows power,” Damian countered.

You laughed, trying on both, twirling for them like it was a runway show. They shouted over one another until finally you picked the black, smoothing it over your dress as you moved toward the door.

That was when Jason spotted the small overnight bag tucked beside it.

His eyes went wide. “Wait a damn minute— is that an overnight bag?”

Chaos.

“You’re staying the night at his?!” Conner shouted, horrified.

“You cannot be serious,” Damian hissed.

Dick threw his hands up. “We’ve lost her!”

Jon looked like you’d just told him Santa wasn’t real, which is slightly alarming since you had the conversation with him last year when Damian told him so. Maybe you’ll have to have the conversation with him again. Maybe have Clark take him to the North Pole to show him how he’s not there.

You raised your hands, firm but gentle. “Enough. I love you all, you know that. But I am an adult, and I am allowed to have my own life.”

“But—” Jon started.

“No buts. I’ll be back in the morning, and we’ll have pancakes together. Just like always.”

They quieted at that, grumbling but placated. Jason muttered something under his breath about “being replaced by some guy,” but you kissed his cheek and handed Cass the spare key.

“Be good,” you warned as you grabbed your bag. “Don’t burn the place down.”

They chorused their goodbyes as you slipped out, waving. But the second the door shut, they bolted to the window, watching you climb into a sleek car none of them recognized.

The silence was heavy until Damian sniffed disdainfully. “Disrespectful. What kind of gentleman doesn’t open his date’s door?”

That earned a round of muttered agreements as they slumped back inside, half-heartedly unpacking food and setting up Mario Kart on the TV.

Normally, sleepover Mario Kart was a blood sport. Tonight, the game sputtered — no one yelling, no one throwing controllers, everyone oddly subdued.

Finally, Tim broke. “So we’re just… not gonna acknowledge that we all thought she’d end up with Dad and Clark anyway?”

The silence cracked like glass.

Jason threw his controller. “Thank you! Exactly!”

Conner groaned. “Oh my god, finally someone said it.”

Jon looked around frantically. “Wait— wait— is that allowed?”

Dick buried his face in his hands. “Unbelievable. We’re having this conversation now?”

Voices rose, overlapping, chaos spiraling again until Cass quietly stood, walked to the bookshelf, and pulled down the glittery, bedazzled tube that you had made years ago. She held up the Sparkle Talking Stick.

It was needed when you had so many... passionate loved ones in your life. So, for a bit more order and maybe 1% less chaos than normal, you created the Sparkle Talking Stick that each kid signed as an agreement to listen when someone held it.

Immediately, everyone shut up.

Cass placed it on the table. Jason reached for it first, glaring at the others. “She’s obviously happier when she’s with them. She should just say it.”

Conner took the stick next. “Then why the hell is she sneaking out on overnight dates with randos?”

Dick grabbed it after. “Because maybe she thinks they don’t want her anymore! And whose fault is that?”

The Sparkle Stick made its way around, each kid venting in turn, until Damian finally snatched it, glowering. “Enough. The conclusion is obvious: Father and Kent are cowards. Their attempts at wooing are laughable. If they had done their jobs properly, she wouldn’t be entertaining other men.”

He pulled out his phone without hesitation. “Father,” Damian said crisply when Bruce answered. “Due to your and Kent’s lukewarm efforts, she is now pursuing other men. Do with this information what you will. Goodbye.”

He hung up before anyone could stop him.

The kids stared at one another for a couple of minutes.

Jason leaned back, smirking. “Well. Guess we’ll see what they do about it.”

[briennemurdock]

Hey not sure if your currently taking requests but I just wanted to I soooooo stoked that you write for Remy! I've been starved for years cuz there's like no fan fics for him😭.

anyway I was wondering if you could do like a fic or headcannon where gambit somehow got hurt on a mission and is on bed rest but is also like really horny because you wont have sex with his since hes hurt.

If not that's fine I just thought it up and thought it would be hilarious 😂. Anyway luv your work, keep it up😘

NSFW!Gambit/AFAB!Reader

MMMMMHHHMMMMMM BESTIE UR MIND. ABSOLUTE GENIUS. I hope that you don't mind I did make it NSFW there at the end but the majority is just teasing our favorite gambler. Also, This is for the folks who were also really attracted to that one scene in criminal minds with the bulletproof vest. iykyk.

TWs: teasing, sexual innuendos, explicit smut, Handjobs, Mutual masturbation, PNV sex. Raw sex. (Wrap it bf you tap it yall) Creampie. Reader written with Fem! pronouns.

"Asolutetly not." You're quick to say it. Gambit pouts as the words leave your mouth, still on the infirmary bed with all the wires and doodads still hooked up to him. He's giving you those scoundrel puppy eyes that he knows you usually give in to, but you're not willing to budge this time.

"No, Remy. I will not be-" You take a quick glance around the room, leaning in a little closer as you begin to whisper-yell at him. "-I will not be having sex with you right now!" Remy sighs in a pitiful way leaning against the headboard in your direction. You can’t begin to look him in the eyes right now, instead lightly pushing his face away from your spot, sitting close to his bed on a chair that you had moved from the corner. His pout turns into an amused smile, as he instead takes your hand in his own, moving it down to press a kiss to your palm. You try not to blush at him. You’re supposed to be standing strong, dammit! 

  "Come on, Chère. S' not like it's gonna make Gambit hurt any worse-” You cut him off by lightly slapping his abdomen. Remy immediately flinches, curling in on himself with a pained groan. You feel a little guilty afterward, flattening your palm to rub the area soothingly.

    “Yes, it would. Remy, I could seriously hurt you. You heard beast, any vigorous activity could rip your stitches.” You say, moving to where you can sit on the bed, facing him. You cup the side of his face, gently moving stray locks out of the way. He rolls his eyes, not at you, but at the memory of the talking-to he got when he had woken up in the infirmary. 

    “Never stopped me before. Since I been with the X-men it’s like everythin’ become a big deal. So what if I rip a few stitches here an’ there?” Remy grumbles. You give him a stern look, before leaning in to kiss his temple. He melts into your touch.

    “It is a big deal, Remy. You need to heal. End of discussion.” You say gently. Remy thinks on it for a moment, before giving you a slight smirk. 

    “And by “end of discussion” you really mean “Until Gambit tempts me into bed”, Right?” He says. You roll your eyes at him before standing. If that’s the attitude he’s going into these next weeks with, you know for a fact he’s going to be insufferable.

    You were right. The incoming weeks were almost as much torture to you as they most definitely were to him. Wherever you went in the mansion, Gambit was sure to follow. He’d be in the kitchen while you would be cooking, unable to help due to doctor's orders, but no one ever said that he had to stay out of the kitchen. He’s come up behind you, snaking his arms around your hips as he’d “Give you pointers”. He’d lean close and whisper in your ear, sometimes giving it a nip or two. But one thing about Gambit is that every time you turned him away, or laughed at him and told him to sit down, he’d get pouty. 

    That was a trend that continued. He’d deliberately go out of his way to tease you, on movie night, in the library, in the showers even. And every time, despite how hot under the collar you might have been, you turned him away. The more bothered you seemed to be however, his pouts turned into smirks. Eventually, you got fed up with it. You were trying to be a good girlfriend and make sure Remy didn’t hurt himself, but if he was going to be a brat about it, you could be a brat too.

    You started off a little more subtly than Remy did. Lingering touches here and there, kissing him just long enough to leave him wanting. You’d wear just a tad less clothing around him, or wear slightly lower-cut tops. You were beginning to realize just how easy it was to get him riled up.

    One particular day, the tension was thick in the air, having coalesced into something barely breathable. Remy was lying back on the bed on his elbows as you redressed his wound, making sure to spread ointment onto the healing stitches and care for the skin. You frequently found yourself drawn to the sight of his lower abs, the large bruise having begun to yellow as it healed. Maybe it was the fact that you hadn't seen his skin in a while, but the sight of him had you breathing a little funny. Remy was also a little quieter than normal, unable to look away from your gentle hands as you took care of him.

    Once you finished, you lingered by his side, a hand pressed against his chest. You look up to find him already watching you, but neither of you says anything. You purse your lips, debating on whether or not you’re doing what you think you’re about to do. Remy tilts his head at you questioningly. He opens his mouth to speak but fails to do so as your hand trails down to his waistband. He takes a shocked breath through his nose, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment before he’s looking at you again through a lustful haze. 

    “Thought you said-”

    “Shut up.” You sigh, cutting him off. Remy smirks at you, biting his lip. You roll your eyes, caressing the crotch of his pants a few times before you begin to slip them off of him.

    “Don’t get too excited.” You whisper, but really it sounds more like a needy sigh. “Just a handy, okay?” Gambit huffs a laugh at you, but doesn’t tease. He's practically bucking his hips into your hand when you finally take hold of his cock, stroking him to hardness. You can’t seem to look away from the sight, watching as his abdomen clenches with every stroke from base to tip. You twist your hand on the upstroke, listening as Remy lets out a curse and a sudden moan just as you thumb his head, collecting his abundant precum as you use it to stroke back down again. 

    “You’re really pent up, huh?” You ask in a heated whisper. Remy’s head is tilted back in pleasure, and he huffs in amusement as he cracks an eye open at you. His hand slides up your thigh, Your legs being pressed against each other tightly to find some friction. You gasp as he suddenly slides two of his fingers up the inside seam of your pants, and you can practically feel yourself get wetter at the touch. 

    “Looks like I’m not the only one.” Remy hums. You can’t seem to pull away from him as he continues to stroke you. The air is hardly breathable, and the burning in your chest and your core starts to become too hot to ignore. 

    “Fuck it.” You say. Remy is confused when you let go of him, only to break into a wide smile when he realizes you were beginning to strip. The shirt is first to go, before your bra, and then your jeans and underwear. Remy wolf-whistles at the sight, and you wave him off, embarrassed. 

    “Couldn’t stay away from the temptation of Remy LeBeau, Now could you Chère?” Remy muses. He’s such a goof. You try to hide your smile as you carefully straddle his legs, making sure to avoid his sore spots. One of his hands holds onto your upper thigh, the other making its way to your center. He strokes you languidly with his fingers before circling your slit and pushing two inside. You suck in a breath, careful to set your hands on his shoulders without putting any weight onto them. 

    “Looks like this pretty pussy missed me as much as I missed you,” Remy says breathlessly. His eyes flicker from your cunt up to your bare breasts, and then to your flushed face. You feel like you’re falling apart too quickly, already climbing that high as he fingers you with those hands you love so much.

    “Remy,” You call for him breathlessly. “ m’ not gonna last too long.” Remy can't help himself any longer, and pulls you closer to catch you in a passionate kiss. He drags his teeth across your bottom lip, letting go of the plush skin. He doesn't withdraw his fingers until your thighs begin to shake and you start to clench down on him. You whine as he does so, barely holding your composure. Remy takes your hand off of his cock, pressing a kiss to your knuckles before gently dragging your hips further into his lap. Your mind is hazy, but you know to be careful as he lines himself up.

    “If we're going to do this, we're taking it my speed, okay?” You say. Remy nods, barely taking in the information. He was ready to be inside you. After weeks of nothing- all he could think about was you. Your giggles, your smiles. Your body. The way you taste on his tongue. The feeling of your thighs clenching around his head.  Remy would do anything you asked of him at this moment.

    You take it slow as you lower yourself down on his cock. The stretch of him feels delicious against your inner walls. Remy leans in, kissing and sucking on your breasts as you take your time. He bottoms out with a wet sound, his hands resting against your upper thighs.

    Remy curses as you begin to move, bouncing on his cock somewhat slowly. Even in the haze of your lust, you're worried about hurting him. Remy, on the other hand, doesn't share the same sentiment. His hands clench around your thighs, and when he can't seem to take the slow speed anymore, he slams you down onto him.

    You gasp at the action, and apologies spill from his lips as he tilts you forward, knocking your balance so you're forced to lean onto him as he controls the pace, eagerly thrusting into your heat. 

    “Remy-” Your protests are cut off with a kiss as your favorite scoundrel begins to take exactly what he wants. His grunts and moans beneath you send another trickle of warmth inside of you. To be honest, seeing him take control like this was hot- almost hot enough for you to forgive the fact that he was certainly overexerting himself- but it was hard to be mad at him when he's fucking you so good.

    One thing about Remy is that he's a talker in bed. If anything, you were surprised he was as “quiet” as he had been the majority of the time. But once he started to get closer to his peak, Remy began to ramble. 

    "You think you're smart? -Ah! Teasing me like that.. mmh… expecting me to just take it?" You're not really paying attention to his words, nodding in response while only thinking about his steady grip on your thighs and ass and the peak you're reaching so quickly. Remy squeezes you harder, almost harshly as he begins to take you faster. His hips begin to stutter, thrusts starting to do him in one by one. 

    Remy lets out a loud groan as he reaches his peak, burying himself deeply inside you and thumbing your clit. He continues to thrust as he helps you reach that white-hot peak of pleasure, pressing kisses to your temple as you ride it out on top of him. By the time you're both fully finished, you're panting for air. You're fully collapsed onto Remy's chest, Remy being absolutely boneless as he rests against the headboard. 

    “You’re such an idiot.” You say when you finally have enough sense. Remy just chuckles, continuing to press kisses to every part of your face and neck he can reach. You sigh happily as he does so, pressing some of your own kisses to his shoulder.

    When you finally peel yourself off of his chest, the first thing you check in on is his bandages. You scowl when you see that they've been soaked through with sweat, but more concerning is the spot of red that has started to form. You look up at Remy with narrowed eyes, and he quickly looks down as well, before looking back up at you and simply shrugging with a gleeful smile.

    “Casualty of love, Chère.”

[briennemurdock]

dinner and a show

pairing: void!gambit/remy lebeau x fem!reader

warnings: 🔞!!!, established relationship, does this count as public sex & exhibitionism if it’s in an abandoned diner in the middle of the void lmao, cunnilingus, fingering, multiple orgasms (f!rec), unprotected sex, clothed sex

w/c: 3.4k

a/n: heyyy 😝 back again bc i can’t stop myself. literally one person asked for me to expand on the diner sex that i mentioned in my first remy fic here, and my brain was like ok say less lollll. reblogs and comments are much appreciated! i hope u all enjoy <3

“you sure know how to wine and dine a girl, huh?” 

he really does have the wine part down. that, he brought straight from the hideout. a couple of liquor bottles you both like tucked safely in his deep pockets. the dine part could surely use some work, but you take what you can get here in the void. you know he’d cook you something nice if he had the means; he raves about the gumbo and beignets he used to make frequently enough to have you craving something you’ve never even tasted before. 

remy’s eyes glint as he crunches on a piece of cracker jack popcorn, jutting his hand out to share the box with you as you place your own box of teddy grahams down to pluck out a handful. 

“only de best for you, chère.” 

you know he’s serious, but he’s messing around too, at least a little bit. you meet his eyes playfully before your own cut to the garbage that litters the floor of the abandoned diner, the dusty countertops and booth seats, the broken tables. it’s a fucking dump, much like everything else in the void, but your gambit still somehow manages to make it oddly charming. he’s a sweetheart, the biggest loverboy you’ve ever met. all he wanted to do was take you on a date, get you both out of the hideout for something that isn’t a recon mission or scavenging. 

you have no clue how he managed to get the old, rundown jukebox working, but he did. etta james croons quietly from across the room, and your boots tap against the ankle of his where you’ve got his foot trapped between both of yours. 

“y’know,” you say, “in another world, this was probably a really nice place for dates.” 

home-y breakfast dates, brunches on the weekends after having a little too much fun the night before. you’d sit across the table from him and take his features in as he nurses his cup of coffee and people watches out the window. his shirt collar would be low enough that you could see the freckles that adorn his strong chest, maybe even the smattering of half-uncovered lovemarks you left on him earlier. you’d trail the toe of your shoe up his leg until he catches your ankle in his hand, until he levels you with a gaze that has your stomach clenching with wantwantwant. 

when you come back to yourself, remy’s silently eyeing you over the rim of his bottle while he takes a sip. his eyebrow is quirked though, and you know you’ve been caught dreaming about him. 

“got lost up dere for a minute,” he notes, reaching for your fingers when he sets his bottle down. a smirk tugs on the corner of his pink lips. “you was thinkin’ somethin’ nasty, huh?” 

“no, i- i was not,” you argue half heartedly. you were; you’re a big, fat liar and you both know it. he’s too perceptive for you to try and lie your way out of it anyway. you’ve been with him for so long now, but having remy’s undivided attention on you still manages to get your cheeks heating up. 

remy lifts your hand and places a slow kiss on the knuckles. “y’ain’t gotta be shy wit’ me, belle. gambit has dese type’a thoughts too.” 

you know he does. he whispers them in your ear before biting down on the lobe, kisses them into your skin. 

“oh, so you’re a pervert?” your eyebrows raise, and a smile splits your cheeks before you can stop it. “you only want me for my body, is that what you’re sayi- remy!” 

a piece of caramel popcorn hits you square in the forehead. 

he chuckles when you sputter, deep and handsome, but he takes your waving hands in his own gloved ones and cups them gently. “gambit just want you, chère. body, mind, and soul.” 

it’s so easy for him to get you melting, for him to carefully herd your deflecting and lower your hackles with the earnest tone of his voice. he watches it happen, watches your grin soften into something small and your head duck in happiness. when you look at him again, his smile is just as soft. 

“i want you too, remy,” you say. nothing has ever been truer. “and really, thank you for doing this. you’re sweet to me.” 

“de rien. it ain’t much, but we make do, don’t we?” 

you always do. 

your eyebrows furrow when he unexpectedly slides from the booth, but the heat in your cheeks flares up again when you realize what it is that he’s doing. remy bows slightly at the waist and presses another kiss to your knuckles. 

“may i have dis dance, chère?” 

it’s an easy answer, and he grins that handsome, dimpled grin of his when you slide from the booth to stand in front of him. his chest plate is cool against your cheek as remy guides you slowly around the floor of the diner to the soothing tunes of etta james, thick fingers pressed lightly against the dip of your back while the fingers of his other hand hold yours out to the side. you’ve never danced with anyone like this before, not where it feels like the world has fallen into place. it’s more like swaying than dancing at this point, but you’re keen to let remy sway you back and forth like this until he lifts your entwined hands to twirl you in a circle. 

it brings a giggle to your lips, and you’re giddy when he tucks you right back against his chest where you belong. you feel his chin rest against the top of your head when you settle. remy blankets you like this; he embraces you wholly. 

he only lifts his chin when you start to raise your head to look at him. his gaze meets yours in the middle, soft and warm, and you’re kissing before you know it. both of his gloved hands come up to cup your cheeks and pull you closer, causing you to melt into him all over again. your own slip under his leather coat to grip at the back of his chest plate. 

the kiss deepens as remy’s fingers curl into the hair at the nape of your neck. he holds you in place, essentially scruffing you like a needy kitten while he takes charge of the kiss. his tongue teases at your bottom lip until you’re opening your mouth wider to let him inside, and remy licks between your lips as if he’s trying to commit your taste to memory, like he’s trying to learn you anew. you taste caramel and liquor on his tongue, along with that special hint of just pure remy that you love so much. 

his empty bottle clatters to the floor when he backs you against the table you sat at earlier. it startles you enough to have you jolting in his grasp, but it brings a sneaky smile to your face as you climb onto the table and swipe your hand behind you, sweeping your own bottle, empty boxes of snacks, and the old menus to the ground to give you more room. 

remy’s grin is smug. heat swirls in your stomach when he looms over you like this, tall and oh, so sure of himself. 

“you eager for somethin’?” he asks. what a silly question, you’re eager for anything and everything he could possibly give you. 

remy’s got you so keyed up that you hardly notice him unzipping your suit and pulling the sleeves down your arms, all too focused on the burning kisses he leaves up and down your neck. the fabric pools around your waist, and remy helps you from the edge of the table so he can pull it down the rest of the way to finally get you bare for him. 

getting your pants over the platform of your boot is a feat in itself, but there’s broken glass on the floor now. neither of you want to risk that when you’re supposed to be romancing each other. 

he takes you in where you stand before him, emerald eyes roaming the curves and angles of your naked body. remy’s on you again before you can blink; he kisses you like he wants to make a home for himself inside you, carve a place for himself between your ribs to nestle beside your heart, and little does he know that you’d let him with no hesitation - you would carve it yourself. your hands scramble up the leather of his coat to grip at his silky hair, but they can’t stay still. you’re all over him, carding your fingers through his hair, clutching his coat to pull him closer, rubbing your hands against his chest plate. 

your frantic movements have the shoulders of his coat slipping slightly down his arms, and that’s when the idea strikes. 

remy shrugs the coat from his shoulders when you start tugging at it and backs up willingly with an easy push to his chest. your lips smack noisily as he pulls away, and he licks at his for one last taste. remy sees the satisfied gleam in your eye, the playful quirk to the corner of your lips as you slip your own arms into the warm sleeves of his brown, leather coat. 

it’s big on you, no doubt, but remy looks at you like you’ve hung the stars in his sky. 

you back yourself to the table again and lift up on the balls of your feet to settle on the edge. remy comes to you when you crook your finger at him, meeting your lips once more with a smile and easing between your bare legs. 

“look better den gambit does in his own coat, chère, woo. don’ even know what you do ta me, do ya?” 

you tuck his coat tighter around you, batting your eyelashes at him in a way you know he loves. “whatever do you mean? i’m just a little chilly.” 

“caught a chill up in here, huh?” he places his palms on either side of you and noses up your neck. “i got somethin’ in mind t’at could warm you right up.” 

you’re not expecting him to drop to his knees, but god, is it a welcome sight. his hands are warm on your thighs when he spreads them wide, even the fabric of his gloves run hot with the constant contact against your skin. if anyone else were to stare at you like this, you might get shy, but there’s something reverent in remy’s gaze, something devout and awed as he watches the puffy lips of your cunt part for him. 

remy’s eyes slide to your face when he leans in, and the first press of his lips to your aching clit has your back bowing. he just kisses you there, a chaste little thing, but the pressure of his mouth is enough to have you twitching. 

“please,” you whimper. “remy, please? please.” 

a deep inhale, a warm exhale. 

“pauvre bete…” a slick swipe of tongue that has your hands scrambling against the dusty table. 

it has you trembling, legs twitching in the air as remy sucks the swell of your sensitive clit into his mouth. his tongue bats against it until you’re gripping at his hair and clenching around nothing. you can hardly bear to watch, the sight of his tongue lapping away at your sopping cunt, his hands keeping your legs open, the deep, yearning green of his eyes, it’s all too much. your hips roll before you can think twice, and remy groans his approval into you. you grind up against his face so roughly that it rattles the table, but you don’t have it in mind to be worried. with remy here, you’re not going anywhere. 

”your f-fucking mouth, oh my god,” you keen, craning your neck to watch him work. a slow swirl of his tongue around your clit has your eyes rolling pitifully and your lashes fluttering. one of his hands travels from your thigh to the heat of your pussy - he spreads you with his thick fingers, pulling away for a moment to watch the way that sweet little button pulses between the vee of his digits. 

“mon dieu,” remy breathes. his mouth is on you again in an instant, sucking your clit between his spit-slick lips and bobbing his head lightly. the pressure of his fingers works wonders too, and you’re grabbing yourself underneath one of your knees to give him more room. you’re so focused on that devilish mouth that you nearly miss his fingers moving to prod at your hole. you nod so hard that your head thunks against the table, mouth falling open in a silent cry as two breach inside to rub against your spongy walls. “t’at what you gonna do on my dick?”

your fuzzy brain has no clue what he’s talking about until you feel yourself tighten around his fingers. you’re clenching on him, squeezing him tight until his tongue on your clit has you relaxing again. 

remy curls his fingers and massages them in steady circles until you’re squealing. you crane your neck again to look at him, and it’s then that you hazily notice that the fingers bullying themselves inside of you are covered by the fabric of his gloves. you’re soaking the sleek black fabric; it shines with your sticky wetness. you’re probably soaking the inside of his coat by now as well, you’ll surely soak his handsome face when he makes you— 

he lifts up higher on his knees when you jolt, his other hand that’s unoccupied with your cunt moves to hold you down by your stomach. 

“f-f-fuck, fuck, please make me cum!” you cry. “remy, remy. it’s s-so good, baby, so good. please?” 

he groans again, something gritty and deep from his chest, but he pulls away slightly to kiss the plush of your thigh. “y’ain’t ever gotta beg for t’at, you kno’? gambit always give his girl what she need…” 

he does. he does; he’s so good to you in every way. you nod your head, and remy nods back before bringing his mouth to you once more, thick fingers never halting their movements. 

you can feel it in your stomach, feel that sweet warmth building in your gut until your legs are trembling with the need to lock around his head. 

“say it,” he mumbles, lips not straying far from where you’re aching for him. 

it takes everything in you to speak, but you’d do anything for remy. 

“always g- give me what i need, my remy always- always gives me… what i… oh, god, there! there, remy, i’m-” you can’t even finish your sentence before he has you seeing stars. it makes your back arch, your toes curl in your boots, and your fingers scramble for his hair; you’re squealing again before you know it. remy lifts himself to his feet so that he can hold you while you come down. his arm slips underneath the back of his coat that you wear to wrap around your waist, and the fingers of his other hand slip slowly from the pulsing clutch of your body. 

he tastes like you when he kisses you breathless. you’re already breathless enough from the pleasure he so willingly gave, but he steals the air from your lungs and breathes new life into you, molding your shattered pieces together again. 

his chest plate clatters to the ground in your shared haste to feel each other closer. the pants don’t make it far; you thoroughly enjoy their tightness usually, but it would take too long to get them down his thick thighs now and you’re too desperate for him to try. you help push them down far enough to free his cock - remy adjusts his stance at the end of the table and pulls you closer to the edge to rut against you.

“sweet girl. remy got hisself de sweetest girl…” 

it’s mumbled against your lips, and you nod your head again, clutching the shirt that covers his strong shoulders with shaky, clammy hands. 

“do whatever you want with me.” your eyes are frantic as they bore into his, but they lose focus for what feels like the hundredth time when remy sheaths his heavy cock inside the warmth of your still-sensitive pussy. he rolls his hips gently, leans over slightly to press you further against the table and cups the back of your head so it doesn’t hit the wood. 

“dass’a loaded statement, chère,” he jokes, but you meant it. you meant every word. remy can take you apart and piece you together again as he always does. he’s the only one who knows how, the only one you’ve let learn. 

if you were in bed, he’d be shunting your body up the mattress with the force of his thrusts. here though, here, the leather of his coat sticks to the table and keeps you more or less in place. his hands do a good job of that as well; it feels like they’re everywhere. gripping your hips, pressing your thighs to your chest, cupping underneath your head and making you look at him. you’re not going to last long, not with remy all over you like this. 

“that feels so good, remy, shit! you- you fuck me so good. can you- harder?” 

he doesn’t hesitate at all before he’s fucking you the way you asked. hard, deep. he fucks the thoughts from your head, the words from your mouth. the only thing you have the wherewithal to say is his name. 

so you chant it, repeat it like a prayer. 

“remy! remyremyremy, my remy…” 

“keep sayin’ my name like t’at, chère, you hear me?” it’s grit through his teeth; his jaw flexes so hard that the dimple in his cheek pops. you couldn’t stop if you tried. he pulls you up until you’re flush against him, and you raise a hand to brush against his cheek, thumbing at the stubble there. your arms fly around his neck before long to pull him into a messy, uncoordinated kiss. he tugs you closer by your thighs, and they wrap around his waist to hold him close. the change in position has you fluttering around him again. “merde, can’t get enough’a dis perfect body…” 

you’re going to cum again. you can’t last, not with remy fucking you the way he is and holding you just the way you need to be held. you wish he was as naked as you were though, so you could feel the warmth of his skin, the energy that buzzes underneath it. 

“please make me cum,” you breathe. ”please, i- remy, i’m so-!” so close, so desperate, so in love. so many things. 

you don’t have to tell him because he already knows. he’s already one step ahead, so typical of your gambit. 

“listen to your body, chère.” he holds the sides of your head with both hands, making sure that you’re looking into his eyes as he talks you to your orgasm. “remy gon’ get you there, you kno’ he will. again and again, ‘til you’re done.” 

your chin quivers, and remy’s quick to bring a gloved hand between you to rub rough circles against your swollen clit. you fall apart on him, on his fingers, his cock, legs locking around him like your body wants to keep him where he is until time stands still. 

“dass’it,” he grunts. remy noses at your temple and presses a kiss to your cheek. “woo, y’grippin’ me tight.” 

he gets his too, you feel when he does. remy shudders against you and fucks in hard, stilling balls deep inside. you milk him dry, take everything he has to give you and then some, and you’d never have it any other way. 

you pluck at his hair when he sags against your chest. it’s a mess, strands sticking up straight and mussed from your greedy, desperate fingers. his own fingers pluck something from the pocket of his coat. 

a bag of chex mix, rumpled and crinkly from your frantic fucking. his smile is sly when he opens the bag and brings a broken piece of pretzel to your lips, and you nip at the tip of his thumb when you take it in your mouth. remy tugs at the collar of his coat, fixes it around your neck. 

“you like when i wear it?” you ask. you know he does. his cock twitching inside of you is enough of an answer, but you’d love to hear him say it anyway. 

“gambit like it a little too much. you drivin’ me crazy here, chère.” 

if he fucks you this good again, you’ll wear it every damn day.

dictionary!

chère - term of endearment, “dear" or "sweetheart"

de rien - it’s nothing

pauvre bete - poor thing

mon dieu - my god

merde - shit

[briennemurdock]

lead me home

pairing: void!gambit/remy lebeau x fem!reader

warnings: 🔞!!!!!, established relationship, post-daw resistance fight, the 3 b’s: blood, bruises, and baths (non-sexual bathing lmao), eventual smut, somnophilia for like .5 seconds, thigh riding, fingering (f!rec), finger sucking, riding, unprotected sex, service oriented boyfie gambit <3

w/c: 5.3k!

a/n: this is literally my first ever non-kpop fic, which is crazy. idk much about gambit or his lore, but i fell in love w him in deadpool & wolverine so here i am :) if this is so totally ooc i’m very sorry, i’m only going off of what i saw in the movie! anyway, as per the end credit scene and mr. tatum, gambit is still in the void after the fight, sooo….. here’s this!

“i can walk,” you grumble, cheek bunched up against the cool leather of his coat. you’re positive you can, but still you make no effort to remove yourself from the safety of his strong arms. 

you had been walking fine, up until the residual energy zinging through your body gave way to pure exhaustion. you’d made it halfway back to the resistance hideout in the banged up odyssey before it gave out on the two of you. what’s left of the trek is thankfully walkable, but it’s not easy with your body as sore and aching from the fight as it is. 

remy chuckles against the crown of your head, ducking his own lightly to press his chin to your sweaty hair. 

“gambit knows t’at.” his grin is easy. 

he’s hurting too; he’s equally as exhausted, but he grins and bears it and puts you first anyway. you love him. 

“i’ll get blood on your coat.” 

not yours, you don’t think. well, maybe a little bit of yours, but the majority of the blood staining your clothes belongs to cassandra’s gang of mutants. you fought hard. all seven of you did. 

“gambit knows t’at too, chère,” he says, still grinning. you want to reach up and poke your finger into the dimple in his cheek, but your arms won’t listen. you’ll settle for studying his handsome face instead, eyeing the sharp cut of his cheekbones, the tall slope of his nose. “a lil’ blood ain’t never hurt nobody.” 

“is that how the saying goes? i don’t think that’s how the saying goes.” maybe he’s right though… you’re too tired to think too much about it, and remy’s right about a lot of things. 

he shrugs and it jostles you, so you adjust your arms around the wide breadth of his shoulders and hold on tight. 

as soon as the resistance hideout graces your sight, you’re nearly ready to fling yourself out of remy’s arms and run to the door using what little bit of energy you have left. it might not be much, but it’s your home here in the void, and you’re ready for the small comforts of it that you didn’t know you’d be able to come back to. the warm glow of the lamp lights, the chill of the pool water on your skin, the heady taste of remy’s ever growing collection of liquor. 

your head lolls against his arm as his steps carry you to the door. “god, i can’t wait to take my bra off,” you groan, and remy laughs again as he shoulders the door open. 

“you need any help widdat?” 

his mischievous gaze never wanes even when you level him with a halfhearted glare. 

you shouldn’t need any help, but maybe you’ll let him anyway. 

there’s a twitch at the corner of his lips as he carries you down the steps. he’s favoring his right leg, you can tell by his gait, but he hasn’t said a word about it. you know your gambit well enough to know that he’d rather take care of you first and downplay his injuries when you inevitably ask about them. 

it doesn’t hit you until remy gently sets you down in the entryway just how quiet the hideout is with only the two of you in it. there was always some sort of noise to be heard: laura’s heavy boots thunking on the floor, blade sharpening his weapons, the sluicing sound of elektra twirling her twin sai. now all you hear is the rhythmic dripping of the bathtub faucet and the airy shuffling of remy’s deck of cards as he takes them from his coat pocket. it’s a lot to take in at once, the silence is. the silence, and the inherent knowledge that you have no universe to return to like the others did, that remy has no universe to begin with. remy is the only thing worth living for here in the void. him and the surprisingly earnest promise wade left you with.  

we’re gonna get you out of there, sweeties, you and step up just sit tight! whoever the hell is writing this hasn’t figured that part out yet, ‘kay? and you know what? you’re welcome. i actually know a couple of things you can do to pass the time while you wait. have either of you ever heard of smashturba—

remy’s gentle, gloved hands on your shoulders bring you out of your thoughts, and your head rolls back until it thunks against the bulk of his chest. 

“lemme take dis off, chère, how ‘bout t’at? gon’ draw you up a bath. get you cleaned right up.” 

you know you need it. it’s then that you can feel every bit of the grime from the fight: the dirt under your nails, the blood caked in your suit and on your skin, the nasty bruises that must litter your body. the exhaustion seeps forward tenfold, and you teeter on your feet. remy steadies you as always, flexing his hands on your shoulders before he unzips the back of your suit and presses a slow kiss to the nape of your neck. he gets you bare just like this - tenderly pulling your arms from the sleeves of your suit and kneeling to help untie your boots and take off your pants. your hands grip remy’s shoulders to balance yourself while you step out of them. he’s as solid and sturdy as a mountain, your gambit. 

and he does, in fact, expertly undo the clasps on the back of your bra when he’s done, sliding the straps down your arms and giving you a playful wink as he tosses it to the side. he studies you - eyes the bruises and nicks and blood that paint your skin. he clicks his tongue and shakes his head at himself, thumb tracing the shape of a particularly nasty purple-blue bruise on the curve of your hip.  

“should’a kept a better eye on you,” he fusses, and remy steps away for a moment to turn on the warm water in the tub. it runs brown before turning clear. he plugs the drain when the water heats to the temperature you like the best. “i kno’ you can hold your own, but t’at don’t mean i like seein’ you hurt.” 

you can relate. watching remy get tackled, shot at, and thrown around wasn’t easy for you either. 

it was a harrowing experience all together. a rag-tag team with a rag-tag plan, even though the end result turned out much better than expected. you even managed to escape alioth, which is a feat in itself. but the what ifs, the could have beens, they hit you like a ton of bricks. 

you watch him pull off his gloves and take off his coat, but other than that, he remains completely clothed. remy’s hands are steady as they guide you into the tub. your teeth gnash when the warm water laps against the gashes that litter your torso and legs as you ease your way down. you wish he could join you, sit behind you and pull your back against his warm chest so that he could hold you like you need, but he can barely fit in the small tub by himself, much less with another person. at least he’s close, kneeling by the bathtub on his knees and watching you keenly. 

your own knees curl to your chest as he dips a cloth in the water and rings it out before bringing it to your cheek. the first touch of the cloth on your face makes your eyes droop; he’s gentle, only applying the softest amount of pressure to scrub the drying blood off of your skin. 

the water tinges pink when he dips the cloth back under. 

he continues like that, pressing the wet cloth against your neck, your chest, your arms and cleaning the blood from your body. the ends of his black sleeves are soaked from the water, so you use your last remaining strength trying to push his sleeves up his muscular arms so they won’t get wet again. he lets you fuss over him for a moment with a glint in his eyes.

“let remy see dose hands,” he mumbles, and he hums his thanks when you present them to him. he scrubs the cloth across your palms and between your fingers, paying close attention to the tips of your fingernails to make sure he’s cleaned the dirt and blood from under them as best he can. remy is thorough; his deft fingers work wonders. his hands increase their pressure when he starts to really bathe you, lathering the cloth with a bar of soap and scrubbing you clean. he chuckles when you start to sway with his movements. “done fell asleep on me, eh? we almost through, chère.” 

“you have magic hands,” you breathe, words slurring, and remy chuckles again. he really does, in more ways than one, whether that be the energy that thrums under his skin or the way he takes care of you. 

“that so?” 

“mm.” 

he thinks you’re sweet. it’s not often that he gets to see you like this; remy loves your spitfire attitude and the way you carry yourself from day to day, but here, both physically and mentally exhausted after the day you had, you’re pliant and malleable under his hands, more honest. you slump to the side of the tub so that you can rest your head against his chest plate, the beat of his heart thumping underneath it. 

“remy,” you say. “remy.” you just want to say his name, taste it on your tongue. 

“mon chère.” a kiss to your shoulder, your neck, the top of your head. he’s content to let you rest there for several moments before he sits you up again and watches as your eyes struggle to stay open. “c’est tout, up we go.” 

when he pulls you to your feet, you cling to him like you’ll disappear if you don’t. it truly feels like you might - like the world would swallow you whole if you let go, if you don’t hug him tight. if he doesn’t wrap his arms around you and hold you steady, tether you to the ground. 

the water sloshes when he helps you step out of the tub, and it almost physically hurts when he turns away from you to grab a towel. 

that’s when you look down; the water is darker than you expected it would be, a debilitating pink-red color that might stain the already dingy tub if you don’t drain it soon. you shiver, slightly overwhelmed that all of that blood came off of your body. how much of it belonged to cassandra’s mutants? how much of it belonged to you? you could have— 

“look at me,” he tells you, and your gaze refocuses on him in an instance. there’s nowhere else you’d rather look. remy unplugs the drain before you have the chance to get distracted again. “look here. reckon it’s better to look at gambit’s handsome mug den t’at mess, huh?” 

that does bring a shaky smile to your lips, a small one that’s just for him, and remy dries you off as best he can while you steadily try to wrap yourself around him again. 

you let him play doctor when he’s done drying you off. he sits at the table while you stand between his legs to dab alcohol on your wounds and bandage them up before he helps you put on some clothes, a clean pair of underwear and one of his cropped tops that he likes so much. 

you’re halfway asleep when he takes you in his arms once more to carry you to the skull bed. he lifts you onto the mattress with little trouble, over the massive teeth around the edges of the jaw and straight onto the pile of throw pillows. remy putters around the bed for a bit, pulling the covers over you and arranging the pillows to make you more comfortable. it’s not until your eyes droop closed that he moves to head back to the bath himself, but your arm shoots out to grab his hand before he can. 

“mon petit chère,” he croons, something dulcet and warm and soothing. “i need t’get down to the bath right quick.” 

you frown, you can’t even help it. you want him in bed, spooned right behind you with his arms wrapped around your waist, you want to rest your head on his chest so that you can hear the rhythmic beat of his heart. you want him here with you, but you know he’ll feel better too when he gets the dirt and grime off of his body, just like you did. you should get up and help him like he helped you, erase the bloody signs of the fight from his beautiful body as best you can, show him how much you love him, how much you cherish his presence. 

“what’s t’at bobin for, huh?” remy chuckles. 

you pout harder. “i want to help.” 

he leans against the massive teeth and reaches over to smooth your hair from your forehead. “why don’tcha stay right here and keep an eye on me? gambit need all the lookin’ after he can get.” he lifts your hand up and kisses your knuckles before you finally ease your loose grip from his fingers. 

your eyes aren’t nearly as keen as they usually are when you watch remy take his clothes off. your blinks get slower and your eyes stay shut for longer, but you do keep your eyes on him like he asked you too. it’s the least you can do. his balaclava comes off first, then his chest plate and fitted shirt. his traps flex when he pulls the shirt over his head. if you were any less tired, you’d probably be biting your lip by now. 

just like you figured, he’s as banged up as you are. dark bruises litter the wide expanse of his muscular back, and his front looks the same when he turns around. the next time you open your eyes after another long blink, he’s already easing himself into the bath. remy lets himself relax for a moment, and you watch as his bulky arms come up to rest against the sides of the tub, head tilting back against the lip. you stare, you can’t help it. it’s the longest you go without blinking in a while, all so you can trace the never ending curves and lines and shapes of his body. 

“you go any longer without blinkin’, chère, ya eyes gonna dry out,” he jokes, a satisfied grin growing on his handsome face. 

“says the preening peacock,” you mumble, and you make a spectacle of blinking your eyes rapidly. a sleepy whine works its way into your voice. “you told me to watch! you like it. don’t even lie.” 

“mais oui, caught me red handed.” 

he doesn’t stay in for long, only long enough to relax for a few moments and clean himself off. you hope the water isn’t as dark with blood as yours was; the thought nearly makes you sick to your stomach, unable to bear the thought that remy could have been hurt worse than he was. 

your eyes stay on him still while he towels off, while he dabs alcohol on the worst of his injuries and bandages them up. remy’s naked as a jaybird when he finally makes his way back to the bed, and you throw the blankets back so they’ll be ready for him when he climbs in. he’s still favoring that right leg; he grunts as the muscle twinges when he climbs over the set of teeth in the jaw of the bed frame. you’re immediately pulled into his strong arms, one snaking around your shoulder and the other resting over your arm where it lays against his toned stomach. 

home at last. 

it’s like your brain shuts off the second you come into contact with his skin again. he’s dewy and warm from the bath. you can hear the thump of his heart, his steady breathing, and your eyes nearly roll as they finally slip shut. 

“sleep,” remy whispers. “gambit ain’t goin’ nowhere.” 

his dulcet voice is the last thing you hear before you finally succumb to your slumber, safe and sound in remy’s arms. 

it’s sweltering. 

the heat blankets you like a fog, wraps around you like a vine.

a blazing, orange fire, flames that lick themselves up your legs and torso. they should burn. the flames should scorch your clammy skin, and they do, until the orange of the fire makes way for dazzling purple. breathtaking, gleaming bursts of purple that embrace you like a warm hug instead. 

you’re hardly awake, haven’t even opened your eyes yet. without the use of your eyes, your fuzzy brain works in overdrive to understand what it is that you’re feeling. 

the feeling of heat, of unbridled pleasure. 

your hips twitch on their own, chasing the feeling your sleep-addled body and mind suddenly crave so desperately. the noises that bubble from your throat can’t be stopped: choked whimpers, pitiful keens, airy whines. you rub against something hard, something warm, and it’s the best thing you’ve ever felt. your fingers frantically search for the source of the heat, clenching and unclenching in their haste to pull it closer toward you. 

the soft give of skin, a deep breath, a tender kiss to your sweaty hair. 

a particularly hard snap of your hips has your eyes finally fluttering open, and the source of the heat makes itself known.

how could it be anything other than remy? 

even with your mind hazy from sleep, you immediately feel bad for tugging on him like you were, for disturbing his much needed rest, so your fingers unclench themselves from his bicep. his heartbeat is steady; you can hear the rhythmic beating of it from where you’re resting on his chest. 

“you up?” he rasps. he hasn’t been up long. “y’killin’ me dead.” 

how mortifying. you were rutting against him like a dog all because of something you don’t even know if you could consider a wet dream? you’re sweating, and your underwear is soaked. the shirt of his you wore to bed is so twisted and wonky from sleep that your bare breasts press against his side, but he holds you close regardless. 

“this is so embarrassing!” you wail, and remy chuckles. 

“mais non.” your leg is still thrown over his thigh, so he cups you behind the knee and drags your leg up until it’s resting over his crotch. he’s hard, mouthwateringly so, leaking against the muscular ridges of his stomach all from feeling you rut against him in your sleep. his hand rubs up and down your thigh when you begin to lightly press it against the bulge of his cock. “you can do whatever you want to remy, chère, don’t gotta ask. done drove him out his mind…”  

his lips are warm when you kiss them. your hand comes up to cup his face, his stubble scratches against your fingers. remy groans deep in his throat when your tongue licks lazily against his, and your cunt throbs in response. can he feel it with you pressed against him like this? he gives you his own answer with a flex of his thick thigh, pressing it against you harder. it’s easy to grind down on him like this, when you’re half on top of him and relaxed with sleep. 

“y’know, ah, if my mind serves me right, somebody told me once t’at i have magic hands.” 

he says it with a grin, right against the pout of your kiss swollen lips. 

“somebody, huh? who, some couyon?” 

“the love of my life,” he says instead, green eyes earnest and soft. “l’amour de ma vie.” 

you can’t help but kiss him again; you put your all into it, hoping that he can feel every ounce of the adoration you have for him. he’s the love of your life too. it’s deep from the start, slow and all encompassing, and you can’t get enough of the way remy holds you close to him by your thigh and your back. 

the heady press of his thigh against your soaked core is sorely missed when he rolls you over on the bed and throws the covers back. remy props himself on his elbow beside you, his eyes roam like you’re a feast he’s ready to devour. he doesn’t have to spread your legs, you do that yourself, unveiling the ever growing wet spot that covers the gusset of your panties. 

“gardez donc,” remy breathes, shaking his head like he can’t believe his eyes. 

you jolt when he thumbs the wet fabric before pulling it to the side to see you bare. you watch as he works his jaw, sitting up on your elbows to have a better look when he finally ducks down to spit onto your already soaked pussy. your head flops back onto the pillow nearly as soon as it happens. it’s too much… the feeling, the sight of it. remy’s thick fingers spread you open, and he watches raptly as his spit seeps down the glistening skin of your cunt. he rubs you like that; two fingers dip shallowly into your hole to gather your wetness and his spit before bringing them back up to your swollen clit. 

“oh my god, remy, fuck,” you keen, and those beautiful, green eyes bore into yours. 

“dass’it, you jus’ lay back and let remy deal de cards, eh?” 

all you can do is nod. 

his hands are magic, no one’s ever touched you the way remy has; you’ve never felt such unbridled pleasure until remy took charge of it. the two of you didn’t have the chance to do this too often, not with the others present. of course, you did find your ways. he’s taken you plenty by the fire outside, in the stone staircase at the doorway, and even on a few particularly memorable occasions, on a table in joe’s diner while you don his leather coat. a bed this big is a luxury, and you know exactly how you’re going to spend your time together until wade fulfills his promise. 

your legs shake as remy’s fingers slip inside. his middle finger first, with the heel of his palm pressed right against the bud of your clit for that delicious stimulation he knows you need. you stretch easily for him, and your thighs spread wider to accommodate his movements. his ring finger makes its way inside shortly after, and soon, your hips are rocking sharply against the rough heel of his hand while his thick fingers bully that spongy spot inside that makes your toes curl. 

“pleasedon’tstop,” you whimper, voice frantic and airy. remy nudges your cheek with his nose, breathing heavily against the line of your jaw. 

“wouldn’t dream of it, chère.”

he hums when your hand flies down to grip his wrist. it’s so overwhelming, it’s everything, that dazzling purple heat flashes again until it’s all you feel. 

“curl them, curl them like tha- oh.” remy listens well; he curls his fingers like you tell him to and keeps his motion steady until he has to sit up further and use his other hand to hold you down. he presses down on your stomach to hold you still but soon moves it to your restless legs where they writhe against the mattress. they nearly snap shut around his insistent fingers before remy pries them back open. you like when he uses his strength on you, when he holds you down. 

the devil’s always been good to you, your own fallen angel. 

“lemme see it,” he goads. “don’t hold nothin’ back from me.” 

it’s loud; you don’t have to tell him how much you like it because the sloppy noise of your cunt does that for you. his cock leaks steadily against your hip, you can feel the sticky drip of precum on your sweaty skin, but all you can do is grip remy’s wrist and hold on tight while his fingers rub against your spongy walls relentlessly. 

your eyes roll when he gets you there, and you cum with a full-body shudder. remy holds you to his chest as you curl in on yourself, shaking and shivering in his warm embrace. his fingers fuck you through it, only slowing his rhythm and easing their curl when your own fingers tighten around his wrist. remy ushers you back against the pillows now that you’re done, slipping his soaked fingers from your core only after you finish pulsing around him. his gaze is soft, but it darkens as you use your hold on his wrist to bring his digits to your mouth. 

“ooh, you nasty!” he grins, and his eyes slide down to your swollen, spit-slicked lips. remy curls his fingers again, petting them against your soft tongue and fucking them deeper into your mouth. “she’s sweet, eh?” 

you’d suck on his fingers all day if you could, but you slip them from your mouth with a pop! to answer him. “mm. i can see why you’re so obsessed with me.” he swats you lightly on the thigh for that, and you wiggle gleefully. 

remy slips your panties from your legs before he settles himself between them to kiss you again. he kisses your sweetness from between your lips, tongue curling around yours and sucking it into his mouth for a better taste. you’d let him fuck you like this if you didn’t remember his leg was hurt; you’d let him bend you in half and fuck you until your knees are clamping shut around his wide shoulders, but the thought that he could hurt himself more makes you hesitant. 

he kisses down your neck when you pull away from his lips, purses his lips around your sensitive nipple and flicks his tongue. it has you arching your back, and the cropped t-shirt you’re wearing rucks further up your chest. you curl your fingers into his hair to tug him closer. 

“let me- god, let me get on top?” you breathe. he makes to pull his head back, but you hold him in place. remy laughs through his nose and continues to kiss and lick and suck at your chest, and it isn’t until he nips at it that you let him go, but not without a swat to his shoulder. 

you almost squeal when remy takes you in his arms to roll you both over. his lap is your favorite seat; you wiggle your hips to get comfortable, and remy takes hold of them. his cock slips between the lips of your pussy where it’s warm and wet and soft, and you rock down onto him slowly. 

“you keep t’at up, chère, gambit won’t last a minute,” he grits. 

he’s cum like this before, with you just grinding yourself on his cock, shooting ropes of pearly cum up the ridges of his abdomen until you duck down to lick it all up. you’d do it again, but you’re aching to have him inside where he belongs. when you lift up on your knees and reach down to grip him, remy cups the backs of your thighs to help keep you steady. he’s a stretch, his length and girth is nothing to scoff at even after he fingered you pliant and needy. 

“dunno if it’ll fit,” you pick, circling your hips so that the give of your hole teases the head of his cock. 

“y’know gambit fits. just gotta let him in, chère.” 

you don’t have it in you to tease him any longer, so you press him inside with the tips of your fingers and sink down slowly. dazzling blasts of purple burst behind your closed eyelids; he feels so good, you fit together like a perfect puzzle. the first rock of your hips has your head lolling, and your hands scramble for leverage against the bulk of remy’s chest. 

“dass’it, dass’a good girl,” he grunts. “mon dieu.” 

you’ve always been his good girl, you always want to be. it spurs you on to do your best. your own body is sore from yesterday’s fight, but you feel reinvigorated on top of him like this. the bouncing of your breasts is covered by the shirt you’re wearing - it’s enough for remy, the sway of the cloth, the peak of your sensitive nipples through the fabric. one hand leaves his chest so that you can tug them jagged hem of your top up to your mouth. you bite down on it, baring your bouncing breasts to the man below you, and remy cups them in his hands. 

“hoo, merde. lemme take t’at off’a you?” 

he loves to see you in his clothes, you both know it, but he wants you naked. remy tugs the hem from between your teeth and shucks the shirt over your head, tossing it off the bed completely. you preen when he takes you in; there’s nothing to be shy about here, not with your gambit. 

“what are you looking at, remy lebeau?” you ask with a cock of your head. your hips resume their movement, grinding in slow circles until your eyes are fluttering. 

“you a sight for sore eyes, chère, i’ll tell you t’at.” 

like he’s one to talk. the window on the ceiling above the bed bathes him in warm light. remy’s beautiful, the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen. his beautiful heart, beautiful soul, beautiful body… he’s the perfect package. 

you change tactics, switching your sensual grinding to rough bouncing that has your breath hitching in your throat. he’s deep like this, and every time you drop down in his lap, your swollen clit rubs against the coarse curls of remy’s pubic hair. 

you’re so close, so fucking close you can taste it. it has your knees trying to kiss where they’re straddling his hips. he notices the shaking in your thighs, he always notices everything about you, and his hips immediately buck to help you out. your eyes roll, mouth dropping open in a silent moan as remy begins to fuck you. he’s so strong, his hands grip your waist to pull you down on him harder, and it has you keening high in your throat. 

“eyes on me,” he grunts. “keep dese pretty eyes on gambit when he makes you fly.” 

it’s a struggle, but your eyes find his as quickly as they can. your hands are still planted on his chest, but you move them to either side of his head so that you can be closer to him. remy’s grip on your hips is intoxicating; you’ll feel it for days, god, you hope you’ll feel it for days. you’ve never felt safer in someone’s arms, never felt more loved or wanted. 

remy nods his head when your eyebrows start to furrow, hands moving from your hips to clutch the rippling fat of your ass. 

“you’re gonna make me cum,” you whimper. “baby, you’re- oh, remy, fuck!” 

you give him another full-body shudder when you cum, nearly lifting yourself clean off his cock in the process due to how hard you shiver. he holds you down, hips rutting as he chases his own release and follows right behind you. the rhythmic pulsing of your cunt gets him there quickly, it always does. 

“keep on clenchin’ like t’at, chère. bon dieu, ça c’est bon.” 

you plop down onto his chest when you’re both done, and remy’s hands come up to massage your back. 

it’s quiet again, all you can hear is your shared heavy breathing and the distant drip of the bathtub faucet. you’re content to lay here until remy’s hands get restless, until they reach out in search of his deck of cards. for now, you’ll rest against his chest and listen to the beat of his heart. 

you don’t know what will happen in the coming days or how long you’ll be stuck in the void until the tva finds somewhere for you and remy to go. you’re not sure of much, you won’t ask for much either, but you’re sure of at least one thing. 

as long as remy’s by your side, home isn’t far away.

dictionary!

(mon) chère: term of endearment - (my) "dear" or "sweetheart"

c'est tout: that's all

petit: little

bobin: frown

mais oui/non: well yes/no

couyon: (could also be spelled as couillon?) a rascal, a fool

gardez donc: look at that

mon/bon dieu: my/good god

merde: shit

ça c'est bon: that's good

[briennemurdock]

big summer for all of those who love the dumb and pretty boys !!

need them to two man me.. WHOA who said that ??

[briennemurdock]

i actually need this loser SO BAD nothing is funny !! i'm waiting by my tv like a wife waiting for her husband at war i need the new season NOW

[briennemurdock]

Hands down one of the best fics I’ve ever read. Like genuinely you write so well! I literally love this- and i love how even if the reader isn’t in any of the big fights, she’s still so important!

💖💖🫶🏻 I’m going to reread this series all the time😭😭

The Wonder of Him : ̗̀➛ Johnny Storm x Reader

READ PART 1: The Wonder of You : ̗̀➛ Johnny Storm x Reader

Pairing: Johnny Storm x Reader

Summary: Falling in love with Johnny Storm was easier than it should've been. Loving a superhero, though, is never easy. But he's worth it. He's always been worth it.

Warnings: 18+ ONLY MDNI, SMUT (making out, oral m. receiving, shower sex, unprotected p in v, creampie, hint of temperature play again), porn with a LOT of plot, sequel, slight hint of some angst, fluff, lovers who haven't put a label on it, Johnny is a massive flirt, hopelessly in love losers, SPOILERS! for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, female reader but no characteristics described, maybe some incorrect stuff regarding the 60s and how it worked but it's a fantasy world, VERY lightly edited so apologies for any mistakes (message me if you find some big ones)

Word Count: 18,781 words

Requests are open! : ̗̀➛ Find my masterlist here

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: ✧

One month.

One month without Johnny Storm and you were, slowly, going insane. Truthfully, you were going insane without the entirety of the Fantastic Four in your life while they were in space.

The Baxter Building lab was quiet. You had the entire, elongated room to yourself, from the workstations to the monitors. It felt like you had spent every waking moment since the Excelsior went up into space in that damn room. Every inch of Reed’s notes had been combed through, you’d made some minor adjustments to the bridge teleportation devices based on Reed’s notes, and had reached the point of rereading old notes and studies to try and fill the void.

Sue’s warm presence couldn’t be felt in every room of the building. She wasn’t sneaking into the kitchen to grab yet another craving during the day, even though she muttered to herself loud enough for you to hear that she was going to spoil her appetite. The scent of her perfume had slowly fallen from the air, it no longer clung to the cushions of the living room couch, could no longer be smelled simply from stepping past her bedroom door.

The kitchen felt lonely without Ben. There was no one to taste test your dishes, make recommendations of the perfect blend of spices to add to your sauces. Even picking up Maisie’s cookies felt sad, knowing you didn’t need to grab any of those delicious black and white ones for your friend to enjoy.

Even Herbie’s missing presence could be felt in every room. No little beeps down the hallway in the morning, his little arguments with Reed in the lab, or the little humming he would do when he’d help Ben in the kitchen.

The Baxter Building felt cold without Johnny Storm.

You felt cold without Johnny Storm.

Four years of working with Reed, of knowing this family, and it was after they’d been gone for three days that it finally hit you. Over the course of those four years, you had never been apart from any of them for more than a week. Every day of your life was spent in that building, working at Reed’s side, cooking with Ben, talking with Sue over the dinner table, or curled up beside Johnny on the couch for whatever movie Channel 2 was playing that night.

It took that long for you to realize that the line between your work and personal life, the one that you had been trying so hard not to muddle up, had blurred a long time ago.

At that realization, you hadn’t left the tower since. Your apartment was long forgotten. Instead, Johnny’s bed became yours.

His warmth didn’t flood the sheets anymore, not without him to lie in them. They were cold, the silk pillowcases cool to the touch every time you laid your head upon them. Fall was quickly winding down, though, winter on the horizon, and you craved the warmth your favorite flame boy gave off. One night to love him how you truly did wasn’t enough. His closet very quickly became your own, too.

Lynne hadn’t said anything the first time you met her in the boardroom for a meeting, but the glance she shot your way said it all. Heels, highwaisted black pants with a tucked in white blouse, but the oversized off-red jacket thrown over your shoulders was the dead give away. That, and what you knew was the faraway look in your eyes.

Reed had left you in charge to speak on his behalf, which prompted Lynne to drag you into any and all meetings for the Future Foundation. You attended, wore a smile, spoke when spoken to. Every other minute was spent staring out the windows, eyes on the skies, praying to see the Excelsior. All while the faint smell of Johnny’s jacket, whether it was his cologne or just simply him, reminded you that he wasn’t here with you.

One single night with Johnny Storm and you were a goner.

Today was no different than the last thirty days. An 8 a.m. meeting with Lynne and the Future Foundation, followed by hours holed up in the lab, trying not to let your brain wander.

The bridge teleportation device sat in front of you, the soldering fixed to strengthen the energy arms, while the other sat across the room at Reed’s workstation. The dress you had worn for the meeting was discarded, replaced instead with a pair of sleep pants you kept in the guest room and Johnny’s faded Elvis t-shirt he’d had as long as you had known him.

Johnny. What if he was dead? What if they all were-

A quick bang of your hand against the workstation was enough to break you from your thoughts, those terrible thoughts that you tried not to have. It was impossible to outrun them, though. A month of no contact from the Excelsior, no updates, no word from the four up there in space. Complete radio silence, and it only had your nerves growing by the minute.

There was a beeping across the room, the same beeping that had been occurring for the last 45 minutes. With one swift press of your keyboard, you silenced it, keeping your attention entirely on the device in front of you. It was just the alert for a message, most likely from Lynne trying to bring you into yet another meeting. You didn’t have the energy for that, not now.

Not when your mind was constantly repeating those final moments one month ago.

Johnny’s hands were warm, they were always warm. But with you, they were warm in a different way, a softer way. He cradled your cheeks in his hands, thumbs running a smooth line back and forth over your flushed skin. All you could do was press a small kiss to the part of his palm exposed, while your eyes stayed trained out the glass panels beside you leading up the walkway to the Excelsior. Reed, Sue and Ben stood with Lynne, the cheers of the city all lining the sidewalks booming through the walls.

“Can you look at me?”

You did, but it felt like a gut punch to do so. There he was, the man you loved, standing before you in that blue and white spacesuit. “J. Storm” embroidered over his right chest.

“It’s not fair,” you said after a moment, swallowing the lump that had formed in your throat. “I tell you I love you and now you’re just jet setting off to space.”

Johnny’s lips quirked up slightly at that, his fingers pinching at your cheek.

“I’ve got a reputation, baby, I can’t be falling in love. Have to run away before you suck me into your orbit,”

The swift punch you laid to his abdomen did nothing but force a laugh from his throat, the layers of the suit stopping the force of your outburst. His hands caught yours, still balled in a fist, as he laid a gentle kiss to each knuckle cradled in his hands. You did your best not to melt at the sight alone.

“I think we remember last night very differently, Johnny. You were the one who said I love you first,”

His lips hummed against your knuckles, and you could feel the smirk growing on his lips as those blue eyes darted back to you.

“Oh, believe me, I remember last night perfectly. Especially the moment I had my head buried between your le-”

He caught your other fist easily, laughter ringing through the air. Using the leverage of both of your hands in his, Johnny tugged you into his chest with ease, curling his arms around your back with a squeeze.

“Don’t go flirting with the herald while you’re in space,” you tried desperately to lighten the mood, chin resting on his chest to look up at him. Even as you tried to lighten the mood, you knew the tears forming behind your eyes were inevitable. “Don��t forget about me up there.”

One of his arms left its place around your waist in an instant, holding it up straight for you to see. The edge of his suit sleeve fell down just slightly, letting the overhead lights glint off that familiar silver bracelet around his wrist.

“You remember this? You got it for me for my birthday two years ago, and I haven’t taken it off since,” his arm fell back down, hand curling around the back of your head to press a kiss directly to your hairline. “You’re always with me, I couldn't forget you even if I tried.”

Fuck Johnny Storm and those stupid lines once again. Burying your head into his chest, wishing the suit wasn’t there so you could feel his heat, the smile that crawled onto your lips was inevitable as you hugged him tightly.

“Just come back to me,” your words were muttered out against his chest, silently willing your tears to stay at bay until he was gone. “If you die up there, I’m just going to regret ignoring this for four years even more.”

His body shook with laughter. Johnny’s glove-covered hand left the back of your neck and curled around your neck, just slightly tugging on your hair to pull your head back. He didn’t say a word, barely gave you a chance to think, before he tugged you up into a kiss–gentle, soft, but pressed to your lips with every ounce of love in his body. A love so overwhelming you were sure your knees would give out right then and there.

“You can’t get rid of me that easily, baby,” his words were whispered against your lips like a promise. “You’re stuck with me now.”

But what if you’d already lost him? A month with no contact…there was no telling what could have occurred up there.

“Alright, bridge teleportation test six,” you muttered to yourself with a shake of your head, running a hand down your face and trying to rub the sleep from your under eyes and fight away the intrusive thoughts plaguing your mind. The switch was placed in front of you, a new egg balanced on the stand in the middle, and one of Reed’s many notebooks open beside you. Safety glasses on, you took a deep breath. “Let’s hope this data calibration doesn’t fry the entire eastern seaboard.”

A simple flip of the switch in your hand, and the pulsing white energy of the device was lit up. Three beams of energy, encasing the pearly white egg in a misty sphere of white energy, before it was gone in the blink of an eye. The energy dissipated as you threw your protective glasses down onto the table, whipping around just as the egg reappeared across the lab.

The power flickered off, but you didn’t flinch. Instead, you counted quietly to yourself: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven-

The power to the building flickered back on the second you got to seven. It was enough to bring a miniscule smile to your face, turning to jot that down in your notebook.

“Alright, power back on automatically at seven seconds, up from 15 seconds, which is up from manual breaker override,” your words were mumbled to yourself once again as you noted the new development in your notebook. “I’m pulling power from, at least, seven different boroughs, but at least it’s automatic-”

“Is talking to yourself a new development, or do I not come visit you enough to notice?”

That voice was enough to stop you dead in your tracks. Your body froze at the sound, the sound you knew well. For four years, you’d heard it every single day: moaning about something Reed had done, flirting up a storm with you around every corner, ranting on and on about space. You had heard it moan your name, whisper “I love you” into your skin in the dead of night like a sacred promise.

When you turned, there he was. Still in that blue and white spacesuit he donned the day he left, as if he’d just left yesterday. But that look, the one reserved only for you, was still soft on Johnny Storm’s face, even as his lips ticked up into that impeccable smile you knew so well.

It took a moment of silence, just staring, for your voice to finally find you again.

“Is this real, or am I sleep deprived?”

Johnny laughed, a sound that skipped your heart almost immediately. But that smile softened as your voice broke on every word, sobs already threatening to escape your throat.

“I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m real, but how sleep deprived are you? Lynne said you’ve been sleeping in my bed, and as far as I know that’s a damn comfortable bed-”

“You’re actually here?” your voice cut through his words again, eyes wide as you took that most cautious of steps forward. “You’re…you’re alive?”

If it was even possible, Johnny’s smile softened even more at your words. His arms stretched out, an open invitation.

“I’m here, baby. I thought I told you already, you’re stuck with me,”

That was all you needed to hear before practically flying across the room, launching yourself into Johnny’s arms. He caught you, with ease. He’d always catch you, and you knew that.

The warmth. It was the first thing you felt. His warmth enveloped you in its own separate hug, seeping into your skin and bones. A choked sob fell from your lips before you could stop it, arms curled around his broad shoulders and one hand desperately clinging into the short strands of Johnny’s blonde hair. The wet trail of tears that soaked your cheeks was inevitable, soaking the skin of Johnny’s neck as you buried your head into the crook of it, sobbing through each inhale of that familiar smell of just him.

A month of no little touches. No hugs, no hands brushing your lower back, no thumb dancing over the apple of your cheek. Johnny’s arms felt like home, and god, you never wanted to leave them.

Johnny’s voice was soft as he wrapped your body just as tightly into his own arms. One of those gloveless hands found its home right at the small of your back, while the other cradled the back of your head like something precious. Little whispers of “shhh” accented every phrase muttered directly into your hairline, with every little kiss peppered to your skin: I’m here. We’re okay. I love you.

When the tears subsided, when the worst of the sobs left you, you finally managed to pull back from the now soaked crook of Johnny’s neck. Hands resting on his chest, one over his heart and one over that embroidered “J. Storm”, you finally got a good look at those blue eyes prettier than the sea itself.

Then, you shoved him.

“Whoa–okay, what the hell?” clearly caught off guard, Johnny stumbled back just slightly, eyes wide as he looked at you.

“A month!” you practically shrieked, hands quickly shoving at his chest again. Johnny was slightly more prepared for it this time, but still stumbled back slightly. “A fucking month!”

“Whoa-! Okay, okay, I know, I know!”

“No contact for a fucking month, Jonathan!”

“To be fair, we were literally lightyears away-”

“You could’ve been dead!”

“As you can see, I’m very much not dead,” his hands were ready this time, catching yours as you moved to shove him again. He clutched them in his, holding them tightly against his chest as he shot you an unimpressed look. “If you could stop shoving me for two seconds, that would be really helpful.”

“I won’t stop, because I’m fucking pissed at you-”

It was Johnny’s turn to cut you off with a single tug on your hands. Stumbling into his chest, you didn’t get another word out before he surged forward, connecting his lips with yours.

Your brain didn’t want to give in, but it very quickly lost that battle to both your heart and your body. The air knocked straight from your lungs didn’t matter the second you both collided, the feeling of Johnny’s lips on yours better than oxygen itself. You tore your hands from his, curling them up around his neck in a desperate attempt to hold him as close as possible. Your body curved, molding itself into every part of him.

Johnny was no better. The desperation, the longing in each of his movements was prevalent. His hands grasped at every part of you they could: your arms, your waist, your hips, your thighs. No piece of you seemed good enough for him, no way to hold you close enough, as those heated and slightly chapped lips moved against yours as if devouring you whole. A meal he couldn’t get enough of.

With every semblance of willpower left in your body, your fingers tugged on his hair slightly, separating you for even just a moment. Panting heavily, in sync with one another, you didn’t want to know what you looked like to anyone else. Flushed skin, t-shirt falling off of one shoulder, eyes blown so wide the color almost couldn’t be seen. Johnny was no better.

“Y-You can’t just keep kissing me every time I’m pissed at you, Johnny,”

“It’s such an effective way at shutting you up, though,” he quipped, the stupidly handsome smirk back for just a moment as he dove back in for another kiss before you could retort. When he pulled away, the smirk was gone though, replaced with a face full of guilt as his lips pressed a featherlight mark to the tip of your nose, your forehead, and then to your cheek. “I’m sorry. We made the jump, shit went south, and we lost the FTL engine in the process. Ben had to slingshot us around a neutron star–a literal neutron star–just so we could jump again. We didn’t have comms until just a bit ago.”

“Someone could’ve at least told me you were back,” you weakly tried to argue back, but all the fight had left you now that your brain had finally caught up with the present and accepted that Johnny was here. He was alive, he was okay, and he was with you.

His little smirk was back in seconds at your words, his glance turning to look back toward your workstation.

“Honey, I was standing right outside of that elevator watching you ignore Lynne’s hundredth call of the last hour. She’s been trying to tell you since we made contact with the Foundation that we were landing soon,”

You froze, cursing yourself in your head for ignoring that incessant alert, giving the man before you a sheepish smile in return.

“Well…oops?”

He laughed again, the sound like music to your ears. Johnny took one of your hands in his, bringing it to his lips as he ghosted small kisses over every knuckle of your hand. You just wanted to melt at the sight, a new round of tears threatening to fall as his gaze stayed locked with yours.

“I’m here, you’re okay,”

“I was so scared,” your admittance came out in a hush, sucking in a deep breath to try and stave off the tears again. “I was so scared you guys weren’t coming back.”

“No way I wasn’t coming back to you, not when I’ve finally got you,” his words came easily, like it was the easiest thing in the world for him to say. With a single flick, he uncurled your fingers from your palm, placing a kiss there instead as his next words were mumbled straight into your skin, into your very being. “I wouldn’t leave you. I promise.”

The way he said it, the conviction in his tone, you knew he meant it. A promise he couldn’t keep, one he wouldn’t know he could break until it happened, but a promise he’d fight tooth and nail to keep. For you.

“I’m amending my no flirting in the lab policy. I’m adding in no public displays of affection,”

If your heart had broken to see Johnny in front of you again, it shattered once more when you turned to see Reed and Ben standing outside the elevator doors. Both still clad in their own blue and white space suits as well.

“Come on, we’ve been waiting for these two to figure it out for ages,” Ben tried to reason with his best friend, the semblance of a smile pulling at his rocky lips for just a moment. “He only talked about her every day for a month straight. Give them some leeway, Stretch.”

“Maybe,” Reed commented after a moment after humming in thought. “It is quite nice to see Johnny so soft with someone-”

You hadn’t let your mentor get another word out, crossing the room in seconds to tug him into a tight hug just like you had with Johnny.

The laughter of the boys in the room could be heard as Reed definitely froze in your arms, giving you a light hug back with a short pat against your shoulder blades. Deciding not to torture the man too much, you pulled away after a moment, before quickly slotting yourself into the hold of Ben’s rocky form.

“God, you guys can’t do that to me again,” you muttered just loud enough for them all to hear, rubbing frantically at your face to try and keep another round of tears at bay. “I thought I was going insane.”

Ben shook his head, throwing a pointed look over your shoulder in Johnny’s direction. “You thought you were going insane? That one wouldn’t shut up about you for a month. Love you, kid, but my God I was ready to toss him into space.”

“Uh, given the way she just beat me up for almost not coming home, she probably would’ve found a way to turn you from rock into dust if you did that, buddy,”

The noise of the two’s playful argument was nothing to you as you locked eyes with the one last person you’d yet to see. Blonde hair pulled back, clad in the jumpsuit you knew she always wore under her flight suit, cradling something to her chest as she stood quietly behind the boys.

“Sue,” her name fell from your lips in a breathless huff as you ducked under Ben’s arm, walking quickly toward the woman. Sue smiled in your direction, turning just slightly to the side as she unwrapped the emergency thermal blanket bundled up against her chest.

“Before you get ahead of yourself, there’s someone you should meet,”

And God, was he beautiful. The most perfect little baby cradled right up against Sue’s chest. Wide little eyes like a doe’s, as blue as the ones you had fallen in love with years ago, taking in every little detail of the room. Little tufts of hair matted down to his forehead, body still cradled in the confines of the thermal blanket tucked around him.

Just before Sue, you came to a stop, resting a single hand on her arm. Eyes full of wonder, you couldn’t take your eyes off the little baby now looking up at you.

“Sue…oh my god, you gave birth in space,”

There was a short echo of laughter through the room. Sue joined in, before quickly maneuvering the little baby into her hands, passing him off into your own without warning.

“This is Franklin. Franklin, this is your aunt,”

Holding little Franklin Richards in your arms was surreal. Cuddled into your chest, as if seeking out your warmth, those little blue eyes looked up at you like you were the greatest thing he’d ever seen. It was impossible not to let a little laugh slip past your lips, a tear leaving its trail down your cheek. 

With just a single finger, you brushed the little hairs on his forehead back, trailing it down the side of his face. His little hand came up, tiny fingers wrapping just barely around your finger, holding it in his grasp as he babbled in your arms.

A hand wound its way around your hip, your body tugged back into the warmth of the one you’d come to recognize so easily. Your tear gaze met Johnny’s. The softest smile you’d ever seen was on his face, an emotion swirling in his eyes, as he looked down on your and his nephew, that you’d only come to put a label on a month ago: love.

He pressed a kiss to the side of your head, fingers flexing against your hip, before he placed another kiss to the same spot: firmer, longer.

That was the moment you looked up to the rest of the team, your family, as they stood in front of you now. Behind the tiredness in their eyes, the bags under Reed and Sue’s eyes, you could finally see it written across their features. The notes of terror in Sue’s eyes as she looked down at her son in your arms. The way that Ben looked as if he’d aged a thousand years, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders suddenly. The guilt that racked each of Reed’s features, followed by a quiet determination you’d come to know so well.

That’s when the pieces of the puzzle finally snapped together in your head.

“Oh god…you couldn’t stop him, could you?”

❤︎

If you had thought that Reed was obsessive over scanning Sue repeatedly while she was pregnant, you had yet to see this side of Reed Richards.

The side that came out when a being predating the universe itself, who hailed himself as the Devourer of Worlds, was threatening to destroy the Earth in what could only be mapped out as a matter of weeks, or even days. Top that off with that same being wanting little baby Franklin Richards for himself, to use him as some kind of successor to his power…yeah, maybe you could slightly understand Reed’s obsessive nature in this sense.

Reed hadn’t let you leave the lab in a matter of three days since they had returned from space. Not that you tried to, wanting just as badly to find a solution that didn’t involve having to give up a child to some kind of space god. Every night you’d passed out on the couches in front of the chalkboards, long after you had forced Reed to retire for the night and go see his wife and son, promising yourself that you’d scan every note, every equation of his, in hopes of seeing something the smartest man in the world couldn’t see.

Every morning, you’d awoken on the lab couch instead of the floor, draped in the blanket that you knew usually sat folded at the end of Johnny’s bed. Even his scent clung to the fireproof fabric, invading your senses, your body begging you to simply go upstairs to him.

You had just gotten him back and now you’d been without him again for three days. It was worth it, though. You had to help Reed find an answer, something that would protect this little family you had found. Your DNA was as normal as it could be, untouched by cosmic rays. You couldn’t help protect them in the way they could protect you, protect the world, but you could do this: help them find a solution. Comb every ounce of data available to you, find something, anything, that could point them in the direction of a solution.

“And you see that building over there? That’s the Empire State Building. Almost 1,500 feet to the very tippy top, and I once watched your uncle fly circles around the top of it,”

Little Franklin Richards babbled some kind of nonsense in your arms, tapping his tiny hand against the glass overlooking the skyline of New York from the living room.

Sue had practically dragged you out of the lab somewhere around 8 at night, telling you to get proper rest somewhere that wasn’t the floor or couch of the lab. You chose to ignore her side remark about how she assumed that wasn’t going to be in the guest room. Reed had gotten a scolding next, a promise from his wife that if he wasn’t upstairs by 9:30 she was coming back for him, too. And the beautiful, innocent sight that was little Franklin in your arms was enough for your break from the lab to be worth it.

“Central Park is that way,” you guided the little baby’s gaze to the right of the darkened skyline, smiling as he followed your gaze. Sue was in the kitchen just feet away, preparing something for Reed to eat when she inevitably dragged him out of the lab. “Way over there, streets and streets away. One time, I watched your uncles throw hot dogs at each other on Bethesda Terrace for ten minutes. They just kept buying them to throw them at each other, your mommy was really over it.”

The cutest of noises left the little baby. That grabby hand came back to you, clutching to the edges of your blouse as those blue eyes looked up at you, wide and beautiful. The sight alone stretched your smile even wider, reaching up a single finger to swipe against the edge of his nose.

“Don’t worry, your uncles are trouble makers when they’re together. You’ll get to see all their shenanigans for the rest of your life,”

If we live that long.

“Seeing you holding a baby is invoking some feelings I didn’t know I had. Is this, like, a secret kink or something?”

The thought that infiltrated your head was gone in seconds, replaced with a playful eyeroll as Johnny stepped up to your side. He leaned over your side, pinching at his nephew’s cheek, before meeting your waiting gaze.

“Really? Can you not be inappropriate around your nephew for, maybe, three seconds?”

The second the words left your lips, you regretted them. Johnny dramatically began to count to three as she shoved your hip as hard as you could into his. It only drew a laugh from him, his hands coming to curl around your hip with a squeeze.

“He can’t understand it, there’s no harm! See, watch: Franklin, do you care that I’m trying to explain to your aunt how incredibly sexy I find her at all times?” even your eyeroll was accented with a grin you desperately tried to bite back. Franklin simply blinked up at Johnny, who threw his hand out to the side in a shrug. “See? No harm, no foul. He’s none the wiser.”

“Doesn’t mean you should talk like that in front of him,”

“Sweetheart,” god, you hated how easily he could make your heart skip a beat. “He’s, like, a month old. He’s not going to remember this conversation in the slightest, until I inevitably repeat it for the rest of my life.”

That drew a laugh out of you. His hand never strayed from its place against your hip as you turned in his hold, now facing him head on so you could fully see that shit-eating smirk on his lips.

“You’re lucky I love you, Johnny Storm,” that simple statement was enough to turn that smirk into a softened smile, reserved just for you. It didn’t stop the pointed look you shot him, though, as you adjusted your hold on baby Franklin. “But get those thoughts out of your head. We said I love you, that doesn’t mean I’m having a baby with you.”

“Right, right, makes sense. I’m thinking we revisit that conversation in about a year,”

“Johnny-”

“You’re so right. God, you’re just a genius, baby,” he cut in again, snapping his fingers as that smile shifted back to that playful smirk. “It's too soon, I have to put a ring on it and keep you all to myself for a bit first. I’ll have to ask Sue where mom’s ring is, though, she always said mom wanted me to give it to someone someday. We’ll put the baby conversation on track for the year and a half to two year range.”

As absurd as a conversation it was, it was enough to draw short laughter from you once again.

He was so good at doing that, so good as simply shifting your train of thought, of making you laugh and smile until your cheeks hurt. He’d always been good at it, and you were ready to forever curse yourself for being so scared that you deprived the both of you of this for four years.

“I…really do love you. So much, it’s kind of concerning,”

“And I’ve missed the hell out of you these past few nights,” Johnny turned to Franklin quickly, whispering a quick ‘sorry’ for his swearing as he dropped a kiss to his little forehead, before one of his hands cupped your cheek. You leaned into the feeling as if it was second nature already. “I finally come home and my girl locks herself away in the lab with my brother-in-law? Sleeps there, too, to the point where I have to carry her to the couch every night. You’re killing me, baby, my entire room smells like you but you aren’t in it!”

“Well, someone has to try and keep Reed in line while he’s trying to decipher the composition of Galactus and find a way to stop him from devouring the world…” 

You hated talking about it. Knowing he was out there somewhere in the universe, slowly moving his ship toward Earth on his conquest to destroy the world you knew. To take the innocent child in your arms away.

“Hey, we’re all helping,” Johnny cut in, fingers squeezing at your jawline just slightly as you brought your attention back to him. “I’m trying to find him some kind of a crank-shaft thing to solve the problem.”

“A lever, Johnny,” laughter bubbled out of your as you shook your head at him. “The law of levers. We talked about this.”

“Yeah, law of levers. From that Achilles guy-”

“It’s Archimedes-”

“It started with an A, I was close enough. Point is, we’ll find a way to solve the problem, just like we always do,” your chin was pinched between Johnny’s thumb and forefinger as he dipped his head closer to yours, breath fanning out over your lips. “Doesn’t mean you can hide from me for days, baby. You’re like a drug, and I’m having some serious withdrawals.”

When he stole a kiss from you then, silencing the laughter that once again tumbled from your lips, you didn’t hesitate to melt into him. The warmth of his hand as it cradled your jawline, thumb rubbing the most gentle circles against your cheek. The soft touch of his lips as they slanted over yours, pressing into you with every ounce of love he could convey in a single touch.

It was enough to hate yourself for locking yourself away for three days, trying to solve a problem larger than life itself. Because if the world was going to end, you wanted to know every spare moment you had was spent in his arms, with his kiss searing itself into your skin.

The kiss was over much sooner than you ever would’ve liked it to be, Johnny’s lips practically torn from yours. Your eyes popped open just in time to see Johnny now just two feet away, pressed against the windows of the living room, that familiar rainbow shimmer hovering in the air in front of him to hold him in place.

When little baby Franklin clapped his hands, you had to cover your mouth with the one hand not holding him to conceal your laughter.

“Absolutely not,” Sue’s voice cut in, now just a few feet away from you both. Her hand was stretched toward her brother, still holding him in place against the window, with her eyes narrowed. “No funny business in front of my son, Johnny.”

“Sue, he was literally made with funny business,” the unimpressed look that you and Sue both shot at him was practically identical. “What is life without funny business? Speaking of–Reed can stretch…everything, can’t he? When you guys were making Franklin, did he-”

“Jonathan, I advise you don’t finish your sentence,”

You laughed at the antics of the Storm siblings, joining Sue at her side to hand her back her wiggling son. It was then that she finally dropped her hand, letting Johnny off of the window to take Franklin into her arms again. The way his little smile seemed to brighten just from being in his mother’s arms was unmistakable.

“Thanks for finally figuring out whatever is going on between you two,” Sue nodded her head toward Johnny with a soft smile to you. “I’ve been rooting for it. Plus, maybe you’ll be able to actually keep him in line.”

“Come on, now, she always has!” Johnny called after his sister, who was stalking back across the room to grab the food she’d made for Reed, no doubt to take it down to him in the lab. The warmth of Johnny’s hand rested against your lower back as he found his way to your side once more.

Left alone in the living room with just the man behind you now, you didn’t hesitate to lean back into his touch. You could feel the rumble in his chest from his laughter, a gentle kiss placed to the side of your head,before suddenly you were swept straight off your feet.

A yelp escaped your throat as Johnny threw you over his shoulder like it was nothing. Arms locked around your thighs to hold you in place, Johnny didn’t say a word and simply stalked across the room toward the stairs

“Johnny!” you exclaimed, bracing yourself against his back and shoulders so that you didn’t slip out of his hold. “I should get back to Reed, you can’t just kidnap me!”

“Uh, I can, and I did,” was his simple response as he began the trek up the staircase toward the bedrooms. “He’s gotten enough of your time, it’s my turn with the pretty assistant.”

You couldn’t argue with him. Truthfully, you didn’t want to argue with him. You missed him, and if this was the end of the world, right here in his arms was exactly where you wanted to be. It’s where you needed to be.

It was impossible to decipher the look on Ben’s face when you both passed him in the hallway, fresh out of the bathroom. Johnny gave him a simple greeting, walking past him as if there was nothing unusual about the sight before him. When you were face to face with him, you could only offer the rocky man a sheepish smile.

Ben only shook his head, mumbling something about “keeping the noise down”, before he disappeared to his own bedroom.

Johnny dropped you at the foot of his bed, grinning down at you as your back jumped against the mattress below you. With one hand on his hip in a mocking stance of authority,  he pointed down at you.

“You make yourself comfortable. You basically made my bedroom yours while I was gone, so just pretend it is yours anyways,” you could only roll your eyes fondly in response. “I’m about to take the world’s quickest shower, and if your adorable ass isn’t in this room when I get back I’m going to burn Reed’s lab to the ground.”

You didn’t have the heart to argue that burning Reed’s lab was impossible, given that Reed had custom designed everything in this building to be fireproof in the last 4 years. Instead, you only gave him a mock salute, one that seemed to satisfy him, before he practically ran back into the hallway with a slam of the bathroom door.

The only thing saving your mind from wandering was the linens beneath your skin, still teeming with the unmistakable scent of Johnny that lingered everywhere in the room.

With your blouse and pants discarded into a pile on the opposite end of the room, you didn’t hesitate to slip into one of Johnny’s grey sweaters that he typically wore in the winter. It hung loosely around your shoulders, the one side almost slipping off your arm, and hung low enough to just barely cover your panties-clad bottom half.

One glance around the room was enough to calm your mind for a moment, too. You’d stayed there for the month without him because it was the only place in the entire building where you could just be surrounded by him. The shelving by his closet, decorated with memorabilia and the framed photo of him taken before their first launch into space. The bookshelf of records, with The Wonder of You perched right on top. The record itself had been played almost on a loop some days when you missed him the most, one phrase of his stuck on an endless repeat in your head.

I don’t ever think I’ll get over the miracle that is you…loving me.

There was also the obnoxious painting of him on the wall opposite of the bed. A pretentious gesture to have a painting of your own face hung on your bedroom wall, but such a Johnny move that deep down inside you found it endearing.

The moon hung high in the sky over New York as you stepped up to the window of the darkened room, letting its light bathe over you. It hung just behind the Excelsior, highlighting the damage across the ship in its light. A frown crawled its way to your lips at the sight: the siding torn, the windows cracked, the hull misshapen from the pull of lightspeed space travel. A reminder that they barely escaped, that they barely came back to you.

Your eyes flickered down to the streets, so far below. Even from the high vantage point in the building, you could still make out the people below. The mobs that had begun to form since they had returned, demanding Sue and Reed give up their son in exchange for the planet. The talk shows that called them selfish, the radio hosts who spoke as if they knew what had happened in space, the impossible position your family had been put in. The people who would never understand your family, who would never understand the lives they’ve sacrificed in order to protect them these last four years. What they’ve given up to become the world’s protectors.

These people didn’t know shit, and they’d been pissing you off since they’d begun to form outside on the streets below.

It was the papers hanging on the far window that caught your eye, dragging it away from the ship and the people below. You took a step over to stand before them, flicking on the lamp sitting just beside the window to get a better view.

Johnny’s handwriting had never been the neatest, but you knew it well. The alphabet was strewn across multiple pages, lines connecting certain letters to a phrase written in a language you had never seen before. Taking a glance around all of the pages, that alien language seemed common among every page, as if Johnny had been building new words the more he connected that one phrase to certain letters.

As if a lightbulb went off in your head, you turned on your heel quickly to step up to the record player behind you. Thankfully, under a few other records, lied the one you had handed Johnny that day in the lab a month ago. The second you dropped the needle down onto it, as it slid into the grooves etched into the record, that same alien language sounded through the room: the same thing written across the papers in front of you.

Her language. The Herald’s. Johnny had said something about it on some trip into the lab the day before, before Reed had gathered everyone to explain the little information the two of you were able to gather from Herbie’s samples from their trip to converse with Galactus. She’d said something to him…now, he was reconstructing her entire language from a single phrase.

“You genius, genius boy,” you couldn’t help but mutter to yourself, overwhelming love and pride blooming deep within your chest, before you turned on your heel to stalk back into the hallway.

You didn’t bother knocking on the bathroom door. Shutting it quietly behind you, a soft smile overtook your face at the sound of Johnny humming to himself from behind the curtain.

Whatever was driving you right now, you didn’t even know. Whether it was seeing the lengths that he’d go to in order to protect the people he loved, like reconstructing an entire alien language, or the threat of the world ending in a matter of days, all you wanted was him in the end of it all.

Sweater and panties discarded into a heap with Johnny’s own clothing by the sink, your fingers curled around the edge of the bathroom curtain, pulling it back just slightly. The humming ceased as Johnny looked up, startled for just a moment before his gaze landed on you. His gaze trailed down the length of your body, and you could almost see his pupils dilate in real time. That handsome, heartbreaking smile of his returned as he held out a soapy hand in your direction. You took it without hesitation.

The water was hot, almost on the verge of scalding since Johnny didn’t understand the concept of what was truly hot or not anymore. The water temperature didn’t matter to you, not in the slightest. Johnny only watched quietly as you curled yourself around his bare body, hands sliding up into his wet strands of hair. His own hands curled around your waist, tugging you under the stream of water with him.

“This is a bit of a surprise appearance,” his voice was quiet in the intimate moment under the pouring water from the shower head. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your gorgeous company?”

“Just wanted to be with you,” was all you could manage to say. You were too wrapped up in those blue eyes, the gaze that was entirely fixed on you since the moment you appeared around the curtain. “And…wanted to tell you that you’re a genius. I saw the papers on your window.”

The smile on his face immediately turned sheepish. It always had over the years whenever you complimented him like that. Johnny Storm was used to being complimented on the way he looked, but when it came to someone complimenting him on that genius brain of his, he never did quite know how to take it.

“I-It’s probably stupid and won’t help-”

You surged forward, slotting your lips against his in a passionate kiss. Your fingers tugged just so on the strands of his wet hair threaded between them. His chest rumbled with a groan at the feeling, his grip against your hips tightening as he pulled you until every inch of your bare skin was pressed to his. You didn’t miss the twitch of him pressed against your abdomen.

“It’s not stupid,” your words were mumbled against his lips, stealing another breathtaking kiss from him before you fully pulled away to look up at him. If his eyes were dilated before, then you hadn’t seen them after a kiss.

Johnny stood silently for a second, mouth dropped open just slightly in shock.

“Did…did you just kiss me to shut me up? I thought that was my thing?”

“No, you keep kissing me when I’m mad at you. I kissed you to stop whatever self-deprecating thing you were about to say,” one of your hands slid back down the side of his neck, over his collarbone, and came to rest right over his heart. The thump against his chest was comforting to hear, even as it beat slightly faster than it ever would normally. “It’s a genius idea. To know what it is she might be saying, especially when her language is all over those deep space transmissions we’ve been receiving, you could be well on your way to figuring out the exact piece we didn’t even know we needed to figure out a solution.”

That smile, full of wonder, quickly shifted up into a smirk for just a moment. Your eyes were already prepared to roll, even though your smile was still bright across your lips.

“So, what you’re saying is…I found the lever?”

You laughed: lighthearted, free, full of the most joy you had felt in weeks. You swore you could feel Johnny’s heart skip a beat under your hand.

“Yes, Johnny. I think you may have just found us a lever of some sorts,”

His laughter mixed with your own as he pulled you back into him, peppering a thousand kisses to every inch of skin in his reach. Your cheek, to your neck, right over your pulse point, and down to your collarbones and across your bare shoulders. The water from the showerhead still beat down on your both as you curled your hand further into his hair, nails trailing over his scalp.

“You're one of the only people who has ever believed in me like that,” his words were soft as they were mumbled into your shoulder, almost drowned out by the water. “Sue always has, but not the way you believe in me. You have since the day you walked in, and always made sure to remind me around every corner.”

With a little tug to his blonde hair, you brought Johnny’s face back to yours. He didn’t seem sad, per say, but there was the slightest hint of melancholy throughout those handsome features you adored so much. Like he was thinking back on all the times he was belittled by someone, the times when the press reduced him to nothing but a playboy.

“Because you deserve to hear how brilliant you are. You don’t have the absurd amount of degrees that Reed has, but you are one of the brightest people that I’ve ever met,” the tip of your nose just barely brushed against his as you leaned in, beads of water trailing down the side of your face and dripping from your chin. “It also didn’t help that I was quite taken with you from the get go.”

“You did a semi-decent job of hiding it for four years,”

“Did I, though?”

“Yeah, or else I would’ve fucked you years ago,”

“Well-”

Any retort that could’ve possibly fell from your lips was swallowed by Johnny’s heated kiss.

As long as he always kissed you like this, you’d happily let him shut you up mid sentence forever.

Johnny’s hands were greedy, trailing over every inch of your skin that they could. His tongue dipped just past your lips, mingling with yours as his hands made their way up your sides. Even in the heat of the shower, those heated hands of his still left goosebumps along your skin as they traveled up.

It didn’t take long for one hand to cup your breast fully. His thumb flicked over your already hardened nipple as his fingers squeezed into the plump flesh around it. The moan that cascaded from your lips was swallowed by his own groan of pleasure, and hopefully drowned out by the water itself. His lips found your jawline, nipping at your skin before they trailed a heavenly heat down your neck. His teeth sunk in gently, but firmly, leaving a mark right where the last had just finally fully healed over.

“Missed this. Missed you,” he practically groaned the words into your neck. Johnny’s free hand quickly found its way lower, taking hold of the back of your thigh in order to hike it up around his waist, giving himself the perfect opportunity to ground himself up and into your core. Already soaked, already desperate for him, your head fell back with a moan, thankful for his hold on you keeping you upright in the midst of the water beating down on you both. “Thought about you every day up there, just you. Holding you, kissing you, telling you how much I love you.”

God, you loved this man. More than anything. You weren’t sure words could accurately explain it anymore, so instead you chose the Johnny route: show him.

Dropping your leg from his hold, you were just barely able to find the leverage to spin the two of you out from under the showerhead. The cold never hit your skin, too warmed up from the heat that radiated from Johnny himself. With a gentle push, his back met with the shower wall.

His wide blue eyes never left you as you slowly sank to your knees between his legs. You didn’t miss the twitch in his cock either the second you were level with it.

“Baby, what are you doing?”

“What you did to me before you left: showing you how much I love you,” one palm splayed across his thigh for leverage, your free hand came up to hold his length. A shudder visibly ran through his body the second your skin touched the sensitive skin of his pulsing cock, your gaze locked onto his. “You told me to save this for when you came back. A “saving the world” gift, I think is how you described it?”

His adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, laughing lightly to himself.

“Yeah, but Galactus kind of told us to fuck off. Also, he kind of induced Sue into labor and tried to steal my nephew, so I’m not sure I’ve really earned this-”

Johnny cut his own words off the second you gave a single squeeze to the length still resting in your hand. Leaning in, you rested your cheek directly against it, lips so tantalizingly close, eyes still innocently trained up on him, even if every thought in your head was far from innocent anymore.

“Do you want me to get off my knees, or do you want the blowjob, Jonathan?”

He huffed out another laugh. His one hand came to cup your cheek for just a moment, fingers pressing firmly into your skin.

“Baby, if I ever say no to you on your knees, I want you to douse me with a fire extinguisher"

You buried your laughter in the kiss you placed right along his v-line. The tufts of blonde hair that trailed down the pronounced lines tickled at your skin as you lavished kiss after kiss into his skin, desperate to show him your love just like he had to you that night.

The hand that was on your cheek left, finding its place instead against the back of your head as he let out a sharp intake of breath as your lips glided over every inch of his skin along his lower abdomen. Johnny fingers didn’t curl into your hair, didn’t tug, his hand simply sat there and caressed you. Still holding you as if you were the most precious thing in the world to him. It lied in wait for you to give him the okay.

Johnny’s moans mixed with the beating of the water against the floor of the shower, half of your body still positioned under the stream of water. That cock, hot with need and throbbing in your hand, twitched the second you gave him a single tug along his entire length. You swiped your thumb gently–but firmly–over the tip, spreading the beads of precum that had collected there across the sensitive, flushed deep pink head.

“I-I don’t remember teasing you like this,” he stuttered over his words, something Johnny didn’t do often. It brought a smirk to your lips in seconds.

“You didn’t,” was your simple answer. Your gaze met his through hooded eyelids, thumb still rubbing just perfectly against the head of his cock, allowing you the perfect sight of his mouth dropping open in another low moan. “Consider this retribution for disappearing into space for a month.”

“I thought we talked about that-”

Johnny's own words were cut off by his own loud, uncontrolled moan the second your tongue darted out to lick a stripe straight up the head of his cock. Sweet, smooth, and addicting the second you had a single taste.

Whatever quip dared to fall from Johnny’s lips ended the second your lips closed around the tip, his cock laid flat against your tongue as you took as much as you could in a single go. It wasn’t enough–it would never be enough–you wanted more. You needed more.

“Fucking hell, baby,” he rasps out, breath hitching the second your tongue reaches further down his length, swiping along every inch of him you can take into your mouth. His hand still lies on the back of your head, still hesitating there, still hovering. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

You want to argue back, about how that’s the exact opposite of what you wanted. What you wanted was him alive, for a very long time, so you could spend the rest of your life showering him in praise and love.

Saying any of that would mean removing him from your mouth, though, and you were already too lost in a sea of pleasure to let go. Not until he was bursting with pleasure at the seams, until you’d shown him how much you loved him.  How much you adored him.

Johnny was big, you’d known it the moment he’d entered you and filled you in a way that surely ruined you for anyone else on this earth. In the entire galaxy. You’d never be able to take every inch of him,  as much as you wanted to. Even though you wanted to devour him whole, to have him writhing in ecstasy in the palms of your hands.

Instead, you let your hand work over the rest of his length–twisting, caressing every part that you couldn’t sloppily take within the warmth of your mouth. Your tongue salved over every stretch of skin it could reach, gliding down the prominent vein throbbing along the side of his length as your head bobbed back and forth along his shaft.

“Baby–Jesus fucking Christ–I think you’re actually trying to kill me,” he groaned out, words lost in the sound of rushing water and the sound of your head bobbing back and forth.

His fingers curled again, before unfurling, still not crossing that line. The hand you were using for leverage against his thigh came up to grasp his hand in your own, forcing his fingers to curl into the soaking wet strands of your hair without ever removing yourself from his twitching, aching shaft.

For just a moment, you stopped, the groan he let out indicating just how badly he didn’t want you to. Johnny hips canted forward just slightly, as if he was still restraining himself.

Your eyes glanced up at him, his cock still enveloped in the warmth of your mouth and resting against your flattened tongue. You didn’t need to have a mirror to know how much of a mess you were in the moment–remnants of makeup strewn across your cheeks from the water and steam, skin flushed red from the heat, spit dribbling out of your mouth and down your chin.

Johnny was no better. He was unraveling, and it was clear in his eyes. They were blown wide, hiding any semblance of the blue you loved so much. His mouth hung open in bliss, chest heaving with pants. His fingers flexed into your hair just slightly.

You forced him to grip them tighter, and he finally seemed to get the hint–you trusted him completely. There was no one else you’d rather be at the mercy of.

His fingers curled, tugging on the strands. For a moment it stung, but that pain soon gave way to pleasure. The moan that fell from your lips vibrated around his shaft, causing his fingers to flex once more against your scalp, dragging you even closer, forcing himself just slightly deeper within your mouth and profanities to fall from his lips like a song.

“Fuck–shit–fuck baby,” Johnny threw his head back against the tile of the shower, hand against your head guiding you back and forth, keeping the rhythm you had already set the pace for. “If this is what I get for not saving the world, I kind of want to find out what happens when I do.”

You wanted to roll your eyes at his antics. Instead, you pressed yourself forward further, inviting him deeper into your mouth until he filled every crevice of you that existed. That was enough to shut him up for the moment, as his moans grew louder.

Letting go of control, you let him guide the pace. Everything about it was sloppy–obscene–the way your head bobbed back and forth along his shaft, slick with your spit. Your lips were swollen, puckered around him as you sucked in your cheeks just a tad, feeling the twitch of his cock within your mouth once again at your sudden change in pressure.

“Sweetheart–oh my god–I’m not going to last like this,”

It only spurred you on. Taking back just a bit of the control from the hand gripping your hair, you bobbed your head up and down along his length as quickly as you could.

The furthest parts of him were still enveloped in your hands, still being twisted and tugged and now slick with your spit as well. You lost yourself in the pleasure, tongue gliding up and down every ridge and vein of his throbbing cock. Your chest heaved with a gag, the head of his cock reaching as far back as your body could possibly allow him to. All it did was spur you on, another moan falling from your lips, gargled by the sound you made as you dragged yourself back and forth across him.

Another moan fell from Johnny’s lips–your name. It was sinful, the way your name sounded on his lips in this moment of pleasure. The coil of heat within you that had been winding itself up since you’d dropped to your knees tightened, and you knew without ever touching yourself that you were completely soaked, aching for this man you loved more than anything.

“Fuck–baby–I can’t. I can’t, I’m going–I’m going to-”

Pushing yourself to your absolute limit, you took him as far back as you could, forcing back that gag that your body tried to heave from you. Hands taking hold of his thighs, nails digging into his skin, both of his hands found your hair in an instant as the downright delicious moan was practically choked out of him. His cock twitched, his hands gripping to your hair as tightly as possible, before he finally spilled every drop held within him into your awaiting mouth.

Slightly saltier than the precum you had licked straight off of him, but still with a hint of sweetness to it. Still just as addicting to you–the proof of how good you could make him feel, of how good you had made him feel. And, eagerly, you swallowed every drop that he gave you.

Johnny’s hands within your hair tugged you back gently, letting his cock slide back down your tongue before it fell past your lips with a slight pop. Your body heaved, taking in a deep breath of air once again, trying to catch your breath. Johnny heaved above you, too, the sound of your heavy breathing mixing with the shower, the temperature of the water having dropped slightly now with how long you’d been under the running water.

“Come here,”

In contrast to everything else he’d said in the heat of the moment–so raspy, so riddled with pleasure and desire and lust–his words were soft. That coil of heat in you was still wound tight, but that familiar sound of his softened voice had your heart skipping a beat. Something he could so easily do.

His hands grasped yours as Johnny tugged you slowly back up to your feet. Your knees buckled just slightly on the way up, but Johnny’s arm was quick to wrap around your waist, molding you to him to hold you upright.

“Was that good?” your question left your lips quietly, his lips pressing a series of kisses to your temple.

“Better than every dream I’ve ever had about it,” was Johnny's quick response. Hand cradling your cheek, his thumb drawing over the outline of your lips as soft laughter bubbled up from you at his comment. “God, I love you so much.”

Both of your lips found one another, searching blindly with eyes already closed as the constant stream of water beat down over you both. Johnny’s teeth dragged over your bottom lip, taking the skin of your lip between his teeth in a quick bite, his kiss there to soothe the sting before you could utter a single groan.

Johnny’s lips never left yours as he spun you, pressing your back up against the cool shower wall this time where he’d just been. A shiver ran straight up your spine from the coolness of the tiles against your skin, before those heated hands trailed up and down your sides. Around your hips, to your lower back, filling you with warmth  as his lips greedily moved against yours still slick with your own spit.

The heat that spread through your body was unbearable. It was driven by lust, by love, by the pure need to feel him in every sense of the world. To have Johnny Storm as close to you as humanly possible. You hike one leg up around his hip, ankle pressing into his lower back, as you ground yourself into him. 

An almost primal growl seemed to emit from somewhere within Johnny at the sound, a warning as his hands flexed against your hips to lock you in place against the tile wall. His mouth found your jawline, nipping just barely at your skin.

“You’re going to have to give me a minute to recover here, baby. Think you sucked my soul straight out of me,” your chest rumbled with another round of laughter as he nipped at the skin right beneath your jawline again. You could feel his smile against your skin. “You did! If you don’t give me a minute, I won’t be able to ravish you the way I want to.”

A retort died on your lips as his own moved down, laying kisses against your neck. Soft, gentle, filled with love and passion in every single press of his lips to your skin. You let your hand curl into his wet hair, to glide through the strands and let you nails scratch against his scalp, immersing yourself in the feeling of simply being held by Johnny Storm. Being loved by Johnny Storm.

Then, it happened again: he hummed. You heard it, you felt it right against your neck, and it was impossible not to let tears prick your eyes as you recognized the song once again. That same song–your song.

I guess I'll never know the reason why you love me as you do. That's the wonder, the wonder of you.

“Did I ever tell you?” Johnny's voice cut through his own humming, head still buried into the crook of your neck. “Did I tell you when I knew I was in love with you?”

You willed the tears away as they threatened to fall, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of love you felt in your heart. All you could manage was a shake of your head, answered with another kiss to the column of your throat.

“I thought you were the prettiest thing in the world those first few months you worked for Reed. Turned on the charm, pulled out every trick in the book, and none of it worked,” another open-mouthed kiss was pressed to your neck. “Then, I came into the lab one day. I had an idea for the suits before we went up that first time. Drew up some shitty looking plans for my idea, too, was just some extra strapping around the legs to give us more mobility. I thought the current ones wouldn’t let us move our legs much. Reed dismissed me, telling me nothing else needed added to the suits. Then, I came back down for a fitting one day, just to see those exact straps I designed added to each of the suits, and none other than you shuffling your papers at your workstation to cover up my designs that I’d left down there.”

You remembered it well, as if it had happened yesterday. The look of dejection on Johnny’s face was clear as day as Reed dismissed him, already happy with the design of the suits as is. That look was burned into your brain as you stayed the night that night in the lab, looking over every aspect of Johnny’s terribly drawn plans to execute them perfectly on the suits.

Reed had come down that following morning and seen the changes. He’d said nothing at first, just examined them, before he gave a little nod of his head and approved of your changes. You’d been quick to tell him they were Johnny’s changes, the ones he had dismissed.

That was the same day you were sure Reed’s opinion on you changed as well, that maybe he didn’t resent the idea of having an assistant anymore. Not when you went out of your way to do something like that for his family.

“That’s when I knew,” Johnny continued, lips following his same trail back up to your jawline before ghosting over your cheek. Still cradling you as if you were the most precious treasure the earth had ever seen. “I took one look at you, hiding those papers, and my heart skipped a beat. And suddenly I was just thinking to myself…shit, I’m about to fall in love with this girl.”

You took a deep breath, letting his words settle within you, before you spoke.

“It started a long time ago, but…I admitted it after the funeral,” his eyes came back to yours as he pulled his head back to look down on you now. You let your hand stray from his hair, fingertips ghosting over every feature on his face–from the curve of his brow to the outline of his lips, memorizing every single piece of him. You weren’t sure if it was a tear that fell down your cheek, or another droplet of water. “I admitted it to myself, and then I locked it away. It terrified me.”

“It terrified you to love me?”

“Yes, because I knew you could break me,” a short laugh left your lips, accenting your words. “The names the media always called you weren’t who you were, but you did always have a reputation. I knew that. Johnny loves space, Johnny loves women…how could Johnny ever love me? If you didn’t, I knew it would break me, shatter me like I was a fragile pane of glass.”

Those blue eyes trailed down to your lips, his thumb tracing your lips, fingers holding your chin within their grasp.

“What changed?”

“The end of the world. It made me realize…I’d let you break my heart if it meant I got to love you, even if it was only for a moment,”

Johnny’s lips found yours without another word, slotting them right where they belonged. Where you never wanted them to leave.

His hand curled around your neck, the other your hip to mold your body to the tiled wall, his own fitting perfectly into the space against yours. One leg still hiked over his hip, his length pressed into your core with a single roll of his hips–hard, hot, and throbbing once more.

Your mouth opened on instinct, inviting him in. Johnny took the invitation in seconds, letting his tongue delve in to mix with yours, to taste every inch of you available. The moan that tumbled from your lips swallowed by his own, drowned out by his own deep groan.

The hand cradling your neck trailed down your body: from your neck, to your chest, along your hardened nipple, and down your abdomen until it curled around your thigh. The heat trail left along your skin bloomed, goosebumps traveling up and down your arms. His hand splayed across your thigh, fingers finding purchase in your skin as he hiked your leg around his waist, allowing your ankles to cross behind his back. Suspended, pressed against every inch of him, at his mercy.

“I won’t break it. I’d never break it,” his words were moaned against your lips, his cock dragging through your soaked folds with every drag of his hips against yours. You desperately tried to conceal the mewls that fell from your lips with every delicious drag of him against you, every catch of his head against your opening. “Not sure if I made this clear yet, but you’re it for me, sweetheart.”

“That’s a bold statement to make,” you whispered, breath fanning out over his lips as your eyes locked with his.

Johnny smirked, eyes never leaving yours, as the head of his cock caught along your opening with another roll of his hips.

“I know, you make me do some crazy things. There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for you,”

Your brain couldn’t even reflect, to think back on that night in the kitchen weeks ago when he’d said those words to you the first time, before he sunk into you with one single push of his hips.

There was no adjustment needed. No sting. No need to prepare. Your body welcomed every inch of him with a single stroke, like your walls were already carved for him and him alone.  Cried left your lips in seconds, hands curling into his hair once again for something to hold onto as you messily slammed your lips back to his, melting into the feel of him as his hands dug marks into the skin of your hips.

“Please–please, please please,” were the only words you were able to cry out, babbling them over and over as you clawed at him, trying to bring him even closer, as if it was possible. It was your teeth that then took his bottom lip between them, biting down just hard enough to bring a groan from his mouth. “Please, Johnny, please, please-”

He pulled his hips back without warning, just the tip barely lodged within your walls, before he drove back in. Hilt buried as deep as your body would allow, his hips pressed to yours, grounding up against you as you threw your head back against the tiled wall. Johnny’s heated lips trailed back down to your neck, a place you were sure he’d live if he could.

“I got you, baby,” he muttered through gritted teeth, another mark placed upon your neck by his mouth. His hips snapped back again, driving along the heat of your walls, star forming in the corners of your vision once more. “Fuck, baby, I got you.”

Your hands never left his hair, curled around the dampened strands. Tugging in time with every gasp of pleasure that tumbled from your lips, with every cry of his name like a prayer into the streaming water over your bodies.

His hips drove into you at a maddening pace. Pulling himself almost the entire way back before driving to the deepest depths that he could reach. A chorus of profanities tumbled from his lips into your neck, littering your skin with calls of pure pleasure and ecstasy. Johnny hands heated themselves just a hint, enough to draw another gasp from your lips, as they curled around each cheek of your ass, gripping the flesh beneath his palms like it was the only thing keeping him going. His handprints surely seared into your skin, marking every piece of you as his.

Body pressed back against the tiles so tightly they were sure to leave indents along your skin, his rhythm never faltered. His throbbing cock, twitching with need, dragged along the warmth of your walls with every bruising thrust into you. The ache was already prevalent in your bones, in your hips, from the snapping of his body into yours without care. You didn’t care, though, not when the pain felt this good.

“Fucking perfect,” his lips found yours again, cutting himself off to lay another open-mouthed, heated kiss to your lips. It was sloppy, filled with the shared moans that dripped from both of your lips, a string of saliva hanging between your mouths when he pulled back by just a hair. “Made for–fuck–made for me, baby. Made just for me.”

“A-All yours. Only yours. Just for you,” you repeated his words, crying out between them, choking on them through mewls of pleasure. 

Locking your ankles tighter, dragging him just a tad closer to your body, Johnny’s thrusts changed. Shorter, deeper, but still driving in just as quickly, just as frantically as before. The choked gasps that escaped your throat only increased in volume, tears pooling at the corners of your eyes as you shut them. Head thrown back in ecstasy, you weren’t sure if you were even in the room anymore. Too lost, too deeply buried in your own pleasure to care.

That coil of heat burned deep within you, tightening, threatening to snap at any moment. One of Johnny’s hands made its way back up your body, fingers tweaking at your nipple as you groaned at the sensation into his mouth. A smirk crossed his lips, pressed into yours as he licked his way inside once more, still toying with the sensitive bud rolled between his fingers.

You retaliated, pushing yourself off the wall to drive your hips into his, meeting his thrusts. His fingers dug into the flesh of your ass, lips finding your ear as his teeth tugged down on the earlobe. The profanities that fell from his lips sounded like pure sin, mixed with the huskiness and raspiness of his voice, sending another shot of pure heat straight to your core, soaking you more than you already were.

“I-I’m not going to last,” he stuttered out, hot breath fanning over your ear as he rutted into you, pace still brutal and addicting. “Not when you’re so warm, when you feel this good.”

“I’m n-not going to last either,” you barely got the words out, tugging on his hair as you buried your own head into the crook of his shoulder, crying out as another pang of pleasure shot through you with another drag of his cock against your walls. Another press of his hips to yours.

With the end in sight, creeping up on both of you, Johnny renewed his efforts.

One hand grasped onto your ankles behind him, hiking your legs up higher. The angle of his thrusts shifted, somehow burying him deeper within your walls, hitting a part of you he hadn’t yet touched. A sob of pure pleasure tore through your lips, the sound only growing louder when one of Johnny’s hands snaked its way down your front, thumb rubbing little circles directly to your sensitive clit as your body was thrown into overdrive.

You keened at the feel of him, at every snap of his hips as he drove himself into you. Every sink of his cock, every time it nestled deep within your walls. You met his thrusts back with as much force as you could, throwing your hips off the tiled wall and into his, slamming yourself onto him with every ounce of strength you could muster.

That coil of heat only got tighter, threatening to snap with every throb and twitch of him inside of you. Every little circle that his thumb made around that bundle of nerves, every firm press he gave to it. The squelch of your arousal around the place in which you were joined together was loud, louder than the running water still beating down on you both.

The waves of pleasure were threatening to crest over you, and you knew Johnny was right there with you. His hips were faltering, his rhythm shaky, barely able to maintain himself as he still fucked into your with reckless abandon, chasing his own high.

Fingers curled into his hair still, you tore your head from his neck, surging forward to connect your lips with his. Messy, a clatter of teeth together as he tried to pull at your bottom lip and vice versa.

“Johnny–Johnny, I can’t,” was all you could manage to mumble against his lips through your high pitched squeals, his rhythm faltering and his thrusts growing shorter, but still just as deep. “I can’t, I can’t I’m–I’m going to–I’m so close-”

“Me too, sweetheart,” his own words were clipped, mumbled through his fervent attempt to place a thousand kisses to your lips, digging in his hips as deep as they could go. “Let me feel you. Please–please, let me feel it, baby.”

The crest of your orgasm hit like a shockwave, like a rippling wave of pure pleasure moving through your body.

Every cry that left your lips was his name, just his name falling from your lips like a mantra you wanted to repeat for the rest of your life. Your thighs shook, muscles tightening as every ounce of your own pleasure gushed out of you, practically dripping from you, pooling into a ring around his cock as it still drove frantically into you, chasing his own release.

Your name fell from Johnny’s lips, too, as they pressed to yours. His hips dragged in short, deep thrusts before they still, buried to the hilt inside of you. He twitched within your walls–once, twice–before that familiar warmth pooled within you again, every drop of him collecting deep inside of you.

Quiet filled the bathroom once more. Just the sound of your heavy breathing mixing together, accented by the shower. Water still rained down, your skin surely beginning to prune after all this time, the water having turned cold.

You never dropped your ankles, nor tore your fingers from his hair, or let your forehead stop resting against his. Johnny never moved either, not from within you, not even an inch back to fully look at you. He simply leaned in, stealing a kiss from your lips with all the gentleness in the world, reminding you that you were still the most important thing in the world to him.

“Have I mentioned that I love you?” you managed to speak after a few moments, as the charged energy within the room finally dissipated. He laughed, pressing his lips back into yours.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t mind hearing it again-”

A loud bang sounded through the bathroom, coming from the doorway into the hallway. Both of you jumped just slightly at the unexpected noise booming through the walls.

“Look, I’m all for young love, and I’m glad you two are done with your back and forth game that’s been going on for years,” Ben Grimm’s voice carried through the walls, muffled only slightly by the door. “But I’m about ready to tell Reed to put saving the world on hold so he can sound proof every wall in this building. Come on, kid, Johnny can’t be that good.”

Ben muttered something else from beyond the door, something about his earlier comment about keeping the noise down and how he meant it. When you and Johnny locked eyes again, though, all either of you could do was laugh.

“Sound proofing the building,” Johnny managed to say within laughs, pressing a featherlight kiss to your cheek as he shot you a cheeky smirk. “Not a bad idea. Gives me plenty of other places I could ruin you.”

“You’re impossible, Johnny Storm,” was all you said, even as you tugged him back into another kiss. A feeling you were certain you would never get enough of.

❤︎

Reed Richards was insane, that was something you knew long before you began working for him. Just how insane, though?

Well, he’d never attempted to teleport a planet to a different point within the universe, that’s for sure.

The idea was crazy, certifiably insane…but just insane enough that it could work. The same teleportation bridge you’d worked on together, able to teleport an egg just across the lab, was about to be applied on the largest scale possible in order to teleport the world to another point in the galaxy. The only idea just crazy enough to maybe save the Earth from the impending doom that was Galactus.

Somehow, in just 36 hours, this crazy group you were lucky enough to call your family was able to mobilize the world, teleportation bridges built in every major city across the entire world. The power consumption was another problem, but one that Reed’s brilliant mind had been able to solve. He’d praised your work, shortening the length of the power outage from bridge usage to just seven seconds. That mind of his made it smaller, sending the world into a worldwide energy curfew, enough to conserve enough power to move the world without a hitch.

In that dark of that night, you had laid with Johnny in the bed you were slowly calling your own. Those usual plaid pajama bottoms, white t-shirt with that bright blue 4 over his chest. One of his sweaters covering your body, which was curled into his arms.

“Galactus had been reported by the team at the Future Foundation to have passed Mars just hours ago,” the radio across the room, sitting on a bookshelf, sounded through the quiet of the room. “The window of time to save the earth is slowly closing in, as we await the hail mary of Dr. Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four.”

“This is going to work, right?” you had whispered out into the quiet of the night the second the radio had stopped, eyes trained across the room on the sliver of Excelsior you could see through the windows across the room. Most of them were covered by sheets upon sheets of papers, scribbled in an alien language by Johnny’s handwriting.

His grip around you had tightened, a kiss pressed to your forehead.

“We’re going to make it work,”

You hoped that Johnny was right. You needed him to be right.

Nerves wracked your entire body, the sound of Reed, Sue and Ben moving through the lab sounding through your ears. You felt far away, though, like you weren’t truly in the room as you looked up at the giant lab screen before you.

A map of the entire world, markers one by one flickering on as bridges went live across the world. And you? Stationed at the main panel, overlooking the four workstations in which the Fantastic Four would ready the world in, preparing to make the final call. Your hands, shaking, tugged on the oversized sweater you’d stolen from Johnny’s closet, fiddling with the ends of it that rested against the top of your black slacks, trying to find a way to ground yourself in the unfamiliar territory.

“Nervous?”

Sue’s voice cut through the haze in your mind, pulling your gaze to her. Her smile was easy, like this wasn’t the most nerve wracking moment of her entire life, as she slid a coffee onto the table in front of you, her other hand holding the portable baby monitor that looked down on sleeping Franklin Richards upstairs. You took it without hesitation, giving her the tiniest grin you could muster as you took a sip.

“Oh, you know, just the end of the world and whatnot,”

“Take a deep breath, kid,” Ben appeared at your other side, sliding a little paper bag your way: one of Maisie’s snickerdoodle cookies sitting wrapped inside of it. He shot you a large grin as he moved past toward his workstation. “I want it on the record that one is from me, not Johnny!”

“He’s right, though,” Sue chimed in, bringing your attention back to her as your laughter subsided at Ben’s little comment. Her hand came up to your upper arm, resting there in comfort, her thumb sliding back and forth over the fabric of the sweater. “This is going to work.”

“I know. It has to,” you said back with a nod. “Doesn’t mean it’s not terrifying. I haven’t felt this terrified since you four went into space the first time.”

Sue laughed, a sound that somehow managed to instantly bring peace to you. Like a sense of comfort that only she was ever able to bring. Her smile was still soft as her hand squeezed your upper arm gently.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever properly thanked you for everything you’ve ever done for us. None of this is possible without you, you’ve been with us every step of the way,” she gestured around the room as she spoke, to the operation you were about to attempt. “Plus, I think I have to thank you for loving Johnny. Lord knows he was pining for you long enough, I’m the one that always had to hear about it.”

You laughed, bringing over your hand to rest over her hand, squeezing it back.

“Johnny, somehow, might be the easiest part of it. But all of this…I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I’d do anything for you guys, you’re my family,” you glanced down at the monitor in her hands, at the sleeping form of Franklin. “I’d do anything to protect him, too. That’s your firstborn, Sue. I…I’d do anything to make sure you never lose him.”

Reed called something out through the lab, something about multiple calls rolling in at once from cities across the globe. Sue turned for just a moment, before she glanced back, squeezing your hand once last time.

“You’re wrong, honey. He’s not my firstborn,” her hand left yours, gently caressing your cheek for a moment, just like a mother would, before her hand slipped away. “I had two kids before I ever had him.”

You wondered, then, how you ever could’ve doubted if these people around you considered you family.

Reed, Sue and Ben took their places at their workstations. Headphones on, microphones to their lips, you listened to their callouts through the room, confirming with multiple cities across the globe.

Copy Lima.

Copy Cape Town.

Copy Sydney.

Copy Tokyo.

With each city copied, you watched every red dot on your map turn green.

The elevator dinged open across the lab, footsteps practically running across the floor before they came to a stop right beside you.

“Guys, I am onto something!” Johnny called out to the room, hands thrown wide in celebration. Reed shot him an unimpressed look from his chair, turning back to the list on the screen before him.

“We’re moving a planet here, Johnny,”

“Yeah, Johnny, it’s 4. Fantastic 4,” Ben emphasized, holding out four fingers in his direction. His gaze shot to you quickly, as he put a fifth thumb up. “5 including you, of course. 6 if we want to count Herbie, and uh, 7 is old enough to be in the mix yet.”

You only shook your head, a smile stretching across your lips for a fleeting moment as Johnny swooped you into his arms. A rushed kiss was placed to your lips before his forehead rested against yours, blue eyes boring into yours.

“I figured it out, baby,”

“The whole thing?” you questioned, understanding exactly what he was talking about.

“Everything I need, completely reconstructed,”

Your smile returned for a moment as you cupped his cheeks, pulling him into another kiss, before planting them on his chest and gently shoving him away.

“Knew you could, genius. Now go get this planet ready,”

With your four favorite people placed before you now, more cities were called into the air: Delhi, Vienna, Rome, Chicago, and countless others.

It was the second every light on the screen before you flashed green that your stomach felt like it had shot into your throat.

Reed glanced back at you, catching your eye, waiting for your signal. Swallowing the lump in your throat, you gave him a nod.

“Earth go for countdown,”

With a single press of a button from Reed, the twenty second countdown began to play on the screen before you.

The hum in the air of electricity was prevalent immediately, along with the slight rumble in the ground as the device just blocks away in Times Square roared to life, along with every other device across the world.

Elbows resting against the table in front of you, your hands covered your mouth, foot tapping incessantly against the ground as you watched the countdown drop second by second: 16, 15, 14, 13, 12.

You spared a glance at Johnny. He was already looking back at you, smile as easy and comforting as he could make it, and he mouthed “it’s okay” to you over and over again.

11, 10, 9, 8, 7-

Maybe that comforting smile would’ve worked if the alarms hadn’t begun to blare, and if the green lights across your map didn’t slowly start to flicker back to red.

“What is that?” Sue called out in worry, lights beginning to flicker red faster and faster. Johnny shot from his chair toward the screen, throwing off his headset in the process.

“What’s happening?”

The quickest that your shaking fingers could, you tapped in a series of keys across the keyboard before you, pulling up the live newsfeeds from around the globe to the main screen of the room.

The Herald. Flying straight through every single bridge across the globe at a speed you couldn’t comprehend. Using whatever power was infused into her to shatter every bridge on impact.

Until every single green light on the map had faded back to red, all except New York.

“She’s coming for the bridge,” Reed called out to the room as everyone stood, staring up at the map displayed before them on the screen.

“No,” Sue cut in, glancing around the room with a look of pure horror. “She’s coming for Franklin.”

You’d never seen Reed Richards panic, not the way he did just then. He’d practically sprinted back to his workstation alongside Sue, just as Ben went back to his. Reed’s finger thrust back in your direction, his gaze turning to you–wide eyed and full of fear–as he shouted.

“Lock the building down!”

There was no hesitation on your part as you input the lockdown code, hand coming down to press the button for activation as Reed, Sue and Ben shouted things across the room at one another.

Johnny’s hand caught your wrist before you could press the button. You turned, catching his eyes as they pleaded with you.

“I have a plan,”

Truly, that’s all you needed to hear. You only nodded, hand not moving an inch.

“Okay,”

“I don’t know if it will work-”

“It will,” you cut him off, surging forward to press a kiss to his lips quickly, before stepping back with a small grin. “I trust you. Go.”

Johnny didn’t hesitate before he was out the windows across the lab, igniting and streaking through the air in moments. The second he was out the window, your hand slammed down on the lockdown button, shuttering every window in the building.

“Wait, where’s Johnny?”

When you spun back around on your heels, all three sets of eyes were trained on you as Ben asked the question. You simply switched the feed on the main screen over to the live feed from Times Square, nodding at the three in front of you.

“He has a plan…he’s got this,”

Moments later, moments that felt like ages, Johnny finally appeared on the screen. Landing directly between the arms of the bridge, on top of the platform, the fire that surrounded him dissipated. With a single flick of the device on his wrist, those same deep space recordings sounded off through every screen littering Times Square, every single recording in her language.

The herald came to a stop, feet in the air above him, the second she heard the recordings.

As if he was fluent, spoken it all of his life, Johnny spoke the language he’d spent days upon days deciphering, piecing together from a single phrase spoken to him. She spoke back, a language no-one else in the room could understand. You couldn’t help it that your nails found their way between your teeth, grinding back and forth against your nails in an attempt to calm the nerves that threatened to jump out of your throat.

“How is he doing this?” Ben called out to the room, glancing around in astonishment, before his gaze settled on you. “He barely had a grasp of the English language.”

“Because he’s a genius,” you simply said, a smile cracking through your anxiety for just a moment. “A genius, genius boy I love so god damn much.”

“23 transmissions, all in your language, traced back to the planet Zenn-La. Your home,” Johnny’s voice broke through on the screen again, speaking in English once more. “They were looking for you so that they could thank you. Once I translated one phrase, I pieced together enough language to understand a part of your history.”

As Johnny spoke, talking through her story to make sure he got it right, something in your heart broke for the woman who was shining in silver on your screen: Shalla-Bal. Just a scientist, desperate to save her own planet and to spare her family, choosing to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to do so.

“Those were messages from the one planet Galactus spared–your planet. These other planets weren’t so lucky. How many do you remember, Shalla-Bal?” the recordings switched over, cries and desperate pleas in alien languages you’d never heard before. “They all begged for mercy. You brought Galactus to all of these planets, and now you’re bringing him to my home. To the woman I love, to my family!”

A scream cut through the recording, her scream, before it cut out. The lab was plunging back into silence, just the faint chatter on the other end of every headset sat across the room at each workstation, every city across the globe trying to piece together what had transpired.

It felt like hours, but it had barely been minutes later, when Johnny finally reappeared in the lab. You’d spun the second you heard him, colliding halfway with him to throw your arms around his shoulders, tugging him in for dear life to hold him. His lips instantly pressed to your temple, hand curling around your waist to hold you to him, as he turned to the others.

“Johnny, that was incredible,” Ben called out as you moved from Johnny’s arms, his hand shooting down to interlace his fingers with yours, tugging you to his side as he shook his head.

“Does it even matter?”

“You saved Franklin,” Sue told him matter-of-factly, leaning back against her workstation with her arms crossed. “Yes, it matters.”

“She told us to leave, to save ourselves. That..maybe we’d live long enough to forgive ourselves for it,” his eyes glanced down to your hands for a moment, before back to Reed. “We aren’t leaving, are we?”

“No,” his response was easy, quick, as he sat on the benches encircling the middle of the lab area. “No, we’re not leaving. We can’t.”

The direct line at every station began to ring, signaling incoming calls from each city across the globe. Reed stalked past all of you, picking up a piece of chalk along his way to his boards. You gave Johnny a small nod, sending him back to his desk as you approached yours, slipping on your own headset and transferring the incoming calls to Reed’s desks to yours.

The frantic voice of a man from Vienna sounded over the headset, desperate to find answers. Your hand ran down your face, trying to will yourself to handle what were sure to be hundreds of calls like this.

“We have multiple calls coming in at once, hold Vienna,” you told the man as easily as you could, holding the line with a single click. Another frantic voice came through on the next picked up call, this time a woman from Rome. “Please, hold for a moment, Rome-”

“We need to bring Galactus here,”

The sudden words from Reed Richards sounded through the room, and silenced everyone in seconds. You turned, headset slipping off your head to look at your mentor, head cocked to the side. There was only one word you could use to describe how he looked in that moment: defeated.

“We need him to come here?” Ben questioned as he and Johnny stepped up along one side of you. “I feel like we just spent a lot of time trying to prevent that from happening?”

“We need to get him away from his ship, and we need to bring him here,” Reed stepped up alongside you, reaching over you to hit a series of keys against your keyboard, pulling the live feed of Times Square back up on the main monitor. “To Times Square, to be exact. Then, instead of moving a planet away from one giant, we move one giant away from a planet.”

He was gone in seconds from your side, stalking back to his chalkboard across the room. Equations were written across the board in seconds, without a second thought, like it was built into Reed’s nature to do so.

You stepped up closer to him, watching him work, and Ben and Johnny hovered behind you.

“If we route every power grid on the Eastern seaboard through our one last bridges, charged back up, we can keep the portal open for…” the equation stretched across the length of the board, before he finally reached his answer, circling it in the white chalk as he dropped it down onto the ledge of the board. “37 seconds.”

“37 seconds?” you questioned, eyes feeling as if they were going to fall out of your head.

“Not a lot of time to throw a space god off a planet,” Johnny cut in as you shook your head.

“It’s not, and it’s insane,” you tacked on, shaking your head at Reed, voice rising in volume. “I follow you blindly into most things, Reed, but this is crazy. I mean, where would you even send him?”

“To the far edges of the universe, he’ll be stranded there without his ship,”

“And how are we supposed to lure him to Times Square?”

Reed grew quiet, a sign you always took as a bad omen. When Reed didn’t know what to say, or was struggling to find the way to say it, it almost never ended well.

“I haven’t figured that out yet-”

“You have,” Sue cut in, drawing the attention of every person in the room over to her. “We have to use the only thing Galactus wants. It’s the only way…we have to use Franklin.”

The room went still at her words, as if every ounce of oxygen was plucked straight from the room. Maybe it had been.

You turned, along with Johnny and Ben, to look at Reed. Hoping he’d argue.

“...yes,”

The scoff that fell from your lips was instant. You couldn’t even describe the emotions that curled within you, the pure anger and rage at the mere idea of using a poor, innocent child as bait for some devourer of worlds. Within a second, you stalked across the room, shoving past Reed on your way to the elevator.

“No, absolutely not,”

“Please, just wait-” Reed’s hand barely caught your upper arm before you ripped it out, turning with tears pooling in your eyes.

“No! I will, and always have, followed you everywhere Reed. I trust your judgement around every corner, because I know you’ll always find a way to fix a problem. Because I look up to you. But if this is what has to be done…I can’t. I can’t do it, I can’t be a part of it. I can’t do that to him, not even if it would save the world,”

No one tried to stop you from leaving the lab, not that you would have listened.

The cool night air couldn’t even calm your nerves, could satiate the anxiety coursing through your veins. It could’ve been minutes, or even hours you weren’t sure anymore, of standing on the balcony overlooking New York from the living room of the Baxter Building. Your hands were white knuckling the railing. Every so often, you attempted a deep breath to try and calm yourself, but nothing seemed to work.

Poor, innocent little Franklin Richards. To be used as bait. Of all the absurd ideas you had entertained from Reed over the years, the thought of having to use his child like that wasn’t something you could fathom. Even if you knew, as well as everyone in that room, that it was the only way.

“Are you accepting company on the balcony, or did you want to brood alone out here?”

You scoffed, casting a glance back at Johnny. He rested so casually against the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he watched you. You didn’t turn him away, but flicked your head back to the skyline.

“How long have I been out here?”

Johnny slid into the open space beside you, the sleeve of his burnt orange jacket sliding along yours. 

“An hour. Enough time for Reed to talk to Sue, for them to hatch a plan, and for it to all come together,” he bumped his shoulder with yours, bringing your gaze to him. “Galactus’ ship is on pace to reach earth by late afternoon tomorrow. We’re going through with the plan.”

“I figured. It’s the only way,” with a soft groan, you let a hand run down your face, rubbing at the sides of your eyes. “I’m sorry, I freaked out. I shouldn’t have stormed out.”

Johnny’s hands took yours, tugging you into him. You turned without hesitation to face him, palms resting against his chest as he held both of your hands within his.

“Ben and I kind of screamed Reed’s head off for a hot moment afterward, so trust me, no one blamed you. I was seconds away from following you out,”

His head bent forward, leaving the lightest of kisses to your knuckles, eyes never leaving yours the entire time.

“What’s the plan for the city?”

“Sue is going to talk to Harvey Elder–yeah, I know, the nickname Moleman is funny–in the morning. He’s got a bit of a soft spot for her, so she’s pretty sure that he’s going to agree,” Johnny paused for a moment, thinking over his words, before he let out a deep breath. “We’re going to evacuate the city into Subterranea. When the buses come to shuttle everyone in…I want you on one of them.”

Immediately, you shook your head, mouth dropping open to argue.

“Johnny-”

“I can’t lose you,” he cut you off, blue eyes looking earnestly down on you, pleading with you to listen. “It’s bad enough that I’m going to have to worry about Franklin, and my sister, and Reed and Ben the entire time. I can’t worry about you, too, I’ll go out of my mind. Because if the girl that I cherish, that I treasure, that I love the most was in the line of fire too, then I can’t focus on anything else. I need to know you’re somewhere safe, where Galactus can’t hurt you, where he can’t take you from me. I…I need something to come back to. You’ve done your part, let us do ours.”

Every part of you wanted to argue, wanted to fight back. You’d been with them this long, been through every step of this process with them the whole way. You wanted to be with them, to help them, but what could you do?

You’d done your part, and now, you had to trust that they’d all come back to you in the end.

“Okay,” you agreed softly. The relief that flooded his face was instant the second those words had left your lips.

Johnny’s hands curled around your neck, tugging you up into a kiss that stole your breath away. A single tear slipped down your cheek as you felt every emotion that was poured into that kiss. Every ounce of love, every promise he’d made, every firm press of heated lips to yours that promised to engrave the feeling into your soul for the rest of your life.

A goodbye kiss. One in case it was the last you’d ever have.

“No matter what happens tomorrow,” Johnny whispered the words against your lips, cradling you within the palms of his hands, looking down on you as if you were the sun and he was a planet simply stuck in your orbit. “Just remember that I love you.”

You repeated the phrase like a mantra in your head. Every second, every minute, every hour that you were without him.

From the second you and Lynne stepped onto the bus to Subterranea, the last two employees of the Future Foundation to evacuate the city in the final moments of peace that Earth would know, you whispered it to yourself over and over again.

Remember that I love you.

Lynne never let go of your hand, gripping onto it like a lifeline.

That hand became your lifeline, every moment you were trapped in the cold depths of Subterranea, wishing you could just feel the sun for a moment, see the blue of the sky.

Every time the earth above you rattled, thundered, and bits of debris fell to the ground around you and coated you in dust, you knew it was the footsteps of Galactus marching across the city you loved. Toward your family. And every time, you repeated those words once more to yourself.

Remember that I love you.

And finally, after what felt like forever, the message was relayed through the radios from Reed himself: it was over. They’d won.

Every single citizen around you celebrated. They cried, they cheered, but you didn’t. You wouldn’t, not until you saw them with your own eyes. Not until you saw him.

The destruction of the city was evident. Building torn apart, debris littering the roads, various avenues torn to shreds by the sheer size of Galactus.

Citizens lined the streets as they poured back out into the city from Subterranea. You stood with Lynne at the doors of the Baxter Building, welcoming employees who met up with one another, reuniting on the front lawn and the sidewalks, cheering that, somehow, the world was saved.

A smile only crossed your face the second you laid eyes on them again.

Blue and white suits torn, covered in debris, hair a mess, but alive. Walking straight up to the building together, little Franklin cradled in the arms of his mother. Battered, maybe a little broken and bruised, but alive.

Lynne’s laughter rang through the air the second you broke into a sprint. Johnny met you halfway, ignoring the laughter of his own family, as you flew directly into his arms.

Arms wound tight around his neck, his around the backs of your thighs as he lifted you from the ground without a second thought, spinning you through the air. Your laughter rang out, even as tears slid down your cheeks.

Johnny’s hands slide from your thighs, to your hips, to cradling your waist, bringing you back down until your feet finally touched the ground again. He didn’t even give you a chance to speak before he leaned forward, capturing your lips in a kiss.

“There’s so much I have to tell you,” he murmured against your lips, never straying far enough that you weren’t touching. “You probably won’t believe me.”

“You came home from space with superpowers, Jonathan Storm, I think I’ll believe just about anything at this point,” giggles left your lips as you said it, pecking at his lips over and over again, never wanting to stop touching him.

“Good,” he spun your once more, a smile as bright as the sun stretching across his face as you laughed through your tears again. “As long as you always believe me when I tell you I love you.”

Johnny Storm loved you, now and forever, and you knew it was true. You would never fully understand the reason why, but maybe that was just the wonder of him.

[briennemurdock]

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

✶ — LIFE ON MARS !

part one | part two

summary: johnny storm is on a mission to woo the newest addition to the space crew, who doesn't seem to like him very much. it almost works. almost. (10.8k words)

pairing: johnny storm / f!reader

contents: strangers to lovers, enemies to lovers, fluff, angst, grumpy x sunshine (grump!reader), johnny can't flirt to save his life, cw for very brief mentions of blood and gore, space sex, dry humping, smut 18+, mdni!!!

✶ — April, 1960 | ANSA Launch Facility — ✶

A long, long time ago, before bodies were ever invented, the atoms of all living things existed in the stars. Humans were, at their core, nothing more than an inherent act of defiant creation — just a bunch of tiny solar systems pretending to be people. At least, that’s what you preferred to believe anyway, ‘cause the comforting thought eases your worries about your own misgivings. Restless, removed, reclusive.

Because, of course, you can’t sleep when the stars are whispering your name. Of course, no one will ever know you quite as well as the moon, when it had known you long before man ever did. Of course, you’re so often filled with a celestial-like solitude when you were never meant to be in this world to begin with, and fell into it completely by happenstance.

The vast infiniteness of the universe reminds you, every day, of how small you are. And every day, it reduces you to a starry-night sort of silence.

Johnny Storm struggles to approach you accordingly. He knew you only distantly, like all heavenly bodies are meant to be known. All he knew of you was that you were a professor — the first of your kind, a colleague of Reed’s, and a scientist whose accolades had caught his sister’s attention. Such vague descriptions did little to capture your beauty, a youthful and quiet sort of charm. As lovely as the stars and perhaps as lonesome as them, too.

And how was he meant to talk to the girl with the galaxy in her eyes? It’s a question he hasn’t quite figured out the answer to yet. But he’s damn sure going to try.

“How well do you know him?” is the first thing Johnny thinks to ask, while the group of soon-to-be astronauts squeeze into their all-white ventilation garments.

You give him a deadpan look in return, clad only in a black tank top and a pair of spandex shorts, as you tug the skin-tight fabric up your legs.

You don’t know Johnny Storm all that well, just that he’s Sue’s younger brother and a pretty damn good engineer. But, in the few short days you’ve gotten to know him, you’ve noticed his strange penchant for covering his awkward tenderness with a feigned sort of arrogance. He’s obviously still getting used to this new world, and the subsequent attention that comes with being among the first people in space — aptly called the Saturn Five.

You figure he’s not yet accustomed to the sudden adoration from the public, and so he’s forced to improvise accordingly.

“How well do I know…?” you trail off.

“Oh, right. Yeah—” the blonde boy stammers, laughing softly at himself.

Your emotionless stare never wavers.

Johnny’s cheeks flare. “My— My brother-in-law, I mean. Reed.”

“Not well,” you answer in a detached monotone and drag the white sleeve up the length of your arm. “Mostly by reputation.”

Johnny scoffs and drags his garment over his freckled shoulders, lean torso straining against the fabric of his thin t-shirt. “And you still decided to show up?” he quips.

You don’t share his amused smile. You rarely ever do. Never, actually. Most of the time, Johnny can’t tell if you realize he’s joking or if you just don’t care.

Now, you just nod in response and answer his rhetorical question in a single word. “Yes.”

Johnny nods to himself, too, and pulls the silver zipper of his suit up his chest. “Yeah, no. I get it. Reed’s a pretty good guy, I guess— But I’m just here to make sure my sister doesn’t do anything, honestly,” he confesses in a breathy chuckle. “…What about you?”

“What about me?” you repeat with pinched brows, tugging on the other sleeve.

“What are you in for?” Johnny wonders with a playful squint in his light blue eyes — the exact color of the sky at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, or the color of the ocean at exactly 33 meters deep. “‘Cause I know it’s not just because you like my company, Doc.”

“I don’t know,” you shrug. “To change the world, I guess.”

“That’s all, huh?” he laughs.

You nod once. The zipper whizzes quietly as you drag it up to your neck. “That’s all,” you answer in a monotone before turning on your heel and walking away.

Johnny’s footsteps echo through the expansive launch facility as he rushes to catch up with you. He walks a little too close for your liking, enough for you to feel the warmth radiating from his pale skin and to smell the vanilla-tobacco cologne on his long neck.

His broad shoulder brushes yours with every quick stride down the white brick corridor, moving in extra close every time you pass by bustling scientists in lab coats or clunking machines that didn’t exist to the world a year or more ago.

“I wasn’t— I wasn’t prying too much back there, was I?” he frets with furrowed brows, ocean eyes swimming with concern as he ducks to look at you.

You don’t share his gaze as you hum in a detached tone of voice, “I don’t know. Were you?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Johnny sighs with a shrug. “Half-and-half, I guess— Prying and, for selfish reasons, genuinely concerned for your wellbeing.”

You stop suddenly in the middle of the narrow hallway. Johnny stumbles on his feet beside you. A group of doctors walk down the corridor, then — a gaggle of men with heavy glasses on their noses and clipboards in their weathered hands. He has to take an extra step closer to you to let them pass by.

His chest brushes yours at the dwindling proximity, which seems to affect him far more than it does you. The scent of your perfume makes him dizzy; something fruity, like a raspberry, maybe. Far sweeter than the way you glare at him now.

“Concerned about what?”

“Well, I just mean it’s— It’s one thing for Reed to rope all of us idiots into his crazy plan, you know? We’ve all known him for years, we already know he’s crazy,” Johnny laughs, only partly joking. “But you’re…”

“What? A stranger?”

“Normal,” Johnny corrects before shrugging. “Well, actually, pretty would’ve been my first choice, but… tomato, tom-ah-to, right?”

He flashes you a crooked pink smile then, which would’ve made any other girl swoon at his feet — a proven theory he’s tested at several bars since he became known as Johnny Storm, faithful member of the heroic Saturn Five. But you don’t even blink, totally unmoved by his charm (or lack thereof).

Johnny sighs and drops his head. He finally lets go of all the boyish theatrics he thinks for some reason he needs, which you’re grateful for.

“Look… If something were to happen to us up there, I think I could stomach that, you know— It’d be awful, obviously, but we’d handle it. Like we always do…” He trails off, button eyes round and full of a distant worry that sends him rambling before he can stop it. “But this… This is dangerous stuff, Doc. And Reed knows it. And he shouldn’t have recruited anybody else, but he did, and if something happened to you… I don’t think I’d forgive myself.”

You’re slightly moved by his admission, though you don’t show it on your face.

“Well, I guess, it’s a good thing nothing’s gonna happen up there.”

You turn to walk away again, and Johnny nearly trips over his own feet to stay in stride with you. “Hold on. Just— Just one more question, alright?”

“I’m going on this mission, Johnny Storm.”

“It’s not that—” he insists, voice breaking slightly at the use of his full name.

Even despite your not-so-subtle bitterness towards him, he thinks he hears something strikingly soft in your voice. It’s something almost tender, and perhaps only in his head, which gives his name a brand new meaning. You make it sound like everyone else has been saying his name wrong his whole life.

“I was just going to ask if you wanted to maybe hang out later, by the way, hypothetically,” Johnny rambles, talking wildly with his hands.

You notice his panicked gesturing from the corner of your eye, and how quickly he tucks his anxious fingers underneath his strong arms when he crosses them over his chest. He thinks he almost catches you smiling before you swallow it back down again a second later.

“I’m a little tied up here, actually,” you tell him, though it comes out too monotoned to sound like the half-joke you meant it as.

“Oh. Right. Yeah, me too…” Johnny nods, trying to play it cool despite his stammering.

You enter the main lab side-by-side for your daily check-ups. The rest of the Saturn Five are already waiting for you there. Ben, Reed, and Sue all sit next to each other on their exam tables, hooked to a series of buzzing machines which draw their blood into crimson tubes hanging at their side.

Johnny trails like a puppy behind you, brows raised and eyes glittering in a sheepish sort of look. “So, what about tomorrow, then?”

“Leave her alone, Johnny,” Sue calls across the room with a knowing smile on her face, always inherently gentle in her way, but still teasing like all older sisters are entitled to be.

The blonde boy gapes in response as he stammers, “I’m— I’m not even doing anything!”

“You’re bothering her.”

“I am not!” he argues instinctively, then flashes you a worried ocean-eyed look. “Am I?”

“I don’t know. Are you?” you shrug, as unenthusiastic as ever.

Johnny smacks his lips against his teeth. “Yeah, that’s not helpful—”

“She’s our lead astrophysicist, Johnny—” Reed reminds playfully from his wife’s side, olive skin growing sticky and pale as the nurse takes his blood. (He’s more frightened by needles than the unknown emptiness of outer space. It’s weird.) “—Which is code for: she’s way too busy for you.”

“Too pretty, more like,” Ben scoffs from beside the older man.

Johnny’s face screws in offense, which only makes them laugh harder at the stupid joke — even if it is sort of true. When you part from him to head to your own station, Johnny thinks he hears you laughing at it, too. A quiet, breathy sound that’s more of an exhaled breath than anything, but still a laugh nonetheless.

“Oh, really?” he huffs dramatically, ‘cause he’s been trying to get you to smile for three whole days now. “That’s what gets you?”

✶ — April, 1961 | New York — ✶

Your last night on planet Earth is spent talking to the moon, crescent-shaped and gleaming. It tells you not to worry, though not exactly with words. It just holds you in its gentle glow and reminds you that you aren’t leaving anything behind, that there isn’t anything new you could possibly discover in the vast infiniteness of space. Because the universe was your first ever home in truth, billions and billions of years ago, and now it’s calling you back.

Like a childhood room you only see on holidays, frozen in time like you never even left it.

That’s how Johnny finds you — at an ungodly hour of the early morning, standing in the center of the worn sidewalk, bathed in the neon hues of the bright city square that never sleeps. You drown in your cable-knit sweater, arms crossed over your chest and fingers tucked away in a feeble attempt to hide from the early spring chill. You keep your chin tilted towards the sky, and your eyes trained on something far away.

He wonders if there’s something up there only you can see. That’s how you tend to look at the world, anyway, like you’re keeping all of its secrets.

“Where do you think it ends?” Johnny blurts, always so wrapped up in his own head that he tends to continue inward conversations rather than start brand new ones.

You’re unstartled by the suddenness of his arrival, ‘cause you felt him behind you long before he ever had to announce it — consumed immediately by his palpable body heat, along with the minty aftershave and sea-salt bodywash on his skin from a fresh shower.

“Why do you ask such vague questions?” you snap in return, as harsh as the late winter chill.

It’s your basic primal instinct to be annoyed by his presence, like the rage is hardwired into you. The simmering embers of misplaced anger in your chest are quickly snuffed out by the rolling breeze of a lingering winter, which bites mercilessly at your cheeks and the tip of your nose. Something primitive in the back of your mind subconsciously wishes he’d come closer then.

When you turn to glare at the blonde boy over your shoulder, you find him donned in a fitting long-sleeve tee and a baggier pair of plaid pajama pants. His strong, shaven chin is tilted upward, and his sleep-swollen gaze is pointed to the sky like yours once, only it’s a lot more annoying when he does it.

Johnny laughs on a quiet, exhaled breath. “I mean, where do you think the sky ends and eternity begins?” he repeats, a question that has plagued him for some days now.

He’s tormented by the thought of a thin, black veil — one which separates the only home humans have ever known from an emptiness that goes on endlessly in every direction. Is space just dark and dead and doomed? his mind rages. Is everything worth marvelling at just here on Earth?

“100 kilometers above sea level,” you answer instantaneously. “Approximately, anyway.”

Johnny’s head snaps in your direction. “What?”

“100 kilometers above sea level,” you repeat like it’s obvious. “That’s where the Earth’s atmosphere separates from outer space—”

A laugh sputters suddenly past Johnny’s pink mouth. The boyish sound echoes through the empty city square, which is only filled now by your bodies and flashing neon signs.

A deep frown settles between your brows in return. “Why are you laughing?”

“I’m not,” he insists despite his chuckling. “I swear, I’m not—”

Your eyes narrow at him while his lighter ones glimmer with a newfound life. His cheeks flare a faint pink color from his poorly held-back laughter and the unforgiving late-night chill. He balls a pale fist in front of his mouth to hide how wide he’s smiling.

“It’s a fact—”

“No. I know, I just… I needed that, I think…” Johnny confesses before dragging in a much-needed breath; his first good one all night, maybe. “I’ve just been so in my own head lately, you know? With a bunch of existential stuff from the launch, I guess. I think I just needed to get out of my head for a second, so… Thanks—”

“I didn’t say it to make you feel better,” you snap.

Johnny smiles in the face of your glowering. “Yeah, I know that, too… I’m pretty sure you’re physically incapable of lying.”

“Okay, well, that’s just not true,” you scoff. Not because he’s totally wrong, but because you don’t need him thinking he knows a single thing about you — even if you have spent every day of the past year together.

“Really? Johnny hums with a knowing smile, crossing his arms over his toned chest as he takes a daring step closer. “Then tell me something nice.”

You swallow hard at the dwindling proximity between you. His body heat is all-consuming, swaddling you in a blanket of warmth and tenderness without trying. Whatever the sun is made out of, I think your soul might be made of it, too — those are the first words that rise like bile in your throat. Or your heart, maybe, and you’ve just got sunlight running like fire through your veins.

“Your eyes are very blue,” you observe in a monotone instead. “Like, the kind of blue where it starts to get a little scary if I look at you too long.”

Johnny’s plush grin widens. A big, boyish smile that moves everything inside of you — a flame that melts your body and turns your bones to ash, lighting up all the dark corners.

“And how long did you have to stare at me to figure that one out, Doc?”

“Why does everything have to be some kinda flirtatious remark with you?”

“Because sometimes I can’t tell if you’re flirting with me or starting a fight, so I just assume it’s both.”

“Well, I’m definitely not flirting with you, Johnny Storm—”

“Oh, definitely not…”

“—Flirting is for children. We have a job to do.”

“Right,” he nods in a playfully solemn voice, with a wide smile and a sparkling look in his button eyes. “It’s very serious.”

You shake your head and turn away, headed back towards the towering skyscraper that overlooks the entire city — where you’ll spend your very last night on Earth before you’re seeing it from a space shuttle.

“I hate you,” you grumble as you go.

Johnny’s shoes scuff the pavement as he trails slowly behind you. “No, you don’t…” he lilts under his breath as he follows you inside, blanketed immediately by the warmth of the Baxter Building.

The boy spends his last few hours on the planet pondering not what separates his world from the immeasurable cosmic, but rather how disturbingly thin the veil is between hating someone and loving them.

✶ — April, 1961 | ANSA Hangar — ✶

Nylon for the base. Spandex for mobility. Urethane for the pressure. Nomex for high temperatures. Mylar for the heat loss.

As Johnny helps dress you in the clunky blue and white space suit, you imagine each differing chemical coming together, resulting in a unique mixture that will (hopefully) prevent you from dying the moment you break through the atmosphere. All per Johnny Storms’ blueprint.

“How’s it fit?” the blonde boy wonders aloud from where he stands behind you, latching the last buckle around your back. He gives it one sharp tug just to make sure it stays in place, and you sway softly on your feet to keep your balance.

You nod once. “Good.”

“Better than the last one?” he asks with a smile evident in his voice, knowing that his first trial of spacewear was a complete and utter nightmare. It was too tight in some places, too loose in others, and failed not just one but two fire safety tests. That was about a year ago now. You’d like to think you have a little bit more faith in him these days.

“Anything would be better than the last one,” you scoff.

“Rude,” Johnny frowns.

You spin on the heel of your boot to face him and momentarily falter at how close he is to you. You take a sudden step back from him, like someone jerking away from an open flame. You turn away from his prying gaze and motion to his personalized suit still hanging on the display.

“Do you want help?” you offer unenthusiastically despite yourself.

“Nah,” Johnny declines, shaking his head and crossing his strong arms over his chest. His biceps strain against the tight fabric of his ventilation garment. “I got it. You go ahead.”

Your eyes narrow in a challenging squint. “You said it was a two-person job.”

“Because I wanted to help you,” he shrugs with his cheek tilted to his shoulder. “And I knew you wouldn’t have let me otherwise—”

“So you lied?”

“No, I… slightly misrepresented the truth in order to spend a little extra time with you…” Johnny corrects, blue eyes squinted as he carefully chooses each word. He smiles at the scowl you give him, “…Shoot me.”

“I’ve been meaning to, actually,” you deadpan and turn away.

You hear Johnny snickering behind you as you leave, like he finds something strangely sweet in the empty threat.

He likes it best when you’re mean — he thinks you’re gentlest that way, tender like a green and yellow bruise that’s still healing. The kind you dig your thumb into and revel in the pleasurable soreness you find below the skin. You’re like that, in a way. A delicate lover somewhere deep down in the bruising enemy you’ve decided to be.

Down the windowless corridor and through a set of heavy metal doors, you find the hangar bustling with unfamiliar faces and bulky cameras. The muffled chatter erupts into a thousand droning voices as you enter the room. A visibly anxious and already suited-up Reed Richards stands at the head of it, at the very center of the hounding press.

You freeze in place as the door clicks shut behind you. Your presence gains the attention of the media personnel across the hangar. You cower under their prying eyes and flashing cameras.

“What is this?” you wonder aloud, to no one in particular.

Reed hesitates for a moment, mouth agape and dark eyes wide, as his brain tries to figure out how to answer your question and the hundred others shouted his way. So, he just walks to your side instead, and the gaggle of journalists and photographers follow like so many ducklings behind him.

“This is Doc— Our in-house cosmologist and astrophysicist,” the older man announces as he stands at your side. He puts a gloved hand on your shoulder, almost apologetically so, like he’s trying to silently convey that he hates all this just as much as you do. His fake smile wavers slightly after having been plastered on his face for so long. “If anyone knows what’s waiting for us up there, it’ll be her.”

“I didn’t consent to this—” you deadpan, flinching at the blinding camera flashes.

Your protest gets buried under a barrage of questions shouted at you from every direction. Each member of the press is trying to be heard over the person standing next to them, who is trying to be heard over the person standing next to them. It’s an unforgiving cycle that fills the expansive room with chaos.

“How did the two of you meet?!” a newswoman questions into a bulky microphone from where she stands before a large news camera.

“At Colombia—” Reed answers, faltering briefly when the rest of the Saturn Five walk into the room behind him. Sue, Johnny, and Ben enter wearing their own customized spacesuits. The older man locks eyes with his wife almost immediately, who flashes him a sympathetic smile in return.

Johnny waits for you to look at him, too. He thinks he’s spent the better part of the past year just waiting for you to look at him. Because, most times, he sees you before he’s seen anything else in any given room.

Reed, realizing his sudden silence, stumbles over himself to continue. “Uh, Doc was giving a lecture on black holes, I believe it was, and I—”

“Cosmic radiation,” you correct bluntly.

“…What?”

“I wrote a book on the Black Hole Paradox, but I never taught the Black Hole Paradox,” you ramble in a detached monotone. “We met after a lecture I gave on cosmic radiation— specifically the idea that cosmic rays can penetrate the body and alter its molecules, leading to extreme genetic mutations, which can be passed down for generations.”

For perhaps the first time since security allowed the press into the hangar, silence fills the all-white room. You tend to have that effect on people. On everybody, it seems, except for—

“See what I mean?” Johnny says with a wide grin, relatively unfazed by the hundreds of cameras pointed his way. The lenses follow his every move as he walks to stand beside you, throwing a heavy arm around your shoulder. “Best damn cosmetologist I ever met,” he blunders unknowingly, but with a crooked pink smile that’s hard to say no to.

“Cosmologist,” you correct without taking your emotionless stare off the camera zoomed into your face.

You duck from beneath Johnny’s arm and shove through the crowd of media personnel, heading for the doctors waiting on the other side. The blonde boy takes the sudden attention with ease — he’s gotten all too used to it over the past year.

“She’s the prettiest one, too,” he jokes into the news camera, with a gloved hand cupping the side of his mouth like he’s telling some sort of secret. “But don’t tell her I told you.”

The fiberglass helmets are made of a thick polycarbonate, which Reed’s spent several years perfecting for this very mission. One of the many nurses slides it over your head and locks it into place. The amber-tinted visor, designed to reflect thermal radiation, paints the white building in so many shades of flaxen gold.

Johnny stands beside you — because he’s always somehow right beside you — and turns his heavy head to look at you when the doctor locks his helmet into place. The tinted glass dullens his ocean-eyed gaze and muffles his voice when he asks you, “Remember that date I asked on?”

“Which one?” you deadpan.

“Any of ‘em?” he shrugs. “Is it too late to hash that out, you think?”

“Well, you can’t exactly take me out for coffee now, can you?”

A pink smile curls from behind his thick, glass visor. “Well, we get back in two weeks, Doc. I’ll have plenty of time to take you out for coffee then.”

“Trust me, Johnny Storm, you’ll be sick of me in two weeks.”

His laugh is muffled, but no less cherry-colored. “I’ve seen you every day for the past year, Doc,” he argues. “If I’m not sick of you by now, I don’t think I’m ever gonna be.”

It makes you frown. You don’t understand why he’s lying. ‘Cause you are, by nature, a rather demanding creature. You’re moody, cynical, and sometimes cruel. You’re at times totally untangible, and at others extremely unreasonable. You’ve intentionally made it very difficult to love you because you’ve spent many years not knowing men to be kind.

But Johnny — perhaps obliviously, and led only by his unbridled curiosity — longed to be close to you despite his inherent softness, and despite all your metaphorical barbs.

“Coffee, then?” you monotone without a glance his way, lest he see the vulnerability swimming in your gaze. “When we get back, I mean.”

Johnny glows at a moment’s notice. His button eyes widen in a not-so-subtle look of shock as his pink mouth falls softly agape. ‘Cause, sure, he’s been trying to get you to like him every day for the past three-hundred-sixty-five of them, but he didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly. Or at all, really.

He nods beneath his helmet, rapid and boyish, and smiles at you far wider than you think he realizes. “It’s a date, Doc—”

The comms built into your helmet hiss as they crackle to life. Johnny flinches as his sister’s voice comes through the faint static. “Comms check. Everybody sound off,” Sue instructs from his other side, flashing her baby brother a knowing look.

“Check,” Reed nods.

Ben salutes with two fingers pressed to his forehead, over his rounded glass helmet. “Check, check.”

A cameraman moves down the line as each of you speaks. The chunky gadget sits heavy on his broad shoulder as he squints into the rubber eyepiece of the viewfinder, zooming into each of your faces.

“Check,” Johnny says with a nod in his direction, always so painfully casual.

The cameraman settles finally on you. He looks at you through the lens as though it were a third eye, and your face screws with a subtle scowl. “Tell this man to get his camera out of my face,” you answer in a flat voice.

Sue’s pretty laugh sounds through the static. “Comms are live.”

The large hangar door whirs slowly open. Early morning daylight bathes the room in shades of orange-gold. The Excelsior towers before you, sleek and silver and shimmering in the soft sunlight. The five of you walk in a line up the steep tarmac, inching closer to what will become your new home for the next several days.

Reed reaches for Sue’s hand before they pass the threshold. “Good luck kiss?” he offers, already leaning in towards her.

“Maybe just one for the road,” the older woman grins.

Their lips pucker for a kiss, but their fiberglass helmets bump audibly together instead. They laugh about it, anyway, as the double doors to the shuttle part with a faint hiss.

Johnny turns expectantly to you then, eyes round and silently hopeful. Your scoff crackles through his comm. “In your dreams, space-boy,” you deadpan and walk on ahead of him.

“Ouch…” Ben winces playfully in response as he enters ahead of the blonde boy.

Johnny shrugs off the rejection with a slow nod. “Rain check, then.”

✶ — April, 1961 | The Excelsior — ✶

You still remember that strange liminal space between high school and university, where they called you overtly ambitious like it were synonymous with the word bitch. No one had been to space before, let alone a woman, and very few of your kind were able to break into the astronomy field at all. Therefore, no one was quite inclined to believe that you’d be the first among them to be truly successful.

Why don’t you just settle down? they huffed impatiently, like your life wasn’t just beginning. The best way for your kind to contribute to society is to be a mother— Everyone knows that.

That was, of course, before you were pictured on the cover of the Times with the rest of the Saturn Five — wherein you were described in print as ‘perhaps the most eminent female astrophysicist of our time.’

You were among the first of women to earn a degree in the field, and the first ever to receive your doctorate from the same university. You were the first female faculty member of Columbia’s astrophysics program — an assistant professor for some excruciating months, until it became rather grating to take orders from men four times your age. Sometime thereafter, and despite all the odds, you were the first female full-time astrophysics professor.

Such accolades inevitably caught Sue Storm’s attention. She liked your persistence, and Reed Richards liked your mind. And somewhere between then and now, you were recruited to become one of the first ever humans to experience the uncharted terrain of outer space.

As you strap into your seat on the Excelsior, you can’t help but wonder about who you’re living behind, and what those who doubted you must think of you now — if they marvel at what you’ve accomplished, or if they pity you still for trying so hard to break the mold.

“Final check and check, please,” Sue instructs through comms, from where she navigates between the two pilots.

Each of your voices crackles through speakers in return, and only then does Ben initiate the ignition sequence. You watch from behind him as he presses a series of buttons on the light-up panel, a pattern you’re unfamiliar with that he knows all too well. His weathered fists push a weighted lever, and the shuttle roars to life.

You feel the floors trembling beneath your weighted boots. Your seat shakes with it, too. Your gloved hands clutch the straps of your buckles in an unforgiving grip while a funny feeling rolls over your stomach. Not with fear, or worry, or excitement exactly — but the distant acknowledgment that your life’s going to change forever.

“We’re go for launch,” Ben announces to his co-pilot, who presses his own series of blinking neon buttons.

The whirring engine jerks suddenly as it lifts from its place on the ground. Four million pounds of pure steel propel suddenly towards the heavens with the burst of a golden flame. There’s a harsh pull and then a numbness, which turns into a heavier, emptier feeling as you break through the atmosphere — roughly 100 kilometers above sea level.

“Woo-hoo!” Johnny exclaims boyishly into his comms, arms raised above his head as the shuttle pierces finally through the dreaded veil — as he witnesses, for the first time in human history, where the bright blue sky meets an all-black eternity.

The gravity is slow to dissipate. It makes everything feel suddenly lighter — the cool air running through your suit, the heavy boots on your feet; your stomach, your heart, your mind. The dizzying feeling must be to blame for the absent-minded smile on your face, you think, ‘cause you look at Johnny then like you’re watching the beginning of the whole world.

A giddy laugh sputters suddenly like magic from your lips. Johnny and the stars sigh in unison. He’s been wondering ever since he met you what the sound of your laughter must sound like. Your smile is the only thing he’s dreamt of for the past year, the only thing, and he mourns it all over again when you ultimately turn away.

The Earth grows more and more distant. What once seemed so limitless, now looks so tiny against the star-speckled void of outer space. Everyone you’ve ever known, everyone there ever was, lived their entire life on this indistinct orb of green and blue. Every saint and sinner, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization. Millions of years of joy and suffering are contained within this brief smudge, swimming in a sea of never-ending blackness. A fleck of dust lost inside a bright sunbeam.

“You seein’ that?” Johnny wonders into his comm, to no one in particular, though he still hasn’t quite taken his eyes off of you.

You nod wordlessly for a moment, ‘cause you can’t believe how blue the world is from here.

It’s a rich, vibrant color that humans couldn’t recreate if they tried, ‘cause such a cerulean-cobalt shade cannot travel the entire distance from the sun to the land. Its molecules, instead, get scattered in the wind and the water, before reflecting in the more observable lighter hue that paints the sky.

But this? This deeper, dreamier, more melancholy blue — this blue that does not reach the Earth, this blue that gets lost on the way to the humans down below — holds the beauty of the entire world in its hand.

“It’s beautiful…” you murmur into the crackling comm, more speechless than the rest of them have ever seen you before.

You turn to Johnny then, who sits across the aisle from you, and wear the orbital golden sunrise in your gaze. Inside his, you find the same dreamlike blue that paints the depths and edges of the faraway Earth. The lost, untouched ultramarine swims now in his round button eyes as he stares unblinkingly at you.

“Yeah…” he nods within a breathless sigh, overcome by the ethereal infinite surrounding him — and the one sitting just beside him in the shape of a girl. “Beautiful.”

✶ — May, 1961 | The Excelsior — ✶

The routine you fall into in space is not quite unlike the one you had on Earth. You’re alone more often than not, hidden away in the observation room with your books and your journals, trying fruitlessly to make sense of the inherently nonsensical universe around you. It’s exactly how you’ve spent most of your life, really — the only difference now is you feel much more at home here, on the Excelsior and in the unpathed emptiness of outerspace, than you ever did on Earth.

Sue Storm is perhaps the only one of you who understands the importance of a real schedule. You and Reed, particularly, would work your circadian rhythms half to death if she let you. But, in an attempt to maintain a routine in an inherently timeless place, Sue insists on taking all of your meals at the same time every day, and in the same spot at the small kitchen table in the galley.

You sit between Johnny and Ben for at least an hour out of the day there, and catch up on plans or other miscellaneous discoveries found while on opposite sides of the shuttle.

The five of you exercise for one hour every day, before breakfast and after dinner, in order to keep the strength in your bones and muscles, which would otherwise be sucked out of you from the microgravity. The rest of the day is fair game and often spent with the five of you scattered about. Sue and Ben are usually navigating in the control room, Johnny and Reed are always finding something to do with their idle hands, and you can often be found on the observation deck looking for something new in the nothingness spanning before you.

And when the rest of the Saturn Five, at the end of a long day, return to their sleeping bags strapped to the wall — yours is the only one left empty. And Johnny knows immediately where to find you.

You drift like a dream in the dim cupola, a room made of so many fiberglass windows. The starry, black velvet universe sits just outside — an undreamt emptiness at your fingertips.

Your hair is tied back and out of your face. Your body is adorned in your nightclothes, a simple white tank top worn over a pair of red gingham pants. Your legs are crossed beneath you, as if you were sitting down, and you scribble something into a journal while a heavier textbook floats at your side. You’re a pretty girl dressed for a quiet night at home, observing Mars as casually as someone would watch their television.

Johnny knocks briefly on the ajar door before he enters. He’s already in his pajamas, too — an old t-shirt that clings to his lean torso and a pair of dark sweatpants that sit low on his hips.

“Sue wanted me to tell you it’s time for lights out, so… Lights out.”

You nod without looking his way, still slouched over the book in your lap. “Good night, Johnny Storm.”

His quiet laugh fills the silent room. “I think she meant she wants you in bed, too, Doc. You know how she is about the schedule.”

“Well, I’m busy, so…”

“You’re always busy,” Johnny scoffs, shutting the cupola door behind him as he maneuvers into the room with you.

The lack of gravity makes his bones feel lighter than air as it carries him towards you, cradling him in its cold and heavy hand. He lingers just behind you, warm with exhaustion and smelling of musky vanilla-berry shampoo as he peers over your shoulder. He can hardly make sense of your haphazard scribbles. Your pen whizzes across the page like something’s telling you’re about to run out of time.

“What are you writing about?”

You motion wordlessly to something at your side, as easily as a parent shrugging off a child. Johnny looks around until he finds a telescope — short, bulky, and likely worth far more than it looks. He plucks the weighty thing in his hands as it drifts by his feet. He falters with it for a moment, struggling briefly to determine which eye to close in order to see out of the damn thing.

With furrowed brows and a single squinted eye, he peers through the lens of the telescope. He doesn’t know how to focus it, or exactly where he should be looking, so instead he marvels at the big, blurry planet looming before him — looking much closer than it did just a moment ago.

“Planet,” he concludes with a slow nod, like it isn’t plain as day in front of you.

With a practiced and half-distracted hand, you contort your wrist slightly to focus the lens for him, all without looking up from your notebook. When Johnny peers through the telescope again, everything is more distinct — the blobs from before are now craters and rocks and ridges on the billion-year-old planet.

Within the shrouds of rust-colored dust and martian stars is something more distant but still well-defined — it’s rounded like a planet, but grayer and swathed in a heavy veil of ice.

“What is that?” Johnny murmurs incredulously. “Is it like a… A ghost planet or something?”

The words feel a bit silly as they spill from his mouth, but you nod in response anyway. “Most scientists would call that an exoplanet, but sure, yeah. A ghost planet.”

“I’m a scientist!” Johnny argues, boyish features screwed in offense — not because you’re wrong, but because he feels a bit like he’s earned the title after being in such close proximity to some of the brightest scientific minds known to man. You, for one. His sister, for another. And Reed, though he would never co-sign that out loud.

“You’re an engineer who plays dress-up in his sister’s lab coat—”

“That was one time!”

You look up and nod your chin towards the window. “Look at what’s around it.”

Johnny ducks his head and squints one eye to peer through the telescope once more. With untrained hands, he refocuses the lens to see a bit clearer — the indistinct clouds there turn into more defined specks, red and dull and dying.

“Uh… Rocks,” he confirms.

You bite back a grin and nod. “Sure. Rocks and stars and dark matter,” you explain further, growing increasingly giddy in a way that makes you already embarrassed at yourself. “It’s a planet— A fossil planet.”

“…Fossil?” Johnny echoes.

“You can tell by the colors of the stars around it that it hasn’t changed or merged with any other galaxies in at least a billion years,” you ramble, gesturing wildly with the pen in your right hand. You point out the window like the strange planet is right outside and not tens of millions of kilometers away. “Which means it’s essentially frozen in time.”

Johnny just nods along. He barely understands you if he’s being honest — ‘cause he’d much rather build things than observe them — but he likes hearing you speak, so he pretends you’re speaking the same language.

Until it’s his turn to talk, that is. Then his blonde brows pinch slowly together and his ocean eyes turn to sparkling buttons. “Wait, what’s so special about a dead planet?”

“Everything,” you answer like it’s obvious, hardened gaze glinting with a newfound life. “They’re like time capsules— They can tell us everything about what our early solar system looked like. How it changed over time, how after billions of years of inhability, Earth just happened to be perfect for human life, it’s—”

The dim lights above you click suddenly off, leaving just one row of amber auxiliary lights glowing overhead. A second later and the heat whirs slowly off, too.

The comfortable warmth gives way to a heavier cold. A shiver crawls up your spine almost instantly that you fight stubbornly away. It’s Reed’s way of conserving power, and Sue’s way of saying that everyone who isn’t in bed will freeze for the night.

Johnny deflates at the interruption.

He was just starting to get you to open up again, just like you did a week or more ago, when the Excelsior first launched and you looked at him like you were discovering something. Johnny wants you to find it again. Whatever it is.

“I hate when he does,” you scowl, dull eyes losing their previous spark.

“I guess it’s a good thing you have your very personal space heater to keep you company, then, huh?” Johnny croons with a lopsided grin. Your frown deepens, and he shrugs. “What? I run hot. I always have.”

“I’m busy. And it’s late,” you deadpan and turn away again. “Good night, Johnny Storm.”

You return to your work with an admirable ease, like Johnny isn’t there at all. Your pen darts across the page in a series of swirled and smudged cursive, sounding much louder in the sudden quiet. He lingers at your side anyway, inching closer despite himself, as though the microgravity were pulling him towards you. He doesn’t say a word; tries to move too much, tries not to breathe too hard, for fear of being noticed.

You do notice him, though. You can’t help but notice everything about him.

“You’re still here,” you observe distantly.

“Well, I don’t want you freezing to death out here, Doc,” Johnny scoffs like he’s doing you some sort of service. “Just let me stay— you know, for warmth. You won’t even realize I’m here, alright? Scouts honor.”

He holds up four fingers instead of three. You turn away again and say nothing. Johnny takes it as the invitation you mean it as, ‘cause you’re no stranger to telling him to fuck off when you really want him to.

You continue your scribbling while he lingers at your side, chest pressed against your arm as he peers over your shoulder. Through the messy cursive, he manages to make out, It’s possible this exoplanet once existed in our own solar system and was later ejected; check for any potential strange orbital movements—

Your hand freezes in place when Johnny’s warm breath fans over your bare shoulder. Each rhythmic exhale through his nose brushes your skin. It makes it hard for you to think, makes all the words in your head jumble suddenly together. You don’t know why.

“You’re breathing on me,” you blurt emotionlessly, neither angry nor pleased, just observant in a way he’s always known you to be.

“Sorry,” Johnny flinches back.

His round eyes swim with a darker shade of blue as they dart over your profile. He wants you to look back at him, even if it’s with malice. He just wants you to see him.

But you keep your eyes on the journal in your lap, even though you can’t figure out what to write anymore. The only thing in your head now is the sun in Johnny’s veins and the deep, Earthy blue in his eyes.

“It’s okay…” you mumble, still detached as ever, but with a white-knuckled grip on your pen. You swallow hard and wait for him to be close again, mourning when he keeps his distance. With a weary look over your shoulder, you repeat more firmly this time, “It’s okay.”

Johnny knows it’s an invitation, but for what, he doesn’t know. His unmanicured brows furrow as his tongue darts out to wet his pink mouth. “Do you want me to… to do it again or…?” he trails off.

The soft look in your eyes turns glacial in an instant. “Don’t say it!” you scold. “Do it, but don’t— don’t say it out loud. That makes it weird.”

You look away again, inwardly cursing yourself for being so vulnerable. Johnny purses a smile to the side of his mouth, lest he look too excited for your request to come closer. He curls his arm around you and keeps a softly calloused palm on the outside of your elbow, gently tethering himself to your side as you sway together in the zero-gravity.

You feel his warm fingers against your skin and flinch on instinct. You haven’t been touched with such gentleness since early childhood. You weren’t a stranger to man or their bodies, nor what their hands could do to yours, but something about Johnny made you feel different.

It was something about Johnny.

You hated that it was always about Johnny.

But you let him keep touching you, anyway — and, in his arms, you feel finally like you belong some place. His breath feels warm and familiar as it rolls across your skin. His chest feels solid and firm as it presses against your back. When he gets closer than he means to, and his chapped lips accidentally brush the curve of your soft shoulder, you tense like he’s burned you.

Johnny’s breath hitches, too. “Sorry,” he blurts again, wide-eyed and worried that he’s ruined something.

“I liked it,” you confess, as blunt with him as you’ve always been. “I think…”

“You think?” Johnny echoes, pink lips curling. “So, you’re not sure?”

“No,” you answer plainly and spare him only a brief glance from the corner of your eye. “So you should probably try again. Just in case.”

He doesn’t know how you do it — how you manage to torment him with your feigned ambivalence and reward him with your closeness at the same time. Johnny obeys you anyway, though, ‘cause it’s in his blood to bend to your every whim. He thinks if the two of you were sunflowers, he’d face you instead of the sun.

He smooths his plush lips slowly along the expanse of your exposed skin, from the edge of your shoulder to the junction of your neck — not quite kissing you, just caressing you with his mouth. His tongue darts out to wet dry lips, and the pink brushes just over your pulse.

You hum on an exhaled breath. And in the deathly quiet of outer space, it sounds almost like a moan.

Johnny falters briefly. “…More?” he whispers against your skin.

You nod wordlessly. You couldn’t get the words out if you tried. You just know you want him to kiss you. God, you don’t want him to stop kissing you.

The entire universe spins around you when his warm lips lock more intentionally on your neck. You go dizzy in an instant without the gravity to hold you down. It makes you feel like you’re going crazy — did love make people crazy? Did love turn people into unrecognizable versions of themselves?

You figure it must.

Because the girl who turns her head to catch Johnny’s lips with her own most certainly can’t be you. The girl who abandons her life’s work, who lets her pen and paper float aimlessly next to her, who turns away from the uncharted universe in front of her to hold desperately onto the blonde boy she couldn’t stand a year ago — whoever she is, is a stranger to you now.

Your fingers twist in his freshly cleaned hair, mussing recklessly at the satin blonde tendrils. Johnny’s hand trails down your body in the meanwhile. His warm, wide palms smooth over your bare arms and across your back. He cups the back of your thighs, urging them around his waist. You lick into his mouth and lock your ankles behind him, keeping yourself tethered to him as you float aimlessly in the heavy air.

“And to think…” Johnny pants when you part from him, smiling lips swollen and rosy. “You spent all this time pretending to hate me.”

“I wasn’t pretending,” you slur with his spit on your mouth.

“Really?” he hums. “‘Cause it kinda feels like you like me a lot, actually—”

His strong hands curl around the curve of your hips, pulling you impossibly closer. Your lap sits flush against his own. Something soft and firm presses along your inner thigh. “I could say the same about you, Johnny Storm.”

You shift slightly, and Johnny realizes how hard he is. His cock strains against his sweats and the tighter boxer-briefs he wears beneath them. Feeling distantly overwhelmed and half-embarrassed, his pale cheeks flare pink. “Sorry…” he grimaces.

“Don’t,” you squint, slightly demeaning but somehow still playful. “I like it… I think.”

You kiss him again, deep enough to steal the breath from his lungs, wet enough to feel your spit on his chin. You wrap your legs tighter around his lean waist until his stiffening cock is sandwiched between your bodies, pressed intently into your own warmth.

Johnny gasps through his nose. He almost thinks he can feel the lines of your clothed cunt against him, hidden folds embracing the most sensitive parts of him. It makes him wonder if you’re wearing anything under your thin pajama bottoms as your hips rock back and forth over his own.

Your mouth is equally as unforgiving. You kiss him like you’re searching for heaven in his mouth, like you can taste stars on his tongue. His lungs burn for air, but still he never parts from you. You’re killing him, with your mouth and with your hips, but Johnny throws himself deeper onto the blade, anyway. He pulls you that much closer, kisses you that much deeper — until he worries he might bleed out.

Your lips smack in protest when he parts from you. “We should stop,” he frets through panted breaths, eyes dilated and heavy-lidded.

“Please, don’t—” you beg and fall back into him again.

Johnny falters. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen you beg. He doesn’t think you’ve ever had to before. You never have to beg for anything; all you have to do is take.

A groan sounds deep in his throat when your hips grind over his own in a slow and practiced rhythm. “It’s gonna be too much,” he slurs against your mouth.

“What?”

“I’ll…” he sighs breathlessly and trails off. He can’t figure out the words to say without sounding like a total teenager; he only knows he should probably get them out before he bursts in his boxers and has to explain to Sue why he’s wasting water on a second shower.

“ I’ll cum,” he confesses finally, fingertips digging bruises onto your clothed thighs in a feeble attempt to stop your merciless movements.

Your lidded eyes dart over his form. His tousled blonde hair, his glazed-over ocean eyes, his flushed cheeks, his kiss-swollen mouth. He’s pretty and pathetic. You want to take care of him and ruin him all at once.

“I want you to cum,” you say. You plead. You command.

Johnny loses himself in your assurance. His slow and languid kisses turn sloppy — full of tongue and teeth and swapped spit. The fingers that once restricted you now fight to keep you close. His hands twist into the fabric of your pants as he guides your hips back and forth against him.

A pretty whimper sounds in your throat every time your clit catches the bulbous tip of his clothed cock, and the exhaled breath fans over his cupid’s bow.

His boxers dampen from his drooling pre-cum as he twitches in the confines of his underwear. He wonders if you feel it, too. He figures you must, if your erratic thrusts and choked back whines have anything to say about it.

“Johnny—” you whisper like a warning to him, voice breaking as your inevitable orgasm twists in your belly.

“I know,” he pants through rapid nods. “Fuck, baby— I know.”

He adjusts you on his waist with a pair of wide hands around your thighs. The harsh and sudden movement sends the two of you spiraling, spinning softly together in the open air like two orbiting planets. The new angle opens you wider for him, keeps your throbbing clit pressed intently to his aching cock.

Johnny feels the way your pussy pounds like a heartbeat for him as it rubs up and down his lap. A whine grumbles deep in his throat.

“I’m cumming,” you whimper against his mouth. Foreheads pressed together, eyes squeezed shut, nails digging crescent shapes into his shoulders. Your sensitive clit catches the ridge of his cock over his sweats, and you gasp. “Oh, fuck, Johnny— I’m cumming.”

The blonde boy holds you tighter. He curls one strong arm over your back and towards your shoulder; his other cradles the outside of your clothed thigh in a bruising grip. He keeps you spread open and pressed mercilessly against him while his hips rut with a sporadic sort of rhythm.

“C’mon,” he grunts in panted breaths against your chin. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon—”

You tense in his hold, trembling when you cum for him. Your thighs clench around his waist. Your fingers ball his thin shirt in your fists. Your face screws as you fight back a moan. A whimper rises and dies in your throat instead, as a warm feeling of honeyed release blooms in the pit of your stomach.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Johnny praises in vague mumbles while you twitch in his hold. His hips stutter as his boxers grow sticky with a premature release. “That’s it, baby… Shit. I’m cumming, too— Gonna cum so hard for you, baby. Fuck—”

His voice breaks with a pathetic whimper. He chokes back a louder groan and tilts his heavy head back towards the ceiling.

Through heavy eyes clouded with a lingering pleasure, you watch Johnny’s orgasm rack through his body. His chiseled jaw clenches. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. His skin flares a faint pink color.

Even through the layers of clothes separating you, you feel his cock twitching with each rope of cum it spits into his boxers. Johnny grunts through each one of them, hips stuttering against your own, slow to come back down again.

You just stay like that for a while — limbs entwined, twirling slowly, floating together in every sense of the word. Johnny buries his face in your neck. He presses wet kisses to your burning skin, while you keep your heavy eyes trained on the cupola. You blink slowly at the stars and distant planets there, forgetting until that moment that there’s a whole world out front of you.

An entire universe you spent your whole life dreaming about, gone momentarily forgotten in Johnny Storm’s arms.

“Do you think we’re the first astronauts to orgasm in space?” you wonder aloud in a distant whisper.

It makes Johnny laugh. The warm breath of it fans across your shoulder. His body trembles with it, too. “Yeah,” he scoffs. “You gonna write about me in that book of yours? See what other firsts we could do up here?”

He presses one last innocuous kiss to your neck before parting from you. He lifts his heavy head, lips curled into a crooked smile, and finds you scowling at him in return. “Don’t push it,” you deadpan.

“Sorry,” he grimaces, ‘cause he can never quite tell where the line is — how close you’ll let him get before you’re pulling away again. Apparently, cumming in his pants will only get him so far. “I still get to take you out for that coffee when we get back, though, right?”

“Yes,” you nod in your usual deadpan, though something about your detachment seems different now. Maybe because you’ve still got your thighs wrapped around his waist. “I plan on doing a lot with you when we get back.”

It sounds almost like a threat as it spills from your monotone mouth.

It finds Johnny like a promise, anyway.

✶ — May, 1961 | Baxter Building Med Bay — ✶

How quickly a dream turns into a nightmare.

In a blink. In a flash of a bright light. In a searing storm of daunting blue and purple.

On the early morning of the dissent back home, you warned Reed of heightened solar activity. Johnny barely understood a word of it then, but he heard the distant worry in your voice when you told the older man about the strange eruptions of plasma pulsing from the sun, which you feared would disrupt the journey back to Earth.

“Our shielding isn’t strong enough, Reed— We can’t get caught in that flare.”

“We won’t,” he assured, voice strangely even for such an anxiety-riddled man. “You’ll keep an eye on that radar, and Ben will keep us outta the line of fire. We won’t get pulled into that magnetic field, Doc, I swear—”

“It’s not that I’m worried about.”

And you were right not to be.

It was strangely poetic, in a dark, sadistic way, how the thing you dedicated your whole life to learning about ended up killing you in the end.

You’d alerted Reed of the increasing cosmic rays coming in ripples from an aggravated magnetic field. And when Ben hit turbulence, worried that the ship wasn’t strong enough to take it on, the older man told the panicked pilot to push onward. Not because of his own hubris, but because there wasn’t any other choice. There was no going back then — either you laid there and took it, or you pushed the Excelsior to its limits and prayed you escaped unscathed.

Johnny only remembers darkness. And his sister’s screaming. And your strange silence. Then he remembers fire — a big burst of a bright orange flame that engulfed the shuttle as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, snapping in half just before plummeting into the Atlantic.

The Saturn Five did not return to the Earth the same way they had left it.

Ben’s lean, white body, for one, is now covered in bulky calluses that make him a hundred times stronger than the average man, totally unrecognizable from the human he was before. Reed reaches across the aisle for his slumped-over wife, and his arm stretches abnormally to fill the distance between them. Sue, seemingly subconsciously, disappears at random in a flicker of refracted light — as easily as someone turning off a light switch. Johnny burns from the inside out, glowing orange from the wildfire raging inside of him.

And you…

You didn’t return at all.

That’s all Johnny can think about when they’re air-lifted back to the Baxter Building. Press hound the halls outside while ANSA doctors scatter about, unsure of what to make of the suddenly superpowed Saturn Five. He paces back and forth all the while, clenched fists bursting into flame at random, ash burning on his tongue.

“We have to go back out there,” Johnny decides firmly, made stern with his sorrow.

He does not cry for you. His grief is made out of something much more discreet than that, as silent as blood spilling from a weeping wound. Your absence pierces him like a thread through a needle. The thought of finding you again is the only thing keeping him stitched together now.

“With what ship?” Ben calls to him.

“We can build another ship— We’ve done it before!”

Sue pushes through the doctors crowded around her, stumbling towards her baby brother despite the blood matted in her hair. “It wouldn’t do any good, Johnny,” she tries her best to calm him despite the tremor in her own voice.

“We can’t just leave her out there!” the blonde boy shouts, teary eyes wide and crazed. He gestures wildly with his hands, and Sue flinches at the flame he holds within them.

“Johnny—”

“We can’t!”

“Johnny, she’s gone!” Sue shouts over him.

She puts her pale hands to his chest, feeling his rapid heartbeat beneath her palm. Her mouth opens to speak, but the words die on her tongue when her fingers start to disappear on their own accord. She balls the fabric of his shirt into her fists and tries to focus.

“If the fire didn’t kill her, being sucked into the atmosphere would’ve, and you know it! It would’ve crushed her, Johnny—”

The boy shakes his stubborn head. “You don’t know that, Sue,” he chokes.

“But she—” Sue pauses to swallow down her own sob, then flashes her brother a more assured, glassy-eyed look. “But she didn’t suffer, Johnny.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know it. I do. It was quick. It was over before she knew it was happening—”

“Not that,” Johnny snaps and stumbles back. His pale skin glows a faint orange color under the weight of his rage. He softens only at the fearful look in his sister’s eyes. “We don’t know if it killed her at all, Sue…”

The woman sighs, almost sympathetically so. “Johnny…”

“Look at us, Sue!” he shouts, voice ringing through the white and blue med bay.

He gestures around him with fiery hands — at the personified rock that used to be Ben Grimm, at the abnormally flexible limbs of Reed Richards, at the rainbow waves of light dancing around his sister and turning her invisible at whim.

“How do we know that something didn’t happen to her, too? Something that might be keeping her alive out there?”

“There wouldn’t be enough oxygen, Johnny,” Reed comments with an apologetic sigh from where he slouches on an exam table. His words are weighed down with an obvious regret that paints his weathered face. “Even if something did happen, we only had enough air supply for the trip. She’d be running out of oxygen—”

“Don’t!” Johnny snaps with an accusatory finger pointed his way. Reed cowers under the flame in his hand, and the red rage in his dark eyes. “You don’t get to speak right now, Reed— ‘Cause what happened to us out there? That’s on you.”

“It’s on all of us,” Ben says in a feeble attempt to quell the palpable tension.

“It’s on you!” Johnny repeats and storms out of the room, despite the distant calls of his name.

The muffled chatter outside the med bay doors bursts into a symphony of a thousand voices when Johnny rushes into the hallway. He pushes past the press waiting there, dodging questions and camera flashes, as he makes a beeline for the elevator.

“How’s it going in there, Johnny Storm?” he hears a deep-voiced reporter ask.

“How do you think?” the blonde boy bites in response.

His non-answer succeeds only in producing a hundred more questions in return. The choir of unfamiliar voices turns into a buzzing sort of drone as he steps into the lift. Johnny squints at the never-ending flashes and incessant yelling that pervades his inevitable migraine.

“Care to make a comment, Mr. Storm?”

“What happened to Ben?”

“Where’s the Doctor?”

“Are you okay, Johnny Storm?” a younger newswoman, no older than him, calls from the front of the crowd. The only difference in her prying is that it seems almost genuine, as her made-up face screws softly with concern.

“Yeah…” Johnny sighs and presses the button for the main floor. The elevator doors ding as they close ahead of him. “I just… I had a date.”

to the brave souls who made it this far: thank you and i love you and i'm sorry for making you read something so long hahah. but i hope you liked it!! just know i'm giving all of you a virtual kiss on the forehead right now ily!!! (▰˘◡˘▰)

[briennemurdock]

the love list

You’ve been in love before, okay? And it’s… alright, you guess.

You’re sensitive. And you miss jokes, and you’re stuck wondering if it’s you who’s just not getting it. Love.

Enter Clark Kent — mutual friend recently turned boyfriend, sweetheart, and small-town farm boy. Also the man who’s making you question everything you know about love. Which isn’t a lot.

Better make a list.

[10k, fem!reader, no spoilers, one steamy scene & no other way to put this but you’re a weird girl <3 ]

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

It’s not that you haven’t had boyfriends before.

‘Cos you have. Well, kind of.

Technically, if you’re counting (and you are), there was Danny. He was your boyfriend from second grade, which lasted all of 2 days.

It was tough from the beginning. He hadn’t been appreciative of the myriad of bugs you tried to present him with over the 48 hours of your relationship. He also didn’t want to hold your hand.

The final straw came when he claimed that a pile of worms was gross, not romantic.

You still didn’t get that. But you figured if getting mud between your fingers wasn’t some notion of romance, then perhaps romance wasn’t for you.

And after that, it had been a long while.

Teenage years had slogged by. You got to watch as your friends got boyfriends—then got to wonder what bizarre magic it was that turned them into hopeless fools.

Lost to reason. Endeared by things you could never quite understand.

You had asked about it, just once. Your best friend at the time, Kelsey, had fixed you with a look and said, “You’re thinking about it too much. It’s just, like, love. You get it or you don’t.”

Kelsey and you hadn’t been friends for much longer. But you still remembered what she said for years to come. 

It hadn’t been all that confidence inspiring, if you were being completely honest. Since then, you’ve been wondering if you’re just one of those people who are never going to ‘get it’.

There seems to be a lot of things that people get that you don’t.

It’s not been for lack of trying though. During your early twenties, there had been that awful three weeks where you had downloaded a dating app.

It had been tricky. It didn’t seem all that romantic either. How are you supposed to sum yourself up in a couple of photos? How are you supposed to read tone through a text?

Besides, no matter what you seemed to do, all the conversations led back to the discussion of sex. Which didn’t seem very fitting, considering it was called a dating app. Were hookups considered dates? A mystery to you.

But - and you remember this clearly - it had been the day you’d deleted the app, that you had run into Darren in the hall of your apartment complex.

By anyone else’s standards, Darren is the only boyfriend you’ve had.

Except for now — because now, you have Clark.

And yeah, like you said, it’s not like you haven’t had a boyfriend before. It’s just that somehow, with Clark now, you’re noticing things. 

New things. Different things.

You and Darren had dated for the better part of a year. The break-up had been amicable — at least you think so. 

Getting a read on Darren’s emotions was one of those things that never really clicked - though, ironically, you could tell that it was one of the things that annoyed him so.

It was one of quite a few things, apparently. 

According to your friends, you and Darren had a ‘fairy-tale’ meeting. Bumping into each other in the elevator, his coffee spilling down your sleeve, his apology and insistence at making it up to you. 

You’d agreed before you’d even really realised it was a date.

It was easy to get wrapped up in it, in him. Darren was certainly nice to look at. He had this swoopy blonde hair and nice green eyes that reminded you of seaweed. He didn’t seem to like it when you’d told him that though.

The first date had been at a dive-bar you’d never seen before, a grimey place called The Last Resort. 

It flaunted crimson lighting and sticky vinyl seats. You’d been too overwhelmed and tried to stem it with a margarita - overshooting it a bit with the booze. You hadn’t expected it when Darren tried to kiss you.

It had been awkward, his lips not quite meeting yours, combined with the squeak of surprise you’d let out. But Darren insisted it was cute.

He’d walked you home (but then again, he did live in your building) and asked you at your door, tall and nearly intimidating in the space of your doorway, if you’d like to do it again. You’d barely had a second to think it over, to analyse any emotion of the night, before an answer stumbled out.

It’s, like, love. You get it or you don’t get it. The only haunt from your old best friend - the only reason you really wondered if you were missing something.

Something that made you want to get it, even if you weren’t entirely sure what it was.

You’d told Darren yes.

After a couple of weeks together, you were confident. Kelsey had been right. You got it now.

Darren was sweet. He took you out — though, those nights frequently ended up at The Last Resort. Eventually, you learned to like it with time. 

He’d invite you over and cook you dinner — but sometimes he’d forget that he hadn’t been grocery shopping and would just order in. 

He’d kiss you like no else had - because no one else really had - and you’d let him convince you to be late to work. He’s peel off your clothes in a rush of frenzied passion, as though he couldn’t make himself wait. Darren made you feel special.

Love. You had been in love.

Correction: you think you had been in love. 

It must’ve been, you’ve since concluded. You can’t really think of any other reason that it lasted that long if it wasn’t love.

In fact, you hadn’t really questioned it until now. Hadn’t had any reason to.

Until Clark.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Clark’s apartment is fancier than yours. 

It’s all high-rise and sleek surfaces, with big windows that stretch from the roof to the ground. You like how fast the elevator goes and how it makes your stomach swoop.

Clutching the strap of your bag, you watch the numbers climb as it reaches his level. The path to his apartment is memorised, even though, technically, you and Clark have only officially been seeing each other for a couple of weeks. 

You have your prior friendship to thank for that. A friend of a friend, that’s how you two had met. 

Lois Lane is a fantastic reporter and a good friend. She could ask the right questions, make you uncomfortable for the sake of finding out the truth, but she was never mean. You liked that. It was rare in people.

You two had been friends — though you hadn’t been sure if she would use that word — back in your college days. 

It was an accidental reunion on the streets of Metropolis that had her dragging you along to some Daily Planet happy-hour drinks after work. There you’d met Ron, Steve, Cat, Jimmy, and Clark.

This is where people say the rest is history.

The elevator dings and rocks to a halt. You step out, counting the doors on the way to Clark’s apartment. His door, like all the others, is a lime-green you’re not fond of. Clark always smiles when he catches you wrinkling your nose at it.

It’s as you come to a pause before the familiar lime-green, do you realise you haven’t called ahead.

You hadn’t been thinking of that — just that you got off work early, had to run an errand on this side of town, and were right by Clark’s building entirely by accident. You’d only been thinking of seeing Clark.

Most people don’t like it when you show up unannounced, you’ve found.

You get it, you suppose. You get that way when someone comes into the kitchen when you’re cooking - or when you’re wearing your headphones and people won’t stop trying to talk to you. It makes you itch.

You don’t mind so much when people come by and visit you, mainly because it doesn’t happen all that often. 

It might be your apartment; a quaint shoebox, especially compared to Clark’s.

But Clark insists that he likes your apartment more, calls it homier. Which is nice, because Darren only ever called it tiny.

And Darren really didn’t like it when you called by without telling him in advance.

The first time you had, after getting a surprise bonus at work, had been the first time he’d ever raised his voice at you.

You’d stood in the hallway the whole time, because Darren never even undid the chain to let you in, and felt slimy with guilt and confusion for days after.

Just as you’re envisioning all the ways this unexpected visit might result in a similar disaster, the door swings inward. There stands your boyfriend.

He’s smiling - a good sign for your predicament - and it’s a good-surprised kind of smile. Like finding something you’d thought you’d lost kind of surprise.

Clark opens his mouth to speak, but you beat him to it.

“Hi. I- I’m sorry, I— wait, how did you…? I didn’t knock.”

“Hi,” Clark says back, still so smiley. He has one hand still on the door, the other against the doorframe. He looks very pretty. “What are you sorry for? I thought I heard you come down the hall, so I thought I’d just check.”

You wonder if he’s done that when it hasn’t been you — the thought of his head poking out, searching the hall for you, makes your stomach feel like it does when the elevator goes too fast. In a good way.

You shrug your shoulders in explanation for your apology. “I didn’t call ahead.”

To that, Clark grins a little wider. He steps back and opens the door further, to invite you in. “I’m glad you didn’t. I love surprises.”

Something preens within you at the idea of being a nice surprise.

He’s clearly back from work early — or he’s working from home, but still decided to put on his work clothes. No glasses today either.

He’s wearing his usual slacks and smart dress shoes. His white button-up, though, has been replaced with a tight-fitting ringer t-shirt. It hugs his arms well, snug across his biceps, and it's tight across his chest.

If he asked you what you thought of it, you’d probably sputter something stupid. And sinful.

He doesn’t ask thankfully, he just ushers you inside politely. You step through the door you’ve been through countless times, toe off your shoes, and stop at the edge of the kitchen. Clark closes the door behind you and you wonder what protocol for this is.

This is a new part you’re still getting used to.

Normally, you’d take yourself to the couch, the usual corner seat you’ve unofficially reserved. But, now that you think about it, you haven’t actually been here since Clark dropped the g-word.

(He hadn’t actually asked to be his girlfriend in that manner of words. It had been much more poetic, flowers bought, a nervous and murmured ‘Please be mine?’ that you still thought about before bed.) 

A hand touches your shoulder lightly and you turn towards it, to Clark, with a tentative smile. 

This is where you’re unsure. Are you just allowed to kiss him? Whenever you want? Darren hadn’t been like that.

Kisses to say hello? It feels preposterous. You’ll never stop if given the chance.

“Hi,” Clark says again, and all thoughts of Darren evaporate. His hand shifts, tracing the line of your shoulder slowly up to your face.

Then, he answers your endless unvoiced questions for you, his hand cradling your jaw tenderly. You can feel the callouses on his fingers, feel the goosebumps you get in response. 

Clark guides your chin up, you hold your breath, and he kisses you, soft.

You savour the moment by keeping your eyes closed a little longer, even when his lips have left yours.

Clark’s smiling again when your eyes flutter open, grinning enough to show teeth. You’re mirroring it without even realising, eyes creased and cheeks already aching.

You can’t believe it’s been a few weeks and it still feels like that when you kiss him.

It’s an effort not to get worried about when that will stop.

Clark removes his hand slowly, eyes still roaming your face, but eventually he relents. He takes a step further into the apartment.

You follow, wrapping one hand around your wrist to subtly feel for your pulse. It’s rocketing. No wonder you feel so lightheaded.

“How’d you end up on this side of town?” he asks, taking a seat on the couch.

You realise where his dress shirt is now, picked up between his fingers as he unwinds a spool of thread. There’s a button on the table, matching the others on the shirt.

You take a seat next to him. Close, but not so close to be clingy. Clingy isn’t good, you’ve learned.

You pull your legs up and rest your head on your knees, watching as he hunts for a needle on the table.

“Work let me leave early,” you say. Clark locates the needle with a quiet aha! “I had to return that book I got from the library. I don’t know if you remember, but they only had it at this particular branch.”

“I remember,” Clark says warmly, his eyes glancing up at you. “You finished that book already?”

He’s talking and trying to thread the needle at the same time. It’s not going well. The needle looks tiny in his hand. You take pity on him after the third try.

“Yeah, I — hey, let me have a go,” you cut yourself off, holding out your hand. Clark smiles guiltily, carefully passing over the needle and thread in your waiting hand.

In one quick motion, thread wet on your tongue, you push it through the needle. Instead of handing it back, you hold out your hand again - and Clark dutifully puts the button in your palm, handing over the shirt at the same time. You readjust, putting your knees to the side and folding your feet up beneath you.

“It was good, then?”

You hm, eyes fixed on the button as you prepare the thread, lining everything up. You glance up, meeting Clark’s eye, and realise he’s still asking about the book.

“Oh. It was okay, I guess,” you shrug a little.

You bite the needle between your teeth so you can align the button with both thumbs. “It had one of those three-day loans so, y’know, I had to read it in three days.”

It’s one of those little rules that make more sense to you than to anyone else. Darren hated them - and you hated that he called them senseless. It was the exact opposite!

“Well, of course,” is all Clark says. Another flash of your eyes up to his face tells you that, surprisingly, he’s not making fun of you. “I should get you to read some of my articles if you can read all that so quickly.”

For some reason, that makes your face burn. You focus on jabbing the needle through the fabric in precise motions to distract yourself.

“Why would you want me to do that?” 

“Why not?” Clark responds. “I trust your opinion.”

The burn in your face gets worse. You pull the needle through for the final time and tug the thread taut til it snaps.

Just to check - and to give yourself a moment - you run your fingers over the button to check. Secure and neat.

“Here you go.” You pass it back. The needle and thread go back on the table.

Clark takes the shirt, but doesn’t move to do anything else. You lift your eyes to his face and realise he’s waiting for your answer.

“I don’t think I’d be very good at it.” You admit. He shrugs, as if to say maybe. 

“We won’t know til you try,” he says. Then he kindly backs off, turning his attention to the shirt.

He does just as you had, running his fingers over the newly secured button, but with a much more enthusiastic reaction.

“Holy cow, this is—” He squints at it. “It’s so neat!”

Clark looks up at you, eyes somehow both wide and accusatory. “You didn’t tell me you could sew.”

Technically, you can’t. You can do little things like buttons and hems—but the way Clark’s smoothing his hands over the fabric, you’d think you’ve given him a brand new shirt, made from scratch.

You say sheepishly, “It’s just a button.”

Suddenly, the shirt is tossed to the side and Clark’s reaching for you - his large hands curl around your thighs, just above the knee, and he pulls you across the couch with a surprising strength. You slide forward, almost into his lap.

“Clark!” You laugh, hands on his collarbones to stop yourself from falling into his chest.

Your protest goes unnoticed - or ignored - as Clark’s hands move up, circling around your waist and pulling you even closer. You are in his lap now, with his big arms around you and his face so close. God, it’s a nice one, you can’t help but think.

He’s smiling at you and you have no idea what to do with your hands.

“Sorry,” Clark says, not sounding very apologetic at all. “It’s just, you’re so full of surprises. I love getting to learn new things about you.”

One hand on your back is tracing up and down lightly. You feel like you’ve accidentally swallowed a bag of pop rocks.

“A lot of people can sew.” You say. You shift a bit on his lap, hoping you aren’t making him uncomfortable and his hands loosen to let you do so - but the moment he realises you’re not moving off, he brings you in closer.

“I know,” he says, hand resuming its drift up and down your back. “A lot of people aren’t you though.”

His eyes roam your face, his mouth curled into a smile so sweet, it’s devastating.

Your hands at his collarbones finally unfurl as you let yourself relax a little more into him, pulse still racing. Your nerves never really leave around Clark.

“What are you thinking about?”

You’re not expecting the question - and answer more truthfully than usual. “How you still make me nervous.”

You expect Clark to laugh, but he doesn’t. His brows knit together, a sketch of concern on his face.

“In a good way?”

You weren’t before, but, abruptly, you’re concerned that Clark might think otherwise.

Darren certainly complained that all your annoyances came out of nowhere. History tells you you’re not the best communicator.

“Yes,” You nod severely. You’re clinging a little tighter to his neck now, worriedly. “It’s good. You’ve never made me bad-nervous.”

“Whew,” Clark says. “You’ve never made me bad-nervous either.”

You haven’t thought about that before. The idea of Clark being nervous is laughable.

Awkward? Yes. But he’s so sure in his ideas, in his motions. It’s why it surprised you that much more when he asked you on that first date.

Brow furrowed, you ask, “I don’t make you nervous, do I?”

In answer, Clark frees one of his hands and brings it between you. Gently, he places it atop one of your own, cradling it, and he drags it from his neck down to his chest.

He holds it over his heart. 

“Feel that?”

You can, just lightly. There’s a thumping, but you can’t quite tell if it’s faster than usual - not unless you sit still for 15 seconds and count the beats.

“It would be much more efficient to feel the pulse on your neck.” You inform him.

Clark chuckles, smiling somewhat shyly. “That’s-well, uh, I mean, where’s the romance in that?” 

Genuinely perplexed, your brow creases again. All of this is romantic to you - being in his lap, his hands on your back. 

It certainly feels more intimate than any kind of cuddling you did with Darren—though, he self-proclaimed himself ‘not a cuddler’. 

“Isn’t it?” You ask.

To test the theory, you slip your hand out from under Clark’s.

He lets you maneuver him, picking up his hand and moving his two front fingers together, up to your neck. You push them lightly against your jugular, knowing your rabbiting pulse must be thrumming against his fingers.

Clark looks at you, his eyes fixated on your hand still holding his, and swallows.

His ears have gotten redder. He lifts his gaze to your face, “I stand corrected.”

You release his hand with your own shy smile and before you can back out, you reach for his neck, two fingers out. He lets you, chin even shifting up to give you more space.

His skin is warm, with a little scratch from his shadow - he’ll be due for a shave soon. You haven’t gotten brave enough to tell him that you quite like stubble just yet.

Fingertips tracing, you find his pulse point. 

Staring at the hollow of his throat, you don’t even need to count to 15 to feel his pulse is faster than normal. He’s not lying. You do make him nervous.

You’re not quite sure why it seemed so impossible until right this moment.

Flicking your gaze up to meet his, you find Clark already watching you. Like his ears, a lovely pink colour has dusted across the tops of his cheeks - it takes a second to realise it’s a blush. He’s blushing. 

Clark clears his throat. His voice sounds raspier when he asks, “Believe me now?”

With his heartbeat against your fingers, you have no choice but to. Though the idea it’s just from two fingers is positivity delirious.

“I never said I didn’t.”

“No, you didn’t.” He agrees. 

He straightens up on the couch, his hand on your lower back keeping you steady as his face dips closer to yours. You hold your breath instinctively - and swear you see the ghost of a smile cross his lips - then, he’s kissing you.

It’s short. He doesn’t linger, though the look in his eyes tells you he might want to. 

Given you're on his lap, hand still pressed to his neck, you try to convince yourself it’s probably a good thing. 

Just one kiss is enough to inspire more. There’s no other word than ravenous—which is highly concerning since you had never felt that way with Darren.

You shelve the thought of sinking your teeth into Clark’s shoulder far, far away.

And then mentally make a note to check and see if you’ve had any bites from rabid animals recently. That would at least explain the strange urges.

Clark breaks the silence, “Thank you for mending my shirt.”

He reaches for it, tugging it between your bodies. He thumbs over the newly fixed button, almost as if he’s marvelling at it.

His sincerity mystifies you. It’s like nothing you’re used to.

Having read a dozen articles on new relationships (your best attempt at research, inspired after your first date with Clark), you know definitively that bringing up an ex is the worst thing you can do.

It’s the first thing on the lists: THE TOP TEN THINGS WOMEN DO WRONG, as Cosmopolitan had titled it. 

1: Bringing up their ex. Always bright red, meaning danger!

That’s how things work in nature at least, like poison dart-frogs. You know better than to lick a poison dart-frog and you apply the same knowledge here. 

No bringing up exes. You don’t want to bring up your ex.

Worse, you don’t want Clark to bring up any exes.

But you can’t drop it - the thought caught in your mind like a fly that can’t find the open window, going round and round, louder and louder.

You got it. The love thing. 

It had been an open and shut case with Darren, one that had left you mildly dissuaded from it in the future. Yeah, yeah, love, you’ve been in — but it had been like, sharing a sundae.

Except, you had a straw and Darren had a spoon - and the flavour was chocolate, which you didn’t like, and you only got some if it melted before Darren ate it all.

…Not your most astute metaphor, you’ll admit.

Point is, with Clark, you’re worried you were so focused on getting it, that you actually… didn’t.

Point is, if you were in love with Darren, then you have no idea what you’re doing with Clark.

Point is, that’s incredibly fucking scary.

You best start keeping notes.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

In your notebook, you write he thanked me for mending his shirt. 

You’re not sure exactly what the list is yet. 

Notes on the Clark Kent boyfriend experience? A step-by-step guide to the differences between boyfriends?

Neither of those seem right. You end up printing a ? at the top of the page and deem that sufficient. Then after a moment of consideration, you add the word love before it so it ends up reading: love ? 

You read the first line you’ve written again. It’s the most concise way to sum up what had stuck out to you about that day — not the mending, but the sincerity in his thank you. The excitement over just a button.

If you didn’t know Clark to be so earnest, you’d think it might be one of those sarcastic jokes.

Sometimes, people play them on you — an exaggerated reaction that you’re supposed to know actually means the opposite.

But only sometimes. You’re not particularly good at cottoning on in the moment.

Luckily for you, Clark isn’t the sarcastic type. You like that he’s honest.

The first line in your notebook doesn’t stay lonely for long. The next time you add to your notebook, it’s your eighth official date together, just a few days after.

Clark had secured some swanky museum tickets, a perk offered from his job, as he told you over the phone. He’d called while still at work, the telephone lines ringing and an office murmur in the background.

It made you think he got the tickets and called you right away. Your stomach had done the elevator thing again, all swoopy and good-nervous.

The shelved thought of biting his shoulder made a fierce reappearance and you had to fight to focus on Clark’s words, not just his voice.

 “They have a new butterfly exhibition, that’s what the tickets are for, and I thought of you. I thought we could, uh, go. My treat. I mean, obviously, I’ve already got the tickets…” He had trailed off awkwardly. It’s part of what makes you like him, his awkwardness. It’s so very Clark.

“What do you think?”

You answered candidly, “I love the museum.”

You hope the one he’s talking about has a mineral room.

“You do?” He’d sounded truly delighted to find that out. “That’s great, I—mean, me too. So we’ll go?”

You remember frowning at that, like he thought you might not want to - very much untrue. “Yes. I like going places with you.”

Following that had been a sharp inhale, then a stuttered cough, which made you pull the phone back with a cringe at the volume.

“Sorry, that was— something, my throat.” His voice had pitched up a bit. “So, tomorrow? Friday? It’ll be less busy, but we could do Saturday if you don’t want to go after work.”

“I like Friday.”

Then, far off, someone else’s voice had filtered through the phone. A coworker, jeering loudly enough for you to hear—“Clark, stop twirling the cord like you’re on the phone with your gir— oh my god, you are, aren’t you?” 

“I have to go now.” Clark had said hastily, voice suddenly louder, like his mouth was closer to the receiver. “I’ll come by your place, Friday, 6pm. It’s an evening exhibit. Have a good day!”

Then the phone had hung up. 

Then you were here, the next day, walking to the museum with Clark beside you.

This afternoon, you had been mulling over whether to call it a date or not.

Clark hadn’t actually said the words — it’s a date — not like how he had when he first asked you, over a month ago now. That had been clear.

This feels like murky ground. Do you still even call them dates after you start dating? Darren didn’t. 

As you two walk, hand in hand, you decide to ask, “Is this a date?” 

Clark jolts to a halt on the sidewalk and with your hands joined, you inadvertently come to a stop too. Perplexed, you look back at him, having to tilt your head up.

Fixed on you, his eyes are wide behind his glasses, something like concern pulling his brows together. It reminds you for all the world of a lost baby rabbit. His nose even twitches too.

You don’t like how upset he suddenly looks.

“What?” he says, sounding crushed. His fingers shift in yours. “I-I mean, I think so. I would- do you not think so?” 

You also don’t like how his hand is loosening in yours, so you grip it tighter and shrug your shoulders. “I don’t know if you still call them dates once you start dating. You didn’t call it one. That’s why I asked.” 

That makes Clark sigh loudly in relief. His shoulders, which have hiked up to his ears, sink down like a slowly deflating balloon. 

He doesn’t look upset anymore, which is good. In fact, he’s looking at you much more intensely, a smile gracing his mouth.

He grips your hand back with the same fervor as before and starts you both walking again. “Yes, this is a date.”

You like that he answers your questions without poking fun at you for asking them. 

You twist his hand over and start counting the freckles on the back absentmindedly.

“When is it a date and when is it just hanging out?” 

You don’t look up, so you miss the affectionate glance Clark steals. He gives a hum in thought. He has 11 freckles on his left hand.

The museum peeks out, just up ahead. Something wilts in you. You wish you had another block to go, to keep walking with him. Then you could count the freckles on his other hand and see if they match.

“I think when you go out together, like this—” Clark finally answers, gesturing with your joined hands to the museum as you approach. “—it’s a date. Just you and I. I invited you out.”

“You invite me over,” you point out. 

“True.” Clark smiles at you. “Maybe dates are the special occasions then.” 

Your mouth twists. You don’t like that answer. Namely because it feels like a special occasion every time Clark calls, or invites you, or holds your hand, or kisses you.

“It’s always a special occasion,” you say pointedly, frowning a bit in your confusion. “You’re the special. Everything else is just an occasion.”

You’ve arrived at the doors to the museum. There’s a little line. Clark has the tickets in his pockets. 

You pause slightly further back to let him retrieve them — you know you hate having to get things out in a rush — but he doesn’t reach for his pocket.

You glance up at him, concerned. He’s turned that brilliant shade of red again. 

“Clark?” 

“Hm?” He clears his throat, long lashes batting wildly as he blinks rapidly. You wonder if you should tell him you can’t blink away a blush - you know because you’ve tried.

“Tickets?” You ask a bit more weakly. Maybe he’s experienced a sudden change of heart about the museum - or you.

“Yes!” He exclaims, banishing that last thought swiftly. He shoves one hand in his pocket and pulls them out, brandishing them like a winning lottery ticket. “They’re here, I have them.”

The sign carved into stone, above the entrance way, reads METROPOLIS OBSERVATORY & SCIENCE CENTRE. It explains why it would be open for the evening - star-gazing is trickier during the daytime, you’d imagine.

Clark lets go of your hand to hand over the tickets, which get punched, handed back, and pocketed again. You make a note to ask for the keepsake later — you like things people often call junk. 

He doesn’t reach for your hand again, instead resting his on the small of your back, ushering you through the doors.

The interior opens wide, with several paths splitting off from the entrance. There’s large, bright butterfly stickers on the ground leading to the right, accompanied by flourishing arrows. You can see into the beginning of the exhibit, people milling around already.

There’s also signs posted on a column, various arrows assigned to different paths. One reads Observatory, another Botanical Hall, and below it, Mineral Room, with a crystal decorated sign pointing to the left.

You perk up in interest and stop at the intersection of paths. “Can we see the mineral room, please?”

“The mineral…? You don’t want to see the butterflies?” Clark seems surprised. 

That makes you pause, worried. You didn’t think about this — will he be upset if you say you want to look at rocks more than the butterflies?

You feel for your wrist, fingers pressing to your pulse. An old habit. You’re relieved to find your heartbeat steady. 

Still, an old argument tickles at the back of your neck, Darren’s frustrated voice creeping in, and you force yourself not to physically bat the bad feeling away. 

Biting your cheek, you realise you should’ve said something on the phone to begin with.

Now you’ve made Clark believe one thing, when you meant another. He invited you to see the butterflies. He didn’t mention going to the mineral room. You’re probably being demanding.

“If you want to,” you say as evenly as you can.

You’re not very believable. Clark sees straight through it, and even so, you’re not even aware that your body language gives you away, feet pointed to the left.

Never mind the fact you’re also a terrible liar - or the fact he can hear the skip in your heartbeat.

You wait for his sigh.

His hand on your back slips forward and he holds it out, palm up. You frown at it, then look up at him. 

“I want to do what you want to do,” he says earnestly. “Let’s look at the minerals.”

He nudges his glasses up with his spare hand and his gaze holds such a softness that eye contact seems more unbearable than usual. The familiar burn in your face returns.

You look at your shoes—but not before you put your hand back in his.

You’re the only two in the mineral room, which is a treat all in itself. It’s quiet. You can keep Clark closer than usual. 

He listens dutifully when you rattle off about pleochroism and birefringence — still keeping that intense warmth in his stare that you can’t handle for long. He doesn’t stop smiling the whole time. Neither do you, given the ache in your face.

By the carbonates, he kisses you, slow and sweet.

His glasses fog up and his blush makes an appearance. You feel like you’re having your own chemical reaction in your chest, fondness crystallising in the valves of your heart.

And when you ask if he minds that you didn’t get to see the butterflies at all, you believe him when he says not in the slightest.

You add, he asked me questions about rocks, to the list after he walks you home.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

After one particular morning, you add three lines in one go.

It had started the night before technically, when Clark had offered to come over to yours for the night. Tame enough overall, but… surprising. 

Because, well, you were already at his apartment.

The thing is, you really like your own bed - though Clark’s is a close second.

And it’s just, you get finicky about these things —and last night, it had been the yoghurt you bought for tomorrow's breakfast, already in your fridge. 

It makes you itch when you mess up the flow you have planned. But it didn’t mean you didn’t want to spend the night with Clark either.

Darren used to say you were punishing him when you went home like this. He’d never really believed you when you said there was nothing wrong — if there’s nothing wrong, then why are you going home?

Darren also didn’t like it when you were truthful. He said he did. Just be honest with me. 

Yet, when you were — telling him his sheets were too scratchy, that his incense made your head too woozy, and his yoghurt brand was the one you hated — it always seemed to backfire. You told him anyway, because he asked.

One time, he’d called you a tease, spitting out the word. You didn’t get what you were teasing, but didn’t like how it felt either way.

To avoid this, you had made sure to set the precedent with Clark.

You stay over, but only with ample warning and a well-packed bag. You bring your own toothpaste, pillowcase, and a tiny Kermit that stays hidden in your bag - there for reassurance mainly. Clark never lights any smelly candles and his sheets are plenty soft enough for you.

Tonight, you find the precedent isn’t needed. Saturday night, a lazy afternoon spent together, and your boyfriend makes no protest beyond an adorable pout when you start to pack up to leave.

“I wish you could stay the night.” Clark murmurs. 

It doesn’t sound like a guilt trip - it sounds like i miss you, before you’ve even gone. 

He looks devastatingly comfy, relaxed beside you on the couch, lounging in his casual clothes. His hair is messier than usual.

You want to bury your hands in it, and let him kiss you over and over again, like he’s been prone to doing recently.

It’s becoming a serious hazard for your heart—so much, you’ve been thinking of informing your doctor. This much tachycardia can’t be healthy.

You remember it’s impolite to stare.

“I don’t have my things.” You remind him.

Clark twists his mouth, sighing a bit. “I know. I just like it when we sleep in the same bed.”

“I do too,” you say truthfully as you lace your shoes, moving slower than necessary. You glance back up. 

Something in Clark’s open expression pulls the explanation off your tongue. “I just, it’s- I have my yoghurt. I got it for tomorrow.”

It sounds silly when you say it aloud. You try not to cringe so visibly.

“Wait, you’re going home just to go home?” Clark perks up, as if this is good news. “Not because you’re sick of me?” 

Distress must show on your face because he hastily adds, “I’m kidding. I know you’re not.” Then, before you can worry about that too much, “Can I come with you? Spend the night?”

You haven’t even considered that he might want to. 

“You’re already home, though.” 

You realise that might sound like you don’t want him to and your hands clench up tightly.

Thankfully, Clark only shrugs and smiles, “Well, I was already going to walk you home.”

Relaxing, your hands unfurl. He’s being sincere. He wants to come over and spend the night - and he doesn’t mind if it’s at yours, instead of his.

Something in your chest aches tenderly and without thinking, you abandon your shoes and burst across the couch to Clark.

Surprised, he still catches you, arms cushioning your fall against him, but he isn’t prepared enough for your kiss. It catches him off guard and your teeth knock together from the force.

“Sorry,” you breathe, not that sorry at all. You’re gripping his shirt in your hands like you’re worried he might slip away — or worse, retract his offer to come over. “Yes, come over. I really want you to.”

Clark, still reeling from your kiss, looks a bit starry-eyed as he fixes his glasses that you’ve knocked askew.

But he’s smiling and he’s smiling at you. You can’t resist another kiss. You adore the little hum he makes in response.

It’s as though its set you off for the evening— Clark quickly packs a small bag, you kiss him; he grabs both your coats, you kiss him; he locks his door and you wrap yourself around his arm, pressing up on your tiptoes to kiss him.

He’s paying attention to locking the door and you can’t quite reach, so you kiss his jaw instead. Clark flushes hotly, but he’s still smiling. You still can’t believe he wants to come over.

It’s a highly uneffective way to travel, wrapped up in each other as you walk the blocks to your own apartment. 

It’s a warmer night. The heat worsens when the doorman at your building clears his throat obnoxiously, making it clear your lovey dovey behaviour has an unwilling audience. It makes Clark fluster wildly, sputtering out a polite apology. 

You drag him to the elevator in the midst of his, “My apologies, sir-!” so you can kiss him again, away from prying eyes.

Clark looks a little debauched against the elevator wall. You could probably roast marshmallows over his bright red face. His hands hover over your sides, flexing, but not touching. 

“You—” He starts, a little out of breath. “What’s- I mean, I really don’t mind, but you’re, uh, well, eager tonight.” 

“Bad?” Your voice dips into worry, fast.

“No!” Clark quickly amends. His hands finally find your waist, strong and sure, pulling you in before you even realise you’d been retracting. “It’s just a, uh, a bit of surprise.” 

It’s true. To begin with, you were very shy with affection - your first kiss so sweet, Clark remembers your lips trembling. 

Like how you hold your breath subconsciously every time he kisses you first. A tiny sharp inhale. Clark could write a full-length feature, worthy of the Daily Planet front page, on how much he adores it. 

You remind him, “You like surprises.” 

Clark softens at the memory you’re referring to, eyes shining in affection. “I do.”

“You like it when I surprise you?” You check.

“That I really like.” He’s grinning now, and he’s so handsome that you don’t know what to do with yourself. Kiss him? Bite him? Live in his dimples? He’s so nice to you in a way Darren never was.

The elevator dings, opening to your floor.

You tumble out together, with Clark still attempting to maintain a sense of manners. He straightens his rumpled coat with one hand, the other occupied by yours.

You lead him to your door, then through it.

Shoes toed off, you flip on the lights, then wince at their harshness. Clark slips off his shoes and gives your hand a squeeze before he drops it, moving past you. He knows the path to the myriad of lamps about your place.

As he turns them on, one by one, he has to duck to avoid the low-hanging living room light. It’s a relief to turn off the big overhead light.

“Let me put this in your room, alright?” he says, gesturing with his bag in hand, before disappearing into your bedroom.

Something compels you to follow and you watch as he turns on the lamp on your bedside too, coating the room in a soft amber. That now all-too familiar rabidness runs rampant beneath your skin.

“Clark?” Your soft voice catches his attention, and he turns, mid-way through shucking off his coat.

He told you once that you could ask him anything. 

“Can you kiss me again?”

Something crosses his face, his eyes a little wider. He swallows, hard, and his motions falter momentarily. Finally, he wrangles his coat off and tosses it onto his bag and then he reaches for you.

“Y-Yeah, c’mere,” he says. In the same motion, you’re in his arms and he’s sat back on your sheets, pulling you both onto the bed. “Anything you want, honey.”

Still, he doesn’t move to kiss you just yet. 

You’re adjusting yourself, getting comfortable in his lap, and you’re still wearing your coat. You move to shrug out of it and Clark helps, his hands guiding it off your shoulders.

It’s banished to sit with his coat. The whir of the air-conditioner unit permeates the air and you can feel the softness of your sheets where your knees meet the bed. 

A hint of Clark’s cologne makes your nose twitch. It smells nice, musky and warm. It might be your new favourite scent.

You’re suddenly too nervous to look him in the eye, so you study the rest of his face. You’ve reddened his lips with your kisses, which you feel quite guilty about. Further up, you follow the line of his brow. You can’t resist tracing along one with your finger softly. 

“You’ve got good eyebrows.” you say, closer to a whisper. 

Clark’s grip on your waist tightens, so gentle that you’re not sure if he’s aware he’s done it. He swallows thickly and you remove your hand, moving it to rest over his throat.

“You think so?” 

You can feel the timbre of his voice under your fingertips when he speaks and it makes you grin. You nod in response to his question too, finally brave enough to meet his gaze.

Blue eyes meet yours. 

Then, sweeping your hair back from your face, he kisses you.

The first kiss is slow, easy. Like the kiss he gives you when saying hello. Your hands find their place around his neck, jittery and twitching in your excitement.

Clark’s hands on your waist shift, his arms wrapping around you like a hug. His next kiss, you sink into. You’re helpless to do anything but.

He dedicates himself to the curve of your mouth, memorising it with kiss after kiss after kiss.

It makes you feel dizzy. You clutch the collar of his shirt, a soft, sweet noise slipping out your throat.

It breaks the kiss. Clark exhales hard, his nose drawing a line down your cheek, along your jaw. He kisses as he goes, delicate little presses of affection.

He hovers at your neck, “May I?” 

He sounds a bit wrecked, voice rougher and unlike himself. You nod, a minuscule motion, and clutch his collar tighter.

There's heat on your neck, a warning kiss bestowed. Then his lips begin to mouth softly at the warm skin of your neck, with what can only be described as a devoted reverence. 

You melt in his lap. 

Clark’s arms around you keep you close as your head tilts back, letting him in. His glasses nudge against your jaw as he teeth scrape your neck.

You’re so close to him—and yet not close enough. You want to crawl into his skin. You’re too worked up to know if that’s an appropriate thing to tell your boyfriend. 

It’s no mind; with Clark’s lips on your neck, you’re not capable of any words.

You’re not capable of anything beyond these cute hiccuping gasps that will follow Clark for weeks. He feels insatiable, like a livewire. He’s attuned to everything you.

It’s why he pulls back, one hand stroking up your spine.

“You’re shaking,” he says, voice low. 

You are—trembling slightly in his hold.

You hadn’t noticed, the same way you hadn’t clocked your own laboured breathing. It’s like you’re skipping a breath by accident, the way you do when you’re overwhelmed.

Unclenching your fingers from his crumpled collar, you put two fingers to your pulse point. It’s still warm from Clark’s mouth and beneath the skin, your pulse rabbits wildly. 

“I-” Your mouth is unbearably dry. “I promise I’m enjoying it.”

Even your voice is shaky, though your assurance isn’t. You are, you are. You’re not shaking because you’re scared of this, of him. It's just a lot.

“I know.” Clark says calmly, though his eyes scour your face with a tinge of worry. His hand hasn’t ceased its soothing up and down your back. “I know, I—”

“It’s not you,” you say, desperate to steal the worry from him. “Well, it is you, but it’s not, like, you—that sounds stupid. It’s, uh, me, it’s a me thing. I— you haven’t done anything wrong, please.”

“Okay,” he says, which makes you feel better, because it means he believes you. “Neither have you. Believe me, I know what it’s like to feel like everything’s dialled to eleven.” 

That is sort of what this feels like—like you’re a spring loaded too tightly. 

The rich smell of his cologne, the taut feel of his firm shoulders, the heat of his beautiful mouth - all of it urges on that fervent feeling that skitters under your skin. You can’t process it all at once.

You close your eyes. 

Despite how you really don’t want to, you draw back your hand from his neck, curling your nails so they bite into your palms. Clark’s hand against your spine pauses, pressed against your lower back. He holds it there, and waits, patient.

It doesn’t take long to ready yourself — only a few moments — and when you finger your pulse, it’s steadier. Eyes creasing open, you find Clark watching you closely.

The apology nearly falls off your tongue out of habit. Clark gets there first.

“Please don’t apologise,” He pleads. 

His eyes scan across your face, looking for any other sign to worry, but it’s needless. He can hear your heartbeat, can follow the now steady rhythm of it. 

He knows you - and more than that, he trusts you. He trusts you’ll tell him if something is wrong, even if sometimes you need a nudge. He doesn’t need any apologies for needing a moment.

Clark kisses the next apology out of your mouth and it dissolves on your tongue. 

It’s chaste, this kiss. While he’s still close, breath fanning across your face, he murmurs, “Tell me if you need another one,” like this wasn’t even a hiccup to him.

You kiss him so fiercely, you bite his lip. Clark barely registers the twinge of pain, only the enthusiasm. He aches.

Without breaking the kiss, he leans back on your sheets, and tugs you down with him. His big hands slide to hold your hips, grip still gentle. The buzzing under your skin gets louder. 

You pull back, hands still moving up, and you tentatively, carefully, slide his glasses from his face.

Clark lets you, hands unmoving from their place, his gaze still hopelessly fixed on you. His lashes are long, his eyes creased from his smile. He’s so handsome.

He looks in love, you think to yourself.

You bury the thought for later - and your hands in his hair, like you’ve been wanting to do all night. 

You only need one other breather that night. One break from the sensations—when his long, careful fingers sink into you and have you whimpering into his neck, grasping his shoulders tightly. His breath shudders, but he talks you through it, patient and unwavering.  

You fall asleep, sated, skin to skin, and dream of nothing.

In the morning, you’re roused by the smell of fresh coffee. The sheets beside you are empty and you follow suit.

Golden light paints the kitchen. Bathed in it, Clark looks sleep-rumpled and lovely.

You drink your coffee together, your ankles linked together beneath your table. It looks extra tiny with Clark’s large frame sitting at it. 

He does the dishes, no asking or prompting from you, so perfectly midwestern of him. He only nearly drops one of your mugs when you kiss his shoulder blade in thank you.

You watch him, in between getting yourself dressed, and Clark blushes scarlet when you pass him with no pants on to retrieve something from your bag - which makes no sense, considering you were wearing much less the night before.

It’s almost like those days before he had asked you out—quick glances that make you both smile, eyes dancing away. You have to remind yourself you’re allowed to look now.

It’s easy. So easy, it’s scary. 

The buried thought from last night rises to the surface. Whether you want it or not, Clark Kent is single-handedly rewriting every idea you ever had about love.

That old fear twinges in you— you get it or you don’t.

You decide you don’t mind if you were wrong with Darren, if it means you get it this time — get it and get to keep it.

When he’s gone, in your notebook, you write he came over to my place - which is almost too astute, but you know what it means. 

It’s not about the yoghurt, or the bed, or anything else. It’s the complete simpleness of how it had panned out. You can’t stay the night and he wants to see you, so he makes the effort.

Below it, you write he likes doing the dishes. 

Then, after a moment, you cross it out. Your brows knit together. No, it wasn’t that that was different to Darren. It takes another moment to put your finger on it. 

You write he likes to help. With more thought, you tack on another word, so it reads he likes to help me.

The last one makes your face burn so much you nearly get too shy to put it down on paper. You write it all the same; he takes his time with me. 

You really, really hope you get it this time.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The love list isn’t meant to be seen by anyone’s eyes but your own.

And to be clear, he didn’t mean to see it.

Clark is not a snoop. He believes strongly that privacy is a human right that everyone deserves to have respected. Even amongst relationships, not every thought needs to be shared. Not every secret.

He still has his big blue secret, after all. 

You have… this list.

He hadn’t meant to see it, truly. But given how you’d left your notebook open on your kitchen table, and how you knew he was here, it hadn’t clocked as something you might want to hide. 

You disappear after letting him into your apartment and Clark can trace you to your bedroom, his hearing tuned to your heartbeat. In the evening kitchen air, your perfume lingers. Your notebook is left on the table, open.

And Clark just… glances at it.

He doesn’t even know what it is.  

He’s not so presumptuous to think it’s about him to begin with — there are no names on the paper. But, given its title, if it’s about love, he quietly hopes it’s about him.

Though, there is a question mark attached. That feels less good. 

Especially as he reads the line about rocks and questions, which is as telling as it gets - Clark is pretty sure he’s the only one taking you to museums and kissing you in the mineral rooms. He really hopes he is.

It’s as he skims over the line he takes his time with me and realises what that means, he knows he should really stop reading.

Unable to help it, his cheeks bloom bright red. But beneath his slight embarrassment, something glows proudly.

These are good things. He’s making you happy.

But… then, why the list?

“—did I tell you about how when I was going by Fran’s the other day, there was this shirt in the window- you know the shop across from—”

You stop speaking and walking in the same second.

Clark’s head snaps up and he watches your eyes dart between him and the notebook in rapid succession, hears your pulse tick up in pace. The embarrassment from earlier flourishes up again.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to- it was out.” He wasn’t sure before, but now he knows this wasn’t meant for his eyes. Gosh, he’s such a jerk. “I only glanced, I promise.” 

He pulls at his collar, which suddenly feels too tight. You won’t meet his eye and Clark can see the tell-tale sign of your nervousness—your fingers pressing to your wrist, taking your pulse.

Awfulness coats over him. But despite that, you only give a shrug and murmur, “It’s okay. It’s not, like, bad. I was just- it was just to help me.” 

Clark swallows. “Help you?”

You haven’t made a move to close the notebook or to approach him. He can still read the lines if he glances over - and he can’t ignore the itch to understand it. Help you with what?

You shrug again, now picking at your fingertips. You still won’t look at him.

“Just,” You exhale through your nose, a stressed sigh, and Clark wants to close the space between you. “When you… did something I didn’t get—or, just- like I know you’re not supposed to bring up exes, or- or compare, but it was only— Darren didn’t—”

You make a frustrated noise, hands clenching up tight, your sentence abandoned. Clark’s heart aches, more at your frustration than the mention of your last boyfriend, Darren.

He doesn’t know a lot. Has never met the guy. What he does know is that Lois wasn’t a huge fan, which meant he probably wasn’t the most stellar of partners. He trusts her judgement a lot.

Clark tries not to judge people he’s never met — but as your words sink in, when you did something I didn’t get, and he looks at the list again, something clicks.

he thanked me for mending his shirt, he came over to my place, he asked me questions about rocks.

They’re hardly impressive acts of love.

Clark likes to think he’s done a good job at wooing you, but none of what he’d consider the most romantic is on the list. None of the carefully crafted date ideas, none of the meticulously picked gifts.

It’s the little things. The quiet acts of love, of patience.

It’s evening, the sunset bleeding into the horizon, but Clark suddenly feels like he’s doused in yellow sun. Relief twines with his endearment, almost feverish with how it stirs up in his chest. 

The next thought bleeds into fact with ease; he’s in love with you. Irrevocably. Entirely. 

And with one final glimpse at your notebook, Clark knows exactly how to tell you.

For right now though, you’re still staring at the ground. Still picking at your fingertips in frustration, one ankle rolling to the side in a fidget. 

You’re not worried about the list, he realises, you’re worried about him.

That just won’t do.

He crosses the room in two quick strides. It forces your head up in surprise and it’s the perfect opportunity to cup your face. Clark cradles your jaw, hears the inhale and smiles, before he kisses you.

He kisses you sweet, short. Then kisses, again and again. He can only hope he’s kissing away the frustration, the doubt, the unease. 

There’s a brief moment where he worries he’s overwhelming you, your breath still stuttering between kisses — but your hands rise to hold his wrists, keeping him in place. He knows you well enough to know that means more, please.

He indulges you like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It is, to him.

You’re leaning into him and Clark takes the weight effortlessly. He’s messing up your lipstick undoubtedly, which he'll feel bad about later. 

“We’ll be late if we stay much longer,” he says, reluctantly breaking the kiss.

You’re both breathing heavy. Clark studies the plush of your lip, while your eyes stay closed - which only makes you all that more endearing to him.

You’re a stickler for being on time though, so it’s so unlike you to respond with, “S’fine. It’s—” 

You pivot mid-sentence, as if remembering what spurred his kisses on. “—the list. You didn’t think it was…?”

You don’t finish your sentence, trailing off stiltedly. Clark drops his next kiss to your hairline, his thumbs swatching along your cheeks with gentle ease. 

“Think it’s what?” He hums, his next kiss on your nose. “I’m not thinking anything about it, because I wasn’t meant to see it and-” A kiss to the corner of your mouth. “Huh, what do you know? Its completely left my mind. What are we talking about?”

There’s a furrow in your brow for a moment before you catch on. Then your mouth curls into a shy smile and Clark knows he’s convinced you. 

Your grip on his wrists tightens, an involuntary motion to get him closer. He complies, kissing you again. The pink of his cheeks might become permanent if he doesn’t calm down soon. 

“C’mon,” He relents the closeness to step back, slipping his hands from your face. “We can still make it on time.”

Clark Kent, notoriously late for most things, except for your dates. He’s learning from you. 

Fixing his glasses with a nudge, he gives you a moment to compose yourself, before he offers his hand. When you link it with his, he dotes you with a kiss upon it.

He figures that, to you, it’s the little things that really matter.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

When you return home and the notebook is where you left it, open to the love list, embarrassment wells within you.

You hadn’t meant for him to see it. It had been a mistake in your excitement, flustered just by him coming to meet you at your door. 

He’d been a sweetheart about it all the same, but it doesn’t mean you can shake the fumble so easily.

Yet, at the same time, there had been something… different about Clark on the date that followed.

He’d seemed surer, more settled. Like something had been decided finally, and he could see the way forward.

Your coat finds a home on the peg by the door, your shoes slipped off.

Soft footsteps take you to the table and it’s as you go to fold your notebook closed, does it catch your eye. 

There. Below the love list, there are two new lines, both in handwriting that isn’t your own. With a soft jolt, you recognise it as Clark’s.

Perplexed, you squint down at the paper.

He’s written, in his neat scrawl, he loves that you made this list. 

Your heart pounds, that familiar fervor you associate with your boyfriend begins to coarse through your bloodstream. You bite your lip so hard it nearly bleeds—but you can hardly feel it. You’re goddamn untouchable right now.

Whether you got it with Darren didn’t matter. You realise now it never mattered. It’s you and Clark—and that is all you need.

Because, below his first line, Clark has written—he loves you.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

the notebook :’) bcos i love a lil graphic

tagging sum lovelies i think might be interested / replied to my snippet tehe <3 but no pressure! @spideystevie @sanguineterrain @brettsgoldstein @aarchimedes @strangerstilinski @djarinova @kissmxcheek @langaslefthairstrand

[briennemurdock]

You guys really don’t know how much it means to me to hear Johnny say he “loves space”, to be so absolutely enthralled with it. He’s the one pushing Reed to make new space suits, the one to come to Reed’s lab, going so far as to “schedule a meeting” because he cares so much. He’s the one looking like a kid hopped up on sugar when they’re launching - despite what happened to them last time, he’s ecstatic to get back up there. He’s the one obsessed with the alien communications they keep intercepting, the one who solves it and teaches himself a whole new language - in only a few months, mind you!

You can see how absolutely completely in love with it all he was. He wants to go up there, he wants to explore and understand and discover their universe. And he’s smart enough to do so! They jab at him sometimes, of course Reed is the genius, that hasn’t changed, but Johnny is smart too and they show that!

It makes sense that he would be included in the original mission, he doesn’t feel like Sue’s little brother just tagging along for the ride. He may not have the mathematical brain like Reed, but he learns a whole language, or at least enough to reach Shalla-ball, in the span it takes the world to mobilize and build the transporters. And when he realizes the worm hole is bending the blaster shots, he thinks out loud and works out what angle he would need to fire at to hit her. He’s quietly smart in all the ways the others forget until he’s putting it on display in the middle of Times Square and I love that! Yes, he’s still the lighthearted one of the group, the one to try to crack a joke, but it’s not at the expense of his intelligence most the time, more at his age. He’s the annoying little brother, he’s the goofball uncle, he’s the kid who solves an alien language through sheer commitment and passion and he is perfect.

He felt so much like the Johnny I fell in love with in the comics, the one who loves the attention, but loves his family and their job so much more.

[briennemurdock]

Best Uncles Ever

-> requested by anon

[briennemurdock]

We need to talk about how this dork has this big painting of himself in his room sjskdj (I haven't seen anyone mentioned that in fanfics btw 👀)

Like, I loved that so much sjskf lol. Everytime there was a scene where it was shown, I laughed so much and I was the only one who laughed at the screennings I went to 😅

Also, I just love his bedroom so much. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy 🧡

[briennemurdock]

being johnny's wife mood board ⋆.˚ ᡣ𐭩 .𖥔˚

[briennemurdock]

Morning? Routine?

[briennemurdock]

SPECIAL GUEST

PAIRING: johnny storm x female reader

RATING: none

WORD COUNT: 1.2k

SUMMARY:

where getting caught after spending the night with johnny storm leads to breakfast with the fantastic four.

(or: H.E.R.B.I.E. is a snitch)

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

consider this a sort of prologue to an eventual full fic about these two, but @birdie-birdie-birdie sparked this in my brain and i had to get it out. and also, thank you to @munsonstorm for giving this a read for me!

WARNINGS/TAGS:

johnny storm - fantastic four: first steps, female reader, no use of y/n, established relationship (or situationship?), getting caught trying to sneak out, awkward encounters, fluff.

Reed enters the kitchen with a yawn, tying the belt of his robe into a knot at his waist. H.E.R.B.I.E. has already started to prepare breakfast — eggs and bacon sizzling on the stove, slices of toast stacked neatly on a plate, the juice maker churning fresh orange juice and, most importantly, coffee steaming in the carafe. He grabs a mug and fills it to the brim to combat the exhaustion Franklin’s middle of the night cluster feeding has caused.

“Good morning, H.E.R.B.I.E.,” he says after a sip. The robot beeps back at him as he rolls by with a stack of plates and placemats to set the table. Reed finds the morning paper in its usual spot on the counter and flips through it, skimming the headlines between more sips of coffee. H.E.R.B.I.E. beeps to let him know the table is ready and he looks up, brows pinching together when he notices a fifth table setting.

“Does your programming need to be updated again?” He wonders aloud. H.E.R.B.I.E. responds with a series of beeps that Reed interprets as “no” and “guest”. “We don’t have any guests coming,” he adds.

H.E.R.B.I.E. beeps again, robotic arm pointing up. Reed frowns, unsure of what it means. 

You tip toe down the stairs, your shoes clutched in one hand and your bag in the other, dressed in the same clothes from the night before, now slightly wrinkled from being left in a pile on Johnny’s bedroom floor. 

Staying the night is not usually part of the routine when you visit Johnny at the Baxter Building. The risk of getting caught together was too high, given the fact that he shared the apartment with his family, but for the first time since starting whatever this thing between you was, he had asked you to stay. And you, being a sucker for his big blue eyes and warm hands and sinful mouth, agreed. He kept you wrapped up in his arms all night, his face pressed against your neck and his legs tangled with yours beneath the sheets. 

Pulling yourself away from him this morning had been torture, especially when Johnny let out a little whine when you escaped his hold, but with the sun already up and the chances of making a clean escape dwindling by the minute, you knew it had to be done.

You reach the bottom of the stairs and peek around the corner, cursing to yourself when you saw Reed Richards, Mister Fantastic himself, standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee. You press yourself back against the wall, trying to think of an alternative. Maybe you could just go back upstairs and hide in Johnny’s room until the coast was clear?

You take a couple steps back in the direction you came from, heading for the stairs, but freeze when you hear Reed clear his throat. Turning slowly, you find that the man is now standing a few feet away, watching you curiously.

“Uh…hi,” you say, giving a little wave. Beside Reed, H.E.R.B.I.E. beeps, waving back at you. He looks down at the robot.

“This is the guest?” He asks. The robot nods. Reed’s attention returns to you. “Hello. I’m Reed Richards.”

The idea of Reed Richards introducing himself to you, like he’s not the most well known man in the world, is almost enough to make you laugh but you bite your tongue and introduce yourself.

“Reed, honey, who are you—“ 

Sue Storm appears behind her husband with her son on her hip, looking far too beautiful for how early it is. She’s dressed for the day in a smart pair of pants and a soft looking sweater, hair already styled and makeup applied, though the dark circles beneath her eyes are becoming harder to cover as Franklin’s sleep regression wears on. Her sentence trails off when she sees you. 

“Hello,” she says, lips curling in a knowing smirk. “Who’s this?”

“She’s a guest,” Reed says, sharing a look with his wife. Some unspoken communication passes between them and you wonder if maybe the universe could help you out and produce some sort of emergency that would call the Fantastic Four away from this painfully awkward encounter. 

“What’s cookin’, H.E.R.B.I.E.?” A booming voice asks, heavy steps coming down the stairs. 

You look over your shoulder just as Ben Grimm appears, stopping short when he spots you. He looks toward Reed and Sue, who must also be able to communicate telepathically with Ben, because his confusion morphs into understanding, rocky mouth now tilted in a sly grin. 

“Come sit,” Sue says, setting Franklin into a high chair at the head of the table. 

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to impose—“

“H.E.R.B.I.E. makes a mean breakfast,” Ben chimes in, pulling out one of the chairs and gesturing for you to take a seat. You blink at him.

“Okay,” you acquiesce, sinking onto the chair and setting your stuff on the ground by your feet. “Thank you, I appreciate it.”

“Of course,” Reed says, taking a seat beside Franklin’s high chair. “Would you care for some coffee? Or fresh squeezed orange juice? We also have milk and tea.”

“Coffee would be great,” you reply. 

H.E.R.B.I.E. rolls up beside your chair a moment later, balancing a tray with a mug of coffee, a pot of sugar, and a tiny silver container of creamer that he sets on the table. You take the mug and add a couple scoops of sugar and a splash of cream. 

“So,” Sue says, sitting down on the other side of Franklin, across from Reed. She gives you a friendly smile. “Tell us about yourself.”

The family listens attentively as you tell them about working as a librarian at the public library. Between bites of eggs and toast, Reed follows up with questions about your educational background when you mention that you have a degree in chemistry in addition to your Master’s in Library Science. Sue, while spooning oatmeal into Franklin’s mouth, asks to hear more about the outreach programs you’ve helped implement.

It’s Ben who asks the question on everyone’s mind.

“So, how’d you meet the hotshot?” 

Your cheeks feel warm as they wait for you to respond. “He comes into the library a lot,” you reply honestly. 

“Really?” Sue asks. Her surprise is mirrored on the other family member’s faces. “Huh. Imagine that.”

Footsteps on the stairs announce Johnny’s arrival. He turns the corner into the dining area, arms stretched above his head and eyes squeezed shut as he yawns. You pretend that your gaze isn’t immediately drawn to the strip of skin revealed when his shirt rides up. 

“Morning,” he says, blinking the residual sleep from his eyes. H.E.R.B.I.E. rolls up with a mug filled with creamer and a hint of coffee, just the way he likes it. He scratches the robot on the head. “Thanks, HERB.”

It takes him a moment to realize that everyone is staring at him and that, more importantly, you’re seated at the table. 

With his family.

Eating breakfast.

His lips stretch into a wide grin as he rounds the table and bends over to plant a kiss on your cheek. You stare at him, wide eyed with surprise, while he settles into his seat. 

Sue hides her smile behind her mug. Reed busies himself with wiping oatmeal off of Franklin’s chin. 

“Nice of you to finally join us,” Ben says, voice smug. “We were just gettin’ to know your friend here.”

“You mean my girlfriend,” he corrects, shoving a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “She’s great, right?”

“Sure is,” Ben replies. “What’s she doin’ with you?”

Johnny glares at his friend, flicking his next bite of eggs in his direction. Ben laughs and Reed asks him a question that drags his attention away, allowing you to lean closer to Johnny.

“Girlfriend?” You whisper. He looks over at you, gaze soft and sweet. Your heart pounds in your chest.

“That okay?” He asks, blue eyes suddenly filled with uncertainty. You smile at him, closing the distance between you and kissing him softly, aware of the others at the table attempting to sneak glances at the two of you.

“More than okay.”

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed, please consider leaving a comment, reblog, or drop by my inbox.

LINKS

main blog | masterlists | ao3

[briennemurdock]

Assuming Earth 828 has the same musical history that our earth has, which artists do you think Johnny Storm liked listening to? Would he be fond of The Beatles?

I made a playlist for Johnny Storm! (Some of the songs aren't from the 60s, but they're 60s-inspired.) I think he'd listen to all the songs on the playlist tbh. I can also see him really being into the Beatles and the Supremes. This song reminds me of him so much it's insane!!

I can see Johnny listening to it on repeat! Tbh. If anyone else has any suggestions as to what Johnny would listen to, please feel free to add on! I love 60s music, and I think he'd have a wide variety in music taste, tbh.

[briennemurdock]

best part of the movie was this dude